World Politics

[Bala Verde]

Le Pen is currently at 17.9% which is still embarassingly high. She does pick up a lot of the "anti-system" vote, not all FN voters are raving bigots (though many are). In the next town from where I live she led the vote with 28.5%! Sarkozy is indeed unabashedly attempting to seduce as many Le Pen voters as he can by talking immigration, security etc. Interestingly enough many FN voters are immigrants living in the housing projects who are tired of being harassed by their neighbor's kids.

No problems though, as soon as Hollande gets elected (or more accurately Sarko gets voted out) France will miraculously become a paradise on earth and all our problems will suddenly dissapear. We simply need to hire a lot more civil servants and increase the number and amount of handouts - why didn't we think of this before! Hollande has also promised to void any signed treaties and reconstruct all of Europe his own way. Nothing less.

Not that I am a fan of Sarkozy, who made a lot of mistakes and still remains dogmatic on many issues. I can understand why people don't want to vote for him. In fact he did quite well considering the global economic crisis that has existed for virtually his entire presidential term and the fact that the French media has pounded on him relentlessly for the past 5 years. To only finish 1.5% behind Hollande in the first round is a pretty strong showing relatively speaking.

Hollande preaches change, but many analysts agree that if he gets in he will simply represent business as usual. The difference being that the perks of power will change hands.

Thanks for the analysis. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

 

[Amsterhammer]

The Dutch government officially resigned today. The largest (current) parties all favor earliest possible elections, which would be towards the end of June. The latest poll has the Socialists as the largest party for the first time ever. Much is likely to change before the actual election, but right now it looks like all the parties involved in the collapsed minority government are losing ground.

 

[Bala Verde]

The Dutch government officially resigned today. The largest (current) parties all favor earliest possible elections, which would be towards the end of June. The latest poll has the Socialists as the largest party for the first time ever. Much is likely to change before the actual election, but right now it looks like all the parties involved in the collapsed minority government are losing ground.

I was waiting for you to post an update on the situation in the Netherlands.

Good news and let's hope 'foreign fearing' Wilders doesn't walk away with it.

I heard it could be disastrous for CDA...

 

[Amsterhammer]

For those whose Dutch is insufficient, the last column shows the difference between the latest poll and the number of seats won at the last election in 2010.

As of today, the PVV (Wilders) is (only) five seats down, whereas the CDA is 10 seats down. Another poll claims that the SP (Socialists) is now the biggest party with one seat more than the main right wing government party, the VVD.

The fourth line shows that the majority of one seat that this government had with the support of Wilders has now evaporated. On current figures, any left-ish coalition would have to include either the CDA (which threatens to become a rump by comparison with its former 'glory') or the Christian Union, which will prove to be extremely tricky.

Whatever happens between now and election day, we're likely to again see a situation where many parties will be negotiating for months in order to try and create a viable coalition. I'll post updates as they occur.

 

[VeloCity]

Really disturbing article on the Bush-era torture policies:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...anced_interrogation_of_prisoners_.single.html

Here is what I learned. Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them. When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. “The law has been changed,” detainees around the world were told. “No rules apply.” Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more. They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple. And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture. They did it by denying detainees legal process because, as the CIA’s Inspector General put it in a 2004 report, when you torture someone you create an “Endgame” problem: You end up with detainees who, “if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.”

 

[Nielsa]

I was waiting for you to post an update on the situation in the Netherlands.

Good news and let's hope 'foreign fearing' Wilders doesn't walk away with it.

I heard it could be disastrous for CDA...

Reminds me of 2002 in France.

Candidates 1st round; 2nd round

Jacques Chirac 19.88%; 82.21%
Jean-Marie Le Pen 16.86%; 17.79%
Lionel Jospin 16.18%;

Turnout 71.60%; 79.71%

The socialists, greens etc showed up (79.71% turnout) to vote against Le Pen in the 2nd round. The Le Pens have their core voters but not much penetration beyond those ~17%.

 

[frenchfry]

Reminds me of 2002 in France.

Candidates 1st round; 2nd round

Jacques Chirac 19.88%; 82.21%
Jean-Marie Le Pen 16.86%; 17.79%
Lionel Jospin 16.18%;

Turnout 71.60%; 79.71%

The socialists, greens etc showed up (79.71% turnout) to vote against Le Pen in the 2nd round. The Le Pens have their core voters but not much penetration beyond those ~17%.

To me it's the same in NL. Wilders has his core but does not sway the right-of-centre voters who prefer the traditional moderate conservative parties.

Indeed Le Pen's score is pretty much limited to what she got this time around - a bit less than 18%. There is a core of zenophobic nationalists but many vote Le Pen to show their displeasure of the incestuous political system here. She is touting herself as the new leader of the right in France but she is still the same old hypocritical self-serving bulldog as ever. She appeals to those who don't have the ability to think through her bogus ideas (the same population that the far left goes after). This is not to be condescending of the uneducated, but they are proving to be incredibly naive by buying into some of the garbage spewed during the campaign. Of course the same could be said for US republicans, but that is another subject.

My problem is that I am a pragmatist, and there is so little meaningful debate coming from our political leaders (right and left) that it is not very reassuring. Then again they are only pandering to what we want to hear - which in France is that everyone is a victim and requires more government handouts even if we ruin the country by borrowing.

 

[Anonymous]

Really disturbing article on the Bush-era torture policies:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...anced_interrogation_of_prisoners_.single.html

If true then, top down, those involved should be prosecuted. End of.

Just so you know....

"LARRY SIEMS directs the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center, where he leads PEN’s ongoing efforts to defend writers facing persecution around the world and PEN’s Campaign for Core Freedoms, a comprehensive initiative to turn back new threats to freedom of expression in the United States. A poet and a nonfiction writer, he has written extensively on immigration and cross-cultural issues; his publications include the acclaimed collection Between the Lines: Letters between Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans and their Families and Friends. He researched and reported on human rights abuses along the U.S.–Mexico
border for Human Rights Watch, and studied and wrote on immigrant politics in Orange County, California under a fellowship from the Open Society Institute. His poems have appeared in leading literary journals."

Those are particularly strong leftist credentials. The George Soros ties are particularly interesting.

Let me ask you... if I were to post something accusing Obama and administration officials of something as serious as what Siems is alledging and that the author was being supported at least in part from Koch Bros grant money would you consider the subject matter or would you dismiss out of hand?

Interesting conflicts regarding what is and what is not torture;

I agree with Jaffer and Siems that recognition of those who exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib—their lead example—would be very healthy. I also agree that many people across the government did courageous things in opposing coercive practices. But I very much disagree with the instinct this oped reflects to divide the Bush administration into white hats and black hats and to honor the white hats by way of disgracing the supposed black hats.

For one thing, it is very easy to forget nearly ten years after the fact that, gross abuses like Abu Ghraib aside, these questions were hard. This was not a morality tale in which one’s binary positions about coercion define one’s goodness and honor. The question of what does and doesn’t constitute undue coercion, where the line is of torture as a legal matter, and where it lies as an ethical matter in the context of high-stakes counterterrorism interrogations do not admit of easy answers, and it was not surprising at all that the Bush administration had significant divisions of opinion on the subject.

Second, it is also easy to forget that if one is dividing the world up into white hats and black hats, certain people’s hats have a way of looking pretty gray. What would Jaffer and Siems do with, for example, Jim Comey—who fought like a lion against what he considered too-permissive guidance to the CIA on interrogation but certainly never contended that the CIA could not engage in any coercive practices? Or what would they do with Dan Levin, who began the process of rewriting the torture memos after their withdrawal and showed enormous courage in doing so honestly—and paid a real price for it—yet also concluded in that process that waterboarding was not necessarily torture, depending on how it was done? For that matter, what would they do with Jim Haynes—the Pentagon’s then-general counsel whom I am sure Jaffer and Siems would regard as one of those high-level officials who “expressly approved the torture of prisoners” but is also almost certainly the single reason why the military never waterboarded anyone? (I discuss both of the latter two cases in this essay.) Not only was the debate hard, legally and morally, but people’s roles in it were complicated.

In the end, Jaffer and Siems are conflating two very distinct issues that it is important to keep separate. One is whistle-blowing about gross abuses under anyone’s standards of law and morality. The other is, in conferring honors, retrospectively taking sides in policy and legal debates in which neither roles nor positions were as simple or as morally clear-cut as Jaffer and Siems portray. I endorse the first project and reject the second.

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/04/mixed-feelings-about-this/

 

[Echoes]

Le Pen's score is neither a zenophobic (the "moderates" are as much as zenophobic as she is) nor a protest vote. Simply, more and more French become eurosceptic and she was the only candidate - among those to whom polls gave a chance - to advocate the euro exit.

I don't have all the stats but the polls showed she was ahead among young people. And more and more kids are speaking openly about it (Times, they're a-changin') while it used to be a taboo.

I'm not even a fan of hers because she doesn't want to exit the EU but I think her score is logical and justified. I hope she'll be the new leader of the opposition.

Yesterday, I would've been proud to be French, really.

 

[frenchfry]

Le Pen's score is neither a zenophobic (the "moderates" are as much as zenophobic as she is) nor a protest vote. Simply, more and more French become eurosceptic and she was the only candidate - among those to whom polls gave a chance - to advocate the euro exit.

I don't have all the stats but the polls showed she was ahead among young people. And more and more kids are speaking openly about it (Times, they're a-changin') while it used to be a taboo.

I'm not even a fan of hers because she doesn't want to exit the EU but I think her score is logical and justified. I hope she'll be the new leader of the opposition.

Yesterday, I would've been proud to be French, really.

That other parties can also have zenophobic tendencies doesn't change the fact that the FN's calling card is anti-immigration. Whether you like the Euro or not, a quick look at the FN's propositions shows that France would be a much poorer nation if they were applied. Putting a virtual wall around any country (both economically and for immigration) is a death wish these days, we are part of the world economy whether we want to be or not.

My 20 year old son voted FN a few elections back, since then he has been informing himself and rejected them this time around.

Not to say there aren't any problems relating to immigration, but there are better ways to approach the issue.

 

[VeloCity]

If true then, top down, those involved should be prosecuted. End of.

Just so you know....

"LARRY SIEMS directs the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center, where he leads PEN’s ongoing efforts to defend writers facing persecution around the world and PEN’s Campaign for Core Freedoms, a comprehensive initiative to turn back new threats to freedom of expression in the United States. A poet and a nonfiction writer, he has written extensively on immigration and cross-cultural issues; his publications include the acclaimed collection Between the Lines: Letters between Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans and their Families and Friends. He researched and reported on human rights abuses along the U.S.–Mexico
border for Human Rights Watch, and studied and wrote on immigrant politics in Orange County, California under a fellowship from the Open Society Institute. His poems have appeared in leading literary journals."

Those are particularly strong leftist credentials. The George Soros ties are particularly interesting.

Let me ask you... if I were to post something accusing Obama and administration officials of something as serious as what Siems is alledging and that the author was being supported at least in part from Koch Bros grant money would you consider the subject matter or would you dismiss out of hand?

Interesting conflicts regarding what is and what is not torture;



http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/04/mixed-feelings-about-this/

Maybe you missed this part:

"I read nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents about America’s abuse of prisoners since 2001."

All Siems is doing is summarizing what he found in those formerly classified Bush-era documents, which were made available because of a FOIA ruling (and as an aside I think every American should consider themselves fortunate that we have something like the FOIA) and are therefore now available to anyone willing to go through those documents - you can verify it all for yourself if you want to. In other words, everything that Siems is writing about can either be substantiated or shown to be inaccurate - ie it's entirely falsifiable. If you suspect that Siems made something up, misquoted, took something out of context, feel free to pore over the documents yourself and show us where - I can virtually guarantee you that there are Bush-backers/conservatives/those with a vested interest doing just that right now. If your hypothetical Koch-backed writer can do the same regarding his/her claims about Obama and provide substantiating documentation, fine, no problem, go for it, and we'll do the same fact-checking. It's like Issa and Solyndra (or Issa with just about anything, really) - he made a whole bunch of accusations that he couldn't back up and it (rightly) fizzled into nothing. Although Issa has also since admitted that it was largely political to begin with.

But does anything Siems write about come as a shock or a surprise to you? It's kind of like a rider for which there's been plenty of evidence of doping finally failing a doping test - it's just confirmation of what the evidence has been pointing toward for years now.

 

[Anonymous]

Maybe you missed this part:

"I read nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents about America’s abuse of prisoners since 2001."

All Siems is doing is summarizing what he found in those formerly classified Bush-era documents, which were made available because of a FOIA ruling (and as an aside I think every American should consider themselves fortunate that we have something like the FOIA) and are therefore now available to anyone willing to go through those documents - you can verify it all for yourself if you want to. In other words, everything that Siems is writing about can either be substantiated or shown to be inaccurate - ie it's entirely falsifiable. If you suspect that Siems made something up, misquoted, took something out of context, feel free to pore over the documents yourself and show us where - I can virtually guarantee you that there are Bush-backers/conservatives/those with a vested interest doing just that right now. If your hypothetical Koch-backed writer can do the same regarding his/her claims about Obama and provide substantiating documentation, fine, no problem, go for it, and we'll do the same fact-checking. It's like Issa and Solyndra (or Issa with just about anything, really) - he made a whole bunch of accusations that he couldn't back up and it (rightly) fizzled into nothing. Although Issa has also since admitted that it was largely political to begin with.

But does anything Siems write about come as a shock or a surprise to you? It's kind of like a rider for which there's been plenty of evidence of doping finally failing a doping test - it's just confirmation of what the evidence has been pointing toward for years now.

I got the point. But you missed this;

If true then, top down, those involved should be prosecuted

And this;

Let me ask you... if I were to post something accusing Obama and administration officials of something as serious as what Siems is alledging and that the author was being supported at least in part from Koch Bros grant money would you consider the subject matter or would you dismiss out of hand?



And this;

I agree with Jaffer and Siems that recognition of those who exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib—their lead example—would be very healthy. I also agree that many people across the government did courageous things in opposing coercive practices. But I very much disagree with the instinct this oped reflects to divide the Bush administration into white hats and black hats and to honor the white hats by way of disgracing the supposed black hats.

For one thing, it is very easy to forget nearly ten years after the fact that, gross abuses like Abu Ghraib aside, these questions were hard. This was not a morality tale in which one’s binary positions about coercion define one’s goodness and honor. The question of what does and doesn’t constitute undue coercion, where the line is of torture as a legal matter, and where it lies as an ethical matter in the context of high-stakes counterterrorism interrogations do not admit of easy answers, and it was not surprising at all that the Bush administration had significant divisions of opinion on the subject.

Second, it is also easy to forget that if one is dividing the world up into white hats and black hats, certain people’s hats have a way of looking pretty gray. What would Jaffer and Siems do with, for example, Jim Comey—who fought like a lion against what he considered too-permissive guidance to the CIA on interrogation but certainly never contended that the CIA could not engage in any coercive practices? Or what would they do with Dan Levin, who began the process of rewriting the torture memos after their withdrawal and showed enormous courage in doing so honestly—and paid a real price for it—yet also concluded in that process that waterboarding was not necessarily torture, depending on how it was done? For that matter, what would they do with Jim Haynes—the Pentagon’s then-general counsel whom I am sure Jaffer and Siems would regard as one of those high-level officials who “expressly approved the torture of prisoners” but is also almost certainly the single reason why the military never waterboarded anyone? (I discuss both of the latter two cases in this essay.) Not only was the debate hard, legally and morally, but people’s roles in it were complicated.

In the end, Jaffer and Siems are conflating two very distinct issues that it is important to keep separate. One is whistle-blowing about gross abuses under anyone’s standards of law and morality. The other is, in conferring honors, retrospectively taking sides in policy and legal debates in which neither roles nor positions were as simple or as morally clear-cut as Jaffer and Siems portray. I endorse the first project and reject the second.

I'll state it again, if what Siems writes is gospel then all involved should be prosecuted.

