Category: Bigotry

And the EU Implosion Continues Apace

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The Austrian right wing Freedom Party just scored a surprise win in its Presidential elections:

Austria is braced for political turmoil with fears that the landslide victory for a rightwing populist and gun-carrying candidate in Sunday’s first-round presidential vote could trigger snap elections.

 Norbert Hofer, of the rightwing Freedom party (FPÖ), defied pollsters’ predictions to beat the Green party’s Alexander Van der Bellen into second place, gaining 36% of the vote. The two candidates will go head to head in a run-off ballot on 22 May.

 While the presidential post is mainly a ceremonial role, Hofer has threatened to make use of a right to dissolve parliament before the 2018 elections, warning other candidates in a TV debate that “you will be surprised by what can be done [by a president]”.

 Hofer, a youthful 45-year-old who is partially paralysed after a paragliding accident, has campaigned for disability rights and is seen as having lent a friendly face to a party that balances virulently anti-immigration and Eurosceptic messages with leftist stances on welfare issues, led by firebrand Heinz-Christian Strache.

 Hofer, who claims to protect himself in the “uncertain times” of the refugee crisis by carrying a Glock gun, scored overwhelming victories in all of Austria’s states apart from Vienna. In Styria, Burgenland and Carinthia – border states most affected by the refugee trail from the Mediterranean to central Europe – Hofer managed to gain 40% or more.

Let’s ignore the racism right now.*

The policies of the FPÖ are support for the welfare state, which the German dominated EU is trying to minimize, and it is skeptical of an increasingly anti-democratic structure and culture in Brussels.

It’s not surprising that this party is popular. Their positions are popular.

Meanwhile the mainstream parties have stapled themselves to EU policies that are based on delusional economics that are causing pain and misery for the vast majority of the population.

It’s no wonder that the 2nd place party was the Greens, with the two mainstream parties getting absolutely demolished:

………

Austria’s two main parties, which clung to a majority in the last national elections in 2013 after having run the country for most of the past 70 years, have seen approval ratings slump as they flip-flopped on the migration issue. The government’s inconsistency added to simmering domestic discontent about rising unemployment and economic stagnation.

The presidential candidates running for Faymann’s Social Democrats and Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner’s People’s Party took 11 percent each, and were eliminated from the run-off. They managed to beat only Richard Lugner, an octogenarian shopping-mall operator and socialite famous for his appearances at Vienna’s Opera Ball together with celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.

The European experience has not yet failed, but it has been digging itself into a hole for decades.

It has become detached from, and disdainful of, the people that it is supposed to serve, ad its response to increasing hostility from ever larger segments of the populations is to build the walls higher on their fortress mentality.

*Apart fromthat Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

PayPal to Homophobic Bigots in North Carolina: Drop Dead

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2 weeks ago, Paypal announced it was beginning a major expansion in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Following the signing of an anti-gay bill into law by the governor, PayPal has canceled these plans:

Two weeks ago, PayPal announced plans to open a new global operations center in Charlotte and employ over 400 people in skilled jobs.  In the short time since then, legislation has been abruptly enacted by the State of North Carolina that invalidates protections of the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens and denies these members of our community equal rights under the law.

The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture.  As a result, PayPal will not move forward with our planned expansion into Charlotte.

This decision reflects PayPal’s deepest values and our strong belief that every person has the right to be treated equally, and with dignity and respect. These principles of fairness, inclusion and equality are at the heart of everything we seek to achieve and stand for as a company. And they compel us to take action to oppose discrimination.

Our decision is a clear and unambiguous one. But we do regret that we will not have the opportunity to be a part of the Charlotte community and to count as colleagues the skilled and talented people of the region. As a company that is committed to the principle that everyone deserves to live without fear of discrimination simply for being who they are, becoming an employer in North Carolina, where members of our teams will not have equal rights under the law, is simply untenable.

While we will seek an alternative location for our operations center, we remain committed to working with the LGBT community in North Carolina to overturn this discriminatory legislation, alongside all those who are committed to equality.

We will stand firm in our commitment to equality and inclusion and our conviction that we can make a difference by living and acting on our values.  It’s the right thing to do for our employees, our customers, and our communities.

