The complaisance is amazing, we are the French

 Yes mon ami, there are Muslim-controlled no-go zones in gay Paris, but what can we do? 🤷

2 Cheers for Passing Tax Bill. Too Bad Spending's Still Out of Control

NY Post

 

... Federal outlays are up more than $2 trillion a year over the prepandemic level, from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to $6.8 trillion in 2024. ...

Yet the Republicans blinked at rolling back practically any of it, let alone all. ...

 

Marine Le Pen's jail sentence will be an electronic tag lol, which lends credence to the charge that this is merely political and unserious

  Reported here:

... Le Pen was also given a four-year prison sentence — two years suspended and two wearing an electronic tag — and fined 100,000 euros, although these will not be implemented while any appeals processes are under way. The ban from public office is immediate, however. ...

Le Pen and 24 other members of her political party, Rassemblement National, were accused of diverting over 3 million euros ($3.3 million) of European Parliament funds to pay staff based in France instead.

Le Pen and her co-accused had denied the charges, while the party describes the trial as a politically-motivated witch hunt. ...

Marine Le Pen sentenced to jail in France, barred from running for office in 2027

 Marine Le Pen Sentenced to Prison, Banned From Next Elections Over Embezzlement

... Judges handed down a sentence Monday that bars Le Pen from seeking public office for the next five years, upending France’s political order and thrusting her far-right party into limbo. Le Pen also received a four-year prison sentence, half of which was suspended. The ruling takes Le Pen out of contention for the 2027 race, when President Emmanuel Macron finishes his second and final term and she was expected to be the front-runner. ...

None other than Bernard-Henri Levy, the French Jewish author of the book The Will to See, puts then Representative Mike Waltz (FL-6) and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic together in October 2021, thanking them for coming to his book launch

 Trump National Security Adviser Mike Waltz denies ever meeting the guy he was standing near.

 

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz said he never met Jeffrey Goldberg but stood right next to him at the French Embassy in 2021 lol

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: To watch our ally of 80 years, the USA, turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days

 

Trump’s embrace of Putin is a Molotov-Ribbentrop crisis for Europe:

The new regime in Washington is testing pro-American sympathies to breaking point

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard20 February 2025 6:50pm GMT

We are at that moment in Animal Farm when the gentle carthorse Clover looks through the window to see the pigs playing cards and drinking a toast with men.

The pigs are all perfectly at ease and sitting back in chairs around a table, no doubt a rougher surface than the luxurious polished table used to host America’s Marco Rubio and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week. The Russian press reports that the meeting was a love-fest of jokes and bonhomie, with a “very tasty lunch”.

George Orwell’s scene was an allegory of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Europe’s great power alignment suddenly and violently shifted. The liberal democracies woke up on Aug 23 1939 to discover that the Soviet Union had reached a non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany. Days later, Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Nazis could then turn their concentrated fury on France and Britain without having to worry about a second front.

Britain had started to re-arm as early as 1935. Neville Chamberlain hurled money at the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, with Spitfire squadrons arriving just in time. Defence spending had risen to 9pc of GDP by 1939.

This time, Europe’s democracies have indulged the same pacifist illusions as they did in the run up to 1939 but have milked the peace dividend even longer. Military spending by EU states was 1.9pc of GDP in 2024, a full 17 years after Vladimir Putin declared political war on liberal civilisation and all its works at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 – “a good speech” said one Angela Merkel, audibly, in the front row.

He then set about restoring the tsarist empire to the borders of Catherine the Great with an unswerving consistency. Austria is not even part of Nato and behaves accordingly.

Some are rising to the challenge. Denmark has given its stock of munitions to Ukraine and even the trade unions back a war tax to raise defence spending to 4pc of GDP. “We are in a very, very critical period in world history,” said Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister.

Poland’s military budget is already up to 4.7pc. “We’re that afraid,” said his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski at last week’s Munich forum.

Lithuania aims for 5pc to 6pc of GDP by next year, alarmed by intelligence warnings that Putin may seize the Suwalki Gap, which runs through its territory from Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

They all know that Putin has a narrow window of time to attack if the Ukraine war is quickly settled on Russian terms. His advantage is temporary: a greatly enlarged army heading for 1.5m by 2026 and an industrial war economy firing on all cylinders but untenable for much longer.

Fears are growing that Donald Trump will order the US military to pull its Nato tripwire forces out of the Baltics in order to seal the “deal of the century” with the Kremlin. Will he swallow the bait as the smooth McKinsey-trained head of Russia’s investment fund, Kirill Dmitriev, dangles the offer of hydrocarbon riches – real or imagined – in Russian Arctic waters?

The issue runs deeper in any case. Maga America has a greater natural affinity for Putin’s Right-wing cultural Weltanschauung than it does for the liberal democracies. After the battering of the last two weeks, some of us are forced to conclude that Britain and Europe are now the real enemies for this new Washington and, furthermore, that the US is anything but isolationist under Donald Trump.

He will not let us carry on being different. He will force-feed us his Maga ideology. His oil-fracking energy secretary was in London this week describing our renewables as “sinister”. Will we face sanctions for trying to do something about CO2 emissions? Perhaps, yes. Particularly for that.

I do not wish to dissect every post by Trump on Truth Social, or dwell on the speech by JD Vance. I think Britain should repeal all its hate legislation and stop misusing police resources on thought crimes. It should stop dividing us into categories and return to colour-blind liberalism. But one can agree with elements of Vance’s anti-woke critique while entirely rejecting the larger message behind it.

We are told repeatedly by Trump’s circle that he does not really mean what he says, or that we should not overreact to what he is very clearly doing. Let us hope they are right, but it is becoming harder by the day to have confidence in such assurances, or to believe that either Republicans or plutocrats will lift a finger to stop him – and I say this as a defender of Pax Americana for half a century.

Sir Keir Starmer is right to stay calm and try to defuse this terrifying inter-allied crisis on his visit to the White House. But we of The Telegraph parish, readers and writers alike, will all have to look into our souls if, as now seems painfully plausible, Britain is singled out for tariff warfare along with Europe on the pretext of our VAT taxes.

Worse yet if Trump does this while reaching a cosy commodity deal with Putin along with a grand bargain with Xi Jinping to protect Elon Musk’s interests in China. That would test one’s pro-American sympathies to breaking point.

Europe shares much of the blame for the disintegration of the Western alliance system. It failed to re-arm after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Germany rewarded Putin months later by launching the Nord Stream 2 project, which had no purpose other than depriving Kyiv of strategic leverage by re-routing Siberian gas through Baltic pipelines. In return, Germany enjoyed a sweetheart gas deal at sub-market prices.

Britain could have rebuilt its military hardware at ultra-low borrowing costs during the secular stagnation of the 2010s, when it had ample spare capacity. It could have rebuilt its decaying infrastructure and revived its economy at the same time. The multiplier effect would have let us do these things without pushing the debt ratio any faster. Britain pursued austerity instead. Now it faces a greater task, in a hostile bond market.

Europe was even more destructive. Germany cut public investment and military spending to the bone for 15 years. It relied on mercantilist export surpluses of 8pc of GDP to drive growth, a policy that has left Germany in the cross-hairs of Trump’s trade warriors.

The eurozone debt crisis – self-inflicted because the European Central Bank did not then have political approval to back-stop debts – turned into a wider depression because Brussels over-egged austerity and used bailouts to impose drastic spending cuts. There was no exemption for military spending.

Defence as a share of GDP in 2015 was Hungary 0.5pc, Belgium 0.8pc, Germany 1.0pc, Spain 1.0pc, Italy 1.2pc, France 1.8pc –and that was after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Military budgets crept up slowly thereafter but not enough to prevent further disarmament.

Europe thought it could keep free-riding on Uncle Sucker forever, despite warnings that this would end badly. There was much talk along the way of a European army and endless euro-speak meetings about procedures, modalities and the architecture of EU defence, but never anything real. That is why Europe today finds itself utterly naked.

But nobody expected it to end this badly and this suddenly. To watch an ally of 80 years turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days.

Mad King Ludwig to say Russia not the aggressor, Putin not a war criminal, and leave the 40-nation coalition forming the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine

My country is dead to me.

Trump to abandon Russia war crimes prosecution:

Washington signals end to pursuit of Putin as third anniversary of Ukraine invasion looms

 

Joe Barnes

 21 February 2025 6:02pm GMT

The US has signalled that it could leave an international effort to prosecute Russia for invading Ukraine, The Telegraph can reveal.

US envoys refused to label Russia as an “aggressor” at a meeting of a “core group” of countries preparing a Nuremberg-style tribunal to try Vladimir Putin for his war crimes, according to Western officials.

Washington is similarly refusing to co-sponsor a United Nations statement that supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity and demands Moscow to withdraw its forces from the war-torn nation.

Mr Trump’s administration has also refused to sign off a planned G7 statement calling Russia the “aggressor” in the war with Ukraine to mark the third anniversary of the conflict on Monday.

The US president has blamed Ukraine for starting the war, branded Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” and pushed for Russia to be invited back to the alliance of industrialised nations.

European officials fear Mr Trump’s flattery of Putin could lead to the Russian despot being let off the hook for his invasion as part of any peace settlement.

This stance has put preparations for the final meeting of the “core group” next month in doubt. The group is leading a 40-nation coalition to form a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, modelled on the response to Nazi war crimes after the Second World War.

It would involve the US and other countries joining Ukraine to grant jurisdiction to a dedicated criminal tribunal to investigate both the perpetrators of the crime of aggression and those complicit in that crime.

The crime of aggression cannot be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

“Unless they acknowledge it’s an aggression, they can’t participate,” an official said of US opposition to the labelling of Russia as an aggressor.

Losing Washington’s backing for the tribunal will be a major blow to the project’s international reputation and standing. 

“This is quite a drastic shift,” a European diplomat told The Telegraph. “Rewriting history and pretending that Russia wasn’t the one who started this war is something that we simply cannot and will not agree to.”

The US has not yet officially withdrawn from the scheme and is expected to attend its next meeting next month in Strasbourg, France.

A diplomatic note seen by The Telegraph revealed that European officials were “shocked” at US claims at a series of international meetings that Russia should be invited back into the “civilised world”.

European capitals are now holding talks over a possible collapse of the special tribunal if the US does walk away as feared.

The latest US position marks a significant shift in policy between Joe Biden and Mr Trump. 

The former president had branded Putin a “war criminal” and signed off a series of international statements that described Russia as the aggressor state.

Washington is now pushing for the almost three-year war to be called the “Ukraine conflict” in discussions with international allies.

A State Department readout of the meeting between Marco Rubio, the US state secretary, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, twice described the war as “the conflict in Ukraine”.

Hakeem Jeffries should welcome a government shutdown on March 14 because Trump is now a bad faith president who oversteps Congress' power of the purse and can't be trusted

Really, Democrat leadership is looking at it all wrong.

Just shut it down and go home. That's what Democrat legislators have had to do in many states. Might as well try it in Washington.

In fact, put out a general call for all Democrats to refuse to cooperate everywhere in the country, like the communists do in Italy and France.

Don't go to work at the factory. Don't go to work at the school. Shut down all the government offices everywhere. Don't go to work anywhere. Snarl transportation on land, sea, and air. Empty the shelves at the grocery stores. Cancel all the doctor appointments. Let 911 ring and ring and ring.

Call a general strike.

Shut the whole goddamn country down until Trump agrees to play by the rules. Get mad as hell and refuse to take it anymore!

 

... House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, have been in talks about how best to use the funding deadline to counter Trump. But some top Democrats worry that even if they won policy concessions, Trump would only ignore the law — as they believe he has in some of his initial assaults on federal agencies — so a knockdown, drag-out battle and potential shutdown could be all for naught.

“If the foundational role of Congress is the power of the purse, why would we ever believe them again on an appropriations deal?” said Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware. “It’s going to be harder for us to work together because it’s harder for us to trust each other.” ...

“We’re not going to keep on bailing him out,” added Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, who is among a growing faction of Democrats who are ready to stare down Trump in a shutdown fight. “We’re not a cheap date.” ...

“If Senate Democrats don’t have the gumption to do what is necessary in this moment, I believe that House Democrats will,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said. Asked whether the confrontation could lead to a shutdown, she insisted her party wouldn’t be to blame and the price of Democratic votes should be “very high.”

More.

America has always produced outstanding 19 year olds, like Audie Murphy of Kingston, Texas

 

When Audie Murphy was 19 and two days after he had already been wounded in the legs, he stood alone on top of the burning wreckage of a tank destroyer for an hour gunning down 50 German soldiers with a machine gun that still worked, for which he won the Medal of Honor. It happened in Holtzwihr, France, 26 January 1945.

 

A boy we all looked up to.

 

 

Martial law fails in South Korea, Romania cancels a democratic election whose outcome authorities didn't like, and Syria is about fall to a former al-Qaeda revolutionary

 Did I mention the French left and right united in Parliament and voted no confidence in Macron's PM, too?

They say that Trump is a chaos agent.

This is KAOS! We don't do CONTROL here!

