What's News Tonight: November 2008 Archives

What's Breaking News Tonight?

Mumbai TV WMD

By John Batchelor on November 29, 2008 12:05 AM | 25 Comments

What If Mumbai Was About Television Cameras?

Speaking Sunday 30 with a team of Mumbai attack analysts, Bill Roggio, Chandrakant Pancholi, Shlok Vaidya, and B. Raman from Chennai, also Aaron Klein from Jerusalem

on the massacre of the Jews at Nariman House. As of now, at nearly 60 hours, the city is not yet declared secure. The NSG commanders at the Taj Hotel ann0unced to the chorus of media cameras that three attackers were KIA and that the Taj Jotel may be clear. No confirm. This followed successful actions at the Oberoi-Trident Hotel and the Nariman House. However consider that the battle plan for the attack on Mumbai may not have been about taking hostages at hotels and fighting slow-motion gunfights with the NSG; but rather may have been about grabbing high profile targets, corraling foreign guests to attract European and American as well as South Asian eyes, and then dragging the contest out over several news cycles just in order to produce a viral theater of terror on TV and the web. The television cameras surrounding the Taj may be the best weapon for the attackers. Those cameras carried the events worldwide and built the perception of the attackers as ruthless, effective, bold, numberless, superhuman. The sleepless, ranting, repetitive, clueless, ahistorical, chauvinistic and generally banal media became a force-multiplier to the scattershot guerilla attack. Mumbai TV WMD.

Where Have We Seen This Before?

Yosef Bodansky's 2008 "Chechen Jihad: The Next Wave of Terror," re the Chechen links with Al Qaeda, opens with a spectacular what-if from the G-8 meeting at Petersburg in July 2006. Just days before, Russian Federation security forces, thanks to a tip from an insider, destroyed by missile a truck full of Chechen guerillas, arms and explosives. The commander of the guerilla was the infamous Shamil Basayev (right), who planned to lead a mass guerilla attack on Petersburg, hold hostages at hotels, hospitals, theaters and schools, demand negotiations for bogus demands, attract the massive TV coverage, wire up the building with explosives, and then destroy randomly over many days, shoot randomly, start firefights, create chaos, and then escape disguised as tourists. Basayev's battle plan was developed with Al Qaeda cooperation, and there were many nationals in the assault teams. It didn't happen. But Al Qaeda never retires a battle plan. The aim in Petersburg was a Hollywood spectacular. Was this the aim at Mumbai? Why else take the Taj except to create an opera stage? Why else drag out the confrontation for 60 hours? It would have been easy for the attackers to escape. It would be simple to throw off weapons, change clothes, take up their identity papers, and leave the Taj as rescued hostages. No evidence that the NSC or the Mumbai police did any vetting of the rescued hostages. Why stay in the Taj to shot it out with overwhelming NSG except to guarantee media. Look at the Taj event. The attackers set fire to the sea side of the Taj facing the large plaza

where the TV cameras are arranged, where the fire trucks and police are deployed. This meant that the TV would have great visuals of smoke, flames, gunfire. The mayhem of Saturday morning was televised around the world in real time. The gunfire, the fire trucks, the smoke and hot flames, the panicky rushing around, an attacker shot as he threw a grenade from a window, so that his body fell to the ground (right), and then the cameras springing up, dozens of them, to surround the white-haired, black uniformed General J.K. Dutt (below) of the NSG, who gave a heated, argumentative presser to shouted questions. A terror opera. And now the funerals and accusations against Indian intelligence and military and police mobilizations. TV WMD.

How Many? Who?

Best signals source reports that the attackers numbered up to 100 with accomplices -- control agents, support personnel, scouts, transportation, that there had been several dry runs over the last months, that the scouting was scrupulous, that the attackers had acquired safe houses,

safe rooms supplies, communications. The profile of the failed Chechen attack was that there were commanders, intelligence officers, supply officers, and assault troops. Source identifies so far a multi-national force of attackers: Britons, Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Hyderabad Indians. There is evidence of combat training with small arms, but no sign of fire discipline; and the Indian intelligence reports that there are LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) links to some of the attackers is consistent with training in the LeT camps outside Pehsawar and Lahore. The captured weapons are all types of assault weapons, Chinese grenades, no sign of RPGs or sniper rifles, or SAMs. The few photos do not show men who were in kevlar body armor, nor wearing headset communications. However we do not have photos of the attackers in the hotels, or the accomplices; and there is plenty of intercepted mobile phone traffic to suggest there was sophisticated command and control of the attacks. How good was the attacker intelligence? The murder of the three top police officials on the first night is presented as a random event, all three in the same vehicle that responded to the attack at Cama Hospital and came right up against automatic weapon fire. Best signals source

reports also that two of the KIA Americans were intelligence officers who were staying at the Taj. Random kills like the police chiefs? In sum so far, the profile of the Mumbai attack November 2008 fits the profile of the Al Qadea conceived spectacular aimed at Petersburg July 2006. We have watched sixty hours of a spectacular terror attack, and so far the Indian authorities are reporting only a handful of attackers either KIA or captured (right, Azam Amir Kasav, the only attacker taken alive so far, fluent in English, from Faridkot, Pakistan, now said to be cooperating) while up to 155 victims are reported dead (including 2 NSG officers and more than a dozen police), more than 35o wounded, and the great state of India is in mourning, shock and despair. WMD.

NSG Nightmare Mumbai

By John Batchelor on November 28, 2008 12:40 AM | 7 Comments

Indian Commandos Launch Multiple Operations.

The legendary Black Cats, the National Security Guard commandos of the Indian forces, called NSG, finally launched the rescue efforts at the three hostage locations in Mumbai at

daylight on Friday 28 November Mumbai time. This is said to be an NSG nightmare scenario, with multiple hostage event scenes across a vast, not secured city. Also significant is that the counter strikes are launching in full daylight, not using the night to cover the approach. Why the long delay from news of the assault on the evening of Wednesday 26 to the counter strikes thirty-six hours later? Unconfirmed reports that the NSG was delayed at Delhi by VIPs. Also unconfirmed reports that NSG was delayed by transportation from Mumbai airport to the hostage scenes. Following again on TV 18 Mumbai live in English and in Urdu (separate feeds and images) and from Shloky Vaidya's Twitter report. The TV 18 readers are repeating continually now that the attackers are linked to LeT, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Good)

terror gang operating out of Kashmir camps funded by Pakistan's ISI. Also the readers are routinely mentioning "a very clear foreign hand." (Updating the TV 18 speculations that the attackers are LeT trained in camps at Peshawar and Lahore; that the attackers used a local safe house where accomplices purchased supplies days ahead; that some of the attackers have already escaped the net.) The NSG assaults are Bollywod plus, using helicopter insertions, flashbang grenades, snipers. The three sites are the Taj Hotel, the Oderoi Hotel, and the Nariman House. Again, what is significant here is that the Nariman House is a non-descript five-story house in Colaba, a posh neighborhood in South Mumbai. TV 18 is now reporting that the rabbi and his wife at Nariman (Chabad) House, Gabriel and Rivka Holtzberg, are dead. Several other hostages have escaped from Nariman House. The NSG came in very low to the Nariman House. The nightmare scenario for the NSG includes taking the risk that the attackers do not carry RPGs as the far less sophisticated killers did at Mogadishu in 1993.

What Kind of Nightmare?

At South Asia Analysis Group, Swati Parashar, a colleague of B. Raman, observes that the

Mumbai assault means that a handful of disciplined killers can paralyze the Indian state's most powerful city and wreck the morale and confidence of the Indian state. She also mentions that if this does prove to be an operation launched from Pakistan -- and there are many fresh clues -- then the Indian state has been rocked by a well-known rival. However there is hesitation here, because Ms. Parashar argues also that the Mumbai attacks looks to be an end in themselves. Not for Pakistan. Not for a spoken goal of revenge for the Gujarat riots in 2002 or the destruction of the Babri Masjid Temple two decades ago. Just rage and mayhem and mass murder for no end. Yes, the effect will be to weaken the state, to drive it to fear and despair, but that is an indifference to the killers. These are not state actors. These are pure homicides who regard the innocent as aliens. They kill innocence to kill innocence. The nightmare scenario is that India will come to believe that the Mumbai nightmare is normal and acceptable and deserved. A global financial center stunned, frozen, undone by four dozen killers and accomplices who intend to keep killing until they are killed. Ms. Parashar closes her monograph with the Urdu words of the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

Rakht-e-dil baaNdh lo dil figaaro chalo
Phir hameeN qatl ho aa.eN yaaro chalo

Pick up the burden of the heart, let us go heartbroken ones;
We are the ones to be murdered my friends!!

Mumbai Pogrom

By John Batchelor on November 27, 2008 1:29 AM | 10 Comments

Unconfirmed Reports That Jews Were Targeted at Nariman House.

Five star hotels, hospitals, gas stations were some of the targets of the raiders at Mumbai, however the most worrisome of the targets was Nariman

House, an undistinguished five-story building that is an Israeli Jewish settlement in South Mumbai -- in a posh, safe neighborhood called Colaba on a peninsula with the sea on both sides. Ongoing hostage rescue situations are ongoing at the pricey, landmark Taj Hotel, the high-rise Oderoi Hotel, and at the anonymous Nariman House. My best Israeli source reports no confirmation as of now that Israeli Jews were singled out as targets. Many foreigners were targeted at the hotels, and the Nariman House settles are in fact foreigners -- Lubavitcher from Israel, an outreach group called Chabad Lubavitch. Mumbai TV 18 is reporting that one Jewish family is believed murdered, but this is not confirmed. My source tells me that the rabbi and his wife at Nariman (Chabad) House, Gabriel (right) and Rivka Holtzberg, have not been seen or heard from since last night. There are up to 20 Israeli Jews in Mumbai in all circumstances who are not now accounted for, but some may be on holiday; and the Israel authorities are seeking their whereabouts. TV 18 is

now reporting that 3 hostages, a mother and child and one other, possibly a cook, have just escaped from Nariman House at approximately 11 am Mumbai time. The escaped hostages are now identifying that five or six killers are still inside the Nariman House and that all the Israelis are hostages. The important details are that the first three floors of Nariman housed five Israeli families. The top two floors hosues Indian national families. The larger questions is, did the attackers single out Nariman House for destruction? It is not now on fire like the Taj Hotel. It is a very small and specific target compared to the Taj or the Oderoi hotels, and it is surrounded by a residential neighborhood (below, Nariman House is at almost dead center, and undistinguished). It is peculiar that the attackers chose the Nariman House. The overall attack came from the sea about 2100 hours Mumbai time Wednesday 26, and the killers landed at the quiet, unremarkable Colaba fishing quay and then spread out to their targets. Much chaos on the TV 18 reporting. No overview being provided by government officials. Three of the top police officials in Mumbai are dead by assault, and the police are busy and grim with multiple incidents underway and missing attackers. At the least, the assault on Nariman House requires a scrupulous post-op analysis. "They are Israeli Jews... That is a reason they may have been targeted," the TV 18 reporter allowed at noon Mumbai time.

Murder Raid

By John Batchelor on November 26, 2008 9:25 PM | 12 Comments

B. Raman Warns War on the Indian State.

(Thumbnail left is an unconfirmed snap of a suspect Mumbai killer.) Speaking Sunday 30, presuming we can get through, to terrorism prodigy B. Raman (Ram), retired Indian State Intelligence,

re the massive terror attacks on the gigantic city of Mumbai, which Ram argues now is an attack on the future of the Indian State. The struggle continues as Ram, from the Institute of Topical Studies at Chennai, writes and as I write. I am following it on Shloky Twitter page. Also on a Flickr stream. I listen to Ram for a sense of proportion. He has been writing of the threat of Indian Mujhaideen for years and most fiercely these last months. Ram is a pro's pro, but you can hear the despair as he writes while watching the action on the web and on TV:

8.The Government of Manmohan Singh reacted to the repeated warning signals of the moving iceberg since November 2007, in the same way as the Bush Administration reacted to reports about the plans of the Al Qaeda for an of aviation terrorism in the US; in the same way Megawati Sukarnoputri reacted to reports of the activities of the Jemmah Islamiyah; and in the same way Khalida Zia reacted to reports of the plans of the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen .

9. Bovine. It just did no react. It was in a total denial mode.I wrote and said again and again ----hand over all the investigation about the IM to a central investigating agency for a co-ordinated investigation instead of their being investigated by the police in a piecemeal manner in different States ruled by different political parties. No reaction.

10.From a localised threat, jihadi terrorism has become a pan-Indian threat with a pan-Islamic ideology. Deal with it with a pan-Indian strategy, I said. No reaction.

The scale of the attacks is the news. Coordinated, cocky, racist and classist, now making war on the five star hotels and transportation centers (above Chattrapati Shivaji Railway terminus), singling out American and British passport holders for slaughter, in order to strike at India's confidence of its place in the world of great states. The most powerful and sinister and long threatening aspect of the Mumbai attacks is that not even Ram has certainty of who the attackers are and what they represent. The best India has to offer on the enemy is in a fog of war:

4.Is the IM the name of an organisation or of a movement? Is it one or many organisations in different States acting, like the International Islamic Front (IIF) of Osama bin Laden, as a united front-----autonomously where they can and unitedly where they should? Who constitute its command and control? Where are they? In India or outside? Nobody knows for certain.

American and Europeans TV are making much of an Al Qaeda link. This is strangely anarchic and sixty year old Indian civil war, a remnant of the Partition Wars of '47-48, and this is also the global jihad on modernity. Moslem-born

killers. A bystander emphasizes they looked like "boys." The twitter service report, and the flickr stream pics, shows that the massive city, tens of millions of people, major communications and transportation systems, is shut down, compromised, paralyzed in the dark. Crowds gathered in the streets in wonder, fear, frustration (right). It is daylight soon and the clean-up and hunt will begin again, and also the on-going hostage events at hotels and hospitals must be resolved. The failure to provide common defense is a fierce judgement of the Singh government. I recall a much smaller scale attack launched on the Indian Parliament building at Delhi in December 2001 that was stopped by quick guards and gunfire. That attack pushed the then BJP government to armed confrontation with Pakistan along the line of control running through Kashmir. Will this Mumbai attack start the confrontation again? The IJ are Indian nationals, however all hands know that the Pakistani ISI trains, equips, houses and aids the jihadists operating out of Kashmir and in cells in India. If this attack has an address, it is the ISI in Islamabad. This is the night of the long knives all over again. A murder raid on the world's most important democracy during the century's first great test of global credibility in markets and prices. A murder raid on global civilization. The good guys fell asleep and lost the night to the killers. Here is an example of what terror looks like from the people trapped inside the massacres at 921 PM Eastern Time:

#mumbai Undetonated grenades are apparently sporadically distributed along the routes the terrorists took.
less than a minute ago from web
#mumbai An "encounter specialist" is a law enforcement officer who specializes in high value potentially dangerous targets. 2 minutes ago from web
#mumbai Potential confirmed blast at Santa Cruz. Nariman House is amassing a large crowd. 4 minutes ago from web
#mumbai Army is inside Oberoi. NSG still prepping. 19 minutes ago from web
@supersam5 Thanks much. 21 minutes ago from web in reply to supersam5
#mumbai Is there is an up to date quality timeline of these events plotted on a map? That would be very useful for analysis. 24 minutes ago from web
#mumbai Anyone have any data as to how the cellphone networks are holding up? They failed or were shutdown in the last bombing campaign. 26 minutes ago from web
#mumbai There's a single group thesis that is trumpeted on the media, however, there's a major big problem - http://tinyurl.com/6nysgh 28 minutes ago from web
#mumbai FPolicy cites Rohan, who confirms my initial analysis regarding Deccan Mujahideen = HuJI/IM/SIMI nexus. http://tinyurl.com/59dyvw 34 minutes ago from web
#mumbai New narrative: attacked the railway hub, then hijacked a car, shot up a crowd, then hit the hotel. Feasible but bad tactics. 36 minutes ago from web
#mumbai Time to think about second order events. Are the hotel attacks a smokescreen? Probably not, but consider - http://tinyurl.com/59v365 about 1 hour ago from web
#mumbai Taj residents are told to stay inside. Phones are dead. Told to turn off the light.about 1 hour ago from web

Could this happen to New York, or Washington, or Los Angeles? We all know the answer, not if but when. And if it happens to Mumbai, it happens to all of us. My cynicism tonight makes me measure that this is not about stopping the IJ, this is about making the next IJ attack more difficult. And also making the comparable AQ attack aimed at Paris or London or New York or Chicago more difficult. Still, a murder raid, pure savagery, and shocking in its way to a world that had thought in the crash of all markets that it was beyond shocks.

