Two Political Episodes During a Chicago Political Weekend

It was an odd weekend in Chicago. The city's police force understandably focused on demonstrations inspired by the NATO conference. The cops and the crowd more or less managed to keep a lid on possible conflict.

Things were a bit different in Tinley Park, a Windy City suburb. Over the weekend, a Tinley Park restaurant became the scene of a wild, hammer-wielding fight between an alleged white supremacist group and an alleged anti-racist group. The story is noted in today's online edition of the Chicago Tribune.

It's an odd story. One would think a white supremacist group would be especially unwelcome in Barack Obama's Chicago. Why a self-defined "anti-racist" group travelled from Bloomington, Indiana to disrupt and assault a collection of bigots, as the Tribune story noted, is a curious question. How the group obtained information about the gathering is even more intriguing. Perhaps the white supremacists were using the NATO conference as a smoke screen for activities that could only be characterized as "dark."