the word 'impunity' is defined at Dictionary.com as exemption from punishment or from detrimental effects or actions.

Eugene Robinson , a WaPo columnist, has written this week about Sir Salman Rushdie in a column entitled "Sir Salman vs. the bard of espionage".

In the course of making his points about Rushdie and his work, Robinson quotes a published letter from David Cornwell, a.k.a. John LeCarre of spy novel fame, vis:

"... there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity."

As so often with leftists like Cornwell, the real point is avoided.  Robinson's column is about Salman Rushdie, who lives even today with a decades-old hit contract on him courtesy of radical Islam.  Cornwell, and Robinson by his own admission of agreement with Cornwell's "reasonable point" (Robinson's own words in the column), makes no effort to except or even mention the bloodthirsty consequences against which, we presume, Rushdie and many others have no 'impunity' in Cornwell's world.

In the world I inhabit, I speak my mind in public and presume impunity against consequences which are illegal;  I shouldn't be shot, beaten, assaulted, beheaded or have my property destroyed as a consequence of having 'insulted' anyone or anything.  This is fundamental human rights law, codified in the Ten Commandments and the Code of Hammurabi and every other law from antiquity right up to the present, in every civilization known.  It has always been, and is, and always will be, wrong and illegal to murder people because you don't like what they said-- OR FOR ANY OTHER REASON.

Cornwell straddled the razor blade here by first saying he deplored Rushdie's persecution.... "like any decent person"...   BUT. 

There's the B word, as leftists always use it, as if it's some sort of inoculation against responsibility for the words that come right after it.  But sensible and decent people know that it isn't.  If Cornwell had specifically exempted some actions, or even offered a couple of examples of the kind of consequences for which impunity is not appropriate in his view, then I would not have written about it.

But he didn't.  And now he's responsible for having clearly implied that on some level Rushdie, and by extension anyone, deserves whatever happens after insulting 'great religions'.

Like both of my readers, I'm thinking now of Christopher Hitchens.  :-) 

David Cornwell, sadly, does not surprise with these views.  The trouble is, the idea he expressed here, quoted in Robinson's column, is then given approbation by Robinson himself, including this- "it's basically the same point I made about those Danish cartoons that ridiculed the prophet Mohammad, in a stunt whose only purpose was provocation".

The question 'provocation to what?' goes unasked and unanswered, and in this Robinson assumes responsibility for having approved of Islamic rage if it is properly 'provoked'.

He might differ, but he is in the same position as Cornwell; having made no specific exemption for violence while implicitly discussing the Rushdie fatwa, having failed to offer any examples of the kind of consequences of which he speaks, he cannot claim any moral high ground here.  He is saying "insult a great religion and you deserve what you get."

And here is yet another small piece of evidence that the approval of and participation in diabolical acts against humanity by the 1930's German intelligentsia was not a fluke.  High intellectual achievement may well be a source of pride, but it is not welded to moral goodness and decency.  The one can exist and thrive without the other, and often does.  It is usually a matter of small lines erased, small bits of ground lost gradually over long periods of time.  Often the intelligentsia is horrified to 'discover' what they have become, too late to prevent tragedy and too late to speak against it with any moral authority. 

I can only hope the modern western media intelligentsia will one day be horrified at their support of fundamentalist Islam's crimes, just as they should be over the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the Stalin gulags and the many other examples of mass murder by governments and parties that enjoyed widespread intellectual and media support in the west.

But I won't hold my breath.

As often as I've seen the Wolfowitz affair mischaracterized in the press, this example from AP (on yahoo news today) is about the most concise, compelling and inaccurate as can be found.

Remember these things when you read it:

Wolfowitz was dating the woman prior to his being chosen for the World Bank post. 

He knew that he was entering into a conflict of interest regarding career decisions for her, so he made every effort to recuse himself from those decisions.  The Board of Ethics at the World Bank REFUSED HIS REQUEST to recuse himself.  They FORCED him to participate in those decisions.

