A Nebraska judge recently ruled that driving one’s motorcycle at 128mph did not necessarily constitute reckless driving.

Since the late 1960s, Vermont, home of Calvin Coolidge and other rock-ribbed Republicans, has found its natural beauty a mixed blessing. The Granite State’s bucolic charms, its green mountains and Christmas card village greens, have attracted a major wave of immigration from the flatlands, bringing to Vermont the equivalent of an invasion of Californians. Vermonter Stephen Morris reports on a recent florescence of exotic political life forms.

Schoolfellows who know John Kerry from the old days in the Political Union will find awfully recognizable the spotlight-grabbing behavior featured in the incident of today described by Dean Barnett on Soxblog, who writes:

I know we’re never going to see the day where we all agree on the quality of George W. Bush as both a president and a man. But can we not at least agree that this country is fortunate to not have John Kerry as its president?

Another must-read posting from Wretchard, who takes the occasion of Representative Cunningham’s resignation to recall another very different day:

Whatever Randy Cunningham did in later life, it remains true that on the tenth of May, 1972 ShowTime 100 would shoot down two MIGs, then a third. ...

November 13, 2005

We turn to France, whose decision to stay out of the Iraq war is starting to make more sense. After all, why go all the way to the Mideast when you can fight Muslims in your very own suburbs?

— JON STEWART

The situation is really bad — today Chirac announced that the French are pulling out of France.

— JAY LENO

Sierra Times editorialist Selwyn Duke has the answer on how to stop the riots, the car burnings, the church burnings, and the attacks on innocent people which have spread all over France: Shoot Rioters on Sight. He is right, you know.

American and Europe both have in common a contemporary state of affairs in which socialist ideology and the Welfare State have destroyed the work ethic of the native ineducable class, in the natural course of things destined for a career of unskilled labor. In both societies, it is impossible to find native-born citizens willing to stoop to modestly paying jobs involving unpleasant physical labor or tedium, and in both cases, we import replacement workers from abroad.

With characteristic hypocrisy, Americans complain about illegal immigration, while relying in countless cases upon off-the-books workers from Mexico and Central America to clean their houses, mow their lawns, move their furniture, or build their new home. Illegal aliens bus our tables, serve our fast food, and in general do all the dirty work and heavy lifting. The French, and other Europeans, resorted to a similar expedient earlier, in a more above-board fashion opening their doors to a major influx of residents of former colonies, or guest workers, to fill the same kinds of roles.

In America, we naturally get, as part of our enormous new wave of immigration, a small number of criminals and hormone-intoxicated male adolescents. All large waves of immigration are bound to contain a portion of the same. But we are primarily receiving people who are hard-working, family-oriented, and Roman Catholic. Our illegal Hispanic immigrants of today have both the natural inclinations, and a natural trajectory, to become tomorrow’s Republican voters. Europe was less fortunate. Its unskilled laboring classes are primarily drawn from Islamic countries.

From a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant perspective, Mexicans and Salvadorans seem downright exotic, but Spain was also part of European civilization, and Roman Catholics are also Christians sharing a common European culture and its values. Europe’s equivalent laboring caste is far more fundamentally alien.

America also has a tradition of assimilating foreign immigrant laborers, and can point to a demonstrable record of delivering in the past to the descendants of lowliest of its laborers a real path upward with respect to education, career opportunity, and prosperity. France has frozen its Islamic immigrants out of opportunities for upward mobility by a low-growth economy produced by its regime of Social Welfare. France even effectively curtails their physical mobility, trapping its Islamic laboring classes in battery-cage banlieus, functioning as Theodore Dalrymple observed in 2002, as the practical and moral equivalent of the South African system of apartheid.

The second European generation of foreign unskilled labor remains unassimilated, and without a path to opportunity. World-wide Islamic revolution is in the air, and we are seeing the thirteenth night of violence in Paris.

