Neo-Nazis: Laugh of the Day

I busted a gut when I read this AP story yesterday:

Road Cleaned by Neo-Nazis May Be Named for Rabbi

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Two Adopt-a-Highway signs on a Missouri road acknowledge a neo-Nazi group's participation in the state's litter prevention program.

But if Gov. Jay Nixon signs a large transportation bill, that half-mile section of road will be renamed "Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway" in honor of a rabbi who narrowly escaped the Nazis in World War II and later marched with Martin Luther King Jr.

The Springfield unit of the National Socialist Movement committed last year to clean up trash along the section of Highway 160 near the city limits in west Springfield. Two signs noting the group's membership in the Adopt-A-Highway program went up last October.

"For the National Socialist movement to be in the Adopt-a-Highway program is well within their rights," said Rabbi Alan L. Cohen of the Jewish Community Relations Board of Kansas City, which worked on selecting Heschel's name for the highway.

"But obviously there were people raising the concern that this is the wrong message for people to see driving down a Missouri highway, that there are National Socialists out here," Cohen said Sunday. "Wouldn't it be nice to have someone who stands for justice."

The state says it had no way to reject the group's application. A 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling arising from a similar effort by the Ku Klux Klan says membership in the Adopt-A-Highway program can't be denied because of a group's political beliefs.

That 2005 Supreme Court ruling also had to do with a racist group here in Missouri. (Oh, and we have some other radical group in the bootheel of Missouri ... something like the "Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord" whack jobs. The Show-Me state excels in home-grown radicalism / terrorism.) The case found that the state cannot deny any organization's application to the program on grounds of political beliefs; but, a group can be denied if any its members have been convicted of violent criminal activity in the past 10 years.

What happened in that 2005 case was that the Missouri Department of Transportation lost a long legal battle in trying to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway on freedom-of-speech grounds. So, the state decided to get in a "cheap shot" by getting the Missouri legislature to officially designate that part of highway 55 as the "Rosa Parks Highway" in honor of the courageous woman arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.

[Go here for more of the story.]

Oh the sweet irony of having yet another white trash group picking up trash named in honor of a Rabbi!