China's Xi Jinping cannot make any serious concessions to Hong Kong's democracy movement. The Umbrella Revolution spreading from the affluent Island to the poorer quarters of Kowloon is an existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party.

"If he were to give way, it would set off contagion across the mainland," said George Walden, a veteran British diplomat who survived the Cultural Revolution inside China and later negotiated Hong Kong's future with Deng Xiaoping.

"The authorities see this as a matter of life and death, a fuse that can take down their world," said Zhao Chu, a Chinese columnist and star on Weibo - China's Twitter.

For China's Communist Party, the Hong Kong drama exposes its Catch-22, the impossible contradiction of its policies.  Yet the crisis comes at a treacherous moment for Hong Kong as well.

The enclave is up to its neck in China's credit bubble, channeling $1.2 trillion in hard currency loans to Chinese companies. The International Monetary Fund said the "extreme tail event" of a credit shock in China would "entirely wipe out capital in Hong Kong's banking system."

My first email early this morning (5/16) was to congratulate TTPer Karma Singh.  You've been reading his reports on India, the last one being India's Ronald Reagan (4/30/14).

The results of history's largest election - well over 500 million ballots cast - were announced today, giving India's Ronald Reagan - Narendra Modi - a stunningly massive victory. 

The corrupt Congress Party, which has monopolized power in India for most of the last 67 years, had its clock cleaned.  Modi has a mandate to govern India as strong as Nehru's Congress Party in the 1950s.

Nehru was a Third World Socialist who ruined India's economy.  Modi is and will do the opposite. India has much to be proud of today and much to look forward to.  Now we in America must hope that we'll follow in India's footsteps and elect a pro-capitalist pro-freedom pro-patriotism government, starting this November...

...But we certainly won't be taking those steps by electing an immoral idiot like Jeb Bush as president.

How many times have you heard that old adage, "politics makes for strange bedfellows"?  But no matter how many times that's been, you're not going to believe how many conservative Republican Members of Congress are about to jump in bed with Speaker Pelosi.

One of the things that most drives these folks around the bend is the sell-out of their party's principles to Country Club Corporate America.  They can't stand Big Business's addiction to cheap labor.  It's an addiction that blocks effective attempts to stem the flood of illegal alien immigration from Mexico, or to stem the flood of trade deficit dollars to China.

The list of issues that conservatives in the House will oppose Pelosi on seems endless, and amnesty for illegals plus refusing to fence them out is certainly one of them.  But there is one issue not on that list, an issue of the gravest national security on which they are sure cooperation with her is possible.

That issue is...

With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama is doing more than to enter a quagmire. He is doing more than play with the fates of two half-broken countries-Iraq and Syria-whose societies were gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon.

Obama is stepping into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down.

Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism-the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition-than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago.

Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays-all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms.

With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf-which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos-and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.

Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State? And that there is no one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our world but the Americans and Western countries?

If a politician or government official takes a direct monetary bribe for granting a favor or sweetheart contract, do you think he should be sent to prison?

Such an illegal activity is despicable, but it is usually far less costly to society than the legal forms of corruption, which undermine the integrity and respect for government that is necessary for a civil and prosperous society. Most legal corruption is all about increasing power for those in government.

This past Friday (2/28), the following amendment offered by Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, was defeated in the Senate Judiciary Committee.  It was to prevent "Intentional discrimination by employee of the Internal Revenue Service."

It is hard to imagine anyone interested in good government being against such an amendment, because it is clearly designed to help prevent those in the IRS from abusing their power -- which many have done. Yet 10 senators, all Democrats, voted against it. They were: