SecDef Robert Gates spoke unusually at Singapore this news cycle when he declared that the Kim regime was not acceptable as a nuclear power. More that the Kim regime was not permitted to be come a nuke power. Odd, teasing, peculiar, eccentric, contradictory remarks.  "We will not stand by..."   The Kim regime tested a 10 to 20 kiloton nuke two weeks back on a Monday morning. Does this not make the Kim regime a nuke power? I will speak again to the most discerning Gordon Chang as to how to read the current Obama administration shadows about North Korea. The last best logic is that the White House NSA has been caught withotut a policy in Northeast Asia other than bribery, and it isn't working.  Now we try illogic.

Late in the news cycle on Friday 29, POTUS neatly follows the White House power line that Sonia Sotomayor would not have penned the hot 2001 remark about a wise Latina woman if she had it to do over.  The POTUS voice trumps all others when it speaks in the affirmative. POTUS connects perfectly with the remarks by Robert Gibbs.  POTUS has an agreeable, reasonable, beseeching, consoling tone that cannot be taught, it has to be created.  Note also how POTUS glances down when speaking -- the correct posture when remembering a paragraph you have read and approved to say aloud.  No need for TOTUS here, POTUS is guile and clarity:  

Beijing Mutt.  

The Kim regime will continue its myriad provocations with its ballistic missile and nuke technology as well as war-making threats along the cease-fire line and at sea. The United Nations Security Council is still in search of a cranky statement that doesn't actually offend anyone on the Security Council. The award for best pretzel position of the week goes to Beijing for asserting to the media for quotes that it is uncomfortable with the Kim regime for testing a nuke. Beijing is the Kim regime in the same manner a pet owner is the family mutt. Beijing feeds and clothes and houses the Kim regime. The nuke and ballistic missile tech in the Kim regime hands came from the hands of the PLA in Shanghai. The Kim regime would not last one week longer than the moment Beijing turns off the oil, electricity, food and shopping. Where does the jet fuel in the Migs come from? The PLA is a flabby fool to have created a pet monster, and now Beijing is a fool to tolerate the creature.  Sunday 31, I will discuss the Kim regime and the prospects for more provocations and Beijing pretzel logic ahead.  And also the Obama administrations inspired idea to outsource the policing of the Kim regime to Beijing.  Monster mutt has nukes, so ask the dope who feeds it to make it stop barking?  Please?

While Chrysler fades away thirty years after the Carter administration bailout, and GM is undergoing an Obama adminstration transformation into the Post Office, Ford's gregarious Alan Mulally, formerly of Boeing, darts to Redmond, Washington to stage a sales pitch with Mother Microsoft's dynamo Steve Ballmer.  All smart guys and smart hucksters.  I like the narrative of a smart car that does the same as a stupid car except does it more ostentatiously.  Without promising when, it points the way to web- connected robot vehicles running on electricity, or hydrogen, or natural gas, or compressed air.   MSFT missed the GOOG phase and now looks to the Smart phase, remaking itself into a vehicle company.   Rent-A-Windows, leave the driving to us.  Or maybe the new American Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), call it "Apollo 13."  Balmer, the son of a Detroit Ford worker, hints at the sales point that he likes. Once upon a time, power brakes were an option. Now, they are no longer an option.  Smile.  Ford calls this early version of the CEV:  the smart car Sync Hands Free Entertainment System.  I can hear the Japanese and Chinese tooling up with their models; and Fiat is waiting to get in with its MSFT eco:Drive.  Robots!  Power up!

Facebook is the agreed upon "Galactica" of the lucky, literate generation born after 1990, and the news of a Moscow-London based enterprise, Digital Sky Technologies, investing $200 million into the company is big news. This five-minute conversation, recorded by the hip news site Boomtown at a warm conference of web entrepreneurs, reveals very little of what these two sharp players know and don't know. The Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is evasive, pleasant, corporate, confidently vague. The Russian tyro is strangely more polite but no less obtuse.  Yet their distracted conversation may reveal what they both fear.

Facebook has failed to satisfy the fairy tale of a mountain of gold.  The reason? The children who make Facebook popular refuse any wide-scale monetization. Your site on the web is free and clean, or it withers beside the free and clean.  This is the transparent rebirth ship, and it does not tolerate spam or viral goons.   MySpace, an invention of spam-masters, wasted its advantage when it loaded up with junk ads, pop-ups, then tried vulgarity. Facebook looks to be struggling to avoid the same fate -- less a new player start to dine at the banquet. This may be another quiet reason why Sandberg needs the Russian check. It is all a piratical turn, because looking out a few years, the Russians will learn to imitate, innovate and reconfigure to generate wave after wave of Facebook sites over what was the Soviet empire.   How will the Russians monetize?  They won't, and that is what they fear.  Both sides were lured by the scale of the future.  The madness of now means both crowds will create the next turn for the Facebookians, West and East. Meanwhile, the children born in Moscow, London, New York and LA after 1990 will all have the same sentimental memories, and that is not a negative for the balance of this century of shocks.  Like the passionate Colonists uniting with the aspiring Cylons in "Galactica," America and Russia need search for a new Earth.

There is a deal of fake reporting on this self-same video about the Iran presidential election, as if there is doubt, as if the treasured mouthpiece, the apocalyptic Twelver and Holocaust-denier, Ahmadinejad, has a credible rival.  NBC accepted this handout.  No need to comment on the credibility of a news department that would accept a handout from a Holocaust denying, Israel-threatening regime.  

California's Babbititan chronicler Jim the Realtor identifies another surprising value in beach proud Oceanside, the third largest city in the burgeoning and troubled San Diego County. This is a former small house at 1700 square feet that was remodeled with steroids during the housing bubble into a with luxury laden 4100 square foot trifle that looks to be a beach party weekend house for the childless or aimless.  The puzzle here is not only what it is offered for now as a foreclosure but what it may have sold for in 2006.  

California Detroit.  

Spoke to Jim Carlton, Wall Street Journal, on Sunday 24, re the California economy and budget, and the news was worse and much worse.  The defeat of Arnold Schwarzeneger's various and ungainly revenue initiatives ont he ballot last week mean that there is no sure way to close the $20 billion budget gap.  JIm Carlton said the remedies are all negative.  Raise taxes and drive out more high-end taxpayers, cut the education budget (50%) of the state budget) and face the wrath of the teachers, or beg Washington -- and face the rejection of Congress as well as the competition of other need states, such as the much worse off Michigan.  Also, the municipalities in California, such as Oceanside, are in need of funds because of real estate tax decline.  At the same time, the state wants to borrow from the municipalities, such as Oceanside.  California in Detroit, the end of the American century.   Jim Carlton did say that the housing decline in San Francisco is not as bad as it was three months ago, that Sonoma County may be stabilizing, same for the city of San Francisco.  The puzzle is if this new low level is useful to a Sacramento that is out of ideas.

RNC Box Office #1 Bullet.      

Nancy Pelosi demonstrates her inability so far -- on the getaway day for the Memorial Day break for Congress (we are all safer now with Congress out of session) -- to find a solution to the "CIA Lied" problem. The concern the moment Mrs. Pelosi erred -- she was supposed to say "I was misled!" not "the CIA lied!" -- was that the Speaker was weakened for the legislation fights ahead. Here is a burning example: the Speaker will not comment, will not answer, will not restate, will not correct. " ...I've made the statement that I'm going to make, I won't have anything more to say..."  Note how the Majority Leader Steny Hoyer steps playfully to shield and embrace the Speaker once the question from the floor starts on the "CIA Lied" tale. It is a peculiar demonstration of Hoyer's confused and old-fashioned role as the helpmate to the all-powerful but now struggling Speaker.  It is also how it looks like when you mean to wield a dagger just as easily as an embrace of comradeship.  Who else would step close to the Speaker with a pained grin by the once and future Majority Leader?  Do I think Mrs. Pelosi will be forced from the Speakership? Negative. She is weakened, like a lioness with a thorn in her paw, that's all, and will rely on Hoyer to push the dull, expensive, ungainly Obama administration agenda of healthcare, cap and trade, and education while she nurses her paw.

