Dick Lugar of Indiana speaks a flat and plan tactic that he calls "audacious" that POTUS and the Democrats put aside (shelve, dump, retire, quit, forget) the healthcare reform mania and turn instead to the Afghanistan war and to jobs and the economy.  John Fund, WSJ, told me Sunday 29, that POTUS and the Democrats are like the dilemma for the British POWs in the famous film David Lean's 1957 "Bridge on the River Kwai" -- soldiers so committed to building a handsome wooden bridge for their Japanese captors that they forget the bridge will bring more Japanese war supplies to defeat the British military.  Eventually the bridge-builders faced that it was necessary to blow up the bridge in order to help win the war.  Lugar and Fund are telling the POTUS and the Democrats what would save them. Blow up the 2000 page healthcare reform gobbledygook that no one understands.  Here comes the locomotive.  Will the United States of Olympia Snowe save the Democrats and blow up the 60th vote by refusing Harry Reid's pleadings?

The terror attack on the Nevsky Express from Petersburg to Moscow is the same as attacking the Metroliner on the New York to Washington run, a major stab at the comity of the Russian Federation.  My information is that it was jihad related.   A renegade military munitions expert named Kosalapov who went over to the notorious, romantic, homicidal Shamil Besayev and the Chechen diehards.  Basayev was slain in 2007 by a Russian op that intercepted him on his way to a massive martyr operation in Petersburg.  The Russians have been hunting Kosalapov since 2006.  The man-hunt is ceaseless but likely futile.  The Chechens have joined the jihad in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia.  Vladimir Putin rose swiftly by boasting he would got through an "outhouse) to get the Chechens.  Basayev's ghost haunts Russia.

Superstar athlete Tiger Woods car crashing on his own block is not a happy story, and it is not going to get better. The details given out are incomprehensible. Husband and wife are the best witnesses, and they left the hospital before the police could take a statement.  Whatever is going on, we don't have it and may not want it.  The larger picture is that of cookie-cutter exclusive Orlando, Florida, a gated community called Isleworth, which is said to resemble a gilded cage for high-net-worth big spenders. Crashing your own Escalade at 0225 hours into a fire hydrant is the first clue that there is no escape from whatever has locked you up. "The Prisoner" as farce and tragedy. Bring in the PR firm, Mr. Woods, start spending time with youth groups who want to learn golf, visit a clinic, the end of the beginning. Is this part of the crack-up of the banking world? Likely. Those high-price tournaments, those extravagant golf-playing societies, the fees paid as part of your package or bonus, or just as a corporate perk, all crashing. Time to short sale the fairways. Early century party is over. Meanwhile, POTUS has a nicotine-craving for bad, obsessive golfing in the company of his suddenly Keystone Kop musclemen from the  Secret Service and a handful of tongueless Chicago cronies. Somehow it feels as if the gate-crashing flapdoodle, the Tiger Woods car-crashing brouhaha, and the POTUS mad-golfing mania are all going to get together in one tale. Supermen cry, too.  No more McGuffins for the banks, the TARPs, the pols, the media.  The reality TV show of 2009 is foreclosed and about to be marked down severely.

Speaking Sunday 29 Jess Bravin, WSJ, re the sudden exit of the White House GITMO op Phillip Carter who, at 34, has suddenly decided to "spend more time with his family" rather than continue on the GITMO hard cases. Carter appears to have been fired just weeks after White House Counsel Greg Craig was fired. A fair explanation for these serial departures is the continuing turmoil about the Attorney General Eric Holder decision to put KSM and four cronies on federal trial in New York.  Now we learn (again) that two of the five tagged for a New York federal court are questionably incompetent -- and that some part of their conditions may be explained by the imagined horrors of their imprisonment since 2002.  More sophisticated blame-shifting to follow.   Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al-Mawsawi may be most visibly incompetent.  Bravin remarks drily, "Now it is unconstitutional to put anyone on trial who is mentally incapable of assisting in his defense... "...if either of these defendants is found incompetent... they will be placed in a mental facility until they are competent..."   The GITMO circus is coming to town, and at least two of the mass-murders may be displayed as victims, freaks, permanent wards of the state.  

