France's New Marianne Stamp Inspired by Topless Feminist Who Hacked Down a Christian Cross with a Chainsaw

A postage stamp depicting France's cultural symbol Marianne has touched off a flurry of controversy 

writes Reuters (merci à Duncan),

after one of its creators revealed it was inspired by a topless feminist activist who hacked down a Christian cross in Kiev last year with a chainsaw.

The new stamp depicts a youthful Marianne, a symbol of the French republic,   wearing a Phrygian conical cap but does not show her topless. It was unveiled by President Francois Hollande on Sunday as part of Bastille Day celebrations. 

Photographer and designer Olivier Ciappa said on his Twitter account that he was inspired by a number of women but most of all by Inna Shevchenko, a veteran member of the Femen group of feminist activists, which often stages bare-breasted protests.

"Feminism is an integral part of the values (of the French Republic). And Marianne, at the time of the revolution, was bare-breasted, so why not pay homage to this fabulous Femen," he said in an op-ed piece on the Huffington Post website.

Later, France 24 made an update to its story, reporting namely that

Inna Shevchenko, the leader of topless feminist group Femen and one of the inspirations for the new stamp depicting Marianne, the feminine symbol of France, has created a mini-storm with a tweet slamming Ramadan and Islam in general.

Who knew that American college students are required to surrender the Bill of Rights at the campus gates?

Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act

 writes Judith E Grossman, a feminist who has "marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women's rights."

But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged—by an ex-girlfriend—with alleged acts of "nonconsensual sex" that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier.

What followed was a nightmare—a fall through Alice's looking-glass into a world that I could not possibly have believed existed, least of all behind the ivy-covered walls thought to protect an ostensible dedication to enlightenment and intellectual betterment.

 … like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, the tribunal
does pretty much whatever it wants, showing scant regard for fundamental fairness, due process of law, and the well-established rules and procedures that have evolved under the Constitution for citizens' protection. Who knew that American college students are required to surrender the Bill of Rights at the campus gates?

My son was given written notice of the charges against him, in the form of a letter from the campus Title IX officer. But instead of affording him the right to be fully informed, the separately listed allegations were a barrage of vague statements, rendering any defense virtually impossible. The letter lacked even the most basic information about the acts alleged to have happened years before. Nor were the allegations supported by any evidence other than the word of the ex-girlfriend.

 … While my son was instructed by the committee not to "discuss this matter" with any potential witnesses, these witnesses against him were not identified to him, nor was he allowed to confront or question either them or his accuser.

 …  Across the country and with increasing frequency, innocent victims of impossible-to-substantiate charges are afforded scant rights to fundamental fairness and find themselves entrapped in a widening web of this latest surge in political correctness. Few have a lawyer for a mother, and many may not know about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which assisted me in my research.

A Young Charismatic Leader Rose Up, Talking of Hope and Change…

Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, invigorated the crowd during [the] FreedomWorks Free the People event. Describing his own personal journey escaping Cuba and working hard to build a life for himself in the U.S., the elder Cruz noted comparisons that he believes exist between Fidel Castro’s governance and President Barack Obama’s executive actions. Upon rising to power, he said that Castro, like Obama, spoke about hope and change. While the message sounded good at the time, it didn’t take long for socialism to take root in his home country. And he paid the price.

The unspoken commandment when it comes to sex in America: thou shalt never blame the woman

… men have become second-class citizens

writes Suzanne Venker (thanks to Instapundit).

The most obvious proof is male bashing in the media. It is rampant and irrefutable. From sit-coms and commercials that portray dad as an idiot to biased news reports about the state of American men, males are pounced on left and right. And that’s just the beginning.

The war on men actually begins in grade school, where boys are at a distinct disadvantage. Not only are curriculums centered on girls’, rather than boys,’ interests, the emphasis in these grades is on sitting still at a desk.

Plus, many schools have eliminated recess. Such an environment is unhealthy for boys, for they are active by nature and need to run around. And when they can’t sit still teachers and administrators often wrongly attribute their restlessness to ADD or ADHD. The message is clear: boys are just unruly girls.

Things are no better in college. There, young men face the perils of Title IX, the 1972 law designed to ban sex discrimination in all educational programs.

  … What was once viewed equal opportunity for women has become something else altogether: a demand for equal outcomes. Those are not the same thing at all.

 … men are in an impossible situation, for there’s an unspoken commandment when it comes to sex in America: thou shalt never blame the woman. If you’re a man who’s sexually involved with a woman and something goes wrong, it’s your fault. Simple as that.

Judith E. Grossman shed light on this phenomenon in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. A former feminist, Grossman concedes that in the past she would have expressed “unqualified support” for policies such as Title IX. But that was before her son was charged with “nonconsensual sex” by a former girlfriend.

… When men become husbands and fathers, things get really bad. In family courts throughout America, men are routinely stripped of their rights and due process. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is easily used against them since its definition of violence is so broad that virtually any conflict between partners can be considered abuse. 

“If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man and men are just assumed guilty in our society,” notes Dr. Helen Smith, author of the new book, "Men on Strike." This is particularly heinous since, as Smith adds, violence in domestic relations “is almost 50% from men and 50% from women.”

Shocked? If so, that’s in part because the media don’t believe men can be victims of domestic violence—so they don’t report it. They would rather feed off stories that paint women as victims. And in so doing, they’ve convinced America there’s a war on women.

Yet it is males who suffer in our society. From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced.

The more the divorced mother prevents the father's contact with their kids, the more child support she receives

Child support formulas are based on the ridiculous notion that a father would make those same sacrifices for an ex-wife who is living with her new husband or boyfriend and for children he never or seldom sees

writes Phyllis Schlafly.

Many fathers would happily do more to support their children if they got to see their kids more and were more engaged in their lives. But current child support laws have reverse incentives: the more the mother prevents such contact, the more child support she receives.

Child support is not even really child support because the mother has no obligation to spend the money on the kids, and faithful payment of child support does not buy the father time with his kids. The purpose of child support is to allow the mother to maintain a household and standard of living comparable to the father’s.

Because of perverse incentives, a so-called “no fault divorce” is often followed by a bitter child custody dispute with bogus allegations of domestic violence or child abuse, and the winner can get a huge child support windfall. Usually the family court judge cannot tell who is telling the truth.

Reform should eliminate these bad incentives. No parent should collect money for denying kids the opportunity to see the other parent, and payments should not exceed reasonable documented child expenses. If both parents are willing and able to manage joint child custody, there should be no necessity for child support payments. 

As annoying as the IRS is, it follows accounting rules and taxes only actual income. But a family court judge can ignore current income (or lack thereof) and instead calculate child support on past income or on imputed future income.

  … We can no longer ignore how taxpayers’ money is incentivizing divorce and creating children who never or seldom “engage” (Obama’s word) with their fathers. We can no longer ignore the government’s complicity in the predictable social costs that result from more than 17 million children growing up without their fathers. Fatherless boys and girls are much more likely to run away, abuse drugs, get pregnant, drop out of school, commit suicide, or end up in jail.

The root of the family court evil is the redefinition of a legal doctrine called the Best Interests of the Child. This phrase originally meant the presumption that courts should generally stay out of family decisions because, as the Supreme Court wrote in 1979, “natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children.”

Some states say “best interests” and some say “best interest,” but it means the same thing. That’s just a buzzword to conceal the transfer of parental rights to judges.

This phrase is now used as an affirmative grant of power to family court judges to overrule parents on all child-related issues. Three things are wrong with the current interpretation of Best Interests of the Child.

First, it is contrary to the rule of law by giving judges extraordinary discretion to enforce their own prejudices and to micro-manage lives. They punish parents for things that were never written down as crimes or offenses.

Second, the “best interests” standard undermines parental rights. Instead of saying that parents are the final authorities, as the family unit was understood for centuries, it allows judges to make routine child-rearing decisions.

Third, courts have no competence to determine a child’s best interests, so they rely on poorly trained evaluators who make unscientific recommendations about custody and visitation. There is rarely any evidence that a court-defined schedule is better than joint child custody.
 
Reform should get family courts out of the practice of pitting parents against each other, entertaining criminal accusations without evidence, assessing onerous support payments, sending dads to debtors’ prison, and appointing so-called “experts” to make parenting decisions. Instead, the courts should protect the rights of both parents.

Happy Bastille Day from Carine and Cats Chasing Chipmunks

Happy Bastille Day, shouts Carine of Books, Cupcakes, and Cats Chasing Chipmunks, a French expat of E-Nough fame having moved to New York with her equally French husband and their three French cats (but like many New Yorkers, they dream of Texas).

Tocqueville warned against the government becoming "an immense tutelary power … with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules"

In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation

writes Niall Ferguson (thanks to Instapundit).

"The inhabitant of the United States," he wrote, "has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it."

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. "In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals."

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: "Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools."

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

 … Instead of joining together to get things done, Americans have increasingly become dependent on Washington. On foreign policy, it may still be true that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But when it comes to domestic policy, we all now come from the same place: Planet Government.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Clyde Wayne Crews shows in his invaluable annual survey of the federal regulatory state, we have become the regulation nation almost imperceptibly. Excluding blank pages, the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936 it was just 2,620.

True, our economy today is much larger than it was in 1936—around 12 times larger, allowing for inflation. But the Federal Register has grown by a factor of 30 in the same period.

 … The cost of all this, Mr. Crews estimates, is $1.8 trillion annually—that's on top of the federal government's $3.5 trillion in outlays, so it is equivalent to an invisible 65% surcharge on your federal taxes, or nearly 12% of GDP. Especially invidious is the fact that the costs of regulation for small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) are 36% higher per employee than they are for bigger firms.

… Obama occasionally pays lip service to the idea of tax reform. But nothing actually gets done and the Internal Revenue Service code (plus associated regulations) just keeps growing—it passed the nine-million-word mark back in 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, meaning nearly 19% more verbiage than 10 years before. While some taxes may have been cut in the intervening years, the tax code just kept growing.

I wonder if all this could have anything to do with the fact that we still have nearly 12 million people out of work, plus eight million working part-time jobs, five long years after the financial crisis began.

Genius that he was, Tocqueville saw this transformation of America coming. Toward the end of "Democracy in America" he warned against the government becoming "an immense tutelary power . . . absolute, detailed, regular . . . cover[ing] [society's] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way."

Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: "It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

Google USA and Google France on Their Respective National Holiday Commemorations — Spot the Difference

In France, at least, this is what Google's doodle looks like on Bastille Day.

Compare with Google USA's Fourth of July doodle — praised at the link for being so avant-garde as to be (wait for it) "uncontroversial."

Moreover, Google's dogs on a trip theme leads Chris Matyszczyk to mock Mitt Romney's dog-on-the-roof story (regarding a politician no longer in the national news) — all the while ignoring Barack Obama's dog-for-supper story (regarding a politician still very much in the national news).

A Moderate Islamist

A Moderate Islamist
by Le Monde's Selçuk

Iraq's difficulties of today, the pains of today, and the disappointments of today pale in comparison to what we Iraqis had to endure under Saddam Hussein

"Iraq, today, 10 years on from the war, from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is not what the Iraqi people hoped for and expected. We hoped for an inclusive democracy, an Iraq that is at peace with itself and at peace with its neighbors," Salih said. "To be blunt, we are far from that."

Thus reports The Atlantic's J J Gould. from Jeffrey Goldberg;s conversation with Barham Salih, the former prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan's regional government and a former deputy prime minister of Iraq's federal government.

"But," he added, "it's important to understand where we started from. ... Literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were sent to mass graves. Ten years on from the demise of Saddam Hussein, we're still discovering mass graves across Iraq. And Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein -- the overwhelming majority of Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein."

Salih acknowledged that the contemporary reality is grim: "This is a new experiment in the Middle East. I don't want to whitewash the many missteps and the terrible things that happened in the country to date. ... I'm not telling you that it is a utopia and all is fine and wonderful." And yet:

... for those of us who lived under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and understand what tyranny means, ... the difficulties of today, the pains of today, and the disappointments of today -- and they are very profound, because Iraqis deserve better -- these pale in comparison to what we had to endure. ... Then, people had the certainty of the knock on the door late at night, and could possibly end up in a mass grave. Two weeks ago, in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, a new mass grave in which there were some five-six people who were shot. Their families never heard from them since 1988. They were found and they could only be identified by the pajamas they were wearing as they were taken from home. These are the type of stories that my people, my community, had to endure.

It's important not to be cynical or dismissive when someone speaks about the impact genocide has had on his view of the world.

Still, it's important to recognize that, in this case, his answer doesn't vindicate the Iraq War in the terms in which its critics have come to impugn it -- which are, really, the same terms in which the Bush Administration justified the war in the first place: It was the right course of action not just because it would succeed in removing a murderous dictator from power, or even because it would lead to circumstances that would be in some significant respects better than the status quo, but because it would clear the way for democracy, peace, and prosperity in Iraq.

You might even find the implications of Salih's thinking kind of scary -- which are arguably these: If the United States chooses to destroy a political regime, the U.S. is both in the right and absolved from responsibility for what comes next -- as long as it puts an end to atrocities on the scale of those Saddam perpetrated.

Salih doesn't seem to accept that logic, though. He acknowledges that the U.S. coalition made serious mistakes. But: "In my view -- and I say this without equivocation; I say this in Kurdish; I say this in Arabic when I'm in Baghdad -- this has been fundamentally a failure of leadership by the Iraqi elite that assumed power after the demise of Saddam Hussein."

So the Iraq war was, despite all that went wrong, a good thing; the "overwhelming majority" of Iraqis are (and presumably feel) better off because of it; and the fault for all that has gone wrong is ultimately with Iraqis themselves: It's a remarkable point of view to encounter in June 2013.

Thomas Jefferson’s Tea Party Speech

From Robert Tracinski (be sure to check his Tracinski Letter out regularly), we get the following:

At the Jefferson Area Tea Party’s Independence Day celebration in Charlottesville, Virginia, we were favored by a surprise visit from our most famous local celebrity, the Sage of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson came to read the Declaration of Independence to our audience, but after he was done, our emcee, radio talk show host Joe Thomas, asked the third president if he could favor us with his views on today’s Tea Party movement. Here is what Mr. Jefferson said. — RWT

A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.¹ What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?²

Our grievances we have [set forth] with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate. Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art.³

Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid.⁴

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him. The idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.⁵

If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater [degree] are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose a man has less right in himself than one of his neighbors or all of them put together. This would be slavery and not that liberty which the Bill of Rights has made inviolable and for the preservation of which our government has been changed.⁶

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That “all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.” To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straitly within the enumerated powers.⁷

It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice, [our representatives], to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism—free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.⁸

I think, myself, that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.⁹

When we consider that this government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states, we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices or officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily. Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies, and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it may never be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, government shall itself consume the residue of what it was instituted to guard.¹⁰

[In short,] we [must] prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them.¹¹

The earth belongs to each generation during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and encumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. [Thus], no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.¹²

We are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium.¹³ Paper is poverty. It is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.¹⁴

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.¹⁵

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned—this is the sum of good government.¹⁶

A little patience, and we shall see the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.¹⁷ Here will be preserved a model of government, securing to man his rights and the fruits of his labor, by an organization constantly subject to his own will.¹⁸

The kind invitation to be present at [your] celebration of the anniversary of American Independence is most flattering. In the bold and doubtful election we [made] between submission or the sword, [it is] a consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be—to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all—the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that that mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.¹⁹

The flames kindled on the fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.²⁰

For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.²¹

1. Letter to James Madison, 1787,  
2. Letter to William Stephens Smith, 1787,  
3. A Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774,  
4. Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 1816,  
5. Letter to Francis W. Gilmer, 1816, 
6. Letter to James Monroe, 1782,  
7. Opinion on Creating a National Bank, 1791,  
8. Kentucky Resolution, 1798,  
9. Letter to William Ludlow, 1824,  
10. First Annual Message to Congress, 1801,  
11. Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802,  
12. Letter to James Madison, 1789,  
13. Letter to Abbe Salimankis, 1810,  
14. Letter to Edward Carrington, 1788, 
15. Letter to John Taylor, 1798,  
16. First Inaugural Address, 1801, 
17. Letter to John Taylor, 1798, 
18. Letter to William Plumer, 1815,  
19. Letter to Roger C. Weightman, 1826, 
20. Letter to John Adams, 1821,  
21. Letter to Roger C. Weightman, 1826.

Lance Armstrong: Impossible to Win the Tour de France Without Doping

While new rumors holds that Yankee capitalists entered a pristine Europe and threw money at the Tour de France, thereby destroying it (and while the current Tour de France comes under new doubts), Lance Armstrong gives an exclusive front-page interview to Le Monde's Stéphane Mandard (excerpts in English), in which the former champion says that, because of the necessity for oxygen in what is essentially an endurance trial, it is impossible to win the French bicycle race without doping.

Related: In the Tour de France's doping race, Lance Armstrong was far behind "King Miguel"

Vous continuez à faire du vélo malgré tous les ennuis que vous a apporté la pratique de ce sport ?

