Just before 7 p.m. mass time at Ed Hanrahan’s wake last Thursday, June 11, five or six black people entered crowded St. Giles Church in Oak Park, two of them carrying video cameras, and pushed their way to the front, where the coffin lay, making quite a stir. 

By one account, “Trudy”’s at Chicago Daily Observer, they “nearly reached the casket, fists raised, shouting ‘Black Power’” before turning around and leaving.  By another account, from a source I contacted, the only “Black Power” heard at the rear of the church was yelled by the woman in the group, sixty-ish and wearing a big white floppy “church” hat, who yelled it, turning around at the church door on her way out, raising her fist.

The four (or five) men were in their 40s and 50s, my source estimated.  She was at the rear and, hearing commotion, had turned to see the group moving up the center aisle, then turning to the left, at which point a mourner yelled, “They’re coming up the left side, Ed” to Ed Hanrahan’s son.  At that point they were approaching the family gathered at the left front. 

They were persuaded to leave and did so, leaving some, maybe many mourners in the packed church shaken, according to my source.

So packed was the wake that my source had to park two blocks away.  When she arrived some time before the scheduled mass, an Oak Park police car was parked in front — there to direct traffic, she presumed.  No sheriff’s deputies were present that she saw.  The rude visitants left of their own accord and were not hustled out by deputies. 

Nor were they identified as Black Panthers, though they obviously were protesting the Fred Hampton slaying almost 40 years ago.  But they were clearly disruptive.  When they were gone, the priest apologized and announced it was time for the mass.

Nothing of the disruption was reported locally or metropolitan-wide until “Trudy” made her comment on a Don Rose column at Chicago Daily Observer. In the column, Rose crowed over his role as a consultant in defeating Hanrahan and destroying him politically in the wake of the Black Panther slayings.

What is the left telling us these days?

[S]omething many feel, many find as a hunch, that Sarah Palin is the most dangerous threat to the Obama administration with no close second.

How are they telling us this?

[B]y their  “over the top” attacks.  Not just the Letterman assaults, but the constant barrage of grievances filed against her in Alaska.  The attacks every day on Palin for no apparent reason — except that the left seems to see her quite differently from any Republican candidate.  A difference of kind, not of degree.

She has what it takes.

Palin could fill a stadium if she were reciting a cookbook.  But she isn’t.  She is delivering common sense to an electorate that is becoming ever more jaded every day with the Obama nonsense.  Miranda rights for terrorists?  $4 trillion deficit? 

One of these days,

Whenever she chooses, she will take her first trip to Iowa to campaign for some obscure congressional candidate, and when she does, the liberal media cannot ignore the screaming crowds.  And they will not be crowds manufactured by an advance team.  They will be fired up mothers, working people who do not want to pay for deadbeats’ mortgages, people who are now going to grass roots tea parties.

They have to destroy her.

If this be fascism, make the most of it:

True or not, what’s undeniable is that the federal government has burrowed its way deep into the quotidian workings of American capitalism.

The true-or-not part:

“Anything the federal government, or any government, sticks its nose in fails or makes things worse,”

said by factory worker Dennis Davis, who

recently stopped at the Cabela’s store here [Hamburg, Pa.] to buy a $90 carrying case for the long-barreled Contender pistol he uses to shoot pesky groundhogs at his brother’s farm. He paid with a store-issued credit card.

The U.S. government helped finance the transaction. Earlier this year, it recharged the credit-card operations of the Nebraska-based retailer of hunting and camping gear with nearly $400 million of federal financing.

Pesky groundhogs, yes.  But what of pesky U.S. government burrowing into private enterprise.  It’s got Mussolini beat for subtlety, such as it is, I’ll say that much.

And how will Cabela’s people vote, Dem or other?  With their pocketbooks, one might guess.  Answer:

Increasingly, companies big and small are competing on the basis of their ability to tap government money. A divide is opening between gets and get-nots.

About Obama’s Cairo speech, from Cliff May:

Also, I was troubled by this: The President said: “9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country.” Can you imagine FDR describing Pearl Harbor that way, rather than calling it, “a day that will live in infamy”?

Obama added: “The fear and anger that [9/11/] provoked was understandable. But in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.” Can you imagine Eisenhower saying that about the measures taken by FDR and Truman to defeat America’s enemies?

We have become a Therapeutic Society. I’m not confident that Therapeutic Societies can win wars. They are, however, skilled at coping with defeat.

That last ‘graf!  Therapy first!  Better at losing than winning!

Fascist:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is expected Wednesday to propose the most sweeping reorganization of financial-market supervision since the 1930s, a revamp that would touch almost every corner of banking from how mortgages are underwritten to the way exotic financial instruments are traded.

The Fed’s role:

At the center of the plan, which administration officials are referring to as a “white paper,” is a move to remake powers of the Federal Reserve to oversee the biggest financial players, give the government the power to unwind and break up systemically important companies — much like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. does with failed banks — and create a new regulator for consumer-oriented financial products, according to people involved in the process.

More more more at Wall Street Journal, “Details Set for Remake of Financial Regulations.”

* Disappointment rife among Euro leftists:

“The most striking feature of the [recent] election results . . . is the fact that the center-left parties across Europe, the Social Democrats and Socialists, have not been able to give a plausible answer, political answer, to the economic crisis,” said Thomas Klau of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Have they tried David Axelrod?  He’s good with political answers, and in a pinch could send someone over.

Could this lead to a court-packing scheme?

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg threw a wrench into Chrysler’s government-backed merger with Italian automaker Fiat, issuing a stay in the sale pending Supreme Court review.

Isn’t it what a president does when his best-laid plans go agley?