David Petraeus is the strong horse, and the pashas of Pakistan respect the strong horse. This quality will buy Petraeus some extra muscle to rearrange the battlefield. No more. Petraeus accepts the assignment reluctantly. My information is that POTUS chose him, that POTUS an Petraeus argued about it for forty minutes, and that Petraeus saluted and accepted the mission.  POTUS fears the fate of LBJ, to inherit a war that cannot be won and cannot be quit.  The July 2011 concern is about POTUS asserting that the war is done; the Afghans are in change.   The Pakistanis await Petraeus, and then they await the US exit.  POTUS obeys King Abdallah of the House of Saud.  POTUS offers sweets to the generals of Pakistan.  POTUS will do what it takes to get out of Afghanistan.  Will Petraeus let POTUS go?  Bret Stephens, WSJ, observes that Petraeus is the one man in uniform whom the president cannot fire.  LBJ could not fire MACV General William Westmoreland.  LBJ quit before Westmoreland did.  Petraeus is exempt. 

  

Time out in the heat wave that sits atop North America for a sentimental knock-out of a performance of Danny Boy by three casual artists-- before turning to the gloomy news from Eire. Speaking to Liz Alderman, NYT, of the severe Irish trouble in the crushed economy and the cliff-diving real estate. The Irish dreams are abandoned along with the housing developments and the transparent commercial real estate complexes. The banks are zombies. The youth are quitting Ireland again for opportunities in Europe, if they can find them. The money is gone. Taxes rising. Voters are furious.  Modest salaries for nurses, teachers and caregivers cut by 20% already and more coming. This is the way to cut the deficit without raising the long-term debt by inventing money (stimulus) the way the US and others have done. Negative growth for years. Hard time to be 22 with a university degree and no way out.  Best to relax and listen to the crooners sing of the pipes, the pipes are calling -- but not for supper.  Eire abandoned is coming out way across the ocean in the USA.  California and Michigan and New Jersey first, forty-three other states to follow.  The public unions will be flattened.  Pensions will be disappeared.  There will be blood.

 

  

 

The Kim succession struggle lurches toward a climax with reports that Kim is failing and his faculties are gone. POTUS Obama oversteps his usual realpolitik at the G-20 and condemned Kim for the March 26 attack. The detail about realpolitik that confuses the policy ops is that realism sees no difference between Kim and another dictator, or even between the Kim state and the US.  Kim is gone.  The boy king Kim Jong Un will not succeed.  Enter failure.  Beijing alert.  Sixtieth anniversary of the sneak attack passes with more than a usual amount of poison on the line.

 

The next chapter contains some of the preliminaries for a two-month-long melodrama.  There is a three- to seven-day window for BP and the Coast Guard to evacuate the flotilla around the gusher.  Once the evacuation begins, it will be another seven to ten days until the ships are back in place for collection and to continue the relief wells.  In that window, there is likely another tropical depression.  The waters in the Atlantic and in the South Caribbean are bathwater warm, perfect for trouble as the storms pick up the oilly water and fling it.   Spoke Brian Sullivan, Bloomberg, who reports the threat: If the storm goes to the east, it may push the oil away from the land; it it goes west, then the oil is flung in storm surges against the barrier islands like a wall of poison.  Welcome Alex, the first-born drama -- and all your brothers and sisters behind you.

 

Spoke Mary Kissel, WSJA, re the swift and silent fall of Kevin Rudd from the prime ministership of Oz.  The presenting issue that threatened and cracked Rudd's popularity and was the confiscatory 40% tax on mining resources.  The gouging became too naked; the government could not explain its redistributionist crusade.  However, before the miners waylaid the Rudd magic, the government had failed to convince its own Senate that there was anything but palaver it its cap-and-trade bill.  Mining finished Rudd, but warmism weakened him for the fall.  The public in Oz is no more convnced that the world is melting than is the public in the USA.  Beware saviors of the Earth.  POTUS is another crusader who arrived in office with the cap-and-trade plan on his desk.  Harry Reid, in his last summer on the Hill, is said to be preparing a propaganda push for the John Kerry bill on global warming.  Is this the telltale sign that the government will fall in due time?  Warmism as a leading indicator of a government's collapse?

