HALF-FULL REPORT 12/18/08
There hasn't been an HFR since November 4 since it's too depressing to raise a glass that's completely dry and empty. Lately, however, so much fun stuff has been filling the HFR full liter stein that it's like the Munich Oktoberfest in December. Let's start with the biggest silver lining of November 4: we didn't end up with President Pain-in-the-ass McCain. Once again, he reminded us this week of what an insufferable jerk he is. The only reason he got the nomination is because the Stupid Party allows Democrats to vote in its primaries. It's such a relief we never have to pay any attention to him ever again. Jindal-Palin 2012! Next we move to Blagogate, which is serving to bring into clear focus that corruption is the Democrat Party's middle name - and that for the next four years we'll have a Chicago White House, the operations of which will be run by Blago buddy Rahm Emmanuel... ... Now on to the substantial benefits of the US/global recession. ... We'll close this edition of the HFR by raising a glass of sacramental wine to a great American patriot and founder of the modern conservative political movement, Paul Weyrich.
TEMPERING SCHADENFREUDE WITH CAUTION
The collapse of oil prices is having a devastating impact on our enemies in Iran and Venezuela, and our sometimes enemies in Russia. The Iranian economy was a mess even when oil prices were high. The mullahs maintain a tenuous hold on power through massive subsidies for food and energy, subsidies they can no longer afford to pay now that oil revenues are a third of what they were in the summer. Hugo Chavez's situation is even more dire. Germany's Deutsche Bank estimated in October Venezuela needed an oil price of $95 a barrel to keep its budget in balance. Venezuela had food shortages and raging inflation before oil prices collapsed. If Mr. Chavez has to cut subsidies -- as he must -- he could be toppled in a matter of months. But except for Venezuela -- where nothing but good can come from Mr. Chavez' misery -- we should temper our schadenfreude (pleasure in the misfortune of others) with caution. Because desperate circumstances cause desperate men to do desperate things.
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT YOU CAN GIVE A FRIEND
Obviously - it's a gift subscription to To The Point! It certainly has the best value-to-cost ratio of any alternative. And you don't have to go to a store, search aimlessly for something cool, gift-wrap it, or undergo any other hassle. Just a minute to fill out the info form at TTP Gift Subscriptions and you're done. You can of course go the whole nine yards and pop for a full year at $95. That would have to be for a really good friend! Or you could opt for the most economical route, a single month for $9.99. There's a really attractive third choice, that we've just made available in time for Christmas: three months for $24.99. You know the value of To The Point for yourself. Why not provide it to a friend for Christmas - enabling him or her to take refuge in the Oasis for Rational Conservatives as the craziness of 2009 unfolds? There's no better Christmas present you could give a friend than To The Point. Clicking on TTP Gift Subscriptions is all it takes. It's a wonderful way to wish someone Merry Christmas!
DRIVING IN CHINA
When you hear the word "China," if you're like most people the picture most likely to appear in your mind's eye is vast uncountable hordes of people. I've got a different picture, having bounced along so many thousands of kilometers of bad Chinese roads: no people at all.
China is almost half a million square miles bigger than the continental US (the contiguous 48 states without Alaska/Hawaii) - and it is amazing how much of it is desert or high mountain plateaus where hardly anybody lives. And I mean no one, as in empty. I'd estimate that more than half, upwards of two-thirds of China is virtually uninhabited.
That means cramming 1.3 billion people into an area less than one-third of the continental US. People who have made a deal with their Chicom leaders: you get to keep political control and we get to prosper in a growing economy. The deal breaks down if the economy falters - and it is faltering fast.
The engine of China's economy - her exports that we buy - is in steep decline, foreign direct investment is down 36% for 2008, scores of millions of peasants who had found work in cities are now unemployed and headed back to their bleak villages.
China is in trouble - and when dictatorships get in trouble, history shows the option they most often choose to try and save themselves is war. Will China - or will it opt for the alternative that geopolitics is now providing, to take America's place as protector and peacemaker?
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR YOURSELF
One of my fond childhood memories is that whenever we had guests over for dinner, my father would always offer his favorite toast, the famous Spanish one: Salud, amor, y pesetas - y el tiempo para gozarlas. (May you have) Health, love, and wealth - and the time in which to enjoy them. It is appropriate that the most important of this triumvirate comes first - health. When we are young, it is easy to take natural good health and vitality for granted - and it becomes progressively less easy as we get old. Which it is why it is wise to start preserving one's health when young (just as it is wise then to start saving money). I'm 65 now and as you know, 12 days ago (12/05) underwent serious abdominal surgery. My doctors are amazed at how rapidly I am recuperating. One reason for this is that I have taken nutritional supplements in "life extension" amounts for over 30 years. Another is that I am taking specific nutritional formulas to promote healing and recovery. Almost exclusively, they are formulas designed by famed life extension scientists Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw - dear friends for 40 years - and produced by our mutual friend Will Block's company Life Enhancement. I think that such nutrition is the best Christmas present you could give to yourself.
SUING HENRY PAULSON
The insurance giant AIG has lately become the poster child for corporate risk-taking, mismanagement and greed. Its unimaginably large losses, rooted in insurance it extended to financial companies engaged in subprime mortgage-backed transactions, have destroyed both AIG's corporate reputation and balance sheet. Indeed, but for the fact that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - who during his days running Goldman Sachs had extensive ties to AIG - deemed the insurance firm "too large to fail," the company would surely have gone under by now. One result of Mr. Paulson's nationalization of AIG is that all of us taxpayers are now owners of a company that promotes Moslem Shariah law - the brutally repressive, totalitarian theo-political-legal program of authoritarian Islam. It turns out that AIG has a subsidiary specializing in takaful¸ insurance products that are "Shariah-compliant." Fortunately, an important legal initiative has just been launched aimed at blocking Secretary Paulson and the Federal Reserve Board from engaging in this sort of unconstitutional behavior via Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF) and other commercial transactions.
BLAGO AND OBAMA
What does Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have to trade for a lighter sentence? Pondering this question is, I suspect, keeping many prominent people in Chicago awake nights. Mr. Blagojevich is accused of conspiring to sell government favors for personal benefit. But his great crime, in the eyes of many politicians, is that he has made "pay to play" all too easy for ordinary people to understand and too ugly for them to ignore. "Hot Rod" Blago tried to sell Barack Obama's seat in the U.S. Senate. He held up an appropriation for a children's hospital to extort a $50,000 contribution from a hospital executive. He tried to have journalists at the Chicago Tribune fired for writing editorials critical of him. The FBI has Mr. Blagojevich on tape, incriminating himself in vulgar, profane language. Hot Rod's brazen overreach is shocking, which is one reason why this scandal is likely to have longer legs than any since Monica Lewinsky's trysts with President Bill Clinton. The other big reason why this scandal has legs is, of course, the relationship between Hot Rod and the president-elect.
BIBI AND OBAMA
The "international community" is eagerly anticipating the incoming Obama administration's policy toward Israel. It is widely assumed that as soon as he comes into office, Mr. Obama will move quickly to place massive pressure on the next Israeli government to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the interests of advancing a “peace process” with the Palestinians and the Syrians. Obama's team, like its supporters in the international foreign policy establishment, is dismayed by the Israeli opinion polls that show that Likud, led by Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, is favored to win February 10's general elections by a wide margin. In the coming contest between Bibi and Obama, it is important to recall that one of Netanyahu's most difficult challenges during his tenure as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 was handling his relations with the hostile Clinton administration. From the moment Netanyahu was elected until the moment he left office, the Clinton administration's Israel policy was devoted entirely to bringing down his government. It is likely that the Obama White House will duplicate these efforts against a Likud government.
ATLAS IN AMERICA
Insanity has its consequences. Every day now, another consequence of America's insanity - and I mean that literally - of November 4 becomes apparent. It's funny to see the MSM frantically trying to disconnect Zero from Blago, as the dim bulb in the brains of those who voted for him starts to shine a glimmer of light on his corruption. Insanity and stupidity usually go together (the evil genius is a Hollywood myth, rare in reality). And when Atlas shrugs, it makes a lot of stupid people go nuts. That's what's happening in Greece this week. After all the unending ever-increasing assaults on entrepreneurial capitalism by Washington for decades, November 4 has turned out to be the last straw. Electing Zero is what it took for Atlas to shrug in America, with one result the huge increase in unemployment since the election. Massive job losses are only the start of bad news in 2009. Zero hasn't a clue of how to create wealth. Like all liberals, he only thinks of how to steal it ("redistribution" is just a liberal euphemism for "theft") from those who have created it and give it to those who have not for personal political gain. But what happens when the creators of wealth stop creating, so the thieves no longer can continue stealing and the moochers can no longer live off stolen wealth? That was the question asked and answered by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. There is now the very real possibility that America is going to live through the answer in the coming Zero years - and that what is happening to Greece this week is going to come to our shores starting next year.
IT WON’T BE A NICE WORLD FOR MR. O
Warnings about the foreign challenges the Obama administration will face early on focus on the usual suspects - al Qaeda, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia and, not least, the global solvency crisis. While each of these issues demands serious attention, the crises abroad that shocked, consumed or defined a succession of presidencies came "out of the blue." Focused on ending our Indochina war, Richard Nixon was blindsided by an oil-price shock (thanks to our eternal buddies, the Saudis). Jimmy Carter literally woke up to find the Soviets in Afghanistan - and our embassy staff held hostage in Iran, a collapsed ally. Ronald Reagan faced the Beirut Marine-barracks bombing. Somalia panicked Bill Clinton; Rwanda embarrassed him - and the rise of al Qaeda paralyzed him. W got 9/11. For Mr. Obama, too, the first international crisis could be something that not one of us foresees (although, as always, events will seem obvious in hindsight). But there are also a number of potential crises hiding in broad daylight - and ignored.