POTUS's big GITMO/torture speech at the National Archives was squeezed by three sudden turns: the arrest of four knuckleheads in New York who planned a terror attack on a synagogue and against aircraft with SAMs, the announcement that a GITMO Al Qaeda thug will be moved to NYC to stand trial for his life on war crimes, and the GITMO/torture speech of Dick Cheney at the AEI in direct opposition to the POTUS speech on GITMO and EIT. The effect was both to highlight the POTUS and to put him only at the feisty level of the former VPOTUS (below). Rather than settle the affair, the POTUS looks like the case against the proposition at the Oxford Union. Dick Cheney was the case for.   And the case?  Resolved that "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Listing to pieces of the POTUS remarks (periciopes below), it can sound as if he is most put- off that presidential history is not tidy.  History is not a court case; and this is not about legal precedence.  The war conduct of the POTUS predecessors, from Lincoln to FDR to Ike, JFK, LBJ, RMN, even the reluctant Jimmy "Desert One" Carter and the half-hearted Bushes, do not provide a presidency that can start "from scratch."   They wanted to blow up Jews in Riverdale?  Maybe the mess to clean up is the knuckleheads? 

The new Q. Tarantino Nazi-opera, "Inglourious Basterds," looks to dominate the exclamations at this year's Cannes film fete, and it is not completely idle to speculate what is happening in the Hollywood culture that a camp cartoon about Jews slaying swastika oafs would grab the slender attention of the glitteratti. The above clip is videography of the farmhouse set used for some aspect of the film's flamboyant mayhem. "IB," playing at Cannes, will be released in August in the US, and for now the trailer on Youtube has a blocked embed code.  (Wait, see below).  The presenting issue for "IB" is why is this a juicy, buzzing rage now?  The Holocaust-denying Tehran Twelvers and the Obama administration appeasing in Washington and Brussels must be part of the answer. The recent bally-hooed meeting between PM Netanyahu and POTUS Obama resulted in a firm, very firm, guaranteed no backbone for the indefinite future. POTUS fancies himself Nixon going to Mao, and no facts on the ground will move him from the opera in his imagination. Why a Nazi-killing hit opera on the big screens?

"It Can't Happen Here."  

My quick response is that Hollywood is in rehearsals for the appeasing. It happened this way 1933-1939. The early response to the original Nazis by the London and New York editorial pages was mockery, satire, amazement, indifference and mockery again. The German brutality toward the Jews started right after Hitler elbowed aside ancient Hindenberg in January 1933 (left, December 1, 1933 re the infamous Dachau).  The viciousness went on in full view for five years before Kristallnacht in 1938. Nothing was done of substance by Washington or London to answer the gangsters in Germany.   "It can't happen here," was the collective delusion.  As late as 1942, Jack Benny's "To Be Or Not To Be" indicates that satire was still a credible reference, though it was shifting to horror.  Now the Tarantino film finds a purchase among the Obama voting folk who approve of appeasement at any price.  Tarantino's version is the anti-Jack Benny -- horror shifting to satire.  Appeasement requires satire to banish the doubts and fears.  Better to slay the theatrical Hitlerites in make-believe warpaint and white cloak than to confront that fact that we are once again mousey isolationists in the face of Jew-bashing lunatic tyrants.  It can happen here.

