Tag: Bigotry

The Ukraine is Being the Ukraine Again

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As part of an investigation into “Organized Crime”, a senior Ukrainian law enforcement official demanded a list names, addresses, and phone numbers of all Jews in the city of Kolomyya.

Yeah, there is noting at all suspicious or antisemitic about this:

A Ukrainian Jewish group accused the nation’s police force of “open anti-Semitism” after a high-ranking police official requested a list of all Jews in the western city of Kolomyya as part of an inquiry into organized crime.

The official request to the head of Kolomyya’s Jewish community is dated February 18, 2020, according to a photograph of the document that Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, shared on Twitter Sunday.

“Please provide us the following information regarding the Orthodox Jewish religious community of Kolomyya, namely: The organization’s charter; list of members of the Jewish religious community, with indication of data, mobile phones and their places of residence,” read the letter.

The letter was signed by Myhaylo Bank, a high-ranking officer in the national police force who handles organized crime. The letter did not explain his unit’s particular interest in Kolomyya’s Jews.

They just need this information so as to smoothly conduct the annual Stepan Bandera memorial march and pogrom.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Your Feel Good Story of the Day

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It’s an old story, Hamilton County Sheriff fires an officer because she is gay, and she beats him like a rented mule in the primary:

In a heated race in Ohio, Democrat Charmaine McGuffey ran to be both the county’s first female and first out LGBTQ person elected sheriff. She also ran against the man she alleges fired her because she’s a lesbian – current Sheriff Jim Neil, a Trump-supporting Democrat.

And she stomped him at the ballot box, winning approximately 70 percent of the vote.

Jim Neil should never have been the Democratic Party for anything in the first place.

He’s a teabagger who appeared on stage with Donald Trump in 2016.

God, It’s Me, Matthew, Could You Smite These Motherf%$#ers?

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The religious nutjobs setting up a tent hospital in central park are requiring anyone who volunteers for service sign an agreement to discriminate against the LGBT community:

On Tuesday morning, a makeshift tent hospital in Central Park will begin treating overflow patients from Mount Sinai, as the spread of COVID-19 begins to overwhelm local hospitals. Announcing the 68-bed respiratory unit this weekend, Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the relief organization, Samaritan’s Purse, responsible for funding and erecting the facility.

The mayor did not mention that the group is led by Franklin Graham, a notorious anti-LGBTQ and Islamophobic preacher with a track record of using humanitarian missions to proselytize an evangelical agenda.

Graham, the son of prominent minister Billy Graham, has specifically sought to recruit Christian medical staff to the Central Park facility. According to the group’s website, all volunteers, including health care workers, should read and adhere to a statement of faith, in which marriage is defined as “exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female” and the unrighteous are sentenced to “everlasting punishment in hell.”

………

Samaritan’s Purse, which holds a reported $650 million in net assets, has a lengthy history of using disaster aid to spread their agenda. A campaign known as Operation Christmas Child, which delivers gift boxes to children in Muslim countries, has been criticized as a conversion scheme.

Seriously, Hashem, you smote the Israelites for conducting a census in an sloppy manner. 

Smite Franklin Graham.  It’s long overdue.

Not a Surprise

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It turns out that Naomi Seibt, the German girl put forward by the Heartland Institute as an answer to Greta Thunberg, is a white supremacist asshole.

I did Nazi that coming:

A young campaigner who has been hailed by climate sceptics as the right’s answer to Greta Thunberg has previously described a white nationalist who appeared to promote “white genocide” theories as one of her “inspirations”.

Naomi Seibt, a 19-year-old from Münster, Germany, who styles herself as a “climate realist”, has also had to deny she made remarks that could be seen as antisemitic following an attack on a synagogue last year.

Seibt has been described as the darling of climate change deniers and spoke at a small side event of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) – a high-profile annual meeting of rightwing activists in Washington that will also feature the US president, Donald Trump.

………

An examination of the young activist’s YouTube videos and interviews has revealed that Seibt has shown support for an alt-right activist.

In a YouTube discussion last year that was highlighted in a report by the German broadcaster ZDF, Seibt discussed an attack on a synagogue in Halle that killed two people who were outside the temple, and said Jews were considered to be “at the top” of groups who were seen as being oppressed. “Ordinary Germans”, she said, were “at the bottom”. Muslims, she added, were somewhere in between.

………

“It is clear that she is articulating – no matter how inarticulately – age-old tropes of Jewish power and white grievance: the idea that Jews are a privileged class and that white people are oppressed by them,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who studied the remarks.

………

In another YouTube interview describing her embrace of “views that were outside the mainstream”, Seibt referred to the Canadian alt-right internet activist Stefan Molyneux as an “inspiration”.

………

Seibt has been hired by a US thinktank called the Heartland Institute, which has traditionally been financed by fossil fuel and coal companies and is known for pushing radical anti-science theories about the climate crisis.

So not a surprise.

Trump Ignored a Pogrom While He Was in India

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This is not a surprise. Trump has always had affection for racist demagogue authoritarians.

Still, the fact that there was a pogrom against Muslims in Delhi while Trump was visiting is a mark of both Trump’s venal nature, and Narendra Modi’s brazen bigotry:

The violence unleashed against Muslims in Delhi by armed Hindu mobs during President Donald Trump’s visit to India is a portent and a lesson. As Trump sat down to dine with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, on Tuesday, Hindus in the same city were beating and shooting Muslims, and Muslims were fighting back, trying to defend their homes and businesses from looters and arsonists. More than 40 people were killed—including an 85-year-old woman too frail to flee her burning home—and more than 200 people, mostly Muslims, were injured.

The Delhi police, who report directly to Home Minister Amit Shah, either stood idly by or escorted the mobs. Videos of police breaking CCTV cameras and taunting prone and bleeding Muslim men while filming them with their smartphones circulated on social media. The violence echoed that of 2002, when Modi was chief minister of Gujarat and authorities there did nothing to stem carnage that killed some 1,000 people, the majority of them Muslims. It also brought back memories of the revenge killings of at least 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi after the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

In all these cases, mobs targeting a single religious group were allowed to run riot, unchecked by police. This is the definition of a pogrom.

This is particularly disgraceful, though the US has been very accommodating Modi’s bigotry since his ascension to PM in 2014.

If you want a good, and engaging summary of just who and what Modi is, see this John Oliver video (banned in India):

Mike Bloomberg Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving

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I am beginning to think that Michael Bloomberg is running for President to provide cover for the racist resort of Pete Buttigieg.

Unlike Buttigieg, whose hostility can only be divined from his actions as mayor, Bloomberg is on tape many times saying unbelievably racist bullsh%$:

While promoting a multi-million dollar initiative to “reduce disparities” as the mayor of New York City in 2011, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg said “enormous cohorts” of young black and Latino men “don’t know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.”

Bloomberg made the remarks during an interview with PBS Newshour, as he promoted his Young Men’s Initiative, a $127 million, three-year program funded in part by Bloomberg’s charitable organization, financier George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the city of New York. “Blacks and Latinos score terribly in school testing compared to whites and Asians. If you look at our jails, it’s predominantly minorities,” Bloomberg said.

“If you look at where crime takes place, it’s in minority neighborhoods. If you look at who the victims and the perpetrators are, it’s virtually all minorities,” Bloomberg continued. “This is something that has gone on for a long time, I assume it’s prevalent elsewhere but it’s certainly true in New York City.”

This guy has made racism a central part of his public personae, and when juxtaposed with scores of allegations of sexual harassment at his company, this guy should not be able to be elected dog catcher.

Bloomberg Should Just Drop the N-Word and Be Done with It

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�� New Podcast! “Episode 807 | Bloomberg’s Racist, Classist Past | What Happened To Pete? | Moderates for Bernie” on @Spreaker #biden_ad #bloomberg #notmeus #wallstreetpete https://t.co/FSNJj87h1s

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 10, 2020

Because the NY Times NEVER Links to the folks who break the stories

Michal Bloomberg has now disavowed the stop and frisk policies that he evangelized for when he was Mayor of New York.

I am inclined to believe that his change of heart was not sincere, particularly since we now have him tape saying that most of the crime in a city comes from young black men.

Unbelievably racist, though still better than Pete Buttigieg:

A recording of Michael R. Bloomberg in 2015 offering an unflinching defense of stop-and-frisk policing circulated widely on social media Tuesday, signaling that the former New York City mayor is about to face more intensive scrutiny as he rises in the polls as a Democratic presidential candidate.

While Mr. Bloomberg apologized for his administration’s law-enforcement tactics in November just before he entered the race, he had previously spent years insisting that the policy was justified and effective, showing no indication that he had developed serious misgivings about stop and frisk. The policing tactic was used disproportionately against black and Latino people across New York City for years.

