Duke is going to jail on tax evasion and mail fraud charges. When he tried to host a going away rally in Virginia last week, he found that only one hotel in the area would rent him a room.

That's when Duke and his supporters decided to put aside their ideological distaste for foreigners and go to "this East Indian-owned hotel," according to Doggett.



Patel remembers getting a phone call February 21 from a desperate sounding man — Doggett — who begged to rent a conference room. "He said it was Euro-something," Patel recalled. "I didn't pay any attention... It was business," Patel said.

Last Saturday night, Duke finally held his rally. Only half of the 160 people expected showed up and what was billed as a major policy address turned out to be a brief, extemporaneous address. Duke railed against the Bush administration's Iraq policy, dubbing it a Jewish conspiracy "beneficial only to Israel," according to Doggett.

There was one bit of solace for Doggett and Duke, however: Mordechai Levy and his supporters were nowhere to be found. "It was Shabbos," Levy explained. "You can't stop it on Shabbos if you don't know about it."

But the sweetness of this small victory was tempered by the indignity of it all, Doggett admitted, and most galling to him was the belief that they had been overcharged by Patel. "They raped us pretty good for the room," he complained.

This, of all the things that Duke and his followers have said about a working-class immigrant, was the only statement that offended Patel.

"I didn't overcharge anybody," Patel hissed. "I charged them the regular rate."



Meanwhile, the senile old coot Byrd fancies himself as the Elder Statesman of the Senate. If you've had the chance to hear him babbling on the Senate floor, you'll see how bad he has lost it. In his day, his views were at least as repugnant as Duke's, but then, being Democrat means never having to be accountable.