  

The plunging polls for POTUS and all Washington are logical and common-sensical. Spoke to Tim Homan, Bloomberg, re the cliff-diving of new home sales. All four regions plunged, led by the West down 53%. Prices dropped again. There are fewer new homes for sale now than at any period since 1970. The new homes sales number points to the continuing frail building sector. Without jobs, no buying. Without buying, no jobs.  POTUS is snakebit, yes, and beast-bit, yes; and now POTUS is just plain cursed by the Macondo well meeting McChrystal's loose lips.  Nearly two-thirds of the poll's respondents say the country is on the wrong track.  POTUS is not a leader.  POTUS is a mouthpiece.  The client just lost close interest in what he says.  All pols are endangered.

Who is writing the script?  Fabulous, but too fantastic, pell-mell, illogical, climactic.  Just because it is US imperial history -- that's no excuse.  Events are in the saddle.  There is a shahid op launched at Richard Holbrooke within the same hours Stanley McChrystal is summoned to the Oval Office to explain impudent remarks about the (admittedly pompous, inflated, insufferable, slow-witted) Richard Holbrooke?  Afghanistan is well served by men who understand the genius of silence and misdirection.  Holbrooke cannot keep shut.  McChrystal has the pained laugh this time.  While McChrystal blew himself up, Holbrooke just missed martyrdom.  These are not significant events. My routine mistake in reading the news is presuming that there is a best outcome.   There is just an outcome.  You survive, then you deal with it.  Holbrooke survives, so now he starts again.  McChrystal will survive something, then he will go on to dealing with the other threat in AfPak, Holbrooke.  And POTUS?  Nowhere to hide the fact that we all know POTUS is not up to this fate.  Spoke Gordon Goldstein, author, "Lessons in Disaster," re the McGeorge Bundy observations of what JFK and LBJ did right and wrong in Vietnam.  The first lesson was to take charge of the brass.  If POTUS does not show McChrystal the door, the brass will shrug and move on.  Survive.

The brouhaha over the Rolling Stone gossipy piece, "Runaway General," is not because Stanley McChrystal and his staff have remarked in a fresh way. The opinions of Holbrooke, Jim Jones, VPOTUS Joe Biden and POTUS are all well known and widely followed. Rather, the chatter is now about what POTUS can do. McChrystal is POTUS pick for ISAF. McChrystal is public general.  No good options for POTUS, which is itself the measure of the office.  McChrystal has lost the confidence of his most devoted supporters, who are the very same people who most decidedly reject POTUS's conduct of the war on terror.  Spoke Carlotta Gall, NYT, in Kabul, re the Helmand Province operation of this winter and spring, and learn that the Marja offensive is widely known as a failure, or "bleeding ulcer," as General McChrystal calls it.  The general himself is now the upset tummy of the Obama administration.  Wannabee tough guy Robert Gibbs tosses out that "all options are on the table," which is bland, aimless, and usually means that Gibbs does not know what is next.  Neither does POTUS.  VPOTUS Biden, now forever known as "Bite Me," will rise to the occasion and speak out in some obtuse and illogical way.  Ceasar at the Rubicon, toe in water.  Is this the coup we never imagined?  The White House brought down by laughter?   POTUS at war with his own proconsul?  Another beer at the White House?

