These are times that try men's souls, wrote Thomas Paine in 1776, and so is the time that's upon us now. So, it is time to examine our core beliefs, very clearly and plainly. More than anything else, difficult times demand that we know what we believe - not with shallow slogans, but down to our depths.

"Conservative values" are not a core belief - they are derivative, not primary. The term is, at best, a short-hand reference to a set of ideas. But unless you have a very clear grasp of what those values are, the slogan becomes a cheap imitation. We must know the real thing, not merely a group of words that stand in its place.

Have you ever asked yourself what makes a government legitimate?

Legitimacy in human government is far more important than force. Ruling humans by force alone is a losing proposition: The ruled will adapt; they'll hide their grain before it can be taken, or they'll just leave. In order to rule humans successfully, they have to be willing. This willingness can be attained either by manipulation or by convincing people that joining together provides better results.

A government that convinces people to support it has a valid claim to legitimacy. A government that manipulates people into supporting it does not.

Absolutely no doubt who the HFR Hero of the Week is:  Rick Perry, who took a bullet for the team.  He was all set to give an adaptation of a suggested closing statement I wrote for him (appended below) at the South Carolina debate last night (1/19), when he decided that if he continued, the Not Romney vote would remain so split Romney would win.

Now he won't.  Gingrich will win the SC primary tomorrow (1/21) - despite the Obamamedia trying to take him out with his coyote ugly shrew ex-wife from Hell - thanks to Perry.

That said, there is also absolutely no doubt who the HFR Jerk of the Week is - the schmuck, the phony "social conservative," the corrupt horse's derriere of the year - who singlehandedly caused Perry to lose the nomination because Perry told him to shove it for soliciting a bribe while Santorum said, "Let's talk."

We're talking about...

Did you know that in Denmark, the poorest 30% pay 14.1% of all taxes and the richest pay 48.7%  -- while in the United States, the poorest 30% pay just 6.1 % of all taxes and the richest 30% pay a whopping 65.3%?

The surprising thing is not that the richest pay most of the taxes but that the U.S. has nearly the most progressive tax system in the world, while the Scandinavian countries have about the least progressive tax systems, contrary to commonly held belief.

The above facts, along with hundreds of other useful tidbits, are found in a compelling new book, Government Versus Markets: The Changing Economic Role of the State (Cambridge University Press, 2011), by one of the world's most highly regarded economists, Vito Tanzi.   It, and one other book, should be required reading for Washington dummies.

With apologies to John Fogerty and Credence Clearwater Revival:

I see the bad Palestinian moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightning.
I see bad Gaza times today.

Don't go around in Gaza tonight,
Well, it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad Palestinian moon on the rise.

I may have awakened him.  The late James Jesus Angleton, once the chief of CIA counterintelligence, sounded kinda groggy to me after I got him-loud and clear!-on my famously untrustworthy ouija board.  Of course I have no idea whether he gets to sleep at all.  I don't quite know exactly "where" he is, after all, and he doesn't answer direct questions on the subject.  Anyway, there he was, and I started right in.

ML:  So what am I supposed to think about Petraeus?

JJA:  That you're living in a country where espionage is rampant.

ML:  Huh?

JJA:  Have you read those stories about the "software breakdowns" in the Romney get-out-the-vote program "Orca"?

ML:  Sure, it didn't work, passwords didn't work, it was a gigantic snafu.

JJA:  Uh huh.  And has anyone raised the possibility that the Romney organization was penetrated in order to introduce "fatal errors" in their computers?

We begin with the announcement many of you have been patiently waiting for:  The 12^th TTP Rendezvous (RXII) will be in California on Memorial Day weekend, Friday May 25 to Sunday May 26.  Monday the 28^th is Memorial Day, which gives everyone a day to either relax or return home at a leisurely pace.

RXII will be The Plan B Rendezvous.  We'll have a few sessions where a speaker talks and folks listen.  But the main focus is for this to be a working rendezvous, discussing what strategies you can avail yourself of to best protect and prepare yourself for an increasingly probable fascist maelstrom.

We all hope for an end to the Zero Presidency this November (actually next January).  Yet we can't bet our farms on this, nor that there won't be extremely severe economic, social, and political problems in the aftermath of its desired demise, due to the inertia of fascism it has built up.

How you and your loved ones surmount those problems is quite likely to depend on how good your Plan B is.  The purpose of The Plan B Rendezvous is to enable you get a Plan B that really works for you.  A number of TTPers have already done this, and they'll be there to teach you how. I'll see you there.
 
Now here's a  question of the week:  What is Rick Perry's Plan B?  He does have one, you know.

It is widely recognized that excessive regulation is unnecessarily killing jobs. The question has been what to do about it.

The president is telling us he is trying to do everything possible to create jobs. Members of his administration have acknowledged that regulations that do not meet a cost-benefit test cost jobs - as everyone with a basic understanding of economics realizes.

Yet the cost-benefit studies that are done by these regulatory agencies are little more than jokes, with grossly incomplete and incompetent analyses.  Here's a simple way they can be done for real.  How about it, Mr. President?

Not quite two years ago, in Terrorism and Tiny Zibbs, I discussed why one of the principal causes of Moslem terrorism is that so many Moslem men are afraid of women.

This was made quite evident in a London Daily Telegraph poll of British Moslems conducted last week that stunned the British. 24% of British Moslems, it turns out, are sympathetic with the feelings and motives of the suicide bombers attacking London, and almost one-third believe that: “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Moslems should seek to bring it to an end.”

The outrage this provoked caused most folks to overlook the poll’s internals, which showed that the great majority of those alienated British Moslems are men. Very few British Moslem women want to bring Western society to an end, for that society respects them as full human beings and gives them freedom to act as such.

So all this soul-searching navel-gazing blather in the British liberal press agonizing over the failure of British society to cure Moslem alienation utterly misses the point - as liberals almost unfailingly do. The fault, the blame, the cause of Moslem terrorism, hatred, and alienation lie not with us in the West, but with the cultural defects of Moslems themselves - and specifically of Moslem men.

To my European friends:

I see from various polls that very nearly all of you support President Obama's reelection.  The numbers are remarkable, indeed incredible.  More than ninety percent of you would vote Obama (94% of Italians, for example, and the numbers for Great Britain, France, Spain, and Germany are even higher).  Other numbers show that nearly half of you think you should somehow be able to vote in our elections, since American policies have such an enormous effect on you.

All of which reinforces my belief-speaking as the grandson of Russian immigrants who arrived in Harlem and western Massachusetts early in the last century-that the American Revolution was a great thing, and that Americans were right to abandon authoritarian Europe for the possibility of creating a free country across the ocean. 

Anyone who truly values liberty has to see that Obama is a threat.  He wants to turn the United States into a version of Europe:  big, meddlesome government, constantly higher levels of taxation, and intrusive regulation of almost everything, combined with a deliberate and systematic weakening of military power and a foreign policy that shrinks from decisive action against freedom's enemies.

That's you, sadly.  So it's understandable that you'd favor Obama (although the numbers - reminiscent of plebiscites rather than normal elections - are ridiculous).  It's yet another sign of the decadence of Europe.

As Jackie Gleason always said at the start of his show, "And awaaaaay we go!" with the first HFR of 2012.

The first week of the year got shot out of the fascist cannon with Zero declaring war on Congress by making four presidential appointments that are egregiously unconstitutional.  Ed Meese, President Reagan's Attorney General, explains why.

The fury of Boehner Congressfolk means nothing to Zero.  As an example of how hopelessly feckless the Pubtards are, Republican Senator Scott Brown (remember how excited we were about him a year ago?) announced his support for Zero's fascism.

Michael Savage is no doubt correct in predicting that Zero's reelection will result in a Hugo Chavez-type banana republic dictatorship, for we are well on our way towards it right now.  The fascist unconstitutional lawlessness of our federal government has built up a monumental amount of inertia, which won't be halted or slowed down merely by Zero's defeat.  It will take an equally monumental effort to reverse its direction.

Which brings us to the pointlessness of Mitt Romney.  Why is he running for president other than to be president?  That's really what's going on, you know.  He wants to live up to his dad.

Can an amendment to the U.S. Constitution fix the deficit problem?

Polls show most Americans think we need a balanced-budget amendment. Yet serious scholars of the issue understand that the deficit is merely a symptom of the problem, namely, that people want more benefits from government than they wish to pay for.

Various forms of balanced-budget and tax-and-spending-limitation amendments have been proposed. Almost everyone realizes that an amendment must be flexible enough to deal with national emergencies, such as a major war.

But if the amendment is too flexible, politicians will quickly find ways around whatever limitations on spending, taxing and deficits are imposed. And the more tightly drawn any proposed amendment is, the more difficult it will be to pass it because an effective amendment will limit the powers of the very people who are required to vote for it.

As we struggle to try to devise a constitutional fix to the structural problem of destructive debt, spending, regulation and taxation, it would be useful to consider the following.  Call them Rahn's Three Requirements for A Constitutional Fix: