I have to give you ammunition every now and then (pun intended)

Have a good holiday!

mb they didn’t shoot your hypothetical vandal because he was an agent provocateur?

what is next, drawing and quartering for littering?
impaled at the stake (or worse) for graffiti?
torture for folks you don’t like?
oh wait, that last one was the bush regime

hey maybe it was a LARP bat and he was just playing around (I can sense your answer already: blam blam blam and more blam… you know, the usual)

ps – this is yet another one of your murderous fantasies…
you know, the ones I kid you about?
you should talk to a trained psychologist and/or psychiatrist

see, if they just did what I said there would be no need for this. The camera shows a little prick with his face covered, bat in hand smashing the window of a police car. In the next frame there is a little prick with his face covered, bat falling to the ground leaking blood from a .45 wound, no question they had the right guy, no need to make this display. It is so simple.

LARP swords and unrelated crap and goofiness, oh my!
lolz

I’m actually going to my High School’s 50th anniversary this weekend and I too hope to connect with a lot friends I hadn’t seen for a while. Should be good, everbody that’s ever went to the school is invited and they have a bunch of stuff going on all weekend (bands and demonstrations and shit). Todays my last day of work till July 19th, going to celebrate our nation’s bday tomorrow on a boat cruise in Lake Ontario to kick off my vacation!

Have a good one!

PS – That fucking oil leak better be plugged when I get back! :-)

Since we’re being civil, I’m going to my 35th high school reunion this weekend, can’t wait. we have a small enough school that everyone that ever graduated is invited. We have some folks from 1935 going to be there, all the way to the kids that graduated last month. This little town almost doubles in size. This year the theme is dragging main, you may have called it cruising, think American Graffiti. I have a friend that is bringing his AC Cobra back from Nashville, he has cancer real bad so this is probably going to be the last time we will see him, we’re gonna send him off in style. I got on facebook a few months ago and have reconnected with so many of my old friends that it is going to be a hoot. I just hope I’m not setting myself up for a disappointment.

My friend that is in the National Guard trained for two months in crowd control before the convention, Blackhawk helicopters were common place for weeks before, it was on the news several times showing the NG landing in blocked off intersections to “medivac casualties of a riot should one happen at the convention” but the medivac was always led with a first copter with M-4 toting Guardsmen. We pretty much just let the Denver cops that were used to working with each other handle the crowds and brought in police from suburbs to help with traffic and such. All I know is it worked, maybe we just have wimpy protestors J

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5G7aCgXtWg

I think you’re right, they failed to plan properly and then after the Black Bloc types showed up on Saturday and reeked havoc they kind of lost control and just started cracking down on everyone. As a result, many peaceful and legitimate demonstrators were denied their right and opportunity to protest.

Denver did go to great lengths to get advice from the cities you cited on how they handled conventions in their cities and really, really listened to what they had to say. They also didn’t hassle anyone in the designated areas. When I said they would break up groups forming, one of they tactics they would use is to set up road blocks that would heard the groups into these designated areas, then leave them alone if they stayed there.

shcb, The thing that confused a lot of people is that Queen’s Park (Ontario’s Legislature) was designated as a demonstration area but the police didn’t allow that to happen, as witnessed in the videos on YouTube.

I understand the need to keep everything under control but the right to assemble is a major pillar in our democracy. This story is far from over, as people marched again last night to Queen’s Park to demand answers and are promising to do so every night unitl we get them.

I see you boys had a 5.5 quake too! exciting

a) they were outnumbered and wanted to go home to their kids
b) they didn’t want to be seen as the mean cops
c) they let things get out of hand very early.

When we had that democratic convention here in Denver they got ahead of the protesters by randomly (random to the protestors, systematic to the police) moving barricades and fences, breaking up groups as they were forming, arresting people who wouldn’t go quietly and simply holding them for a day or two and then releasing them without charges or very minor charges, that sort of thing.

They gave them areas to congregate and protest well away from the event. They also were very successful in infiltrating the ranks of the protestors and found out how they were communicating, the protestors were stockpiling weapons in strategic locations and marking the locations with graffiti, the police would find these stashes and simply remove them, then wait for someone to come looking for them and off to the really, really slow moving special court house the folks would go. They just never let them get organized. It was a thing of beauty.

We spent 1.5 billion on security (compared to 18 million in Pittsburgh and 25 million in London) for these summits and all hell still broke loose. We had 20, 000 officers in riot gear.

A lot of people find it kind of odd the police cars were left abandoned in the middle of the road along the protest route. Good media shots to justify expense? Who knows… but it was quite the experience. (I was peaceful, not one of the hooligans)

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

Doesn’t really matter, this is a bad spill, it will take a while to clean it up.