–A week after taking a trolley ride across the south lawn of the White House with the Mexican President (see above) Obama announced plans to send 1,200 National Guard troops (and spend $500 million) to the Southern Border. John “Dang Fence” McCain says it’s not enough. He wants at least 6,000 troops, which would cost about $2 billion.
–The McCain ironies keep coming. The latest McCain ad brags about the senator’s ability, as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, to keep bringing home the military bacon to Arizona.
–Embattled BP has told Congress that there were warnings that something was wrong in the Deepwater Horizon well hours before the blast. The problem is described as a “very large abnormality.” The so called “top kill” maneuver to plug the well may be attempted later this week. Maureen Dowd calls it “the plume of doom.”
–TIME’s Tim Padgett explains the gun battles in Jamaica as authorities hunt for a drug lord with the perfect drug lord name, Chris Coke of the Shower Posse. At least 30 have already been killed.
–The Washington Post finds fraying in the cooperative threads between the United States and Europe. One big issue is the requirement to spin off derivatives brokers from banks, a controversial measure that was never a top priority of reformers, and which is likely to be dropped in the House and Senate conference.
–Scary National Security Alert: President Obama admits Marv Albert is in his head. The president confesses on TNT that when he plays basketball, “In the back of my mind Marv Albert is making the call. I have your voice in my head as I’m shooting three.” North Korea now investigating whether it can exploit this Marv Albert mind control hack. Also, Obama says his bowling game is improving, the Wizards would do well to draft John Wall (video here) and Charles Barkley has a “scary golf swing.”
–The great Gay Talese profiles an Upper East Side restaurant called Gino for the New Yorker. The piece is short and good, but more importantly Talese is publishing again, which is good for the universe.
–At a fund-raiser in California, Obama heckled a heckler. Pool report after the jump.
Obama got heckled during his second round of remarks, came close to declaring bipartisanship in Washington a dead end, joked about the images of him with a Hitler moustache and spent quite a bit of time pushing for immigration reform.
Speaking to a larger crowd and this time from teleprompters, Obama was in the middle of, as he called it, a trip down memory lane about the economy, when a man yelled out: “Move faster on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”
“It’s good to see ya,” Obama said to the man as the crowd started to boo, and the man continued to shout something your pooler couldn’t hear amid all the noise
“I have to say, you know what? I saw this guy down in LA,” Obama said. (POTUS was also heckled about DADT at the last Boxer fundraiser he headlined in Los Angeles.) “Two points I want to make,” Obama said of the heckler, “he really should like buy a ticket to, if he wants to demonstrate, buy a ticket to a guy who doesn’t support his point of view.”
The other point, Obama said, “is maybe he didn’t read the newspapers because we are working with congress as we speak to roll back ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’” POTUS further dinged the man: “I actually think he does read the newspapers because he wasn’t as – his heart wasn’t in it – he said ‘Do it faster.’ C’mon man…”
–Mexican tourism officials make a joke. Media mad Arizona sheriff declares that he is outraged.
–Obama is headed to Louisiana on Friday. He will hold a presser on Thursday about BP. Not clear yet how many questions he will take.
