There is still time to avoid a recession - a recession being technically defined as two quarters of negative economic growth.   What needs to be done, and can be done in the next 60 days, follows.

First, it is important to realize the present economic slowdown was caused by a series of mistakes by the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the administration, and Congress.

Many of our government policymakers and politicians still insist it was the other guy's fault and pretend that taking money from one group of taxpayers and giving it to another (a k a, a "stimulus package") will somehow miraculously revive the economy.

The administration is guilty of having both proposed and acquiesced to spending that resulted in more costs than benefits to the economy, which has slowed growth. Even though those in the administration cannot suddenly reverse much of the wasteful spending on their own, they can do several things by presidential directive - Executive Orders issued by President Bush -- to make things better immediately.

In a breathtakingly cynical example of playing politics, the White House just accused Republicans of playing politics over its Miranda-rights Christmas gift to the crotch bomber.

With fumbling terrorism czar John Brennan walking point, administration spokesmen attacked those who believe that treating would-be suicide-bomber Umar Abdulmutallab the way we handle shoplifters harms our national security.  With its desperate counteroffensive on this issue, the White House is struggling to recover from the PR debacle over the decision to award Abdulmutallab (and other terrorists) rights to which they are in no way entitled.

The White House position is a PR blend of lies, half-truths and ignorance. Let's strip out the politics and lay out the facts from an intelligence professional's perspective:

With every passing day now, we're subjected to another episode in an amateurishly bad TV sitcom starring Obozo the Clown President.  Try changing the channel and the sitcom morphs into that ghastly 1988 horror flick Killer Klowns From Outer Space.

It's enough to give you coulrophobia.  For it really does seem that space aliens looking and behaving like clowns have seized Washington and are engaged in destroying our country.  While this is not literally true, what would be the difference if it were?

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Well, one difference would be a plain vanilla sex scandal submarining Obozo's Plan for a Fascist America - or at least the health plan part of it...

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And as long as we're in to juicy Washington gossip, here's the juiciest - or what will become so.

As the administration fiddles and fumbles with its soft- on-terror policies at home, one Obama-blessed campaign abroad is hitting al Qaeda and its franchises hard: the drone war.

Drones work. They kill terrorists. Important terrorists. And we don't have to squabble about where to put their shredded bodies on trial.

For all the billions poured into Afghan pockets, the continuing giveaways to well-connected contractors, the abuse of our military as glorified aid workers and terrorist targets, and the general strategic incoherence in Washington, we're getting this one thing right.

On Tuesday (2/02), an up-the-ante wave of attacks fired 18 missiles from Unmanned Aerial Systems. (UAS is our term of the week for drones.) The strike hit a terrorist stronghold, killing another dozen or more militants.  Cool.  Very cool.

The HFR can only raise a truly half-full glass to the Daschle Disaster this week. 

Exposing the former Democrat Senate Majority Leader as a tax cheat  and millionaire political fixer was good enough.  What compounds the benefits is that Zero's attempt to take over and destroy health care in America has been seriously damaged.

The number of appointees in Zero's White House who owe their political lives to Daschle is very large.  He was the guy who could shepherd and coordinate the health care takeover, and now he's gone.  This is a fantastic two-fer.

It's countervailed by the Dems not approving another tax cheat - one more blatant and disgusting to taxpayers than Timmy Geithner.

For if Daschle had not withdrawn and had been approved with Zero saying he "absolutely" supported his tax cheating and making millions from influence peddling - and with every comic from Jay Leno on down making fun of him - then the one thing America most needs would have been greatly accelerated.

A tax revolt.

Why do individuals and countries engage in self-destructive behavior? Many books have been written on the topic, but given the U.S. election campaign, it is worth examining why some politicians and other opinion leaders advocate policies contrary to both good theory and empirical evidence.

Despite this evidence of success, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to increase the top tax rates, though there is no evidence that raising the top rates will result in any more revenue but there is evidence it will result in slower growth.

They can get away with it because voters have had their brains mangled by public education.

Since education in almost all countries these days is chiefly in public institutions, except for relatively small numbers of students educated in U.S. private schools and universities, it should come as no surprise that the government employees doing the "educating" are biased toward the public sector and are anti-business.

One of the key objectives of the Tea Party people is the strict enforcement of the 10^th   Amendment :  "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

As an early 1960s vintage member of the then-new conservative movement, I remember us focusing on the 10^th amendment during the 1964 Goldwater campaign. It has been a staple of conservative thought, and the continued dormancy of 10^th  amendment enforcement has been one of the failures of our now half-century-old movement.

As the Tea Party movement in so many ways seems to represent the 2.0 version of our movement, I am thinking about the 10^th  amendment anew. It strikes me that the best way to revive the 10^th  Amendment is to repeal the 17^th Amendment -- which changes the first paragraph of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution to provide that each state's senators are to be "elected by the people thereof" rather than being "chosen by the Legislature thereof."

The Age of Zero is only ten days old at this writing (1/30), and already this is a failed presidency.  On the eve of Zero's Immaculation, his approval rating was 83%.  Now Rasmussen reports it's 63%, a 20% drop in less than two weeks.

The goofball mistakes are piling up, but here's the top three, a Stupidity Hat Trick.

His first international interview is with a Moslem news outlet, earning him the label: "President al-Arabiya."  He grovels and apologizes to the Moslem world for America being the target of their hatred, as only a liberal embarrassed to be an American can.

In return, Mahmoud Ahmadinutjob spits in his face and demands that Zero beg for forgiveness for America's sins against Iran, the number one terrorist state on earth.

Zero follows up this demonstration of brilliance by attacking Rush Limbaugh by name, petulantly demanding that Republicans not listen to him.  Did Rush somehow bribe Zero to say this?  Now, everybody is listening to Rush - who immediately takes maximum advantage of his Zero-provided megaphone and offers an extremely clever proposal:

How much money would the government have to give you and every other American to avoid a recession? You cannot answer because the question contains a false conclusion, and when political arguments are about false conclusions, the wrong policies are pursued.

To try to reverse the current economic slowdown, one first must understand the real causes and then try to correct those causes. Many in Congress, the administration, and the Fed have misdiagnosed the problem and then given the wrong medicine -AKA "the stimulus package."

There are four government-caused reasons why Washington remains "stuck on stupid" regarding the economy.

What do Haiti and Afghanistan have in common, other than the presence of our military? They're both profoundly failed states that we pretend just need the right encouragement.

We told ourselves that in Somalia, too. And we soon may be telling ourselves whopping fibs about Yemen. Or Pakistan.

Failed, failing and outright fake states come in different flavors, from societies in which tribes remain more powerful than struggling governments to those that are gang-plagued and anarchic. There's no single solution to the problem. But we and other successful states typically stand in the way of any solutions.

We -- and the locals in failed or failing states -- would be far better off if competent powers engaged in a form of triage, categorizing them into: