BRUCE BAWER: Misrepresenting Germany in the New York Times.

Case in point: a 14-minute “Times documentary” entitled “Seeking Asylum in Germany – and Finding Hatred.” Credited to Ainara Tiefenthäler, Shane O’Neill, and Andrew Michael Ellis, and posted front and center on the Times website last Thursday, it’s about Abode, a tall, lanky 22-year-old Libyan refugee who, at the beginning of the film, has been living in the Saxon town of Bautzen (pop. 41,000) for over two years.

From the outset, Abode is presented as an innocent victim of racist hatred. We see him in his room at the Bautzen asylum center, talking softly, his large brown eyes oozing sensitivity. We see a cell-phone video in which a young white woman half his size kicks and hits him, apparently without provocation. We see him rehearsing for a hip-hop stage adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in which he plays Mercutio; the theater director, a middle-aged woman, speaks of him glowingly.

Providing contrast to this peaceable young man, we see a ragtag neo-Nazi group in Bautzen’s town square, waving flags and praising Donald Trump. And we see close-ups of racist online comments (in German) about refugees.

Abode says that when he used to see pictures of Europe on TV, he thought it looked wonderful. But now he hates it. “Libya is the land of good,” he says. Germany, by contrast, is a land of Nazis.

“Nazi” is a word he uses a lot. He says he’s had “problems with Nazis and the police” ever since his arrival in Germany. Eventually we discover that he’s been described in the local media as the head of a gang of refugees who engage in rioting and violence. We see a newspaper front page featuring a picture of him aiming a machine gun.

Read the whole thing.

YES, IT IS: New draft of ‘Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful?’ If you are concerned with police misconduct and excessive violence, and you should be, the single most productive thing you could do would be to get rid of qualified immunity, which is a judicial creation with no basis in the Constitution. Yet hardly anyone is talking about this. Why?

THE REAL WAR ON BLACK MEN: Hard Data, Hollow Protests. The death toll from Black Lives Matter (and its shills in the NFL and the media) continues to grow, as Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal:

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend.  Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243. . . .

Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. That truth has not stopped the ongoing demonization of the police—including, now, by many of the country’s ignorant professional athletes. The toll will be felt, as always, in the inner city, by the thousands of law-abiding people there who desperately want more police protection.

Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James could not be reached for comment.

SKY STREAK: An F/A-18E Super Hornet over the Philippine Sea. The jet is flying by the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76).

QUESTION ASKED: CAN WE STOP CALLING IT A ‘MUSLIM BAN’ NOW? “The list of restricted nations never included some of the largest Muslim countries. Now it includes North Korea and Venezuela.”

PATRICK POOLE: Puerto Rico’s Governor Dismantles Media Attacks on Trump’s Response to Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

BODIES OF WATER ARE PEOPLE, TOO: The State of Colorado Is Being Sued by…the Colorado River?

Bringing a suit on behalf of the Colorado River is hardly a novel concept in the international arena; similar efforts in Ecuador, Colombia, India and New Zealand have established legal rights for natural resources in those countries.

“There’s a new international law emerging,” says Flores-Williams. “It’s leveling the playing field between corporations and nature, which traditionally has had no say. Now you have courts in India issuing judicial orders on behalf of the Ganges River.”

But in the United States, in order to file a suit on behalf of a natural entity like the Colorado River, you must establish that harm is being done to human beings, because the U.S. legal system is based around people.

The important question is, Does the Colorado River self-identify as a human being — and if so, what is xits preferred gender?

HMM: Flag on the play? The NFL might get in trouble with the IRS for getting political.

Most people think of the NFL as big business — but nothing could be further from the truth.

As a non-profit 501(c)3 organization beholden to IRS restrictions on political campaigning, the NFL cannot endorse a political candidate, nor campaigns nor political issues.

The players are walking a fine line with their very public #TakeAKnee political protest.

The IRS tax code clearly states that while it is perfectly appropriate for the NFL to encourage citizens to vote, their actions must not cross the line of favoring or encouraging their fan base to go against a candidate or group of candidates in the future.

I’m not sure about that. The players don’t work for the NFL, but for the various teams, right?

GOOD NEWS: U.S. Gas Prices In Some Markets Already Back Down To Pre-Harvey Levels.

JON GABRIEL: Red Team? Blue Team? Start Your Own Team.

Remember when multimillionaire President Trump criticized a multimillionaire football player last night? Well today, a multimillionaire basketball player said he didn’t want to go to the White House no more. So, President Trump said the multimillionaire basketball player wasn’t welcome at the White House in the first place. And then a different multimillionaire basketball player tweeted something mean at President Trump.

Honestly, I’m just happy the Republic hasn’t collapsed.

A few million put on their Red Team uniforms and rushed to their computers. Another few million put on their Blue Team uniforms and grabbed their iPhones. To the barricades, citizens!

Then they wasted a beautiful Saturday afternoon tweeting at each other.

Melissa and I spent Saturday doing chores and then drinking and talking too loudly with old friends — highly recommended.

DEPRAVED ART IS THE BEST ART: “Egyptian authorities have arrested seven people they accuse of being gay and promoting homosexuality for allegedly raising the rainbow flag of the LGBT movement at a concert last week, even though there is no law banning the practices.”

Linda Sarsour could not be reached for comment.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: More NFLOL, DACA/Amnesty on the Senate Table, and Much, Much More.

DONALD SENSING: The NFL lies down on its deathbed and forbids itself rise. “I posted 23 days ago that The NFL continues its slow suicide, with both attendance and TV viewership having declined for a few years in row now. With this weekend’s demonstrations, the NFL has made full transition from an athletic organization to a political one. So what will attendance and viewership do now? Well, Sunday night’s game – after the full afternoon of televised abstentions and kneeling – was down eight percent from just last week and was the worst this year.”

THE NEW-NEW LABOUR: Expel Jewish Group From Party, Israel Like Nazis.

A fringe event at Labour conference has heard calls to expel Jewish activists from the party, while a speaker compared Israel to Nazis and the audience was banned from tweeting in an attempt to silence “hostile” coverage. The room echoed its agreement as a speaker protested that the Jewish Labour Movement was given a campaigning awarded yesterday, instead calling for the group and Labour Friends of Israel to be “kicked out” of the party. A speaker, Miko Peled, said Israel and Israelis should not be treated differently to white South Africans during Apartheid or Nazis. He claimed Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza. He said those present should stop calling Israel by its name, a view taken up by other speakers who then referred to it only as “the Zionist state”. The notorious Tony Greenstein, who was suspended by Labour for ranting about “Zionist scum” was applauded, and there were cheers for Ken Livingstone.

Things like this are becoming less fringe and more “respectable,” because of course the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

ANTI-MONOPOLY SENTIMENT SEEMS TO BE WIDESPREAD AND BIPARTISAN: John Oliver rips AT&T-Time Warner merger.

LET’S HOPE SO: Iran’s supposed missile launch was fake, US officials say.

The video released by the Iranians was more than seven months old – dating back to a failed launch in late January, which resulted in the missile exploding shortly after liftoff, according to two U.S. officials.

President Trump had originally responded to the reported launch in a late-Saturday tweet, saying, “Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel. They are also working with North Korea. Not much of an agreement we have!”

This was after Trump, speaking before world leaders at the United Nations, called the Iran nuclear deal an “embarrassment” to the United States.

One embarrassment doesn’t negate the other.

VALERIE PLAME’S REAL BLUNDER:

Last week, Valerie Plame Wilson got into trouble for retweeting a vile anti-Semitic screed accusing American Jews of being dual loyalist war mongers. The problem wasn’t what she was saying—similar accusations have been made by everyone from Barack Obama on down for years. The problem was how she was saying it: Unlike her allies in the progressive camp, Plame was foolish enough to implicate all Jews in advocating war with Iran, instead of simply identifying a few convenient culprits for calumny.

* * * * * * * * *

The mess Plame created for herself is an illustration of what happens when you go “too far” in what’s now the acceptable pursuit of Jew-baiting, which was mainstreamed by the anti-Iraq war “netroots,” further perfected by Obama administration sycophants in selling the Iran Deal and then, in different form, enthusiastically endorsed and used by Steve Bannon and Trump during last year’s presidential campaign. Herewith is a chronological collection of comments from elected officials, commentators and former military officers along this theme:

— In October 2002, an Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama delivered a speech in Chicago opposing war with Iraq. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” Obama declared. “What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” Few of the people listening to the speech that day could have known whom the future president was talking about. Presaging Giraldi’s condemnation of “chairborne warriors,” Obama set his sights not on the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, House Speaker, Senate Majority Leader, or Senate Minority Leader–all of whom had far more influential roles in the decision-making process leading up to war, and all gentiles – but on two Jewish individuals, one of whom, Perle, did not even serve in the Bush administration but sat on a nondescript advisory committee to the Defense Department, and who would otherwise have remained obscure had not their ethnic background taken on totemic importance in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists.

Read the whole thing.

THE BROKEN EVERYTHING FALLACY: Fed Suggestion That Hurricanes are Good for Economy? Hardly.

Paul Krugman for Fed Chair?

BOURGEOIS VIRTUES: How Did Marriage Become A Mark Of Privilege? “Marriage, which used to be the default way to form a family in the United States, regardless of income or education, has become yet another part of American life reserved for those who are most privileged. Fewer Americans are marrying over all, and whether they do so is more tied to socioeconomic status than ever before. In recent years, marriage has sharply declined among people without college degrees, while staying steady among college graduates with higher incomes. . . . College graduates are more likely to plot their lives methodically — vetting people they date until they’re sure they want to move in with them, and using birth control to delay childbirth until their careers are underway. Less educated people are more likely to move in with boyfriends or girlfriends in a matter of months, and to get pregnant at a younger age and before marriage. This can make financial and family stability harder to achieve later on.”

As I mention in this week’s USA Today column, the clerisy practices the bourgeois virtues, they’re just not allowed to praise them.

Plus: “Mr. Wilcox suggests a bigger emphasis in high schools and pop culture on what’s known as the success sequence: degree, job, marriage, baby. ‘The idea is that if people follow that sequence, their odds of landing in poverty are much lower,’ he said.”

Weirdly, that’s pretty much what Amy Wax and Larry Alexander said.

MY TAKE:

Well, build a wall, maybe. Or repeal ObamaCare.

Related, from IowaHawk:

UNITY FOR WHOM? THOSE WEARING I-LOVE-ME-JACKETS?  NFL Players Memo To Roger Goodell: Declare November As Unity Social Justice Month

SO ABOUT MERKEL:  German elections: One more such “victory” and Merkel is undone.

THE NFL CHOOSES TO ROLL LEFT AND DIE:   The NFL and the National Anthem.