Che Guevara on Everything From Beer Mugs and Flip Flops to Santa Hats and Russian Dolls Through Dog Jackets and Pink Underpants

From Switzerland, Le Monde's Michel Guerrin brings back an article on René Burri, the Swiss photographer whose photo of Che Guevara has been pilfered on a thousand objects, from curtains to bikinis, 160 of which have been assembled in a Vevey exhibit called Revolution for Sale.

BHL Reminisces About Christopher Stevens, the Diplomat Who Loved San Francisco

Les fanatiques qui ont assassiné hier à Benghazi l'ambassadeur américain en Libye, Christopher Stevens, ne sont pas seulement des criminels, ce sont des imbéciles.

While Corine Lesnes speaks of Christopher Stevens in Le Monde as "one of her aides" whom "Hilary Clinton lost" when he "died in Benghazi" ("Le 11 septembre, Hillary Clinton perdait un autre de ses aides, Christopher Stevens, 52 ans, l'ambassadeur en Libye. Un autre membre de cette nouvelle génération de diplomates qui, de Mike McFaul en Russie à Robert Ford, qui est resté à Damas jusqu'à l'impossible, n'hésitent pas à payer de leur personne pour défendre les libertés. Chris Stevens est mort à Benghazi, une ville qu'il avait contribué à sauver") — thus diluting the fact that the Libyan ambassador was assassinated in a terrorist attack — Bernard-Henri Lévy pens a Le Monde reminiscence about Stevens, whom he knew personally.

Cet homme jeune, brillant diplomate en même temps qu'homme de terrain courageux, était l'un des meilleurs amis de la Libye et l'un des artisans secrets de sa libération.

Dans ce combat commun, de Paris à Benghazi puis Washington, nos routes se sont plusieurs fois croisées.

… Je me souviens d'un matin où nous découvrons ensemble, dans un éclat de rire partagé, que nous avons rendez-vous, tous deux, au même moment, avec le Président d'un CNT alors peu à cheval sur le protocole. Je me souviens de discussions vives mais franches, et toujours dans la bonne humeur, sur la perspective d'un Dayton libyen qui semblait avoir sa faveur et qui consistait à parier sur une Libye divisée et confédérée. Je me souviens de son élégance, de son sourire éclatant et de ce jour, sur la route de Brega, où il s'était livré à un vibrant, très littéraire et, en ce lieu, assez incongru éloge de San Francisco.

… Les Américains ont perdu un ambassadeur. Les Libyens ont perdu un compagnon et un ami. Les imbéciles ont gagné.

More Provocation from the Christian West to the Muslim Extremists

Plantu on the Pope's Message to the Islamists
• Benedict XVI: Love one another!
• Terrorist: Yet another provocation!

Plantu and the Islamic Violence Against Uncle Sam's Citizens

Plantu on Pakistan's 17 dead
• Islamist Director: CUT!

Reminder: The Type of Torture That America Never Engaged In

One Foreign Ministry officer told me of [an Iraqi] colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.

For years, we were treated to the terrible tales of torture of the Bush administration, but as Eason Jordan reminded us 9 years ago — indirectly (thanks to Instapundit) — the pain of alleged American "torture", such as water boarding or even piling naked prisoners in a human pyramid, was entirely temporary, left no physical sequels, and involved real bad guys, thus never holding a candle to the torture of such régimes as that of Saddam Hussein…

A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.

Caption Contest

Outraged at Muslim Riots? No, at the West's Freedom of Speech

Needless to say, Serguei's cartoon takes a swipe at America as well as at freedom of expression, bringing up Yankee hypocrisy in the process and all of America's usual so-called failings…

• Lady Liberty: Those people are taking freedom of speech to a pretty extreme point!
• Uncle Sam: So are we!

Criminal Justice Degree, Anyone?

Reader Jessy Jay asks us for a link to his Criminal Justice Degree resource.

Et voilà…

The Le Monde Reader Who Regularly Caricatures the U.S. Castigates Mitt Romney and Is Therefore Published 4 Times in Less Than a Month

The Le Monde reader who regularly demonstrates his haughtiness towards the United States and its people — among other ways by using the catty expression United Stateser — has written a diatribe against Mitt Romney, predicting that "the Mormon billionaire" promises to bring about a combination of Ronald Reagan's Reaganomics and George W Bush's policies and, indeed, that with his "spectacle of sorcerer's apprentices", he will turn out to be even worse than the worst president of all time (Dubya, natch). And so, to no one's surprise, Le Monde prints the letter — the fourth by André Fromon in less than a month!

Compared with Hitler’s Holocaust or Stalin’s gulag, Mao Zedong’s organized famine has been one of the more or less forgotten crimes against humanity

About 100 official documents concerning the “The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962” have been published by the historian Zhou Xun

writes Helmut Dahmer.

In her review of this work (“Uncovering a great leap into an abyss,” Sept. 6), Didi Kirsten Tatlow says that, compared with Hitler’s Holocaust or Stalin’s gulag, Mao Zedong’s organized famine has until now been one of the more or less forgotten crimes against humanity. I should add that the Chinese famine has been the biggest one in the history of mankind. This was the result of the second endeavor of a Stalinist party to enslave the peasant majority of a huge country to accelerate its industrialization. Karl Marx remarked that important historical events tend to be repeated: What happened the first time as a tragedy, in the second edition comes back as a farce. During the 20th century we have learned that the repetition of a tragedy may surpass all we can imagine. The enforced collectivization in Russia, especially in Ukraine, claimed about six million victims. The Chinese re-enactment of this tragedy surpassed the Russian death toll at least five times.

Obamacare Summed Up in One Sentence

Obamacare summed up in one sentence

British Heroism in the Clouds: Britannia's Heroes of the Skies, From World War I to the Troubles in Ireland

The Zeppelin-slayer; the 'wing-walker'; the helicopter pilot who thwarted the IRA... In this extract from his major new book, Lord Ashcroft salutes Britain's greatest airmen

Thankfully, the Media Has Its Priorities Straight

Hitting the proverbial nail on its head once again is Michael Ramirez (thanks to Instapundit)

2 Stories From World War II: Life (and Death) in a French Camp and One Woman's Escape from Occupied France

Le camp des Milles, une ancienne tuilerie-briqueterie de 15 000 m2 désaffectée, ouvrit en septembre 1939, d'abord pour interner les "ressortissants de la puissance ennemie", autrement dit majoritairement des Allemands et des Autrichiens réfugiés dans le Midi pour... échapper au régime nazi. A l'été 1942, ils furent plus de 2 000, dont une centaine d'enfants, à être déportés à Auschwitz, via Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis).

In Le Monde, Renaud Lavergne tells us the story of a woman whose family was taken to a French concentration camp during World War II while Julia Holland recounts the story of her mother Rosemary, a former Telegraph journalist who was one of the first women to escape from internment in France.

Les Milles est le seul camp français encore en l'état aujourd'hui. Son histoire est désormais reconstituée, ouverte au grand public qui découvrira, notamment, comment de nombreux artistes et intellectuels y furent internés, parmi lesquels le peintre Max Ernst ou l'écrivain Lion Feuchtwanger.

… Ce matin du 4 août [1942], donc, la police fait irruption au Terminus des ports. "On nous a donné une heure pour rassembler toutes nos affaires. On nous a dit qu'on nous conduisait dans un endroit d'où l'on nous enverrait en famille dans un autre lieu jusqu'à la fin de la guerre. Puis on nous a jetés dans un camion, et j'ai reconnu le camp des Milles, devant lequel nous retrouvions parfois mon père. Comment aurais-je pu penser cela ?...", dit Miriam Altman, toujours "estomaquée", soixante-dix ans plus tard que cette rafle ait été menée "par des policiers français ayant suivi les ordres des Allemands, alors que ceux-ci [qui n'occuperont la zone sud qu'en novembre] n'étaient pas encore là ".

Julia Holland on her "mum’s wartime story":

She had become an au pair in France just months before the outbreak of the Second World War. Trapped in Paris, she watched the victorious German army parade down the Champs Elysees. Later imprisoned by the Germans, she was one of the first British women to escape from internment in Nazi-occupied France. Her arrival at Waterloo Station, determinedly clutching a pineapple, was front-page news.

… The journey to the prison camp at Besancon lasted for two days. Conditions onboard the trains were horrendous. There were no toilets or running water. One group of Irish nuns were so desperate for water that they “refreshed” themselves with eau de cologne until a little old nun managed to spill the lot.