It is a treat to listen to Politco's earnest, smart, youthful, process-focused writers and editors and realize that they do not have time to ask why -- they only have enough of the day to ask what happened. Why healthcare by the end of the year? Because POTUS said so? Because SOTU steps on January? Because 2010 is elections? Because the 60 votes do not exist without a miracle? Because Hollywood loves a clock for the third act? Note that at the close of the video, there is mention of a jobs bill in the House. The House Democrats are haunted by the joblessness. It makes the House a one-way ticket to Palookaville -- and that is even ignoring the healthcare folly and the cap and trade delusions. A trillion dollars for stimulus 1, and now we need another trillion to bribe people to hire. What does healthcare have to answer joblessness?  When you are out of work, you skip the dentist, you ignore the doctors, you get by without worrying about your meds refills, you dose the children with generics, you stall the 90 day overdues from the pediatrician and the mammograher. And if you have a heart problem, you pray and fade. Healthcare without a job?  Vote?

Shining Winter Maze.  

Colleague Simon Constable, DowJones, leads David Wessel, WSJ, through the maze of possibilities in front of the Senate in order to assemble 60 votes to break the GOP filibuster. The public option  in the Democratic desired outcome. And the solution suggested here is the United States of Olympia Snowe, once more. All avenues of the healthcare reform maze lead to the United States of Olympia Snowe by herself in what I picture as a scenario like the blizzard blowing late in Stanley Kubrick's masterful version of Stephen King's "The Shining." Will Senator Snowe lead the Democrats throught the tricky passages to 60 votes? It is the only credible explanation for success, and it may be the future; but not until after the State of the Union, perhaps not until February. Long winter, snowy wind, Jack Nicholson searching for Olympia (Shelley Duvall) Snowe. "Here's Johnny!"

The report by the excellent and wry Elizabeth Williamson, WSJ, is a puzzle, because it is difficult to say if the newsroom in Washington knows what the answer is to the question posed: Why does POTUS choose to go golfing almost compulsively (every Sunday instead of church, every free weekend, sometimes more)? Several weeks back, I spoke to Christopher Andersen re his Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage, and toward the close of our conversation he asked me if I knew why POTUS was spending so much time on the golf course? "Smoking," he said. I said on-air that it was not smart for POTUS, and he should quit it. My impression from Andersen is that the smoking is not a secret. However from the presentation above, my guess is that the White House image team has decided to shield POTUS from photos of his smoking. That would explain using heavy security and a four-man team in front and behind him on the course. My thought also is that this is an elaborate, clumsy and shallow ruse that will eventually be exposed by an accident or a papparazzi. Also, does POTUS not smoke at the White House? Is the WH still a smoke-free zone as arranged by HRC when she was First Lady? Unknown.

Lou Dobbs reveals what is not surprising this news cycle, that he is considering launching himself for president. You recall the 1941 masterpiece by Frank Capra, "Meet John Doe." The game (concocted by newspaper advice columnist Barbara Stanwyck to save her job) was to create a common man who was so fed up with the anger, falsehoods, danger and squabbling of the day that he was going to kill himself on Christmas Eve rather than live longer in this American rat's nest.  The frantic newspaper search for a John Doe to satisfy the public affection for and craving for this desperate invented citizen produces an amiable, vapid, dreamy ex-ball player, starring Gary Cooper.  Presto, the John Doe Clubs spring up across the country to show that people can work together, live side by side, cooperatively, and these same clubs petition John (Gary Cooper) Doe not to kill himself. Meanwhile, the concoction of falsehoods and public manipulation by the newspaper is taken over by the plutocrat publisher who aims to promote himself for the presidency on the basis of the John Doe Clubs. Cynicism, brutality, exploitation, lies. Capra never could solve the ending. Now we have Lou Dobs and his little step-brother in Doeism, Glenn Beck, both of them toying with politics for self-promotion and book sales. The end Capra could not see because he was insufficiently cynical (it was 1941, the world was in a pit; it is hard to be cynical when they are shooting at you), was that Gary Cooper writes a bestselling book with Barbara Stanwyck, and they get a weekly radio advice show together until TV is invented. Now we have Lou and Glenn, in search of their Barbara Stanwyck.  Meet Lou Doe.

United States of Olympia Snowe.  

Jodi Schneider told me Sunday 22 that the Senate healthcare reform debate and voting will not meet POTUS deadline of the end of the year, and that the calendar looks like January and February will be dominated by the State of the Union, healthcare reform, and possibly a revival of the cap and trade legislation.  James Taranto, WSJ, agreed that the healthcare reform will not be rushed, that February is likely the target.  At the same time, Harry Reid has given up on Joe Lieberman, and, according to Jodi Schneider, will bring his earmarks to the wholesome state of Maine to see if he can purchase or lease attention from the United States of Olympia Snowe for the 60th vote needed to break the certain filibuster by the GOP.

