Before any more time went by I wanted to flag your attention to something that happened in New York City on Sunday. There was a rally of “Polish nationalists” protesting a bill aimed at the recovery of property confiscated from victims during the Holocaust. I put “Polish nationalists” in quotes here because I don’t want to equate Polish nationalism with the most unreconstructed forms of virulent anti-Semitism and Holocaust-denial which were on display at the event — placards with anti-Semitic attacks, various kinds of Holocaust denial, one demonstrator taunting a group of Jewish counter-protestors by waving a dollar bill in their faces, claims that Jews who died in the Warsaw Ghetto were mainly killed by other Jews, etc., etc., etc. Read More

Maybe this New York rally I mentioned below wasn’t the only one.

A short time after I wrote my post I received an email from TPM Reader T who pointed me to this press release about the protest which notes that the protests were planned for “New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Hartford and Philadelphia and, in solidarity, in several places around the world.” Read More

Trump calls vote to release the full Mueller Report a “disgrace” …

Trump: demands for release of the full Mueller report are a "disgrace" pic.twitter.com/dxkC6XL26L

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 2, 2019

Some sleuthing from TPM Readers has confirmed that the there were a bunch of Polish nationalist rallies around the country on Sunday protesting the new Holocaust restitution legislation, Senate Bill 447.

This article at a site called polishclub.org discusses the rallies around the country. Google translate suggests the language is pretty horrendous. Here’s how Google renders one portion of the first paragraph: “This crisis has also resulted in something positive. In Poland, the era of conspiracy ended, we were shown what Polish-Jewish relations really are and what is really going on in them. We were shown the size of Jewish gratitude, for exposing the lives of Poles helping Jews to avoid death, as well as for sheltering them for the last 800 years.” very idiomatic, pun-filled piece. But very inflammatory, anti-Jewish/antisemitic. Read More

We’re currently watching the House Judiciary Committee debate and vote on issuing a subpoena to get the full Mueller Report and underlying evidence tied to the investigation. You can watch it with us here.

In the last couple days I’ve had a few requests for an explanation of what’s going on with Brexit, what is Brexit. I’m no expert on the topic. But I think I can give a broad description of the history and the present. So if you’re interested, here goes. And note I’ll cover ground that many are likely familiar with. Read More

As I’ve mentioned before, many post-Holocaust Jews have bad communal memories about Poland. In this case, when I say ‘memories’ I mean communal beliefs, even among people who’ve never been to Poland or had any personal contact with the events of the 1940s. Of course, that isn’t the entirety of the story or the history. This is why I enjoyed so much Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction of Nations, which introduced me to a very different strain of Polish history, one with a deep civic, cosmopolitan heritage and multi-national vision of Polish history and nationhood. I discussed that here and here in this interview with Snyder himself.

The politics of the Polish current government and these rallies we saw over the weekend come out of something very different.

TPM Reader HL shared this background … Read More

This story here gives you a good sense of how Trumpism, domestic white supremacist activity and revanchist anti-Semitic politics in Poland and other parts of Europe are all part of one common story. This story of racist and anti-Semitic graffiti at a Democratic party headquarters in Oklahoma too.

Ways and Means Chair demands six year of the President’s tax returns, personal returns in addition to returns of various Trump entities.

Six GOP state legislators in Georgia are sponsoring a proposed law that would set up an “ethics board” for journalists in the state and exact civil penalties if journalists or news organizations failed to turn over photos, audio or video of recordings of interview subjects.

The law also appears to create a framework for investigating journalists and empowering litigants to sue journalists if they don’t hand over work copy from interviews.