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Ambrose Evans-Pritchard finally realizes that Britain must leave the European Union:

If Europe’s political leaders succeed in ramming through a barely disguised remake of the same European constitution rejected by the French and Dutch people, I for one will come off the fence after years of hesitation and join the fight for total British withdrawal from the Union….

I was at the Laeken “razor-wire” summit in December 2001 when Europe’s bruised leaders chewed over Ireland’s “No” to Nice, and Denmark’s “No” to the euro, and vowed henceforth to listen to the people.

There would be an end to the “creeping expansion of the competences of the Union”. Power would flow back to the nations. I lived and breathed every moment of the betrayal thereafter: the hijacking of Laeken by Franco-Belgian diplomats to rush through an EU constitution before the Poles, Czechs, and Balts arrived; the charade of a Philadelphia “Convention” of parliamentarians, when the real drafting was done by Commission lawyers answering to a Euro-imperialist.

Gisela Stuart, Britain’s sole voice on the Presidium, called the process a stitch-up from start to end, moulded by an “unaccountable political elite”. Dissent was ignored. Documents were slipped through in French late at night. “Not once did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want,” she said.

Pritchard explains his 15-year hesitation to come out and directly oppose the Fourth Reich on his blog. They’re all reasonable and understandable, and as events have proven, ultimately irrelevant. One must oppose the centralization of power for its own sake, because those who seek it are usually intelligent enough to provide a half-way reasonable case to delay the potential opposition. And as Pritchard has learned, they are always lying in order to buy enough time to advance the process to the point of no return.

UPDATE: Lest you think I’m indulging in science fiction by identifying the EU as the Fourth Reich, this comment from a Europhile sort of gives the game away:

If the EU can complete the process of continental integration that wars failed to complete in 1914 and 1939, then that would be a very good thing. An EU of continental countries would be able to create a European consciousness as well as a European economy.

The EU is simply an attempt to do what Hitler did, using banks instead of tanks. And the Brussels bureaucrats are not much fonder of Jews than their predecessors in Berlin were.

Instapundit picks up on it quicker than most:

THE DRIP, DRIP, DRIP ON OBAMA: It’s as if his real purpose were to get some people excited about a Democrat, then fade just in time for Hillary to win the nomination.

It has been obvious that the Magic Negro’s campaign is a fake one from the start. Doesn’t anyone ever think these things through? Although his campaign was not so much to get people excited about a Democrat, but to prevent the nomination from looking like an automatic coronation of Clinton. Because the nominee has to reflect the will of the people… it doesn’t look like much of a choice when only one option is presented, after all.

So, they’re given a few, and then the rug is pulled out from under the incorrect choices. As someone on NRO pointed out, Obama is merely playing the Bill Bradley role of the nice Democrat about whom everyone can write nice, positive things and who will not come anywhere close to winning the nomination. Edwards is Hillary’s only genuine rival, but he has too many strikes against him to pull off the nomination even though he’d probably do very well against Thompson, Giuliani, McCain or Romney.

Auguste at Pandagon is offended by the notion that women don’t tend to rob banks by themselves:

Feminism says: Women can handle crime sprees all by themselves, thank you

Yes, you read that right. The FBI believes that the “ponytail bandit” must have an accomplice, because she’s a woman, and women can’t handle this kind of thing.

Apparently he never stopped to consider the fact that the FBI has amassed a fair amount of experience regarding bank robbers and their modus operandum. Interestingly enough, the FBI often makes use of this experience as a guide in the way they go about pursuing wanted criminals. A serial killer is usually a social outcast, a killer of homosexuals is usually gay, and attractive young girls who rob banks are usually doing so at the behest of an older male accomplice with a criminal background with whom they are sexually involved.

This doesn’t mean that the historical norm is necessarily applicable to every specific case, only that it gives the investigators a reliable basis on which to begin their hunt. It is called a hypothesis, which is a part of the scientific method which is increasingly anathema to both the feminist mind and the feminized mind.

Cathy Young worries about the terrible problem that The Dangerous Book for Boys might not suit every child on the planet:

“I would have loved this book as a kid, and it really bugs me how people are saying ‘this is such a great book for boys, and it’s so wonderful that it’s aimed at boys,'” she says. “Where is the book for girls who did stuff like make their own chain mail as kids, or cracked rocks with sledgehammers in the driveway both to see what was inside them and to see if you could get sparks?”

Less attention has been paid to the boys who are not particularly into “boy things,” who may be more interested in reading than in catching snails and may prefer art to stories of battles. The fact is that for both girls and boys, biologically based gender differences—which some feminists have been far too dogmatic in denying—are considerably attenuated by individual differences.

Obviously, there will be a third book in the series, The Sensitive Book for Sissies, followed by The Transgendered Book for Tomboys. Why doesn’t the finger-waving feminist bitch worry about all those poor boys in China who don’t read English and are therefore similarly deprived of attention from the book? And what about those poor illiterate boys who can’t read in the first place? Don’t they need a book too?

Why can’t idiot fucking women keep their insatiably nagging noses out of any-fucking-thing? It’s a boy’s book, for boys. There’s not only thousands of books marketed for girls, but there’s absolutely nothing that has stopped anyone from publishing a dangerous book for girls since Gutenberg invented the bloody printing press 557 years ago. But two guys write one successful book for boys, and suddenly we have the ritual tearing of the clothes and donning of the sackcloth and heaping of the ashes because, oh no, the girls, the nancy-boys and the tom-dykes of tomorrow haven’t been included for once.

And what about the cover? Was it inclusive enough, did we have the requisite white kid, black kid, Asian kid and Hispanic kid all smiling in multiracial harmony? Oh no, we forgot the damn Eskimo! Break out the sackcloth!

In the immortal words of The Sports Guy: “Women ruin everything.”

From NRO:

A new Gallup poll shows Republicans losing in every 2008 national matchup with Democrats. Here they are:

50 Clinton
46 Giuliani

49 Clinton
46 McCain

53 Clinton
40 Romney

50 Obama
45 Giuliani

48 Obama
46 McCain

57 Obama
36 Romney

50 Edwards
45 Giuliani

50 Edwards
44 McCain

61 Edwards
32 Romney

Based on the all-powerful polls, you’d think the Republican leadership might consider it be worth looking at the one candidate who has the benefit of being in tune with the overwhelming majority of Americans on the two primary issues in this election cycle. But no, it’s much better to be pragmatic than principled.

VFR vivisects Michael Medved’s latest masterpiece in immigration moronics:

Hey, I’m just ballparking here for the moment, but let’s say that while 14 percent of the population is Hispanic, only eight percent of the electorate is Hispanic. And while Medved uses a benchmark of 45 percent Hispanic vote for Bush in 2004 down to 21 percent today, we know that the 45 percent figure is hogwash, based on one faulty poll which was wildly out of line with every other poll on Hispanic voting patterns. But let’s be generous and guestimate that the previous average Hispanic support for the Republican party over several elections was 36 percent and that it has dropped to 21 percent as a result of Republican opposition to amnesty. Fifteen percent of eight percent of the electorate is 1.2 percent of the electorate that the GOP loses by opposing amnesty.

Big Brain talks about how Hispanics will be “alienated” by Republican opposition to legalization. Strangely, it hasn’t occurred to him that non-Hispanic white Republicans might be alienated by Republican support for legalization. Based on the kind of passion that exists on this issue and the number of people who have been saying that they will not support any Republican who votes for amnesty, a conservative guess is that if the Republicans passed the amnesty they would lose ten percent of the non-Hispanic white vote. Let’s say conservatively that non-Hispanic whites, who form 67 percent of the population, form 70 percent of the electorate. Ten percent of 70 percent is seven percent of the electorate that the GOP would lose by supporting amnesty.

So, by stopping the Kill America bill the Republicans would lose 1.2 percent of the electorate, but by supporting the Kill America bill they would lose seven percent of the electorate.

Medved isn’t just a math-illiterate moron, he’s apparently a traitorous Three Monkey moron. I’m just wondering, if you cross a Medved with a Malkin, do you get a Shapiro? Seriously, how in the name of the Galapagos Islands did these three dimwits ever manage to find a national following. They’re not only reliably wrong, but they regularly manage to make themselves look ridiculous in the process.

The Lizard Queen has a backup plan in case the Bush administration winds at her back aren’t enough:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed Tuesday that he has ended his marriage of convenience with the Republican Party, thrusting himself firmly onto the national stage as a potential independent candidate for president – a billion-dollar elephant in the room of presidential politics.

Bloomberg has denied that he’s running, but has also refused to rule out a bid…. Some of Bloomberg’s friends, however, take that denial with a wink.

Team Clinton is simply taking a page from the playbook that got Bill elected. Encourage a third-party no-hoper to run in order to siphon away the squishy independent votes from the Republican candidate, which leaves a sufficient plurality for the Democratic victory.

I don’t think this is actually necessary, especially with the Bush administration creating a severe degree of difficulty for most of the Republican candidates with its refusal to abandon either the occupations or the immigration amnesty. But it demonstrates the lengths that Team Clinton is prepared to go in order to ensure her victory.

It’s interesting to note that Edwards appears to be staking out a bit of an anti-immigration position, since Hillary has failed to do so. It probably won’t work for him, but it will be interesting to see if it causes Hillary to follow suit. If she nails down the anti-war and anti-immigration votes, she won’t need Bloomberg.

I realize this is supposed to scare us. And yet the solution is pretty obvious, because you know, we could always just NOT LET THEM IN:

Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com. Teams assigned to carry out attacks in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany were introduced at an al Qaeda/Taliban training camp graduation ceremony held June 9.

A Pakistani journalist was invited to attend and take pictures as some 300 recruits, including boys as young as 12, were supposedly sent off on their suicide missions.

Fortunately, they won’t be a problem, our open borders notwithstanding. We’ll just take them out when they attack our troops in Iraq, because the presence of our military forces there acts as a magic terrorist magnet. See, if we weren’t over there, we might have to fight them over here.

Gary North on the American Ghandi:

Ron Paul is convinced that self-government is the wave of the future. Empire isn’t. That was Gandhi’s message in 1915. It did not seem plausible back then. By 1947, it did.

It has taken until quite recently for India to move economically more toward self-government and away from Nehru’s Fabian socialism. Sadly, the U.S. economy seems to be moving back toward Nehru. The state keeps getting bigger in the visible affairs of this world. But a great decentralization is taking place: in education, on the Internet, and with technology generally. The wave of the future is not toward Fabianism and its legacy. Ron Paul’s campaign is proof of this.

It’s an astute analogy. And as far as the decentralization of education, I can assure you, you haven’t even begun to see anything yet. In twenty years, the idea of gathering a group of individuals physically together in order to learn is going to look positively pre-Cambrian.

Call it Green Ed. With a name like that, who could possibly be against it? Increase human liberty, educate the children more effectively and save the planet.

I wish I could say this surprises me:

Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill. On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest. She does both, she says, because she’s Christian and Muslim.

Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she’s ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she’s also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved….

Redding’s bishop, the Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner, says he accepts Redding as an Episcopal priest and a Muslim, and that he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting.

This sort of incoherent idiocy isn’t as unusual as you’d assume it would be. And it’s not the dumb ones who are prone to it either, but the intelligent maleducated. I once dated a girl with a degree from a well-regarded college who thought she was still a Catholic in good standing after converting to Mormonism.

Her: “Just because I’m Mormon doesn’t mean I’m not Catholic anymore.”

Vox: “How did you manage to graduate without learning what ‘convert’ means? Oh, that’s right, you’re an IR major.”

This sort of thing tends to make one suspect that perhaps there is a very good reason the Bible forbids putting women in leadership positions in the Church. If you want to kill a church, just put a woman in the pulpit.

Interfaith possibilities are exciting. So is the Dark Lord obtaining the Ring of Power. That doesn’t make either one of them desirable. Both the bishop and the priest should be excommunicated; the fact that they will be celebrated instead is proof that the Episcopalian organization is no longer a Christian church, but a post-Christian circus.