Absolument, je continue à faire du vélo et à m'entraîner. Faire du vélo a toujours été une thérapie pour moi. Et ce qui était vrai lorsque je m'entraînais pour le Tour l'est toujours aujourd'hui. Une bonne grosse sortie de trois ou quatre heures vous vide la tête comme rien d'autre.

 … Vous considérez-vous toujours comme le recordman de victoires ?

Absolument.

Avez-vous gardé vos sept maillots jaunes ou les avez-vous brûlés ?

Ah, ah ! Hors de question. J'ai travaillé dur pour ces maillots. Je les aime pour ce qu'ils sont et tous les souvenirs qu'ils représentent.

Comprenez-vous que l'Union cycliste internationale (UCI) et les organisateurs du Tour vous aient rayé du palmarès ?

Oui et non. C'est bien d'effacer mon nom, mais le Tour a bien eu lieu entre 1999 et 2005, n'est-ce pas ? Il doit donc y avoir un vainqueur. Qui est-il donc ? Je laisse le soin aux autres de débattre à l'infini qui était le vrai vainqueur de ces Tours. Mais personne ne s'est manifesté pour réclamer mes maillots.

Dans son rapport, l'Usada vous accuse d'avoir bénéficié du « programme de dopage le plus perfectionné, le plus professionnel et le plus efficace de l'histoire du sport »...

Tout ça, ce ne sont que des conneries. On a vu que l'affaire « Puerto » [le vaste réseau de dopage sanguin organisé par le médecin espagnol Eufemiano Fuentes] était cent fois plus sophistiquée. Notre système était très simple, très conservateur, et pas maléfique comme je l'ai entendu dans la bouche des représentants de l'Agence mondiale antidopage, entre autres. Il y a beaucoup de preuves de ce que je dis et l'histoire montrera que tout cela n'était qu'une simple posture de l'Usada dans le but de faire du buzz. Par ailleurs, sur combien d'autres équipes l'Usada a-t-elle enquêté ? Si la réponse est aucune, alors comment peut-elle clamer que notre système était si sophistiqué ? C'est totalement irrationnel.

 …  Pourquoi êtes-vous prêt à parler devant une commission de ce type ? Que voulez-vous dire ?

Toute l'histoire n'a pas encore été racontée. La « décision motivée » de l'Usada n'a pas dressé le portrait fidèle du cyclisme de la fin des années 1980 à nos jours. Elle a parfaitement réussi à détruire la vie d'un homme, mais n'a pas du tout bénéficié au cyclisme. Qu'est-ce que je dirais devant la commission ? Je comparaîtrais, je m'assoirais, j'écouterais et je répondrais honnêtement aux questions.

Une des questions pourrait être : quand vous couriez, était-il possible de réaliser des performances sans se doper ?

Cela dépend des courses que tu voulais gagner. Le Tour de France ? Non.
Impossible de gagner sans dopage. Car le Tour est une épreuve d'endurance où l'oxygène est déterminant. Pour ne prendre qu'un exemple, l'EPO ne va pas aider un sprinteur à remporter un 100 m, mais elle sera déterminante pour un coureur de 10 000 m. C'est évident.

 … Comment en finir avec la culture du dopage dans le vélo ?

A bien des égards, ça ne finira jamais. Je n'ai pas inventé le dopage. Désolé Travis [Tygart, le directeur de l'Usada] ! Et il ne s'est pas non plus arrêté avec moi. J'ai simplement participé à ce système. Je suis un être humain. Le dopage existe depuis l'Antiquité et existera sans doute toujours. Je sais que ce n'est pas une réponse très populaire, mais c'est malheureusement la réalité.

Devant la commission d'enquête sénatoriale sur le dopage, votre ancien rival, Laurent Jalabert, dont les urines prélevées lors du Tour 1998 contenaient de l'EPO, a déclaré : « Armstrong était un tortionnaire. » Il a aussi juré qu'il ne s'était jamais volontairement dopé, et que son médecin, dans l'équipe ONCE, était surnommé le « Docteur Citroën », par opposition au vôtre, Michele Ferrari...

Ah, « Jaja », avec tout le respect que je lui dois, il est en train de mentir. Il aurait mieux fait d'éviter de parler de Ferrari et de Citroën, car il sait très bien que Michele était le médecin de la ONCE au milieu des années 1990.

Comprenez-vous la déception, voire la colère, de ceux qui ont cru en votre histoire ?

Je comprends parfaitement, et j'en suis profondément désolé. A bien des égards, je ne parviendrai jamais à réparer cela, mais je passerai ma vie à essayer.

 … Que vous inspire le dénouement de l'affaire « Puerto », où la juge a ordonné la destruction des poches de sang qui auraient pu permettre d'identifier les autres clients non cyclistes du docteur Fuentes ?

Je suis sûr que certains grands clubs de football ont eu de l'influence sur ce jugement. En tout cas, c'est encore le cyclisme qui a été tenu pour seul responsable.

Vous avez le sentiment que le cyclisme est le bouc émissaire du sport professionnel ?

Absolument.

Et vous avez l'impression de payer pour tout le monde ?

Je laisserai les autres décider.

 … Sarkozy semble vouloir revenir pour la présidentielle de 2017. Pourquoi avez-vous fait un come-back en 2009 ?

C'est une bonne question. Cette décision a été la plus grosse erreur de ma vie. Je ferais n'importe quoi pour l'effacer, mais ce qui est fait est fait. J'aurais dû écouter Jean-Marie Leblanc [l'ancien directeur du Tour] lorsqu'il m'écrivit une lettre ouverte à l'automne 2008 pour me conseiller de ne pas revenir. Il avait raison.

This administration is focusing like a laser beam on jobs; or rather like a super-powered death ray

… the country as a whole has decided that the Democratic Party is where their bread has buttered

writes Benny Huang at Patriot Update.

Liberalism is on the march and there’s nothing those squarish, reliably red states in the geographical center can do about it. Florida has gone blue; Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia too.

Obviously, more Americans are voting in their economic best interests now, right? Not so fast.

[The thesis of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”], which has been borrowed many times over since 2004, is one of the great unexamined assumptions of American politics. Yes it’s true that plenty of Americans have issues in mind besides the economy when they enter the voting booth but it doesn’t follow that the Left offers economic prosperity.

First it’s necessary to define the term “economic best interests.” Words don’t mean the same thing to liberals that they do to other people. For liberals, “economic best interests” does not meaning lower taxes, lower living expenses, or having a job.

It would be in the economic best interests of plenty of Americans to pay less at the pump. There’s a path from here to there but there’s a giant roadblock along the way—the Democrats. They oppose fracking, drilling in ANWR, and the Keystone pipeline. Under no circumstances will they consider reducing state or federal gasoline taxes. In my state, the governor is proposing an increase in the already high gas taxes.

It isn’t just the gas we put in our cars and the heating oil we use to heat our homes that the Democrats want to make more expensive, but the electricity that keeps the lights on. As then-Senator Obama explained in 2008, “When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, you know, under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

Of course they would. And as bad as that would be for Americans in general, it would be hardest on those who make their living in the coal mines of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Is it really in their economic best interests?

This administration is focusing like a laser beam on jobs; or rather like a super-powered death ray. Everywhere it sees jobs being created it destroys them, and not just in coal country either. Take, for example, the National Labor Relations Board’s decision to prohibit Boeing, our nation’s largest exporter by value, from establishing a new plant in South Carolina because of its right-to-work laws. (Boeing later fought that decision and won.)

Chrysler and General Motors seem to have more latitude. The federal government is still a major stakeholder in both of these companies, yet both are setting up new factories in China. GM announced earlier this year that Shanghai would receive a new Cadillac factory, while Chrysler plans to manufacture Jeeps in China starting in 2014.

How’s that for chutzpah? The federal government arrogantly dictated to a private company that it could not open a factory in a right-to-work state, while two companies with substantial government ownership were setting up shop in an entirely different country.

The great job-killing Death Star of the Obama Administration is its health care fiasco, farcically called the “Affordable Care Act” or Obamacare. There’s nothing affordable about it, and that’s one problem. The other problem is that employers across the country are cutting employees’ hours or laying off workers to avoid the onerous expenses imposed by a law that was supposed to make health care cheaper. Papa John’s has already promised to reduce employees’ hours, as has the Commonwealth of Virginia and the City of Long Beach, California.

The new law is making it more and more difficult for less educated workers to find full time employment. Soon their only means of survival will be to take on a hodgepodge of part-time jobs without benefits. Temps will fill the jobs once performed by full-time employees.

Yet it is axiomatic to the average liberal that any American who doesn’t own a yacht ought to be voting Democrat. The problem is their definition of the term “economic best interests.” Here’s how they define it: SSDI, EBT, Obamaphones, and section eight housing. “Economic best interests” means never having to work a day in your life, which, given their other economic policies, is a very distinct possibility.

France's Big Brother, by contrast with the United States, is totally illegal

France's Big Brother, by contrast with the United States where the NSA program has been validated by the Congress, is totally illegal, writes Le Monde on its front page, followed by a lengthy article inside the newspaper called Révélations sur le Big Brother français Le Monde (here in (odd) English).

Ce Big Brother français, contrairement aux Etats-Unis où le programme de la NSA est secrètement validé par le Congrès, est totalement illégal.

La Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) confirme que « de telles pratiques ne seraient pas fondées légalement ».

Le député européen Arnaud Danjean, lui-même ancien de la DGSE, confirme que « les moyens techniques d'interception électronique sont entre les mains de la seule DGSE » et que « le système français n'offre pas nécessairement les meilleures garanties ».

Grand Frère Comes To France: "Phone Calls, Emails, Web Use" All Spied On

This weekend's epic indignation by Francois Hollande at the NSA, coupled with his laughable ultimatum for Barack Obama to stop spying, was almost good enough to mask the fact that none other than France has its own version of the NSA happily intercepting and recording every form of electronic communication.

This from Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden (merci à RV).

Almost.

Overnight French Le Monde reported that "France, like the United States with the Prism system, has a large-scale espionage telecommunications device. Le Monde is able to reveal that the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE, special services) has systematically collected and spied on the electromagnetic signals emitted by computers or phones in France, as well as flows between French and abroad all our communications. Politicians are aware of this, but secrecy about the Big Brother operation is the rule."

Reuters has more:

France's external intelligence agency spies on the French public's phone calls, emails and social media activity in France and abroad, the daily Le Monde said on Thursday.

It said the DGSE intercepted signals from computers and telephones in France, and between France and other countries, although not the content of phone calls, to create a map of "who is talking to whom". It said the activity was illegal.

"All of our communications are spied on," wrote Le Monde, which based its report on unnamed intelligence sources as well as remarks made publicly by intelligence officials.

"Emails, text messages, telephone records, access to Facebook and Twitter are then stored for years," it said.

The activities described are similar to those carried out by the U.S. National Security Agency, as described in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The documents revealed that the NSA has access to vast amounts of Internet data such as emails, chat rooms and video from large companies such as Facebook and Google, under a program known as Prism.

They also showed that the U.S. government had gathered so-called metadata - such as the time, duration and numbers called - on all telephone calls carried by service providers such as Verizon.

France's DGSE was not immediately available for comment.

...

France's seven other intelligence services, including domestic secret services and customs and money-laundering watchdogs, have access to the data and can tap into it freely as a means to spot people whose communications seem suspicious, whom they can then track with more intrusive techniques such as phone-tapping, Le Monde wrote.

What is amusing is that some are still surprised by such ongoing revelations. The sad truth is that every "democratic", "developed" government has been violating the privacy of its citizens for years and in this electronic day and age, no such thing as privacy exists.

