True Dat

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone."

- Frederic Bastiat

Soccer is for Panzies

Why they call it a beautiful sport is beyond me. The javelin is beautiful. Track events are beautiful. “Le foot” is just another team game. I realize that the fact that few Americans enjoy it is used a reason to engage in lecturesome nagging – it also ignores the fact that the same people would feign outrage at displacing the native interests of any other culture on earth except that of the United States.

Should Canadians engage in symbolic displays of shame because the zombie-like interest in Hockey or even Curling? Just to worship at the empty, generic, gel-coated fiberglass alter of “football”? Should Britons have to apologize or enjoying Cricket? No.

So the next time you get the canned tirade about “Americans and their sports”, just tell them to go fuck themselves. The statement is commensurate with the motives of the usual recorded rant.

The Other McCain says it all when it comes to American who fixate on Metric Football:

But affluent elite American soccer fandom of the type celebrated by the Nation/NPR piece has roughly the same relationship to merely liking soccer that knowing show-tune lyrics has to sodomy — which is to say, none at all.

Put in context, it’s for non-fans of any sport who yearn to seem ‘butch’ once every couple of years. Slather on top a big helping of yearning to be liked by people who hate you (and are willing to indulge in irrelevancies over it) and you have the perfect, unsophisticated “cosmopolitan” – who is in fact nothing more than a dim-wit who vacations here and there and can parrot a few phrases about things they idealize.

conservatives don’t hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.

American liberals love soccer not merely because it allows them to engage in displays of their imagined superiority — “Look at me! I’m a sophisticated cosmopolitan!” — but also because it’s usually the only sport they’ve ever actually played.

“Mom Wouldn’t Let Me Play Football” is a convenient shorthand that I’ve used to describe a category of person typified by, inter alia, David Brooks.

Letters and Text Messages to Your Wife Can Theoretically Send You to Jail for Up to Three Years

FRANCE's parliament has approved a groundbreaking law that makes psychological violence an offence as part of a broader range of measures aimed at boosting protection for victims of domestic abuse

writes Emile Picy (merci à Benjamin), showing that Phyllis Schlafly's concerns are not limited to the American continent.

"We have introduced an important measure here, which recognises psychological violence, because it isn't just blows (that hurt) but also words," Nadine Morano, the minister for family affairs, told the lower house of parliament …

Anyone found guilty of breaking the new law faces up to three years in jail and a €75,000 fine.

The bill defines mental violence as "repeated acts which could be constituted by words or other machinations, to degrade one's quality of life and cause a change to one's mental or physical state".

Ms Morano said witnesses could be called on to testify in such cases, and doctors' certificates detailing their patients' descent into nervous depression could also be used as evidence.

"The judge could (also) take into consideration letters, SMSs or repetitive messages, because one knows that psychological violence is made up of insults," she added.

The law can be used to protect both women and men who might suffer from such abuse, however parliamentarians have acknowledged that women are the main victims of domestic violence.

See How Rapidly they React ?

Carrying on about their fantasies of what the UN can do that they won’t, which is defending them from risk and danger, Europeans are trying to employ argument and ‘discussion’ on themselves for the 30th year running.

An editorial in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter asks What's the point in a European army?

For the first time in 2011, Sweden will assume command of Nordic Battlegroup 2, one of the 18 battlegroups that make up the European Rapid Reaction Force. The battlegroups are supposed to maintain readiness for deployment within ten days and a four month tour of duty in conflict zones.

Sounds good. I’m sure people feel warm and safe knowing that the reaction is nominally called to be rapid, and all that.

I imagine it also depends on your definition of ‘rapid’, though.

Although Europe's battlegroups "are an ideal force for the protection of populations, or the halting of ethnic cleansing," their deployment is often blocked by a lack of political will, and member states' reluctance to provide troops. The daily concludes that the idea of a "rapid" reaction force will remain a misnomer because "the UN is too slow and ponderous, and the United States follows its own agenda."

Actually, they are ideal - to those prone to imagining the world as it’s hoped to be, but not as it really is. Should anything like the ethnic cleansing in the fashion of the former Yugoslavia take place again, don’t think for a moment that the delays, unmet commitments, and bickering seen then will be any different today.

The usual argument European national forces have been under has been that their budgets and numbers are too small to have a complete effective defense and expeditionary structure. THEREfore a combined and coordinated force structure was needed. As we know, argumentation doesn’t lead to any actual accomplishment in meatspace.