He offered a particularly blunt defense at the Aspen Institute in 2015: The Aspen Times reported then that Mr. Bloomberg said that crimes were committed overwhelmingly by young, male minorities, and that it made sense to deploy police in minority neighborhoods to “throw them up against the wall and frisk them” as a deterrent against carrying firearms.

An audio clip of those comments was posted on Twitter Monday by Benjamin Dixon, a progressive podcaster, who highlighted it with the hashtag #BloombergIsARacist.

“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Mr. Bloomberg said in the recording. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city.”

If the Democratic Party Presidential nominee is a racist, it will depress the minority vote at all levels.

Any political official who thinks that the Democrats can win the Presidency and pick up seats when the top of the ticket is a racist needs to change his career to the food service industry.

This is the most PUMA Thing Ever

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For those of you who don’t know what the initials mean, there was a PAC formed, People United Means Action (PUMA), to demand that, despite Barack Obama winning the primaries, Hillary Clinton should be the nominee.

The movement, such as it was, was an exercise in upper middle class white women privilege.

It has not changed:

the replies to this tweet are full of white women outraged and disgusted by the ostensible misogyny of Tlaib booing Clinton, none of whom have any comments about the misogyny & racism of calling four women of colour Bernie’s “Concubines”. pic.twitter.com/IR98wf2zic

— Alexander (@purplechrain) February 2, 2020

The level of oblivious narcissism is stunning.

Self-Important White Guys Are Not a Good Investment

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In news that should surprise no one, hedge funds run by white guys under perform those of women and minorities by about 41%.

A reason is not given, but my guess is that members of the white guys club are more able to fail upwards, which is the very definition of white privilege:

Hedge funds not controlled by white men had returns almost double their peers the last three years, according to a Bloomberg analysis of hedge fund data.

Within Bloomberg’s database of 2,935 funds, the analysis found 35 managed by minorities or women and compared them with 908 peer funds. The database includes over 65% of the industry’s top 1,500 managers by assets under management.

Hedge funds either controlled or managed by a minority or female leader had a return of about 6.6% over the past three years, compared to about 3.9% for their peers, the analysis of Bloomberg’s hedge fund database found.

Gee, You Think?

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I will note that stating the blatantly obvious is probably as good as a Washington Post will get so long as Fred Hiatt is running the show on that department, but when an Op/Ed is titled, “The Tacit Alliance of Militia Members and Border Patrol Agents Is Getting out of Control,” you are pretty firmly into, “Well, Duh!” territory, particularly when you scrupulously ignore that the behavior of Customs and Border Patrol is the product of s deeply racist and abusive culture:

The leader of the militia group United Constitutional Patriots was arrested April 20 by the FBI on a federal weapons charge. As The Post reported, “The United Constitutional Patriots came to public attention this month after the emergence of videos that showed men stopping and detaining people crossing the border.” The videos included two that, CNN reported, appeared to feature a UCP member impersonating a Border Patrol agent. Another video showed armed men in military-style uniforms detaining dozens of migrants. “Customs and Border Protection agents arrive and collect migrants but do not ask the group with guns to disperse or take their weapons elsewhere,” The Post reported.

Vigilantism is always a threat to democracy, but the militia videos are especially troubling because of the appearance that civilians were masquerading as law enforcement officials — in at least one, according to The Post, members could be heard shouting “Policia, alto!” or “Police, stop!” — and because federal agents encountered the vigilantes without confronting them.

The null hypothesis is that CBP is actively partnering with civilian racist thugs because  ……… wait for it ……… CBP is run by and for racist thugs.

Maybe mentioning that the CBP is a corrupt and bigoted organization would help create a greater understanding the whole situation.

I Went to the National Civil Rights Museum Today

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It’s at the Lorraine Motel building, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

It’s a good museum, and you should go.

I am a profoundly weird person though, becuse the thing that effected me the most was just walking in, having to empty my pockets, and walk through a metal detector.

At a memorial to one of the most prominent proponents of non-violence in American history, they have to have a metal detector, and a wand, to prevent some James Earl Ray wannabe from shooting up the place.

If this doesn’t outrage you, you are seriously dense.

The Bedbug at “All the News That’s Fit to Print” Endorses Eugenics

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I am referring, of course, to Brett Stephens, who is now claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically more intelligent, at least a bit:

Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different.

Seriously, between Brett Stephens and Bari Weiss, I’m beginning to wonder if the Times Editorial Page Editor James Bennet is literally trying to find the most contemptible Jews possible to become regular columnists.

