I’ve closed the comments on my previous post because it looks like any constructive discussion that might have taken place there has been exhausted, and now I’m getting a number of racist comments. I’ve tried to delete the worst of them; if I missed any, I apologize.

As you all know by now, the previous post was picked up by The Drudge Report, and the increased traffic to my site led to my blog being shut down. Just so you know, there was no government conspiracy or censorship going on. My blog is hosted on a shared server, meaning other websites and blogs are hosted on the same computer, and when I got over 300,000 hits that first day I was on Drudge, it used up all the network connections to that server. That meant that I was hogging the whole server and not allowing any traffic to the other sites, which is technically a violation of the terms of service. Thus, my hosting company shut down my site.

I could have gotten the site back up sooner if I had moved the site to a virtual private server or took some other action to increase my bandwidth. But let’s face it, my blog is a local blog, not a blog of national interest. So I just waited it out, and within a couple of days my traffic counts were pretty much back to normal. My hosting company was very understanding and got the site back up as soon as traffic died down. It took a few days; thanks for your patience.

I’ve been taken to task somewhat for publishing the previous post. All I can tell you is that I consider Paul a reliable source. He was an eye-witness to the event; police radio traffic confirmed that there were calls about a disturbance on Thrush that evening, and so I went with the story. Despite subsequent attempts to discredit Paul, his description of the events that night have been corroborated. True, not all neighbors heard racial threats being yelled, but some did.

There is no dispute from anyone that there was indeed a large group of kids going down Thrush, stopping traffic, running on lawns and porches, and making a lot of noise at 11:00 at night. I would submit that this is unacceptable behavior regardless of what they were yelling. It is not “kids being kids,” and I don’t believe we should condone it, even tacitly. If you had a family with small children, this would be very disturbing. It certainly does not make anyone want to move into the area and raise their family there. This issue needs to be addressed, not swept under the rug or brushed off with unsubstantiated accusations of exaggeration.

As far as the national exposure, I did not seek it out, and I didn’t find it particularly helpful. It appears that there are some who are claiming that there are race riots going on throughout the country, and my post was supposed to be proof that it’s happening here, too. Nobody locally has said or intimated such a thing. My interest in the story was purely local. My regular readers know that I’ve expressed concern over the City Council’s cutting of police protection and other basic services while raising taxes for expensive, needless capital projects. This story was relevant to those concerns.