Update 22:00 Wednesday 26:

Add this savvy, despairing comment from the Indian diaspora posted on the India Times Online coverage of the attack:

Senthil,UK,says:Deshmukh and the entire congress leadership have pursued a journey of destruction of India by encouraging terrorists. Deshmuhk was not able to contain the violence against North Indians and is not able to contain the growth of terrorists. The fact that 16 armed groups of terrorists are roaming in the City is a clear example of what the Congress is doing regarding security. People of India will now here statements like 'We are after them', 'Justice will be prevailed' and all non-sense and the state govt will blame it on Pakistan. Shameless Congress! It is only interested in securing Muslim votes. Cong had rolled out red carpet for all the illegal immigrants and given them ration cards in Delhi and Mumbai to balance the votes cast against it by the Hindu votes. Throw this useless govt. They should resign.S--- on their face!! Soniaji spend some time thinking about India's security. Just postpone ur plans to blame the BJP for this.Idiot Lalu will now blame the Sang for this. The terrorists have specifically chosen 5 star hotels to disrupt the low of funds from abroad

From India Times Online, with video links of damage:

Mumbai: In one of the most violent terror attacks on Indian soil, Mumbai came under an unprecedented night attack as terrorists used heavy

Dome of Taj hotel in flames in Mumbai after the terror attack (AFP Photo)

More Pictures

machine guns, including AK-47s, and grenades to strike at the city's most high-profile targets -- the hyper-busy CST (formerly VT) rail terminus; the landmark Taj Hotel at the Gateway and the luxury Oberoi Trident at Nariman Point; the domestic airport at Santa Cruz; the Cama and GT hospitals near CST; the Metro Adlabs multiplex and Mazgaon Dockyard -- killing at least 80 and sending more than 900 to hospital, according to latest reports. ( Watch )

The attacks have taken a tragic toll on the city's top police brass: The high-profile chief of the anti-terror squad Hemant Karkare was killed; Mumbai's additional commissioner of police (east) Ashok Kamte was gunned down outside the Metro; and celebrated encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar was also killed. ( Watch )

Shape of Things to Come

By John Batchelor on November 25, 2008 8:44 PM | 7 Comments

Studying London 2008 for Washington 2009.

There are large clues about our US future in the budget chat that the dynamic duo PM Gordon Brown and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling (right), performed before Parliament in the last news cycle in the wondrous ceremony called "Question Time." My

reasoning for reading the already dusty details of a foreign country's monstrous budget is that, since Gordon Brown led the world in fashioning a bank rescue plan back in September -- a plan that Hank Paulson started to imitate until he changed his mind -- then this new Labor budget may very well be be a guiding light for the Obama administration plans in January/February 2009. The chief fact of the Labor budget is that it is a "gamble within a gamble" -- so says Financial Times chief financial guru Martin Wolf. Not only does the budget combine higher taxes for the rich with huge borrowing by the government into order to pour money into the public sector, but also the budget is built upon rosy expectations that a return to growth in 2010 will allow London to slow the stimulus, the giveaway. Some call it Big Government. Out of date. What I read is the Colossus of All Correct Decisions Will Be Made For You Government. (Some also call it Old Labor, marching to a red flag, socialism, central planning, command economy, but it's too trendy and arbitrary and cobbled together make-believe to be old-fashioned anything.) Forclosed mortgages supported for ninety days, to be extended willy-nilly. Make work jobs provided at the Royal Mail and other unbusy establishments (delivering catalogues?). VAT cut 17% to 15% for the average bloke buying tools and housing items but not for the stuff the average bloke buys, such as petrol, alcohol and tobacco (that's how they get to claim they are cutting taxes while raising taxes). High arbitrary new tax bites of 45% on the official 300,000 rich people left on the islands (over 150,000 pounds/annum) and a shopping list of sin taxes that define how Mother Britain wants folk to live -- much higher taxes on petrol, alcohol, tobacco, big cars, airplane travel. If you walk to work and at work, eat soy and local eggs, live in a burrow with a roomie, use no electricity and do not ever consume alcohol or tobacco or elective pharmaceuticals, and you are only likely to fly in an airplane once a year and holiday by mass transit, then you can expect to find contentment. The surprise is that the Tories were so surprised (or were they) that Brown/Darling now aim to run the national debt to trillions, and that the best case scenario is that the national debt stops at a trillion. No one much mentioned the rosy scenario as the knee slapper du jure. A recovery by 2010, a balanced budget by 2015? Dystopian fiction. I am studying the reaction of the major commentator figures -- decided rolling eyes and gulping air before somber tones -- because this looks to be how to behave when we get a copycat blueprint of Brown/Darling for the Obama stimulus package/Mother America policies. You will pay more taxes if you drive the wrong vehicle, fly too many airplanes, consume the wrong products and live in a large house in the wrong state. And somehow taxing the rich smokers who own two addresses or more will return Britain (and the US) to growth? And how will Britain and the US pay for these guidelines while we are waiting for the smokers to buy too many cars and start the consuming of houses again? The Bank of England printing presses are at Debden. The U.S. Treasury printing presses are virtual on-line manufacturing centers. The shape of things to come is unstable but musical (below).

Invisible Devastation

By John Batchelor on November 24, 2008 9:05 PM | 9 Comments

Crash of the Commodites.

Spoke around the globe on Sunday 23 to learn that the crash of the commodities markets has struck the most vulnerable countries and will push regions to instability. The clue started with Patrick Barta's report from Bangkok re the Banlung (below) region Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. "These are

hunter gatherers," he said, as this is the ancient land of unique native Mon-Khmer peoples; however in the last years the prices at the market have led to large plantings of rice and other crops, and the last two years have been a success. Then the market prices started declining in August, after a weird commodity spike in July, and the farmers are now in debt and despairing. Oddly the Cambodia warehouses are not full, and the issue of famine that started last summer with some food riots on Manila and Cairo has not gone away. But the farmers believe themselves abandoned by the worldwide price collapse. This commodities story continued oddly Sunday 23 re the Somalia pirates. I spoke with Robert Wright, Financial Times, in London about the shipping costs of the pirates, and the capture of the Saudi-owned oil tanker Sirius Star 400 nautical miles at sea, using a pirate mother ship. The twist on the story was that the shipping business has fallen so far that there are fewer ships moving dry goods (non-oil) to market, so the pirates are pushed to the boldness of hijacking oil tankers. The fall off of non oil shipping is the fall of farm prices and commodity prices, too -- no demand. The pirates on the Gulf of Aden were already damaging to the countries depending upon the Suez Canal for fees from shipping. But now there is a double bind: the pirates in the Gulf Of Aden, or a prohibitively expensive extra 20 days to go around the Cape of Good Hope to Europe. Shippers can't afford to lose a ship to pirates, can't afford the extra $50,000 a day for the Cape route. So shipping traffic is another casualty of the commodities collapse. This commodities story connects directly to the report

from Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal, at Hong Kong that the unemployment rate among recent college graduates is at least 30% in China (right, a job fair for college graduates), that China needs at least 25 million new jobs a year just to keep up (unemployed migrants on the home page), and that the economy in China is in a death spiral. There is world-wide deflation. We can see the fall in the price of oil to under $50, back to where it was in May 2005; but we cannot see easily the collapse in the price of metals ore, rubber, food that the developing nations depend upon for a budget. The oil price decline rocks the dictatorships and rogue states of the Middle East. The low food prices rock the agrarian- based marginal states of Asia and South America. What is happening to Citi and the other global banks is a noisy colorful, loud, bold, melodramatic sensation. What is happening to the invisible billions of people who depend upon farm prices and mine prices and timber prices is a quiet invisible devastation. Chinese unemployment is a match. Asian farmers without markets is tinder.

Update 09:00 Tuesday 25 Wall Street Journal:

BHP Withdraws
Rio Tinto Bid

BHP Billiton abruptly broke off its 18-monthlong pursuit of rival miner Rio Tinto, saying the recent fall in commodity prices and worsening world economy made its $68 billion deal too risky to complete.

Update 13:39 Tuesday 25 Financial Times

Cobalt fall reflects slowdown in China

Industrial activity in Beijing has slowed so quickly that demand for the versatile metal has ground to a halt, says one of the biggest miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo - Nov-25

Ransom key to Sirius Star return

The owners of the hijacked Saudi oil tanker face months of negotiations and may have little option but to pay, amid reports suggesting the Somali pirates might lower their $25m demand - Nov-25

Which enemy is greater: Islamists or hijackers?

For western diplomats and security officials watching lawlessness inside Somalia develop into threats to the outside world, the difficulty is that targeting one foe could strengthen the other - Nov-25

Never Never Never Give Up

By John Batchelor on November 23, 2008 12:39 AM | 13 Comments

Waiting for Citi With Winston.

While we wait for Citi news, the fate of the financial system in the balance, I am speaking Sunday 23 with Carlo D'Este, author of a new magisterial and enthusiastic biography of the unbelievable Winston Churchill, "Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945," a man who committed himself from his motherless nursery to German-made tin soldiers, maps, maneuvers, pre-Oedipal generalship and a compulsive, ruthless, beastly self-centeredness that should have led him to destruction about one hundred times by 1900. He survived Ascot sadism, Harrow hijinks, Sandhurst, Cuba, India with the 4th Hussars (left, Subaltern Churchill in India, 1895), Pashtuns, Sudan, Kitchener, Boers, Haldane, and his animal-spirited mother and father, and then he took up politics at the genuine risk of his self-worshipped reputation. By 1907, and a chance meeting with the First Lord of the Admiralty, when Churchill discovered his love of ship, too, this tale resembles a non-stop Hollywood action adventure movie, except that it is based upon the madness of the British Empire. A blunt Oedipal drama fuels it, with Randolph Churchill abusing Winston by mail and in person as Randolph slowly perished of insanity, yet Winston planted himself by his father's remains, his elbow on the coffin, to greet the mourners. In D'Este's handling, Churchill never forgives his father and never forgets his father, a conversation with a ghost for seventy years after Randolph's death in 1895. It may be one clue to Churchill's resolution, his legendary quotation, "Never, never, never give up." Churchill bulled and bullied his way into all the disasters of the first half of the 20th century, Gallipoli, the Sommes, Lenin, Singapore and Pearl Harbor, and he survived numerous, battles, accidents, illnesses and reckless

expeditions, all of which he chronicled with a feverish vanity; yet at no point does it appear that he doubted himself. Perhaps those doubts were what he called his "black dogs," but he hid that with a river of booze and a volocano of tobacco. By 1945, Churchill had participated in and supervised the loss of several dozens of millions of human beings on all continents and oceans (right, Churchill haranguing the U.S. Congress, 1943), and he still had the loss of India and the rest of the colonial empire to go, yet he kept on, chatting with his father's scornful ghost. I ask myself what Churchill would have made of the last seven years of pursuing Bin Laden, battling the same Afridi and Pashtuns as Churchill, battling the same Iraqis as Churchill, battling the same financial ruin and Russians and political chicanery as Churchill. The answer would probably be, "Never, never, never give up," and "If you're going through Hell, keep going." If you are persecuted by your father's cruel voice fifty or sixty or seventy years after his death, what do enemies like Hitler, Gandhi and Stalin come to?

Note on the Pirates off Somalia and Kenya.

First Lord Churchill would have loved this: Best Ummah signals source sends a ICC Commercial Crimes Service bulletin datelined November 21 from London warning of three pirate motherships, Burum Ocean and Athena or Arena and one unnamed. At least one of them, Burum Ocean, is a Russian made stern trawler. Operating 60 nautical miles NE of Bossasso, Somalia in the Gulf of Aden. Also, a warning that an additional group of pirates may be operating south of Somalia, targeting ships to and from the Cape of Good Hope or

inbound to Mombassa, Kenya. My colleague Jed Babbin, Human Events, writes me on this alert, "Just how will the 'soft power' people deal with this?" and "Need more than a Navy to deal with this. Need a PSI-like international alliance. And a bunch of bombers."

"He wants something now..."

By John Batchelor on November 22, 2008 12:31 AM | 6 Comments

Iraq, January 2005, George Bush Impatient.

Speaking Sunday 23 to State Department veteran Robert Earle, author, "Nights in the Pink Motel: An American Strategist's Pursuit of Peace in Iraq," re Mr. Earle's year in theater working directly for Ambassador John Negroponte. Mr. Earle came out of medical retirement to

travel June '04 to the Green Zone (pictured here, which the author calls the "Pink Motel") and take up an office in Saddam Hussein's ex Palace and study the insurgency and the enemy. He writes extremely well, hypnotically, a gift of gab, Graham Greene and Rolling Stone together, and he has the wit to observe closely how human beings are both predictable and compelling. Baghdad in the summer of '04 was opera. In Mr. Earle's eyes, it resembles a 132 degree Saigon 1963 wedded to Berlin 1946. This is the moodiest book I have found on the tragedy of the Bush administration in Iraq. From the moment Mr. Earle climbs into the Rhino, the armored vehicle to make the six-mile run from the airport to the Green Zone, this story is excitement and doom. The Iraqis are mysterious, violently childish, frightened to madness, helpless, and just short of cannibalistic. The Americans are mostly in it for the money. A few of the Americans are charming lunatics who believe that there is principle involved -- democracy, law and order, peace, some sort of civilization to reestablish. Mr. Earle is one of these lunatics and he meets others whom he characterizes by their attitudes or obsessions. "True Hero" or "Baseball Cap." One female stands out, Kay at five feet with red hair, whom he meets enroute home for leave while she is mourning a friendship with a Navy Seal who has lost a hand. Kay has spent the previous three years seeking her own destruction in war zones. Kay's delusion in 2004 is that she will abet establishing the rule of law in Iraq. Mr. Earle's illusion is to write a George

Kennan "Long Telegram" length super memo that the president will read and therefore understand that victory in Iraq is impossible in less than decades and that the majority Shia will dominate any government no matter how it is organized. Mr. Earle writes this super memo, and his boss and comrade John Negroponte makes sure it is delivered to the President. Ambassador Negroponte reports to Mr. Earle, in January 2005, that the president has read the report and rejected it. Mr. Earle is discouraged, despairing. Mr. Negroponte's explanation, while they sit in Saddam Hussein's gargantuan architecture (right, the American Embassy in the Green Zone) , awaiting the results of the first post-Saddam Iraqi vote, is that President Bush is impatient: "He wants something now, not in five or ten years."

Chicago, January 2005, Barack Obama Ambitious.

Reading this melancholy scene from the Green Zone (below, the Palace pool), I thought about another kind of drama in Hyde Park in January 2005, when Tony Rezko met with newly sworn-in Senator Obama to

walk over the mansion at 5046 South Kenwood Avenue. Mr. Obama was 99th senior senator, and he had won his overwhelming victory the previous November 5 because his trite rivals had self-destructed and because he had established himself as the anti-war senator. The result, in January, was that John Kerry was defeated, Bush was returned, the Senate and House remained in the hands of the Republicans, and Mr. Obama's future was assured -- a lifetime position, at 43, as a modest, little known, slight minority party senator from Illinois. It would not have been in anyone's imagination that the president's impatience with success in Iraq would soon transform the political landscape into a political minefield for his second term. And that the chaos in Iraq would turn into a crazed civil war driven by Iran an Syria in order to humiliate and defeat the Americans across the Middle East. And that the quietly ambitious Mr. Obama would launch a quixotic campaign for the presidency in February 2007 that would result in 365 Electoral College votes in November 2008. And that in January 2009, four years after Mr. Earle's disappointing conference with Mr. Negroponte, Mr.Obama and his newly appointed and confirmed Secretary of State Mrs. Clinton would begin their time of impatience with Iraq.

Blackhawk Down, the Remake

By John Batchelor on November 21, 2008 2:17 AM | 15 Comments

Somali Pirates Are Organized.

Speaking Sunday 23 to Robert Wright, Financial Times, at London re the havoc in Suez Canal shipping caused by the pirates out of Somalia and other Indian Ocean ports. Ninety-five

ships have been attacked, thirty-nine taken, and fourteen are still held, the most famous right now being the Saudi owned Sirius Star (at anchor with pirates on board), a tanker with $100 million of crude and a crew that assumes it will be ransomed. None of this is cheap. The merchant fleets are plotting to bypass the Gulf of Aden, where the attacks are commonplace, and route the long route around the Cape of Good Hope. (The Sirius Star is too deep a draft for the Suez Canal and was bound for the Cape of Good Hope; it was 400 nautical miles off Somalia, when it was taken: note by Robert Wright on Sunday 23, that no one onboard Sirius Star would have imagined they were under threat that far at sea: this is a new level of risk.) This adds 20 days from the India Ocean to Europe or North America and, if you are a Suezmax tanker, adds $1 million to the insurance costs and a lot of yelling in London and Brussels. The questions is why is this happening? The pirates are striking far at sea from small boats launched from mother ships. This is organized warfare. Who?

Al Qaeda Is Focused

Is it coincidence that Ayman al-Zawahiri's trash talking video message, that was recorded sometime between November 5 and 11, mentioned the "lions of Islam in Somalia?"

And I tell my brothers, the lions of Islam in Somalia: rejoice in victory and conquest. America is gathering its wounds in Iraq, and Ethiopia is looking for a way out, and for this reason, the stage of conspiracies and machinations has begun. So hold tightly to the truth for which you have given your lives, and don't put down your weapons before the Mujahid state of Islam and Tawheed has been set up in Somalia.

My best source on Ummah signals reminds me that Al Qaeda continues to plot to take over Somalia, and that it has struggled these years because of the chaos, anarchy, just general degradation of the population. Al Qaeda needs a government on hand in order to make a revolution and impose Shariah law. Connect the dots? Not yet. The whole of the Horn of Africa has been collapsing for many years. Men (right, captured pirates in the docket at Mombasa, Kenya November 18) driven from their tribes and herding by famine, drought, war in Ethiopia and Eritrea, the four horseman of the Apocalypse and a complete abandonment of the region by the EU and the Gulf States, all this has created a darkness visible that is growing. Now with the recessions in the Western economies, the beggaring of the petro-dictatorships, the collapse of commodity prices in Africa and Asia, there is no hope to wait for. A Marxist would conclude that the pirates are revolting against the ruling classes. A Capitalist would conclude that the pirates are acting on favorable market conditions. But still, this is Somalia.

Blackhawk Down, the Original

My memory is that the connection between the "Blackhawk Down" incident of October 3-4 1993, also called the First Battle of Mogadishu, and the jihadists who became Al Qaeda was not firmly fixed. My best signal source for all sources was clear to me over many years that the attack on the American Task Force Ranger was a premeditated strike by Osama Bin Laden's agents. My best source often asserted that Al Qaeda was born at Khartoum in '93, and the first two efforts were the attack on the American embassy in Khartoum and the attack on the Mogadishu expedition. The official American explanation in '93 and still today is that the attack was a spontaneous riot, that the hundreds of armed attackers just appeared spontaneously to go up against American automatic weapons and American and Pakistani counter-attacks, and that the fact that the Somali militia wielded RPGs was not significant. Yes, Osama Bin Laden was deported from Khartoum in 1996, when he settled in Afghanistan. Yes, Al Qaeda has long recruited on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa. But sill, no confirm from the DoD or the historians of Mogadishu. (Left, one of the Task Force Ranger helicopters enroute to the incident on October 3, 1993.)

The Other Detail in Minnesota and Maine

Sunday 23 speaking also to Diana West, whose Townhall column puzzles about the strangely porous State Department program that has permitted thousands of Africans, especially Somalis, into the US as relatives of legal immigrants. The facts are that most of these relatives are likely frauds. In a test case of 3500, only twenty percent were legitimately relatives. I wrote Diana that I have watched Lewiston, Maine for many years, where thousands of Somalis have settled through the State Department program, and in turn have brought in their relatives legally. The Somalis are called economic refugees, a legacy of the original Somalia expedition launched by George H.W. Bush and Jim Baker in 1992. The Clinton administration inherited the Mogadishu catastrophe in 1993. Then two of the coldest states in the country inherited the refugee remnant who now, fifteen years later, have become active, voting American citizens (left at Lewiston, Maine November 4, 2008). But what about these fraud reports? And what about the Somali pirates? And what about al-Zawahiri's "lions of Islam at Somalia?" Coincidences?

Update 21:30.

Ummah signals source writes that DoD intel today acknowledges a highly probable AQ link to the 1993 Mogadishu attacks:

"...In 1993, Osama bin Laden himself told Peter Bergen and al Quds al Arabi newspaper in London that AQ was involved. OBL had left Saudi Arabia in a a fury with his supporters in 1992 and moved to Sudan. East Africa became a major focus for AQ at this time because of its proximity to Sudan and because of the US and UN intervention in Somalia. Thus, the strength of the Nairobi, Mombasa and Mogadishu cells. From Sudan AQ attempted to establish a solid foothold in Somalia in the 90s but was unsuccessful. West Point's Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) recently released a wealth of translated captured interal AQ documents that detail the challenges that the terrorists faced.

"The West was defeated and fled Somalia.. [But] the original problem that you went to address still exists. What happened to the Somali Salafia and where is it now.? Did you suddenly go to Somalia and suddenly withdraw, as happened in Afghanistan, without accomplishing any clear objective or follow up the victory and benefit from it to accomplish additional victories?"
(AQ writer, circa 1995, complaining that AQ had abandoned its mission in Somalia.)
http://ctc.usma.edu/aq/aq_somaliaII.asp#_ftnref9

CTC states: "Conventional thinking suggests that Somalia, a failed state, would be an ideal safe haven for al-Qa'ida. Our analysis, however, indicates that weakly governed regions such as coastal Kenya, not failed states like Somalia, provide an environment more conducive to al-Qa'ida's activities. In Somalia, al-Qa'ida's members fell victim to many of the same challenges that plague Western interventions in the Horn. They were prone to extortion and betrayal, found themselves trapped in the middle of incomprehensible (to them) clan conflicts, faced suspicion from the indigenous population, had to overcome significant logistical constraints and were subject to a constant risk of Western military interdiction."
http://ctc.usma.edu/aq/aq_exsumII.asp

Fear Is Missing

By John Batchelor on November 20, 2008 1:38 AM | 13 Comments

Titanic Sinking, No Worries.

Several market sources communicated late in the trading session Wednesday 19 that there was a modest sangfroid in the selling. The short attack on Goldman Sachs was blinked away as

what goes around comes around. The apparent indifference to Citibank's torture was not even a headline issue. Instead the attack on GS spread to an attack on Bank of America (BAC). My trader source wrote,"If it's financial, they are all bankrupt." Another source wrote, "When Citi goes, can JPM and Morgan and BAC be far behind?" The short attacks were workmanlike and nimble. No one sounded alarm that the whole financial sector has now been tagged as a loser. Fifteen days after the election of an unknown, inexperienced, uncertain young man as the next president, the market has retreated 15%. Five of the last seven days have been down. The markets look so oversold that it is hard to imagine who is selling, and perhaps human beings are no longer involved, just clerks pushing clicks as the funds liquidate assets regardless in order to stay credible. However the so-called support at 8000 is gone. No one, not even Jim Cramer, wants to own anything. And in Washington, the auto-makers and their UAW companion were again in front of the cameras pleading for access to the TARP bailout. Genuinely pleading. At least there is fear in Detroit, because there seems no fear in the markets. Lower and lower, with expectations grimmer and darker. Overnight the Asia markets are off 5% and look ordinary. Everyone is shrugging. There is no fear. Why? Because we believe, as the central bankers propose, that the printing presses can save the economy? Because, we believe, as Larry Kudlow and the supply-siders propose, that there is a tax cut coming to save us? Because we believe that a Cabinet of familiar Democratic Party personalities will be able to reverse what a Cabinet of familiar Republican Party

personalities could not? Dr. Doom, aka Nouriel Roubini (above right), told Bloomberg TV that we already have deflation in a recession, which is pushing commodity prices much lower and will push unemployment as high as 9%. Housing prices have not bottomed, Mr. Roubini asserts, and there might not be a bottom. Banks, autos, airlines, hotels, retail, all are staggered and still. No one is consuming. And still no fear. A mystery. The dark age, but narcotized. In 1935, unemployment was still a stunning 21% but no one much remarked, since it wasn't 30% like 1932-33. Is that the explanation? We are not fearful, because we have gotten used to the luxury liner sinking by the bow?

Doom You Can't Feel

By John Batchelor on November 19, 2008 2:41 PM | 11 Comments

Just In Case You Thought This Is An Ordinary Bear.

My favorite gloomy blog Calculated Risk features a chart (below) comparing the crashes of '74, '87, '01 and '08, and will soon post the '29 version. We are watching the same pain that provided Warren Buffet his start in the Richard Nixon bear of '74 and that gave the banks their game of dungeons and dragons with fantasy CDS after '01. The end of the selling does not mean that the markets start back up. We settle down to the long wait. In'29, that was through 1933, and then it started down again in '36 after FDR misread the scene and stopped hiring and spending with printed money. The semiotics show that Mr. Obama is reaching for his Abraham Lincoln hat to build a Cabinet and government, however the guidance from the tough guys on Wall Street is that he best put on the FDR hat and start spending like the WPA, CCC, TVA, and start regulating like the NRA. Both versions are cartoons, but useful for magazines. (Who buys magazines?) Reading my London Times 1933 has taught me that you don't know where the bottom is when you are in it, and you don't know what it feels like when

you are in it because denial is the way the body deal with fear. My Virginia culture watcher tells me that while the restaurants are full, the auto showrooms are empty (right, the grim reapers of the Big Three on Capitol Hill Tuesday Nov 18) and the job offers for young people are sparse and worse. MBA grads are abandoned. I watched the restaurant crowd in the hip Village last evening and saw much wining and celebrating; however, when I listened, the vivacious young people were speaking of cutbacks, layoffs, no buyers and a few about picking up business because they are local. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and this economy is from a crater on the moon. Turn out the lights, the ConEd bill isn't paid since summer, and we don't much own the house anyway, and who can fix a lamp now, let it be dark.

Update 1830 pm:

Now I hear from my trader source that the short sharks attacked Goldman Sachs (GS) and drove it through $55 and it settled just pennies above it. This is well below it's IPO opening day

and brings the eight years of the genius Hank Paulson premium to a net zero minus (right, see total GS chart since IPO). GS is down this year from 200 to 55, and there is air below. Now the shorts will get daring and try for an all crash. The attack on Citi continues, and two sources email that Citi is about to follow AIG into a ward of the state. The question, can Morgan, JPM and BAC be far behind, and BAC was down big today. The gallows standup artists on the Calculated Risk blog recommend reviewing escape plans. My favorite remark so far today came from "Hank Paulson's Mother: Note to the House and the Senate: If you don't pass the TARP, the stock market will tank. Wait, what week is this again?" How does it go again? We won't want Professor Larry Summers to replace Hank Paulson in the Santa Claus for Banks role, because he is mean to professor girls, but it's okay to drop in Jon Corzine of New Jersey, because he handed GS to Hank Paulson before the IPO.

Al Qaeda Talks Trash

By John Batchelor on November 19, 2008 12:03 PM | 10 Comments

Bump On His Head Is Back.

Osama Bin Laden's deputy gangster Ayman al-Zawahiri is back in the news with an unfootnoted, rambling, six-power-points video on the new American president-elect and how Al Qaeda is really, really, really disappointed. Assume it will be clipped up and posted on "YouTube Hobgoblins" soon. My best source in Ummah signals sends along a Word document translation updated on November 11. Best source reports the critical details,

"Final video created on Nov 17. Publicly released on Nov 19. The video was recorded presumably in the week between Nov 5 and Nov 11. Last year the lag time between an event and Zawahiri's video response was less than 72 hours. It's now down to 3 weeks. This is the significance of the dates."

According to al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian national bourgeoise crank who in the 1990s toured America to raise cash from the credulous and criminal (left, al-Zawahiri's faked passport photo 1994-95), Mr. Obama is making the same unfortunate mistakes as the wicked Mr. Bush before him, refusing to accept defeat in Iraq, defeat in Afghanistan, defeat in the fantasy of the Ummah, just plain defeat as a bunch of Dhimmi punks. A recent air strike on another of the notorious Ak-47, RPG "wedding parties" in Afghanistan, this one near Kandahar, is cited as proof that Mr. Obama doesn't get it.

Malcolm X.

The notoriously operatic and stage-struck Mr. al-Zawahiri (right, in full glam make-up in his Pakistan dacha, from a video released in 2006) then concludes that unlike the late Malcolm X (below, 1964), Mr. Obama is a fraud -- a disrespectful son of a Muslim father who has fallen in with the Jews and Christans. Ergo, Mr. Obama is no change. The Al Qaeda discouragement is emphasized with sighs, head-shakings, harsh expectorations, other patronizing, scene stealing sounds of bilious dismissal. Al-Zwahiri, who my source notes looks extremely weary during his jeremiad, throws in the strangely antique trash talk that Mr. Obama and Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice are "House Negroes." And then he goes free associating about how badly he and his pals are going to burn and pillage and wreck and be really mean to America the Crusader and how brave and constant and really cool are his pals the Muj, his "lions of Islam." The whole package is predictable, repetitive, unimaginative, unfocused -- and seems hours longer than its minutes. It needs illustrations, hotlinks, web 2.0 paraphernalia, some cut-aways, better lighting and some music orchestrating. Hire Bollywood for the re-recording. And please, no more one-camera monologue video. If there is only one of you sounding off, just send a press release. The crowd that can't read isn't going to sign up for dynamite belts anytime soon. The banal quality of this production makes me puzzle why there was ever fear of this character? He is a pre-Google blowhard. Worse, he's old news. What's he going to do, send an ultra-lite loaded with CDS into Goldman Sachs at 30 Hudson? Who has time to worry about another bank failure?

Translation of the Obama Trash Talk Part of the Memo (modified on November 11):

The second of these messages is to the new president of the United States. I tell him: you have reached the position of president, and a heavy legacy of failure and crimes awaits you. A failure in Iraq to which you have admitted, and a failure in Afghanistan to which the commanders of your army have admitted. The other thing to which I want to bring your attention is that what you've announced about how you're going to reach an understanding with Iran and pull your troops out of Iraq to send them to Afghanistan is a policy which was destined for failure before it was born. It appears that you don't know anything about the Muslim Ummah and its history, and the fate of the traitors who cooperated with the invaders against it, and don't know anything about the history of Afghanistan and its free and defiant Muslim people. And if you still want to be stubborn about America's failure in Afghanistan, then remember the fate of Bush and Pervez Musharraf, and the fate of the Soviets and British before them. And be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them.
As for the crimes of America which await you, it appears that you continue to be captive to the same criminal American mentality towards the world and towards the Muslims. The Muslim Ummah received with extreme bitterness your hypocritical statements to and stances towards Israel, which confirmed to the Ummah that you have chosen a stance of hostility to Islam and Muslims.
You represent the direct opposite of honorable black Americans like Malik al-Shabazz, or Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him). You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America. And so you promised to back Israel, and you threatened to strike the tribal regions in Pakistan, and to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, in order for the crimes of the American Crusade in it to continue. And last Monday, your aircraft killed 40 Afghan Muslims at a wedding party in Kandahar. As for Malik al-Shabazz (may Allah have mercy on him), he was born to a black pastor killed by white bigots, but Allah favored him with guidance to Islam, and so he prided himself on his fraternity with the Muslims, and he condemned the crimes of the Crusader West against the weak and oppressed, and he declared his support for peoples resisting American occupation, and he spoke about the worldwide revolution against the Western power structure.
That's why it wasn't strange that Malik al-Shabazz (may Allah have mercy on him) was killed, while you have climbed the rungs of the presidency to take over the leadership of the greatest criminal force in the history of mankind and the leadership of the most violent Crusade ever against the Muslims.
And in you and in Colin Powell, Rice and your likes, the words of Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him) concerning "House Negroes" are confirmed.

Best source adds this liner note to the package: "We have only seen him in video once this year, on August 22. This is his 10th appearance this year. All but the one in August was audio (over video collages). Zawahiri knows that the increased tempo of ops in Pakistan's frontier is targeting him specifically. He knows that America is trying to smoke him out. This is why his OPSEC has been increased. He looked extremely tired in the August video."

Best source adds this footnote re Somalia (Land of the Two Migrations): most significant for the report I will have Sunday 23 from London re the piracy phenomenon off Somalia: "Most significant in the speech is his shout out to Somalia towards the end. This is in response to Shabaab Strategy Chief Nabhan Ali Nabhan's shout out to AQSL on behalf of the Somalia muj back in Sep. Zawahiri is acknowledging receipt of their message. Shabaab is about to officially merge into AQ. Expect a video announcing the establishment of Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Migrations (Somalia) in the next 2 or 3 months. Note that Zawahiri instructs them to establish a sharia-based authority. This is in response to the lessons that AQ learned in Somalia in the 1990s when they were unable to establish a regime amidst chaos. (AQ has learned that it fares better when there is a government to counter.)"

Why HRC Takes State

By John Batchelor on November 19, 2008 4:59 AM | 11 Comments

Trusted Source: HRC Takes State.

Mr. Obama has offered her the job, and HRC is moving toward accepting the job as Secretary of State. The Obama administration is working on the deal that will dominate political chat for

the rest of this gloomy year, and the best information now is that all the stars have lined up for Mrs. Clinton to accept the job. There will be rough edges, such as dealing with the many entangled details of Bill Clinton's global affairs, but nothing profound. It will provide the Obama team a major voice in world affairs with credibility immediately on Israel and Palestine, on Russia, on China and East Asia economies. Mrs. Clinton will be the third female StateSec and not attract interference about being the first female, or being an awkward official for the hairy potentates overseas to deal with. She will need independence and broad funding support; she will need an air force and a whole new political apparatus built upon the antique political offices at State; but she will have the foundations of a massive reawakening of State as the traditionally first and most senior Cabinet post -- the Prime Ministry of the United States of America.

Why HRC Takes State:

1. HRC has the opportunity to redraw the map from Islamabad to Tripoli, especially with regard Pakistan, Iraq and Gaza. Tehran respects her. Riyadh cannot figure her. Hamas and Fatah trust her. Who knows why?.

2. HRC can find Osama Bin Laden. Remember him? Also, the next attack on the Homeland makes the State Sec the primary minister to direct and consolidate the allies at the U.N, and she already enjoys the respect of the UN Security Council.

3. The best StaeSec was George Marshall, because he built a permanent peace in Western Europe. HRC has the chance to build a permanent peace in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. How? At the bargaining table, the Russian P.M. Mr. Putin cannot out stare her and cannot read her.

4. The PR China trusts her. Who knows why?

5. President Clinton will do what she asks and quickly. Mr. Clinton is the most effective foreign policy weapon in the American arsenal at least since TR and possibly since Benjamin Franklin, a man for all continents.

6. The president asks for her help. It does come to this. Mr. Obama is now the office, and when the office asks for your help, you say, "Yes, Mr. President."

StateSec Chase

By John Batchelor on November 18, 2008 12:05 PM | 6 Comments

HRC is the Game, the Rest Is Misdirection Noise.

Perennial foreign policy polymath and grumpy old man Richard Holbrooke is back in the chase for StateSec today in a squirim-making article published in the Clinton friendly LA Times. Our President-Elect Obama can read through (as he motors 12 minutes from Hyde

Park to the Chicago transition hq, right) the usual hosannahs to Holbrooke the veteran, Holbrooke the genius, Holbrooke the man who can get things done. This same story ran up the flag in 2000 prior to the Al Gore retreat, and in 2004 prior to the John Kerry defeat. A good source told me on Election Day in 2004 that he was being lobbied by Mr. Holbrooke as late as 6 pm on November 5, 2004, until the early exit poll results turned around and Kerry withered in Ohio. Now, the same story again, allowing the efficient LA Times to publish the also running. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and the outlier Marine General James L. Jones (ret.). What this short list tells me is that HRC is the only planetary candidate. The other names have much smaller pedestals than HRC and will be most happy fitting into speciality tasks for the Obama administration over 8 years. HRC is the One.

David Ignatius Doubting Bill Clinton.

Then there is the sour milk column in WaPo by foreign romantic David Ignatius that asserts HRC to State is a bad idea, comparing the prospect to how badly Ed Muskie at State worked with Jimmy Carter 1977-79. This is a peculiar example and makes me think Mr. Ignatius is sending us up. Jimmy Carter is Barack Obama and Ed Muskie is HRC? Is there a deeper pit that Mr. Ignatius could have found to kick in the prospective first two years of the Obama work? Mr. Ignatius says that two egos from the same race don't work well. Then he mentions that what is mostly wrong about HRC to State is that Bill Clinton (left, at Kuwait City November 16, recommending HRC to State) is way too smart, too gifted, too restless to stay away from the contest. This makes HRC ineligible. Folly. You put your best players on the field and you find a way. Bill Clinton in the last eight years has become a planetary Teddy Roosevelt. After TR left office, he travelled and wrote and spoke and schemed. He was a fireball of foreign policy and domestic ambition, the original progressive fighting Wall Street and what he called "the Interests" -- meaning J.P. Morgan. TR drove Taft wacky, and the cartoons of the time

illustrate the scrappiness of both maharajas (right). TR shaped the outcome of 1912 with his Bull Moose revolt that wrecked Taft, shaped the Wilson-Jennings debate about the First War up to the Lusitania fiasco, shaped the GOP decision in 1916 to go with a bearded cipher of a judge and ex-NY governor named Charles Evans Hughes, and then shaped the rush to war in 1917. Unstoppable, and only fate and the Angel of Death prevented TR from returning to the White House in 192o. Good for Bill Clinton, and good for HRC, and good for the country if Mr. Obama makes the very strange decision to go with HRC at State. Do I think it will work? Did TR work with William Howard Taft, with Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan at State, with Charles Evans Hughes or General John Pershing or even his old horse soldier crony Leonard Wood? No. A TR is not supposed to work with people he invented. They must work with TR. Bully!

Update 17:30:00

Politico's Glenn Thrush runs an unnamed source item that HRC is weighing the State offer and may turn it down. Reasons are that 1. She already has a great job. 2. Second to no one.

3. It's not the presidency. The Obama transition team vetting of WJC and his global connections is a non-story. Reject a New York Senator (in Pat Moynihan's and William Seward's chair) because her husband is an ex-president with attitude and cash? Not credible. My best notion and source on this is that HRC has been offered the job and is doing her due diligence letting the forces of light and forces of darkness arrange themselves before her fortress. The hoot on Page Six, with Chris Matthews on the Acela bad-mouthing HRC as melodramatic, is a minor example of the threat of HRC obliging the snipers to look over their shoulders: consider that Mr. Matthews, a durable diva of a penurious cable, wants to run for Arlen Specter's job. Not smart to mess with Mother Nation. News from Castle Clinton: No decision has been made. Does this not sound presidential?

"...the Republican Party as an organization - or what is left of it..."

By John Batchelor on November 18, 2008 12:04 AM | 13 Comments

Reading through the London Times 1933.

The rumor of John McCain going into the President-Elect's administration at Defense (below, in Chicago yesterday, a photo spray, Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel) sent me looking for the earlier moment when the Democratic Party was omnipotent, its

president-elect was untouchable, and the nation along with Europe was flattened by deflation, bank-runs, unemployment, panic and despair. That was 1933. Once inaugurated, FDR started experimenting with monetary policy, including nixing the gold standard and mandating wages, prices and enterprises. The result was that the markets headed lower, Europe blinked and gulped and darkened with lawless dictatorships, and unemployment continued to climb. FDR eventually came to his senses, or was badgered into it, but not quickly. In late fall 1933, with the nation gloomy as it approached a joyless Christmas, the president was still master of public opinion and money, and he set a speech in Washington on Wednesday December 1, in front of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, to answer what the headline writer called the "growing army of critics." The sentence that most attracted my eye in the story was the dry, "There is some significance in the apparent unwillingness of the Republican Party as an organization - or what is left of it -- to deliver a frontal assault on the monetary, industrial and agrarian polices of the administration..." Here is the story of FDR's first term and Barack Obama's first term. There is no reason to expect an organized opposition to policies. The Republican Party has more than retreated. It looks like surrender. The rumor of J. McCain to SecDef speaks to a scenario where war policy will be set by mumbling potentates not representatives of groups, factions, interests. This rush from partisanship is a rush from debate. This did not work well in FDR's experiment. The economy lost interest in his cheerful freelancing. Because there was no Republican Party extant, FDR was re-elected nearly unanimously in 1936 and led the country into a second deeper more numbing recession that dragged on to the outbreak of war 1939-41. By the time FDR decided, against his party bosses wishes, to run for a third term, FDR was a supremely popular and whimsical leader with no checks or balances. When I see Mr. Obama, who has no record, no library of decisions, no recognizable foundation, enjoying a 70% approval rating and receiving media cheers for hosting Mrs.Clinton and John McCain in the president-elect's Chicago clubhouse, then I can presume that there is not yet a check or a balance on the imminent and still undefined administration. This is not Mr. Obama's problem. It is the Republican Party's -- "or what is left of it..." In 2012 it could be everyone's problem. And in 2016 Mr. Obama will only be 55 years old.

Rumor McCain SecDef

By John Batchelor on November 17, 2008 10:55 AM | 20 Comments

The Report is that Barack Obama Will Offer John McCain Defense.

Sunday 16, Larry Johnson of No Quarter reported that his sourced information as of now is that Barack Obama will offer John McCain the Cabinet post of Secretary of Defense. The

additional information is that John McCain is inclined to accept the post.

What Does It Mean?

The offer to Mr. McCain will rock the Republican Party and will discomfit the Democratic Party. Larry Johnson reported that his defense contractor sources believe that McCain at DoD will end the business as usual in Washington and begin a nightmare of troubles for them. Larry's uniformed friends believe it is a grand notion and will provide excellent support for the force committed right now.

Watching Chicago

The media attention to the meeting between Obama and McCain suggests that many have the same report as Larry Johnson's. There are always complications, as we see with the strong rumors of the State Department to Mrs. Clinton. Watching.

The Gulf of Tonkin Lie

By John Batchelor on November 16, 2008 12:52 AM | 13 Comments

Lyndon Johnson Lies to McGeorge Bundy.

Speaking today to Gordon Goldstein, author, "Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to Vietnam," re the memories of McGeorge Bundy as he served two presidents, JFK and LBJ, as the country descended into a war that it was doomed to lose over South

Vietnam. The Vietnam war was based on two major lies. The first lie was that the Kennedy administration, with Mr. Bundy going along (right with the president), didn't direct events that murdered the Diem brothers, legitimate bosses of the country, in November 1963. Mr. Goldstein's book, boosted by lengthy interviews with Bundy before he died in 1995, provides plenty of evidence of the calumny of the Diem brother killings by Kennedy's ambiguous, callous conduct, August to November 1963. However it is the second lie that interests me here. The second lie began on Tuesday August 4, 1964 when Kennedy's successor LBJ walked down to the basement of White House to the office of his national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and said, "Get that resolution your brother drafted." The resolution was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that the ignorant and self-blinded Congress would pass nearly unanimously three days later. The brother was McGeorge Bundy's younger brother serving then at State. The issue was the supposed two attacks on U.S. destroyers off the coast of North Vietnam. We know now that the first combat took place on August 2 -- an exchange of gunfire triggered by special forces operations by the Americans. The second incident did not happen. The USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy were not attacked. At the time, McGeorge Bundy suspected there was something incomplete about the reports from the destroyers about an imminent attack, not an actual attack, and he responded, "Mr. President, we ought to think about this." LBJ's answer conveyed the vulgar, cunning, cynical, lurid, ruthless, delusional personality that dominated the Vietnam catastrophe from 1965 until his pointless, ignorant death by heart attack in January 1973, "I didn't say that. I didn't ask you what you thought. I told you what to do." Did LBJ know that the second attack was a lie? Is that why LBJ bullied McGeorge Bundy about a report that his own national security adviser doubted? Or is it that LBJ lied to himself about the Gulf of Tonkin?

Bob McNamara Lies to Lyndon Johnson

Nine hours later, Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara sat with LBJ, McGeorge Bundy and other VIPs in a heated White House meeting of the National Security Council and recommended a reprisal on North Vietnam for the attack on the Maddox and Turner Joy. (Right, cabinet meeting in 1965, Bundy in middle front with his back to the camera.) Again, did LBJ know that it was a lie? Did McNamara purposely lie to LBJ? Unknown. The meeting gave the proposal unanimous support. The President ordered air strikes on North Vietnamese patrol boats and an oil depot. The headlines the next day stampeded Congress and the public toward a panicky, hysterical, ill-informed, ghoulish rush to war. McGeorge Bundy later remembered that LBJ "clearly felt that Bob McNamara had told him he could count on there having been attack. In terms of the real situation, this is all in a sense show business. The real question of whether you wanted to stay and fight in Vietnam is much wider and deeper than what happens in the Gulf of Tonkin." This is a dry example of McGeorge Bundy's legendary arrogance, intellectual aloofness, numbness and lifelong unwillingness to admit to the lie he went along with. The lie was the LBJ war policy from the first. The Gulf of Tonkin was a naked, stupid, sloppy, sadistic lie. It is forty-five years since the JFK administration lie about the Diem brother murders, and Rufus Phillips, author, "Why Vietnam Matters," told me last Sunday 9 that the murder was the moment he knew that the Vietnam war was in trouble. I will ask Gordon Goldstein if McGeorge Bundy knew that the Gulf of Tonkin lie was when he knew that the Vietnam war was in trouble. The lessons of the Vietnam war, a gross model of American political catastrophe in the 20th Century, must include the two lies at the center of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. (Below, May 5, 1961, JFK, LBJ, Jackie Kennedy, Arthur Schlesigner, and McGeorge Bundy behind LBJ, watch Alan Shepherd's fifteen minute space flight on Mercury "Freedom" 7.)

Barn Door Closing Talk

By John Batchelor on November 15, 2008 4:28 PM | 14 Comments

Long After the Horse Thieves Escaped.

The G20 bosses of the planet pose for a group picture like a glamour shot of a Model UN club while their flacks issue a verbose, toothless statement meant to assure us that the law and order

boys are now in charge of the investigation. We know what the crime is. We were robbed. We know who did it. The bankers, starting with the biggest banks on the planet, some of whom leveraged themselves to 30 times assets under Basel II and then faked their risk management by buying fantasies called Credit Default Swaps (CDS.) What are you geniuses going to do about it is the question? Instead what we get is the banality of scolding from the G20. For example, if there is one stat that screams theft it is the scale of growth of the infamous Credit Default Swaps from 2002, following the attack on New York financial buildings, to 2008 and the attack on New York financials. In 2002 there were $1.5 trillion of CDS obligations. In 2008 there were $54.5 trillion of obligations. Stop thief! You see why no one wants to loan money? You see why the banks are fragile as meteorites? Tens of thousands of open-eyed compulsive gamblers called bankers stole and stole for six years, pretending they were making money when they were just paying themselves rewards for fraud and grotesque market manipulation. They would have written a mortgage to a prairie dog if it had a social security number and an email. And where are the U.S. Marshals to round up the horse thieves? Why aren't our G20 leaders screaming for justice and recompense? Examine the gang on the bleachers. If they are not responsible, who is? The lot of them supervised governments that looked out the windows or vacationed in Sardinia or collected stamps rather than guarding the treasure room. Why am I sure the G20 lot know they are guilty? Consider the G20 immediate action recommendation for "Prudential Oversight by March 31, 2009:"

· Supervisors and regulators, building on the imminent launch of central counterparty services for credit default swaps (CDS) in some countries, should: speed efforts to reduce the systemic risks of CDS and over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives transactions; insist that market participants support exchange traded or electronic trading platforms for CDS contracts; expand OTC derivatives market transparency; and ensure that the infrastructure for OTC derivatives can support growing volumes.

Goldman Sachs the Horse Thieves

It just came to the gurus at Treasury and all those ministries of finance at the other G-20s that supervising systemic risk of the CDS, and maintaining an electronic trading platform for CDS so their prices can be ascertained by all parties, is a wise decision? Just came to them that the CDS market was as crooked as a savannah river? Who sold at least $20 billion of CDS to Goldman Sachs and then went corpse-like when the mortgage backed assets fell apart? AIG. Who bailed out AIG not once but twice so far? Hank Paulson, ex-god of Goldman. This is supervision? This is transparency? And now the G20 tells us that it will stop those tricky guys at AIG and Goldman and Treasury? Who is the thief here? What's the penalty for plundering the markets and then plundering the taxpayers and then recommending we close the barn door after you have what you want? Do I think they will close the barn door? No. But they will talk about it.

Worlds Without End

By John Batchelor on November 15, 2008 1:03 AM | 20 Comments

Our Modest Rocky and Wet Planet Around Our Modest G-Type Star.

Spectacular news from two teams of astronomers who produce not only the first ever directly

observed exoplanet, the 25-light-year away Fomalhaut b (left), but also three additional exoplanets in orbit of 128-light-year distant HR 8799 (below right, those three red dots are exoplanets). These four planets are certainly gas giants, from three times Jupiter to five to ten times Jupiter, but they are distinctly planets not undersized stars. Using ground-based telescopes fitted with adaptive optics to remove the atmosphere distortion, and to block out most of the light of the central star, the teams now have started down the road that will produce tens of thousands of planets directly observed in the next decades. Last Sunday 9 I spoke with Harvard astronomer Dmitar Sasselov about his astro-comb technology that is improving results from all observations, and he he hinted that there were amazing announcements in train. These four planets are just the beginning. The Kepler probe to be launched next year is a dedicated planet hunter that will go looking for fifty Eden

like Earths in a small piece of the Southern sky, one hundred square degrees in the constellation Cygnus. Until now, we had tabulated approximately 300 exoplanets, all observed indirectly, deduced by how the planets made the central star wobble. Now we add these four directly observed exoplanets, and we await Kepler. Our modest rocky and wet planet around a modest star in the modest limb of a modest galaxy is about to become lost in a blizzard of planets, from gas giants to uncles and nieces of Earth.

Search for Extreme Life

What this immediately means to the planet hunters is that the likelihood of identifying planets capable of sustaining life as we know it is going to climb along with the numbers of the directly

observed, because it is much easier to measure the chemical composition, and therefore the conditions, of a planet you can see. But we must not think narrowly. Consider also the recent report of a South African gold mine near Johannesburg where in fracture water at a 2.8 km depth scientists identified and assembled DNA into a single complete genome of a single bacterium that lives without sunlight. Candidatus Desulflorudis audaxviator. It lives an independent life style, a natural ecosystem from a single genome. It is alive -- what is called an extremophile. If an organism can live inside rock, where it has never interacted with sunlight, oxygen, the atmosphere at all, then similar robust creatures could be shot through the other planets in our solar system and those exoplanets out there. The search for life on Mars, with the two rovers and the Mars Phoenix lander, has been pursuit of life as we are, carbon-based creature that interact with the photosphere. The gold mine bug, D. audaxviator, which is technically bacteria, shrugs us off as extremophiles, too. Life is opportunistic, busy and adaptive. Gas giants like Fomalhaut b may be most hospitable to our gold bug creature's cousin. DNA may not have discernible limits.

Epsilon Eridani

There is no better time than the moment, when end of the world scenarios are routine and the G-20 meets in Washington to argue about seats in the lifeboat, to look away from the hothouse

of the Libor and toward the cold vastness of the Milky Way. I spoke also last Sunday 9 to Dmitar Sasselov about Epsilon Eridani, a planetary system that is only 10.5 light years distant and that resembles our system closely with the detail that it is only one-fifth our age (artists's rendition right). It has two asteroid belts, deduced (not directly observed) planets and a sun a little smaller than ours. Extremophiles may be routine and random, given that at 850 million years our Solar System was undergoing constant asteroid bombardment and planetary cataclysms, and the surface of the baby Earth was molten from collisions. Three and a half billion years from now, Episolon Eridani may have a rocky and wet planet in the habitable zone that features Credit Default Swaps and a Goldman Sachs. It may be the DNA tool kit that explains our predicament. No matter to me, looking at the new pictures, there are worlds without end. The fresh facts of those three planets orbiting HR8799, and of sturdy Fomalhaut b, and of toddler Episilon Eridani, they make all the doom talk fade away. Do the gold bugs D. audaxviator rule?

GM Walking Death

By John Batchelor on November 14, 2008 1:10 AM | 23 Comments

Folly Writ Large.

Speaking Sunday 16 with John Tamny, editor of the thrillingly overwhelming RealClearMarkets, re the imminent opera of the Big Three car-makers. Mr. Tamny argues that GM is best let go into bankruptcy, to reorganize in some fashion, perhaps in the hands of

another owner. He also argues that it is folly writ large for President-Elect Obama and his allies Mrs. Pelosi and Harry Reid to pour public monies that are needed elsewhere into a company that has wrecked itself with bad decisions over decades and is still so deeply in denial of its fate that it will stage cheesy, ludicrous, futile marketing of the grotesque Cadillac in South Korea (right).

"In the end, the state of Michigan and the U.S. automobile sector are struggling not due to back luck, but precisely because they cling to a company that investors no longer value. And with GM shares near all-time lows, those with capital are stating loudly that so long as GM remains as is, the funds necessary for job creation will continue to flee."

Three Dollar Stocks.

A senior financier told me the fate of GM is already in the stock price, and all the arguments about Michigan, the supply chain, the speading gloom are a waste of breath. "Three dollar stocks don't survive," he said, and no more. I blinked and looked around the table of sophisticated, well-informed intelligentsia gathered at the Knickerbocker Club for supper and remarks by bold Muslim women working to educate Moslem college children. All the others were nodding. No one at the table owned GM or wanted to own GM. From a year high 0f $31, the decline was now terminal at $2.95 today. Not if but when and how GM is fragmented and sold off. Since I recognize the absolute firmness of this judgement, I also can see that it is what the Obama administration will refuse to see. Instead the Democratic majority will ignore the market judgment and perform money-printing tricks to ride out the recession. Barney Frank's Financial Oversight hearings on the fate of GM, Ford and Chrysler, which start on Wednesday 19, will provide clues as to which way the Obama team

will go in January. Public opinion is the gate-keeper, and Mr. Obama does possess that email chain of ten million cheerleaders for commanding miracles on the scale of the oceans stop rising and the Jihad boys make peace and General Motors cuts labor costs. There will be banal TV ads for the unwanted, ineffective, grossly expensive electric car Volt, bought and paid for by the unimaginative Congress with the winking collusion of GM's clueless Rick Waggoner (right). Mr. Tamny's dry, persuasive opinion that GM is finished, and the confident nonchalance of my supper companions that GM is finished, convinces me that the end of all this will be GM in the grave. But not yet. First we will witness the walking death of GM through the first Obama term, administered by industrial undertakers and union ghouls and their cheerless PACs.

Motown Sound

By John Batchelor on November 13, 2008 1:24 PM | 7 Comments

Detroit is the New Battleground.

Nancy Pelosi's well-known and dreamy claim that she can rescue the formally Big Three with a bailout package in the 11oth lame duck session is quickly becoming a surrogate war for all the other disputes in the financial crisis. My correspondent Jim McTague, Barron's,

writes the sharp question: If your 401k is down 30%, why do you have to give more money to rescue the UAW's pensions? Is there a consequence of failure to sell your product? Does it mean something that GM is manufacturing tawdry, grotesque Tahoes and Caddies with gasoline prices like the vig? What about the fact that Detroit's union-dictated labor costs per hour are more than fifty percent higher than Toyota? Then again, the 110th lame duck is a peculiar and cramped field to fight this battle because the Republicans in the Senate still retain a filibuster threat. We can guess that the Bush administration does not want this fight because the President George W. Bush tried to horse trade with President-elect Barack Obama on Monday -- "You get Detroit, I get CAFTA" -- and it didn't work. Today, Mr. Obama is back with a bold statement asking for $50 billion for Detroit, no barter, and adding the wonderful twist that a board of governors, or commissars, will take over the executive resposibilities of the heretofore public companies. No mention of a Ministry of Autos. Meanwhile, Republican leader Mitch McConnell, after surviving a test in Kentucky, is not vulnerable to dreams by Mrs. Pelosi or bully pulpit wish lists from the president-elect. The filibuster is a real weapon, and it works smoothly. Kicking this down the road, a favorite Clinton epoch expression, is a no harm outcome for the GOP. What is wrong in the Motown at Thanksgiving will still be wrong in Motown on Lincoln's birthday, when Mrs. Pelosi will have nearly two dozen extra votes and Harry Reid will have at least 57 votes to squelch a filibuster and can easily count on Maine's two RINO senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and the always timid George Voinovich of Ohio and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. On the other hand, since Mitch McConnell and John Boehner (who will survive the leadership vote next week in the GOP House) know that the 111th Congress is out of their control, the Republicans can make the best deal right now. The tireless Rasputin Barney Frank, (right, in a hearing October 21), holding public hearings next Wednesday 19, is not going to make it easy for the Republicans to

accept this defeat when it is certain to come in the 111th: TARP bailout money for Democratic union bosses to pass back to Democratic candidates for the 112th fight. Conservative Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee recognizes that the Republicans may want to deal in November, and not in February, and he mentions "tough love" in speaking about the bailout of the UAW in order to give some Republicans some cover. Also, the Democrats are using Detroit bailout fears in ads running in Georgia against Saxby Chambliss, who faces a second round for his seat, and in Minnesota against Norm Coleman, who is scratching to survive shenanigans from the Al Franken ops in Minnesota. Will the Republicans blink? Likely. Will we pay for the UAW and their job banks and health benefits that we mortals can never get and the maintenance of those salary structures and lordly fiefdoms at GM, Ford, Chrysler and their tormented serfs like Volvo? Likely. The Motown sound for Christmas. We give, they get, Detroit still does not make the cars the world takes. Does this mean we all have to buy those steroid injected Navigators and Suburbans? Or do just the Democrats have to drive Fords? Does GM replace its logo with DEM and Ford with Frank?

6 PM Update: See update: Gaming the GOP, on the Mentioned in Dispatches section.

NATO For Sale

By John Batchelor on November 13, 2008 12:04 AM | 4 Comments

"Red Storm Rising," the Remake.

News arrives from bankrupt Iceland that the Cold War airfield that was the critical battle zone in Tom Clancy's sensational 1986 techno-thriller "Red Storm Rising" is now for sale and the

Russians are on the short list. At a Reykjavik luncheon last week Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimmson announced that he was offering the Keflavik airport and airbase (right) for cash to any taker, and that Russia was the deep pocket he had in mind for a buyer. Forward basing Russian Backfires and Mig 29s at Keflavik would cede control of the North Atlantic and therefore of the NATO alliance supply lines to Russian air power. In the event of war, game over Western Europe. There was no report of laughter at the remark. Iceland is now beyond desperation. A combo of Scandanavian and UK interests have blocked the IMF loan until and if Iceland negotiates more earnest over the fraud of the online Icesave bank that enticed and then shredded Europeans accounts. A report from an LSE brain says that a third of the

country's 300,000 citizens are planning to emigrate, vamoose, and this includes most all the young. Iceland's three big banks failed in the first weeks of the credit crisis, and since then the

young and restless financial children on the island have been making plans to go back to fishing cod like their grandparents or to go fishing for Euros in Europe like their peers. Iceland needs cash and selling Keflavik has the advantage of being rational. The US withdrew its air arm in 2006, Iceland has no Air Force, and the threat of an imminent world war in which Keflavik would anchor the defense of Western Europe and North America from Russia does seem remote. Nonetheless the Russian ambassador, who was present at the luncheon, acted surprised but not offended or speechless. No plans to purchase, he said, but then again --

When the Kremlin Reconsiders.

This last week, the leading man sock puppet Russian president Dmitri Medvedev (left) has been busy delivering bellicose remarks, inspecting NKVD recreators on Red Square, posing with first strike mobile missiles and jawboning the ever-shrinking ruble. The ruble is the regime-change threat. Russia was beggarly with oil at $28 in the winter of '03, and it will be beggarly in the winter of '09 with oil at $38 and sinking. Do I think the ex-Reds will make an offer on Keflavik? No. Because it is theirs for free if they want it. The defenses are down. The crisis of confidence worldwide has damaged everyone's ability both to project power and to defend territory. It makes no sense for Russia to be parading might and threatening Europe with missiles. It makes no sense for the United States, with Citibank under $10 a share and GM out of cash, to maintain half a million troops overseas to guard the oil supply lines that can't be guarded and to leave the US and European coasts uncovered. You have noticed the Russians have a surface and subsurface fleet with plenty of nuclear fuel and weapons? Will the Kremlin reconsider its position about Iceland as oil goes lower and as the Russian budget shortfall grows and the ability to maintain the ruble and order fall?

1933? 2008?

It didn't make any sense in the first panicky run of the Great Depression for Germany to be parading its might, consolidating its power and persecuting Jews and dissenters as soon as Adolf Hitler took the chancellorship January 30, 1933. Yet as I read through the London Times, amid all the brave words about how the markets are dull, or firm, or light, there was the drumbeat of German race theory. There was a sidebar of Japanese aggression in China, too, but not so much attention for Nippon aggression in 1933. The prominent sinister story line from Europe was Germany, the "concentration camp" at Oranienberg, and the desire of Jews with cash or a skill to emigrate, some to Palestine, most hoping to get into England or the United States. And the prominent sinister story line from North America in 1993 was tumbling farm prices, higher and higher unemployment, failing banks, and an earnest, uncertain, beseeching new president. Do I think we are seeing the same conditions today that pertained in 1933? No, though we do have bad banks and worse leadership and an earnest, uncertain new president. Still, these are much stranger, more tangled moments. I cannot read the threat warnings. But I am certain that the fact that the Iceland president taunted NATO by offering a strategic asset (retired) to the other wobbly, over-confident super-power for cash is not a positive development. Even in jest -- and Mr. Grimsson, with an island of pensioners, penitents, and the hopeless, was not light at heart -- even in jest, the 21st Century has too many frail, enraged, financially and politically unstable nuclear powers for the idea of Russia wanting a strategic advantage in a test of strength to be dismissed as impossible.

Pilgrim Lobby

By John Batchelor on November 12, 2008 1:38 AM | 9 Comments

Obama Pilgrim at Washington.

Author John Matteson, of "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father," reminded me Sunday 9 of the towering influence in American history of John

Bunyan's (right) seventeenth century blockbuster "Pilgrim's Progress." The book not only dominated the imagination of the youthful Bronson Alcott in 1815, but also persuaded the whole of the New England Transcendental culture, Emerson, Hawthorn, Thoreau and the phalanx of Abolitionists and reformers, that there was a higher calling to public life than money and power. This reading by Professor Matteson reminded me of the New Puritans arriving in Washington with the new presidential protagonists. Clearly President-Elect Barack Obama is a Puritan who has followed a journey so far, at 47, that compares aptly to the progress of John Bunyan's hero, Christian.

Barack Obama is a Sensational Christian.

And now I see, with the stern, censorious pronouncement on controlling lobbyists by the fastitdious Obama transition chief-of-staff John Podesta, (left), that the style of the Obama administration will be John Bunyan's plot. (Obama to Fill Team Using Ethics Code. ) You recall that the story is an allegorical fairy tale about the ways of the world as seen from the point of view of an innocent utopian traveller. The hero Christian flees from the City of Destruction, which is this world, to seek the Celestial City, which is Heaven. Along the way, Christian is teased, tempted, befriended, blessed by Jesus at the Wicket Gate, and then horrified by acts of cruelty that animate the drama. The first act is the cruelest. Christian meets a gentle young male companion Faithful, and they pass through the village of Vanity Fair (right, below). The citizens of Vanity Fair are so corrupted that Christian and Faithful cannot understand their language. They are incomprehensibly villainous. The Vanity Fair blackguards arrest, torture and lynch by fire the

gentle Faithful while Christian flees. This is how I read the fears of the Obama team with regard Washington's epidemic of lobbyists. During the campaign, Mr. Obama spoke often how he disdained lobbyists and would not let them into his White House. Now I see the fresh twist in the change we can believe in is that lobbyists will be tolerated in the administration but

they will not be permitted to work in a policy area where they have lobbied the previous year. In other words, the Obama administration's plan to avoid the moral risk of lobbying is to mandate that you lobbyists cannot actually know what you are talking about. You must speak the language of ignorance. If you know about healthcare, you must work on mass transportation. If you are good at energy, you must work on net neutrality, and so forth. Everyone an amateur in this Vanity Fair. That will stop corruption. Faithful the Constitution will still be tortured and lynched, but not by people who know what they are talking about.

More Vanity Fair

I expect a deal of this concern from the the president-elect and his team as they settle in to Vanity Fair. Lobbyists are the least of the villains. Next, Mr Emanuel and Mr. Podesta will have a fresh rule about how they are going to avoid being captured by the giant Despair (left) and taken to the Castle Doubting where there is the threat of suicide. Hint: there is a key named Promise that opens all the doors of the castle.

Gloom Watch

By John Batchelor on November 11, 2008 12:53 AM | 12 Comments

CNBC Features a Money Manager of Gloom.

Martin Hennecke, a manager of the formerly high net worthies at Tyche, grimaced into the camera on CNBC and suggested that the US, to hold off having its debt downgraded from AAA to AA, must recall all its troops and start selling assets. No one laughed. The gloom settled

over the screen. I connect this unusual morning performance with the random weird credit problems reported on my favorite gloom blog, Calculated Risk, and my favorite gloom broadsheet, New York Times: AMEX becomes bank holding company in order to secure Fed help; Circuit City is a bankrupt; ninety percent of the mortgages in a town in California are under water; housing prices nationwide will decline at least 32% from the top; and perhaps a fifth of all major retailers this Christmas will be gone by spring to bankruptcy or liquidation; and finally a comment from October 9 in a new Washington Wire on Wall Street Journal that AIG was the real problem on Black Swan weekend September 12-14 (right, Lehman Brothers as the clock struck the end, September 14) , it is still far worse than the Treasury supposes, and it is not fixed. In fact the whole Treasury-cooked bailout scheme, rushed through Congress like an invasion of Iraq, is now challenged openly as inadequate or worse, contrived. The news is so one-way despairing that I rushed to my choice new hideaway, the microfilm room at Columbia University's Butler Library, to scroll though 1933 in the London Times for what it was like the last time the word "depression" was not about the weather. What I found in late October and early November 1933 were two suicides that bothered the Times seventy-five years ago and bother me now, because they made no sense, except that in times of global financial collapse, ordinary, honest, responsible, lonely people seek to destroy themselves without a farewell.