Which is to be expected: Egypt just showed what happens to "democracy" when it is not properly cultivated by the 1% which has a vested interest in giving the peasantry the impression that people still have rights, and liberties and their vote "counts" just so the public attention is diverted from what truly matters: the endless transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich under the guise of "wealth effect", "democracy", "representation" and other lies.

Buzzfeed: Best Signs From The “Restore The Fourth” Rallies

Buzzfeed's Ellie Hall has the 40 Best Signs From The “Restore The Fourth” Rallies

The truth is: wind energy is just a tax scam

 … what the left and the green movement don't want to talk about regarding windmills is (as usual) the truth 

writes Craig's List (thanks to InstaPundit).

The truth is: windmills, like solar panels, break down. And like solar panels, windmills produce less energy before they break down than the energy it took to make them. That's the part liberals forget: making windmills and solar panels takes energy, energy from coal, oil, and diesel, energy that extracts and refines raw materials, energy that transports those materials to where they will be re-shaped into finished goods, energy to manufacture those goods. More energy than those finished windmills and solar panels will ever produce.

 …  The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it's too cold or the wind speed is too high.

 … The truth is: wind energy is just a tax scam.

Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst focusing on energy and environmental issues for the Heritage Foundation, is not surprised. He asks:

"If wind power made sense, why would it need a government subsidy in the first place? It's a bubble which bursts as soon as the government subsidies end."

And therein lies a lesson for those who seek to make fortunes out of tax payer subsidies, and for those who want to live in a dream world of "clean energy", the whole renewables industry of solar, wind and biomass is just an artificial bubble incapable of surviving without subsides from governments and tax payers. The Green evangelists who push so hard for these wind farms, as usual have not thought the whole idea through.

Assassination Attempt on French Consul in Benghazi

An assassination attempt was made on France's consul in Benghazi, reports Le Monde, which turned out to prove unsuccessful.

"Phew, both of you are alive" were François Hollande's first words to Jean Dufriche and his wife, after none of the bullets targeting his car on July 4 hit either spouse. They were driving through the Libyan city when passengers in another car opened fire upon them. "At least 10 bullets hit the car" said Mohamed Hijazi, spokesman for Benghazi's secret services, "but no one was wounded".

The honorary consul and his wife left the Libyan city for Tunis (but there were no reports of his making a variant of the Samuel S Jackson speech in Pulp Fiction).

Gettysburg: Sweeping Republicans Aside and Redefining History the Leftist Way

Redefining Gettysburg for the Democrat party, at the 1938 commemoration and during the 1963 anniversary:

1938:

Winding up the great three-day ceremonies on the scene of the Civil War’s decisive battle seventy-five years ago, President Roosevelt today [July 3, 1938] told 50,000 cheering veterans of the Civil and World Wars that the present generation is fighting its way through “another conflict as fundamental as Lincoln’s” — a conflict on the battlefield of the mind. “It is being fought not with the glint of steel, but with appeals to reason and justice on a thousand fronts,” he said, “to save opportunity and security for the citizen in a free society.”

 1963:

Fifty years ago, on Memorial Day in 1963, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., that foreshadowed profound changes that would be achieved in only 13 months and that mark us still.

The occasion was a speech that almost wasn’t given at all, for an anniversary that was still a month off, delivered by a man who had grown weary of his apparent uselessness in an office that neither interested him nor engaged his capacious gifts.

 … [When the veep was distracted, distressed, and depressed, Juanita Roberts, Johnson’s personal secretary] wrote Johnson directly, saying, “I can’t regret this one yet — I am excited by the possibilities it could offer.” She told the vice president that this was a chance to deliver “a masterpiece to be remembered by” and suggested that Dwight D. Eisenhower, living in Gettysburg in retirement from the presidency, might be drawn to the event.

By then the idea had gained momentum, all except the Eisenhower element. “Bringing in nationally prominent Republicans, however, could reduce the advantage of this situation,” a top Johnson aide, probably Busby, wrote in an unsigned internal memo that now rests in the files of the Johnson Library. 

All politics, in L.B.J.’s time as in ours, is personal.

Wouldn't it be surprising if the Times had dismissed the political element so cavalierly (as "mere" politicizing), had it been a Republican wishing to keep Democrats away from a like event?

In addition, The New York Times has a slide show of Gettysburg, three pictures (one third) of which have nothing to do with the Civil War.
Related: The Last Best Place on Earth

Could You Pass The Literacy Test Given To Black Voters In The 1960s?

Buzzfeed's Brian Galindo asks if you could pass a literacy test given to black voters in the 1960s.

For myself, the answer is: no way.
 
In case you care, I have been called Mensa material several times, and I could not have passed this test for the simple reason that after going through the shock (and, indeed, the insult) of discovering the type of questions asked (15 seconds wasted just there) — which have not an iota of relevance to real life (or to any preparation in real school exams) — I would be wondering if I were answering these — inane — questions entirely right and wasting time every time wondering if there wasn’t some kind of trap somewhere. 

Unfortunately, the article comes in context of the Supreme Court decision to strike down "Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a key provision in the law that mandated nine states with a history of racial discrimination, mostly in the South, to get federal permission before they could change their voter laws", suggesting that such obstacles will now reappear in the South.

Indeed, I take issue with many a comment the Buzzfeed post: To everybody dissing the Republicans , let’s not forget too quickly that from the 1870s to the 1960s and 1970s, the segregationist South was in lockstep with the Democrat  party.  

 In the past — indeed from before the Civil War — the Dems counted on the white vote while demonizing minorities. What’s new is that since the 1970s the Dems count on the minorities while demonizing the white race. (Didn’t LBJ go along with civil rights precisely because he saw that now that, in the civil rights era, the Jim Crow-built society was floundering, this would bring all the “Negro” (LBJ’s word) voters to the Dems?) 

