The Bush Doctrine Comes Home

by digby

This footage of the police in riot gear last night in Minneapolis is really amazing. I’m hard pressed to see all that much difference between this stuff and the horrible oppressive government behavior everyone was expressing such shock at in Beijing during the Olympics.

Including the Minneapolis protest, police have arrested 422 people since Saturday in pre-emptive raids and at protests in downtown St. Paul that were marred by violence. St. Paul was quieter on the convention’s third day, when four women from the peace group CodePink were arrested after crawling under a fence a couple blocks from the Xcel Center where the convention is being held. They were released.

You’ve got to love the phrase “pre-emptive raids.”

That’s a lot of arrests for a country where the right to free speech and free assembly is supposed to be guaranteed by the constitution.

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