Two ordinary Americans whose only crime was to play by the rules … You are both in our thoughts

(Thanks to Greerwyn and Fausta…)

Update: How to see the pulled video (and/or check out the Full transcript and screenshots of SNL’s Soros/Sandler bailout satire or simply go to Yahoo videos)…

Bailout @ Yahoo! Video

What Is It That Our Country Deserves?

Even in Michigan…

Flaming Twisted Wreckage

Europe and the EU, those glorious amalgams of good intentions which were supposed to prove through a million gestures, ceremonies, and reams of paper, were supposed to be the mutual social scheme society to end all social protection schemes, has left each of it’s member-states to fend to itself.

The European banks have always been overleveraged compared to their deposits, nearly twice as much as their US counterparts. Having stopped to catch their breath while lecturing the rest of humanity, they now notice that they’re toast.

The dozen largest European banks have now on average an overall leverage ratio (shareholder equity to total assets) of 35, compared to less than 20 for the largest US banks. But at the same time most large European banks also report regulatory leverage ratios of close to 10. Part of the difference is explained by the fact that the massive in-house investment banking operations of European banks are not subject to any regulatory capital requirement. Another part of the explanation must the regulatory arbitrage, for example though the credit insurance offered for example by AIG.

Not only that, the Euro which was long known to need a soft landing has bonked. Now they have to renegotiate loans in other currencies with those less-valued, formerly magical €s and borrow again.

Good luck with all that. We will remember the past months’ of sniping and “rubbing America’s nose in it” warmly.

Nobel Prize in Medicine Goes to Two Frenchmen (Plus One German)

The French are ecstatic as, for the first time in 28 years, a Frenchman — nay, two Frenchmen (actually, one Frenchman and one Frenchwoman) — win the Nobel prize in medicine… (As a number of Le Monde readers point out, though, the French state forced Luc Montagnier out of office, due to his retirement age, and the AIDS researcher turned up at… an American university.)

Télézapping : Cocorico Nobel
envoyé par lemondefr

Where “Statesmanship” Means Influence Peddling and Arms Trafficking

Behold, some more of that “we are the world” stuff that Europeans are so well known for promoting.

Angola was on Monday seeking to halt a French trial into a vast arms trafficking scandal involving the son of late president Francois Mitterrand and other members of the French elite.

Funny that, I thought the left always sold itself to us as a transparent anti-elite that wanted to be a hermaphrodite version of both your mother and father. They are, in addition to anything else they can prove themselves to be, the global essence of the “Peace Camp”.

The son of the late French President and lefty demi-god, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand proves very nicely what “reaching across the aisle” amounts to in Europastan. Along with the UMP’s Charles Pasqua and his co-constiprator Jean-Charles Marchiani, they took bribes to assist in a politically pointless arms trafficking operation that makes the Iran-Contra affair look like a high school bake sale.

Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, a former adviser on African affairs at the Elysee presidential palace, is accused of "complicity in illegal trade and embezzlement" and taking bribes worth 2.6 million dollars.

Former interior minister Charles Pasqua and his right-hand man Jean-Charles Marchiani also risk 10 years for influence peddling on behalf of the Angolan authorities.

Pasqua on Monday again denied any wrongdoing and suggested the charges were politically-motivated.

"Everything has been done to implicate me in an affair that I had nothing to do with," Pasqua told Europe 1 radio.

The Angolagate case long poisoned relations between Paris and Luanda and the trial comes at an awkward time for France which is keen to strengthen ties with one of Africa's leading oil producers.

Oh, and no war for oil!!! Only les ricains do that sort of thing!

The difference here is that since Jean-Christophe is the son of a man that the lift thinks a monarch, that there won’t be any screaming or public humiliation. Expect shortly a broad interpretation that the arms were sorely needed, and were the right and humane thing to do:

Prosecutors allege that tanks, shells, landmines, helicopters and even six warships were shipped to Angola over five years, allowing Dos Santos to build up his forces in the war against US-backed Savimbi.
Angola's payments were channelled through firms in Paris, Geneva and Tel Aviv to shell companies in Jersey, the Virgin Islands or Monaco, with suitcases of cash used to pay off middlemen, prosecutors say.
Other high-profile defendants include the French thriller writer Paul-Loup Sulitzer and Mitterrand's one-time advisor Jacques Attali, who risk five years for selling Angola access to their political and media contacts.
Although no Angolans are charged in the French case, prosecutors allege that 30 officials including Dos Santos received tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks.

These are the people screwing up humanity by fueling wars in underdeveloped parts of the world. THEY are why the US has had to deploy the expeditionary forces that have to rectify the imbalances caused by these European-government dwelling and selling pirates from the near east to the Balkans to their former human holdings in Africa.

This of course should never get in the way of a tirade about the dirty-trick, underhanded reactionary manipulatiuon, or warmongering of the CIA. Noooooo way. That’s different... That doesn’t require facts or anything based in reality.

This is why the likes of the BBC limit their description of this affair to calling it an “arms scandal” without any sort of ideological attribution. The UNITA rebels that the weapons supplied in this scandal were pointed at, were opposing a regime that was turning into a Soviet satellite propped up by the direct foreign intervention of Cuban soldiers. These weapons were for the local compatriots of those Cubans and Russians for the purpose of forcing a revolution that they hoped would spread violently – one fueled in that direction by Mitterand, Pasqua, and their cohorts – only to have that revolution ended by the diplomatic maneuvers of some rotten peace-hater called George Bush.

Kim Jong Il Would Feel Right at Home

The American Left has resorted to political re-education camps, exploiting children, and using cheese-doodle addicted adolescents to engage in creepy idol worship for their spiritual channeling purposes.

Further to the idea of an election day “Obama Boot Camp”, George Romero warned you...



The “Why you’re here” story of self, brought for your repetition through the use of cult formation techniques.

Just Keep Repeating to Yourself: It’s Only a Movie, It’s Only a Movie...

Observing Hermann Observes:

“The European Central Bank – which raised rates into the teeth of the crisis in July – has played a shockingly destructive role in this enveloping slump. Its growth predictions this year have been, and still are, delusional. Neglecting its global role, it has vastly complicated the fire-fighting efforts of Washington.

It could have offered cover to the US Federal Reserve this spring when Ben Bernanke was forced by events to slash rates to 2pc. It could at least have signaled an end to monetary tightening. That is how an ally ought to behave.

Instead, it stuck maniacally to its Gothic script, with equally unhappy consequences for both sides of the Atlantic, as well as for China, Japan, and India… Far from offering reassurance, the weekend mini-summit of EU leaders served only to highlight that nobody is in charge of this runaway train. There is still no lender of last resort in euroland...

But in spite of all of that data and discoveries of just how Hypo getting a government hypo only looks like the beginning, one of his commenters resorts to the ignorant European fallback position of being clueless about the entire subject, and calling anyone making the observation “ideological”.

in spite of the fact that his predictions never materialise... That really disappoints me. From reading your blog I thought youd have the rigor to at least look behind that most blatant propaganda and dont use it to reaffirm yourself in that knee jerk manner of a hopeless ideologist.

Even if the repetitive crap is true...

That these same sorts have for the past 20 years without a shred of data said that “the American dream is die-ing,” apparently, ISN’T ideological of course... No wonder then than we find an American political party with the same ostrich-like reaction to losing their meal-ticket.



After the Sub Prime Crisis already started in 2007 Obama says Sub Prime Mortgages that gave houses to people who couldn't afford them was a good idea.In fact, just keep repeating to yourself: it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie...

So Long (For Maybe a Week), Schadenfreude

The snickering seems to have stopped for now, as people in the larger European states discover that their own banks are more heavily leveraged than they are in the US, and don't see much hope for a comprehensive commitment by governments to keep them liquid.

I'm sure we'll soon be hearing how Europe tanks with more undefinable élan and panache:

Continental Europe is heading for a deeper recession than the US as it lacks the necessary flexibility to react to the worsening economic situation, according to leading executives and policymakers.

To a degree due to the slow pace of innovation that respective populations are willing to accept, they have grown more flexible over the past decade. But will that be enough? Not likely without abandoning some of the loonier transnational campaigns such as imagining that a miracle will give them a way to largely convert to biofules and renewables, and all manner of social interventions. That easiest ones to back down off of will be the ones that were symbolic to begin with – in fact the contraction may provide a pretext to abandon some of the stranger, less achievable commitments.

After all, these are the conditions where Europeans have in the past gotten very self-protective, and often very ugly – historically, these are the times the labor strikes have become larger in scope and more debilitating, just when they do the most harm to the conditions that would hasten recovery.

Executives and policymakers are worried that Europe did not use the good times of the past few years to push through much-needed reform in areas such as labour flexibility. Companies across Europe from Daimler and Siemens to KPMG and Unicredit are bracing themselves for the slowdown by cutting jobs, production and recruitment. This comes as growth in Europe has plummeted after a strong first quarter to lead many analysts to think several continental economies are already close to recession.

Or IN recession as the Irish, Icelanders, and Greek governments were straightforward enough to readily admit, just as they've been up front about their tides and turns over the past 18 months.

Many European companies had banked on growth from emerging markets such as Russia and China to compensate for weakness in Europe. “I think times are tough no matter how international you are,” said the chief executive of a leading German company. “Nobody really knows what will happen. But if you were a betting man I don’t think you would go for Europe over the US.”

Meanwhile, the predictable blame game, that need to pummel some figure of authority over something the public at large doesn't get, begins.

Because Hating Happy, Normal People Makes Them Feel Smart, part II

Why the spontaneous hatred of Sarah Palin? Why didnt it require any orchestration? Because Palin herself doesn't necessarily matter to those engaged in it, because the dominant trends and arguments in the tacit form of culture promoted to all of us has programmed into the likes of these critics.

Ignoring the very notion of free will and individual liberty, as a mater of defending their own choices they must hate. Blogger Whiskey explains why:

This blindness, and the battle for supremacy over the fertility of socially conservative Whites through the "Janissary Effect" of Liberal Culture is what drives the fury over Palin by those who drive that culture. They see their power slipping away from them, by the existence of an alternate model.

In other words, others' freely made choices are a threat, and they respond by hating happy, normal people. It threatens the cultural monopoly of this well-connected minority within the left, and the mechanisms in the culture and the media (I.e. The obsession with “Faux News” and other silencing memes) by which it seeks self-perpetuation at the cost of other's lives, their familial stability, making fertility a source of angst and tension scheduled to strike at the age of 40, and in many other ways to undermine the basis of happiness in human relationships. All for the sake of propping up the lectures they've repeated to themselves over the years.

This is why the Culture Wars were fought in the first place, starting in the mid to late 1980's when the Baby Boomer generation early cohorts first reached their late thirties and early forties, and positions of cultural power. It's why Murphy Brown had a child on her own, with a father irrelevant. It's why nearly every television show, movie, and pop music artist all push the same social conventions of social liberalism. It is the weapon against fertility — the ability to "capture" young social conservative men and women and "convert" them to social Liberalism, when they move to large Urban Areas, outside the reach of their childhood churches, parents, and friends, and the social networks that shaped their views.

A desperation to reinforce this model gives those who believe in this nothingness a reason to believe anything – any new grievance made instantly fashionable by those with the monopoly, into the arms of anyone who can toy with those dog-whistle tones and symbols, making new-age Gods out of Chicago political hacks, the weather, rebranding as revolutionaries the same political class that created an economic crisis, and so on. The antecedents to this don't just get a argument in favor of the concepts, they get hatred, retaliation, and the like.

This threat is seen most clearly by those who use their Cultural monopoly, in movies, television, and popular music to enforce cultural mores. Hence the spontaneous and rage-filled venom spewed by movie, television, and pop music celebrities. Including Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and now, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford who dubbed Barack Obama "a Lightworker", presumably after watching one too many episodes of "Charmed" which also featured "White Lighters" with magical powers.

When this political class is let down by their faeries, lesser gods, and magicians that they hoped would flag their moods, to whom or what will they lash out at next?

Party Hearty

It seems that the young among the Maghrebiens, designated social outliers in French society, and socially useful as a magnet for both public pity and bigotry, have learned well from the natives by being both violent and politically venal.

In Colmar, an Alsacian tourist trap town easily confused with a cheesy cuckoo clock, the incumbent mayor had a close-rum election win overturned after it was discovered that at the last minute he had approved the long debated construction permit of a large mosque for the sake of getting the 146 votes that it took to put him over the top.

The administrative court in Strasbourg annulled the municipal elections of Colmar, stating that the outgoing mayor, Gilbert Meyer (UMP), had exerted "pressure [ED.: vote-buying] on part of the electorate" before his victory over his opponent Roland Wagner.

Mr. Meyer has exerted such pressure by committing to submit to the City Council a proposal for a grant to build a second mosque in Colmar in a letter to the Imam Daoudi Bachir, president of the cultural association of Muslim Maghreb, a estimated the court.

This promise was only relayed to the faithful, but the opponent of Mr. Meyer was able to take a position on the subject, noted the administrative judges.

They also felt that the "hasty implementation" of work that led to organize a sports event on the eve of the second round of municipal elections and the presence at the event of Mr. Meyer "that day "were designed to influence voters in the district that would benefit from it."

The constituents will be pleased to learn that in America, they call that “pork”.

Elsewhere, in this season of peace of the only religion that’s still practiced to any degree on the postmodern continent, police in Lyon are for the eighth year in a row have called out riot police because adherents are celebrating the end of Ramadan, Eid el Fitr, by getting violent.

The most serious took place between 18 hours and 19 hours between the rue de la République and rue de l'Arbre Sec in the 1st district of Lyon. A group of about ten people were arrested, including minors, for violence or rock throwing. Fights and tension, also impacting fleeing bystanders, the incidents have taken place mainly in the Presqu’île (peninsula) area of the city.

Around 4 in the afternoon, a pregnant woman aged 25 was stopped near Rue Ferrandiere, when she tried to cross the district while a brawl broke out between dozens of young people. "Her car has been shaken. She then received insults, had projectiles thrown at her, and was spat upon. "I was very scared, incredibly shocked to find myself in danger in the heart of Lyon, I have the sentence for the Muslim community when I see it" reflected the young woman who was finally helped by bystanders and a police patrol.

As every year for eight years at this time, police had set up a very important mechanism for maintaining public order, with a company of CRS police reservists and a company of mobile gendarmerie. The police were present in large numbers at Place Bellecour and around the commercial center of the Part-Dieu where the situation had seriously degenerated several years ago.

Peace out, people!

Because Hating Normal, Happy People Makes Them Feel Smart, That’s Why

As we’ve seen before, they all appeared to be either aged revolutionaries and adolescent followers... These are the people that actually think they’re no different than Bolivian peasants, but ignore the fact that they have virtually every part of their lives subsidized or programmed in some way, have running water, electricity, education, and medical care.

The pictures say it all at the latest European “Social” Forum. The sector of the population that you don’t see there? People of working age, any appreciable number of parents, or anyone likely to be sustaining their own existence and intellect through their own effort.

It seems supporting causes that look like little other than warmed-over Marxism isn’t just par for the course with these folks, it’s a form of institutional intellectual welfare, reciting the same old recycled rants from abroad and ago, and needing a crowd to give you the beer-goggles to make yourself say it.

In fact even the musical entertainment, a combination of militant south American drummers, Joan Baez impersonators, and a bad Hip Hop act does a great deal to reflect on the state of Europe’s “Social” activism heritage – it proves that even the dead can have some political power. All you have to do to get some is go out there and march, demanding some sort of mysterious hitherto unknown of special rights for sex workers, wear an orange prisoner jumpsuit, find something outside your sphere of familiarity to get enraged about, or any other identifiable antecedent to the “happy, normal” model of being, and you too can be ‘in’.

Joe Biden, Young Internationalist Working Man!

Biden:

When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said, and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it

Lunch Bucket Joe, the left's Mr. International Statesman has proved himself once again to be a complete bufoon. When, pray tell, did the French, the Americans, or the Lebanese kick Hizballah out of Lebanon? The followers of the Hizballah ARE Lebanese, and they've virtually deposed the government at that. A trained chimpanzee could figure that out.

Not only that, he generically demand that 'others' somehow, in the form of NATO (read: Europeans) somehow do that imaginary and politically implausible thing, without it having had any sort of domestic political difficulty if Americans were deployed as part of a NATO force, or even plausible to a risk-averse European public.

What should be painfully obvious to this wiz-kid, the backbone of the American left's myopic global outlook, is that EUvians would be hesitant even to defend their own territory:

If Russia was to make a similar military move into another Baltic country (Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia) all of who are NATO members, people are divided as to whether troops from their country should defend these states. Half of Germans (50%) and two in five Spaniards (40%) and Italians (39%) would oppose troops from their country defending the Baltic states while two in five French adults (41%) and just over one-third of Americans (37%) and Britons (35%) would support it.

Deluded even, to the same degree as Biden in his belief that 'others' will do something for them without questioning the risk. The only message this manages to send to anyo ne who has it in for the US or any part of the EU is “invade or attack me, I'll make sure my supporters ignore you”

With this in mind, Europeans believe Barack Obama would be better able to protect Europe’s interests with regard to Russia. Almost two-thirds of French adults (64%), three in five Spaniards (59%) and Germans (57%), just under half of Italians (48%) and 41 percent of Britons all say Obama over John McCain. In the United States, while it is close, it is a different take as 41 percent of Americans say John McCain would be better able to protect Europe with regard to Russia and 37 percent say it is Obama.

A Fine Diversion

Follow the adventures of Dave, just retired, and wandering the earth for the next 1 to 3 years.

America saves Europe

Yet again. Don't expect the ungrateful bastards to thank Paulson anytime soon.

The Stunning Stupidity of Europe’s Intellectual Class

The great enemy? “Googlization.” Why, you might ask?

A spectre haunts the world's intellectual elites: information overload. Ordinary people have hijacked strategic resources and are clogging up once carefully policed media channels.

Disturbing! Without an exclusionary gatekeeper, people get to learn. Can’t have that, now, can we?

Before the Internet, the mandarin classes rested on the idea that they could separate "idle talk" from "knowledge". With the rise of Internet search engines it is no longer possible to distinguish between patrician insights and plebeian gossip.

Emphasis mine, by the way. The intellectuals, heaven forbid, will have to interpret the veracity of information for themselves. Something any real academic or reader has always had to do to earn the respect of those whom they talk down to.

The distinction between high and low, and their co-mingling on occasions of carnival, belong to a bygone era and should no longer concern us. Nowadays an altogether new phenomenon is causing alarm: search engines rank according to popularity, not truth.

I cant imagine why this is alarming to any honest person, since academics on the make for attention have never promised any sort of truth, especially in a continent obsessed with the false intellectualism of post-modern rants and tripe as a means of trying to make the individual ranter think himself smart.

Geert Lovink’s complaint seems to have more to do with being found out and having the regard an appointment or named position in society being taken away. This is no different that the complaints of the monarchs of earlier age seeing the poplauce just as most european though seem to see the world – slack jawed and unworthy in spite of their actual achievements in the expansion of what is known and what CAN be known.

Not only has popular noise risen to unbearable levels, we can no longer stand yet another request from colleagues and even a benign greeting from friends and family has acquired the status of a chore with the expectation of reply. The educated class deplores that fact that chatter has entered the hitherto protected domain of science and philosophy, when instead they should be worrying about who is going to control the increasingly centralized computing grid.

Quite the reverse is what’s true of the state of information sharing. By including those outside of an academic, political, or literary social milieu it has become less centralized, more accessible. As it undermines the currency of a “class” (something EUvians still seem to have a bipolar relationship with), this diffusion of access to publishing thoughts takes away what many believed was the monopoly of that class – one which carries still such a narrow range of world-views that it looks monolithic, desiccated, and has nothing left to say – not until it renews itself and lets others in.

The World Wide Web, which should have realized the infinite library Borges described in his short story The Library of Babel (1941), is seen by many of its critics as nothing but a variation of Orwell's Big Brother (1948). The ruler, in this case, has turned from an evil monster into a collection of cool youngsters whose corporate responsibility slogan is "Don't be evil".

Most people are no longer interested in the ubiquitous use of the casual use of Orwell, but it seems especially specious when it’s used to criticize the enablement of access to information, and to criticize the fact that information can be judged on the motives of author. The horror of the world of Big Brother is precisely that the source of information’s intent and content were singular, something Lovink seems to find comfort in when it comes to the repugnant and lazy elite that he seems so enamored with.

As such it doesn’t take much for him to find appealing any sort of invented nonsense shaped out of ignorance of a subject and grievance about others’ success in understanding it – in short, typical French popular intellectualism. Characterized by nativism massaging paranoia about the present and future, one must recall that the queen of the beehive in his day, Mitterrand, wanted to ban the personal computer because of the irritation it might cause other monopolists: book distributer’s cartel, the newspapers, attorneys, etc. For these people, the future doesn’t represent a possibility and an chance to exercise the best moral judgment possible, it’s something to be feared.

It’s an awfully strange thing for a subculture given to admiring any sort of fake revolutionary, even the mass-murdering types.

In 2005 the president of the French Biliothèque National, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, published a booklet in which he warned against Google's claim to "organize the world's information".[2] Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge remains one of the few documents that openly challenge Google's uncontested hegemony. Jeanneney targets only one specific project, Book Search, in which millions of books of American university libraries are being scanned. His argument is a very French-European one. Because of the unsystematic and unedited manner by which Google selects the books, the archive will not properly represent the giants of national literature such as Hugo, Cervantes and Goethe. Google, with its bias of English sources, will therefore not be the appropriate partner to build a public archive of the world's cultural heritage. "The choice of the books to be digitized will be impregnated by the Anglo-Saxon atmosphere", writes Jeanneney.

What Jeanneney couldn’t understand is that the globe would hold no cultural exception for his lazy ass, and that Google was in no way trying to gather an explanatory encapsulation of global culture, and certainly wouldn’t go out of its’ way to include the authors Jeanneney holds in as high a regard in the manner one man, Jeanneney would like to see them placed. That would be up to Jeanneney, and for Jeanneney to do something about, not insist that others do it on his exclusive behalf at the expense of other great eras, ideas, and bodies of thought.

If fact the things that his thesis reveals as a failure to find in those not legally structured to look up to him and the ideas he hold to be in high regard, not that differently than Big Brother is immense. We are to believe that less is more. Fewer readers is intellectually broader. Equality of opportunity requires a narrowing of the class permitted to express itself...

The stupidity of Europe’s intellectual class is stunning.

What a Pair

Last night a pal of single mum Yasmin, of Catford, South East London — said: “Her dad’s ashamed of her behaviour but she’d have never have become a pole dancer if he hadn’t paid for her bigger boobs.

“She was always self-conscious about her size and managed to convince him she should have it done.

“She played the daddy’s girl and said it would make her feel more of a mother when she was breast feeding her children.

“He went along with it and even went to the top London clinic with her where he paid for the surgery in cash.

“The rest of the family were set against it, but he insisted she should have her way if it would make her a better mother.

It’s not just males trying to cope with Islamist social authoritarianism and oppressiveness that get sexually frustrated... Potential drone aircraft magnet Omar Bakri Mohammed has a daughter who is also given to welfare-state parasitism. The firebrand hatemonger paid for her surgically enhanced funbags with welfare money while advocating the destruction of the British state, Israel, the US, and anyone else he though was colonizing his transplanted life in the UK, all for the sake of the Jihad.

She lives on income support and has her £900-a-month rent and £240- a-month council tax paid by the state.

Yesterday she flashed a defiant finger when asked about her career.

You read that right - In spite of having a gainful employment pole-dancing, the well “integrated” chavette still has her snout in the public trough of social support.

It would be okay if she actually looked appealing. Instead she’s even more indistinct and predictable than a garden variety porn model, except with less enthusiasm and personality. She might as well go with the chemical perma-tan and white jeans look that seems to haunt the many young British Stepford children’s attempt at allure. In short, she should go back to Russia or Venezuela and ask for her money back. The irony of turning herself into a generic commodity and little more than a selfish and demanding piece of ass, is that it doesn’t actually distance her from the likes of most women raised in the bipolar orthodoxy of the Arab world.

Elsewhere: proving once again that Europeans tend to dwell and/or sneer on either 1) personal silliness by some celeb idiot to tch-tch at or 2) the rest of the world’s matters because their lives are unchallenging, uneventful, and boring, and we all know how that can make ones’ brow feverish. Given to desperate pleas for something this results in adolescent attention-seeking behavior. Many think that something should involve napalm, but that’s neither here not there. It also causes attempts at looking intelligent by always being contrarian with the hope that there someone out there who can still be surprised. In this case, it’s a matter of authoritarian nationalist twats who think lefty economic works - endorsing a authoritarian trans-nationalist twat who think lefty economic works.

Hope-o-cracy: His Heart May Be in the Right Place…But His Head Ain't…

(Thanks to Valerie…)

No longer 'news', Now a tradition....

The jobless rate in the 15 nations that share the euro rose to 7.5 percent in August as worries over European economic growth deepened, the European Union's statistics agency said Wednesday.

....

The yearly jobless rate was 7.4 percent in July, rising steadily from a record low of 7.1 percent in December 2007.

....

Spain now has the highest unemployment rate of all the 27 European Union countries -- 11.3 percent -- as the economy slows sharply on the collapse of a housing bubble.

Germany, the largest euro and EU economy, is reporting 7.2 percent unemployment with France posting an 8 percent rate. The Netherlands has the lowest unemployment rate at 2.6 percent.

Adventures in Truthdom

At the risk of attracting the black helicopter crowd, an interesting quote from former Speaker of the House (US) Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich was particularly critical of Paulson and the New York Federal Reserve’s earlier move, reported by The New York Times, to include Goldman Sachs’ chairman at a meeting about insurance giant AIG’s financial crisis.

"I don't understand how the president can avoid firing the Secretary of the Treasury when you have a former chairman of Goldman Sachs who wants to have unlimited ability to spend money, and you have the current chairman of Goldman Sachs, the only private-sector person in a room," Gingrich told Van Susteren.

"Two weeks later, the U.S. government put up $85 billion to help AIG, in which Goldman Sachs has a $20 billion exposure…"

Those spending any amount of time inst and amongst the "expert" and/or "brilliant" classes of either government or business would not be surprised in the least as to the underlying veracity of the above.

News to me

If you can't even get the very basic basics correct one wonders, what else are you completely wrong about. The answer, pretty much everything.

Curtain calls?

After decades spent constructing a shield from economic reality, designed of course to keep "the people" happy, it starts crumbling in Europe.

Who do you think will rehab quicker in this situation, those in the "wild, wild, west" of the US where nimbleness and innovation are still part of the fabric -or- those places where a sclerosis of the mind and governmentalism are still de rigueur?

Duly noted

What a wonderful headline in the FT today:

Bank shares sold off across Europe

Too bad those new shorting rules are in place. Those evil short-sellers may have been able to extract a good chunk of value from the falling shares instead of just watching the monies evaporate into thin air.

Chalk up another win for the unintended consequences of governmentalism!

(Mass Hysteria Update: One of the totems used here at NP as a barometer on how leftdom is "feeling" about things continues to sing the praises of a ban on short-selling of equities. Limiting the amount of liquidity in the system at a time when liquidity is in short-supply. A note to those on the left, try actually thinking versus feeling in the future, the collective we might all be better off.)

Another Decade, Another Contagion Created by Leftists

And yet more of that impulse for “government love” nearly shot down any effort to correct it. The Democrats were mad at the idea that an executive who has the choice between taking recapitalization from the treasury and taking a golden parachute for themselves needed an enducement to act on the public's interest. What they did nearly weasel in, was that a large percentage of the revenue derived by the eventual liquidation of the Treasury's investment would go to activists acting in the favor of the Democratic party.

Just like the cause of the banking broblem itself, it was all about the class warfare taunt. “Community organizers” wanted it, and we all got it – social manipulation laws requiring underqualifying people had to be offered loans they couldn't affrord in the interest of "social levelling". The purpose was to combat redlining, another grievance recited by the left dug up from 1930’s Philadelphia which supposes that racism was behind the lending of mortgages to people able to pay them off.

See? It succeeded! The “oppressed” who could not make enough to pay back loans got them! Happy now? No? Stlll at it, oh mighty "community organizers"?

“What we have here essentially are a pair of government slush funds created in July as part of the Economic Recovery Act that pump tax dollars into the coffers of low-income housing advocacy groups, such as Acorn.”

“Acorn, one of America’s most militant left-wing ‘community activist groups,’ is spending $16 million this year to register Democrats to vote in November. In the past several years, Acorn’s voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Washington, while several of their employees have been convicted of voter fraud…”

That’s right. Rather than returning any profits made in the long-term from the economic rescue package, Democrats want to first reward their radical allies at ACORN for their help – often illegal help – in getting Democrats elected to office. Families, seniors, small businesses, and all American taxpayers deserve better than what Democratic leaders are attempting to jam down their throats.

Welcomed and Enabled by the Aging Children at MSNBC, of Course

We've noted it before, and we'll be sure to see it again - the more Anti-American they are, the more they support Barack Obama.

In a poll asking who won the Presidential debate of the 26th, Drudge Report readers, 94% of whom were making their choice from US based IP addresses chose McCain. 34% of those polled by MSNBC viewers chose McCain, but only 20% of their sample came from within the US.

It was clear from Obama's dejected exit from the stage that he lost.

It's safe to assume that very few people in Russia, western Europe, and the near east actually saw the debate transmitted live and with real-time translation, as it would have started no earlier than 3 in the morning, the impression they're getting, if from anything at all, is from nothing other than ideologically selected and characterized snippets from news reports, and probably even from MSNBC's website itself.

More to the point, outfits like MSNBC like to casually call their poll respondents 'likely voters', dropping the phrase well after one has long forgotten the what the fine print below the poll results says.

Does the US Federal Reserve system fall underneath the Texas Rangers in terms of reporting?

Oddly enough, the New York Times has an editorial today asking its reader(s) to not blame the New Deal programs of the 1930's for the regulatory "failure" of the current financial problems in the US. Fine, outside of a very few aged Eleanor Roosevelt devotees and some Abraham Lincoln Brigade types, not many people in the US really give a wit about the New Deal. Most probably assume the New Deal is the latest quiz show hosted by cutting-edge comedian Howie Mandel.

Regardless, the NYT, in their most humble opinion, of course lays the blame at the feet of George W. Bush. The evidence laid out is damning to say the least:

Under a law passed in 1994, for example, the Federal Reserve was obligated to regulate banks and nonbank lenders to curb unfair, deceptive and predatory lending.

In 1995, Congress passed a law that restricted the ability of investors to sue companies, securities firms and accounting firms for misstatements and pie-in-the-sky projections.

Then, in 1999, Congress dismantled the Glass- Steagall Act, a pillar of the New Deal, which separated commercial and investment banking.

But perhaps no deregulatory effort had more catastrophic effect than the 2000 law that explicitly excluded derivatives, including those credit default swaps, from regulation under the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936.

The waning money shot linking it all together:

Indeed, it was in the Bush years that antiregulation and deregulation found full expression, fueled by an ideology that markets know best, government
hampers markets, and problems will magically fix themselves.

This blog is certainly open to being corrected, but didn't George W. Bush take the oath of office in 2001 after stealing the election from Al Gore. At least that is the last meme we received. Is there a new take on that election that we do not know about?

So, this whole Texas Rangers thing back in the 1990's was all a ruse by W? He was actually directing the Chairman of the Fed to ignore legislation obligating it to regulate banks and nonbank lenders to curb unfair, deceptive and predatory lending? We thought he spent the whole time getting shit-faced. Whats that, replaced by another meme.

Is there a another meme we missed having Bush return to evil genius status? What happend to the "stupid chimp" meme? Maybe we should visit the US more often.

Therefore it MUST Always be About Hijacked Plane Attacks, You See...

Yet another mindless inversion of reality by Plantu. The Trade Center Towers are again being attacked by something American. Also found scattered through out his pieta of hatred is a flat image of Barack Obama who seems unfamiliar to him, but lets him channel some hypocrisy or another, a John McCain whose crime is being American, and a depiction of George Bush pitching a fit, something Plantu or any other observer has ever seen him do.

When is the Concept of an Overbearing Theocracy Okay?

When you're a western leftist, in Iran, but otherwise only when they can shove it doen your throat.

They said it could run afoul of state ethics laws banning on-the-job political activity, as well as university policy.

Could? Never mind the fact that it's a state university as well, and some of this chaplain's fellow travellers have bumper stickers asking "Who Would Jesus Kill".

- With thanks to alert reader Arf

Hope-o-cracy: His Heart May Be in the Right Place…But His Head Ain't…

(Fist bump to Arf)

A weekend ponder

Why is it that one major hit of the skids in the US of a more capitalistic system immediately engenders howls of "capitalism is dead", "laissez-faire is over", "markets have failed" and "we need a new economic system, NOW!"?

Our more socialistic brothers and sisters have been on the skids for years, yet no vitriolic banshee calls for scrapping that system. If anything, calls for an even deeper version of socialism.

Why is that?

In a word, Next

While not 100 percent, the bug looks set to jump the Atlantique:

What is more, about $1.4 trillion of bank debt falls due in Europe this year and next, just as bondholders have received their first big blow of the crisis thanks to Lehman’s demise. Worries about how HBOS, a British bank, would roll over its wholesale obligations forced it into the arms of Lloyds TSB on September 17th. Other banks, notably in Spain, Iceland and Scandinavia, are even more dependent on the wholesale markets. The ECB plans to impose stricter conditions on its lending in February but that will be difficult while confidence remain so low. Mr Paulson may yet have some imitators across the pond.

Of course, Europe will do this without an underlying "real" economy to fall back upon and with the required assent of at least 15 (Eurozone) if not the full 27 member states in order to proceed on the scale required. That trick may make the process of the Democrats and Republicans look lightening fast and hyper-cordial. Juncker is no doubt loading up on the smokes.

