Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society," while his predecessor on the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall, also correctly noted, "The power to tax is the power to destroy." The American Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence, state as one of their grievances against King George III, that he imposed "taxes on us without our consent." "No taxation without representation" was a rallying cry of the Revolution, and from that time it has been widely agreed that imposition of a tax without the consent of the governed is a form of tax tyranny. President Calvin Coolidge stated it succinctly, "Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery."  (Ronald Reagan admired Coolidge so much he had Coolidge's portrait hung in the Cabinet Room of the White House.) So at what point does taxation move from that necessary for proper government to tyranny?

We should call the HFR this week The Toast Report, because that's what so many folks on the dark side have become in the last few days. Let's start with Obambi.  This is going to be like watching one of those spectacular crash-explosion movie disaster scenes shot in agonizingly slow motion.  One month from tomorrow (April 22) is the Dem primary in Pennsylvania.  Obambi's worshippers in the media will be the guys in the movie scene reaching out in slo-mo and shouting noooooo!, knowing all the while they can't prevent the inevitable.  He is going to be destroyed by Mrs. Clinton in PA.  Blue-collar Budweiser Democrats will not vote for someone who takes his kids to a church that goddamns America. The same is going to happen to him in the North Carolina primary on May 6, except for his winning the huge black vote there.  Then it becomes obvious the Clinton-Obama race is about nothing but race, with Obambi only having the black vote.  At that point, the Dems realize they are truly, truly - in Daniel Henninger's delightful term - Mamet-worded.

This week's HFR is way, way more than half-full - it's overflowing.  The delicious destruction of a Democrat fascist is so orgasmic it can't be confined to an HFR blurb, but deserved its own article:  The Real Spitzer Scandal. The Hillary-Obambi Destruction Derby keeps getting better.  But as we enjoy Obambi having to fire his Israel-hating/Palestinian terrorist-loving advisor Samantha Power for calling Hillary a "monster" (you mean she isn't?  who knew?), and the PIAPS having to fire her advisor Geraldine Ferraro for pointing out that people pay attention to Obambi only because he's black (when everyone knows he's only half-black) - let's focus on the real cause of the mud fight: There's no substantive difference between these two moonbats in terms of political principles or ideology or Big Brother/Big Government programs they both advocate.  Thus the only way to create a difference between them is through personal invective, attack, insult, and smear. So far, even though Her Thighness had to grovel yesterday (3/13) to blacks in apology for Ms. Ferraro's telling the truth, Obambi has definitely been more damaged in the fight so far than she.

There is still time to avoid a recession - a recession being technically defined as two quarters of negative economic growth.   What needs to be done, and can be done in the next 60 days, follows. First, it is important to realize the present economic slowdown was caused by a series of mistakes by the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the administration, and Congress. Many of our government policymakers and politicians still insist it was the other guy's fault and pretend that taking money from one group of taxpayers and giving it to another (a k a, a "stimulus package") will somehow miraculously revive the economy. The administration is guilty of having both proposed and acquiesced to spending that resulted in more costs than benefits to the economy, which has slowed growth. Even though those in the administration cannot suddenly reverse much of the wasteful spending on their own, they can do several things by presidential directive - Executive Orders issued by President Bush -- to make things better immediately.

This week's HFR focuses on the Obamarama - or as Jack Kelly describes him, the guy in an empty suit with a glass jaw.  Naturally, we're all dancing on the bar tables over Hillary's winning Texas and Ohio, ensuring a vicious catfight between her and Obambi from now ‘till Labor Day.  What fun. It turns out, though, that Hillary has a woman on her side who is turning out to be one of her campaign's greatest assets, who just may ensure the Hildebeast's victory over Obambi and her nomination.  Nope, not Gloria Steinem nor Barbra Streisand nor Halle Berry.  I refer, of course, to... *** ...On the international scene, the HFR reports that Jews around the world rioted in violent protest over a British researcher's claims that Moses, the founder of the Jewish religion, was high on psychedelic drugs and hallucinated that he spoke to God on Mount Sinai.

That was the title of a very funny book P. J. O'Rourke wrote a few years ago about Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  And it's very apt advice right now for Colombia's Alvaro Uribe. You knew that Venezuela's coke-head clown dictator was going to find a pretext for war with Colombia a month ago in Wars On The Way.  The Colombian Army's take-out of Chavez's FARC buddy Raul Reyes, a murderous Marxist midget (he was barely over five feet tall) last Saturday (3/01) provided it. Now let's hope Uribe accepts Chavez's offer of war.  For if he does, it's bye-bye, Hugo.

