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As of the time the Mr. Coffee wheezed itself full today, wholesale gasoline needed to decline just 29/100ths of one cent (about the value of a Pelosi promise) to be below $1 per gallon.
And a pound of lead now trades at 45.5 cents. Keep that in mind if you're planning to buy dangerous projectiles any time soon.
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Dec 4, 2008
Ho Ho Bang Bang
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And how. Found money. (I over-estimated costs in pre-paying for some election travel.) As a prudent citizen and patriot I feel compelled to get that money in circulation quickly through a wise investment.
The most expert financial planners are advising blue steel and walnut. A Luddite Special, maybe in .30-06?
Dec 3, 2008
Honorable Men
The gentlemen of Prime Minister Tojo's war cabinet meet Dec. 3 to begin drafting the 14-part message to Washington. As a matter of honor, it is to be delivered before aircraft of carrier divisions 1 and 2 begin bombing. Respectable nations do not mount sneak attacks. The final wording makes no mention of hostilities.
Now just 1,500 miles from Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nagumo and all his sailors curse the weather forecasters, who had predicted smoother seas, as they steam into the worst storm of the voyage. Refueling will be impossible. On the bright side, the foul weather will keep American reconnaissance planes from Midway and the Aleutians far from the striking force.
In Washington, Captain Safford again risked is career to relay to Pacific commanders that Tokyo had ordered its embassies in the Pacific region and London to destroy their "Purple" machines -- the encrypt/decrypt devices for the most secret diplomatic traffic. He was amidst the feud between the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Office of Naval Communications. The turf battle turned on the issue of who was allowed to say what to fleet commanders. Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner had decreed that only he was allowed to alert fighting units to imminent danger, and he wasn't ready to do that yet. The Safford message was equivocal and without context, and Admiral Kimmel and General Short ended their day with about the same knowledge they possessed over their morning coffee.
London: Churchill continues to badger Roosevelt for an iron-clad pledge of armed asistance if Japan strikes Singapore. Roosevelt promises only "aid" in the event of a Jap assault on British or Dutch interests. He does not tell London about his clever little scheme of the three small boats, American flags flying, bouncing around in the Jap-infested waters between the Philippines and Indo-China. For weeks he and the top policy echelons have understood that war will be politically acceptable only if Japan fires the first shot.
In downtown Honolulu, the Japanese consulate begins burning its secret files, and by nightfall the FBI discovers it. It does not discover that a young attache there is a junior officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy who has for many weeks been blithely plotting American ship movements, including moored warships by name and precise place. He sends these plots to Tokyo via the consular code, which Pearl Harbor naval intelligence has been ordered to ignore. Washington would tell them what they needed to know.
Tuesday, Dec. 2, 1941
In the office of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Submarine Base, Pearl Harbor, the intelligence reports and charts mocked the assembled brass. There was still that matter of the Japanese Aircraft carriers.
"What! You don't know where the carriers are?" demanded Kimmel.
Commander Ed Layton, intelligence boss, said "No." Intense radio monitoring yielded no trace of the carriers' call signs.
Kimmel asked Layton to just guess where they might be. "Maybe in the home waters, Admiral, but we really just don't know."
"You mean to say they could be rounding Diamond Head right now and you wouldn't know it?"
Layton later admitted how lame his answer was: "I hope they would have been spotted before now."
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In Washington, Roosevelt needed a casus belli to move Congress to give him the war he wanted, or the one he knew he would have to fight sooner or later. He put his speech writers to work. They were to explain why America should fight even if Japan (remember that southern assault force in the South China Sea) attacked only British possessions in south Asia -- Malaya, Singapore, Bruma.
And he dreamed up, or accepted from someone else, a clever little ploy. Charter three small craft. Put American naval officers aboard, crew them with mostly Filipinos, fly the Stars and Stripes, and dangle them in front of the Japanese southern attack fleet. He called it a "defensive information patrol." Admiral Thomas Hart called it bait -- the hopelesss frog on a bass fisherman's hook. But like a good officer, he obeyed his commander-in-chief.
The Kido Butai, steaming as before, approached the International Date Line. Admiral Nagumo looked with satisfaction on a precise list of American men of war moored or at anchor in Pearl Harbor as of November 28. To an aide he said: "I pray that the American fleet remains thus on X-day."
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