(Update, May 19: When I wrote to Tiberge, I had forgotten that she and I have discussed at length in the past the silly delusion that Sarkozy is a conservative. See our November 2007 exchange on why American conservatives love Sarkozy.)

LA to Tiberge of Galliawatch:

Have you ever addressed the media’s constant description of Sarkozy as “conservative”?

Also, how do you think he’s taking his defeat? He’s such a ruthless political animal, for him to be turned out as president of France after one term must be terribly traumatic for him.

I have almost never spoken of Sarkozy as a conservative. I have called him a “false-conservative” a “faux-conservative,” a Socialist disguised as a conservative, a “so-called conservative,” and many other terms. I had trouble five years ago convincing some readers that he was no better than Ségolène Royal, but then as now, they were so terrified of the left they preferred to take a chance on Sarkozy.

Marine Le Pen’s entire campaign was based on exposing the similar goals of the PS (Socialist Party) and the UMP. Bloggers long ago began using the acronym “UMPS” to refer to the one party system. Nicolas Sarkozy did not keep one campaign promise, and yet in the days preceding the May 6 run-off writers, bloggers, analysts, politicians, Catholics and atheists alike, were literally begging the French who had voted for Marine Le Pen to vote for Sarkozy because a Hollande victory would be catastrophic. [LA replies: So Sarkozy’s party was hoping that the National Front voters would now believe the anti-immigration positions adopted out of sheer naked desperation by a man who previously had never kept any campaign promises.] MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:35 AM

Aditya B. writes:

The comedy unfolding in France just got livelier.

According to this article, “France’s new Socialist president owns three holiday homes in the Riviera resort of Cannes, it emerged today.” The Daily Mail confirms this story and gleefully adds, “To the undoubted embarrassment to the most left-wing leader in Europe and a man who styles himself as “Mr Normal,” they are valued at almost £1million.”

This is so typical of leftists worldwide. Reviewing this pansy-boy’s biography, I couldn’t find one item of private sector employment. Just like the Saintly Barack of Honolulu, this man has no idea about how money is actually made. All he knows is how to grab it, and spend it.

These people are vampires. Their raison d’être is to punish people who can make things, who can actually do things. Their whole life is devoted to sucking the life blood out of such people. Perhaps this is how they to make up for their pathetic lack of achievement. In a mass democracy, they are able to find the support of many, many like themselves, equally blood-thirsty and greedy, to destroy the producers and the creative types who make civilization possible. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 08:13 AM

Mark Richardson writes at Oz Conservative:

I’m seeing more things I’ve written about at this site hit the mainstream media. For example, at the quite lefty American website Slate there is an article on Sweden’s efforts to make gender not matter (the subheading of the article is “A country tries to banish gender”).

The Swedish project is an earnest attempt to fulfil the logic of liberal politics. If you believe that autonomy is the highest good, then you will believe that individuals should be self-determining, which then leads to the belief that predetermined qualities should be made not to matter. And our sex is a predetermined quality….

What follows is a list of examples of the Swedes showing intolerance toward sex distinctions. I’ve catalogued many of them myself, but here are some of the ones I missed:

• A Swedish children’s clothes company has removed the boys and girls sections in its stores
  
• One Swedish preschool abolished free play because of concerns that when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented.”
  
• The Swedish Green Party wants to place “gender pedagogues” in every preschool to act as watchdogs on gender
  
• In some Swedish preschools it is forbidden to use the terms boys and girls.
  
• In one Swedish children’s book the words for mum and dad were replaced as being too gendered
  

Several cars were targeted, the perps escaped.

Because of society’s total silence about and total lack of response to systematic acts of savagery by members of a certain racial group (and the odds are 99 out of a hundred that this latest crime was committed by members of that group), the savages feel empowered, and will keep looking for new ways to hurt people.
MORE…

CNS News reports:

The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday.

The GAO testimony said that the federal government was in “a unique position to influence the development of oil shale” because the Green River deposits were mostly beneath federal land.

“The Green River Formation—an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming—contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale,”Anu K. Mittal, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment said in written testimony submitted to the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.

“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.

“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

It’s not just that Elizabeth Warren’s claim to American Indian ancestry is based on her being 1/32 Cherokee; it’s that, as Tony Lee reports at Breitbart, there is no evidence for the claim that she is even 1/32 Cherokee.

An Indian living in the West writes:

There is something comically stupid about socialists. The phrase cutting off the nose to spite the face comes to mind.