The Americans in Paris tend to fall into three categories

I’m aware that there are worse things to be than an American in Paris

writes Pamela Druckerman "who took the ultimate expatriate plunge" ("I started doing psychotherapy in French").

You could be, for example, a Congolese in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But as I spend my 10th Thanksgiving here, permit me a moment of reflection. Because Thanksgiving prompts the question that expatriates everywhere face: Shouldn’t I be going home?

The Americans in Paris tend to fall into three categories. There are the fantasists — people nourished by Hemingway and Sartre, who are enthralled with the idea of living here. The moneyed version of this person lives as close as possible to the Eiffel Tower. The Bohemian version teaches English or tends bar, to finance his true vocation: being in France. 

Then there are the denialists — often here for a spouse’s job — who cope with living in Paris by pretending they’re not in Paris. They tap into a parallel universe of Anglophone schools, babysitters and house painters, and get their French news from CNN. 

Finally there are people like me, who study France and then describe it to the folks back home. We’re determined to have an “authentic” French experience. And yet, by mining every encounter for its anthropological significance, we keep our distance, too.

No matter how familiar Paris becomes, something always reminds me that I don’t belong. 

 … The question of whether to stay is especially resonant for Americans in Paris, because many feel that they live here by accident. Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim. Expatriates often say that they came for six months, but ended up staying for 15 years. And no one is quite sure where the time went. It’s as if Paris is a vortex that lulls you with its hot croissants and grand boulevards. One morning, you wake up middle-aged — still speaking mediocre French.

 … The biggest lesson I’ve learned in 10 years is that I’m American to the core.

Europe's Superior Society? Over 1 Million Frenchman Have Trouble Getting Food on Their Dinner Tables

 This is what America's Democrats do not tell you when vaunting Europe's more generous, more humane, and more generally superior society. According to Le Monde's Catherine Rollot, over 12% of French adults have trouble getting enough good food on their tables, and one million Frenchman will be given food by the association Les Restos du Cœur (The Restaurants of the Heart). Nicole Darmon goes further, saying that 22% of people below the poverty rate are "in a situation of food insecurity."

C'est la France des frigos vides. Celle des produits discount et des petits paniers, celle aussi qui peine à frapper aux portes des associations caritatives pour se faire aider. Alors que s'ouvre lundi 25 novembre la 29^e campagne des Restos du cœur, qui risque cette année d'atteindre le chiffre record de 1 million de personnes accueillies, de plus en plus de familles vivent en « insécurité alimentaire ».

De ces ménages qui doivent faire des restrictions telles qu'ils n'ont plus accès en quantité mais surtout en qualité aux aliments pour satisfaire leurs besoins nutritionnels et leurs préférences alimentaires, on sait peu de chose. En France, contrairement aux Etats-Unis, la notion est encore mal connue et souvent confondue avec l'absence ou l'insuffisance de sécurité des aliments. La tentation est aussi facile de restreindre cette population à celle des 3, 5 millions de bénéficiaires de l'aide alimentaire.

Pourtant, de l'avis de Nicole Darmon, directrice de recherche à l'Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA), qui a étudié les comportements alimentaires des personnes défavorisées, 12,2 % des adultes appartiendraient à un foyer en « situation d'insécurité alimentaire pour raisons financières », soit plus de 6 millions de personnes, un chiffre bien supérieur à la population qui a recours à l'aide alimentaire.

LES FEMMES OU LES PERSONNES SEULES SOUVENT VISÉES


« Ce phénomène, même s'il est trois fois plus fréquent parmi les ménages défavorisés, ne se résume pas à la pauvreté monétaire, explique M^me Darmon. On estime ainsi que 22 % des personnes qui vivent en dessous du seuil de pauvreté sont en situation d'insécurité alimentaire. Bien que plus faible, cette proportion atteint près de 8 % parmi les personnes vivant au-dessus de ce seuil. »

Le Terroir: is the holistic combination of soil, geology, climate and local grape-growing practices real or mysticism?

"American wine growers have long expressed varying degrees of skepticism about [the] ineffable concept" of terroir, asks Nicholas Wade in a New York Times article (one replete with French phrases), "some dismissing it as unfathomable mysticism and others regarding it as a shrewd marketing ploy to protect the cachet of French wines."

