Louisville, Ky. (WDRB) – Witnesses say Louisville Metro Police had to break up a fight early today at Jefferson Mall over the release of a new style of sneakers.

Officers were on the scene where witnesses told WDRB that 75 to 100 people were reportedly in a fight over pairs of the new Air Jordan Eleven Retro Concords.

One witness claimed that a security guard was trampled by the crowd waiting for several shoe stores to open early. That claim could not be independently verified, as WDRB News was not allowed inside the mall.

At least eight police cars were on scene. Sources with the mall claim they were already there to provide security.

From the Keynesian / Krugmaniac  perspective, look at all of the jobs this melee helped to create or save.  The riot police called in to maintain order and make arrests (plus overtime!), the booking agents who would log them into the jail, the ambulance drivers who would pick up the wounded, the therapists who could counsel them,  the locksmith to prepare new fences for the stores and the janitors to clean up the blood.  And, of course, the welfare office who cut the checks that allowed these folks with such misplaced priorities to use their cash on hand for something this important to begin.

This riot is probably the greatest thing to happen to this particular strip mall since October 2008.

“I got the love for the ‘Js,’ you feel me?” said Brandon Betts, a customer who purchased the shoes. ”Look at the box! The box is cold!”

“Man it’s crazy in there: people getting run over and security guards getting trampled and stuff,” he added. “They almost tried to arrest us!”

Sources with the Mall deny that there was a fight and say no police report was made out.

Correction:  No jobs were created for booking agents logging anyone into a jail for these various felonies.  And from North Carolina:

PINEVILLE, NC (WBTV) – Dozens of police officers had to break up fights and restore order at a local mall while shoppers were waiting for an overnight sale of a popular tennis shoe.

WTF is it about tennis shoes?  They don’t make you jump any higher or run faster.  Michael Jordan retired from basketball almost a decade ago.  Now, this could just be the cracker in me talking, but are tennis shoes important enough to add another candle to the Kwanzaa menorah?

You’ve got Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumbaa, Imani and Air Jordans.  Air Jordans being the last candle.  The highest.  The culmination of all of your race-based collectivist couch-sweating labors.

In a related story, Eric “We’re Cowards On Race” Holder brought a federal lawsuit against South Carolina today for daring to ask voters to show some form of identification in order to vote:

The Justice Department on Friday entered the divisive national debate over new state voting laws, rejecting South Carolina’s measure requiring photo-identification at the polls as discriminatory against minority voters.The decision by Justice’s Civil Rights Division could heighten political tensions over the new laws, which critics say could depress turnout among minorities and others who helped elect President Obama in 2008.A dozen states this year passed laws requiring voters to present state-issued photo identification, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Just how is this related to a story about people rioting over Christmas tennis shoes?  Maybe because if showing some form of official ID to vote was such a hardship that all of these people standing in line to pay $200 for a pair of tennis shoes could, I dunno, take their Granny or Auntie to the DMV to get a $15 driver’s license.  The wait would be less too as well as not being out in the cold.

Voting with Their Feet:

Do Blacks care more about tennis shoes than their right to vote?

 In Tennessee, we have to show a government issued photo ID to buy 8 tablets of Sudafed and enter our names in a DEA Registry if we want to effectively combat allergy season.  Yet, somehow, exercising your right to vote – the ultimate franchise – shouldn’t require anything more than showing up at the poll of your choice several times a day and show nothing save the cartons of cigarettes and “walking around money” that Eric Holder gave your preacher.

Taking time away from his busy schedule of murdering border agents, funneling illegal arms to and money laundering for Mexican drug cartels, AG Holder had these comments earlier this month regarding those who have an entire year to figure out a way to get a Photo ID in between their hectic tennis shoe rioting schedule:

Holder expressed concern about the new laws in the Dec. 13 address, saying: “Are we willing to allow this era – our era – to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended?’’

At the same time, Holder vowed to not let politics affect his department’s review. “We’re doing this in a very fair, apolitical way,’’ he said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “We don’t want anybody to think that there is a partisan component to anything we are doing.’’

Of course, not.  Politics plays no part whatsoever in  suing those racists in red states for affirming the identity of their voters and preventing fraud at the polls using the same standard as buying a six-pack of beer or cigarettes.

And if you believe that, I have some Black Panthers standing outside of a voting station  in Philadelphia to sell you.

TRENTON— A top Republican said Wednesday that Gov. Chris Christie really is not running for president, even as political commentators began to use sexual imagery to discuss Christie flirting with the possibility.

That’s going to be a hard image to shake.

