The current disagreement between our intelligence agencies and those of our allies regarding Iran's nuclear program reveals the debased state of the US $75-billion- a-year intel system.

The Germans, French, Israelis and now the Brits agree that Iran has an active nuclear-weapons program, differing only as to how swiftly Tehran can field warheads.

The US intel community's holding out. It's worried about political risks. A reassessment's supposedly under way, but we're clinging to our comforting conclusion that Iran gave up on designing nuclear weapons in 2003.

Mounting evidence to the contrary hasn't made a dent. Not only is the intel community fearful of another Iraq-style weapons-of-mass-destruction mess, but the White House has made it clear that it doesn't want more bad news.  Our intel agencies have been Obama-ized.

It's pretty obvious what most needs to be celebrated this week:  that unless she manages to have Obambi rubbed out in the next few months, the nightmare of President Pantsuit has been postponed to at least 2012...

... We need to celebrate something else that crashed and burned like the Clintons this week:  the greatest piece of fascist legislation since the 16^th Amendment, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act...

... We need to follow this victory up now with a Pro-CO2 Movement, extolling the extraordinary benefits of more CO2 in our atmosphere - such as wiping out hunger.  As we discussed in Solar Warming back in September 2005...

... The best way to produce more CO2 is to produce more of what we need more of most:  oil, oil and gas, oil and gas and coal.  Thus the HFR is grateful to the US Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service (USGS/MMS) of the Interior Department for releasing its current assessment of our country's oil and gas resources...

... One thing the world needs a lot more of is Moslems converting to Christianity.  Which is why a shocked HFR hoists an amazed glass to the Church of England, which announced it is launching a campaign specifically targeting Moslem for conversion...

... and the HFR has lots more this week.

Assume you are an agent for a country that is hostile to the United States, and you want to undermine the American economy by attacking a couple of key industries. Which ones would you go after?

You would learn that the computer, Internet and wireless industries, coupled with the world's most productive financial engineering, have provided much of the U.S. economic growth for the last quarter-century. Given that you, as an agent of a foreign government, could not possibly literally blow up these sectors, what would you do?

Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the HFR was trying to shake a couple of drops out of its far-from-even-half-full glass?  Well, fill up the flagon, barkeep, we're going to hoist a few this week.

We have a selection of heroes to toast.  Let's start with a tankard of Pilsner Urquell for the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus...

We follow that with a chalice of Brennan 2006 Viognier with its bouquet of bluebonnets and West Texas crude to that good ol' boy from Wichita Falls, Rex Tillerson, chairman of Exxon-Mobil... 

Finally, a tumbler of Glen Morangie single-malt (no defiling it with ice or water - the Scots consider that a "mixed drink") to a spy coming in from the cold, CIA Director Michael Hayden... 

That's the last of the good stuff for now.   The HFR pours instead a cup of contempt for bimbo-airhead actress Sharon Stone... 

Here's the fun episode of the week.  The HFR guzzles a goblet of glee over Obambi's latest embarrassment, Father Michael Pfleger...

Let's close with a potpourri of good news, because if drank to each one we'd get seriously wasted...

One last item.  Your humble HFR author takes personal satisfaction in the new movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull .

This past year more than one trillion dollars flowed between the U.S. and the EU. The EU now accounts for 21 percent of U.S. merchandise exports and 19 percent of U.S. merchandise imports, and about 34 percent of U.S. services exports and 37 percent of U.S. services imports.

The U.S. is not only the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, but far and away the world's largest investor elsewhere. Of the more than two trillion dollars the U.S. has invested directly abroad, a little more than half ($1.1 trillion) is invested in Europe. Europeans account for 70 percent ($1.2 trillion) of the direct investment in the U.S.

The bottom line is that the U.S. and Europe are economically joined at the hip, and any actions which damage trade and investment between these two economic giants hurt everyone. The U.S. and EU have a combined population of about 650 million people, and their combined GDP equals 57 percent of the world's total.

The U.S. has also provided...

Since Obama took office, he has been abandoning one US ally after another while seeking to curry favor with one US adversary after another. At every turn, America's allies - from Israel to Honduras, to Columbia, South Korea and Japan, to Poland and the Czech Republic - have reacted with disbelief and horror to his treachery.

And at every turn, America's adversaries - from Iran to Venezuela to North Korea and Russia - have responded with derision and contempt to his seemingly obsessive attempts to appease them.

The horror Obama has instilled in America's friends and the contempt he has evoked from its enemies have not caused him to change course. The fact that his policies throughout the world have already failed to bring a change in the so-called international community's treatment of the US has not led him to reconsider those policies.

His stubborn insistence on advancing his feckless foreign policy in the face of its already apparent colossal failure is of a piece with his unswerving commitment to his domestic agenda in spite of its apparent colossal failure.

The economic world has changed. There are new trends, megatrends if you will, now at work in our economy. They are "mega" trends because they overarch and impact everything else in the economy and will do so for quite a while.

There are other major trends at work as well, but they have been operating as a part of the basic framework of our economy for decades. These megatrends have emerged from the credit cycle because people change their behaviors in response to a crisis, and it would be foolish to assume that everything will just go back to the way things were before.

These aren't predictions of the future, because circumstances change. How many economists predicted this crisis? Very, very few. Think of these megatrends more as chalk marks on the playing field that will guide human economic behavior for some years.

Do you think the Republicans or the Democrats are winning the race to prove they are the dumbest and most incompetent political party?

The Republicans were clearly winning the race until January 2007. They threw away their majorities in both houses of Congress, by not only failing to have a realistic postwar strategy in Iraq but by such things as greatly expanding government spending when they had promised the voters the opposite.

The Democrats won the congressional elections by promising they would have a clear and coherent plan to end the stalemate in Iraq and to be "fiscally responsible" by holding down the growth in government spending and not increasing taxes.

So, what have they done since they have been in power? Having fulfilled virtually none of their campaign pledges, the Democrats' obvious incompetence and incoherence have managed to give the Congress an approval rate of only 29 percent, even lower than the president's.  That's quite an achievement.