France 'totally bankrupt', admits labour minister Michel Sapin

France's labour minister sent the country into a state of shock … after he described the nation as “totally bankrupt”

writes Daily Telegraph's Graham Ruddick (merci à Damian Bennett).

Michel Sapin made the gaffe in a radio interview, which left French President Francois Hollande battling to undo the potential reputational damage.

“There is a state but it is a totally bankrupt state,” Mr Sapin said. “That is why we had to put a deficit reduction plan in place, and nothing should make us turn away from that objective.”

The comments came as President Hollande attempts to improve the image of the French economy after pledging to reduce the country’s deficit by cutting spending by €60bn (£51.5bn) over the next five years and increasing taxes by €20bn.

Data from Banque de France showed earlier this month that a flight of capital has already left the country amid concerns that France’s Socialist leader intends to soak the rich and businesses. The actor Gérard Depardieu has renounced his French citizenship and decamped to Russia in protest, while David Cameron said Britain will “roll out the red carpet” to attract wealthy individuals.

Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, said the comments by Mr Sapin were “inappropriate”.

Related: Senior Obama administration member:
We Are Going To Kill The Dollar (thanks to RV)

No, Senator Rubio (and No, Liberals): There Is Not a Single "Undocumented Worker" in the United States (or On This Planet)

At this dangerous point for our republic, I am certainly not going to attack Marco Rubio, a senator I admire as much as anybody, but I still want to point out that for a party (the Democrats) whose only "arguments" include demonizing conservatives and covering them with ad hominems (reactionary, hateful, racist, etc, etc, etc), Republicans need to go Gingrich-style and punch back — twice as hard, as Instapundit would say.

Indeed, the Florida senator is going too soft on the Democrats when he talks about

the reality that there are 11 million human beings in this country today that are undocumented. That's not something that anybody is happy about, that is not something that anybody wanted to see happen. But it is what has happened (1:24)

On the contrary: Having poor illegals, along with an unsurmountable voter base, is exactly what key members of the far left are happy about and exactly what they have been wanting for decades.

Now Marco Rubio may know this, and may only be playing for a Spanish audience (bravo on repeating everything en Español), but just for the record, I want to point out that even the fact of calling illegal aliens "undocumented workers" is turning them into poor honest well-meaning defenseless victims and thus falling into the Democrat (the victimitis party's) playbook.

The Democrats win by being allowed to set the very premises.

The way for the Republicans to start winning is to start challenging those premises — when (and if) they are wrong, misleading, and, of course, deliberate deceptions.

As I have written before,

it so happens that every illegal alien in the United States is documented; every illegal alien in the United States does have papers.

Mexican papers.

(Well, sometimes, they have Honduran papers, or Guatemalan papers, or Belizean papers, or Filipino papers, or some other papers, but let's keep using Mexico as an illustrative example…)

If a foreigner, say an American, were to head to Mexico, for however short (a vacation) or however long a period (to work there) — and whether he entered the country legally or not (!) — he still, guess what, has papers. He has his American papers! Offhand, he has his driver's license, various IDs, and/or his passport…

True, a number of the Mexican and Central American illegals, many of them paupers, may not physically have papers in their pockets to produce, as is the case with many of their respective countrymen, but still, offhand, the "undocumented" immigrants retain as many (or as few) papers, and rights, as any other citizen of their own country before they emigrated, legally or otherwise.

Everybody has the right to papers, but everybody does not have the right to American papers!

What is there to be outraged about here? The equivalent is true for Americans, and for other Westerners — for instance the Yanqui Gringo mentioned above, who does not have the right (or an automatic right) to Mexican papers. Just as I, a foreigner living in Paris, do not have right — certainly, not an automatic right — to French papers and do not have the right to vote in French elections (it is not a right I would want — no offense intended — and I would never castigate the French for failing to give it to me or to any other foreigner)…

If I had the time, we could enter a discussion regarding the difference between natural rights (which every individual on Earth has) and civic rights (or citizen rights, which depend on the country you are — legally — living in, whatever part of the globe that country is located in), but I don't, so I will just suggest you read the books of Harry Jaffa…

To return to Mexico, nothing in Mexican law presupposes that our American expatriate be given, say, a job (or that he have the freedom to choose any job he wants) in Mexico or that, say, he vote in Mexican elections. Indeed, reports on Mexico's own problem with illegal aliens (Central Americans that cross over that nation's Southern border) point out to quite a few problems in that country (the one allegedly martyred by white American racists), far worse than anything in the United States, with Amnesty International calling "the abuse of migrants in Mexico a major human rights crisis".

Indeed, as JammieWearingFool puts it (gracias por el Professor Reynolds),

No wonder they're all moving to the Nazi-like, fascistic, police-state of Arizona.

Now, if any Mexicans, say the citizens of the estado de Chihuahua, want American papers, there is a simple solution: I suggest that they ask that the state be annexed by the United States. (Don't be so quick to issue a snort. I'm sure quite a few Mexicans would be more than willing to see that happen…)

Update: Referring to el Presidente de México, Rich Galen points out the double standards:

Felipe Calderón is whining about the way we are treating immigrants in the U.S. because they may be asked to produce documents proving they are here legally, while immigrants in his very own country are being kidnapped, robbed, raped, and murdered by the tens of thousands.

Update: Don Miguel adds as follows:

How about this: my father was born and grew up in Mexico. About 10 to 15 years ago Mexico passed a law allowing children of expatriates born in other countries to apply for citizenship. I was interested in this because it would then allow me to buy beachfront property in Mexico (foreigners cannot directly buy property within a few km of the beach or border legally). So I went to the closest consulate with my father's birth certificate and they told me basically to get lost since my father was considered by them to be a "gringo." Regardless of what the law said I wasn’t the “right” type of person for them. So even though I technically met the requirements of the law, there’s no way they would process my application.

That comment leads Pat Patterson to write:

I had heard some stories like the one Don Miguel related and to be honest thought they were either old wive's tales or simple misunderstandings.

Until one of my neighbors thought it would be a good idea for his children to have dual citizenship but was turned away at the consulate in Santa Ana for 'technical reasons' even though he had only recently become an American citizen. His delay oddly enough was because he had been an officer in the Mexican Air Force and the investigation took longer because the Mexican government wouldn't release his service record for years. It seems that the rule of thumb is that college educated American citizens of Mexican origin will either not be approved or delayed while working class Americans of Mexican origin will be approved asap.

Update: Mark Steyn:

…the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa, seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight [in Quincy, Illinois,] of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp storm troopers from either a dinner-theater space opera or uniforms night at Mr. Newsom's re-election campaign.

Update: Ann Coulter:

The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse recently compared the Arizona law to Hitler's policies toward the Jews. You remember how Jews were constantly sneaking across the border into Nazi Germany?

Hollywood's Offerings Promise Only to Get More Anti-American

Possibly you have heard of Andrew Klavan's problems with Argo (via Instapundit), along with such fare as Charlie Wilson's War and Zero Dark Thirty not to mention the Chinese flags of the Red Dawn remake being digitally transformed into North Korean banners.

(I agree with Klavan about the dishonest historical notes at the end of Argo, but I would have added that the notes at the beginning of the film, if anything, are worse — what with the Shah being presented as nothing but a despicable American pawn and Khomenei's Islamic takeover being presented — I kid you not — as nothing if not a "people's revolution.")

Over at The Daily Beast, Michael Moynihan suggests that we should calm down and stop politicizing everything, but the truth is that anti-Americanism rears its ugly head in even the most innocent-looking children's (or family) fare.

Thus, even a mainstream media outlet like Le Monde noticed, uncomfortably, that Kung Fu Panda 2 should "be understood as a metaphor for the China-US struggle for world supremacy" (guess who, between the Chinese and the Americans, are the heroes and who are the villains).

 … the heroes of the movie (Po, the Furious Five, the master — all of them wise, honest, and upright — and the whole populace that they are determined to protect — all of them innocent and virtuous) can only be the Chinese, while the bad guys with their evil designs — and with superior firepower — can only be the Americans…

Is this what it's come to? American, and Western, artists and filmmakers giving China's communist dictatorship the image of poor innocent victim fighting for justice, while Western Republicanism and Democracy is to be the destroyer of the peaceful status quo?

The more I think about it, the more there seems to be some truth to it or, certainly, the more it seems that that is how the movie will be perceived among Chinese spectators… As for the Tibetan occupation, saber-rattling over Taiwan, and China's threats to its neighbors, along with the genocide of tens of millions of citizens, those are facts are conveniently left to the side…

Now we learn, indirectly via an in-depth New York Times article, that

When “Kung Fu Panda 3” kicks its way into China’s theaters in 2016, the country’s vigilant film censors will find no nasty surprises. After all, they have already dropped in to monitor the movie at the DreamWorks Animation campus here. And the story line, production art and other creative elements have met their approval. 

According to Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes, the

lure of access to China’s fast-growing film market — now the world’s second largest, behind that of the United States — is entangling studios and moviemakers with the state censors of a country in which American notions of free expression simply do not apply. 

Whether studios are seeking to distribute a completed film in China or join with a Chinese company for a co-production shot partly in that country, they have discovered that navigating the murky, often shifting terrain of censorship is part of the process. 

Billions of dollars ride on whether they get it right. International box-office revenue is the driving force behind many of Hollywood’s biggest films, and often plays a deciding role in whether a movie is made. Studios rely on consultants and past experience — and increasingly on informal advance nods from foreign officials — to help gauge whether a film will pass censorship; if there are problems they can sometimes be addressed through appeal and subsequent negotiations. 

But Paramount Pictures just learned the hard way that some things won’t pass muster — like American fighter pilots in dogfights with MIGs. The studio months ago submitted a new 3-D version of “Top Gun” to Chinese censors. The ensuing silence was finally recognized as rejection.

 … One production currently facing scrutiny is Disney and Marvel’s “Iron Man 3,” parts of which were filmed in Beijing in the last month. It proceeded under the watchful eye of Chinese bureaucrats, who were invited to the set and asked to advise on creative decisions, according to people briefed on the production who asked for anonymity to avoid conflict with government or company officials. Marvel and Disney had no comment. 

Can you imagine to what extent liberals the nation over — not just in the movie-making business — would be screaming bloody murder should some sort of traditional American group ask for some sort of right to simply take a look at their group's depiction in a motion picture?!

The whole accepted history of Hollywood from the 1960s on has been: Finally, the victory over the early decades of feudalistic censorship along with the triumph of freedom of speech — i.e., the artist's right to self-expression.

Hollywood as a whole is shifting toward China-friendly fantasies that will fit comfortably within a revised quota system, which allows more international films to be distributed in China, where 3-D and large-format Imax pictures are particularly favored.

 … Co-productions like “Kung Fu Panda 3” draw close monitoring by the censors at every step. Scripts are submitted in advance. Representatives of S.A.R.F.T., according to Mr. Cohen and others, may be present on the set to guard against any deviation. And there is an unofficial expectation that the [Chinese] government’s approved version of the film will be seen both in China and elsewhere, though in practice it is not unusual for co-productions to slip through the system with differing versions, one for China, one for elsewhere in the world. 

At this point,  you are allowed to ask yourself, with a dollop of disgust or despair, will most Hollywood producers ever again release a major motion picture not minimizing the danger of America's enemies while treating average Americans (businessmen, capitalists, Bible Belt types, Southerners, etc) as the country's — as the planet's! — main, if not only, peril?

Questions about how Chinese forces are shaping American movies are now playing out in the making of “Iron Man 3,” which is set for release on May 3. 

 … For Americans, the hard part is knowing what might suddenly cause trouble — initial approvals notwithstanding. In 2009, Sony Pictures and its partner, the China Film Group, submitted their script for “The Karate Kid” to China’s censors, and dutifully changed parts of the story to suit them. But the finished film was rejected, according to people who were briefed on the process, essentially because film bureaucrats were unhappy that its villain was Chinese.

 … Steven Soderbergh, whose film “Contagion” was shot partly in Hong Kong, said the participation of China’s censors simply added to the chorus of input that surrounds every big-budget filmmaker.

“I’m not morally offended or outraged,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “It’s fascinating to listen to people’s interpretations of your story.”

"It's fascinating to listen to people’s interpretations of your story" — except when they are conservative Americans!

And especially when they are members of the communist bureaucracy's élite.

Ladies and gents: speaking of liberals screaming bloody murder, what is this if not what the alleged HUAC "witch hunt" from the 1940s was supposed to prevent from happening?!

The main reason the Republicans were defeated in 2012 was because of years of the liberal monopoly in the (public) schools and in Hollywood's movie offerings, leading to an ever-larger number of voters whose main approach to the political process is: compassionate and forward-looking Democrats versus insensitive and treacherous Republicans.

I agree with Andrew Klavan that "This is precisely what Conservatives have to learn to counter … The imagination is the only nation where Democrats get it right. We need to conquer that country."

On the school side, no teenager should be allowed to graduate from junior high without having taken an (in-depth) course on W Cleon Skousen's The 5000 Year Leap (A Miracle That Changed the World). In high school proper, it should be studied at least once a year.

Conservative movies must be made (how to do that? a big question), and conservative movie reviewers in newspapers and on TV shows around the nation must be made to understand that they are not being killjoys for pointing out — repeatedly and unvaryingly — the liberal bias in all sorts of movies, however apparently small — such as Charlie Wilson's War and Argo, which, again, was an outstanding film in all respects, except for the notes at the very beginning and at the very end, which were deeply anti-American in addition to giving a heroic part to Democrat lawmakers and presidents while flat out ignoring any positive contributions — along with the very existence — of Republican lawmakers and commanders-in-chief.

Update: Chinese Film Studios Are the Planet's Largest, Mass-Producing Films Designed to Build a Positive Image of the Country

Update 2: Further Inroads into Hollywood for China's Communist Party and Its Censors

Neither the UN Nor the EU Seem To Be Providing Much Support to the French Forces in Mali

The French are complaining that neither the United Nations nor the European Union

seem to be providing much in the need of support, write Nathalie Guibert and Alexandra Geneste.

Le Monde also has a list of France's main military interventions in Africa since the year 2000.

Incidentally, the troop-transporting airplane in the pictures is American, notes the photo caption.

Brazil Streetwalkers to Take English Lessons for 2014 World Cup; RELATED: The Proud Winner of the Miss Brazilian Prostitute Title Was Beaming

Does this sound like an idea for a Monty Python sketch, or what?

Brazilians prostitutes are taking English lessons for in time for the 2014 World Cup, we learn from Claire Maupas (obrigado para OT), and that in order to better "satisfy" the (non-Portuguese-speaking) tourists and their expectations.

In order to negotiate prices with clients and to clearly understand their stated fantasies, the ladies of the noite will learn, among many other things, how to say condom — although the Portuguese expression is far more romantic (camisa-de-vênus means "Venus shirt").

Whether lessons really need to last 6 to 8 months sounds dubious to this webmaster…

By the way, have your heard of Aprosmig? Yep, kudos for guessing it right away, it's the name of the local hookers association, the one that is going to be teaching English to Minas Gerais streetwalkers (for free), and you can Like their page on Facebook (warning, this may not be recommended, as some of your amigos — and amigas — might misunderstand the sentiment)…

Objectif : pouvoir négocier les prix et comprendre les fantasmes des clients, comme l’explique la présidente de l’Aspromig, Cida Vieira.

In related news, Giovana da Silva (aka Mara) was the proud — and beaming — winner of the Miss Brazilian Prostitute title, also organized by the Associação das Prostitutas de Minas Gerais…
…

In the end, under our Constitution, the Congress has more power than the president

Instead of trying to appease or change President Obama, Congressional Republicans have to come to grips with who they are and what their powers are 

writes Newt Gingrich (related: read the former speaker's reaction to the inaugural address).

The  American Constitution is a simple but very tough document.

It was written by very experienced men who had fought a revolutionary war for eight years.

These Founding Fathers had grown up in a system of legislators fighting royal governors.

They understood fully the power of the purse and they vested it in the Congress.

The Founding Fathers believed respect was earned, not given.

They would have said to the House Republicans, “Examine your role under the Constitution. Look at the enormous power we have given you to confront and control an executive branch that is out of control.”

The House Republicans should then focus on what they believe and decide to fund what they want to fund.

They should split the Continuing Resolution into a series of separate bills and methodically begin eliminating government agencies by simply refusing to fund them after March 31.

They should then attach the easiest to defend entitlement reforms (block-granting Medicaid — where most of  the 30 Republican Governors would support them — and combining various welfare programs into one single program as Peter Ferrara has suggested), and attach them to the least important smaller continuing funding bills (e.g. Department of Labor , Department of Housing and Urban Development).

If the President wants to veto them, fine. Then he runs out of money for those institutions.

The Founding Fathers designed constitutional government around real power.

They expected presidents to be strong, assertive chief executives.

They expected the Congress to use the power of the purse to limit the power of those presidents.

As Madison wrote in Federalist #58:

“The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse — that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

House Republicans can earn President Obama’ s respect by picking the spending fights they can win and then cheerfully relaxing and accepting as much victory as Obama’s arrogance forces them to insist on.

In the end, under our Constitution the Congress has more power than the president.

That power, however, only exists when we have Congressmen and Congresswomen courageous enough to exercise it and smart enough to pick the right fights and then win the communications fight.

Until House Republicans assert their Constitutional powers they should expect the President to continue to treat them with contempt and disdain.

Real negotiations will begin only after they have defunded parts of his government.

Newt in 2016.

Do Conservatives Not Care About the Kids? Do They Only Worry About Gun Owners?

A Salon story by Alex Halperin, entitled Ann Coulter’s astounding gun control diatribe, states, in an incredulous tone of voice, that barely "weeks after the Newtown rampage, it’s the gun owners they’re worried about" ("they" being Ann Coulter, Fox News, and conservatives in general).

In this video Ann Coulter discusses the Journal News gun map controversy. Also of note is the graphic Fox News chooses. Three weeks after the Newtown rampage, it’s the gun owners they’re worried about. What does Rupert Murdoch think about that?

Uh no, Alex Halperin. 
It’s not the gun owners that conservatives are worried about.
It’s the gun owners that the Democrats are worried about. Are… obsessed about.
Conservatives are — properly — concerned with the people — the school kids as well as their elders — and with their rights.

Mali Native Tells Incredulous MSM Reporter That He Would Like Nothing Better Than for Mali to Be Colonized by Whites Again

More from the fiendish history of the West's wicked record of racism and colonialism:

ITN's Lindsey Hilsum tells us how residents are receiving French troop presence on the streets of Bamako, Mali 

we learn via CNN (merci à Hervé).

And the fact is that while liberals all over the United States, Europe, and the rest of the Western world (foremost Barack Hussein Obama) wring their hands over the unspeakably vicious treatment blacks received from their despicable forefathers and their ghastly culture, the fact is that speaking with the locals brings out a different story — indeed, it is so far from what the MSM reporter has learned, that she has to challenge the black Malian on what he has just shared…

Enthusiasm, it seems, has no bounds.

I asked how long the French should stay [00:48-01:08].

"In my view the French shouldn't leave, they should stay in Mali" [the local riding in a car] said.

"But they're the old colonialists!" I [protested].

"I'd like to be colonized again" he replied. 

Qu'ils restent ici ! C'est ça que moi je veux !
"May they stay here! That's what I want!"

 
Related: "Bang! Bang! Bang!" — Mali Army's Military Training May Help Explain Why Its Soldiers May Have Been Doing So Badly

A Typical Conversation on Facebook: "I am just tired of the fear mongering and comparing Obama to Hitler to fire up people's emotions"

"I am just tired of the fear mongering and comparing Obama to Hitler to fire up people's emotions"

But comparing Bush, or Reagan, or Nixon, to Hitler, now that's something that is ENTIRELY permissable!

"Even if Hitler armed only all white people so that they could fight his war, that is a far cry from what Obama is doing. If Obama said only black people could own guns, then an apples to apples comparison could be made. The propaganda is ridiculous, and people that succumb to it are suckers for the gun industry."

Except for one thing, Tami: That is not what Hitler did. Hitler did NOT arm All white people, and he did not arm SOME white people. The only people Adolf (not Adolph) armed was "trustworthy" government employees (police, army, SS, etc) — all benevolent types who would be in charge of protecting the clueless members of the populace…

"You're a law abiding, sane gun owner. Do you honestly believe that felons and the mentally ill should be allowed to own an assault rifle? Do you have a problem with submitting to a background check if you buy a new gun?"

That is precisely — PRECISELY — why we want to get to the ROOT of the problem and identify the mentally ill and lock them up before they do something crazy — something we are NOT allowed to do in the politically correct world that the "compassionate" leftists have made, where it is "insensitive", even "hateful", for "fear-mongering" citizens to pass judgment on the poor crazies and on what can only be termed as their "idiosyncrasies"!

There is NOT one multi-murderer of the past decades who was NOT and who was NOT signaled to any type of authorities for fear of appearing insensitive, politically incorrect, etc… Witness Major Nidal, where the officers feared for their careers should they report his desires to, quote, murder as many American soldiers as he could (!)
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2013/01/16/guns-dont-kill-people-the-mentally-ill-do-n1491044

 «Seung-Hui Cho, who committed the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, had been diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder as a child and placed under treatment. But Virginia Tech was prohibited from being told about Cho's mental health problems because of federal privacy laws. …  Taking guns away from single women who live alone and other law-abiding citizens without mental illnesses will do nothing about the Chos, Loughners, Holmeses or Lanzas. Such people have to be separated from civil society, for the public's sake as well as their own. But this is nearly impossible because the ACLU has decided that being psychotic is a civil right.
Consequently, whenever a psychopath with a million gigantic warning signs commits a shocking murder, the knee-jerk reaction is to place yet more controls on guns. By now, guns are the most heavily regulated product in America.
It hasn't worked.»

(Ann Coulter)

"Do you have a problem with submitting to a background check if you buy a new gun?"

Here's another, more pertinent question:
Do YOU have a problem with average American middle-America citizens (you know, the gun-clingers) reporting the mentally ill to the authorities and having them committed against their wishes? (And not taking heat for doing so?)

Bang Bang Bang: Mali Army's Military Training May Help Explain Why Its Soldiers May Have Been Doing So Badly

Tacatacatactacatac!