Readers of this blog will note a sliver of a silver lining should this happen: Spain is experienceing high inflation, low productivity, and a housing bubble deflate. The Zapatero pip is set to squeak.

The Russian State Agrees with SuperFrenchie: The Simpsons Are a Monstrously Scandalous Product

A Moscow court has decreed that the cartoons that a Russian TV channel is showing, such as South Park and the Simpsons, are subversive, writes Marie Jégo in Le Monde — thus (insofar as SuperFrenchy can be said to be representative of les Français) the Russians seem to agree with the French.

…le futur de [la chaîne] 2×2 semble compromis. "Il faut remplacer ces émissions sordides par des programmes éducatifs. Le respect des valeurs familiales, le goût du sport et le patriotisme, voilà ce que nous devons encourager chez les jeunes", a décrété mardi Pavel Zyrianov, 25 ans, député de la Douma.

It is good to know the kind of material that viewers in Russia and America should be barred from seeing…

Crimes in the Name of Honor and Tradition

Frédéric Bobin has a couple of articles in Le Monde about the tradition of killing or disfiguring women in certain parts of the world…

Statism 3:16

Always amusing when the statists pick up their Bible (that of the paleo-God variety) and start thumping away. Of course, in reality it is just another smug tool in the governmentalist tool-box to use in advancing the agenda.

One wonders if this parable will make it into the "official" canon once the whole story is written. From 1999:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

....

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.

Of course there was a voice in the wilderness who spoke up at the time, no doubt he was dragooned as a "neo-con":

''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''

Perhaps this particular tale can be filed under "Warm destinations and the well-designed roads which help one get there".

The problem, folks, as John McCain and I and you all know, isn’t too little government interference in our financial markets. It’s too much

Laura Hollis writes An Open Letter to John McCain and Sarah Palin…

That Lecturesome Gravitas was always just Fluff Anyway

Behind the fake revolutionary fantasies that so many Germans carry around, it doesn't amount to much. Bragelina... the Baader-Meinhof Gang... same thing.

Der Baader Meinhof Komplex has been selected to be Germany's entry for best foreign language film at next year's academy awards ceremony. I guess they had to wait for the memory of films with discernable weight, like href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-8Ik27_6Uw"target="_blank">Munich
to fade before they released it. Strange, isn't it that the old European memory problem just keeps coming up.

:(

Our Dickensian Present and Its' New Fagans

No, it isn't the newest European concept of a sitcom, it's about as interesting as thier lives get right now. From RTL this past Friday:

These heinous acts took place last Monday in Brussels, rue Blaes, around 7 in the evening. A homeless man was grievously beaten up with by a Muslim father and son. The father started screaming at him that he had "no right to drink during Ramadan," before attacking him, then joined by his son who was guilty of the worst acts of violence.

Serge, the homeless man in question was actually in the process of drinking a beer.

Rashid's son, 21, was arrested and placed under arrest for assault and battery resulting in an inability to go to work, as the prosecution presented the facts. In explanation to the judge, both fanatics have explained that they feel their aggression was the self-defense! Meanwhile, Serge is still hospitalized with a sever wound in his leg that prevents him from walking. He lost 2 liters of blood and can not afford to rent crutches.

Unusual, you think? No way, Jose. That incredibly origonal notion that appeasing those who hate you will trickle down to the culture, that enlightened European act of trying to come together by trying to reason with the unreasonable while prone just isn't cutting the mustard:

Government-Appointed Kuwaiti Preacher: Europeans Are Immoral, Unclean, and Cowardly

The Kuwaiti daily Al-Watan recently published an article by its columnist Sheikh Nabil Al-'Awadhi, who is a government-appointed preacher at a Kuwaiti mosque and in the past had a television show called "An Hour of Sincerity" on Kuwaiti Al-Rai TV. In the article, titled "The Qualities of the European," Al-'Awadhi states that Europeans are disciplined and law-abiding only because they fear punishment; that they are unclean, since they "only wash when absolutely necessary"; and that they are selfish, cowardly and miserly. It should be noted that in August 2006, the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowments suspended Al-'Awadhi from his post as preacher for three months, after he gave a Friday sermon inciting to jihad and calling for harming Jews.

Can you feel the love? Bill Whittle sure can:

A few years before Tolkien put pen to paper, an event took place that a man of his education would have undoubtedly been aware. On February 9th, 1933, the ruling elite of the world’s great Civilization held a debate in the Oxford Union. With thunderclouds growing dark across the English Channel, at a time when resolute action could still have averted the worst catastrophe the world has ever known, these elites resolved that “This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”

The Resolution passed by a vote of 275 to 153. Needless to say, this vote did not avert the fight. It guaranteed it.

Count Serge among it's victims.

Popping Greenies, a continuation

Yes, shock horror, film at eleven and all that jazz. More green hypocrisy:

People who believe they have the greenest lifestyles can be seen as some of the main culprits behind global warming, says a team of researchers, who claim that many ideas about sustainable living are a myth.

According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad. The carbon emissions from such flights can swamp the green savings made at home, the researchers claim.

As Tim Worstall rightly points out:

If they really had the courage of their convictions they’d not be taking those long flights. The rest is just a fashion statement.

Were it only that the Roles were Reversed...

Europe's much trumpeted Large Hadron Collider is having some rather serious sounding problems.

The collider was officially launched on September 10 when the first particle beam was successfully sent around the full circuit. However, it hit a major glitch last week when a mechanical failure triggered a helium leak and forced a shutdown for what was initially reported to be at least two months.
Now it looks like the investigation and repairs won't be finished in time to restart the LHC before CERN's obligatory winter maintenance period, pushing the restart date back to early spring 2009, officials said.

Faulty wiring, mechanical failures.... Were the roles reversed, and the apparatus in the United States, the news would come to be met with little other than abuse and bloviated extended discourse plausiting theories about American science descending into mediocrity, cultural this and that, and huge amounts of concern feigning sincerity. On the other hand, we only know that it Beagled because it was presented to the public with too much flair to otherwise conceal, especially given that they commissioned a vapidly atmospheric and flattering musical theme by Blur and carried as part of its' payload a creation of hack stunt-artist Damian Hirst.

Why Waste Your Energy on Something Real?

To hell with the global banking system. What matters to Europeans is the opportunity to ridicule.

From the left:

Expressing nostalgia for "the good old days when bankers jumped out of windows," Aeschimann condemned as "extortion" the rescue of U.S. corporate giants by the very state that free-marketeers resent.

Never mind a half century of collective unionized extortion that comes at the expense of the whole population, or the dirigisme of what they try to call Capitalism, underlying is a set of paranoid delusions and lack of memory. While the commentary on the BBC World Service and Radio 4 simplistically ask "is this the failure of capitalism", as if the same observers were intelligent enough to differentiate it from anything else, they forget that the COMECON satellites in the Soviet orbit experienced economic downturns all the time. What they couldn't do well at all was take advantage of the upturns in the economy enough to actually improve medical care, life prospects, or anything else to the degree one could in capitalist market environments or even the less efficient partially socialized areas.