The despair at the White House reaches into the bottom drawer of campaign tricks to pull out a partisan goof against Mr. Crude-Oil-in-Mouth Joe Barton in order to distract from the Gulf of Despond. Rahm Emanuel takes the lead line on ABC -- "a gift for us" -- and the Democratic ops follow with inexpensive ad buys that mostly play on YouTube for embeds like the one above.  Several risks here.  Attacking Joe Barton does not change the subject from the Gulf, and POTUS needs to change the subject.  There is also the small issue that Candidate Obama was the largest recipient of BP PAC money.  Also, no matter what the chatter, the Gulf spill continues, there will be new twists, and the inability of BP or the Coast Guard or the White House to stop the spill will drive this story, not a particular item.   News item from Angel Gonzalez of the Houston DowJones is that BP was obliged to postpone oil recovery for a day because of systems failure.  The Joe Barton attacks are for rallying the base, for the voters already completely devoted to the Democrats.  The sitrep is so bleak that the White House needs to cheer up its own team.  My guess is that the White House is now so far out of ideas that it will try anything at all, even stale ad hominem on a theatrical Texan, then try anything at all again tomorrow.  Negative works for your own side; but negative does not work for the Independents.  Drift. Panic. Drift. Despondency. Drift.

"I don't have to tell anybody that these have been difficult times for Ohio and difficult times for the country..." spoke POTUS in Ohio.  "...when I was here last, America was losing 700,000 jobs per month... that's why these folks here worked so hard to pass the Recovery Act, which cut taxes for middle class families, that way boosting demand..."

POTUS speaks mechanically and sluggishly in Ohio within the last days -- aiming to change the subject from the Oil Beast, if only for a few moments.  There is no escape.  Tony Heyward, playing the role of Satan, darted off to the coast of England to watch his boat participate in an Old Blighty yacht race.   POTUS was on the golf course at Andrews AFB for the 39th round of golf in his presidency.  Both men are tracked routinely by the media, asking the unanswered question: when does the Oil Beast go back in its cage?  Spoke John Rudolf, NYT, who reported on the Chevron deepwater rig just twenty miles from the Deepwater Horizon site.  The rig and well are called "Blind Faith," for the Eric Clapton supergroup.  "Blind Faith" is stuck into the same vast and violent hydrocarbon field that the BP "Deepwater Horizon" tapped into in its so-called "Macondo Prospect."   "Macondo" is named for the cursèd town Macondo in Gabriel Marquez's "One Years of Solitude."  The ironies collide and collapse.  Asking the spooky question:  Have we tapped into Hades?  Snakebit or Beast Bit?  Yacht Race in the Pit.  Golfing for Curses.

Spoke Jack Bell, NYT, re the bad luck of the US football team against modest Slovenia, when the winning goal was disallowed by a creative referee. My thought was the the USA needs a turn of good luck, similar to how we were rejuvenated in winter 1980, when the improbable US ice hockey team defeated the Soviet Army superstars. Jack Bell tells me that the US needs to win cleanly over Algeria in order to advance to the next round. Not impossible. What the US mostly needs is luck from anywhere to offset the national sense of helpless drift in the face of the Gulf leak and the joblessness number and the sketchy sense that we are not recovering, just bouncing along the bottom, moving money around as the fiat currencies decline in value as measured by the skyrocketing gold price.  We need luck.  POTUS's speech in the Oval Office may be the low point of the luckless.  Yet there is a hint that the Gulf is going to change again, to something worse.  Perhaps the hurricane season.  Perhaps an outbreak of despair along the coast.  Am told that years later in Alaska, the despair bit deep into the fisherman, a sense of dislocation and aimlessness.  The exit of Tony Heyward, shuffled out of the media eye by the drably Scandanavian Carl-Henry Svenburg (no doubt after heated phone calls in many non--English languages), ends one chapter and begins another for BP -- a panel of speakers, all without explanations for the crisis.  We need luck.  Instead, we have BP.

 

Joe Barton sends a box of chocolates to the Obama administration -- candy kisses in the guise of the striking and ill-imagined metaphor by Mr. Barton that he believes the BP oil spill fund is a "shakedown" and "slush fund."  The Obama team political machine, OFA, immediately sends out an email in order to maneuver the momentary Barton-foot-in-mouth advantage into vote-getting and goofy propaganda:

What Leased Joe. 

