France loves blacks — when they are American (i.e., foreign) blacks and not French blacks

In an interview with Le Monde's Jean Birnbaum and Benoît Hopquin (who still can't spell the first name of Jesse Jackson), Louis-Georges Tin (Maître de conférences à l'IUFM d'Orléans, porte-parole du Conseil représentatif des associations noires (CRAN)) suggests that France loves blacks — when the blacks are American (i.e., foreign) blacks, that is, and a bit less when the blacks are French (domestic) blacks…

D'une manière générale, en France, on aime beaucoup les Noirs d'Amérique... Si vous prenez un discours de Barack Obama, de Martin Luther King ou de Jessie Jackson, et que vous le montrez à un Français, il le jugera formidable. Si vous lui dites qu'il a été prononcé par un Noir français, il vous dira : "Attention au communautarisme !" En France, critiquer le racisme des autres, on sait faire, surtout s'il s'agit des Américains. Mais balayer devant sa porte, c'est plus difficile.

Adventures in Shortdom

Yes, those terrible, terrible short-sellers who do nothing but ruin the financial markets with their bottom-feeding. You know, short-sellers like the guys who exposed the Enron scam:

In January 2001, we began contacting a number of analysts at various Wall Street firms with whom we did business and invited them to our offices to discuss Enron. Over the next few months a number of them accepted our invitation and met with us to discuss Enron and its valuation. We were struck by how many of them conceded that there was no way to analyze Enron, but that investing in Enron was instead a "trust me" story. One analyst, while admitting that Enron was a "black box" regarding profits, said that, as long as Enron delivered, who was he to argue! It was clear to us that most of these analysts were hopelessly conflicted over the investment banking and advisory fees that Enron was paying to their firms. We took their "buy" recommendations, both current and future, with a very large grain of salt!

Holding firms accountable via the markets. Can't have any of that now, can we. No worries though, the quick and nimble monolith of governmentalism will certainly save the day.

The Russian Foe Whom Numbers of French Deride as the "Warmonger", the "Comic Doctor Strangelove", "Parrot of the Caucasus"

Le Monde's Piotr Smolar has an interview with Mikheïl Saakachvili. Needless to say, Le Monde's readers opine (sic) that Georgia's president is an American poodle; that he is a puppet; that he is "the Caucasian parrot"; that he is a liar; that he is dangerous; that he is a warmonger; that he is the equivalent of Dugashvili (Stalin); that he is unstable; that he suffers from mental trouble; and that he is a "comic Dr. Strangelove". That it is in Europe's interest that Russia remain a great power. And that "Medvedev et Poutine ne sont pas de vrais démocrates, mais eux, au moins, savent garder leur sang-froid !" All of which leads a rare reader (by the name of Raboliot) to state:

A lire les commentaires haineux à l'encontre de Saakachvili sur ce forum, je constate que le service communication de l'ambassade d'URSS, pardon de Russie, à mis ses plus brillants sujets derrière leur PC...C'est vrai que le problème d'une démocratie à leurs frontières est abominable et Annonciateur de catastrophes.. Il faut donc discréditer Saakachvili : C'est un suppôt des USA, un "cadavre politique" "un malade" on ressort les vieilles rengaines apprises dans les écoles du KGB.

Xavier adds that

J'ai l'impression de voir dans la plupart des commentaires postés ici qu'une mascarade de la propagande "soviétique". Le mieux pour ceux qui tentent de décrédibiliser la Géorgie étant tout simplement de faire passer son président pour fou, voire mieux de le traiter de "connard", on évite ainsi bien facilement le débat et la vérité qui se trame actuellement.Car qui est le plus fou des deux? celui qui recherche l'intégrité de son territoire ou bien celui qui l'étend?

While Ilias points out that

Être pro-Poutin par anti-américanisme aveugle c est comme être pro-Hitler par anti-anglisme a la question tchécoslovaque en 1938.

Choices from the Left: Jackboot or Birkenstock

It is quite difficult to know how many times one should keep pointing out the obvious. When it comes to the MSM it seems the message never sinks in when it comes to the differences among the various statists looking to run our lives. What should be obvious to even the casual observer is lost on our betters in the media. As an example:

Nestled in the vineyards and rolling uplands east of Vienna, the town of Neusiedl am See is celebrated for its wine taverns, fine fish restaurants and water sports. Geraniums peak from window boxes; the cobblestone streets are meticulously swept clean each morning. The only thing the casual visitor might find mildly unnerving is the squawk of storks from their huge nests on the old town's chimney tops.

But for Austrian far-right politician Heinz-Christian Strache, Neusiedl am See is ripe for revolution.

Now, what is exactly "far-right" about Mr. Strache? What the media fails to notice about the "blood and soil" branch of the statist tree is what these, in reality, "far-left" statists stand for:

- Against economic globalisation
- Deep state control over all facets of an individual's life
- Deep state control over all aspects of societal life
- Heavy state influence over economic matters
- Heavy state influence over individual matters
- Heavy state care of the individual from cradle-to-grave
- Against the free flow of individuals (ie. anti-immigration)

With the exception of last highly noxious item, what differentiates these "far-right" blood-and-soilers from the others on the far-left statist tree, nothing but a matter of degree. As Erik Svane far more lucidly quoted Jonah Goldberg:

Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state. "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," is how Mussolini defined it. Mussolini coined the word "totalitarian" to describe not a tyrannical society but a humane one in which everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. It was an organic concept in which every class, every individual, was part of the larger whole.

Yet the media continues to miss the boat on the far-right-far-leftism:

This produces some jarring juxtapositions. Though he has built his career on dire warnings about the dangers of foreigners, Strache poses on his website as Che Guevara, donning the rebel's trademark beret and highlighting the last three letters of his name for anyone who misses the point. He praises Venezuela's left-wing demagogue Hugo Chavez and, in his campaign rap "Viva HC!", chants "Yes-We-Can" (in English), a reference to the campaign slogan of Barack Obama. That's an odd choice given that Strache is urging that some African immigrants be deported. "Austria! First!" he sings, backed by an unsettling crowd chant. "Our Homeland! Our people! Our culture! Our language! Is what I stand for, HC Strache!"

There is nothing jarring or juxtaposed, the goals of all mentioned are identical: Deeper state integration and control into the life of every individual. The only difference is whether you prefer a shiny leather jackboot stamping on your face forever -or- a moldy tattered Birkenstock.

The judges and the divorce lawyers are corrupt, inefficient, lazy, stupid; the judges are like pit bosses in Vegas casinos

I don't care if the judges and the lawyers die of heart attacks in the process of getting their job done

Alec Baldwin tells ABC News.

They are corrupt, inefficient, lazy, stupid -- they're the most God-awful people.

Baldwin believes that many family court lawyers and their manipulations and delays make the child custody duel much worse than it needs to be.

The judges are like pit bosses in Vegas casinos. Their job is to make sure everybody stays at the table and keeps gambling.

Update: Interview on Larry King Live

Obama the Good, Bush the Bad, and McCain the Ugly

As they never tire telling us, the French are always masters of nuance as well as the champions in always finding just the exact literary simile that fits. This was proven again tonight, when France 2 (!) broadcast a news item (!) on political TV ads in America, comparing leading politicians to the characters of a… spaghetti western (!?!)

Using the emblematic characters of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the entirely serious-minded (sic), profound (sic), and thoughtful (sic) news channel proceeds to tell viewers that political ads in America are misleading and even totally false, whether it's the ad of Obama — compared to The Good — depicting John McCain saying America's economy is sound or the ad of John McCain — compared to the Ugly — stating that Obama wanted sex ed in kindergarten before toddlers could even read…

Who, then, is the Bad — known in the French title as the Crook or the Gangster? (In French, as in Italian, the order of the title is The Good, the Ugly, the Bad.) France 2 (on whose website, incidentally, a poll shows 52% of respondents wanting French troops out of Afghanistan — as opposed to 40% in favor of them staying) mentions the Swift Boat ad of four years ago — "a total lie" against John Kerry — which allowed for the victory of… (you got it) the Crook…

The only logical end game for socialized medicine

Europe is just like slow death, and the only time those people talk about national duty is when they talk about putting the elderly down like rabid dogs.

Looks like the pilot isn't going to be picked up...

Given the mass hysteria (real wrath of God stuff) kicked-up by those financial markets doing what they are actually designed to do, a simple query....

The anti-capitalism scribblers on the left, along with their even more extreme trogladyte minions further out on the fringe left where the really radical nose-picking goes on, have busily been writing the epitaph for capitalism, all based upon a few days of trading here and there

Now that those markets are making the same type of move, to the positive side, will the very same noxious brew of collectivists, statists, leftists, dog-washers, you name it, reassess their opinions?

