Late Friday night my colleague Charles Pellegrino, author, "Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back," learned that his Macmillan published book (Scott MacRae Books) had been unilaterally removed from Amazon.com sales (that is, you cannot buy it in any format from Amazon at any price, but you can buy it from private dealers who use the Amazon site) as part of a bullying tactic by Amazon against all publishers over the IPad.  The story changed again on Saturday, and I spoke to Charlie late Saturday on air, that Amazon is now threatening all publishers with the same preemptive action it has launched against Macmillan if they go through with the deal with Jobs and Apple over IPad pricing.  It is a strange fight.  Amazon sells digital downloads for the Kindle at $9.99.  Apple has negotiated an agreement with publishers to sell the same download for the IPad at $12.99 or $13.99.  Apple keeps 30%.  Amazon is fighting this because it is more expensive competition?  No, because the IPad is a better device than the Kindle, bigger with color and more tricks called apps.  In sum, Amazon is in a dogfight with Apple and is shooting some of the authors in order to scare all of the authors and their publishers into obedience and surrender.  Trade war, Jeff Bezos billionaire vs.Steve Jobs billionaire.  Class action suits to follow.  There will be virtual blood.  Charlie did Coast to Coast two hours later on Saturday30/Sunday31 night, and the Coast team, led by Ian Punnett, eventually figured out what Charlie was telling them (what he had just told me and my audience on WABC) and they happily joined in the fight against Bezos.  I see opportunity to engage the Apple House co-ops, too.  Adam Smith says that the invisible hand (virtual hand) will out: to the cheaper goes the spoils. Soon there will be an Apple/Amazon detenete -- waiting on the Kindle upgrade to color.  Also waiting on an Amazon/Jobs link up to be fought by Sony/Borders and so forth.  And where is News Corp?  Why off-load the 30% profit to Jobs?  Digital is not owned.  Digital publishing is the same as digital audio and video and news.  In 1915, everyone with a big machine shop in Michigan and Wisconsin and Illinois and New York figured it was time to build cars and trucks.  Can you buy the Packard Twin Six?  But there are plenty of Ford Sixes.

POTUS organized the community of the GOP House trio of John Boehner, Mike Spence, Eric Cantor on a Baltimore stageset this news cycle, and the result was a jolly good time for those who fancy political melodrama. In this case, it was POTUS vs POTUS.  Here is the puzzle.  Why does POTUS complain to the GOP House that Capitol Hill will not obey his desires re healthcare, energy, education and now the deficit?  The GOP House numbers 176 sad sack and unwanted votes.  Mrs. Pelosi command 255 dominating votes, and this means she can pass whatever she aims for, including this past year everything she wanted: stimulus, cap and trade, healthcare.  There was little sign of any effort by Mrs. Pelosi to deal. Why would she?  The path to the speakership for her was to fight a shut-it-down guerilla campaign against the Bush White House and the Delay/Boehner majority; and eventually the gridlock gave her the power.  POTUS knows this.  Here is another puzzle.  The argument for POTUS is with the Senate -- both the Democratic and the Republican caucus.  When POTUS was in the Senate,  he was a very good partisan when in the minority (2005-07) as well as in the majority (2007-09).  Senator Obama practiced four years of team gridlock against the Bush administration in obedience to his leader, Harry Reid.  I recall specifically how POTUS spoke dismissively of POTUS Bush nominee, John Bolton, when Senator Obama was a very junior senator in the minority on the Foreign Relations Committee; and then Senator Obama voted negative on Bolton as many times as possible to prevent the Bolton nomination to the United Nations from going to the floor of the Senate, where John Bolton would have been confirmed by the Republican majority in 2005.  POTUS Obama, as a senator, was a rejectionist, a negativist, a solid team player in the grinding down of the Bush foreign policy.  It was expedient gamesmanship in 2005, and it was successful in harassing the Bush policy in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the Koreas.  Now POTUS Obama is in the POTUS Bush chair, facing team gridlock in the House minority -- and in the suddenly not absolutely meaningless Senate minority (40 seats plus Scott Brown).  Where was today's performance last summer and fall while the Democratic leadership constructed the cap and trade bill and the healthcare bills?  Last puzzle.  Is today's Baltimore melodramatic presentation from POTUS about working together or is it about January 19th?

Dan Pfeiffer, 34, is the White House Communications Director, and he is married to the chief of staff to POTUS CoS Rahm Emanuel.  Pfeiffer's job is to deny.  In sum, the oafish, puffy and slow-witted Pfeiffer is way too inside the Obama denials to have thoughts about anyone or anything. Water-carrier and deny-speaker. Pfeiffer's use in the West Wing is to deny the obvious and then to deny that he denied. Dull work but about right for his sense of proportion. Pfeiffer's response to the silly Politico question about the TV celebrity Matthews silly remark about POTUS ("forget he's black") is unconvincing. More, the White House CommDir is no longer getting good information about his own team. The SOTU seemed unresearched. The cap and trade remark was trite. Much of the speech was aspirational in a fairy tale sort of way, some of it was simply impractical. David Drucker, Roll Call, tells me that Democrat senators Landrieu and Pryor have both commented that POTUS did not help the debate with his SOTU wish list. Landrieu is especially dismissive of the House Democrats who stampy-footy want their work rubber stamped by the obedient Senate. The running for the hills is well advanced. POTUS is being mocked by his own party. Phone calls going to the Clintons?  Is POTUS listening in on the whispering?  Yep.  POTUS scans the web at his desk.  POTUS is certain that if he keeps explaining -- for example, how he is going to put Americans to work on green jobs building a green railroad for the green people -- then eventually the green American public will obey.  Ask Pfeiffer, and he will deny POTUS is frustrated with the American people refusing to be green.  Pfeiffer will also deny that POTUS surfs the net, has changed his mind, thinks green healthcare, green energy and green education are off the table.  Deny, deny.  A denial administration.  It is green.

Friends.  

Spoke Joseph Menn, FT, re the sinister and potent nature of the Chinese launched cyber attacks on Google that prompted the present confrontation between Goog and Beijing. Astonishing information that the Chinese are using military teams - the PLA is likely the main attack force -- to spy on and penetrate the machines of particular company officials who have access to the real names and identifications on the google mail accounts.  If the PLA invaded Seattle or Palo Alto with fireteams, if the PLA occupied the West Coast, it could not gain as much data on its rivals and citizens as it now gathers from the hacks -- which have been underway at least since 2006.  The hackers did not make direct attacks on the targets. Instead they tracked the friends and associates of the targets, people who were unlikely to practice severe security with their machines. The hackers would draw from Facebook or Twitter or Im accounts to learn the names of the friends. They would then penetrate the friends's machines usng a Trojan Horse that gained access through a hole in Internet Explorer. (It does not work to gain access through Safari or Firefox or Chrome -- so far.) The entry route is likely exclusively Internet Explorer. Once the Chinese hack soldiers are inside the unprotecte machine, they send an e-mail to the target, figuring the target is more likely to click on a message form a pal. Once the click, then the Trojan goes into the target machine to install a key logger. And from there, the hackers watch the traffic on the target's machine and find a way into the most secure areas in Google. 

Am told that Internet Explorer is totally unreliable, in all forms. Only safe browsers for now are Safari (my recommendation), Firefox (for Mac), and Chrome (not ready for Mac yet.) Does this make Bing suspect? Unknown.

Valerie Jarrett disappoints as a fighter, speaker, op in this Oprah like friendly chat with John Harris, Politico. She has no business plan. "We're going to do what we always do..." "Focus on the economy..." The White House is not ready for the Hill turmoil. The only list VJ has that stands scrutiny is what the Obama administration "inherited." The excuse litany continues. Can it be this simple? An administration in the hands of lightweights who do not even manage cunning denials? The healthcare fiasco has knocked them down. Val Jarrett has been described to me as the leader of the cult. In this conversation, she sound like a devotee of her own cult. What did she do before she was White House explainer-in-chief? She was an ordinary op for the Daley machine. She hired Michelle Obama in the early 1990s. She held cocktail parties for BHO. To my knowledge, Val Jarrett never left Chicago before she moved into the West WIng. What is beyond parochial? This is strange, dry comedy.

Puzzling mix of complaints and sarcasm in the otherwise rambling presentation of Progressive celebrity Stephanie Miller before a most friendly Mineapolis, Minnesota audience on Saturday 23 (turned out to see the darling of Minnesota, Ed Schulz, who apparently has a very high opinion of Ed Schulz).  Miller seems in search of an adversary, or a demon, or something virile and stupid on the other side of her political ambitions.  It is a struggle for the traditional and articulate Progressives to discern or manufacture or locate or resurrect the useful idiot savant of the right-wing burlesques and their Confederacy Lite companions that reigned the long day-for-night years of 95-07, and that dominated the nightmare for idiot years 01-09 with the Orc King George Bush.  Miller searches and searches.  Metaphor fails her.  Miller seizes the Prop 8 demon and it slips into melting ice.   Miller mocks Brown and Lieberman and fails to connect them to the GOP monster.  Miller sounds her frustrations.  Miller is clever, savvy, politically deft, smart, quick, conventionally smutty, easily attractive in what she insists is a Size Zero dress because of her mercury poisoning ordeal, yet she is not able to find a target worthy of her weapons.  The target is POTUS.  But that cannot be permitted.  The elephant in the room has turned into a jackass in the room, a jackass that looks a lot like her father's (Bill Miller, Barry Goldwater's VP running mate in 1964) Democratic Party, LBJ's too, and she cannot shoot at it.  Puzzle.  "You know me, it's been a depressing week.  ...this is a good thing for us.  ...you can't just say, oh, we got him elected, now we're done....  like I say, sending Al Franken doing a kick-ass job...  we love you Minneapolis!"  The GOP is a museum piece.  It cannot feel the kicking that Miller enjoys kicking (presuming she is enjoying kicking her father's surrogate).  The Democrats in the White House are lively and obtuse and knuckleheaded, but she won't or can't or musn't attack.  Puzzle again.

 

Iraq Uncivil.  

Iraq's al-Maliki government is a hand-maiden to the Tehran Twelvers, and al-Maliki, I am told, is Tehran's viceroy. Tehran shows its hand on purpose when it orders 500 plus Sunni lords banned from the March 7 elections. It is a cunning provocation.  Tehran communicates that it will ignite Iraq's Anbar and Baghdad provinces -- where the Baathists and their cronies live with their same grievances of having lost Saddam's favor -- if and when the US brings hard sanctions against Iran. The Obama administration understands the provocation and threat and rushes VPOTUS Biden to sit side by side with General Odierno (always the military weighty, always the stick and the carrot) in order to confer with Maliki. The quid pro quo is that the US will seek to re-indict the Blackwater suspects.  Slim chance.  It is not enough.  Maliki makes his point; so does Tehran. The Iraqis are shedding the need to be vcivil.  Thursday 21, Malcolm Hoenlein introduced me to an Iraqi Jew, Maurice Shohet, who told of deliberate abuse of ancient Jewish sites in Iraq by order of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities.   Who lost Iraq?  George Bush lost Iraq with the incomplete and expedient surge.  But POTUS Obama will be blamed.  

Colleague Simon Constable is joined by Dow Jones market watcher, the pixieish and charming Paul Vigna, and they discuss how normal the correction, how overdue the sell-off. I see support at 9500, and below that there is good support at 8500. We could get there quickly, or we could bleed until the end of the quarter. POTUS will be blamed. Rally? On what? The assault on Ben Bernanke started with cagey Barbara Boxer (eye on her shaky re-election because she polls as a party hack to the Independents, and the feminist model no longer is a certain advantage) and also included the suddenly rocky Russ Feingold. There is a clock: because if the Senate delays the vote until January 31, then Bernanke hands over his post to vice-chair Donald Kohn.  Start the clock on Monday 25.  The earnings season is already discounted. Unemployment remains corrosive. The testing of POTUS Obama has just started.

The detail here that interests is that Comedy Central and the late-nights cannot find an angle of attack on Scott Brown. This is useful. This same lot of writers and hambones found attack points on Sarah Palin immediately: ignorant, facile, loopy.  But with Brown, a former male model and clearly a way good-looking man, they look around for other targets.  Stewart hits Olberman.  Unusual.  They are not ready to aim at POTUS.  Too edgy.  Someone will go first.  POTUS looks and acts weakened.  Not the strongest horse.   His fans are sending him hints and recommendations.  POTUS is ripe for satire -- hard-hearted satire.  Waiting.  The obvious linkage is a tale of two attractive, youthful, agreeable, hard-working and non-confrontational state senators.   One became president.  The other humbled the president.  Now?  Scott Brown is headed for a boom onto the 2012 ticket?  POTUS is headed for a primary challenge?  Lots of satire.

