Haitian Politics

More Haiti coverage, at NYT, "Haiti’s Power Vacuum Escalates Kingmakers’ Battle for Control":

The contest for power is taking place on two levels. One battle pits current politicians against one another; the other is among power brokers vying for control behind the scenes.

The assassination of Haiti’s president has thrown the nation into disarray, spawned shootouts on the streets and left terrified citizens cowering in their homes. But behind the scenes a bigger, high-stakes battle for control of the country is already accelerating.

The fault lines were drawn long before President Jovenel Moïse was killed. For more than a year before his death, the president had been attacking his political rivals, undermining the nation’s democratic institutions and angering church and gang leaders alike.

Then the president was gunned down in his home on Wednesday — and the power play burst into the open, with the interim prime minister claiming to run the country despite open challenges by other politicians.

But even as that battle over who inherits the reins of government plays out in public, analysts say a more complex, less visible battle for power is picking up speed. It is a fight waged by some of Haiti’s richest and most well-connected kingmakers, eager for the approval of the United States, which has exercised outsized control over the fate of the Caribbean nation in the past.

How it will all play out is unclear.

Elections were planned for September, but many civil society groups in Haiti worry that doing so would only sharpen the political crisis. They question whether it would even be feasible to hold legitimate elections given how weak the nation’s institutions have become, and some civil society leaders are expected to meet Saturday to try to devise a new path forward.

Many fear that Haitians themselves may not have much of a say in the matter.

“This whole system is founded on the idea that legitimacy is determined by outside factors,” said Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. “So while politicians in Port-au-Prince fight for power, the rest of the country will continue to be ignored.”

The first to assert the right to lead the nation was the interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, who called a state of siege immediately after the attack and has spent the past several days trying to parlay general words of support for Haiti from the United States into the appearance, at least, of a mandate to govern. But his legitimacy has been directly challenged by the country’s last remaining elected officials, who are trying to form a new transitional government to replace him...

Still more.

 

'I'll Be There'

For some reason this song popped into my brain last night, and I've been singing it ever since.

The Jackson 5, with a very young Michael.

*****

You and I must make a pact

We must bring salvation back

Where there is love, I'll be there (I'll be there)

I'll reach out my hand to you

I'll have faith in all you do

Just call my name and I'll be there (I'll be there)

And oh, I'll be there to comfort you

Build my world of dreams around you

I'm so glad that I found you

I'll be there with a love that's strong

I'll be your strength

I'll keep holdin' on (holdin' on)

Yes I will, yes I will

Let me fill your heart with joy and laughter

Togetherness, girl, is all I'm after

Whenever you need me, I'll be there (I'll be there)

I'll be there to protect you (yeah baby)

With unselfish love that respects you

Just call my name and I'll be there (I'll be there)

And oh, I'll be there to comfort you

Build my world of dreams around you

I'm so glad that I found you

I'll be there with a love that's strong

I'll be your strength

I'll keep holdin' on

Ooh ooh ooh

Yes I will (holdin' on, holdin' on)

Yes I will

If you should ever find someone new

I know he better be good to you

'Cause if he doesn't

I'll be there (I'll be there)

Don't you know, baby, yeah, yeah

I'll be there, I'll be there

Just call my name, I'll be there (I'll be there)

Just look over your shoulders honey, ooh

I'll be there, I'll be there

Whenever you need me, I'll be there (I'll be there)

Don't you know, baby

I'll be there, I'll be there

Just call my name, I'll be there (I'll be there)

Oh, oh, oh, oh, I'll be there

David Blight, Frederick Douglass

At Amazon, David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus Blames 'Conservative Media' For Misinterpreting Their Threat That They're 'Coming For Your Children;' But -- Is the 'Conservative Media' Covering This Story At All? (Spoiler: No)

A big and lengthy post at AoSHQ.

The Terrible, Awful, No Good Xavier Becerra (VIDEO)

At the Washington Examiner, "The wretched Xavier Becerra wants to control your life":

How to weigh the rights of the individual versus the authority of the government?

That question became trickier over the past 18 months. In an otherwise free country, governments forbade us from gathering to worship, instructed us not to congregate with our families, forced businesses to shut down, and even ordered us to wear masks while going about our business outdoors.

The contagion and lethality of the coronavirus stretched to its limits our notions of personal autonomy and duty to one’s neighbor.

