In Charlotte, NC, large numbers of clowns showed up to protest a Klan/Neo-Nazi gathering.

Perfect. If there’s one thing fanatics can’t stand it’s being mocked, as they so richly deserve.

nydailynews.com

There was a lot of talk about Libya last week, because Mitt Romney didn’t know when to shut up about dead Americans, including Chris Stevens, a good man who was our ambassador there.

Somehow, in a terrible moment like that, Romney was boneheaded enough to hand political advantage over to the other side, despite the fact that the President went ahead with a scheduled campaign stop in Las Vegas the next day, as if delaying his appearance by an hour was a suitable mourning period.

But it is not just Libya. It is everything that has happened lately as Romney and the amateurs around him continue to run one of the worst campaigns of recent memory, even against one of the worst economies any sitting President has ever tried to defend.

The people around Romney don’t just look like amateurs, they look like clowns sometimes. Romney was never going to be a great candidate; he doesn’t have it in him, he too often comes across like some stiff poster boy for all the one-percenters who want him elected. But you thought he would do better than this, with the whole thing sitting right there for him, because of this President’s record on the economy and on jobs. Only Mitt Romney has taken an election that should have been his to win and made it something for Barack Obama to lose.

There is a wonderful line out of baseball that covers this, from Orioles manager Buck Showalter, one about “how not everybody knows how to play a winning hand.”

mahablog.com

A lot of us, including me, beginning in 2003 wrote many warnings about not allowing International A.N.S.W.E.R. to be the face of the antiwar movement, and I caught a lot of grief for it. But I was right.

Now, the Occupy Wall Street activists are on the edge of building a movement centered on economic populist issues that polls say most Americans support. And the slogan “we are the 99 percent” could be very effective IF most Americans come to understand it in the context of kitchen-table economic issues.

A broad swatch of Americans feel Washington pays no attention to their problems and caters instead to the rich and Wall Street. Big nationwide marches filled with middle-class, working people could actually get the attention of politicians in Washington. This would be a good thing.

But most of that broad swatch will not join in if they whiff a bunch of leftish issues they are not ready to embrace, and I suspect unmanned drones on foreign soil is one of those issues. And if the “movement” never goes beyond the usual vocational protesters, it’s pissing in the wind.

usatoday.com

The controversial Florida pastor who halted plans to burn a Quran on the 9/11 anniversary last year oversaw the burning of the Islamic holy book on Sunday after it was found “guilty” during a “trial” at his church.

“We had a court process,” said Pastor Terry Jones, who acted as judge, in a phone interview. “We tried to set it up as fair as possible, which you can imagine, of course, is very difficult.”

Jones said about 30 people attended the mock trial at his Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville.

Jones considered the “International Judge the Quran Day” to be a fairer way of addressing the Islamic holy book, and denied breaking earlier promises not to burn a Quran.

If the jury had reached a different conclusion, Jones said he would have issued an apology for his accusations that the Quran promotes violence.

“We still don’t feel that we broke our word — that was in relationship to International Burn a Quran Day,” he said, referring to his previous plan to burn a pile of Qurans on the 9/11 anniversary to protest plans for an Islamic community center near Ground Zero. “We would not establish another International Burn a Quran Day.”

Last year’s aborted event provoked criticism from U.S. religious leaders, violent protests abroad and pressure from President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates before Jones called it off.

After a six-hour trial on Sunday that featured a Christian convert from Islam as a prosecuting attorney and a Dallas imam as a defense lawyer, a jury of 12 church members and volunteers made the judgment, Jones said.

He said the punishment — burning the book after it had been soaked in kerosene for an hour — was determined from four choices on his organization’s Facebook page. He said “several hundred” were polled and voted for burning over shredding, drowning and facing a firing squad.

Jones considered the burning — which was conducted by another pastor since Jones was serving as the judge — a one-time event.

“That is not our intention, to run around America burning Qurans,” he said.

Jones has launched a new organization, Stand Up America, and plans to protest the Quran, Shariah law and “radical Islam,” and has scheduled an April event in front of an Islamic center in Dearborn, Mich.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, declined to comment at length about Jones’ trial.

“Terry Jones had his 15 minutes of fame and we’re not going to help him get another few minutes,” he said.

YJCMTSU

Survival in face paint:

JUAREZ, Mexico — Fire-eaters. Clowns. Tumblers. Jugglers. Amateur circus performers of every sort have long provided entertainment on the street corners and intersections of Mexican cities. But today, in Juarez, it is hard not to see the carnival act as a gaudy symbol of wasted youth and the valor of the Mexican poor in tragic times.

His name is Rene Colorado. He is 22 and best known in the streets as “Sinner.”

Colorado was born in Juarez, but has wandered across Mexico since his early adolescence, trying to survive like so many other young Mexican men.

According to government figures, there are now 7 million Mexicans ages 14 to 24, with neither a job nor prospects for adequate schooling or employment. In a country of nearly 112 million, that represents a bit more than six percent of the total population.

[…]

“Life is all screwed up,” Colorado says, sitting on a sidewalk in front of a convenience store shortly after finishing his round for the night. “Once you get into [gangs], you can’t get out alive.”

Colorado denies ever being completely affiliated with any of the many gangs that roam the city, recruiting pre-teenage boys and girls. However, he acknowledges an addiction to drugs.

“I began smoking marijuana when I was 12 years old, and then I went on to sell drugs so I could have some for myself and get high. But that was two years ago and I’ve been clean since,” says Colorado.

“I have a one-year-old daughter and would like to find a way to support her,’’ he adds, showing off a pen-and-pencil drawing he recently sketched of her.

[…]

Photo: Jose Luis Sierra

At the link there is a 5 photo slide show. And please read the rest, it’s short.

Sadder than usual:

TWO street clowns were found dead in south-eastern Mexico along with messages allegedly from a drug gang accusing them of working as army informers, their families said on Tuesday.

Another 15 people were reported killed in the northern border state of Chihuahua overnight, including a woman who was beheaded, amid rampant drug violence across Mexico which killed more than 12,000 people last year alone.

The clowns were found in bright costumes and makeup on a roadside Sunday in the city of Villahermosa, bearing signs of torture and a message accusing them of being army informers, their families said.

[…]

Dear God.

ectomo.com

Via Sully.