A peculiar cliff-hanger on Saturday 21 in the Senate that takes more sentences to explain than it takes to say that it come to very little. Will Harry Reid find the 59th and 60th vote to move his healthcare bill to debate after Thanksgiving? It comes to Joe Lieberman, who can be agreeably contrary when he chooses. Yet does it signify? Nancy Pelosi and Herry Reid have turned the healthcare bill into a game of bumper cars. Once upon a time, it was about cost-savings and public insurance plans. But that was before the jobs number went over the cliff. After Thanksgiving, the week of November 30, is also when we will get the November jobs number. Healthcare? Who has patience for that song? If that jobless numbers climbs toward the 1982 high of 10.8%, the Senate and the House will get out of Washington as soon as the Christmas tree is lit on the White House lawn. POTUS has called a Jobs Summit at the White House for Thursday December 3. The next morning, Friday December 4, at 830 am Eastern Time, is the red line for healthcare reform and the 111th Congress. Is it fate or is it a coincidence that Sarah Palin will be signing books at Fort Hood on Friday December 4 -- in a media blackout as designed by the US Army for anxiety that her event will become a political circus. Who is the 60th vote? It's what happens on December 4th that is the 60th vote.  I will speak to my professionals all weekend re healthcare, but eyes are on the prize two weeks from now, after the turkey is pardoned, the last mercy in DC if the jobless number touches 10.8.

Ice Age Taxes Yesterday.  

Climate change arrives in North England, Scotland and some of Wales as "millenium" rain storms have been pounding the British Isles from out of the Westerly Approaches for the last week, and as you can see from this video whole rural towns are in calf-high water, bridges gone, the verdure countryside in late fall reduced to a soggy, cloudy, gloomy perfection. It all reminds me of the swift and over the top set up for the romantic and whimsical climate disaster movie "Day After Tomorrow" (2004) (below) when the North Atlantic circulation system, including the Gulf Stream, North Atlantic Drift, Norwegian and North Equatorial currents, all shut down, creating three massive superstorms that quick freeze Scotland and Canada and Russia and push everything above the tropics into a new Ice Age in a matter of months. Thrilling. Gordon Brown does a wonderful somber turn for a disaster movie. Why the severe weather in the Philippines and the British Isles? Unknown. Why global cooling since 2006? Unknown. The Senate has shelved the Cap and Trade bill. The UN Copenhagen climate change summit is now regarded a pre-fab failure. Is there climate change? Yes. Is it greenhouse gasses? Most not likely. Still, the EPA prepares to mandate that greenhouse gases (that would be CO2) are a pollutant that can be regulated and taxed. It is the "Day After Yesterday" on that hunt for new taxes by the Obama administration. Meanwhile, there is an unusual an unintended consequence of the storms in Britain that may apply to the Obama administration when it says it won't raise taxes on we modest folk in order to pay for climate change: "Among the many events that have been cancelled due to bad weather was the World's Biggest Liar Competition, scheduled to take place in Santon Bridge, near Whitehaven, Cumbria Organisers said that when they tried to tell people the event was cancelled, no one would believe them."

Place Your Bets.  

My favorite trade of the new year is gold, gold, gold, not because it is genius sophisticated analysis, but because it is rudimentary Auric Goldfinger thinking.  The Obama administration is committed to running the printing presses and pushing cash into the hands of failed banks, mortgage lenders, car companies, and not a few reckless, ill-managed, petulant state assemblies and their cronies in municpalites.  As long as the presses run, and for soetime after they stop, the inflation will climb and the prices will skyrocket.  The only sure hedge is gold, touching $1150.  The gold price has become the new metric on the Obama administration's haplessness.  Market maestro John Paulson's new gold fund is a big, nosiy, iconoclastic bet against the White House printing press (and Ben Bernanke's passivity) through 2012.  Goldfinger lives in Shanghai, and MI6 has long since folded its Double 0s and pensioned Bond off to the Dalmatian Coast, where he runs a casino.