Scott Brown is not a member of the Confederacy Lite; he is not a right wing conservative who follows the burlesque talking points.  He comes from a simple Massachusetts family background, close to working class, close to anti-elitist.  Not Harvard.  Boston College.  Not  trendy.  Roman Catholic.  A Scott Brown Republican.  "I'm hopeful that the Senate will seat me..."  "...very important issues facing our country..."  "I think the message.... the number one thing I've heard is that people are tired of business as usual...Nebraska... just drives people crazy...transparency matter..."  ".. they want good government back..."  "The one size fits all plan that is being pushed nationally just doesn't work..."  "Let the states tell the Federal government..."  "We need to look out for Massachusetts first..."  "...bottom line ...I'm going to be a Scott Brown Republican...whose not beholden to the special interest and the party..."  "We have terrorists who are trying to blow up our planes..."  "What's up with that?"  "I had some issues growing up.. a guy for Grantham..."  "It's not only overwhelming..."  "I'm from a Big Tent philosophy..."  "I had a great conversation with the President..."  "Do you want me to bring the truck?..."  "You have to have a sense of humor about politics..."  And this is bad news for POTUS and Congress?  

Graveyard Whistle.   

Spoke professionals following the Massachusetts special results, and the consensus was that Mrs. Pelosi and Steny Hoyer will now advocate the House votes on the Senate bill unchanged option in order to deliver the healthcare reform bill to POTUS to sign. Barney Frank appeared to mitigate this option late in the evening by putting out a statement that the Hill should start over, but there is no certainty that Barney Frank wasn't hedging his remarks. The Paul Kirk will vote on the bill option is gone. The Senate reconciliation option is possible. John Fund reminds that the GOP can and will shut down the Senate if Harry Reid tries a 51 vote bill.  No certainty that the 51 votes are there for the Democrats.  Anthony Weiner on the cable spoke before the Massachusetts results were in, and he mentioned that the White House healthcare negotiation the hours before the polls closed had "a whiff of whistling past the graveyard."  Perhaps the quiet at the White House makes adults deaf to the voters until they are confronted with the result of an insurgency.  Who lost Massachusetts?  Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols, the Nation, point to the Obama team, especially Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel, as the Wall Street toadies who weakned Obama's message and left Coakley vulnerable to populist reaction.

  

Independents 68 to 27 for Brown.  

Late news on Election Day eve in Massachusetts that a Martha Coakley event at a local high school was so poorly attended that aides drew curtains to partition off the empty part of the space.  Coakley has never recovered from the Curt Schilling brain freeze.  The Secretary of State projects a turnout of as much as 2.2 million of the 4 million total. Spoke John Nichols, Nation, on Monday 18, who pointed his remarks at the White Hosue for failure to advance a progressive message, and he regarded the POTUS remarks on Sunday afternoon for Coakley, in which POTUS used the word "progressive," as a one-off, a show-boat, not typical of a cautious administration.  (Does POTUS know what was wrong with the Schilling remark?)    Nichols calls for Tim Geithner's head, and perhaps also Axelrod's, and perhaps also a cleaning house after the Coakley fiasco.  (Is Geithner a Yankee fan?)  There will be partisan blood.  Will POTUS fight after the defeat?  Yep.  Is he welcome at Fenway?  Nope.  Does Scott Brown get a cup of coffee boom to the Republican ticket in 2012?  Yep.

POTUS Obama conducted the Martha Coakley rally at Northeastern with the enthusiasm of a young person who has been pulled along to his dad's and mom's high school reunion.  Axelrod did not bother to prep POTUS on a couple of facts on Brown that might have sounded convincing.  Instead, POTUS positioned himself to work with the putative new senator from Massachucetts.  Late word is that the Democratic controlled Public Policy Polling will publish after 10 pm Eastern Time Sunday 17 and will show Brown ahead -- inside the margin of error.  Also late word is that the Coakley team is asserting that it has tracking polls that show it went from 2 behind to 2 ahead around the excitement of the POTUS visit.  Shrug to all polling.  My best measure of the day was my Boston source who reports that Brown yard signs are like mushrooms in spring in suburban neighborhoods that voted heavily for Obama and are the most fertile of the Democratic chattering class fields.  Brown yard signs everywhere.  Missing Coakley yards signs.  Is there a warehouse of Coakley yard signs?

