MPR’s Polinaut notes that former Ventura “Independence” Party candidate Dean Barkley is asking for help retiring his campaign debt.

Barkley who got 17% in his Senate race against Coleman and Franken last November, hasn’t lost that old Indy Party sense of self-confidence-unto-the-the-point-of-delusion:

Barkley said he would probably win the election if it were held today.

Perhaps if a supply of uncounted votes from unicorns and gnomes would turn up in Duluth. Having “interviewed” Barkley during the last cycle, I think if more people met “the real Dean Barkley”, he might actually perform worse than he did last fall.

I’ve said for quite some time; if Bobby Jindal becomes a contender (and his performance last Tuesday didn’t help, but he’s got a lot of time, in political terms, to fix things), “Apu the convenience store clerks” will become de rigeur.

As Brad Carlson shows us, from my blog to Joe Biden’s mouth.

Along with that, look for South-Asian Americans – diligent, hard-working, education-oriented – to get shunted into the same “not-really-authentic-minority” status that the left gives Asian Americans.

Former Miss North Dakota and current freelance journalist Roxana Saberi has been arrested in Iran

Roxana Saberi, 31, has not been heard from since her last call on Feb. 10, her father, Reza, told The Associated Press on Sunday.”We haven’t heard anything,” he said. The family decided to go public, he said, “because we wanted to get some information.”

Officials in Iran have not publicly confirmed the arrest. A duty officer at the U.S. State Department said Sunday officials were looking into an AP request for information on the case.

Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Iran for arresting journalists and suppressing freedom of speech. The government has arrested several Iranian-Americans in the past few years, citing alleged attempts to overthrow its Islamic regime. The most high-profile case came in 2007, when Iran arrested four Iranian-Americans, including the academic Haleh Esfandiari. The four were imprisoned or had their passports confiscated for several months until they were released and allowed to return to the U.S.

Roxana Saberi is a freelance journalist who has reported for National Public Radio and other media and has lived in Iran for six years.

Does this smell as fishy as anything else in the land of the mullahs?

Her father said that in her last phone call, she told him she was arrested after buying a bottle of wine.

“We asked others and they said, `There’s no detention for that.’ So that’s kind of an excuse,” he told the AP.

What will the Obama Administration do?

Given their response to the drug war in Mexico – abrogate the Second Amendment and ban “assault weapons” – the answer seems obvious; impose Sharia in the US.

It’s a fairly common convention in English to refer to very unlikely conditions and scenarios by comparing them to absurdly unlikely conditions or scenarios.  Most any native speaker of English knows what you mean when you refer to a “three dollar bill”, a “French war hero”, a “submarine with screen doors”, or a “DFL Listening Tour”.

Now, off and on over the years, I gotta admit – I thought I was clever, in fact – that one of my rhetorical flouishes in this area was “Icelandic Special Forces”.  The idea that pacific, reindeer-sweater-wearing Iceland would have a unit of snake-eating cloak and dagger operators seemed like…

…well, you know where this is leading, right?

Now that the US has officially joined the ranks of Socialist nations, France wants to make sure that we play by the rules.

The European Union made noises last year about having the WTO verify that the U.S. auto industry assistance package doesn’t violate any international trade rules. Now French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he will ask the World Trade Organization to stick their hands into the matter.

Critics suggest that this could be a diversionary tactic – Sarkozy himself was accused of violating trade rules with his proposed assistance to Renault and PSA Peugeot/Citroen. Or it could be a way to see if both the proposed French and U.S. proposals will pass the WTO test. Either way, Sarkozy and other European heads of state will meet to plan a Europe-wide response to the auto industry situation, as the E.U. continues to mull whether to bring a formal appeal to the WTO regarding the United States’ bailout package.

If another socialist nation thinks the Big Three Bailout was without merit, you know it was a bad idea. Gee, I hope they don’t call on the UN to come over here and enforce the rules.

…ask your significant other or spouse “What, really, could be better for our date night than to go to Keegans and hang out with a bunch of bloggers?”

Nothing, indeed!

Be there!

Send an RSVP, if you’re fixin’ to go, to the email address “Feedbackinthedark” at yahoo dot com.

Amen brother Leo.