HOW GEORGE SOROS DESTROYED THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states.
That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.
In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.
What happened to the big donkey? Among other things, the Democrats decided to sell their base and their soul to a very bad billionaire and they got a very bad deal for both. Here’s the story.
Join the forum discussion on this postWHAT TRUMP CAN DO ON IRAN RIGHT NOW
Ayatollah Boroujerdi in his prison cell
The great Ayatollah Hossein Boroujerdi is briefly out of Tehran's infamous Evin prison, where he had been held in miserable conditions for a decade.
He is one of those dissidents who are so beloved by the Iranian people that the murderous regime of Ali Khamenei does not dare to put them to death, or even on trial. They routinely torture them instead, and deny them medication for their grave ailments, hoping that they will die of “natural causes.”
When regime security forces went to arrest him, thousands of his supporters protested, blocking miles of highway. Khamenei, Rouhani et. al. still fear those people, ten years later.
He’s out on parole, but don’t think the regime is showing mercy. They typically release prisoners for a few weeks at a time—that way everyone sees the miserable state to which they have been reduced—and then drag them back.
There is something President-elect Trump can do right now.
Donald Trump should invite Ayatollah Boroujerdi to the inauguration.
Such a dramatic move would deliver several important messages:
GERMANY’S HORROR-KURVE
Inflation rage is coming to the boil in Germany. Leaders of the country's prestigious institutes warn that the economy is hitting capacity constraints and risks spiraling into a destructive boom-bust cycle.
In a series of interviews with yours truly they said that the ultra-loose monetary policy of the European Central Bank is now badly out of alignment with German needs. It has begun to threaten lasting damage, and is fast undermining political consent for monetary union.
"The ECB wants to inflate away the debt of the southern European countries. This is a clear conflict of interest with net creditors like Germany," says Clemens Fuest, president of the IFO Institute in Munich.
The tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung leapt on the latest price data, splashing with a "Horror-Kurve" showing inflation soaring to seemingly frightening heights.
An example is the UBS bubble index showing that Munich is now the fifth most expensive housing market in the world, with prices that have "increasingly lost touch with economic fundamentals.”
A LETHAL ABUNDANCE OF CAUTION
Did the authorities, in “an abundance of caution,” take too long to reinstate operations after the tragic shootings in the Fort Lauderdale airport this past Friday (1/06)?
The airport was shut down immediately after the shootings and remained shut for more than 12 hours, even though the shootings were carried out by a lone gunman who had been captured almost immediately.
Passengers who were on planes that had landed but not yet been unloaded were kept on the tarmac for many hours — in some cases, without adequate food, water and lavatories. Some of them were probably suffering health problems and the delay may have done them real damage. Was all of that necessary?
Predictably, some commentators immediately called for more security at airport baggage counters and for more restrictions on guns.
More thoughtful people noted that the costs and inconveniences of more “hardening” of airports and surrounding areas would be counterproductive. Each additional step to make flying (and airports) “appear” safer increases costs, time and inconvenience, causing more and more people to drive — and die — rather than fly.
FAREWELL
HALF-FULL REPORT 01/06/17
"It's over."
Friday afternoon, in accordance with the process required by the Constitution and despite ongoing efforts to delegitimize the election, the new Congress counted the Electoral College’s votes and certified Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.
Now Republicans can get to work keeping their many promises (we shall see). And Democrats can get back to less hypocritical ways of defeating them (yeah, right). Yes, it’s a great start to this new year. Welcome to 2017...
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The President-Elect received his much-vaunted briefing on “Russian hacking” today, in which he learned exactly what we already knew: that Russia (and absolutely everyone else, from America to China to the teenager next door) is constantly trying to hack everything, and that we need ever-improving security against that. Here's the rest of what we know happened...
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Bear in mind, as Donald Trump was just reminded, no one in government, not even Barack Obama, claims that Russia tampered with the vote count. (Though Democrats have succeeded in getting...
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HFR Irony of the Week: Barack Obama is building a wall. Around his new house.
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This week, the Alabama judges are our HFR Heroes of the Week (Serious Edition).
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Jack is in Egypt meeting with President el-Sisi, and will no doubt be back in the saddle next week. Here we go with this week's HFR Boys and Girls!
WE REMAIN AT RISK UNTIL JANUARY 20
Who the Jihadis are afraid of – not Obama!
As I promised, as the days of Obama draw down, the jihadis are stepping up the terror tempo.
They know that there will be no reprisals from the Oahu links, and they fear Trump’s lineup of tough guys in the cabinet, so they’re in a hurry to kill infidels while the killing’s good. Therefore we, along with the other Western nations, are at maximum risk right now, until roundabouts January 20th.
And the killing’s plenty good, isn’t it? Berlin, Zurich, Ankara, Moscow, with a very nasty plot uncovered in Melbourne, and yet another involving terrorists in Detroit, Maryland, and Virginia. Not to mention the ongoing slaughter in Syria, and, on Christmas day, Cameroon.
Indeed, as Christmas arrived we were treated to the spectacle of the bishop of Rome—aka Pope Francis--blaming material misery for the jihadist assault on the West. Thus the first Jesuit pontiff surrenders the moral high ground to his mortal enemies.
Maybe Obama should convert and run for pope.
HOW WE KNOW TRUMP MEANS BUSINESS
Donald Trump really is going to make America great again. It wasn’t just a campaign slogan: Trump is for real—and one of the great pleasures in the coming years is going to be the joy of watching all those pundits who think he’s going to be a disaster being proved wrong again and again.
Nowhere will this be more evident than in his policies on energy and the environment.
I made a trip to Washington just before Christmas to check out the lie of the land. What I wanted to find out was just how serious Trump is about slaying the Green Blob which has caused so much misery and expense in the U.S. and across the world for the last thirty or forty years.
And after a series of private briefings with administration insiders and members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I came back heartened.
Here’s how one of them put it:
“Trump is going to send his tanks into the swamp from Day One. He knows there isn’t time to lose and he knows that every day that passes those tanks are going to get sucked deeper into the slime…” [by ‘the slime’ my anonymous informant meant, of course, the liberal/DC establishment which will do everything in its power to frustrate Trump] “…We’re going to go in fast and we’re going to go in hard. They won’t know what hit them.”
COUNTERING OBAMA THE ANTI-SEMITE
UN Security Council
His abstention allowing the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (12/23) was the first prong of outgoing President Barack Obama’s lame duck campaign against Israel. US Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech five days later (12/28) was the second.
On January 15, stage 3 will commence in Paris. At France’s lame duck President François Hollande’s international conference, the foreign ministers of some 50 states are expected to adopt as their own Kerry’s anti-Israel principles. The next day it will be Obama’s turn. Obama can be expected to use the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day to present the Palestinian war to annihilate Israel as a natural progression from the American Civil Rights movement that King led 50 years ago. Finally, sometime between January 17 and 19, Obama intends for the Security Council to reconvene and follow the gang at the Paris conference by adopting Kerry’s positions as a Security Council resolution. That follow-on resolution may also recognize “Palestine” and grant it full membership in the UN. How can the evil perfidy of this Anti-Semitic President be countered?
A CENTURY OF MARXISM-LENINISM
Human beings can be remarkably dense. The practice of bloodletting, as a medical treatment, persisted despite centuries of abundant evidence that it did more harm than good.
The practice of communism, or political bloodletting as it should perhaps be known, whose centenary in the Bolshevik revolution is reached this year, likewise needs no more tests. It does more harm than good every time. Nationalized, planned, one-party rule benefits nobody, let alone the poor.
The diseases that Marxism-Leninism was intended to treat, poverty and inequality, were ancient scourges just beginning to fade, even in Russia. Higher living standards were starting to reach ordinary people, rather than just the feudal elite, for the first time.
Along came Karl Marx with essentially the opposite suggestion. The progressive left rather suddenly fell in love with the idea of expanding, rather than limiting, state power. Here’s a quick history of Marxist horrors from Lenin to Obama.