You guys are really psychotic. Glad I'm in the same party as you.

-- The Plate

Have you gotten through a single post yet without advising us on your sympathetic affiliation with the Democratic Party?

No, he hasnt.

The realization that I'll wake up tomorrow morning with the knowledge that I've lost the respect of The Plate and Martin Gifford... well, I just don't know how I can face anyone ever again.

But all I can do is try, and take it a day at a time.

whose ox is being gored

Now you've done it! I gotta go to work, whatever happens, I am not here.

Che Pasa: ' ... but some of the other actions -- such as breaking the windows and trashing the police cars -- was suspiciously like what provocateurs do and was noticed as such. Given how pervasive the infiltration 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.'

Kitt: 'I can only express a suspicion about that, but that is what I was also thinking. It's such an obvious act of 'old school rioting' that it has staged written the hell all over it.'

You can run some of this stuff down, but unfortunately most of us don't have the resources to do it in real time. You will often find, when violence breaks out at a demonstration or some other public action, a number of people who are participating enthusiastically and then mysteriously vanish. The ones who don't vanish are the suckers they have picked up and betrayed. They are likely to be from out of town, but if you do recognize some of them, don't forget who they are.

One thing we should have learned from the Civil Rights movement, and didn't, was the rigorous application of nonviolence. Violence is the specialty of the state -- it is the state's metier. They will kick your ass just about every time if you choose to play on their field, not only physically but politically.

If you are using WinXP you can use Windows Movie Maker to take the audio and make it suitable for Youtube.

Movie Maker is part of XP and should be on your computer already.

When you open Movie Maker you want to click on "import audio or music" and then find the file you want to put on Youtube and open that. Once the file is opened you just drag it down to the timeline at the bottom of the screen, it would be best to add a title or something so you don't have a completely blank screen on Youtube.

Once you have that done you want to click on "file", "save to my computer", enter your file name and where you want to put the file and then pick "other settings" and "as fm quality" then "next", the file will be saved to your computer in the directory you chose and with the file name you picked.

"I'm surprised that people are jumping to conclusions that the police are being fascist etc." Martin

Have you been paying attention at all then last two days? Its not hard to see the attitude of the authorities. Of course, it requires thinking.

Iokannan: Its pretty obvious from the video Glenn posted that the police gave Amy Goodman two verbal warnings to back away, and that she physically resisted them (I say physically resisted from the police perspective. I've been arrested at protests for pushing an officer who was pushing me back. I'm not validating their logic, but I'm sure Amy understands it quite well after two decades in the biz). She could have easily avoided arrest, at least at that particular juncture, perhaps there's more video that puts this in perspective. But she may have been too emotional or angry to follow her instincts as a journalist. Which would be to stay out of jail so that she could cover the story. She was released quite quickly. Exaggerating this doesn't make the Republicans look worse, it makes us look like we are playing the victim card. Its easier to make us look like we are doing that, than to make them look like victimizers, that;s just the way this cookie crumbles.

Che: Disruption and violence are indeed too different things. I don't think a city government would be very happy about the former. At the start of the invasion, a lot of young protesters sat down at different intersections of SF blocking traffic. I hated that war, and I was enraged, but I had to work, I had been jobless for months and could not afford to lose my job. I had to work. I was just as angry at the demonstrators for treating me as an accomplice to the war--what did they know about me? Disruption isn't effective either, it turns the very people that should be on your side against you, and it does so in a very classical class dynamic. That being said, the violence I was talking about would have been uncoordinated and seperate from disruption tactics, and, as I said, not sanctioned by the leaders of the protest.

I think the time has come to come up with something new. Protests haven't worked on any level for years. Its not like they came out of the primordial soup with carbon based life, they are not the end all be all.

Why look back only ten minutes, Elephantman?

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.

-- Iokannan in the Well

Putting it all together from the remarkably sketchy reports, it is now pretty clear that I was right. Police didn't pick her out of a crowd. She was arrested while "trying to free" two other people who were presumably under arrest or were being arrested.

Again, all I ask is a simple question. With everyone speculating wildly about why Amy Goodman was arrested, and whether her arrest was lawful, is there any video of the actions that led to her arrest?

My inquiry about the prior ten minutes of video is sort of natural, since somebody was there with a video recorder. Why does the recording start when it does? (There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation; it might be that the camera-person wasn't there, or wasn't looking, until somebody said, "Hey, they are arresting Amy Goodman!" Alternatively, there might have been video, and it showed Amy Goodman interfering with officers who were arresting the two Democracy Now! producers. And that video was edited out.)

Get it?