¶ Matins: French Muslims are doing what black New Yorkers have been doing for years: sending their children to Catholic schools. Katrin Bennhold reports.

¶ Tierce: I was tempted not to post today — not to add more noise to an already overloaded network. The only thing worth talking about is how to tell working Americans that yesterday’s rejected bailout may be all that stands between them and a credit lockdown that might freeze their everyday lives. (Credit isn’t just a matter of consumer credit debt. It lubricates most commercial relationships as essentially as oil lubricates an engine.) And it’s rather late in the day for that conversation.

¶ Sext: Front-page news, buried on page A6: “Olmert Says Israel Must Leave West Bank.” I didn’t believe my eyes!

¶ Compline: Édouard came across a bit of video that hasn’t been run on any of the major sites that we’ve seen. Chant after me: “The bailout is bullshit! You broke it, you bought it!”

Oremus…

§ Matins. No laïcité (secularism) to worry about there — and, as a special bonus, the students learn to behave themselves or else.

“It’s ironic,” he said, “but today the Catholic Church is more tolerant of — and knowledgeable about — Islam than the French state.”

“Tolerant” wouldn’t be my word — and there’s nothing ironic about unfanatical religious people banding together in freedom from godlessness. But it’s the insistence on good manners that’s the real draw. Rail against the patriarchal outlook as I do, there still seems to me to be one group of people who benefit from paternalism far more than they might lose by it: children.

§ Tierce. What I’d really like to tell working Americans is this: we voted for the clowns who aided and abetted the free-fall-market that has finally spun off its axle. Maybe you didn’t vote for the Republicans, but we Americans did: that’s how democracy operates.

§ Sext. “We face the need to decide but are not willing to tell ourselves, yes, this is what we have to do. We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories. We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.”

§ Compline. We’ve just come back from a very fun dinner with Édouard and le copain. I had an inkling that Édouard would not let anyone interrupt Kathleen’s explanation of the credit crunch, and I was right. But it wasn’t all work. Kathleen told two of her best stories (the mouse story and the Lord & Taylor story), le copain nous a raconté sa version des faits, and Édouard assured me that “Jersey” (as in the island and the state) is indeed a corruption of “Caesarea.” Who knew? Nobody in Jersey; that’s for sure Aaron.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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