U.N. fiasco

Okay for me, but not for thee. The U.N. champions the rights of women, holding conferences every year - dozens of them it seems at times. They are all for women except for those working for the U.N. Dileep Nair was accused of sexual harassment and the usual U.N. investigation ensued. With one minor catch. Dileep Nair was a U.N. official. So once the investigation was completed with a recommendation of wrondoing, Kofi Annan promptly dismissed the case. Nothing more needed to be done. The tiny glitch then was that the U.S. demanded some accountability and the union that covers U.N. staffers finally stepped up and are threatening a no confidence vote.

Agence France-Presse is reporting that Annan is under pressure to *gasp * resign. Would you know this from our American media?

Annan could not be reached for immediate comment. He is currently in Africa on a mission aimed at ending the long-running civil war in Sudan.

But he faces unprecedented calls to resign over the burgeoning scandal about "oil-for-food," a UN aid scheme that US investigators say allowed Saddam to siphon off billions of dollars.

Bolding mine.
Funny, haven't heard Jimmy Carter pipe up about corruption. And I don't recall the New York Times becoming indignant. Come to think of it, except for this story, has anyone heard of calls for Annan to resign? Does anyone remember Jimmy Carter's indignation over 800,000 dead blacks in Rwanda or indignation and moral outrage over the killing in Sudan? I havent' heard any anger from Clinton either or anyone in his administration.

"'What is wrong with people nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities? This is all to do with the learning culture in schools. It is a consequence of a child-centred education system which tells people they can become pop stars, high court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability.It is a result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically engineered to contradict the lessons of history.

Note from Prince Charles misrepresented by the British Press. Melanie Phillips has the story in context.

Blogger Junkyard dog: "The Press Is Hiding the Slaughterhouses of Fallujah".
Good question.

Good news story of the day

A longtime producer of "money-losing" Nightline is being axed. Well, more accurately, his contract is not being renewed. Same thing. WSJ reporte that the show itself is on a death watch. The longtime producer was the brains behind Koppel reading the names of U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq.

FOX going to Canada

Impartiality from Canada's Globe & Mail in this story headline: "CRTC likely to approve abrasive Fox News"

Fox News, the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right, will come to Canadian ...

AND

He used his much-watched The O'Reilly Factor program as a launching pad for feuds with The Globe and Mail's John Doyle and Heather Mallick, and attacked, variously, Canadian teens (for being "ignorant"), the CRTC (for "banning" Fox), former prime minister Jean Chr�tien (for being "a bum"), The Globe and Mail ("a far-left newspaper"), Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell (for being soft on heroin users) and Canadian health care ("socialist").

So???

UPDATE: No longer a "maybe." It has been approved.

Gagliano, a Gangster??

BIG WAVE in Canada. Link

The allegation that former cabinet minister Alfonso Gagliano was a member of the mafia is “highly serious” and should be treated with caution, Prime Minister Paul Martin said Thursday.

The story first appeared in New York Daily News. Canadian conservatives claim that the U.S. FBI say Gagliano was a member of the Bonanno crime family. It wouldn't surprise anyone, considering the flagrant corruption in Canada's Liberal party.

European Roundup

GERMANY
Does this sound logical to you? A 15-month old baby starved to death because his vegan parents purportedly did not approve of dairy products. They were given suspended sentences of 15 months each. The woman is an unemployed nurse. She did, however, notice he was ill two weeks before he died and gave him rubs with natural oils.

What kind of idiot court believes that story and allows the couple to keep three other children?

NETHERLANDS
More parenting idiocy. Sheeze. Radio Netherlands writer Andy Sennitt worries what four more years of Bush will do to electronic media.

Media fiction

This is why most of us think the Associated Press and the MSM that own them are such incorrigible liars that they will never reform themselves. Mark Sherman, AP writer, on Tom Daschle bidding Democrats goodbye, is a maudlin story with almost no truth.

Daschle is "classy" and "generally unassuming." I guess he missed all those C-SPAN conferences that Daschle held with the press almost daily where he belligerently preened before fawning reporters who dutifully posed with open reporter pads. They were meant as rally-the-troops talks but were reminiscent of Pat Boone singing the stirring lyrics of "Exodus." The voice was shrill and weak and there were no ideas, no great strategies, no focus. Just meanness.

Sherman also fawningly reports this which has got to make you laugh outloud:

Daschle talked about campaign stops where he met people whose problems reminded him of why he first came to Congress 25 years ago, said a Democratic aide. One 75-year-old woman he met wakes up every day at 4:30 a.m. for a job at McDonald's, he said; she needs the extra money because she spends most of her Social Security check on prescription medicines.

I guess that's why Daschle, along with his fellow Democrats, voted to increase the tax on Social Security income, penalizing those senior citizens who elected to supplement their income with part-time jobs, jobs they had to give up or give up even more in social security. At a local nursing home, they lost most of their part-time help, women who worked in the gift shop three mornings a week, two women who worked in the office who helped in filing and in processing paperwork. It was money they needed.

But the Associated Press writer wasn't assigned the task of telling the truth, admitting a humiliating defeat of the Democrat minority leader, nor pull up Lexus-Nexus stories about the registration on the Indian reservations tied directly to the Democrat party, look none too closely at Dasche's chumminess with the Argus Leader or with a friendly judge who attempted to intervene in the election.

All stories kept in our common memory by -- Google and bloggers.

It's a conclusion we have all have been coming to for a while. Janet Daley in the London Telegraph nails it perfectly. The reason for the great divide between Europe and the U.S.

The European Union is creating what it hopes will be a benign oligarchy. Real political power will reside once again within elite circles (as it does already in France) which will conduct their business in the corridors rather than in the assemblies.

Meanwhile, the United States will persevere with the belief, which Europe regards as crass, that giving ordinary people power over their governing class is the only hope for peace and security. Democracy, and what it entails, is not what unites us, Mr Blair. It is what divides us.

Europe doesn't believe in democracy.

It may sound apocalyptic, but I do believe that the democratic experiment in continental Europe, begun just over 200 years or so ago, is coming to a close.

Well worth the read and some thought.

My view is that if democracy has been betrayed in Europe, and I believe it has, it was more through the machinations of the political and intellectual classes than the weak will of people. In that respect, we see the same thing here as Democrats chase their dreams of oligarchy in the U.S. That is the thing that binds John Kerry and the worn intellectuals and shabby mainstream media and their European fans - their base belief that citizens are incapable to self-rule and must be guided by others more worthy of the task. People who are more nuanced and reality grasping.

It's an European conceit that has led to two world wars and one our mainstream media would import here if they could in order to elevate their own position in the scheme. You hear that smugness expressed daily by the Liberal American elites - the journalists, the editorialists, academia - in their contempt for the Red States, disdain for our religion, dismissal of our values, and the daily assault on our beliefs and traditions. You see it in the continued legal assault on the symbols of our religion by the ACLU and the battle against our children, providing our children with abortion on demand without parental notification or input, sex education that includes lessons in sadomasochism and fisting, the endless battle against the Boy Scouts. We turn it off daily: ABC's steamy sex sitcoms, CBS's idea of journalism that embraces fraud and deceit, MTV's sexualization of pre-pubescent teens. These are cultural attacks on our families, our children, our future.

Its realpolitik - politics based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations. These are European terms, along with "Balance of Power" -- the shabby raw power grabs and shady deals that led to two world wars and the decline of Europe. All led, of course, by France, with help from Germany. All facilitated by mass media. When immigrants left Europe, it was because they yearned for self-reliance and freedom. Those who found no inner strength or virtues of hard work and ambition or core belief in themselves, were the ones who returned to Europe, much chastised for their adventure. They are today the Perfect Passives who embrace European socialism. For the rest, the decline in a standard of living, mass immigration with unassimilated millions, and lingering recession with fewer and fewer jobs will bring a well-needed reality check. THEN, the Elites should watch their backs. Carefully.

More dirt from Disney

ABC apologized for steamy (read: tasteless) introduction to Monday night football. These are are the same folks who bring you Disney toys and books, Family Fun magazine, toysmart.com (educational games), family.com and Toon Disney and a lot of other stuff. Maybe you should consider that when buying your Christmas gifts this year for the kids.

This good news story from the BBC on the deline of the U.S. dollar.

Nicolas Sarkozy of France said he and his colleagues were unanimous in their worry that the decline of the dollar would hit Europe's economies by eating into their exports

Sounds good to me.

Lacking cheap under-the-counter smuggled oil from Iraq and the end to billions from construction contracts for palaces and grandiose unneeded airports while the Iraqi people were held captive by a madman and his nutcase sons, poor France and Germany are now suffering horribly. Added to that, the terorists they have cheerfully funded for decades and allowed to immigrate are suddenly not so friendly, and you have the makings of one giant European headache.

Memory Lane

Sometimes it is worth a trip down memory lane. Remember the 1999 reprieves and pardons granted by Bill Clinton to 16 Puerto Rican terrorists for 130 bombings in the late 70s? They killed 6 people and injured seventy. Clinton pardoned them without FBI review, Justice department approval or formal requests by the terorists.

Funny, our media forgot, too.

Newday circulation woes tip of iceberg

Editor & Publisher is spinning the Newsday circulation audit restatement. It was shockingly only 17% 16.9% and the tallies " come close to the range that Tribune Co. estimated in September (daily circ at 480,000-490,000 and Sunday circ between 570,000 and 580,000)."

To their immense credit, Newsday has been upfront on the story, more so than Editor & Publisher, "America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry". What the misstatement represents is

Weekday circulation fraud 97,783 copies
Sunday circulation fraud 97,739 copies

To see the scale, however, these are their revised figures
481,816 daily, 392,649 Saturday and 574,081 Sunday.
(Down from a circulation of 706,954 M-F and 790,187 Sun circulation in 1994. -- see graphic to right of the article.)

But look at the figures the Newspaper Association of America is still showing at their site.

Newsday - - - 574,941 (m)
Houston Chronicle - - - 542,414 (m)
The Dallas Morning News - - - 490,249 (m)
Chicago Sun-Times - - - 468,170 (m)
The Boston Globe - - - 462,850 (m)
San Francisco Chronicle- - - 456,742 (m)
New York Post- - - 438,158 (m)

But outright fraud with drivers backing up to dumpsters, charging distributers for papers they can't sell, delivering to people who cancelled ages ago or people who never wanted the paper, is only part of the problem. One of the biggest scandals in the industry is the definition of "paid circulation" as this 1999 MediaLife story demonstrates. Jack Shafer in Slate wrote a whole article on the Ghost Readers and the convenient 2001 ABC auditing that allows "paid circulation" to include papers discounted by 75%. Thanks to ABC rules, the newspapers can even count newspapers they give away to their employees. Nevertheless, newspapers like USA Today give away their papers at "bulk rates" that are ridiculously discounted and USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review spends hours agonizing over the Wall Street Journal discounted subscription rate that even charges regular subscribers $39 for online subscription. Compare that to the cost of USA freebies at hotels, airports, and restaurants.

And you wonder why they hate Bush when the Justice Department is investigating their circulation figures and when the New York Attorney General is investigating and an attorney for a group of advertisers is alleging racketeering and talking about $600 million in damages?

Joint operating agreements

This is one of the dirty secrets in the newspaper wars -- the Joint Operating Agreements where rival newspapers continue to publish and share advertising revenue. The theory behind it is that the public benefits from having more than one newspaper in a city. The actuality is that the free market determines should what the public wants. They don't, for instance, want the Denver Post, hence a JOA with the Rocky Mountain News. The same with the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The JOA concept is a little flawed. For one, it effectively excudes real competition in advertising rates and ensures a monopoly for the two papers, excluding any rivals from starting up. At worse, it guarantees that neither newspaper is responsive to their audience. Newspaper labor unions, of course, have a vested interest in supporting JOAs in order to maintain jobs. The biggest loser, however, is the public. They dont' get two newspapers: they get one Soviet-style subsidized rag and one they really want to read and support. And the unions throw in free strikes to try to cripple those with whom they aren't ideologically aligned. That's an added inducement to join a JOA, too.

JOAs in 2000. In 2003. And in 2004. In January 2004 the Cincinnati Post announced they would end the cozy Joint Operating Agreement that has made Cincinnati into a ghetto where every policeman is a despised "cop" and there are daily accusations of racism to feed the paranoia of the city captives, culminating in media-induced racial riots on a regular basis.

In Denver, amid much ado, the Rocky Mountain News concluded in an article about their JOA,

Neither newspaper nor owner enjoys a financial advantage as a result of the JOA. Scripps and MediaNews each receive 50 percent of the JOA's profits.

To which we might add, whether they deserved it or not.

Hearst gets faith

Seventeen magazine gets a faith forum in September. Honestly, these people are utterly laughable. I suppose next we can expect them to become patriotic. Nah, that's probably going too far for our lamestream media.

Scams

What a surprise. Saddam Hussein skimmed $21 billion through surcharges, smuggling and kickbacks. No word yet on how much the United Nations, France, Germany and Russia profited from the cozy relationship.

Europe Watch

This is how the EU stifles dissent. In Belgium, the Vlaams Blok party was declared a racist organization by a court because of their opposition to mass immigration and their desire for Flemish identity. The party is the most popular in Flemish Belgium, securing 24.1% of the vote in the last election. Labeled a "Flemish xenophopian and separatist party," the governing coalition members have a "cordon sanitaire" agreement that among themselves that no party will include them in any coalition, an action that effectively excludes the party and their voters from any government despite their success at the polls.

When the EU criticizes and wants to be involved in elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, those governments ought to tell em to go take a leap. In the meantime, the Vlaams Blok party has renamed itself and will continue to gain support at the polls.

Liberal Lefties List

To be a good American lefty list via DANEgerus.

1). You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding.

2). You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th-graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.

3). You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-bidding Americans are more of a threat than U.S. nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese and North Korean communists.

4). You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding.

5). You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical documented changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's.

6) You have to believe that gender roles are artificial but being homosexual is natural.

7). You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand.

There's more.

MSM - ignored, irrelevant, still lying

Liz Halloran, Hartford Courant, on whether the MSM is ignored and irrelevant quotes PressThink's Jay Rosen.

He says the Bush administration has effectively stripped the mainstream press - and in particular the White House press corps - of its relevancy by largely ignoring it and delivering its message through other media.

Previously, 'the White House press and the president needed each other,' Rosen said. 'The relationship was assumed to be of common interest.

It's a rare admission from the MSM and good for GW. It's the only piece of reporting in the piece. The rest is typical, "we are the good guys" and we are the "honest brokers" and Brownstein (Los Angeles Times) claiming "major newspapers very quickly published detailed accounts undermining the [Swift Boat veterans] claims" and so the story should have gone away. Typical of the agenda-driven Brownstein - who works more on behalf of the Democrat party than just about any journalist - to claim that kind of power. Most of us are still very grateful that the Swift Boat Veterans had an opportunity to tell their story, an opporunity that the left-of-Lenin Los Angeles Times would never provide. Undermined? I dont' think so. The book was a bestseller, John O'Neill is still giving interviews, and the consensus seems to be that the Veterans are more credible than say, John Kerry or, say, Ron Brownstein.

That's the problem with journalism's introspection. They might acknowledge their faults in private, although that's not a given, but they sure as heck would never admit their irrelevancy in print. Take such stories for what they are - pep rallies for their dwindling number of readers who still believe such total BS.

Ownership notes: Chicago Tribune owns both the Los Angeles Times and the Hartford Courant.

C.I.A. reform

More reasons for CIA reform from David Brooks as noted in Powerline The CIA's War Against President Bush.

Good essay

"Call it guilt by a lack of disassociation" -- the Democrat party for failing to dissassociate itself from Michael Moore, movie stars and Barney Frank is just one of the reasons the Liberals lost according to Selwyn Duke, writing at the American Thinker.

No, it certainly isn’t your father’s Democratic Party. It has become a soulless organization whose only immutable principle is self-preservation, only source of passion is hatred, and only method for achieving success is opportunism.

Not that the Democrats will pay any heed, mind you. They are busy inventing excuses why they lost this election so they can blame anyone but the lamestream media who drive them.

Barbarians at the gate

Melanie Phillips on the Moral sickness of the world.

The reaction of the free world to Arafat's death, along with the opprobium heaped daily upon his victims in Israel, illustrates the decadence that now rewards evil and punishes those whom it terrorises. It is a horrifying indication of a world that has simply lost its fundamental understanding of right and wrong.

She is such a good writer.

Perhaps because we have forgotten past battles and sacrifices for our civilizations we are so suprised that these are battles we must fight again and again, not every generation, but every few generations. Barbarians always wait at the gates. They amass to pillage and destroy for no reason other than their strength in numbers and their love of battle, their embrace of destruction. Whether in the newsroom or the Disney factory, Hollywood or the Elite salons of pseudo-intellectuals, the decayed academia of the Universities or the anti-cultural elites ghettoed in the Northeast and Pacific states, they assault us daily. Anti-western, anti-rational, anti-American, anti-everything: our families, our church, our homes, our children, our values, our hopes, our dreams. They hold everything we believe in contempt. You might ask for what reason, but they have no answers, no grand plans, no ideals they cherish, no substitute culture to propose. They are Visigoths. They bring destruction. That's what Barbarians do.

