Spoke to Arif Rafiq, Pakistan Policy Blog, reported Saturday 31 that Mrs. Clinton's visit to President Zardari and his counsel in Islamabad is regarded as inapproriately blunt by the Pakistan media and TV. Pakistan is a fragile and paranoid culture living in a rough neighborhood; it is also now at war with homegrown savages. Mrs Clinton's remarks, regarded as bold, fresh and effective in some American cafes, were heard as cruel by the least among them, the poor and proud of Lahore and Karachi, the hard-slogging and ambitious of Islamabad, the superstitious and cursed of Peshawar.  Pakistan is a failed state.  It does not have the strength or confidence to listen to a scolding.  So why?  Do we feel better?  Without Pakistan, there is no solution to AfPakia.  Are we okay now?

The UN climate pow-wow at Copenhagen approaches with the strangely irksome detail that there is no scientific, political, or philosophical agreement that mankind is the cause or even a factor in the recorded climate progression of the planet.  The meaning of this confusion is that the behemoth Cap and Trade legislation in the Congress is suspect as junk science, hooey, a tricked up tax grab, and the parley at Copenhagen may have the credibility of the Red Queen's Justice Ministry.  The last months, Bob Zimmerman, author, "Universe in a Mirror," and I have been watching the sunspot reports as this calendar year moves into sixth place in the last century for least sunspots.  (Right, sunspot designated 1029, the most recent and just about to fade away from the Earth-side of the sun.)  Why does sunspot activity matter to Copenhagen?  Unknown -- except that there is a general observation that a lack of sunspots is associated with a colder climate.  The "Little Ice Age" of the Seventeenth Century was marked by decades of minimal sunspots.  What explains the climate cooling since 2006?  Last year, 2008, was the second least sunspot year of the century; and 2007 was ninth on the list.  With sixty-two days to go in 2009, we are sixth on the list, with an easy opportunity to move into third place and a chance at second place. We are now more than a year overdue for the solar minimum, a periodic phenomenon of roughly eleven years in duration. Coincidence?  Correlation?  Unknown.  At the very least, it appears hasty of the climate models to draw conclusions without explaining the connection between sunspots and Earth's climate.  POTUS is said to be bypassing the December Copenhagen haggling in order to make his green remarks in his Peace Prize address.  There is general confusion about what can be done, and the diplomats are now using the taboo word "impossible" with regard financing so-called correctives and greenhouse emissions targets.

A ten meter bolide struck the atmosphere over Sulawesi Island in Indonesia three weeks ago, and the video is just getting wide play now. The lesson is a simple one of imminent catastrophe.  A bolide is an asteroid that breaks up at impact with the atmosphere and releases an energy pulse like a gigantic thunder clapping toward the surface.   The energy pulse of the Sulawesi bolide is estimated to be the equivalent of a 50kt detonation.  Happens not infrequently, recently in Europe over the Netherlands.  The event is significant in that it is routine.  There is no warning; there is no defense.  The Earth swims threw a swarm of Near Earth Objects.  Apophis is well known, at 500 meters, and will pass within .5 Lunar Distance in two decades.   That is very close.  There is a 2.2 km NEO that passes within 10 Lunar Distances routinely.  That is close.  What don't we see?  What has its orbit changed by events?  What won't we know about until afterward?  Known unknowns all. 

     

One day later, Harry Reid gets fouled by Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (and of John McCain), who says he won't go along with the 60 votes needed to break the GOP filibuster threat on the healthcare reform's Bridge Too Far: the public option. The game is in time-out as the Democratic leadership reconsiders the tactic to go for the public option without the United States of Olympia Snowe or her companion, Susan Collins. Joe Lieberman gives plenty of cover to the reluctant Democrats such as Conrad, Carper, Lincoln and now Evan Bayh of Indiana. Harry Reid's disheartened behavior yesterday has turned mournful, defeatist, Nevada needful. Calling Joe Lieberman "the least of my problems" does not speak well for those other problems, such as a handful of doubters.  Unsubstantiated thought. Does Harry Reid have 50 votes for the public option (however its face is painted) after today? The other team got involved when GOP leader Mitch McConnell (right) whispered from the chorus, "I think it's appropriate to make the point at the outset that a vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to this bill will be treated as a vote on the merits of the bill..."  What does this mean? Any Democrat who votes for cloture (to close debate and bring the bill to a vote) will be treated as if he or she voted for the public option. There will be no place to hide after the cloture vote.   Does Harry Reid have 60? No. Does he have 50? Unknown. Will he force Lincoln, Conrad, Carper, Bayh and others to risk retribution back home? Unknown.  Does the Huffpo/Kos Left regret not kicking Joe Lieberman out of the Senate in the 2006 Democratic primary?  Known.   Will it try again?  Unknown.  Does POTUS have an opinion?  Of what?

Strange doings on Capitol Hill late today when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid surprised too many people on his own side by announcing, in a fragile, disheartened fashion, that he can deliver 60 votes for the public option.  The GOP heard the lack of confidence and immediately seized upon the unforced error -- "a thousand page, trillion dollar..." -- and announced a filibuster.  Many head counters argue that Harry Reid does not have 60 votes for the public option.  Harry Reid sounds as if he knows that he does not have the 60 votes.  Harry Reid also speaks in a disheartened fashion of the United States of Olympia Snowe, as if she is a pet child who has disappointed him in a spelling bee contest.   In truth, he sounds disappointed in everything, especially the Republicans.  Very disappointed.  Despairing, weary, numb, fatalistic, gloomy, spooked, reckless -- just the sort that throws a Hail Mary early in the game.  "I believe there is a strong consensus to move forward in this direction....  a public option which has received so much attention...  she does not like the public option of any kind... comes a time that she sees the wisdom of supporting...  I'm always looking for Republicans...just a little hard to find them, we've had to do a lot of this on our own...  the moderates are extremely limited...  I could count them on two fingers... we hope Olympia will come back...she's worked hard...  I'm disappointed that on the one issue, the public option is something that has frightened her..."

At a Miami fundraiser this news cycle, POTUS emphasized how he was not disheartened, weary, fatalistic; how he is ready to go.  He did not mention the public option.  His assertions suggest some debate somewhere about his ambitions, or accomplishments, or attitude.  Is the cool persona confusing his own party?  POTUS will need all available focus and push if he is to help Hail Mary Harry.  Basketball is POTUS game.  Call him, Half-Court Harry.  Emphasize that Harry Reid's behavior today is largely inexplicable.  POTUS could not have approved of Harry Reid's decision.  There is no evidence of cooperation or coordination on the day's remarks.  The Senate is hopping on one foot; the White House is hopping on another foot.  However if and when Harry Reid does not have 60 votes for the public option, the Obama administration cannot hide from a defeat of Harry Reid's making.

  

Spoke Saturday 24 to Jamey Workman, author, "Heart of Dryness," re the Botswana state leap to reap part of its open pit diamond harvest (above) being a major motive behind the Botswana govrenment's genocidal campaign against the unarmed Bushmen of the Kalahari since 2002. The Kalahari is 900 thousand square kilometers of 100 degree arid desert where up to 50 thousand Bushmen used to make their home.  The Botswana government, directed by the IMF and World Bank, chose to force the Bushmen to so-called new cities (cages) so that it can exploit the water resources of the boreholes in the Kalahari for diamond mining and processing in cooperation with DeBeers.  Progress vs. traditional stone age creatures, correct -- the 21st century tradeoff.  Except, Jamey Workman also taught me that the centralized reservoir system of Bostwana is severely vulnerable to climate change.  Bushmen can live in drought.  Diamonds, DeBeers, IMF, and the Botswana central government all need vastly abundant water supplies.  I have learned that the diamonds we value as jewelry and luxury are in fact the product of a grotesque waste of water -- and that somewhere likely in Africa are caged human beings who needed the water used up by the mined, cut and polished diamonds in order to drink, eat and live.       

Maine is Obama country; it is also a lightly populated, deeply iconoclastic and surprisingly big government state. The Yankees are rising to demand the public option.  Will POTUS listen? The excuse used so far by the Obama Politburo is that POTUS did not campaign for the public option and therefore is not tied to its fate; however that is leftover thinking.  A year since the election, the Democratic Congress has moved toward the public option.  POTUS cannot walk away from the fact of it, and yet POTUS dallies, or avoids, or looks for someone else to lead.  Why does POTUS ignore his own fervent supporters -- the Yankees rising to call out for a public option in the healthcase bill?  What does this achieve?  POTUS fears loss?  Loss to whom?  Maine provides a significant volunteer cadre for the 2010 mid-terms.  And it is the United States of Snowe's state.  Disheartening Mainers, the White House provides much cover for Snowe to equivocate through the voting ahead.   Also, the White House introduces the possibility that POTUS is deaf.   Too much time on the golf course, smoking Marlboros.

Deals Within Deals.  

Peter Spiegel, WSJ, preps the Obama administration's options on Afghanistan.  Again, the scale of the problem is that last June POTUS constructed a quid pro quo deal with Abdullah of the overly clever and calcluating House of Al-Saud.   POTUS will deliver a pro-Arab Palestinian State on the 1967 borders in exchange for Saudi Intelligence purchasing an armistice from the Mullah Omar Afghan Taliban. The aged, demoralized, sinister Abdullah, 86, is desperate for a demonstration to the Ummah that the Wahhabist posse is superior to the Tehran Twelvers -- and empowering the despicable and deranged Abbas at Ramallah is the best plan Riyadh's geniuses in their middle class palaces can think.   POTUS needs the Saudi deal to pacify Afghanistan, marginalize or pacify Pakistan's chaos, and derail the Israeli security apparatus from its profound fear of Tehran. There are other moving parts. Desperately the White House Politburo must deliver Palestine to Abdullah before the 2010 mid-term, so that Abdullah can deliver the Taliban before the mid-term. Karzai has wrecked the plan. Now the White House and ISAF are risking another round of voting fraud in Afghanistan.  Did you note that the Punjabi Taliban struck near the Kamra Air Weapon Complex in Punjab?  This is presumed to be a nuke weapon storage facility.  The Great Game raises the stakes.   Is the Obama administration playing for keeps?  Because the Taliban is playing for time and victory.  Speaking much re Afghanistan Saturday 24 with the AfPakia team, Arif Rafiq, Rufus Phillips, Bill Roggio, Michael Vlahos.

This is the age of planets, and the number of exoplanets have now past 400, a landmark that will date our century when our offspring's offspring's offspring number exos at one million and climbing.  Just now the excitement of the newly revealed 32 new exos found by the ESO HARPS spectograph in Chile, including Corot 7b, which is the same density as Earth and has the magical feature that its atmosphere rains rocks.   There is also the gas giant HD 209458b, 150 lights years out that is now said to contain the moledules of water, methane and carbon dioxide, understood as the building blocks of organics.   All of this is mesmerizing.  However it is still the build-up to the expected results from the first reports from Kepler.   The search is for Edens, that is, Earth-sized rocky and wet planets in the habitable zones of G type stars just like ours).  More, a  London astronomer argues that Kepler is so sensitive (it can see your shadow cast by walking in front of your porch light from the distance of the moon) that it can detect exoplanet moon to the scale of .2 times the mass of Earth.  An exo-moon can be just consistent with organics (heat, water, methane, carbon dioxide) as an exo planet, as long as it is in the habitable zone or has access to a heat source such as gravity (like Titan around Saturn).  This all points to a rich library of exos coming soon -- and hundreds of Earth twins in our galaxy within our lifetime.  Edens a billions or two years younger than us, and some older, too.  What did we look like before the Cambrian explosion of half a billion years ago and the oxygenation of the oceans and atmosphere?  What do we look like now with another fate?  More planets than grains of sand, and more Earth twins than imaginable.  Hope to speak with planetary astronomer and astrobiologist Dimitar Sasselov, Harvard, soon on the freshest news from Kepler and from other exo reporting.

Landing on Park Place.  

Late in the day the White House issued mandates of pay cuts for the top 25 executives of the TARP zombie enterprises (AIG, GM, C, BAC), and this noise-making  has started a mewing chatroom from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. There will be Monopoly hooey. Pay Czar Ken Feinberg claims to have the Federal authority to limit cash paid to private citizens who work at banks (and dead companies) which were forced to accept loans from Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke in October 2008 and afterward.  They were dead.  The Feds made them the living dead.  Now they are chained zombies.  This does not look logical.  Strange days. You work at a zombie bank. You were hired on February 1, 2009, or some date since the crash, at a lordly sum that builds in a bonus package that is calculated quarterly. Your zombie bank is having a very good year, thanks to the business plan that lets you borrow from the Fed at near zero interest and then gamble. Your compensation could be collectively up to $23 billion (Goldman Sachs).   Suddenly the Pay Czar is playing Monopoly games: moving cash around, turning cash into delayed stock, rolling dice, adjusting pay-outs, deciding who can land on Park Place, who can land on Go.  And yet you have a legal employment contract that was the reason you joined the zombie bank, for example, Bank of America, to help it rebuild itself as a credible institution. What delicious tomfoolery.  How does this improve anything to do with the jobless recovery and the zombie bank model?  It does entertain.

Empire.  

Most enjoy this simple ceremony of POTUS deplaning Marine 1 and striding purposefully with an escort across the tarmac under the din of giant jet engines to enplane the gigantic,  handsome Air Force 1. The empire is inhibited, deeply indebted, demoralized, floundering, yet it remains the sum total of the original transforming vision of the "citty on the Hill." Speaking Saturday 24 with Robert Lacey, author,  "Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia," who profiles the five kings of the House of Al-Saud since oil was first exploited in 1933 by an American team (because Ibn Saud distrusted the British colonials).  What the book underlines is that the House of Al-Saud depends entirely upon the imperial authority and creativity of the US in order to sustain its antique, odious, defeatist, cruel, generally tyrannical traditions.  There is a scene from early in the Obama presidency, a telephone conversation between crafty and frustrated King Abdullah, 86, and the fresh, curious, adroit POTUS, 47.  The duo speak of meeting soon.  They close their ceremonial remarks with "Inshallah."  I smiled.  The kingdom endures only as long as the empire telephones and speaks so ironically, "Inshallah."

Suddenly the Obama administration, in the voice of White House Domestic Policy Advisor Melody Barnes, discovers that Candidate Senator Obama and the Democratic controlled 110th Congress fed the failed banks TARP life support and forgot last Fall 2008 to get a deal signed that kept the zombies from routine binge profiteering.  Blame Evil Henry Paulson.  Blame deaf and dummy George Bush.  Certainly blame the too big to fail banking centers and their accomplices at the Fed, Alan Mudd and Ben Bernanke.  However it is impossible to pretend that the Politburo at the White House is a victim of wicked, greedy, stupid, lustful bankers.  POTUS gave them permission to return to their greed.  POTUS promises he will reform the system that died but in the meantime POTUS complains that the zombies are wreckers.  It is not wrong to say that the zombies are greedy.   John Tamny, CATO and RealClearMarkets.com, told me Sunday 18 that Goldman's grab at $23 billion in bonuses is ludicrous, since Goldman was dead, a corpse, wormy, except for the Paulson-Pelosi-Reid bailout.  Charlie Gasparino, CNBC, (his wonderful hot new book, "Sellout," coming next month) told me Saturday 17 that the Feds and the Obama administration are permitting the banks to borrow from the Fed (us) at 0.000001 % and then gamble with our money and keep the profits.  Great business plan if you can get into the Fed window to chortle with Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner.  But the Obama administration has aided and abetted this folly since POTUS, as candidate, arrived at the Bush Cabinet table in September 2008 to confer re the the Lehman/AIG phony credit crisis (the real crisis was in the money markets: they failed).  I mention that we are now in the approach path to an uncivil society.  The zombie banker elite and cronies who have everything and will not and cannot change or learn.  The rest of us who have less each year and cannot challenge the plunderers of our taxes and products.  Complete alienation.  East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania 1945-1989.   The White House is whining like a rube who forgot to close the deal with the Devil.  "Hey, that's not fair!"   The Goldman response is perfect.  Silence except for the miraculous sound of all those digits.

The Tehran Twelvers and the usurper Ahmadinejad immediately assert that the Baluchistan shahid operation was launched by the Brits and the US, meaning the infamous MI 6 and the sad sack CIA.  This is flattery.  The  Baluchis are a savage breakaway province of Pakistan, and their ops spill over into Southern Iran.  It is a tough neigborhood.  Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef are Baluchis, and they constructed the 1993 and 9-11 attacks out of their sinister rage.  The significance for the attack, slaying the deputy commander of the IRGC ground forces Shooshtari, is that the IRGC is a warrior cult apparatus.  It cannot adapt.  It uses blunt instruments and terror.  Now the counter-terror from a warrior cult outsides its reach.  A small detail: there is plenty reason to believe that the suspect terror group, Jundallah, has a lengthy history with the Tehran regime security apparatus and the intelligence services of other powers.  There are no innocents in the business of sabotage and subversion.  I learned last evening from Woodrow Wilson Professor Stephen Kotkin that uncivil society (police states with elite party members such as the IRGC) collapse from the top, not the bottom.  The protesters in Tehran opposing the usurper Ahmadinejad are not as threatening to the Twelvers as IRGC rage and revenge and cowardice and paranoia.  Then again, even paranoids have enemies.

