This Toledo, Ohio occurance was, indeed, a crying shame. Michelle Malkin has it covered completely, as always.

So the way it went down was, the Nazi scum were scheduled to march and local black gang-bangers were prepared to give them an exciting reception. To head off trouble, the city cancelled the Nazis’ march, but that didn’t stop the gang members, who were too ready to riot and destroy other people’s property to quit just because there was no longer a reason to take any action. They wanted to hurt some white people, create mayhem and burn things down, and it didn’t matter that their excuse no longer existed.

As far as I’m concerned, much of the blame for this inexcusable and inhuman behavior falls in the laps of such self-motivated instigators as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan. I find it repulsive that Jackson and Sharpton dare place religious prefixes before their names, for they are nothing short of Godless hatemongers, as is Farrakhan.

These are people who thrive on racial hatred, because the only political platform they have is racism. By continually shouting to all too many blacks who give them credibility that “Whitey is racist and he wants to keep the black man down” and representing themselves as defenders of their race against this insidious white plot that really, really does not exist, they retain their power bases among blacks and gullible liberals of other ethnic persuasions.

They keep racism alive in the black community as they feed the flames of a simmering rage that needn’t be, simply because they need as many downtrodden people as they can inventory into their ministries of hate in order to maintain the constituencies that support their miserable careers.

Like the ACLU, these Provocateurs of racial violence are the enemies of the blacks and other minorities, posing as their friends while using them to meet political agendas. It’s just too bad so many people listen to these parasites and believe what they’re saying.

Like I said, a crying shame.

Columnist Michael Graham has an opinion piece on the affair in Jewish World Review.

So how did these fringe fascists get blamed for the Toledo riot?

Or maybe the mainstream media buys the argument, offered by some of the rioters and their defenders, that the riot was a civil rights protest against fascism.

Probably, to the last. Our Mainstream Media, just like most liberals, are living in their own private Idaho{h/t, B-52s}.

So to recap: In response to a Nazi rally that didn’t happen, several hundred black Americans burned down buildings and looted businesses in their own community, apparently in protest of the First Amendment, while the elected mayor of a mid-sized American city negotiated with the gangsters among them to plead for order in the streets.

Even if you believe that neo-Nazism poses an imminent threat to the Republic, how does destroying a Toledo gas station or setting a local bar on fire help hold back the Aryan hordes? I just wonder how many other Americans, watching the disturbing images of hundreds of black neighbors rushing a local convenience store, were reminded, not of Nuremberg, but New Orleans?

I have a lot of black friends and acquaintances, and none of them would ever dream of participating in anything like the Toledo rioting or that which occured in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict.

Those inclined to mob violence are the folks who allow themselves to be kept down and out of the “loop” of mainstream society by the same black community leaders and white liberals that claim to represent their interests.

I realize that, as a white guy, I am supposed to let this behavior go by without comment. That was certainly the mainstream media’s strategy.

Unfortunately, the problems facing black Americans are very real. The lingering racism black Americans face is real, too, as are the setbacks some black Americans choose to bring upon themselves.

Walter Williams has a pretty on-point column going in today’s JWR about a nation of sheeple.

The column’s about the way we, as Americans, have been gradually ceding the guardianship of our rights to the very elements they are supposed to protect us against.

…In the name of safety, we’ve undergone decades of softening up to accept just about any government edict that our predecessors would have found offensive. Let’s look at some of it.

The anti-smoking movement might be the beginning of the softening up process. They started out calling for reasonable actions like no-smoking sections on airplanes. Then it progressed to no smoking on airplanes altogether, then private establishments such as restaurants and businesses. Emboldened by the timidity of smokers, in some jurisdictions there are ordinances banning smoking in outdoor places such as beaches and parks. Then there are seatbelt and helmet laws that have sometimes been zealously enforced through the use of night vision goggles. On top of this, Americans accept government edicts on where your child may ride in your car. Americans sheepishly accepted all sorts of Transportation Security Administration nonsense. In the name of security, we’ve allowed fingernail clippers, eyeglass screwdrivers and toy soldiers to be taken from us prior to boarding a plane.

