HALF-FULL REPORT 03/21/08

We should call the HFR this week The Toast Report, because that's what so many folks on the dark side have become in the last few days.

Let's start with Obambi.  This is going to be like watching one of those spectacular crash-explosion movie disaster scenes shot in agonizingly slow motion.  One month from tomorrow (April 22) is the Dem primary in Pennsylvania. 

Obambi's worshippers in the media will be the guys in the movie scene reaching out in slo-mo and shouting noooooo!, knowing all the while they can't prevent the inevitable.  He is going to be destroyed by Mrs. Clinton in PA.  Blue-collar Budweiser Democrats will not vote for someone who takes his kids to a church that goddamns America.

The same is going to happen to him in the North Carolina primary on May 6, except for his winning the huge black vote there.  Then it becomes obvious the Clinton-Obama race is about nothing but race, with Obambi only having the black vote.  At that point, the Dems realize they are truly, truly – in Daniel Henninger's delightful term – Mamet-worded.

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That would be David Mamet the famous playwright, who has written a public pronouncement, Why I Am No Longer A ‘Brain-Dead Liberal'.  Mamet has enormous stature in the literary world, so when he announces that he ascribes to Milton Friedman and not Karl Marx, this is a big deal.  So big it might actually cause some liberals to wake up their brains.

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (3/20) notes that Mamet is a "tuning fork for regular-guy sentiment," thus his new thinking is not good for Democrats.  Mamet's plays and screenplays, Henninger also notes, use the f-word so often it could be called the Mamet-word.  If lots of Democrat voters start thinking like Mamet, he concludes, "come November" the Democrat Party "could be Mamet-worded."

Indeed, the Dems have tied themselves up into such a Gordian Knot over their superdelegates, Florida+Michigan disenfranchisement, two candidates viciously tearing each other apart both of whom are unlectable in November, it's really hard to see how they can extricate themselves.  The whole party could be in the toaster with Obambi.

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In the toaster but what about in bed?  Just after the November 2006 elections I wrote How Conservatives Are Going To Get In Bed With Nancy Pelosi – predicting that the strange-bedfellows adage would be proven true over… Tibet.

And sure enough, today (3/21) Nancy Pelosi met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, publicly denouncing Chinese rule and oppression in Tibet. 

Farther to the left than Pelosi (yes that's possible, easily in this case), way farther is a moonbat black race-hustler, Maxine Waters (D-CA).  Yet she and hard-core conservative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) teamed up yesterday offering legislation for a US boycott of the Beijing Olympics over China's tyranny in Tibet.

Tibet being discussed in Monkeys in Tibet, the question for the HFR is:  are the Beijing Olympics toast?

Perhaps not yet, but the toaster's warming up.  As the Taipei Times gloats, the 2008 Games are fast becoming a debacle.  World-class athletes from a variety of countries are refusing to participate because of the harmful air pollution.  A boycott of world leaders over Tibet is brewing.  The Washington Times today called upon President Bush to not attend.

As the boycott threats and protests against the "Genocide Olympics" mount, the Chicoms are realizing how impossible it will be for them to prevent embarrassing demos during the games themselves, how they are in a lose-lose situation – if they permit them protests will explode all over the country, if they brutally hammer them the world press is there to record it.

Note that the Chicom Olympics and the Democrat Convention will both be in August, a long sizzlingly hot month, warm as… toast.  Someone should send the Chicoms and the Dems a Rolling Stones CD, suggesting they listen to their famous song, You Don't Always Get Want You Want.

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Toasted Olympics maybe, but as Jack Kelly explains this week in The Al Qaeda Graveyard, there's no doubt left that AQ is burnt to a crisp in Iraq.

That was made even more clear today (3/21) by reports that foreign Al Qaeda terrorists are fleeing Iraq in droves.

Couple that with Moqtada al-Sadr announcing, "I have failed to liberate Iraq," and has given up fighting America, retreating into seclusion in Iran.

What also failed was the pathetic anti-war protests on Wednesday (3/19), the fifth anniversary of the War in Iraq.  It rained in Washington that day, and it was fun to see a handful – for that's all there was – of soaked Code Pinkers angrily chanting in front of the White House.  Walking past them, I couldn't help saying with a big smile, "Give war a chance."

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Last week's HFR had a teaser about "the coming collapse in commodity prices."  Obviously I should have given more than a teaser, as Bloomberg today (3/21) is saying we're having the "biggest commodity collapse in at least five decades."  Commodity speculators are toast.

It's called "deleveraging."  That's Wall Street jargon for "losing your shirt."  And your pants, with your undies in a very tight twist.  Going out on a borrowed limb to bet on thousand-dollar gold, hundred-dollar oil, a two-dollar euro – well, it's like betting on some shack to be worth millions or a dotcom with vaporware. 

Folks who risk their money on finding a greater fool end up being broke fools themselves.  Always better to follow the advice of Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), the Warren Buffet of his day, who when asked his greatest investing secret said, "Selling too soon."

Yep, it's been a toasted week for doom-and-gloomers predicting (gleefully anticipating?) the next American Depression. 

But it's been a great week for us optimistic Americans.