If the markets continue to self-correct in a positive fashion will it be noted on the left? Of course, the question presumes the left is coming from the vantage point of facts and reality and not just using yet another current event to bang the ideological bongos for more utopianism, more socialism, and more sloganeering against the individual.

As an aside, over the past week one has been deluged with reportage about the "failing" financial markets hurting the little guys (Jean/Joe six-pack). Oddly it is hard to recall hearing from the very same voices how previous rising financial markets benefitted the very same Jean/Joe. If moves in financial markets can hurt, they can also help. Of course when it comes to the statist left, all "narratives" are one-way: theirs.

That would be a neat trick. How does it work?

Not knowing the meaning of words tends to lead one to make silly comments:

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said Thursday that paying more in taxes is the patriotic thing to do for wealthier Americans. In a new TV ad that repeats widely debunked claims about the Democratic tax plan, the Republican campaign calls Obama's tax increases "painful."

Whether an individual coughs up $Zero or $Zillions, they have the ability to be just as "patriotic" as the other. What is interesting is this plan by Senator Obama. The number most often heard is that "95% of Americans" will receive a tax-cut under the Senator's plan. How does that work?

According to the IRS the top 50% of all earners in the US pay 96.93% of all income taxes. Conversely, the bottom 50% of earners pay 3.07% of all income taxes.

The bottom 50% pay basically no income taxes. How will the "95% of Americans" number be reached? The only alternative for an individual to receive a tax-cut would be via lowering payroll taxes, for some. That would be good and bad. The good, we can finally stop hearing the incessant garbage from the left about how payroll taxes are (cue angels playing melodious harps in the background) a sacred inter-generational covenant among all Americans which is a burden happily, equally, and eagerly borne by all (cut angels playing melodious harps in the background). The bad, the successful among the Americans will have yet another financial burden to carry while others get a free-ride.

So how will that work?

La Baf Tries to Hold an Auction at the Jeff Koons Exhibit in the Versailles Château's Gallerie des Miroirs

What with Jeff Koons a millionaire from the sale of his plastic art, two Koons wannabes (Arthur Koons and Erik Koons of La Baf) decide to strike it rich by holding an auction of their blow-up toys at the Château de Versailles as well.

Gonflage à l'exposition Koons du Chateau de Versailles
envoyé par Labaf

Hélas! Things go terribly wrong when a controversy rises over whose Koons sculpture is the (most?) real one and a heated exchange breaks out in the Gallerie des Miroirs that continues into the Cour de Marbre.















Update: La Baf was mentioned in the February 2009 issue (# 129) of Technikart…

One more hack journalmalist theorizes away the fact that Jews are hunted down in the streets of Paris

It's not at all what it appears to be. Everyone is behaving splendidly. Really.

That's Funny, I Though it was the Other Way Around

Normally it's missing a few marbles that makes people into vegetarians, and least of the identity politics variety.

Do Obama's Vision and Values Include Making Fun of Veterans' Wounds and Scars?

It's one thing (one which is bad enough), as Jonah Goldberg points out, that Barack Obama and his campaign staff do not realize that

One reason McCain is not versed in the mechanical details of sending e-mail and typing on a keyboard is that the North Vietnamese broke his fingers and shattered both of his arms. As Forbes, Slate and the Boston Globe reported in 2000, McCain's injuries make using a keyboard painfully laborious.

(Jonah Goldberg goes on to ask: "what does it say about his supposedly 'cybersavvy' staffers that they don't know how to conduct a five-minute Google search?", adding that "by this logic [incidentally], Obama is even less qualified to be commander in chief because, unlike McCain, Obama has never fired a gun, flown a plane or led men during wartime.")

It's another thing, as Christopher Cook points out, that Barack Obama seems to intentionally mock McCain's war wounds (at 12:20 in the video).

At a moment when describing a McCain ad, Obama adds a somatic gesture to create an image of John McCain. That gesture involves changing his stance and arm position to imitate the way McCain stands—a stance the Senator developed as a result of the injuries he suffered while he was a "guest" at the Hanoi Hilton.

…The gesture was clearly an imitation of McCain—the context makes that plain. Obama makes no other such bodily gestures EXCEPT when he's creating a picture of McCain in the windmill commercial.

