Protesters earn jackass points on Halloween

I didn't stay up for all the Portland protest action last night, but what I did see did not make a lot of sense. In contrast with Friday night's moving vigil for Kevin Peterson, Jr., it seemed pretty pointless.

A crowd of more than 100 – one witness thought it was more like 200 – stomped up MLK Boulevard in northeast Portland and broke windows on a number of businesses. A lot of windows. According to police, "Windows were broken out in two different phone stores, a coffee shop, a computer store, a community bank, a hotel, a restaurant (that was open at the time), a financial office, and two realty offices (photos)." 

The reason? Capitalism. Capitalism must be abolished.

First Lincoln, now capitalism. Now people are being targeted for the evil of running a business. The kids have really lost me. This is why some people are voting for Wheeler.

The wonderful Portland police managed to arrest no one. Their version is here.

Then a smaller group headed back over the river to downtown Vancouver to agitate over the police homicide of Peterson. There they met the heavily armed, probably not-entirely-sober white supremacy types for a lot of dangerous posturing. The lefties pulled down an American flag from a government building and burned it in the street. Some Proud Boy types poured some sort of burning liquid on a Portland protester in a wheelchair. The black-clad dissident types tried to march onto I-5, but the local cops blocked their entry onto the freeway.

I didn't see anyone get arrested over there, either.

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see the point of showing up to disrupt life in the 'Couve at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night, if it's not to trigger violence. Yes, the Kevin Peterson homicide needs to be protested, but there are other ways to do it. Burning stuff in the street in the middle of the night in somebody else's town just feeds into the right wingers' narrative. When a member of the Portland left winds up in the hospital, or worse, from a nighttime field trip to Vantucky, my sympathy level will not be really high.