Bon appetit!
France Assigns New Terms for 'Email' and 'Spam':

The French Ministry of Culture today officially banned the use of the terms 'email' and 'spam' from government documents and web sites. The ruling aims to slow the epidemic of American words which have invaded the French lexicon.
...
The term 'spam' which comes from the American packaged meat products industry, will be replaced with the term "snausages," which the Culture Ministry says is "evocative, with a very French sound."

A ministry spokesman acknowledged that the term resembles the name of the American dog snack, but it's pronounced differently.

"In any case," said the unnamed source, "the pet treat Snausages is manufactured by Heinz, and so we have a delightful connection with one of your French-looking Senators, who is married to Teresa Heinz. We think of John Kerry as one of our own. He's even a veteran of a war in one of our former colonies."

It's ScrappleFace.

Wotta country!
Mark Steyn on the wonders of the USA:

Thursday, the front page of my local newspaper had a story about whether New Hampshire's 1791 adultery law applies to extramarital gay sex: a guy from Hanover, New Hampshire, has accused his wife of having an affair with a woman from Vermont, and the woman's defence is that lesbian sex isn't covered by the adultery prohibition as the New Hampshire legislature didn't have gay sex in mind back in the 18th century. On the other hand, a Boston-based gay group has filed a brief arguing that "gay and lesbian relationships are as significant as non-gay ones" and therefore it's discriminatory not to subject gays to the strictures of the adultery law.

What a great country, I thought, where the question of whether or not I can seek relief from the courts for a lesbian seducing my wife depends on what side of the state line I'm on.

In-depth education alert!
(Via Best of the Web) High times at the Democrats' "educational" branch - NEA board member had license suspended:

A Vermont teacher recently elected to the executive board of the nation’s largest teachers union had his license suspended earlier this year for having sex with a colleague in his classroom.

However, officials with the National Education Association said Wayne Nadeau’s disciplinary problems are behind him and won’t affect his ability to serve in a leadership role.

The colleague was a "female paraprofessional". Whew! I'm relieved on two counts then.

Fortney wants to fondle a fruitcake!
There were hijinks in the House of Representatives today. It seems that the Democrats objected to a pension bill and staged a walkout from a committee meeting. But they left Congressman Fortney Pete Stark (D-California, born 1931) behind. And the old boy was apparently feeling frisky:

The committee reporter captured the essence of Stark's less-than-soaring rhetoric, read on the House floor by Rep. Kenny Hulshof, R-Mo.

"'Oh, you think you are big enough to make me, you little wimp? Come over here and make me. I dare you,'" Hulshof recited.

According to the stenographer's transcript, the room then broke out in laughter, at which point Stark raged, "You little fruitcake, you little fruitcake. I said you are a fruitcake."

Obviously a candidate for taxpayer funded prescription drugs. Wait, he's been a Congressman for 30 years - he's already got 'em.

Fortney was previously famous for telling black Health and Human Services Secretary (in the first Bush Administration) Louis Sullivan in 1990 that he was "a disgrace to his race". Uh oh! Sounds like Fortney is diversity challenged!

And what was in the pension bill that got the surly senior citizen's Depends in a twist?

The measure before the committee would make a number of changes to the nation's pension and retirement-saving system, including acceleration of increases in various contribution limits enacted in 2001 and scheduled to be phased in over the next five years. Under it, individuals would be able to contribute an annual maximum to $15,000 to a 401(k) plan and $5,000 to an IRA, beginning next year. People aged 50 and over could contribute even more.

You see, individuals saving for their retirement instead of being dependent on government payments doesn't fit in with Democrat plans.

How low can they go?
Despite the Rev. Al's axe handle, there weren't any real fireworks when the Demo presidential candidates showed up at the NAACP convention. However, that didn't mean there weren't moments of hilarity. As Noel from Sharp Knife observed in the comments to this post, "The best part was when they started arguing about who had done the most jail-time." As reported in the Washington Post:

The forum also featured the unusual spectacle of candidates competing to boast of their jail records. During a discussion about restoring the voting rights of felons who have served their time, Sharpton said he was the only candidate who had been in jail, saying he served a "redemptive" sentence. But Kerry interjected, saying that he too had been to jail. A spokesman later said Kerry spent a night in jail after a Vietnam War protest.

Woo hoo!

But the best was yet to come. After NAACP honchos excoriated the candidates who didn't show up at the whinefest, Smilin' Joe Lieberman showed up on hands and knees to beg forgiveness:

After offering the NAACP another apology for skipping the candidates' forum and then ticking off his own civil rights credentials, Lieberman praised the NAACP for its work during the Florida recount. That's when things became absurd. "We didn't realize at the time, Al Gore and I, that we not only needed Kweisi Mfume fighting for justice here in Florida counting votes," Lieberman said, "we need him on the Supreme Court where the votes really counted. Maybe that'll happen some day."

Let's see, aside from never attending law school, Kweisi is most famous for fathering several illegitimate children by different mothers. Or as Thomas Lipscomb engagingly puts it:

Kweisi Mfume's list of illegitimate children makes [Jesse] Jackson look in serious need of Viagra

Maybe instead of comparing their stays in the hoosegow, they could have talked about their kids!

No wonder Howard Kurtz is referring to the 9 Dwarves as the Pander Bears and actually calls on Bubba for behavior lessons:

On June 13, 1992, candidate Bill Clinton went before Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition and said:

"You had a rap singer here last night named Sister Souljah. . . . Her comments before and after Los Angeles [meaning the riots] were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight. Just listen to this, what she said: She told The Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote, 'If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? . . . So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?' . . .

"If you took the words 'white' and 'black' and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech."

That encounter -- what journalists have dubbed "pulling a Sister Souljah" -- showed that Clinton was willing to stand up to one of his party's interest groups. It is the sort of moment that has conspicuously been missing this year as the Democratic candidates have moved from one conference to another (abortion rights advocates, blacks, gays) pledging their support.

When Bubba can be held up as a good example, things are getting pretty bad.

The Professor is rocking and rolling!
Things are hopping at the Billabong with a takedown of the asshats who vandalized the Sydney Opera House and the Professor catching Phatty Adams cribbing his column again - this time from the New York Review of Books. (Tim Blair has converted it into a Phatty Quiz). But the item that really struck my fancy was this:

In a remarkable missive entitled "Materialism is Damaging Western Sydney", a fellow called Darren Magennis provides the latest left-brained example of correct thinking. If the Professor wasn't so determined to impress Mrs. Bunyip with his desire to be more Tim [Mooncalf Dunlop - ed.]-like, he'd laugh out loud.

The damaging impact of materialist influences is readily obvious to those with knowledge of the economics of development. In South America and Africa it is apparently not uncommon to find starving families consuming expensive luxury products marketed by American multinational firms.

Not French companies or German ones, just the unspeakable American variety.

I have personally witnessed a similar effect in several Western Sydney households. It is not at all uncommon to find a family surviving on a Salvation Army food hamper with a $20,000 home entertainment system, Nike shoes and designer clothes. Even more ubiquitous are the unemployed single people with massive wardrobes of expensive designer clothes and shoes. It is very common for such people to go without food for several days, or to be unable to afford essential university textbooks, due to their insatiable desire for designer-wear.

If the Professor wasn't trying to get into Mrs. Bunyip's good books, he'd note that the Salvation Army should be ashamed of itself for soliciting donations to feed those who could quite easily sustain themselves by pawning their entertainment systems which, in all liklihood, the taxpayers underwrote in the first place. But no, apparently that would be too harsh, because idle and irresponsible spendthrifts can't to be held accountable for being idle and irresponsible spendthrifts:

Poor people cannot be criticised for this behaviour. It may even be the best possible course of action for a person faced with a strongly materialistic culture.

