Why didn't I ever think to call Russian dictator Vladimir Putin The Gremlin In The Kremlin?  It took the London Telegraph to come up with the cleverest headline of the week.  At last, Russians are realizing what a punk Putin is, who tries so achingly hard to be a macho-man.  (You know I have personal experience over what a lightweight he is.)

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Meanwhile, the hammering of Newt continues.  What's really gone viral - particularly in Iowa - is this video hit comparing Newt's values to those of Kim Kardashian.  Ouch!

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It's a contest as to who should be the HFR Hero of the Week.  We report, you decide. 

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Now for the HFR Word of the Week.  Rehypothecation.  It's literally a trillion-dollar word.  To understand why, we need to talk about Cameron and Corzine.

Have things stopped getting better?

Americans had become used to ever-increasing living standards, but there is evidence that for many people, life is not improving. There is also a growing pessimism about the future with surveys showing that Americans do not think their children and grandchildren will be better off.

Last week, there was a most interesting discussion between two of the world's leading tech gurus - George Gilder and Peter Thiel - at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Mr. Thiel argued that, in many areas, progress has stopped or almost stopped.  Mr. Gilder was more optimistic.  Yet both agreed on what the obstacle to progress is.

Now that John Bolton’s UN Ambassador nomination has been sent to the Senate floor, the hot question is: will they or won’t they? Will the Dems filibuster? Maybe, but more likely is they won’t, as it would all but guarantee the quick enactment of the stupidly-named “nuclear option” of ending judicial filibusters. Either way, the betting on Capitol Hill is that he will be confirmed.

As he settles in to his new UN offices, don’t expect John Bolton to have been the least bit intimidated by the Dem’s vendetta against him, nor to lie low and not rattle anybody’s cage for a while. That’s not what GW is sending him to do at Turtle Bay. John has quite a list of cages he intends to rattle, and the first one belongs to France.

Last week (7/05), in a case before the U.S. Military Court of Appeals, by a 3-2 vote the judges delivered an outrageous decision.

Army Ranger First Lieutenant Michael Behenna was deemed to have no right to self-defense when he killed the Iraqi prisoner he was interrogating after the latter threw a concrete block at him and tried to seize his firearm.

Unless he is pardoned, Lt. Behenna will remain incarcerated for the next twelve years.  (Note: to support Lt. Behenna, go to defendmichael.com.)

Unfortunately, under President Obama, service personnel's rising fears of being prosecuted for acting to protect themselves and their missions are but one of many disastrous ways in which the military is being, to use his now-infamous turn of phrase, "fundamentally transformed." Consider a quartet of examples:

When I hear politicians say they cannot cut government spending and we must have tax increases, I know they are either corrupt or incompetent.

Anyone who has ever been around government agencies knows that they tend to be overstaffed and inefficient compared with operations in the private sector. But we also know that many governments in other countries do a much better job in managing taxpayer dollars than ours.

At a minimum, we should demand that our political leaders manage the government they are responsible for as well as other political leaders in these countries manage their governments.

President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats say we cannot reduce our debt problem to manageable levels without increasing taxes. I say, why not? Some other countries spend less per capita and yet provide higher levels of government service. Take a look at the chart below.

One of the delights of science is its capacity for showing us that the world is not as it seems. A good example is the startling statistic that there are at least 10 times as many bacterial cells (belonging to up to 1,000 species) in your gut as there are human cells in your entire body: that "you" are actually an entire microbial zoo as well as a person.

You are 90% microbes by cell count, though not by volume -- a handy reminder of just how small bacteria are.

It has been clear for a long time that the microbes in your gut are not just passengers but colleagues that help with the digestion of food: releasing vitamins, breaking down toxins and metabolizing nutrients into more useful forms.

What's becoming clear from such experiments is that they are also vital to the immune system's capacity to fight infection. It's as if they train the body's defense forces.

For instance, breast-fed babies, whose gut microbes are dominated by creatures called bifidobacteria, are less likely than formula-fed babies to suffer not only from diarrhea but also from allergies later in life.

Beware Greeks bearing debt -- or any other country that has too much of it.

Despite ever-increasing government regulation of banks, which often are required to hold government debt as reserves, the systemic risk of a failure in the global financial system is growing rather than diminishing. There are solutions that require less, rather than more, regulation.

If you look at the big banks that have been in trouble or the banks that regulators and others worry about being in financial trouble, you will notice that virtually all of them have a corporate form of ownership and are heavily regulated. They also increasingly are being forced to be tax collectors for governments.

There is an alternative form of bank ownership that is likely to lead to fewer problems and avoid the "too big to fail" problem, and that is mutual-fund banking.