Yeah, I know what he’s talking about. Micromanagement by government does kind of suck, it goes against the grain of the Constitution and the American way of life as a whole. It would, however, be just fine in a socialist country or San Francisco.

The article began with reference to President Bush’s proposal for using the military as a primary disaster management entity and the author’s belief{mine as well} that the Posse Comitatus Act serves a positive purpose toward preventing the federal government using the Armed Forces for domestic police duties.

In my opinion, the only reason the Administration has been so quick to volunteer our military thusly is that they are overreacting to all the undeserved flack they took in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, panicking when there’s no reason to panic. At least there wouldn’t be if the current batch of Republicans(you know, the majority?) could be counted on to support their president instead of appeasing the Democrats at every turn.

But I digress, an ongoing problem I have.

It is quite true that we’ve been “taking it sitting down” while we allow our politicians to run amok, pretty much controlling our lives and circumstances through the incremental introduction of increasingly invasive and restrictive laws. The majority of Americans have become lazy in that they don’t look over their elected officials’ shoulders from time to time to learn the details of these people’s voting agendas.

We’ve accepted federal intrusion in our financial privacy through the Bank Secrecy Act. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, says, “More than 99.999 percent of those [who] had their privacy invaded were law-abiding citizens going about their own personal financial business.” Most recently there’s the U.S. Supreme Court Kelo decision, where the court held that local governments can take a private person’s house and turn it over to another private person. Politicians have learned and become comfortable with the fact that today’s Americans will docilely accept just about any legalized restraint on their behavior.

He weighs in on a time when Americans reacted quite differently to government infringement on their freedom.
You say, “Hey, Williams, but it’s the law!” In the late-1700s, the British Parliament enacted the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts, and imposed other grievances that are enumerated in our Declaration of Independence. I’m happy that we didn’t have today’s Americans around at the time to bow before King George III and say, “It’s the law.” Respectful of the Posse Comitatus Act, President Bush has suggested that he’ll ask Congress to amend the law to allow for the use of the U.S. military to enforce regional quarantines. Whether Congress amends the law or not, Bush has no constitutional authority to deploy military troops across the land. Why?

Give the entire column a read, it’s surely food for thought.

Go over to GM’s Corner and check out his Caption Contest.

Basketball enthusiasts might be interested to know the identity of Larry Bird’s biggest fan.

You see them in most big cities, but I’ve never seen nearly as many of these tragedies in the making anyplace else as I have here in San Francisco.

They are young people between the ages of perhaps sixteen and twenty six and generally come in one of three “looks”: frayed Gothic wannabe, often completely concealed within a mire of tattoos and face-pierce jewelry, “wish it was still the late Sixties” hippie wannabe and “wish this was ten years before I was born” punk wannabe.

Here in the liberals’ Mecca, they are to be found sitting along the sidewalks on Market Street, giving the appearance of being in their own living rooms, often entertaining their street colleagues, eating, getting high, panhandling and bumming cigarettes, or doing the same thing up in Haight Ashbury. They leave the trappings of any meals or liquid party materials right there on the sidewalk when they get up to leave, because the local socialist attitude has indoctrinated them into the mindset that everybody else is their mother and father.

While in most cities, purely in the interests of what former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani used to call maintaining “quality of life,” charges such as mendicancy , obstructing the sidewalk and littering(as a ticket) would be among those applied by arresting officers on the beat. In San Francisco, however, these young people enjoy two benefits, one being that they are accorded the “human right” to be both eyesore and irritant without hindrance, the other that the jails here are well beyond being merely overcrowded and the locals are much too worshipful of their real estate bubble to want to “waste” valuable land on anything as unprofitable as detention facilities.