1st Lt. Joshua Palmer

If you read only one posting this Veteran's Day, go to Hugh Hewitt to read about 1st Lt. Joshua Palmer who died April 8, 2004 in Fallujah, Iraq.

Quivering Lip

The British stiff upper lip, alas, is a thing of the past, as Theodore Dalrymple notes.

More *sigh* Democrat soul searching

This is the self-delusion of the Democrats as a consultant tells them what they should do to win elections. It comes down to pretending to be all the things they aren't. But the best part is their "Closing the God Gap."

It simply means that, as Bill Clinton did, we should show respect for the central role religion plays in the lives of the majority of Americans.

They actually believe that Bill Clinton's lip service to religion, showing up for church service with a five-pound Bible and returning on Easter to the Oval Office to be serviced by an intern is showing respect for religion. Democrats and their consultants actually believe we are so stupid we think their sudden pretense of tolerance toward average Americans means anything. Democrats allow their fringe groups to victimize the Boy Scouts, throwing our children out of schools and public buildings and parks, denying them funding because of their Christian beliefs, in effect persecuting them, and they actually hire twits to tell them that there's a God Gap.

Democrats embrace the NAACP who slander all Americans with outrageous charges and declare anyone who disagrees with them racist. Democrats encourage and embrace the ACLU as it seeks to erase any evidence of God from the public sphere to replace it with what? Socialism? Nihilism? There's isn't a God Gap. The Democrats are suffering from a morality deficit. They think lack of decency can be cosmetically covered up with a grand politicial plan devised by some paid political consultant. At least the consultants tell em that's so. But, then, they've been listening too those consultants too long already.

R.l.P. (Roast in Purgatory), you bloody terrorist

Yasser Arafat, the United Nation's Personal Terrorist, died at age 75. That's roughly 50 years longer than most of the men he murdered or he ordered to be killed to maintain leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They were not good men, just rivals, wannabe terrorists in their own right, men like him, men who would kill as easily as he would. Only Arafat prevailed, with much assistance from his European salon friends. He was the Designated Terrorist much beloved by Internationalists who wish to ride roughshod over the laws created by democratically elected representatives while totally ignoring any wishes of the ruled. Arafat was publicly embraced by a fawning Nobel Peace committee, rewarded recognition by the U.N. in his capacity as a Permanent Observer. European governments, mostly Old Europe, used the pretext of the PLO cause to skim money from their own coffers and their own citizens, billions to wage a proxy war with the U.S., billions more padding the bank accounts of European politicians.

Some future time historians will write of the fall of the Old Europe and they will start the narrative in the 1960s when Europe embraced the terrorist strategy as a way to circumvent international laws and demonstrate how European politics, once again, trumps human decency. Making use of German terrorists, providing refuge for celebrity terrorists like the Jackal, the wholly amoral Europeans allowed the extranational terrorists to promote Internationalism that was no different than the dreams of the Comintern albeit without the Russian language, no less lethal than any of the European isms that are the filth of the 20th century. Fascism, Communism, Socialism. The Isms that killed millions upon millions of their own as they struggled for power against each other at least until the 1960s when they moved the battleground elsewhere for their amusement and lucrative armaments deals, propping up their governments with illicit deals with every despot from Africa to Asia.

The New York Times embraced Arafat. He was, as they called him, a Romantic Revolutionary. Never mind the innocents he killed, the families at pizza parlors, the people in those buses, the children and adults permanently maimed by bomb fragments tainted by rat poison. The people who did not die but were crippled or blinded, hideously scarred. Nevermind the pitiful plight of Palestinians raised with hatred instead of hope, carefully nurtured on hatred like Pol Pot's tiny murderous brigades. Nevermind Palestinian children encouraged to throw rocks at guns and strap bombs to their young bodies. Nevermind the women deprived of the stability of homes and the luxury of having their children grow to adulthood. They were all fodder for political folly, like a generation of German youth who had been sacrificed to delusions of power and grosser immorality.

Yasser Arafat was a monster embraced by evil men, including most of what we think of as the mainstream media in this country and most of the world press. May he rot in hell. And may those who help obscure his past find the same hell themselves.

For a much more eloquent denounciation that nails this miserable sod, see Max Boot's "How Arafat Got Away With It."