 Terroir is a concept at the heart of French winemaking, but one so mysterious that the word has no English counterpart. It denotes the holistic combination of soil, geology, climate and local grape-growing practices that make each region’s wine unique.

 … Now American researchers may have penetrated the veil that hides the landscape of terroir from clear view, at least in part. They have seized on a plausible aspect of terroir that can be scientifically measured — the fungi and bacteria that grow on the surface of the wine grape. 

 …The discovery of stable but differing patterns of microbial communities from one region’s vineyards to another means that microbes could explain, at least in part, why one region’s zinfandel, say, tastes different from another’s. The links between microbes and wine-growing regions “provide compelling support for the role of grape-surface microbial communities in regional wine characteristics,” the researchers conclude.

 … While [David A. Mills] said that “I make fun of terroir all the time,” he believes that regional distinctions between vineyards do exist and that microbes have a role in creating them. If the specific links between microbes and the sensory properties of wine can be identified, growers will be able to take a savoir-faire attitude to terroir instead of a je ne sais quoi shrug. 

On the other hand, he added, pinning the qualities of wine on bacteria and fungi may spoil that frisson of enchantment for some connoisseurs. “Many people don’t want this figured out,” he said, “because it demystifies the wonderful mystery of wine.”

Color Photographs of World War II

Check out Jalopnik's World War II color photos (thanks to Instapundit).

More from the Library of Congress on Flicker…

No other place on earth where you can get such a tear jerking and ass kicking mix of solemnity, emotion, respect for vets, and flat out amazement at what this old man can still do

I just watched this video and it really made my day 

writes a French expat in Texas about a Youtube video with a World War II veteran called Impossible Shots with Ted Gundy and Gibbs 1903A4 sniper rifle.

It may seem more like a Veteran's Day thing than Thanks Giving, but bear with me.

I wish you could see this through my foreigners eyes. This is stuff like this that happens only in America that makes this country great. I can't think of any other place on earth where you can get such a tear jerking and ass kicking mix of solemnity, emotion, respect for vets, and flat out amazement at what this old man can still do; involving guns, of course ;-) All of that like it's the most natural thing... Well I guess it is over here, but it certainly ain't for me.

So yeah, tis the day where you say out loud what you're greatful for. … I have to repeat that I'm really glad [my French wife] and I made it to this great country, and we'll stand by it when push comes to shove. [She's] got the pen, I got the sword, let's roll! ...

Che Guevara in 10 Quotes

Thanks to The Libertarian, we have proof of why Che Guevara is praised to such heights by the left (gracias por Instapundit).

Che was no innocent freedom fighter.  Known as ‘the Butcher of La Cabaña’, Che Guevara is known to have ordered the execution of several hundred people he suspected of betraying his communist ideology.  Often, he would have his soldiers and commanders shot without trial, in numerous cases performing the executions himself.   After successfully taking over Cuba, Guevara proceeded to order the imprisonment of gay men, sought the execution of all political dissidents, severely restricted the press, tried to ban rock and roll music, and drove the Cuban economy into the ground.  In his youth, he was even known by many of his friends to be an incurable racist, and rarely bathed.  In response to Che’s entirely undeserved popularity among anti-establishment youth in the UK and around the world, many organisations have begun to put up posters with select quotes from the guerrilla fighter, titled, “Can You Tell Who Said What?: Che Guevara or Adolf Hitler.”  All the quotes, selected for their brutality, are from Guevara.

Following in that vein, here are ten of the most revolting quotes from every university student’s favourite ‘freedom fighter’, Che Guevara:

Che Guevara
1)      “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates.  Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”

2)      “Youth should learn to think and act as a mass.  It is criminal to think as individuals!”
3)      “The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”
4)      “We must do away with all newspapers.  A revolution cannot be accomplished with freedom of the press.”
5)      “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.  These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail.  This is a revolution!  And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
6)      “Hatred is the central element of our struggle!  Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him a violent and cold-blooded killing machine.  Our soldiers must be thus.”
7)      “The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portugese.”
8)      “The black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead.”
9)      “I fired a .32 caliber bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple.  He moaned for a few moments, then died.”
10)   “I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”

Obama's foreign policy is but an auxiliary to fundamental transformation at home, useful not so much to create international stability per se, as to enhance Obama influence in pursuing his domestic agenda

The Iranian agreement comes not in isolation, unfortunately. The Syrian debacle instructed the Iranians that the Obama administration was more interested in announcing a peaceful breakthrough than actually achieving it.

Thus writes Victor Davis Hanson (thanks to Instapundit).

The president’s dismal polls are only a multiplier of that general perception abroad that foreign policy is an auxiliary to fundamental transformation at home, useful not so much to create international stability per se, as to enhance Obama influence in pursuing his domestic agenda. Collate reset, lead from behind, “redlines,” “game-changers,” ”deadlines,” the Arab Spring confusion, the skedaddle from Iraq, Benghazi, the Eastern European missile pullback, and the atmosphere is comparable to the 1979–80 Carter landscape, in which after three years of observation, the opportunists at last decided to act while the acting was good, from Afghanistan to Central America to Tehran.

Oprah Castigates America for Its Racism, Sniffing that Some Americans Need to Die Out, But Regarding the Zurich Incident, Apologizes Obsequiously to the Swiss

Oprah Winfrey Castigates America for Its Racism, Sniffing that Some Americans Need to Die Out, But Regarding the Zurich Incident, Apologizes Obsequiously to the Swiss for Having Even Mentioned that It Occurred in Switzerland, for even daring mention that it was in their country that she (allegedly) encountered racism.

It would be foolish to not recognize that we have evolved, in that we're we're not still facing the same kind of terrorism against black people en masse as was displayed with the Scottsboro boys

said Oprah Winfrey in her BBC interview, before qualifying that with a "but":

Are there places [in America] where people are still terrorized because of the color of their skin, because of the color of their black skin? Yes.

Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey had an entirely different approach to Switzerland for the Zurich incident of racism, minimizing the whole affair before… apologizing to the Swiss!

Speaking on the red carpet premiere for her new film, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Winfrey said: "I think that incident in Switzerland was just an incident in Switzerland."

"I'm really sorry that it got blown up. I purposely did not mention the name of the store. I'm sorry that I said it was Switzerland," she added.

In other words, a racist occurrence in a foreign country turns out to have just been an incident and, in any case — whatever magnitude the racist occurrence really was — in the same way that Oprah never mentioned the Zurich store name to protect the storeowners, she should — for reasons of diplomacy, presumably, and good manners — have protected the Swiss nation and the Swiss people by not mentioning the country in which it took place…

Meanwhile, Americans she considers racists are the perpetrators of a "kind of terrorism" who need to die…

Double standards, anyone?

Related: Witness the Unbelievable Amount of Racism That Exists Among Conservatives and in the Tea Party

Home-Made Revolver

Le Monde's Serguei aims at those typical idiotic gun-lovin', cowboy-playin' nuts from rural America…

• I'd like to purchase a .357 Magnum

• Sending it over straight away on your 3D printer

If a time traveler arrived in our age from 1960, he would hardly be able to speak the English language without being pilloried

Do leftists think that they own the English language?

asks Benny Huang with regards to the gay "language police".

 The way they lord over it like their personal fiefdom tells me that they do. They introduce new words, ban old ones, and assign new definitions hitherto unknown. What begins as a suggestion soon becomes an imperative—use the words they want you to use, the way they want you to use them, or pay the price.

 Keeping up with the latest jargon can be difficult. Every once in a while, some well-meaning person will use a word that was innocuous just a short time ago only to discover that it’s now inflammatory. If that person doesn’t understand why the old word is now verboten it’s okay to ask, though it isn’t okay to evaluate the reason and decide for himself whether it’s valid. Edicts of the language police are final.

 … If a time traveler arrived in our age from 1960, he would hardly be able to speak without being pilloried. “Negro” is now a derogatory term, though black is still acceptable, if not optimal. Apparently, the United Negro College Fund has not gotten the message. “Negro” is nothing more than the Spanish word for black. So it’s okay to say black, just not in a foreign language. What do these people have against Español?

 “Colored people” is equally unacceptable, though not “people of color” which is all the rage in academia. For the life of me, I can’t explain why one is okay but the other will get you fired. Maybe we should ask the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “People of color” means anyone who isn’t white, which is a strange definition because, last time I checked, white is a color. What are we supposed to call those who don’t fall into this category? People of no color?

No, we call them white. White is an acceptable word, though yellow is not. Don’t ask me why. Yellow people are called Asians even if they’re several generations removed from Asia but white people are called white. We don’t call them Europeans, unless they’re actually from Europe. Red is also unacceptable. We call those people Native Americans. It doesn’t matter if you have roots in this country dating back to the seventeenth century, if you aren’t red you can’t claim to be a Native American.