Spoke Taegan Goddard, Political Wire, reports that details emerge that Joe Barton's major corporate contributor is Anadarko Energy Corporation, which is a major partner of BP in the Gulf and throughout the world.  Also that Anardarko has already been dunned for its share of the Gulf clean-up, as it is deeply involved with the drilling exploration at Deepwater Horizon.  Joe Barton apologized to some of his major paymasters.  Congressman are not for sale.  Some are for lease. 

 

POTUS Obama's professorial scolding of BP for the past weeks has awakened the sleeping giant of injury lawyers along the Gulf and created a new professional opportunity for the next decade.  Shrimping in bankruptcy court.  There will be shrimp blood?  What is most attractive is that at long last the Obama administration has accidentally come across a way to generate well-paying jobs that are not based upon the Treasury in this country.  Enterprising mouthpieces like the amiable and suggestively impatient Mr. Aronfeld are welcome to leap into the massive cash river that is BP.  Forty billion dollars per year in income can produce a lot of nice lifestyles for the whole Gulf.  Does the Gulf generate a tenth of that in fishing?  Maybe.  But the best fishing for the rest of those lifetimes will be over at the Tort Bar.  The Obama team picked the arbitrary number of $20 billion for the escrow fund, to be administered by the Delphic Oracle and a Harvard Law-trained Angel of Better Plaintiffs.  Why not $200 billion?  Why not confiscate the keys to BP?  Rename it Barack Petroleum (no wasteful log changing costs.)  At the least, the Gulf of Torts will now welcome that fresh sandy smell of crude in the morning tide mixed with rotting fish at the shoreline and the romantic aroma of money form the cabanas.  Smells like, "Guilt!" 

I admit to a weakness for apocalyptic visionaries, and this wondrous missionary crone Harold Camping, from the San Francisco Chronicle, satisfies something about these days as we watch our youthful, grave, hopeful, fretful POTUS wandering around the Gulf staring at the vast ocean with puzzled impatience. Camping's fame depends upon his solution of a code in the Bible (King James Version, 17th Century) that fixes the day of the Savior Jesus's return as May 21, 2011. Perhaps Pacific Time. Not coincidentally, this is also the day that Camping fixes as the end of the world, featuring earthquakes and much Hollywood of 2012 like hysteria. Camping broadcasts his narrative to up to 54 nations on his short wave radio gospel station. Ghana, Nigeria, Dominican Republic are mentioned. I like it all. POTUS Obama's speech on BP was not immediately apocalyptic, however the subplot is that if we do not heed the recommendations of Steven Chu (did I mention that Chu has a Nobel Prize??) and other global warmists by shucking carbon-based energy sources and learning to live with clean (solar, wind, tide, nuke?) then we will all be doomed to a climate of fear. Or something to that effect. Camping says that the Savior will return. POTUS supporters mention a Savior now and again. Then again, perhaps Camping means that on May 21, 2011, POTUS Obama will end the world as we know it?  Do you suppose Harold Camping voted for POTUS?  That Harold Camping speaks well of POTUS to Ghana, Nigeria, DR?  Puzzling.

Nikki Haley is in the fine tradition of South Carolina to gather attention to itself by outperforming on the national stage.  South Carolina, the Palmetto State, has long dominated American politics, from the Revolution and the Pinckney aggression with regard the Constitution, to the rising against Andrew Jackson, the launching of the Civil War, the domination of the Civil Rights debate. The recent flurry of outsized pols continues with Nikki Haley.  Spoke Shaila Dewan, NYT, to learn that Nikki Haley has wanted to be a politician since she was in the second grade (second row, left, exactly the same smile today) at Bamberg, South Carolina.  Nikki Haley does not speak of identity politics; she speaks as an accountant and pol.  She was raised Sikh and continues to follow the Temple; at the same time, she and her husband are raising their children at the Methodist Church, and the couple were married in both the Sikh temple and the Methodist Church.  South Carolina has a weak governor's office in comparison to the strong legislature.  Nikki Haley aims to correct the imbalance.  Shaila Dewan spoke briefly of the smears against Nikki Haley during the campaign.  There has been no media update mention of the "inappropriate physical relationships" since the first round of primary voting.  The smear artists are either subdued by the wide presumption that Nikki Haley will become governor and are planning some new twist, or else the story is only going to turn into the legend that contributed to her victory. 

