back in the 1910s. They were the lucky ones. They never wanted to go back, and rarely talked about the "old country," so unpleasant their memories must have been. (Though they always spoke Hungarian, and my grandmother was the best Hungarian cook and baker you can imagine.)

I went to Budapest once, just for a few-day jaunt, and I found it, frankly, creepy. I was surprised to see that the old Jewish ghetto neighborhood there (unlike the one in Prague, which has been beautifully restored and is something of a major tourist attraction now) is still an empty, decrepit area. The people in the city seemed grim and unfriendly. It wasn't what I was hoping to experience there.

The journalist Kati Marton (wife of Richard Holbrooke, and before that Peter Jennings) wrote a very interesting and lively book in 2006, "The Great Escape : Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World." The virulent anti-Semitism of the Hungarians caused them to lose their greatest cultural and scientific talent: artists and mathematicians, physicists and filmmakers, and photographers who left that place and graced the rest of the world with their genius.

It's horrible to watch a country that seemed to have so much promise when it first emerged from Communism regress into this sorry state.

Intended for Gyongyosi, not to Cali.

Jobbik has been denoted by scholars, different press outlets and its political opponents as fascist, neo-fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-Roma, anti-European Union and homophobic. The party describes itself as "a principled, conservative and radically patriotic Christian party", whose "fundamental purpose" was the protection of "Hungarian values and interests." Measured according to its representation in the European Parliament and the National Assembly, it is Hungary's third largest party.

Jobbik rejects the common classification of the political spectrum in left and right. It prefers a distinction of political parties based on their stance towards globalisation. On this scheme, the party sees itself as patriotic.

Jobbik's ideology has been described as right-wing populism, whose strategy “relies on a combination of ethno-nationalism with anti-elitist populist rhetoric and a radical critique of existing political institutions.

Jobbik rejects the globalised capitalism, and the influence of foreign investors in Hungary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobbik