SOMETHING NEW: OUR Political JOKE OF THE MOMENT!
This time courtesy of "The Tonight Show's" Jay Leno--

"And of course Saddam Hussein has released another tape. Have you heard this latest tape? It's the same old thing. "Bush is a demon, Bush is an evil aggressor. Bush is Satan." Let me tell you something, if this guy wants to insult our president and call him evil, he can just join the Democrat Party and run for president like everybody else."

To The All-American
Answer To The
"Axis of Weasels"

FranceStinks.com &

GermanyStinks.com

Inside
FranceStinks.com

THIS SITE has now been visited by over FOUR MILLION new first-time visitors-- Thank YOU! We took a brief update hiatus for a few weeks, but now we're back to our usual update schedule of once or even several times a week here and on our sister site at www.BigBoots.US, and daily visits have become a routine for many of our fans AND our detractors.  (by the way, stories that scroll off this front page wind up in our NEWS pages divided by the specific weasel nation in question, so they're only moved, not forgotten!)

Speaking of the latter, many of them have a very skewed view of the USA, partly thanks to the sources of information they choose to seek out and believe. For some informative words on that subject specifically for our unhappy French and German visitors please click HERE or, for more features, scroll down--this is one VERY full-of-stuff site indeed!

Inside
GermanyStinks.com

The interim findings of David Kay and the Iraq Survey Group make two things abundantly clear: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was in material breach of its United Nations obligations before the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 last November, and Iraq went further into breach after the resolution was passed.

Kay's interim findings offer detailed evidence of Hussein's efforts to defy the international community to the last. The report describes a host of activities related to weapons of mass destruction that "should have been declared to the U.N." It reaffirms that Iraq's forbidden programs spanned more than two decades, involving thousands of people and billions of dollars.

What the world knew last November about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs was enough to justify the threat of serious consequences under Resolution 1441. What we now know as a result of David Kay's efforts confirms that Hussein had every intention of continuing his work on banned weapons despite the U.N. inspectors, and that we and our coalition partners were right to eliminate the danger that his regime posed to the world.

Although Kay and his team have not yet discovered stocks of the weapons themselves, they will press on in the months ahead with their important and painstaking work. All indications are that they will uncover still more evidence of Hussein's dangerous designs.

Before the war, our intelligence had detected a calculated campaign to prevent any meaningful inspections. We knew that Iraqi officials, members of the ruling Baath Party and scientists had hidden prohibited items in their homes.

Lo and behold, Kay and his team found strains of organisms concealed in a scientist's home, and they report that one of the strains could be used to produce biological agents. Kay and his team also discovered documents and equipment in scientists' homes that would have been useful for resuming uranium enrichment efforts.

Kay and his team have "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery . . . has come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that the Iraq Survey Group has discovered that should have been declared to the U.N."

The Kay Report also addresses the issue of suspected mobile biological agent laboratories: "Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant and BW [biological warfare] production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers. That said, nothing . . . rules out their potential use in BW production." Here Kay's findings are inconclusive. He is continuing to work this issue.

Kay and his team have, however, found this: "A clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to U.N. monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW [chemical-biological weapons] research." They also discovered: "a prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N."

The Kay Report confirms that our intelligence was correct to suspect the al-Kindi Co. of being involved in prohibited activity. Missile designers at al-Kindi told Kay and his team that Iraq had resumed work on converting SA-2 surface-to-air missiles into ballistic missiles with a range of about 250 kilometers, and that this work continued even while UNMOVIC inspectors were in Iraq. The U.N.-mandated limit for Iraq was a range of 150 kilometers.

The Kay Report also confirmed our prewar intelligence that indicated Iraq was developing missiles with ranges up to 1,000 kilometers. Similarly, Kay substantiated our reports that Iraq had tested an unmanned aerial vehicle to 500 kilometers, also in violation of U.N. resolutions.

What's more, he and his team found that elaborate efforts to shield illicit programs from inspection persisted even after the collapse of Hussein's regime. Key evidence was deliberately eliminated or dispersed during the postwar period. In a wide range of offices, laboratories and companies suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction, computer hard drives were destroyed, files were burned and equipment was carefully cleansed of all traces of use -- and done so in a pattern that was clearly deliberate and selective, rather than random.

One year ago, when President Bush brought his concerns about Iraq to the United Nations, he made it plain that his principal concern in a post-Sept. 11 world was not just that a rogue regime such as Saddam Hussein's had WMD programs, but that such horrific weapons could find their way out of Iraq into the arms of terrorists who would have even fewer compunctions about using them against innocent people across the globe.

In the interim report, Kay and his team record the chilling fact that they "found people, technical information and illicit procurement networks that if allowed to flow to other countries and regions could accelerate global proliferation."

Having put an end to that harrowing possibility alone justifies our coalition's action against Hussein's regime. But that is not the only achievement of our brave men and women in uniform and their coalition partners.

Three weeks ago I paid my respects at a mass grave in the northern city of Halabja, where on a Friday morning in March 1988, Hussein's forces murdered 5,000 men, women and children with chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein can cause no more Halabjas. His "Republic of Fear" no longer holds sway over the people of Iraq. For the first time in three decades, the Iraqi people have reason to hope for the future.

President Bush was right: This was an evil regime, lethal to its own people, in deepening material breach of its Security Council obligations, and a threat to international peace and security. Hussein would have stopped at nothing until something stopped him. It's a good thing that we did.

The writer is Secretary of State.

WARSAW (Reuters) - Polish troops in Iraq have found four French-built advanced anti-aircraft missiles which were built this year, a Polish Defense Ministry spokesman told Reuters Friday.

France strongly denied having sold any such missiles to Iraq for nearly two decades, and said it was impossible that its newest missiles should turn up in Iraq.

"Polish troops discovered an ammunition depot on Sept. 29 near the region of Hilla and there were four French-made Roland-type missiles," Defense Ministry spokesman Eugeniusz Mleczak said.

"It is not the first time Polish troops found ammunition in Iraq but to our surprise these missiles were produced in 2003."

The Roland anti-aircraft system is a short-range air defense missile in service with at least 10 countries, including France and Germany.

They are fired from a mobile launcher vehicle and defense experts say the missiles are highly effective against aircraft attacking at low and medium altitude.

Under a strict trade embargo imposed by the United Nations, Iraq was barred from importing arms after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Among others, Russia, Britain and France all sold arms to Iraq in the 1970s and 1980s. In Iraq's arsenal were Soviet-built Scud missiles, British Chieftain tanks and French Mirage fighters.

But Iraq managed to circumvent the arms trade ban in the 1990s through shadowy deals with various arms traders and kept its military equipment functioning.

"NO MILITARY EXPORTS"

"Since July 1990, France has not authorized a single shipment of military equipment to Iraq," a French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told Reuters. Similar accusations surfaced in the U.S. media in April, she said.

In 1980-81, 13 Roland-1 missile systems were shipped to Iraq and from 1983 to 1986, 100 Roland-2 missile systems. The Roland-3 has never been exported to Iraq, she said.

"It is not credible to say that the Roland missiles found a few days ago were produced in 2003 and delivered just before the Anglo-American intervention," the spokeswoman said. "Let's be absolutely clear about this: no military exports to Iraq were licensed after July 1990."

It was unlikely that the missiles could be used 17-18 years after their delivery, she added.

Mleczak said Polish troops were notified about the missiles by a local Iraqi, who received a reward for the information.

"The ammunition depot was neutralized," said Mleczak. Polish television pictures showed missiles placed in a shallow trench and a huge explosion when the Poles blew up munitions at the site.

Since early September, Poland, a staunch supporter of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, has led a multinational force in one of four so-called stabilization zones, in central Iraq.

In the run-up to the outbreak of the 2003 Iraq war, American and British combat pilots struck Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries repeatedly as they patrolled no-fly zones in the north and south of the country.

(Additional reporting by Jon Boyle in Paris)

Here's another sorry reason why GermanyStinks indeed!:

A Sad Case Of Schadenfreude

Andrew Gimson says Gerhard Schröder has unleashed and exploited his country’s latent anti-Americanism, long suppressed by postwar German leaders in the Spectator, UK.

Last Sunday I attended a very odd and unpleasant meeting at the Tempodrom in Berlin. The several hundred people who were present believe the American government is to blame for the attack on the World Trade Center, which it either carried out itself, or else allowed others to carry out, in order to have an excuse to invade Iraq and establish world domination. Michael Meacher has recently argued in our own dear Guardian that Washington deliberately failed to stop the attacks, and a number of American conspiracy theorists had come to Berlin to peddle this line. Many people in this milieu — though not, one can be certain, Mr Meacher — further believe that the American government is in turn controlled by a Jewish world conspiracy, and that Mossad is behind the suicide bombings in Israel.

Any number of variations on these wild themes could be heard at the Tempodrom, and any amount of dubious detail was advanced about why the American authorities failed to send fighters to shoot down the airliners after these had left their permitted courses. One speaker described at length how the airliners had been controlled by propeller-driven aircraft that appeared in the sky near them. A British student from East Anglia University, who had started to find out about these conspiracy theories on the Internet and had helped to put up posters for the conference, said in tones in which one might describe a religious conversion, ‘This stuff is the truth, the real world.’ Nobody found my suggestion that the Americans were taken by surprise on 9/11 the slightest bit convincing.

The conference organisers, who were drawn from the extreme Left, were anxious to exclude their rivals from the neo-Nazi Right, and had announced that they would resist all attempts to exploit the 9/11 story ‘by the purveyors of propaganda, paranoia, racism, mystification, proselytisation or advertising’. This solemn warning against ‘advertising’ did not prevent the speakers from advertising their own ludicrous books, which were selling briskly at the back of the hall. Nor had the heavies on the door managed to stop Gerd Walther, an office holder in the extreme-right NPD (the National Democratic party of Germany) from infiltrating the conference and trying to bend the ear of anyone who would listen about the true state of affairs in Germany, which he regards as an occupied country run by a class of collaborator politicians who are themselves controlled — surprise, surprise — by the Jews and the Americans: ‘But the German people will have its [sic] freedom. On 8 May 1945 the German Wehrmacht capitulated, but the German Reich did not go under. It’s just not capable of acting at the moment, but we’re waiting to restore its capacity to act. We believe the Jewish–American occupying power is heading for defeat. The Jewish power in America will fall.’

It seemed to me that if one started to take this kind of thing seriously, one would addle one’s mind. Der Spiegel magazine has this week devoted 16 pages to debunking the conspiracy theorists, but even to plough through that feels like a sort of contamination. These people are utterly disreputable, and perhaps we can still afford to ignore them for most of the time.

It would not, however, be wise to ignore the conditions in which such noxious beliefs can flourish. The Germans are becoming more receptive to all forms of anti-Americanism. A year ago 68 per cent of them still regarded a leading role for the Americans in foreign affairs as desirable, with only 27 per cent against: now 50 per cent of them reject such a role for the Americans, with only 45 per cent in favour. A venomous stream of anti-American and anti-Semitic resentment has burst forth in Germany during the Iraq crisis. A recent survey in Die Zeit showed that no fewer than 19 per cent of Germans are prepared to believe that the American government could be behind 9/11. Dr Jeffrey Gedmin, an American foreign policy expert who has often appeared on German television to argue the case for the invasion of Iraq, was amazed by the volume and bitterness of the hate mail he has received. ‘You Jew son of a whore, you are not welcome in this country, you and that nigger hyena Condoleezza Rice,’ was the sort of message sent to him by many of his correspondents. Dr Gedmin happens, incidentally, to be a Roman Catholic.

It is quite possible to be a severe critic of the policies pursued by George Bush and Ariel Sharon without being either anti-American or anti-Semitic, and many Germans have achieved that feat. It would also be grotesquely unfair to imply that just because someone is anti-American, he or she must be anti-Semitic. A growing majority of Germans are anti-American in some shape or form, but no more than a minority of that majority are anti-Semitic too. Yet in a certain kind of semi-educated person who feels somehow under threat, and who finds the conventional explanations for his predicament unconvincing, the leap from anti-Americanism to anti-Semitism is dangerously easy.

In Germany one finds a spectrum of opinion, ranging from perfectly respectable objections to American policy through to evil and demented ravings. Dr Gedmin, who is director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, estimates that about 10 per cent of his correspondents have actually thanked him for making the strategic case for what the Americans have done in Iraq — a case which few other people have had the temerity to express on German television. He reckons that a further 60 per cent of correspondents have attacked his views, but have done so in reasonably civil terms. Only about 30 per cent have descended to the rabidly anti-Semitic form of anti-Americanism.

Another American who works in an office full of educated Germans said, ‘With every American soldier that dies the schadenfreude is immense. Every day people come by my desk and say, “Isn’t it great, Bush is coming crawling to Schröder now. Schröder won’t get an invitation to the ranch at Crawford — George Bush is going to beg him to go there.”’

With every reverse, or seeming reverse, that the Americans suffer in Iraq, the schadenfreude in Germany reaches new heights, or depths. The Germans hope the Americans will fail in Iraq. They expected them to lose the war, and now they expect them to lose the peace. Such views are not, of course, unknown in Britain, but are far more widespread in Germany. They are accompanied by an astonishingly low estimate of the Americans’ abilities, lower even than the BBC sometimes conveys.

Whenever I visit Berlin I try to see my friend Dr Tilman Fichter, a veteran Social Democrat. We usually walk round the gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg, which are looking more and more beautiful, for they are being restored to their 18th-century form. Dr Fichter on this occasion excelled himself. He is full of acute insights into German politics, but considers the American armed forces to be of no value whatever. As he himself put it, ‘Even a British Boy Scout troop is a more military formation than the American army today.’ He believes the Germans would be prepared to serve in Iraq as long as a British general was in charge of the country.

Blank-faced young women with flat stomachs jogged past us as I struggled to cope with these compliments. The Americans, I remarked, got to Baghdad in an extraordinarily short period of time. But Dr Fichter was unshakeable. He maintained that the American armed forces cannot now be any good, because the old East Coast elite no longer serve in them and they recruit entirely from the ghetto and from Cuba. He lamented the defeat in American politics of the East Coast by the mid-West and the South, and recalled with a shudder a visit he once made to Phoenix, Arizona.

President Bush is dismissed by most Germans as a cowboy and a hick, and there is no desire to admit that many of those around him are able people with long experience of foreign policy who were strong supporters of German reunification in 1990, as was the President’s father. An American journalist of my acquaintance recently had occasion to visit the office of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and found the Chancellor’s staff giggling about Mr Bush in front of another American reporter.

Such juvenile, and breathtakingly unprofessional, behaviour dismays what is left of Germany’s old Atlanticist establishment. Ever since the war there has been a strong vein of anti-American feeling in Germany. To have your country defeated, occupied and then defended by a foreign power is humiliating. Conservative Germans deplored the Americanisation of German culture, while the rebellious generation of 1968 regarded the Vietnam war as a crime comparable to Auschwitz, and demonstrated with ostentatious moral fervour in favour of peace and against the nuclear missiles that Nato wanted to station on German soil. But Chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl stood firm for Nato, and the great debt West Germany owed to its American protectors was never forgotten by West Germany’s leaders. The West German orthodoxy was that the Germans could only ever prove they were worthy once more of the Free World’s trust if they were true to the Atlantic alliance.