He also had NO input into the 'hefty raise' this story mentions.  NONE.  It was the State Department who decided her new salary.  Wolfowitz suggested that they hire her, but that was the end of his interaction with them.

It is clear from these facts that the World Bank had decided to trap him in this ethics quandary and then use it to rid themselves of him.  He was attempting to reform their corrupt system of handing out (and pocketing) money, and they were unhappy with that notion.

And when Wolfowitz finally resigned that post, he carried with him a World Bank document which had been written in order to clear him of these ethics charges and preserve his reputation.  The board happily signed off on this, agreeing that he had done nothing wrong.  He demanded that document as a condition of his resignation, and they gave it, proving that their real goal was only to get rid of him in whatever way they could manage it.

Is any of this clear to the readers of this AP story?  Or does it leave the readers with the ominous sense of crimes hushed up, of wrongs covered and forgotten, of guilt unpunished......?

We refute, you decide.

UPDATE--  The responsible party for the report mentioned below is of course John Podesta, not Leon Panetta as I've carelessly said below.  Corrections are now made.

D'OH!

/end update

With interest I've been following the public discussion of the report that Leon Panetta John Podesta ramrodded through over at the Center for American Progress (the hard left thinktank that decided to take the first swipe at talk radio for this election period).

Most news outlets treat it as if it was 'real', that is to say the report is coincidental and not designed to prop up a preexisting campaign drive among liberal pols to destroy conservative talkradio.

For example, they never mention that the report was essentially driven by Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, and they never even SPECULATE that Mr. Panetta Podesta might still be trying to do Hillary a favor.

It is obvious, though, to anyone with a few brain cells to rub together.

I waded through the text of that report as it appears on the CAP website, and in particular I examined their supposed explanation of the inconvenient fact that radio broadcasters, when free to do so, tend to put on programs that will attract the largest audiences. 

That is, after all, how broadcasters make money.  The bigger the audience, the bigger the revenue. 

People with hundreds of millions of dollars invested in radio stations, and with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual payrolls and electric bills and taxes to pay, are interested in only one thing; maximizing revenue. 

So what is Podesta's angle?  How does he try to convince us that the overwhelming success of talkradio is NOT due to the fact that the largest audiences like it the most?  How do they explain that conservative talkradio is NOT market driven?

Essentially, they say it's a regulatory problem.   

"... the result of multiple structural problems in the US regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting,  and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management."

They dream of radio stations all owned by representatives of various different races, and of talk shows all about city council motions and trash pickup and school districts.

It's not that you can't find those things on the air now...  it's just that NOBODY LISTENS TO THEM.  

Besides, their vision of radio is already on the air--  it's called NPR.

AND NOBODY LISTENS.

So truthfully, they have not even tried to prove that simple market demand is NOT the reason that conservative talkradio dominates the airwaves.  They've CLAIMED to have proved it, but they really didn't even bring it up.  Their argument is that there are not enough rules and requirements in place that would effectively limit conservative talkradio, and THAT's why it is so prevalent. 

The 'rules and requirements' they're drooling over are no more than rules to either cause conservative talkradio to be a financial risk for station owners (by compelling them to broadcast equal amounts of liberal talk which nobody will listen to and no advertisers will subsidize) or to force stations into ownership by minority groups who will ignore the financial gains of conservative talkradio because they are politically motivated against it.

The public already tells us what it wants, every day, by making these shows highly rated.

Democrats claiming to act "for the good of the public" are really only acting for their own good, and it's painfully obvious.  Freedom of speech, as usual, only goes one way when you're a liberal.

Okay, so it's all over the web and the radio now that Senator Inhofe (R. Okl) says he overheard Senators Clinton and Boxer discussing the need for legislation to curb conservative talkradio.

It was a chat in an elevator, he says. 

Now they both say that he's lying.  Well, not in those terms, but they say the conversation never happened, and that's the same thing.

So let's go over this--

Clinton and Boxer are both liberal Dems, and there is every reason to believe that they feel this way about talkradio and that they would like nothing better than a legislative 'solution' to their problem.

Inhofe is a conservative, and from this fairy tale he stands to benefit---  how?  Beats me. 

This has all the appearance of the real thing, folks.  I would be astonished if Clinton and Boxer were NOT discussing making laws against conservative talkradio.

Remember, the report from the liberal thinktank that came out earlier this week, claiming that talkradio is NOT market driven  (it is, of course) and recommending laws to limit conservative programming?  Well, the architect of that report is John Podesta, the leader of that thinktank-- and of course the White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton. 

Bottom line, the odds favor Inhofe's version...  and it is sad but not surprising that those two Senators would call him a liar.

I remember well the SNL sketch of 1991 in which their General Schwarzkopf figure takes questions from the press. 

They asked for details of troop movements and attack plans.  Schwarzkopf seemed a bit taken aback, and said he couldn't reveal specifics like that, but each question became more and more strident and focused on details, and the crowd slowly began to laugh.

"General, what time will you attack, where will it be, and with how many men and tanks?"

"Um, we can't reveal specifics of battle plans.  Next question."

"General, what direction will your main thrust be, and will you be using any decoy movements to fool the enemy?"

"um, we can't--"  and so forth.  Funny.  Because the media were, back then, beginning to get a reputation for wanting to know everything and broadcast it.  It was written off as nosiness and oneupsmanship back then.  Nobody dreamed the media would have a purposeful desire to cause problems for our military in wartime.

These days, it just flat isn't funny.  Scroll down to bottom and look at the column on the right.  It was posted on the BBC website for several hours before they were obliged to protect their reputations by taking it down.

UPDATEUPDATEUPDATE---

New info...  this is even better!  :-)  HEhehehehHEHEHh...  14%!!!

********************************************

I love this. 

Congress was rated abysmally right before the handover, with the Republican-led remnants getting a dull 21% rating in December 2006.  By February, the new congress had swelled to an inspiring 34% approval (tongue firmly in cheek), but that 'honeymoon' is now over.  They're back down to 24% and dropping like guano to the cave floor.

Democrats approve at a 29% rate, with Republicans at 23%.  In other words, even their own majority party thinks they're a bunch of walking corpses.

I believe the Republicans got scared and quit talking and acting like conservatives, and that's why they lost last fall.  The large scale Republican support for this amnesty bill is proving me right, I think.  We had Republicans in congress, but we did not, for the most part, have conservatives.  As we've always said, elections are winnable by conservatives who proudly talk the talk and walk the walk, but today it seems there are few who are willing.

But what explains the 29% support for congress from the liberal side? 

To me, it seems they're not being liberal ENOUGH to keep their own side happy.  Our soldiers are still in Iraq, there still isn't nationalized health care or windfall profits taxes on oil or federal approval of gay marriage or a prison term for the war criminal Bush or a ban on SUVs or any other wacko leftist thing they want so badly.

As little sympathy as I have for modern liberals, I must yet acknowledge that it's gotta be stressful to be one these days.  If they actually say and do what their core voters want, they'll never win another election.  But if they ignore the core, they pay a real price too. 

The 1970's was for me a time in which (my dad will verify this) I read so much junk that I hardly knew what was going on around me.  Once I started a good novel, I couldn't stop.  I remember a late night drive across Texas, 500 miles or so, in which I squeezed my whole body down into the footwell of the passenger side of Dad's pickup so I could read by the dashboard lights down there and would not disturb his night vision.

But much of what I know of the world came from the research and efforts at realism which the best novelists always used.   In my later travels I always found that the 'backgrounder stuff' in these novels was accurate and well done, and that the feeling they were going for about a particular place in the world was spot-on.

I gulped down the Travis McGee series by MacDonald, every spy novel I could find by anyone at all, and for a while Robert Ludlum.

I still enjoy novels, but find them somewhat less interesting these days than real life.

