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Update 4:07 pacific: Lindsay has just called in about an arrest near the bridge – somebody being arrested here – cops are making racist remarks to the guy they are arresting using fake spanish to him and knocking off a hat he was wearing. Lindsay didn’t see a cause for the arrest – just turned around and he was on the ground. As we were talking, she could see them dragging him across the road and a nearby motorcycle cop started taunting Lindsay to "take more pictures – Greetings from the great southwest!" while pointing to his badge.
Just confirmed – Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and two reporters have been arrested in St Paul. (Audio – both raw from the arrest and then a report on it available here.)
An UpTake video team is also under arrest just managed to avoid arrest and is reporting from their arrest location across from the Harriet Island concert. They are reporting more rubber bullets and tear gas being used on this crowd which includes families and children who were at the SEIU Take Back Labor Day concert.
When the video is processed for YouTube, we’ll have it up but you can watch it here.
Lindsay just called in – police sealing off large area of downtown – she’s ok but at the moment blocked from getting closer to these events.
Update: Minnesota Independent News reporting:
Directly across from the Xcel Center on the river, about 100 people are being detained with hands atop their heads. There is a SWAT team, about 50 cops surrounding those detainees, and about 80 more officers milling in the area. Two police boats in the river. Six or seven Humvees full of Minnesota National Guard troops entered the perimeter about half an hour ago.
No one I’ve spoken with knows why the group is being detained. I tried to get some delegates to talk to me on camera, but no. The situation has been going on for well over an hour. It looks very tense down there, with SWAT teams pacing up and down Shepard Road.
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Thanks for staying on this, Siun.
I hope Amy is ok.
And I pity the fool(s) who are soon to be Defendants in her upcoming civil suit.
Why are they arresting, or trying to arrest reporters?
OMG
the tear gassed people at the concert, children!!
’cause this is the rethug nat’l convention, and intimidating, arresting, beating-up journalists is just par for the course.
People that would take their kids to something like that should have their heads examined.
They’re old-fashioned. They assume they’re the ones with the cameras.
The “something like that” was a Labor Day concert sponsored by SEIU – not a demonstration -but as they were leaving the concert site, they were caught up in a mass arrest of a peaceful protest area.
This is supposed to be a free country – and you should be able to go to a union sponsored concert without facing tear gas!
They may regret arresting Amy. And soon.
Amy!
Rounding up journalists now? Amy Goodman’s starting a riot? I suppose if the electorate would start hearing the truth, they rise up en masses, so by reporting the truth I guess they could say Amy is inciting a riot. Sad.
By the way, are there any FDL crews going to the Ron Paul convention at the even bigger area? I heard 10,000 tix have been sold already, and would be curious how they are responding to all the Repub lunacy. By the accounts I’ve seen, the PUMAs in Denver could’ve filled a room of about 100 capacity yet dominated the news last week. Ron Paul was a Repub candidate and is drawing 10,000 to a counter-convention. Talk about Party disunity!
fine
aren’t the Paultards rioting too?
Just sat down here.. Thanks for the news, Siun. DO you know, is Lindsay near the rally on CSPAN now?
See the report from Lindsay we’ve just added as an update – she wants folks to know about the racism being used against this arrestee in particular.
’cause this is the rethug nat’l convention, and intimidating, arresting, beating-up journalists is just par for the course.
the word “journalist” in this case meaning those who are trying to report on the protests and police thuggery, i.e. ‘the news’.
Then there are the highly paid and well-behaved, orders-taking network people who confine *their* coverage to the events inside the convention center.
There’s a word for those people too, but it’s not “journalist”.
CNN has only just started talking about Palin’s daughter being pregnant. Between that and the hurricane, I don’t see much attention being paid to police riots in MSP. They can’t concentrate on more than two stories at once.
What’s the word on the street that infiltrators started the violence?
From what I can gather, she’s near the area where the UpTake folks were … it’s near the bridge to the Harriet Island area as far as I can tell.
Why did the cop say “greetings from the great southwest?” Does he think he’s in Arizona? What a strange thing to say. But they all sound as if they are having a wonderful time beating up on people – just anyone will do I think.
Look at how useful it is to have reporters on the ground at events. The value of having FDL “crews” like Jane, Lindsay, etc. in the trenches is great. This is how I’ve always envisioned the New Media operating, and we’re seeing how valuable it can be. Remember the Scoots Libby trial?
Obviously it takes money though. We need to figure out ways to grow our audience even more and how to get more people to pay for this stuff. Please keep up the great reporting and be safe!
No tv hear is the MSM covering this Amy Goodman is one of their own right do they really want to give the police the benefit of the doubt on this?
Dear heavens, they are trying to start a riot. They’re fucking with the wrong people now.
The Rs are as boring as soap operas. Sorry real people must get hurt in the process, unlike the fake people in real soap operas.
Ironic…
The ad that just popped up on this page for me says, “Careers in law enforcement and policing. Online degrees.”
Has anyone heard from Norske? He was taking his family, including grandkids, today.
I wonder what did the GOP say to the feds and the police and how long did they say it to convince them to act this way.
Anybody read “Ordinary Men”?
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a study of German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) Reserve Unit 101, used to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the death camps in Poland in 1942. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the experiments of Stanley Milgram, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. These men were ordered to round up Jews and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. The commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option. Browning argued that the men of Unit 101 killed out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, not blood-lust or primal hatred. The implication of the book is that most people placed into a group and given the choice between killing and belonging to the group or not killing and not belonging, will choose the former. Additionally the book demonstrates that ordinary people will more than likely follow orders, even those they might personally question, when they perceive these orders as originating from an authority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Browning
I bet Karl did
Yeah he would be the first guy they would round up. Sometimes I think we should leave emergency contact numbers at the face book sites.
The FDL team is fantastic! Major kudos, but stay safe, guys!
Take a look at this photo of Sara Palin. Scroll down to the photo.
http://www.kunstler.com/
Will the police go after Ron’s people?
Cops using “fake Spanish” – why, no, they’re not racist. s/
Any word on the Spanish media in this country covering this?
Is that photoshopped?
Good catch maybe they imported some help.
And you do that when their are right wing agent provocateurs and left wing idiots who both want nothing better than to try to make this a real Chicago 68 exactly how?
Thanks siun. It’s an anti Iraq war rally on CSPAn. I think it’s a replay from earlier today. Nice to hear the teamsters are a part of it.
It doesn’t look like it.
Jeez, I just watched the video. WTF?
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, to my knowledge nothing even remotely like this happened in Denver last week. It was more like a party atmosphere downtown.
If I was mayor of a major city I would think twice about hosting the RNC.
badly
This should be on the front page of the NYT.
Thx.
It takes a lot of energy these days not to become a naive boob.
Siun, tear gas – a chemical weapon – used against children is really evil: permanent pulmonary damage can result. Tear gas used against kids or adults with severe asthma – or adults with COPD (emphysema) or heart disease can be deadly.
In pregnant women, tear gas can cause spontaneous abortion and fetal abnormalities.
The risk of fetal abnormalities is most severe in the first trimester…and many women aren’t aware of pregnancy before the eighth to tenth week.
The Secret Service’s willing accomplices in this police riot are incredibly reckless.
Typical gooper apparatchniks: pretend to care about the unborn, but in reality will poison the unborn whenever the corporatists snap their fingers.
See my 33 and Ravens 39. Don’t believe everything you see.
from VCGRIFFIN in reddit comments:
I’m following on Twitter http://twitter.com/coldsnaplegal http://twitter.com/theuptake
This is Truly the fall of democracy
AUDIO http://www.indybay.org/newsite…..531782.php
It is photoshopped. Done with more finesse than some of the others I’ve seen. There are a couple real photos of Sarah with weapons at Bag News Notes.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_10356105?source=rss
Hey everybody, free tickets to see Johnny and Sarah in Colorado Springs next Saturday! Doesn’t that sound like fun?
Democracy Now is asking for help–they broke into a Grit TV repeat–”Please Help Us”.
They are requesting calls go to Mayor’s office in St. Paul.
Phone: 651.266.8535 –this is number for Mayor Chris Coleman’s PR person.
They are also asking people call for Senator Klobuchar’s assistance:
Dept. Chief of Staff for Sen. Klobuchar
andrea_mokros@klobuchar.senate.gov
Maybe it is photoshopped, good point. On the other hand, the body would fit…
Too bad. That would have been sweet.
Rightio. Tell us all about it, Pete! Nice to see you again.
Also, on the photo, who is that boy with a cigarette behind Palin?
a concert?
it wasn’t a protest rally, it was a concert
SEIU Take Back Labor Day Concert
What should we say?
Pete..in 2004, in NYC, Bloomburg, under orders from the RNC, had the NYPD round up hundreds of people who were…participating in a Criticial Mass Ride downtown. In the ensuing confusion, other people, families, delivery kids, etc. were also round up and stuck into filthy warehouses on the docks on the West Side. The suits against the city and the NYPD went on for several years. They were afraid of people on BIKES. Frankly, if I were the mayor of any major US city, I would not take the RNC for any amount of money. Minneapolis will be seeing these suits for years to come.
Very police sympathetic article here:
http://ap.google.com/article/A…..AD92U58MO2
I could’nt get through!!!
the mail box is full and if you get put on hold it goes to a busy signal.
Your number will probably go on “The List”.
This is so much bulshit
Here’s an obvious thought: while everyone is distracted with the salacious rumors of Bristol Palin’s present/past? pregnancy, the Repugs decided it was time to decimate free speech while no one is paying attention.
This is at least the second photoshop of Palin onto a bimbo body that’s been circulated. It’s best to assume that anything you see like this is fake, and not circulate it — it’s just as much sexist crap as it would be if she was a Democrat, and we wouldn’t like it at all if it were done to our people.
This is supposed to be a free country – and you should be able to go to a union sponsored concert without facing tear gas!
Hey, I saw police do the same to an entire crowd at a Fleetwood Mac concert in 1973. Not a soul was doing anything wrong, they just wanted the longhairs outa redneck Stockton and they used teargas foggers, rubber bullets, babies were passed out, it was ugly.
And the police chief said it was because the crowd was causing destruction. We were … after we were gassed, we tore down chain link fences trying to escape the gas.
This is simply redux stuff. And much of our country supports it. Welcome to Chicago 68.
The police have incited a riot response in peaceful protest. This is why the police, in this situation, don’t want photographs. This proves their crime.
I hope some one has take to higher elevations to photo their crimes. This will be important in civil and criminal proceedings against the police and the republican party.
I’m usually a supporter of the police but a lot of them, due to their conservative nature, get stupid during civil/political events and let their own feelings show and they want to throw arresting power around to show their disdain of the public. This is when I have no respect for them and neither does Joe Public.