http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8&feature=related

http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/conventions/27760444.html

...As the march wound toward its end, police trailing the rear grabbed one marcher and began spraying pepper spray on people in the area. It wasn't immediately clear what led them to grab the man.

Marchers stopped near the end of the fenced-off parade route near Xcel while organizer Cheri Honkala made them promise to remain nonviolent....

...Not long after, police discharged a series of flash-bang grenades and smoke canisters at an intersection not far from a security fence surrounding Xcel...

..."Everything was going really well, and all of a sudden it just got heavy. It seemed like people were getting moved for no reason," Nye said.

She said she was right in the intersection where the police percussion grenades went off.

"It was really scary," she said. "But most of the scariness comes from them," she said, meaning police. "They really got adrenalized and there was this horrible inevitability to it. They've got their toys and they want to use them."

linked

You have jackasses like radio host Phil Hendrie, on LA's allegedly liberal talk radio station KTLK AM, ridiculing Goodman and the other people who were arrested and bending over backwards to find a way to justify the police and FBI actions.

Disgusting. Especially when presented on a supposedly "leftwing" radio station.

Atrios must have been watching the RNC convention on TV

"Angry Left"

Uh, George, maybe you've missed it but we're actually having quite the party these days.

I don't think St. Paul riots were the "party" he was talking about but the less the media covers it the better for us. We wouldn't want to give "George" any more talking points.

They might have been in an area that they were not spposed to be....

America.

... They might have been diong something that they were not supposed to be doing....

Protesting.

Simple answers to simple questions.

Cheers,

Ahem: the broken windows

were at Macy's (I know they're always in bankruptcy so they don't have to pay their vendors, but still, they are not modest shop owners... please) and at the First National Bank(also not your struggling peddler, though banks don't have it easy these days) -- and, strangely, at the Community Access Cable Collective (whatever it's called) where Amy Goodman does her broadcasts from the field. And the cop cars (they say three of them).

Seems to me that whoever did it was very carefully choosing targets, not randomly smashing glass for the thrill of it.

I'm still puzzling why the Community Access office was targeted. What anarchy!

-- Ché Pasa

If you think that the small shopkeeper's businesses won't suffer, some catastrophically, from a week of this whether they get a brick through the window or not, you aren't as bright as I gave you credit for.

I never truly realized what a clueless cliche of an angry ultra leftist you really are until now. You hit all the right notes any coffee house anarchist does but you're still a middle class dweeb with no real feel for class or class consciousness. They are just words to you, you have no concept of what it is like to be a member of the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie or proles.

http://www.twincities.com/ci_10356273?source=most_viewed

@Ché Pasa (September 2, 2008 08:32 PM):

"Well, AI

"You may have seen the posts I made and omooex made referring to the April 2003 assault by police on dispersing demonstrators at the Port of Oakland. In that incident, the Authorities fired all sorts of 'non-lethal' weapons as protesters, ordered to disperse, were dispersing, hitting many in the back -- a few in the face -- and causing painful and very ugly injuries, though no one was disabled or killed.

"Jerry Brown, Democrat, former Governor of California, former Democratic candidate for president, and current California Attorney General, was Mayor of Oakland at the time, and he defended his police force's actions taken in defense of the Port, which of course was shipping desperately needed war materiel to Battlefront Iraq. He was quite outspoken in his defense, and in condemning the protesters -- he may have even said they got what they deserved."

"But it was the People who forced the changes. The civic bodies, the electeds and the courts played catch up."

---

No, I hadn't seen your and ommoex's posts, but I was painfully aware of the Oakland incident at the time, through the reports of the corporate media, and was of course, disgusted by the thuggery of Oakland's law-and-order hirelings.

I had not been aware, however, of Brown's role in the incident.

Some questions and observations:

1)Wasn't it the case that the backlash against Brown and the Oakland PD was to a great extent attributable to the fact that unionized dock workers as well as anti-war protesters were brutalized by the police? Do you think the outcome would have been the same if the action had been directed at and affected only the anti-war protesters?

BTW, I urge everyone reading this to check out the pictures of two of the Oakland victims, here:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0407-06.htm

2)The fact that Jerry Brown, a supposedly enlightened and California-mellow Democrat, was the mayor of Oakland at the time and yet supported the police brutality in question rather reinforces my point regarding the fact that the mayor of St. Paul, who defended the police abuses in his city, is also a Democrat. My pointing out the latter in my response to your post was primarily directed at Democratic Exceptionalists like CargoCult, either regarding the effect on civil liberties of electing Democrats, the desirability of police violence against "troublemakers", or both. It's worthy of note that a Democrat was also the mayor of Chicago when the infamous "police riot" occurred in 1968 during the Democratic Convention. (See the Walker Report).

3)Based on what I've been able to piece together from different reports, the group responsible for most if not all of the property damage that did occur in St. Paul was the RNC Welcoming Committee (RNCWC), a relatively small group of not-too-bright "activists" whose idea of effective political action was rather slovenly conceived, to put it charitably.

4)The illegal detentions, their over-reaction (a word coined, I believe, in 1968 by Chicago Mayor Richard Daly) to the actions of the RNCWC, and the brutality of the police against many other people, however, was by no means justified by the minor threat posed by a handful of unarmed mental midgets. As a matter of fact, much of the police violence seemed wholly independent of the actions of members of the RNCWC, and probably would have occurred even if the RNCWC hadn't been there to act like juvenile delinquents on methamphetamine. The 17-year-old Buddhist and Amy Goodman and her producers are cases in point.

5)I know from personal experience, as well as from reading about and viewing on film and videotape, what a dim view of political protesters (challengers of authority) most people in positions of authority have, and this is particularly true of the under-educated, lower-middle class men and women from patriarchal families who comprise so much of America's local law enforcement agencies. It is exponentially more true today than it was when the bumper-sticker was created in the '60's: "Warning: Your Local Police Are Armed and Dangerous." In those days, before the police were militarized, they were armed with pistols, shotguns, and rifles. It seems that almost every PD in America now possesses armored personnel carriers, helicopters, and a multitude of weapons of diverse lethality.

6) One of the most distressing and dangerous phenomena in local law enforcement is the all-too-common mind-set that they can roust, arrest, and even brutalize anybody who pisses them off for whatever reason, knowing that all the pain, inconvenience, and expense will accrue to their victims. Even if charges are dropped or people are acquitted, the cop will have exacted his or her revenge for the insubordinate behavior of their victims, with little or no accountability unless the incident is caught on tape and/or results in an expensive lawsuit for the city. I vividly recall, for example, a Midwestern sheriff's publicly stating that he didn't give a shit what the US Supreme Court said, if he saw anybody burning a US flag, he was going to bust their ass. And it was clear from his demeanor that he meant "bust" in both senses of the word.

I think I'm approaching, if I haven't exceeded, my 1,000-word limit, but we can continue in other posts this discussion of police repression and brutality, the role of their civilian leadership, and public reaction to it under different circumstances.