Retiring Vermont Senator Judd Gregg was quoted in The Hill arguing in a sour fashion that the Democrats would pass some version of healthcare by moaning about 60 votes in the Senate and then constructing them afterall. The bill then will go to Conference, where all the progressive cooking by Mrs. Pelosi will be ladled into the Senate's cautious cake mix, and then Hary Reid will find another 60 votes to pass the public option lite. Gregg offered no evidence for his measure, just craggy and disconsolate fatalism. I half-believed the Gregg scenario until I spied a (above) peculiar performance by Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin.   "It has to pass in the Senate this year.... I, I, want it to..."  There are only six weeks left in the year.   Loose lips like this sinks ships.

Sarah Palin meets Oprah Winfrey doesn't need an explanation, the event is a wordless success with just a glance at their self-regarding whimsy. Why is Sarah Palin significant as a politician? My information from a wag is that in the feverish search for the next Republican star who is not weighed down with puffy jowls and grouchy remarks, Sarah Palin looks like the new Pepsi Generation. You remember the Pepsi Generation? When Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell and Dick Cheney were young and foolish, the B&W Pepsi Generation owned the future of American politics. Now it's Sarah Palin's cohort to rise and clink Pepsi bottles and command the GOP pop. Is the she the one?  If not, she's closer.

Bows and Codes.  

POTUS arrived in a torrent of rain at Shanghai just after midnight local time and motored to the RON hotel for the beginning of his two-day state visit to the dictatorship of the Beijing cadre.  The town hall meeting with the Shanghai students, including questions from email, is the featured performance of the first day.  Spoke to Mary Kissel at Hong Kong re the POTUS trip so far, and she emphasized that the bow to the Japanese Emperor Akihito was bizarre and puzzled Asia, that the POTUS remarks in Singapore about encouraging US exports and rebalancing trade were coded language for a weaker dollar, that the Asian leaders are alarmed and demanding that the US contribute to dollar stability, that the POTUS refusal to speak of human rights in public is a mistake read as a show of weakness, and that the Beijing leadership does not respond positively to weakness as if it is good manners.  Mary Kissel made the additional argument that in a one-party state, which is by definition an uncivil society, there are no avenues for political diversity and dissent.  It is critical to a strong future for China that the United States provide support to the democrats.  Stormy weather, onto Beijing.  (Below, Nixon bows to the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, 1971, and the emperor bows back.)

Startling Evidence of Success.  

Colleague Bill Roggio, Long War Journal, includes this startling video from Al Jazeera that records evidence of a captured American weapons cache and burnt-out, abandoned vehicles left over from the Taliban victory at a severely remote ISAF outposts in Nuristan Province (eastern Afghanistan) on October 3-4 that resulted in US casualties and a hasty retreat from the region. The reports at the time, which Bill Roggio and I discussed that weekend in surprise,  were that the Taliban assault troops came in waves, as many as 300 attackers, and that the fighting continued over night. Despite repeated US airstrikes, the Taliban pressed the assault.  Within a week, word came that ISAF had abandoned the position it had fought to maintain.  Roggio writes: "The Taliban provide footage from what was formerly known as Combat Outpost Keating in the Kamdesh district in Nuristan province. The Taliban now are in full control of the district and claim to have recovered US munitions at the site."  What this may mean in Washington is that Stanley McChrystal's ISAF, over-committed, out-numbered, is already in retreat from the Taliban offensive along the AfPakia border to the East. This reminds of the retreat on the Korean Peninsula in the summer of 1950, before MacArthur's counter-attack at Inchon Peninsula.  Retreat is not a plan.  At this point, it is a mystery what POTUS and the DoD have available to respond to the Taliban cockiness evident in this video.   Is ISAF already defeated in the East of the country?  Is the delay at the White House because there is no politically sophisticated way to acknowledge surrender and flight?  How do you secure a country when the enemy holds the East?  A withdrawal to the cities may be in order, building strategic hamlets with the clear and hold strategy used by General Abrams in the late Vietnam war.  And yet video like this suggests that the Taliban is highly motivated, has good intelligence, enjoys easy recruiting, know how to pick a fight, is unafraid of American airpower.  Speaking Saturday 14 with my AfPakia roundtable of Bill Roggio, Rufus Phillips, Ari Rafiq re the White House dilemma, and re the latest controversy over the leak of a memo from Afghanistan Ambassador Eikenberry.

