Rick Santorum And The Taliban

Yes, but somewhere in sharia law I think there’s a verse about how much they hate sweater vests, so Santorum loses. As always.

The Problems Of Capitalism And Elections In France

The Article: Elections, anti-capitalism and class struggle in France by John Mullen on En Passant.

The Text: Sarkozy: the end of the bling-bling President?

The Presidential race is on in France as all the candidates have now declared. On 22 April the first round of voting will choose two candidates for the run-off two weeks later. Nicolas Sarkozy, ruling President and the right wing’s young and sharp man of action, looks to be under severe pressure. He has been able to update the style of French conservative leaders, previously more characterised by slow-speaking patrician tones. Even if he shocked many with his childish outbursts (“Sod off, you shit”, he famously answered a heckler on a factory visit), he managed for a while to unite conservative opinion behind him.

He has also carried off several significant victories for the employers’ class. He pushed through a major pension “reform” (despite millions of people on one-day strikes) meaning that we all have to work longer, for less. He has reduced taxes on the rich, cut jobs in public services, encouraged police racism and clamped down on refugees and other immigrants. He has also been able to “reform” universities, putting in place the first steps towards autonomous institutions, with funding and teaching priorities tailored much more closely to the needs of big business.

Left activists, quite correctly, concentrate on the latest attacks by the government and employers on the living standards and public services of ordinary people. But if you take a step back, it is clear that working class resilience has meant that the ruling class in France has not been able to take neoliberal attacks anywhere near as far as in many other countries in Europe. Just to take a couple of examples: poverty among senior citizens is running at twice the level in the UK as it is in France; French railways are still nationalised; and university fees, over £7,000 in the UK, are around £200 in France. In quite a number of areas, France is where Britain was before the worst of the neoliberal attacks. An average full time employee works three hours a week less in France than in the UK. Schools in poorer areas still get smaller class sizes and a little more funding.

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Brand New Kicks, Why You Shoppin’ At Payless?

Hoodie Allen’s catchy new single No Interruption.

Mark Twain On Censorship

Mark Twain on the logic of censorship: “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”

The Creepy Ways Obama And Romney Are Getting To Know You

The Article: The Creepiness Factor: How Obama and Romney Are Getting to Know You by Terrence McCoy in The Atlantic.

The Text: On a clear day in February 2001, a trim mid-career political analyst named Matthew Dowd landed in Washington, D.C., from Austin, Tex., and hurried into the White House for a meeting with Karl Rove. Inside a manila folder, he carried a sparsely-populated bar graph. The few numbers it had hit Rove like a bomb.

“Really?” Rove asked, snatching the document and glancing back at Dowd. “Man, this is a fundamental change.”

The truly independent voting bloc, Dowd’s data showed, had dissolved from one-fourth of the electorate in 1984 to just 7 percent. That meant the years of work leading up to the 2000 campaign and hundreds of millions of campaign dollars during it had focused on just 7 percent of voters — fewer than 8 million people. Everything next time, Dowd told Rove in his second-floor office, would have to be different. Forget independents. Find the Republicans hidden among the Democrats. What Dowd wanted, he would say years later, was “Moneyball for politics.”

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