For many, it was evidence Newt Gingrich is too reckless to be president of the United States.  Palestinians are an "invented people," Mr. Gingrich said in an interview with a Jewish cable network last Friday (12/9). That was "the most racist remark I have ever seen," said one Palestinian leader.  The Arab League condemned his remarks as "irresponsible and dangerous." Mr. Gingrich is a "bomb thrower," former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said during the GOP presidential debate Saturday (12/10). But Mr. Gingrich isn't wrong about the Palestinians, Mr. Romney conceded. Newt, it turns out, got it right. Maybe because he read Jack Wheeler's Philistines and Palestinians (December 2006) for the history.

Unseasonable cold greeted delegates to the UN conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa Nov. 28.  They were chilled more by the impending collapse of the biggest, most brazen scam in the history of the world. The warnings of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the world faced imminent doom from anthropogenic (man-made) global warming were based on peer-reviewed scientific literature, the IPCC chairman claimed.  But when Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise checked the 18,531 references in the 2007 report, she found 5,587 were newspaper and magazine articles written by non-experts, unpublished doctoral theses, and pamphlets produced by environmental groups. IPCC reports were written by leading scientists, the UN claimed.  Ms. Lafromboise found many of the authors were graduate students selected more for political connections and "diversity" than for expertise.  This explains, in part, why these reports contain so many factual errors. Fraud is a better explanation.

Why didn't I ever think to call Russian dictator Vladimir Putin The Gremlin In The Kremlin?  It took the London Telegraph to come up with the cleverest headline of the week.  At last, Russians are realizing what a punk Putin is, who tries so achingly hard to be a macho-man.  (You know I have personal experience over what a lightweight he is.) ** Meanwhile, the hammering of Newt continues.  What's really gone viral - particularly in Iowa - is this video hit comparing Newt's values to those of Kim Kardashian.  Ouch! ** It's a contest as to who should be the HFR Hero of the Week.  We report, you decide.  ** Now for the HFR Word of the Week.  Rehypothecation.  It's literally a trillion-dollar word.  To understand why, we need to talk about Cameron and Corzine.

It was Roman author Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundas, 23-79 AD) who, in his 37-volume "Natural History," first said the ostrich, when it feels threatened, will bury its head in the sand. Such a maneuver would, of course, do little to protect the ostrich from a predator.  But, the theory goes, it made the ostrich feel better, because it could no longer see the doom descending upon it. Pliny triggered a myth which, 2,000 years later, is still going strong.  He was wrong.  Ostriches don't bury their heads in the sand when a predator threatens.  (Mostly they run away; sometimes they don't:  an ostrich kick can kill a lion.) Well, not wrong in Washington.  Because among the bird-brains in DC -- where ostriches with their walnut-size cranium vastly outnumber hawks and wise old owls -- the most common response to a threat is to pretend it doesn't exist.  As a result, we are slouching toward a war that could go nuclear.

The financial crisis in Europe has resulted in the appointment of new prime ministers in both Greece and Italy, by in reality the Germans and French, rather than through the ballot box in Greece and Italy. This raises the question, "Is it possible to have both a bureaucratic welfare state and a democracy that protects individual liberties?" In the United States, as well as most other countries, the people are increasingly governed and regulated by unelected bureaucrats who create "administrative law." The rise of the Bureaucratic State, at least in the U.S., is only about 80 years old. The number of federal employees grew slowly over the first hundred years of the American Republic so by the time of the first Grover Cleveland administration in the 1880s, there were still fewer than 100,000 federal civilian employees. By 1925, the number had grown to about a half a million, and now there are almost 3 million civilian federal government employees, plus another 17 million state and local government employees. There are two fundamental reasons for this trend: