You're right, Susan, of course. The beat cop has little or no autonomy, certainly not when he -- or she as the case may be -- is the merest cog in the machine of oppression, in the case of St. Paul apparently designed and directed by the Secret Service.

Lord knows I've beaten up on Glenn enough for his previous focus on the media face on the screen or the name in print and ignoring the editors and producers and publishers and owners who are actually in charge of what gets into the papers and on teevee.

So I take your point that hating the cops or even blaming them for their actions (at least in some cases) is counterproductive.

They do what they're told or their careers are over. Pfft. Yes, I know.

That's why it is so important, ultimately, to address these issues from the policy setting end. There are proven ways to do it. But really the first thing is that the People have to be fed up enough with the police violence and bloodshed to say ENOUGH and mean it.

If you wanted to do what the neocons have been doing, here's how you'd go about it.

First, you'd form some radical right-wing groups that focus on "key issues" - gun rights, world government, etc. - and introduce them to a bunch of 1930s-era Nazi propaganda.

Then, you'd send them to the conventions to raise as much trouble and make as many headlines as possible, all so you could point out how crazy, violent and unstable the radical right really is.

Or, you could just set it up as a front - but the people who are involved in this kind of thing far prefer to convince gullible and naive people to do the dirty work for them.

Of course, you have to make sure the cameras are in place, or there's not really any point.

As far as a police state?

A police state is something like East German's Stasi society, or various third world dictatorships. If this was a police state, all the protestors would be dead or in hiding and we'd be living under martial law, with the entire Bill of Rights suspended - a neoncon's wet dream, that would be.

As far as "the Minneapolis raids", hysterical overexaggeration is only funny for a little while. Every day, raids like this are carried out by U.S. police forces under no-knock drug search warrants - this has been going on for years. The drug war was just the neocon's attempt to move towards a real police state, truth be told. Before it was the Patriot Act, it was the Drug Control Act - the thing was written well before 9/11.

It wasn't easy for me, Kitt. Ordinarily, I have a hard time taking more than 5 or 10 minutes of Amy Goodman before I want to cross-examine my local NPR affiliate station manager and ask him whether the station offers any programming to balance the far-left tilt of Democracy Now!

So, what news did we get out of Goodman and her two producers? I know their stories; they say that they did nothing wrong.

I also listened to Goodman on that Air America guy's program.

I would have had many more questions for Amy Goodman had I interviewed her:

How much more video is there? Only small bits were posted. Why? Is that all there was? What was the group that Salazar was with when she got arrested? What violence on the part of protesters have they witnessed?

I'd ask for comments on the details of the local and Slate reporters who have reported on the protesters who have clearly and quite openly engaged in property damage and illegal blockades of traffic.

I'd ask her why and how she intended to "free" her producers as they were being arrested by St. Paul police.

I'd ask her whether she intended to file a civil lawsuit against the city and if so, how much she intended to ask for in damages. What are her damages?

That kind of thing, just off the top of my head. That would be a half-hour show, I think. I could probably think of more questions for her.

Did the NSA illegally wire tap these groups even before the new FISA legislation was written into law. What did they wire tap?..Internet, cell phones, land lines. What did they know? When did they know it? What types of surveillance were used and were they legally obtained at the time they obtained it?

-- jman335

But 'national security' will override any real accounting of the events, of course. Don't you know the Taleebandits would hate us for our freedom if we knew :P

by Molly Priesmeyer: The Minnesota Independent

All weekend long the police talked of the “criminal anarchists,” groups allegedly hellbent on inciting riots and causing destruction during the RNC. Now today, the national media has used images of smashed windows–there was a Macy’s window smashed, windows of a cop car broken when a cop wasn’t in it, and a bank window smashed, I saw it happen–as proof of a bunch of protesters gone wild.

We followed this group for nearly the entire day, a small faction made up of a total of 60 or so Funk the War and Food Not Bombs anti-war protesters and some self-proclaimed “anarchists” who said they weren’t part of any group. (The Food Not Bombs house was one of the homes raided on Saturday.) There was threats of tear gas, and pepper spray used on us more than once. Around 20 people had to have their eyes cleaned out. There was intimidation on every corner and from ramps of parking garages, and one cop wrestling someone to the ground. As cops and the mainstream media would tell it, it was out of control. But for the “anarchists,” it was hardly anarchy.

For one thing, despite the media fearmongering and the ominous presence of riot cops–some aiming tear-gas guns at protesters from garages–and the 12 cop cars following us down the street at one point, for the most the 60 or so protesters in this group were fairly benign, though there were about 15 of them whose worse crime committed was pulling newspaper boxes into the street, and in one case, a Dumpster. When that happened, about 15 people in the group stopped to clean up the trash that had fallen to the street.

http://www.minnesotaindependent.com/6699/embedded-with-the-anarchists-dispataches-from-rnc