Then there's this unintentionally illuminating bit on haute couture, ALP-style:

At least one female acquaintance of mine claims she was "snubbed", at a Labor-left function, by another female friend of mine, because her clothing was not suitably elaborate! A reasonable standard of dress is obviously required to achieve social acceptance even in otherwise open-minded forums.

Good heavens, but doesn't that make the mind boggle! What could "suitably elaborate" mean in this context? As far as the Professor has ever noticed, today's Labor women appear to believe that the first obligation is to honour their party's proletarian heritage by masquerading as the battered old bags in which Australia's workingmen carried lunch and overalls until the Salvation Army encouraged them to sleep late and play with their graphic equalisers. Do the suitably elaborate ones sport red ribbons in their underarm thickets?

Much more by following the link.

Results just in!
From the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest that is - It was a bland and twisty cheese:

A lizard lover from Alabama won an annual contest celebrating bad writing with a ghastly simile comparing doomed romance to processed cheese. Mariann Simms of Wetumpka, Ala., won $250 in the 22nd Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a parody honoring the writer of the worst beginning to an imaginary novel.

"They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white ... Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently," Simms wrote.

The contest, sponsored by San Jose State University, is named after the oft-mocked British novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel "Paul Clifford" began, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Simms, 42, who purchased an Australian Bearded Dragon from a reptile breeder last weekend, took a break from feeding crickets to the juvenile lizard, named Zippo, to discuss the epiphany behind her winning entry -- which, like the majority of pathetic ramblings submitted to the contest, was characterized by ridiculous whipsawing between unrelated concepts, as well as a profundity of commas and an extreme verbosity, which manifested itself in sentences frequently exceeding 50 words, many with multiple restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.

"My kids eat twisted cheese, and I don't want the cheese people to sue me for this, but basically the white part and the orange parts just don't taste any differently, and that got me to thinking about lovers entwined," said Simms, an amateur comedy writer who has won four T-shirts in David Letterman contests.

The winner wasn't bad but check out the complete list. There were some that I thought better like:

Colin grabbed the switchgear and slammed the spritely Vauxhall Vixen into a lower gear as he screamed through the roundabout heading toward the familiar pink rowhouse in Puking-On-The-Wold, his mind filled with the image of his comely Olive, dressed in some lacy underthing, waiting on the couch with only a smile and a cucumber sandwich, hoping that his lunch hour would provide sufficient time for both a naughty little romp and a digestive biscuit.

- or -

Had Dorothy known Duncan was a psychopath who would seduce, then brutally murder her, and that her best friend Dana, a forensic pathologist would investigate her death and also fall in love with him, but be saved just in time by Dwayne, her much maligned colleague, perhaps she wouldn't have bought him that Screwdriver.

Then there is the Purple Prose category:

The sun rose over the horizon like a great big radioactive baby's head with a bad sunburn but then again it might just have been that Lisa was always cranky this early in the morning.

- or -

The rhythmic breathing of my companion was interrupted violently by a fit of coughing, causing the peace of the early morning to be ripped from me as if Richard Simmons had charged into my bedroom in his be-sequined health fervor and started Sweating to the Oldies on the end of my bed.

Some folks are really scary!

And while we're on the subject
One puzzling aspect of the Niger uranium bunfight is why Joe Wilson, retired member of the State Department goof troup and former Clinton National Security Council official, was sent to Niger by the CIA to do a comedic turn as a "spy". I mean, the British are laughing at him:

"He seems to have asked a few people if it was true and when they said 'no' he accepted it all," one official said.

which was pretty much his own description in his NY Times piece. Why send this tea party warrior to do a real job?

Terrence Jeffrey explains it in Our Man in Niger:

So, who is this Wilson? He's our man in Niger.

Well, almost. Wilson is a retired State Department official. As charge d'affaires in Iraq in 1990, he was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam. Later, he served as ambassador to Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe. His most important credential for this controversy dates to the mid-1970s, when he served as a diplomat in Niger. In the late 1990s, as an official with President Clinton's National Security Council, he made a return visit to Niger.

These experiences apparently made Wilson America's greatest expert on Nigerien uranium exports.

Uh oh, I see it coming.

But the real scandal isn't whether the British were right or wrong about Iraq's interest in buying Nigerien uranium (the British stand by their conclusion). The real scandal is why the CIA had to rely on a retired State Department official to travel to Niger to double-check British intelligence about Niger's uranium.

If proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a significant security risk to the United States, then mines in Africa that produce uranium that can be used in weapons of mass destruction should be significant targets of U.S. intelligence gathering.

They haven't been.

After a July 15 press conference, in the presence of other reporters, I asked House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., if the diminution of CIA personnel in Africa in the 1990s hurt our ability to track Niger's uranium industry.

"Yes, that's part of the problem," Goss said.

Jeffrey: "Part of the problem is that we diminished our CIA presence in Africa?"

Goss: "Yes, that is absolutely accurate."

Jeffrey: "During the Clinton years?"

Goss: "Yes. It happened to be in those years when he was the president. That is correct."

Well, golly! Maybe they needed more manpower tracking down potential playmates for the Pres.

Let's not forget the real culprits
Aside from the predictable whining from Democrat party bloviators, Brent Bozell reminds us who is getting the most mileage out of the African uranium "story" in Manufacturing the 'daily drumbeat'. Yep, it's the flies around the butt of the Democrat party - the American media:

The public gets two kinds of news. There is the unpredictable erupting event, from the great (Berlin Wall falls) to the small (a child goes missing). Then there's the more common type of news, the everyday assembly-line product of press conferences and public events. Some call this "manufactured news," since public figures at the center of the news can orchestrate their spin. But there's a subcategory of "manufactured news," in which the media create a story based on a political agenda. Welcome to the so-called Bush speech "controversy."

Last week, the Democrats decided to inflate 10 words out of President Bush's State of the Union address into a toxic mix of Watergate, lying and, just for fun, Daddy's broken tax pledge. "Read His Lips," they chided with a new TV ad, because "America deserves the truth." Like clockwork, the so-called objective media responded with an avalanche of sympathetic coverage that begged this question: Why buy an ad when you've got several networks and news magazines that will carry your message for free?
...
This whole charade is brought to you by the true clowns of false intelligence, the ones who went on television and predicted massive casualties, massive resistance by regular Iraqi citizens, chemical weapons attacks on our forces, a military "quagmire" without dislodging Saddam. Who are these people to criticize others for failing to report the whole picture with crystal-clear perfection?

It's easy if you just remember, "If it's Katie Couric, you know it's bullshit".

It's our old pal Fidel
You may remember an item from last Thursday about the mysterious jamming of US satellite feeds to Iran. There was some suspicion that the jamming was coming from the Caribbean, but that it would take some time to pinpoint it. Well, surprise, surprise, surprise - Castro regime jamming U.S. broadcasts into Iran:

The Cuban government has been jamming all U.S. broadcasts into Iran since the Voice of America began beaming new Farsi-language programming into that country earlier this month, according to U.S. officials and electronics experts outside the government.
...
"Cuba is obviously doing this at the behest of the mullahs in Iran," said Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the VOA Board of Governors. For technological reasons, he said, "Iran needed someone in this hemisphere to do its dirty work."

Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Florida Republican, suggested Cuba was doing the jamming in exchange for a favorable deal on Iranian oil, on which Cuba is becoming increasingly dependent.

"There is an intimate relationship between Iran and Cuba," he said. "It is clear the relationship is becoming deeper and more pronounced."
...
Joe Garcia, spokesman for the the Cuban American National Foundation, said, "Cuba is a rogue state, involved in narcoterrorism, narcotrafficking, kidnapping, foreign incursions around the world, arms sales and harboring criminals. Jamming a television signal is normal. They are doing it for Iranian oil."

Hey, the Axis of Evil team is short a player these days. How about bringing Fidel up from the minors?