I was walking up

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I was walking up toward Dupont Circle from the Starbucks at Connecticut and N Street this afternoon when I walked past three neatly-dressed older men — one Korean, another perhaps a Brit — standing outside a building on Connecticut Avenue. They had that slightly awkward but still dignified look of important folks waiting for the driver to pull up or just hawking about trying to decide where to get dinner. Who knows? Anyway, I noticed they were all wearing name tags. And whenever I see that I always try to get a look to see who the people are, what the organization is, and so forth. What did I see?

UNITED NATIONS FOUNDATION.

You’ve never seen longer faces.

Now to some really interesting information from today’s uber-insider-connected Nelson Report. We may be near a breakthrough on the Korea stand-off. No, not between North Korea and the United States, a breakthrough in the tense stand-off between the State Department, the Pentagon and the OVP.

Now here’s the scoop. And bear in mind there’s a good measure of scuttlebutt and informed speculation mixed into this report. But I made some phone calls myself on this matter, and there does seem to be something to this. The word is that Dick Cheney may be gravitating toward tactical alliance with Colin Powell over Korea. Cheney seems to be thinking that as fun as regime change in Pyongyang might be, the US is focused on Iraq and then later on Iran. And he doesn’t want Korea blowing up while the US has important business to get done in the Persian Gulf. (Even global hegemons have to set priorities!) A Cheney trip to the region in April could be the catalyst for a shift in policy.

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