"Tax the rich," says Harry Reid.  "Tax the rich again, tax and tax, and meanwhile subsidize and shift taxes and raise payroll taxes and..."   It is a Democratic waking nightmare. Of course, everyone knows that it sounds terrible. If the economy was growing and creating jobs, it might sound schoolmaster rational. With joblessness at 10.2%, with the zombie banks still grasping for pennies by borrowing at 0% from the Fed and lending not a penny, instead gambling again on commodities and the market, with the dollar shrinking like the Wicked Witch of the West, Harry's Senate blather about taxes sounds like a tolling bell. Whose funeral?  First thought, look at Chris Dodd's polls.  Plutocrat villain and loony Lothario William Randolph Hearst could beat Dodd right now, and Hearst really is dead (sitting next to Rita Hayworth in Heaven).  Maybe this time the American people will reward a party for raising taxes in a jobless wilderness.   Maybe taxes are a secret to growth.  Maybe Milton Friedman was wrong.  Maybe this time the nightmare is going to end happily ever after.

The scripted, lightweight banter on CNN with a chucking host and a jug-eared enlisted man chorus permits David Petraeus to reject again and again the expectation that he is a presidential candidate. "What about "No" don't you understand..." is his pop, over-practiced self-deprecating misdirection. Petraeus is a drab, monotone speaker: he is earnest, unemotional, apolitical in his remarks. He is a serving general in a subordinate command. He is fixed as a registered Republican in New Hampshire. Is he a candidate? My information is that the friends of Petraeus have been passing around pamphlets for his candidacy since at least '07.  Petraeus is West Point '74, which means that he just turned 57.  In 2016, he will be 64 years old, a not irregular age for a presidential candidate.  About the consistent "No" that he likes to return when asked.  The way to run for president is never to run for president --  Grant and Ike (below in Concord, New Hampshire) are still saying "No" behind the Pearly Gates -- until you are drafted from your surprisingly convenient Granite State address.

Late Saturday evening  7 November after the Pelosi win in the House, 220-215, a big-shouldered and sympathetic young man from ESPN Radio came over to my studio to ask what the vote meant for him, for the way he handled his healthcare as a part-time worker at several broadcast and media units. I knew what he meant. Was this bill going to cost him money that he didn't much have, because he would be required to purchase healthcare or pay a fine? I told him that I didn't have healthcare from college until I was in my 40s, and that if I had lived under the plan just passed in the House, I could not have managed being a novelist (with my real name). He thought about it. I told him that there would be about thirty million young people in his category, and we were fresh out of jails, so that it would come to a fine on your taxes. He thought about it and asked, "What's going to happen?" I didn't have a good answer, so I told him that after they argued for a long time, everyone was going to make money except the taxpayers and guys like us. I should not have been cynical. I am older. I have responsibility to be earnest when asked an earnest question. I went for irony.  The above ad from the usual lobbying crowd, this time called "League of Americans Voters," tries mockery and cynicism. 

  

Bogged Down in Berlin.   

The Tehran Twelvers grabbed three American children, Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, last summer along the Kurdish border with Iran and now hold them hostage as spies in exactly the same dopey and useful fashion North Korea held two American jounalists last winter until the Bill Clinton mission to escort them out. Tehran's aim is to make mischief in order to create publicity in the Ummah.  It is working.  The trouble of the moment is that Jerusalem intercepted Tehran's arms-running to Syria and via Damascus to Hezbollah in Lebanon.  PM Netanyahu was with POTUS today to speak directly to the Tehran provocation.  The UN remains bogged down in the double-talk on the nuke fuel. It is Tehran's genius to stall and misdirect and deceive and prevaricate.  POTUS will soon be ensnarled in a hostage drama if it suits Tehran's calendar of delay.  StateSec HRC, in Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, spoke to the bogged down jeopardy:  "We believe strongly that there is no evidence to support any charge whatsoever.  And we would renew our request on behalf of these three young people and their families that the Iranian government exercise compassion and release them, so they can return home."

Spoke to Attorney Ed Hayes, retired CIA officer Larry Johnson, re the Ft. Hood shooter Hasan, and there is so far agreement that his crime looks much closer to Columbine than it does to a jihadist murder raid.  Lonely, tormented, isolated, frightened, cruel, and possibly self-medicated human being living inside a delusion that was based on random fantasies of his life, his religion, his purpose.  Columbine.  And there never has been a better explanation for the Columbine massacre than that the shooters vanished into a rage that murdered before it was consumed.  My source from the West Bank, where Hasan's family still lives, finds no connection to organized jihad.  The investigation continues, but in the first 80 hours, no credible, demonstrable links to known terror gangs.  