Get it? Black and white are okay, but red and yellow are racial epithets. I get dizzy trying to keep up.

Who knows what changes the future will bring? In all likelihood, the words we use today will be obsolete in a generation. New words will replace old words and we Gen-Xer’s and Gen-Yer’s will be the clueless old farts who inadvertently say offensive things.

One thing is for sure—when these changes occur, they will all be initiated by those on the political left. It’s their language, we just speak it. English is putty in their hands, to be molded as they please. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just so gay.

Shots All Over Paris, the Capital of One of the Nations Always Berating America for Its Gun Culture; the Élites Blame Some Bitter French Racist Opposed to Blacks and Gays — Shootist Turns Out to Be Muslim

Police officers fanned out in the French capital on Monday in search of the man responsible for a shooting at a newspaper headquarters that left one man gravely wounded and the city on edge 

reports the New York Times' Scott Sayare.

In what may be related episodes, a man opened fire later in the morning outside the headquarters of a major bank and there were reports that an armed individual in the same area had stopped a car and forced its driver to drive him to the Champs-Élysées. 

Related: Witness the Unbelievable Amount of Racism That Exists Among Conservatives and in the Tea Party

A young photographer’s assistant, 23 years old, happened to be standing at the entrance of our daily newspaper Monday morning, 

writes Libération's Annette Lévy-Willard, as she recounts what happened and tries to figure out who was behind the attack. Needless to say, she suggests that it is a bitter, gay-bashing French racist.

when a man armed with a shotgun came through the sliding door, straight off a pleasant street in the Marais.

 

As if this were a horror movie, the gunman, white, wearing a black cap and vest, moved toward the young photographer and shot him at least twice, at near-point blank range. He was struck by blasts in the chest and an arm. 

Our colleague was rushed to a Paris hospital, where he was in the operating room for hours. We hope desperately he will recover.

But why would Libération be the target of such violence? The man-with-a-cap is suspected of being involved in a similar incident on Friday, when a gunman entered the building of the TV news channel BFM, threatened staff members but left without harming anyone. If this is the same man, does he have a grudge against the press? 

Libération is a daily newspaper of the Left founded in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — this year, almost to the day, we are celebrating our 40th anniversary.  Libération is a “liberal” or “progressive” newspaper, as you might say in the United States. Editorially, it is supportive of gay marriage, a recent controversy in France. Traditionally, Libération also takes positions against racism and xenophobia. Earlier this month, the newspaper ran a long interview with Christiane Taubira, France’s black minister of justice, who had promoted the government’s new law permitting same-sex marriage. 

In October, a candidate for the National Front compared Ms. Taubira to a “monkey.” Picking up on the theme, right-wing demonstrators taunted her with a banana. At first, Ms. Taubira maintained a dignified silence about the abuse, but finally, she told Libération: “These racist attacks are attacking the heart of our democracy.” 

So we have two stories here: first, it turns out that gun control countries like France are hardly as safe from gun violence as they claim to be — as they claim to be in their usual tirades against the clueless idiot cowboys over in the lawless United States.

Second, contrary to the (desperate) wishes of the bien-pensant, the perpetrator turns out, as it happens, not to be a typical bitter white Frenchman clinging to his religion (and to his guns). He is a Muslim.


Since Annette Lévy-Willard's tirade came out, indeed, the shootist has been captured; as the BBC reports:

French authorities have named a man taken into custody on suspicion of carrying out recent gun attacks in Paris as Abdelhakim Dekhar

The suspect threatened a TV station last Friday, and attacked a newspaper office and a bank HQ on Monday.

 … The intruder emptied the chamber of his gun in the reception area without firing, saying: "Next time, I will not miss you."

 

The World Turned Upside Down: "Tonight I Am Eating French Fries"

It's the world turned upside down

writes Corine Lesnes in Le Monde and on her blog.

After the failure of the Geneva negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, America's neoconservatives cannot praise France highly enough, while various defenders of the Obama administration are full of resentment againt the United States' "oldest ally" for having railroaded the agreement through its "stubbornness".

 … "Vive la France" wrote John McCain on his Twitter account [while] Rick Grenell sent out the message: "Tonight, I'm eating French fries".