Rioting and the burning of automobiles by gangs of Islamic youths have spread from the housing projects in the suburbs of Paris to cities all over the county.

Despite the so-called poverty and destitution of which they are victims (at least according to the media), the Islamic “youths” of Clichy are the spoiled brats of the West European welfare state. Despite the media talk of “discrimination” (if there is any discrimination of immigrants in Western Europe, it is “positive” discrimination), they get the same generous welfare benefits as other Frenchmen. The West European government handouts are so high that none of the allegedly “frustrated and angry unemployed” are willing to do the kind of jobs that the Poles gladly take. The moral perversion which accompanies socialism has affected Muslims to a larger extent than it has affected people raised in the traditional Christian culture of the West with its stronger sense of individual responsibility — and even among the latter social welfarism has had devastating effects on traditional morality, which has almost disappeared.

The Poles on the other hand have lived under almost half a century of communist dictatorship, but socialism did not affect them to the same extent as it has affected the peoples of Western Europe. They remained faithful to their Catholic religion.

Non- facetiously

Saturday night’s rioting was the most destructive so far as 1,300 vehicles were set alight and 349 people arrested, despite an enhanced police presence.

So far more than 800 people have been arrested and 3,500 vehicles torched, mainly in the working-class, high-immigration outer suburbs of Paris where unemployment is as high as 20 percent.

Cars were burned out in the historic centre of Paris for the first time on Saturday night. In the normally quiet Normandy town of Evreux, a shopping mall, 50 vehicles, a post office and two schools went up in flames.

(Apache Press International)

November 2, 2005 Paris – - French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy today accepted terms of surrender from Mohammad Al Jabooti, the leader of a pack of Muslim rioters after just seven days of civil unrest north of that nation’s capitol. Following a brief signing ceremony at the Palais de Justice, the French Republic surrendered to the suburb of Chichy-sous-Bois.

“The terms offered by our Muslim overlords in exchange for our immediate capitulation was most generous” said Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. “We are grateful we have been allowed to live.” “…and what greater gift is there than life itself?”

The terms that the French Republic agreed to was the immediate conversion of all 22,000 Catholic churches into Mosques and the summary beheading of the approximately 30,000 remaining priests and 60,000 Jews in that country.

“It is important for us to understand and respect their culture” said Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist prime minister. “There is no higher sign of disrespect in Islam than the practicing of another religion and we now need to recognize that fact”. “For us to choose any other path than submission would only make us responsible for prolonging the violence and betray the French people’s rich history of capitulation.” When asked about the inherent violence associated with the planned ritualistic slaughter of almost 100,000 of the former-republic’s citizens, Fabius bristled that any condemnation of that policy is in itself as a sign of racist thinking and grotesquely insensitive to the needs of the Muslim community.

“That is the problem with you Americans!” “You always want to play the cowboy and you never consider the subtle nuances of surrender. This is something we know well and that emotion beats in the chest of every real Frenchman. Surrender is as instinctive to us as breathing.”

Handicapped woman bus passenger set on fire by rioting Islamic youths in Paris suburb of Sevran.

Harry Hutton of Chase me, ladies, I’m in the cavalry observes that while “Arizona is the stupidest state in the whole United States quite an achievement given what the rest of the country is like yet last year their economy grew by 7.1%, second only to Nevada, the fourth stupidest place.” All of this is according to a ranking system quoted by Tim Blair.

In the post-1960s, Vermont, renowned in earlier times for laconic Yankee individualists, became a favored refuge for counter-cultural escapees from more densely populated states located to its south. Today, Vermont is more commonly identified with Ben & Jerry than Calvin Coolidge, and native Vermonters, derisively referred to as “chucks” (as in woodchuck), are regularly outvoted by recent immigrants, spoken of pejoratively in Vermont as “flatlanders.” The once most paradigmatically Republican state in the Union is currently represented in Congress by an Independent self-acknowledged socialist. Carried away by animosity toward the current administration in Washington, a portion of the Vermont flatlander population is talking secession.

‘Vermont still provides a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized mass production, mass consumption, narcissistic lifestyle which pervades most of the United States,” said Thomas Naylor, a former Duke University economics professor who retired to Vermont and has written a book called ‘’The Vermont Manifesto—The Second Vermont Republic.”

‘’Vermont is smaller, more rural, more democratic, less violent, less commercial, more egalitarian, and more independent than most states,” Naylor said. ‘’It offers itself as a kinder, gentler metaphor for a nation obsessed with money, power, size, speed, greed, and fear of terrorism.”

This time the president gave us what we hoped for. Our adversaries are skillful and determined, and we are unquestionably going to face a full scale, no-holds-barred effort to block Samuel Alito’s nomination. The fate of this particular nominee will be strongly influenced by his performance before the Judiciary Committee, but a filibuster attempt seems virtually inevitable. In recent years, conservatives have soundly trounced liberals in the domestic marketplace of ideas, but we still lack the political leadership in Congress capable of engaging the Kennedys and Schumers and their staffs on equal terms. Are GOP votes lined up and locked in for the “nuclear option” to be invoked? Is Senator John McCain under control on this one? Have we planned for the next step, in case Judge Alito’s confirmation is successfully blocked? It has seemed obvious, since the time of President Reagan, that the answer to unreasonable leftwing opposition to well-qualified judicial nominees is simply to make it clear to all concerned that the president has a list, and that on that list there is a nominee B more conservative, more unpalatable to the left, than nominee A, and that after nominee B, there is a still more conservative nominee C, and so on.

Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy remarks on the appearance of ethnic Catholics like Judge Alito as Republican nominees as indicative of the watershed changes in American politics in recent years in which the children of working class Catholic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe have moved up and out of the working class, and up and out of former ties to the democrat party.

He writes:

I think that the demographic fact of the make-up of the conservative Justices (Thomas, Scalia, and Alito) is a remarkable statement on the nature of modern conservatism… I don’t know Alito, but I feel like my background growing up is similar enough to his that I will hazard a few speculations on what this says about the nature of modern conservativism. For those like myself (and I hazard to guess Scalia, Alito, and Thomas) conservatism is attractive because it now seems to be the party of meritocracy where one is judged on your character and ability, and not on your connections or demographics. As the doors of schools such as Princeton and Yale Law School (in Alito’s case), and the professions themselves have been thrown open to Italians, Poles, Irish, etc., individuals such as Scalia and Alito have had the opportunity to prove themselves.

Among other things, I think this cultural upbringing reflects itself in a skepticism about racial preferences in college admissions and hiring. It is difficult to say, from what I can tell, that Sam Alito’s ascent to the Supreme Court came about through some sort of unfair advantage, money, or family connections. In the legal arena, I think this cultural temperament may reflect itself in a anti-elitist streak rebelling against the arrogance of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary and a humility in the face of the common-sense of citizens as reflected through democratically-elected legislatures.

Professor Zywicki got lots of flack (from derisive liberals who will not abide references to meritocratic advancement) in comments on his posting, and evidently decided that his use of the term “ethnic Catholic” could be taken as a euphemism for someone Italian, or produced some other kind of offense to politically correct sensibilities, and removed a portion of his remarks. Pity! I’d like to have seen the unedited version.

This nomination was marred by absolutely outrageous behavior at the White House Press briefing by CBS Chief Correspondent John Roberts. Roberts subsequently proffered a patently insincere disclaimer of obscene intent and a bogus apology. If this administration were operating properly, the White House Press Secretary would have responded to a hostile interrogative couched in terms of obscene allusion by immediately calling security, and having Marine guards escort that reporter from the premises, while recessing the proceedings long enough to order his secretary to fire off a facsimile notifying that reporter’s employer of the permanent loss of the credentials admitting him to White House briefings.