…for tonight (just published), then I visited Raven’s place and watched this spot-on, must see video.

Thanks, Raven!

When the French people rejected the cumbersome and repressive EU charter so pressed on them by their former (YAY! Good riddance!) president, socialist, anti-America commie scumbag Jacques Chirac, I must admit that I was surprised — after all, signing off on socialism is the first big step in moving ones freedom in the essential direction of the chopping block, and the sheeple over there had previously seemed ready and willing to go the distance. I mean, when surrender and capitulation are nine tenths of a country’s collective stock in trade….

I had been following the polls on the political contest between Nicholas Sarkozy and his leftist opponent, Ségolène Royal, sort of loosely and noted, again to my surprise, that Sarkozy had been leaving Royal farther and farther behind as the election approached. Given that these polls came from mostly liberal and downright ultra-portside media sources, who normally tend to bias their reporting, in profound ways, to the left, this was a good sign.

And Sarkozy has been elected the new president of France.

Sarkozy campaigned on a platform of sweeping reforms, pledging to dismantle large portions of the social welfare state and to make France competitive on world markets again.
He also pledged to reduce taxes, shrink the size of government and shut down redundant government programs.

Carrying out these reforms will be an uphill battle, but Sarkozy believes that France is ready for a change. The French have lost faith in work, he says. “Reviving the work ethic is at the heart of my program.”

Unlike his predecessor, Sarkozy is not the weasel we would have previously expected to emerge victorious from a French election. He has a refreshing, reality based vision for his people and the spine to bring it to fruition. In fact, he seems more like the kind of politician we need but sadly lack in our own government here in the states(and he’s French!).

Instead of tired platitudes, Sarkozy is best known for sharp, new formulas, and has never shied away from shocking the politically-correct sensibilities of the media and political elites.

When riots erupted in the predominantly Muslim slums around Paris in November 2005, Sarkozy called the youths who were ransacking stores and firebombing cars “scum,” and said the area needed to be “cleaned out with a power hose.”

Relentlessly attacked for those remarks, Sarkozy never retreated and never expressed regret. On the contrary, he still refers to his actions during the riots with pride.

So one begins to wonder: Have the French people finally woke up and smelled the proverbial coffee? Have the implications of having allowed themselves to permit such a huge Muslim population into their country finally registered, as well as the rendered biproducts of a dhimmi government that chose to make excuses for the Muslims who rioted in France eighteen months ago? Have they finally realized the relationships between the present state of their economy and the very realistic, demographics based projections for the same economy a generation down the road, when their children or grandchildren will be coming of age?

And electing a pro-America president to boot.

Skeptic re the French that I am, I wouldn’t bet the farm that they’ll eventually become acceptable as those of most other nationalities, but I will begrudge the French my acknowledgement that they seem to have taken a step in the right (no pun intended) direction. Electing Sarkozy was, in my opinion, the best thing they could have done.

Now we can wait and see what happens….

Columnist Diana West has written an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel

…in just about every account of your American trip — biggish news in Europe — it is prominently mentioned that Guantanamo Bay is prominently high on your list of, well, prominent concerns. Trouble spots. Global things you lose sleep over.

This is, with due respect, bizarre. Iran is going nuclear, Europe is going Islamic, Russia is going off the reservation, China is a fearsome thing, and your big concern is sending what is called a “clear message” to Mr. Bush about Guantanamo Bay, the tropical jail where the United States keeps jihadis on ice — and keeps the rest of the world safer as a result. But that’s not what you say. “An institution like Guantanamo can and should not exist in the longer term,” you told the German news magazine Der Spiegel this week. “Different ways and means must be found for dealing with these prisoners.”

I have a suggestion: How about if we ship all these guys — unflushed Korans and all — to Germany? Maybe “72 Virgins” Airlines would cut us a deal. Then you — Germany — can parole them to Lebanon.

That, of course, is just what you did just before Christmas with Muhammad Ali Hammadi, the convicted Hezbollah killer of Petty Officer Robert Dean Stethem. In case you didn’t know, Mr. Stethem is one of our American heroes, a courageous young Navy diver who became an early casualty of the war on Islamic terror. In 1985, at age 23, he was beaten to an unrecognizable pulp by Hammadi and his gang, shot through the head and dumped onto a Beirut runway during the Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847.

Great article, read on…

So we have Merkel on hand to tell us what to do with the terrorists we have in captivity. It’s pretty sad that the western Euros haven’t yet gotten the message that they are no longer credible enough to tell the United States what to do or how to do it. Their economies are in bad shape and are only worsening, their honesty and dependability as allies have come up wanting between their dubious collective support in the Global War On Terror and the Oil-For-Food scandal and it now seems as though Germany’s been performing the “kiss of shame”, big time, on the Islamofascists in an attempt to get the terrorists to leave them alone.

Fat chance. To al-Qaeda and their colleagues, an infidel is an infidel, period.

The European observers — responsible for monitoring the crossing and ensuring the terms of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement are upheld — fled the area, fearing the situation was getting out of control, the officials said.

So what we’re talking here is fleeing Europeans.

As to those who run, let them run… We don’t need cowards and we need appeasers even less.

Bye bye, Eurofux…

This is the last thing I ever expected to see.

The European Union is threatening to cut off aid to the Palestinians, after the Islamic militant group Hamas won key local elections in the West Bank. The rise of Hamas could have dire consequences for the peace process.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana says the organization could halt tens of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority, if Hamas wins landmark parliamentary elections next month. The Islamic militant group appears headed for victory, after it won municipal elections in the West Bank’s biggest cities.

Europe(particularly the weasel states) has been neither a supporter of Israel nor a detractor of Palestinian terrorism, if anything they have seemed less the former and more the latter.

This is good news, although the response from the Palestinian Authority is predictable,

Such kind of fundamentalist terrorist organization, like Hamas, cannot play a political role,” he said. “As long as they are terrorists, and they are bloody terrorists, it is obvious that they cannot play a political role.”

The Palestinian Authority rejected the criticism, saying it is interference in an “internal Palestinian affair.” Palestinian Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.

“It is not acceptable. People must respect the democratic choice of the Palestinian people,” he said.

And therein lies the essence of the welfare state, in this case the state that is on welfare.

“It is not acceptable.” As with all welfare recipients, the PA believes that what handouts they receive from other governments are an entitlement, that they are free to set the conditions.

They’re probably targeting France with their protests, knowing which side of the croissant their surrender is on.

The French have decided to start up a CNN-like news network.

The French government has given the green light for an international TV news channel to start broadcasting in French by the end of next year, with the aim of spreading the country’s vision to the world.

That easily qualifies for the comic quote of the day.

France’s “vision?”

Hah! More than ten percent unemployment? The large, violently hostile Muslim community they allowed to proliferate on their soil, then agitated by treating them like red headed stepchildren? A healthcare system that managed to help kill off some ten thousand senior citizens during a summer heat spell three years ago? A corrupt government that continued to sell war materials to Saddam Hussein after signing off on a UN resolution forbidding any country from doing just that? A well earned reputation for using immediate, unconditional surrender as their first line of defense?

“France must … be on the front line in the global battle of TV pictures,” a spokesman quoted Chirac as telling the cabinet, which approved the establishment of a company to run the French International News Channel (CFII).

“The aim is to bring France’s values and its vision of the world to everywhere in the world,” he said.

Just what we all need, a continuous international broadcast of French bullshit.

For a more realistic look at French “values and vision,” let’s go talk to GM Roper.

French values and vision, heh heh heh…

The online Opinion Journal reran an 8 November Op-Ed yesterday by Joel Kotkin that gives thoughtful insight into the poverty that has been attributed as a root cause of the Muslim riots in France(we all know what I think about that), and from my read doesn’t indicate any sort of optimism regarding any economic turn for the better for either French Muslims or for France.

The French political response to the continuing riots has focused most on the need for more multicultural “understanding” of, and public spending on, the disenchanted mass in the country’s grim banlieues (suburbs). What has been largely ignored has been the role of France’s economic system in contributing to the current crisis. State-directed capitalism may seem ideal for American admirers such as Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The European Dream,” and others on the left. Yet it is precisely this highly structured and increasingly infracted economic system that has so limited opportunities for immigrants and their children. In a country where short workweeks and early retirement are sacred, there is little emphasis on creating new jobs and even less on grass-roots entrepreneurial activity.

Since the ’70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government). In France and much of Western Europe, the economic system is weighted toward the already employed (the overwhelming majority native-born whites) and the growing mass of retirees. Those ensconced in state and corporate employment enjoy short weeks, early and well-funded retirement and first dibs on the public purse. So although the retirement of large numbers of workers should be opening up new job opportunities, unemployment among the young has been rising: In France, joblessness among workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.

Read the rest of the Op-Ed here.

Are the French in a bad spot, or what?

Their chickens have come home to roost, as the saying goes.

They have spent generations cultivating the perfect socialist society that combines copious unemployment, massive welfare, anti-semitism, anti-Americanism, high level corruption, national cowardice and general-purpose spinelessness and a come-one-come-all Muslim immigration policy that has structured their population to a ratio of more than five followers of Islam to one hundred multi-generation native Frenchman.

On top of that, they have treated their Muslim population to the same sort of pontification to which they treat all other non-Frenchmen; unfortunately, the Africans take things a little more seriously than most folks and have no respect for the property, lives and rights of others, so there are those tragic riots going down over there… The French weasels should learn from this, but I doubt they will.

The awesome Suzanne Fields has great perspective here regarding the political, military and economic failure known as France.

This is a source of renewal of the long-standing anti-America sentiment in France: How dare the cigar-chomping, loudmouthed vulgar American bore, who knows nothing about fine wine, haute cuisine or couturier fashion, ride to the rescue of the land of 300 cheeses? Unable to accept their own weakness, they turned on us. A taker hates a giver. French polls repeatedly show how little the French think of America. Anti-Americanism is the first refuge of the French scoundrel.

“What we mistakenly see as a craven, anti-Semitic, insecure, hypocritical, hysterically anti-American, selfish, overtaxed, culturally exhausted country, bereft of ideas, fearful of its own capitulation to Islam, headed for a demographic cul de sac, corrupted by lame ideologies, clinging to unusually unsupportable entitlements, crippled by a spirit of multilayered bureaucracy,” writes Denis Boyles in his book, “Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese,” is “actually worse than all that.”

What I see in all this, despite all the media attempts to put a human face on the rioting, is a throng of animals who, having nothing, entertain no respect for anything others have worked for. They are merely scum using shallow excuses to go on a rampage, victimizing, as all Muslim terrorists do, innocent people without the means to defend themselves. They demonstrate blatant cowardice, but that figures as it is compatible with French politics.

Mona Charen also weighs in accurately on France.

Through a combination of socialism at home and appeasement abroad, the French believed they had found a viable alternative to, in former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s phrase, “jungle capitalism,” as practiced by you know who. Jacques Chirac was more direct, condemning “ultra liberal Anglo-Saxon” economic policies, while also famously boasting that France would anchor a European pole in a “multipolar” world, with American influence vastly reduced. With 300 French cities in flames, French pretensions lie singed and shriveled.

Unfortunately, the same Islamic terrorism — sorry, “rioting,” is occurring on smaller scales in Belgium and Germany — two of France’s fellow weasel states — so it seems that there is a pattern: Let Islamics take over a few neighborhoods, open a few mosques, etcetera, and as soon as they feel strong enough, they’ll let you know that while your country has national borders, Islam has no borders, Muslims own the world.

Period.

So we have a choice, from the standpoint of immigration. Do we want to emulate France, or would we prefer to learn from their mistakes?

Jewish World Review today features an Op Ed by Sam Schulman that seems to me to be dead on, regarding the failure to pass of the EU constitution and what it means to Israel, Let’s congratulate the national peoples of Europe for their courage.

Don’t be disturbed by the stories from France and the Netherlands that a motley coalition of communists and neo-nazis have defeated the EU constitutional referenda. The restoration of the principle of self-government to the various European nations is the best news for the Jews to come out of Europe since  the acquittal of Dreyfus.

The fact is that the European “superstate” was founded on one idea: nationalities cannot be trusted with a state of their own. A majority of Frenchmen or Dutchmen must not be permitted to decide on their own economic and foreign policy— lest — well, lest the heavens fall. Under the new European constitution, a panel of unelected experts would take all decision-making power away from individual national groups. The Dutch, the Germans, the French, the Czechs would surrender their ability to govern themselves in the interest of something higher. What, exactly, that higher value might be was never explained— but if one opposed it, one was a “xenophobe” or a reactionary.

So the national peoples of Europe were about to surrender their states. Needless to say, the notion that, of all people, the Jews should be allowed alone to have a state in which they could govern themselves and choose their own leaders under the rule of law was an outrage to the “European Idea.” To the extent that the European Union continued its march against national self-determination, Israel’s legitimacy would be eroded.   

I agree. The Weasel States, who carry the most weight in the EU, pretty much call the shots at the U.N., and that unctuous, corrupt, anti-America, anti-Israel bureaucracy has, for as long as I can remember, opposed Israel at every turn, siding with the Palestinians and whatever other Arab countries have had issues with Israel.

Read the rest. 

The rejection of the proposed EU constitution is now official, the link in the preceding post now reaches the updated Wall Street Journal article, Here…