Lawrence E. Bathgate II of Lakewood, who has led fundraising for three presidents and a presidential nominee, said that after a series of high-level telephone calls, he is convinced that Christie is not headed into the GOP primaries for president.

“I heard him say that he wasn’t running last night. Everything I know, and everyone I’ve talked to — and it doesn’t get much closer than the people on the plane with him — say he’s not running,” Bathgate said in an interview.

Yes, it’s cheap taking shots at Christie.  To be fair, I’ll take cheap shots at Sarah Palin shortly.  But when he starts holding court about foreign policy – don’t start talking about exceptionalism and why we don’t have any but that you’re not going to do anything about it.  Are people on the right so hard up for a candidate that they’ve turned chubby chaser?

Same with Sarah Palin.  Go sell your books.  Go raise your kids.  Three and a half years of “I’m running / I’m not sure I’m running” blue balls are enough for me thank you very little.  Quit dry humping conservatives for attention.  My leg can’t take it anymore.

Where is your Pro-Choice lobby now?  You can ante up your underage uterus on the operating table with a taxpayer funded blind but you can’t hit on soft 17 unless you travel across state lines to Atlantic City or Nevada.

The founders of the three largest online poker sites were indicted on Friday in what could serve as a death blow to a thriving industry.

Eleven executives at PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and a number of their affiliates were charged with bank fraud and money laundering in an indictment unsealed in a Manhattan court. Two of the defendants were arrested on Friday morning in Utah and Nevada. Federal agents are searching for the others.

Prosecutors are seeking to immediately shut down the sites and to eventually send the executives to jail and to recover $3 billion from the companies. By Friday afternoon Full Tilt Poker’s site displayed a message explaining that “this domain name has been seized by the F.B.I. pursuant to an Arrest Warrant.”

This is the quid pro quo that government virtue paid to legalized vice and is the U.S. equivalent of Russia’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky farce.

Harry Reid calls out hit squad on the Vegas competition

Of all my vices, gambling is not counted among them.  Not that I’m against it – I’m just not good at it.  Judging from the constantly imploded and rebuilt steel and glass along the Las Vegas Strip, neither is anyone else.   Leaving out the morality of gambling, online or otherwise, the only difference between the physical casino that checks your bags while removing all of the windows and clocks from the gaming area and the one that you play in the solitude of your home office is the silent governmental partner who wants to make sure he gets his cut.

Full-Tilt Government.  The House always wins.

Rob Taylor at NewsRealBlog has a good piece up on the 10 biggest financial feces already flung mid-air towards the fan blades that are somehow getting no play in  state-run media.  I’m tempted to cash out my 401k, buy shotgun shells and all the frozen vegetables at Wal-Mart now.

The Happy Warrior himself Mark Steyn is back with his inimitable style focused like an Obamanian laser on the failures of multiculturalism, liberal military adventurism and media malpractice on display after the assassination of two US soldiers at the Frankfurt airport this last week.

Ann Coulter’s working OT in a right-to-work state.  To the union dock monkeys, she’s not from the government and she’s not here to help you.  Which is why I like her.

A backpack found along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. march in Spokane contained a bomb “capable of inflicting multiple casualties,” the FBI said Tuesday, describing the case as “domestic terrorism.”

The FBI said the Swiss Army-brand backpack was found about 9:25 a.m. PST on Monday on a bench at the northeast corner of North Washington Street and West Main Avenue in downtown Spokane.

Spokane Washington Nazis.  If there’s one thing I hate – it’s Spokane Washington Nazis.

In an interview on msnbc cable’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Spokesman-Review reporter Thomas Clouse said confidential sources told him that the device was equipped with a remote control detonator and contained shrapnel.

Rachel Maddow?  Huh???  This “reporter” got routed to the bottom of the barrel awfully quick.

The FBI has not established an official motive, but Harrill told NBC News “the timing and placement of the backpack (along the march route) is inescapable.”

“At that point, it falls directly in the realm and sphere of domestic terrorism,” Harrill told the Associated Press. “Clearly, there was some political or social agenda here.”

On that, we’re agreed.  There’s a political agenda at play and I’d wager that you’d see a mannish looking older lad with a pageboy haircut and an MSNBC microphone sprinting from the scene.

Perhaps  the holy spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. will be roused from that eternally subsidized mansion in the sky to shame those murderous Tea Partiers bent on ruining the most solemn occasion of the year.  That is what you go to Maddow for, isn’t it?

That fits Teh Narrative(tm) so well all that’s missing is Katie Couric and the SPLC deciding whether it’s the effort to repeal Obamacare or Sarah Palin hosting Kate Plus Eight that set off the barrels full of T-N-T those teabaggers are sitting on.

Are they really going to roll the dice again so soon?  Believe it.

Like, you’d have to be a hep, ten-speed ridin’, ponytail swishing, jazz loving schizopottamus not to make that obvious connection, man.

The End of the Left Spectrum just doesn’t have a voice it seems and a slew of big name blogcommies join in to explain why.

No one seems to have tripped over the answer so I’ll provide the Cliff’s Notes:

The national and alt-media subsidizes The Socialist in positions from editor, internet blogger, to research assistant, to columnist, announcer, coffee gaffer, etc.  McCarthyite Blacklists have nothing on the traditional print and television media in the United States from hiring people on the Right.

The media in the U.S. has institutionalized Leftism.  It’s our Rendellian Early Warning System. They’ve generously placed a yoke on their subhuman strength to harness their Stalinist aspirations for some useful (idiot) purpose.  Every year, new Victor Navasky J-School grads till a barren field salted by their previous year’s failures for a wine, cheese and underage male escort stipend.  When they “blog” it’s called “news reporting”.

The Rightwing Pegasus, however, can’t be broken so it still roams the prairie free.

Look no further than the Climategate e-mails from last year.  It was religious blasphemy to even mention the story of purloined e-mails showing Global Warming as a complete and utter fraud in a prelude to one of the more brutal winters on record.  We had to go to Britain to find the story because of the self-imposed blackout in the U.S.

BONUS QUESTION FROM THE COMMENTS:  “But what about Krugman?”

Good question.  Unlike his fellow socialists, Krugman is so uniquely and yet hurriedly wrong about everything that “the unit of measure for how wrong someone is” should be measured in Metric Krugmans.

Public Editor Watch: The NYT Public Editor comments on it’s atrocious AZ Shooter coverage and the name Krugman is nowhere to be found.  Why were they so bad?  Like the AZ shooter, it’s everybody else’s fault but their own.  It’s the Internets fault.  It’s “time’s” fault.  You know, those things beyond the control of an editor.

/Because of 1440/7!

The New Brady Campaign: 5 day waiting period on pitchforks.

They’re not really fascists.  They just ask for things that fascists do in order to keep the public from seeking a redress of their grievances in response to a deaf Congress:

Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.) reportedly plans to introduce legislation that would make it a federal crime to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a federal official or member of Congress.

“Perceived” is the keyword there. No more “targeting” an incumbent in a primary.  No more “breaking out the pitchforks and torches”.

For people who perceive anyone who seeks to limit there power in anyway as a threat, lowering the threshold to their subjective definition is an assault on Free Speech and elevates our Kleptocrats to an untouchable status.

I would say to “kick” him out of office but that sounds like a threat too.  See how that works?

*Ahem*  After a spirited contest of ideas, I propose that the incumbent be gently walked from The People’s Office, through a tickertape parade for his years of loyal service and into a limousine where he will be shuttled to a comfortable job that provides both his family and mistresses a satisfactory lifestyle until Nature runs its course unencumbered from the interference of a mankind undeserving of the blessing of his existence.

That’s bound to get those donations pouring in.

Is there anything richer than a gaggle of smarmy progressives snickering at the conservative “Constitution fetish”? “Fetish” is the fashionable Left’s latest suggestive imagery turned talking point, a dig at the new Republican majority in the House, which began its session this week by reading the Constitution aloud. It’s as if Dracula were complaining about a crucifix fetish.

Look into my eyes.  I’ve been fantasizing about repealing your mammoth, heaving, soapy penumbras all day.

McCarthy then proceeds to brutalize the pervy progressive projectionists, not unlike Jodie Foster in The Accused, with some of the more depraved hits they laid down on their metaphoric mattresses.

Yea.  Look at yourself in the mirror you dirty little tramps.

Explaining (sort of) why Blackmun’s iconic Roe v. Wade decision simply had to be preserved despite its void of support in law and logic, they wrote: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” You’re telling me you think James Madison could compete with that?

Jimmy Jam was always spittin’ Mad game but Blackmun was Supafly TNT in the legal sack.

And would that it were just a fetish. In 2005, the justices sparked public outrage by ruling that government kleptocrats could seize private property in order to increase the tax haul — er, I mean, for sustainable community development. Was this really an appropriate invocation of eminent domain? Shouldn’t the people’s representatives rein in this blatant judicial overreach? Once and future minority leader Nancy Pelosi was astonished at such impertinent questions. “It is a decision of the Supreme Court,” she harrumphed. “It is almost as if God has spoken.”

Nothing makes San Fran Nan aka Madam Nasty Pelosivic start screaming “Oh God” faster than 6 men in black robes (and three kinda, sorta women) waving their gavels over her head.  All public holes filled with unappealable adjudication that’s bound to test the nation’s gag reflex.

Her courtroom climax?  Precedent setting.

Check it all out.  It’s in the NRO After Dark section.

Open question:  Where do you keep your Constitutions?  Personally, I keep my main one between my mattress and box springs.  An extra one in a sock drawer.   Every year I keep getting older but they keep staying the same age.

Who’s Your (Founding) Daddy? Yea.  You like that dontcha?

STANFORD, Calif. – President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

After all, it’s un-American to ask illegal aliens to provide proof of citizenship but actual US citizens should be forced to have their internet activity and opinions monitored by either the federal government or one of it’s close, close friends.

If Publius wants to leave a comment saying that he disagrees with the government’s plan for something he should be held accountable by the appropriate authorities for spreading his disinformation.

“We are not talking about a national ID card,” Locke said at the Stanford event. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.“

And if you believe that, I have one frequently used national gun owner’s database I’d like to sell you.  Those who trade liberty for a password auto-fill blank deserve neither.

Who will be the liberals to call this encroachment on individual freedom what it is and to it’s face without qualifying that “if it’s done responsibly”?

I couldn’t name one since everyone I’ve ever met is a nanny state fascist who never met a government agent peering into their lives that they didn’t want to perform a striptease for.   Give or take a terrorist communique or feticidal maniac.

But what if our enemies (or friends we haven’t made yet) aren’t possessed of such mild wisdom?

YEONPYEONG, South Korea (Reuters) – North Korea has placed surface-to-surface missiles on launch pads in the Yellow Sea, Yonhap news agency said, as the United States and South Korea began military drills and China called for emergency talks.

China made clear that the talks would not amount to a resumption of six-party disarmament discussions which North Korea walked out of two years ago and declared dead. South Korea said it would carefully consider China’s suggestion.

Hoping that the ChiComs goosestep in to save the day isn’t a strategy.  Their history as a swashbuckling, diplomatic Zorro leaves a great deal to be desired.

We’re left with two views:  Either North Korea is China’s proxy, sabre rattling at Seoul while the U.S.’s cokeweenie President is a windsock in the breeze or, North Korea is simply China’s rabid dog whose water bowl they occasionally replenish but who they have no real control over their behavior.

China, which agreed with South Korea that the situation was “worrisome,” suggested the emergency talks for December among North and South Korea, host China, the United States, Japan and Russia.

“Worrisome”, eh?  An unprovoked, undeclared act of war against a civilian target is acceptable but potentially responding to it in kind is “worrisome”.  Behold, ChiCom logic at its most refined.

“Premeditated murder” ordered from NorK command central equals  “fresh talks” translated from Chinese.

Seoul expects jitters in financial markets to settle in the short term unless North Korea carries out further provocations, Yonhap quoted a senior Finance Ministry official as saying.

The government plans to inject sufficient liquidity in won and dollar trading if local markets suffer from herd behavior on Monday, Yonhap said.

The nuclear-powered carrier USS George Washington, which carries 75 warplanes and has a crew of over 6,000, has joined the exercises and will be accompanied by at least four other U.S. warships, an official from U.S. Forces Korea told Reuters.

South Korea has deployed three destroyers, frigates and anti-submarine aircraft, Yonhap reported, adding the exercises were being held far south of the disputed area where the artillery firing took place on Tuesday.

South Korea doesn’t have the will to be a country anymore.  While  suckling at the teat of our largesse, North Korea declared war and they went to the mall. Less than half of them believe there should be a military response.  Which begs the questions, why are we there?

If all of our warships leave the area after these exercises without making North Korea back down then Kim looks strong as he hands the wheel to his son.  But what if he fires on our ships while in the course of these “exercises”.  And why do we hold “exercises” when our ally has been attacked?  You hold exercises in anticipation of an attack not after.

Our command seems to be ascribing cold, dispassionate motives onto a lunatic dictator which does not bode well if there are Chinese submarines somewhere in the Yellow Sea.

Like Joe Biden said, Obama would be tested.  Safe to say, no matter how awesome and intimidating his stitches from playing b-ball looks, he is not prepared or up to this challenge.  He can bow his way out of this conflict to the detriment of South Korea and every other U.S. ally fending off geographic bullies but he will have a permanent black eye to match his fat lip.

This will be his Legacy.