  

Disturbing and mesmerizing whispering that the Oval Office is the scene of stormy and romantic melodrama between POTUS and his most senior and trusted advisers.  Whispering that POTUS is sleeping poorly and is much aggrieved at slights, shortfalls, interruptions.  Whispering that POTUS is vulnerable to jet lag.  That POTUS has returned to chain-smoking.  That POTUS hesitates to heed his advisers, because POTUS frets that he is being sand-bagged by experts, allies, confidantes.  Whispering that POTUS frailties most in display in West WIng settings.  That POTUS evidences a Nixonian persecution mania.  Can any of this be confirmed?  Not easily.  Less detailed, POTUS is said to express his opinion to pals in Chicago that he dislikes his job.  Wilder whisperings that some pros are now weighing that POTUS try an LBJ exit after one term - rather than face a Carter collapse.

 

Why is gold running higher and higher? It is the metric of a thousand thousand explanations and rationalizations. Is it deflation? Is it precation for pending inflation? Is it an investment? Is it fear of another leg down in the credit crisis? The best fiat currencies are still rolling off the printing presses. The Fed and the Bank of Japan and the ECB are lending at near Zero rates, and still the consumer-based economies will not and cannot recover and stabilize. Worldwide deflation is a strange creature. Now there are new unknowns. The wage strike actions in Guangdong Province are spreading unpredictably. The news started with Foxconn, moved to Honda, and now there are other factories mentioned.  The China Price is rising.  Is there inflation in China?  Is it China buying gold -- all the gold bugs in Asia? And how does this connect to the declining oil and commodity prices?  It is pleasing to consider that the best smart money does not yet have it figured.  Buying Treasuries.  Buying gold.  Not much else is going up, maybe nothing on a weekly basis.  And the destruction of BP continues.  There is a hint here that we are watching another eruption build somewhere faraway, and it is may be headed this way.