Doomsday Machine.  

Twenty-five years ago I travelled to Schweinfurt-am-Main in West Germany, the home of the Black Horse Regiment (see video above), in order to visit my brother; and I learned that the Black Horse life expectancy in the coming land war for Germany was about half a day or less. The Russians and their German allies would flood through the Fulda Gap and not run out of momentum until the Rhine RIver. Everyone on the base was under orders to bug out toward Paris and survive. I learned that our regiment was based in the same buildings that had housed a Panzer regiment once upon a time. Also, that the Germans had heaped lots of weapons in a tunnel that ran under the main road -- to escape the Allied bombers. After the war, it was too expensive to clean out. You could see the outlines of the tunnel when it snowed, because the heat melted a path in the snow above.  What I did not know at the time was that the Soviet bosses Andropov, then Chernenko, expected Ronald Reagan to launch a First Strike attack on the Soviet Empire.  The Soviets were convinced the war was imminent.  The Soviets had prepared a doomsday machine (see David Hoffman's "Dead Hand") that would continue to fire nukes at Germany and the US long after Moscow was a crater of craters.  The Black Horse regiment was not wrong to prepare for worst-case scenario.  It didn't happen.  The Soviet army aimed at the Fulda Gap instead threw itself on Afghanistan (below) and broke like a wrecked train.  Now Germany commemorates 20 years since the BErlin Wall was taken down and the two parts of Germany reunited.  The Fulda Gap scenario is science fiction.  But just yesterday it was as real as WMD in the hands of the jihadists, or nukes on the launch pad aimed at Jerusalem.  The doomsday machine was not retired; it changed masters.

 

No Conclusions.  

POTUS emerged gloomily to warn not to jump to conclusions about Ft. Hood (above) following his afternoon off-the-record luncheon with the Washington elite journalism, CNN's David Gergen, Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, Newsweek's Jon Meacham and Howard Fineman, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Cynthia Tucker, POLITICO's Mike Allen, NPR/ Fox's Mara Liasson, Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall and New York Times trio David Brooks, Andy Rosenthal, and Gail Collins.  What's the worst that can happen when POTUS meets with opinion-makers?  No conclusions about Ft. Hood's mass murder by a Virginia-born 39 year-old Army Major, whose parents emigrated from a Palestinian village near Jerusalem, whose brother lives in Jerusalem, who is said to have shouted about "Allah" before he murdered his comrades?  Also, no conclusions about why David Axelrod, Anita Dunn, Bill Burton and Robert Gibbs also attended the journalism luncheon.  No conclusions, just speculations. What was the purpose of this luncheon on this day?  The unemployment number testing the 1982 high? The strategic review for Hamid Karzai's kleptocracy? The trip to East Asia where China just accused the US of protectionism (and Beijing has a credible case)?  Was it wise for these celebrity journalists to go along to sit with the White House message team -- off the record? The only profession that gets paid not ever to reach a conclusion is the profession of stooge.  Still not jumping to a conclusion.

Sixty Thousand.  

Robert Lee Hotz, WSJ, files an astonishing video on the humpback whale population worldwide that was hunted to only 5 thousand on the planet in the 1960s and was one of the first wave on the Endangered Species Act of the 1970s. The protection worked, despite the rogue fleets and the Japanese fleet, and now the humpback is at 60 thousand. A study of the humpback genome has now discovered that the humpback whales in the Indian Ocean are a special variation and do not mix well, and are very few in number . The puzzle is how to protect one nomadic but hermit like subspecies. The puzzle I have is about the 60 thousand number. A tiny finite number. All the humpbacks in the solar system? In the Eden search, we will we find oceans where humpbacks may live. Are there more humpbacks on the Edens of the galaxy than homo sapiens? And if there are, is that the best solution to spreading life? Not us, but humpbacks. I am reminded of one of the lovely early Star Trek movies, with Kirk, Spock, Bones, when the whale creatures come to destroy us until we use a whale to represent us.

Not Compromising.  

