ooh, that smell.

What a funny world we live in. In the wake of the Charleston shooting all of a sudden we are on some jihad against the confederate flag. The star from the Dukes of Hazzard is legitimately pissed because they just cancelled his syndication deal and there go the residuals. Leave the flag alone, Bubba Watson shouldn't have to expunge it from the roof of his car, we don't have to burn all the old Lynard Skynyrd album covers.

It's a symbol. Like this guy is wearing a symbol. At the ferry dock. In Seattle. From The Stranger.

Jay Trinidad, a professional photographer who lives on Bainbridge Island, was on his way home on Thursday evening when he saw a man with a red swastika armband sitting in the passenger waiting area of the downtown Seattle ferry dock. He took an extraordinary photo of the man.
They did not exchange words. "I was walking around the terminal and then I saw him," Trinidad told me today. "I'm like, 'He's really doing that? Today?' There were people sitting next to him. There were a lot of people around. It just struck me as bizarre... Here's a guy with Nazi armband and no one is pointing and saying, 'What is going on there?'"

"What struck me about this was the complete brazenness on the day the whole country was learning about Charleston," Trinidad said. "It struck me as him basically sticking his middle finger up to everyone who could see him."
But nobody openly challenged the man. Trinidad said the couple to his right in the photo seemed nonplussed. He didn't speak with them either.
"Either he sat down next to these people and they didn't move, or they sat down next to him," he said. "Either way, you cannot miss the gigantic swastika on the guy's arm... It's like he's trying to flex his little Nazi bicep."
Trinidad got on his homebound ferry. He feels deeply unsettled by the incident, wondering: "How many people in that waiting area had no problem with that guy?"
I asked him about the racial makeup of the crowd. "They were white people and they were on their phones," he said. "It really bothered me—the whole experience."

I though a lot about this guy this week, what is going on up north? Everybody knew about the loonies in Idaho, but Washington? Apparently Dylann Roof's spiritual mentor is one Harold Covington. Covington is a right wing science fiction writer and the leader of a white separatist group called the Northwest Front. I wonder if Yul Brynner up top with the armband is one of his boys?

Harold Covington - 1980

“They’ve been given a vision of a time in some imagined but possibly not too-far distant future when all of a sudden, on the street or in their office, or in some trendy fern bar, or Starbucks, or wine-and-cheese boutique on the Upper East Side or in San Francisco, they will look up, possibly from the laptop, where they are typing up their day’s quota of leftwing, liberal horseshit, and they will see a young white man like Dylann Roof standing in front of them with no steroid-pumped policemen in blue to protect their liberal candy asses from the consequences of years of their own behavior,” he said. “They will see in that young white man’s eyes, that he recognizes them. That he is now beyond deception or bullying or browbeating or Twitter-shaming or intimidation, that he knows them for what they are. And they will look down and see that he has something in his hand.” Harold Covington

These are the guys that scare me. Not Bubba and Daisy Duke. It's almost a common refrain amongst some conservatives. Liberals are the reason the loonies on the right engage in violent and abhorrent behavior. Liberals who see something wrong in something as innocent as a guy choking his mother.

The father of a man who opened fire on Dallas police headquarters blames liberal policies for his son’s obsessive anger.
“Every one of us has a breaking point,” said Jim Boulware. “He hit his.”
A police sniper shot and killed 35-year-old James Boulware — described as a conspiracy theorist who had made threats against schools, churches, and family members – after he fired gunshots and detonated explosive devices shortly after midnight Saturday at the police station.
His father told CNN his son was enraged at police – who the younger man blamed for taking away his son in a custody battle.
Jim Boulware said liberal policies had spurred a Child Protective Services investigation after he choked his mother two years ago, which landed him in jail for three weeks – until his father bailed him out.
“I knew he was angry at police, he blamed them for taking his son,” the elder Boulware said. “I tried to tell him the police didn’t do it. The police were doing their job to enforce the laws. If you want to get to that, you’ve got to go back to the liberal people that put these laws in place, to where CPS and all can grab kids.”

By the way Jay, great picture. This is going to be one of the greatest shots you have ever grabbed.