The puzzle here is what Chris Matthews aims to communicate by remarking on the small beer of an investor group dropping Rush Limbaugh from its effort to purchase a struggling NFL football team based in St. Louis. Was it national news? No? Was it politics?  Vaguely. Was it opinion? Perhaps, but of a slight sort. The facts are foolish. This is about a professional sports franchise, the sport of kings and the idle rich. I do not see Matthews anymore -- different schedules, no TV -- however I dubt it is routine of the MSNBC veteran to speak of celebrity hosts. Why then? Ratings, envy, spite? None of that works. Limbaugh is a talker in a hot studio of his own invention in Palm Beach, Florida. Matthews does Washington gossip in a studio owned by NBC in D.C.. I do not see what it profits Matthews. Do you?  Whenever it comes to me to puzzle about show business, I think of genuine mysteries, and I lose interest.  Perhaps it was a drab news day, and the producer said, Stretch.

Vintage operatic, defensive performance by Joe Biden in Missouri -- in which VPOTUS blame-shifts with skill to make certain the audience accepts that the economy is a ruin because "Barack and I" inherited a ruin. Nine months into the administration, and Biden bashes Bush. On the same day POTUS is with George H.W. Bush in Texas. Why? Because the new studies of the the $1 trillion stimulus package from February show meager job creation and almost all of that for teachers and other state budget items. Speaking to Louise Radnofsky, WSJ, on Saturday 17 re the dumbfounding fact that, out of $16 billion awarded contractors (and $2 billion paid out), there have been only 33 thousand jobs created nationwide -- mostly new jobs.   There are similar meager results reported from the brutally cliff-diving state of Michigan, where a report says approximately 300 jobs have been saved by $ 617 million distributed or awarded so far.  VPOTUS is just warming up his shovel.

New York 23rd Congressional District has a special election on November 3 to replace McHugh, who was elevated to Secretary of the Army by POTUS. Games within games in the battleground 23rd, as Naftali Bendavid's report in the Wall Street Journal illustrates. It is now a three-way contest between the Republican state party choice, Dede Scozzafava, a social liberal with no special skills out of the state assembly (said to be an ex-governor George Potaki choice), and two rookies, the unknown Democrat, Bill Owen, and the unknown conservative, Doug Hoffman.  The rural upstate district is heavily legacy Republican, however the regional Tea Party voters are unattached, unpredictable, stunningly wired this cycle.   The Democrats, sensing a pick-up, are riskily sending in POTUS to a fundraiser on Tuesday 20.  The snobby, buffed Club for Growth is said to be pushing large sums of money into supporting the routine Libertarian conservative Hoffman.   What is most significant is that the momentum is with the conservative by the logic of negative campaigning.   Owen and Hoffman are pounding Scozzafava as inadequate (mostly on the radio), while Scozzafava is pounding Hoffman with NRCC money as a tool of Pelosi.  Since negative works, and no one is hitting Hoffman, regarding him as the spoiler, Hoffman is showing movement.  With 19 days to go, Hoffman is much more than a spoiler.  No favorites except the great sport, Mr. Unknown.  This may be a national trend.  Not Right, not Left, not Moderate.  Nothing.  An end to trend.  Instability.

David Wessel is a sober, dry, thoughtful and most well-informed journalist who wrote a good, exciting book, "In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke and War on the Great Panic," on the Fed crisis of last fall; he is also a most trusted voice in Washington Fed money chat.   When Wessel says that the Obama administration lacks a plan to answer the highest deficit as percentage of GDP since 1945 (passing 1 million war casualties, rationing, war surplus, millions of men returning to seek employment), then this is a starling and damaging accusation.  That $1 trillion TARP plan, stimulus plan, budget plan, healthcare plan, bail-out plan, those add up to long term grueling taxes, cut-backs, rationing, shortages, dissension.  The first casualty is truth, but the second is the U.S. dollar.

O'Reilly and Beck.  

Writing an essay this evening about the feud between Fox News and the White House, and I discovered that the heart-of-gold crank Bill O'Reilly has suddenly attacked the warm-hearted crank Glenn Beck for the latter's swine-flu-denial skit. This is delicious slapstick and immediately reminded me of the guileful teamwork of Abbott and Costello -- one tall and impatient, the other chubby-cheeked and childlike -- and their "Who's On First?" skit. Fox News is a gift like a comic opera, and the new duo eat the scenery when alone and eat the network when they work together. Now David Axelrod has paid FNC, and O'Reilly and Beck, and Bud and Lou, the lovely, lucky compliment of declaring them all to be official TV opponents of the administration and super-duper, decoder-ring cronies of the GOP.  Why? He's in Left Field. What?  At Second Base. Don't give a darn? Shortstop.  What does POTUS think?  Basketball.  "I Don't Know?"  Third Base!

Anita Dunn is the White House Communications Director and therefore her provocative remark that Fox News is the "research" and "communications" arm of the GOP has turned into a media pie fight. CNN and MSNBC and FOX immediately fire all their cap pistols in order to get into the circus ring.  There are no significant calories to anything here. The usual handful of suspects on FNC are skilled baiters and cacklers. The White House Communications Office is a handful of youthful media stars who spend too much time watching cable and reading about themselves on cheerfully gossipy websites.  Does the GOP have a close personal friend in Fox News?  Look at the results.  A weighty majority Democratic Congress and a sincere and patient sympathy for the Obama administration at the BBC, AFP, Reuters, AP, etc.  Add the UN, NATO, EU, and the Arab League all celebrating POTUS.  The Nobel Peace Prize Committee was way too much whip cream on the Cappucino of Politics.  Fox did this?  Anita Dunn has a cunning sense of irony. 

Not all bad news from California real estate. Jim the Realtor demonstrates there are still mysteries in pricing in 2800-4000 square foot McMansions in the sunny, desired, upscale neighborhoods of Salona Beach in San Diego County. How can you explain multiple bids that climb the price of a $1.5 million dollar development house (same as next door) in 2009? Yet here is the evidence, with the surprising detail that someone showed up to put down $1.25 million in cash for a house. Cash? It must be the Shanghai mob or their younger cousins. There is also what Jim reports as a sense of stealing from the bank's backlog of REOs.  The prices are settling back to 2004 prices.   Trying to catch the falling knife.  The Obama administration should see steadying numbers in the next months.  The real estate cliff-diving is done.  What is not happening is the jobs.  Those $1 million foreclosed houses are telling a story of treasured lost incomes.  The silent Okies have gone searching for work.  Not in California.

What is darkly, rudely, bitterly sad about the arrest of two French Algerian brothers -- one of them described as a physicist working in efforts related to the CERN accelerator -- because of suspicion of links to North African Al Qaeda elements -- is that this incident supports the worst fears of the paranoid that the Jihadists are not concerned with states or dignity but are in fact creatures of nihilism and a solipsistic savagery. Not much detail from the French police about the scale of the threat. The Brits have connected one suspect to physics work done in the UK.  A CERN representative was not happy:  

The critical response to Thursday's VBIED attack in Kabul is the India government (above). Speaking to B. Raman, Institute for Topical Studies, at Chennai, on Sunday 11, re the contest. Ram argues that the Taliban and its associate Gulbuddin Heckmatyar Hizbe Islami are working to drive India from the region. Why? The Jihad cannot get past old enmities such as the Partition War of 1947-48. What is especially rich is that the kleptocrat and usurper Hamid Karzai is said to be in sympathy with the potent though strangely passive Indian government. I do not seek to sort this out -- instead I am just exploring the simpler, top levels of the tangle in AfPakia that the Obama administration aims to solve with cunning, cash and promises. If you bribe the Taliban, what part of the Afghan Taliban? At the least you would aim to bribe the Haqqani network that is allied with Mullah Omar and that is credited with the most effective attacks in the east, such as last week's wave in Nuristan Province. Yet Karzai loses if Omar and the Haqqani network win. Why would India let its best ally in Kabul, the usurper Hamid Karzai, lose -- while permitting Mullah Omar, a pest to Pakistan decamped in the rebellious Quetta, to win? And why would the ISI, that supports Omar and the Haqqani network, let Karzai and India win? I will halt the speculation of the AfPakia Blues by noting that, in the breathlessness of the Obama administration's plans for Afghanistan, there was mention that a resolution of conflict in AfPakia could lead to a resolution or at least a tempering of conflict in Kashmir (below). Understand? A seventy-year-old blood feud to be solved as a supplementary miracle. Sin of pride? Creative naivete? Nobel Prize for Bluff?

Thaddeus McCotter speaks directly to the dragged out decision making process re Afghanistan in the Obama administration. McCotter sides with the position represented by McChrystal and supported by McCain -- that defeating the Taliban is an irreplaceable mission and goal, that permitting the Taliban to advance into swatches of Afghanistan unchecked will be a betrayal of the Afghani people and an invitation to chaos in the region. This is a moral argument as well as a strategic argument.  In 1942, FDR abandoned the Filipinos on Bataan (below, the Death March). In 1953, Truman and Ike abandoned the Koreans on the Armistice Line.  In 1974, Nixon and Ford abandoned the Vietnamese and Cambodians to the nightmare.  Now we watch POTUS weigh abandoning the Tajiks and Pashtuns to the Jihadists.  It has meaning to say that it is wrong to abandon people who have accepted our help and have no way to protect themselves from the Devils.  We are the "Citty on a Hill," or we are conquered. 