Spoke Pam Belluck, NYT, re the discovery in a famous Armenian cave of a Fourth Millenium BCE one-piece leather shoe, the right foot, approximately size 7 American. It was for lacing up. It was filled with grass, as if with a shoe tree, and was tucked in a careful recess, as if the owner were coming back later in the season. The cave was under continuous use for throusands of years, and as recently as the Second Millenium AD. Astonishing continuity and determination. Spoke Spencer Wells, author, "Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization" re the swift and mysterious development of Homo sapiens over the last 70,000 years. The shoe in Armenia, according to the latest thinking in anthropology, paleontology, genetics, is a product of the creativity and ambition of our race.  Approximately 70-75,000 years ago on Sumatra, in what is now equatorial Indonesia, a gigantic volcano on Mount Toba erupted so violently that the debris cloud in the upper atmosphere altered the Earth's climate for a thousand years.  It was the largest eruption within the previous 2 million years.  Homo sapiens was then a hunter-gathering race, entirely in Africa; and with the consequent sunlight reduction and damage to botany and zoology, our crowd was reduced to as few as two thousand human beings, near extinction.   This latest thinking is that we recovered and prospered again thanks to our genetic tool kit that awakened the nascent ability of Homo sapiens to change and adapt.  The FOXP2 gene is a coach-like gene for our DNA -- and is thought to be the explanation for how we adapted so quickly.  Our population recovered, and we left Africa about 60,000 years ago.  By 15,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had covered Asia and Europe, outmaneuvering and outlasting our sturdy and predatory cousin, Homo neanderthalis.  (Some interbreeding is identified in new work.)   The Younger Dryas period, a sudden and severe Northern Hemisphere cold snap caused by the melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet and the consequent rapid shutting-off of the North Atlantic Circulation current, shocked and damaged the Homo sapiens in Europe and sent the clans scrambling to adapt again.  (Much critical explantion for the development of Homo sapiens is based upon reaction to climate: we are sassy and relaxed until we must change.)  From 10,000 years ago, there is evidence of grains being domesticated from the Yellow River to the Indus and Euphrates, the Nile, and especially in the Black Sea basin.  Rice, wheat and corn.  Agrarian settlements and larger villages and soon cities from the Black Sea region to Mesopotamia soon followed.  Much of our natural health and size was lost in the transformation from hunter-gatherer to farmer.  People physically shrank for some thousands of years; we were smallest and most short-lived approximately 3-5,000 years ago -- from the Egyptians to the Romans.   Maladies, pandemics and mental disabilities that didn't exist in the nomadic state entered into the farmer villages and trader-warrior cities.  Also, particularly human attributes such as chore-specialization, daily game-playing, social elitism, and eventually the construction of large-scale warfare units soon followed along.  So did fashion and poetry and law and Hollywood.  I like to think of the 5,500-year-old shoe in the Armenian cave (below) as a slipper awaiting the return of a petite, anxious, fastidious princess who dreams of diamonds and Dionysius.

"...Not to go on all fours! That is the law! Are we not men? Not to suck up drink! That is the law. Are we not men?.."  From the H. G. Wells genius, "Island of Dr. Moreau."  Now surrounded by booms, with a berm, and the wildlife is mucked with crude.  Mrs. Pelosi mechanically asserts a Dr. Moreau sound bite posture with regard BP. The Democrats are searching for an adequate POV from which to blame both BP and the Republicans for the Deepwater crisis. This is a struggle. POTUS continues to travel to the Gulf to demonstrate that he is paying attention. The pictures of the dying bird life and stained grasslands under beautiful blue skies are all that need be said of a national catastrophe that has wrecked political gamesmanship. Who watches Washington when the drama of the Gulf has months and even years to go? Hurricane season is on us, and the Coast Guard (sturdy, plodding, overwhelmed, heroic, blustery Thad Allen, below) prepares for the Mother of All Oil Spills, when twelve-foot surges put the oil on the bayou and begin the devastation of the barrier islands. BP suddenly announces it will cut its second quarter dividend, now in excess of 10% with the crash of the stock. Whitehall pushes back at the Obama administration PR destruction of BP's worth. It is a buy or a corpse to be cut apart? Buyers everywhere. Soon, the bidding will begin on Prudhoe Bay. The Obama adminstration exposes itself as hostile to corporate governance. Unless the corporation is a bank too big to fail. The Obama team has passed incoherence. This is an artform. The game is to survive. Hurricanes approaching soon. Pop the pocorn. There will be oil. 

Spoke Rod Nordland, NYT, at Kabul re the ISAF offensive that has long been planned and announced for Kandahar and that has now become the Kandahar Cooperation. Not making this up. ISAF generals are telling reporters that the media invented the term "offensive," and that the plan never called for a combat operation. Rod Nordland says this is inaccurate. The generals said "offensive," and now the generals says "cooperation." The explanation is that Hamid Karzai and the Pashtun elders who met in early April have feared another Fallujah and so have asked for a delay, a transformation of the plan to smash the Taliban. The Kandahar Cooperation could be delayed past Ramadan all the way to winter 2011. I asked if the White House still wanted the American combat troops to start withdrawal in July 2011. The answer is, affirmative. There are now 94k US combat troops in Afghanistan, and their chief role is to guard foreign aid workers in Kandahar and Helmand Province. This sounds like a futile mess. It is. POTUS is confused and conflicted. And we are cooperating with the Taliban. That's how George Washington captured Trenton. The Continental Army cooperated with the Hessians.