If he's correct, there wil be plenty of us (Americans) that won't tolerate this. I'm wondering why this isn't headline news on every channel? I'm guessing much of this is nothing more than his interpretation of what he's read and not everyone shares his conclusions. I guess we will see what happens.

 

[rhubroma]

I got the point. But you missed this;

If true then, top down, those involved should be prosecuted

And this;

Let me ask you... if I were to post something accusing Obama and administration officials of something as serious as what Siems is alledging and that the author was being supported at least in part from Koch Bros grant money would you consider the subject matter or would you dismiss out of hand?



And this;




I'll state it again, if what Siems writes is gospel then all involved should be prosecuted.

If he's correct, there wil be plenty of us (Americans) that won't tolerate this. I'm wondering why this isn't headline news on every channel? I'm guessing much of this is nothing more than his interpretation of what he's read and not everyone shares his conclusions. I guess we will see what happens.

Simply put, Scott, because the US public was/is not meant to know the truth about the ghastly praxis of its military machine and political establishment in this regard. To do otherwise, in the moment of crisis, would have been condemned as criminally unpatriotic, indeed anti-American, by these establishments and so, in the climate of fear and uncertainty, the press relinquished its liberty and journalistic integrity to not incur the wrath of cynical politicians and a society made convinced of the notion that justice was tantamount to vendetta and revenge. Imagine the liars and the criminals accusing the bearers of truth of crimes for simply telling the American people the real crimes they committed in the name of so called freedom! When the neocons were in power, moreover, every instrument of misinformation and coercion was used, as well as making a political and psychological expedient of the fear and horror the nation felt after 9-11, to affect their plans with practical impunity in the press. The corporate owned media outlets abysmally failed the American people in the build-up to the invasion of the Middle East in regards to informing them of what their political and military leaders were actually up to: namely through force to try to favorably reestablish the balance of power in a region vital to America's economic and industrial wellbeing because of oil. In other words, they orchestrated an ideological war to "bring democracy to the Middle East" purely as an excuse to conceal the real economic reasons driving the bellicose policy. However, when it is these same economic interests that drive how and what gets reported to the American people in both the liberal and conservative media spheres, this is little surprising. In short, so long as the corporate interests are protected by the deployment of US military power, its crimes will go largely unreported within the conventional media outlets, also because they are governed by the same interests. Nor when war is conducted in such an illeagal manner, is it at all surprising the crimes commited against civilization by those executing what high command has ordered from the top down. So it’s really quite elementary Watson.

 

[rhubroma]

That other parties can also have zenophobic tendencies doesn't change the fact that the FN's calling card is anti-immigration. Whether you like the Euro or not, a quick look at the FN's propositions shows that France would be a much poorer nation if they were applied. Putting a virtual wall around any country (both economically and for immigration) is a death wish these days, we are part of the world economy whether we want to be or not.

My 20 year old son voted FN a few elections back, since then he has been informing himself and rejected them this time around.

Not to say there aren't any problems relating to immigration, but there are better ways to approach the issue.

What seems to be going on in France of late, is that on the one hand the scorn with which some view the liberal EU as a corrupting force of national identity has increased the popularity of one such as Madame Le Pen and, on the other, the disdain for a rebarbative neo-liberal economic model that has threatened the very social tissue that the French Republic has always maintained, through speculative assaults on the euro by the highly undemocratic, though quite sovereign, power of international financial capitalism and the banks. Indeed the favorable pace of Hollande's socialist march to the possible premiership of France sent the markets in a downward spiral after the preliminary results, and is a clear demonstration that the world of finance and financial capitalism is a meddling and disruptive force in democracy today, as well as an insidious form of social blackmail when any evidence of opposition to its model is manifested in the voting polls. Thus the reductive role that politics today has taken on as a mere functionary to economic interests and powers, which was already announced in the early 90's by the future Democratic president Bill Clinton in his post-ideological catch-phrase against Bush Sr. "It's the economy stupid;" seems to have today been transformed by the French in this moment of neoliberal crisis into a manifesto against a political class that has lost all democratic touch with the collective: "It's society stupid."

Every once in a while, amidst the generalized depression, someone (even of authority) evokes the word "growth" with the air of one who indicates a breech in the thick cloud cover. The problem is that nobody knows anymore what "growth" means: of what stuff it is made, what novelty does it bear, to whom does it bring wellbeing and to whom does it bring penury. It's by now already passed half a century since Robert Kennedy made his famous speech "against the GNP", in which he substantially stated that the numbers only define the quantity, nut not the quality. Yet still today, despite development having revealed its positives but also its broken negatives, its wastefulness, its contortedness and twisted deformities, one still speaks of growth in terms of a lump of numbers and that's all. None of the super-technicians at Rome, or Berlin, or Strasburg, or London or New York take into account, nor do the politicians who have become paralyzed by those accounts, have any will, or the time, or the capacity to tell us what's put inside of the empty box of economic growth. The present unpopularity of politics, not only in France, but throughout the so called developed world, also resides in this by now congenital reticence: a petty mound of figures that explains practically nothing to us, neither unites nor divides us, which neither makes us dream nor argue. Growth: how, why, where, to obtain what, to be what?

 

[Bala Verde]

Any news on the recent allegation that Sarkozy received 50m euro from Gaddafi for his reelection campaign?

 

[Nielsa]

Haven't looked into it (this allegation first surfaced half a year ago) but Sarkozy is certainly no saint. Of course if someone wants revenge on Sarkozy for being the main guy pushing for the intervention, this is how you do it.

Actually that's funny. Michael Moore and some other US media were criticizing Obama, saying he was the main driver for war in Libya. While in some European media, Sarkozy received the same criticism.
In the European media I saw, Obama was presented as the restrained one who didn't want another military adventure.

In other news, a BBC article says: (without quoting a source! what happened to proper journalism?)
"Opinion polls suggest about 50% of National Front voters will back the president, about 30% will abstain and about 15% will support Mr Hollande."

15% voting Hollande is interesting, and perhaps indicates that some people vote for FN in the first round only protest the current system.

 

[Bala Verde]

Haven't looked into it but Sarkozy is certainly no saint. Of course if someone wants revenge on Sarkozy for being the main guy pushing for the intervention, this is how you do it.
(Actually that's funny. Michael Moore and some other US media were criticizing Obama for being the main driver for war in Libya. While in some European media, Sarkozy received the same criticism.)
In the European media I saw, Obama was presented as the restrained one who didn't want another military adventure.)

In other news, a BBC article says: (without quoting a source! what happened to proper journalism?)
"Opinion polls suggest about 50% of National Front voters will back the president, about 30% will abstain and about 15% will support Mr Hollande."

15% voting Hollande is interesting and perhaps says something about how some people vote for FN in the first round only protest the current system.

Doesn't populist FN also have a 'socialist' slant?

If so, the idea of protecting the French (benefit system), being opposed to (further) (trade) liberalisation and deregulation, skeptical of free trade, more opposed to the EU, couldn't they expect to find that in the socialist party?

In the Netherlands, the extreme right wing populist party of Wilders combines the anti-immigrant, nationalist and also anti-system/anti-EU electorate with (parts of) the socialist vote. I could imagine that is similar in France?

 

[Nielsa]

Well, different people have a different idea of what "socialism" entails. One of he traditionally defining features of European socialist parties is an idea of solidarity and humanist values. (And trying to combine that with commercial development.)
That does not jive with nationalism, restricting immigration, or ideological opposition to the EU (opposing Merkel's austerity ideas is a different issue). Most traditional left-of-centre voters won't consider voting FN as they see them as diametrically opposed to the leftist core values.

Having said that, you have a good point, although I wouldn't use the words "socialist slant". I'd perhaps say that we're looking at the old "anti-system" vote, but now people have realized the moderate left are not willing to make any radical changes.

Like you said, there people are worried about the economy and want someone who can stand up to the banks and stock traders and what have you.

 

[l.Harm]

For those whose Dutch is insufficient, the last column shows the difference between the latest poll and the number of seats won at the last election in 2010.

As of today, the PVV (Wilders) is (only) five seats down, whereas the CDA is 10 seats down. Another poll claims that the SP (Socialists) is now the biggest party with one seat more than the main right wing government party, the VVD.

The fourth line shows that the majority of one seat that this government had with the support of Wilders has now evaporated. On current figures, any left-ish coalition would have to include either the CDA (which threatens to become a rump by comparison with its former 'glory') or the Christian Union, which will prove to be extremely tricky.

Whatever happens between now and election day, we're likely to again see a situation where many parties will be negotiating for months in order to try and create a viable coalition. I'll post updates as they occur.

What's your preference?

I'm happy with the agreement (CDA/VVD/D66/CU/GL). Hope SP and PVV wil decline soon, especially PVV. Can't imagine he'll get again so many votes after this

 

[Bala Verde]

Interesting:

[US] Senate probe finds little evidence of effective "torture"

 

[Echoes]

Doesn't populist FN also have a 'socialist' slant?

If so, the idea of protecting the French (benefit system), being opposed to (further) (trade) liberalisation and deregulation, skeptical of free trade, more opposed to the EU, couldn't they expect to find that in the socialist party?

Le Pen clearly has a 'social' slant but the "socialists" are only socialists in their name.

Hollande reminded in an itw for the Guardian that THEY were responsible for deregulation and liberalisation of the economy in the eighties under Mitterrand's Presidency (fatal admition). While, the French right have always had a tradition of a strong protective and independent state, embodied by the figure of General de Gaulle, who was also a Eurosceptic in his own right.

Besides, PS is a hardcore Europeist party, even more than UMP (though actually the UMP is only Eurosceptic in Sarkozy's speeches, they all voted YES in the 2005 referendum). Sarkozy was an outstanding campaigner, actually. He really thought his Words matched his Acts. And yet 27% of French voters still voted for him. Amazing. "French are calves", said De Gaulle.

 

[Merckx index]

Well France elected Francois Hollande last night and I think that is a major kick in the teeth for the austerity that was being inflicted in the Euro. He also wants to make changes to the Fiscal Treaty and also add a growth agenda to it. One of his policies is a 75% tax rate for incomes over a million euros.

With almost all of the votes counted, Hollande was leading with 51.6% to Sarkozy's 48.4%, the nation's Interior Ministry said. Voter turnout was reported at more than 80%.

Is that 80% of registered voters, or 80% of eligible voters? In the U.S., we have not approached 80% turnout of eligible voters in my lifetime, and not 80% of registered voters in 40 years.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html

 

[VeloCity]

Lots of hearsay here of course, but even if a fraction of it is true, can't be good.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/libyan-missiles-on-the-loose/2012/05/08/gIQA1FCUBU_story.html

Whenever the CIA uncovers a new plot overseas, like al-Qaeda’s latest scheme to blow up civilian aircraft using advanced, hard-to-detect explosives, people breathe a sigh of relief. But this is a multifront war, and almost by definition, the attack that gets you is the one you didn’t see coming.

For the past few months, I’ve been hearing private warnings about another threat to commercial planes — namely, the spread of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from Libya after the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi’s regime. A State Department official said in February that Gaddafi had acquired 20,000 of these weapons, and that only 5,000 of them had been secured through a $40 million U.S. program to buy up loose missiles.

“How many are still missing?” asked Andrew Shapiro, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, in his Feb. 2 speech. “The frank answer is we don’t know and probably never will.”

Here’s the scary part: Two former CIA counterterrorism officers told me last week that technicians recently refurbished 800 of these man-portable air-defense systems (known as MANPADS) — some for an African jihadist group called Boko Haram that is often seen as an ally of al-Qaeda — for possible use against commercial jets flying into Niger, Chad and perhaps Nigeria.

 

[Nielsa]

but the "socialists" are only socialists in their name.

Exactly. One has to facepalm whenever one hears someone talking as if there's any socialist governments in Europe.

 

[Alpe d'Huez]

Former World Bank chief economist and Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz came out today harshly critical of the Eurozone's austerity measures, calling them suicide, and something that has never worked in history. Good, short read.