Dan Schulman, President and CEO, PayPal

Good for them, and a well deserved bad for North Carolina.

Money Beats Talibaptists

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Following widespread outrage, and multiple companies said that they would pull out of Georgia, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal has vetoed the “Hate the Gays” bill:

Under increasing pressure from major corporations that do business in Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal announced Monday he will veto a bill that critics say would have curtailed the rights of Georgia’s LGBT community.

House Bill 757 would have given faith-based organizations in Georgia the option to deny services and jobs to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Supporters said the measure was meant to protect religious freedom, while opponents have described it as “anti-LGBT” and “appalling.”

Speaking to reporters Monday morning, Deal, a Republican, said he didn’t think the bill was necessary.
“I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith-based community in Georgia, of which I and my family have been a part of for all of our lives,” he said.

He said he was not reacting to pressure from the faith-based community or responding to the business community, which warned Georgia could lose jobs if he signed the bill.

His decision, he said, was “about the character of our state and the character of our people. Georgia is a welcoming state. It is full of loving, kind and generous people. … I intend to do my part to keep it that way. For that reason I will veto House Bill 757.”

As Charlie Pierce says, “This is a dodge, of course. It’s about bigotry in the private sector, as we all know, and the veto is due to push-back from more powerful entities in the private sector. Isn’t capitalism grand? And here’s the real irony of it all: Deal is term-limited out, so he has no real f%$#s to give to anyone.”

This is Amazingly Wise

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Ted Cruz had the single dumbest response to the bombings in Brussels.

He suggested that we engaged in increased police and armed militia patrols in Muslim eighborhoods.

Needless to say, anyone with half a brain realized that this was batsh%$ insane.

It’s would create a violent, oppressive, and abusive environment which would drive some people in Muslim neighborhoods to terrorism, and others away from society and law enforcement.

Over at Talking Points Memo, a reader made a brilliant connection.

Specifically, our “Anti-Gang Get Tough on Crime” policing has done exactly that with gangs in poor neighborhoods:

The root of his error is right there in his defense: “If you have a neighborhood where there’s a high level of gang activity, the way to prevent it is you increase the law enforcement presence there and you target the gang members to get them off the streets.”

This is not some radical right-wing Trump-esque sentiment. It is the status quo of law enforcement in this country, and has been for decades. (You may even personally remember California’s 1988 STEP act — an eerily prescient precursor to the USA-PATRIOT act’s acronym idiocy that stood for Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act. STEP made gang participation illegal and massively increased sentences for members—and even for people who just looked like members, by raising the prospect of a gang-related indictment, leading to harsher plea-bargain agreements).

Targeting gangs like this is pretty widely accepted, and the few who push back face toxic accusations of wanting to protect criminals. That’s how escalating anti-gang and anti-crime rhetoric (think “super-predators”) swept everyone in its path in the 1990s. All Cruz did here was swap out “Muslims” for “gangs”.

As you say, that proved a step too far, and now he’s trying to walk it back to “radical Muslims”. But what’s so fascinating to me, as a gang researcher, is the reason folks like the NYPD and O’Reilly (!!) — who surely approve of anti-gang laws — object to Cruz’s idea: they see that it will backfire, that persecuting non-radicalized Muslims will ultimate push them toward radicalization.

They are right. But this is precisely what is wrong with excessive anti-gang laws! They essentially make being a male adolescent of certain ethnicities a motive for arrest and likely incarceration. If the criminal justice system already sees you and treats you as a gang member, you might as well become one — at least you’ll get some protection, especially inside prison, where gangs rule the roost. And for parents, spouses, and children, targeting is more likely to inspire a sense of injustice than a desire to cooperate with law enforcement.

………

We’re finally beginning to acknowledge the counterproductive nature of mass incarceration policies. But walking back over-zealous targeting laws is still a hard sell, especially among law-and-order, conservative types. Yet it is obvious to them that the same policy applied to Muslims is idiocy.

This is truly profound.

Mealy Mouthed Weasels At PBS

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Editor’s Note: In our report Tuesday night on a North Carolina family that’s supporting Donald Trump, we were continuing a long NewsHour tradition of talking directly to voters.

We want to hear from them, in their own voices, speaking about what motivates their political preferences.

Regrettably, none of us at the NewsHour recognized the questions that could arise from Grace Tilly’s tattoos, and we didn’t raise them with her until after the report aired. At that point, our producer contacted Ms. Tilly and she insisted the tattoos are religious in nature and have nothing to do with a neo-Nazi theme or white supremacy.

We referenced her comments in an editor’s note, posted on our website.

Many of our online commenters have since let us know they reject that explanation. We’re now posting this note as a follow up.

We at the NewsHour remain committed to being as transparent as possible in covering this election.

She had a code for Heil Hitler (88) tattooed on the back of her hand.

You got taken in by a Neo Nazi, and you need to acknowledge this.

Remember this screw up, and more importantly their unwillingness to man up, at pledge time, folks.

Remember This Come Pledge Week

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On her hand is the Celtic Cross, the logo for Stormfront, and NeoNazis throughout the world


On the other hand, “H H”, as in, “Heil Hitler”


And you can get it on T-Shirts and Pillows

The PBS news hour did a warm fuzzy about how politically engaged some Trump supporters in North Caroline were deeply involving themselves in the political process.

Somehow, they missed the fact that this family was festooned with white supremacist tattoos:

Last night, PBS NewsHour ran a story on the Tilly family of Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Tillys do not have a history of being active in politics, but various members of the family—both old and young—are being motivated to vote or work for a campaign for the first time by Donald Trump.

If you can put aside the fact that the Tillys are rallying behind Trump, this is a small but almost heartwarming story of a family choosing to engage with democracy. That’s also if you can put aside the fact that Grace, one of the central characters in the story, has large white power tattoos on each of her hands.

Someone at the News Hour has got a lot of explaining to do.

This sort of stuff is American Nazi 101, and I have no clue how everyone involved in this news report missed it.

Finally, Someone Confronts Hillary About It.

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Just Desserts at a Fundraising Dinner

I could call Hillary’s endorsement of the penal state in the early to mid 1990s the “Elephant in the Room”, but given the attendant political symbology, it wouldn’t clarify the issue.

Bill Clinton was campaigning for president, and when he was campaigning for reelection, both he and Hillary Clinton acritively demonized black popular culture, see the “Sista Soulja Moment“, particularly with regard to young black men.

Their crime bill was an abomination, and Hillary was blithely talking about “super predators” as a code word for young urban black males.

A black lives matter protester shelled out $500 for a fundraising dinner, and got in Clinton’s face about her history:

Two activists with the Black Lives Matter movement interrupted a private fundraising event in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night, demanding that the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton account for language she used as first lady about the need to “bring [at-risk youth] to heel”.

First reported by the Huffington Post, the protest began after Clinton told attendees about the need for police body cameras to stem police violence against members of the public. At this point, activist Ashley Williams stepped forward and unfurled a banner reading: “We have to bring them to heel.”

The banner’s text refers to a speech Clinton made in 1994 in support of her husband’s crime bill, the passage of which has since been criticized as having expanded the prison system and imposed unduly harsh sentencing on non-violent offenders.

“I’m not a super-predator, Hillary Clinton,” Williams said once Clinton turned around and noticed the sign, paraphrasing another line from the then first lady’s speech. “Will you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?”

Williams told the Huffington Post that she and another protester made a $500 donation to the Clinton campaign to attend the event, held in a private residence with roughly 100 attendees. Williams was eventually removed from the fundraiser by secret service agents.

Her eventual response, “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today,” is a non-apology apology.

What’s more it is further reduced in meaning in that she delivered this message only in writing.

There is a problem with what you said 20 years ago. 

The bigger problem was that you actively promulgated a racist trope because it helped Bill’s reelection campaign.

It is a very sad part of your history, and any apology needs to come from your mouth, and not from a memo dashed off to one of your pet journalists.

The Tamir Rice Investigatation Gets Even Less Credible

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It turns out that the grand jury investigating the two officers who shot 12 year old Tamir Rice to death never even took a vote on whether to indict:

The grand jury that opted not to indict Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback in the shooting death of Tamir Rice never actually took a vote on the matter, according to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office.

What actually happened in the most significant grand jury hearing in county history isn’t quite clear, and the mechanism by which the grand jury “declined to indict” — in Prosecutor Timothy McGinty’s own words — is equally unclear.

At the conclusion of a typical grand jury hearing, there are two possible outcomes achieved via vote: a “true bill,” which results in criminal charges and a case number in the court system, or a “no bill,” which is a decision not to bring charges. A “no-bill notification” is signed and stamped and kept on record at the county clerk’s office.

Though Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty never explicitly said the grand jury voted not to indict — nor did he utter the phrase “no bill” — in his Dec. 28 press conference, he declared that that grand jury had declined to indict.

How, then, if not by voting?

After learning and confirming on Jan. 15 that there was no “no-bill notification” on file at the county clerk’s office for the Tamir Rice grand jury proceedings, Scene formally requested the document officially showing the decision, however it was reached, and wherever said document might be. We were told that it didn’t exist. Employees at both the clerk’s and prosecutor’s officers were unable to explain the lack of paperwork.

Tuesday, Scene spoke with Joe Frolik, the communications director for the Prosecutor’s Office, who said no no-bill record exists because, “it’s technically not a no-bill, because they didn’t vote on charges.”
He elaborated: “This was an investigative grand jury. This was kind of their role. Sometimes, a grand jury, after its investigation, will decide if there are no votes to be taken on charges.”
But how that decision was reached and the location of any record of that decision remain publicly unaccounted for. The term “investigative grand jury” appears nowhere in McGinty’s public statements and reports on the proceedings.

………

As for a case that went before a grand jury but didn’t result in a vote, [Law Professor Jonathan] Witmer-Rich said, “I’m not aware of an example…It could happen, I suppose, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about that.”
Professor Lewis Katz, a criminal law expert at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, noted that investigative grand juries are ordinarily held in secret. In his view, the Tamir Rice grand jury was not investigative.

………

Reached Tuesday, Subodh Chandra, the local attorney for the Rice family, said that the whole process has been “irregular.” He said he and his team had asked the county if the grand jury members were led through each possible charge for a vote or whether there was one overarching vote on all charges, but never received an answer. When informed no vote of any kind took place, Chandra said: “If it is true that the prosecutor didn’t even call for an up or down vote on potential criminal charges, including aggravated murder, then it is truly the ultimate insult to the Rice family,” Chandra said, “that the prosecutor didn’t even think it mattered to bring the grand jury proceedings to their proper conclusion.”

Our system allows a lot of leeway for prosecutors to make decisions, so I don’t think that there is any call here for a criminal investigation, but the good people of Cleveland need to put a permanent end to this guy’s political career.

About Bloody Time

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After years of Orthodox Jewish control of the East Ramapo School Board, where they have done little but strip the school system for parts, parents have sued the New York State Department of Education demanding a state takeover.

From their press release:

On January 14, parents of public school children in East Ramapo Central School District filed a petition in State Supreme Court in Albany, asking the court to direct the New York State Board of Regents and the State Education Department (SED) to take concrete remedial action to safeguard their children’s right to a sound basic education as guaranteed by the New York State Constitution.

The petition describes numerous State and federal investigations and reports documenting a continuing pattern of fiscal mismanagement and neglect by the East Ramapo Board of Education over the last decade. The Board’s mismanagement has resulted in a severe lack critical educational resources, resulting in poor student outcomes and depriving district students of a sound basic education. The reports, including two in the last year by State-appointed monitors, provide compelling and overwhelming evidence of a district on the brink of financial collapse. 

In these reports, State and federal officials document the Board’s failures to provide essential programs and services to vulnerable student populations, including English Language Learners (ELL) and students with disabilities. They also spell out the signficiant cuts made by the Board in the number of classroom teachers and support staff employed by the district and in essential school programs.

Over a year ago, a comprehensive report by a fiscal monitor appointed by former State Commissioner John King made numerous recommendations to address the Board’s mismanagement, reallocate funding within the district’s budget, and begin restoring essential resources cut from district schools. These recommendations were echoed in a December 14, 2015, report to the Board of Regents by Dennis Walcott and a team of monitors appointed by State Commissioner Mary Ellen Elia in August.

Despite the State’s best efforts to secure their voluntary cooperation, the Board has steadfastly refused to take meaningful steps to fix the problems identified in the reports and take prompt corrective action to provide students with a sound basic education.

The East Ramapo school board is attempt to destroy the public school system for two reasons:

  • They don’t want to pay any taxes.
  • They are attempting to ethnically cleanse the town, and killing the public schools is a good start.

Unfortunately, the politicians, and hence the bureaucracy, is unwilling to take any political heat from New York’s frum Jewish community, so nothing has happened.

If I were a plaintiff, I would be asking to move the elections to the November elections for President and Congress.

Having the elections at an odd time, Spring of odd-numbered years, is a recipe for this sort of crap.

I would also see any number of the board members prosecuted for corruption, as it is clear that they are engaging in sweetheart deals with the local Yeshivas, but I don’t see that as being politically possible unless the Feds step in.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Geraldo Rivera

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On Fox News, he has stated thatthe reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency shows that the nation was not ready for a black man in the White House.

He further goes on to state that he believes that Obama shirked his duty to address these issues, which I also agree with:

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera was Tuesday’s “One Lucky Guy” on the network’s “Outnumbered” midday hit and shared his unpopular opinion with the conservative female co-hosts ahead of President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address Tuesday evening.

………

 But Rivera argued that despite substantive policy disagreements, the real divisions made clear during the Obama presidency fall along racial lines:

When you strip away all of the gun rights and the, you know, terror all rest of it, what you have essentially is a nation divided between white people and everybody else in broad strokes. When you look at the groups that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats right now, the Asians, the Hispanics, the African-Americans, the Muslims, you see a nation where people have largely chosen up sides and if you strip away everything else, what you are going to find is a racial divide. It’s biggest, unaddressed issue.

………

 Rivera finally relented and charged that Obama had failed to confront race relations head-on as the first African-American president. “If I was this president,” the Fox News personality offered, “I would have said ‘I’m going to deal with this race. I’m going to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. The Civil War is over. The North/South divide — I would have made that the central focus of my president were I him.”

“He failed utterly,” Rivera concluded, and by “benign neglect made it worse.”

As I have noted many times before, Barack Obama’s public personae is all about avoiding to appear the “Angry Black Man”, and as such he has studiously attempted to avoid facing racial issues.

Still, agreeing with Geraldo?

I feel so dirty.

The Truth, from John Erlichman, of All People

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Over at Esquire, the inimitable Charlie Pierce found this gem from Dan Baum’s book Smoke and Mirrors, in an interview of John Ehrlichman:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

While the Nixon administration is not generally considered to be a font of unvarnished truth, sometimes, after a career is over, the truth will slip out, and in retrospect, Ehrlichman always seemed the most self aware of that scurvy lot.

A Better Reason than Steve Miller Not to Go to Cleveland

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A while back, I suggested that there was one less reason to go to Cleveland, because Steve Miller had been put in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I wished to have nothing to do with any institution that has anything to do with Steve Miller.

Well, we now have another reason not to go to Cleveland, or for that matter the whole of Cuyahoga County, specifically, it is now clear that the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor is less interested in pursuing police misconduct than Frank Rizzo, who famously promised to “Make Attila the Hun kook like a faggot.”

Simply put, black, white, or green, if you go there, you are taking your life into your own hands:

Tim McGinty never intended to prosecute the officers who killed Tamir Rice. Will that cost him his job?

 Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty’s announcement that a grand jury, at his office’s recommendation, declined to file charges against the two officers who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice surprised almost no one.

 McGinty has made no attempt to mask his belief that rookie officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner Frank Garmback committed no crimes on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014. That’s the day when Garmback rapidly pulled their police cruiser within inches of Rice at a Cleveland community center and Loehmann jumped out, firing.

 In fact, during his press conference, McGinty made numerous mentions of the many risks police officers face, the split-second decisions they have to make to protect their and the public’s lives, and how real the toy gun Rice was holding as he played at the park looked.

 In what could have been a defense closing argument, McGinty stated that the enhanced surveillance video that captured Rice’s shooting, and the aftermath in which he lay bleeding and unattended on the ground, while his 14-year-old sister was tackled to the ground by officers, handcuffed and put in the back of a patrol car as she tried to run to him, “proved” that Rice was indeed “drawing his pistol” (which was actually a pellet gun) as the officers approached.

