Last week, 4,000 US Marines launched a major operation in Helmand, the poppy-queen province in southern Afghanistan. The Marines performed magnificently, reaching their objectives with minimal casualties -- mostly from the 110-degree heat.

But something important was missing: Afghans in uniform.  A few hundred Afghan players showed up in the backfield. But the village elders saw only American guns.

The Marine mission is to provide security for villagers, build trust and instill confidence in the Kabul government. This would all be far easier if the Afghan military and police were competent, trustworthy and present. They're not.

What's the problem? Why haven't years of effort and billions of dollars, coupled with our training expertise, forged fully reliable military units and constabularies? The answer lies in...

We should call the HFR this week The Toast Report, because that's what so many folks on the dark side have become in the last few days.

Let's start with Obambi.  This is going to be like watching one of those spectacular crash-explosion movie disaster scenes shot in agonizingly slow motion.  One month from tomorrow (April 22) is the Dem primary in Pennsylvania. 

Obambi's worshippers in the media will be the guys in the movie scene reaching out in slo-mo and shouting noooooo!, knowing all the while they can't prevent the inevitable.  He is going to be destroyed by Mrs. Clinton in PA.  Blue-collar Budweiser Democrats will not vote for someone who takes his kids to a church that goddamns America.

The same is going to happen to him in the North Carolina primary on May 6, except for his winning the huge black vote there.  Then it becomes obvious the Clinton-Obama race is about nothing but race, with Obambi only having the black vote.  At that point, the Dems realize they are truly, truly - in Daniel Henninger's delightful term - Mamet-worded.

If Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deliberately intended to sabotage his nation's economy, he would be hard-pressed to do anything different from what he is now doing to his country.

It has been widely reported that Mr. Chavez has been increasingly taking control of the oil, telecommunications and energy sectors, as well as the media. What has not been reported is the full extent of the corruption in Venezuela and how this ultimately will destroy the economy.

The financial scandal taking place there is far bigger than Enron, and may ultimately even exceed the U.N. "oil-for-food" scandal, the biggest financial disgrace of all time.

Venezuela has had a rapidly growing economy for the last few years, due to high oil prices, but the house of cards is about to collapse.

Obama went to Moscow desperate for the appearance of a foreign-policy success. He got that illusion -- at a substantial cost to America's security.

The series of signing ceremonies in a grand Kremlin hall and the litany of agreements, accords and frameworks implied that the United States benefited from all the fuss. We didn't.

We got nothing of real importance. But the government of puppet-master Vladimir Putin (nominally just prime minister) got virtually all it wanted. In Moscow, this was Christmas in July.

That's because we just agreed to the disarmament position of the American Communist Party of the 1950s.

The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that "diversity is the number one priority" at the Naval Academy, where I have been a Professor of English for 22 years.

The Naval Academy superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, echoed him. Everyone understands that "diversity" here means nonwhite skins.

Fowler insisted recently that we needed to have Annapolis graduates who "looked like" the Fleet, where enlisted people are about 42 percent nonwhite, largely African American and Hispanic.

The stunning revelation last week was that the Naval Academy had an incoming class that was "more diverse" than ever before: 35 percent minority.

Sounds good, only this comes with a huge price tag. It's taxpayers who bankroll the military. Yet nobody has asked us if we're willing to pay this price. Instead we're being told there is no price to pay at all. If you believe that, you probably also believe in the Tooth Fairy.

This week's HFR is way, way more than half-full - it's overflowing. 

The delicious destruction of a Democrat fascist is so orgasmic it can't be confined to an HFR blurb, but deserved its own article:  The Real Spitzer Scandal.

The Hillary-Obambi Destruction Derby keeps getting better.  But as we enjoy Obambi having to fire his Israel-hating/Palestinian terrorist-loving advisor Samantha Power for calling Hillary a "monster" (you mean she isn't?  who knew?), and the PIAPS having to fire her advisor Geraldine Ferraro for pointing out that people pay attention to Obambi only because he's black (when everyone knows he's only half-black) - let's focus on the real cause of the mud fight:

There's no substantive difference between these two moonbats in terms of political principles or ideology or Big Brother/Big Government programs they both advocate.  Thus the only way to create a difference between them is through personal invective, attack, insult, and smear.

So far, even though Her Thighness had to grovel yesterday (3/13) to blacks in apology for Ms. Ferraro's telling the truth, Obambi has definitely been more damaged in the fight so far than she.

This week's HFR focuses on the Obamarama - or as Jack Kelly describes him, the guy in an empty suit with a glass jaw. 

Naturally, we're all dancing on the bar tables over Hillary's winning Texas and Ohio, ensuring a vicious catfight between her and Obambi from now ‘till Labor Day.  What fun.

It turns out, though, that Hillary has a woman on her side who is turning out to be one of her campaign's greatest assets, who just may ensure the Hildebeast's victory over Obambi and her nomination.  Nope, not Gloria Steinem nor Barbra Streisand nor Halle Berry.  I refer, of course, to...

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...On the international scene, the HFR reports that Jews around the world rioted in violent protest over a British researcher's claims that Moses, the founder of the Jewish religion, was high on psychedelic drugs and hallucinated that he spoke to God on Mount Sinai.

It is hard to get there if you don't know where you want to go.

Despite the Democrats gaining control of Congress and his own previous mistakes, President Bush still has the opportunity to leave a constructive economic legacy, but to do so he must first clearly define his goals and determine what is realistically doable.

It turns out there is a trio of legacies - regarding reforming Social Security, excessive spending, and excessive regulation - being made available to him.

Grand Cayman, The Cayman Islands Turtle Farm.
If people were not allowed to own chickens and if chicken eggs and meat could not be legally sold, how many chickens would there be? 

The reason chickens, cattle, catfish, and goldfish are not endangered is because they are owned by private parties, bred and raised in captivity, and sold for commercial profit - hence there are billions of these animals. 

The poor sea turtle is endangered precisely because the global environmental lobby refuses to let sea turtles be commercially farmed and marketed like chickens and cattle and catfish.

Our effort in Iraq passed a major milestone this week: Our troops are leaving the cities.

Advisers remain in place. Joint patrols will still occur. And our forces will wait nearby to respond to Iraqi calls for support. But the last of the bases and US-only outposts within Iraq's urban centers will be vacated.

Terrorists have already begun testing the new security arrangements. Iraqi forces won't always pass with flying colors.

Yet this situation seemed a pipe dream not so long ago: Iraq's security forces, serving an elected government, assume primary responsibility for the good order of their own country.  It is an extraordinary achievement, the credit for which goes to President George W. Bush.

To borrow historian Niall Ferguson's metaphor, if finance is an evolutionary process, then regulation is its intelligent design - which, I would add, is a cognate of faith, not science.

Or, to take the observation of former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, if "the financial system (is) the brain of the economy," then, I would suggest, heavy regulation is its lobotomy; while it removes the emotional highs and lows, it also dulls the perception, facility and adroitness.

A century ago, medical science had faith in lobotomies. Today, it seems, Washington political science has faith in lobotomizing financial regulation.