Colleague Simon Constable enjoys a droll chat with deputy foreign editor Adam Horvath, Wall Street Journal, re the topsy-turvy "Bananas" coup in Honduras. Adam Horvath is delicious in not quite smiling at the fact that the US is now supporting Chavez who is supporting the return of the Chavez stooge Manuel Zelaya (left).  There is a most wry detail from Horvath at the close that there is a new election in seven months that will place both Zelaya and the temporary Congress Speaker Roberto Micheletti with a new guy.   Clearly a compromise is avaiable till then to do nothing. Status quo ante is always attractive. And in Latin American palace histories, possession is eleven-tenths of the law.  Good news that Chavez is denouncing the US for playing a part in Zelaya's ouster, since the Obama administration is wonderfully clueless and guiltless and charming in its confused piety that it wants the constitution respected and Zelaya restored.  This is getting better than "Bananas," since no one is at risk, Chavez is humiliated, and now poor little Honduras is on the map as a freedom fighter to the American right-wing.  More and more, the Obama administration is an update of the bootless Carter.  Remember Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell the (rumored) cokehead duo?   Jordan went on to work with cancer kids before he died of long standing health issues.  Powell is still a DC lobbyist, likely doing land-office business these days.  Where in the world are Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs in the year 2040?  Where are you?

The Beeb features street theater in Honduras as the thrown-out President Manuel Zelaya huddled with his mentor Hugo Chavez in Managua and claimed, at the close of the news cycle, that he was going to fly back to his capital Tecucigalpa and resume his term. Zelaya is a dolt and a laughingstock. Chavez is a shrewd, tireless provocateur who knows that the fuel for his ambition is anti-Americanism and pro-Jihad. Unclear that this point how Chavez will finesse the non-America, non-jihad turmoil in Honduras. Zelaya would improve his street credibility if he would don a full beard and try on fatigues and a little Marxism. Meanwhile the Speaker of the Congress in Honduras, Robert Micheletti, has assumed the presidency to serve out the remaining seven months of Zelaya's term. By Honduras constitution, Zelaya cannot be re-elected.

Gifted English satire directed against the Scottish PM Gordon Brown with a surprisingly complete absence of affection. While the US has been distracted by the earnest ingenue POTUS, the English have been enjoying tormenting the pious and unlucky Brown. No fairness about it, Brown stepped in after the reviled Tony Blair was booed from the podium at Labor confabs in the summer of '07. The August '07 warning of credit troubles ahead put Brown in a position where he has been the designated loser ever since. The man is a talented politician in the wrong place and the wrong time. I admire how he is holding on to a smashed chair. Meanwhile all of Parliament is in disgrace for its spending cheats and its blockheaded denials. Still there is a year to go till the general election. Brown may come back. These days, politicians have no past, no future, just an existential now. Brown is wicked fun to mock.

Joan Baez in her California kitchen performs the durable "We Shall Overcome" with some Farsi lyricas that she sends out to the demonstrators and partisans in Tehran and other Iran cities. She looks fabulous. Fifty years in the footlights, and Joan Baez does not back off, does not break theme. I read that she was reluctant to support a presidential candidate until Barack Obama, whom she sided with in February 2008 in his struggle with HRC. I ran up against the Baez family once when I was writing a bio piece on Richard Farina for the Soho News and called the Baez sisters in California. Joan Baez and her younger sister Mimi Baez Farina, the widow, got on the line together and told stories about the at-that-point fourteen-year dead Richard. He was killed falling off a motocycle without a helmet the night of the publication party of his first and only novel, "Been Down So Long Looks Like Up To Me." The sisters were generous. Wish I had the tape to hear what I sounded like when I was young. Now, seeing Joan Baez decades later, I see my curious youth. Someday those folk in Tehran, when they reflect, will see her singing at 100 years old and recall their zealous youth.

Colleague Thaddeus McCotter in the afternoon news cycle Friday 26 addresses the diplomatic moral dilemma caused by the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan. To condemn or not to condemn? To interfere or to claim non-interference? Thaddeus McCotter makes a towering good point when he speaks of a most similar challenge to the US leadership during the Soviet Union persecution of the Jews and others around Andrei Sakharov in the 1970 and 80s. Sakharov's translator Natan Sharansky, who was jailed by the Soviet thugs, praised Ronald Reagan's steady response to the Soviets: "Reagan (dared) to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire...that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union. It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us....the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution - Reagan's Revolution."    Thaddeus McCotter aims his remarks at the Obama administration and its hesitations the last two weeks to speak out candidly about the tyranny in Tehran. After Neda Agha-Soltan's murder, after the cover-up of the crime and the on-going persecution of witnesses, family, protesters, it is impossible for Washington to "close its eyes to the real nature of" the Twelvers.  POTUS moved with stronger though still coded language late in the day to speak of the "brutality" of the Twelvers.  Not yet "evil."  The White House hesitates and hesitates to name a predator rogue state as an enemy of liberty.  In the hesitation, the Twelvers gloat in their beards the same way the Politburo once gloated in their jowls.

The discerning and impatient Joe Morgenstern treats the new Iraq war movie, Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker," to a boffo rave for this weekend, and it is on my must see list right away. The story centers upon the always existentially rich trope of the bomb squad challenging the mind games of bombers. This time it is Baghdad in 2004, and the enemy is everywhere. Recall that the Army and Marines were not deployed with adequate equipment for the roadside bombs. Our vehicles were not reinforced armor, our detection equipment was rudimentary, our anti-bomb signals were just starting. This was before the IED arrived from Iran and Al Qaeda. The bomb in this clip looks Home Depot compared to the IRGC Al Quds stuff I saw in pictures in '06. This movie looks cool anytime, and perhaps Hollywood can now liberate itself from its antipathies to the Bush administration in order to explore the deep ironies of the Kabul and Baghdad 2001. Soon add the Pakistan fighting and the political dissent in the Obama administration.

The reports late in the day and into the evening were consistent with the massive security operation that isolated and overwhelmed the demonstrators while special operations targeted the underground gathering places, depots and communications nodes. The arrests continued through the night, and now that it is daylight in Tehran Thursday 25, there will be more of the sweeping. These videos came to me within the last six hours. No names or locations. The street scenes (below) look recognizable to folk who know Tehran. Friday prayers will be a pivot point for the regime.

Above find colleague Thaddeus McCotter on Tuesday 23 on the floor of the People's House speak with modest eloquence for the people of Iran and for liberty everywhere. It is good to hear this spoken out. It is good to test the chaos of facts with official remarks recorded into the Congressional Record that will mark this date and hour. It is good that this video will make its way to Iran, and that the old and cynically weary may understand its importance sooner than the young. It is important to stand forcefully and loudly with liberty, no matter the hour in the crisis, no matter the place.   Reminds me of how curious I was at the Peace Moratorium in October 1969, driving down to Washington, wandering in the cold that day in a sea of hundreds of thousands of students. The RMN White House was ringed by city buses to keep us from the gates.  I recall all of it, and how futile it was, but somewhere in it was our understanding that America is about liberty, and the consent of the governed, and not about perpetrating a showplace war on the side of crooks against a ransacked and massacred peasant people half a world away.  America must be a "Citty upon a Hill" to the eyes of all other peoples.   William Bradford's four-hundred-year-old vision for the New England and the Massachusetts Bay Colony remains intact for all America.  POTUS may have skipped that lesson. America is liberty's place.  Not for keeping our voices down. Not for working with European appeasers.   Not for pretending that liberty isn't our business everywhere, and that when liberty is threatened, America is involved.

"...for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us..."  

Thaddeus McCotter, 11th Michigan, knows the lesson.  As pushed down as Michigan is right now, it is pricelessly rich, a city upon a hill, in comparison to the fate of Tehran until and if and unless liberty lends a hand. 

Channeling LBJ?  

Strangely, POTUS lets himself get drawn into a fake debate via a rainmaker reporter (may be Chip Reid) re what the GOP presidential candidate may have said and when about Tehran vs what POTUS may have said and when about Tehran. "What do you think?" and "Only I am the President" are peculiar reminders of the displaced crankiness of LBJ and RMN during the Vietnam war.   Does POTUS know this association? Did he do this purposefully, like a movie quote in a Spielberg story?   Channeling in the Bully Pulpit?  Unknown.  The sidebar explanation of the obvious by POTUS that he has different desires than members of Congress also seems creatively unusual banal. It was just yesterday that POTUS was the 99th junior senator from Illinois who was using his perch in Congress to excoriate POTUS Bush re foreign turmoil.  Good for him.  No memory? No irony? Potomac fever must have a secondary symptom of shamelessness when doing small-talk on TV.   You can say anything you want as long as you want and no one will stop you.   Perhaps POTUS misses the dialectic of the campaign years. POTUS will now certainly hear from John McCain and Lindsay Graham. Mystery?   If he is comfortable as POTUS, why would he bother with this freelancing Youtube moment?  Also, who were the stooges who did the laugh track after "What do you think?"  Media?  White House flacks?  Hirelings?  Audio engineer remix?

Sunday 21 spoke to Ardeshir Arian, Media-Without-Borders, from LA, and we mentioned a video piece that he sent along to me on Saturday, and now I am reminded to post. AA and I think of this as Dumb and Dumber Get Out the Vote, 2009. Ardeshir reasons that the two made the record, using their mobile phone, because they wanted a document to show the people who hired them to vote as often as possible for Ahmadinejad. Ardeshir Arian hears the accents on this video as rural: this is not Tehran.  Dumb and Dumber are filling in ballots by using a list on registration numbers that have been provided to them.   Perhaps the counterfeit voters are deceased, perhaps the information has been stolen, perhaps the fraud is lackadaisical.   Dumb and Dumber count the number of digits used on the ballots to match the correct number from state forms.  And the reason we have this tedious clip -- it drags on -- is that Dumb and Dumber posted the vid on Youtube as an apology for their mischief.

Trusted source Nick Grace, SourceWatch, identifies this video as a natural gas line on fire that leads to the explosion of a structure that is a Basij headquarters in Tehran.   Looks to be dusk on Saturday June 20.   Report says that Basij were inside. No details on casualties. Early news from Tehran looks to more of the same random protests and chaos throughout the large boulevards and squares. I am updating for the next hours till show time. Sunday 21, speaking to several Iranian voices who are long well connected to the resistance to the Twelvers: Amir Taheri, author of the critical "Persian Nights: Iran Under the Khomenist Regime," from London; Banafshe Zand-Bonnazi, Planet Iran, who will bring on with her the famous Iran resister Ahmad Batebi, from Washington; also Ardeshir Arian, Media-Without-Borders, from Los Angeles.  Michael Ledeen, Foundtation for Defense of Democracy, will lead the discussion in Washington at 705 Eastern Time.

"Persian Nights: Iran Under the Khomeinist Regime."      

Scattered and consistent reports from multiple open sources -- and from two trusted Iran activists linked to Tehran resisters -- that some aspect of the demos have gone forward in Tehran and that the state police apparatus has responded predictably. The Beeb shows this snippet of a chat with a convincing Tehran police boss who shows the sleepless strain of the last days. The reports from Tehran Tweets, via my colleague B. Raman at Chennai, India, speak of Mousavi defiance, many casualties at Tehran hospitals, continuing confrontations as darkness falls in Tehran, and a general fog of war on the story. Sunday 21 I will speak to several Iranian voices who are long well connected to the resistance to the Twelvers: Amir Taheri, author of the critical "Persian Nights: Iran Under the Khomenist Regime," from London; Banafshe Zand-Bonnazi, Planet Iran, who will bring on with her the famous Iran resister Ahmad Batebi, from Washington; also Ardeshir Arian, Media-Without-Borders, from Los Angeles.

Suddenly the EU media star voices have turned hawkish and neo-con after the murderous threats of the long-time paranoid brute Ayatollah Khamenei, who is a religious leaders in the manner of the the infamous Yagoda of the Moscow purges.  Khamenei denounces not only the protesters but also Old Blighty and POTUS Obama.  (The Twelver accusations that POTUS is encouraging protesters is not cock-eyed: my reports that Western intelligence apparatus have been pouring money into Tehran -- that would be CIA and MI6 -- is consistent with this whining.)  What is worse, thirty years of predation or thirty minutes of tough talk for soft power. The twists in the tale are coming so switftly that irony is lagging far behind. Do I hear Europe speaking of a "black day for Iran?" When did they get the Tweet that sealed the opinion? Last hour?  Two weeks ago?  Soon, Skye and CNN International and the Beeb will start to sound like Tony Blair re Saddam.  (Sounding like Rummy re Saddam is too far too fast.)  Tehran is a murder cult. It has nukes and ballistic missiles. It is determined to sow chaos to bring on the 12th Imam from a well from the tenth century. What page of the Twelver script sounds rational to Europe?  Meanwhile, Rafsanjani's stooge Mousavi did not show up for Friday prayers -- a surprising stupid gesture, since this is his exile warrant. Rafsanjani may soon be on the run.   The Ahmadinejad Twelver putsch has secured the apparatus for the next cycle, and the brutality that will follow this Khamenei performance will not be on TV.  (Am comparing this to the Hitlerite crushing of Ernst Rohm in the summer of 1934.)  Will tanks crush kids? Nah. It will be a slow motion massacre of hope, and the coming weeks and months will demonstrate how people turn on themselves when liberty is gone. Students ratting on students, kids on parents, teachers on students. Everyone on video will be contacted and given a false choice, bow or break.  Sunday 21, I will speak to a wide range of Iranian activists and critics, including, in Farsi translation, the famously brave Ahmad Batebi, who was tortured by the regime and escaped in 2008.

Rafsanjani's stooge Mousavi will stand beside Ayatollah Khamenei at Friday prayers in moments and call for national unity to a wall of Basiji. End of the beginning. The Tehran activity the last week has left out the critical detail of where are the poor people in all this Twitter mania and Facebook networking?  One hundred thousand students and their comrades in the manicured streets of Tehran are not a revolution. The Ayatollah and the Twelvers remind that the revolution is in the hands of the regime.  (Rafsanjani is a rogue; he may be broken.)  The revolution is also useful to the predators.  Critical to connect the savvy brutality in Tehran and the repeated signs from the Kim regime of an imminent missile launch and new nuke test.  SecDef Robert Gates late in the news cycle announced he was deploying anti-missile defense systems to Hawaii, anticipating the Kim regime launch.  No reports of Twitter in Pyongyang.  Will they Tweet the launch?  "ICBM enroute to Pearl Harbor, cheers, K."   Now the new comfort zone is that North Korea will lob ballistic missiles at the eastern Pacific, that it will test miniaturized nuke warheads, that all this will be paid for and attended by the IRGC, and still there is reason to open the hand of diplomacy and accommodation to the Twelvers.  The Obama team is freshly creative.  Ignore the left hand testing the nuke while offering the right hand a peace deal.

State sends out a workmanlike tenor with the happy name of P.J. Crowley to argue the nonsensical point that "...it's up to the Iranian people, that is why resolving this process is so important..."   Process?  Is that what they call it at State?  We are also reminded oddly by Crowley that the US and Iran have not had diplomatic relations for thirty years. Why would that be? We are reminded there is a "nuclear program" involved.  Program?  What could that be?   Could that be an explanation for the non relations? How about the predation? How about the stooge Ahmadinejad, number one Holocaust denier? Nah. Must have been poor diplomacy from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush.    Now we are going to repair all that as soon as the provocative video stops coming from the demos in Tehran, and those privileged children in Dubai (left) cease the photoshopping of our peace partner. Cool. This is a plan. We can trust relations with a regime built on lies, sadism, Jew bashing, genocide threatening, all of it obedient to those with hallucinations of a thousand year old child returning through a well to ride beside Jesus and herald Paradise for the true believers. Must see this agreement in writing. At what point does POTUS stop pitching the US audience and start pitching the Guardians of the Mahdi?

Aviator John McCain constructs a sober, blunt, historically accurate opinion of the Tehran tyranny that is now abusing its citizens for all to see on TV and video feeds. "...the Muslim clerics, extremists, control the political climate, mechanisms of Iran..."  John McCain is unambiguous.  The Twelvers control Tehran.  For the Obama administration, the struggle is to find a way not to say what John McCain says. POTUS and VPOTUS are searching for diplomatic language that is consistent with their soft power theme. Challenging.  POTUS took a first attempt at it (below) several hours later.  The White House decided on the "deeply troubled" approach.  Still avoiding the problem.  We can see what is happening on video.  "Deeply troubled" is paternalistic, fatalistic, academic, passive, banal.  Soft power has   limits.

  

Poison.   

Here is a cunning, coy, hostile display by Joe Biden when asked the arranged question re the legitimacy of the Potemkin polling in Iran. Biden is powerless to change the facts, but he has the time and method to pour poison into the faux results. Two minds about Biden's aggression here. If Joe Biden knows that the Twelvers are tyrants and that regime mouthpiece Ahmadinejad is a cretinous jackass, then why does he stand by idly as the Obama administration toys with appeasement to Tehran? Or, does Joe Biden believe that taunting the regime, however passive aggressively in this performance, has utility, has meaning, connects to a proactive plan to unseat the Ayatollah before Tehran goes active nuke? Impossible to know. Source tells me that Joe Biden is not at the center of Obama administration policy, that he is long marginalized, that Joe Biden's inconsistent, spontaneous, mischievous style alarms and disgusts the privy council of Emanuel and Axelrod.  (Joe Biden, must watch his back and mouth.)  Joe Biden is freelancing in this clip.  Who is sorry now for the Biden choice in August, 2008?

Ahmadinejad wins a landslide greater than POTUS.  I was too Hollywood rosy about the Tehran Twelvers and presumed their epic comedy script would arrange a second round of the presidential election next Friday 18 -- to build the melodrama for another one hundred hours of faux democracy. Instead, the Twelver script doctor used an alternative end and arranged for a nearly two-thirds mandate for the regime mouthpiece, aka M. Ahmadinejad, with the twist that M.H. Mousavi gets to play Al Gore manque and protest the vote was rigged. Subsitituting Sauron (aka Khamenei) for Rehnquist, Scalia and the Supreme Court, the contest is declared closed and official. Bravo. Now there will be a few hours of protests in the capital by romantic mobs of agitators, burning blankets and campaign detritus, that claim that it is impossible to run a fair election in a tyranny run by a murder cult. Some of the agitators will be secret police rats who will take names and photos of the other protestors for later harassment and surveillence. And what of "Al Gore" Mousavi? He will become the new face of a radiant democratic future.  He will enjoy vast amounts of copy by the BBC and other organs of hope. POTUS will mention him as a illustration that change is possible in the Tehran regime. POTUS already tried this general agitprop theme on Friday, when thrown a last (suspiciously convenient) question by the obeisant press corps. "...we are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran... after the speech I made in Cairo, we tried to send a clear message  ... as has been true in Lebanon.. people looking at new possibilities... there's been a robust debate helping to advance..."   What price appeasement?  They pretend to be rational, and we pretend to be encouraged.  Does POTUS sound a touch bored by his own part of the Twelver script?

Tehran is midway in its expensive production of an epic reality comedy called the presidential election.  The script calls for the first round of voting to produce a run-off between the regime stooge M. H. Mousavi and the regime mouthpiece M. Ahmadinejad.  Tehran's Twelver cult is built around the personality of the sickly Ayatollah Khamenei, a pious thug, and the squabbling of the officer cadre in the black-suited Praetorian Guard, called the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.  Tehran is the ultimate Potemkin village, and this election is a subset.  Lights!  Cue the ladies in black.  Regard this performance piece as the dark ages restaged.  The Persian people are the slaves of a murder cult that possess nukes, ballistic missiles and a plan to use them.  The poll-watching drama is for the credulous, the craven, and the cable networks that need faux news between market and weather reports.  Note that the proto-cynics at the State Department have issued a blanket praise for the elections so far.  Meanwhile Mousavi, closer to the fray, has issued a blanket complaint about voting irregularities.   Fire up the Gore v. Bush hot air.

Twinkle-eyed Kenneth Feinberg, longtime Washington mouthpiece and mediator -- famous for his 9-11 victims resolutions -- is named by the Tim "Treasury Czar" Geithner as the new Pay Czar by the Obama administration, and it is difficult to know if this is a send-up or a sober, dopey endeavor.   Feinberg is charming, nonchalant, vague, geeky, slightly hysterical, either embarassed or irritated, to speak of his role as an authority figure.  The joke that he likes to tell on himself is that the Pay Czar will get no pay from the USG. "...I am doing this at the request of the Secretary for zero compensation."  Funny?  Who is the joke on?   In Marketplace, Feinberg remarks that he has responsibility to czar over the seven stupidest zombies in the TARP/Fed/Treasury/bail-out world, such as AIG, Bank of America and Citi, GM, too; however he adds that he doesn't have any known power, and that he doesn't think it's a good idea that he actually command anything.   Pithy James Kwak at Baseline Scenario dismisses the Pay Czar notion as careless propaganda and a passing trifle.   A lot of "shoulds" and not many "musts."   Why did they do this?  Is this self-mockery?  Feinberg confesses eagerly that the losers will not be able to recruit anything but losers as long the Uncle Sam is counting the petty cash.  The most cynical measure on the Pay Czar folly is that the Obama administration has figured out that it cannot survive without the pirates everywhere -- except at the seven Feinberg losers.

The straggling Rasputin of the Bush administration, Karl Rove, carefully drives his overlarge RV of a brain way off the road in order to run over the usually safely unread and unusually antique, dusty, anachronistic paragraphs of Maureen Dowd. Why did he do it? What Rove has to say is too obvious to be funny; too ordinary to be quotable; and may be a promotional gimmick. Is Rove working closely with Dowd? Do they slap each other around in public in order to drive page visitors?   This rich-pastry Rovian performance pushed me to search out Dowd's latest column. The best interpretation I can figure of what Dowd wrote is that it is okay for POTUS Obama to play golf and go on dates while he is unprepared to win the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it was not okay for POTUS Bush to be unprepared to win the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and play golf. I am not misleading, though I may have left out some online venom.   Dowd is smart, smart to get money out of the Sulzbergers and Carlos Slim for what she writes. Good for her.   Rove is clever, clever to get money out of News Corp for what he says and writes. Good for him. My small complaint is that they re still talking about their glorious fisticuffs in the Bushian '06 here in the Spring of 2009.  It is me to fault.  I could just decide not to listen.  I was curious why Rove's face on the freeze frame looked freshly hungry.  I won't listen the next time.  Quick additional notions for those who know there is more at risk these days than Karl and Maureen getting mud in their eyes: The rogues have nukes for lease; China is a Congo 1912; and we are losing our grip on directing our own destiny. Also: Have you noticed the bankers are still not transparent, and yet no one cares as much as they did? Why?

