Hong Kong.  How did this small city-state of 7.3 million people go from having a per-capita income of only a few hundred dollars per year to a per capita income that is equal to that of the United States in only 50 years?

Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842, and the adjacent "New Territories" were leased for 99 years in 1898. In 1997, Hong Kong was returned by the British to China, with an agreement that it would become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) -- "one country, two systems."

Hong Kong retained the British legal system, most individual liberties, and a high degree of local autonomy, except for foreign policy and defense. The amount of democracy has been limited -- with the British serving as the ideal benevolent dictator and the Chinese as a somewhat less benevolent dictator for the past 17 years.

Hong Kong is about as close to the ideal free-market capitalist model that you can find on the planet -- which came about largely by accident.

The latest event in what is surely one of the world's most fun sports - Moslem Enragement - is the Modoggy Cartoon Contest taking place in Sweden.

It started out so innocently.  A group of Swedish artists in the small town of Tällberg decided to hold an exhibition entitled "The Dog in Art," and invited submissions.  A famous (and famously eccentric and mischievous) artist, Lars Vilks, exhibited a large cartoon drawing entitled "Mohammed as a Rondell Dog."

A Rondell Dog or Rondellhund has been a harmless art form in Sweden for the last several years.  Anonymous artists have set up plywood or plastic sculptures of dogs in traffic circle roundabouts (rondells) throughout the country.  Here's a typical one:



So Vilks puts up this cartoon sketch:

Lots of uplifting news this week, but first a trio of questions.  Are you a big fan of Eric Holder?  No?  Well, how would you like an Eric Holder on steroids?  No again?   Lastly, why is Sarah Palin answering Yes! to these questions instead?

Because that's precisely what she is doing in Louisiana. 

Zero intends to nominate Tom Perez, a racist fascist far worse than Holder for AG, should the Pubs fail to win the Senate.  And that's just for starters.  Harry Reid running the Senate for the next two years will allow Zero to run completely amok.

Yet Sarah, rather than telling the Louisiana Spoiler - Rob Maness - to stand up like a man for his country and bow out, has doubled down on her support for him.  This is ludicrously mistaken and here's why....

Elsewhere, things are looking pretty good.  This week has seen an amazing number of October Surprises - all of which have screwed Zero and the Dems.  Bad Karma has finally caught up with them.

*In Texas, hero-to-baby-killers Wendy Davis drove her gubernatorial campaign straight off a cliff with her wheelchair attack ad on Greg Abbott.  After a deluge of disgust, she doubled-down with her ridicule.  Abbott was already ahead by 14 points before Wendy's hara-kiri ads.  Wendy gives the term "politics of personal destruction" a new meaning.  Here are more examples...

Yet all of that is merely the tip of the Bad News Iceberg for the Dems this week.  Beneath that tip is...

Do you think government has grown or contracted during the past seven years?

If you listen to the political class and many of their lackeys in the news media, you would think there have been massive cuts in government spending. The truth is the opposite both in the United States and Europe.

According to Keynesian orthodoxy, the massive government spending binge of 2009 was supposed to result in a rapid recovery, high growth (the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration had predicted several years of approximately 4 percent growth in the U.S.), and big increases in employment. It didn't happen.

The Democrat Party and one of its gurus, New York Times economist Paul Krugman, blames the poor result on the "stimulus" being too small.  One little problem for the Krugman crowd is...