So here we have these kids who sit there, stay stoned and drunk and produce nothing, not only for others, but for themselves.

To digress briefly, mostly for any younger readers who weren’t around back in the 1960s and 1970s, back then, before the Internet and its provision of easy access to information, before the tidal wave of immigration brought on by lifted quotas, before living costs spiralled out of control as they have in many cities and before the workplace again became an employer’s market, there was a lot of elbow room for young people who wanted to be lazy and utterly nonproductive for a few years. Getting a job, even one in a corporate environment, was a piece of cake.

You looked in the employment section of the newspaper{what we once called the “want ads” and where there were always scores of job openings of every description, hungry to be filled}, found some jobs you liked the sound of, made some calls on your rotary dial telephone, put on a suit — there was this respect thing back in the day, you see — went down, filled out this sheet of paper called an “application”, resumes were nice, but not as necessary as they are today for most jobs, got interviewed a few minutes later and, if the interviewer liked what he/she “saw”, you were working within a couple of days. And you were “in”, you could work hard and build up a track record qualifying you for better paying jobs with other firms, or a strong future with the one you were at. You could leave and then rejoin “the establishment” at will.

Back then, let’s say you took home $125.00 a week. You could easily find a nice one bedroom apartment renting for $175.00 a month and cover your telephone and utility bills, buy food, hygiene items, clothes and other necessities and maintain a modest social life. There were no ISPs, cellular phone or cable companies sending any bills, until HBO arrived on the scene nearer the end of the era than the beginning.

Back to today: No way! Ours has become an unforgiving society where the marketplace is concerned, because there’s simply too much competition for every job and a prospective employer can afford to discard job candidates for a paucity of cause. Lengthy gaps in employment histories are examined, and references are thoroughly checked. Many employers even want credit references these days. People want to review resumes before they schedule interviews. It’s a whole new ball game.

So we’ve got those young people on the street out there, trying to enjoy a kind of lifestyle that ran its course before they were born, paying no attention to the consequences they will face when they suddenly wake up in their late twenties, looking to straighten their lives out.

A fortunate few will make out, but most of them will be the aging homeless of an even less forgiving tomorrow, among them the idiots who think it’s cool to have tattoos on their faces.

One of those guys who wear all black, much in need of washing, sport too many tats and use their faces for open-air jewelry boxes whom I estimated at about twenty three years of age, asked me for “a dollar” a few years ago.

“Why don’t you get a job?” I asked.

“I’m lazy.” He replied with a smirk.

“Good for you.” I said and kept on walking. Asshat!

When he’s “catching his rattling last breath with deep sea diver sounds”{a little Tull, there} on a filthy length of sidewalk someplace in another twenty someodd years, I hope he still remembers how to smirk.

The socialist political environment in a liberal city, where the ACLU rules the roost, enables these clueless doomed “children” to rejoice, unencumbered, in their quest to become the next generation of derelict lifers — the homeless, after all, are a large cash crop for liberal interests. The more, the merrier.

I’ve long since become accustomed to the fact that the Mainstream Media grinds its liberal political axe without a shred of reportorial ethics, conscience nor any ambition to provide the public with any kind of factual, unbiased reporting. Anything, no matter how trivial, that may cast any kind of positive light on anything Bush, for example, seems to be a non-event, never happened, while anything, again no matter how trivial, that may cast any kind of negative light on anything Bush becomes an epic parade of headlines and feature stories, half the time delivered with such rabid enthusiasm that the so-called journalists and the columnists who feed off them don’t even bother taking the time to confirm their information.

We’ve all seen that, and seen some of the leftist reporters responsible who’ve been caught out lose their positions, thrown to the wolves by the same editors and upper management people that encouraged their irresponsible “reporting” to begin with, in order to save their own skins. We’ve seen the media respond to a still unfounded charge that American soldiers flushed a Koran down a commode at Camp Delta with a major onslaught that brought references to the Soviet gulags, to Nazi concentration camps and even the killing fields of the Pol Pot regime, and the media jumped on all of it with relish, like a bunch of slobbering, undisciplined pre-adolescents..

Leftist twits like the NYT’s Maureen Dowd bent over backwards to make the American public believe that the Bush Administration and our soldiers were no better than Saddam, who tortured, terrorized, oppressed and murdered his own citizens as a matter of policy.

Despite all the evidence that glares blatantly from MSM newspapers and evening reports, editorials and Op Ed columns, liberals will actually look you in the eye and claim there is no media bias or actually go so far as to say, still looking you in the eye, by gum, that the MSM is right wing biased.

So-called “news” from the N.Y. Times, S.F. Chronicle, Washington Post, L.A. Times, etc, CBS,NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR and other liberal sources would have us believe we are being trounced in Iraq, for example, that everything happening over there is negative, that the Iraqi people feel we’ve occupied their country for colonial purposes, we’re there for the oil and so on, and so on. Whenever an American soldier dies in combat or from a terrorist car bomb, RPG-7 grenade or IED, he or she is added to a death count intended to show America that we are in some kind of quagmire, “another Vietnam.”

In truth, we are beating the hell out of the insurgents over there, driving down their numbers faster than they can replace those that Coalition and Iraqi forces capture or kill. We have helped open schools so that now thousands of Iraqi children are being educated where many could not enjoy educations before. There is a successful Iraqi stock exchange in Baghdad, newspapers are flourishing as the Iraqi people embrace their newfound right to freedom of speech. We have been training Iraqi police and military forces with a great degree of success, and these forces are working as counterparts with our own. As they become seasoned, adequately staffed and prepared to do their jobs independently, we will begin withdrawing our own forces and allowing them to take over.

In today’s Opinion Journal’s Review & Outlook, some good observations are made regarding a letter sent from bin Laden’s XO, Ayman al-Zawahiri to al-Qaeda’s Iraq commander, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that was obtained this past Summer and whose contents were just released.

The letter in its entirety is here.

This link is included within this column, titled Zawahiri’s Lament.

Those who want a premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will now have to explain why that won’t play into the hands–and plans–of the enemy. Zawahiri makes it quite clear that al Qaeda’s ambitions extend well beyond the borders of any one country. The goal is a fundamentalist Islamic regime that begins in Iraq, extends into the neighboring secular nations of the region, assaults Israel and moves on from there. And yes, he uses the word “caliphate.”

The tone of the letter makes it quite obvious that Zawahiri is not a happy camper, that he’s watching the extremist tactics employed by his people in Iraq work against them, both in the media battle that seems to have become as big a part of both sides’ campaigns as the fighting itself, and in the more localized effects of the wanton bombings, the beheadings and other terrorist strategies being employed by the Islamofascist butchers in Iraq.

As for the Sunnis, he urges Zarqawi to cast a wider net–an implicit admission that he’s worried about Sunnis who have been showing signs of interest in the democratic political process unfolding there. Afghanistan–and the Islamic democracy emerging in that nation–is his worst nightmare. “We don’t want to repeat the mistake of the Taliban, who restricted participation in governance to the students and the people of Kandahar alone,” he says. “The result was that the Afghan people disengaged themselves from them. Even devout ones took the stance of the spectator and when the invasion came, the emirate collapsed in days, because the people were either passive or hostile.”

Later in the editorial,,

Amid these lamentations, however, one area emerges about which the terror commander exudes great confidence: the media. The lesson he learned from Vietnam is that “more than half of the battle is taking place on the battlefield of the media.” He clearly wants to use the media, in the U.S. and in the Arab world, to induce the U.S. to pull out of Iraq and default a position of strength to al Qaeda.
He actually worries about the possibility that Zarqawi will blow victory on the media battlefield: Toward this end, he gently urges Zarqawi to discontinue his habit of beheading hostages, suggesting that perhaps instead he could just shoot them. “We are in a media race for . . . hearts and minds,” he writes.