Requiem for a party

I missed this Economist article written two days after the U.S. election.

The Democrats certainly need to engage in a vigorous debate about the future of a party that has been in relentless decline for the past 50 years. A machine that once enjoyed a huge advantage in voter registration is almost at parity with Republicans; a party that once lorded it over Capitol Hill is now a minority in both houses of Congress, as well as being locked out of the White House. Worse, the defection of the white working class to the Republicans has left behind an awkward alliance of the upscale and the downscale - of educated elites (with a few billionaires thrown in) and ethnic minorities.

That's certainly blunt. I doubt most Democrats and no one in our Vichy Old Media can bring themselves to be so honest. The Economist is rooting for Hillary Clinton but only because, as the subtitle says, "Hillary may not be the best person to put her party together again. But she is better than the rabid left."

In my view, if the Democrat party wants to purge the rabid Left from their ranks, they're gonna have to start with the Vichy Old Media.

Election Monitors

What did those international election observers think of American elections? (Second from the bottom) Der Spiegel says "not bad, but still not up to par with Venezuela and not even as good as Serbia." I guess because Venezuela had Jimmah Carter to watch em.

A more realistic view of the Venezuelan elections can be found at the American Thinker.

Tim Blair: Enjoy the Goodness

Tim Blair and Goodness that would flow if Kerry had been elected.

Dead French parrot

The headline on this Independent story is nuanced: "Arafat is alive but condition is 'very complex', say French" Translation: We are still looking for the Swiss bank account number.

Years ago there was a running Saturday Night Live joke (when SNL was actually funny) about Franco still being dead. If they were still funny they would have an Arafat Still Alive segment with John Cleese as a desperate French politician trying to revive the dead long enough to convince a Swiss banker who slams the corpse against a counter insisting,

'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased
to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft
of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be
pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off
the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run
down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

Old terrorists never die, apparently, but they do fall of their perches.

See Romantic Revolutionary

Sissy Leftists

Hysteria from The Guardian on our election results. Do you get the feeling that these people dress in purple and have nervous dispositions and shriek a lot in falsetto voices?

The drafters of the constitution understood that the tyranny of the majority could be more fearsome and destructive than the rule of an autocratic despot. Now, the majority rules, absolutely. There is no room for the dignity of those who fought on the other side.

It's got to be an excess of hormones. Atlantic Blog wonders about the hysterical intellectuals. Personally, I think the problem is the hormones and lack of self discipline. It is always possible, though, that this kind of thinking is what really worries our Lefty friends.

As for our opponents on these shores, some of them really make you understand the word disloyal. When you start rooting for America's enemies, you have a screw loose. As much as I disagree with Liberals and Leftists, I wouldn't wish for the death of American soldiers to bolster my resentments nor would I cheer America's enemies on. He may be, in his own mind, magnanimous, but it is only because his side lost the election that he was forced to consider his position. Where did so many people who think of themselves as magnanimous and free spirited learn to hate so much?

Over my dead body

The French are, apparently, calling for closer relations with the U.S., as French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier "told Americans" in a letter in the Wall Street Journal, according to this Expatica article.

The problem is France is NOT a friend of the United States. The French are pathologically self-centered and terminally corrupt and any friendship would be to their advantage. In many ways, it is the Cold War all over again. Whenever the French offer to deal, it is to their advantage and to our ultimate pain. The French influence on the United Nations has resulted in a UN Human Rights Commission with China, Libya, and the Sudan, a Food for Oil program that enriched Europe at the expense of Iraqi lives, and a distressing rise in worldwide corruption, and 800,000 dead Rwandans. Now they have this brilliant idea of "a high-level group of independent figures from both sides to explore ways to deepen political cooperation across the Atlantic." Read: leftwing Democrats, leftwing American academics, and leftwing American business leaders, no doubt led by an equally flawed Bill Clinton or a halfwitted cracker like Jimmy Carter. Meanwhile France will continue to supply nuclear weapons to every crackpot in the world as they urge us to consider closer relations. Yeah. Right.

Newspaper criculation scandals continue

One of the big reasons Old Media hates, absolutely hates, GW Bush is the Federal investigation of some Old Media favorite corporations - Time Warner, for example, as well as Enron and WorldCom, all highflyers during the Clinton years of misstated earnings and collusion with their auditing firms, as well as union investments in dubious corporations. Old Media has another reason to grit their teeth over a Federal investigation of their newspaper circulation figures as well.

On Sunday, Newsday (Chicago Tribune-owned, acquired when they bought the Los Angeles Times) fired their "seventh circulation employee." These are the people who demand - I SAY DEMAND - accountability from everyone else, with the exception of any Liberal, leftwing, or Liberal-leftwing-supporting group, company, or individual. And they have cheated their advertisers for years as well as deceiving the public on their success.

Hopefully, the Bush administration will also call for a complete investigation into Neilsen ratings for television.

Circulation fraud stories, here and here.

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn is simply brilliant. Writing in the London Telegraph on our elections, he has this wonderful insight:

In affirming the traditional definition of marriage in 11 state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive enlightened Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not expressing their "gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the Kelly route and have their betters tell them what they can think. They're not going to have marriage redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a couple of activist mayors. That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies marching in lockstep to the gay lynching, just freeborn citizens asserting their right to dissent from today's established church - the stifling coercive theology of political correctness enforced by a secular episcopate.

Every word is worth needlepointing.

Common Folk

For sheer distortion of reality, the New York Times is mandatory reading daily, but this Thomas Frank piece is a winner.

"Democrats", he intones in the title, "forgot the common folk." Not - the media elites forgot the common folk. Frank likes to pretend that the New York Times and other leftist media who drive the Democrat party, and have for years, are bystanders instead of architects that are driving the Democrat party, as they have newspapers, to near destruction.

Frank has this wonderful advice (mind you, advice from major media that has thus far managed to destroy their own credibility and the credibility of the Democrat Party):

Yet this would have been a perfect year to give the Republicans a Trumanesque spanking for the many corporate scandals that they have countenanced and, in some ways, enabled. Taking such a stand would also have provided Democrats with a way to address and maybe even defeat the angry populism that informs the "values" issues while simultaneously mobilizing their base.

Excuuuuuuse me, but weren't the corporations that grew spectactularly and completely unregulated and without scrunity, under the Clinton watch?? And wasn't the SEC under Clinton responsible for the misstatement of earnings, the corruption and collusion of auditing firms in this fraud? And wasn't it the SEC under Bush who found this fraud and has pursued the criminals?

Don't count on the New York Times for truth, folks. They are in the Spin business - trying daily to find some excuse - any - that could be used to rally the party they own and control and direct.

Election Perspective

Count on Tim Blair for perspective on our election:

• Number of people who voted for Bush: 59,651,262
• Number of people who live in Britain: 59,600,000
- From Quentin George, one of his readers.

Tim Blair did a little research of his own, too, and a reader is starting a toothbrush drive for the British to demonstrate American compassion.

Various bloggers are posting world reaction to our election. Since most of the world also supports the U.N. and their idea of human dignity with Sudan, China, and Libya on the the Human Rights Commission, you can predict the reaction. Iberian Notes translates from a Spanish bulletin board. No Watermelons (crediting The Corner) has a unsigned Mirror item. What is instructive, though, is all the venom and hatred toward the U.S. is a media creation, shared by, if not generated, by our own media foremost. Our media just hide it most of the time, disguising their hatred of the United States by substituting an anti-war, anti-Bush screed 24/7. It would be more worrisome except that the decline in the influence of American media makes it entertaining to watch their self destruction as they are engulfed in circulation scandals and their pet Stepford journalists are Fisked regularly and satisfyingly by the Blogosphere.

And, let's face it, the U.S. is performing a public service of sorts. The kind of people the international and American media appeal to would be screaming for death to Jews if we weren't handy substitutes for their venom. It's that kind of mentality - mindless hatred - the kind that 60 years ago energized the European continent into the last world war, egging on the bullies who need to hate to feel anything.

Tell us Bubba

For a lecture on morality and values, there's always Bill Clinton, explaining to the Financial Times why the Democrats lost the election.

John Kerry lost the election because Democrats were seen in middle America as “two-dimensional aliens”, Bill Clinton said on Friday.

The party had been “crazy” not to engage voters in the American heartland in a conversation about religion and morality, the former president and party favourite said.

Only a Leftwing publication would think to ask a disgraced and impeached former U.S. President about morals. And only a shameless twit like Clinton who enjoyed BJs from a 21-year-old girl in the Oval Office while talking on the phone would respond.

Wanna know the problem with the Democrat party? You just read it.