Nothing Fancy for Cash.    

Significant provocative intelligence from Jim the Realtor, the blog that Calulated Risk watches for housing news in San Diego County, California. Jim Klinge reports that the 1989 tract house market has suddenly become hot thanks to the government tax credit and to a surge of cash-heavy buyers. Jim reports multiple bids to houses in areas where there were no bids six months ago. He moves through a neighborhood where a house model that sold for $550 thousand in 2005, then bottomed at $280 thousand last winter, is now moving with multiples bids in the $368 thousand range. Nothing fancy -- 1500 square feet. Folk have money and are bidding in heavy competition for the same routine houses. The bargains may be gone. This may be a dead cat bounce.   It may be a bottom of the crater.  Jim is unsure if it will continue after the POTUS tax credit ceases -- whenever that is.  At the least it is good news for California, which is a wasteland of unemployment, foreclosures, cut-backs, under-staffed schools, transparent buildings, commercial real estate nightmares. Does this come in time to help the Obama administration for the 2010 midterm? Unknown, because what drives the polling is jobs. Real estate makes jobs possible, but very slowly. Multiple bidders in a range that is down 33% from the top does indicate that the lifeboat panic has stopped. Now for the long march to repair the scale of that gap -- $550 to $280 and bouncing up to $360. Lot of jobs lost in those dead cat bouncing numbers.

The Congress was briefly (90 minutes) at the White House this news cycle to discuss Afghanistan, and now we await a Solomonic decree from POTUS. None of this answers the deeper threat, which is Pakistan. The news indicates that, with US government permission, the hireling DynCorp and Blackwater (Xe) are both operating violently in the Pashtun tribal areas of the Northwest Provinces. US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, recently challenged the Zardari government that either it kills Taliban warlord Mullah Omar at Quetta or the US will do the job.  What does this mean?  The Obama administration doesn't think this was tried by the Bush administration?  The Obama administration prefers mercenaries over McChrystal?  Islamabad will watch us operate as if Tom Clancy is writing a script for "Rainbow Six?"  What does Omar do while we are paying mercs to chase him? What does the ISI do while we are buying off the hands-out, devious and treacherous Taliban?  And what kind of Taliban sells to us?   One credible scenario is that Islamabad, needing to shake us down for unfettered billions, will fashion an incident along the Line of Control at Kashmir and draw in India to a confrontation. I mention the idea of another nuke to nuke stand-off as an illustration of how unpredictable the region can become quickly if there is an advantage in it. The Obama administration is carrying on at the White House as if this is a chess game and the POTUS is a chessmaster. It is not chess.  It is the Great Game.  Several empires over the last three centuries have tried the game and lost.  The Hindu Kush is not Clancy.

The famous prankster Cindy Sheehan joined dozens of peacenik worthies who not only protested outside the White House at the start of the ninth year of war in Afghanistan but also managed to get arrested on the White House grounds.  The message is predictable:  What isn't predictable is the White House response.  POTUS was given a significant boost to the nomination, because he was understood as the peace candidate with credibility.  That now looks like a hasty choice.  The protesters are an implicit threat to the White House's authority -- the same sort of threat once represented by the right-wing against the Bush administration on critical debates such as the Supreme Court picks.  How will Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod manage the unmanageable?  For the Progressive Left -- the White House's best ally in the struggles ahead -- these are profound debates about ideology and integrity.  Look over the list of who participated at the White House on a happy, cool fall day.  Relentless, sophisticated, expansive, pious, prankish, implacable, militant:  The October 5 Anti-War Coalition includes Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, the War Resisters League, Witness Against Torture, Code Pink, Peace Action, World Can't Wait, Veterans for Peace, and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. 

Why is this man loose without a keeper? Last time I checked, his name was Alan Mudd and he was in handcuffs. Must have been a dream. Alan Greenspan is on TV telling us what we need to do in the ransacked economy. "...no new stimulus for two reasons... there's a considerable debate...." Is there a debate? The banks are zombies. Ken Lewis is in disgrace and will spend the rest of his life with his attorneys. Citibank is a laughingstock. The housing market is a crater. Debate? And who was chair of the Fed while the bubble turned into "When Worlds Collide" meets "Pirates of the Caribbean." Do we blame Alan Mudd? Yes!  And now he is allowed to speak without laughter?  No!

