The French Connection Election: Yesterday afternoon, My gal and I strolled together to the French Consulate on Fifth Ave & 75th Street so that I could exercise my French voting rights. We were intent on taking a few pictures to mark the occasion. I had decided to have my better half snap the images, as I surmised that it might be a dicey proposition to take photos inside the consulate during the voting procedures….. As I feared, once she started clicking away, the Consule General (4th photo on the left) instantly made a beeline toward us and then proceeded to tell us, in no uncertain terms, to immediately cease and desist. Moreover, he sternly asked us to promptly delete the images off the cell phone. Of course, I took the phone from my true love and pretended to diligently delete them. Little did they know, I was an astute undercover reporter for a highly recognized online publication. (For your viewing pleasure, the adjacent images are what we got away with.) Curious Crazed Consulate Caper: This get’s even more interesting. To put us all in the appropriate frame of mind, the consulate staff had posted large color posters of all the candidates on the walls of a circular stairwell leading to the large ballroom (turned voting hall) on the floor above. Out of the 11 candidates presenting themselves for the French Presidency, take a wild guess who was missing? Yep, that’s right, you guessed it, Marine Le Pen was nowhere to be found! As soon as I noticed the astounding gaffe, I forthwith asked those around me WTF is this? No one seemed to know or have noticed, but they too were rather miffed. Further to my astonishment, upon alerting a few volunteers officiating in the proceedings, these dim wits claimed they hadn’t noticed it and didn’t seem to care in the slightest, much less bother addressing the considerable clandestine cockup. To attempt to rectify the totally FUBAR situation, I went looking for my new pal The Consule Generale de France so as to directly question him about the grave omission, but conveniently he had disappeared from sight. I tried to track him down, but at that point, some other person of authority suggested to me that I best move along so as not to disrupt the steady flow of voter traffic. Shortly afterward, I was asked to quickly get moving and gently escorted out of the building under the watchful eye of the attending security guys. Sure smelled like Globalism to me...