Things have not been going well for Ahmadinejad the Persian Midget and his sour band of terrorist mullahs this week.  This is thanks to Porter Goss giving Michael Hayden a lesson in how to run psy-ops at the CIA before his departure tomorrow (Friday, 5/26).

Take the riots in Tabriz and other Azeri-populated cities in northwest Iran.  On May 23, a government newspaper in Tehran published a cartoon depicting an Azeri-speaking cockroach.  Oops.

That very day, Azeri demonstrators marched on government offices in Tabriz, riots broke out in a number of Azeri towns, the Tabriz main bazaar was shut down with shopkeepers joining the demonstrators, who had to be dispersed with teargas.

The irony of the mullahs having cartoon riots directed at them is just too delicious.  I wonder how such a cartoon slipped into a government newspaper?  "No comment" from Porter.

The good news is that there are more countries managing their economies in a fiscally responsible way than there were two years ago.

Fiscally responsible means keeping average annual deficits less than average annual economic-growth rates, keeping net debt from exceeding one-third of gross domestic product, and maintaining a relatively small government.

The bad news is that most of the world's biggest economies, including that of the United States, are getting deeper and deeper in debt as a result of excessive spending, and will ultimately have to pay the price.

The chart below gives the details.  They are not pretty for us nor for most of the West.

No snide comments how "rational Frenchman" is an oxymoron.  There are plenty of them, albeit not enough.  I had lunch with one of them here in DC yesterday.  He's Pierre Lellouche, who represents Paris (4^th district) in the National Assembly (France's Parliament) and is President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

If you had been there with me, you'd have come away wishing he were Bush's National Security Advisor for Europe.  Even better, though, is that after Nicolas Sarkozy is elected President of France next April (see Sarko vs. Eurabia, January 2005), M. Lellouche may be France's Defense Minister.

So if you had joined me for lunch, here's how you would have heard him describe France and the world.

For many years now, I have been a public defender in a large southern metropolitan area. Fewer than ten percent of the people in the area I serve are black but over 90 per cent of my clients are black. The remaining ten percent of my clients are mainly Hispanics but there are a few whites.

I have no explanation for why this is, but crime has racial patterns. Hispanics usually commit two kinds of crime: sexual assault on children and driving under the influence. Blacks commit many violent crimes but very few sex crimes. The handful of whites I see commit all kinds of crimes. In all my years as a public defender I have represented only three Asians, and one was half black.

As a young lawyer, I believed the official story that blacks are law abiding, intelligent, family-oriented people, but are so poor they must turn to crime to survive. Actual black behavior was a shock to me.

The media invariably sugarcoat black behavior. Even the news reports of the very crimes I dealt with in court were slanted. Television news intentionally leaves out unflattering facts about the accused, and sometimes omits names that are obviously black.

All this rocked my liberal, tolerant beliefs, but it took me years to set aside my illusions and accept the reality of what I see every day. I have now served thousands of blacks and their families, protecting their rights and defending them in court. What follow are my observations.

To be clear, my observations are of defendants in court and their families.  They do not apply to those many blacks leading law-abiding lives.