Under the Locomotive Piccadilly Station

The first mystery was Phillip Henry Chetwynd, 27, graduate of New College, Oxford, a barrister in the City, the only child of a widow and a late Royal Navy captain, who one afternoon in early November 1933 stood alone on the Piccadilly station platform watching a train chug to a stop. The engineer told the court that he saw this tall young man throw his umbrella aside and leap

directly under the slowing locomotive. No note was found. No romance mentioned. No debts, with two trust fund paying him six hundred pounds a year. The court ruled death by temporary insanity. One fellow commented, "He was trying to get work, but in the city, that's pulling a dead horse." The second mystery was a widow, 54, who was found dead in her bed in a bedsitter. No note. Her chin was wrapped in the style of the time to fight off a double chin. Death by overdose of a sleeping sedative. Her banker attested she was stable with comfortable money in a local account and income from Canada. There was a romance, a man who had gone on to North America, but no foul play. The corner ruled it death by accident, but everyone shrugged and asked again, "Are you sure there was no problem with money?" In both cases, the Times featured headlines that suggested the deaths were a result of the troubled economy; however no evidence was found to support the thesis. I puzzle now, when you see a headline of a substantial professional suddenly dead by what appears suicide, do you suppose strongly that it was caused by the market crisis? The tale of the late Barry Fox in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, a successful man in his fifties who lost his job at Bear Sterns and was not going to be hired by J.P. Morgan Chase, was written exactly to the theme of crisis and despair; yet there was no note mentioned, and there was no mention of overwhelming debts. At 51, Fox was more equipped than most to seek other employment. Yet Fox is pictured in the article as disturbed by the gloom: he tried an overdose, and then he leaped from the window -- like Chetwynd diving under the Piccadilly locomotive. Did the gloom get Fox? The gloom is spreading and thickening. I am on a gloom watch for a culture of plenty as in 1933, as in 2008. My eye is especially on one former investment bank at 30 Hudson Street, New York, New York (right). Goldman Keeps Falling as Analysts Cut Views.

Karzai Brothers Are Diem Brothers

By John Batchelor on November 10, 2008 1:48 PM | 5 Comments

Afghanistan is Vietnam.

Spoke Sunday 9 with two strong voices inside Afghanistan, both in Kabul: Daoud Sultanzoy, MP from Ghanzi Province, and Ann Marlowe, Forbes.com, re the present deteriorating

circumstances in Afghanistan and the despair of the Afghan people after seven years of American firepower and occupation. Daoud Sultanzoy is Pashtun, the largest ethnic group in the country, and he speaks for no small faction. His frustration with President Hamid Karzai (right, with then-candidate Barack Obama July 24, 2008) and his brothers and their allies and cronies is now constant and blunt. I asked him what the Afghan parliament -- he was speaking from the Parliament building at 10 am on a cool Afghan fall morning, the leaves just turning color -- expect now from the Americans with the new administration taking control in two months. Daoud Sultanzoy said the expectation is for no change unless the US and NATO stop dealing with the Karzais. Afghanistan is run by narco lords, and after seven years the opium farmers and their distribution chain are stronger and richer than at any time under the Taliban. Daoud Sultanzoy also said that the Karzai Brothers Incorporated are making money not only with the opium trade but also by reselling direct US and NATO aid, such as food and weapons. Ann Marlowe from Kabul, where she is embedded with the Afghan police, said that Afghan morale

is much more cynicial and frustrated than her last visit six months ago. The people no longer believe that the Americans will let them solve their own problems. The Karzai brothers have sophisticated control of the money and food chain in Kabul, and the US State Department, and DoD, go along passively. Ann Marlowe has long argued that there is no military solution to Afghanistan. In face of the promise by the Obama administration to commit additional troops and money to Afghansitan in the new year, the prospects increase sharply that what we now witness, after seven years of war-fighting against a guerilla force backed by Pakistan, is a 21st century visit to South Vietnam, 1961-1963, with a twist. (Right, South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, May 1961)

The Diem Brothers were Murdered.

Spoke to Rufus Phillips Sunday 9, author, "Why Vietnam Matters," re the Kenendy administration launched coup that removed the greedy, inept, unhinged Diem brothers from power and then murdered them on November 1, 1963. Rufus, now 78, arrived in Vietnam in the summer of 1954, as a CIA aide to the famous Colonel Ed Lansdale of counter-insurgency warfare fighting. Rufus saw the building up of the Diem regime under the Eisenhower administration (left, Ike, John Foster Dulles, President Ngo Dinh Diem, on a visit to Washington, 1957) as well as the celebration of the Diems as the stablizing force against Ho Chi Minh and the communist goons from China and Russia. Rufus retured to Vietnam working for AID in the Kennedy administration, and he toured the Delta region in the late summer of 1963. At the White House, on September 10, 1963, Rufus was invited to a critical Cabinet meeting to debate the fate of South Vietnam, the war with the North and the Viet Cong, and the Diem brothers then ruling by fiat and theft. The hot political issue that day was the worldwide bad media the Kennedy administration was suffering because of the Buddhist self-immolation protests against the stupid, vaguely Roman Catholic Diems in Saigon. However since August JFK had been presented with the option of removing one or both Diem brothers and replacing them with gung-ho, obedient Vietnamese generals. Present and huffing in self-serving authoring around the table was a chorus of American political celebrites. JFK, Robert McNamara, Dean Rush, John McCone, McGeorge Bundy, Edward R. Murrow,

Maxwell Taylor. Not present was South Vietnam ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, from Saigon,(the man JFK had defeated for the Senate in 1952) who had cabled repeatedly he wanted the Diems gone. Rufus watched two briefings from the DoD and State to JFK which painted two different Vietnams. JFK even jested, "Are you gentlemen sure this is the same country?" Enraged, caged laughter around the room. The DoD and CIA insisted the war could be won and suggested, perhaps, someday, US troops. State and the NSC said the war was lost unless we get rid of the Diems. JFK called on Rufus, who was just back from touring the AID assisted hamlets in the Delta where the VC were very active. Rufus, at 33, junior to everyone and no longer at the CIA or in uniform, now an earnest, French and Vietnamese speaking AID super op, gave the facts. JFK took notes. Sixty hamlets overrun. The war in the Delta in confusion. And then Rufus Phillips recommended sending back Ed Lansdale as a special adviser to counter-insurgency. John McCone, DCI, objected to Landsale, because of Landsdales's (and everyone's)

failures in MONGOOSE against Fidel Castro; McCone was was not going to let Lansdale go back tonight. The meeting ended with a storm cloud. Seven weeks later, the CIA concocted, DoD and McNamara approved coup against the Diem brothers on November 1 was a disaster. The Ambassador Lodge pleasing plan (left, Lodge with Diem October 1963) called for the Diems to be abducted and transported to exile in France. Instead General Doung Vanh "Big" Minh ordered the Diems shot in the back of the personnel carrier sent to take them to the airport. Rufus Phillips was in Saigon that day, playing an auxiliary role in what was to be a smooth transition to a new government; and he remembers today, 45 years later, that he was sickened by the news of the murders and he knew right then that Vietnam was in trouble so deep that it was plunging to a catastrophe. November 1, 1963, the day America lost.

The Afghanistan Twist

Twelve years of war, mass murder, at least one million deaths, the burning down of a culture (right, Vietnam 1967) and the destruction of several South Vietnam and American regimes followed. All this is prelude to asking the question, which Rufus Phillips asks in the concluding chapter of his book, is this the future of Afghanistan and America? How long until a Washington imposed solution to remove the clearly deracinated and ludicrously greedy Karzai brothers? How long until an Afghan warlord from the army or police force claims to be the new PM? How long until our enemies focus on using the Taliban as a surrogate to drawing the US into Afghanistan and the region in a much deeper fashion -- not just Kabul, but Islamabad, Kashmir, Baluchistan, the Punjab and South Asia? How long until the Obama administration is the Kennedy administration with a sinister twist. The twist is that we know the end of the story.

New Presidents Consider Andrew Jackson

By John Batchelor on November 9, 2008 12:42 AM | 13 Comments

The Statue You See From the White House North Portico.

Speaking Sunday 9 with Jon Meacham of Newsweek, author of the new "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House," re the frantic, bloody-minded and deeply partisan

presidency of the man who created the ornery commander-in-chief. Andrew Jackson, the statue George W. Bush and Barack Obama will see from the North Portico of the White House when they stroll out together to ride to the Inauguration, has been a fascination for historians since his tenure, 1829-1837. Andrew Jackson's example of himself as a chief executive who battled all powers ceaselessly, no truce, his fight with South Carolina over nullification and secession, his fight with Nicholas Biddle and the bankers, his fight with the Indians he disinherited, his fight with the Congress over his veto power of the bank charter, his fight till the end of his time with the Senate over censure, all these contests describe two terms of uninterrupted bitterness, vulgarity, trickery, graft, smears, cruelty, war and massacre, slavery and piracy, and other extreme measures, some practiced by Jackson, some by the Congress, all by zealous elements in the country. No one was much sure, month to month, if keeping the Union together was a money-making idea or even a worthwhile endeavor, except that Andrew Jackson was certain that it was his country (26 states, then adding Arkansas and Michigan) and that it was going to stay his country: "Our Federal Union must be preserved," reads the base of Jackson's statue. Andrew Jackson was a man more stubborn than reasonable, more angry than cunning, though he was cunning, and America had the good luck to have as president a willful aggressor who decided unasked that running the raw Union his way was his God-given mission. He was educated just enough to make everyone of his fights into a torrent of biblical language, such as "Should the uncircumcised philistines send forth their Goliath to destroy the liberty of the people and compel them to worship Mammon...?" He was lucky enough to have ruthless, verbose opponents, such as John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Nicholas Biddle, so that each of his victories was magnified by the fury and wealth of his defeated foes. He was miraculous enough to survive swords, bullets, pandemics, mountains of tobacco and whiskey and coffee, and a lonely eight years in the target range without his worshiped wife Rachel, who died the Christmas after his election. The facts of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), from his father's death before he was born, his two brothers killed by the British troops, his mother vanished into a grave, through the Indian fighting and cruelty, the unbelievable Battle of New Orleans, the slave-holding baronetcy at the Hermitage, the slanders of his wife, and the ceaseless duels, insults, threats, lies, deaths, and two assassination attempts in office, make the story over much to be anything but seventy-eight years of American history.

The Questions Is What Kind of President?

Andrew Jackson's demonstration of reckless, tireless commitment to his own passionate idea of the people, the country, the United States, has attracted the imagination of presidents as tested as Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman. The question today is what will the new president Barack Obama take from Jackson's model of potency in office, if anything at all? TR divided presidents into two groups: "The course I followed, of regarding the executive as subject only to the people...was substantially the course followed by both Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Other honorable and well-meaning presidents, such as James Buchanan, took the opposite, and, as it seems to me, narrowly legalistic view that the President is the servant of Congress rather than of the people, and can do nothing, no matter how necessary it is to act, unless the Constitution explicitly commands the action." This sounds like Taft, (not Wilson), Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, (not FDR), (not Truman), Eisenhower, Kennedy, (not Johnson), (not Nixon), Ford, Carter, (not Reagan), GHW Bush, Clinton, (not GW Bush). What will it be for President-Elect Obama? The will of the experienced, imperial, monied Democratic Congress, or the will of the people? And what is the will of the people? There is no right answer. There is Jackson's statue in Lafayette Park, seen every day from the North Portico, Old Hickory on the attack.

Sergeant Schmidt Sees Nothing; Nor Does the President-Elect

By John Batchelor on November 8, 2008 1:10 AM | 29 Comments

What Was On the McCain Plane.

John McCain op Steve "Sergeant" Schmidt (right) provides fevered responses to rambling questions by interpid memorist Ana Marie Cox, who has no discernible partisanship, in a

recent TDB. The result is a dumbfounding demonstration that what was on the McCain campaign plane was chatter among arrogant, unread, evasive, envious and obsequious characters who remain ignorant of their own failures. Skipping his heavy-lifting about how presidential campaigns are tough, his heaving sighs about the well-known war hero, his blame-shifting to Blackberry leakers from his own camp, Mr. Schmidt exposes himself as either a fool or a fraud when he claims that he knew the race was done on Monday September 29 when the House GOP voted down the Paulson folly Tarp 1.

"I was flying on a plane with Gov. Palin to Sedona for debate prep, watching the split screen on the TVs, because she had a Jet Blue charter, and it showed the stock market down seven, eight hundred points; it showed the Congress voting down the bailout package on the other side, and then, House Republicans went out and, told the world that the reason that they voted against this legislation, allowed the stock market to crash, allowed the economy to be so injured, was because Nancy Pelosi had given a mean and partisan speech on the floor. And this was their response. And I just viewed it as beyond devastating, and thought that at that moment running with an "R" next to your name, in this year, was probably lethal."

You read correctly. Mr. Schmidt blames the men and women in the House of Representatives, who defended the country from the grotesque theft of pubic funds by pilfering bankers, as the villains who crashed the market, damaged the economy and lost the presidential election. He blames the brave few who fought for us plundered many. This is either a mindless distortion of the facts by an exhausted whiner or is the sort of rewrite of history practiced by the moral coward Soviets. The facts are that the Hank Paulson (left) plan was a half-cooked stew of guesses and self-dealing that has failed from the first and continues to be nothing much but transfer taxpayer money to the greedy and guilty. On Monday September 29, the House rose up and refused to go along with the panicky, and the GOP members were joined by Democrat members to defeat both of the party's leaderships and the White House, a stunning demonstration of backbone and principle. The markets were selling off not because they House wouldn't rollover but because the banks had closed their doors to credit. No one trusted anyone because they all knew they were sneak thieves who had poisoned the asset base of the planet with cancerous loans. It was the high noon of bank gangsterism. The wild selling around the world was because everyone could see that Mr. Paulson was ignorant, as was the White House, both the President and Vice-President, and every central banker with a mobile phone. They still don't know what to do. Even Jim Cramer doesn't know what to do. But all this fact, then and now, is not present for Steve Schmidt. He sees nothing. He hears nothing. He learns nothing. And he was on McCain's plane. We can imagine what the other geniuses around the candidate, Rick Davis, Mark Salter, Lindsay Graham, Joe Lieberman, were saying about the bailout fight and the sturdy 111 men and women of the GOP who refused on September 29 and again on October 3 to go along with the hysterical stupidity. "Those rascally nobody Republicans!" "Those selfish right-wing midgets!"

The Scary Part Is What Is Still On the Obama Plane.

The Friday 7 press conference by President-Elect Obama provided little confidence that the Democratic team can figure out the bank collapse any more than the Republican team. Mr. Obama remains in campaign speak, and he likes to talk about the "middle-class," whatever that is, and "stimulus," whatever that is, and the mission called "helping homeowners," just as if there is still three-day polling in Indiana to worry about. Mr. Obama, the vote is in. Time for clarity. The problem is not the anxious middle-class nor the worthy jobless nor the gloom of the tradesman and online hawkers. The problem is that there is a world wide financial panic caused by a collapse of credit. No bank trusts to loan because the poisoned sausage of bad loans is still stuffed in every vault. The Treasury is throwing taxpayer cash at banks who horde it (polite term, husband) to avoid their own martyrdom. And you want to write $600 checks to "hardworking families?" The recommendation is, "Keep it real, guy." Mr. Obama stood at the microphone in front of the arms-crossed Joe Biden, and the hands-clasped Rahm Emanuel, and behind them were eighteen grey heads and eight American flags. Not a gleam of confidence in a set of eyes. From the fly-fishing Paul Volcker to the still charmingly Hobbit like Robert Reich, not a shrug, not a wink, not a quick pop up on the balls of the feet, nothing in the way of confidence. Twenty we -haven't-a-clue citizens led by one earnest, sonorous, light-resume fellow in the TV lights who three days ago could blame the Republicans and the White House and Wall Street for the sins of the past. Now? "I know that we will succeed if we put aside partisanship and work together as one nation. And that is what I intend to do." Hey! This isn't MSNBC log rolling. This is fear itself. Do you see? I figured not.

The Senate is Worse

By John Batchelor on November 7, 2008 12:59 AM | 13 Comments

Money Pit.

Republican pros are moving to reorganize the House and the Senate before the money stops altogether from the disgusted, disdainful party members. The GOP is a money pit for the stale, elderly, flaccid preppie crowd, and it is no longer a rational return on investment for

the swollen middle-aged swingers who dot the South and the West, staring at their 401ks as if they were deportation papers. The party's deathless graybeards, such as pickle-faced Richard Viguerie and bloodless Grover Norquist, horde their swags and demand change before they will hold smokers for candidates again. This may strike you as a cynical joke of a threat. However the most impeccably conservative members are dashing to the cameras to provide crusading promises, as did Jim DeMint (right) of South Carolina, one of the right-wing bulls in the white-haired Senate:

"We have got to clean up, reform and rebuild the Republican Party before we can ask Americans to trust us again. This must begin with either a change of command at the highest levels or our current leaders must embrace a bold new direction," Sen. Jim DeMint said in a statement moments after Obama won Tuesday evening. "Our party must start today to admit our mistakes, fight for our convictions and encourage new conservatives to run for office."

