HOW THE ENVIRONMENTAL LOBBY SUPPORTS RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM
The Russian economy is highly dependent on oil and gas exports, and reducing Russian oil and gas exports would be the most direct way to cause pain to the Russian leadership. However, Europe is heavily dependent on Russian gas and oil, particularly gas. The countries in the EU did not need to be in this position, because the EU has plenty of gas reserves that could be economically tapped using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Because of the environmental lobby, though, the EU has allowed itself to become dependent on foreign energy sources -- particularly Russian. Perhaps Peter Foster said it best in Canada's Financial Post on March 8: "Europe's alternative-energy policy is in a shambles. The EU would be even more vulnerable but for a typically unanticipated example of free-market ingenuity: hydraulic fracturing and the boom in oil shale gas. But guess what: Greens are everywhere resolutely opposed to fracking, and nowhere more than in Europe. [L]ike their peace march colleagues half a century ago, they are ultimately dupes for an authoritarian agenda."
HOW UN-AMERICAN IS HARRY REID?
Aging industrialists Charles and David Koch are "un-American," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a speech on the Senate floor Feb. 26. That's an expression we haven't heard much since the early 1950s, when Joe McCarthy was accusing Army dentists, State Department clerks and various and sundry others of being secret Communists. Back then, liberals thought it was vile to call someone "un-American." Some still do. Sen. Reid's screed was "the definition of McCarthyism," said Joe Scarborough, host of the "Morning Joe" program on MSNBC. His guests March 6th agreed. So just who is Un-American here?
HALF-FULL REPORT 03/14/14
Important Announcement: the last section of this HFR is devoted to addressing concerns regarding the New TTP Forum. The theme for the week is Birds of a Hubristic Feather. The shades of Sophocles and Aeschylus are looking up at us from the depths of Hades in sad wonder that humans in power never learn the lesson the Greeks knew so well two and a half millennia ago. Thus we get such marvelously good news this week as Pelosi Galore announcing that Dems Won't Run from Obamacare in Midterms. You're just not going to get a better example of masochistic hubris than that. It's of course the path to electoral disaster in November. Zero could take a different path, but can be supremely confident this will never happen - because Zero is a solipsistic narcissist who lives in Hubris City. In addition, he's ignorant, uneducated, and actually pretty stupid - all his affirmative action Ivy League degrees notwithstanding. He's glib and shrewd and smooth - but not smart. Now,is there anyone on the planet more hubristic than Zero? Why, yes - that would be Vladimir Vladimirovich Pooty-Poot Putin. Oh, look! He's riding a horse without a shirt! Oh! He's so big and tough and strong! Oh, what a pile of horse manure.
IS PUTIN IN A FANTASY WORLD?
Russia risks a wave of capital flight and a shattering economic crisis as the West prepares a package of sanctions over the seizure of Crimea. Chancellor Angela Merkel spelled out the danger for Russia in a speech to the German Parliament yesterday (3/13) that silenced pro-Kremlin voices in her own coalition and left no doubt that Europe is now fully behind the US on punitive measures. "If Russia continues on its course of the past weeks, that will not only be a great catastrophe for Ukraine. It will cause massive damage to Russia, both economically and politically," she said. "None of us wants it to come to this, but we are determined to act. Let me be absolutely clear; the territorial integrity of Ukraine is not up for discussion." The West has threatened visa bans and an asset freeze on individuals as early as next Monday (3/17) unless Russia steps back from the brink on the annexation of Crimea. And that is only the begining. Russia has threatened to retaliate with "symmetrical sanctions" but Tim Ash, from Standard Bank, said it is a one-sided contest that Moscow cannot win. Here's why.
THE POGO PRESIDENCY
Ever hear of a guy named Walt Kelly? He was born in Philly in 1913, moved to California in the 30s to draw Donald Duck cartoons for Walt Disney, and started his own newspaper comic strip in 1949. It featured anthropomorphic animals in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, with the main character named Ponce de Leon Montgomery County Alabama Georgia Beauregard Possum - a dig at the South's pretentious aristocracy. Kelly titled his comic strip after Ponce's nickname - Pogo. If you grew up in the 50s or 60s, you grew up with Pogo, along with an innumerable cast of lovable animal characters (there were almost 1,000 over the years), all poking gentle fun at the human condition. In 1971, two years before his death from diabetes, he published the cartoon for which he is best known. 
This is more frighteningly relevant today than 42 years ago - and the "us" is all of us. There are varying degrees of complicity. At the top, of course, is an Anti-American President who hates his own country. Zero is an affirmative action baby, handed everything on a platter without earning it because of his race and made-up bio. He's our #1 security threat because he doesn't want to defend us, and worse, doesn't know how if he did want to. Bad combo. Which bring us to the real security threat beyond our shores. It isn't Russia, with its one-trick pony economy that can't even get itself above water with oil at $100 a barrel. Putin is all bare-chested bluster, all hat and no cattle. No, the real foreign threat we face is China. I've been going to China since 1979, and as you know, just got back from there again last week. Here are three pictures of the spectacular places we visited that I took with my Panasonic DMC-TZ5 compact camera. There is a particular reason for me to show them to you.