Seriously, as a human being and an American, I find Stephens an embarrassment, and as a Jew, I find him a Shanda fur die Goyim.*

*Yiddish for a, “Shame before the nations,” meaning that this person is an embarrassment to the whole Jewish people.

Tweet of the Day

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Not often a European soccer game is stopped due to fans being *too anti-Nazi*.

Rayo Vallecano's anti-fascist fans already chased Ukrainian Nazi Roman Zozulya out of town once. Then he came back with a new team.https://t.co/cCjIhp9VEp

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) December 17, 2019

Anti-Nazi chants from rowdies at a soccer match in Europe.

There may be hope for the future of humanity yet.

And the Kapo* Come Out of the Wordwork

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Seriously, have they ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?

Given Bernie Sanders’ endurance as a top-tier presidential contender, and his support for Palestinian rights, it was almost inevitable that conservatives would start labelling his campaign anti-Semitic. Last week’s election in Britain—and the alleged similarities between Sanders and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn—provided the pretext.

“Linda Sarsour Is Too Antisemitic For The Women’s March, But Not For Bernie Sanders,” declared a February 10 headline in The Federalist. Three days later, The Washington Examiner followed up with, “Bernie Sanders has an anti-Semitism Problem.” Commentary added, “Bernie Sanders Has a Big Jeremy Corbyn Problem.”

The effort to implicate the most successful Jewish presidential candidate in American history in Jew-hatred is now well underway.

………

It distinguishes Sanders even more dramatically from Donald Trump, who invokes anti-Semitic stereotypes more blatantly and more frequently than any American politician in modern memory. From Trump’s 2013 reference to “Jonathan Leibowitz – I mean Jon Stewart,” to his 2015 declaration to a Republican Jewish Coalition crowd that, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” to his closing 2016 campaign ad, which featured three Jews — George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet Yellin — alongside language about “global special interests” that “control the levers of power” to his suggestion that American Jews view Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” to his statement to a Jewish audience, just this month, that “You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me…You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax,” Trump is almost incapable of speaking about Jews without calling them either avaricious or disloyal.

The most contemptible ones here are Commentary, of course, because they know the damage that false accusations like this can do the Jewish community.

They truly are shanda fur die goyim,

*As in Kameradschaftpolizei, the notoriously brutal prisoner functionaries who aided the Germans in the concentration camps.

Watch What They Do

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Under Pete Buttigieg’s administration, racial disparities in marijuana arrests are among the highest in the nation:

………

It’s a theme Buttigieg returns to often. In July, at an event in Iowa, he shot down a racist question from an audience member by responding, “The fact that a black person is four times as likely as a white person to be incarcerated for the exact same crime is evidence of systemic racism.” When pressed by fact-checkers on his claim, he said that he was referring to the racial disparity in marijuana arrests nationwide, citing an American Civil Liberties Union study that found black people were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for pot than whites.

………

The disparity in South Bend, Indiana, however, has been significantly worse than that under Buttigieg’s leadership.

Since Buttigieg became mayor in January 2012, taking charge of the South Bend Police Department, the city’s black residents have been far more likely to be arrested for marijuana offenses than its white residents. That disparity in South Bend under Buttigieg, in fact, is worse than in the rest of the country, or even the rest of Indiana.

………
South Bend has a black population of roughly 27,000 and a white population of around 64,000, and local police have made 1,256 arrests for pot possession since 2012. Of those, 805 were black, while just 449 were white. Nationally, the rate of marijuana use is roughly equal for blacks and whites. The disparity in South Bend policing extends into other crimes: In 2018, 22 black people were arrested for selling weed in South Bend, while just 4 white people were taken in.

In 2018, 714 people were arrested for all drug-related offenses. Despite making up just a quarter of the population, more than half of those, 384, were black. While overall, South Bend was worse than both Indiana and the country as a whole, there were some individual years during which arrest rates for black people in South Bend were lower than the statewide average.

………

Before Buttigieg entered office, according to testimony from a former city official, a small group of white police officers conspired to push the city’s black police chief, Darryl Boykins, out of his job, hoping to use donors to persuade Buttigieg to make the move. “It is going to be a fun time when all white people are in charge,” one officer reportedly said.

Buttigieg, amid a controversy over police recordings, did fire Boykins, but after protests from the black community, rescinded the firing and demoted him instead. Though the parties deny any involvement, the affair, Buttigieg later wrote in his memoir, “affected my relationship with the African-American community in particular for years to come.”

