If after 17 months of turmoil during which you spent upwards of $50 million, and have only the taste of wormwood and gall, you should be more careful about the fights you pick. The news media downplayed the blow labor unions and Democrats suffered Tuesday (6/05).  "Walker survives recall in Wisconsin," read the headlines in most newspapers, the Chryons on the cable news channels.  Yeah.  And Reagan edged Mondale, Nixon nipped McGovern, LBJ slipped by Goldwater.  The Dems fought dirty.  A caller to a Washington D.C. radio station Tuesday said he was on his way from Michigan in a union-organized four bus caravan to vote in Wisconsin.  In tiny Norway, just north of the Illinois line, a "heavy turnout" customarily is about 300,  resident John  Barrett told a Milwaukee radio station.   By midmorning Tuesday, 1,794 had voted. They still lost.  And they are still doomed.

No problem is so severe that our government can't make it worse. The subprime mortgage crisis plunged our economy into a deep recession, and nearly destroyed our financial system.  The federal government responded by: *Doing absolutely nothing about the Federal National Mortgage Association  (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), the "government-sponsored entities" whose reckless policies and mammoth bankruptcies triggered the crisis. *Bailing out the big investment banks whose reckless behavior worsened vastly the crisis brought on by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. *Punishing community banks that had absolutely nothing to do with the crisis. Government has done next to nothing to prevent the next financial crisis, much to make sure it will be worse.

What government unit has the right to tax you -- your local government, regional or state government, federal government, or multinational organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organization? The reason the question is becoming more important is that rising numbers of politically powerful persons and institutions are calling for global taxes on such things as financial transactions, tobacco, sugar and carbon emissions. Think of the consequences if international organizations gain the ability to tax. The tax-exempt bureaucrats who run these organizations will have an endless list of "unmet needs" and thus will create reasons to have never-ending tax increases. The United Nations is pushing a global financial transactions tax "to offset the costs of the enduring economic, financial, fuel, climate and food crises, and to protect basic human rights." Endless global taxation to finance endless global corruption and fascism.

President Barack Hussein Obama is racing down the trail blazed by Sen. George McGovern, who in 1972 was buried by the largest popular vote landslide in American history. (President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 won a slightly higher percentage of the popular vote than Richard Nixon did in 1972 -- 61.1 to 60.7 -- but LBJ's margin over Sen. Barry Goldwater was smaller, because fewer voted for minor party candidates that year.) Sen. McGovern was too far to the left, swing voters thought, and not very competent -- an image reinforced by the shambles his supporters made of the Democrat national convention. Swing voters are forming the same opinion about President Obama, who sometimes seems as if he's deliberately trying to dismantle the coalition that elected him in 2008.  Here's how he's doing it:

Santa Cruz, California.  This HFR will be a bit truncated, as the Seascape Rendezvous begins in just a few hours.  There's a lot of fun stuff this week, so let's get started. The best international news is the impending death of a monster.  It's from a surprising source - who knew Dan Rather was still functioning?  He's 80 now and has a news show on a small cable channel called HDNet.  On Wednesday (5/30), he reported that Hugo Chavez was in "the end stage" of metastatic rhabdomyosarcoma. This is an especially virulent cancer that once it metastasizes (spreads throughout the body) is quickly fatal.  Chavez's government has been quite secretive about what type of cancer he has, refusing to disclose any details.  If Rather's source is accurate, Chavez may indeed be dead within a month or two.  And then there will be blood.  Castro will see to that.... More enjoyable int'l news:  Iran has been Flamed.  On Monday (5/28), the discovery of a massive new computer virus dubbed Flame was announced.  Like Stuxnet only 100 times bigger (20GB vs. 200KB), it targets computers in Iran - and Palestinian Arab computers in Israel's so-called West Bank.  Flame is not just copying massive amounts of Iranian data, it's wiping out entire hard drives. Wonder who could have designed it... that its unidentified programmers did no coding from sundown Fridays to sundown Saturdays in Israel's time zone might be a clue.