It is not untrue that the Obama administration takeover of Chrysler and GM, along with its unconditional affection for Ford (POTUS and Ford's Alan Mulally), all add up to grotesque protectionism of a so-called American industry. When I glance at the automobile advertisement section in the London Times for 1933, I find a raft of English carmakers who are gone with the wind. And when I read the automobile section of the New York Times in 1916 I find the same tangle of lost names, grand illusions and earnest small town dreams of splendor with truck and car-making. The auto business is not for freezing in place as a government warehouse of great expectations and sloppy, lazy, over-priced, flabbily subsidized dreams of transportation for the masses. Make a profit or go away. This is capitalism, Western style, not mercantilism, Old World guild monopoly style.   China and East Asia are ready to flood the North American market with the cheap Chery and imitators. Toyota will return with a cheaper, sleeker, hipper Prius and so forth. They will make a profit or die -- and if Bejing wants to subsidize the Chery in order to dominate the American market, who is to cry "dumping!" in Washington and be heeded? Protectionism works all ways. The undead car companies are dead; bury them in rotting pieces. The ambitions of the UAW and the hybrid designers will rise again, or not. A POTUS as a used car salesguy is folly. Harry Truman pitching the Hupmobile?  

The fun Nancy Pelosi puzzle is how long this game of got'cha goes on, since there is no payoff short of removing her from the Speakership -- and the only people who can do this are the members of the Democratic Caucus in the House. I spoke to my professionals Sunday 17 about the likelihood of Pelosi being rejected by her own members, and the general opinion is no chance and less than no chance. Pelosi is respected, which means she is feared. There are reports of her office making threats that resemble the Kremlin calling the Lubyanka Prison in 1939. Jodi Schneider, CQ, said that her team called some of the Democratic members late last week (Friday) and there was no interest in the topic. Now, according to the rules of the game (above), the sunny Republicans are looking to splash lighter fluid. Maybe it will work to extend the tale to Memorial Day Weekend. The flap may have killed the game of Truth Commission, since any such fantastic Star Chamber would include Mrs. Pelosi's creative journey into her tortured memories of September 2002.

Eric Cantor, the House minority whip hand, showing routine mischief-making skill to bait Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, on the empty floor of the House within hours of Nancy Pelosi's creative voyage into incredibility with regard torture and the CIA.  ".... and I ask the gentleman if he shares this belief..." from Cantor is not a rhetorical device that is difficult to escape. Nonetheless, Steny Hoyer walks heavily and purposefully into the briar patch and even uses the words "belief" in his response to Mrs. Pelosi's "Hollywood Boulevard" performance:

My best Hill source does not dispute my remark that Steny Hoyer wanders the C. Building with a dagger under his cloak, under his toga too on dress-up days, and that Nancy Pelosi needs bodyguards to watch her back at all times.  John Murtha used to be a bodyguard before Steny Hoyer had the FBI dig up the bones at the John Murtha airport.  The speculation is premature that Nancy Pelosi will lose her job because she just a little bit lost her mind by challenging the CIA's credibility on digital facts. However Steny Hoyer has communicated in a statuesque, mechanical fashion, thanks to Eric Cantor, that he is not a stranger to chatting idly while the cock is warming up to crow thrice.

Nancy Pelosi in her press conference of this news cycle deepens the fog of war surrounding waterboarding and the CIA. Her latest position on camera is that the CIA was "misleading the Congress of the United States." This is not yet the opinion of any other member of the leadership who was briefed by the CIA. Why does the Speaker believe it is required to explain the fog of war? It was foggy. Blame-shifting and finger-pointing and filibustering and fall-guying works when talking of the fog of war. Mrs. Pelosi is secure. No need to be creative. It was the CIA, the villains, the bad guys, the ones no one trusts. That will suffice. Instead, Mrs. Pelosi insists upon being discursive and sympathetic. Instead she uses "they" like salt on her boiled eggs.  And now she has used the land mine word, "misleading."  General quarters!   All the POTUS footwork of traveling to Langley to lead a rally with the Agency is thrown away like a Playstation 2 game.  Does Mrs. Pelosi need to be reminded that the Agency can make you look as heinous or holy as it wishes when it works over the data files?  You want to see Mrs. Pelosi on the flight deck of the wayward AF One Cousin buzzing Manhattan?  Click.