Federal, state, and local governments took a central role in subsidizing the development, manufacture, and distribution of vaccines. Some governmental entities are even considering requiring the COVID-19 vaccine for certain purposes.

Again, there are tough questions involved here, questions that the public, the press, and our government officials need to debate and discuss in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Leave it to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to take a tough and nuanced debate and make it simplistic, political, and stupid.

Becerra is, of course, unqualified for his Cabinet job. We believe nearly everyone in the Biden administration understands this. He was appointed to serve as a cultural warrior — a lieutenant to the vice president and top culture cop, Kamala Harris. Becerra's record as a lawmaker and as California’s attorney general was similar to Harris’s: He saw his job as prosecuting the people with “bad” politics, notably pro-lifers and Catholic nuns.

So when Becerra took to the airwaves last week to defend President Joe Biden’s bad wording about “door-to-door” vaccine administration, it was no surprise that he presented the administration's position in the worst possible light.

“We need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” Biden said last week.

This may have been simply poor wording by the president. His administration now claims the “we” wasn’t federal officials but health authorities and community leaders. And the “door-knocking” it promised supposedly didn’t involve interrogation or coercion but more of an offer: Hey, we have a vaccine right here. Would you like it?

But that wasn’t Becerra’s line.

Asked on CNN whether it’s “the government's business knowing who has or hasn't been vaccinated,” the cultural warrior turned Biden proxy replied, “Perhaps we should point out that the federal government has spent trillions of dollars to keep Americans alive during this pandemic. So it is absolutely the government's business. It is taxpayers' business if we have to continue to spend money to try to keep people from contracting COVID and helping reopen the economy.”

The answer was both stupid and clarifying.

President Jovenel Moïse’s Assassins Seen Captured by Mob in 'Shocking' Video

I'm not easily shocked, but you be the judge here.

At Fox News, "Haiti President Jovenel Moïse’s ‘assassins’ seen captured by mob in shocking video."

COVID Rent 'Moratorium' Screws Queens Landlord --- and More

My wife has been been hammering these rent "moratoriums" since practically Day 1 of the corona-lockdown. I mean, tenants can't pay back thousands upon thousands in back rent, so who pays? We all will, taxpayers, of course. 

Now that's some sneaky-ass socialism. 

At NYT, "A Landlord Says Her Tenants Are Terrorizing Her. She Can’t Evict Them":

For more than a year, Vanie Mangal, a physician assistant at a Connecticut hospital, called relatives to tell them that their loved ones were dying of Covid-19, watched as patients gasped their final breaths and feared that she herself would get sick.

Ms. Mangal found no respite from stress when she went home. She is a landlord who rents the basement and first-floor apartments at her home in Queens, and for the past year, conflicts with her tenants have poisoned the atmosphere in her house.

The first-floor tenants have not paid rent in 15 months, bang on the ceiling below her bed at all hours for no apparent reason and yell, curse and spit at her, Ms. Mangal said. A tenant in the basement apartment also stopped paying rent, keyed Ms. Mangal’s car and dumped packages meant for her by the garbage. After Ms. Mangal got an order of protection and then a warrant for the tenant’s arrest, the woman and her daughter moved out.

All told, Ms. Mangal — who has captured many of her tenants’ actions on surveillance video — has not only lost sleep from the tensions inside her two-story home but also $36,600 in rental income. “It’s been really horrendous,” she said. “What am I supposed to do — live like this?”

In years past, Ms. Mangal, 31, could have taken her tenants to housing court and sought to evict them. But during the pandemic, the federal government and many states, including New York, imposed eviction moratoriums to protect renters who had lost their income. The moratoriums have been widely praised by housing advocates for preventing millions of people from becoming homeless.

At the same time, those broad protections have created tremendous financial — and emotional — strain for smaller landlords like Ms. Mangal, who often lack the deep pockets to survive without payments. And in New York City, there are a lot of those small landlords: An estimated 28 percent of the city’s roughly 2.3 million rental units are owned by landlords who have fewer than five properties, according to JustFix.nyc, a technology company that tracks property ownership.

Landlords can seek pandemic financial assistance, and the federal government has allocated $46.5 billion for emergency rental relief. But the aid has been slow to flow to property owners, and it comes with certain strings attached: It requires the landlord to allow a tenant to remain and not raise the rent for a year after the aid is received. Ms. Mangal has not applied for those reasons.

