Last night (01/18), 40 hours before Donald Trump’s swearing-in as president of the United States, Taiwan’s “Representative” in the U.S. (i.e., de facto Ambassador) laid out what Taiwan wants from the relationship – and it does not include being offered up as a “bargaining chip” in the United States’ relationship with China.

Speaking at a dinner celebrating 80 years of diplomacy at Twin Oaks, the Washington, D.C. estate owned by Taiwan’s government, Representative Stanley Kao praised the current state of U.S.-Taiwan relations.

The relationship has “never been better in recent memory,” he said, even if engagement is “quiet and low-key” at times. Taiwan hopes to continue that momentum under the new Trump administration – with a caveat. The relationship “should be based on its merit and not used … as some kind of bargaining chip,” Kao said, to applause from the audience.

Kao’s comment touches on a concern that Trump may view Taiwan, formally known as the Republic of China, as a bargaining chip in the larger U.S.-China relationship.

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.”