Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

They? Read Haaretz, and you'll see there is a great deal of people who realize just that. There's even the occational article in Jerusalem Post that exhibits such insight.
You must be paying for the editorial content on Jerusalem Post's website, because it's been a long time since I've seen anything on there that could be called dissent. I used to check their site every week or so. Now I rarely even bother. You know they'll just take the government's position 9 times out of 10.

Oh, that's just rich. Suddenly, the TSA cares about the constitution. Right. Never mind that the entirety of their existence is based on using it as their toilet paper.
Yeah, they wipe their ass with the fourth, which seems to explicitly prohibit that sort of thing and then cite a few other amendments as justification. I think those arguing against the TSA make some great points and I'd love to see this go the Supreme Court. But then some idiot has to and say something like this ...
Dan Patrick said:
?There was a time in this state, there was a time in our history, where we stood up to the federal government and we did not cower to rules and policies that invaded the privacy of Texans,?
That was the Civil War jackass, when your state fought the federal government for the "right" to own/sell/trade human beings like cattle. There's always got to be the nostalgic circle-jerk. They can't just make a rational argument based in court rulings and legislation.

Hmmmm - that legislation is just so Un-American. Almost beggars belief that a country founded on the principles of individual freedoms has not complained more. I can see in moments of immediate threat why that may be needed but I do not think that America (USA) is actually in that position now.
Quite hypocritical indeed. Plenty of people also make a big deal out of 'freedom' and 'individualism' when all they do their entire lives is try and do exactly what their neighbors are doing (just slightly better).
 
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Thanks chaps - almost as cynical as the Ukanians. My Ukanian question is why we are shutting down our armed forces and yet continue to (over?) load them with missions, but at the same time give millions away to third world countries most of the money goes in to despots pockets and a Swiss bank account.

India FCS!

http://meaindia.nic.in/mystart.php?id=8600

"India depends, again, for the most part on domestic savings for capital formation. Yet foreign capital inflows do play a significant role in the Indian economy: it stimulates the stock market, reduces the cost of debt for large firms with access to global sources, feeds a veritable frenzy of entrepreneurship taking good advantage of venture capital and private equity and, in general, meets the gap between investment and domestic financial savings (a large part of domestic household savings are in a physical form and not available for investment by anyone other than the saver concerned). India?s fast growth attracts a lot of foreign capital. As significantly Indian industry?s outward investment, is also growing proportionately, with India for example, emerging as the second largest foreign investor in London.

India maintains control on foreign debt (total debt stock is roughly equal to total foreign currency assets), its debt service ratio is low (a healthy 5%), the share of short term debt in total debt is about 18%, even as the share of concessional debt in the total has come down by half to about 18% from the early years of the decade. So, foreign creditors have little reason to be concerned by the recent widening of India?s current account deficit, stubbornly below 2% of GDP and even negative in the early part of the decade. "

The above tells me that they are in way better shape economically than we are.


I think that some are rather embarrassed Indian Politicians others want their Swiss Bank accounts filled.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11318342

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12599969
 
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They? Read Haaretz, and you'll see there is a great deal of people who realize just that. There's even the occational article in Jerusalem Post that exhibits such insight.
In "they" I Did not mean that as a blanket statement directed at all Israelis, it was directed at the extremists/wing nuts...
 
Just when you think you have heard the dumbest thing ever and nothing would ever top it,....... here comes a Republican.


Republican?s Climate Solution: Clear-Cut the Rain Forest

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, needs to hit the science books, forestry experts suggest.

They reached that conclusion after hearing Mr. Rohrabacher declare during a Congressional hearing on Wednesday that clear-cutting the world?s rain forests might eliminate the production of greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.

On the witness stand was Todd Stern, the Obama administration?s climate change envoy, who was questioned on whether the nation?s climate policy should focus on reducing the more than 80 percent of carbon emissions produced by the natural world in the form of decaying plant matter.

?Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rain forests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?? the congressman asked Mr. Stern, according to Politico.

?Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?? he continued.

Forestry experts were dumbfounded by Mr. Rohrabacher?s line of questioning, noting that the world?s forests currently absorb far more carbon dioxide than they emit ? capturing roughly one-third of all man-made emissions and helping mitigate climate change.

?He?s seriously confused,? said Oliver Phillips, a professor of geography at the University of Leeds in Britain and an expert on terrestrial carbon storage. ?He?s just got half of the equation. Natural things decay, of course, but they also grow.?

The idea that cutting down forests would result in a net reduction of emissions is ?crazy,? Dr Phillips added. ?The need is to reduce deforestation.?

Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University, found another hole in Mr. Rohrabacher?s logic. Roughly 75 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from the natural world come not from above-ground biomass, but from the soil, she said. ?You don?t even want to give this guy another wacky idea, but he forgot about soil,? Dr. Law said.


How did this guy get elected?
 
What's interesting is that his question about cutting and re-planting is actually quite valid. Older trees, as they have fewer leaves and are less "active" actually DO remove less CO2 than a younger tree does. It's not a new or novel proposal at all.

Which makes me thing that something is being lost in context... imagine that... an anti-Republican slant from the New York Times. :)

Steve
 
?Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rain forests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?? the congressman asked Mr. Stern,

Because clear cutting the forest will only get rid of old growth right?
 
Because clear cutting the forest will only get rid of old growth right?
Yes, clearcutting is plainly taking down everything, old and new. Going through the forest and take down only the oldest trees on the other hand, is simply nothing but good old fashioned forest keeping. Old, dying trees (which are relatively dry) are also best suited for use as fire wood for you stove or fireplace, as it doesn't emit so much smoke...
 
Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University, found another hole in Mr. Rohrabacher?s logic. Roughly 75 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from the natural world come not from above-ground biomass, but from the soil, she said. ?You don?t even want to give this guy another wacky idea, but he forgot about soil,? Dr. Law said.
Would clearcutting not lead to erosion, thereby removing all that dangerous soil and leaving mostly bedrock behind? ;)

That guy is some nutter... :wall:
 
The more I read about Homeland Security, and the associated agencies, the less secure I feel.

For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target


AUSTIN, Tex. ? A fat sheaf of F.B.I. reports meticulously details the surveillance that counterterrorism agents directed at the one-story house in East Austin. For at least three years, they traced the license plates of cars parked out front, recorded the comings and goings of residents and guests and, in one case, speculated about a suspicious flat object spread out across the driveway.

?The content could not be determined from the street,? an agent observing from his car reported one day in 2005. ?It had a large number of multi-colored blocks, with figures and/or lettering,? the report said, and ?may be a sign that is to be used in an upcoming protest.?

Actually, the item in question was more mundane.

?It was a quilt,? said Scott Crow, marveling over the papers at the dining table of his ramshackle home, where he lives with his wife, a housemate and a backyard menagerie that includes two goats, a dozen chickens and a turkey. ?For a kids? after-school program.?

Mr. Crow, 44, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of anticorporate demonstrations, is among dozens of political activists across the country known to have come under scrutiny from the F.B.I.?s increased counterterrorism operations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Other targets of bureau surveillance, which has been criticized by civil liberties groups and mildly faulted by the Justice Department?s inspector general, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When such investigations produce no criminal charges, their methods rarely come to light publicly.

But Mr. Crow, a lanky Texas native who works at a recycling center, is one of several Austin activists who asked the F.B.I. for their files, citing the Freedom of Information Act. The 440 heavily-redacted pages he received, many bearing the rubric ?Domestic Terrorism,? provide a revealing window on the efforts of the bureau, backed by other federal, state and local police agencies, to keep an eye on people it deems dangerous.

In the case of Mr. Crow, who has been arrested a dozen times during demonstrations but has never been convicted of anything more serious than trespassing, the bureau wielded an impressive array of tools, the documents show.

The agents watched from their cars for hours at a time ? Mr. Crow recalls one regular as ?a fat guy in an S.U.V. with the engine running and the air-conditioning on? ? and watched gatherings at a bookstore and cafe. For round-the-clock coverage, they attached a video camera to the phone pole across from his house on New York Avenue.

They tracked Mr. Crow?s phone calls and e-mails and combed through his trash, identifying his bank and mortgage companies, which appear to have been served with subpoenas. They visited gun stores where he shopped for a rifle, noting dryly in one document that a vegan animal rights advocate like Mr. Crow made an unlikely hunter. (He says the weapon was for self-defense in a marginal neighborhood.)

They asked the Internal Revenue Service to examine his tax returns, but backed off after an I.R.S. employee suggested that Mr. Crow?s modest earnings would not impress a jury even if his returns were flawed. (He earns $32,000 a year at Ecology Action of Texas, he said.)

They infiltrated political meetings with undercover police officers and informers. Mr. Crow counts five supposed fellow activists who were reporting to the F.B.I.

Mr. Crow seems alternately astonished, angered and flattered by the government?s attention. ?I?ve had times of intense paranoia,? he said, especially when he discovered that some trusted allies were actually spies.

?But first, it makes me laugh,? he said. ?It?s just a big farce that the government?s created such paper tigers. Al Qaeda and real terrorists are hard to find. We?re easy to find. It?s outrageous that they would spend so much money surveilling civil activists, and anarchists in particular, and equating our actions with Al Qaeda.?

The investigation of political activists is an old story for the F.B.I., most infamously in the Cointel program, which scrutinized and sometimes harassed civil rights and antiwar advocates from the 1950s to the 1970s. Such activities were reined in after they were exposed by the Senate?s Church Committee, and F.B.I. surveillance has been governed by an evolving set of guidelines set by attorneys general since 1976.

But the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 demonstrated the lethal danger of domestic terrorism, and after the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. vowed never again to overlook terrorists hiding in plain sight. The Qaeda sleeper cells many Americans feared, though, turned out to be rare or nonexistent.

The result, said Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent now at the American Civil Liberties Union, has been a zeal to investigate political activists who pose no realistic threat of terrorism.

?You have a bunch of guys and women all over the country sent out to find terrorism. Fortunately, there isn?t a lot of terrorism in many communities,? Mr. German said. ?So they end up pursuing people who are critical of the government.?

Complaints from the A.C.L.U. prompted the Justice Department?s inspector general to assess the F.B.I.?s forays into domestic surveillance. The resulting report last September absolved the bureau of investigating dissenters based purely on their expression of political views. But the inspector general also found skimpy justification for some investigations, uncertainty about whether any federal crime was even plausible in others and a mislabeling of nonviolent civil disobedience as ?terrorism.?

Asked about the surveillance of Mr. Crow, an F.B.I. spokesman, Paul E. Bresson, said it would be ?inappropriate? to discuss an individual case. But he said that investigations are conducted only after the bureau receives information about possible crimes.

?We do not open investigations based on individuals who exercise the rights afforded to them under the First Amendment,? Mr. Bresson said. ?In fact, the Department of Justice and the bureau?s own guidelines for conducting domestic operations strictly forbid such actions.?

It is not hard to understand why Mr. Crow attracted the bureau?s attention. He has deliberately confronted skinheads and Ku Klux Klan members at their gatherings, relishing the resulting scuffles. He claims to have forced corporate executives to move with noisy nighttime protests.

He says he took particular pleasure in a 2003 demonstration for Greenpeace in which activists stormed the headquarters of ExxonMobil in Irving, Tex., to protest its environmental record. Dressed in tiger outfits, protesters carried banners to the roof of the company?s offices, while others wearing business suits arrived in chauffeured Jaguars, forcing frustrated police officers to sort real executives from faux ones.

?It was super fun,? said Mr. Crow, one of the suits, who escaped while 36 other protesters were arrested. ?They had ignored us and ignored us. But that one got their attention.?

It got the attention of the F.B.I. as well, evidently, leading to the three-year investigation that focused specifically on Mr. Crow. The surveillance documents show that he also turned up in several other investigations of activism in Texas and beyond, from 2001 to at least 2008.

For an aficionado of civil disobedience, Mr. Crow comes across as more amiable than combative. He dropped out of college, toured with an electronic-rock band and ran a successful Dallas antiques business while dabbling in animal rights advocacy. In 2001, captivated by the philosophy of anarchism, he sold his share of the business and decided to become a full-time activist.

Since then, he has led a half-dozen groups and run an annual training camp for protesters. (The camps invariably attracted police infiltrators who were often not hard to spot. ?We had a rule,? he said. ?If you were burly, you didn?t belong.?) He also helped to found Common Ground Relief, a network of nonprofit organizations created in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Anarchism was the catchword for an international terrorist movement at the turn of the 20th century. But Mr. Crow, whose e-mail address contains the phrase ?quixotic dreaming,? describes anarchism as a kind of locally oriented self-help movement, a variety of ?social libertarianism.?

?I don?t like the state,? he said. ?I don?t want to overthrow it, but I want to create alternatives to it.?

This kind of talk appears to have baffled some of the agents assigned to watch him, whose reports to F.B.I. bosses occasionally seem petulant. One agent calls ?nonviolent direct action,? a phrase in activists? materials, ?an oxymoron.? Another agent comments, oddly, on Mr. Crow and his wife, Ann Harkness, who have been together for 24 years, writing that ?outwardly they did not appear to look right for each other.? At a training session, ?most attendees dressed like hippies.?

Such comments stand out amid detailed accounts of the banal: mail in the recycling bin included ?a number of catalogs from retail outlets such as Neiman Marcus, Ann Taylor and Pottery Barn.?

Mr. Crow said he hoped the airing of such F.B.I. busywork might deter further efforts to keep watch over him. The last documents he has seen mentioning him date from 2008. But the Freedom of Information Act exempts from disclosure any investigations that are still open.

?I still occasionally see people sitting in cars across the street,? he said. ?I don?t think they?ve given up.?



They waste their time and energies on a guy like this? Maybe it is time to have a look at my F.B.I file again. I wonder how they see my anti government protests and activities.
 
Mysterious fund allows Congress to spend freely, despite earmark ban

Washington (CNN) -- The defense bill that just passed the House of Representatives includes a back-door fund that lets individual members of Congress funnel millions of dollars into projects of their choosing.

This is happening despite a congressional ban on earmarks -- special, discretionary spending that has funded Congress' pet projects back home in years past, but now has fallen out of favor among budget-conscious deficit hawks.

Under the cloak of a mysteriously-named "Mission Force Enhancement Transfer Fund," Congress has been squirreling away money -- like $9 million for "future undersea capabilities development," $19 million for "Navy ship preliminary design and feasibility studies," and more than $30 million for a "corrosion prevention program."

So in a year dominated by demands for spending cuts, where did all the money come from?



Roughly $1 billion was quietly transferred from projects listed in the president's defense budget and placed into the "transfer fund." This fund, which wasn't in previous year's defense budgets (when earmarks were permitted), served as a piggy bank from which committee members were able to take money to cover the cost of programs introduced by their amendments.

And take they did.

More than $600 million went to a wide number of projects, many of which appear to directly benefit some congressional districts over others.

RELATED: Budget ax threatens successful AIDS program in Africa


For example, that $9 million for "future undersea capabilities development" was requested by Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Connecticut, whose district happens to be home to General Dynamics Electric Boat, a major supplier of submarines and other technologies to the U.S. Navy.

And the $19 million for "Navy ship preliminary design and feasibility studies"? Rep. Steve Palazzo, R-Mississippi, asked for that. His district's largest employer is Ingalls Shipbuilding -- a major producer of surface combat ships for the Navy.

Nothing in these expenditures appears to be illegal, but critics say they still may violate the spirit, if not the language, of the earmark ban.

"These amendments may very likely duck the House's specific definition of what constitutes an earmark, but that doesn't mean they aren't pork," says Leslie Paige of Citizens Against Government Waste, a government-spending watchdog group. The group believes if modification of the National Defense Authorization Act generated savings, that money should have been put toward paying down the deficit.

In their defense, supporters say the amendments offered by various members may very well represent good governance. The $30 million Rep. Betty Sutton, D-Ohio, set aside for corrosion prevention could go far to help tackle the Defense Department's corrosion problem, estimated to cost the military more than $15 billion a year.

However, there are two things worth considering: Sutton's request comes on top of the $10 million already included in the bill for corrosion related programs, and Sutton's district is home to The University of Akron, which created the country's first bachelor's degree program for corrosive engineering in 2008.

Then, on May 9, two days before the defense bill mark-up, it was announced that the Defense Department had given the University of Akron $11 million to build its new "National Center for Education and Research in Corrosion and Materials Performance."

Sutton was the biggest supporter of that new spending.
 
Thanks chaps - almost as cynical as the Ukanians.
Yep, we've got to be cynical enough to pay attention but not so cynical that we ignore politics after the first six months of the 1-2 year long presidential campaigns. It's a hard balance to strike.

The above tells me that they are in way better shape economically than we are.
Looking at debt/GDP alone doesn't really tell you much about how strong a nation is economically. About whether or not they'll implode or grow exponentially. The UK (and US, for that matter) are fine in the short term. Unnecessary austerity measures being pushed in both nations will do much more harm than good in the long term.

How did this guy get elected?
Because the GOP has figured out how to get people to consistently vote against their own interests.

They waste their time and energies on a guy like this? Maybe it is time to have a look at my F.B.I file again. I wonder how they see my anti government protests and activities.
:lol: This guy sounds like a somewhat more radical version of my dad. I'm going to have to tell him to start looking out for surveillance operations on his sweet potato growing operation.
 
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The more I read about Homeland Security, and the associated agencies, the less secure I feel.




Senior Defense Official Caught Hedging on U.S. Involvement in Stuxnet

If you want to see a top Pentagon official squirm, tune into CNBC?s cyberwar documentary Thursday night, and watch Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn face an uncomfortably direct question about the Stuxnet worm.

In ?CodeWars: America?s Cyber Threat,? correspondent Melissa Lee asks Lynn outright: ?Was the U.S. involved in any way in the development of Stuxnet??

Lynn?s response is long enough that an inattentive viewer might not notice that it doesn?t answer the question.

?The challenges of Stuxnet, as I said, what it shows you is the difficulty of any, any attribution and it?s something that we?re still looking at, it?s hard to get into any kind of comment on that until we?ve finished our examination,? Lynn replies.

?But sir, I?m not asking you if you think another country was involved,? Lee presses. ?I?m asking you if the U.S. was involved. If the Department of Defense was involved.?

?And this is not something that we?re going to be able to answer at this point,? Lynn finally says.

The sophisticated Stuxnet worm was released on systems in Iran in June 2009 and again in March and April 2010, and was designed to specifically target programmable logic controllers used in industrial control systems made by Siemens. The worm was programmed to launch its attack only on Siemens systems that had a specific configuration ? a configuration believed to exist at Iran?s Natanz plant, where weapons-grade uranium is being enriched.

The New York Times reported earlier this year that the United States and Israel had worked in conjunction to create Stuxnet. When Gary Samore, President Obama?s chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction was asked previously about Stuxnet at a conference, he avoided the question and remarked with a smile: ?I?m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.?

According to the Times, in January 2009, former President George Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz. President Obama was then briefed on the program before he took office and wanted to speed up the plan. Stuxnet is believed to have been part of that plan.

Unfortunately, CNBC doesn?t dig any further into questions about the United States? role in Stuxnet. Nor does it explore the implications of what it would mean if the United States was indeed involved in creating and unleashing a powerful piece of malware that could be tweaked and used to attack critical infrastructure systems in the United States and allied countries.

The documentary, which Threat Level viewed prior to broadcast, also makes a number of unsubstantiated claims: that the configuration Stuxnet sought, for example, existed only at Natanz, and that Stuxnet succeeded in significantly sabotaging Natanz?s centrifuges. Though centrifuges at Natanz experienced problems, the circumstantial evidence pointing to Stuxnet as the cause is currently incomplete and contradictory. Nonetheless, the piece does a good job of pulling a lot of information together to give an overview of Stuxnet.

The program is not just about Stuxnet, however. It also looks at cybercrime, vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure systems, the broader issue of cyberwarfare, and the wide use in the United States of computer parts made in China that may contain built-in spyware. The documentary covers all these issues well, but makes the oft-repeated mistake of focusing too much attention on the headline-making, low-tech denial-of-service attacks against Estonian websites in 2007, calling them an example of ?enemy fire.?

Next to Stuxnet, and the United States? possible involvement in it, the Estonian attacks ? part of a dispute over the placement of a statue ? were child?s play.
 
BBC News - South Tyneside Council 'gets Twitter data' in blog case

BBC News said:
South Tyneside Council says Twitter has released information after it acted in a US court to identify a Twitter user behind allegedly libellous statements.

The council went to court in California after three councillors and an official complained they were libelled in a blog called "Mr Monkey".


This is a Landmark case for the UK anyway.

Also, this is unrelated to the Twitter story from last week about a Football player who had his High Court press injunction breached by Twitter users and an MP using Parliamentary Privelege.

So, Twitter does cough up user information if pressed by the CA Courts. Some Twitter Users may have to be more careful in future.
 
You must be paying for the editorial content on Jerusalem Post's website, because it's been a long time since I've seen anything on there that could be called dissent. I used to check their site every week or so. Now I rarely even bother. You know they'll just take the government's position 9 times out of 10.
I don't pay jack shit for online content. But I've still seen opinion posts to that effect.


In "they" I Did not mean that as a blanket statement directed at all Israelis, it was directed at the extremists/wing nuts...
Duely noted.

The more I read about Homeland Security, and the associated agencies, the less secure I feel.

They waste their time and energies on a guy like this? Maybe it is time to have a look at my F.B.I file again. I wonder how they see my anti government protests and activities.

Sounds more or less like a training op, if it's something they actually spent time on, it sounds like a huge waste of resources and manpower. As a training op, it would be somewhat understandable, but I don't think they do training ops like this, and then I guess they would have written it as well.


Is that video getting any press on your side of the pond? As far as I can see, that was to a large extent an great deal of unessesary arrests.
 
I have been busy going to and from the hospital the last few weeks and have not been able to keep track of what is happening in the world. But that is all I have seen of it.
 
Were they actually charged with anything or just released? Oh, and the fact that his show is broadcast by RT makes him complete scum. RT is a propaganda mouthpiece for the Russian government. The only reason it was picked up by RT is because Kokesh is a antiwar nutjob and highly critical of the US government.

Oh and:

Jefferson Memorial Dance Arrests Poorly Handled
By Don, 3:59 pm May 29th, 2011

Poorly handled by the demonstrators, that is.

The above video splices together several perspectives on yesterday?s arrests at the Jefferson Memorial of Adam Kokesh and others who were there to demonstrate against restrictions on personal expression at the memorial site.

The BoingBoing crowd is making a lot of the way Kokesh is brought to the ground, which is a highly unfortunate distraction from the more important issue of ?free speech zones? in modern America. You can skip forward into the video to about the 2:20 mark and see the two more physical arrests. The first is of an unidentified individual; the arrest starts out with little physicality until another individual runs in and attempts to pull the first man away from the officer. Both are taken down to the ground and restrained.

The third arrest is of Kokesh and starts around 3:00. Viewing from there and listening to the audio it?s clear that the officer first attempts to tell Kokesh to submit to arrest without touching him, then endeavors to turn him around and detain him. Kokesh ignores the requests, continues to walk away, then refuses to kneel. It?s at that point that the officer lifts him and throws him to the ground to restrain and arrest him.

The selectively edited highlight reel ? James O?Keefe would be proud ? doesn?t show the first man interfering with the other man?s arrest nor do you see the officer attempt to arrest Kokesh without violence. It?s hard to tell to what extent anyone is resisting against the officers once they?re prone; while they don?t get any limbs free it?s clear they were physically resisting before that point. They could be straining against the hold the officers have on they ? it?s impossible to tell from the video.

I?m personally a big supporter of civil disobedience against unjust laws and I was all the way behind Kokesh and the others? till the second the officers attempted to arrest them. The law against peaceful non-disruptive demonstration is baloney, but it?s the current law of the land. Getting charged with it and fighting it ? although this is pretty pointless since there?s already a case in play that may be further appealed above the circuit court level - is great, but resisting that arrest is not.

Changing the law and changing public opinion via non-violent demonstration and challenging the constitutionality of an arrest is fine, but the additional escalation in this circumstance is entirely on Kokesh and the other demonstrators. They had the opportunity to get arrested for that they believe in and show the world the status quo ? the arrest of the couple gently swaying, for example, is a perfect demonstration of how silly this restriction is. Forcing the encounter to be violent by resisting arrest cheapens the whole thing and distracts from what should have been the core issue.

Kokesh and the others could have chosen to go limp and non-violently resist the arrest. Instead they made this mess. Too bad.

http://www.welovedc.com/2011/05/29/jefferson-memorial-dance-arrests-poorly-handled/
 
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Were they actually charged with anything or just released? Oh, and the fact that his show is broadcast by RT makes him complete scum. RT is a propaganda mouthpiece for the Russian government. The only reason it was picked up by RT is because Kokesh is a antiwar nutjob and highly critical of the US government.

Oh and:

Which has nothing to do with wether or not he has the right to express himself in a public place. The arrests in this case were completely unwarranted in the first place. There might be a case for charging some of them with resisting arrest, however, I'm one of those who think it's generally speaking silly to charge someone for resisting arrest if the arrest they're resisting is in itself delegitimate. That is of course, if they're not resisting by attacking the officer.

I'd say the same if he was a prowar nutjub neo-con, by the way.
 
Then said law would seem to directly violate the first ammendment, and I'm sure it's time for the courts to have a look. Especially given the actual nature of this dancing, and the reaction of the police. It makes the law look as silly as those found on web sites titled "silly laws in the United States".
 
Despite the language of the constitution, there are exceptions to a number of the amendments, including the first. For instance, one needs a permit to protest on public land, which the memorial is. That alone is enough to remove the protesters and arrest if they do not comply, regardless of the method of protesting.
 
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