Obama may not have been directly saying "ha, ha, you got your arms broken and a bayonet plunged into your groin and I didn't." It doesn't matter. His way of imitating John McCain is by imitating the man's physical stance.

Barack Obama is a puerile, emotionally under-developed little man. It's appalling to think that he could be this close to the presidency.

And by the way… Let's not even go into the subject about what this says about the left's alleged undying respect for servicemen and veterans…

Jeff Koons Blows Up the Château de Versailles

America has invaded the gilded chambers and sculptured gardens of the Château de Versailles in the form of a much-debated exhibition by the American superstar artist Jeff Koons

writes Elaine Sciolino in the New York Times.

“I’m thrilled with the totality of the whole experience,” he said Wednesday as he posed for photographers in the palace gardens in front of “Split-Rocker,” his 11-ton stainless-steel sculpture covered in 90,000 live flowers and plants. “It’s so profound — the high point of my artistic life.”

Not everyone here was as pleased by the installation. Several dozen people demonstrated outside the palace gates early Wednesday, a protest organized by the National Union of Writers of France, a little-known, right-wing group dedicated to artistic purity in France.

Protests?! Against the authorities and the state?! Maybe this ought to be a job for La Baf as well…

The exhibition “strikes at the heart of a civilization” and “is an outrage to Marie Antoinette,” said Arnaud-Aaron Upinsky, the group’s chairman.

He has called the exhibition “a truly sullying of the most sacred aspects of our heritage and identity,” and in an open letter in July to the minister of culture, Christine Albanel, he demanded that the exhibit be canceled.

…Some visitors to the museum seemed unsettled by the presence of Mr. Koons’s work in the grand 17th-century edifice, with its marble walls, ceiling paintings, marble sculptures, chandeliers and more than 350 mirrors.

Jumko Jaim, a homemaker from Tokyo on her first trip to Paris, called herself shocked at the sight of the porcelainlike ceramic “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” in the center of the Venus Salon.

“This object doesn’t suit the beauty of the décor,” Ms. Jaim said. “It spoils it. There’s so much nice modern art in the world. Why this?”

…“I paid to see all of Versailles,” said Sylvie Guérin, an administrative technician from Montreal. “I didn’t come here to see a red lobster that I can buy in a gas station in Quebec to go in my pool.”

If Jeff Koons can sell a red lobster from a Québec gas station to go in the pool for 12 million Euros, maybe plain individuals (such as La Baf members) ought to bring their own inflatable toys to the Château de Versailles to sell for 12 million Euros as well…

Go Ahead, Question His Patriotism

If you've felt bad about questioning Obama's honor and his sense of obligation to his fellow citizens were he to be president, don't:

While campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

“Global citizen Obama's” effort had two purposes:

1) to create something over which to maintain antagonism and righteous indignation over
2) To give him a way to appear to sweep in and look like a saviour, when he was more than willing to demand an American withdrawal from Iraq when it would have obviously caused the place to descend irreversibly into an abyss.

Case in point

Often times those individuals not on the barking left, the real lamp-post scratching left, try to engage leftie howlers in discussion on issues, rarely with any success. Based entirely on irrationality and hyper-emotive sloganeering, the "ideas" of the howling left are impossibly wrapped-up in statism and socialism to ever be unwound. One tug of the string and the whole tattered mess falls apart. Thusly, the howlers are so beholden to their warped ideology that they can never give an inch to reality.

Case in point, those falling financial markets. How does one approach, from a rational stand-point, claims such as this just six weeks ago:

I am intensely annoyed by the incessant reporting of movements in the FTSE 100 index on just about every news bulletin I hear as if this is indication of either my well being or that of the UK economy as a whole.

Neither is true. As far as is possible I have no money invested in the London Stock Exchange. I think it irrational for anyone to do so right now. Second, and more important, a substantial proportion of the FTSE has nothing to do with the UK. Either, as is the case with the Ukrainian companies noted above, they’re using it as a market place which indicates no link with any real economic activity in the UK, or even if the company is registered and trades here much of the activity it undertakes is elsewhere. In that case the rise and fall of the FTSE is no real indicator of the health of the UK economy at all.

So, "the FTSE is no real indicator of the health of the UK economy at all" a mere six weeks ago. Today, from the very same source:

This is Melt Down

Yesterday is rightly being called a ‘black Monday’.

