E Dung has made his case and will repeat it ad infinitum because his mind is closed and the truth really doesn't matter to him. Only the cause and getting elected through any pretense really matters. Why keep feeding him? Only dung, disguised as reasonableness, will come out.

Please explain how I was immoderate.

If plain logic mixed with a little sarcasm strikes you as immoderate, I'd guess you'd be happier living in Belarus. No one is ever offended there, and the skies are not cloudy all day.

Police in the course of keeping order and making arrests cannot be distracted by questions, arguments, inquiries, and the like.

-- Gratefule Live

It's highly debatable that they were "keeping order". But aside from that, who says they can't answer a question? Seems to me that if they had taken a few seconds to answer a question posed by the accredited journalist they would have managed to "keep order" with a lot less trouble than they ended up getting.

This is getting tiresome.

Neither you nor I saw a video depicting the entire arrest.

Have you noticed there is a significant and obvious edit in the middle?

Frankly, who fucking cares if she is depicted as being on the ground or not? If she says she was, then in all likelihood she was neither imagining it nor lying.

Capiche?

No coverage of Iraq War veterans at the RNC from Amy or Glenn? Sorry, but I do find that to be just a little bit odd.

Jon Stolz is an Iraq War veteran against the war. He's in the video I posted. You keep pretending he doesn't exist. I find this very odd. I'm starting to suspect you're working with the authorities to distract attention from the anthrax investigation. Very suspicious.

I'm pretty sure that if it weren't for Amy Goodman, 9/11 would never have happened, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq, and George Bush would have had only one term in office.

I find this all very, very odd. Hard to figure out. A scam. I think we're being taken for a ride.

Imposed order is true order. Only imposed order can be trusted. Thus, it is nonsense to say that it is worth cracking a few heads to keep order, because order comes from cracking heads. Not until heads have bee cracked can we be assured that true order exists.

[See torture, intelligence]

I'm not advocating killing people, Kitt. That's just silly and hysterical. And perhaps if you use your real name, I'll speak further with you.

-- Tina Trent

Kitt is my real name, but you needn't bother speaking further with me anyway. No, what you are advocating has an end game. And that end game is as I said, 'shoot first, ask questions later'. Doesn't matter what you personally are advocating. You're not a member of the ninja turtle team.

Have you seen any statements from the police as to what happened to lead to the arrest of the two producers? Have you seen any video of what led to the arrest of the two producers? Have you seen any accounts, other than Goodman's of her attmepting to "free"(?!) the two producers as they were being arrested? Have you seen any video of Amy Goodman before she was arrested; in other words immediately prior to the video we have seen?

Given the police have yet to make a detailed statement about anything they've done, and aren't likely to for awhile, nor has any video come out yet of what happened before and after Goodman's arrest itself, we're really only left with her own statement. Given her standing and cred, I wouldn't bet against her there.

Oh, perhaps the statement from Democracy Now! did sound a tad overblown. Perhaps Goodman was simply protesting the (perceived) thuggish behavior of the police to the two producers, perhaps she really did think she could keep them from arresting those two.

Perhaps you should quit with the serial contrarian routine and try thinking about how Goodman's account might be wholly factual, and that the St. Paul PD hasn't done anything to dispute it.

But then I'm just a "stupid sack of shit", aren't I?

But, I'm increasingly dismayed by the Rambo-DieHard-BlackHawkDown school of domestic policing. Ondelette is quite right to focus on it in the context of U.S. politics, and domestic policy. It's where our problems lie -- not with the inevitable ~125 "anarchists" (who will grow up to be ultra-rightists just like David Horowitz did) but with the normalization of excessive shows of force against the citizenry.

-- Holly McLachlan

The two fictional and one historic are poor choices. It is just typical American military doctrine and it actually makes good sense. Overpowering firepower and force. Consider the result of too weak a response and lack of preparedness. Think 9/11 or Katrina or the Rodney King riots. People could have died. In point of fact, there is little difference whether the chaos comes as a result of a riot, terrorist act or a natural disater. As I said before, this policing and criminal justice studies, is a complex and recently new area of inter-disciplinary scholarship and study. That may shock some but it is a fact. The roots of the modern urban police force began with Robert Peel's tenure as Home Secretary in the early part of the 19th century. It didn't even become an area of academic inquiry until the mid 1970's and we can probably thank the 60's and Johnson's national commission to study crime. Believe it or not, there have been greatimprovbements. In the 70's, kids got shot.

@CargoCult (September 1, 2008 11:59 PM)

"I'm really tired of the Nader crowd screaming about how Democratic and Republican policies are identical, especially when the only purpose it serves is to help get Republicans elected (as well as being untrue)."

I don't think that Nader or anyone else has ever said that Dem and Repub policies are identical, CC.

What Nader, Barr, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, and others have pointed out, however, are the overwhelming similarities in the policies of the two corporate-owned parties that strengthen the corporate welfare/warfare/surveillance/garrison state, and the concomitant erosion of the liberty and security of the American people.