The point of the ‘European Army’ was to solve that problem. Of course the moment it becomes possible, the yackity-yak engine fires up again, leaving the rest of humanity to hold the bag when forces are needed anywhere.

The emotionalism is summed up in the first reader comment that appeared in response to the article:

Sweden should not contribute to the EU's Waffen SS, we have barely resources here at home since the defense was destroyed during the past governments. Rather, we should rebuild a credible capacity so we can defend ourselves.

It’s a perfect circle of jabbering, since they will neither rebuild nor will they integrate into anything credible.

And by arguing about it endlessly, I’m sure there are people thinking that something is ‘being done’ to solve that dilemma.

Depriving Men of Constitutional Rights

Family courts routinely deprive divorced fathers not only of their own children, but even many constitutional rights

writes Phyllis Schlafly in The Awesome Power of Family Courts.

Family courts routinely deprive men of their fundamental right to parent their own children, by charging them with a wide variety of trivial offenses. Family courts generally uphold feminists' demands to kick a man out of his own home, and take control of their children and his money, based on a woman's unsubstantiated allegations. The principal tactics in this racket are domestic violence accusations and court-issued restraining orders.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was passed in 1994 as a payoff to the radical feminists for helping to elect Bill Clinton President in 1992. Personal sponsorship of this law was taken over by then-Senator Joe Biden.

VAWA shows the hypocrisy of noisy feminist demands that we kowtow to their ideology of gender neutrality, to their claim that there is no difference between male and female, and to their opposition to stereotyping and gender profiling. There is nothing sex neutral about VAWA. It is based on the proposition that there are, indeed, innate gender differences: men are naturally batterers and women are naturally victims. VAWA is not designed to eliminate or punish violence, but to punish only alleged violence against women. Most of the shelters financed by VAWA do not accept men as victims.

VAWA has been known from the getgo as "feminist pork" because it puts $1 Billion a year of U.S. taxpayers' money into the hands of the radical feminists. They have set up shop in domestic violence shelters where they promote divorce, marriage breakup, hatred of men, and false accusations, while rejecting marriage counseling, reconciliation, drug-abuse treatment, and evidence of mutual-partner abuse. There is no investigation or accountability for the taxpayers' money spent in these shelters. … VAWA has a built-in incentive for the woman to make false charges of domestic violence because she knows she will never be prosecuted for perjury.

Read the whole report…

Update from Instapundit:

YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO THE STATE: To Get Children Back, Father Must Get Counseling to “Address His Use of Sexist and Racist Language.”

Looking More like a Third World Pit Every Passing Day

De Standaard has published a pair of articles on the fate of Jews of Antwerp: they are leaving, and it is reported further that there will be no Jews left in Antwerp in 50 years, or as Europe’s political adolescents nearly dare to say, “Judenrein” for the same old straw-man reasoning that dates back to the middle ages.

The growing anti-Semitism is increasingly driving young Jews to study in New York, London or Israel, and they are not returning. "Wearing a kippah to work in London is not a problem as it is here."

With one pack of haters after another trying to sound smart and ‘humane’ by telling Jews to “go back where they came from”, one wonders where exactly that is, and how little European and middle-eastern humanity has matured in the last century, since in large part, those not consumed by the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Europe, had to evade the same fate in societies dominated by Muslims. It was ‘where they were from’ until they too were told to ‘go back where they came from’.

Since ‘Zionism’ took their imaginary scourge off of their hands, and they also oppose Zionism, it’s logical to assume that they are not ‘merely against what Israelis do’ or ‘against Israel’ or ‘against Israelis’, but rather just want to see the object of their obsessions dead. Will they satisfy their guilt in the same way Germans did in the Nazi area by saying that they were merely ‘resettled to the east’? Probably.

I also wonder when I hear the invective of a Gulf Arab or Iranian insisting that Palestine is ‘theirs’, whether or not they’ve through about what the Palestinians would think about that. Having long acted as though the Palestinians are their property for use as a political pawn, they’ve gone so far as to even skip a step in their contorted ‘humanistic’ argument about the Palestinians as well.

So Long, Exalted Cyclops!

Reason editor Nick Gillespie notes lat Senator Robert Byrd’s real negative legacy: having his snout in the government trough for a nigh 1/4 of the history of the United States.

it's Byrd's status as the Babe Ruth of pork-barrel spending and taxpayer-funded narcissism that is his real legacy and the one we should never forget or forgive. Here lies a man who pushed his home state to build a statue of him in defiance of a rule that such honorees be dead for 50 years.