To win their elections nowadays, it is true the Democrats don’t exclude people by giving literacy tests. Instead they demonize their opponents as racist (precisely the reason so many feel it a non-brainer to equalize the Jim Crow laws with the GOP), all the while unleashing the IRS on them — along with various other branches of the federal government.  

In addition, they try to import impoverished workers in need of government help to add millions of Democrat voters to the rolls. 

And why do millions of American go along with this?

Isn’t it precisely because they have been convinced (thank you, U.S. school system) that the caricature of conservatives can’t be anything but factually correct?

Tocqueville: A power that is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild and seeks to keep men in perpetual childhood

Tocqueville also predicted the current danger to the United States (and, through it, to the world), notes Joel B Pollack on Breitbart.com, notably "the slow imposition of Obamacare in the United States, delayed only so that it might never be defeated, creeping gradually into every aspect of life, administered by agencies already shown to be hostile to freedom."

The words of Alexis de Tocqueville in Book Four, Chapter VI of Democracy in America are particularly poignant:

I had remarked during my stay in the United States, that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism...

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest,--his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not;--he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their gate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

This, it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successfully taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people....

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day, and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions, only exhibits servitude at certain intervals, and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is vain to summon a people, who have been rendered so dependent on the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.

I add, that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them....

A constitution which should be republican in its head, and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts, has ever appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.

Related: Some Thoughts on American Patriotism…

The progressives' ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers

Steve Bartin (thanks to Instapundit) links what he (rightfully) calls "One of the great speeches in American history."

Calvin Coolidge's classic July, 4 speech. We re-link this one:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Yes, writes Instapundit, what the progressives preach is in fact regress.

Related: Some Thoughts on American Patriotism… 

In 2015, a Copy of an 18th-C Frigate Is to Recreate Lafayette's Crossing the Atlantic Aboard the Hermione to America

Benedict Donnelly, the head of the Hermione-La Fayette Association, is looking for 3 million Euros to complete his dream of finishing the building of a copy of an 18th-century ship and have it sail to America (thanks to OlTri), in the footsteps (so to speak) of Lafayette.

Lafayette sailed as a passenger on the Hermione to America in 1780 and the building of the copy of that frigate, writes Le Figaro, has lasted for 15 years now. The copy, like the original, is to sail from Rochefort to Boston.

Deeply held feelings: A mystery that the pro-choicers are curiously uncurious to solve and a question they squirmingly refuse to answer

Disagreements about abortion nearly always end at the same impasse

writes Benjamin Duffy at Patriot Update

—an endless debate about when life begins.

The pro-life position is usually that it begins at conception. The pro-choice position—and I hate calling them that—is more nuanced, which is a nice way of saying convoluted. They’re sure that a human being exists at the moment of birth and that none exists at the moment of conception, but everything in between is a mystery that they are curiously uncurious to solve. While the pro-lifers’ preferred point comes with some of its own problems, it’s at least precise and non-arbitrary. The same cannot be said of pro-choicers’ squirming refusal to answer the question.

 … For the rabidly pro-abortion, the question of when life begins is not a scientific one but a matter of deeply held feelings. If a woman thinks the two-celled organism in her fallopian tube is a child, then she’s right. But if she thinks that a child just minutes before birth is merely a problem, then she’s right too. And it doesn’t stop there! Even when the nurse places the bouncing baby boy in his mother’s arms, his humanity is still an unsettled question.

What’s the verdict, mom? Baby or problem?

If mommy gives the thumbs down, the clump of cells in swaddling clothes can be whisked away to the incinerator. Notice I didn’t say “killed” because killing implies that a life existed in the first place. In the sick mind of [an abortionist like] LeRoy Carhart, the child never existed if his mother never accepted him.

It isn’t possible to understand Carhart’s analysis without considering how the pro-choice crowd perceives the issue. They believe that a child is a burden that no one should have to bear without full consent, ergo he must do a disappearing act if his mother finds him inconvenient.

Yet everyone knows that the question of when life begins has an answer, and it isn’t “when mama says so.” Mama could decide that her four year old is a problem, or her rebellious teenager, but we all agree that she can’t kill them. (Don’t we? Paging Dr. Carhart…) At some point life is an unambiguous fact, not subject to interpretation. Pro-choicers are very, very squeamish about drawing that line because someone will always cross it and then they will be in the position of having to condemn it.

The emergence of quick and legal abortion has warped our thinking in regard to pregnancy. “Baby bumps” are developing children only in the wombs of mothers who want them, as if nature cares at all what mama thinks. Our ability to convince ourselves that unwanted children never really existed in the first place borders on schizophrenic delusion.

 … The reason we’re still having this debate forty years after Roe v. Wade is because ordinary pro-choicers honestly believe that lives are not at stake. People on the inside of the abortion industry know better, but they don’t admit it when they know the cameras are rolling. If they ever spilled the beans the debate would be over because it’s the premise—that a growing fetus is a life—that’s disputed. The conclusion—that lives shouldn’t be tossed into a medical waste container—is not.

Even the NYT Is Forced to Admit that Abroad, Barack "Smart Diplomacy" Obama Is Treated with Discourtesy

[Barack Obama's] first meeting [with Russia's Vladimir Putin] was marked by a nearly hourlong lecture by Mr. Putin about all the ways the United States had offended Moscow. At their second, Mr. Putin kept Mr. Obama waiting 30 minutes.

Even the New York Times is forced to admit that Barack "smart diplomacy" Obama often gets the cold shoulder abroad, as Mark Landler and Peter Baker report on "very blunt conversation[s]" and "bruising encounters", given that the Apologizer-in-Chief's "main counterparts on the world stage are not his friends, and they make little attempt to cloak their disagreements in diplomatic niceties."