In November 1941 my mother escaped through the barbed wire with her friend Frida. They had no false papers, very little money and no contacts beyond a possibly sympathetic dentist. With the help of ordinary people who put their own lives at risk, they slowly and secretly headed southwards on a train to Marseille and near disaster: “As we disembarked at the station we could see a group of officials ahead carefully checking the passengers’ papers. The beginning of a long queue was forming. We joined it, not looking at each other, knowing that this was the end. There was no way our papers were going to fool this sort of official check.” (You’ll have to read the book to see how they got out of that one...)

A Cartoon on the Effectiveness of the United Nations Regarding the Syrian Issue

• Foreign Minister Fabius to the (sleeping) delegates of the UN:
Hold me down or I shall get very cross!
• President Hollande: Well spoken!

Without realizing it, Plantu echoes all the criticism that has been leveled at the United Nations by America's conservatives over the years and over the decades…

50 Years of Negative Campaign Ads

Le Monde has a portfolio of 50 years of negative ads, thanks to Philippe Bernard…

Interviewed by M6 Regarding Larry Flynt's $1,000,000 Reward for Info on Mitt Romney's Taxes

I was interviewed by the M6 evening news program regarding Larry Flynt (in view of the Hustler honcho's million-dollar reward for any information on Mitt Romney's taxes), between 13:17 and 15:15. (If you are wondering about "1945", it refers to 19:45, i.e., the 7:45 pm show.)

9-11 on the Comics Page: Wizard of Id

And What Is It That Winston Churchill Inspires in François Hollande?

• Plantu: We Need Another Churchill!
• Hollande: Which reminds me! Cigars are another thing we need to tax!

The Entire DNCC in 25 Tweets

"God is dead." - Nietzche.
"Nietzche is dead." - God.
"Let's take a vote." - DNC

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 5, 2012

E-nough's Damien recaps the entire Democratic National Committee Convention in 25 Tweets… of which here are two…

New: Bill Clinton: Please don't judge Obama by the standard he [Obama himself] set. ow.ly/dvdtZ

— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 6, 2012

A Love Triangle Gone Dangerously Public

If you believe the French weekly Le Point, Thomas Hollande, the 27-year-old lawyer and son of President François Hollande and his former partner, Ségolène Royal, blasted his father’s current partner in an interview for “putting private life in the public domain” by backing a political opponent of his mother

report Steven Erlanger and Maïa de la Baume from Paris.

If you believe Thomas Hollande, on the other hand, there was no such interview, just a conversation with a young woman who twisted his words.

… According to Le Point, Thomas Hollande said his father was “stupefied” by a Twitter posting from Valérie Trierweiler, his partner, publicly supporting Ms. Royal’s opponent in a legislative race. Ms. Trierweiler was said to have been angered when the president issued a public statement of support for Ms. Royal. Ms. Trierweiler’s action, highly criticized at the time, was seen as damaging to the elder Mr. Hollande’s effort to be a “normal president,” without the emotional swings and personal complications of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Ms. Royal lost her race, but it was doubtful whether she could have beaten her popular local opponent in any case.

Appearance on the M6 Evening News

I was interviewed for 20 minutes by the M6 evening news program regarding the US presidential election (11:18-13:22), but I only appear for a dozen seconds. (If you are wondering about "1945", it refers to 19:45, i.e., the 7:45 pm show.)

Welcome to Belgistan — The most common baby name in Brussels for 4 years has been Mohammed

A showdown over sharia is coming in Belgium because the high Muslim birth rate is changing the political landscape

writes CBN (shookhran to Fausta) in its 5- to 6-minute video report

The most common baby name in Brussels for four years running has been Mohammed … Muslims are still a minority in Belgium but in the capital of Brussels they are already the largest religious group — one quarter of the city's population — and are expected to be the majority less than 20 years

Third Democratic Official Reportedly Likens Republicans to Nazis

Third Democratic official reportedly likens Republicans to Nazis…

Update: Mitt Hitler and Double Standards:
Godwin's Law Applies to Thee, But Not to Me

Le Monde Cartoon Emblematic of Contrast in MSM Approach to Obama and to Romney

Serguei's cartoon is emblematic of the contrast in the treatment given the idolized Barack Obama and that given the caricatured Mitt Romney.

Guerre d'images par Serguei

French MSM on "Guaranteed Success" and "the Obama Magic": Obama's Values the Same As "Numerous Americans"

By contrast with their stereotypical treatment of Mitt Romney, the French media's approach to Barack Obama is stellar, as proven in the Le Monde article of the Democrat convention's openining, replete with the expressions "the Obama magic", "guaranteed success", "Michelle Obama's 'home run' ", "her husband's values and convictions", and said Obama values being the same "as very numerous Americans" — not to mention a batch of smiling photos in comparison with what what Radegunda calls "the most angry-looking pic they could find" of Mitt.

Le "home run" de Michelle Obama devant la convention démocrate

La première dame des États-Unis a fait l'éloge d'un président qui, a-t-elle dit, partage les valeurs de très nombreux Américains : travail, éducation, honnêteté, intégrité. Succès garanti.

Update: Check out Le Monde's cartoon

Mitt Romney, the New American Hawk Who Is Worse Than Even Bush Junior

As can be seen in Alain Frachon's article in Le Monde, the French are preempting Mitt Romney's November victory by in caricaturing him in the strongest way possible while branding him as a hawk — in The New American Hawk — one who is a combination of Ronald Reagan, and "even more, of Bush Junior (W)".

Indeed, the (contempt-filled) comments are already starting to brand Mitt as worse than Dubya!

Ce qui trouble le plus, c'est une posture en politique étrangère qui paraît avoir été arrêtée il y a dix, vingt ou trente ans. Le discours ici a des allures de vieille recette, qui consiste à affirmer haut et fort la primauté des Etats-Unis, d'abord grâce à sa puissance armée.

Cela rappelle étrangement celui de Bush junior, au lendemain des attentats de 2001, cette combinaison d'ultranationalisme et d'idéalisme botté.

Update: Compare with the treatment of Barack Obama

Update 2: Check out Le Monde's cartoon

Yes We Can: Obama's Rallying Cry of 2008 and the Updated 2012 Version

The Economist features a KAL cartoon.

Health insurance would be a lot less expensive if it covered only the kinds of risks that can involve heavy costs

Insurance is all about risk

writes Thomas Sowell.

Yet neither insurance companies nor their policy-holders can do anything about one of the biggest risks -- namely, interference by politicians, to turn insurance into something other than a device to deal with risk.

By passing laws to force insurance companies to cover things that have nothing to do with risk, politicians force up the cost of insurance.

Annual checkups, for example, are known in advance to take place once a year. Foreseeable events are not a risk. Annual checkups are no cheaper when they are covered by an insurance policy. On the contrary, they are one of many things that are more expensive when they are covered by an insurance policy.

All the paperwork, record-keeping and other things that go with having any medical procedure covered by insurance have to be paid for, in addition to the cost of the medical procedure itself.

If automobile insurance covered the cost of oil changes or the purchase of gasoline, then both oil changes and gasoline would have to cost more, to cover the additional bureaucratic work involved.

In the case of health insurance, however, politicians love to mandate things that insurance must cover, including in some states treatment for baldness, contraceptives and whatever else politicians can think of. Playing Santa Claus costs a politician nothing, but it can cost the policy-holder a bundle -- all of which the politician will blame on the "greed" of the insurance company.

Insurance companies are regulated by both states and the federal government. This means that, instead of there being one vast nationwide market, where innumerable insurance companies compete with each other from coast to coast, there are 50 fragmented markets with different rules. That adds to the costs and reduces the competition in a given state.

When there are innumerable insurance companies, it is by no means clear that political regulation of them will produce better results than the regulation provided by competition in the market. In a competitive market, insurance companies would cover only those things that their policy-holders are willing to pay to have covered. Policy-holders would have no reason to pay to have insurance cover things that would be cheaper if paid for directly -- or not paid for at all, in the case of things that are not a real concern to many people, such as baldness cures.

One of the factors in the number of the "uninsured," for whom politicians are willing to turn the whole medical care system upside down, is the high cost of insurance that covers far more things than most people would be willing to pay for, if it was up to them. The uninsured who use hospital emergency rooms and don't pay are a problem only because politicians passed laws forcing hospitals to let themselves be taken advantage of in this way.

Too many political "solutions" are solutions to problems created by previous political "solutions" -- and will be followed by new problems created by their current "solutions." There is no free lunch. In the case of health insurance, there is not even an inexpensive lunch.

Health insurance would be a lot less expensive if it covered only the kinds of risks that can involve heavy costs, such as a major operation or a crippling disability. While such things can be individually very expensive, they don't happen to everybody, and insurance is one way to spread the risks, so that the protection of a given individual is not prohibitively expensive.

The problem of "pre-existing conditions" is a problem largely because of the way that politicians have written the laws -- more specifically, by giving a tax break to employer-provided health insurance. If individuals bought their own health insurance, with the same tax advantages, the fact that an illness occurred after they changed employers would not make it a "pre-existing condition."

There is no inherent reason for employers to be involved, in the first place. The fact that some guy manufactures furniture or plumbing fixtures in no way qualifies him to understand insurance for his employees. Including him in the loop adds another unnecessary layer of bureaucratic costs.

Political risks are the biggest risks.

Update: Joining in the discussion, mamapajamas says that he

can remember not all that long ago, in the '80s, going to a doctor for an annual physical and being able to pay for it with cash on hand. It was when insurance companies started lumping everything into policies that prices got out of hand.

Now that Obamacare is with us, at 63, I'm going to have to pay for free maternity care, free contraceptives, and free prostate exams that I will never use... because it is all included in my health care coverage. The greatest thing about private insurance is that I was able to eliminate those things from my coverage.

Radegunda replies that

I'm now required to insure myself against the risk of coming down with autism ...

Attack Ads: It was actually Democrats who proved how little electoral success an abundance of riches could buy in 2004

[The Democrat] complaint runs, conservative groups will have enough money to flood the airwaves with attack ads, drowning out more representative voices and creating an artificial Republican tide.

But as Lexington points out,

the practitioners sound far less certain that a record-breaking advertising blitz will be enough to unseat a sitting president.

It was actually Democrats who proved how little electoral success an abundance of riches could buy in 2004, when left-leaning 527s (a sort of precursor to super PACs) spent almost twice as much as right-leaning ones without toppling Mr Bush.

Furthermore,

Not only has the Obama campaign outspent Mr Romney’s on the airwaves over the past few months, media types say, but it has done so with sophistication। …

A hard man to smear

But it is hard to change voters’ views of an incumbent, after four years in which they have been building up firm impressions of their own. Worse, says Steven Law, the president of both American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, Mr Obama is a particularly tricky man to tear down. Voters are well disposed towards him. They bridle at attempts to label him a liberal and recoil when he is mocked or attacked too aggressively, perhaps because of his status as the first black president. A tone of regret and disappointment, rather than anger or indignation, is imperative.

Mr Rove understands this. One of Crossroads’ ads features a woman explaining how she voted for Mr Obama in 2008—“He spoke so beautifully”—but now agonises about her family’s finances and the national debt. In another a female voice says, “He raised our hopes. He seemed to understand. But today he’s different.” In a third, yet another middle-aged woman with children (spot the swing voter) laments, “He promised change. But things have changed for the worse.”

Where’s you Cape? I don’t See your Cape?

The Boy Who Cried Warming is an independent film featuring scientists taking the mickey out of the zealots who “want to save us from Global Warming.”

The Le Monde Reader Who Uses Catty Caricature "United Stateser" Is Published 3 Times in 2 Weeks

Two weeks ago, Le Monde Watch revealed a Le Monde reader who, because of his haughtiness towards the United States and its people, had two letters published in the space of three days!

Two weeks later, believe it or not, Le Monde publishes a third letter to the editor of André Fromon's! Yet another letter which — on s'en doute — uses the catty expression United Statesers.

Actually, it turns out, André Fromon has been published no less than six times since the beginning of summer (and nine times since last year)! (Not all of which concern America, as it happens…)

By contrast, when I asked a colleague at the International Herald Tribune (an American newspaper, oui, but published in Paris) what was their policy regarding letters to the editor, I was told that they tried to avoid publishing any given reader more than twice in three months…

Mais bon : André Fromon (who called Jean-Luc Mélenchon a courageous, brave, and elegant leader) is hostile to the Anglo-Saxons and speaks of United Stateser citizens, so what can one say; it's entirely normal for Le Monde to give him so much space…