And the legacy lives on, exemplified by the self-congratulatory nature of an award given to some lucky spendthrift for spending taxpayer’s money with extra special panache and élan, like a attention-seeking transvestite dressed up like the Sun King.

Whom Did You Fight For?

I Fought For You

How Do I Hate Me? Let me Count the Ways

To be a leftist, I’m convinced that one must try your best to live a short, ulcerate life. Just as kids eventually discover that the tooth fairly isn’t real, I have the sense that they trauma is no different for the cause-of-the-week activist leftist when they discover that their oppressed waifs think for themselves.

i.e.: German Footbal: Leftists harass Muslims for supporting Germany

The leftists have been particularly aggressive in the city’s Neukölln district, home to many residents of Turkish and Arabic heritage, daily Der Tagesspiegel reported on Monday.

Here they have made a point of destroying and removing Germany flags hanging outside shops and vehicles because they believe the proud patriotism hearkens back to the ugly nationalism of the Third Reich, the paper said.

Actually, judging by the trearing down of things hung outside shop windows, I think they DO hearkens back to the ugly nationalism of the Third Reich.

However, we all know that these outsider-types, prior to being programmed politically, are NOT to be permitted to think for themselves, or improve their own lives. After all, what is to become of their image as victims?

Bassal and his cousin Badr Mohammed, a well-known conservative Christian Democratic Berlin politician who lives in the same building, worked together to get the 20-metre-long flag, which cost them €500.

In recent days the situation has escalated, with the anarchists attempting to remove the flag four times and even setting it on fire, the paper reported. On one occasion a group managed to gain access to the roof of the building and cut the flag down.

Last Friday evening some 16 people dressed in typical black anarchist garb confronted Bassal in his shop, and the mood was tense, the paper said.

Opposing his existence, no doubt – or his right to an opinion... it always boils down to something like that.

“They see us as immigrants,” he said. “They don’t understand that Germans who aren’t from Germany would defend Germany.”

Both Bassal and Mohammed told Berliner Morgenpost that they are incredulous they have to defend hanging a German flag to native Germans.

Starting from the position that these ‘activist’ types operating from, you have to understand that they really DO believe that those they pretend to passionately defend aren’t fully human, and desperately need their aid.

Sillier still, they tend also to ‘get active’ in order to indulge their own joy of destructive violence, and are too young and stupid to have either a factual or contextual understanding of the horror that was East Germany – in fact, they tend to be the only sort that would support the neo-totalitarians peddling good old fashioned bait-and-switch class warfare, Die Linke.

But according to Der Tagesspiegel, Bassal has decided to remove the flag and hoist it only on days when there is a Germany match. Meanwhile other residents told the paper they were taking special care not to leave their flags unattended.

Said Without Irony

My, that’s some tasty kool-aid.

It is meant to be the most clear democratising feature of the EU's new rulebook, the Lisbon Treaty, but implementation of the "citizen's initiative" is a political minefield and is prompting much discussion about the danger of the tool turning into a mockery of democracy.

As opposed to, say, pandering to the public with the concept, of course. Even with it, the only less direct form of government there is to the EU is sitting in Pyongyang, where “the people” are said to have been in charge for 6 decades.

The modified proposal sees the commission decides at the moment it registers the initiative if it is fundamentally silly or against European "values."

Read into that all you like – if you can read it at all. Otherwise, enter “the activists”, those with a cause mentality that is more interested in perfecting the art of pretending that any citizen may have a say:

At a hearing on the issue organised by the parliament's Liberal group on Tuesday (22 June), democracy and civil society activists lined up to criticise the proposal.

What’s rather obvious is that the debate, now over 100 000 or 1 000 000 signatures are needed to rase a point any single lawmaker alone is permitted to raise, has entirely to do with the possible content of what the citizens are interested in: things that matter to them. We all know that that can’t be tolerated. After all, “the world” is watching them!

Others took issue with the commission's argument that 100,000 signatures have to be gathered before admissibility is considered, arguing it is too burdensome. The commission says that deciding on admissibility too early would see screeching media headlines like "Brussels gives greenlight to abortion."

Or anything else initiated by actual citizens, for that matter.

The culprit must be BP, presumably because there is no evidence that George Bush was scuba diving near the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20th

In place of leadership we get photo-op trips to the gulf and the knee-jerk pattern of blaming others

writes Joe Hoerter to The Economist.

In this case it is BP, presumably because there is no evidence that George Bush was scuba diving near the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20th.

Highly Recommended

I know the liberals call you 'the most dangerous man in America,' but don't worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me. Keep up the good work.

