It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states.

That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.

In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.

What happened to the big donkey? Among other things, the Democrats decided to sell their base and their soul to a very bad billionaire and they got a very bad deal for both.  Here’s the story.

Inflation rage is coming to the boil in Germany. Leaders of the country's prestigious institutes warn that the economy is hitting capacity constraints and risks spiraling into a destructive boom-bust cycle.

In a series of interviews with yours truly they said that the ultra-loose monetary policy of the European Central Bank is now badly out of alignment with German needs. It has begun to threaten lasting damage, and is fast undermining political consent for monetary union.

"The ECB wants to inflate away the debt of the southern European countries. This is a clear conflict of interest with net creditors like Germany," says Clemens Fuest, president of the IFO Institute in Munich.

The tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung leapt on the latest price data, splashing with a "Horror-Kurve" showing inflation soaring to seemingly frightening heights.

An example is the UBS bubble index showing that Munich is now the fifth most expensive housing market in the world, with prices that have "increasingly lost touch with economic fundamentals.”

Donald Trump really is going to make America great again. It wasn’t just a campaign slogan: Trump is for real—and one of the great pleasures in the coming years is going to be the joy of watching all those pundits who think he’s going to be a disaster being proved wrong again and again.

Nowhere will this be more evident than in his policies on energy and the environment.

I made a trip to Washington just before Christmas to check out the lie of the land. What I wanted to find out was just how serious Trump is about slaying the Green Blob which has caused so much misery and expense in the U.S. and across the world for the last thirty or forty years.

And after a series of private briefings with administration insiders and members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I came back heartened.

Here’s how one of them put it:

“Trump is going to send his tanks into the swamp from Day One. He knows there isn’t time to lose and he knows that every day that passes those tanks are going to get sucked deeper into the slime…” [by ‘the slime’ my anonymous informant meant, of course, the liberal/DC establishment which will do everything in its power to frustrate Trump] “…We’re going to go in fast and we’re going to go in hard. They won’t know what hit them.”

Human beings can be remarkably dense. The practice of bloodletting, as a medical treatment, persisted despite centuries of abundant evidence that it did more harm than good.

The practice of communism, or political bloodletting as it should perhaps be known, whose centenary in the Bolshevik revolution is reached this year, likewise needs no more tests. It does more harm than good every time. Nationalized, planned, one-party rule benefits nobody, let alone the poor.

The diseases that Marxism-Leninism was intended to treat, poverty and inequality, were ancient scourges just beginning to fade, even in Russia. Higher living standards were starting to reach ordinary people, rather than just the feudal elite, for the first time.

Along came Karl Marx with essentially the opposite suggestion.  The progressive left rather suddenly fell in love with the idea of expanding, rather than limiting, state power.  Here’s a quick history of Marxist horrors from Lenin to Obama.

The UN Security Council vote last Friday (12/23) condemning Israel was not about “settlements.”  It was an Arab subterfuge, a trap into which the United States, the UK, New Zealand and other naïve or cynical diplomats took an active role.

It was all smoke and mirrors, a con trick holding up the settlement issue to dazzle the voters while the real intent was to disown Israel of territories to which they have genuine claim and turn them into “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.”

For certain, President Obama latched on to the idea. It was pay-back time, a golden opportunity not to be missed to hit back at Bibi before handing in the keys to the White House. For shame!

Now we know that he was cooking up this evil brew back in November.

“I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.”

In a congressional meeting room, somewhere on Capitol Hill, one of the world’s leading skeptical climate scientists, Dr. Tim Ball, is toasting the advent of the Trump administration.

“I don’t want to use the phrase tipping point because that’s a phrase that has been abused in the scientific area. But I think we’re on the verge of a dramatic shift,” Ball tells the small invited audience of journalists, scientists, think-tankers, lawyers and DC politicos. He’s talking about the war on the Green Blob.

Most of them are scarred veterans of the decades-long battle to expose the man-made global warming scare as what another speaker, Tony Heller, describes as “the biggest scientific deception in history.” Many have suffered personally and professionally for speaking out against the so-called “consensus.”

But with Trump’s inauguration it will be the beginning of the end for the Green Blob—that sinister cabal of corrupt politicians, UN and EU technocrats, bent scientists, shrill activists, rent-seeking corporatists, blood-sucking lawyers and gullible journalists which has held the world to ransom these last four decades by promoting the man-made climate change scare story and other, related environmental scams.

Donald Trump's assault on trade is escalating. First the foes were China and Mexico. Now it is the world.

The Trump transition team is now mooting an import tariff of 10% across the board, doubling down on earlier talk of a 5% duty. This is a sobering demarche. Such thinking is of a different character to Mr. Trump's campaign rhetoric, which mostly hinted at trade sanctions to force concessions.

A catch-all tariff is a change of belief systems. It overthrows the free trade order that has been upheld and policed by Washington since the 1940s.

Markets are still behaving as if they will get the "good Trump" (tax cuts and fiscal stimulus) rather than the "bad Trump" (trade wars), despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

In fairness to the Trump camp, we should not be beguiled too easily by free trade pieties, or fall for the canard that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 caused the Great Depression. It could not possibly have done the damage so often claimed.

Nonetheless, it may be that Mr. Trump and his coterie in Washington are walking straight into the "Thucydides Trap" in their handling of China.

When former Texas governor Rick Perry ran for president in 2012, he promised he'd abolish the U.S. Department of Energy (at least when he could remember it). Liberals wrote this off as typical conservative stupidity.

Why would anyone want to abolish the DOE? According to one liberal commentator, it was because the department "was established during Jimmy Carter's administration and it perhaps sounds like it might have something to do with solar panels."

Jimmy Carter created it, all right, but solar panels were only a symptom of the real problem. The DOE was conceived in dark and pessimistic beliefs and forecasts that have proven totally wrong. As Obama might say, the DOE is on the wrong side of history.

Thanks to the DOE, we've endured wasteful, panicked policies such as massive subsidies for the wind and solar power, and electric cars.  Worst of all, Congress has saddled consumers with ethanol subsidies and mandates.

These boondoggles cost us billions of dollars, and none of them are commercially viable in their own right.  The DOE isn’t viable either.  It’s time to get rid of it.