Further complicating matters, while the moratorium technically allows landlords to evict unruly tenants, a review of court records and interviews with landlords suggest that in practice, it is all but impossible to do so.

“Some people like to say these cases are outliers, but it is more common than people think,” said Joanna Wong, a Manhattan landlord and a member of the Small Property Owners of New York, a landlord group. “I agree with the spirit of the protections, but not how they were passed. It created this situation where there is a subset of people who were not intended to be protected who ended up being protected.”

The federally imposed tenant safeguards expire this month, but New York extended a separate statewide moratorium for an additional month, through August.

New York’s housing courts are preparing to reopen for in-person hearings soon after the state moratorium is lifted, but it could take many months, and most likely longer, for the backlog in cases to clear. Even before the pandemic, an eviction case could take up to a year to be adjudicated.

Before the outbreak, New York City landlords filed between 140,000 to 200,000 eviction cases every year against tenants, who often found themselves on their own in court, without legal counsel, fighting to stay in their homes.

While most cases were resolved without a court-ordered eviction — 9 percent of the cases in 2017 resulted in an eviction, the city said — tens of thousands of New York City residents still lost their homes every year, while the rest had their names added to “tenant blacklists” shared among landlords.

Across the country, more than seven million households are behind on rent because of unemployment and lost wages, including about 500,000 in New York State, according to the census. Renters nationwide owe $5,600 on average in unpaid rent, according to a Moody’s report...

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Clearing Venice Beach (VIDEO)

Kinda harsh evictions, actually. 

The police and city workers were rousting homeless folks at 2:00am, for supposedly as that time there were few other people around. That said, it seems to me evicting the homeless at that time of morning is a form of harassment and terrorism. 

It's gotta be done, of course, but a little more humanity for these folks, many of whom have psychiatric health issues. Sheesh.

At LAT, "Block by block, tent by tent, city crews remove homeless campers from Venice Beach."

Ursula was asleep on a beanbag under an umbrella on a patch of sand, just feet from the public bathrooms on Venice Beach when three LAPD officers shined flashlights on her and told her to move. It was just after 2 a.m. Thursday.

She told them she’d been given a hotel room the day before and had come back for the shopping carts teeming with possessions she left behind. But the effort left her too tired to return to the hotel.

“You’re going to have to get up and exit this area,” one officer said — as sanitation workers stood off to the side, ready to sort her belongings from trash.

“The park is closed.”

For more than three hours, a crew of about a dozen Los Angeles sanitation and recreation and parks workers accompanied by several officers from the Los Angeles Police Department went to work on Ocean Front Walk, sweeping up detritus from one portion of a homeless encampment that has set Venice on edge for months.

A tarp here, a blanket there. Bottles and cans and other consumer waste. But after all was said and done, after the eastern horizon had begun to glow with the impending dawn, they had moved only two people — Ursula and a man who had been reluctant to leave behind his paintings. The rest had left earlier in the week.

It was a case study in how difficult, and complicated, it can be to move unhoused people when the goal is to avoid the kind of blunt-force dispersal that the city carried out this spring at Echo Park Lake.

The crews had come back for a second consecutive morning, mopping up after last week’s deadline to clear the southern portion of the homeless camps from Windward to Park avenues, a stretch of about 650 yards. St. Joseph Center reported that it moved 72 people from the boardwalk to shelter or housing last week. City Councilman Mike Bonin, who represents Venice, said Thursday that about 90 people had been given shelter of some sort...

Still more at that top link.

 And I guess things didn't go so well. See, "L.A. delays the next phase of removing homeless people from Venice boardwalk."

Ronald Suny, Stalin

At Amazon, Ronald Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution.

Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War

The last volume of the trilogy. 

At Amazon, Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War.

Haitian President Assassinated (VIDEO)

While sad, of course, this is a pretty fascinating situation.

Two of the 17 assailants were American, and there's a Colombian connection of some sort too, with perhaps some of the assassins being mercenaries. 

Either way, this seems a significant development, though I haven't heard much yet from the Biden White House. Maybe we'll have some Haitian boat people trying to make in the U.S. in rafts soon. Cuba's 90 miles off the coast of Florida, and Hait's not that much further. God forbid these people perish tying to get to this country where a far-left White House couldn't give a shit. (And this assumes you even care about what happens to Haitians, in any case, and I do.)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Haiti's years of political struggle coincided with other calamities":

Haiti has demonstrated extraordinary resilience in the face of seemingly unstinting political turmoil and natural disaster. Now the Caribbean nation, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, is again in the international spotlight with the assassination early Wednesday of its president, Jovenel Moise.

Even before a series of modern-day calamities — the brutal father-son Duvalier dictatorships that ended in 1986, periodic destructive hurricanes, the devastating 2010 earthquake and a nearly decade-long outbreak of cholera that followed — Haiti was shadowed by a centuries-old legacy of colonialism, slavery and exploitation.

Less than 700 miles from Florida, the former French colony is deeply entangled with U.S. history. The slave revolt that culminated with Haitian independence from France in 1804 also brought about the Louisiana Purchase, the vast territorial sale by France that changed the face of a still-young United States.

Situated on the western third of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic, Haiti is culturally vibrant despite grinding deprivation.

Its 11 million people reflect a mélange of influences — Afro-Caribbean, European and Latin American. Artists of Haitian birth, including acclaimed writer Edwidge Danticat and rapper-actor Wyclef Jean, have left a significant mark on U.S. culture.

Haiti’s hardships, except when they occur on a grand scale, often go little noticed by the outside world.

Moise’s assassination was preceded by months of growing violence by criminal gangs, which set off a vicious round of kidnappings, killings and displacement whose effects rippled across a broad sector of Haitian society. A United Nations report last month cited a “widespread sense of insecurity” and “dramatic consequences for the civilian population.”

At times, even well-intentioned international efforts have caused yet more suffering in Haiti. In a recent memoir, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote that the world body should have done more to address a cholera epidemic, traced by several investigations to U.N. peacekeepers.

That outbreak killed thousands of Haitians after the 2010 earthquake, and was not brought under control for nine years — shortly before the pandemic began. Haiti has essentially no COVID-19 vaccination program in place.

Here is more background on past crises the country has weathered.

The Duvaliers

Francois Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude — known respectively as “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” — ruled Haiti between 1957 and 1986, their successive reigns characterized by numerous harsh abuses. The elder Duvalier, a rural doctor who pledged to economically empower the country’s downtrodden Black masses, instead fell into autocratic ways and declared himself president for life, buttressed by a terrifying paramilitary group known as the Tontons Macoutes.

His son Jean-Claude Duvalier, at 19 the designated successor, took over following his father’s death in 1971. At first the younger Duvalier sought to cultivate an international softer image, but the Tontons Macoutes used brutal means to try to suppress nationwide protests over joblessness, poverty and political repression. In 1986, facing overthrow, "Baby Doc" fled to France. He returned in 2011 to Haiti, where he failed to regain power and was embroiled by embezzlement charges, but was allowed to remain free.

Jean-Claude Duvalier died three years later, and in the post-Duvalier era, Haiti has struggled to attain stable governance. A charismatic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, became the country’s first democratically elected president, in 1990, but lasted less than a year before being deposed by a coup.

That pattern persisted; at the time of his killing, Moise was governing by decree. Opponents and many legal experts said his term should have ended in February.

The 2010 earthquake

The catastrophic magnitude-7.0 temblor ravaged the capital, Port-au-Prince, and heavily damaged several other cities. Haiti was no stranger to ruinous storms and smaller quakes, but this was its worst natural disaster. While figures remain disputed, deaths were put at about 200,000, with an additional 300,000 people hurt. At least 1.5 million Haitians were internally displaced.

Despite a massive infusion of international aid, recovery proved elusive...

Still more.

And at the New York Times, "The prospect of U.S. military intervention in Haiti carries haunting echoes." And live updates here.

White House Defends Hunter Biden's Art Selling Scheme (VIDEO)

Pfft.

Right. Hunter Biden is the next Claude Monet or Pierre-Auguste Renoir --- you gotta be kidding me!

I'm mean the crackhead's work is going on the market for as high as $500,000 for a piece. That's outrageous!

At the New York Times, "White House Sets Ethics Plan for Sales of Hunter Biden’s Art":

WASHINGTON — The White House has helped develop a system for Hunter Biden to sell pieces of his art without him, or anyone in the administration, knowing who bought them, the latest effort to respond to criticism over how President Biden’s son makes his money.

Under the arrangement, a New York City art dealer would sell the paintings, which the dealer has said he is pricing at between $75,000 and $500,000, while keeping secret all information about the sales, according to a person familiar with the plan.

The gallerist, Georges Bergès, has agreed to not share any information about the buyers or prices of Hunter Biden’s work with anyone. Mr. Bergès has also agreed to reject any offer that appears suspicious, such as one well beyond the asking price, the person familiar with the matter said.

Hunter Biden has been under scrutiny for years over business dealings around the world that often intersected with his father’s official duties. His work in Ukraine in particular became a political flash point, helping to lead indirectly to the first impeachment proceedings against President Donald J. Trump, and his business dealings in China became a campaign issue last year.

Hunter Biden is also under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware over his taxes. He has said he is confident he will be cleared of any wrongdoing.

He has taken up painting in recent years, and his efforts to sell his works created a new ethics challenge for the White House, which came under pressure to ensure that buyers would not purchase them in an effort to curry favor with or gain access to the administration.

While some government ethics watchdogs defended the right of the president’s adult son to pursue a career, others raised concerns that the new arrangement lacked sufficient safeguards to prevent improper influence over the administration from potential purchasers.

Virginia Canter, the chief ethics council at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog, questioned what would stop purchasers of the artwork from subsequently making public they had bought a painting by Hunter Biden. “I think it’s creative,” Ms. Canter said. “I guess they want to manage the conflict but the problem will be enforcement. Unless you have the purchaser sign nondisclosure agreements, this information would come out.”

The administration should also specifically prohibit officers of foreign governments from purchasing the pieces of art, she said. The Treasury Department warned last year that the anonymity of high-value art transactions could make the market attractive to those engaging in illegal financial activities or people subject to U.S. sanctions.

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, said the arrangement, which was previously reported by The Washington Post, would ensure ethical dealings.

“The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history, and his family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example,” Mr. Bates said in a statement...

 

Richard Evan, The Third Reich in Power

At Amazon, Richard Evan, The Third Reich in Power.

Tucker Slams Extreme Leftists on Mandatory Indoctrination in Our Schools (VIDEO)

A great, great opening segment.

Watch:

Biden Defends Afghanistan Withdrawal (VIDEO)

Should be an easy case, but at the video the president is stumbling and bumbling.

At NYT, "In Forceful Defense of Afghan Withdrawal, Biden Says U.S. Achieved Its Objectives":

WASHINGTON — President Biden vigorously defended his decision to end America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan on Thursday, asserting that the United States can no longer afford the human cost or strategic distraction of a conflict that he said had strayed far from its initial mission.

Speaking after the withdrawal of nearly all U.S. combat forces and as the Taliban surge across the country, Mr. Biden, often in blunt and defensive tones, spoke directly to critics of his order to bring an end to American participation in a conflict born from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He said the United States would formally end its military mission at the end of August.

“Let me ask those who want us to stay: How many more?” Mr. Biden said in remarks in the East Room of the White House. “How many thousands more American daughters and sons are you willing to risk? And how long would you have them stay?”

Mr. Biden said he was not declaring “mission accomplished,” but he made clear that the future of the country — including the fate of the current government and concerns about the rights of women and girls — was no longer in the hands of the American military.

Responding to questions from reporters about his decision to bring the war to a close, Mr. Biden grew testy as he rejected the likelihood that Americans would have to flee from Kabul as they did from Saigon in 1975. He insisted that the United States had done more than enough to empower the Afghan police and military to secure the future of their people.

But he conceded that their success would depend on whether they had the political will and the military might.

Pressed on whether the broader objectives of the two-decade effort had failed, Mr. Biden said, “The mission hasn’t failed — yet.”

The president also insisted that the United States had not abandoned the thousands of Afghans who served as translators or provided other assistance to the American military. Responding to critics who argue his administration is not moving quickly enough to protect them, Mr. Biden said evacuations were underway and promised those Afghans that there was “a home for you in the United States, if you so choose. We will stand with you, just as you stood with us.”

John F. Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said the military was looking at relocating Afghan interpreters and their families to U.S. territories, American military installations outside the United States, and in other countries outside of Afghanistan.

The war began two decades ago, the president argued, not to rebuild a distant nation but to prevent terror attacks like the one on Sept. 11, 2001, and to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. In essence, Mr. Biden said the longest war in United States history should have ended a decade ago, when Bin Laden was killed.

“We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build,” he said. “And it’s the right and the responsibility of Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”

Mr. Biden delivered his remarks even as the democratic government in Kabul teeters under a Taliban siege that has displaced tens of thousands of Afghan civilians and allowed the insurgent group to capture much of the country.

More at that top link.

 

Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939

Currently reading. 

Boy is this one fat tome, lol. 

And a review, at the New York Times:

In "The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939," the British historian Richard J. Evans picks up where he left off in "The Coming of the Third Reich," the first installment of a three-volume history that is shaping up to be a masterpiece. Fluidly narrated, tightly organized and comprehensive, "The Third Reich in Power" explains, in thematic chapters, how Hitler, after gaining control of the German government in 1933, immediately set about transforming the national economy, purging enemies, reversing the humiliating terms of the Versailles peace treaty and imposing a nationalist-racist ideology on a less than receptive population.

That's a tall order, and Evans, as he carefully constructs a portrait of life in Germany under the Nazis, makes it clear that the Nazi program, in virtually every arena, met with only spotty success. He challenges the notion that Germany was, by tradition and history, uniquely susceptible to Hitler's message and totalitarian rule. Under the kaiser, he argues, Germany was in many respects a modern state, with universal manhood suffrage, a flourishing Social Democratic Party and a dynamic economy. The Nazis, in 1933, ruled a nation in which the Communists and Social Democrats had received nearly a third of the vote in recent elections.

All the more impressive, then, that the Nazi Party, in a few short years, transformed Germany into a police state and dragged it into a European war that most Germans feared and assumed would end badly. It was able to do this, moreover, at a fraction of the cost, in human lives, incurred in Soviet Russia.

The Nazis benefited greatly from the inability of the Communists and Social Democrats to cooperate, and from the virtual carte blanche handed to them by the people, traumatized by the social disorder and economic dislocations of the Weimar period. Always, no matter what the excesses of the regime, the non-Nazi alternatives seemed worse. An overwhelming majority of Germans thrilled to the promise of a resurgent economy and a rearmed Germany that could command international respect.

The Nazis were at their most efficient in establishing a climate of fear and convincing average Germans that even chance criticisms would be picked up by the Gestapo's all-hearing ear. There was no such thing as a harmless joke. Schoolteachers, before grading essays, made sure to look over the main Nazi newspaper, fearful lest they criticize material that had been plagiarized from its articles.

Evans notes that the Gestapo, contrary to legend, was not made up of fanatical Nazis. Most of its members were career policemen who had joined the force during the Weimar period or even earlier. Of the 20,000 Gestapo officers serving in 1939, only about 3,000 belonged to the SS.

The Nazis tried to transform every aspect of German life, from music to sports to garden design. Brownshirts confronted women on the street wearing too much makeup - the new German woman was expected to rely on exercise to create a natural glow - and sometimes snatched cigarettes from their painted lips.

Evans manages to weave a wealth of statistical information into a smooth narrative enlivened by eyewitness commentary from diaries, Gestapo reports and observations by Social Democratic opponents of the regime reporting to their colleagues abroad. This method works particularly well in his chapters on Nazi persecution of the Jews, which vividly convey the slow smothering of Jewish life, punctuated by episodes of fantastic violence, and the inexplicable double-think of ordinary Germans who stood by silently. Evans, here and throughout, maintains a dispassionate tone. He lets the facts, and the voices of the times, speak for him.

In the countryside, where tradition ran deep, local loyalties often trumped Nazi policy. In the Hessian village of Körle, storm troopers tried to seize bicycles from a club with ties to the Communist Party, but the local innkeeper, a longtime Nazi, said that the club owed him money and that the bicycles therefore belonged to him. He stored the bicycles in his loft and returned them to their owners after the war. The Nazi machine, as Evans describes it, moved forward with a good deal of creaking and squeaking. The economy was no exception. On many fronts, the Nazis managed nothing more than to bring the economy back to the status quo that existed before the Depression.

Most Germans did not realize the dirty little secret to the German economic recovery, which, by the late 1930s, had reached its natural limits. The only way forward, in 1939, was war and foreign conquest...

Still more.

 

San Diego Sees Surge in Road Rage Incidents (VIDEO)

It's the COV-Rage surge, apparently.

At ABC 10 News San Diego:

Cameras in the Classroom

Tucker Carlson from tonight's show:

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