The G-7 is a victim of the Great Recession.  The original elite industrial economies, Germany, France, UK, US, Canada, Italy, Japan, now mostly disgraced and feckless like their banks (Canada excepted), have been eclipsed by the G-20 and even the G-30.  Because the G-7 is unloved, unmourned, incoherent, the hand-holding at the minister meeting in Istanbul did not provide answers to the near future. What growth that exists on this planet is to be found in the BRICs, Brazil, Russia, India and China. The sighing worry of the corpse of the G-7 is the legacy of the U.S. dollar.  Why is the dollar down 12% against the English pound and Euro in the last months despite the fact that the UK and the EU are not vibrant economies? Because the dollar may be terminal, and there is little the G-7 (of G-20 or G-30) will do about it -- until and if Tim Geithner and the Obama administration recognize that the dollar is the most irreplaceable victim of the Great Recession. 

Professor (and Chair of Economic Council) Christina Romer, one of the POTUS financial wizards, says much too much about how she does not know, and cannot know, and will not know, when the American job market will start to grow again:  "...The numbers were disappointing ... This is how real recoveries happen... They come in fits and starts, and this is unfortunately one of those fits...  We hope we get a good GDP number for the third quarter... by the beginning of the year we are adding jobs to the economy... he'll do whatever it takes... the President went to Copenhagen, because he knew it was something that was important to the American people..."  If you are comforted by the fact that the White House Great Recession team is less savvy about the American economy than a routine Tarot-card-reading, you are a first-class cynic; and congratulations, this is our age.  Some wiseguys assert that "The Hanged Man" means conformity, inaction, surrender.

Speaking Sunday 4 re Ardi, the surprising female hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, from a once forested area in what is now Ethiopia, who has rocked the exciting pursuit of the missing link, the ancestor to both apes, chimps and homo sapiens. Four-feet-tall, Ardi is 4.4 million years old and yet shows several critical similarities to homo sapiens, such as, according to Robert Lee Hotz, WSJ, "supple wrists, strong thumbs, flexible fingers and power-grip palms shaped to grasp objects like sticks and stones firmly." Also: Ardi was ready to use tools, though there is no evidence that our ancestors did use tools until 2 million years ago.  Ardi's brain was small -- about a woman's fist size -- much smaller than the brain of the most famous younger woman, Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis who lived 3 million years ago in Africa.  But Ardi walked upright while also spending quality time in trees. There was no arch to the foot, so running would have been arduous.  But this is not a savannah dweller, as presumed, but a forest creature.  Striking to me is that Ardi did not use her hands to walk on, as all previous models argued.  Speculation is that chimps and apes evolved after Ardi into what we see today. The most primitive part of us may be our hands, dating back to Ardi and to the as yet unlocated missing link.   Mr. and Mrs. M. Link were thought to be at 6 million years to Earth, and now speculation moves the couple back, perhaps 7 to 9 million years ago.  Our assumptions of how we evolved are now in chaotic play. Coolest of all to me, Ardi was most social.  Her remains were found with the fossils of up to 36 others, male, female, children.  Not ape-like, not chimp-like -- human-like, in a fertile, noisy forest, 10 degrees North, 39 degrees East, with her close kin and children, living and dying, and now speaking to us with critical, transforming information.

Disgraced Zombies.  

The first time unemployment number on Thursday and the September jobless number on Friday will combine the worst in predictability with the worst in despair. Seven million jobs lost since the Great Recession started December 2007. No one borrowing nothing except the Feds are borrowing everything. Why? We are not borrowing because we are sure we will lose our jobs, or already have, or are foreclosed and have lost credit, or just generally are reviled by the weight of the debt we already maintain. Enterprises do not borrow because they need to deleverage to maintain their payrolls in the crushed consumer market. I learn from a smart poster at Calculated Risk that only the Feds can borrow, that is, leverage. But the FDIC has already given all its money to the disgraced and zombie banks in order to keep the banks open so they can issue new bank debt guaranteed by the FDIC, which the FDIC then borrows because it has given all its money to the disgraced and zombie banks. You do see the tail-chasing illogic? Who is stupid? We are. For continuing to keep our money in disgraced and zombie banks, because we think our money is safe in a disgraced and zombie bank guaranteed by the FDIC.  The Obama administration didn't start this merry-go-round of worthlessness and can-kicking, but the Obama administration is now mighty comfortable with the disgraced and zombie banks.  Mighty comfortable.