— Ronald Reagan
in a letter to
Rush Limbaugh,
December 11, 1992

Cutting off their Early Morning Cocktails is Next

This is what happens to societies that put all of their hopes in the Government, and by extension, at the fate of any and all of their fellow citizens.

An EU Commission paper on pensions argues that no more than a third of our adult lives should be spent in retirement writes Natalie Hamill. This means that by 2060, according to current trends, we should expect to be retiring at 70.

The next few years look rather bleak, as member states grapple to get their national finances in order. With credit ratings slipping and austerity measures becoming more widespread, governments are scrambling to find ways to cut their deficits and implement drastic public spending cuts. Retirement reforms will be an area of high priority.

Quite simply, had these folks taken on the responsibility for their own savings for themselves, they won’t live in societies that through Kamakaze budget spending, have put them in a position where they have to work until they’re 70.

as famed for their 35 hour working week as for their croissants, are the latest to protest, after the French Government announced that the retirement age must be raised to 63. Despite the strikes last week President Sarkozy is adamant; the pension system in France is close to bankruptcy (currently £27 billion in deficit) and therefore the age must be raised. France has the lowest retirement age in the EU, and given the economic climate, it cannot justify this anymore.

But whilst French workers huff and puff on strikes in Paris, they should spare a thought for the hard-working Germans, pillar of the EU, and (as they always feared) now a crutch of the Eurozone. Contributing the largest proportion of the Greek bailout has damaged the German government’s standing with its citizens and frustration is simmering at the injustice of their working hard and retiring at 67, but having to pay for the, previously, comfortable retirements of the Greeks at 61.

In Greece, strikes and violent protests have plunged the country into chaos; but few of the austerity measures have caused as widespread outrage as the proposal to raise the retirement age to 63. Prime Minister Papandreou has no choice, he must cut public spending or he won’t get the rest of his bailout. Greece cannot finance the “golden” retirements its citizens expect, and other countries shouldn’t be asked to.

March, yell, set fire to cars, and bang pots all you like, but your well-being is still your responsibility.

I’m Surprised that he Didn’t Dress them up like Uncle Sam

A cartoon by Arend van Dam says all you really need to know about European intelligence and sophistication. It’s reporting bad news that causes the bad news, not the bad news itself that anyone would need to know about.

The subheading that reads “Credit ratings agencies' estimations of Eurozone debt is hurting the single currency.” Is careful to avoid the fact that it’s the Eurozone debt, unfunded mandates, and punitive over-regulation that might might have something to do with their credit rating instead.

More of the Same Ol' "Rightists, Watch Out You Don't Go Too Far"

The Economist last week printed an issue which included the articles What's wrong with America's right ("Too much anger and too few ideas. America needs a better alternative to Barack Obama") and The risks of “Hell, no!” ("The tea-party movement is pushing the Republicans to the right. That may make it harder to recapture the White House from Barack Obama").

The more positive (i.e., more realistic) news is that this week it compared the Community-Organizer-in-Chief to Vladimir Putin…

I responded by writing them the following:


When you write that America's "voters expect solutions, not just rage", you are suggesting that citizens are demanding (some sort of) intervention from above (from Washington, DC). But that is not what America is about. America is about solutions from the bottom — unfettered from (undue) interference from the top.

Speaking of foreign affairs and the USSR, Ronald Reagan said, "there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace" and that is to "surrender." The equivalent, for liberals, in America's internal affairs, is that there is one guaranteed way to "bridge the divide", to "renounce extremes", and to "go beyond polarization" and "beyond hatred and anger" (all "in the interests of America", of course), and that is for America's conservatives — never for the liberals themselves — to surrender their principles.

Therein we have the true meaning of the Democrats' "bipartisan support." It is Orwellian newspeak, concealing a request for Republicans to shut up and go along with liberals' progressive and statist politics.

The GOP is the party of No. As well it should be. Just as Democrats — and statists the world over — stand for "Yes we can" (get more government intervention and more bureaucracy and more hand-outs and more unity behind a "benevolent" ruler), the party of No stands (or ought to stand) by the Constitution, which itself is the declaration, 222 years ago, to statists the world over, from the British monarchy (in 1776) to would-be élites in the United States itself (from the 18th century to today), that the people stand up and say No.

They say No to the idea that we must rally behind the country's ruler (well-intentioned or otherwise); No to the idea that we must not question his policies, his taxes, and his decisions on our behalf (or not criticize them too harshly in any event); No to the very belief that our alleged betters have a better understanding of what is good for us; No to hamstrung efforts by would-be nannies to regulate our lives; and, indeed, No to the belief that the common individual is in need of oversight in the first place.