But one thing I never forgot, even though the title escapes me, is a novel with a backpage warning.  The year was 1976, and the backpage (nominally dealing with the reality behind its plot) bleakly asserted that within a few years the world would be running out of oil and we'd all die in the cold, in the dark.  I think the book was Alistair MacLean, but I could be wrong.  But that back page I'll never forget.

It was an environmental panic-button back then, this 'new ice age' that was rapidly approaching.  Global temps had cooled, you see, from the '40's through the '70's.

The scientists were clearly wrong about the coming ice age.  They're probably wrong about the coming heat age, as it were.  And apparently, they were wrong about us running out of oil as well.

There are some scientists who believe the earth actually produces oil, that it isn't a limited resource in the sense that 'dinosaur juice'  would be.  And some fields have shown a tendency, after having been ostensibly emptied, to refill themselves. 

I do not know anything like enough to be a judge of this, but I do know that discoveries of extra oil, new sources, in fairly large amounts, almost always follow closely behind some lefty prediction that we're going to run out of oil.  And the real bonus here is that the Jack Field has been discovered only a couple of hundred miles offshore of Texas and Louisiana.   

It's American oil! 

Enough, they think, to add 50% to the known reserves of American production.  That's huge.

And it may be just the beginning.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going out to the air-conditioned SUV and heading for the practice range so I can improve my golf swing.  :-)  I'll be sure to drink a toast to American excess at the bar later.... 

Lindsey Graham, explaining his support of the immigration bill with George Steponallofus last weekend--

"to my republican colleagues, this is the best deal we're ever gonna get"

No facts offered to support this, just a phony looking grin.  Graham doesn't offer to explain why this is our last best chance at a good bill, and of course it ISN"T.

"What we've done here is, Republicans and Democrats have sat down to solve a problem that no one party is gonna solve by itself"

Implying that opponents of the bill have, um, insisted that only one party should solve it?  What is he saying here?  Whatever it is, it isn't relevant to the specifics of the bill itself, which is the real reason it has opposition.  In BOTH parties.

When Graham was asked whether Jim deMint, who says it's a mess of a bill that puts amnesty before security, is more in touch with South Carolina voters than Graham is--

"I think voters know that 12 million people are here, and they aren't gonna be wished away.  This bill does not forgive 12 million people, it gets 12 million people under the law."

Amnesty is defined as forgiveness of crime.  If the standard, normal punishment for a crime is withheld and a token slap given in its place, the crime has been forgiven.  And if the standard punishment is to be sent back where you came from, then NOT sending them back is equal to forgiving them.  That's amnesty. 

The word has the same root as "amnesia", and it means the same thing; forgetting what they did.

"Getting them under the law", at present, would mean under MEXICAN law, in MEXICO.  This bill removes that possibility, and is therefore forgiveness, otherwise known as Grahamnesty.

"people... are being exploited every day, abused at the work site"

Implying that opponents of the bill are happy that some illegal alien workers are abused and want it to continue.  Is that how you feel?  Me neither.  A pointless insult.

"it is a huge mistake for this country to take this bill down without a viable substitute"

But Senator Grahamnesty, what is keeping you from coming up with a viable substitute?  Not the opponents of the bill, that's for sure... we've been BEGGING the government for YEARS to come up with a good bill on immigration.  And this is not it.

And get a load of this fast talking jag--

"if we fail here who is to follow?  The 12 million become 20 million...  we'll never have merit based immigration if you don't deal with the whole issue including the 12 million.  You'll never have a temporary worker program unless we have a comprehensive bipartisan solution.. everyone's givin', everyone's takin..  to walk away from this and let it fail means not only does the borders continue to be broken and 12 million becomes 20 million...  it means this country can't govern itself...  we're at what 27% this congress?   my question is who the hell is 27%?   how could you like what you see in Washington?  how could you be favorable to your government when every hard problem is demonized?"

There's so much scheiss here, I feel like a Munich mushroom. 

Senator, I don't care about words like 'comprehensive' and 'bipartisan'.  I don't care about compromise, or givin or takin.  The 12 will only become 20 if you DON"T SEAL THE BORDERS (and they won't).  And failure to pass this bill does not, as far as I can see, prevent anyone at any time from writing a BETTER BILL AND PASSING IT. 

Oh, and if failure to pass this bill is equivalent to failure to govern, then I'm all for it.  Gimme chaos and anarchy anytime, as opposed to bills written in secret and brought up for votes without debates.  Lindsey bragged that he worked on this bill for two months, but didn't mention that it was a secret session or that La Raza ("the Race") was invited to have input there, but the public wasn't. 

And Graham got even worse--

  what is the plan if we fail?  what do we do with the 12 million?   how do we come together as a country and solve the problem of 12 million unregulated, broken borders, nonregulated immigration policy for the future...this really is about can we govern or are we gonna let the union halls and talkradio take over this debate and walk away saying we can't deal with this issue now.. if we can't deal with it now, when does the later come?"

Breathless, semi-coherent, desperate.  Shamefully inadequate.

And there it is again.  Talkradio.  Senator Grahamnesty and Senator Lott seem to think that talkradio is something other than millions of people gathering together in a public forum to complain that our representatives are not representing us in Washington.  Sadly for them, that's what it is.

And again, there is the notion that 'if we can't deal with this issue now', then dig the grave, jump in the coffin and lower away, cuz it's all over, and we'll never ever ever EVER ever ever again be able to do this.

In summary, Graham's reasons--

If not now, then (implicitly) never.

We'll never get a better deal than this.

Some workers are abused and exploited.

This bill is bipartisan.

It's a mistake to defeat this bill without a good substitute.

It's comprehensive.

It's a compromise, everyone's givin' and takin'.

If we can't pass this bill, it means the country can't govern itself.

And the one I haven't quoted, which came immediately after this, was better than any of them--

"Remember ' no catholics, no jews, irish need not apply'?  I don't want this country to go back to that."

In other words, if you oppose this bill, YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF STINKIN' RACISTS.

AARGH!!

I'm aware that writing this may some day get me arrested, but I can't help myself.  I am long past the decision point on this, and I hereby declare that any politician who calls me a racist at a distance of ten feet or less is gonna lose a couple of teeth over it. 

ESPECIALLY a Republican politician.

I"m sick and tired of politicians in my own party telling me that I"m a racist, that I don't want what's right for America, that I'm a zombie waiting for instructions from some troublemaking talkradio host.  And not only does that include President Bush, it STARTS with him.  I've defended the man in some intense conversations at home and abroad (try speaking for Bush in Europe... I've DONE it), I've voted for him several times...  and he repays me by telling me I don't want what's good for America?  That just shocked me to the core.  Made me FURIOUS.

I've been voting for more than two decades now, and I generally vote for people who claim or imply that they hold principles similar to my own, who care about the things I care about, who stand for and speak for decency and morality and common sense and wisdom and conservatism.  Lindsey Graham is one of those people, and that is how he got himself elected. 

If I were to go to South Carolina today with the purpose of punching him in the nose, I reckon I'd have to provision myself for a long wait at the back of a long line.

Then again, I'd be arriving late, due to my long wait in Mississippi, to punch Trent Lott in the nose.  :-)

If Israeli soldiers had bulldozed their way into the home of the late Yassir Arafat and stolen his Nobel peace prize, the world would hear of nothing else, for WEEKS.

But the same act, committed by Hamas thugs, yields the equivalent of NO press coverage whatsoever.

I'm even reading now that Fatah's president Abbas in the West Bank has demanded that Israel help them fight Hamas.

Fatah, in case you haven't heard, is ALSO a terrorist thug group dedicated to the destruction of Israel and a retaking of the entire terror-tory of Palestine.