Spoke Alex Kellog, WSJ, re the latest sad tale in Detroit, what the WSJ calls "black flight" from the best old neighborhoods such as Boston-Edison. The city population continues to drop, and the abandonment of the center city is accelerating. Tearing down Mitt Romney's childhood home is just a glimpse at the wholesale abandonment. What drove out Johnette Burham, the centerpiece of Alex Kellogg's excellent piece, was that her house was targeted repeatedly by thieves when she was away. The end came when they set her house on fire and the smoke killed her dog and cat. Burham left. Her Atkinson Street is now one-quarter abandoned and headed to worse. The property values are now so low that homesteading makes sense, but not until the new mayor, Dave Bing, can rebuild the police force and other security services. The man who broke into Burham's home more than once, and finally helped set it afire, lived next door in his grandmother's house. Though the police had his name and address and reason for suspicion, the police didn't arrest him until Journal reporter Alex Kellogg called them a year after the arson. Detroit needs hard work and high risk. Spoke Pete Hoekstra, MI-2, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor; he indicates that the governor of the state and the mayor of Michigan must be partners to rebuild the city by creating attractive businesses and employing workers.

Meg Whitman easily crushes Steve Poizner in the California gubernatorial primary for the GOP, and the lesson learned is that money can out-buy money when two rich people are competing for a seat no working person would much want. The governorship of Sacramento is an aimless, powerless post of much pomposity and no effect whatsoever on the state of the state. California fails as an enterprise. Is it because it was captured by the public unions and stripped of all merit and growth? Or is it because a significant part of the population turned cynical homeowner and stripped out the credibility of the banks and mortgage lenders? A cooperative plundering by a soviet socialist failure overrun with whiners and scavengers.   They pretend to direct us, and we pretend to follow.   CSSR.  What is credible for a governor such as Meg Whitman? Tough decisions? Such as ordering the wrecking of the state apparatus? Perhaps, but she will needs nukes to blunt AFSCME and the SEIU. 

Carly Fiorina's victory over the dullard Tom Campbell is less dynamic. Campbell was used up when he switched from the governor's race to the senate race. Of note, the insurgent Chuck Devore of Orange County has failed despite Tea Party backing. Why no Tea Party strength in California? The most thrilling detail of this contest is the birth of the Demon Sheep. On to the battle with the Hindenboxer.

Steve Jobs, the wraith, speaks cogently and sentimentally about the creation of the iPhone. First came the tablet. Jobs was playing around with a tablet and gave it over to a pal, who called back to show him the finger touch scrolling. Jobs saw this was the foundation for the iPhone, put away the tablet, and produced iPhone1. The iPad is a revival of the original concept. My iPad is highly entertaining, useful, flexible. I use it to watch my email during the show, to watch Bloomberg and HuffPo, to check on the newspaper front pages. It is best at videos of Hitchcock and John Ford movies. The ten-inch-wide HD screen makes the 1950s technicolor explode.  The 1944 "Marnie" with Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, heaven  The iPad is also good for apps that I don't much need but are fun, such as the Weather.com app and the Goals.com app. I use the Pandora app and the WABC app routinely. The missing flash is a bother. The new iPhone2 arrives presently, and I shall look it over. The fact is that I don't use a phone much, and when I do, it is abruptly and for moments to communicate arrival or departure. The BlackBerry is the instant communication too, never wrong, always perfect signal. My 3G iPad provides a gmail backup to the BlackBerry. Pandora set to Al Bowlly radio is heaven, spinning up Crosby and Sinatra and Doris Day. iPad under my skin, why should I try to resist?