The EU Has More Regular Summit Meetings With Russia Than with the Obama Administration

So where is all that "smart diplomacy" of the Apologizer-in-Chief's leading us?

The main front page article of the International Herald Tribune on Tuesday (top right) has the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, criticizing Barack Obama in an interview with The New York Times' Steven Erlanger and Stephen Castle — criticizing him all so diplomatically, of course, but criticizing him (and his policies, fiscal as well as foreign) nonetheless.

Mr. Barroso, speaking animatedly for 90 minutes, was rebutting a criticism by President Obama and some economists that Europe’s rush to cut government spending to appease market sentiment risked worsening the region’s economic slump. Mr. Obama wrote in a letter last week to his Group of 20 counterparts that withdrawing fiscal stimulus too soon could lead to “renewed economic hardships and recession.”

Mr. Barroso also rejected an American contention, made recently by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that Europe was driving Turkey into the arms of its less secular Islamic neighbors.

…Concerned by Mr. Obama’s postponement of a European Union-United States summit meeting in May, Mr. Barroso confirmed that he had set up a small study group to examine ways to make the relationship more substantive and coordinated, especially on issues of job growth and regulation. He said that he wanted to produce “deliverables” and that the two sides could do more in relations with third parties, like Russia and China.

Yet the European Union has more regular summit meetings with Russia, he pointed out — two a year.

International Day of Rage

Mr Monks said union barons across Europe were planning a co-ordinated ‘day of action’ against the cuts on 29 September, involving national strikes and protests.

They will call it a historic moment for those in love neo-authoritarian-socialism, a tragedy, the beginning of the end, etc. I call it an inflection point.

Further in the old European spirit of licking the boot that kicks you, all the talk is about the old-fashioned thrill of the goose-step. While some pace hither and fro about the diminution of rights and the creeping dictatorship of the non-internationalists, they are at risk of falling into it for no good reason other than the widespread, shared political views of their do-gooders, luvvies, and activist “caring” types.

Mr Monks, now head of the European TUC, said: ‘I had a discussion with Barroso last Friday about what can be done for Greece, Spain, Portugal and the rest and his message was blunt: “Look, if they do not carry out these austerity packages, these countries could virtually disappear in the way that we know them as democracies. They've got no choice, this is it.”

‘He's very, very worried. He shocked us with an apocalyptic vision of democracies in Europe collapsing because of the state of indebtedness.’

Greece, Spain and Portugal, which only became democracies in the 1970s, are all facing dire problems with their public finances. All three countries have a history of military coups.

All of it caused by caving in to those very same do-gooders, luvvies, and activist “caring” types who always seem to demand an enlargement of entitlements. It’s sort of a “we are all ACORN” type of universe.

However it’s all idiotic. Lethargy is the player with all the momentum. The talk of apocalypse, which I guess means having to drink canned beer, the the kind of thing arrived at in moments of fear and ignorance, while rowing through the middle of the stormy sea.

I’ll believe it when I see the promotion of a ‘national dress’ or a reconstituted form of socially unifying mechanism once codified in martial non-uniform garb, like seeing a lot of the same sloganeered t-shirts, or some “unity color” selected by the now-threadbare Roy G. Biv minus the ones used for Thai, Iranian, and Ukrainian protest movements.

However, if I DID have to place a bet, my guess is that if a charismatic Hitlerian figure is to emerge, it will actually be a TV personality with a New Age or self-help bent to their unspoken narrative. Deepak Chopra for “interim manager”, if you will. What makes the jackboot theme implausible is the lack of actual force nor population of military age to pull it off in the stylish manner that they’re accustomed to.

Other than that, I would expect a real meltdown to take the form of a continent in a sort of localized chaos where a continental government still exists, but all their laws governing their citizens are ignored, and local and regional entities function in the manner of a fragmented array of something that looks an awful lot like the duchies and mini-states of the previous millennium. Pockets of cosmopolitanism (i.e. running water and public transit), form an archipelago laid out on a plane of more rural entities that will provide a wide range of quality of life from prosperous suburban life to ones where outsiders passing through are attacked out of simple paranoia.

Assuming that IS the case, it will some time in the future beyond it, well after a struggle of reconstitution of some kind, be looked back upon with horror, but also a great age of awakening for a revival of the creative arts, the individual will, and perhaps even of faith. An aristocracy will emerge. A lack of funding and of ingenuity will end most any conflict we now know of. One issue crackpots will simply evaporate, and Greek public culture will rationalize its superiority somehow.

Then again, it could really go south, even by the standards of medieval age style fragmented continent. The Greenies could take over.

How Dare you Smoke in ze Presence of the Philosopher!

Having doubled back over and over, over the years to cover Martin Heidegger’s inspiration and rationalization of the acts of the Nazis, a transcript of his now notorious seminar has been published.

A darling of recent ‘deconstructionists’, who ironically enjoy aesthetic chaos, his work has been blindly used over the past 25 years in the same way Derrida’s empty, self-absorbed rubbish has: to obfuscate.

Now everyone can read for themselves what, according to student transcripts, Martin Heidegger lectured on between November 1933 and February 1934 under the title "On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State". In April 1933, he became rector of the Albert Ludwig University and in 1934, he handed in his resignation. During his year in power he applied himself single-mindedly to organising the university's Gleichschaltung (bringing into line). All the documents from his rectoral term are now all being published together. The lack of empathy in their tone stands in contrast, for example, to his speech honouring the the Nazi martyr figure Albert Leo Schlageter from May 1933. The documents show that during the one year intermezzo, the new masters could rely on Heidegger. He cancelled the evening readings in January 1934, so that the "swearing in of the People's Chancellor" could be celebrated in style. He called upon people to make donations to the Winterhilfswerk so that it might become a "visible demonstration of the Volksgemeinschaft" (people's community).

The “people coming together” theme, especially that of constructing gleischhaltung or (uniform and universal) social agreement, might sound familiar to those paying close attention to the contemporary left, that seems to call anything that doesn’t agree with them ‘divisive’.

As opposed to monomaniacal gleischhaltung that they like to promote as ‘nice’ and free of disagreement and other viewpoints.

Admired for enacting "the automatic restoration of voting rights for former felons": Charlie Crist Praised by a Democrat Back in 2007

In case anybody is wondering about the late transformation (or betrayal) of Charlie Crist: already back in 2007, in a letter to the editor of The Economist, a Florida Democrat is heard to praise the governor of the Sunshine State for bringing an end to the alleged bickering in a "state that had once symbolised polarisation", for allowing "meaningful relationships to be forged across the political aisle" (in spite of angering "many of his fellow Republicans"), and because "his post-partisanship appears to be every bit as meaningful" as that of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In other areas pragmatism has almost always trumped partisanship. Mr Crist may not be as flashy as California's governor, but his post-partisanship appears to be every bit as meaningful.

The post-partisanship for which Crist is to be praised includes "the automatic restoration of voting rights for former felons"! Let nobody say we were not forewarned.

Sunshine state

SIR – Lexington frets that the “post-partisanship” politics of Arnold Schwarzenegger may not spread much beyond California (November 3rd). Lexington can find solace in another state that had once symbolised national polarisation: Florida. I voted against Charlie Crist in 2006, but in his first year as governor he has done more to re-enfranchise (mostly Democratic) black voters than any of his predecessors through his support for voting systems with paper records and the automatic restoration of voting rights for former felons. This has angered many of his fellow Republicans, but allowed meaningful relationships to be forged across the political aisle. In other areas pragmatism has almost always trumped partisanship. Mr Crist may not be as flashy as California's governor, but his post-partisanship appears to be every bit as meaningful.

Seth Kaplan
Miami Beach

Caring and Sharing

Remember: they’re better than you.

As the economic crisis pinches national budgets, EU member states' funds set aside for development are dwindling and increasingly being used instead as channels for public cash for domestic companies and promoting national vested interests rather than poverty reduction in the poorest of countries.

Some states are even counting the cost of deporting refugees back to their home countries as 'development aid'.

They even believe the platitudes they’ve been parroting about themselves.

"There is even talk of counting remittances - the money sent home by immigrants. This is taking the fruits of the labour of migrants and calling that aid."

Meanwhile, between breathless, overbearing complaints about the Arizona border enforcement law, they take time to be munificent and generous.

A number of countries, notably France and Italy, have made agreements with developing countries that force them to co-operate on repatriation of migrants before they can access the aid, making development aid into a tool of anti-immigrant policies.

Presumably, they aren’t talking about personal remittances.

Countries often use aid to funnel money to domestic companies. Aid to China makes up a large proportion of Polish aid and aims to boost national exports for example. This sort of activity, termed 'tied aid' has existed for as long as governments have offered development assistance, but in the last few years, this has taken off as a share of aid.

Surely you ‘little people’ will understand that.