Armed with imagination and with vocal cords:  The way that the Mali army trains its soldiers may — conceivably — help explain why its troops have been performing subpar (merci à Duncan et Hervé).

Maybe this is how Barack Obama thinks Americans could continue having guns in their lives when (and if) his gun control passes…

Plus Ça Change… Barack Obama Gives Stirring 1913 Speech

In the International Herald Tribune's 100 Years Ago section, we learn the following:

1913 — Wilson Attacks Magnates

NEW YORK — Mr. Woodrow Wilson’s talk to business men in Chicago on Saturday night [Jan.11] has excited just as much stir in the business world as his recent threat that he would “provide a gibbet as high as Hainan’s” for any financier who might take advantage of Wall Street to precipitate a panic. The Chicago speech, almost the last to be made before the inauguration of Mr. Wilson as President, taken in conjunction with other addresses to captains of industry, is construed as evidence that the President-elect has now definitely aligned himself with the “advanced” wing of the Democratic party, which is pledged to make business men honest by the process of special inquiry and special law.

A Few Black People in the 1960s Not Being Martyrized by White America

Last night (after much nail-biting), I posted a story on race relations in America, pre-1970s that suggested — based, no not on any pro-Southern, pro-white ideology (which I have none of — au contraire) but based on a certain amount of (ahem)… evidence — that members of the civil rights movement (white or black) perhaps did not always suffer as much at the hands of murderous Southern racists as some of them like to remember… (This coming from a blond male with blue eyes took some daring, you must admit…)

Might it be that the narrative, notably all the movies that we get from Hollywood, is slightly exaggerated?!

I have more than one reason to believe so, notably when I came upon a series of TV show excerpts from the 1960s. In "What's My Line?", part of the program was to have blindfolded jury try to figure out the identity of a given celebrity answering their yes-or-no questions. The mystery challenger therefore would necessary change his or her voice.

If you've never heard Sean Connery speak with the voice of a girl, you'll want to check it out…

But not just Sean Connery, also… Muhammad Ali.

And check out Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole: there is no way that they can change their voices to pretend to be a girl!

(But be forewarned, once you start watching the line-up of 20th century celebrities, it's hard to stop…)

In any case, check out how much fun the former Cassius Clay is having. Having with — white people!

Isn't this different from what we get from biopics of one civil rights martyr after another?

I have to admit I haven't seen Ali. But somehow I doubt that Michael Mann included the scene of Muhammad Ali as the mystery challenger on What's My Line.

Is It Possible?! What If All Southern Whites Weren't the Equals of Nazis and What If the South Had Not Been a Total Racialist Nightmare?!

It seems that nothing can happen on this planet without leftists the world over, and especially in America, immediately drawing a parallel with America itself (minus its leftist, progressive element, needless to say).

Thus, a decade after Germany murdered millions of people in concentration camps, and all the while the Soviet Union still was murdering millions of people in the Gulag, black Americans in the South were living the same type of horrifying circumstances.

Are we allowed to do the unthinkable and say the (painfully) obvious? Uh, actually, they were not?

Are we allowed to do so without immediately being accused of being racist, of defending Southern whites, and of being brainwashed simpletons and KKK sympathizers pretending that everything was hunky-dory for blacks in the old South?

From Ann Althouse — via Instapundit — we hear that the New York Times is again taking on the dark times of segregation. This, while we get "history" lessons from Oliver Stone on what a swell guy Stalin was, and how the Cold War was all America's fault…

What if the New York Times were told, what if you were told, that, generally speaking, the civil rights movement in the South of the 1950s and 1960s was met not by violence but by, if not respect, if not a lack of violence, certainly by a lack of generalized violence?!

And what if, alternatively, someone — a black leftist?! — were to cry out: "Thank God for Chief Bull Connor"?!

Wouldn't the New York Times, wouldn't you, wouldn't the black leftist, wouldn't leftists the world over, be offended? Shake your/their head? Guffaw? Shout racism?  Scream bloody murder?

And yet, that may be closer to the truth than to the it-was-all-so-horrible-and-invariably-akin-to-Mississippi Burning narrative…

I was as surprised as anyone when, some two decades ago, I read Let the Trumpet Sound (A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr) by Stephen B. Oates, obviously a (rightly) positive, indeed heroic, biography of MLK with a (correctly) sympathetic picture of the civil rights movement.  (Oates has written a myriad of books regarding champions of civil rights over more than a century in America — John Brown, Nat Turner, Clara Barton… — including my favorite biography of Abraham Lincoln, With Malice Toward None. And for the record, I've been working, with Dan Greenberg, on my own biography of Honest Abe.)

As it turns out, however — get ready for a shocker — MLK, blacks in general, the movement, and (in the final analysis) America itself were all lucky to get Chief Bull Connor (a Democrat) in Birmingham, Alabama — for the truth is that what happened in Albany, Georgia, may have been more descriptive of the (white) Southern mentality and of how MLK's movement was usually treated…

From Let the Trumpet Sound (A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr) by Stephen B. Oates:

[In 1962] King's movement, for all its fervor, [was going] nowhere.  As fast as his nonviolent columns reached their targets, [Albany's] Chief Pritchett put them in paddy wagons and dispatched them to jails in other counties.  Movement leaders could never muster enough recruits to fill all the jails at his disposal.  Then, too, Pritchett treated the marchers with unruffled decorum; he had done his homework on King, studied his Gandhian speeches, and planned to overcome nonviolent protest with nonviolent law enforcement. 

When demonstrators knelt in prayer, Pritchett bowed his head, then arrested them with a puckish smile.  He never clubbed anybody, never called anybody names, and never let his men do so either.  Consequently, reporters who covered the Albany campaign saw no brutality on the part of local police to photograph and report.  …

Pritchett also placed King under round-the-clock police protection, which irritated him and sent him complaining to the chief.  But Pritchett was taking no chances.  If King was attacked or killed, "the fires would never cease."  As the campaign progressed, King and Abernathy developed a grudging respect for him.  Once King even canceled a demonstration so that Pritchett could spend the day with his wife.  It was their wedding anniversary.

 … King and Abernathy came to trial … and several associates, expecting them to be convicted and returned to jail, scheduled mass protest marches.  But the city wanted to get rid of King and Abernathy and ax the movement once and for all.  The court therefore suspended their sentences and ordered their release.  They were free, thrown out of jail again.

By now, King had lost all control of the Albany Movement. … it was no use.  The Albany Movement was over.  … "We ran out of people before he [Pritchett] ran out of jails."

 … [MLK] was steeped in anguish.  So many of his own people seemed not to care about the struggle; so many whites were hostile or indifferent.

Many readers, white or black, will scream bloody murder (and racism racism racism!) as they read this, but still, the conclusion is inescapable — over and over again, the civil rights movement went nowhere because many times, and in many places, demonstrators (white or black) were not harmed, since many times Southern whites (for reasons good or ill) did not overreact, and since authorities refrained from arresting members of the movement.

Needless to say, all of this is not to pretend, nor to imply, that everything was hunky-dory in the South, for blacks or for others, or that Southern whites were not hostile or indifferent to blacks and to their (very real) civil rights — they were — nor is it meant to pretend, or to imply, that all men, whatever the color of their skin, should not enjoy the same rights, civil, voting, or other — they should — nor is it meant to believe.  But it is to deflate the left's self-serving narrative of Americans, or at least Southerners, as incorrigible Nazis, and of the South, or of America in general, as a nightmarish hellhole of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Members of the civil rights movement are invariably depicted as victims of such a nightmarish society, as are, say, the poor, women, Latinos, gays, etc, etc, as well as those who "fell afoul" of Senator McCarthy.

By contrast, what took place in the same years — the Soviet oppression of people (and peoples), the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe and (attempted) takeover of China, and the communist assassination of millions and millions of citizens (all reasons, obviously, why McCarthyism arose in the first place) — is ignored or downplayed, or often accompanied by the words "Oh yes, terrible, terrible… But! But: we have to make an effort to understand the Soviets… Plus, you know, they had good intentions"!

Related: Is this sounding familiar? Obama's Predecessor of Sorts at the Helm of New York City

The Obama presidency has been like [New York's] David Dinkins mayoralty all over again, with utter incompetence being papered over with appeals to white guilt.

Update: A Few Black People in the 1960s Not Being Martyrized by White America

Being there.....

One is tempted to throw a shoe at the monitor and exclaim, "Where have you been?!" when reading the following:

The world is headed for an environmental "catastrophe" if countries do not invest in renewable energy, François Hollande warned on Tuesday.

Speaking at a green energy conference in Abu Dhabi, the French president said that people had an obligation to protect the planet for future generations.

"If we don't act, if we don't do anything, if we don't invest anything, we can be sure that we will have a catastrophe very soon. We have to have confidence to invest in the new energy. We can act together to create this world of renewable energy," he told delegates at the World Future Energy Summit.

One would, of course, be wrong. This is the sort of pablum which elevates the nostalgia factor to say 2002 or 2003, those were the days! Anything was possible in those halcyon days, a mere 2m could become 1b, just like that.....

Life is indeed a state of mind.

Obama's "Friendly" Russians: "Surging anti-American sentiment" in Moscow and its legislators' "unanimous pseudo-patriotic frenzy”

Within hours of Barack Obama's stating, during the third election debate, that we were no longer living in Cold War times — all the while accusing Mitt Romney of wanting to take us back to the 1980s (ah! the Reagan years!) in an era when everything is hunky-dory with the Russians — the New York Times publishes a report from Moscow that states, and indeed does so quite explicitly, that if anyone is living with a Cold War mentality, it is the Russians. 

That is how I started a post written within hours after the third presidential debate, during which that #%$&*&#$ to Mitt Romney refused to make any common-sense arguments against Obama's fairy-tale foreign policy and alleged smart diplomacy.

Excuse my French regarding Mitt, but I just listened to Mark Levin on Barack Obama's press conference — via Instapundit — and that has put me in a not-so-good mood.

Incidentally, another thing Romney should have said during the third debate (during either debate, really), when Obama referred to clueless Americans still thinking of "the Russians" as the enemy, is that Americans have nothing against the Russians, as in the Russian people, and never have had, it turns out, even — da, da, tovarich — during the Cold War. It is not splitting hairs to insist that what America has been on guard against before, and should be on guard against now, is the attitude of the Russian leaders, the attitude of the Kremlin — especially with both its foreign policy's anti-Western stance and its domestic policy's anti-democracy stance, presently as well as in Soviet times during the Cold War.

Why is that so hard for leftists like the Barack Obama to understand?!
And why is, why was, that so hard for conservatives like Romney to voice?!

(Of course, the answer to the first question is that the only enemy that the Apologizer-in-Chief recognizes in his leftist fairy tale world are conservative Americans, whose voices must be drowned out and who must be neutered.)

Now we have more — from Ellen Barry:
 

The members of Russia’s lower house of Parliament — which last year passed so many harsh new laws with so little debate that commentators compared it to a “rabid printer” — returned to work last week as the standard-bearers for President Vladimir V. Putin’s brand of patriotism.

Having captured the world’s attention in December by banning all adoptions of Russian children by American families, members of Parliament have dreamed up a variety of further proposals to purge Russian politics and civic life of foreign influences. 

Among them: A full ban on all foreign adoption. A requirement that the children of Russian officials return directly to Russia after studying abroad, lest their parent lose his or her post. A requirement that officials’ children be barred from studying abroad altogether. A requirement that movie theaters screen Russian-made films no less than 20 percent of the time, or face fines as high as 400,000 rubles, or about $13,000.

One group of legislators is working on a bill that would prevent anyone with foreign citizenship, including Russians, from criticizing the government on television. One proposal would ban the use of foreign driver’s licenses, another would require officials to drive Russian-made cars. One deputy has recommended strictly limiting marriages between Russian officials and foreigners, at least those from states that were not formerly Soviet.

So who is it who is adopting a hostile stance, Barack Obama?!
Who is it who is doing the flag-waving and being paranoid?!
Is it really Americans?! Really?!

Many of these ideas sound eccentric, in a capital city whose elite are well-traveled and integrated into the West, and are very unlikely to advance and become law. But they certainly will not hurt anyone’s career in the current political environment.

So who is it who is adopting a hostile stance, Barack Obama?!
Who is it who is doing the flag-waving and being paranoid?!

“You know, there is a principle in questions of patriotism or protecting the interests of the country, as the authorities see it, that it’s better to overdo it than to show weakness,” said Aleksei V. Makarkin, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. “If you try too hard, and come up with some exotic, scandalous draft law, you are in any case one of us. Maybe you are too emotional — you’re a patriot.”

Since Mr. Putin’s inauguration, the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, has hurriedly passed a series of initiatives tightening the state’s control over dissent and political activism: it has steeply increased fines for Russians who take part in unauthorized protests; required nonprofit organizations to register as “foreign agents” if they receive money from overseas; reinstated criminal penalties for slander; and vastly expanded the definition of treason to include assisting international organizations.

When the adoption ban passed, cutting off all adoptions of Russian children by Americans, only four deputies out of 406 voted against it, with 400 voting for it and two abstaining. Grigory A. Yavlinsky, the founder of the liberal party Yabloko, described the vote on his blog as “a unanimous pseudo-patriotic frenzy.” 

 … Yevgeny N. Minchenko, director of the International Institute for Political Expertise, said the major pieces of legislation that passed through the Duma last year were produced by staff members in Mr. Putin’s administration. Last year, he said, demonstrated that the Parliament serves as an “instrument” of the Kremlin.

“Unfortunately, in my view, there is a dangerous trend that practically the only way to consolidate all the parliamentary factions is with various kinds of anti-Western initiatives,” Mr. Minchenko said.

So who is it who is adopting a hostile stance, Barack Obama?!
Who is it who is doing the flag-waving and being paranoid?!

Mr. Putin has made patriotism a central theme of his third presidential term, and Yevgeny A. Fyodorov, a United Russia deputy, said strengthening Russia’s sovereignty is now the Duma’s “most important direction.”

Mr. Fyodorov said he would like to see the Constitution amended to allow for a national ideology, something that is now explicitly excluded in the text, but concedes that this will take time. He said the adoption ban — or, as he called it, “the ban on the export of children” — signaled the beginning of a major effort to “strengthen Russia’s sovereignty” by purging foreign influences on civic life.

“You know the saying — we saddle up slowly, but we ride fast,” he said. “The U-turn has just begun, and the most radical steps, including the ones connected to the Constitution, will take place in three or four years.”

Mr. Fyodorov, whose proposal to bar government officials from keeping property overseas has won some support in the Kremlin, said any permanent ties between government officials and foreign countries — a child residing abroad, or a spouse with property outside Russia — constitute a “factor of distrust” that, according to legislation passed last year, can now serve as grounds for an official’s dismissal. The long-term task, he said, “is to gradually reformat the elite to fit the national mood.”

“The existence of a strong connection between an official and foreign countries — I formulate this broadly — is a factor of distrust,” Mr. Fyodorov said.

This mission is complicated by the fact that Moscow’s ruling class is, in fact, already deeply integrated into Western Europe. One leader of the legislative campaign, a United Russia deputy, Sergei Zheleznyak, was pilloried by a blogger, Aleksei Navalny, because his daughters study at exclusive institutions in Switzerland and Britain. Nevertheless, the Kremlin has determined that officials’ foreign holdings must be brought under control, because they are alienating the public, said Sergei A. Markov, a political analyst who served as a legislator with United Russia until last year.

“The population considers the elite to be half-foreign,” he said. “Their property is abroad, their houses are abroad, their wives are abroad, their children are abroad. Even Russian industrialists work through offshore companies. Why do these people run Russia, they say.”

The proposals are bound to raise eyebrows in the West [except in Barack Obama's White House], but they are actually driven by domestic politics, analysts said. Mr. Minchenko noted that even as anti-American sentiment surged in the Duma this fall, Mr. Putin has avoided damaging steps like closing the NATO transit point in Ulyanovsk. He called the legislative campaign “carefully dosed” to avoid permanently hurting bilateral relations.

His colleague, Mr. Makarkin, was less sanguine.

“Those initiatives which yesterday seemed exotic could become reality tomorrow; we saw this happen last year,” he said. “The most important thing is, there are practically no limitations.”

Purging Russian politics and civic life of foreign influences.

Various kinds of anti-Western initiatives.

Surging anti-American sentiment.

A "unanimous pseudo-patriotic frenzy."

So who is it who is adopting a hostile stance, Barack Obama?!
Who is it who is doing the flag-waving and being paranoid?!

See four years of NP posts on Obama caving in to the Kremlin (or to "the Russians",
people who obviously represent no danger to America and to the West at all)…

Map of the Opposing Forces in Mali and the Strategic Portal in Central Konna

Le Monde has a map of the opposing forces in Mali — French troops versus Al Qaeda — and how the geography of the west African country makes the central part's Konna (a town recaptured from the rebels by the French) a strategic gatehouse (click on the map for a larger image thereof) to either the southwest or the northeast.

Related: French Strikes in Mali Supplant Caution of U.S.

   French fighter jets struck deep inside Islamist strongholds in northern Mali on Sunday, shoving aside months of international hesitation about storming the region after every other effort by the United States and its allies to thwart the extremists had failed.

For years, the United States tried to stem the spread of Islamic militancy in the region by conducting its most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara.

But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials. 

“It was a disaster,” said one of several senior Malian officers to confirm the defections.

Then an American-trained officer overthrew Mali’s elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. American spy planes and surveillance drones have tried to make sense of the mess, but American officials and their allies are still scrambling even to get a detailed picture of who they are up against. 

Now, in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe, the French have entered the war themselves.

First, they blunted an Islamist advance, saying the rest of Mali would have fallen into the hands of militants within days. Then on Sunday, French warplanes went on the offensive, going after training camps, depots and other militant positions far inside Islamist-held territory in an effort to uproot the militants, who have formed one of the largest havens for jihadists in the world. 

Some Defense Department officials, notably officers at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, have pushed for a lethal campaign to kill senior operatives of two of the extremists groups holding northern Mali, Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Killing the leadership, they argued, could lead to an internal collapse. 

But with its attention and resources so focused on other conflicts in places like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, the Obama administration has rejected such strikes in favor of a more cautious, step-back strategy: helping African nations repel and contain the threat on their own. 

Over the last four years, the United States has spent between $520 million and $600 million in a sweeping effort to combat Islamist militancy in the region without fighting the kind of wars it has waged in the Middle East. The program stretched from Morocco to Nigeria, and American officials heralded the Malian military as an exemplary partner. American Special Forces trained its troops in marksmanship, border patrol, ambush drills and other counterterrorism skills. 

But all that deliberate planning collapsed swiftly when heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya. They teamed up with jihadists like Ansar Dine, routed poorly equipped Malian forces and demoralized them so thoroughly that it set off a mutiny against the government in the capital, Bamako. 

A confidential internal review completed last July by the Pentagon’s Africa Command concluded that the coup had unfolded too quickly for American commanders or intelligence analysts to detect any clear warning signs. 

“The coup in Mali progressed very rapidly and with very little warning,” said Col. Tom Davis, a command spokesman. “The spark that ignited it occurred within their junior military ranks, who ultimately overthrew the government, not at the senior leadership level where warning signs might have been more easily noticed.”

 … “The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful,” said another ranking Malian officer, now engaged in combat. “They made the wrong choice,” he said of relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion against the Malian state. 

The virtual collapse of the Malian military, including units trained by United States Special Forces, followed by a coup led by an American-trained officer, Capt. Amadou Sanogo, astounded and embarrassed top American military commanders.

 … as Islamists pushed south toward the capital last week. With thousands of French citizens in Mali, its former colony, France decided it could not wait any longer, striking the militants at the front line and deep within their haven.

Some experts said that the foreign troops might easily retake the large towns in northern Mali, but that Islamist fighters have forced children to fight for them, a deterrent for any invading force, and would likely use bloody insurgency tactics.

“They have been preparing these towns to be a death trap,” said Rudy Atallah, the former director of African counterterrorism policy for the Pentagon. “If an intervention force goes in there, the militants will turn it into an insurgency war.”

Is that defeatism we see coming from the Pentagon in the Obama years in the final paragraph?

Costa Europa

On the one-year anniversary of the Costa Concordia entering world headlines, we present a Nicolas Vial cartoon from a few months back likening the doomed ship to the European Union.

When It's the French Military Intervening Abroad, French Cartoons Show a Valient Fire-Fighting Plane Dousing the Flame of a Timebomb

If he were to draw a cartoon of George W Bush intervening militarily in Iraq or Afghanistan — like François Hollande intervening militarily in Mali — do you think that Plantu would have put Dubya in the cockpit of a Canadair fire-fighting plane, dropping water on the flame burning the fuse of a terrorist/a totalitarian bomb?

By Intervening Militarily Against Islamists in West Africa, "Hollande of Mali" Earns Foreign Policy Kudos

By intervening militarily in Mali, reports Hélène Sallon in Le Monde, François Hollande has earned foreign policy kudos, including from numerous newspapers in western Africa. The French presence fighting the Al Qaeda group is slated to grow from the initial 550 soldiers to 2,500.

En lançant une intervention militaire largement attendue au Mali, le président François Hollande a gagné sur la scène internationale ses premiers galons de chef d'Etat et s'est attiré les éloges des éditorialistes des pays de l'ouest de l'Afrique. "Hollande le Malien", le gratifie ainsi dans son éditorial le site Internet Maliweb. Une distinction qui n'allait pas sans dire. "Si jusque-là pour sa sympathie jugée protubérante pour le Mouvement national de libération de l'Azawad — MNLA,  la France n'était plus la tasse de thé des Maliens, l'action rapide et décisive de François Hollande à leurs côtés les réconcilie désormais", précise l'éditorial.

Désormais, aux yeux de tous, il est le "sauveur" face à "un péril qui n'avait jamais paru aussi global", poursuit Maliweb. Le quotidien électronique Le Journal du Mali salue également "la main tendue de la France à notre pays malmené depuis huit mois par les djihadistes et terroristes de tout bord, infiltrés au Nord et contre toute libertés individuelles et tolérance..." Il loue en François Hollande "la finesse politique" et la "prudence" d'"un homme d'Etat qui s'affirme de jour en jour".