Earnest and careful Politico Eamon Javers contributes here a soft feature on POTUS and religiosity, specifically the use of the name "Jesus," in public performances. Not a crisis, not heat, not an issue that can inform or help the joblessness number, the nuke threats in Pyongyang and Tehran, the zombie banks; however it is a theme that will be explored and exploited in regional elections.

 "...He's only been to church once on Easter Sunday since he's been the president of the United States  ...obviously he's been busy, but he's been able to find time for a lot of golf on Sundays, not so much going to church... not religious enough to go to church on a fairly regular basis..."  

Does POTUS have a church? Unknown. (And we can recall the candidate Obama noisily quitting Rev Wright's church in the spring of 2008 during the Pfleger imbroglio.) How often does POTUS attend church? According to Javers, just one Sunday since January, Easter Sunday. What does POTUS do instead of church services? Golfing?  (POTUS said to be No. 8 on list of golfing presidents, can you name them?)  And why does POTUS skip the photo op of church service with his attractive young family? Unknown. What is mysterious here is how the speechwriters are working in the name "Jesus" to the POTUS policy speeches. Why bring this name into it if you are not attending the liturgy? None of this is a thrilling story. More a slow fuse. May go to a bomb, may not. Watching. POTUS Without a POTUS Church, week 20 in the District.

The ambitious and articulate Bill Richardson here makes remarks about the crisis in Northeast Asia that demonstrate the confusion in Washington just now with regard the Kim regime. What I learned Sunday 7 from my professionals on North Korea, Gordon Cucullu, Claudia Rossett, Gordon Chang, Mary Kissel, John Bolton and Evan Ramstad (at Seoul) is that there is no Obama administration policy on the Kim regime murder cult. Richardson asserts that the Obama administration is separating the nuke and missile testing provocations from the "human rights" issue of the abducted and doomed Laura Ling and Euna Lee. This is sophistry. The Kim regime regards all these provocations as effective aggression against the US. Dictator Kim Jong Il is dying. His so called successor is an unknown, immature, Swiss educated non-player, who may be in ill-health. The murder cult of the military and state police anticpitates that it will face retribution in the event of the fall of the Kim regime. The condemned Americans are hostages. The nukes are hostages. The missiles are hostages. Attack us, and we will use them. Richardson's argument is contradictory on its face. Ling and Lee are not "human rights."  They were abducted across the border in China. Sometimes known as an act of war -- but not if the Beijing thugs and their PLA servants regard North Korea as a useful rogue.  What Richardson and the sluggish Obama administration will not admit to on air is what Gordon Chang has long taught me to propose:  We do not have a North Korean problem, we have a China problem.

Above find the opening of a lecture that JBS guest cosmologist Evalyn Gates presented last winter in Oregon based upon her new "Einstein's Telescope: The Search for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe." EG is a researcher and Assistant Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.  (This clip will lead you to the full 67 minutes lecture.)   EG writes smoothly, compellingly and exactly of the battlefield of the mind in theoretical physics here at the start of the 21st century, especially in the pursuit of a new language to explore and explain the so far unsolved phenomenon known as Dark Matter and Dark Energy. This is all joyful mind-pounding notions of the organization of all that we perceive in the four dimensions.  (And as policy, I recommend theoretical physics to the Obama administration as a cheap way to astonish the Science.com posse who are squinting at the parsimonious change offered by budget boss, Peter Orszag, a negligible change from the Bush administration budget and most fretful to the science crowd, including the Dark hunters.)  "Einstein's Telescope" itself describes the phenomenon of light passing through the gravitational lens of stars between us, the observer, and the object out there, the observed, and how this deeply enhances our ability to perceive humblingly distant objects.  EG will be in NYC for the World Science Festival beginning June 10 through 14, will deliver a lecture on cosmology on Thursday 11 June, will attend the book corner in Washington Square Park on Sunday 14 June, and will deliver similar to the above lecture on her book "Einstein's Telescope," at the Hayden Planetarium on Monday 15 June starting at 7:30pm et.  I look to speak to EG again on 21 June re the new and controversial data that asserts that many of the stars we see now were created in early dusty galaxies within 1 billion years of the Big Bang.  Researchers point to galaxy HDF 850.1 at the staggering distance of Redshift 4.76.  What does this mean?  I will ask EG, but I am guessing that it discomfits the status quo ante theory of exactly when and how stars were formed during the course of the approximately 13.6 billion years old cosmos and must be connected in some fashion, with a physics that supplants Quantum the way Quantum supplanted Newtonian, to the plush strangeness of the never seen, never measured Dark Matter and its more dominating colleague, Dark Energy. 

