Monday, March 12th, 2007
I went to exercise my First Amendment rights, and all I got was this rubber bullet wound
Holy cow. There is something seriously wrong going on in Tacoma, Washington. Check out this article for the details.
Ain’t that a fine how-do-you-do? These people engaged in a week of peaceful protests that, admittedly, included some civil disobedience, and what is the response of police? Using their bicycles as cudgels and wantonly spraying tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd. No Miranda Warning, no Riot Act - just calculated brutaility. And when the outraged protesters rightly demand to see some badge numbers - silence. Cold, condescending, contemptuous silence. Hell, one man was tasered almost half a dozen times before being arrested on trumpted-up charges of “assaulting a police officer.” Never mind the fact that all he was doing, by his own account, was milling around with other protesters. According to the twisted logic the police were using that night, exercising your First Amendment rights is the same as striking a police officer - a third-degree felony. Wonder if they learned that from the UCLA campus police that repeatedly tasered an Iranian-American student for the crime of being a Muslim in a place of higher education.
Incidentally,this is what a “mob scene” looks like to domestic terrorist Michelle MalKKKin:
And it gets worse. I’ll let fellow Bartcopper picosecond fill you in on the details (emphasis mine):
A friend who was there said that the second video doesn’t catch the “best” part. The horn you hear at the end is from a truck trying to pass through the crowd - apparently a dockworker coming in to work. The cops supposedly pulled him out of his truck, shot him POINT BLANK with rubber rounds, then shot tear gas into his cab.
Question for Michelle: if this was a “librul-driven mob scene,” then what, pray tell, was Kristallnacht?
Good Jesus. What’s next? Are they going to arm the riot police with mustard gas and flechette rounds instead of tear gas and rubber bullets? Or maybe the police will just order the military convoys to open fire on the protesters. It’s not like the thugs in charge ever cared about piddling little (objectively pro-terrorist) details like chain-of-command rules, anyway.
Unfortunately, police brutality isn’t the only issue at stake here. At a City Council meeting the following day, Walter Cuddeford, the man who was auto-tasered, was arrested again for running over his allotted time to speak. The trumped-up charges this time were - get this - tresspassing and disrupting a city council meeting.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. TRESSPASSING?!
Now, I’m no lawyer, but isn’t the purpose of declaring certain places “public property” so that anyone can access them, without regard to their political or financial station? That would be like me being arrested for tresspassing if I farted in a public library!
And as for “disrupting a city council meeting,” he was invited to speak, was he not? You can’t just arbitrarily revoke his invitation just because he’s relating inconvenient facts. And so what if he ran over his allotted time, doesn’t Robert’s Rules of Order allow someone to request more time to speak if they have more to say on a given subject? Geeze, public officials these days seem to have no use for democracy.
Well, that does it. The First Amendment has been cancelled, at least in Tacoma, Washington. I can only hope that it remains intact in the rest of the country. If not, I may have to invest in a surplus HAZMAT suit before attending any protests in the future.