It would seem the lesson of Vietnam is featured prominently in the terrorist handbooks: The Americans’ greatest weakness is their liberal media. Beat them in the MSM, you beat them at war, no matter what the physical realities are.

The long Zawahiri letter is a rough roadmap of the strategic vision for al Qaeda’s intentions in Iraq and the global jihad. If it has a familiar ring, that’s because George Bush has been warning the world about it for several years.

Some excellent commentary on the letter can be found at Sister Toldjah!, and Howie at The Jawa Report offers another perspective — be sure to follow the link in his post.

But to cut to the chase, we are winning in Iraq and in the Global War on Terror in general, not only in terms of killing the enemy but also in terms of winning the hearts and minds of the people in the regions in which we operate. It’s just too bad that the MSM, for partisan political reasons, continues to lie to the public in their shameful crusade to discredit President Bush.

The remarkable Michael Yon, a civilian journalist who had been blogging from within the ranks of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment{the Deuce Four} in Iraq via his newsmagazine until its tour recently ended, is now heading into a new embed. Read his latest post here.
A single column by Michael Yon is more informative where the war in Iraq is concerned than six months’ worth of the New York Times and CNN combined.

I thought I had said all I was going to on the issue of the Miers nomination, but then I ran into the following:

In yesterday’s Opinion Journal was a column featuring reprints of letters from Republican readers who are not in the anti-Miers camp for any number of reasons, such as,

While I agree that I was underwhelmed with the Miers pick, I am of a mind to blame Congress–more specifically, the Senate. They have consistently shown no backbone, even as the party in power. I realize it takes some time to get used to the majority status, but come on. They have always dodged any fight with the Democrats. Even after Tom Daschle lost, you would have thought that they would have at least felt a little more powerful. I mean, he lost on the filibuster issue! Still, the senators forged a compromise. No fight, compromise. The Democrats had promised to bring business to a halt in the Senate. Did anyone but our leaders believe them? If a hog goes on a hunger strike, will he garner much sympathy? Not until he actually looks thinner. Those hogs weren’t going on any hunger strike, they like sending money home too much.
The pick doesn’t get me excited, but after our Senate leaders’ behavior, I don’t blame Bush for dodging a fight.

and, on a more aggressive note,

I and my friends in Orlando, Fla., are very happy that 1,000 conservatives at National Review’s dinner are not happy with Harriet Miers. Political disaster is not a phrase we use.

However we are very tired of “It’s President Bush’s fault” and the lack of support he gets from republicans in the House and Senate and the 1,000 conservatives who attended your dinner. If you want him to wage war with liberal democrats what are you and your 1,000 friends going to do? So far you have done nothing to help him. You are all wimps. We watch Fox News and we do not hear any republican or conservative using the same rhetoric that Reid, Pelosi, Kennedy, et al., use to describe President Bush. Whatever Pat Buchanan or Bill Kristol are for we are against because they are lukewarm in supporting President Bush. If all 1,000 of you are so important and powerful, then why is federal spending so of control? Our philosophy is appoint no one from any Ivy League School. Appoint no one from the Northeast. We don’t care what your friends in Washington or New York say or feel.

Read the rest of the reader comments.

A lot of the above is true, many of these same senators, media people and high profile pundits, all on the right, who criticize the President for nominating a “stealth” candidate like Harriet Miers rather than someone with a long record as a fire breathing, two fisted, to-the-death conservative, need to look at how dumb they’re being.

These folks all yell that we have the power in our Senate majority to ramrod through any confirmation we want, yet when Bush has nominated good conservative people with any controversial baggage in the past, these same Republican senators have given the President little vote support, giving in to the Democrat minority.

Why should Potus nominate someone who will require a fight to confirm when the track record of his Senate “back-up” reads more like French than American? And who are these loud mouths that haven’t supported him in the past to demand that he trust them now?