The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is the annual showpiece of Vladimir Putin, who began his political career as deputy mayor of St Petersburg. 

In its opening session today (5/22), the most senior Western politician attending told Russia's leaders in the bluntest terms that their country will be frozen out of the global financial system and face slow economic breakdown unless the Kremlin steps back from confrontation with the West.

Peter Mandelson, Member of the British House of Lords, former Deputy Prime Minister and EU Trade Commissioner, informed them:

"A sense of Russia-risk is crystallizing around the events in Ukraine. The great danger is that this negative sentiment will set in concrete around Russia.  It is the markets that are leading the way, not governments, and they are quickening the pace. This is the looming nightmare for the Russian economy and it will have to be dealt with very boldly by the Russian government. To be cut off from global capital markets is not a good idea."

Why does the Obama administration claim it wants you to pay less for your airline ticket, but more for the shrimp you buy?  One reason the economy keeps stumbling along is that businessmen, consumers and taxpayers are having a hard time planning because of endlessly inconsistent and often lawless policy directives from the Obama White House.

On the same day last week, the administration announced that it was seeking to block the proposed American Airlines-US Airways merger, allegedly to protect consumers against higher prices - and that it might impose higher duties (taxes) on shrimp from foreign competitors to protect U.S. shrimpers, meaning that all who eat shrimp will have to pay more.

The Justice Department, under the leadership of ethically and intellectually challenged Eric H. Holder Jr., came up with a study that concluded that airline ticket prices would be higher and service worse if American Airlines and US Airways merged. The conclusion was immediately challenged by affected parties (the companies and the unions) and many transportation economists.

I do not know, as a frequent flier, whether I will be better or worse off with the proposed merger. I do know, however, that the folks at the Justice Department also do not know - but trying to block the merger massages their egos and their lust for power.

Ever so often, the America-hating depravity of liberals is exposed with breathtaking clarity.  Normally, they try to hide their embarrassment at being an American.  Or they'll get angrily defensive.  "Are you questioning my patriotism?" they'll intimidatingly ask.  To which the answer is:  "I would if you had any patriotism to question."

They fudge and smudge over the fact that they are always on the side of America's enemies.  They always blame America for any problem in the world, and root for America to lose in any conflict.

What they hide best is their secret admiration for Osama Bin Laden.  They know how many Americans would like to tar and feather them if they admitted they were thrilled that a guy in a beard and turban living in an Afghan cave destroyed the world's tallest buildings in America's greatest city, killed thousands on American soil, and humbled the Great Superpower in the eyes of the world.

So liberals keep this to themselves.  Once in a while, though, one of them exposes himself and reveals the ugliness of his soul. 

Like a fellow named Richard Marshall did in an email to me this week.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman were right when they blamed the noxious anti-Israel incitement rampant in Europe for Saturday's (5/24) murderous shooting attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels and the assault and battery of two Jewish brothers outside their synagogue in a Paris suburb later that day.

Anti-Israel incitement is ubiquitous in Europe and is appearing in ever-widening circles of the Western world as a whole.

Until this week, the Catholic Church stayed out of the campaign to dehumanize Jews and malign the Jewish state.

Pope Benedict XVI was perceived as a friend of Israel, despite his childhood membership in the Hitler Youth. His opposition to Islam's rejection of reason, eloquently expressed at his speech at the University of Regensburg in 2006, positioned him as a religious champion of reason, individual responsibility and law - Judaism's primary contributions to humanity.

His predecessor Pope John Paul II was less willing to confront Islamic violence. But his opposition to Communism made him respect Israel as freedom's outpost in the Middle East. John Paul's visit to Israel in 2000 was in some ways a historic gesture of friendship to the Jewish people of Israel.

Alas, the Golden Age of Catholic-Jewish relations seems to have come to an end during Francis's visit to the Promised Land this week.

Terrorists, money launderers, drug dealers and tax evaders use automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers, banks and countless other goods and services that we all use. Yet all too many government policymakers think that if we make these things very difficult to use, the bad guys will go away -- forgetting, of course, that all the rest of us suffer from mindless regulation and control.

Banks and other financial service firms have become the targets of choice for the unthinking government class and its allies -- because in popular culture, bankers are often cast as the evil villains, despite the fact that the world economy could not function without them.

Thirty years ago, the excuse for more financial services' regulation was that "drug dealers" used banks. That argument morphed into "banks facilitate money laundering," which was made a crime in the United States in 1986.

Then after Sept. 11, 2001, that excuse evolved into "terrorists use banks." More recently, the justification for more rules has become "banks around the world enable businesses and individuals to avoid taxes." There are always new excuses for more regulation -- but the demands remain the same: