Yar

Muslim thugs, primarily from Somalia, have captured and are holding 17 ships for ransom, including a shipment of munitions and an oil tanker. Ninety ships have been attacked just this year. The reaction by the world community has been to bravely run away, sending cargo around the Cape of Good Hope so as to avoid the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden. Me, I would have scuttled every captured ship, taken the write-off and sent the families a ham. That's probably why I'm not in charge of anything important. You'd really only have to do it once or twice, though. Just saying. Oh, and can we stop minimizing the threat by calling them "pirates?" Brings to mind little boys playing pretend. Some of them may well be little boys, but they aren't playing. It's only a matter of time before they figure out a cruise ship warrants a much larger, more expedient payday.

The Russians have taken a different approach. They are sending warships down to the Horn to protect their interests. Interests that will undoubtedly include monitoring ship traffic. It's the only way to find those nasty pirates, doncha know. So when they find a ship with something really bad on it -- or something really good -- they have a responsibility to detain that vessel until they neutralize the threat. Or get paid. After all, who's to stop them? We're swapping one set of thugs for a more organized, better-armed set, one prone to, um, accidents. Even if they get paid. And nobody's going to do anything about it.

A Sudden Rush of Brains to the Head

When the Russians start in on us about the lack of trust between our two nations, that means they have a blackmail file. Allow me to formulate a theory:

OK. Brace yourself.
Medvedev/Putin is 'optimistic' about having favorable (to them) relations with the Obama administration because...drumroll...
They have a certified copy, or the original, of Obama's birth certificate.
And it doesn't say 'Hawaii' on it.
It might not say 'Obama' on it, either. Awkward. But that's a stretch. I figure it's something very disqualifying (But Mrs. Clinton would have ripped his throat out, so to speak, and she didn't) or it's something intensely personally embarrassing, which would be not actually being an African prince but the son of some anonymous Leroy.

Hawaii has sealed the records so no one stateside can go look, but the campaign's been going on since the Battle of Hastings. Two years is plenty of time for a determined intelligence-gathering operation to work up a dossier on anyone, and I don't think even Mr. Obama saw himself as the nominee back then, much less The Office of the President Elect. So the true document is loosed into the wild and it's only a matter of time before it is produced. The only suspense is under which circumstances.

Six Degrees of Barack Obama

Barack Obama is friends with Bill Ayres. Bill says so.

Bill is friendly with Hugo Chavez. He went to Venezuela in 2006 to speak at an education conference, where he expressed his admiration for Chavez.

Hugo Chavez is friendly (like the snake is friendly with the mongoose) with Dimitry Medvedev and by extension Vladimir Putin, the hand up Medvedev's back. He probably likes Putin better, actually. How could a kung-fu fighting pet tiger owner not appeal to the Napoleon Dynamite of world politics?

Medvedev is planning a sit-down with Mr. Obama to discuss Russian-American relations. He says he's optimistic. I bet. Even if The Office of the President Elect saw fit to ask for advice, who'd he consult? Ayres, his bomb-throwing surrogate daddy, would welcome taking it all down, man, so long as he gets a dacha on Lake Michigan. His cabinet will be resuscitated Clinton staffers so we (and people we negotiate with) can mostly predict what they'll say. Biden can only be counted upon to say something stupid and unhelpful. Probably a recipe for glazed ham he swiped out of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. If McCain's age was a liability, why'd we elect Grandpa Simpson as VP?

Russia sees Obama as an insecure lightweight, a grasping, overcompensating punk. They'd have to. Chavez thinks the guy is no big deal. I can't decide whether that's hilarious or insulting. And the people who elected him will be too busy trying to keep ahead of the bills to care if Obama sells out the home world.

I must say it makes me uneasy when life imitates punk.

An interesting footnote: I was looking for the NYT article I saw where Ayres came out after the election and said he was in fact all buddy-buddy with Obama. Can't find it, on two different search engines. It must never have existed...