Tag: Bigotry

And He’s Gone

When I suggested that Biden aide TJ Ducklo should be fired for his abusive behavior to a reporter, I did not expect this to happen, but now the former Assistant Press Secretary has resigned.

His behavior was indefensible, so it wasn’t:

White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo has resigned, the day after he was suspended for issuing a sexist and profane threat to a journalist inquiring about his relationship with another reporter.

In a statement on Saturday, Ducklo said he was “devastated to have embarrassed and disappointed my White House colleagues and President Biden”.

“No words can express my regret, my embarrassment and my disgust for my behavior,” he said. “I used language that no woman should ever have to hear from anyone, especially in a situation where she was just trying to do her job. It was language that was abhorrent, disrespectful and unacceptable.”

It is the first departure from the new administration, less than a month into President Joe Biden’s tenure, and comes as the White House was facing criticism for not living up to standards set by Biden himself in their decision to retain Ducklo.

During a virtual swearing-in for staff on inauguration day, Biden said “If you ever work with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I will fire you on the spot. No ifs, ands or buts.”

Ducklo was suspended for a week without pay on Friday after a report surfaced in Vanity Fair outlining his sexist threats against a female Politico journalist to try to suppress a story about his relationship, telling her “I will destroy you”.

Thoughts and prayers, I guess.

If He Were Black, They Would Have Already Shot Him Multiple Times

Instead, it appears that, on the recommendation of an anonymous Kenosha police captain, teen murderer Kyle Rittenhouse and his legal team has been deliberately deceiving the court as to his whereabouts.

Obviously, this from my perspective as a non-lawyer, but this appears to be a BIG no-no for someone who is out on bail:

Prosecutors apparently couldn’t find admitted Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse, so now they are seeking a warrant for his arrest.

On Wednesday, the Kenosha County District Attorney’s office said Rittenhouse had violated the conditions of his release. Prosecutors said they need a new arrest warrant specifically because Rittenhouse failed to inform the court after changing his address. The defense, however, responded by saying they intentionally concealed Rittenhouse’s true whereabouts because a local police captain instructed them to lie about where he was staying.

………

According to the conditions of his bond, Rittenhouse was supposed to relay such a change within 48 hours of moving. The motion asks Judge Bruce E. Schroeder to issue a new arrest warrant and increase Rittenhouse’s bail by $200,000.

………

The Illinois teenager was charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted homicide, and two additional felonies over the admitted shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. Rittenhouse also severely wounded Gaige Grosskreutz with a rifle carried across state lines. He further faces one misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under the age of 18. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the August shooting and is now 18.

………

In sum, the defense says it intentionally wrote the wrong address on the release papers after being advised to do so by local law enforcement. This, the defense claims, was to protect the location of a “safe house” for Rittenhouse.

The motion notes [emphasis in original]: “Pierce was directly informed by a high-ranking member of the Kenosha Police Department not to provide the address of the Rittenhouse Safe House because of the numerous threats made against Kyle and his family.”

………

“While I was completing this form, I was approached by a Kenosha Police Department Captain, who offered his assistance,” Pierce continued [emphasis in original]. “I asked the Kenosha Police Captain what address to put on the form. The Kenosha Police Captain told me that I ‘absolutely should not‘ provide the address of the physical location of the Rittenhouse Safe House on the form, but to instead provide his home address in Antioch, Illinois.”

There are a couple of points here:

  • What lawyer doesn’t pass this by the f%$#ing judge? (I’m already regretting ending my swearing for February)
  • What cop tells a defendant in a murder trial to lie to the court?

Well, I guess the answers to this question are pretty straightforward, and the expression, “Racist dirtbag,” figures prominently in both.

Rittenhouse needs to spend his pre-trial in jail, and his lawyer should be his cell-mate, at least until he gives up whatever police captain told him to lie to the court.

And In Gender Equity News

A study has shown that weakening unions increases gender inequality:

Barbara Biasi, assistant professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, recently published a study that concluded that eliminating unions increases the gender gap in wages.

She looked at data from Wisconsin, before and after Scott Walker eliminated collective bargaining rights in 2011, in his Koch-funded effort to destroy unions. 

………

Barbara Biasi, an assistant professor of economics at Yale SOM, had an opportunity to examine this question when Wisconsin passed Act 10, legislation that essentially weakened the power of teachers’ unions. Afterward, schools had much more latitude in deciding how much to pay teachers.