………

None of it was unexpected.

McGinty insisted on taking the case to a grand jury, dragging it out for months, despite a judge ruling in June that there was probable cause to charge Loehmann and Garmback with crimes, including involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide dereliction of duty and, in Loehmann’s case, murder. Attorneys for Rice’s family cried foul as McGinty allowed the officers to take the oath and read prepared statements to the grand jury with no cross-examination, and he released reports justifying the killing written by outside experts, which the family’s attorneys denounced as biased.

Last month, he made disparaging remarks about the Rice family and their lawyers, appearing to accuse them of seeking to profit from the child’s death through a pending lawsuit.

And despite his professions of sympathy for the family, including saying he and his staff could see their own children and grandchildren in the face of the now-dead boy, attorneys for Rice’s family said that prior to telephoning her on Monday to inform her of the grand jury decision, the prosecutor has rarely bothered to communicate with Tamir’s mom.

We have a deeply evil bigot running criminal justice in Cuyoga county.

Simply put, until the rule of law returns to Cuyahoga county, visiting, conducting business, going to school in that place is a dangerous decision.

Poland is Being Poland Again

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Most of the Jews of Poland died in the Holocaust.

Many of the rest fled following antisemitic incidents post WW II.

But Poland is Poland, and they won’t let an absence of Jews get in the way of blaming them for everything:

When some 50,000 people turned out in Warsaw recently to protest a plan by Poland’s ruling party to pack the nation’s constitutional court, the hard right-wing political faction responded quickly with a counter-demonstration of its own. Its counter-protest featured, among other things, a placard that mocked those claiming to defend democracy as “the committee to defend Jewish-Communist wealth.”

At around the same time in Wroclaw, Poland’s fourth largest city, crowds at a parallel demonstration to support the recently elected Law and Justice party shouted, “Wroclaw is being de-Polanized as the Jews are buying up homes in the city.”

At another Wroclaw demonstration, held November 18 to protest a European Union plan that would see Poland admit some 7,000 Syrian refugees, demonstrators denounced the proposed immigrants as Islamists — and to somehow add to this point, they set fire to a previously prepared effigy of a Hasidic Jew holding the E.U. flag.

God, Honor and Fatherland,” the crowd then chanted.

Some things never change.

H/t the inner walls

*Google the Kielce Pogrom.

David Whorowitz Strikes Again

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In case you are unaware, David Whororitz is a self styled expert on the Middle East and Islam.

He’s a nut and a bigot.

It’s kind of like Nathan Bedrord Forrest claiming to be an expert on Civil rights.

Well, he’s come up with a list of the 10 most anti Semitic and pro-Muslim colleges in the country, and one of them is a complete mind f%$#, Brandeis University.

That’s right, he’s calling what is arguably the most Jewish non-sectarian school in the nation a den of anti-Semitic Muslim extremists:

David Horowitz used to hang at the Café a lot. In fact, when we first opened, he was here for lunch every day. [Charle’s Pierce’s, have some stupid for lunch cafe] We haven’t seem much of him, largely because he’d been obscured by the lunch rush of customers that we now get every day. So it was nice to see him pop up in his old booth today. Edroso, our brilliant daytime bartender, spotted him first.

Harvard, Columbia, and Brandeis are among 10 leading American universities named by the David Horowitz Freedom Center as being the “most friendly” to radical Islamic propaganda and anti-Israel incitement.

Contemptible, bigoted, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

Good News, at Least in the Short Term

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The right wing National Front, after scoring a stunning win in the initial round of regional elections in France, struck out in the 2nd, and final, round of elections:

France’s far-right Front National has failed to win control of any regions in the final round of local elections despite a historically high score in the first-round when it was ranked as the most popular party in France.

The defeat of FN was down to mass tactical voting, an increase in turnout and warnings by the left that what it called the “antisemitic and racist” party would bring France to its knees. All this combined to stop FN translating its huge first-round score of nearly 28% into the overall control of any region.

