When Anarchists Attack; Day 1 Of GOP Convention

Ah, the joys of watching organized anarchists engage in not-nearly-as-random acts of violence as one would suspect. A group of anarchists was caught throwing bags of concrete off overpasses. Lovely.

The so-called anti-war types also got in on the violent fun and games. Too bad these people aren't so much anti-war as simply anti-American. They are fully funded subsidiaries of the raving loon left.

Protesters smashed windows, punctured car tires and threw bottles Monday during an anti-war march to the site of the Republican National Convention. Police used pepper spray in confrontations with demonstrators and arrested five.

Instead of the single coherent march that organizers had hoped for, fringe groups of anarchists and others wrought havoc along the streets between the state Capitol and the Xcel Energy Center where the convention was taking place.

I guess they didn't like seeing so much plate glass windows in pristine condition that they had to break things up a bit.

And that's not the half of it. A bunch of protesters got arrested for putting together a whole assortment of goodies for use in the protests and hoped-for rioting that would follow. The police managed to infiltrate these groups and arrested a whole bunch of them and their leaders.

At least five suspected leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee, a self-described anarchist group, were taken to the Hennepin County jail, and another was being sought, said Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher.

On Saturday afternoon, he displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine.

"We know these things were going to be used as weapons," Fletcher said, a charge protesters and their advocates vigorously disputed.

The ACLU will inevitably claim that these people's rights were trampled. The police knew that the anarchists were going to pull some kind of stunt, and they thwarted at least some of the mayhem.

Well, while the law enforcement agencies have their hands full outside the convention venues, the convention itself is getting underway under more somber circumstances as the GOP has scaled back the celebrations with Hurricane Gustav battering the Gulf Coast. The focus will be on the storm victims, not McCain.

UPDATE:
56 arrests made thus far, and we're only getting started.

Police estimates of the crowd shifted several times during the event, ranging from 2,000 to 10,000. The crowd was clearly in the thousands. Late Monday afternoon, long after the antiwar marchers had dispersed, police requested and got 150 Minnesota National Guard soldiers to help control splinter groups near downtown.

Members of the Connecticut delegation said they were attacked by protesters when they got off their bus near the Xcel Center, KMSP-TV reported. Delegate Rob Simmons told the station that a group of protesters came toward his delegation and tried to rip the credentials off their necks and sprayed them with a toxic substance that burned their eyes and stained their clothes.

One 80-year-old member of the delegation had to be treated for injuries, and several other delegates had to rinse their eyes and clothing, the station reported.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who said that today isn't a day for politics, engaged in a little bit of politics (to say nothing of getting his facts wrong on Iraq). That's right folks, Sen. Biden, who had called for a partition of Iraq, thinks that it's Sen. McCain who was out of sync with the rest of the world, even as the US handed over day-to-day control of Anbar province to the Iraqi government. That, for those who haven't been paying attention (and that clearly includes Sen. Biden), is one of the most violent-prone provinces in Iraq and was home base for al Qaeda and the insurgency. The Anbar Awakening, based on US surge tactics, broke the insurgency and al Qaeda in Iraq.