And to the right:

"Greenspan was considered a master," Tremonti declared. "Now we must ask ourselves whether he is not, after [Osama] bin Laden, the man who hurt America the most. . . . It is clear that what is happening is a disease. It is not the failure of a bank, but the failure of a system. Until a few days ago, very few were willing to realize the intensity and the dramatic nature of the crisis."

Especially all of those people in the entire business press who have been writing about the potential of a banking crisis without quite knowing what shape it would take for the past 18 months.

But the purpose of the message is clear. If there is a downturn, in lieu of looking at the causes or measures to correct it, there has to be a straw man to blame. Enter the all purpose US. If it didn't exist, the euro-ass-clown commentariat would have invented it.

But fear accompanied gloating. The crisis threatens to worsen woes -- inflation, unemployment, weak growth -- of regional powerhouses including Britain, Spain and Italy. Joaquin Almunia, an ideologically moderate Spanish Socialist who is the European Union's economic commissioner, offered a simple analysis.

Deep wisdom there in that simple analysis. In fact that might be the only analysis you will get, after showing the same weaknesses in Europe for the past year that the US has shown. But let's not bother ourselves with anything like that, after all, the US'[ unemployment rate in a recession is still 2 points lower than Germany in what it liked to call its' recent boom.

No, when in doubt, you need the reflection of that great coterie of exhaulted experts that you can't seriously question, a junta of economic nattering such as the likes of those the LA Times sought out and found... And what greater expertise can you find than a cell-phone sales-lump:

"And I'm furious when I see the pictures of Americans who thought they were on the sunny side of life and now have lost their homes and have to live in their cars," Evers said. "I definitely do not feel sorry for the bankers who lost their jobs in the last couple of days. I can't believe that a country like the U.S.A. could have been so careless on a money issue!"

"I was taught that the U.S.A. is the motherland of moneymaking," she added. "And now all I can see is a herd of headless chickens running around on Wall Street."

This in a country where they completely banned short selling, so that no-one will ever be able to do anything is an asset starts to evaporate. There won't be any reason to run around like a headless chicken, nor will there be the opportunity to.

Of course they are serious

Kos opines, either disingenuously or he just missed the memo - I am thinking the latter, about the Democratic party in the US clamoring to bail-out their previously stated enemies on Wall Street:

Yet bizarrely, Democrats are rushing headlong into those boondoggle, flailing their arms in blind panic at the behest of the Bush Administration, all for a proposal that will dump a trillion dollar budget deficit on Obama's lap before he's spent a single dime on anything else.

The answer to "why?" the Democrats in congress are rushing headlong into this boondoggle is found in today's column from Tony Juniper (relevant emphasis added):

In the present crisis, however, there is a huge opportunity to do things differently, through governments taking control of the economy and by spending money – large amounts of it – to stimulate economic activity, cut our reliance on imported fossil fuels and slash climate-changing emissions. By spending now to build a low-carbon economy, we could generate a new army of highly skilled green-collar workers, building new power infrastructure, transport networks and super efficient buildings.

What the Democrats in general, and the statist left in particular, see in this crisis is opportunity. An opportunity to reach deeper and farther than ever thought possible into the money-making machine of the private sector. This is a chance to control private economic activity, steer business and commerce to the approved lefty groups (individuals, businesses, and of course ... NGOs), push the income equality mantra, push the green mantra, patronage, (insert your own socialist totem here).

Now, the left may not "get" all they want in this initial round of the big grab going on/planned. But, the nose will be under/in the tent. Others of Juniper's ilk are already circling the very same lamp-post and giving it a good scratch. The left smells the blood and they want their piece of the action. Do note, any "concessions" received by the left will come as they naturally do, no work/effort just bottom feeding on the misery (and taxes) of others.

Now, the folks on Wall Street have nobody but themselves to blame for being put into this position. If you cry "free people and free markets" and then run to the safety and comfort of the governmental teet once you hit the wall, tough luck. You want taxpayer monies to pull your bacon out of the fire, you get the joy of dealing with the politically machinated strings which come along with the cash.

Enjoy, the rest of us certainly will not be.

The scope of Obama's planned defense cuts, combined with his angry tone, is breathtaking; he sounds as if America's military is the enemy

Islamic terrorists have attacked a hotel and a U.S. embassy in the span of two weeks. Russia is invading American allies and sending warships to our hemisphere. What would Obama do? Gut the military.

Investor's Business Daily continues:

That's right, the Democrat choice for commander in chief wants to not only slash military spending but dismantle our nuclear arsenal — all so he can pay for his massive new welfare programs.

Didn't hear that in his acceptance speech in Denver? That's because he knows better than to make such an anti-military plan widely known. But he made the little-noticed pledge just before the Iowa caucus to a left-wing pacifist group that seeks to reallocate defense dollars to welfare programs. The lobbying group, Caucus for Priorities, was so impressed by Obama's anti-military offering that it steered its 10,000 devotees his way.

In a 132-word videotaped pledge … Obama agreed to hollow out the military by slashing conventional and nuclear weapons. The scope of his planned defense cuts, combined with his angry tone, is breathtaking. He sounds as if the military is the enemy, not the bad guys it's fighting.

Investor's Business Daily (which adds that "Palin's reception of Uribe is a far more serious statement than Obama's visits to the tourist spots of Europe that he chalked up as foreign policy experience") has the transcript…

Obama seems oblivious to the threat from Islamic extremism. During his 4,350-word acceptance speech in Denver, he couldn't summon enough spit even to utter the phrase a single time.

Getting Their "Roots" Done

Jawa Report reveals just who we're talking about when the left talks about the realness of their "grass roots" campaigns being some sort of proletarian uprising against anything. It's fake, and it's fully employed to scurry around election rules and libel laws.

Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.
Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.

It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign.

As it is, his holiness the Obama is not the candidate of the post-anything age. He was down in Florida scaring old people, has twice the funding of the Republicans thanks to the corporate shakedown circuit in spite of presenting the illusion that he needs your $12 to oppose corporate America, and is sure to permit the engineering for further fake public dramas.

PR FIRM BEHIND THE VIDEO?
The YouTube poster who uploaded the video did so under the account name "eswinner". He names his channel "AGroupofConcernedAmericans". The goal of his channel, says "eswinner", is:

Offering a fair and unbiased view towards life and politics...
I try to give an unbiased account of all things American.
The video was uploaded four times under the "eswinner" account, using different titles for each video. The video was also uploaded to Google Video on the same day and with the same title.
That Picasa page of "eswinner" is used by an "Ethan" advertising on Craig's List that he will rent out his yacht to interested parties. But "Ethan" also leaves his e-mail account: ewinner@winnr.com.
And just what is winnr.com? An alternate dns designation for Winner & Associates. A firm that employs one Ethan S. Winner.
Hundreds of pictures on the Picassa page belonging to "eswinner" show that the page belongs to the same Ethan S. Winner that is employed by the public relations firm of Winner & Associates. Other instances of an "eswinner" or "ewinner" posting on the internet are found sprinkled here and there. All of those postings seem to fit the profile of Ethan S. Winner and suggest that eswinner and Ethan Winner are one and the same.