Mrs. Pelosi's remarks on the secret and stubborn healthcare pow-wow -- especially her empty rhetoric of "common ground"-- reveal the fact that there is a collective slow-down in the monomaniacal talks between the House and the Senate.  The cause of the slow-down is Massachusetts. Everyone at the White House is watching the polls from Boston and the early reports of Scott Brown leading in absentee ballots, and leading with 20% of the Democrats voting Brown. The Brown surge gives plenty of room for those in the healthcare talks to refue to cooperate. Why give Mrs. Pelosi anything when Brown is about to wreck the the Senate's 6th vote? If healthcare fails, let it fail without concessions from liberals or conservatives in the Dem caucus. Also, there is a sweet argument that the Democrats on the Hill want Brown to win and are stalling the White House pow-wow as they wait for Righty. A Coakley loss will wreck the process, sink the bill, and free everyone of the bad news of Harry Reid.  Also, a Coakley loss will relieve Boston of the burden of electing a junior senator who does not understand (or want to understand) the Red Sox Nation.  The Curt Schilling flub is incomprehensible.  The smear on a flier -- paid for by the state Democrats -- that Brown wants rape victims abused the more was not only clumsy, it also gave Brown an easy counter-punch -- almost as if Coakley has been ordered to take a dive?  Nah.  There is also the strangely frail and snobby remark by John Kerry, 

The Boston Herald says "Poll Shocker," -- showing Brown up 50-45.5 over Coakley -- and the Martha Coakley campaign is now at the point it will stop panicking and start fighting. Cornered, outgunned, humbled, mocked, the Coakley team will now concentrate on the order from the White House to "win ugly." Spoke to Scott Rasmussen of the Rasmussen Poll, whose polling 24 hours before the Suffolk poll showed Coakley at 49-47; and he said the momentum was the vital detail for Brown.  Also turn-out, as the independents are motivated.  Boston source says that Martha's attack ads on Brown play every hour on all Boston talkers and news, and that every fifth word is "Republican."  Also, there are those rumors of union thugs driving buses circling the wilder sides of town for random volunteer voters.

34 Hours.  

All eyes on Haiti, and speaking to Bloomberg's William Varner, to Larry Johnson, No Quarter, re SOUTHCOM's response, to Karen Hooper, Stratfor.com, on the last two hundred years of abuse and abandonment of Haiti by the Western Hemisphere colonies and states. There is also the ongoing melodrama in Massachusetts or (or "Massachusettes") with the Martha Coakley supporters going negative on very clean Scott Brown; and with the Brown supporters making low key videos (above).  Also the banks too big to fail sent their chiefs to the Hill to defend their poor practices of 2003-2008. Haiti reporting does dominate the news cycle, now at 34 hours since the quake first struck, with aftershocks as recently as ten minutes ago. The Obama administration is responding ably and swiftly. The USS Carl Vinson and the USS Bataan are inbound, with a deal of Coast Guard ships accompanying. The Massachusetts race will slip from the front pages, and so will the bank news, as the scale of the disaster takes hold on the TV. This may not surpass the death toll of the tsunami in 2004, but it will look worse because the victims are to be buried and they are all in once place. Mass graves and a vast problem of corpse disposal will dominate the TV. No real news can match this until the refugees are in camps and the US military has secured Port Au Prince. The Coakley and Brown race will need to play out more quietly.  All the anchors, all CNN, all cable leads, all hard news, is now fixed on the rescue and grief.  The Coast Guard send a flyover video (below) of the city and outreaches in daylight.

Cash.    

The Rasmussen Poll for Massachusetts up tonight puts the race between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley at 49-47 for Coakley. The Brown Team uploaded this Hollywood convincing and charming video within the last hour (329 views as I write) to illustrate that the clans are gathering to rally on January 19 to vote against the Kennedy machine and vote for a unlikely hero. The famously pugnacious and tireless Doug Flutie now endorses fellow BC grad Scott Brown, the sort of sentimental moment that makes for momentum.  Scott Brown's YouTube moment from Monday 11 debate on Boston TV --- "it's not the Kennedy seat..." --- is now at 107k views (doubling since I filed five hours ago) and climbing at ten thousand an hour. Reports coming in that the DNC has sent in a team of ops to steady the Coakley get out the vote plan. The SEIU will have its say. ACORN is not out of the question. However cash is the blood of an insurgency, and this video asserts that the checks and calls with money are arriving from everywhere. Scott Brown has stepped up to the challenge of the Dem machine by firing back with counter ads within hours to negative ads, and by stating outload the loopy scenarios for Harry Reid to ram through the healthcare bill with Paul Kirk's vote before a victor Scott Brown could be sworn in and vote for Massachusetts. It's show time, and two cowboys are ready to ride.  The quote of this video is the young man who says, "This is my first rodeo..."

Nancy Pelosi at the Detroit Auto show, surrounded by Methusaleh's squash partners, makes statements that are uninformed by the recent facts of greenhouse gases and the Obama administration. Mr. Pelosi rammed through the House a cap and trade bill last spring that is unacceptable to the U.S. Senate on an election year. The Obama administration, frustrated and hasty, used the EPA to issue a judgement that greenhouse gases can be controlled by mandates under the Clean Air Act. (Despite the fact that most of greenhouse gases are water vapor). Ian Talley, WSJ, tells me that the States, while claiming they want to comply with the EPA mandates requiring permits for more than 25k tons of greenhouse gases per year, are balking because they don't understand or trust the mandates. There is a chance that mandates will go so far as to require permits for a single motor left running to maintain a pipeline that could, in the course of a year, generate 25k tons of greenhouse gases. Other potential conflicts include seeking to build a new power plant, where rivals for the bidding could dispute each other's projected emissions. In sum, the EPA mandates have created a whole new ocean of engineering and litigation unknown. The States are crying "Uncle Sam!" and asking for a freeze at least until 2011. This is far, far from Nancy Pelosi's Nanny State dreaminess of green cars and electric motors. Is Mrs Pelosi aware that some electric motors have the potential of needing a permit to operate? And that the States, not themselves paragons of candid management, do not know how to manage a willy-nilly Federal government?

Banker's Apprentice.  

Dutiful, hard-charging Mrs. Santa Claus of the Obama administration, Christina Romer, tries humor and irony to confront the certain storm over the gargantuan bonuses the banks are to pay to their gang after several quarters of the carry trade and cheap loans from the Fed. This will be funny. POTUS is already distracted by the jobless, the Harry Reid fiasco, the Flight 253 revelations and now the healthcare bargaining, so how can he find time for more of his cheap shots on his pals the bankers?  Huffpo is not fooled.  Obama is the banker's apprentice, says Huffpo.  Romer has rarely seemed more charming and has never appeared more impotent.

The special election in Massachusetts scheduled for January 19 is a donnybrook now after two contrasting likely voter polls in the last hours show the Republican State Senator Scott Brown leading the Democrat State Attorney General Martha Coakley by one point or trailing by fifteen points. Special elections are unpredictable turnouts; the winner takes all. Emily Cadei, CQ, reports that there are Republican and conservative PACs that are now pushing cash into Massachusetts for TV buys in support of Brown by attacking Coakley as a machine pol who will rubber stamp Harry Reid and the healthcare bill, cap and trade bill, other gargantuan spending bills in Congress. This is the 60th vote in the US Senate that is critical to the Reid offensive. John Fund, WSJ, tells me that there is a Democratic fallback plan, in the unlikely event that Brown wins, to delay the swearing in until after the military overseas votes are count, which will buy ten extra days -- in which Harry Reid would push through healthcare in DC with the rent a senate vote of the appointed placeholder Paul Kirk. Impossible to imagine that Brown can beat the Boston machine. Impossible like the 1969 Mets?  John Avlon, DealyBeast.com, remind that independents outnumber both Democrats and Republicans combined in the state, and they will have their say on healthcare, tea parties, stimulus package, unemployment.  The protest vote will be a reckoning for the Hill.

The trenchant agitprop Al Jazeera contributes a video from a fresh subset of the Taliban in Kunar province that is said to show an attack on an ISAF convoy. The vehicles and the lone fixed-wing aircraft are consistent with US operations. The AJ correspondent makes note that the flora are consistent with late summer, not with fall or winter conditions in Kunar. Watching the locals scavenge the destroyed vehicle that has been pushed into the churning river, it is all a flash back to the Vietnam war, when the locals also scavenged wrecked convoy equipment.  The video clips of the training of the boys with Ak-47s is sad and timeless.  Boys do push-ups and shoot junky weapons; it is a goofy thrill.  Boys listen to the stories from the old men who tell them that we are fighting for our homeland and our way of life -- Sharia law in Free Afghanistan.  There is no military or ideological fix here.  The International Front for Combating the Crusaders and the Jews is using ISAF as a foil in order to create governance in failed states where the kleptocrats rule with IMF and World Bank cash.  Fifty years from now, is AfPakia a cut-off agrarian wilderness or a tourist attraction?  Hard to imagine high-tech start-ups.  Michael Herr's famous close to his book Dispatches on Vietnam comes to mind:  "Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there."

Pin the Tail on the Jihad.  

