Guantanamo.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Wasn't getting hauled off more or less the point?

What is all this 1968 stuff about if not to bring back 1968?

-- Cat vs. Roomba

Funny. I thought the purpose was to exercise what are supposed to be Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

The "1968 stuff" is, by my reading, strictly comparisons between then and now. Clearly four decades hasn't been long enough for our society to get beyond this sort of thuggery.

But then you approve of such thuggery, so you must be very happy.

If someone could tell me how to compress one of those in order to upload it to You Tube, I'd appreciate it.

There were many justified complaints about China's overkill security during the Olympics.

But I didn't see anything from there like the scenes from Denver, and now even worse from Minneapolis-St. Paul: police and soldiers in maximum riot gear, tear gas canisters and gas masks, wielding batons and assault weapons, marching enmasse in manner to intimidate and provoke, and seemingly mistreating and arresting people in order to intimidate others.

What we saw in China were police in clean dress uniforms, unarmed or bearing only sidearms if any, and soldiers in dress uniform standing at attention. For the most part they reacted only when demonstrations or trouble occurred. The riot gear, assault weapons, tear gas and other implements were kept well out of sight, if they existed at all.

Perhaps the foreign reporters will pick up on the contrasts.

I haven't seen the footage you talked about, but I doubt that a provacateur would be indistinguishable from a douchebag trying to fuck up public property. I can't see why you would even try to make that distinction visually, unless of course you are also scrutinizing photos of Palin to see if she looked pregnant four months ago. If there were no people at the Republican convention in black masks who wanted to set fire to garbage cans, break windows and tussle with police, it would be the first major national demonstration that I have ever heard of or been to where that was the case.

It seems obvious that the police violated the right to free speech of many of those assembled. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't a legitimate danger from unbalanced thugs who had joined the protests.

This does bring up interesting issues that would be worth discussing. Given that the RNC would bring together many hated politicos, just what should the police and city have done to protect them and to protect civilians from being caught up in any violence directed at the RNC? I'm not saying that the police were right, but one way to try to figure out how to solve problems is to put yourself in the place first of the people you perceive to be causing them. Just what should the mayor have done? We're all adults, we know that every protest is about 90% great people, and about ten percent violent jerks who want to destroy thngs. And that's a pretty loud and active ten percent. What should the police have done instead? This isn't a rhetorical question. If you can't answer that question, then critique, beyond initial rage, isn't very valid.