(Screen Shot of the People’s Daily English edition with Dear L’il Kim as Sexiest Man Alive. Images courtesy People’s Daily).

It is easy to get distracted these days. I have no idea what Mr. Geithner, the alleged Secretary of the Treasury, was thinking when he took the new plan to avoid the fiscal cliff up to Senate Minority Leader McConnell. Apparently the poker-faced Republican just laughed.

Sources at The Daily Socotra revealed that Mr. Tim Geithner proposed a two-step process to raise $1.6 trillion dollars in revenue. The first of these steps would raise $960 billion through higher taxes on upper earners, while another $600 billion would come from tax reform. The Secretary also apparently casually asked that Congress cede its Constitutional power of the purse- represented by the debt ceiling limit- to the Executive Branch.

It seems a little surreal, and I am not sure a lot of Senate Democrats thought it was a great idea either. But it doesn’t sound like anyone is getting serious, at least not yet. But I did note that the month apparently changed last night, and whatever the hell is going to happen after the first of the year it is getting closer.

Screw it, the election is over, this is what we got, and now we have to live with it. With all this going on- the President is back on the campaign trail for some reason best known to himself- it was easy to let other vital issues slide to the back-burner.

Like who the sexiest man alive is.

I hope you saw it. The Onion is a fun paper, gleefully irreverent on every topic of political life. They ran a satirical piece in which they named moon-faced North Korean dictator Kim Jong Eun the “sexiest man alive for 2012.”  The PRC’s equivalent of The New York Times picked up the story. The People’s Daily missed the humor, and ran it in full in their online English version of the paper.

Through the miracle of the decadent capitalist internet, they also attached a slide show of more than fifty heroic images of the pudgy L’il Kim.

It was totally awesome. The official outlet of the Chinese Communist Party trumpeted The Onion’s award as completely legit, since everyone else looks at the Dear L’il Leader with a certain amount morbid fascination about what he will do next. Lately, there have been reports of senior DPRK defense officials dying in self-inflicted mortar firings and the like.

KCNA, the official news outlet of North Korea (the equivalent of the People’s Daily) announced that they have a Christmas present for us. They are planning on launching a long-range Unha-3 ballistic missile between the 10th and 22nd of this month. They screwed up the last attempt in April, apparently attempted by a crew of rocket scientists who have been replaced by mortar fire.

The ROKs to the south are having a presidential election or something on the 19th, a complete coincidence.

It is grand fun in the Hermit Kingdom, the antics of which never cease to amaze and astound.

But that wasn’t the only couple notes from the North. Apparently the USS Pueblo has gone missing.

Just to recap, Pueblo was captured in a sad bit of political violence in 1968. It was towed into Wonsan, a particularly bedraggled port just north of the MDL-X. That is the “military demarcation line- extended,” if you have not been following things, and there the matter rested for years and years.

In my time on the Peninsula, we imaged the ship from space regularly to monitor its status. The North Koreans turned it into “People’s Museum #5,” and the US stubbornly maintained Pueblo in active status- she currently is the third oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy, only behind USS Enterprise (CV-65) and Old Ironsides.

(Big E leaves active service today. More than a half-century of service as the first nuclear carrier, and the second oldest ship in the active inventory- until today. Photo USN)

Odd, since Pueblo will move up today when the Big E is transferred to the inactive fleet down in Tidewater today. Good run for her- 51 years of steaming in defense of the nation, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Operation ENDURING FREEDOM.

Anyway, I have already recounted my bile at the apparent lack of interest on the part of the Clinton Administration which naively thought the Pueblo might be returned- and with a bogus superstructure, the about-to-be second oldest ship in the US Navy was towed out of Wonsan and all the way around the Republic of Korea to the Northern Limit Line, into DPRK waters, up the Taedong River and given a prominent berth in Pyongyang. She has been there since October of 1999.

Oh well.

We apparently are not following Pueblo any closer this week than we did in 1999. She has gone missing. A company specializing in the burgeoning tourist business, Koryo Tours, discovered the disappearance after employees returned from a trip.

It is entirely possible the ship is under renovation at the Fatherland Liberation Museum, or something stranger is in progress.

Secretary of State Madeline Albright could not get her back. Senator Wayne Allard tried and failed. There is current a letter-writing campaign by a fellow named Rick Rogala in Sarasota, FL, to ask for her return. Rick is a former Puelbo Seaman Apprentice from that awful and humiliating incident. He says he can have no closure until Pueblo is home.

I wish him well on his attempt, and who knows? You never can tell what the North Koreans are up to, and the Dear L’il Leader is still a wild card in a wild deck.

A White House delegation- representing the real sexiest man alive- apparently was in Pyongyang last summer to ask them not to mess around with the ROK elections. The scheduled missile launch would suggest that element was a failure. But you never can tell.

It could be a prelude to the return of the Second Oldest Ship in the US Navy.

I won’t hold my breath, but I would like to see it. Heck, I would even vote for Kim as the sexiest man alive for real if it would help. Anyone got a stamp?

(Welcome aboard, Sailor! DPRK guide at People’s Museum #5. Photo Koryo Tours.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com