Deep puzzlement in the Eastern Pacific. On May 21, the media declared that the US Seventh Fleet planned anti-submarine warfare exercises with the ROK Navy in June. The critical detail mentioned was the supercarrier George Washington and "Aegis ships" would participate. Spoke Chuck Nash, USN, retired, re this development on May 23. Then on June 4, the Korean media moved the detail that SecDef Gates mentioned that the US may postpone the joint exercises. Within some hours, during the Singapore Shangri-La confab of Defense Ministers, Gates appears to have adjusted the postponement by agreeing that the ROK would conduct anti-submarine warfare exercises in the Yellow Sea -- with the "support" of the US Seventh Fleet. No mention so far of the George Washington. Why does the hunt for the GW signify? The Yellow Sea is the PLA bathtub for its submarine fleet. The PLA is most discomfitted by the Seventh Fleet projecting power up against the continent. The North Korean provocation of March 26 continues to draw in strange drama among the powers. Note that the Russians continue to plan a fleet exercise in the Sea of Japan in June.  

Spoke tonight to my AfPak team of Bill Roggio, Arif Rafiq and Ann Marlowe, and learned that Pashtunistan is robust and frisky for more of the ISAF investment of blood and treasure into the aimless and pointless war on the Taliban. Item from the London Times made me think that this AfPak fiasco is coming to a close. Three Chinese nations were detained at Kabul airport because they were carrying on 810,000 Euros. Who is paying what to whom? And with this sort of anecdote, can we be far from China Beach Babylon II.  Ann Marlowe observes that McChrystal and Karzai spend their days maneuvering to maneuver, a war of process without a mission or a goal.

Turkey and its flashy cunning PM Erdogan continue to manage the spin on the confrontation on "Marmara" by featuring the returning victims, led by mother and child. The scale of the Israeli intelligence failure emerges. The "Marmara" was the sting ship. The other ships in the flotilla all heaved to as soon as challenged. The jihadist-linked IHH ship "Marmara" led the IDF a chase, preparing the ambush on the top deck. My information is that it was common knowledge the ship was packed with hotheads who boasted of their intention to seek martyrdom. This is thug talk for, we're going to crack some heads. The whole jihadist mentality is about stupid sacrifice. Not smart sacrifice. Really stupid, aimless, wasted, forgotten, dull sacrifice. Like yobs heads to a Midlands football match intending to win the battle in the stands. 

The IDF failed to detect the stupids and sent in 15 lightly armed commandos who were easily overwhelmed. Waiting on forensics for who fired the stolen IDF pistols. Waiting on the IDF inquiry. Mention that will speak with B. Raman, at Bangalore, re the IHH involvement with Pakistani agents directing the jihadists in Bosnia. There were several Pakistani agents onboard "Marmara," fate still unknown. IHH is known to cooperate with Al Rashid Trust, a known terrorist front. In the training camps for the jihad in Pakistan run by the alphabet soup of fanatics, such MDI, JUD (political arm of the terror team LET). In sum, there are clues that the "Marmara" was a construction of many hands, from the ISI working in conjunction with Turkish and Islamicist provocateurs.  The suspect gangsters under Israeli custody are refusing to give their names or origins, and will not permit inspection of their hands for nitrates. The stand-off continues. Meanwhile, the Gaza border reopens, and the contraband rush begins from Sinai.

 into Gaza, and vice-versa.

Successful sting operation of the IDF and Israel run by the Hamas gang and its eager paymasters in Tehran. The IDF failed to spot the trap. The Hamas agitprop team was in place in Turkey to go immediately with the story of Israeli brutality. The lynch mob that met the commandos was organized to confront and sacrifice.  The nine KIA are likely all from the martyr ops. Waiting for forensics on who was shot and and by whom, since the IDF reported losing pistols to the mob. An IDF failure of intelligence. Hamas gained nothing but the cheap attention it craves (below, the sad-sack Gaza harbor). No change.  Bibi Netanyahu traveled to Jerusalem rather than delay to see POTUS.  Bibi has the priorities correct.  IDF first.