Villa Santa Colomba, Sienna, Italy.  Robert Mundell, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1999, has been holding a small, annual conference here in Tuscany at an exquisite castle he purchased several decades ago and restored.

His wife, Valerie, is a charming hostess and an accomplished organizer of the conferences. The castle is the family's principal residence, though Dr. Mundell continues to teach one semester each year at New York's Columbia University, where he is a professor of economics.

To get fresh ideas about the current global economic problems of the day, Dr. Mundell invites not only academic economists to his conferences but also central bankers and other financial and business professionals to obtain a variety of perspectives.

Some of the questions discussed at the conference will be found below, and you may wish to think about them yourselves. But first, the good news is that...

Threats, bombs and at least 36 dead didn't stop Iraqis from voting on Sunday, March 7. But the harder part -- forming a new, more inclusive national government -- lies ahead.

Formal results won't come for a few days. We'll learn how many votes, authentic and fraudulent, went to each of the big five parties and fringe elements. But the news looks good, so far. There are solid grounds for sober optimism and the expectation of slowly improving government in Baghdad. The elections happened. And they were genuinely contested -- not merely on ethnic or religious lines but on national issues, as well.

For all its tragic missteps, the Bush administration may have done a great thing in the end: Democracy in Iraq may work to a serviceable degree. That would, indeed, change the Middle East for the better over time.  History may owe President Bush a great debt of gratitude.

Are you aware that without speculators, most food and physical products would cost a whole lot more?

Because many members of Congress don't possess a mirror, they have been looking for the villain who is causing gasoline prices to soar. A large number, mostly but not exclusively Democrats, have decided that speculators, or at least "greedy speculators," are the villains.

Many members of Congress make up "solutions" to things they do not understand and cause problems where there are none or make real problems worse, which explains the current run-up in gasoline prices.

I was wrong. For years, I've argued that our government should pay more attention to South America. Now Hillary Clinton has -- and, boy, is it ugly.

With tragic back-to-back earthquakes dominating the headlines from south of the border, a desperate ploy by the hard-left Argentine government -- backed by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez -- threatens to shake the continent's political landscape.

And Secretary of State Clinton, during her whirlwind tour down south, managed to outrage our British allies and assist despised President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in her family's assault on Argentine democracy.

Clinton's diplomatic malfeasance in Buenos Aires wasn't an accident. She spoke for President Obama, who loves Third World liberation rhetoric and seems to think Britain's still colonizing his family home in Kenya.

Here's the backstory that our media's ignored:

The HFR raises a glass of Newcastle Brown ale to the British hero of the week, Daniel Hannan.

As a Member of the European Parliament for Southeast England (Kent, Surrey, Sussex et al), he delivered a 3-minute speech on Tuesday (3/24) directed at British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who was attending the session in Brussels.

It is the most devastating skewering of a politician right to his face in modern memory.  His accusation that Mr. Brown has "a pathological inability to accept responsibility" applies equally to Democrats in Congress and their president.

As you watch the speech - only 3 minutes - you'll probably ask:  Where is our Daniel Hannan?  Where is an American politician with the wit, the eloquence, and the courage to similarly skewer Zero?

Imagine a fellow who lives in a dry county in Mississippi (where alcohol is not sold or served) goes to New York and has a drink at a bar where he knows the bartender. Shortly thereafter, the bartender visits his friend in that dry county in Mississippi. The local sheriff arrests both the bartender and his friend for an act committed in New York.

Most people, quite properly so, would argue the Mississippi sheriff has no business arresting people for a legal act committed in New York, even though it would have been illegal if committed in Mississippi.

Unfortunately, some prosecutors in the U.S. federal government are now acting like the rogue Mississippi sheriff described above when it comes to gambling, securities and tax laws in foreign countries.

Last week was not a good one for proponents of social re-engineering of the U.S. military. 

They had been buoyed by the previous week's congressional testimony of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, widely seen as evidence the Pentagon was prepared to accede to President Obama's demand that avowed homosexuals be allowed to serve in the armed forces. 

Now, however, four other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have weighed in, and all bets are off on the idea of experimenting with - and possibly breaking - the All-Volunteer Force.  One by one, they poured cold water on Mr. Obama's agenda of homosexualizing the US military.

Let's have cup of coffee and talk.  The HFR Saloon is closed for the week after too much toasting the greatest Irish-American in our history - Ronald Reagan - on St. Patrick's Day.  So we'll go next door to the HFR Coffee Shop.

I'm sure you've seen the news reports on how President Teleprompter thanked himself due to his teleprompter foulup.  Note, however, while the media of course videoed the gaffe - it is nowhere to be seen, not on YouTube or anywhere else.

Not only has the video of "Obama thanks himself" vanished, but try clicking on any website claiming to have it.  Up will come a security alert trying to gain access to your computer.  This happens not just on US websites, but world-wide.  And it happens with search engines world wide, not just Google.

The video of Zero thanking himself would go instantly viral once posted on the Web.  But not only has its posting been prevented, they will try to damage your computer as well.  Zero can't stand to be laughed at, and will try to hurt you if you do.

Fortunately, not even he can stifle Gutter Ball gaffes when they are made with Jay Leno.

Speaking of gaffes, did Secretary of Homeland Defense Janet Napolitano call the President of the United States a terrorist?

What do you think was the most costly intelligence failure of all time?  No, was is not the world's leading intelligence agencies' failure to notice that Saddam had few, if any, weapons of mass destruction.

It was the failure of many leading climate model builders to be modest enough about their predictions, and the politicians' and media's failure to ask the tough questions of these climate experts.

As a consequence of what we now know was an overblown global-warming scare, everyone on the planet is paying substantially more for food and fuel than is necessary.  And Democrats in Congress are doing everything they can to keep it that way.

The President has wrestled control of the health care debate away from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by finally introducing his own plan. Unfortunately, the White House's proposal includes everything we found untenable about the old Senate bill - only this one is even more expensive!

This is what you might call putting "perfume on a pig."

What's in this "new" proposal? It has the unpopular (and arguably unconstitutional) individual mandate that forces people and employers to purchase health insurance - only this time with much harsher fines on employers who choose not to go along with another expensive government mandate.

It has provisions that will make employers think twice before expanding their workforce. It has cuts to Medicare Advantage, a popular program which allows seniors to pay a little more money out of pocket for better coverage. And, of course, it still has sweetheart deals - only this time they've been extended even more.