Assume you are an agent for a country that is hostile to the United States, and you want to undermine the American economy by attacking a couple of key industries. Which ones would you go after?

You would learn that the computer, Internet and wireless industries, coupled with the world's most productive financial engineering, have provided much of the U.S. economic growth for the last quarter-century. Given that you, as an agent of a foreign government, could not possibly literally blow up these sectors, what would you do?

Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the HFR was trying to shake a couple of drops out of its far-from-even-half-full glass?  Well, fill up the flagon, barkeep, we're going to hoist a few this week.

We have a selection of heroes to toast.  Let's start with a tankard of Pilsner Urquell for the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus...

We follow that with a chalice of Brennan 2006 Viognier with its bouquet of bluebonnets and West Texas crude to that good ol' boy from Wichita Falls, Rex Tillerson, chairman of Exxon-Mobil... 

Finally, a tumbler of Glen Morangie single-malt (no defiling it with ice or water - the Scots consider that a "mixed drink") to a spy coming in from the cold, CIA Director Michael Hayden... 

That's the last of the good stuff for now.   The HFR pours instead a cup of contempt for bimbo-airhead actress Sharon Stone... 

Here's the fun episode of the week.  The HFR guzzles a goblet of glee over Obambi's latest embarrassment, Father Michael Pfleger...

Let's close with a potpourri of good news, because if drank to each one we'd get seriously wasted...

One last item.  Your humble HFR author takes personal satisfaction in the new movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull .

This past year more than one trillion dollars flowed between the U.S. and the EU. The EU now accounts for 21 percent of U.S. merchandise exports and 19 percent of U.S. merchandise imports, and about 34 percent of U.S. services exports and 37 percent of U.S. services imports.

The U.S. is not only the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, but far and away the world's largest investor elsewhere. Of the more than two trillion dollars the U.S. has invested directly abroad, a little more than half ($1.1 trillion) is invested in Europe. Europeans account for 70 percent ($1.2 trillion) of the direct investment in the U.S.

The bottom line is that the U.S. and Europe are economically joined at the hip, and any actions which damage trade and investment between these two economic giants hurt everyone. The U.S. and EU have a combined population of about 650 million people, and their combined GDP equals 57 percent of the world's total.

The U.S. has also provided...

Since Obama took office, he has been abandoning one US ally after another while seeking to curry favor with one US adversary after another. At every turn, America's allies - from Israel to Honduras, to Columbia, South Korea and Japan, to Poland and the Czech Republic - have reacted with disbelief and horror to his treachery.

And at every turn, America's adversaries - from Iran to Venezuela to North Korea and Russia - have responded with derision and contempt to his seemingly obsessive attempts to appease them.

The horror Obama has instilled in America's friends and the contempt he has evoked from its enemies have not caused him to change course. The fact that his policies throughout the world have already failed to bring a change in the so-called international community's treatment of the US has not led him to reconsider those policies.

His stubborn insistence on advancing his feckless foreign policy in the face of its already apparent colossal failure is of a piece with his unswerving commitment to his domestic agenda in spite of its apparent colossal failure.

The economic world has changed. There are new trends, megatrends if you will, now at work in our economy. They are "mega" trends because they overarch and impact everything else in the economy and will do so for quite a while.

There are other major trends at work as well, but they have been operating as a part of the basic framework of our economy for decades. These megatrends have emerged from the credit cycle because people change their behaviors in response to a crisis, and it would be foolish to assume that everything will just go back to the way things were before.

These aren't predictions of the future, because circumstances change. How many economists predicted this crisis? Very, very few. Think of these megatrends more as chalk marks on the playing field that will guide human economic behavior for some years.

Do you think the Republicans or the Democrats are winning the race to prove they are the dumbest and most incompetent political party?

The Republicans were clearly winning the race until January 2007. They threw away their majorities in both houses of Congress, by not only failing to have a realistic postwar strategy in Iraq but by such things as greatly expanding government spending when they had promised the voters the opposite.

The Democrats won the congressional elections by promising they would have a clear and coherent plan to end the stalemate in Iraq and to be "fiscally responsible" by holding down the growth in government spending and not increasing taxes.

So, what have they done since they have been in power? Having fulfilled virtually none of their campaign pledges, the Democrats' obvious incompetence and incoherence have managed to give the Congress an approval rate of only 29 percent, even lower than the president's.  That's quite an achievement.

One of the many great things I took from my Army career was the rule that "the maximum effective range of an excuse is zero meters." But excuses are all we have in Afghanistan.

Among the worst of the countless follies that make an old soldier sick is the endless excuse-making for the sloth and cowardice of the Afghan National Army and the extortion culture of the Afghan Police -- while Taliban warriors fight to the bitter end.

The bottom line is that Taliban fighters are willing to die for their cause, while the Afghan soldiers we've tried to train don't even show up for formation. And the NATO-trained cops are so corrupt they've driven Afghans into the arms of the Taliban.

Meanwhile, nearsighted generals and clueless politicians make excuse after excuse... while leaving our soldiers on their own on the battlefield.