It was yet another lousy week for Zero, but to tell the truth, it's getting reeeeaaallly boring talking about this guy.  I am so excruciatingly bored with him and his grimacing wife and his moonbat supporters and his groveling media sycophants and his union thugs and his crony business-shysters and his airhead celebrities.

So let's get outta here and go somewhere else.  How about France?  That should be fun - for it's simply awesome to witness the French immolate themselves.

When I was growing up, there were two Frances.  One was that embodied by Maurice Chevalier (1888-1972) - completely captivating, oozing French charm and savoir-faire, impossible not to like. Here's a link to him singing Thank Heaven For Little Girls in Gigi (1958).

The other France was embodied by Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) - completely pompous, oozing arrogance and pretentiousness, utterly ungrateful to America for saving his country in World Wars I and II, yearning for the days of French gloire (glory) centuries ago and pretending they still existed.       

De Gaulle's France is the only one left now, still pompous, still the arrogant beggar, with a hopelessly incompetent champagne socialist running the place.

Last week, ABC News ran a story that led with the statement, ‘Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.'

What the reporters failed to mention was that ABC, a unit of the Disney Corp., also has millions of dollars in Cayman-registered funds. Probably most employees at ABC, including the reporters who wrote the story, have some of their money in Cayman-registered funds, as probably do many of you reading this column, even though you don't know it.

This is how the real world works.  There is a very good reason why fund managers place a portion of their portfolios in the Caymans.  It's that the Cayman financial regulatory system is far superior to America's.

The US military has promised “an overwhelming response” in retaliation for the Fallujah Atrocity of March 30. "Coalition forces will respond," the U.S. army's deputy director of operations Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference. "They are coming back and they are going to hunt down the people responsible for this bestial act. "It will be at a time and a place of our choosing. It will be methodical, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming."

Here’s a way to begin.

Earlier this month NGO Monitor released its report on foreign government funding of radical political Israeli NGOs which work to undermine Israel's international standing and subvert Israeli society.

Along with the usual European suspects who give millions of shekels (or euros or pounds) to Israeli groups like this, it works out that the US government is also funding extremely radical organizations, courtesy of American taxpayers. Notably, the three groups that reported receiving funding from the US are all in the business of waging political warfare campaigns directed at the Israeli public.

According to the report, in accordance with the NGO Transparency Law which requires NGOs to report on donations received from foreign governments, three Hate-Israel Israeli NGOs received funding from the US, i.e., Obama's State Department. They are:

Ambergris Caye, Belize.  The Cayman Islands are rich, and Belize is poor. Why?

Both are small Caribbean countries with the same climate and roughly the same mixed racial heritage, and both were English-speaking British colonies. Belize (the former British Honduras) received its independence in 1981, while Cayman is still not fully independent but is self-governing at the local level, with its own currency, laws and regulations.

Belize should be richer: It has a larger population than Cayman (345,000 as contrasted with Cayman's 54,000). Belize has a much larger and more varied land area with many more natural resources, including gas and oil, and some rich agricultural land that Cayman lacks. Both have nice beaches, but Belize has the second-largest barrier reef in the world after Australia and also has Mayan ruins. Yet Cayman, with fewer points of interests, has done more to attract tourists.

Back in the early 1970s, Cayman was as poor on a per capita basis as is Belize today. Both countries had ambitions to be tourist and financial centers. Cayman succeeded and has about six times the real per capita income of Belize. What did Cayman do right and Belize do wrong?

Santa Cruz, California.  This HFR will be a bit truncated, as the Seascape Rendezvous begins in just a few hours.  There's a lot of fun stuff this week, so let's get started.

The best international news is the impending death of a monster.  It's from a surprising source - who knew Dan Rather was still functioning?  He's 80 now and has a news show on a small cable channel called HDNet.  On Wednesday (5/30), he reported that Hugo Chavez was in "the end stage" of metastatic rhabdomyosarcoma.

This is an especially virulent cancer that once it metastasizes (spreads throughout the body) is quickly fatal.  Chavez's government has been quite secretive about what type of cancer he has, refusing to disclose any details.  If Rather's source is accurate, Chavez may indeed be dead within a month or two.  And then there will be blood.  Castro will see to that....

More enjoyable int'l news:  Iran has been Flamed.  On Monday (5/28), the discovery of a massive new computer virus dubbed Flame was announced.  Like Stuxnet only 100 times bigger (20GB vs. 200KB), it targets computers in Iran - and Palestinian Arab computers in Israel's so-called West Bank.  Flame is not just copying massive amounts of Iranian data, it's wiping out entire hard drives.

Wonder who could have designed it... that its unidentified programmers did no coding from sundown Fridays to sundown Saturdays in Israel's time zone might be a clue.

Despite pledges to cut spending by the new Republican House majority, it appears spending during the current fiscal year (FY2012), which ends on Sept. 30, will actually be greater than in fiscal 2011. The House Republicans were filled with good intentions, but they got snookered by President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The Tea Party crowd and other Americans who believe in fiscal responsibility are unlikely to be tolerant of and re-elect Republicans who are so incompetent that they cannot reduce federal spending and continue to fund programs that most of their voters oppose.

The Constitution is clear. Article I, Section 9 states, "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." That is, only Congress can authorize the spending of money.

The House Republicans can insist on reductions in overall spending and, particularly, get rid of unpopular and nonessential programs as a price for passing any of the necessary appropriations bills.  They didn't.  Why should they be reelected in November?