After big gains by the Front National in regional elections, leftwing voters in some areas are being asked to vote for the rightwing Les Républicains party

But the far-right party still won a record number of votes in the final round: at least 6.6m, handing a significant boost to the party leader Marine Le Pen’s bid to run for president in 2017.

………

Exit polls on Sunday night showed that, with less than 18 months to go until the next French presidential election, the nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-European FN still gained hundreds of regional councillors across France — tripling its presence on regional councils and extending its nationwide reach, cementing its grassroots powerbase and boosting its quest for power nationwide.  

 ………

 Addressing her supporters, Le Pen presented her party as the victim of “calumny and defamation” by the government who she said had “intimidated and infantilised” voters by teaming up with its rivals on the right to keep FN out of power. She said her party’s rise was inexorable.

She said the tactical voting by leftwingers who chose Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing Les Républicains party in order to put up a “barricade” against FN had already played into her claim that she and her voters were the victims of an elitist system that persecuted them. She vowed during the campaign that her voters would take their revenge by turning out in even greater numbers during the presidential campaign.

Le Pen herself failed to capitalise on her high first-round score in the vast northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, after the Socialist party pulled out of the race and made an extraordinary plea for its voters to choose Sarkozy’s candidate Xavier Bertrand just to stop Le Pen. First estimations showed that Bertrand, Sarkozy’s former employment minister, won with a resounding 57% of the vote, with Le Pen taking 42.8%.

Right wing populist parties, like the FN, live off feelings of betrayal by the “elites”, and this election, where Socialist candidates withdrew from the elections to provide a firewall against the FN, plays into this narrative.

I expect for Marine Le Pen to make it into the 2nd round of the Presidential elections next time around as a result of this.

Considering that both current President Holland and former President Sarkozy are both about as popular as as a case of the Clap, we are going to see a lot more nose holding of voters in upcoming elections.

F%$# Donald Trump for Making Boris Johnson Look Wise

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The fact that Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who can best be described as little more than a life support system for his hair, can appear wise when talking about Donald Trump is an indication of just how wrong and disturbing the whole phenomenon of Trump’s political ascendance is:

London’s mayor, the conservative politician Boris Johnson, also chimed in.

“As a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, London has a proud history of tolerance and diversity and to suggest there are areas where police officers cannot go because of radicalization is simply ridiculous,” he said.

“The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump,” Johnson quipped.

We live in Bizarro World.

It Appears That Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia Thinks That Blacks Are Too Stupid for College

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Yes, he actually said that during an affirmative action argument before the Supreme Court:

In the oral arguments Wednesday for a Supreme Court affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia—a well known critic of affirmative action—suggested that the policy was hurting minority students by sending them to schools too academically challenging for them.

Referencing an unidentified amicus brief, Scalia said that there were people who would contend that “it does not benefit African-Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.”

He argued that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.”

“They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re — that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them,” Scalia said.

Remember when I said that I was ready for Scalia to choke on his own bile?

It’s not gonna happen.

If it could, he would have been taken to hospital in an ambulance today.

In fact, half the court would have had to be treated for bile suffocation just from the amount that he spewed.

This is Not a Surprise

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The Euroskeptic and nativist National Front just crushed the first round of regional elections in France:

French mainstream politicians have struggled to come up with a response to what one analyst described as the “major hangover” of a historic victory by the Front National in the first round of regional elections.

 While the far-right had been predicted to do well, the FN’s record score of almost 28% of the national vote and first place in six of the country’s 13 regions by Sunday night left the traditional parties reeling.

 The governing Socialist party came third as expected, but analysts agreed on Monday that the main loser was the centre-right opposition party Les Républicains, led by the former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

………

In 2010 the FN scored about 11% of the national vote in the regional elections. Support for the FN has risen steadily since 2011 when Le Pen took control of the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and set out to shed its racist and xenophobic image.

This is not a surprise.

Germany seems determined to repeat the policies that made its depression the worst in Europe in the 1930s, and now it has the power to enforce on most of the rest of Europe.

What’s more, the European Union has prosecuted further integration in a manner calculated to vitiate any semblance of meaning public input.

The juxtaposition of these two is a petri dish for anti-EU populists, but the populist left remains firmly committed to the European Union, so the only meaning alternative is the bigots, racists, and Fascists.

We will see more of this.