And please note: the "Progressive" Mayor of St. Paul, and we assume the equally "Progressive" Mayor of Minneapolis, is backing up the police actions all the way

Do you think "progressives" are for law-breaking? They are most certainly not!

You will live to hate that word "progressive". We will live to hiss it at collaborators and provocateurs and informants.

It has no place in our political discourse as it exists, except as an obfuscation or a minipulation.

It's the most dangerous word on the political market today. I wouldn't ride in it on a bet.

Dung...

"Anybody got any video of Amy Goodman "attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfully detained"?

-- Elephantman "

Can you please provide footage that it WASNT YOU who broke the windows of the police cars? Didnt think so.

Cat V Roomba.. just go back to sweeping the floors. Theres nothing for you to see here.

Kitt

Small correction. Dung stinks it up everywhere he goes.

Shooter, thank you.

Little Brother, go f*ck your pompous little hand. I'm a Democrat, and I'm just reporting what I saw. Too bad if it's not what you want to see or hear.

And on Salon, of course...

Dung

Goodman has already been released. That would make one wonder if, as Democracy Now contends, she had been unlawfully arrested.

It's one thing that you never post anything worth reading, but what makes you truly insufferable is you horrid sense of what you like to believe is humor. Maybe they love the smell of your thunk-turd droppings at RedState but you're stinking up the joint over here.

-- Kitt

What do you want me to say? According to the commenters posting here, she was released after she was charged. So she was charged, and then released. Seems pretty reasonable to me. I'm not licensed in Minnesota, however, so I don't know what kind of charging document there'd be. She may have been handed a written citation. She may have appeared before a magistrate. (I guess it might make a lot of sense to have a sitting magistrate on Labor Day at a time and an event like this. Honestly, I don't know and haven't pretended to know. I'm just asking some simple questions.)

The only really stupid thing to say in all of this is that the fact that she was released from police custody proves that she was not charged with a crime, and had committed no crime. And you took care of that! Congratulations! Have a nice day!

I want people to protest, I don't want them to screw my town up.

So STFU, Kitt.

-- The Plate

I don't want "your" town screwed up either. It is your insistence that just because you showed us a few pictures and then you've assumes that we don't care about that, well that's what makes your righteous shit hard to take. Your introductory story on this post also didn't improve your credentials.

I'll never know if you are what I've accused you of or not. It doesn't matter. I do know what you've posted on here and what you have implied you think our attitudes about what you've posted on here are. On that subject, you've shown yourself to be an arrogant jack ass.

no fans of a bunch of punk rock goofballs tossing shit around town. That said, the punks played some great music on their sound systems.

Oh yeah, this guy's for real. Really real. "Punk rock goofballs"? He'll be decrying "hippies" next. Phony as homemade sin. You know, like Bristol Palin's.

Guantanamo.

Especially at protest demonstrations.

This is apparently what they attempted to do today:

2. Transportation Troubles – This includes blockades downtown (at key intersections), on bridges (10 bridges over the Mississippi River in the metro area), and other sporadic and strategic targets (busses, hotel and airport shuttles etc).

There was no explicit intent to vandalize businesses and police cars, but these are the kinds of incidents that get blamed on protesters at large events all the time.

As I said previously: Given how pervasive the inflitration of the protest groups has been, I would hesitate to say with any kind of certainty that physical destruction has been the work of protesters, and not provocateurs.

Of course muddying the waters about who has committed acts of vandalism and to what object is part of the game that is being played by the police and by the protestors. The police use the vandalism as an excuse to gas and blugeon and arrest, the protesters use their apparent innocence of vandalizing property and the brutality of the police as a "victim card."

But I thought the commentary during one guy's phonecam Uptake tour of the protest was interesting. Paraphrasing, he pointed out that there was no clear and agreed on message or objective, it was pretty much just people going off and doing their own thing, whatever that was. That could have included the vandalism. But there is no proof that it did.

Civil disobedience and disruption of routine are fundamental aspects of protest -- at least if the protest is intended to have any effect at all. The near absence of it at the anti-Iraq-war protests was one of the factors that tended to diminish their effectiveness. (There were other factors that may have been more important.)

There was one point during one of the protest uploads today where I was reminded -- with a kind of horror -- of the Amritsar Massacre, when apparently aimless protesters wandered, follow-the-leader-like, into a blind alley. The only way out was the way they came in, and had the police chosen to, they could easily have blocked off exit and arrested them all or... well, whatever.

They didn't do that. Good.

Disruption such as was planned was tried but it didn't seem to be effective at all, in part because there was apparently no coordination. That may or may not have been due to the "decapitation" exercises by the police over the weekend.

So what do the preceding ten minutes of video look like?

Just ten minutes? Surely fifteen would be more illuminating. How about twenty? Sixty?

How about we go and track all their movements back twelve hours, just to be sure this wasn't some massive set-up by Goodman and her producers!

Surely no one expects us to believe that these police officers picked Amy Goodman out of a crowd to arrest her.

Very little would surprise us at this point, and only a fool thinks anything is proscribed anymore.

Then again, this is you we're talking about.

What was Amy Goodman doing that led to her arrest? Seems like a pretty obvious question under the circumstances.

It was equally "obvious" all those party officials and military officers Stalin's men targeted during the 1930s were simply being 'relocated' to the east. Never mind no-one ever heard from them again; they were just relocated.

Again, only a fool accepts things at face-value, particularly in these circumstances.

Idiot.