Whimsical Mike Allen of Politico contributes this rambling and candid five minute video of the POTUS media corps landing in Dresden, Germany in pursuit of Air Force One, and it is a fair representation of the folly of depending upon pack journalism to provide opinion about a presidential embassy. These young people are modestly paid, overtired, amiable, purposefully dull, soft-minded and all attached to media organizations that are cash-strapped, disinterested, pretentious and aimless. What results from these contradictions is a pleasant, unsophisticated, soporific style that is fact loaded and absent persuasion, doubt, comprehension.  No reason to read the copy other than the headline of POTUS in Germany.   Why is POTUS on a six-day trek to Riyadh, Cairo, Giza, Dresden, Paris, Normandy? The answer is, no one knows, it just worked out that way.  There is no coherent theme.  Instead there is POTUS discovers a clutter of Potemkin receptions -- a lot like the campaign plane of 2008, wandering the states looking for free TV time.   Now it's 2009, and POTUS is off wandering again. looking for free TV time.  POTUS's job is to repeat on TV the usual combed over jargon-of-the-moment that is not understandable unless the POTUS flacks provide an interpretation -- what POTUS meant to say. This is the real use of the drone like media. It repeats what the Obama team says it means, and repeats it in such a way that is even less significant. Consider the point of view. Start with a dull writer or duller on-air voice, add dull copy from young, dull speech writers, throw up a series of backdrops of dull apparatchiks from pompous and facile national governments (Merkel of Germany is atypical), deprive everyone of sleep and feed them wretched sweets and booze, also permit smoking and the reconditioned air of aircraft that leads to spreading respiratory and digestive viruses, result: self-mockery and Babel.  (I add bitingly, there was a time we sent aircraft to Dresden to turn it into a cow pasture: Henry Morgenthau's genius idea for all Germany in 1945 that FDR and Churchill liked a lot.)

Hat In Hand State Department.  

The Obama administration and the State Department were caught wrong-footing the Kim regime last winter, and now there is no plan in place to recover and get back on the field. The Kim provocations continue, now turning to a show trial of two hapless American journalists who were abducted along the snowy, desolated North Korea-Chinese border (left), now again turning to firing short range missiles to demonstrate readiness for launch on warning. The trial of the journalists is not a means to an end; it is a demonstration of potency just as much as a nuke test. The show trial of Laura Ling and Euna Lee in this news cycle is part of the succession drama in North Korea. The dying Kim Jong Il means to establish his mysterious, untrained, Western educated third son Kim Jong-un at the top of a police state cult that is nuke-tipped to resist all invasions or coups. The hardliners now hold sway and are pressing their power against the region. Importantly, Beijing is a benefactor and a beneficiary, as the waves of provocations in North Korea come at the same time Beijing is seeking to cut off or mute memory of Tianenmen Square's 20th anniversary. North Korea will grow a lot hotter is my best signals source advisory. The Obama team is way behind. Can it get worse? The not too veiled threats by SecDef Robert Gates last weekend, that North Korea's nuke testing is unacceptable, is a certain way to make Northeast Asia much, much worse.

Sunday 7, I will speak of the Kim regime turmoil with John Bolton as well as my foreign policy professionals, Larry Johnson, Gordon Chang, Bill Roggio, Melik Kaylan  and Mary Kissel from Hong Kong.  Also speaking with Wall Street Journal correspondent on the Korean peninsula Evan Ramstad, at Seoul.