Two days later, a nonchalant "change of command" emerges, if not "a bold new direction." None of these changes are inspiring, and it may be why you do not let the passengers choose a new crew after the collision with the iceberg. John Boehner (left) is running for leader again in the House, and it is late in the day for a challenger to emerge, such as the cheerful Jeb Hensarling. Mike Pence, who could challenge and could win the leader's chair, has decided to back Mr. Boehner and to accept the chair of the Conference. Why? A good guess is because Richard Lugar of Indiana will be 78 years old in 2010 when his seat comes up for re-election, and Mr. Pence looks to want the job. The failed, disgraced Tom Delay leftover Roy Blunt has quit as Whip, and the ambitious, unaccomplished, untrusted, bailout-approving Eric Cantor has decided to claim the job. My colleague Thaddeus McCotter will stand again for Republic Policy Committee chair, and he is being challenged by the unloved man he chose as vice-chair, the north Dallas burger, Michael Burgess. The results look to be in place for an uneventful transition to a GOP House of drift, defeatism and marginality. The hourglass on Mr. Boehner runs out in 2010.

The Senate is Worse.

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky will return to his job unopposed and unloved. I am told compared to the ludicrous outplayed Bill Frist of Tennesse, Mr. McConnell acts like a gazelle. Jim DeMint, the most conservative rated senator by far, will not challenge Mr. McConnell, a great disappointment to the graybeards. The chief struggle in the Senate will be the stalking and destruction of the handful or moderates, called RINO (Republicans in Name Only). The general opinion is that if this is to be a minority, it will be a cadre with principle. Marked for rejection are the Maine duo, Olympia Snowe and Susan

Collins, the frail Arlen Specter, who the party means to abandon in 201o, and the bizarre and incoherent George Voinovich of Ohio. The number one RINO target is John McCain, who will be hounded from office, and perhaps even before his term expires in 201o. The plan is to open the seat with Mr. McCain's resignation, which will oblige the popular Democrat Janet Napolitano to appoint an interim (not herself), which will mean a weak opponent for Jeff Flake to run against and defeat. Sounds devious and Firenzean? Yes, and also illustrative of a fact that the GOP in the Senate is pleased to play for pay and companionship, none of that war of ideas for these gentlemen. Will the spectacularly driven new chief-of-staff tyro Rahm Emanuel (right, on the streets of Chicago) have to make phone calls past five in a Washington afternoon in order to make the GOP Senate rollover?

First the Bankers

By John Batchelor on November 6, 2008 12:31 AM | 41 Comments

Reviewing A Model for the GOP Purge Coming Like Winter.

When Josef Stalin (below right) heard that his chief Bolshevik Party rival Sergey Kirov (below center in pastoral propaganda scene) had been assassinated in the middle of the night at the Smolny Institute Party headquarters in Peter

(Leningrad), the dictator took the night train to the scene and set up a drumhead court. This was 1934, weeks after the Nazi Party's night of the long knives in Germany had jettisoned the untidy Brown Shirts. Stalin, quick to learn from the ambitious Hitler, aimed to outperform the Teutons when dealing with Kirov and the potent Leningrad Party. The numbskull Kirov shooter, an NKVD hireling and stooge Nikolaev, was dragged in and quickly condemned to death by firing squad that night. "But Comrade Stalin, they made me do it!" Nikolaev complained of his NKVD bosses, who had of course directed Nikolaev's gun hand under orders from Moscow and Stalin. By 1937, everyone who had anything to do with Kirov's assasination -- families, allies, NKVD sadists, jailers, witnesses, drivers, friends of the families, children, too -- had been destroyed or sent to the Gulag. Stalin purged, and then he purged the purgers. "When making an omelette, you must break eggs," is the proverb.

First The Bankers.

The first targets for the Republican purge must be the modern Kirovs, the bankers, especially Hank Paulson, his toadies at Treasury, Ben Bernanke, his toadies like Timothy Geithner at the Fed and the SEC's genius Christopher Cox, (see below) and the big nine bank bosses who took money from the bailout on October 13, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley (left Morgan's John Mack), Wells Fargo, Citigroup (right, Citi's Vikram Pandit), Bank of America, J.P.Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street. What wrecked havoc on the GOP in 2008 were a flimsy candidate, an absent president and petulant vice-president, an aimless war and of course the collapse of the credit markets worldwide and Lehman Brothers in specific on Black Swan weekend, September 12-14. However even with all that, John McCain was competitive in the polls right up until the Lehman Brothers failure and the panicky, half-cocked and self-dealing Paulson plan was pushed onto the Congress September 28 to October 3. At that point, the Republican party collapsed into hysteria, doubt, whining, denial, incoherence, knuckleheadedness and selfishness. John McCain showed himself not a winner, not a leader, not a visionary, when he broke from the trail on October 1 and claimed he wouldn't debate the innocuous Mr. Obama until it looked like he was leading the Republican Party and Congress in rescuing the collapsing markets. Complete foolishness and a final judgement on John McCain as a fiscal steward. However the Republican president and vice-president as well as the Republican Senate and the Republican leadership in the House all went along with the fairy tale that the Paulson bailout was a solution. Not only were they all wrong, the plan didn't work. Enough reviewed. Guilty. In the first phase of the purge coming, first we get rid of all of the bankers in the party who had anything to do with the bailout, and then we get rid of everyone who took money from the bailout. What is a Republican Party without bankers, financiers, hedgies, bond traders, fund managers, investment polymaths, Goldman alum, and Treasury groupies and the attendant billionaires, high-net-worthies and masters of disasters? The answer is, Liberated. The Party is in mortal danger of meaninglessness, so let's try freedom from the meaningless bankers when were so smart they beggared the planet. "But Comrade Stalin, they made us do it!" they will scream as they are led to the firing squads. Shoot them now. We will turn to the Republican Party pols, collaborators and deserters by name next: who is to be shot, who goes to the Gulag, who just disappears.

Failed Stewards, Good Riddance

By John Batchelor on November 5, 2008 1:47 AM | 29 Comments

Thaddeus McCotter Holds 11th Michigan by 15%.

The reason my colleague Thaddeus McCotter was successful on a night that saw the Republican Party reduced to a remnant in the West, a smattering in the Midwest, a wipe out

in the East, with only the South representing a substantial block, is because Thaddeus McCotter joined 110 other members of the GOP House to vote "no" twice on the Paulson folly bailout September 29 and October 3. Yes, George Bush and Dick Cheney have been strangely MIA since last Christmas, and yes, the Democrats in Congress have gotten a pass on their stumbling behavior for two years. However it was the Hank Paulson-invented, Bush and Cheney blessed, GOP Senate-stamped, John McCain approved, John Boehner and Roy Blunt abetted bailout fiasco that wrecked the GOP in 2008. The emails and phone calls were up to one hundred to one against the bailout. The leadership in Congress and the White House and Cabinet failed to lead. Since the TARP II was passed on October 3, the Treasury has recast the $700 billion behemoth bill at least three times, turning it into a grotesque pot of paper wealth for whoever is favored or bold or quick to get to the head of the line. No one still can say what the bailout does or what it will achieve. It certainly didn't stop the crash of credit, since the markets fell more than 20% after the bill was passed and talk of recession turned ghoulish. Watching the failure of the markets and the banks the month of October was a bitter, maddening experience to the voters. The GOP died slowly all month. By the time of the final vote on November 4, more than 25% of the country had voted by mail in the smoke of the burning markets. The verdict was fixed for the GOP as well as John McCain. The overwhelming victory for Barack Obama on Election Day (above, in Grant Park, Chicago) was an even more lopsided rejection by the Republican voters of the aimless politician in John McCain and the ignorant stewards in the White House.

Birth again.

Thaddeus McCotter sends me his new manifesto for rebuilding what remains of the GOP in the House, "Now, Seize Freedom." It is passionate, cogent, hot-tempered and historically sound.

Thaddeus composed five fundamental principles for the Republican Party for today, and it is wonderful to read them, especially the first. "1. Our liberty is from God not from the government." Also easy to agree with, "2. Our sovereignty rests in our souls not the soil." And "3. Our security is through strength not surrender." And "4. Our prosperity is from the private sector not the public sector." And finally "5. Our truths are self-evident not relative." Reading them again, I am happy to say good riddance to the mighty and luminous GOP of savvy, expedient politicians (above, John and Cindy McCain voting in Arizona) that failed on November 4, 2008, and to say welcome to a battered and shabby GOP that begins without much in the way of resources or a plan or any hope of authority in Washington. Thaddeus calls this moment the "Republican Rock Bottom." We did fall down here without principles. Get back to principles, there will be rebirth.

Barack Obama Reality TV Show

By John Batchelor on November 4, 2008 4:01 PM | 23 Comments

Reply to James Fallows of the Atlantic Re His Endorsing Obama for President.

Mr. Fallows writes, "Three negative reasons, one positive, to believe that Barack Obama's victory will advance America's interests, and that John McCain's would be severely damaging:"

Mr. Fallows writes, "Negative 1: Accountability. There have been minor positive aspects to the eight-year Bush-Cheney era now coming to an end. But when the diplomatic, fiscal, Constitutional, economic, and other civic consequences are viewed as a whole, this era has, in my view, been a disaster for the United States.

And evidently this assessment of our recent history is not just my view. That is what the record-low approval ratings for President Bush, and the record-high "wrong track" poll readings indicate. For America to return the incumbent party to power after this record would make a mockery of the idea of ballot-box accountability and two-party competition. If an incumbent party retains power after this record, what is the meaning of party competition at all?

I have spent a lot of time as an American overseas, starting in the bitter Nixon years of the early 1970s. Never has the "brand identity" of being an American suffered as much as it has under George W. Bush. Any American business person operating overseas will confirm this fact.

John McCain (right, last stop in Colorado on Election Day) pretends that he is not from the incumbent party. But in economic policy and international diplomatic/military vision there is no significant difference, none at all, between his policies and what the Bush Administration has offered. The "maverick" distinctions boil down to McCain's acknowledgment of climate change, his wildly disproportionate emphasis on the "earmark" menace, and -- to his credit -- his early opposition to the Bush-Cheney torture policies. Those matter but are not enough."

_____

Reply to Negative 1. Mr. Fallows endorses Mr. Obama because he is not named Bush or Cheney and because he comes from the party that is not called Republican. This is not a reason to believe in Mr. Obama. This is not a reason to vote for anyone. It is in fact just an explanation for why you are voting against a lame duck president who was elected feebly by a Supreme Court non-decision in 2000. I note that Mr. Fallows does not mention either Barack Obama or Joe Biden in his primary reason to endorse the Democratic ticket.

_____
Mr. Fallows writes, "Negative 2: Leadership style. John McCain is not willfully ignorant and incurious, which is a welcome contrast to George W. Bush. But he has shown during the campaign that he shares Bush's weakness for impulsive, gut-instinct decisions. For Bush: the Iraq war; for McCain, the choice of Sarah Palin and the short-lived "emergency suspension" of his campaign.

Some presidential decisions do require quick, "3 am" instinctual responses. Most do not -- and instead require a willingness to think broadly and dispassionately about the consequences of each alternative, since big decisions have effects that ripple for years. (See: "Iraq war," above.) Like Barack Obama, McCain does not have a record of executive decision-making. Unlike Obama, McCain has provided powerful reasons to doubt his judgment under the kind of pressure that matters most: the pressure to make decisions that are not quick but wise.

Reply to Negative 2. Again, Mr. Fallows is unhappy with the fact that John McCain is a product of forty years of the sort of reckless, impetuous, stubborn and intuitive conduct that is appropriate to an Annapolis grad and carrier-based aviator who survived a Sam missile, five years of sadism and thirty years in Washington's moral swamp. Being a war hero means never having to say you are sorry for being alive. Mr. Fallows avoids commenting directly on Mr. Obama's record of decision-making because obviously there is no record unless you rudely mention his choice of political associates and money-raisers.

___

Mr. Fallows writes, "Negative 3: Sarah Palin."

Reply to Negative 3. Joe Biden. More completely, Barack Obama has no concept of who Joe Biden is, what he considers important, how he works, and how he behaves. Choosing Joe Biden has the singular strength of being entertaining. Is Sarah Palin ready to be POTUS? Not when she was chosen. Is Joe Biden ready to be POTUS? Yes. And that is the problem for Mr. Obama.
___

Mr. Fallows writes, "Positive: The tone, the policies, the cast of mind, the talent, and, yes, the hope consistently represented by Obama during these past two years on the trail. If he is elected, disappointment will certainly follow. The expectations now projected upon him far exceed what any mortal can achieve. But to give the country a new chance, a leader must inspire, and he can."

Reply to Positive 1. This is strangely fearful and does not require a detailed analysis. The sit com show of Mr. Obama (right, or "Obama, The Musical" now in Nairobi, Nigeria) that his campaign has edited and re-edited and blanked out these last 21 months, since the announcement in February 2007, is two dimensional and not at all compelling after November 4. Mr. Fallows knows this. We all know this. Now begins the three-dimensional reality TV show and it is not at all happy or explicable with bromides or sound-bites. There is a beginning and a middle and an end to the reality TV that is about to open in the Chicago-based transition and the Washington-based first 100 days of the new administration, and each of the phases will include the name Tony Rezko and the mansion at 5046 South Greenfield Avenue. Bill Ayers will delight us; Jeremiah Wright will thrill us; Louis Farrakhan will confound us; but Tony Rezko we will understand. Cook County we understand. Patrick Fitzgerald and Richie Daley and Rod Blagojevich we understand. Elliot Ness and Al Capone we understand. The "Chicago Way" we even like. "They pull a knife, you pull a gun," Sean Connery told Kevin Costner (below, 'The Untouchables," 1987) "He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago Way."

Enter the FBI

By John Batchelor on November 4, 2008 12:33 AM | 8 Comments

What is Rezko Talking About, Part 2?

A surprising new report in the Washington Times on Election Day reveals that at least since late 2007 FBI agents have been questioning principals in the Barack Obama and Tony

Rezko purchase of the mansion and lot on South Greenfield Avenue in Hyde Park in early 2005. This is both logical and stunning, because it means that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of Tony Rezko has targeted exactly the questionable behavior of Mr. Obama when he first became a U.S. senator and was obliged to file a financial disclosure form. What the convicted Mr. Rezko is talking about to the U.S. Attorney, awaiting his sentencing for government corruption, most certainly includes how he managed to purchase the lot at 5050 South Greenfield Avenue for the unusual high price of $625 thousand on the same day that Mr Obama purchased the mansion at 5046 South Greenfield Avenue for the unusually reduced price of $1.65 million. We have the fact of the FBI inquiry from a civil suit, a whistleblower suit, filed in Chicago by a former clerk at Mutual Bank of Chicago. Kenneth J. Conner is asking $4.2 million because, he claims, he was fired when he refused to go along with a scheme that inflated the value of the lot that Mr. Rezko, in the name of his wife, Rita Rezko, purchased from the Fredric Wondisfords in early 2005. An inflated price, so the thinking goes, that allowed the sellers to reduce the price of the mansion by $300 thousand to Mr. Obama. Mr. Conner says that when the FBI agents, working at the request of the U.S. Attorney, visited him in late 2007, they focused on the lot and were not ambiguous about what the lot meant in terms of risk to Senator Obama.

"Agents and I talked about payoff, bribe, kickback for a long time, though it took them only a short number of minutes of talking with me while looking at the appraisal to acknowledge what they already seemed to know: The Rezko lot was grossly overvalued."

Graft is Impolite

There are not two ways to interpret these remarks and this incident. The U.S. Attorney is investigating collusion between a money handler Mr. Rezko and a serving senator Mr. Obama, and the impolite word is graft. The fact that the FBI agents questioned Mr. Conner nearly a year ago -- well before Mr. Rezko's first corruption trial began in March '08 -- suggests that all the principals in the lot deal may have been questioned by now. Tony and Rita Rezko, the Mutual Bank officers, the sellers of the lot, the Wondisfords, the realtor of the sale, Donna Schwann, and the purchasers of the house at a discount, the Obamas. Most crucially, if Mr. Obama has not been questioned by now it would be extraordinary, even unbelievable, given the threat of Mr. Conner's inferences; and if Mr. Obama has been questioned, it will be a major blow to his new administration when and if this fact is revealed. The voters have not been well informed of this felony risk. Bearing false witness on a Senate disclosure form is the same crime for which Ted Stevens of Alaska was

just convicted. Mr. Obama and his lawyers know where the story is. Mr. Rezko and his lawyers know. Now we can guess some it thanks to the conscientious snarkiness of a man who wants money for losing his job to crooks. There is nothing about this story that is neat. It certainly has the feel of presidential lore already, sweetheart deals, secret covenants, grinding evidence, counter-intuitive arrangements, money-laundering, and it has just turned the magic hour in Dixville Notch, Vermont (right, won by a Democrat for the first time in 40 years, 15 -6) on the day Mr. Obama will likely become the 44th president-elect.