I am reading a very thick book at present (by Howard Sachar), a history of the state of Israel going back to the 19th century rise of Zionist political activism, the story of Hertzl and Weizman and Ben-Gurion and the courage and optimism of the few in the face of overwhelming odds.  It's a complex and fascinating story, and the most telling detail I've found so far has been the repeated story of a failure of the Arab states and peoples to cooperate in their efforts to destroy the nascent state of Israel.

The Arab problem has always been a preoccupation with each other that prevents wholesale cooperation.  Old grievances, petty squabbles and the ever-present desire to step on each other's heads as they climb the ladder of Arab supremacy-- these things consistently prevent their success against the supposedly hated common enemy.

There's a lesson here, folks.  This inability to cooperate on grand agendas is also saving OUR skins at present.  If a billion Muslims abandoned all pretentions and divested themselves of all ego in favor of one goal, it would be unimaginably harder to fight this war on terror. 

... because of that awful Manmade Catastrophic Global Warming...  die, I say.  We're ALL GOING TO DIE!

But perhaps not, after all, from HEAT.  :-)

Five centimeters, by the way, is about two inches.  Of snow.  A week before the SUMMER SOLSTICE here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Unusual, even for Sweden.

But Sweden isn't the only place getting snow this week.  The forecast for Yellowstone Park, the section in Wyoming, shows an overnight low Sunday night of 34 deg. Fahrenheit, and a chance of snow.

A week before the SUMMER SOLSTICE.  This week, the days are longer and the sun is higher than at any other time of the year.

Geez, I can't wait for the Dog Days of August.  I gotta get that parka back from the dry cleaners.

... of who the opposition is.

In case you haven't run across it during today's news, on Drudge, or on the Rush Limbaugh show today, here's a link to a very interesting video on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JE48XHKG64

It's none other than Albert Gore, candidate for vice president of these United States, orating at length (and without notes or teleprompter, very impressive) on the dreadful risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to continue arming himself with WMD and to continue oppressing his citizens and neighbours. 

Gore calls him a "monster" and makes a profound case for exactly what Dubya has done with Saddam. 

Of course, he is excoriating Bush the elder for NOT having done it.  He was, after all, campaigning with Bill against Bush and Quayle.

So what Bush the elder SHOULD have done, Bush the younger should NOT have done. 

Listen to him, and ruminate on the perfidy of the left. 

Just so people don't forget--

While the left is whining that Bush is like Hitler, while the press is gloating that Bush's ratings are at all time lows, out there in the real world the bad guys are still trying to kill us.

Iran is shopping the world for uranium and nuclear weapons parts and bits, and some people in the world are willing to sell to them.  This transaction was interrupted, thank God, but how many more are not? 

Oh how the world rang with the cries of outrage when Bush brought up the Axis of Evil.

He was right, of course.

 With painful regularity I read and hear stories about the big drug companies, "big pharma", and their evil pursuit of ill-gotten gains at the expense of poor ordinary people just trying to survive. 

Some people I love have presented me with this argument, suggesting and complaining that drug companies "overcharge" and are too concerned with profits.  I always ask if they know what will happen when profits shrink.  The answer is usually no. 

So I'll comment on a Dallas Morning News story (page 15A of the Sunday 6/10/07 print edition) from the New York Times wire service, by Stephanie Saul, to remind us what is going on with that filthy lucre the drug companies extract from our clenched fists every year.

It is a Wyeth Pharmaceuticals research story, about lab mice given a human gene that causes Alzheimers.  The test of memory is a swimming test, in which healthy mice remember where the clear plastic rest platform is and find it quickly the second time, while Alzheimers mice swim aimlessly each time in the pool even after finding the platform on previous tries.  Simple enough, then, to see if memory is aided by treatment.

And it is, visibly and profoundly.  Dr. Menalas Pangalos is the vice president for neuroscience research at Wyeth, and he is quoted as saying "we're going after this, and we're not stopping until we've nailed it."  Wyeth's CEO says the company has over 350 scientists working exclusively on Alzheimers research, on 23 separate projects to develop a cure.

