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The heat is going out of the day at the marina at the end of Grand Isle and under a raised metal roof workers slump exhausted, lying on benches, heads on tables.

They've been out in the sun all day dressed up in heavy boots and protective overalls collecting tar balls off the beach. I ask one of the workers, Barbara, if she saw President Obama, although I know the answer: no-one did, except politicians, officials and journalists. "Uh huh. I saw him land," she tells me.

So is he doing enough? "I am sure he wants to stop it, just like everybody else. You can see what kind of community this is. All along this area it's nothing but people fishing. I can't say that he's not doing enough. He took responsibility because he's the chief, but it's basically BPs fault."

As we finish talking Paul, a young man with dreadlocks shouts out: "Its BP, BP's fault not Obama."

Grand Isle is a pretty place, at the very end of a finger of Louisiana that sticks into the Gulf of Mexico, surrounded by green marshlands and little water ways.

It is here that Obama came to make his pitch. He only spent about four hours in Louisiana, walking along the beach, picking up tar balls, hold a meeting and making a statement.

He said that the buck stopped with him as the president, and tried to show he shared their pain. He said:

"It's an assault on our shores, on our people, on the regional economy, and on communities like this one.

"This isn't just a mess that we've got to mop up. People are watching their livelihoods wash up on the beach. Parents are worried about the implications for their children's health.

"Every resident of this community has watched this nightmare threaten the dreams that they've worked so hard to build. And they want it made right, and they want to make it right now."

Then he flew off.

At the marina a bar runs along one jetty. They're selling beer, bloody marys and tar ball shots. Jagermeister and jello, I'm told.

A group of friends clutching beer in coolers are laughing uproariously. They come fishing for speckled trout and underneath their good humour they are deeply unimpressed with the president, one man says.

"He's doing a terrible job. He's not taking control. There's no coordination on the clean up they're letting BP run the whole show."

Another drinker tell me: "He's being a real politician trying to cover his ass. He says he's calling the shot but how can he be calling the shots when he doesn't know what BP is doing?"

His wife comes up and says her six-year-old grandson wants to go to the beach. "There's the oil sheen. I can't put my grandson in that," she says.

Frustration is a word the White House uses a lot. But it is a good word - even better than blame. There is a sense here, in this lovely strip of land, that someone, something just has to step in and stop this hurt and devastation.

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As the , the TV networks' assembled White House reporters - Chuck, Major, Jake and Chip - stopped their live broadcasts and promptly sat down in their front-row seats while the photographers' cicada chatter of shutters started up.

But the president made us wait until the very end for his best performance. For almost an hour, he talked and answered eight questions thoughtfully, defensively and with a lot of detail. There was a lot of meat.

Barack Obama wanted to stress that from the first day of the crisis, dealing with it had been his top priority. Given the chance to back off his commitment to deep sea drilling, he said that it was needed but the cosy and corrupt relationship with the oil industry would end.

There would be tougher, tighter regulation in future. Interestingly, he said that while he had no doubts about how the government had reacted since the crisis, he did wonder whether they should have been in a better position to cope. He suggested the federal government might need its own equipment, its own team, paid for by the oil companies.

He had reached the end of his answer to the last question when he paused and went into what was obviously a pre-planned riff.

"This is what I wake up to in the morning and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about.

"And it's not just me, by the way. When I woke this morning and I'm shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, 'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?' Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications not just for this generation, but for future generations."

He went on to say: "In case you were wondering who's responsible, I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down."

It won't be enough to stop the criticism. Only plugging the hole will do that. Tomorrow, the president will be in Louisiana.

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I am off in a moment to see the president perform in his first full-blown news conference for more than a year.

The headline, of course, will be a six-month extension of a ban on drilling, but more fascinating will be the theatrics.

He has to counter a rising tide of criticism. The attacks come mainly from Washington commentators, politicians and journalists.

It is true one of the most trenchant and , the extraordinary Democratic strategist from Louisiana.

He said FDR - Franklin Delano Roosevelt - would have leapt out of his wheelchair to be on the Gulf in person, directing the operation.

But when I was last down in Louisiana, the anger I heard expressed was aimed at BP, not the president. Still, does suggest a majority don't think he has handled this well.

Perhaps it is because Barack Obama doesn't get, or doesn't like, a key part of his job. I watched rather amazed one morning news show yesterday, on a supposedly White House-friendly network, as the two presenters and a reporter worked themselves into a lather about how out of touch the president was on this issue, how badly he had handled the crisis.

Their complaint? The fact the administration doesn't have the equipment to run the operation? The failure to change the law so the federal government can be in charge? Lack of enough oil-soaking booms in the Gulf, perhaps?

No. It was that he was in San Francisco. It sent the wrong signals. They, of course, didn't mention today's news conferences or tomorrow's visit. But he hadn't satisfied their craving for theatre.

It is rather startling that a president who rose to office using the power of image and symbolism and display to such huge effect doesn't often reach for these tools these days.

It's true you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, but Mr Obama could at least try to make his prose an exciting page-turner, not a dry, instructional manual. Perhaps I exaggerate.

We all know he can turn it on, when he wants to, when he can be bothered. But he seems to think that working hard behind the scenes, getting experts together, designing policies, is enough.

For heaven's sake, this isn't Germany. The American media, and perhaps the public, want a president who hugs, weeps and waves his arms, an emoter-in-chief, not a tip-top civil servant.

My advice for the president would come straight from Private Eye.

"Produce small onion."

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President Barack Obama will outline his first National Security Strategy on Thursday. Much time and effort will be spent deciding on how it differs from but I have a feeling he will duck the biggest question - America's role in the world.

The document will obviously centre on Mr Obama's mission to engage more with other countries. But it is easy to see that as a change of means, not ends.

There was a at West Point this weekend when he said:

"We are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of co-operation - we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don't."

There will be the rather tired argument about whether engagement is weakness or strength. But the bigger question is whether America sees itself as a leader for at least part of the globe, first among equals in a multi-polar world, or a partner in a kaleidoscope of shifting alliances.

The former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, has written arguing that engagement with Russia and China has meant the US has not stood up for its allies and gives way to bullies in return for insubstantial kind words from the two big powers. But what struck me most forcefully was his take on Turkey and Brazil's talks with Iran, which he describes as "infuriating" and aimed at humiliating and denigrating the United States.

The former mayor's analysis may be rather simplistic. But it is true that while Mr Obama has recognised the growing importance of medium-sized regional powers, he hasn't really outlined what to do if they join together to oppose perceived American interests.

In a critical but friendly report on the strategy of engagement, the Center for a New American Security argues: "America as a nation appears unsure of its own role and voice in the world and is highly divided internally." It adds:

"It is time to renew America's capacity for global leadership by reaffirming the values and interests we share with friends, investing in a better understanding of the world around us, reaching out to a new generation of young people around the world, standing firmly on the side of justice and free­dom, and restoring America's moral authority."

The president didn't talk about "global leadership" in his West Point speech, but he did suggest that the US should mould the future.

"We have to shape an international order that can meet the challenges of our generation. We will be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well, including those who will serve by your side in Afghanistan and around the globe. As influence extends to more countries and capitals, we also have to build new partnerships and shape stronger international standards and institutions."

There is no question that some countries, including the UK, look to America for leadership, whether for sentimental or practical reasons. Should it be less ambiguous about giving that lead or a more humble partner in power?

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The United States Secretary for the Interior Ken Salazar, Colorado born and raised, likes to sport a shoestring tie and a cowboy hat. Rather owlish, he's not many people's idea of a cowboy, but he's threatening a move that would make a rodeo hero proud: he says his boot is on BP's neck, but he is ready to push them out of the way.

His violent imagery reflects a growing frustration within the White House. They have to look as if they are on top of the oil spill that President Obama is now calling a disaster. But they don't seem to have the legal right or the technical ability to do much about it. Instead they have to prod, cajole, encourage and threaten the giant oil company, and then sit back and hope for the best.

BP is now planning to try to stop the flow completely on Wednesday. Their stop-gap solution of sucking up the spilled oil into a ship on the surface is now capturing far less oil than it was last week. So it is not surprising that Mr Salazar has said that he's angry and frustrated that deadline after deadline has been missed, that he's not completely confident that BP know what they are doing and that if they don't do what they are supposed to they will be pushed out of the way.

It is, after all, what some critics say should happen. Democratic strategist James Carville hasThey presumably would like President Obama to step in and take charge. But that is easier said than done, as a briefing on Friday showed. Spokesman Robert Gibbs was questioned repeatedly about why the White House wasn't in the driving seat. He said of BP: "It is their responsibility. They have the legal responsibility and the technical expertise to plug the hole." The law spells that out. In the case of oil spills it's the company that has to be in charge of the clear-up. Perhaps the White House could find a way around that.

But there is an even bigger problem. While the president can command the biggest and most powerful military the world has ever known, he simply doesn't have the sort of technical equipment or expertise to deal with a spill 5,000ft below the ocean. He has sent his energy secretary, Nobel Prize-winning Steven Chu, down to Louisiana to have some big-brained thoughts - but beyond some early talk of gamma rays, we have heard nothing more from him. It's tricky. The president can't afford to appear impotent, but at the moment he has to rely on BP to make him look competent. Perhaps he, and cowboy Ken, will stride in to town and take over. But it is certainly politically more comfortable for the president to stand on the sidelines tutting disapprovingly than making himself the boss of an operation that may be doomed to make one failed attempt after another.

UPDATE: Speaking at the White House, Admiral Thad Allen, who is co-ordinating the government's response to the oil spill, has said that Ken Salazar's remarks about pushing BP aside were "more of a metaphor". When reporters pressed him, he said: "To push BP out of the way would raise the question, 'to replace them with what?'" He added that he was the national incident commander and he believed that the right way to deal with this was with BP.

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Anthony Carbone picks up a long-handled metal net and with practised ease and a flick of the wrist dumps a batch of steaming hot, dark red crawfish into a bucket, ready to be served in the Dockside restaurant, in Picayune, Mississippi.

Although the restaurant, confusingly, is next to Highway 11, not on a dock, it is only a stone's throw from the Gulf of Mexico. Anthony gives me one of the little monsters to taste. They're good and spicy, boiled in the family's secret backyard seasoning (part of the secret, I can tell you, is peppers of three different degrees of hotness).

Anthony's uncle and aunt opened the restaurant in New Orleans but moved it to this rather quieter rural location some years ago. Unpretentious, it is bustling with customers popping in for a shrimp po' boy (a French loaf stuffed to overflowing) or a basket of crabs. It's a family affair and they're all welcoming and huge fun, but in the wake of the Gulf oil disaster they can't help but be a little worried about the times ahead.

They've been to a BP claims centre to see if the company will pay them any money, and they haven't yet heard back. BP have said they will pay all "legitimate" claims, but the case of Dockside shows how difficult that is to define.

The crawfish I tasted are $2.99 (£2.09) a pound, and the special -- battered shrimp, crawfish turnover, fries, coleslaw and bread -- sounds a bargain to me at $6.75 (£4.73). But some of the costs to the restaurant are going up.

Anthony says: "The prices have gone up on just about anything local, anything that comes out of the gulf, the prices have already increased. In this economic time, it's not the best time to raise prices."

I ask if that is because it is scarce.

"Yes," he answers. "But a lot of it is because a lot of the shrimp boats are going to work for the oil clean up which is a more everyday job. You're going to get a cheque a day whereas with shrimping you go out one night and make a lot of money and the next day make nothing. So that's putting pressure on the cost of the shrimp."

That's one cost BP might like to cover. The whole point of this restaurant is that it sells fresh, local fare, some of it caught by Anthony and his uncle in their own boats. When the shrimping season starts at the end of the month the waters presumably will still be closed, so they should expect compensation for that. But how much?

Then there is another, trickier problem, Anthony tells me. If business falls off because of customers' fears, that is a direct result of the spill. But will BP pay up for the economic consequences of people acting on unfounded worries? Indeed, Anthony asks, should they?

"Our phone rings every day. People want to know is that safe to eat, is this safe to eat, and that's the biggest problem for us. Are these people going to a steak house or a sea food restaurant?"

We are invited stay and peel a huge pile of crawfish. It is very tempting but duty and the next interview narrowly win out over staying there all evening sucking crustacean heads over a few beers (about the only alcohol allowed in this nearly dry county). I say I'll be back with the family, and I mean it. I just hope their business will prosper and not become another victim of the great spill.

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The Mississippi delta

I am in a Greenpeace boat thundering down the muddy Mississippi in search of the river's latest unappealing shades of brown. The jet boat jumps and thumps past the dredgers and tugs, past the lighthouse at South Channel, where they're storing booms and Hazchem suits to tackle the spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The guide for our tour is Paul Horsman, Greenpeace's man in charge of oil spills, a marine biologist by training.

Our first sighting is on a tiny beach with just a lick of sand. On it sits about an 8ft (2.4m) smear of deep metallic red, the colour of a New Orleans Sazerac cocktail. But the coast-guard arrive in their fan boat and tell us to move away. "You can't land!" they hail us. We don't want to land, just to film. They move their boat in between us and the beach so we can't. It's the best stroke of luck we have.

Forced to move off, we go towards a line of rocks and artificial jetty, designed to keep debris from the open sea drifting into the shipping land. It is spotted with splotches of light brown stains.

Paul Horsman, wearing an orange jumpsuit, wellies and blue gloves, is soon down on his hands and knees, scooping up great globules of the stuff from between the rocks. It looks as if he's dipped his hands into melted chocolate.

"What I've got in my hands is some of the oil, it's very thick, it's very fresh, it's viscous material. It's a clear indication it is spreading. We are working at the fringes of knowledge here. You know, we have a 40-year history of working with oil spills. We know they have a long-term impact on the environment. As far as this one is concerned, it's the first time it has spread in such a wide direction in such deep water. I would say there is a massive experiment going on in the Gulf of Mexico, the results of which we have no idea."

Just before heading back, we investigate another beach on the tiny strip of coast line that accompanies the Mississippi all the way to its final destination. As before, there are splashes and patches. As we get close, we can see globes and tendrils of brown stuff floating in the ocean, like refugees from a lava lamp. Then the Greenpeace cameraman, Carlos, starts shouting: "There, over there: there's masses of it, can't you see?" Sure enough, behind the tall reeds, there are splashes of oil trapped in a pool, a rich dirty gumbo dripping down the sandy bank. It is what we think is the first landfall of the liquid crude.

Greenpeace, of course, is a pressure group, and they want people to switch away from carbon-based energy. They are using this accident to campaign for their wider cause. But does Paul Horsman think this accident really is a game changer?

"In an era where we are meant to be switching away from fossil fuels, the fact that the oil industry is encouraged by governments to expand into the frontiers, and when you are pushing the frontiers like the deep oceans, like the Arctic, like the tar sands in Canada, you are going to have accidents. It is time that the oil industry and government recognise that we have to shift away from fossil fuels. You don't get oil spills from wind farms."

A colleague asks a good question: the Three-Mile Island accident put an end to the expansion of the nuclear industry for a generation. Is this comparable? Paul says that it's different: people want to be able to switch the light on, they don't care where the power is coming from. If they want to fill up their SUV, it has got to be oil at the moment. So I ask him if his aim is realistic.

"No-one pretends that the oil is going to switch off tomorrow. We are going to have to use oil in reduced amounts over the coming years, and one of the ways to get to the reduced amounts is to push the oil industry to say, so far and no further, this is one drill too far."

For all the sound and fury from the Obama administration, there has been no definite change of heart about deep-sea drilling, no recantation of his move closer towards the Sarah Palin "drill, baby, drill" attitude in January's state of the union. We still have to see whether spill, baby, spill will make a difference.

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Louisiana

Remember President Obama saying he was going to pursue BP "aggressively"? Remember him talking of the "ridiculous spectacle" of the companies involved in the spill making excuses on the hill?

The aggression hasn't lessened as BP tentatively proclaims the success of its plan to suck up the oil and gas spilling out of the ruptured pipeline into a storage ship.

First the secretaries for the interior, Ken Salazar, and homeland security, Janet Napolitano, sent a stern letter demanding to know if BP really meant what it said when it promised to pay all the costs.

Now another barbed statement has followed.

"This technique is not a solution to the problem, and it is not yet clear how successful it may be. We are closely monitoring BP's test with the hope that it will contain some of the oil, but at the same time, federal scientists are continuing to provide oversight and expertise to BP as they move forward with other strategies to contain the spill and stop the flow of oil. We will not rest until BP permanently seals the wellhead, the spill is cleaned up, and the communities and natural resources of the Gulf Coast are restored and made whole."

For the moment, BP is taking it on the chin. But I wonder if there will be a reaction to the continued assault, and whether it makes other big companies nervous...

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Weather forecasts are suggesting that winds may blow the oil slick lurking off the Gulf of Mexico to shore this weekend.

President Barack Obama is doing his best to make sure that the wave of blame that is bound to follow does not lap against the doors of the White House. He has said:

"I saw first-hand the anger and frustration felt by our neighbors in the Gulf. And let me tell you, it is an anger and frustration that I share as president. And I'm not going to rest or be satisfied until the leak is stopped at the source, the oil in the gulf is contained and cleaned up, and the people of the Gulf are able to go back to their lives and their livelihoods."

Then, he turned his attention to the companies which were operating the rig, and whose senior staff seemed to blame the accident on failures by others:

"I know BP has committed to pay for the response effort, and we will hold them to their obligation. I have to say, though, I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings into this matter. You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else. The American people could not have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn't."

BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, has responded:

"We absolutely understand and share President Obama's sense of urgency over the length of time this complex task is taking. We want to thank the president and his administration for their ongoing engagement in this effort."

"For too long, for a decade or more, there has been a cosy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill. It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies. That cannot and will not happen any more."

The hurt that disasters inflict on the people directly in their path is more important than the harm done to political reputations. But no American political operator can be insensitive to the huge damage done to Mr Bush's reputation by the perception that he was insensitive, tardy and out of touch in dealing with Hurricane Katrina.

President Obama has got in trouble in the past for playing it too cool, reacting pragmatically and intellectually rather than channelling the emotions of his country. Now he is taking no chances. This is a disaster but he is trying to ensure it is not his disaster.

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Did the hint of a smile play on Hillary Clinton's lips as she spoke of the many differences in American politics that had to be "worked through"?

She was answering a question from my colleague James Robbins about whether she was worried that a coalition government in Britain would not be a stable partnership.

Perhaps she was thinking that the mild jibes between Clegg and Cameron during the election didn't really bear comparison to the torrid grudge match between her and the president a couple of years ago.

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Politicians from the City of the Angels of doing the devil's work, introducing Nazi-style laws. The conflict is of course about illegal immigration, in a state where new proposals are rubbing hard the old sore of racial discrimination.

nearly 11 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, with roughly seven million of them from Mexico. In Arizona, many white residents blame illegal Mexican immigrants for bringing the killings and kidnappings of the drug wars north to their state. When I was in Arizona recently, admittedly at a Sarah Palin rally, I found the concern outweighed any other among the audience.

The governor of Arizona has just signed into law . This comes hard on the heels of a law that will force police to ask for proof of citizenship or legal residence from anyone they stop, if officers have reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally. They could be detained if they don't have their papers.

Some say this inevitably leads to people who look Mexican being singled out: racial profiling. There was talk about boycotts before Los Angles, where 48% of the population is Hispanic, put its money where its mouth is. The Los Angeles measure only threatens roughly $8m worth of business, but it is a symbolic stand against a law that council members compared to Nazi legislation that preceded the . said, "Los Angeles is the second-largest city in this country, an immigrant city, an international city. It needs to have its voice heard. As an American, I cannot go to Arizona today without a passport. If I come across an officer who's having a bad day and feels that the picture on my ID is not me, I can be ... deported, no questions asked. That is not American."

Dealing with illegal immigration is a , to the grave disappointment of Hispanic supporters, many of whom want an amnesty.

Everyone in the US bar Native Americans is descended from immigrants, willing or unwilling. But who should be here now is a tricky subject in a changing country. It is not just from Florida in the east to California in the west, it is on the bus I take to work in the morning in Washington and in areas of New York and Chicago that you hear more Spanish than English. It makes some of those descendants of earlier immigrants very uncomfortable.

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President Barack Obama has spoken in glowing terms about the new British prime minister as someone he has met and found to be a "smart, dedicated and effective leader".

He was speaking at a news conference with Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, where both men were doing their best to mend some seriously broken fences.

Mr Obama went on to say that David Cameron had raised the subject of Afghanistan himself in yesterday's phone call, telling the US president that he was committed to the joint strategy.

The president added that he was confident the new British government would recognise the importance of supporting President Karzai.

Doubtless we will hear more in a similar vein when the UK's new Foreign Secretary William Hague visits Washington on Friday and meets Hillary Clinton. They last met a couple of months ago and after that meeting Mr Hague told me he had reassured the secretary of state that he wanted a strong relationship with the European Union.

As for the less-than-special relationship between Presidents Obama and Karzai, the two men today fell over themselves to be nice. Mr Obama acknowledged tension, setbacks and disagreements between the pair but said they had been "simply overstated".

Mr Karzai said that the disagreements of the last few months reflected the depth of the relationship. Neither man, at least while I was watching, spoke the word "corruption".

This love-in may just be the latest phase in an up-and-down relationship, but the big issue that the US and the new British government both must face is that nothing they say or do appears to alter or improve the governance of Afghanistan.

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I was watching live pictures of David Cameron walking into No 10 when we were told that President Obama was about to phone him. That's pretty quick. The phone call was also an instant invitation: the president said he and Michelle wanted to invite Mr Cameron and Samantha to Washington in July.

The two men will have already met a little to the north of here, in Canada at the G8 and G20 in June. Remember how long Gordon Brown had to hang around before getting an invite.

It may be that the president likes the cut of the new man's jib. But I tend to think that the White House has learnt that the British can be touchy allies, and it costs nothing to be nice. Mention the special relationship and the White House tends to groan. They still remember the fuss about the president only managing to squeeze in a meeting with Gordon Brown while walking through the kitchen of a New York hotel.

In the call to the new prime minister, the president lavished praise on the special relationship, talking about his deep and personal commitment to it, that the United States had no closer friend and ally than the United Kingdom, and how it was a bond that lasted for generations and across party lines, and which he hoped would thrive.

All this may be so, but the president's people also know the British press get awfully upset if they don't hear some such reassurance at regular intervals. It is one of those curious things about the president that while his whole foreign policy is based on the idea that the world needs to be reassured of America's friendly intentions, he doesn't seem to have particularly warm relationships with any foreign leader.

In that respect he's almost a mirror image of George W Bush, who didn't seem to care what people thought of his policy but was keen to slap backs and exchange quips. Perhaps Obama thinks it's time he had a chum on the world stage.

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The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico sits ominously off the American coast, growing steadily day by day. , shredded tyres and human hair in the leak to block the hole. It hardly sounds reassuringly high tech. But there's been plenty of technical detail in Washington as three companies try to explain what went wrong. Two Senate committees are hearing the evidence. In simple language, it's a blame game.
While all sides say there can be no definite conclusion about the cause of the tragedy, seems to blame a process carried out by Halliburton:

We are looking at why the blowout preventer did not work because that was to be the fail-safe in case of an accident. The blowout preventer is a 450-ton piece of equipment that sits on top of the wellhead during drilling operations. All of us urgently want to understand how this vital piece of equipment and its built-in redundancy systems failed.

Over the past several days, some have suggested that the blowout preventers (or BOPs) used on this project were the cause of the accident. That simply makes no sense. The attention now being given to the BOPs in this case is somewhat ironic because at the time of the explosion, the drilling process was complete.

In other words, over to you BP. Even if you don't quite get the relationship between blowout preventers and cement plugs it is pretty clear no-one wants to say it is their fault. There's a lot of money at stake and President Obama is pressing for new laws that would raise the limit on what companies must pay out.

He's also decided to split into two the government organisation with responsibility for the oil industry. At the moment the oversees safety and collects billions of dollars for leasing the operations. For years, many have accused it of being too cosy with industry. The president seems determined that even if the oil continues to spread, the political consequences will be kept within firm boundaries.

The Senate session has now halted for a break. I'll be back with more if it's worth it.

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Get Shorty?

Roe v Wade. Brown v Board of Education. In the United States the names of Supreme Court cases are shorthand for history. Those cases pointed the country in a different direction on abortion and civil rights, respectively, one protecting women's right to choose abortion and the other throwing out "separate but equal" institutional racism.

Whether Supreme Court justices are conservative or liberal matters as much as the law. The president today picked 50 year-old Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens, who announced his retirement last month shortly before his 90th birthday. So she might, if confirmed by the Senate, influence the direction of the country for decades to come.

President Obama made it quite clear in one sense that Kagan was a political pick.
He said her "understanding of law, not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page, but as it affects the lives of ordinary people, has animated every step of Elena's career". He added that cases she had fought as solicitor general, like that attempting to stop corporations spending more on elections, made a point about her priorities.

"I think it says a great deal about her commitment to protect our fundamental rights, because in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens," the president said.

Kagan started out clerking for , the civil rights campaigner and first black Supreme Court justice, who nicknamed her "Shorty". There is little doubt she is on the liberal side of the great divide.

In the current fractious political climate in Washington she might get a hard time when the Senate comes to conformation hearings. Some will object that she has never been a judge. The Washington Post headline "High court nominee never let lack of experience hold her back" does not inspire confidence.

But will Republicans start a "Get Shorty!" campaign? Some will object at her fighting as dean of Harvard law school to keep military recruiters off campus because of the ban on gay people serving openly in the military. But they also note she went out of her way to hire more conservatives and to listen to their views.

She hasn't pronounced on the hottest of hot button issues: abortion and guns. She has backed the Bush administration's detention without trial of foreigners accused of terrorism. Some conservatives feel that while she is a liberal she's not as liberal as many other possible picks. Indeed, those on the other side of the .

One interesting aside: Kagan is Jewish and if she is confirmed, in Obama's America, there will be no White Anglo-Saxon Protestant on the Supreme Court, indeed no Protestant of any hue or background.

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The British embassy in Washington hosted a splendid party on election night, complete with red, blue and yellow cocktails and a giant plasma TV screen showing the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ results programme.

But I can't really say America is agog watching our most exciting election in decades. The president's spokesman has said it is "a bit fascinating" and, more importantly, that the US will work closely with who ever is elected. This White House gets very bored by the British media's obsession with the special relationship and I don't get the feeling that the exact flavour of the government will make too much difference.

Personalities are fascinating and do matter hugely in politics on occasions. The chemistry between Maggie and Ronnie, Blair and Bush did certainly create a reaction, if not new policy compounds. But much of the day-to-day specialness of the UK-US relationship takes place between military and intelligence contacts on a daily basis. If there are no policy changes - and there won't be - these will not suffer the slightest hiccough of a hiatus.

The one thing this administration is a little concerned about is the suggestion that the conservatives are hostile to the European Union, and the Conservative's shadow foreign secretary William Hague reassured Hillary Clinton on this point months ago. American eyes are fixed on Europe at the moment and the president has phoned German Chancellor Angela Merkel twice in the last few days, urging her to take swift action on the Greek debt crisis. They will be hoping the latest package will stop the contagion spreading.

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The fear of the "enemy within" is as old as history, but it is what adds a frisson of fear to the arrest of Faisal Shahzad in connection with the Times Square bomb plot.

He was born in Pakistan and spent five months there recently, but last year became an American citizen.

Of course, in any country, in any city, there would be a sense of shock if a potential car bomb, however bungled and amateurish, was found in a major city. But in America, in New York, the alarm is greater, because of 9/11 and because of the determination after that murderous assault that the United States would never again be attacked on its own soil.

Those of us who have lived with IRA bombs in the background to our daily lives know that that can be an aspiration, but not a promise any politician can keep. Particularly if the suspected enemy is a fellow citizen.

President Barack Obama has said that Americans should not live in fear, or be cowed. So far, there have been none of the political mutterings that followed Fort Hood and the underpants incident (or at least I haven't spotted them) and so maybe it is only a matter of time before the point-scoring starts up again. Or maybe the US is learning that with all the vigilance, the best intelligence, the tightest security, you can never eliminate all risk, and that the unwitting allies of terrorists are those who want America to be terrified.

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President Ahmadinejad of Iran says nuclear weapons are "disgusting and shameful", a danger to the countries that have them.

We have to assume this is an indirect denial that he is on the verge of developing such a weapon. Or perhaps having a kit of parts isn't quite as disgusting.

Anyway, he revels in tweaking the tail of his reluctant hosts, the United States.

He is the only head of state who has turned up for the first day of this month-long .

That in itself is seen by some as barefaced cheek when the West believes his country is trying to make a nuclear weapon.

When the head of the said he was unable to confirm that all Iranian nuclear material was used in peaceful activities, Mr Ahmadinejad grinned broadly.

His speech - or perhaps I mean lecture - was pure theatre. Studded with pious references, it was a stern warning about the evils of nuclear weapons.

He didn't directly say Iran wasn't developing them, just that they were terrible.

He said that their sole purpose was to annihilate all human beings, that they were "a fire against humanity", their production and possession was a risk to the country that had them and the possession of nukes should be seen, not as a source of pride but as disgusting and shameful.

He glancingly mentioned Israel's supposed stockpile but concentrated most of his wrath on the US, which he identified as the only country that had used nuclear weapons and which remained the main incentive for other countries to develop them.

The Germans, French, British and Americans walked out.

But perhaps many other countries here will have some sympathy with his approach.

He is not alone in seeing the old nuclear powers as an arrogant club who believe they have the right to rule.

Whatever the official position, no-one seriously doubts that Israel has nuclear weapons and many countries feel resentful of the fact that the US and its allies aren't at all bothered by this.

There is real purpose in all this.

As the US presses for sanctions against Iran, President Ahmadinejad has come to stir up charges of hypocrisy and double standards.

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