The White House appears in disarray after two weeks of helter-skelter response to Flight 253; and the landscape continued a wilderness this news cycle when POTUS appeared for the third time to display his uncool anxiety. I am told that the White House is lost in the noise of national security and homeland defense.  The challenge is the analysis and the almost total lack of useful analysts.  The problem is not screening, not data management, not timing, not coordination, certainly not which gate the flight used. The dots did not have to be connected to spot the trouble.  (And they were connected after the plane was airborne: so why did they shut the door without vetting all seats?)  The trouble is Yemen and the terror camps.  The rule is, deny the enemy safe haven.  The US policy toward Yemen has been routinely hands-off.  Now there will be a scattershot of strikes and kills.  This is the right direction and must continue to be useful.  Does the White House plan to commit to the fight?  Not at this time.  POTUS is feeling his way like a man playing pin the tail on the  jihad.  POTUS declares. "The buck stops with me," as he leans forward and sticks the pin into the blankness. 

I am told that John Brennan is the only senior spook in DC who will speak up in defense of POTUS.  Brennan, it is said is the fig leaf the Obama administration desperately desires. 

Spoke Wednesday 6 to Larry Johnson, No Quarter, re John Brennan of the NSS and the clumsiness of the Obama White House this last week since Flight 253. Larry Johnson's opinion of the Brennan is that he is a run-of-the-mill "pencil-pusher" who served two decades in the CIA without distinction, and whose tour as head of station in Saudia Arabia was dismal. Brennan was in place in 2001 as George Tenet's chief-of-staff, and so he is part of the failure of the first Al Q attack. He inserted himself in the Obama administration with officious conduct during the inauguration; and he is now the commander-in-chief of homeland paranoia at the White House, the man called "John" by POTUS. John Bolton told me Tuesday 5 that John Brennan has his own problems, that his statement that the Obama team security was good for all other days, just not Christmas, was a way of saying, "It was good enough for government work."  Mention that other information speaks to the unlikelihood that the Obama administration can solve the defenses.  I am told that a full body scan machine will not detect the small amount of PETN on Abdulmutallab.  I am told that Yemen leaders know the Obama team is not serious about confronting Al Qaeda Arbian Peninsula, and therefore they did not give permission to JSOC to strike the terror camps last summer.  I am told that the the Yemenis in GITMO will be returned to Yemen asap, when the emergency abates, when the media is not looking closely.  Situation normal, all fouled up.  CINC Brennan on the pencil. This will be one of those episodes in the Obama years that, when we look back, will seem trivial and corny.  The polls reflect a deep distrust of the Obama administration re national security.  The Brennanizing of the Obama White House is a confirmation that the Obama White House is knows that it is amateurish and hesitant.  Choosing to call the war on terror instead the war on Al Qaeda was a primary problem, because there are many Al Qaeda's, there are many jihadist gangs, there are many punks just trying to get lucky. 

Late news from the BBC that there is a blast in Khost Province, and that the governor and officials are injured.  This is the Haqqani Network, working with or for Al Q.  

 

Nancy Pelosi's creative performance to call the closed door, backroom, secret and paraboid healthcare negotiation an open process is the latest signal that the Democrats cannot manage one-party majorities on the Hill.  Everyone is aware of the POTUS poll troubles. Yet the Democrats did not leave themselves an escape clause. Instead, two major Democratic senators are fleeing their majority, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut to retire in a year. Harry Reid is stunned. Now he has to fret about Ben Nelson seeing Dorgan and Dodd quit the lifeboat and realize he is doomed at home after his healthcare pretzel-making. What next? Harold Ford the ex-Congressman and ex-Senate candidate in Tennessee is flirting with a challenge to Karen Gillenbrand in New York. And Martha Coakley running for Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts is said to be just marginally ahead against a GOP unknown in the heavily Blue state. The clues are everywhere that topsy-turvy has arrived.

Visa.  

What is the explanation for why the US ops did not search the US Visa data base for Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab's name after his father warned them of his son's suspicious travels and nature on November 19? A telephone call, an email, a heads up, all would have done it. There is not yet an explanation. If the name is trouble, check for its Visa. Simple. This isn't about policy or even procedure. This is about US slackers giving a pass to a Nigerian slacker.

