WHO'S ON FIRST

Condi Rice may have been speaking figuratively as her spinsters now claim when refusing to dispute the obvious she acknowledged thousands of tactical errors committed in the iraq war--an admission of naked incompetence proportionally equivalent to .....well i'm not exactly sure as i try to recall similar historical ineptitude--Not even Custer were he capable of speaking from the graveyard would own up to the appearance of such self-slander--However Rice's blanket depiction of failure is actually directed at the tacticians of Shock & Awe-- a group from whom she excludes herself as a member--The neocon phalanx has seemingly fractured and many of them are headed for the exits while others are already busy at the revision game and/or sniping at each other in the process--Maybe Custer if he could would have blamed the Crow scouts who concluded that that day was not a good day to die and left Goldilocks to his fate--It seems the conceits of failed enterprises "of great pitch and moment" (Shakespeare was not neocon) do not allow the architects of such ruin to accept any blame themselves--Condi on the side of the strategists and not the tacticians says the overall strategery of regime removal was the right course to pursue(she thinks...)--Implication being if the thousand tactical errors had been rectified failure could have been averted but at any rate it's their fault and not mine--Maybe if knowing a little more about all the different tribes encamped on the Little Big Horn like who and how many were actually there could have helped save George Armstrong his curly scalp and a whole lot of his soldiers--

CONVERGENCE

Sales of new homes fell 10% in February--a large freefall not seen in nearly ten years--Analysts whose expertise usually goes unscrutinized predicted a 2% fall--no small discrepancy that difference between sanguine fantasy and factual reality--In the West sales fell almost 30%--Does this include California?--If it does(we all know it does) this points to a huge shortfall--One any of these self professed expert analysts should be truly embarassed to have missed--What are their prognostications for future foreclosures for those unfortunate enough to have been hoodwinked into adjustable rate and interest-only mortgages? If on average home median prices dropped $13,000 in three months won't speculators seeing this begin dropping some of their holdings rather quickly?The housing sector is showing ominous signs of serious deterioration--An interesting analysis should ask if suburban houses with the longest commute sold less often than those closer to the cities as gasoline by the gallon on average jumped 15 cents/per--Volatile oil supplies behaving...well, with a good deal of volatility--the summer driving session has upped its' tuition--there's a seminar somewhere with a grad student languidly opining about the juxtaposition of this and that--

Peak Water??--Serious drought in the southwest--Phoenix nearly 150 days with no rain--Texas panhandle thousands of square miles of rangeland charcoaled by wind driven prairie fires-- Fire season has the forest rangers anxious--Farmers in the midwest report that flow rates in some areas of the huge oglalla aquifer once pumped 1500 gallons per minute now yield in the neighborhood of 300 gallons--Imagine stepping into your morning shower and no water descends from the spout--Houston we have a problem--A rancher friend in Northern Montana told me he hadn't fed many bales of hay to his cows --no snowcover on the winter pastures--
Doesn't the wide wild Missouri River begin somewhere up in those hills -- Hard to recharge depleting aquifers without melting snowpack--

Bird flu found in cats somewhere in Germany--So far this avian flu has spread farther and faster than scientists anticipated--The question of whether it will find a way to jump to humans only adds to the general anxiety permeating world culture--Prescriptions of sleeping pills made a startling jump in volume among Americans last year--Work 60 to 80 hours a week chasing real estate dollars and financial conundrums and the reward is chemical sleep--One sleep inducer called Ambien seems to turn its steady users into marauding sleepwalkers who beastially attack their own refrigerators--At least one such user awoke to find her fist full of peanut butter--Houston, another problem--

Two year treasury auction meets with a tepid response on the day before the Fed will probably by all prognostication raise interest rates again--Warren Buffet continues to bet against the dollar--Will the rest of the world just continue to lend us the rope we hang our economy with--We continue to devour our children's seed corn--The sounds of silence eminate from D.C.--'What up with Houston?-- There's no problem--Once the iraqis stand up America will be Our Town again'-- Fat chance--

There has never been a large oil price spike since WWII not followed by severe downturn or outright recession--Similarly recession has been the expected culmination of the so called inverted yield curve in the bond markets--Short term rate yields exceed long term rate yields--Consumer spending drops as surveyed consumer confidence rises--which vote are we to trust?--Something is happening here and we don't know what it is--do we, Mr. Bernanke??--

Last (not so sure) and impractically least the surge of violent crime in large and mid size cities--Drug traders in their version of the long war??--not so say the cops-- petty arguments quickly and emotionally escalting into gunfire and the certainty of death and sorrow--This strange state of anxiety converging from far angled fields should give us all pause--

AUTOPSY

Did mr. Buckley provide Mr. Bush a rationale for withdrawal ? Did mr. Bush receive it? Is our iraq adventure for all original intents and purposes whatever they may have once been a done deal? Is Mr. Bush in the denial phase? If so, what will the anger stage provide? A massive tactical bombing of Iran to deflect from the iraq failure? To rally once again the american people around a beleaguered president in a time of war--a new war?--Iran with its so far nonexistent nuclear weapons is now the newest most threatening menace to America?-- Forget all the missing soviet suitcase nukes Iran is the next dragon to slay? The next inception of radical chaos and murder in the middle east ?-- With the Iraq war now costing nearly 20 billion bucks a month where will the additional moolah come from? Who will buy our bonds to finance such folly? Using militarily nearly 450 thousand barrels of oil per day in Iraq where will the additional petro resources be found? If the iranians are attacked will they shut down the oil spigots and punish the U.S. indirectly by crimping the economies of China and Japan? Having curtailed 15% of it's oil purchases from Iran recently are the Japanese saying a massive bombardment of Iran is a fait accompli?-- Did the iranian propostion to set up a futures bourse trading oil for euros play a large role in the most recent saber rattling by the Bush and Bolton gang?-- Didn't Saddam trade oil for euros briefly before the invasion of Iraq? Didn't Mr. Chavez propose an oil for euro trade before an ultimately failed coup attempt briefly unseated him? With many mainline old school conservatives disassociating themselves from the political lifesupport system is Mr. Bush man enough to admit failure? Don't we already know most of these answers already?-- Will the American people wake up?-- Will they recognize just how precarious the times are that try our souls?

THE RUMPOT

Doctor Strangelove Donald Rumsfield sounded tired and confused when he affirmed that the Iraqui security forces would do battle should the disparate tribes/sects of Iraq fall into full scale civil war but he failed to mention who they would battle with/against--It is up to them--The war was so much easier and so much clearer when it was just a lightly opposed blitzkreig--The limelight seemed to have much more lime then--the deadly neocon lecturns Washington wide seemed so sturdied by their lethal certitude--There seems now a slight tone of resignation--Maybe the LongWar seems too long now--The mahogany foxholed neocons and their strident plans for an instantly gratified 'strategery' of remaking of the middle east bore an unmistakeable air of delusion that sadly went unchallenged by all but a handful of those belonging to the party that seems perpetually in search of a spine--Now they mumble their maybe mea culpas to each other--Is anybody anywhere listening to Mr. Perle the architect of this major blunder?-- Mr. Bush exhorts "total victory" but clearly has difficulty accessing a virtual definition--plainly speaking he can't tell us what he means by it--Poor old Rummy retreats to the spin room reminiscent of old Bob McNamara's musing aloud--'If only we had the right numbers we could win this thing'-- Rumple says if we just call them terrorists instead of insurgents or instead of referring to it as a war on terrorism we label it anew 'the long war' we can certainly modify the outcome--Maybe we have just never had enough good acronyms- How have America's leaders (not just the repubs) become so divorced from the real world?--Rumball really laid it on the line stating that corruption threatened to imperil the possibility of any democracy ever taking hold in Iraq--The story was buried on page eight--you know, inside the fold--Saddams fiefdom sort of kept the whole area from self immolation but Iraq now seems to have never been a country at all--Imagine the embarassment of having to ask Iran to help stabilize this situation all the while denying to ourselves that monolithic islamic jihad is actually killing each other very uncivilly--

ADDENDUM::The Rumster opined recently that since we've destroyed the Iraqi Luftwaffe as well as their Panzer legions and U-boat fleets that leaving Iraq now would be like leaving Germany to the defeated Nazi's-- no further questions, Your Honor-----

A STRANGE CALM

The late winter sun lights up The Island and spring's daffodils open to the warmth. Weekend rowers on the Sound oar soundlessly from the distant dock--Crews of teamwork striving for a clockwork precision propel themselves across the silent water--A blue heron in midstride suddenly stops propped up on one leg the other frozen in a momentarilypoised half prance/half strut before continuing his serene shoreline stroll--a potential danger passed a morning meal waits somewhere in the shallows--The white ferry on Elliott Bay backdropped by the far cityscape whales it's way toward the harbor--its' distant work composed and ordered in the early quiet--below the surface of this languid idyll another scenario rears its' gnarly head--

The ugly failure in Iraq demands recognition from its' initiators one of whom just happens to be out of town dispensing nuclear candy to a rather suddenly new ally--The insurgency grows beyond its' 'last throes' into a contagion of internecine murder spliced with eternal vows of vengeance crippling the formation of the new government--Some questions--What will the new government govern when finally chosen?--Iraq doesn't really appear to exist anymore--Sunni's and Shia disappear from mixed neighborhoods to the sanctuary of their tribe and its' militia--The full scale civil war some expected all along is a misnomer--full scale sectarian tribal anarchy is a better fit--Who is the iraqi army when and if they engage actually fighting for? A government elected but not yet formed? Are the Shia and Kurdish recruits being given combat training to combat the Sunnis? To restore an order that has not existed since the fall of Saddam? Is the U.S. courting wrath from the Shia by demanding meaningful inclusion for the Sunnis? Can the Sunnis trust a Shia/Kurd police force to protect them? Are the Sunni's overly paranoid in asking the U.S. to protect them from potential Shia genocide?