Photo: Augsburg College freshman Annie Grossman=McCain-Palin supporter="racist"=anathema

Over at the indispensable Atlas Shrugs, I picked up a sobering--no, actually, quite terrifying--rumination on the colossal collapse in progress, and the very real perils to liberty that lie ahead in the potentially/seemingly dictatorial tendencies of the coming Obama era. It is a big-picture perspective linking many significant developments and deserves serious consideration. When I came across it, I had just finished reading this alarming story out of Minnesota, highlighted by Powerline, about an Augsburg College freshman who was harassed and assaulted as a "racist" for wearing a McCain-Palin pin on Election Night. She was white and the her four female assailants, whose status (student or not) hasn't been determined, were black. In the course of the story, it comes out that this same freshman has endured a pattern of political harassment since arriving on campus this semester--for being a hunter, for being a Republican. Such a level and  prevalence of political intolerance and hounding is, of course, reminiscent of the era in which Nazism took hold in Germany--a point made in the Atlas posting.