WORSHIPPING THE WICKED
You've all seen the news clips of North Koreans in a state of religious lamentation, grieving their guts out over the death of their dictator Kim Jong-il. Cynics who have never been there claim the tears are fake. Nope, the tears are real. And what's more, all those Norks in mourning believe the entire world mourns with them. They would be stunned literally beyond belief to hear that their Dear Leader was regarded as a little fat nebbish laughingstock for all normal people on the rest of the planet. This was epitomized by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone in the funniest movie of modern times, Team America (TTP October 2004). After Kim throws UN nuclear negotiator Hans Blix ("Hans Brix") into a shark tank where he is ripped to shreds, Kim launches into a song: "I'm so ronery... so sadry and ronery arone..." It's the classic portrayal of Kim Jong-il as a joke - yet Kim Jong-il in reality was a hideously evil ogre, not a joke. He caused the deaths by famine of millions of his countrymen, and forced those left to live in impoverishment and the most brutal tyranny. Why, then, was he worshipped? The answer explains his worship in North Korea, and the electoral strategy of the Democrat Party in America.
BUSH WON AND OBAMA LOST IRAQ
The Iraq war began at 5:46 a.m. on March 19, 2003. It ended Sunday (12/18) when the last convoy of U.S. troops leaving Iraq entered Kuwait. In the 8½ years in between, 4,486 U.S. servicemen and women were killed, as were 316 Allied soldiers, and somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Iraqis. "I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Saturday (12/17). Hours after Mr. Panetta left Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, a Shia, arrested the bodyguards of the Sunni vice president, triggering a political crisis. "The decision to abandon Iraq entirely will stand as one of the monumental strategic follies of the 21st Century," Frederick Kagan , an architect of the 2007 surge strategy which brought apparent victory, predicted Monday (12/19).
THE ANTIDOTE TO CAPITALISM IS CAPITALISM FOR REAL
The anti-capitalist of the "Occupy" movement have a point: capitalism is proving unfair. But I would like to try to persuade them that the reason is because it is not free-market enough. The market, when allowed to flourish, tears apart monopoly and generates freedom and fairness better than any other human institution. Today's private sector, by contrast, is increasingly dominated by companies that are privileged by government through cozy contract, soft subsidy, convenient regulation, and crony conversation. That is why it is producing such unfair outcomes. For example, the finance industry upon which the Occupiers focus their fury, are protected from upstart competition by high regulatory barriers to entry, and handles the supply and demand of a good - money - that is priced by government fiat. For doing so, it pockets big bonuses even when arranging the issuance of bonds to pay for the bailing out of itself. It may be called capitalism, but it's not a free market, capitalism for real.
A POSTER CHILD FOR OBAMA-STYLE CRONY CORRUPTION
On orders from the White House, the Navy has purchased 450,000 gallons of a biofuel mix for its aviation fuel for about $16 a gallon. JP-5, the normal fuel for jet aircraft, sells for less than $4 a gallon. A fermented algae biofuel sold by the California firm Solazyme for $26 a gallon was mixed with oil products to bring the overall price down to four times the going rate for jet fuel. The mixing took place in a Louisiana plant built in part by a $21.8 million grant Solazyme received from President Barack Obama's stimulus bill. The board member geniuses who named the company thought they were being so clever with a combination of "solar" and "enzyme." It never dawned on them that instead of pronouncing it sola-zyme, it could be pronounced so-lazy-me. So-Lazy-Me is a perfect name for a company that's a poster child for Obama-style corrupt crony capitalism, don't you think?
THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE: MORE GOVERNMENT SPENDING KILLS JOBS
Do increases in government spending increase or decrease the number of jobs? Conventional wisdom is they will increase jobs, and a few left-wing economists, such as Paul Krugman of the New York Times, frequently are trotted out by reckless politicians and some in the news media to argue that we need more government spending in order to create jobs. If this were true, we should be able to see it in the historical evidence, so let's look at the numbers. Government spending grows each year, but what is relevant is whether it is increasing or decreasing as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) and how it relates to the percentage of the adult labor force at work. As can be seen in the chart below , since 1929 there is an inverse relationship between increasing the size of government and job creation.