Henry Davis Jr., who was recently elected to a third term to the city council, told The Intercept he was unsurprised to hear the significant disparity in arrests. “It’s bad as hell here,” said Davis. “The numbers for African American police officers have dropped to historic lows.” He also said that Buttigieg has yet to make a human connection with the South Bend black community. “He feels like it’s an open book test: If I do these things, then I win,” he said. “He’s discounting the fact that he’s dealing with human beings.”

………

Jorden Giger, a 28-year-old South Bend activist with Black Lives Matter, agrees with the prominent criticism that Buttigieg ignores the concerns of black people in South Bend. “Mayor Pete is like, you know, he’s very calculating,” Giger said.

………

Buttigieg often touts the Board of Public Safety, Giger said, which oversees disciplinary actions for police and firefighters, and which includes three black men. (Indeed, after publication, a campaign spokesperson noted that the mayor-appointed board is majority-minority.)

………

“Citizens had asked for a citizens’ review board, and for him to say now we have one, in fact it’s the same thing we’ve always had, that was really disingenuous,” Preston told the Times. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“They’re political appointments,” Giger said of the Board of Public Safety. Giger said activists have asked him remove and replace several members, but the mayor hasn’t. “He’s not using any of his political capital to address these issues here locally. I think he just wants to get away from South Bend as quickly as he can.”

………

Giger said he was unimpressed by the Buttigieg campaign’s explanation for his lack of black support, namely that black voters simply aren’t familiar with the candidate yet. “It’s very difficult to convince white moderates or white liberals to really get it,” Giger said.

There are other candidates with racially problematic histories (***cough** Joe Biden ***cough**), but not with a record as aggressively hostile to the minority community as Pete Buttigieg.

While he is probably not PERSONALLY racist, it is clear that, as mayor at least, he has hitched his political wagon to the racists in his community and in his police department.

It’s clear that black and hispanic voters are not going to vote for Donald Trump, but if Buttigieg is in the race, there is a pretty good chance that they will not vote at all.

That is, after all, what happened in 2016.

US Attorney General Tells Uppity N-Words to Shut Up

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It should surprise no one that William Barr is now saying that engaging in constitutionally protected protest means that police should not protect those people.

It is literally fascist and racist to suggest that any request for accountability and competence is a reason for law enforcement to retaliate.

It is the very definition of a police state:

Speaking to a roomful of police officers and prosecutors on Tuesday, Attorney General William P. Barr drew a parallel between protests against soldiers during the Vietnam War and demonstrations against law enforcement today.

 But this time, he suggested, those who don’t show “respect” to authority could lose access to police services.

 ………
Barr added that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.

 Although Barr didn’t specify what “communities” he was referencing, activists decried his speech as a clear attack on minorities who have protested police brutality and other racially skewed law enforcement abuses.

 “Barr’s words are as revealing as they are disturbing ― flagrantly dismissive of the rights of Americans of color, disrespectful to countless law enforcement officers who work hard to serve their communities, and full of a continuing disregard for the rule of law,” Jeb Fain, a spokesperson for liberal super PAC American Bridge, told HuffPost, which first reported on the comments.

 As attorney general, Barr has attacked liberal district attorneys who have pushed for police accountability in cities like Philadelphia and St. Louis and suggested that there should be “zero tolerance for resisting police.”

 ………

 “In the Vietnam era, our country learned a lesson. I remember that our brave troops who served in that conflict weren’t treated very well in many cases when they came home, and sometimes they bore the brunt of people who were opposed to the war,” he said. “The respect and gratitude owed to them was not given. And it took decades for the American people finally to realize that.”

It should be noted that Barr never served, because he was too busy going to grad school.

“US Attorney General fails to understand police are not a protection racket,” tweeted Andrew Stroehlein, the European media director for Human Rights Watch. “(And no points for guessing which ‘communities’ he means).”

Indeed.

Barr is the most corrupt US Attorney General in US history, and I am including Jeff Sessions and John Mitchell in this calculation.

Why does this man still have his law license?

Mayor Sentient Mayonnaise Strikes Back

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If you ever wondered why Pete Buttigieg is polling at 0% in the Quinnipiac poll of South Carolina, this quote should be rather informative.

In 2012, the Springfield, MA police department adopted counterinsurgency techniques, and Mayor Mayonnaise gave his full throated endorsement.

