Noosemania Spreads to New Jersey

The plague has now spread across the Hudson.

Can the republic survive?

Nooses at Home Depot spark outrage

PASSAIC -- Police said Thursday that the discovery of three nooses hung across a shelf in the hardware department at The Home Depot here would be treated as a bias incident. Meanwhile, members of the local NAACP were concerned about the discovery amid increasing reports of the symbols of hatred appearing across the nation.

"We are treating this as a bias incident until it's proved otherwise," Passaic police Capt. Tony Zampino said Thursday. "Obviously, it is fashioned in some way where it was of concern to somebody."

On Wednesday, workers at The Home Depot on Dayton Avenue found different colored ropes in the shape of nooses -- a racially charged symbol of the lynching violence of the segregation era -- hanging from a shelf, witnesses said. Zampino said The Home Depot did not report the incident to police. The Home Depot employees disposed of the ropes and did not keep them for the police to investigate, he said. The store manager did not notify police of the incident until 7 p.m. Wednesday, he said. Police said they do not believe there is a store videotape to view whoever created the nooses.

This seems even flimsier than the alleged Columbia noose incident, which sparked worldwide outrage and immediate protests, then quickly disappeared from the news.

Meanwhile, there's another reported case on Long Island.

Clarence Page has an interesting look at the recent headlines.

Today's young black males kill more young black males in a year than the Ku Klux Klan killed in its entire history. Historians have documented more than 4,700 lynchings of African-Americans between 1882 and 1968. In 2005, the latest full year of FBI statistics, almost 8,000 black Americans were murdered, mostly by other black Americans.

It is an ironic sign of progress that the white knuckleheads who made history by making nooses have been driven into the shadows. They hang nooses, then run and hide. The terror inflicted by black knuckleheads stays with us.