A U.S. Coast Guard cutter unleashed cannon fire on the abandoned 164-foot Ryou-Un Maru on Thursday, ending a journey that began when last year’s tsunami dislodged the ship and set it adrift in the Pacific — which it nearly crossed.

Sununu is everywhere these days. On a campaign conference call with reporters last week, he accused Gingrich of “a pattern of anti-principled actions that really irritated his own leadership and produced 88 percent of the Republicans in Congress voting for his reprimand.” On Sunday, the Romney campaign put him up against former Pennsylvania congressman Bob Walker on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where Sununu hit Gingrich for his “$500,000 outstanding bill at Tiffany’s” and warned, “The conservatives that he has turned his back on should recognize the fact that he’s not a conservative.” And this week, Sununu has begun hitting the airwaves on conservative talk radio, telling host Scott Hennen that Gingrich is “not stable.”

Wait, you say, wasn’t al-Qaeda responsible for the embassy bombings?

Romney advisers told me recently that he was planning to stay above the fray and leave the attacks on Perry to the other candidates. But with his precipitous slide in the polls, Romney may no longer have that luxury — assuming the wildfires in Texas are under control enough to allow Perry to attend the debate. Perry has pulled ahead of him in Iowa, South Carolina, Ohio and Nevada (a state Romney’s team had taken as a given), has tied him in California, and holds a double-digit lead over Romney in three national polls.

Rick Perry may have jumped to the front of the GOP pack in national polls, but here in first-in-the-nation New Hampshire Mitt Romney still holds an 18-point lead. When I asked Romney about Perry during a recent campaign swing through the Granite State, he replied, “I don’t know what all of his positions are, you’ll have to ask him . . . I don’t spend a lot of time looking at [other candidates’] positions.”

He left his cowboy boots in Austin, but Gov. Rick Perry brought some Texas straight talk to New Hampshire. “Live free or die, you’ve got to love that,” Perry told an audience in Bedford last week, adding that the state motto reminded him “of a little place down in Texas called the Alamo.” Perry’s promise to make Washington “as inconsequential in your lives as possible” is resonating in libertarian New Hampshire. He has moved into second place here after just a few days in the race, registering 18 percent support among Granite State Republicans.

The failure of any Republican candidate to make the case for vigorous American leadership in the world during last week’s Republican presidential debate has sparked a debate in Washington: Is the Republican Party becoming increasingly isolationist, as Sen. John McCain suggests?