Yes indeed, Jonathan Capehart, the BLM-supporting, Hamas-sympathizing, Border Czar failure Kamala Harris is most certainly part of the slap in the face culture

 Capehart: Kamala Harris Is Part Of "The Culture," The Culture That Is Slapping Trump In The Face Right Now

 

Here are just 15 recent examples:

 

Le Monde: Macron has spent the summer in denial of his defeat, the lumpen left has spent it failing to build a coalition to govern

 The president's justification for this decision is that the other political groups consulted would have quickly overthrown the new government. ... In the absence of any other obvious possibility, it would have been in the interest of democracy for the president to allow the experiment to unfold instead of trying to assert control at all costs in the hope of preserving his policy for as long as possible, even after it has been outvoted. ...

[Macron] has never acted like the clear loser of this election, nor has he clearly accepted the principle of cohabitation.

More.

Kamala Harris is nothing but an authoritarian, a cop, whose first instinct is to use federal power to ban things she doesn't like, such as grocery prices, guns, and hate speech

David French knew she was an authoritarian already in 2019, but he's voting for her in 2024.

Both the alt-right and the NeverTrump Christians want Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump

 

The French election commentary on right wing twitter has been as laughably apocalyptic as left wing

 Meanwhile, here are the final election results from France's most-watched news channel BFM-TV, slanted pro-business instead of pro-worker, shown below.

As you can see Le Pen's "right wing" alliance RN has overwhelming support in terms of votes with 10.12 million in the 2024 Second Round (left column) vs. 3.58 million in 2022, and now enjoys 143 seats vs. 89 in 2022. It's now arguably France's biggest party.

RN has grown its support phenomenally in just two years.

Its problem is that its support is more diffuse, so that its supporters are frequently outnumbered by enough voters from other parties to win seats. And this time leftist NFP and Macron's centrist ENS  cooperated in the second round to reduce candidates so that voters had to choose more often than normally between just two sides.

In the end no one got even close to 289 seats to achieve control in the 577 seat National Assembly.

And Macron could easily lose a vote of confidence in the wake of this within weeks and send the voters back to the polls again.

RN is obviously a growing threat to the status quo all while Macron has been just bleeding out seats since 2017, when he had a comfortable lead with 350.

Even CNN recognizes this:

The RN’s success should not be underestimated. In the 2017 elections, when Macron swept to power, the RN won just eight seats. In 2022, it surged to 89 seats. In Sunday’s vote, it won 125 – making it the largest individual party. That unity means it will likely remain a potent force in the next parliament, while the solidity of the leftist coalition remains untested. 

Stay tuned. The fireworks are not over, not in the least because the lunatics of NFP are even more divided than France as a whole, primarily because of the presence of the anti-semitic communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. 

Final results of French election: "far right" up 62%, adds 55 seats in National Assembly, Macron loses 88

 And now the final results have arrived with the left-wing NFP alliance on 182, Macron’s centrists on 163 and the far-right RN and its allies on 143.

Here.

Macron loses nearly 100 seats in the French National Assembly and Drudge calls it a win lol, Le Pen gains many seats despite Macron deal with left to pull hundreds of candidates

 MACRON GAMBLE PAYS OFF

Macron has gone from 350 seats in 2017 to 251 in 2022 to a projected 160 now.

Macron calling this snap election in France when he didn't have to was just as dumb as Sunak calling one in the UK. Sunak had to resign as the left clearly won, but Macron will wish he had to resign as he faces three years of a hung parliament divided by left, middle, and right, each with 140-200 seats and no clear winner.

289 seats are needed for an absolute majority.

Le Pen's party increased its presence in the assembly from 88 seats to 140 to 160, depending on who you read tonight. Her influence is steadily growing while Macron's is withering.

The plot to sabotage Le Pen was hatched immediately in the wake of her party's stunning performance in the first round on Jun 30.

Everyone's pretending to be shocked by today's results because they don't want to admit what just happened.

Macron sold out to the left.

 

 

Was it at The French Laundry?

 

Gov. Gavin Newsom: The Joe Biden I Saw Yesterday Is The One I Remember From Two Years Ago

Marine Le Pen won 39 seats of 577 outright in the first round on Sunday

 Thirty-nine National Rally candidates have already been elected to parliament after winning over 50 percent of first-round votes -- a tour de force by a movement that never before managed to win a parliamentary seat in the first round of voting of a two-stage election before.

They include the party's longtime leader Marine Le Pen and party vice-president Sebastien Chenu. ...

Among the losers was Communist Party leader, Fabien Roussel, who lost his seat to an RN candidate in a constituency that had been held by the Communists for over 60 years. ...

The party's [NR's] worst scores were in Paris, where all its candidates were eliminated in the first round.

More.

President Clouseau of France just took a beating in the polls from Le Pen

 This clip from early June at the Normandy anniversary with President Applesauce Brains is just hilarious.