OBAMACARE AND A CARAVAN OF UNICORNS
Obamacare will reduce the earnings of its 300,000 members by up to $5 an hour, said a union which represents chiefly lower wage workers in service industries. Obamacare "threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage," said Unite Here. "The Obamacare website says (my husband and I) would have to pay $8,057.04 a year more to keep the great insurance we have now," said Angela Portillo, a maid at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas. "That's a $3.87 per hour pay cut." Americans who've been hurt by Obamacare outnumber those who say they've benefited from it by more than 2 to 1, according to a Rasmussen poll March 3 and a Gallup poll March 6. Administration officials hold out hope for a rush of signups before the March 31st deadline. I, by contrast, hold out hope my retirement will be financed by the arrival of a caravan of unicorns laden with baskets filled with gold dust. My hope may be the more realistic.
SURVIVING OBAMA
Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg minced few words in discussing the interview that US President Barack Hussein Obama gave him on the eve of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's latest visit to Washington. Speaking with journalist Charlie Rose, Goldberg equated Obama's threat to stop supporting Israel in international forums to the talk of a mafia don. Obama told Goldberg that if Israel doesn't cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, "our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited." He added, "And that has consequences." Obama's statement, Goldberg noted, was a "veiled threat" and "almost up there with, ‘Nice little Jewish state you've got there. Hate to see something happen to it.'" Goldberg saw the interview as Obama's way of showing that he is beginning to abandon the pretense of supporting Israel, now that he no longer faces reelection. In Goldberg's words, "It's not that the gloves are coming off. It's more that the mask of diplomatic language is coming off." Now that he no longer has to concern himself with the wishes of the American public and its representatives in Congress, Obama has dropped the mask of opposition to Iran and forged ahead with a diplomatic process that all but ensures Iran will acquire nuclear weapons. So what can Israel do? Well, here is Priority #1: Israel needs to directly attack Iran's nuclear installations - by covert action as well as through overt military strikes, as required. And Obama be damned.
WHAT HAS CHANGED IN TWO THOUSAND YEARS?
Are you more responsible than your government? If so, what can you do about it? How can you carry fiscal prudence from the kitchen table to the voting booth? If your personal spending rises faster than your income each year, you eventually will go bankrupt. Responsible people understand this and thus refrain from taking on more debt than their income can support. This basic fact is true of individuals, businesses and even governments -- look at Greece and Detroit. President Obama presented his budget proposal for 2015 last week. As the chart below shows, it calls for increasing government spending from $3.6 trillion this year to $5.9 trillion in 2024. Much of this whopping increase is to be funded through more deficit spending -- thus increasing the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio, which is already at a record high for peacetime. There is nothing new about governments overspending and accumulating fatal amounts of debt. A quote attributed to Roman senator Cicero (106-43 BC) warned: "The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced. The arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced if the nation does not want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
OBAMACARE IS BECOMING A NIGHTMARE FOR DEMOCRATS
In the 34 states which will conduct elections for the U.S. Senate in November, voters prefer the Republican candidate, 50 percent to 42 percent, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll March 4. Democrats currently hold 21 of these seats. Republicans need a net gain of 6 to take control of the Senate. Up to 14 Democrats could be vulnerable. To preserve some Democrat scalps, President Barack Hussein Obama announced last week another delay in enforcement of the Obamacare provision requiring cancellation of "substandard" health plans. It will conceal from some Americans for a while the bad news in store for them. But a stay of execution is not the same as a pardon. Mere postponement won't mollify the millions worried about what Obamacare portends for their health insurance policies, their choice of doctors, or their jobs. Obamacare will turn the 2014 and 2016 elections into a nightmare for the Dems. Why, then, won't they do anything about it?
HALF-FULL REPORT 03/07/14
It is always an intensely interesting and educational experience on any visit to China. Now that I'm out, I can talk about it, as everything you do online is monitored - just like in the US (except that you can use an anonymizer like Cryptohippie which is blocked in China). On Saturday, March 01, there was an astonishing terrorist attack at the railway station of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. Six men and two women, wearing masks and all black uniforms of some kind, bearing long knives - no other weapons, just knives - stabbed 29 people to death and wounded well over one hundred. I was not far away at the time, and flew through the Kunming airport the next day. *** What's so totally ridiculous about this two-bit KGB thug Putin seizing Crimea and playing the Russian bear is how our very own President Pussy hasn't the cojones to kick him in his vulnerabilities. *** My friend John Bolton nailed it yesterday (3/06) in his speech at CPAC: "Our biggest national security crisis is Barack Obama." John could not possibly be more spot on. Yet Zero is not only the Number One threat to America's national security. He is the Number One threat to America's economy, to America's freedom, to America's culture, and to America's future. So let's see where Zero and his DemFascist minions may have screwed up this week.