Variations on this story are happening in major drug company facilities all over the world.  It is how new drugs are created, how medical problems are solved.   

How much does it cost to employ 350 scientists full time on a project with no return revenue at present?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Let's just ballpark a figure...  say each scientist makes $75k, although many will make much more. 

That's over $25 million a year for payroll, not counting assistants and janitors and clerks and so forth.  Then add in the expensive lab equipment and its maintenance, electric bills, administrative costs (like insurance) and sundries.  I do not doubt that this project alone costs Wyeth $100 million a year.  There is NO guarantee that they will EVER make a nickel of this money back again, let alone profit from it.  And this is not the only project they are working on. 

Does anyone want Wyeth to shut this down so they can charge less for the pills they already make?  Anyone?  Do you want a cure for Alzheimers or not? 

Just asking.  It's a serious discussion.  And serious discussions don't begin with "dirty rotten scoundrels raking in all those evil profits, somebody oughtta put a stop to it!"

Besides, drug companies are one of the mainstays of mutual fund holdings and of pension plans, and 'putting a stop to the greedy drug companies" will also put a crimp in the retirement plans of millions of people by killing off stock prices.  Many of those people will therefore require government assistance in retirement, further damaging our ability to afford it, and further burdening our children and theirs with taxes.

Let the market work.  There is no future in regulating prices, only a past.  You'll be using yesteryear's medicine, and poor quality meds at that.  Whenever the price=quality=supply equation is disturbed, the other two legs will balance out the disturbance.  It's economic law.  If you force the price lower, you get lower quality or less supply or both.

Other ideas are out there.  The British medical system, for example.  Or the Canadian.

OR the left's favorite, the Cuban medical system.

I"m just sayin.  :-)

 Many ordinary Americans won't know about this, and it is important, so tell as many people as you can--

The French, long known (and now just assumed) to be anti-American in general and socialist in particular, are busy ridding themselves of that counterproductive anti-Americanism and ridding their economy of leftist burdens.

They've already elected a right-wing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and this week they're on the way toward giving him a gigantic two thirds majority in the French parliament.

Note the amusing verbage in this story.  The writer, Jon Boyle of al-Reuters, credits "the right" and "the left" with specific comments, giving actual voices to the two wings of political thought, like Greek actors with masks.  Sloppier journalism you will not find.  I learned in high school journalism 101 that when specific things are said, specific people have to be identified as having said them.

But what's even more amusing is the thought that "the left" expressed here.  "The right" was sensible, crediting Sarkozy with plans to cut taxes and reduce unemployment and so forth, but "the left" was simply petulant and upset, charging that somehow a conservative majority was "unhealthy and threatened democracy".

IF there's one thing that has NOT changed, it's the eerie resemblance between the French left and the American left.  Fortunately for la France, their version is getting smaller.

I'm surprised "the left" didn't opine that Sarkozy is like Hitler.  They'll get around to it shortly, certainement.

I used to scratch my head when people like Rush Limbaugh would bemoan the "blue-blooded country club Republicans", the people who looked down their noses at the ordinary, everyday conservatives in this country and complained that we were ignorant and badly motivated.

But after listening to Lindsey Graham and Trent Lott this week, I'm beginning to feel like a minority in my own party.  My blood seems a bit too red these days.... 

Graham calls us "the loud people", falsely implying that we are a minority who are gaining more than our share of attention through sheer volume.  For myself, I suspect we are the majority of the right, and every word uttered by our own senators to diminish us makes me more and more angry.  The Wall St. Journal editors meeting we saw this week on television was a blue-blood nightmare, in which the elites of the WSJ went so far as to imply that we are all racists, and we are all against not just legal but any immigration, because we don't like people who aren't like us.  They cannot discuss the particulars of the bill without making fools of themselves, so they default to the time honored tradition of doubting our good faith and honesty. 

And here I was considering a subscription to that rag.  Well, you won't catch me buying papers written by people who call me a racist.