Change You Can Nap On

By John Batchelor on November 3, 2008 12:45 PM | 15 Comments

Leaks and the Interpretation of Obama Dreams I.

The AP reports a fresh leak of names for an Obama Cabinet and White House, and a first glance at the titles and regions suggest that there is change coming along, sort-of. What you see now in the surging Democratic Party is what you will see in the likely event that Mr. Obama is inaugurated in January '09 and an obliging, dominantly Democratic Senate (59 seats?) agrees with his picks in as quick as three news cycles. In sum, a partisan kitchen of

the campaign faithful and traditional Deep Blue cooks. The four most critical Cabinet jobs in a recession with an overtaxed military are Treasury, State, Defense and Attorney General. We already have Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island floated for Defense, an Army officer veteran who is not anyone's idea of a demobilizer. Jack Reed is no change other than that Rhode Island and the Democrats of New England will enjoy Defense attention along with the usual suspects in Maryland and California. Treasury, in possession of the First Five Year Plan called TARP II, already has attached to it the whispers of trusted war-horses, the man for all decades Paul Volcker, the Clintonistas Bob Rubin and Larry Summers and the new kid (and Dartmouth man) Timothy Geithner of the New York Fed, who made noise during the Bear-Sterns debacle last Spring. No change here, not even sort-of. At State there is the familiar mention of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (right), a veteran Clintonista who jumped ship in the primaries and carries a reputation as a man who likes to chat with rogue state dictators in a charming but uncommitted way. Again, little change here, for Mr. Richardson, veteran of the UN Post, is conversant with all the blocking plays for more than a decade and would be senior to every European leader in memory and travel. In fact there would be total continuity with the Clinton years. President Obama could all but skip the parade of pow-wows and use Bill Richardson as a tireless, chortling, voluble, bilingual surrogate, presuming Joe Biden accepts the demotion and John Kerry has decided to sit out the first term in his wine cellar.

Attorney General Pay-Back.

The freshest detail from the AP story is Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano (below right) mentioned for Attorney General. A young red state female governor sort-off looks like Janet Reno, and a veteran governor who has now won re-election sort of looks like a

strategy to grow the Democratic map. What makes all this work is the detail that Mrs. Napolitano was one of the attorneys who helped the unusual testimony of the law professor Anita Hill before the U. S. Senate's Judiciary Committee in 1987 during the Clarence Thomas nomination battle. Nice pay-back, Mr. Obama, nice continuity with the old Democratic Senate and the new Democratic Senate waiting for several Supreme Court openings. The White House managing editor post pick, with Chief of Staff either to the militant Chicago pol Rahm Emmanual (I like this because it keeps tabs on the Daley brother desires) or the savoir-faire avenger Tom Daschle of South Dakota, is no change whatsoever, couldn't be more orthodox, partisan, predictable, lobby-as-usual and obedient. Perhaps White House counsel may give us hints as to how Mr. Obama is going to handle the unhappy, unfinished tales from his Chicago and Springfield years, but no name has been mentioned yet. Campaign ops Robert Gibbs to Press Secretary, David Axelrod and David Plouffe to the Rove/Ickes/Carville/Rasputin chairs in the West Wing, and Chicago voices Penny Pritzker and Valerie Jarrett to Special Assistants for Illinois Issues all make good common sense and collectively add up to a change of zero. Cheery Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania to Energy or Transportation, smart Tom Vilsack of Iowa to Agriculture, refined Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas to Education, Commerce or HHS all are good party politics and sound, uneventful staffing. Easy nominations, easy confirmations, easy political machines in line for the re-election planning. If and when you can find a change you can believe is a change, please attach a note. For now, the dream-leaking by the tightly controlled Obama leak world is that the Democrats are about to win in overwhelming style and are taking control of the legislative, executive and judicial branches with road-tested, very familiar, and vote-getting personalities. The notion of conservative administration comes to mine. Cautious, too. Tentative. Banal. Without passion or focus. Change you can nap on. Early Days. Shrug.

New Wineskin, Old Wine

By John Batchelor on November 2, 2008 2:02 PM | 11 Comments

Spin the Globe.

Speaking severally Sunday 2 to measure where we are on Election Eve 2008. To Thaddeus McCotter (11th Michigan) of Livonia outside of Detroit (Wayne County) to watch the tsunami hit the GOP and sweep away whole red states and up to 35 House members and eight senators, leaving the Republican Party without graybearded leadership and with two choices: begin again in the hills or surrender to the Noveau New Deal that just took control of the suburbs and cities. To Brody Mullins and my professionals Mona Charen, Vaughn Ververs, John Fund, Jodi Schneider, Ken Silverstein, Margaret Hoover, Diana West, Craig Unger, Larry Johnson, John Avlon, Monica Crowley , and Bill Whalen re the sweeping power that Nancy Pelosi will likely enjoy in the 111th, as well as the Senate changes already planned to establish a new financial oversight (read, Money Commissars) to supervise TARP II as it changes into universal money care. To Larry Kudlow re the tax policies and monetary policies we can anticipate in a Larry Summers or Paul Volcker or Barney Frank Treasury and IRS. To Jim McTague, Aaron Task and Simon Constable re the instability of the global markets under the cloud of worldwide recession, massive layoffs, commodities deflation and a protectionist, redistributionist, Europeanized administration. Lou Ann Hammond will addend the facts of the last days before Detroit becomes a GSE; and Bob Zimmerman will find the silver lining in the promises that Mr. Obama has made to science in general and NASA in particular. The election will provide a new list of names for executive and legislative branches, however the old New Deal wine of unrestrained entitlements, overbearing and whimsical taxation, aimless and whimsical government regulation, ransacked government sponsored entities (Fannie May and Freddie Mac) and the likelihood of the huffing and puffing of an imperial congressional majority every day on the news, means that the 111th Congress and the 44th presidencey will be a tipsy search for FDR's mausoleum (right, FDR campaign rally at Sea Girt, New Jersey, August 27, 1932) of hard times snacks & big boss pork. Not the CCC, rather the Global Warming Fighters. Pack the Court, the Movie.

Foreign Policy Made Jaw-Jaw Simple.

Meanwhile speaking tonight to Malcolm Hoenlein on the threats to Israel and the Middle East from a desperate adversary in Tehran, beggared by the crash of oil prices, committed to imperial conquest from the Hindu Kush to the Med. Seffy Bodansky will comment on the North Korean transfer of ballistic missile and nuclear weapons technology uninterrupted to Tehran and Damascus. Mary Anastasia O'Grady reports on the Democratic record with the Haitian party boss Jean Bertrand Aristide from the Clinton years, and also comments on the struggles for Hugo Chavez without the oil spike and the promised Kremlin investment. Ann Marlowe from Khost and Daoud Sultanzoy from Kabul will comment on the cocky and well-fed Taliban offenseive against a dispirited NATO force. And Mary Kissel form Hong Kong will underline that the Asian economies, especially Japan, are tumbling faster than the US and Europe, and that the Chinese markets are under severe stress now with unemployment on the mainland and a drop in all orders. The protectionist jawboning of the Obama administration (above right, the candidate October 18, 2008 at Springfield, MO) (below right, the candidate November 2, 2008 at Columbus, Ohio) will contribute to routine alienation and military

adventurism in a cash starved Asia. The 111th Congress and the 44th president aim to make foreign policy as simple as jaw-jaw diplomacy. We can expect gabfests to replace Predators. We can also expect a ravenous Tehran and its hand servant Damascus to raid into neighboring states just to maintain jingoist fervor in their collapsing economies. A hungry man is a risk taker, and the globe is awash with cheap oil and beggarly dictators.

The Right Drives By Night

By John Batchelor on November 2, 2008 1:08 AM | 5 Comments

Milk and Beef and the Asphalt Cowboy.

Speaking Sunday 2 to Shane Hamilton, author, "Trucking Country: The Road of America's Wal-Mart Economy," re the phenomenon of the "agrarian trucking culture and deregulatory capitalism," that created the political conditions for the Reagan revolution in the 1980 election. In the beginning was the farmer with milk and the rancher with beef to sell to the big city populations. After refrigeration for the cars, the railroads dominated the distribution chain until the trucks and the truck routes grew sturdy enough to compete. Raoul Walsh's anarchic "They Drive By Night (1940)" (right, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, George Raft), was Hollywood discovering and of course virilely romanticizing the daring of the new cowboys, the truckers, many of them the sons of farmers and ranchers. The New Deal regulated everything but the agribusiness carried by the trucks, because the truckers cut costs for the consumer. The Teamsters resisted for decades, led by the

intrepid Jimmy Hoffa (b. '13 Indiana), but by the 1970s Hoffa was gone and the milkman was obsolesced and the fresh meat display cases replaced the town butchers. The supermarkets depended upon indie truckers to deliver fresh and frozen foods cheaply and incessantly. Richard Nixon's rude folly to regulate prices and mandate 55 mph gave the truckers an opera to celebrate with the Bandit of "Smokey and the Bandit," and then the CB radio organized "Convoy," by the legendary Hollywood director of "The Wild Bunch," Sam Peckinpah. The asphalt cowboy was in place for Ronald Reagan's candidacy to validate. What had been the son of a New Deal Democrat became the small business owner celebrating and voting for Republican conservatism. The right drives by night. And the Wal-Mart economics that started in Arkansas -- the cheapest manufactured goods delivered by the cheapest non-union, non-regulated truckers -- took hold into the 1990s. Shane Hamilton's thesis, assembly of anecdotes and marshaling of stats, headlines, personalities, presidents, wars and economic vagaries are compelling, fresh, eye-opening, prodigious, persuasive. Deregulation was an antidote to the bloated, inefficient, non-transparent, sloppy economic liberalism of the New Deal.

Nouveau New Deal.

If the polls hold, we are about to witness a fierce closing down of the Reagan majority and a calculated renovation of the economic liberalism of the New Deal. The presenting political excuse will be that the unregulated banks have failed (so the story goes) and that the benign, all-seeing central government, with printing presses and inexhaustible patience, must regulate the marketplace -- all of the marletplace. Finger-wagging Mr. Obama is certainly a bookish and mechanical heir to Harold Ickes, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Teamsters, and the flabbily organized command economies of the 1930s. Central planning, regulatory aggression, class warfare and a tax system based on transfer payments are about to return in style -- the Noveau New Deal. But what this present panicky phenomenon of One Big Brother is shoving aside is not going to vanish. The wide-open road cowboy tale will push back. The century old struggle between central government planning and the unfettered pilgrim is ready for another episode in a few years. For now, the same Congress and White House that stopped the unregulated Mexican truckers from competing with and defeating the corporate-dominated American truck companies will now regulate all aspects of the food chain, chiefly with taxes on entrepreneurs and subsidies for cities and transfer payments in the form of price regulations. Could we see milk and beef prices mandated lower? All food prices fixed by region, class, age, income level, identity card? Protectionism breaking Wal-Mart's model? Government owned and operated Sam's? Back to the future. Yes.

Authorized Edited Re-Edited Obama Official Version

By John Batchelor on November 1, 2008 1:01 AM | 18 Comments

Joyfully Partisan Peeking.

Speaking Sunday 2 on the Election Special to Robert Sullivan, editor Time-Life Books, re the timely publication of the new but surprisingly familiar picture book, "The American Journey of Barack Obama." It is a quietly laudatory volume, muted in its uniform affection for a candidate who is still not more than the youthful tyro of a joyfully partisan machine. Studying the story in pictures we can surmise what is allowed, acceptable, appropriate, in the first draft of the authorized biography. Mr. Obama's run for the U.S. Senate in 2003-2004 as well as the run for the White House in 2007-2008 have been only and completely about the careful candidate's chosen narrative. The official narrative. A most edited official narrative. And this book is an edited official authorized version in pictures, which are sometimes provided by the candidate and which are sometimes the product of expedient staging. Flipping through the chronology of the book is a challenging game of peeking into windows. There is what you see and what you don't see and what you know is there but you cannot see and what you know is just around the corner, maybe. My mind kept looking for the parts that aren't present in the frame, the missing parts, because it a certainty that the missing parts are where the unauthorized, unedited, non-official and unwelcome version will start again after Election Day.

The Missing Parts.

According to Robert Sullivan, Time-Life had a rich record to choose from, because ever since Mr. Obama made national news as the first ever African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, 1991, he has been widely photographed. The first half of the book covers the years 1962 or so, toddler snapshots, family groupings, black and white as well as color, to a visit to Jakarta, ending with a snapshot of him and his sister, Maya, in 1987. The second half of the book begins with the courtship and marriage to Michelle Robinson in the early 1990s, including the wedding in October 1992. What is missing from the first half is Occidental College and Columbia College, and certainly missing is the adventure to visit his roommate's family in Pakistan. Also missing is the three years of community organizing in Chicago, of living hand to mouth, of being a stranger in a strange land called Chicago. However it is the second half of the book where the editing is most official. Trinity Church appears in the wedding photo, and later there is the well-known picture of Mr. Obama and Jeremiah Wright smiling in what is described as "happier times;" yet there are no cameos of church-going or church events over the 20 years we are told Mr. Obama belonged an attended the most successful of churches. Also missing are the critical associates of Mr. Obama's rise as a political actor in Chicago after 1992. One shot of Mr.. Obama at his junior lawyer desk; one shot of Mr. Obama working with ACORN. Nothing of the Woods Fund after 1993, nothing of the Joyce Foundation after 1994, nothing of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Grant board that the ingenue Mr. Obama chaired after 1995, nothing of the lengthy association with Bill Ayers (right, in New York, October 2008) of the University of Illinois and Mr. Ayers's wife Bernardine Dohrn and Mr. Ayers's education partner Mike Klonsky, who all benefited from Mr. Obama's work. Nothing of of the run for the 13th Illinois senate seat after 1995, nor anything at all of the eight years in Springfield. No Illinois senate pictures at all. Nothing of Mr. Obama's leadership role in Louis Farrakhan's

Million Man March in Washington D.C. in 1995 (right). Nothing of the publication and promotion of the successful "Dreams of My Father," after 1995: no book signing pictures, no book party shots, no readings of the book. And now the missing parts accelerate. Nothing of Tony Rezko and Rita Rezko from 1995 or 2000. Nothing of the friendship with Rashid and Mona Khalidi, a most controversial pro-Palestinian couple at the University of Chicago with whom the Obamas shared baby-sitting chores. Nothing of the unsuccessful primary challenge to Congressman Bobby Rush in 2000. Nothing of the downtown Chicago event where Mr. Obama made the now famous anti-war speech in October 2002. Nothing of the fund-raising parties to raise money for the Senate run in 03-04. A photo of Obama for Senate logos but nothing of the sponsorship of Governor Rod Blagojevich nor of the most critical boost from Mayor Richard Daley (right below). Nothing of the political fetes that were routine at Springfield before and after the '04 election, including several state sponsored events in '05 and '06. What is striking about the general absence of all these events after 1995 is that most of them were political ceremonies, all news worthy at the time and ripe with photo opportunities for professionals, amateurs, campaign aides. Yet no cameos, no snapshots, no newswire group scenes, not a single picture of the candidate smoking a cigarette, despite the well known fact that he was a heavy smoker until he quit sometime in 2007. There several pictures of several visits to Africa and Kenya, including the senatorial visit in 2006, yet there are no photos of the four-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank in 2005, and there is no picture of the now famous February 10, 2007 event in Springfield, Illinois when Mr. Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency.

The House and the Lot.

There are several photos of the inside of the mansion at 5046 South Greenfield Avenue (below), and what we can see is the kitchen and halls of a spotless, plush, panelled palace. There are also two pictures that include a glimpse of the now famous lot at 5050 South Greenfield behind an ornate iron grille fence (below). The lawn on both sides of the fence is verdure and perfect, like a golf course. We cannot see the "for sale" sign on the street side of the lot, if it was there when the photo was taken. However missing are photos of the condo where the Obamas lived at 5450 South East Park View and which they sold conveniently and swiftly in the spring of '05 in order to move into the mansion. We do not see moving day pictures, house renovation pictures, family gatherings in the vastly roomy and House Beautiful pristine mansion, social events at all in the house, certainly nothing with Tony and Rita Rezko standing with the Obamas beside the peculiarly manicured and undeveloped lot.

What's Breaking News Tonight?

Reply to James Fallows of the Atlantic Re His Endorsing Obama for President.

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