Five years after union agreements expired, male teachers earned about 1% more per year than female colleagues with similar experience and skills, reported Biasi and her co-author, Heather Sarsons at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The gender gap was even higher among younger teachers.

The anti-union wing of the Democratic Party (the identity politic folks) has always dismissed unions as bastions of racism and sexism, and the history clearly shows that, but dismissing unions hurts the people that they claim to want to help.

Pass the damn Pro Act, and strengthen the rights of workers to organize.

Without Racism, the Right is Nothing

WaPo writer Phillip Bump defends Joe Biden from accusations that targeting racism is in fact an attack on the whole right wing movement in an essay titled, “Biden’s targeting of racist extremism is being portrayed as an attack on the right itself.”

The ever-racist Rand Paul has accused Biden’s of, “Calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book.”

Paul is saying that, “Biden thinks Republicans are racist liars.”

I think that Joe Biden’s entire political career shows that he is willing to work with Republicans, and he does not think that they are [all] racists liars.

This is complete bullshit.  It is clear that Biden’s efforts and  pronouncements are a NOT apart of deliberate effort to demonize and perhaps prosecute the his political opposition.

His entire career mitigates against this accusation.  Biden has always gone along to get along with the most contemptible people in politics.

However, there is a way that Rand Paul’s accusation IS accurate.

Specifically, it should be noted that the modern conservative movement, at least back to the days of William F. Buckley’s endorsements of segregation (And arguably as far back as the founding of the Republic), racism has been inseparable from the political right in the United States.

It is transparently obvious that meaningful sustained efforts to fight racism in will necessarily target the right wing.

Short version of this argument:  If Rand Paul is concerned that Joe Biden’s fighting racism is an attack on him, then Rand Paul needs to stop being a racist dirt-bag.

In Case You Were Wondering Just How Toxic the BJP Is………

It appears that the veneration of Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, is now a thing in India.

I would argue that India is further down the road to Fascism and genocide that Trump ever got, and that the opposition, though careerism and incompetence, cannot seem to do anything to stop it:

Last Sunday, in a nondescript building in the India city of Gwalior, 200 miles south of Delhi, a large crowd of men gathered. Most wore bright saffron hats and scarves, a colour evoking Hindu nationalism, and many held strands of flowers as devotional offerings.

They were there to attend the inauguration of the Godse Gyan Shala, a memorial library and “knowledge centre” dedicated to Nathuram Godse, the man who shot Mahatma Gandhi. The devotional yellow and pink flowers were laid around a black and white photograph of Godse, the centrepiece of the room.

On 30 January 1948, Godse stepped out in front of Gandhi and shot him three times at point-blank range. A fervent believer in Hindu nationalism, Godse thought Gandhi had betrayed India’s Hindus by agreeing to partition, leading to the creation of Pakistan, and by championing the rights of Muslims. In 1949, Godse was hanged for Gandhi’s murder.

In the following decades, Godse was widely decried as a terrorist and traitor, the murderer of the “father of India”. Yet, in recent years, as Hindu nationalism has moved from an extremist fringe to mainstream Indian politics – the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has a Hindu nationalist agenda at their core – Godse’s public reputation has steadily shifted from being condemned as traitor to being venerated as a misunderstood Indian patriot.

Meanwhile, Gandhi’s vision of a secular India with equal rights for all religions has been eroded and subjugated since the BJP came to power in 2014.

“Godse did the right thing by killing Gandhi,” said Devendra Pandey, 53, national secretary of Hindu Mahasabha, the Hindu nationalist organisation behind the memorial library. He was vocal in his belief that India should be declared “a country rightfully for Hindus” and that its 200 million Muslims should move to Pakistan.

“Godse considered Gandhi as his father, so to kill him must have caused him great pain but he had a very real reason,” he said. “Godse took action because Gandhi betrayed India – this library will teach the next generation how Godse was a true nationalist martyr.”

At some point there will be a reckoning in India over the country’s embrace of bigotry and its increasingly aggressive attempts to expel and subjugate Muslim Indians.

Would Have Been Better to Address This Early

It turns out that the FBI is conducting background checks on National Guardsmen in the Capitol for the inauguration to make sure that a right-wing terrorist is not embedded in the force.

White Nationalists and their Talibaptist Christian Dominionist brethren have been infiltrating the US State Security Apparatus, both the military (particularly the USAF) and law enforcement.

It comes as no surprise that they are concerned about a random soldier might choose the occasion to engage in assassination.

Getting these folks out of these institutions may be the most important national security issue of the next decade:

U.S. defense officials say the federal government is conducting insider-threat screening on the 25,000 National Guard troops who have begun flowing into the nation’s capital to secure the inauguration, as concerns intensify about extremism in the ranks.

The extra precaution comes after a number of pro-Trump rioters involved in storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 turned out to have military ties, raising questions about extremist sentiment within the armed forces. Dozens of people on a terrorist watch list were in Washington as the deadly riot unfolded.

A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive preparations, said the Army is working with the FBI to vet all service members supporting the inauguration. The Army maintains awareness of threats but does not collect domestic intelligence itself, the official said. It was not immediately clear how extensive the FBI vetting of the military personnel would be.

As the great Walt Kelly noted, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” 

It is going to take a very long time to fix this.

The Pigs Walk

The Kenosha County District Attorney has announced that no charges will be filed against the officers that shot Jacob Blake

The prosecutor is claiming that it will be too tough to convince a jury.

Another corrupt prosecutor covering up for the police:

The top prosecutor in Kenosha, Wis., declined to bring charges against the police officer who shot and gravely wounded Jacob Blake outside an apartment building in August, an episode that sparked protests and rioting and made the city an instant flash point in a summer of unrest that began with the killing of George Floyd.

The decision not to file charges against the officer, Rusten Sheskey, was announced on Tuesday afternoon by Michael Graveley, the Kenosha County district attorney. He said that investigators had reviewed 40 hours of video and hundreds of pages of police reports before making the decision.

The prosecutor said a case against the officer would have been very hard to prove, in part because it would be difficult to overcome an argument that the officer was protecting himself. He said Mr. Blake had admitted to holding a knife — even describing switching it from one hand to another as he moved to open a car door — and that statements from officers and other witnesses indicated that Mr. Blake had turned toward an officer with the knife immediately before he was shot.

………

“This decision does nothing but shore up that message that Black people are not safe in the United States of America in 2021,” Corey Prince, chair of the criminal justice committee of the N.A.A.C.P. in neighboring Racine, said Tuesday. “They continue to devalue Black lives, Black humanity, Black freedom, even when we’re with our kids.”

………

The case incited emotions in large part because of the gruesome scene captured by a cellphone video: A Black man being shot in the back multiple times as he moved away from the officer. Even those arguing that the officers acted appropriately conceded that law enforcement needed to figure out how to reach better outcomes in such situations.

They shot him in the back, but the prosecutor cannot be bothered to even try, because it’s just a Black man, and notwithstanding the protests, Black lives DON’T matter.

Oh, Snap

The leader of the white supremacist group Proud Boys has been arrested in Washington, DC.

He publicly copped to vandalizing black churches during their last round of rioting, and when he got busted, he was found to be carrying illegal weapons:

The leader of the Proud Boys, the violent far-right group, was arrested in Washington DC and charged with destruction of property and a firearms offense, according to local police.

The arrest of Enrique Tarrio on Monday comes ahead of pro-Donald Trump protests in Washington planned for Tuesday and Wednesday to coincide with the US Congress’ vote on Wednesday affirming Joe Biden’s election victory.

The demonstrations are organized by the Proud Boys and other rightwing activists, who falsely allege election fraud and want to see the results of the presidential election overturned in Trump’s favor.

The property destruction charges are related to Tarrio’s admitted role in burning a Black Lives Matter banner torn from a historic Black church during a previous pro-Trump protest in Washington on 12 December, which DC police and the FBI said they had been investigating as a potential hate crime. Police said Tarrio, who lives in Miami, Florida, was arrested after his arrival in the District of Columbia on Monday.

DC police said Tarrio had also been charged with possessing two high-capacity ammunition magazines, which were with him when he was arrested. The District of Columbia, which has some of the strictest firearms laws in the nation, bans the possession of firearm magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

………

The National Park Service said it had received three separate applications for pro-Trump protests on Tuesday or Wednesday, with estimated maximum attendance at 15,000 people.

………

The US capital has mobilized the national guard ahead of the planned protests. Mayor Muriel Bowser requested a limited national guard deployment to help bolster the metropolitan police department, and has asked local area residents to stay away from downtown DC.

“There are people intent on coming to our city armed,” said Robert Contee, the acting police chief, on Monday.

Am I a bad person for being VERY amused about all of this?

Why did This Take 9 Months

The Louisville Metro Police Department intend to fire two more police officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor.

Gee, it only took 9 months.

We all know that without the protest, all three officers would still be on the force, and that there would be no criminal charges filed:

The Louisville police officer who fired the shot that killed Breonna Taylor, a Black emergency room technician whose death set off a wave of protests on American streets, was told on Tuesday that the department was moving to oust him from the force, as was a second officer who obtained a judge’s approval for the poorly planned nighttime raid on her home.

“Second officer who obtained a judge’s approval,” is an awfully circuitous way of saying, “LIED TO A JUDGE.”

The move is the most significant acknowledgment by the department that its officers had committed serious violations when they burst through Ms. Taylor’s door late one night in March, encountered gunfire, and then fired a volley of shots at her and her boyfriend. The terminations mark an effort by the city’s interim police chief, Yvette Gentry, to achieve the reckoning she promised when she came out of retirement to lead the troubled department into the beginning of the new year.

Lawyers for Detective Myles Cosgrove, one of the officers who shot Ms. Taylor, and Detective Joshua Jaynes, who prepared the search warrant for the raid, said each had received notices of termination. Both have been on administrative reassignment as the investigations have been underway.

Until now, the only officer held accountable in the case had been Brett Hankison, a detective, who was fired in June for violating the department’s deadly force policy by shooting off 10 rounds from outside the apartment through two of Ms. Taylor’s windows. He was indicted by a grand jury in September on three counts of wanton endangerment because shots he fired entered a neighboring apartment.

This sort of sh%$ is not going to end until police start being held accountable for their actions.

Tweet of the Day

I may be wrong but I think there’s room at the Four Seasons.
Landscaping.

— The Palaeoanthropologist (@HamishAlexande6) December 29, 2020

The favorite hotel of the Proud Boys is shutting down for 3 days rather than deal with them, and their violent protests, and virus spreading behavior at the inauguration.

This is glorious, as is the Four Seasons Landscaping snark.

Part of My Childhood has Changed

And I am happy as hell that Portland’s Woodrow Wilson High School is changing its name.  (They have narrowed it down to 5 names)

Woodrow Wilson was a hypocritical racist dirt-bag.

Now change the mascot, the teams are called the “Trojans”, and I don’t think that you should name a team after a brand of condoms and ……… What? ……… Homer’s Iliad? ……… Never mind.

Quote of the Day

After an audit of the algorithm, the resume screening company found that the algorithm found two factors to be most indicative of job performance: their name was Jared, and whether they played high school lacrosse.

Dave Gershgorn on Quartz about how algorithms reinforce bias.

I would argue that this is a feature, and not a bug.

When you look at the “Gig Economy”, and AI “Expert Systems,” the unspoking selling point is that they are, “money laundering for bias.”

Your Monolith Update

The “whacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real,” has weighed in on this whole monolith thing.

I suppose that it was inevitable that the Christo-Fascist right would decide that we were being too nice to aliens.

No, I don’t mean foreigners, I mean that they are bigoted against, “With her pink antenna and her polka dot skin And the 24 dimples on her chinny chin chin, And the hydrogen sulfide of her hair,” people.

They tore down the metal menhir, and erected a wooden cross.

I guess we should be grateful that they did not set the cross alight:

The new California monolith was torn down overnight by a group of right-wing young men who livestreamed their vandalism in a grainy video posted on the blockchain streaming site DLive.

In the video, a group of three men are seen pushing the statue over and chanting “America First” and “Christ is King.” The men, one of whom was wearing a “Make America Great Again” headband, called part of the monolith’s construction “gay” then replaced it monolith with a wooden cross. It is a decidedly bleak turn in the ongoing monolith saga that has generally been a delightful distraction for a world wracked by a pandemic.

“Christ is king in this country. We don’t want illegal aliens from Mexico or outer space,” a man in the video says. “So let’s tear this bitch down.”

Seriously, this monolith has had the shortest life cycle of any meme ever.

You Know How Indian Workers Sometimes Beat Their Bosses to Death?

If the American workforce were less compliant, this would be happening at the Tyson pig processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where managers had a betting pool as to how many employees would get Covid-19.