Trent Lott made a blithering idiot of himself on the floor of the Senate last night, releasing a steady stream of what seemed to be deliberately misleading rhetoric. 

Lott said that if America likes where we are now on immigration, then fine, lets kill the bill, as if the one and only choice from now until forevermore is to either vote for or against THIS bill. 

He also said "this is one of the biggest issues facing this country, and the question is do we have the courage, tenacity and ability to get anything done anymore?"

Memo to Senator Lott--  cut the cr@p.   We're onto you.  Passing a bill does not equate to demonstrating courage and tenacity, not if the bill is a pile of junk that dooms the nation to endless and debilitating 'unintended consequences'.  For you to set the passage of this bill as some sort of test of the nominal operational condition of the senate is a massive canard, and it betrays the obvious; you cannot stand a discussion of the details of this bill on their merits, so you divert and mislead and stand up your straw men. 

This is what I expect from Democrats, not from you.

IT isn't about 'bipartisanship', or leadership or courage or tenacity or even the status quo.

IT'S ABOUT A BILL THAT STINKS ON ICE, BEING DRAFTED BY SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS AND HIDDEN FROM THE PUBLIC, AND BEING RUSHED TO A VOTE WITHOUT DEBATE OR PUBLIC DISCUSSION. 

That's what a politburo does, not the Senate of the United States of America.

Senator Lott, we are not addicted to the status quo.  We have been suggesting and demanding action from you for years, but it's action you do not want to take, no matter how vast a majority demands it. 

You passed a bill that specified the building of a fence, hundreds of miles of it, along the Mexican border.  Years later, less than 4 miles of it have been built and it is likely that will be all.  Senator McCain, in a campaign appearance this week, bluntly stated that we will not be building barriers or fences, never mind that congress passed and the president signed a bill to do just that.  I hope and believe this has hurt his chances for the nomination.  And this is not even to MENTION the dreadful Texas border cases, the law enforcement officers of the Border Patrol who are in federal prison now, essentially for defending themselves and their country against free-ranging drug dealers and paramilitary types.  All along our southern border the officers are now rightfully afraid to pull out their guns for fear their own country will put THEM in jail instead of the bad guys.   

This sort of thing destroys our confidence in the 'triggers' and conditions which are built into this bill, milestones which each immigrant supposedly will have to reach before being granted the z visa.  All the senate has to do is pass a bill full of triggers, then lose interest in enforcement of them, much as it has lost interest in enforcing almost all of our current laws regarding illegal immigration.  How can we trust that enacted laws will be executed?

If we don't enforce current law (and we don't), it's only reasonable to conclude that the motivations for this lack of enforcement will be the same for any new legislation which purports to tackle the issue. 

For myself, I'm baffled as to what actually does motivate these so-called Republicans.  Democrats, that's easy--  they will get about 96% of the votes of however many million people to whom they can give voting rights.  In a very real way, this will make the Republican party a permanent and small minority.  God help this country if that happens.

But what motivates a Republican to do so much harm to our national sovereignty, to commit ourselves to social welfare spending guaranteed to bankrupt the system, to commit their children and ours to a spirit-crushing lifetime tax burden beyond belief, and to symbolically throw open the gates of America so that terrorists and criminals of every stripe can wander in, find a place to sit, and get permanent residency status....?

What kind of person can so betray the voters who have placed their confidence in him on principle?  What drives them?  What is their gain in this?

What kind of president goes on television and tells ME, one of his most ardent supporters, that if I don't want this bill to pass then I'm not interested in doing what's good for America?

I'd just like to see a few days of nationally televised parsing of this bill, discussion of its particulars, so that the public can get a handle on it before anything major happens.  The way Reid and his cohorts (and sadly, President Bush) have been trying to rush this thing through before anyone even had time to flip through the pages, it looks for all the world like we're being railroaded.

And the more I learn about the details, the more I hear the clatter of them steel wheels....