Surly, prepped, obtuse, defensive, appartchik John Brennan, White House Homeland liason, offers his entry for the George R. Tennant Memorial 9-11 Excuse Making Sweepstake.  Displaying banker-like virile certainty, Brennan asserts that the Homeland defense worked "every other day," in 2009, just not on a major holiday over Detroit. Brennan does not mention Major Nidal Hassan. Brennan does not mention New-Mexico-born imam Anwar al-Awlaki. Brennan does not mention the six Yemenis who were returned to their native habitat from GITMO a week before Flight 253. Qualification for big cheese in national security is that you know how to make excuses and growl.  Impressive.  It worked for Tennant.  It may not work for Brennan.  He is all excuses; he is all blame-shifting; he is all grumpy.  "No smoking gun" was an unforced error in language.  Abdulmutallab was smoking like a barbecue.  Will this performance stand?  Nah.  The Homeland hearings are starting in January.  Brennan will get scorched like Abdulmutallab.  It is an election year.  They are offering him as the barbecued goat.  Enough?  Nah.  Pass the sauce. (And Brennan's swerve to run Dick Cheney into the ditch is a self-destructive ploy.  The clock is running down on Brennan's public role.  The resume must already be at Xe.)

Civil Society vs. Uncivil Society.  

The Tehran Basiji thugs are not doing well in Tehran these days, as evidenced by this mobile-phone-recorded street-fighting action the last days in the city -- close by the Karim Khan Bridge -- when a lone and spooked Basiji darts out to fire his rifle and then flees in confusion from dozens of unarmed and aggressive young men throwing objects and swarming after him, shouting, "Hamleh!"  (attack). The two open flames in the background are a neat theatrical detail. It is also possible to see the Basiji fleeing in a group, and they have weapons as they run. Bret Stephens told me Monday 14 that he has long supposed the the nuclear fuel dispute between Tehran and the UNSC will come to a head before the clash of the civil society (the students and the Green revolt) with the uncivil society (Ahmadinejad, the IRGC and Basiji); however recent protests have moved Bret Stephens to consider that the civil society is advancing rapidly. The Basiji certainly looks flabby and outnumbered here. When terror fails, when the mob surges in daylight without -- young men not hiding their faces or fearful of gunfire -- what is left to stem the protest?  The Greens are now demanding Ahmadinejad resign, leave the country; and also demanding that Mousavi be handed the presidency.  Iran (Persia) is unto itself a stand-alone civilization that filled Alexander with envy and admiration.   The Persian people created the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic out of a longing for prosperity and style; the Persian people are fully empowered to undo what they did and create a new governance, just like that.  

This news cycle saw a revenge attack in South Waziristan when a VBIED struck a crowd of 200 at a volleyball match in a neighborhood. At least 88 dead.  This is a measure of the bad blood in the Northwest Provinces following the brutal but non-specific Pakistan Army offensive against the Pashtun Taliban over the last months. The Taliban threatened the locals after the locals offered information and armed resistance that led to driving out the Taliban. Everyone knows everything in the land of the Pashtuns, and if the people do not want you to succeed as an insurgency, you will fail. The Pakistan army has now withdrawn for the winter, and the Taliban reasserts itself with a gross certainty. By Spring, the Taliban will be back in charge of the region.  In the Ummah, blood revenge works. 

A parallel story of revenge in Iraq arrived this news cycle when a court dismissed charges against a posse of Blackwater private soldiers who shot up Iraqi civilians in a grotesque over-reaction to threat in September 2007 that left 17 dead. The judge in the case has chided the prosecutors for mishandling witnesses and testimony.  Why did this happen?  Revenge explains the Blackwater conduct -- it was four Blackwater ops who were massacred at Fallujah in April 2004 that triggered the civil war in Anbar and Baghdad provinces -- but also revenge informs the Iraqi public opinion.  After years of watching the troubled and worn American Army and Marines smash the Iraqi army and insurgency and gangsters, along with a vast number of civilians caught in the fighting, the Iraqi public is infuriated and the Iraqi media is unapologetic in its outrage.  By Spring, the Iraqis may move.  In the Ummah, blood revenge works. 

 

Jim the Realtor takes a walk on the woozy side of the forclosure mania in California and illustrates how wildy inconsistent the market has become in the Age of REO. Not only is Bank of America finding its will to move the losers with severe short sales ($600k foreclosed offered at a short sale of $423, no takers so far), but also foreclosed properties are passing into the hands of cons and squatters who use jailhouse tricks to intimidate neighborhoods.  From the anecdote of the squatter, the police are indifferent or overwhelmed.  How commonplace is this petty criminal squatting?  Have California blocks been cut loose from civic authority?  The Bank of America short sale is next door to what looks to be a luxury home with a pampered, serene pool complex.  High-end, gated neighborhoods drifting into vacancies and abandonment?  Once in a Blue Moon, but it goes on into 2010 and perhaps 2011 and 2012?