Mr Schröder tore up that doctrine, which might indeed be regarded as superfluous once the Cold War was over and Germany was reunited. His record since coming into power in 1998 is appalling — he tinkers helplessly as the economy stagnates, with unemployment over four million and rising — but in the autumn of last year he won a second term by playing the anti-American card. He and Jacques Chirac unleashed and exploited the profound anti-American resentments that have festered ever since the war in Germany and France. By using this rancid anti-Americanism to win re-election, Mr Schröder gave his blessing as Chancellor to it. One of the routed German Atlanticists, an eminent member of what used to be the foreign policy establishment, remarked to me on Monday that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, would have been proud to unleash such hatred of America.

The period of good behaviour by subservient Germans has ended, to be followed by a period of bad behaviour which can only be understood as a kind of belated adolescent rebellion against the long and humiliating tutelage of Washington. The Germans want to be taken seriously. They want to be treated equally, and any hint that they are not equal is more than they can bear.

Friends of Germany, among whom I count myself, must hope that the present outpouring of anti-American resentment will be a brief and purifying phase, from which Germany will emerge as a mature and sovereign nation. But certain difficulties stand in the way of such a happy outcome. The Germans consider the Americans to be a backward people with a primitive economic system in which dog eats dog and the state fails lamentably in its duty to direct, protect and organise the life of the people. Yet for some mysterious reason the Americans appear to be a rich, strong, confident, secure, relaxed and patriotic nation. What is more, Germany will only recover its economic dynamism when its dopey political class, among whom the pursuit of consensus long ago degenerated into listless moral cowardice, introduces reforms which give the German economy some of the flexibility and spontaneity found in America. This is a bitter pill to swallow, and the Germans as yet show no sign of finding the stomach for it.

Mr Schröder is a gifted and ruthless opportunist, with an acute ear for the mood of his fellow Germans. But the anti-Americanism which he has helped to promote may prove a force that even he cannot control. There will be official attempts at fence-mending: the Germans are already offering some sort of help in Iraq and will try for a time to avoid making as much of a fuss as they might about Iran, North Korea and genetically modified crops. But there is now such deep and bitter suspicion on both sides, in Washington as well as in Berlin, that it is impossible to imagine a true meeting of minds. The German opinion polls show rapidly increasing support for the idea of a European superpower, to act as a check to American ambitions: 70 per cent of Germans now favour that idea, compared with only 48 per cent a year ago. No matter that they are not prepared to spend the money which alone could give substance to that project. The Germans are going the way of the French, intent on a kind of European Gaullism that puts every possible obstacle in Washington’s way. Unable to bear the reality of American power, they have opted instead to live in a world of illusions.

Andrew Gimson is foreign editor of The Spectator

Remember Anna Lindh? She was the Swedish foreign minister dubbed the "Scandinavian Taliban" for her terrorist apologetics. She's shown up occasionally in headlines, first in January 2002 for her quote: "I think this discussion about equating Yasser Arafat with terrorists is both inappropriate and stupid. It is a very dangerous policy."

Holocaust of the elderly:

death toll in French heatwave rises to 10,000

By John Lichfield in Paris

22 August 2003

The summer of 2003 will be remembered as the year of the holocaust of the French elderly.

France was reeling yesterday from figures that suggested some 10,000 people - mostly over the age of 75 - were killed by this month's heatwave, double the previous estimate.

As a political storm raged over blame for the deaths, President Jacques Chirac called an emergency cabinet meeting and promised an inquiry to examine "with complete openness" the failings of the health and welfare system.

Half the victims are believed to have died in old people's homes, many operating with fewer staff during the August holidays. Many hospitals had closed complete wards for the month and were unable to offer sophisticated, or sometimes even basic, treatment to victims. About 2,000 people are thought to have died in their homes from the effects of dehydration and other heat- related problems while neighbours and relatives were away.

Such was the death rate - described officially as a period of "surplus mortality" - that families are now having to wait for up to two weeks for a funeral because of a shortage of coffins, priests and grave-diggers.

M. Chirac, who has been criticisedfor refusing to break off his two-week holiday in Quebec, promised in a nationwide address yesterday that "everything will be done to correct the shortcomings" exposed by the disaster. "Many fragile people died alone in their homes," he admitted.

Senior health officials have claimed ministers reacted slowly to warnings in early August that a calamity was in the making, while the Health Minister, Jean-François Mattei, has insisted he was not given adequate advice. By the time he and the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, broke off holidays last week and ordered the emergency recall of hospital staff, the worst of the 10-day heatwave was over. Earlier this week, the director general of health, Lucien Abenhaim, resigned, complaining ministers had ignored his warnings, including a plea that military and Red Cross hospitals should be commandeered to ease the burden on state hospitals.

Many healthcare professionals - including the doctor, former health minister and founder of Médécins Sans Frontières, Bernard Kouchner - said it had been a disaster waiting to happen. "We are all to blame," Dr Kouchner said, irritating many of his colleagues on the left, who had hoped the crisis would help them to destabilise the centre-right government and head off health reforms planned this autumn.

Dr Michel Dèsmaizieres, an emergency service doctor in Paris, told the newspaper Libération: "It is just not right to see [patients on] trolleys in the corridors, while whole wards were empty and locked up. In the retirement homes there were people with a body temperature of 42C [108F], for whom we could offer nothing but a little comfort."

M. Mattei, also a former doctor, reluctantly admitted earlier this week that as many as 5,000 extra deaths were recorded - 80 per cent of them old people - in the first half of this month. However, France's largest funeral directors' association has now calculated that there were at least 10,000 extra deaths in the period up to Wednesday of this week, many of them on 12 August when temperatures peaked at more than 100F (37.8C) in northern France. About half the extra deaths were in the Paris area.

Government officials described these figures as "plausible" but urged caution until an official investigation was completed next month.

Dr Marc Harboun, a specialist geriatrics from Ivry, near Paris, said: "This death rate is due to a lack of people and means to reduce the temperature [of the patients]. Medically, we could cope by increasing the dosage in transfusions but, for the other things we needed to do - making the patients drink, dampening them down - we didn't have the time."

Officials said 85 per cent of all public and private retirement homes in France were permanently understaffed. At holiday times, staffing levels fell even further.

One woman, Claude Guérin, described how she took her elderly aunt to a hospital on the Côte d'Azur, suffering from pulmonary problems brought on by the heat. "She was 96, but she was fighting fit before the heatwave," said Mme Guérin.

"At first she was put in an air-conditioned revival room but then she was abruptly transferred to a ward where it was 50C [122F]. I talked to two nurses. One said: 'I don't have time to bother with her.' The other said: 'Get her out of here.' But the doctors would not let her go. Three days later, she died."

AH THE COMPASSIONATE SUPERIOR "CULTURE" OF FRANCE! "I don't have time to bother with her" and then she DIES! Attention, mes amis Francais: Les peuples qui habit dans les maisons du verre...Sont Les Francais!

Here are two unrelated-yet-fascinating stories from Scandinavia, a backwater of Europe and the world, that shed some light on the martial abilities or lack thereof of the Europeans. Read 'em and laugh...or cry. Your choice:

Army goes on office hours
Budget crunch puts Sweden's military on a 9-to-5 schedule for the rest of the year.
August 18, 2003: 11:15 AM EDT  STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -

Sweden's armed forces will operate only during office hours for the rest of the year to cut costs, military headquarters said.

They also will cut fighter plane patrols to a minimum, keep navy ships in port, mothball armored vehicles and stop using large caliber live ammunition during exercises.

The center-left Social Democratic government has told the military to cut spending by 450 million kronor ($54.89 million) this year as part of an overall effort to keep the budget from falling into deficit.

Militarily non-aligned Sweden spends just over 40 billion kronor per year on defense, or some 1.6 percent of gross domestic product.

A parliamentary defense commission said in a recent report that the likelihood of Sweden facing a military threat in the foreseeable future was very small.  

AND WHAT ABOUT A WELL-TRAINED CITIZEN'S MILITIA????? OOOPS!--

OSLO (Reuters) - A Norwegian accidentally shot and wounded six of his friends at a surprise party to celebrate his 40th birthday, police said on Sunday.

Who's Laughing Now?

Tuesday, August 12, 2003
By Neil Cavuto

I was driving home and heard a radio discussion, featuring foreigners commenting on Arnold Schwarzenegger's run for California governor (search). I think they included a couple of French guys, some woman from England and a teenager from Germany. Almost universally, they were amused.

The British woman actually said something like, "that's America, for you. Silly stuff."

The French dudes were even worse. They said it made this country look like a laughing stock.

Oh, really?

Well, messieurs, you may have a problem with a couple of hundred people wanting to run the biggest state in the United States. But I don't.

You may say they've made a mockery of the process. But I don't. I say they've restored the fun in the process.

You may think Californians are nutty. But I don't. Those nuts have created the fifth largest economy in the world. Larger than your sorry Chablis-sipping, socialist selves, I might point out.

You may think it vulgar a stripper runs for office. But I don't. In this country, anyone can run for any office.

And you may think you have the market cornered on good government. But I don't.

Because I'd much rather have a stripper, an actor and a comedian duke it out, than a lifelong poll, a socialist and a bureaucrat debate what cradle-to-grave government programs should win out.

You might call our process silly and comical. I call your arrogance obnoxious and revolting.

You might wallop the state of our affairs. I'd take any of our states over any of your affairs.

Because at least in this country, we lay it all out. Given all your desperate economies, it seems some of you foreigners have yet to figure anything out.

I'd sooner see an actor take a shot at leading, than a socialist take a shot at any of us governing.

We're not perfect. I'm just glad we're not you.

Watch Neil Cavuto's Common Sense weekdays at 4 p.m. ET on Your World with Cavuto on FoxNews-- We do!  AND FOR MORE COMMENTS ON THE NEW POLITICAL CLIMATE IN CALIFORNIA, visit a great new website-- www.ArnoldsArmy.com!

BERLIN (Reuters) - If German politicians lack ideas for reforming the country's struggling healthcare and pensions systems, they can now blame an adverse flow of energy in their workplace.

By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press Writer

PARIS - Goodbye "e-mail," the French government says, and hello "courriel" — the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.

BORDEAUX Something was missing from the country's largest wine fair here last week, and it was not just the air conditioning in one of the exhibition halls (where temperatures rose so high, corks popped). The usual contingent of American wine merchants were mostly absent, confirming to many in the trade fair's bottle-filled booths that American ill will over France's opposition to the war in Iraq has bruised more than egos.

French wine exports to the United States, which was once French winemakers' most promising market and is now one of their greatest competitors, are going down the drain.

"It's clear from our American distributors that there is a hesitation to promote French wines for the time being," said Bruno Finance, sales manager for Yvon Mau, one of Bordeaux's largest wine merchants. He said French wine was losing ground in some other markets, "but as of today the only place there is such a big loss is in the U.S."

The politically tinged backlash comes as French exports to the United States are already suffering from a weak U.S. economy and the dollar's diminished value against the euro, which makes French products more expensive for Americans. Overall French exports to the U.S. dropped by 21 percent in the first four months of the year.

There is no doubt the trans-Atlantic dispute over Iraq has made things worse. American aviation executives were absent from the biannual Paris Air Show this month, and the Pentagon sent fewer of its fancy planes.  France is trying to repair the damage with a maladroit public relations campaign whose tagline is "Let's Fall In Love Again" and features a video in which the aging comedian Woody Allen talks about French kissing his young wife. The Paris Tourism Office said it would decorate the Champs Elysées with stars and stripes on July 4 and that many hotels in the capital would celebrate the American holiday.

But some people worry that the damage might not be so easily repaired. French wines never fully recovered their position in the Scandinavian market after a 1995 boycott there to protest France's nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific that year.

"It gave people the opportunity to try other wines and they never switched back," said Finance amid a clutter of half-filled wine glasses in his company's booth at the fair. He worries that the political pall over French wines has come at a time when competition is growing and the market is in flux. By the time the pall passes, he said, it may be too late for France to recapture its former cache.

France's heavy winemaking regulations make it difficult for French wines to compete with many American and Australian brands - particularly in the United States, where consumers value the reliability of a standardized product. American and Australian winemakers can irrigate their vineyards to control the quality of their grapes, for example, or even mellow their wine by adding oak chips to the stainless steel tanks in which the wine is aged. But that is all illegal in France.

French vintners are at the mercy of the weather and if they want to make a mellower wine, they have to invest in expensive, new oak casks. The result is wine that varies in quality from year to year, an unpredictability that is prized by connoisseurs but is lost on the average consumer.

Because of the competition amid a global wine glut, France turned 2.5 million gallons of Beaujolais wine into industrial alcohol last year. Bordeaux, France's largest wine-producing region, is protected from the American slump somewhat because it can count on loyal imbibers at home. About two-thirds of the wine consumed in France comes from the southwestern winegrowing region. But the U.S. market is far more important to other French wine regions. The country's American-bound wine exports, which totaled nearly $1 billion in 2002, account for about 16 percent of all the wine France ships abroad.

The volume of those exports fell by 9 percent in the first four months of this year, but the numbers are skewed because they reflect the shipment of Bordeaux wine that was sold before it was bottled two years ago. Bordeaux is one of the few regions in France where wine is pre-sold.

More typical is Bernard Hervet, the director of a large vineyard in eastern France's Burgundy region, who says over a glass of chilled Chablis that his exports to the United States had fallen by nearly a third this year. Louis Regis Affre, general manager of the France's Federation of Wine and Spirit Exporters, says retail sales of French wine continued to fall sharply in May while overall wine sales in the United States were growing. "Most French wine promotions in the U.S. have stopped because of the brittleness over Iraq," he said.

Florence Chartrier, who with her husband owns Smith Haut Lafitte, one of Bordeaux's premier vineyards, said that the American market has been receding for years, making it harder for the big properties to sell their wine. Last year, she said, the vineyard had to cut its prices by 15 percent and it took three hours to sell out its production. But this year, with prices reduced even further, it took two weeks to sell everything - and about 15 percent of those orders are still not confirmed.

"People who normally take five cases are taking one this year," she said from the lawn of her stone chateau overlooking rows of green vines heavy with ripening grapes. "There's a coolness to the market." Part of the problem in Bordeaux is that the American wine guru Robert Parker canceled his trip to taste the 2002 wine this year, ostensibly because of concern about traveling during the war.

Parker, a Maryland attorney and publisher of The Wine Advocate, normally rates Bordeaux's top wines in the spring after the grapes are harvested. His ratings are so influential that they determine both price and demand for the region's best wines."His absence has had such a huge impact that's there's not much consumer demand for the 2002," said Todd Hess, Chicago-based wine director for Sam's Wines Spirits, one of largest wine retailers in the United States.

Hess, one of the Americans who came to the wine fair this year, said the change in the exchange rate is adding to French winemakers' woes. "It's hard to explain to a consumer why a product they've been buying for $6.99 is now $8.99," he said.

IT SAYS IT ALL.
(especially the last sentence)

AFTER THE WAR

Thank You

An Iraqi poet celebrates the dictator's fall.

BY AWAD NASIR
The Wall St. Journal Online Edition, Thursday, May 8, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

Mr. Nasir is an Iraqi poet, until recently exiled in London.

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