It turns out that since 2012, the Springfield PD has been a morass of corruption, racism, and violence.

But they are keeping people of color down, so Mayor Pete is good with them.

It should surprise no one that since 2012 the Springfield, MA, police department has been subject to multiple civil rights probes; state & federal criminal investigations & prosecutions of officers; a federal civil suit with a $450K jury/fees award… https://t.co/sBgAeTZ1TE pic.twitter.com/gDJheH4qIp

— Houston Institute (@houstoninst) November 21, 2019

F%$# Yeah!!!!

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All those years of hypocrisy and dishonesty have finally caught up with Benjamin Netanyahu:

For the first time in Israel’s history, a sitting prime minister is accused of bribery: Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit announced Thursday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be charged with bribery, fraud and breach in three corruption cases, dubbed Cases 4000, 2000 and 1000.

The indictment comes after a four-day hearing with Netanyahu’s defense team last month, followed by weeks of intensive discussion at the attorney general’s offices.

Laying out the charges in a press conference, Mendelblit said he made the decision to indict the prime minister “with a heavy heart, but wholeheartedly,” stressing it was not an issue of left-wing or right-wing politics and that enforcing the law is not a matter of choice.

The attorney general lamented that “while conducting a professional hearing process, we’ve witnessed repeated attempts to delegitimize the people who were involved” in the investigations. He defended his colleagues, saying “These people acted out of proper motives.”

This man has been a pox on the Middle East, and a clear and present danger to the state of Israel, subsuming both human decency and the well-being of Israeli society to his ambitions.

Now that he has been indicted, maybe a government can be formed without his sorry bigoted ass.

In the Annals of Least Sincere Apologies………

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Michael Bloomberg’s apology for his aggressive support for stop and frisk of black and Hispanic men in New York is arguably the least sincere apology that I have heard this year:

Ahead of a potential Democratic presidential run, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York on Sunday reversed his longstanding support of the aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policing strategy that he pursued for a decade and that led to the disproportionate stopping of black and Latino people across the city.

“I was wrong,” Mr. Bloomberg declared. “And I am sorry.”

The speech, Mr. Bloomberg’s first since he re-emerged as a possible presidential candidate, was a remarkable concession by a 77-year-old billionaire not known for self-doubt: that a pillar of his 12-year mayoralty was a mistake that he now regrets. It was also, in some ways, a last word on an era of aggressive policing in New York City that began a generation ago under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — though the fallout on neighborhoods is still felt to this day.

Speaking before the congregation at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch in Brooklyn, Mr. Bloomberg delivered his apology in the heart of one of the communities most affected by his policing policies, and at a location that nodded to the fact that should he decide to run for president, African-American voters would be a crucial Democratic constituency that he would need to win over.

Seriously, how stupid does Bloomberg think that the average Democratic primary voter, of any skin color, is?

This is not a heartfelt apology, this is a transparent ploy.

This is Beyond Horrible

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I first heard about this when my RABBI mentioned that there had been a shooting this afternoon:

A heavily armed gunman with a live-streaming head camera tried to storm a synagogue in eastern Germany on Wednesday as congregants observed the holiest day in Judaism. Foiled by a locked door, he killed two people outside and wounded two others in an anti-Semitic spree that smacked of far-right terrorism.

Hours later the police announced the arrest of a suspect in the assault in the city of Halle, one of the most brazen in a string of recent attacks aimed at Jews in Germany. Police officials declined to confirm if the suspect was the gunman or whether he had any accomplices.

The methodology of the assailant bore a striking resemblance to the rampage by a far-right extremist against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, more than six months ago, in which he broadcast his killings live on social media. Fifty-one people died in that attack.

Like the Christchurch killer, the Halle assailant recorded himself, in a 35-minute video of shooting, mayhem and hateful language. In accented English, he identified himself as Anon, denied the Holocaust, denounced feminists and immigrants, then declared: “The root of all these problems is the Jew.”

………

The assailant uploaded his video to Twitch, a live-streaming platform owned by Amazon that has struggled with moderating the real-time content that floods in from millions of active broadcasters. Alerted to the broadcast, Twitch scrambled to remove it and issue an apology, but not before right-wing sites had archived it. Some exalted the killer as a hero.

It could have been worse, but it appears that the gunman was a pretty crappy gunsmith, and his homemade weapons, an automatic weapon and a shotgun, both failed.

Of course he did it on Yom Kippur.

F%$# Nazis.