While tangling with the leaders of two cold war antagonists of the United States is nothing new, the two bruising encounters in such a short span underscore a hard reality for Mr. Obama as he heads deeper into a second term that may come to be dominated by foreign policy: his main counterparts on the world stage are not his friends, and they make little attempt to cloak their disagreements in diplomatic niceties. 

Even his friends are not always so friendly. On Wednesday, for example, the president is to meet in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has invited him to deliver a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. But Ms. Merkel is also expected to press Mr. Obama about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, which offend privacy-minded Germans. 

For all of his effort to cultivate personal ties with foreign counterparts over the last four and a half years — the informal “shirt-sleeves summit” with Mr. Xi was supposed to nurture a friendly rapport that White House aides acknowledge did not materialize — Mr. Obama has complicated relationships with some, and has bet on others who came to disappoint him. 

“In Europe, especially, Obama was welcomed with open arms, and some people had unrealistic expectations about him,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a longtime senior American diplomat. Noting that Mr. Obama continued some unpopular policies like the use of drones, he said, “People don’t appreciate that American interests continue from administration to administration.”

 … Mr. Obama spent nearly four years befriending Mr. Putin’s predecessor, Dmitri A. Medvedev, hoping to build him up as a counterweight to Mr. Putin. That never happened, and Mr. Obama now finds himself back at square one with a Russian leader who appears less likely than ever to find common ground with the United States on issues like Syria. 

… “You don’t need to be buddies with someone to establish an effective relationship,” said Mr. Burns, who now teaches at Harvard. “Not everyone can be Roosevelt and Churchill forming a personal bond to end the Second World War.”

Even with friends, however, there is tension. President François Hollande of France was initially thrilled with Mr. Obama because he saw him as an ally against Ms. Merkel on economic issues.

But by the time they met at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Northern Ireland on Tuesday, the relationship had soured, according to French analysts, because France is frustrated that the United States did not do more to help with the war in Mali and resisted a more robust response to Syria. 

Mr. Obama differs from his most recent predecessors, who made personal relationships with leaders the cornerstone of their foreign policies. The first George Bush moved gracefully in foreign capitals, while Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush related to fellow leaders as politicians, trying to understand their pressures and constituencies. 

“That’s not President Obama’s style,” said James B. Steinberg, Mr. Clinton’s deputy national security adviser and Mr. Obama’s deputy secretary of state. 

 … For Mr. Obama, no relationship is more prickly, and yet more significant, than that with Mr. Putin. Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush forged strong partnerships with their Russian counterparts, Boris Yeltsin and Mr. Putin, respectively. But even that did not prevent ruptures over NATO military action in Kosovo and the Russian war in Georgia. 

Mr. Obama arrived in office determined to invest in Mr. Medvedev, but he underestimated Mr. Putin’s continuing power. Their first meeting was marked by a nearly hourlong lecture by Mr. Putin about all the ways the United States had offended Moscow. At their second, Mr. Putin kept Mr. Obama waiting 30 minutes. 

 … However strained their appearance on Monday, Mr. Obama did not publicly criticize Mr. Putin on human rights or the rule of law. While the White House is frustrated by Russia’s refusal to abandon Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, Mr. Obama has been reluctant to intervene more forcefully on behalf of the rebels.

"Obama did not publicly criticize Mr. Putin on human rights or the rule of law." Well, no, that's something that's reserved for Republicans.

As for R. Nicholas Burns, we mention his FDR quip — “Not everyone can be Roosevelt and Churchill forming a personal bond to end the Second World War” — as we wonder how many media types recall how often they gushed about the One's "smart diplomacy", how often they claimed he was the man to bring respect and love back for America, and how often, precisely, they compared BHO to FDR (if it wasn't to Lincoln, to JFK, or to Reagan).

Obabush in his element in the heart of the Land of the Stasi

He is the spy who came in from the West, writes Arnaud Leparmentier in a column in which the Le Monde writer also reminisces about such things as JFK's speech to Berliners (1963) and Ronald Reagan's (1987), as well as Bill Clinton's many official visits to Germany when he was president (1990s).

Und who ish zhis shpy vrom de Vest zat ve are shpeakink apout? Well, about the White House's current resident, aka "Obabush", and his trip to the land of the Stasi. Indeed, this time (in contrast with his 2008 speech), Barack Obama's visit was held in the part of Berlin that was part of the former East Germany.

In the final analysis, the American president is in his element: at the heart of the former communist dictatorship, which spied upon and filed reports on all its citizens with its sinister political police, the Stasi. Shocking? We will not let him off the hook, this president, a curious winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who refrained from closing Guantanamo, and whose spying on our emails, our phone conversations, and our Facebook accounts has just been discovered. It was a promise, this Democrat was to break with George Bush. Wake up. At least for the present column, we will call him "Obabush."

From Le Monde:

Il est l'espion venu de l'Ouest. Et c'est à Berlin-Est, capitale de l'ancienne RDA, que Barack Obama devait prendre la parole mercredi après-midi 19 juin à Berlin. Non pas devant la porte de Brandebourg, mais derrière, entre les murs de la Pariser Platz. Au fond, le président américain est à sa place : au cœur de l'ancienne dictature communiste, qui espionnait, fichait tous ses concitoyens avec sa sinistre police politique, la Stasi. Schocking ? Nous ne décolérons pas contre ce président, curieux Prix Nobel de la paix, qui n'a pas fermé Guantanamo, et dont on vient de découvrir qu'il espionnait nos mails, nos communications téléphoniques et nos comptes Facebook. C'était promis, ce démocrate devait rompre avec George Bush. Que nenni. L'instant d'une chronique, nous l'appellerons "Obabush".

 … Dans les années 1990, Bill Clinton sillonne l'Allemagne et l'Europe déchirée par la guerre dans les Balkans. "Obabush", rien. Aucune visite officielle lors de son premier mandat. Juste [deux sauts de puce].