The Kremlin's gamble has gone horribly wrong. The eastern regions of Ukraine have failed to rise in mass support for Putin's front organizations, led by political operatives from Moscow, and patently run by the Russian security apparatus (FSB/GRU) as even Russian newspapers admit.

Mr. Putin has failed equally to drive a wedge between America and Europe, or to paralyze the EU by playing off one country against another.

Mr. Putin now faces draconian sanctions from the US, EU, Japan, Canada and Australia together. He can strike back by asymmetric means -- perhaps a cyberattack -- but tit-for-tat retaliation can achieve nothing. There is no equivalence.

Russia's economy is no bigger than California's. This is an economic showdown between a $40 trillion power structure, and a $2 trillion producer of raw materials that has hollowed out its industrial core.

Mr. Putin is counting on acquiescence from the BRICS quintet as it confronts the West, and counting on capital from China to offset the loss of Western money. This is a pipedream. Beijing will reduce Russia to a vassal state of China.  Vladimir Putin is quickly becoming the ruination of Russia.

Important Announcement:  the last section of this HFR is devoted to addressing concerns regarding the New TTP Forum.

The theme for the week is Birds of a Hubristic Feather.  The shades of Sophocles and Aeschylus are looking up at us from the depths of Hades in sad wonder that humans in power never learn the lesson the Greeks knew so well two and a half millennia ago.

Thus we get such marvelously good news this week as Pelosi Galore announcing that Dems Won't Run from Obamacare in Midterms. You're just not going to get a better example of masochistic hubris than that. 

It's of course the path to electoral disaster in November.  Zero could take a different path, but can be supremely confident this will never happen - because Zero is a solipsistic narcissist who lives in Hubris City.  In addition, he's ignorant, uneducated, and actually pretty stupid - all his affirmative action Ivy League degrees notwithstanding.  He's glib and shrewd and smooth - but not smart. 

Now,is there anyone on the planet more hubristic than Zero?  Why, yes - that would be Vladimir Vladimirovich Pooty-Poot Putin.  Oh, look!  He's riding a horse without a shirt! Oh! He's so big and tough and strong!  Oh, what a pile of horse manure. 

The meta-story regarding the mid-term elections is how the Democrats can't wait to get to the voting booth to inflict electoral doom upon their enemies, while Republicans are so depressed they will either stay home or have to be dragged to the polls.

Maybe, but there's this Colorado canary in the Democrat coal mine that's warbling a contrarian song.

In Colorado you can vote up to 30 days ahead of election day by absentee ballot.  To do so you must of course request a ballot.  The absentee ballots won't be counted until November 7^th, but what is known is the number of requests for them.

It turns out that the number of requests by registered Republicans is way up from past years while those from registered Democrats is way down.

Here's more of the buzz heard in the halls of the Capitol Building three weeks out:

America's Mr. Obama insists that various forms of "renewable" energy are the wave of the future and worth spending countless billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize.  He is precisely wrong.  An example emerged on my side of the Pond here in Britain the other day. 

My train was diverted by engineering works near Doncaster. We trundled past some shiny new freight wagons decorated with a slogan: "Drax - powering tomorrow: carrying sustainable biomass for cost-effective renewable power." Serendipitously, I was at that moment reading a report by Dr. David McKay, chief scientist at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change on the burning of wood in Yorkshire power stations such as Drax. And I was feeling vindicated.

Believe it or not, Drax imports a million kilotons of wood from Canada and the US a year to burn in its power station in place of coal, producing twice-as-expensive electricity requiring government subsidies.  And it plans to increase its imported subsidized wood to seven million kilotons a year by 2016.

When I wrote how ludicrous this is in the London Times,  there was a howl of protest on the letters page from Drax's chief executive.  Now, Dr. MacKay's report vindicates me.  The entire rationale for burning wood rather than coal is that it allegedly produces fewer CO2 emissions.  Yet the report shows that, if the wood comes from whole trees, as much of it does, the result is an increase in emissions compared with coal. And that's allowing for the regrowth of forests.

Nonetheless, the renewable-energy bandwagon careens onward, costing ever more money and doing real environmental harm, while producing trivial quantities of energy and risking blackouts next winter.  This applies to every form of renewable energy.  Here's the scorecard in Britain.

It is always an intensely interesting and educational experience on any visit to China.  Now that I'm out, I can talk about it, as everything you do online is monitored - just like in the US (except that you can use an anonymizer like Cryptohippie which is blocked in China).

On Saturday, March 01, there was an astonishing terrorist attack at the railway station of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province.  Six men and two women, wearing masks and all black uniforms of some kind, bearing long knives - no other weapons, just knives - stabbed 29 people to death and wounded well over one hundred.

I was not far away at the time, and flew through the Kunming airport the next day.
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What's so totally ridiculous about this two-bit KGB thug Putin seizing Crimea and playing the Russian bear is how our very own President Pussy hasn't the cojones to kick him in his vulnerabilities.
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My friend John Bolton nailed it yesterday (3/06) in his speech at CPAC:  "Our biggest national security crisis is Barack Obama."

John could not possibly be more spot on.  Yet Zero is not only the Number One threat to America's national security.  He is the Number One threat to America's economy, to America's freedom, to America's culture, and to America's future.

So let's see where Zero and his DemFascist minions may have screwed up this week.