"...Perhaps they should release the briefings... with the intense interest that this has generated... but I'm telling you, they said they want to use enhanced techniques... yes, I am saying that they are misleading, the CIA was misleading the Congress, and at the same time the Administration was misleading the Congress as to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq...   are you accusing them of lying? I am just staying a fact.. They told us they had a legal opinion... We now know what they didn't inform us then.... There were other opinions that concluded that these interrogation techniques were not legal..."

Because I am constructing too many ironies at the moment, I plead superficiality and post this from Hot Air from E to illustrate that the Trump manufactured yarn about a very, very young person, Carrie Prejean, who is now also called Miss California Anti-Christ, is best understood as what TV does best. No content, no meaning, no harm, no foul, no memory -- and very tame compared to the Italian TV and Spanish TV equivalents. Still, the fact that this earnest empty-vessel young person became a national story about values and tolerance is a metric for Spring, 2009, the Zombie Years. Anything is useful to change the subject from the crash of housing prices in the jumbo mortgage set in Newport Beach (below from tireless wit, CR). What do you want to look at, empty McMansions for rent, lease or barter in a cratered REO market attached to zombie bank portfolios that the Brobdignagian Feds claim are credible? Or children in lingerie?  Okay, I like fancy houses, too -- deeply subversive and provocative houses, like San Simeon.  Does the TV set above not resemble the hologram deck that Picard favors when he is really, really camp? At least Kirk would have his lines ready, "Helloooooo, Ensign...?"

The news that Lt. General Stanley McChrystal (three stars) the Special Forces veteran is replacing General David McKiernan (four stars) the AirLand veteran in Afghanistan is one warning light of what I learned from a variety of observers Sunday 10 -- that the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan is not going well and that it cannot be won until and if the war against the Taliban in Pakistan is resolved. One more time, the Bengal Lancers must ride into the Swat Valley to subdue the ferocious and never defeated Afridi (left, "The Lives of the Bengal Lancers, Henry Hathaway's 1935 action drama, the 41st Bengal Landers versus the wily villain Mohammed Khan).  John Bolton told me that the Islamabad civilian leadership may well collapse into another military dictatorship. James Lamont, Financial Times, from Delhi, told me that India wants to keep out of the turmoil on the Af-Pak border; and that India knows that it will be the first to suffer if Pakistan collapses. Zahid Hussain, Wall Street Journal, from Islamabad, told me that the presenting crisis is 500,000 Pashtun refugees are fleeing the indiscriminate savagery by Taliban and Pakistani units in the Swat Valley yet finding no government facilities or assistance waiting for them.  The formula is bald: if Pakistan collapses, Afghanistan is lost.  Our old enemy the one-eyed Mullah Omar is in command; and his colleague Osama Bin Laden and the remnant of Al Qaeda are in league with the rebels.  The Islamabad civilian government and the Pakistani military both understand that the Taliban means to take over the northwest part of the country. Zahid Hussain reminded me that A.A. Zardari has been gone from Islamabad for a month of overseas networking. This does not make Zardari more effective or secure.  I am asked if the nukes are secure.  SecDef Robert Gates says the Pakistani nukes are secure.  Then again, Gates just fired McKiernan and sent in a Green Beret.  Not a confidence building exercise.

The gifted Wanda Sykes's performance at the White House Correspondence Dinner Saturday 9 May delivered a knock-out to the badly out of time and ideas GOP. Like Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars, she delivered her bunker buster remarks at exactly the right spot on the GOP Battle Star. Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney leads the bitter-enders, though he receives agitprop support from a variety of shows and publications associated with the Republican right-wing, all of which can be short-handed into the concept of "Limbaugh."  Dick Cheney will sell a lot of books; and his speaking fee keeps climbing.  I have not listened or read R. Limbaugh for some considerable time; what I know of the old Limbaugh is that he can handle anything but a lack of attention. Robert Gibbs at the White House handled deftly the question about Sykes from the skillful media gang.  Wanda Sykes is now a superstar and may have defined the argument for the next months. Waiting for the Empire to Strike Back.  Episode IX: R2D2 Applies to Goldman Sachs Internships.

On January 17, 1966, a B-52 out of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, on the regularly scheduled alert to keep a deterrent in the air at all times during the Cold War, collided with a KC-135 Stratotanker over the Mediterranean coast of Spain. None of the four men in the tanker got out of the fireball. All three B-52 crew members got out of before the Stratofortress fell in pieces. Also crashing down were four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs, about 1.75 megatons each, three onto land and one into the sea.  No nuclear explosion.  The number one box office hit in America at the time (premiered December 21, 1965) Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman produced James Bond thriller,"Thunderball," based on the Ian Fleming plot of the theft of an atomic weapon after a strategic bomber is sabotaged and crashed into the sea. Theme song by the pop superstar at the time, the mesmerizingly self-infatuated Tom Jones. Everybody at the White House and at SAC HQ at Omaha got the picture the moment they learned there were H-Bombs missing.  You bet they panicked (see below for more).

Truly playful trailer from an independent movie said to be under production, "Sick and Sicker," re the fabled Canadian healthcare system. The cartoon characters are my favorite, when they smash a bear bottle over the beaver's head and the hockey star grins. The short version of the movie is that the one-payer system in Canada is mostly about teams of folk on the phone scheduling your healthcare. The line forms by the month and season. The Ottawa gang also now limits doctors per population density. Love the tale of a man with a baby and a pistol who took an emergency center worker hostage unless his child received treatment pronto. Police arrived. Shots fired. No details added. It is fun to imagine St. Luke's on Manhattan's West Side, with Columbia on one side and gentrifying Harlem on the other, shooting it out in the Emergency Room. I once waited with a broken toe in the St. Luke's Emergency Room for seven hours. They sent me a $50 bill. I paid half, with a note. My one-payer system, divided like Solomon. It was 1978;  Jimmy Carter was POTUS; and St. Luke's was like the DMV.  When Washington gets involved like Ottawa, St. Luke's will be a closed-down DMV.  There's the solution.

The troubled Elizabeth Edwards remarks here on her marriage -- on the TV show of the untroubled Orpah Winfrey. The marriage is not by itself of any political interest. What is of interest is that she and her husband John Edwards were guilty of premeditated political malpractice in the presidential primary season of 2006-2008. The Edwardses announced for president in December 2006 in New Orleans. Fanfare about Katrina. The real storm was the gossip about John Edward's conduct in 2006 with regard a campaign worker (left, Rielle Hunter)  In October 2007 the dogged National Enquirer published the tale. The Edwardses denied everything -- a child was mentioned -- and stayed in the campaign. On January 3, 2008, Edwards placed second, behind Barack Obama but ahead of Hillary Clinton, in the crucial Iowa primary. By the end of the month, and the New Hampshire primary vote, John Edwards was gone. That whole month of January 2008, both the Edwardses comprehended that they remained in the game only as ringers. The result of their folly was to distort the January Democratic primary results and provide a launch for the novice Barack Obama. Without the Edwardses tawdry, devious drama insisting upon staying in the January beauty contest -- instead of getting out in October or never getting into the race at all -- Hillary Clinton is the heavily favored presidential candidate going into the crucial February.  Now, the Edwardses are under investigation for using campaign funds to pay Hunter.

HRC's remarks this news cycle at State are meaningless and futile. Trade and roads for the AfPak border?   See Parliamentary remarks, 1890s, campaigns against the Afridi in the Swat Valley with the 4th Hussars, including Subaltern Winston Churchill.  Hamid Karzai is a narco-lord and an enemy of liberty.  A.A. Zardari of Pakistan, aka Widower Mr. Bhutto, is a gardening tool of the U.S. State Department.  HRC leases him by the week. "...my democracy needs attention and needs nurturing ...," says the Widower Bhutto.  "...we look forward to further support. all victims of terror. our threats are common... my democracy will deliver... which I have called cancer... fighting Al Q and Taliban together..."  Who is the audience for this theatrical?   (POTUS visited Pakistan as a student in the 1980s, a mysterious episode in his biography: is POTUS the audience for this infantilizing?)  HRC is a den mom, and these two patrol leaders are learning to share fire-making chores? Afghanistan is a beggarly poppy field, a plate ripped landscape that has never been coherent, not for fifty thousand years of homo sapiens.   Pakistan is a nuclear 

power with IRCMs that can mount warheads, thank you Kim regime and Saudi checkbook.  Pakistan is also a phony state, now a failed state, concocted by the British Colonial Office and the kleptocrats in Commons in 1947.  Blaming Churchill is useful shorthand.  Zardari the victim of the Taliban cancer?  No. The Taliban are your team, Widower Bhutto. Does Zardari know where the nukes are? Probably not.  Why would the ISI tell him? He would sell the information to the Russians. Do we know where the nukes are?  Most critical: Does Delhi?

On the left hand, the Obama administration signals that it does not aim to pursue the Torture Memos authors or their bosses (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzalez). On the right hand, there is Congress, the vengeful, practical and co-equal Article I body of lords, ladies and sharpies.  Chris Dodd, running behind in the polls for Senate re-election in Connecticut, is motivated to attack the Bush administration in order to talk over his problems with regard his unusual loans from the troubled Angelo Mozilo and the failed Countrywide.  When asked about the Torture Memos, when asked should the authors be pursued for criminal behavior, Chris Dodd is crafty, resourceful, measured, historical and as on target as a smart missile.  "...I believe that waterboarding is torture...I know people don't want to go back....y'know, my father  (Thomas Dodd, left at Nuremberg) was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, they were not a popular idea.... power paying tribute to reason... not to prosecute, is to invite it again.... Guantanomo... Abu Ghraib...."   When asked about Dick Cheney?   "You gotta go where you gotta go..."   Chris Dodd is relentlessly comfortable at blarney while telling stories about mass murder and justice 60 years ago and connecting it to waterboarding and the Bush administration 6 years ago: politics is a blood sport.

Two versions of the housing bubble burst, creating California ghost towns of new homes. Above, the perspicacious Wall Street Journal has followed a tip I first found in Calculated Risk to feature the video -- which I posted last week (below) -- of a backhoe wrecking unfinished model houses by Matthews Homes in Victorville, California.   My correction is that the tearing down bank is Guaranty Bank of Austin (not Irvine). The Journal story by Michael Corkery quoted a bank official saying it would have cost another $1 million to finish the homes. Meanwhile Victorville was fining the bank each day. We are told that scrap and wood from the houses will be reused.

Below, re Indio, California, in a story by Nick Casey, whom I spoke with Sunday 3, another version of the oversupply metric, less drastic. The town fathers only fine the bank if it does not take care of the foreclosed properties.  "The offense: an algae-infested swimming pool at 79760 Eagle Bend Court.  Citigroup wound up in charge of the foreclosed home, one of thousands of such properties it was managing across the country."

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Wells Fargo, an insolvent, reckless, failed, irresponsible collection of deal-makers and blame-shifters, rose all day in anticipation of the stress tests results sometime before the Apocalypse. Warren Buffet, the sage who failed in Omaha and everywhere, bulled the Wells Fargo stock on the weekend at his apology tour before his irritated investors. Now the stress test preliminary results leaked to the WSJ show again that Wells Fargo is insolvent (left, the old and deeply insolvent Wells Fargo and Assay Office in Butte, Montana which burned in 1947) and needs lots of taxpayer billions of dollars indefinitely. Wells Fargo is guilty of a deal of the truly stupid mortgage deals and CDOs from the housing scam years. With the L-shaped recovery at hand, the banks now look like tech plays from the 90s. No profits ever at the bad banks so go with the buzz.  The trustworthy Dave Kansas, Dow Jones, shrugs his big shoulders and reminds us that you cannot fight the tape -- or TARP in the hands of an anger-management printing press government.  Late in the day, the Treasury whispered loudly that 10 of the 19 big banks in stress tests will need additional capital, that is, are insolvent without taxpayers billions.  Too big to laugh out loud.  