Honestly, it probably SHOULD be happening:

A wrongful death lawsuit tied to COVID-19 infections in a Waterloo pork processing plant alleges that during the initial stages of the pandemic, Tyson Foods ordered employees to report for work while supervisors privately wagered money on the number of workers who would be sickened by the deadly virus.

Earlier this year, the family of the late Isidro Fernandez sued the meatpacking company, alleging Fernandez was exposed to the coronavirus at the Waterloo plant where he worked. The lawsuit alleges Tyson Foods is guilty of a “willful and wanton disregard for workplace safety.”

………

Fernandez, who died on April 20, was one of at least five Waterloo plant employees who died of the virus. According to the Black Hawk County Health Department, more than 1,000 workers at the plant — over a third of the facility’s workforce — contracted the virus.

The lawsuit alleges that despite the uncontrolled spread of the virus at the plant, Tyson required its employees to work long hours in cramped conditions without providing the appropriate personal protective equipment and without ensuring workplace-safety measures were followed.

The lawsuit was recently amended and includes a number of new allegations against the company and plant officials. Among them:

  • In mid-April, around the time Black Hawk County Sherriff Tony Thompson visited the plant and reported the working conditions there “shook [him] to the core,” plant manager Tom Hart organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take-all, betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for COVID-19.
  • John Casey, an upper-level manager at the plant, is alleged to have explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of COVID-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus. Casey reportedly referred to COVID-19 as the “glorified flu” and told workers not to worry about it because “it’s not a big deal” and “everyone is going to get it.” On one occasion, Casey intercepted a sick supervisor who was on his way to be tested and ordered him to get back to work, saying, “We all have symptoms — you have a job to do.” After one employee vomited on the production line, managers reportedly allowed the man to continue working and then return to work the next day.
  • In late March or early April, as the pandemic spread across Iowa, managers at the Waterloo plant reportedly began avoiding the plant floor for fear of contracting the virus. As a result, they increasingly delegated managerial authority and responsibilities to low-level supervisors who had no management training or experience. The supervisors did not require truck drivers and subcontractors to have their temperatures checked before entering the plant.
  • In March and April, plant supervisors falsely denied the existence of any confirmed cases or positive tests for COVID-19 within the plant, and allegedly told workers they had a responsibility to keep working to ensure Americans didn’t go hungry as the result of a shutdown.
  • Tyson paid out $500 “thank you bonuses” to employees who turned up for every scheduled shift for three months — a policy decision that allegedly incentivized sick workers to continue reporting for work.
  • Tyson executives allegedly lobbied Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds for COVID-19 liability protections that would shield the company from lawsuits, and successfully lobbied the governor to declare that only the state government, not local governments, had the authority to close businesses in response to the pandemic.

………

The lawsuit claims that while Tyson has repeatedly claimed that its operations needed to remain open to feed America, the company increased its exports to China by 600% during the first quarter of 2020.

They didn’t care, because it wasn’t Wypipo at risk, it was “Mexicans”, and who cares if they die.

These people need to go to jail for a long, long time.

Objectively Pro Nazi

Not the Republican Party this time, though they are to Nazis what hot fudge is to a sundae, but rather the overwhelming majority of the state security apparatus of the United States of America, at the federal, state, and local levels:

As protests over police brutality and racial justice broke out this summer, often resulting in harsh responses from law enforcement, police officers across the country have been accused of favoring a violent extremist group that took to the streets to oppose those demonstrators.

The latest example of a cozy relationship between law enforcement and the far-right Proud Boys happened in the nation’s capital last week when the Metropolitan Police responded to a stabbing involving members of the Proud Boys and an associate.

Provocateur Bevelyn Beatty and the chairman of the Proud Boys, who was with her, told police they were both stabbed by people associated with Black Lives Matter in a street fight early the morning after the presidential election. The Metropolitan Police Department repeated their claim to media outlets, leading to headlines around the country claiming Black Lives Matter had attacked the Proud Boys.

There’s no evidence Black Lives Matter had anything to do with the incident. Police officials have since walked back their initial statements, saying it’s unclear whether anyone involved was affiliated with political groups.

The department’s willingness to echo the accusations of the Proud Boys is another example of law enforcement’s deference to the group, said Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.

It’s been transparently clear for years that police support white supremacists, and white supremacist violence, while clamping down on left wing protests, particularly when law enforcement misconduct is at the root of those protests.

This must be destroyed root and branch.

Yeah, This Is Appalling

Talk about burying the lede.

 In a Washington Post story about Republicans pressuring the (Republican) Secretary of State to throw out legal ballots, we find this bit of horror from Lindsay Graham:

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

(emphasis mine)

The road that Graham was speeding down was, “Invalidate all the mail in ballots from counties with lots of black and brown people.”

This has been a core Republican value since (checks notes) before John Roberts worked at the Reagan White House.

The party of Abraham Lincoln is now the party of  Jefferson Davis, and one of their most important values is, “Stop n****** from voting.”

I do not know how you find common ground with that.

Again, I invoke Robert Graves’ paraphrase of Germanicus Caesar.

H/t Atrios

Boy, I Screwed up This One………

In 2014, as Gamegate affair was metastasizing into an orgy of white male privilege and terrorism, I made fun of what I referred to the “Quinnspiracy“, seeing it as little more a controversy about gaming and gaming journalism.

Shortly after that, what was a kind of an inside-baseball controversy became the blueprint for white male (and it is almost always white male) terrorism via the internet.

At the time, I thought that it was a metaphor for the corruption in game journalism, and how it made it difficult for independent studios to get any coverage. (Valid, but irrelevant to what it revealed)

The real story, which was that an army of violent racist, sexist, and homophobic dirt-bags poised to terrorize our society, and in 2016, our electoral politics.

Of Course He Did

In New York City, the commander of the police department’s Equal Employment Opportunity Division was just suspended for repeated unhinged racist rants on a law enforcement discussion board.

This is my shocked face:

For more than 20 years, an online chat board called the Rant has been the place where New York City police officers have gone in secret to complain about their jobs — not infrequently using blatantly racist and misogynistic language.

But even by the website’s vitriolic standards, scores of recent posts by a user who calls himself “Clouseau” have been especially disturbing.

Between the summer of 2019 and earlier this fall, “Clouseau” posted hundreds of messages on the Rant, many of which attacked Black people, Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews and others with an unbridled sense of animus.

He referred to former President Barack Obama as a “Muslim savage” and called the Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, who is Black, “a gap-toothed wildebeest.”

Now, city investigators say they have amassed evidence that “Clouseau” is a high-ranking police official. And not just any high-ranking official — the one assigned to an office responsible for combating workplace harassment in the Police Department.

………

The police official, Deputy Inspector James F. Kobel, adamantly denied that he had written the racist messages. The posts have been taken down since the Council began its inquiry, and the profile deleted.

………

Inspector Kobel denied the allegations to his superiors, a police official said. But on Thursday, he was relieved of his command of the Equal Employment Opportunity Division and placed on modified assignment pending completion of the department inquiry.

“That is a drastic step, but we thought it was the appropriate step due to the nature of his given assignment as well as the allegations and what we have learned thus far,” the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said. He added that the comments posted by “Clouseau” were “utterly disgusting.”

This guy is a deputy inspector.  They would not be going after him so aggressively unless they had him dead to rights on this.  (The cynic in me considers the possibility that he is being taken down to prevent evidence of law enforcement misconduct from becoming public).

BTW, there is no reason that the rant should not be routinely monitored by internal affairs and civil rights and EEOC staffers.

A racist garbage man can screw up your recyclables, but a racist cop can make you dead.

A Fitting Capstone to the Elections

A group of noe-Nazis defaced a Jewish cemetery in Michigan, but instead of Swastikas, we goe “Donald Trump” and “MAGA”.

The world is a truly horrible place:

The red spray-painted letters were first spotted on Monday morning, scrawled on the tombstones in a century-old Jewish cemetery in Grand Rapids, Mich.

“TRUMP,” they combined to read across several headstones. Two more gravesites displayed another message in red graffiti: “MAGA.”

This act of vandalism at Ahavas Israel Cemetery, discovered hours before President Trump arrived across town to stage his final rally of the campaign, has rattled the tightknit Jewish community in western Michigan’s largest city. The crime is being investigated by law enforcement officials, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Near the end of a bitter, divisive presidential campaign, the desecration marks yet another instance of political tensions apparently producing ugly and sometimes violent attacks. In Florida and the Berkshires, yard signs have been bulldozed and lit on fire. In Boston and Southern California, ballot drop-off boxes have burned to the ground. Across the country, dueling political rallies and protests have devolved into physical confrontations.

Jews need to remember that even if they aren’t first on some bigot’s hit parade, they are ALWAYS second.