Brian Williams spent hours with POTUS last week to manufacture an obliging and soft feature video of the Obama White House, and then ended the day with a peculiar bow to the departing Chief of State.  Bizarre.  Have you ever bowed to a departing dignitary or super boss?   Is this inadvertent by Williams?  Is Williams aware that he does it?  Brian Williams shakes the president's hand all day, each time they reconnected for another segment, and then Brian Williams bowed at the day's exit.  Like an Asian bow?  Like an Ummah bow?  Does it have meaning?  This is a puzzle that cannot be solved right away.  We may be watching the development of a new custom between American pashas.   The bow was banished by the founding cranks.  John Adams refused to bow to King George.   Washington disdained the royal ceremony though I have no memory of Washington ever banning the bow in his presence.  Did Davy Crockett bow to General Jackson?  Did Andrew Jackson bow to anyone?   Douglas MacArthur refused to visit Hirohito after the war.  Mao refused to bow to the Dali Lama.  Richard Nixon bowed to Mao.  Putin bows to potentates.  African antique warlords like Mugabe and Musevni bow all the time.  POTUS Obama bowed to Saudi King Abdullah in London.  But for an American citizen to bow to an American POTUS?  At the White House and the Congress, they stand up when the POTUS comes in the room.  But they do not bow.   And what is a bow?  It is lowering your hand to an inferior position.  It is exposing your neck to the blade.  It is the promise of obedience.  Not a suitable ceremony before a man who holds a powerful office that is venerated but is not himself the potency.

Despite long standing talk of a Bleak House level of corruption, the surly John Murtha remains a potent character in the House as boss of the Midas-rich Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.  Murtha proposes, Murtha disposes, Murtha does any darn thing he wants.   Now the puzzle of the above hit piece from CBS: Why now? The news is not fresh. John Murtha has been heaving earmark cash to his cronies and flacks for decades. The only requirement to receive millions is that you need a post office box in Johnstown, Pennsylvania -- a spurned, desultory, unoriginal town famous for a dam break in 1889 and its reputation ever since as a place to get out of.  Shrug.  Johnstown's favorite Marine  So why this hit, who did it, and why did they give it to CBS, the low, low, low team on the hit piece poll. CNN has a much higher profile.  Fox would enjoy it much more than the schoolmarmish Katie Couric.  CBS?   Isn't this the house that Dan Rather burned down on his way out the door?

Study this  paint-by-numbers Murtha hit.  How does it help anything to throw in the old ABSCAM videotape from 1980, when the FBI tried to entrap young John Murtha with a goofy cash offer (right).  As if John Murtha was ever stupid enough to take cash from one hand to his.  Congress works with cut-outs.  Murtha knew it then and he knows it now with a smile.  My most cynical turn tonight is that Murtha wants the Federal indictment dropped on him, becase he knows it will make him twice as powerful as dull Steny Hoyer and twice as notorious as louche Dan Rostenkowski.   Maybe even get John Murtha his own TV talk show on what is left of CBS -- it could use a touch of larceny and loucheness to make us laugh.  Johnstown John Murtha, the People's Pork Purposefully.

Ever joyless Pat Leahy, with a daring necktie, here makes a House of Lords pompous statement re his meeting with Sonia Sotomayor and his summertime plans, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, for hearings on her nomination. The centerpiece of the senator's toothless remarks were not the clever rhetoric about life experiences from the South Bronx, South Chicago and South Burlington, Vermont (nice mix and match) but rather the darts thrown at the close of this edited video at the "vicious attacks."  Leahy scored easy debating points when he focused on the unforced errors last week by the Noveau Demagogues to make reference to the Klan.   "...when you have vicious attacks by leading Republicans call her the equivalent of the head of the KKK, calling her a bigot .. totally false and outrageous charges...."   The White House has handed off Sotomayor to veteran bloviators on both sides of the aisle, all of whom have, on their better days, reinvigorated the words boor and hypocrite to make them into meritorious avocations.  The last remaining question -- nothwitstanding a thrilling Clarence Thomas/ Robert Bork scale event -- is how big the box office on the first day of the Sotomayor hearings when the judge can, in her opening remarks, determine if there are 95 or 99 votes for her confirmation.  

What is striking about Dick Cheney's dull remarks on Sonia Sototmayor at the National Press Club this news cycle is that he could as well be talking about how he disagrees that U2 is the best band from Ireland for all time and asserts that, if it were up to him, he would rather name the Clancy Brothers. Cheney reminds us that he does not have a vote on her elevation. Did we need to be reminded? Is this a feckless jab at other strident political actors in retirement who do not have a vote and yet speak loudly while waving a Twitter stick, such as the once and future demagogue Newt Gingrich?  Or is this Cheney taking :46 to say nothing at all?  More mysterious, Cheney heaps aimlessness on top of vacuousness by noting that he would have nominated a conservative. Gee. Write that down. The Sotomayor debate has reached the status of non meaning.  Even the demagogues are taking a seltzer break.