Lehman has gone. Merrill Lynch has gone. AIG is teetering. HBOS looks like one for the lifeboat. There will be more.

The financial markets as we know them have failed. More important, the political philosophy that has backed them has failed. Neo-liberalism has to die, for good.

So, financial markets have no bearing on the life of an "ordinary" citizen six weeks ago, today financial markets are in "melt down" dragging with it every man, woman, and child. Is it too much to ask for a wee bit of consistency from the lamp-post scratching crowd? 

How else can we all engage in that lucid, tolerant, prosaic, nuanced, and celebratory happening of exchanging ideas and debating the issues from an open-minded point-of-view? 

(Yes, I am aware those types of discussions only occur on the left when everyone already agrees with each other in lock-step fashion.)

Lucid Frenchman "Gets It" and Shows Off His Unsurpassed Lucidity, Comparing McCain to… a Serial Woman Killer

Le Monde's Dominique Dhombres compares John McCain to Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (and Sarah Palin to his pitbull).

A la fin du discours, John McCain venait l'embrasser, elle [Palin] et toute sa famille. Allure de gentleman, tempes grisonnantes, il avait alors tout à fait l'air de Monsieur Verdoux, l'élégant père de famille, assassin de douze femmes par nécessité, admirablement campé par Charlie Chaplin. C'était en quelque sorte Monsieur Verdoux et son pitbull.

The comparison is not one made of Putin or Medvedev. It is not one made of Robert Mugabe or China's Hu. Apparently, it was never made of mass graves expert Saddam Hussein. No, it is the comparison a typically lucid Frenchman makes of (who else?) America's Republican candidate…

Hey!

Hold on just one minute there, Sparky!

The Intolerant Euro-press: From Smug Certitude to Pulsing Blood Vessels

Soeren Kern writing in The American Thinker surveys the attitude-revealing European press coverage of US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and finds that we're being treated rather unsurprisingly to the usual confusion and rattling off of "opinions-as-facts".

European commentary on Sarah Palin has ranged from ridicule, to ridicule, to more ridicule, to
reluctant acknowledgment that Barack Obama may have met his match. In any case, many European elites are sensing that the Democratic presidential candidate, by failing to pick US Senator Hillary Clinton as his running mate, may have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

In other words, the usual. The press aren't analyzing, and the opinion-makers of the continent of superior enlightenment, are as we've seen so many times citing their owninventions and imaginings. What's revealing about them is the limited and usual set of subject they are spun around: imagining that she is a literal creationist in the mold of a hermit or aesetic, citing her lack of experience despite having treated Sen. Obama to no such
scrutiny with regard to many subjects, but his even thinner experience in particular.

And just in case the paper's editors were not being absolutely clear about their choice for US president, yet another article proclaims: "Obama embodies the future King dreamt about."

Britain's leftwing Guardian newspaper tries to figure out "How to solve the Sarah Palin problem." Another story titled "Sarah Palin's war against information" asserts that "The McCain team knows that if the media do their job and give Palin the same scrutiny that any candidate for high office must endure, she will collapse." Still
another story warns that "Obama faces lurking forces of darkness."

Left out are any inkling of awareness that the Guardian doesn't have dictatorial and coercive powers over the whole of humanity, or that Palin was put under more scrutiny and obvious hostile electioneering against her by the American press that Obama has had at all (virtually all of it involving the press
electioneering in his favor) over the 20 months since his media constructed success has. The reader and viewer of the general interest press still knows nearly nothing about his policy outlook. We've been offered umpteen fawning spreads on his family life, his any other sort of secular sainthood he could be offered, but little else.

But more than anything, what we find as always in the European press is the expression of a kind of personal intolerant hatred based entirely on Palin not being entirely like them in their predictable and suspiciously uniform world view. Never mind the arrogance evident in that expectation, or the negligence to report much of anything substantial at all – these writers are quite obviously looking through
the prism of where they fit into the story, not where the story fits into the news. All we're left with is the narcissism of these writers showing through – one which European readers have grown numb to, and have grown to accept any opinions they register as fact.

According to France's center-right Le Figaro,
Palin will "trigger the eruption of moral intolerance in the campaign." This is actually rather funny, because French elites are notoriously tolerant with everyone, except for those who do not agree with them.

In keeping with the policies versus values theme, the Paris-based leftwing Le Monde says "The choice of Ms Palin has turned the centrist John McCain into the 'heir to Bush'." And the weekly newsmagazine Le Point calls Palin "the fanatic of the American heartland." It describes her speech to the Republican Convention as a "declaration of war [on the] Democrats as well as on the media and elites who dare to raise doubts about her ability to serve as vice-president of the United States."

Unsurprisingly, the opinions expressed by these rags reflects an incredible ignorance of American society. It's the radicalism of the Democrats and their further-fringe hangers on that has placed Republicans in the White House. Moreover, when a French newspaper starts to actually appear to be worried about tolerance, you know that you have a rare and special moment where
they've even found themselves running out of the usual lazy and specious arguments so obvious to those living outside of their bubble.

Those silver linings

They are there if you look!

The Gullible New York Times Falls for Another European Hypocrite Leftist

He looks like a sprite: boyish, handsome in his black Hugo Boss T-shirt and blue jeans. He reminds some of Tintin, the eternally young comic-book hero of so many childhood adventures.

Once again, the NYT shows their fact-checking and appallingly low journalistic standards. This time it doesn’t actually have directly to do with their domestic political opponents, or taking “their fight” to their enemy... which is to say their fellow citizens.

Their “boyish sprite” is 34.

No, this time they fell in thrall of France’s too-old-to-believe Marxist boy-wonder and aging child, Olivier Besancenot, a man who’s made a meal-ticket out of parading a fake working-class cred for himself.

In a poll last month by the firm CSA, 49 percent of respondents said Mr. Besancenot was currently Mr. Sarkozy’s leading opponent, behind the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë (54 percent), but ahead of other Socialists like Martine Aubry (36 percent) and Ms. Royal (32 percent).

Mr. Besancenot is a postman, a member of the working class, who delivers the mail part time in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

But he is also the leader of the Communist Revolutionary League, and in a long interview here, in party offices above a printing factory in this racially mixed city just east of Paris — where cheap clothing stores abut shops selling North African and Middle Eastern spices and take-out food — he describes himself without blushing as a revolutionary.

But given the travesties of the past, from the bureaucratic savagery of Soviet Communism to the chaos of Mao, he said, “revolution needs to be reinvented, for no revolutionary experiment has ever succeeded. ”They have only been betrayed, either crushed by an armed elite or destroyed by “bureaucratic counter-revolution,” he said, adding, “We are trying to strike that balance of taking power without being taken by power.”

The fact that this would represent a chilling abuse of political power, and finds the acts of dictatorships benign by virtue of example is not even hinted at.

Oddly enough, 5 Years Later, we here at ¡No Pasarán! have done a significantly better job to inform French and American readers readers alike about this man than the NYT or even some of the players in the France’s own press have about “lunch bucket” Olivier.

We often wondered if the factor Aggravant still working? To this question, the candidate Besancenot spoke of his monthly salary of less than €1200 as a Postal worker. Blessed are the believers, because the reality is somewhat different. He’s paid mainly by the party. For example, he very regularly got compensation as a European parliamentary assistant when Alain Krivine was an MEP, in amount considerably above the monthly €5000.

What is his provenance? To this question, Olivier Besancenot speaks with modesty of a small studio in the 18th arrondissement. The journalist would have had much to see - a really good size apartment in the neighborhood of Sacre Coeur in Montmartre - the most expensive part of the 18th, one of the most sought after by Parisian Bobos. Of course, he owns it... something impossible on a postal worker’s salary, but who’s saying...

He is a liar. He is a fake, a venal user of the sympathy of his followers, and extremely skilled in living off of make-work commissions and off of the public’s money while trying to tout a veneer of honesty. In short, he’s a subsidized elitist of the sort one only finds in either western Europe or the parts of the underdeveloped world where attention to graft can be obscured.

But the NYT finds this unworthy of their report, if not a cute ‘human interest’ item that I’m sure many of their employees wish vicariously in him something for themselves.

Follow the Gourd!

Hot damn! Those late summer revival meetings must be clipping along at a fevered pace. Those on the hard-left are embracing Jesus through the "Jesus was a community-organiser/Pontius Pilate was a governor" meme like it is the end times.

One supposes these new super-converts will now stop bleating about a certain other sister and her beliefs about creationism and anti-abortionism. You know, hypocrisy being one of them seven deadlies and all.

Maybe those now filling the pews are members of the Judean People's Front...