HALF-FULL REPORT 04/01/11

Well, he had to crack under the pressure sooner or later, and thank heavens it’s sooner.  Everyone on Capitol Hill this morning can’t stop talking about it.  Boehner and Reid have just been told to expect a momentous announcement from the White House. 

At 9pm EDT this evening, the President will announce on national television that, due to the overwhelming difficulties the nation faces which have proven impossible for him to solve because Republicans refuse to cooperate, he is resigning the presidency effective immediately.  Good luck, America, he will say, you’ll have to solve your problems without me.

And yes, today is April Fool’s Day.

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So let’s talk about fools – and their luck.  Zero just might pull Libya off.  He’ll have David Cameron to thank for it, and MI6, which is disintegrating Gaddafi’s regime via defections.

Conservative contempt for Zero is so bottomless that many don’t want him to succeed even when it’s in our clear interests that he do so.  He was right in saying the US could not stand by while Gaddafi perpetrated genocidal slaughter upon his own people, and wrong in not solving the problem immediately by an assassination strike on Gaddafi.

So now he owns this war which has to be won – for if Gaddafi stays in power he will "return to international terrorism and resume his nuclear weapons program," warns John Bolton who is nobody’s fool.  When asked about the rebels fighting Gaddafi and if they might be radical Islamists, John responded,

"Yes, there is uncertainty about them – but when there is Muammar Gaddaffi on one side and uncertainty on the other, you pick uncertainty."

My sources in NATO tell me it’s amazing the military mission is going as well as it is.  The Canadian general in charge, Charles Bouchard, is a big fat guy some 40-50 pounds overweight, with no command philosophy whatever.  His deputy is a British general, whose deputy is a French general, whose deputy is a Turkish general, and the whole lot of them have zero combat experience.  They’re all bureaucrats in uniform.

But the guys flying the sorties and the specops guys painting the targets on the ground do know what they’re doing.  They could do it a lot better if they were tasked with regime change, but the politicos think they can achieve that through defections rather than kinetically. 

But regime change to what?  No one really knows and it’s likely to be messy.

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In fact, the entire Middle East is going to be messy for the foreseeable future.  How to manage the messiness, how to aikido it towards a good direction or at least less catastrophic is way beyond Zero’s capabilities.  The biggest mess could well end up being Saudi Arabia.

It’s startling when you first realize how literally retarded so many Saudis are.  A friend of mine gave me an example.  He lived in the capital of Riyadh for several years running the operations of an international bank.  Since Saudi law requires hiring a quota of Saudi employees, he had to be hiring lots of them.

Their only education is memorizing Koran quotations.  They had no training or job experience, yet they all demanded to be hired as a "manager."  One fellow my friend hired to be a bank teller – only to discover that he was so illiterate that he could not tell the difference, when making change for a customer, between a 50 riyal note and a 500 one.

So my friend made the same decision as have lots of other international companies in Saudi – you hire the number of Saudis you’re required to, and send them home.  Send their paychecks to their home and never let them do any work or they will do damage to your company out of sheer stupidity or incompetence.

The world’s economy depends on the 9 million barrels of oil a day coming out of the eastern Saudi oil fields – with eastern Saudi populated by 2 million Shias that despise their Sunni overlords of the Saudi monarchy.  Iran is doing its best to create an uncontrollable uprising among them.   

Is Zero doing his best to destabilize Iran?  Of course not – but then, neither did George Bush.  Then again, you could be sure that GW would be doing his best to expand oil and natural gas production here in the US, instead of Zero doing his best to shut it down.  Sarah Palin is right:  2012 can’t come soon enough.

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But can we wait until 2012?  That was the question posed in Libya in America.  There is a very large debate within Republican ranks now about cutting the budget of what’s left of FY2011 as opposed to focusing on cutting that for FY2012.

Some folks think that since FY2012 doesn’t start until October, the focus should be on slashing spending right now.  But Paul Ryan’s Budget Committee starts serious work on FY2012 next week – and as Yuval Levin at NRO reports, this involves not cutting billions, but trillions as it will involve basic structural reforms of the entire government entitlement system.   

That said, the budget battle is not the crucial issue – it’s the debt ceiling.  One Senator who realizes this is Marco Rubio, who announced this week (3/30) that he will not vote to raise it.  He caveated this, however:

"I will vote to defeat an increase in the debt limit unless it is the last one we ever authorize and is accompanied by a plan for fundamental tax reform, an overhaul of our regulatory structure, a cut to discretionary spending, a balanced-budget amendment, and reforms to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."

What Rubio’s really saying is that Ryan’s proposed FY2012 revolutionary budget doesn’t stand a chance without the leverage of the debt ceiling.  If there is one thing voters are upset about it’s more debt.  Rubio knows the Pubs will be supported on this.  If the government is shut down over not incurring more debt rather than a budget dispute, the Dems will get blamed, not the Pubs.

This is where the real leverage is, the real battle over government spending.  We all need to tell our Congressistas and Senators to join Rubio on this.

Ps:  Rubio took himself out of presidential contention for 2012 on Tuesday (3/29).  While he is likely to keep his powder dry until 2016, there are a lot of TeaPartyers for whom the dream ticket would be Palin-Rubio 2012. 

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Meanwhile, the total absolute unrelieved insanity continues.  In Illinois yesterday (3/31), Democrat governor Pat Quinn signed a bill passed by the Democrat-controlled state assembly by a vote of 109-1 that extends unemployment "benefits" to 40,000 Illinoisans for another 20 weeks.  They expect US taxpayers via the federal government to pay for it.

There is no state in the country more broke, and more corrupt, than Illinois.  Where are the Congresistas in Washington willing to stand up and vote to defund this insanity?

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If you Google "Kill Team" you’ll get close to a million and a-half hits.  Drudge is blaring headlines about, the world press is having a field day over the story in Rolling Stone about a group of US soldiers in Afghanistan calling themselves the "Kill Team," who killed Afghans for the fun of it and mutilated their corpses.

So hats off to the finest war journalist of our day, Michael Yon, for exposing the scandal as a disgusting smear on American soldiers.  Yon was embedded with the brigade accused of the atrocities.  As he points out:

"Those Soldiers accused of being involved in (or who should have been knowledgeable of) the murders could fit into a minivan.  You would need ten 747s for the rest of the Brigade who did their duty."

The press is, surprise, ignoring Yon’s exposure of their phony scandal.  Google "Kill Team" + "Michael Yon" and you only get 5,200 hits instead of 1.5 million. 

Thanks for your honesty, decency, and patriotism, Michael. You’re our HFR Hero of the Week.

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We’re also saluting a great American – and a great Texan – this week.  He’s a pig farmer from Katy outside of Houston named Craig Baker.  A little while ago, a group of Moslems bought a tract of land next to his.  They hold Friday prayers at a mosque they built, and have announced their intention to build a large Islamic Center.

The ear-splitting calls to prayer blared from loudspeakers were obnoxiously intrusive to Baker, and when he learned that the Houston area already has a total of 60 – 60! – mosques, he decided to have some fun.

And that’s why every Friday at Moslem prayer time in Katy, Texas, there are the Craig Baker Pig Races that have become a popular local attraction.  The Muzzies are insulted and Baker is just all broken up about that. 

So any of you Texan TTPers near Houston – y’all get out to Katy next Friday to watch the races and thank Craig for all of us, OK?  Meantime, you can watch them here:

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Libya in America this week was about the growing thuggery and vicious demagoguery of America’s moocher class.  Yet this was predicted with astounding prescience over fifty years ago by Ayn Rand in her monumental novel Atlas Shrugged. 

Rand’s previous best-seller, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper as Rand’s hero Howard Roark.  That was in 1949.  Atlas was published in 1957, and ever since, Randians have dreamed of her magnum opus being on the silver screen.

Finally it is.  Atlas Shrugged Part I opens in theatres across the country on April 15.  That date is no accident, comrades.  How good is it, how faithful to the book?  My dear friend Nathaniel Branden, to whom Ayn Rand originally dedicated it, was invited to an advance screening.  His reaction:

"I found myself crying at the awareness of how much thought, effort and artistic vision were integrated in this brilliant (motion picture.)   The tears were for the feeling that this is what life could be and should be."

Barbara Branden, to whom Nathan was married, tells me:

"I am delighted, overwhelmed, and stunned.  The movie is not so-so, it is not OK, it is not rather good — it is spectacularly good. The film’s greatest virtue is that, from the first moment, one steps into the world of Atlas Shrugged."

Ever since Zero’s election, sales of Atlas have skyrocketed with hundreds of thousands of copies sold.  One reason is that it is simply uncanny how precisely the political parasites and looters of today were described by Rand so many years ago.

Seeing this come alive visually on the screen is going to have a serious impact upon millions of people, who are no longer going to put up with those who are destroying them and their country.  This starts on April 15.  And here are two scenes to get you started:

Atlas Shrugged portrays a dystopian world brought about by the very insanity that presently is engulfing us.  Yet it is about the heroic triumph over than insanity.  Rand had faith in America’s fundamental goodness and that it will win out in the end.  We should have that faith as well.