Corine Lesnes:

Après l'échec des négociations de Genève sur le programme nucléaire iranien, samedi 9 novembre, les néoconservateurs américains n'ont pas assez de louanges pour la France, alors que certains défenseurs de l'administration Obama sont remplis d'amertume envers « le plus vieil allié » des Etats-Unis pour avoir fait capoter l'accord par son « intransigeance ».


« Dieu soit loué pour la France », a déclaré le sénateur de Caroline du Sud Lindsey Graham sur CNN. « Les Français sont en train de devenir de très bons leaders sur le Proche-Orient. » Ce n'est pas la première fois que M. Graham, qui fait partie des faucons républicains, prend le parti de la diplomatie française. Fin octobre, lors du dîner annuel de l'ambassade de France à Washington en l'honneur de Raymond Aron, il a exprimé plus de sympathie pour les pays alliés ayant fait l'objet d'écoutes de la NSA que n'en a jamais fait l'administration.

John McCain, l'ancien candidat à la Maison Blanche, a lui aussi rendu hommage à la position française. « La France a eu le courage d'empêcher un très mauvais accord avec l'Iran », a-t-il salué, sur Twitter, avant d'ajouter en français : « Vive la France ! »

Dès la fin de la session à Genève, l'un des pratiquants de la première heure du french bashing de 2002-2003, ex-porte-parole de la délégation américaine lors de la bataille sur l'Irak à l'ONU, Rick Grenell, a lancé un mot d'ordre : « Ce soir, je mange des french fries [des frites]. » Avant de se féliciter : « Contrairement à Obama et Kerry, la France ne veut pas adoucir les six résolutions précédentes sur l'Iran. »

"DEAL DU SIÈCLE" POUR LES IRANIENS ?

 … Le républicain Bob Corker a regretté que l'administration ait « toujours l'air prête à se jeter dans les bras des gens » au risque de « diminuer nos moyens de pression ».

C’est quand même fou, qu’à chaque fois que les faucons ou les « néo-conservateurs » (houlà, quelles expressions à vous faire peur!) (ré)agissent d’une manière ou d’une autre, on doive les décrire par des phrases pleines d’émotion (ébahir « Tous ceux qui ont arpenté les couloirs de l’ONU en 2002-2003″, « s’est pris de passion pour l’Hexagone », etc), suggérant que ce sont des badauds…

Personne ne semble se dire que les néo-conservateurs aient — tout simplement — pu faire (je ne dis même pas « ont fait ») preuve d’intelligence, de bon sens et — surtout — de consistence, et cela tout au long de leur présence sur la scène américaine :

• En 2003, disaient-ils (à l’attention de Chirac), les démocraties doivent s’unir face aux dictatures sanglantes et aux forces de l’obscurantisme ;

• En 2013, disent-ils (à l’attention d’Obama), les démocraties doivent s’unir face aux dictatures sanglantes et aux forces de l’obscurantisme

Rien d’inconsistent (ou d’effrayant) là-dedans…

N’est-ce pas ?

Ach Du Lieber: It Iss (or It Vaz) a Cherman Infashun off Amerika!

Check out the census map in Jessica Jerreat's Daily Mail article (Dankeschön für Instapundit):

• Census data shows heritage of 317 million modern Americans
• Clusters show where immigrants from different nations chose to settle
• Largest ancestry grouping in the nation are of German descent with almost 50 million people
• African American or Black is the second largest grouping with just over 40 million people
• Almost 20 million people claim to have 'American' ancestry for political reasons and because they are unsure of their family's genealogy

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2408591/American-ethnicity-map-shows-melting-pot-ethnicities-make-USA-today.html#ixzz2kFROGNTW

At Omaha Beach, the Brave Still Stands

On the magazine Geo's (a European version of the National Geographic with a green border replacing the yellow one) web site, Jean-Luc Coatalem and Nadège Monschau present a series of Yves Gellie's modern-day photos from key historical places in Europe during the 20th century which are now tourist attractions, including shots from Omaha Beach, Auschwitz, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Gdansk shipyards.

Bloody Omaha was one of five beaches stormed during the D-Day landings in June 1944 (see also Omaha Beach Seen From the Skies and World War II Photos of Normandy in the Summer of 1944, After the D-Day Landings).

