The revolution will be televised

Video keeps protest peaceful, as it should be, on both sides.

Unfinished business

Where would we be but for the murder of our liberal leaders?

A tough time to be sane, 2011

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

Run away, run away!

Not really a very large message change from Frank Luntz, but another glimpse of the propagandist's modus operandi.

Dangling modifier

Hope and change come in fitful bursts, followed by reaction and retrenchment. As it is with Occupy Wall Street, so it is in Bahrain:

Of all the uprisings in the Arab world, Bahrain managed to end the unrest, largely by using coercive force. Tensions between Sunnis and Shiites flared, and a country that was once one of the region’s most cosmopolitan is now one of its most divided.

and in Egypt:

[T]he military council began spelling out plans to carve out permanent political powers and protection from civilian oversight under the next constitution. Those efforts exploded after the government used force to clear a small protest camp from Tahrir Square last Saturday, amid mounting unrest across the country.

A few observations, not too taxing for those of you just in or headed for another tryptophan coma:

• Our reporters know to cheer for the Arab spring protesters and against the Occupiers. Why is that?
• Go back three centuries and substitute Protestant and Catholic for Sunni and Shiite, and you get Christian Europe with all it sectarian conflict - and the motivation for our separation of church and state.
• A despotism's power grows out of the barrel of a gun - or the nozzle of a can of pepper spray.
• Monarchy is never legitimate.
• I'm a liberal, so it's not nearly as easy to scare me as your average Fox-watching conservamaton, but Islamist co-option of the legitimate democratic aspirations of the Arab spring scares me.

Not called the authorities for nothing

I had thought of collecting the videos of police violence against the Occupy movement. Joshua Holland at AlterNet beat me to it. Beat. Ha.

There are sobering lessons to learn here:

• The police choose violence to enforce order.
• The police serve power, not the citizens.
• The police don't give a shit about Constitutional rights, only about authority.
• The police handle teabaggers much more gently than they handle Occupiers. Teabaggers can carry firearms without being beaten. Unthreatening Occupiers get attacked for their resolute non-violence.
• The police are trying to provoke a violent response from protesters - and sometimes they succeed.
• Power is restrained by ever-present video, not fully but often. A few cops are too stupid to realize their actions are going to wind up on YouTube. The rest mill around, unsure what to do.
• The big media, who should be all over these videos because they're vivid TV, mostly aren't playing them and will never play them in the sort of heavy-handed rotation Fox uses when it can illustrate one of its spin points. (You can bet they'll loop - out of context - any protester violence).
• Of course, we already knew that big media serve their corporate masters.
• Net neutrality is essential to showing the world what's true. A corporate-controlled Internet would be a censored Internet - hey, those crummy little videos use too much of their precious bandwidth.

Can you imagine how different the Vietnam War protests would have been with guerrilla video? Or the coal country union wars?

Palace guard

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Mayor Orwell

Michael Bloomberg (I-Wall Street) has cleared Zucotti Park with the following bullshit rationale:

“The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day,” the mayor said in the statement. “Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with” because the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

In other, less Orwellian words, the wrong people were availing themselves of the park. Further, they were using all of the park, and of course the terms of the law require using less than all of it. It's right there in black and white!

Plus, up is down.