If you were in debt, would you be more or less likely to increase your liabilities if you knew someone else would pay them off?

Many children can quickly figure out the answer to this question, but it seems to be a real stumper for members of the House Financial Services Committee, chaired Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat. They are considering having the federal government reinsure municipal bonds.

Such fiscal madness likely would make even citizens of banana republics blush.

The Feds are engaged in exactly the same behavior that got American International Group Inc. in trouble: insuring financial assets without having adequate resources to pay off all of the potential insurance claims. Such behavior can be viewed as criminally irresponsible.

Beginning around 2006, the Left began threatening that if Israel does not remove itself from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, the US will abandon us. On Sunday night, former prime minister Ehud Olmert presented this argument in his keynote speech before the Geneva Initiative's annual conference.

If Israel does not withdraw from the territoires occupied after the 1967 war, its cities will remain secure and its population will not be in crisis. But Israel will have to contend with a hostile US government threatening to take unknown steps to force it to contract to within indefensible borders.

What will those US threats involve? Washington is already arming and training a Palestinian army. It is already selling the Arabs the most advanced weapons in the US arsenal. It is already providing military assistance to the Hizbullah-controlled Lebanese army. It is already permitting Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

Would Olmert and his leftist colleagues have us believe that the US military will invade Israel to force us to exit Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem?

If that is what the Left is hinting, let us assume it is right. But if the Left is right, is Israel better off preemptively dooming itself to chronic wars and strategic vulnerability by accepting indefensible borders than by refusing to do so? At least if we refuse to stick our neck in the noose, the US government will be forced to make the case for destroying Israel to the American people.

Happy New Year!  Doesn't it feel great to be rid of 2009?  To be rid of the entire furshlugginer decade of the Aughts?  And what is to be our battle cry as we enter 2010?

Fired up and ready to go!

The battle cry is ours now.  It no longer belongs to that failed schmuck who used it in the long past days of yesteryear to con his way into the White House.  Besides, his supporters are so dejected and demoralized that if he tried to fire them up he would be pushing on a string.

So - what can we expect to accomplish, what can we expect the world to accomplish, in 2010?

First, we can expect it to be chaotic - and the definition of a chaotic system is that small differences in the initial conditions result in really big differences in the outcomes, making the outcomes unpredictable at the start.  In other words, expect the out-of-the-blue unexpected.

Second, realize that America is not the center of the Universe.  Not any longer.  More and more countries will behave as if America and its president are irrelevant - like tiny Honduras not reinstating Zelaya or giant China snubbing Zero in Copenhagen.  Events in other countries will be more world-changing than events in America.

The best current example is Iran.

A sign of immaturity - most often found in children and certain politicians - is being in denial or even unaware of the consequences of one's actions.

The global political class has always suffered from an excess of immaturity, but every generation or so, political immaturity explodes like a star in its death throes and vaporizes everything in its vicinity.

Current examples are all too numerous.  We'll discuss three of the most explosively damaging.

You have to hand it to Turkey's Islamist leaders. They sure know how to get their way. In the seven years since they first took power, the Islamist AKP party has successfully transformed Turkey from a staunch ally of the US and Israel and a member of NATO into a staunch ally of Iran and a member of NATO.

And that's not all. Turkey's Islamist leaders have used the Western language of democracy and freedom not only to abandon the West. They have used that language to destroy the foundations of Turkey's Western-style secular democracy and transform the governing system of NATO's sole Muslim member into a hybrid of Putinist autocracy and Iranian theocracy.

London, England. Imagine reading a news report that "U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi resigned this morning, and it is expected that more than half of the members of Congress will either resign, choose not to run again or be defeated in next year's election."

This statement might seem to be a dream come true, but it is equivalent to the headlines the British public was treated to this past week. Effective June 21, Michael Martin will become the first speaker of the British House of Commons to resign since 1695 (a mere 314 years ago).

The Times of London reports the expected "departure of 325 [out of 646] members of Parliament as a result of forced resignations, retirement, and defeat at the polls would represent the biggest clear-out of Parliament since 1945." 

Will this wholesale slaughter of British politicians be duplicated in the United States?

The current flurry of diplomatic activity is deeply disturbing. It isn't simply that the Obama administration has strong-armed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into participating in diplomatic theater with the PLO whose successful completion will leave Israel weaker and less defensible. It isn't merely that the newest "peace process" diverts our leadership's attention away from Iran and its nuclear weapons program.

The most disturbing aspect of the latest round of the diplomatic kabuki is that Israel's leaders and Israel's staunch friends in the US are enthusiastically participating in this dangerous project.

Certainly the best news of the week is that Copenhagen is imploding.  The "Climate Change Conference" is where the world's Fascist Left intended to cement its control of a global bureaucracy.  But then China and India balked, demanding they be paid oodles of Western money to reduce their "carbon footprints."  Whereupon every hick country from Tuvalu to Sudan demanded they be bribed as well, calling the bribes "climate reparations" from America and the West.

Knowing there is utterly no way to extract hundreds of billions in such bribes from Congress, the chief US negotiator at Copenhagen, Todd Stern, publicly told all those demanding bribes to forget it.  The US rejects "any notion of debt," he said. "Any sense of guilt or culpability or reparations" are "categorically rejected."

Stern is no conservative.  Take a look at his bio.  Yet this guy - under orders from his boss, Hillary Clinton, which is intensely interesting - has done the quintessential thing most necessary to protect America:  reject envy, tell the envious their guilt-mongering has no power. 

There's still a week to go (the conference ends next Friday 12/18), but this is high drama unfolding.  The US has finally told the world to take its envy and shove it.  This is Hillary at work, folks, doing a number on Zero who would never do such a thing.  Lots of drama on several levels.  Enjoy the show.

Bratislava, Slovakia -- This pleasant city on the Danube River is considered part of eastern Europe, although it is only as about as far from Vienna as Washington is from Baltimore (about 35 miles) and is, in fact, near the geographical center of the European continent.

On May 15, a meeting sponsored by several think tanks in Slovakia and Vienna's Hayek Institute was held here in Bratislava to discuss the current situation and what should be done.

Nobel laureate in economics Myron S. Scholes spoke, as did several other prominent European and American economists. There was nearly unanimous agreement that the financial crisis was not only primarily caused by governments, but that the solution was less rather than more government spending -- and less but more focused financial regulation.

There was similar agreement that Europe's financial crisis may be even worse than America's.

Here's the question of the week:  What if King Canute had been a liberal?

You know the ancient tale.  Canute (985-1035), son of Sven Forkbeard, Viking ruler of both Scandinavia and England, tired of the endless flattery of courtiers trying to curry his favor, ordered his throne brought to the seashore at Bosham in West Sussex on England's southern coast.

Ensconced on his throne wearing his royal robes and commanding his courtiers to stand around him, he delivered a Royal Order to the sea to stop the incoming tide so that his royal feet should not get wet.  The sea did not obey, the tide washed over his feet, whereupon he railed at his flatterers:

"Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws."

But what if Canute had been a liberal?  What if he really believed he could command the tide - and continued to believe it as the tide washed over him and threatened to sweep him out to sea? 

Wouldn't that remind you of Democrats facing the tide of 2010?  Of glowarmers commanding the tide of truth to stop?  Of the OPM (Obama Propaganda Media) denying the very existence of tides?