Why do individuals and countries engage in self-destructive behavior? Many books have been written on the topic, but given the U.S. election campaign, it is worth examining why some politicians and other opinion leaders advocate policies contrary to both good theory and empirical evidence. Despite this evidence of success, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to increase the top tax rates, though there is no evidence that raising the top rates will result in any more revenue but there is evidence it will result in slower growth. They can get away with it because voters have had their brains mangled by public education. Since education in almost all countries these days is chiefly in public institutions, except for relatively small numbers of students educated in U.S. private schools and universities, it should come as no surprise that the government employees doing the "educating" are biased toward the public sector and are anti-business.

I have been saving a very special bottle of wine - a 1992 Chateau Vieux French Bordeaux - for a very specific occasion:  to celebrate the death of Fidel Castro.  Looks like I'll be opening it soon - for the best news of the week is Castro's announcing he has one foot in the grave by ending his 49-year run as Cuba's El Jefe Maximo. I chose the vintage not just because 1992 was a great year for French reds, but because I went to Cuba that year.  I told the story a couple of years ago in Cuba Libré.  A meeting with Castro had been set up, at which I intended to tell him the Cuban people would some day urinate on his grave.  He got wind of it and canceled the meeting.  My wife was very relieved. Dagny D'Anconia explained the dictator's slow and awful descent towards demise some time ago in The Partial Assassination of Fidel Castro.  Drawn-out lingering nightmare agony - just the sort of hell a piece of murderous human garbage deserves. What's hilarious is the lib media's portrayal of Raul Castro as a Cuban Mikhail Gorbachev reformer.  Raul is a 76-year old alcoholic who hasn't much longer to go himself.  The army and secret police still run everything, but with Fidel gone the regime has no legitimacy.  Odds will increase for a really bloody revolution.

How much money would the government have to give you and every other American to avoid a recession? You cannot answer because the question contains a false conclusion, and when political arguments are about false conclusions, the wrong policies are pursued. To try to reverse the current economic slowdown, one first must understand the real causes and then try to correct those causes. Many in Congress, the administration, and the Fed have misdiagnosed the problem and then given the wrong medicine -AKA "the stimulus package." There are four government-caused reasons why Washington remains "stuck on stupid" regarding the economy.

Under which recent president do you think the U.S. economy performed best? The policies of Presidents Bush, father and son, and Jimmy Carter clearly did not work as well as Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's. So let's compare their economic performance.  For the numbers show that Democrats can continue "the-Clinton-economy-was-best" ploy only if the Republicans and the news media let them get away with the factual misrepresentation.

At the Winter Rendezvous this weekend in Sarasota, one topic of discussion will be how to make improvements in To The Point, making it even better.  We're jumping the gun this week, and making one many of you have been requesting for a while.  That is to provide a side bar for categories of articles.  Over the next few weeks, we'll be adding categories with links to all the TTP articles on say, Islam, or Mexico, Russia, China, Democrat Fascism, Global Warming, Science, Health, etc. The first one, however, is history.  In the TTP Article Category side bar will be a link to all the articles on the history of various countries and regions of the world.  It's the one many of you have wanted most of all. Here's the list.  There will be more lists to come.

While attention is fixated on Iraq and Afghanistan, the possibility of a number of other wars clearly emerged in the past few days, three in particular. Starting January 30, a total of five undersea telecom cables have been mysteriously cut in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East area.  This is no accident, comrades.  Someone has been slicing them.  Someone with submarines to do the slicing.  Who could that be?  And what would be their target? That's a prelude to war in the Middle East.  How about a war in Europe?  One being promoted by Condi Rice and our State Department in support of Moslem narco-terrorists taking over a Christian country? That would be a region of Serbia called Kosovo. Close to home is a third war on the horizon, between Venezuela and Colombia.

All the smart talk seems to be about a "brokered" Republican convention, with the GOP in a confused mess all through the summer until somebody is finally chosen in Minneapolis in early September. Yet the odds for that are decreasing, and may drastically do so if Romney takes Florida away from McCain next Tuesday.  Huckabee will be history, Giuliani wounded perhaps mortally, all the big conservative guns like Limbaugh will put McCain in the crosshairs, and Mitt Is It for the GOP. The big difference between the GOP and Dem primaries, particularly those of Super Tuesday (2/5) is that most of the former's are winner-take-all, while the latter's are proportional. Thus Hillary could "win" all the primaries from now to June and still not get a majority of delegates.  In fact, with the vicious catfight going on between her and Obama Hussein, that's the likely outcome.  It's the Dems who face a brokered convention, and it is going to be a disaster.