The private monument The Brave was the subject of a No Pasarán post almost 10 years ago, within the first months of the blog's existence, and around the time of George W Bush's controversy-laden visit to Normandy for the 60th anniversary commemorations of the landings.

 Read a brief account of the D-Day landings in 1944

If the true history of the West and Islam is being turned upside its head, what other historical “orthodoxies” being peddled around as truth are also false?

The full magnitude of the modern West’s ignorance of its own past recently struck me while rereading some early history books concerning the centuries-long jihad on Europe. The historical narrative being disseminated today simply bears very little resemblance to reality.

Thus writes Raymond Ibrahim (shookhran to Victor Davis Hanson).

Consider some facts for a moment:

A mere decade after the birth of Islam in the 7th century, the jihad burst out of Arabia.  Leaving aside all the thousands of miles of ancient lands and civilizations that were permanently conquered, today casually called the “Islamic world”—including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of India and China—much of Europe was also, at one time or another, conquered by the sword of Islam.

 … for roughly one millennium—punctuated by a Crusader-rebuttal that the modern West is obsessed with demonizing—Islam daily posed an existential threat to Christian Europe and by extension Western civilization.

And therein lies the rub: Today, whether as taught in high school or graduate school, whether as portrayed by Hollywood or the news media, the predominant historic narrative is that Muslims are the historic “victims” of “intolerant” Western Christians.  That’s exactly what a TV personality recently told me live on Fox News.

So here we are, paying the price of being an ahistorical society: A few years after the Islamic strikes of 9/11—merely the latest in the centuries-long, continents-wide jihad on the West—Americans elected a man with a Muslim name and heritage for president, who openly empowers the same ideology that their ancestors lived in mortal fear of, even as they sit by and watch to their future detriment.

Surely the United States’ European forebears—who at one time or another either fought off or were conquered by Islam—must be turning in their graves.

But all this is history, you say? Why rehash it?  Why not let it be and move on, begin a new chapter of mutual tolerance and respect, even if history must be “touched up” a bit?

This would be a somewhat plausible position—if not for the fact that, all around the globe, Muslims are still exhibiting the same imperial impulse and intolerant supremacism that their conquering forbears did.  The only difference is that the Muslim world is currently incapable of defeating the West through a conventional war.


Yet this may not even be necessary.  Thanks to the West’s ignorance of history, Muslims are flooding Europe under the guise of “immigration,” refusing to assimilate, and forming enclaves which in modern parlance are called “enclaves” or “ghettoes” but in Islamic terminology are the ribat—frontier posts where the jihad is waged on the infidel, one way or the other.

All this leads to another, perhaps even more important point: If the true history of the West and Islam is being turned upside its head, what other historical “orthodoxies” being peddled around as truth are also false?

Were the Dark Ages truly benighted because of the “suffocating” forces of Christianity?  Or were these dark ages—which “coincidentally” occurred during the same centuries when jihad was constantly harrying Europe—a product of another suffocating religion?  Was the Spanish Inquisition a reflection of Christian barbarism or was it a reflection of Christian desperation vis-à-vis the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who, while claiming to have converted to Christianity, were practicing taqiyya and living as moles trying to subvert the Christian nation back to Islam?

Don’t expect to get true answers to these and other questions from the makers, guardians, and disseminators of the West’s fabricated epistemology.

Obamacare Wreck Explained: The bureaucrats and the activists thought they were smarter than the markets, and smarter than the people who have actual experience in the private sector

Remember when you’re watching [the Obamacare train wreck] that it pertains to the same people who now argue that they know better than you about what kind of insurance coverage you need.

writes Ed Morrissey (thanks to Instapundit).

 … The White House didn’t heed [warnings] for the same reason they embarked on this project in the first place.  The bureaucrats and the activists thought they were smarter than the markets, and smarter than the people who have actual experience in the private sector.  It’s the same infection that creates the monumentally tone-deaf argument that people should be happy that the government forced them out of existing plans they chose for themselves in order to pay more for coverage that the consumers know they don’t need.  It’s unbridled hubris, and it produced this inevitable Greek tragedy that also doubles as farce.

Tunisia Two Years After its Arab Spring Outbreak of Joy

From the annals of Smart Diplomacy, Plantu produces a cartoon on the Arab Spring in Tunisia…

The ONE Question to Be Asked at EVERY Round of the IRS Scandal Hearings

Glenn Reynolds, God bless 'im, continues Instapundit's coverage of the investigation into the IRS scandal (Update: thanks for the link).

All that is good and proper.

(Related: Witness the Unbelievable Amount of Racism That Exists Among Conservatives and in the Tea Party)

But at this stage of the leftist takeover of America, investigating the scandal, however important, is still secondary to the main issue at hand — having the Tea Parties' applications approved and thus have conservatives fully ready for the election fight of 2014.

Here is a recommendation I would like to make to all Congressmen involved in the conducting of hearings of Treasury officials.

Every hearing should start out with statements and questions along the following lines:

Now, Mrs. Lerner/Mr. Lew (or whoever is being questioned), you — obviously — realize that the whole background to this scandal is the improper politicization of the Internal Revenue Service, do you not? Good. And you realize that what occurred was a blatant display of double standards, do you not? Very well. And you recognize that the process was unfair and inappropriate, don't you, and that there was no reason to keep Such-and-Such-a Tea Party waiting for months, indeed for years? Good.

So: there do not seem to be any disagreements about that…

And so I have the following question for you:

Why is it that Such-and-Such-a Tea Party has not yet indeed received approval of its tax-exempt status?

Why is it that — six months later after the scandal broke — its members are still waiting to receive approval of their status?

Indeed, why was the first thing you did when you returned to your office following the previous hearing — scratch that: following the very first hearing, six months ago — not to gather, of your own volition (!), the application papers of Such-and-Such-a Tea Party — indeed, to gather the applications of all the Tea Parties throughout the nation on hold — mark them approved, and mail them out the same day? (Alright, one day or two later would also have been acceptable…)

Don't you think that would create goodwill among the members of this body? And among the American public?

So, now that you do not seem to have thought of taking this step of your own volition, I have this follow-up question to ask you:

What are you waiting for? When will you send out these approvals?

Maybe you are planning to wait until the 2014 elections are over?… Or maybe until the 2016 elections are over?… Until those elections are won (at least partially) by the Democrat Party?… Maybe you plan on waiting even longer, and sending the approval notices out after November 2020?… Hm?…

Indeed, it is not every committee hearing that should start out with variants on the question "What are you waiting for?" and on the statement "I do not understand why you haven't already taken this step", it is every single Congressman's allotted time that should so start!

I have an idea, Mrs. Lerner/Mr. Lew (whoever), a really wild, extravagant idea just popped into my head: how about when you go into the office tomorrow morning, the first thing you attend to is to have the Tea Party approvals in the mail by tomorrow evening? And when you come to the next round of hearings (or whoever is the next IRS official to appear before this committee), you (or they) can tell us that the issue has been taken care of? How about that? Wouldn't that be a great step forward?

Let 'em hear it again and again — and again.

Make 'em squirm.

Far From Being the Party of No, the Republicans Have Always Proposed a Number of (Common-Sense) Health Care Solutions

Far from being the Party of No, Republicans have had a long history of proposing common-sense, free-market solutions to issues such as health care reform.

(1: make lawsuits for medical malpractice less common — something not accepted by the party of trial lawyers;
2: introduce more competition to the marketplace — something not accepted by the party of bureaucrats.)

Now the Republican Study Committee (RSC) comes out, guns blazing, and proposes an American Health Care Reform Act, which includes these and other solutions:

• Fully repeals President Obama's health care law, eliminating billions in taxes and thousands of pages of unworkable regulations and mandates that are driving up health care costs. 


• Spurs competition to lower health care costs by allowing Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines and enabling small businesses to pool together and get the same buying power as large corporations.


• Reforms medical malpractice laws in a commonsense way that limits trial lawyer fees and non-economic damages while maintaining strong protections for patients.


• Provides tax reform that allows families and individuals to deduct health care costs, just like companies, leveling the playing field and providing all Americans with a standard deduction for health insurance.


• Expands access to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), increasing the amount of pre-tax dollars individuals can deposit into portable savings accounts to be used for health care expenses.


• Safeguards individuals with pre-existing conditions from being discriminated against purchasing health insurance by bolstering state-based high risk pools and extending HIPAA guaranteed availability protections.


• Protects the unborn by ensuring no federal funding of abortions.

The Government Is on Our Side, the System Works, We're Safe

A cartoon from Walt Handelsman, a cartoonist with a bi-partisan sense of humor (video) who seems to be retiring…