The Obama administration deployed to the Sunday talk shows to offer assurances to the American family about the threat of A/H1N1.  Sunday 3 May, the JBS will speak to a wide range of correspondents re the prospects for containment.  Newly confimed HHS secretary Kathleen Sibelius is less than convincing when she says, ".... being in closed places is something we continue to encourage..." This is hollow. News arrives of China ordering a quarantine of an arriving aircraft passenger and crew roster, and of Hong Kong isolating at entire hotel. No one should be encouraged to take risks of exposure on aircraft or in hotels; if exposed, the protocol will leave you out of touch for days.  I will speak to Joseph Sternberg, Asia Wall Street Journal, 

at Hong Kong, re the Asian defenses.  Also, the news from Canada that a swine herd has been infected with A/H1N1 by a carpenter recently returned from Mexico is not a positive development; and Dr. Henry Miller, Hoover, will speak to its virology significance.  The facts now are consistent with the WHO not having the facts it needs to conclude anywhere as rosily as Sibelius.  Phase 6 remains imminent and logical.  Border closings and pig herd culling remain credible.

How capitalism will solve the housing bubble, refashion the banks, end municipal collapse, restore American growth: From Calculated Risk, via an enterprising videographer in suburban Bellevue, Washington (left) on April 24, part of a routine weekly auction process of foreclosed residential properties offered to investors. It is a cool, bright, verdure Spring day on the porch of a local establishment, and the investors are big-shouldered males with baritones, grins, muscles, Iphones. From this excerpt of seven parts, we learn that the bidding process can be highly competitive but that this Spring day there are only three most desired addresses. The big action is elsewhere in the area. The men work their Iphones back to their money men. The increments are in $1000k bids, at the end in $100s. The critical element is that the banks offering these REOs have heavily discounted the minimum bid, e.g. from $300k owed on a property down to a minimum bid of $150k. The investor expert here estimates banks are getting $.70 on the dollar. Some of these investors will live in the properties for awhile, but almost all are the infamous "flippers," who started this bubble back in '02-'08. Flip on the way up, flip on the way down. Capitalism keeps the ship-of-state healthy, wealthy and big-shouldered risky.

Jim McTague, of Barron's and the J B S, at the recent Millken Foundation annual conference in Los Angeles, speaks with Bill Markus of Newedge Group re this year in commodities trading. Markus is cautious and ambitious at once, since the cliff-diving of commodities leaves every market oversold and an imminent gold mine. The energy group of oil, gas, coal is especially inviting, because any recovery will drive the prices of energy sky-rocketing in anticipation of industry demand. Same for the metals and food. Jim Rogers, of Rogers Investment and the J B S, at Singapore told me three weeks back that all commodities were in a bull century.  The bill is particularly accurate for food because of demand and the shrinking arable acreage in developed countries, where population gobbles up land for housing and commercial enterprises, and in developing countries, where decades of low prices has driven the small farmer off the land to overcrowd the maga cities and their mega slums.  Rogers says, "You want to get rich, marry a farmer." 

New, fretful, confusing reports from the California border indicates that the A/H1N1 virus was in California before five year-old Edgar Hernandez fell ill on April 2 in La Gloria, Veracruz state. California epidemiologists have located two cases of children in Southern California, a ten year-old boy in San Diego County and a nine year-old glrl in neighboring Imperial County, who fell ill earlier. The boy on March 30; the girl on April 1. Both have tested positive for A/H1N1. Neither are known to have had contact with swine. The new theory is that this killer flu has been circulating for months during flu season along the California-Mexican border.  The theory continues that many may have contracted A/H1N1 and recovered in ignorance.  Testing for infection is likely to turn up surprising new pockets. The scary strain in Mexico is not said to be distinct form the strain in California. There are many unanswered questions. The search for Patient Zero has now exploded with overwhelmingly contradictory evidence.  The slaughter of pigs in Egypt may be hysteria (above).   Then again, the A/H1N1 flu can be anywhere. Do you have it?  Did you already?  Why is it suddenly a killer?  Is this like 1918 -- start stealthily and then explode?