Some might do this partly for love, and partly for money. More likely the love was a rationalization of the money.
Either way, the reasoning at some point that the skill to manipulate the public's views by going deep under the radar will eventually be rationalized into a ethic which permits one to think that taking care of numero uno is as important for the cause as the cause itself. Gotta be refreshed, right?

These people are professional guns for hire. Looking at their portfolio makes that clear. And they only work for big clients. The kind of clients that pay big bucks. The kind of people hired by Exxon to convince people that the effects of the Valdez spill were over. The kind of people hired to help push through oil fields in Chad and Cameroon or help companies respond to boycott threats over the Beijing Olympics.
The kind of people who would have an in-house attorney to handle PR for Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. And get them a movie deal.
Also the kind of people hired by the European Union to help sell the new EU treaty. Who was the lead in that effort? Ethan S. Winner.

Not bad for a guy outdoing Goebbels.

Here's my prediction. They will start borrowing from the Ségolène Royal imprint as best they can. About two weeks before election day, someone who doesn't seem too close to the Obama campaign will make a tacit threat to the public and make the suggestion that a Obama loss might lead to public unrest. Someone in the press will find a reason to play old tapes of the Rodney King riots with the implication of a narrative speciously spun around catchphrases like 'lack of national unity' and the usual instruments formerly used by revolutionaries when people actually pay attention when they would throw spaghetti at the wall.
And somehow the threat of violence will be painted over nicely. The subtext is to use an emotionally trained response from the past to pry open skepticism that people might have about their reasoned choices.

"Choosing Nicolas Sarkozy would be a dangerous choice," Royal told RTL radio.
"It is my responsibility today to alert people to the risk of (his) candidature with regards to the violence and brutality that would be unleashed in the country (if he won)," she said.
Pressed on whether there would be actual violence, Royal said: "I think so, I think so," referring specifically to France's volatile suburbs hit by widespread rioting in 2005.

The goal is to get the though through peoples' heads that a choice for what seems mainstream gets a negative stroke. Behold the BITE model at work using a conduit identified by every underperforming academic's hero, Marshall McCluhan decades ago – a time the left's world view seems to idolize and forever look back to.

They're Popping the Wrong Kind of Greenies

So do you really want to know what a hypocrite looks like?

The program, set up by the DNC Host Committee through the Denver Convention and Visitors Bureau and rolled out about a week before the convention started, raised a total of $18.34 worth of Canary Tags, offsetting 0.9 tons of carbon emissions.

Remember, it's all because they (heart) the earth.

Trouble in Paradise

A nation weeps. All we can say is that all is not well in Jellystone Park.

Meanwhile, gathering more dust than attention, is this kind of Yada yada yada that comes up when a European concludes that discovering his own toe-cheese instantly rises to the level of a social injustice.

Gosh, who knew

While waiting for delivery of the daily bowl of gruel, one notices this:

A British government minister attacked Republican US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin as "horrendous" at the Labour Party conference on Saturday.

The outburst from Communities Secretary Hazel Blears threatens to undermine Prime Minister Gordon Brown's determination for the British government to maintain a neutral position in the US presidential election.

Speaking at a fringe meeting of the centre-left party during its annual party conference in Manchester, Blears said Palin was capitalising on people's disillusionment with regular politics.

"I just think there is so much anti-politics -- not just in this country but around the world," Blears said.

"One of the reasons why Sarah Palin has been such a phenomenon is because she's anti-politics, anti-Washington.

"Her politics are horrendous, but actually she's struck a chord with people -- 'I'm a maverick, I'm not part of those powerful people' -- and people identified with that."

Gee, why do you think she has struck a chord? Gee, why do you think people have identified with that message? Gee, should the proles be interested in supporting candidates who only deepen our already deep disillusionment with "regular" politics?

Professional politicians have done such a fabulous job in both Westminster and Washington, as a voting and tax-paying class we really should be more grateful.

Poison Chalice

Working under the rules of business as ususal, this news is not of any particular interest:

Up to 10,000 staff at the New York office of the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers will share a bonus pool set aside for them that is worth $2.5bn (£1.4bn)...

However, there is now a rather large problem at play. Given that the financial sector is set to lock on hard to the teets of various governmental schemes there is a new set of rules in place. It is one thing, and quite properly so, to let firms determine the pay and remuneration in a truly free-market system. But, when any firm or industry runs howling into the arms of governmental "care" the rules change. No longer are these firms using monies freely given and freely exchanged by the free market. Using governmental funds which are obtained via force from the taxpayer comes with quite very long and tangled strings.

Those claiming the financial markets have "failed" could not be any further from reality. The markets have in fact worked perfectly. The markets discovered these massive problems in the financial sector and acted swiftly and efficiently, as should be the case. Now that governmentalism is entering the market-place at a 90 degree angle, those involved will be playing by the hamstrung, inefficient, and political rules which marr reality on a daily basis.

Not only will the taxpayer be on the hoof for the billions directly related to the financial sector "help" being provided by governments, at least in the US the taxpayer will undoubtedly get to experience the extreme pleasure of paying for even more "social justice" ornaments being hung on the bail-out Christmas tree:

Still, competing interests were already complicating the negotiations, as Democrats pushed for assistance for distressed homeowners and for oversight authority of the bailout program.

US taxpayers should be giving a hearty thanks to the "smartest" guys in the room.

(Update: Start picking your poison)

A post about not too much

Do not doubt, 7.5 kilometers paved with good intentions. Courtesy of the leisure class:

More than 10,000 marched in the Swedish city of Malmoe on Saturday in a demonstration against the excesses of globalisation, organised as part of the European Social Forum being held there.

The marchers, many carrying banners, set off from the suburb of Rosengaard at 2:00 pm (1300 GMT) accompanied by several marching bands, in what was one of the biggest organised in Sweden.

"We are all here because we have a common message," Thor Rutgersson, a 25-year-old teacher told AFP.

"We want better conditions for workers, for students and more cooperation to fight poverty in Europe," he added.

The march included delegations from all over Europe, including trade unionists and students.

"It is important that the countries from eastern Europe are here today," said Piotr Ostrowsky of the Polish confederation of trade unions, the OPZZ.

Saturday's march extended 7.5 kilometres (nearly five miles) and finished in the city centre without incident. A large police presence had been on stand-by on the fringes of the route.

On Friday, about 100 people threw rocks at police and broke windows in the city centre at the tail end of a demonstration organised by a group called Reclaim the Streets, which had attracted some 700 participants.

The fifth European Social Forum began Thursday and wraps up on Sunday.

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.