[Image via the Nazi Documentation Center of the City of Cologne.]

See, up in Lakeville, Massachusetts, 40 miles south of Boston, someone or other wrote "I [Swastika] Obama" on the 18th green at the local country club.

What does it mean? Did an actual Obama-admiring Nazi carve this in the golf course? Is something threatening the president with something? No one will ever know!

As if that wasn't enough Golf-related Racism for one week, now some folks in Port Huron, Michigan, are accused of sending a racist message to their black neighbors using golf balls.

Plastic balls covered with Nazi symbols were discovered Sept. 25 and Oct. 11 in the backyard of the home in which Michael Brown and his wife Michelle live, The Port Huron Times Herald reported Wednesday.

The African-American couple has told authorities they believe neighbors are responsible.

The people accused of, who knows, planting these Nazi balls, are being evicted. Supposedly because of the golf ball thing but who even knows.

Three makes a trend! Someone else do something involving swastikas and golf, but not until the next time we're guesting at Deadspin.

Marc Garlasco is a former Pentagon analyst who currently does the Lord's work at Human Rights Watch, traveling the world to monitor and expose the effects of war on civilians, holding governments accountable. He is also obsessed—to the point of writing a 400-page book and posting more than 7,000 messages to an online forum—with Nazi memorabilia, medals, and trinkets. After a pro-Israel blog revealed Garlasco's hobby last week, Human Rights Watch suspended him "pending an investigation," according to the New York Times.

Garlasco's unsettling side-gig is particularly thorny for Human Rights Watch, which—because it tells the truth about Israel's conduct of war among civilian populations in Gaza and the West Bank—has long been criticized by advocates of Israel as anti-Semitic. Now those critics have some hard evidence to back up the claim: Look! One of their top investigators loves Nazis!

But do they? In a defense on the Huffington Post, written last week before he was suspended, Garlasco acknowledged that his hobby might seem "disturbing" to some, but explained that his grandfather had been conscripted into the German army during WWII, and said his collecting of Nazi artifacts was an attempt to learn the lessons of the past:

I've never hidden my hobby, because there's nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren't fascinated by military history. Precisely because it's so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things. Thousands of military history buffs collect war paraphernalia because we want to learn from the past. But I should have realized that images of the Second World War German military are hurtful to many.

Collecting Nazi memorabilia doesn't just seem weird: It is weird. We've known a few people who go for that sort of thing, and we can't get past the simple fact that it is quite literally a Nazi fetish—a reverence for and investment of meaning in trinkets that are associated with Nazism. Does it make its practitioners apologists for Nazism, or Nazis themselves? No. But there's more going on there than just fanboy enthusiasm for historical artifacts. It's a fascination with the remnants of an evil regime, and it seems to us that the fascination bears some relationship to the magnitude of the evil.

Whatever is going on, we sincerely doubt that Garlasco's blood runs cold at the prospect of owning a leather SS coat because of all the historical stuff he can learn from it—that's an expression of visceral awe. Not necessarily admiration or approval, but still. All manner of collectors lose sight of reason in their pursuits, and we completely understand the dynamic of getting drawn into a dusty little corner of history and wanting to own and catalog it all. But at some level Garlasco made a decision to surround himself with symbols of horror and dread, and "I'm a military geek" doesn't have a lot of explanatory power.

It's a shame, because Human Rights Watch does good and important things, and as one supporter of the organization told the Times, its critics "have been given this deus ex machina gift about the discovery of Garlasco and his out-of-hours hobby."

[Photo via Flickr by Foxgirl.]

Apparently undeterred by advertising boycotts — which now total 46 — Beck this evening unleashed a torrent of accusations against Barack Obama and his plans for AmeriCorps, which he equates with Adolf Hitler's "brown shirts." For those not as familiar with Nazis as Beck, he drives his hysteria home by comparing Obama to Saddam Hussein.

Vets for Freedom vice chairman David Bellavia and the Heritage Foundation's Matthew Spalding help egg on Beck, who thinks Obama's organizing an army to quash its enemies, create a horrific "national society" and generally destroy democracy.

Though clearly outraged, Beck also seems sadly resigned, muttering, "This is what I've been warning for a very long time." He goes on to beg the White House to declare it doesn't support "revolutionary communists." Robert Gibbs, we're sure, will get right on that...

Hedrick gained a bit of notoriety after yelling at Congressman Brian Baird for describing the protesters as the aforementioned "brown shirts." He then reminded everyone about how the Nazis took control of Germany's industries — just like the Democrats!

Well, it didn't take too long for Fox News to bring him on, and tonight, while talking with Hannity, Hedrick used the opportunity to go all out and suggest that politicians "better be careful about that conversation because they might find that the swastika is on their own arm."

Because that's how it happens: one day you just wake up with a swastika. Didn't you read The Wave? Where's Barney Frank when you need him?

Nikki Finke quotes one studio executive as noting: "The Weinsteins live to fight another day." I say, slow your roll: this is the first weekend, and it ain't gonna save the company single-handedly. Next week, Inglourious will have to compete with Taking Woodstock and The Final Destination (supposedly the final Final Destination movie). Horror films make for stiff box office competition, and Taking Woodstock might - might - chip away at hip young contingents who'd balk at violence. But: hot damn! Nazis - and especially Nazi killin' - do pretty okay at both the box office and at awards season. Let's take a look back at the history of Nazis at the box office, shall we? Possible spoilers ahoy, and by no means is this list definitive. Help us with the ones we missed in the comments.

Inglourious Basterds, 2009, Dir. Quentin Tarantino

Nazi Evil Factor: 6/10. Typical Nazis: they go around goosestepping and hating everything but other than Christoph Waltz's character - who just plays evil so well - they're nothing too special, and Hitler is portrayed as an idiot with the temperament of a twelve year-old.

Box Office Performance: N/A In the long run, who knows? But! $37.6M in the first weekend for a Tarantino film ain't bad.

Awards Season Power: N/A No telling at this point. But this year, there are ten - count 'em, ten - slots in the Best Picture category. Even a nomination could bolster its chances, and dollars to donuts, you can bet the Weinsteins are going to fight a brutal campaign to get this thing looked at.

Legacy: N/A Again, yet to be seen. Could be the ultimate Nazi revenge epic (especially compared to Valkyrie, in which not enough Nazis are killed by a sissy, emo, eye-patched Tom Cruise).

American History X, 1998, Dir. Tony Kaye

Nazi Evil Factor: B+. Real, because they're contemporary, and we know they exist, and they're taking our innocent youth with them. They come in all shapes, and sizes, but only one color: white, and angry. They are scary and you probably live near some and don't know it. Also, Ed Norton, we love him! He's so angry looking!

Box Office Performance: C+. Around $24M worldwide, with a great life on DVD. For a film budgeted at $10M with Norton being the most bankable actor, not half bad.

Awards Season Power: D-. Incredibly overlooked. Norton got a nomination for Best Actor from the Academy, but it didn't take home any major awards.

Legacy: B. Kaye wanted to have name removed from the final cut of the film, but critics mostly loved it. Since then, cult status. Still a favorite of basic DVD collections, college dorms, race relations classes everywhere. Maybe the best look at contemporary Nazism to this day. And #50 on the IMDB Top #250.

The Reader, 2008, Dir. Stephen Daldry

Nazi Evil Factor: D. The main Nazi in question turns out to be the older woman who becomes the lover of a young kid. She looks into the distance and stuff after they have sex, and then she gets sad. Then she goes to trial as a war criminal and (SPOILER ALERT) guess what, she never learned how to read. Boo hoo. How mean can the Nazi at the center of an Opera Book Club selection adaptation be? Exactly.

Box Office Performance: B+ 8/10. Awesome. $106,759,226 worldwide, according to the film's Wikipedia page, with more DVD sales numbers to come. With an estimated $32M budget, I think it's safe to say producers were happy with the result.

Awards Season Power: B. It won Kate Winslet an Oscar! How 'bout them apples? Not surprising, but still, mostly a critical consensus that it was the award-winning (note: not the best, nor the favorite) female leading performance of the year.

Legacy: C. The highbrow Nazi chick flick to watch, if you're going to watch one. Flawed, but gets the job done quite well in certain respects. Not the be-all-end-all, but not a bad entry, either.

Schindler's List, 1993, Dir. Steven Spielberg

Nazi Evil Factor: A. This is Spielberg, are you kidding me? It's like the opposite of E.T. Imagine a world where everything cuddly, wonderful, and nice were sucked out of its head and you were forced to watch the entire extraction. Welcome to World War II, and also, the entirety of the Schindler's List experience. The girl with the red jacket, for christsake. These fuckers are evil, soulless, and terrifyingly accurate depictions.

Box Office Performance: A$321M worldwide, and that's without network rights, DVD sales, etc.

Awards Season Power: A-. It's a Spielberg movie about the Holocaust. How do you think it did? Sadly, no huge actor awards, but this one was never about the actors. This was a movie about the story, the storytelling, and the storyteller, and the awards it got reflected that. It remains, statistically, the most critically lauded film of Spielberg's Career. Also, try to talk shit about this movie as a critic, and you're bound to be ostracized for it. End of story.

Legacy: A+. The Holocaust Movie, bar none. A full viewing of Schindler's List fulfills my yearly quota for requisite Jewish guilt, but I don't know anyone who can sit through it more than once. Maybe the biggest downer to ever make so much money and do so well at the box office. Shown in high schools, shown in Sunday Schools, shown in any class that's ever done any serious studying about the Holocaust.

Downfall 2004, Dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel

Nazi Evil Factor: C-. Hitler's going down, and he's portrayed sincerely by an awesome Bruno Ganz as a fat, blubbering, manic moron who doesn't know what to do when the walls are closing in on him. It was controversial for being one of the first films to have a German playing the role of Hitler, and one that tried to humanize Hitler as a three-dimensional character with human flaws. In other words: something besides a monster.

Box Office Performance: B. $92,180,910. Not bad. The film cost around $25M to make, and most of it takes place in a Panic Room-like bunker.

Awards Season Power: C-. It was nominated for Best Foreign Film, but lost. The British loved it: it won the BAFTA for Best Foreign Film. Bruno Ganz was critically lauded, but people just couldn't see giving an award to the guy who played Hitler better than anyone else could play him.

Legacy: B-. The Ultimate Hitler Movie, but moreso for the context than for the portrayal of Hitler. Director Hirschbiegel was trying to help viewers understand Hitler and his pain, and trying to provoke conflicted emotions about him, which worked, but nobody would admit it, and there was lots of outrage over Hirschbiegel's attempt. More important, however, is that Bruno Ganz's performance became an internet meme (whee!) where people would insert subtitles into a scene where Hitler is screaming his subordinates. For all intents and purposes, it is a pretty great internet meme, if there is such a thing. Example, in place of the trailer, above.

Valkyrie 2008, Dir. Bryan Singer

Nazi Evil Factor: C-. Meh. X-Men director Bryan Singer made Nazis about as evil as, I don't know, Magneto on a bad day.

Box Office Performance: B-. $200M. Tom Cruise did pretty well, all things considered, including a reported budget of $90M.

Awards Season Power: F. Niet! Critics don't dig on Nazi, Eye-Patchy Tom Cruise.

Legacy: C-. It's Tom Cruise dressed up as an Eye-Patchy, Nazi Killin' Nazi, directed by the guy who did The Usual Suspects. Camp value!

The Pianist, 2002, Dir. Roman Polanski

Nazi Evil Factor: B. They hate lots of things, but a piano-playing Adrien Brody ain't one of 'em. Typically evil. They kill things people love and are generally evil assholes.

Box Office Performance: B-. For a $35M budget, $120M (most of that coming from worldwide gross), it did fairly well, and still attracts decent followings on DVD.

Awards Season Power: B+. Failed to capture any Best Picture wins, but did score BAFTAs and Oscars for Polanski and Brody. Also took the Palm d'Or at Cannes, for what it's worth.

Legacy: C+. Should have a better one, but Brody's post-Pianist career and Polansky's pervy hideout status continues to haunt this movie amongst people who haven't already seen it. It's great, but is it great enough to be in the pantheon of great Holocaust movies? It should be.

The Producers

Nazi Evil Factor: F. Not so much. There's a maybe Nazi-loving Broadway artiste, but the real villians here are Broadway Producers, who, well, yes.

Box Office Performance: B Well, consider this: the film itself did mediocre box office business because much of America considered it to be in bad taste - Peter Sellers even had to put an ad out in Variety telling more theaters to carry it - but it eventually spawned a long-running musical that gave Broadway some much needed life, which spawned a so-so movie version of the new musical. So, for Mel Brooks, yeah, I'd say it paid off.

Awards Season Power: C. Won WGA awards for Brooks, scores an Oscar nomination for Gene Wilder, won an Oscar for Brooks' writing.

Legacy: C+. Well, it gets to be compared with the shitty Broderick/Lane remake, which was a remake of the musical, which was better than the original movie. Not the best Brooks movie, but not the worst. Then again, "Springtime For Hitler." Kind of wonderful, no?

See, whereas longtime conspiracy theorist and cult-leading gadfly of the Democratic party Lyndon LaRouche opposes Barack Obama and his health care plan because he fears it is a smokescreen for a fascist/Nazi takeover of America that will lead to mass euthanasia of the elderly and infirm, as heralded by the "enemies list" Obama's evil minions set up, real-life conservatives and Republicans oppose health care reform because they fear Nazi-style eugenics and mass euthanasia of the elderly and infirm, as heralded by the "enemies list" Obama's evil minions set up.

So you can see how LaRouche is not in any way indicative of the conservative movement's honorable and fair response to Obama, except in that they've borrowed most of his rhetoric and a couple of his conspiracy theories.

But Republicans are totally proud of the folks they are filling full of lies and telling to go out and disrupt town halls protests, because they represent real Americans, until some of them turn out to be a little wacko, and in that case they are outliers that you must not pay attention to because that would be smearing real Americans.

There is an internet law about it and everything: as soon as you call someone a Nazi you have lost the argument. We won't quibble with that law's infallibility when it comes to, you know, overheated message board (or chat show) arguments. (Though to call it "the Vidal tactic" while skipping past the bit where Buckley responded by calling Vidal a queer and threatening to "sock [him] in the goddamn face" does give the reader the incorrect impression that Vidal was wrong to accuse Buckley of fascistic leanings.)

And Gerson does point out that the "Nazi" comparisons are being made by Republican senators, Rush Limbaugh, and protesters carrying signs calling Obama a Nazi, and he is certainly not happy with them. He is embarrassed by them, in fact!

But because this is a Washington Post editorial by a "reasonable" Republican no criticism of the conservative movement may be proffered without a "pox on both houses" attack on Democrats for doing the exact same thing, all the time, but worse.

Because Nancy Pelosi (D-Boogeyman) accused town hall disrupters of "carrying swastikas" (they were). And because unnamed "liberal antiwar protests" were chock-full of Hitler mustaches. Because Michael Moore said something dumb about the Patriot Act. And because Representative Brian Baird decried "Brownshirt tactics."

Here's the thing about that last one: the people intentionally disrupting town hall events and trying to turn them into anarchic carnivals of rage and possible violence are literally, actually guilty of "Brownshirt tactics."

Both the Nazis and Mussolini had Brownshirts and Blackshirts, their violent followers (many of whom were angry, disenfranchised-feeling war vets resentful of elites), attack socialists and union leaders, often on behalf of capitalists unhappy with leftist governments. Brownshirts marched through socialist strongholds in order to provoke attacks, and then they ginned up more support by holding up those who were attacked as martyrs. Does that sound familiar?

The well-publicized image of the SA-man with a bandaged head, a stirring reminder of his combat against the "Marxists" (along with other portrayals of muscular, oversized storm troopers), became standard in party propaganda. In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed that seventy "martyrs" had fallen in battle against the enemy. Such heroic depictions — set against the grim realities of chronic unemployment and underemployment for young people during the Weimar period — no doubt helped increase membership in the SA units, which expanded in Berlin from 450 men in 1926 to some 32,000 by January 1933.

Obviously that could never, ever happen here. No responsible American business-owners would ever goad the violent right-wing fringe to provoke their political enemies into street fights.

To point out "Brownshirt tactics" is not to accuse your opponents of wanting to kill all the Jews, and when people are actually engaging in them they should always be called out in the most forceful terms possible.

Instead of treating fascist movements as magical forces of incomprehensible evil we should probably try to remember that a lot of repeatable historical circumstances allowed them to gain power.

Guess they were all done making jokes about black people and fried chicken and Asians who can't drive. Thanks Perez, now we have to hate them.

How wacky are the aforementioned conspiracy theories taking root in America's heartland? One such theory claims that Mexico is plotting to invade the country to reclaim the American Southwest as its own territory. And then of course there's the usual one about how our black/Nazi/Muslim/Kenyan president wants to mobilize an army of gay "Obamacare" warriors to euthanize the elderly, the young and the infirm, after the aforementioned gay warriors have sodomized them, their pets and their children, of course, among other things.

The AP report cites an ATF official named Bart McEntire who says that he believes it's "only a matter of time" before we see another Timothy McVeigh-like act of domestic terrorism, something that doesn't seem all that far-fetched in light of recent events.

The report mentions how the Ohio Militia group recently posted a recruiting video on YouTube, which brings up an interesting point/thought — back in the early 90s, when these same sorts of groups were something to really be concerned about, they, the militia groups, were restricted in terms of their ability to recruit broadly, organize and communicate/share "intelligence" with each other. Of course, with the proliferation of the internet, all of that has changed. Just as a relatively unknown black man from Chicago was able to harness the internet's power to rise up and become President of the United States, small factions of the wingnuttery are able to grow exponentially quite rapidly through the dissemination of propaganda in emails, chatrooms and videos. Whereas they once were relegated to mailing wacky newsletters made with some sort of crude printing mechanism in someone's basement and distributed to just a handful of like-minded idiots, they can now spread their messages virally to a much larger audience in very little time. It's enough to really scare the shit out of you when you really stop and think about it.

For example...

In defending himself, Beck cites his show that aired earlier in the evening where he assembled a round-table of like-minded wingnut folk (Glenn Beck never, ever has anyone on whose viewpoints run contrary to his own) to examine the backgrounds of the people Barack Obama has surrounded himself with in regards to health care reform. Sounds fair enough, right? But what Beck fails to mention is anything about his show's opening segment where he brayed on and on like a goddamn hyena with a wasp up its ass about eugenics, a segment laced with comparisons of Obama to Hitler and the Nazis. Of course, he wraps all of this horseshit up with a pretty little bow by dropping numerous coy little disclaimers, all of which essentially translate to, "I'm not saying Obama's a Nazi, but Obama's a Nazi." And oh, he also cried over the thought that his cerebral palsy-stricken daughter might not have been allowed to live under "Obamacare" eugenics.

So yeah, Glenn Beck's not a fearmonger. And now you know.

Oh, and one last thing — Plenty has been made lately about advertisers dropping their sponsorships of Beck's show. Well, besides all of the pharmaceutical company ads and spots run by companies selling gold commodities, there are a few other major corporations still advertising on Beck's show that I noticed tonight. They include: UPS, HSBC, Visa, Pearle Vision and Broadview Home Security, just to name a few. Just saying.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is closing in on the few remaining survivors of modern history's greatest atrocity, aiming to weed out the last few WWII Nazis hiding in America before they are "too sick to bring to trial." On the one hand, these former Nazis have worked hard to escape their past and become upstanding members of society. On the other hand, they did keep malnourished concentration camp prisoners from escaping using attack dogs. Kiiiinda hard to let that slide.

Old School Putridity
The info comes about because John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old former Ohio auto worker, was charged last week with war crimes after being shipped back to the Vaterland. Today, he looks like everyone's grandpa, slightly befuddled and snoozing in a haggard armchair. Except...well... he's been charged with participating in Nazi death camp murders in 1943. Not exactly the fine, upstanding life of the world's former oldest man.

New School Excrescence
Meanwhile last week, authorities nabbed 33-year-old Mickey Louis Mayer, the triple threat White Supremacist, KKK Member and Neo-Nazi who's also a card carrying member of the FBI's 100-Most Wanted List. This freak fled America to become an illegal alien in, of all places, Israel! After hiding out in Tel Aviv's hippie community, he felt that loving feelin' and started courting a Jewish Israeli gal. Repentant? Hardly. On finding out he impregnated her, he went batshit crazy at the thought of having a half-Jewish kid, spilled the beans, and girlfriend ran to the authorities. Mayon is being shipped back to America TONIGHT.

We also frickin' frakin' freakin' hope the same rigorous effort is being expended to ferret out the Neo-Nasty racists who proudly proclaim their hate in our very military.

Nazis! They're our neighbors, our grandpas, our soldiers, the father of our children. Stop the fucking madness!

Diplomat Sir John Sawers is supposed to be taking over the Secret Intelligent Service (better known as Her Majesty's Secret Service) in October. What kind of information did Lady Shelley Sawers, his wife, let loose on in her Facebook profile?

For starters: their friends! 'Cause it's Facebook, right? Photos show relationships with other diplomats, British actors (don't worry, nobody cool), and family. Family like Lady Sawers' half-brother Hugo Haig-Thomas, a former British diplomat that John Sawers succeeded on his way to the top. Haig-Thomas is "an associate and researcher" of a historian.

Not just any historian, though: Holocaust Denier David Irving. Winner! From Irving's extensive Wikipedia page:

By the mid-1980s, Irving associated himself with the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion, and publicly denied that the Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II.[103] Irving was a frequent speaker for the DVU in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but the relationship ended in 1993 apparently because of concerns by the DVU that Irving's espousal of Holocaust Denial might lead to the DVU being banned.[95] He also alleged that parts of The Diary of Anne Frank might have been forged by her surviving father.

Awesome. Haig-Thomas has noted that he "doesn't necessarily share (Irving's) views," but he sure as hell doesn't condemn them.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.What else is interesting? Well, the family likes Liza Minelli, as there's a picture of his wife and daughter re-enacting Caberet. But that's not nearly as interesting as, say, his codename, which was going to be "C" once he started working for MI-6. Read one awesome wall posting: "Congrats on the new job, already dubbed Sir Uncle "C" by nephews in the know!"

Theater Geeks, you'll appreciate this tidbit on their daughter, of whom there were also several pictures of on Sawers' Facebook profile:

Corinne, 22, a recent Oxford University graduate who is now an aspiring actress...recently began touring with Jenny Seagrove in the play Pack Of Lies, coincidentally about a middle-class household suddenly at the centre of an espionage drama when an MI5 spy turns up at their house.

Finally, location, location, location:

Despite the security implications, Lady Sawers revealed on Facebook the location of the London flat used by the couple and the whereabouts of their three children and of Sir John's parents.

Wow. The problem here, if you didn't notice, was that this guy's supposed to lead up one of the world's two most powerful secret service organizations. And serious secrets - like where the guy lives, who his friends are, who his family is, and what his wife's favorite Liza Minelli musical is - have been exposed (along with his Speedos, which terrorists and enemies of the British State everywhere will, at the very least, get a laugh out of). But politicians on both sides of the aisle in England don't think it's too cute: both liberals and conservatives are calling for his employment with MI-6 to be in question, which is funny, 'cause don't you think they'd just fire him? Eh, the Foreign Secretary doesn't think so:

Foreign Secretary David Miliband today dismissed allegations of recklessness. He told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show: 'It is not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks.' He added: ‘He was appointed 10 days ago to be the head of MI6; he's an outstanding professional who will do a really good job in an outstanding organisation that does a huge amount for this country'

At least we get to blame the outing of Valarie Plame on dumbasses like Robert Novak, who can't keep a good Beltway secret to themselves when they hear it. This is just piss-poor form. Also, if Chuck Barris can keep it a secret for twenty years and you can't, you've got problems. The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

MI6 chief blows his cover as wife's Facebook account reveals family holidays, showbiz friends and links to David Irving [Daily Mail]

Do you get how that is a snub? It is because Obama is hanging out in what used to be East Germany, where Merkel grew up, and not in Berlin, where she now lives. So fuck you, Merkel!

Right, so, Dresden. If you went to high school, you know all about Dresden, because that's when you really got into Vonnegut, when this one really cool teacher lent you his copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. The Allies—that's us—firebombed Dresden for not very good reasons, and tens of thousands of civilians died. And then, forty years later, because he hates America, Obama gave a speech there, to apologize for World War II.

Ahem. That is the spin adopted by some of the nuttier blogs out there. Some of the nuttier blogs and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal..

This is shameful, that the President of the United States should acknowledge any wrongdoing by America ever in its glorious history of unparalleled perfect goodness. Can you imagine the furor that would erupt if, say, he went to a German military cemetery where members of the SS were buried and called those monsters "victims of the Holocaust"? Someone might write a song about that sort of thing!

Then Barry and Angela and Elie Wiesel toured Buchenwald. And that's the news from Germany.

[Photo: AP]

Helg Sgarbi, 43, has confessed to wooing Klatten, 46, at an Austrian spa in the summer of 2007. That August, the two had sex in a Munich hotel room while an accomplice filmed them. He first coaxed a sum of nearly $10 million from Klatten, who owns 12.5 percent of BMW and has an estimated fortune of $13 billion, with a sob story about the Mafia coming after him for running over a don's daughter.

In January 2008, after she ended the affair, he threatened to release pictures of her and demanded $60 million. Klatten went to the police. Sgarbi was arrested in Austria last year. His trial began today, and he made a full confession, a move which may have helped curtail his jail time. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

Sgarbi's confession is an almost anticlimactic end to what promised to be a riveting trial. Before it began, prosecutors were believed to have widely leaked details of the case in the German press. Sgarbi played the discreet gentleman, releasing a statement decrying the leaks:

I remain silent, out of respect to the ladies concerned - which is more than can be said for those who are pumping information into the public domain.

And yet he hired Egon Geiss as his lawyer, a famed defender of former Nazis. One of his favored tactics: using a German law which can force witnesses to testify, suggesting that his strategy would be to bring Klatten to the stand. With his confession, Sgarbi avoids that.

What motivated Sgarbi? Reportedly, his real name was Helg Russak, and he was the descendant of forced laborers who worked in BMW factories during World War II — which made his choice of Geiss even odder.

Klatten's grandfather, Günther Quandt, served as an advisor to Hitler; his factories made batteries for Germany's submarines. His first wife, Magda, divorced him and married Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. The Quandt family, which had denied involvement in the regime for decades, agreed to fund an investigation into their past after a documentary film presented incontrovertible evidence of BMW's complicity.

Which would make Sgarbi some kind of billionaire-bedding, Nazi-fighting hero, right? Except for this: The lothario reportedly scammed at least two other wealthy women at the same time that he pursued Klatten. And if those women's wealth had any Nazi ties, they haven't been reported.

(Photos by Getty Images)

• His Holiness got a mess of bad publicity when he un-excommunicated (recommunicated?) Bishop Richard Williamson. Williamson split from the church due to the liberalism of Vatican II, and also he denies the holocaust. That's really the biggie, there. Oh, sure, he'll admit that a couple thousand people died accidentally in the concentration camps, but the whole "6 million Jews" and "gas chambers" thing? Total myth! When news of the recommunication of this lunatic broke, it took Pope Ratzi two weeks to respond with his half-assed promise to make the Bishop deny his firmly held beliefs that Jews are the enemies of Christ and that they're agents of the Freemasons. And now the Jews are all mad for some reason!
• Ratzi got less press for another odd move: he brought back Plenary Indulgences. Whoo! Plenary Indulgences!! Those are when the church, uh, forgives for you all your sins and gives you basically a "get out of Purgatory free" card. The idea here is to trick lapsed Catholics into going to confession, and then with some special prayers they get one of these magic tickets to heaven. Fun fact: the selling of Plenary Indulgences is one of the things that ticked off Martin Luther! Readers are advised to take advantage of this St. Paul's Birthday Indulgence deal—they're letting anyone have one.
• Oh, meanwhile the Vatican's getting all caught up in Italy's own version of the fucking Terri Schiavo thing.
• And finally, the Church is officially cool with Charles Darwin. (For those keeping score: evolution: real. Holocaust: pretend.) To be fair, Creationism is really more of a Nutty American Protestant thing than a Catholic thing, but the Church has not traditionally been too pro-science.

Now you may wonder why, exactly, Pope Ratzi is getting such awful press when his predecessor was basically the most beloved Pope ever. Well, for one, Pope John Paul wasn't a member of the Nazi Youth who was then in charge of the Inquisition. But more importantly: "the Pope, unlike his predecessor, does not have a full-time press officer."

Well that explains it.

Tchibo, a coffee company, and Esso, a gas company, were running a joint ad campaign. In Germany!

Their slogan: "Jedem den Seinen." Translation: "To each what he deserves."
The slogan of Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald: "Jedem das Seine." Translation: Roughly the same thing.

They had to stop using that slogan and apologize. Doing business in Germany involves so many cultural intricacies! [Reuters via Agency Spy. Pic via]

There's The Reader (Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, sadness), Adam Resurrected (Jeff Goldblum, a fake dog, sadness), Valkyrie (Tom Cruise, eye patch, vague and unplaceable sadness), Defiance (Liev Schrieber, the boy from Billy Elliot, angry sadness), Good (based on a brilliant play about sadness), and the currently running Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Vera Farmiga, child sadness, which is the worst). That is so many! Harvey Weinstein, ultra-producer and Jewish person, says of the genre (can we call it that?): "What a wonderful subject to explore in as many ways as possible. I hope our children get educated about the Holocaust, so it will be 'Never again.'"

And, yeah. I mean, I don't know if we should go around calling it 'wonderful,' but definitely it's a subject that bears as much examination as anyone needs it to. We are talking about a period of only a few years in which the equivalent of the entire population of Ohio was wiped off the face of the Earth, after all. The difference is that some movies, like the treacly and dangerously trivializing Life is Beautiful, use the subject as springboard to something else, something more "personal," more selfish. Some people say please, no more of these movies at all, because they begin to become co-opting novelties for people who've no idea of the actual toll of things, don't know the weight of this all too real history. Then things begin to creep closer to the dark shade of the anti-Semitic (in its pointless exploitation, its marginalizing) umbrella, and the whole effort is woefully derailed.

Doubtless that one of the above films will do some injustice to something, because it's near impossible to cover all the bases fairly. I don't think it will be Good, if the source material is treated correctly. Defiance is about something real that happened that survivors have already responded well to, and that's kind of all that matters. Valkyrie, blech. Who knows about the Goldblum one or Pajamas (though some reviews of that have been scathing). And the question remains open for The Reader, which could be good, with its strong director and actress pedigree, or could be another Sophie's Choice, a listless something about Something, anchored only by a mesmerizing central performance.

But will that be enough?

Choice quotes from an early MSNBC review:

A scene where Cruise’s character, Claus Von Stauffenberg, is forced to give the infamous “Heil Hitler” salute. “It’s an unsettling scene but you almost start to laugh," the source says. "His character is resisting it but you never forget it’s Tom Cruise saying ‘Heil Hitler.’ It’s funny and shocking at the same time.”

Oh dear. Also:

“It’s a bunch of white guys in Nazi uniforms. It’s too bad... it’s as if he could say ‘I complete you’ at any time. This is not his Oscar moment.”

We can't wait! [via Gold Derby]

There was a tendency in New York, among liberals used to assuming that the elections are all stolen anyway, to assume the Obama campaign was doomed before it began because of his blackness, plain and simple. There was, similarly, a dark speculation, sometimes in the form of macabre joking, sometimes serious paranoia, that Obama would not survive the campaign if he got too close to the prize. What that didn't take into consideration was that as he looked more and more electable, more people liked him. Honestly, some thought Iowans were more likely to shoot him than vote for him. Then he proved them wrong, and the paranoia lifted, slightly.

And the fact is, with the economy in the toilet, those bitter and ignorant poor whites are finding their distaste for Republicans is beginning to supersede any distaste for Blacks they might also feel. Crazy white power types found their numbers swelled a bit by the immigration "debate"—remember the Minute Men? they were certainly on TV a lot!—but now, the crazies are almost resigned to an Obama presidency.

It's actually kinda shocking how few death threats we've heard about, especially considering the attention this patently ridiculous one received in the media. (Though we'd figure the ATF would be more likely to crow about breaking up an assassination attempt than the Secret Service, who tend to prefer to keep things quiet and not encourage the crazies.) But don't get too complacent! A Missouri Nazi tells The Guardian that a couple more Nazis will still promise to kill Obama, and Andrew Krucoff finds proof that Mississippi is still, you know, Mississippi.

But Obama's right—they're marginalized. The debate's shifted immeasurably, even from a couple years ago. As a fine measure of how far we've come, the GOP has to use code words for "Muslim terrorist" this year instead of just reminding us of his conventional, acceptable Blackness. God bless us all!