Satire Campaign Targets NPD Election Efforts
Opponents went on a book tour for its recently published biography. It tirelessly rampaged on concert stages across northern Germany while on tour with its band "Storchkraft" ("Stork Power"). And even the T-shirts bearing the image of the cartoonish character with the Hitler-esque moustache have unexpectedly been runaway best-sellers.Time for a break, one might think. But not for Storch Heinar. On Sept. 4, the northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will hold parliamentary elections. And Heinar has some hard campaigning to do before he can take a well-deserved rest.
"We're on the home stretch. The stork is giving its all to keep right-wing extremist idiots outside the door," says Mathias Brodkorb, a Social Democrat state parliamentarian and one of the people behind the left-leaning website Endstation Rechts, which translates as "last stop for the right wing." Brodkorb came up with the idea for the stork with Julian Barlen and Robert Patejdl. Their aim: to force members of the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) out of the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania -- and keep them out.
There's still plenty to do in the final days before the election. The NPD currently holds six seats in the parliament, and it is using an aggressive campaign strategy to avoid losing any of those seats. The party has put up hundreds of campaign posters along the main thoroughfare leading into the port city of Rostock, the largest population center in the state.
Fighting Extremists to Attract Tourists
Each morning, Rostock native Benjamin Weiss has to run the gauntlet of these posters, with their pithy sayings and clownish slogans, on the way to the hotel he runs. The trip recently started making him even angrier than usual. So, he decided to act.
"I don't have any more desire to see my guests welcomed with slogans like 'Tourists Welcome -- Foreigners Out!'" Weiss says. Things like that hurt the city's image, he adds, thereby directly damaging the tourism industry as well.
Stretch Force Meters - News
Weiss says that some of the NPD posters are put on road signs up to four meters (13 feet) high "so that they can't be ruined." Instead, Weiss has decided to fight back by making significant donations to the Storch Heinar camp and offering free lodging
It's a little bit of a stretch, maybe, but it makes sense all the same. Nostalgia's a hell of a drug, especially these days. Every other Tumblr is all, “Remember so and so?” People are nostalgic for things that happened earlier this week, like the days
Even the meter cluster is inspired by sports machines, with the meters' zero markers in the six o'clock position. The Multi Information Display (MID) is optimally positioned at the top of the instrument panel, close to the driver's line of sight,
In addition to catching theft, he said above and underground leakages were being vigorously rectified, undersized meters were being replaced, non-billing cases were being detected and billed. As a result of these and other efforts, the rising trend of
The elite runners who will be in the study include several Olympic Trials qualifiers who on average complete a 5000-meter, or 3.1-mile race at least 40 seconds faster than the student-athletes who will be in the study – seconds that can make the
PolitiFact | Rick Perry says Texas added 21000 doctors because of ...
When he was asked about medical malpractice at the Politics and Eggs Breakfast in Bedford, N.H., on Aug. 17, 2011, he had some precise numbers at his fingertips. "I’ll tell you what one of the results was," he said. "This last year, 21,000 more physicians practicing medicine in Texas because they know they can do what they love and not be sued. Some 30 counties that didn’t have an emergency room doc have one today. Counties along the Rio Grande, where women were having to travel for miles and miles outside of the county to see an ob-gyn, for prenatal care and now they have that care." Jon Opelt, executive director of Texas Alliance for Patient Access, a group that supports tort reform and is funded by health care providers, sent us some analysis he had done that filtered out the population effect. Opelt said the higher rate for doctors -- 24 percent -- translates into an additional 1,608 physicians thanks to tort reform. At least, that’s what he said when we first spoke to him. Later, after we showed him that the growth of doctors increased at a faster rate in the pre-reform years, Opelt sent us new numbers, saying tort reform brought 5,000 more doctors to the state and the ratio of doctors to residents has never been better. (We found those numbers to be a stretch: The upward revision comes from including administrators, teachers and other licensed doctors who don’t actually treat patients.) Tom Banning, chief executive officer of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, said that back in the early 1990’s the state began passing laws that made it physician-friendly. Among them, a prompt-pay rule to "to ensure that insurers pay physicians promptly and correctly," Banning said, "which creates a very good environment for practices." Banning said tort reform was more good news for doctors, a sentiment borne out by opinion surveys from the state’s medical association.