Am told that Mrs.Pelosi is frightening her Democratic members with her talk that she will force the healthcare vote on Saturday 7.  The Democratic members are gazing disconsolately into mirrors and asking themselves if they look too old or impotent to get a job in the private sector after 2010 turns them out.  Then it got worse when, late in the day, news arrived on the Hill that the 1900 healthcare insurance reform page bill still does not protect the unborn from abortions funded by taxpayer money.  The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops does not accept the present language.  Democrat Bart Stupak (D-Mi) continues to push for an amendment that would prevent funding abortions, but so far he has not persuaded the Democratic leadership, chiefly Nancy Pelosi.  This is a deal-breaker.  The bishops are not compromising; they are leaning over the ramparts in a lean and relentless mood.  This does not look like a gambit for a parley:

Vigorous, obtuse Jon Corzine's defeat is more about one man's failure than about the tiny, underfunded, poorly networked Republican party's success. New Jersey has been a Democratic stronghold state since Andrew Jackson. Christie is a pro and will work his state effectively in a severe downturn. Corzine will remain the same arrogant, aggressive banker he was when he handed Goldman Sachs off to Hank Paulson during the late Clinton years and bought the junior U.S. Senate seat in Jersey. Corzine's concession speech illustrates his discomfort and deafness. What of New Jersey? The times are troubled; the joblessness is a curse; the behemoth zombie banks have threatened or wrecked the high end mortgages in the Northern Jersey suburbs.   Corzine departs a cipher.  Christie enters a winner.  Virginia's seventeen point win for McDonnell isn't not a match for the banker-laid-low narrative in Jersey.  

23rd Malcontent.  

The small twist of the evening in the New York 23rd, where newbie Bill Owens wins a food fight, overshadows both Jersey and Virginia for me.   What of the GOP after the loss to a Democrat because of the malcontents of the Club for Growth pouring up to $1 million into the district to dry-gulch the GOP candidate?  Civil war.  The right-wing vanity fair is already preparing to demonstrate against Charlie Crist in Florida while threatening the GOP that any dissent from the Tea Party ruminations and prognostications will be punished with a primary challenge.  One fresh change is that the right-wing seems to comprehend that a third party is futile.  From now on, it will be primary, primary, primary as the GOP risks suicide.  Is Rahm Emanuel chuckling, or is he just quietly lucky?

Limbaugh (above) rambles himself into vulgarity as he tries to deliver a pun he cooked up about PETA needing to get involved early in the 2010 mid-term because two species are going to be endangered, RINOs and Blue Dogs.  Along the way, Limbaugh seems to stumble upon a vulgar remark about the New York 23rd's Dede Scozzafava.  Perhaps it was in the script; perhaps it just appeared in his thoughts.  Nothing creative.  Still, why?  Something brittle?  Two rules in talk radio. The first is manners. The second is manners. So is the third, though it is usually unneeded. Puzzle why Limbaugh made the tactical error of being vulgar toward a woman who is already defeated, since he is routinely on script.   Re the PETA cleverness. Fresh to think that Mrs. Pelosi and the right-wing share a self-interest in driving out loyal dissent from the chamber so that what's left is two sides who share nothing and can only think of massacre or oblivion. It has happened before. Comes to martyrdom and deafness.

Pie Fight in the Big Tent.     

Ever droll James Carville, seated beside the serenely patient Mary Matalin, in what looks to be their ante-bellum New Orleans manse, enjoys eating the scenery as he announces the "Big Tent" of Republicanism collapsing in Lake Ontario after news of Dede Scozzafava's quitting the race in the New York 23rd.  Scozzafava was elbowed out by influence and the kind of money (Club for Growth's feisty sniper Jackson Stephens)  it can attract, and that's the kind of politics that makes for laughter and excitement.  Carville knows all this and is having fun overacting as if he is spreading confusion among the adversaries, that is, the Republican National Committee's donors.  The fresh news that Scozzafava has now endorsed the Democrat Bill Owen is almost as deliciously woozy as the fresher news that she has been denounced by the spoiler Doug Hoffman as a "turncoat."  Add the detail that Hoffman entered the race after promising to be loyal to the county party choices, and that Hoffman does not live in the district, the contest now turns into a 7th grade fight at recess.  No one hurt but everyone pretending their feelings are hurt.  About 30 hours to go to the polls opening.  Custard cream pies flying.  Joe Biden is due into the district in the morning, probably standing beside Owen, Scozzafava and Pluto, who doesn't live in the district, though cartoon dogs can't vote in the race anyway (just like Hoffman, who can't vote for himself.)