HALF-FULL REPORT 12/16/11
When someone asks, "Do you want the good news or the bad news?", which do you choose to hear first? I always choose the bad to get it over with, so that's what the HFR is doing today. Bearer of the bad news is economist David Malpass, whose nail-on-the-head analysis of the economic/political mess we're in - And The Crisis Winner Is? Government - appeared in this morning's (12/16) Wall Street Journal. Malpass is making it unavoidably obvious: The 2010 Republican House Majority under John Boehner has been worthless. He is also making it painfully obvious that the Tea Parties are as worthless as the Boehner Republicans. They have accomplished exactly nothing in Washington. Nothing. Nada, zilch, zero. What a flame-out. Evil always triumphs when good people do nothing, and they are doing nothing. So brace yourselves for the longest year of your lives: 2012. More joblessness, more economic decline, more deficit spending, more government intrusion into everyone's life and business, more anger and parasite demands from the Moocher Class, more demonization of the Producer Class, with the Grin of Evil that inhabits the White House laughing in our faces 24/7. Okay, okay, okay, okay, thanks for the downer, Jack, just what I needed at the end of the week - so what's the good news?
YOU GET ONE GUESS WHY DEMOCRATS HATE VOTER ID
The state chairman of Indiana's Democratic party resigned Monday (12/12) as a probe of election fraud in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary widened. State law requires a presidential candidate to gather 500 valid signatures in each county to qualify for the ballot. Barack Hussein Obama may not have met it. Investigators think 150 of the 534 signatures the Obama campaign turned in in St. Joseph County were forged. Measures to guard against vote fraud are racist Republican plots to disenfranchise minority voters, Democrats say. Republicans "want to literally drag us back to Jim Crow laws," said Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-FL, chair of the Democratic National Committee. Now why would she say this? You get one guess.
MOSLEMS IN THE NEWS
These days, we're constantly being subjected to news reports of Moslem antics in various parts of the world. This steady drizzle increased to a downpour over the past week, a global deluge of Islamic weirdness. Here's a sample of examples: Gujranwala, Pakistan. (Gujranwala is Pakistan's sixth largest city with 2.5 million.) On December 12, the Pakistan Express Tribune reported that a local villager, Asif Ali Babar murdered his mother for refusing to force her 12 year-old daughter (and thus his sister) to marry his brother-in-law in a "vani" settlement. Vani is the Islamic practice of selling a daughter in a child marriage as a means of settling a dispute between two families. Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Over a million British tourists come to this Red Sea resort a year (and more from other Western countries). Tourism is the only hope for recovery of the Egyptian economy devastated by the chaotic overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last February. Nonetheless, Islamic fundamentalists who are winning political power in the current elections announced today (12/15) that they intend to ban bikinis and booze at Sharm el-Sheikh and other Western tourist watering-holes. Oh, and the beaches must be separated into men and women only areas. This way, the fundies say, Westerners can "enjoy a vacation without sins." What fun.
TERRORIST SUPERHIGHWAY
President Obama deserves credit for authorizing the execution of Osama bin Laden and for significantly intensifying the drone campaign against terrorists. He's largely stopped romanticizing the Palestinians; has recognized that Putin made an ass of him; and has even hinted that he might stand up to China on some issues. But even if he turns into a combination of Ike, Reagan and Carl von Clausewitz in the coming months, his administration's foreign-policy record will forever be defined by his disastrous rush to leave Iraq - then brag about it. Does anybody at the White House look at a map? I realize that, thanks to the left's death-grip on our education system, we've stopped teaching trivial subjects like geography in favor of gender studies, but you don't have to be able to name all 17,000 islands belonging to Indonesia to recognize that simply quitting Iraq opens a terrorist superhighway straight from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, to Lebanon, Hezbollah, northern Israel and the eastern Mediterranean.
THE DENOUEMENT OF THE DEBT CRISIS
It became increasingly clear last week how the debt crisis will end - and it is not going to be comfortable. The latest phony solution is for the large, "responsible" countries to demand more fiscal responsibility from the smaller and purportedly "less responsible" countries. In Europe, Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy are demanding that other European states give up some of their sovereignty and agree to strict limits on their deficit spending. President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, as well as British Prime Minister David Cameron, have been lecturing the European Union about being more fiscally responsible. How odd and hypocritical, based on their own behavior. The simple fact is that most democracies are unable to police their own fiscal behavior, let alone the behavior of other countries. As a result, the denouement of the debt crisis is upon us. Here is what we are facing.