Unless something is very wrong with my counter, I don't think I get as many visitors as Matt Drudge, so I think it might be time to visit the Wizard and ask some basic questions.

What's Drudge have that I haven't got?

For one thing, he has a flashing police light!

Like this:

Whenever he has a big story, that light appears right over it.

There's absolutely no reason why I can't have the same thing.

Fair is fair!

Not only that, I don't even need to steal the animated gif from Drudge. There are plenty of other flashing lights available.

A few choices:

Yow!

How's that for flashy?

Twins! Not bad.

Well, that's a Drudge clone but smaller, and I'm trying to be original, so I'll pass on that one.

Too puny! They might think I have nothing to, um, flash.

OK, so there are my flashing light choices! I don't know what I should do. But I do know that I can't leave this as "all flash and no post."

So where's the story?

Obviously, the real story is that France needs affirmative action.

At least, if you read Ken Dilanian's latest piece, you'd realize that the reason America's cities aren't on fire is because of affirmative action:

Last year, a French sociologist answered 258 help-wanted ads for salespeople by sending nearly 2,000 fictitious resumes with identical qualifications, and photos attached, as is the custom here.

Faring poorly, among others, were members of France's most disadvantaged minority group - Arab Muslims.

White males with French names received an invitation to interview at a rate of 30 percent, compared with just 5 percent for people with Arab names.

In the United States, such findings might be met with a renewed commitment to affirmative action and vows by the government to continue prosecuting illegal hiring discrimination. But in France, where rioting by mostly Muslim youths has wracked the country for the last 12 days, affirmative action is illegal, and the country's job-discrimination law, enacted in 2001, is rarely enforced.

In a republic where it is proudly enshrined that every citizen is equal under the law, experts say many people are in denial about the reality that they are not equal.

Since when does equality translate into affirmative action? Isn't that like saying equal opportunity must mean equal results?

I'm wondering whether this affirmative action meme falls into what GaijinBiker calls "cherry-picked facts, misleading comparisons, and hackneyed, sky-is-falling negativity soundly debunked by actual events." (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

While you might think France would love affirmative action, the problem (as Colby Cosh reminds us) is that the French "regard multiculturalism as just another one of our [Anglo American] stupid innovations." This was further confirmed by a New York Times report identifying Interior Minister Sarkozy as an affirmative action advocate:

..... [A]ffirmative action or "positive discrimination," as it is called here, is not supposed to exist in France, which does not gather data according to race, religion or ethnicity, even in its census. The practice has been seen as an ill-conceived American invention that encourages divisivness.

But in a television debate last November, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, broke a political taboo and touched off a fierce public debate by arguing in favor of the practice to help raise Muslims out of poor suburban ghettos and give them a place in French society.

Since then the French government has found itself caught between the impulse to respond to the needs of its large ethnic Arab and Muslim population and the desire to reject any practice that threatens the French republican ideal of equality.

"There are parts of France and categories of French citizen who have loaded on their heads so many handicaps that if we do not help them more than we help others, they will never escape," Mr. Sarkozy, who is said to have presidential ambitions, said in a debate this month.

By contrast, in a meeting with high school students in Tunisia in December, President Jacques Chirac said that discrimination could not be positive and that it was not "acceptable" to "appoint people based on their origins."

Just asking....

That aside, there's not much dispute that France lags "behind" (if that's the right word) on affirmative action, but I'm a bit skeptical about that being a cause of the riots. From what I've read, the rioters are thuggish types battling over (among other things) drug turf war. I might be wrong, but had affirmative action laws been in place, I just don't think they're the types who'd be sprucing themselves up, putting on suits, and running around answering "help-wanted ads for salespeople."

Yet I don't doubt that affirmative action will be the result of these riots. Because, from what I can see, the French welfare state created the problems which led to these riots, and governments love to create more government programs to "solve" the problems created by government programs. It's their nature.

But who knows? Affirmative action might supply a new source of revenue for French bureaucrats who could eagerly collect bribes from employers seeking to evade the new laws.

At least that would be good for the underground economy.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Another argument in favor of imposing affirmative action on French employers is that the problems created can all be blamed on the United States! A win-win, by any standard....

Oui!