Tag: US

Cops arrest criminals – NYC Republican Convention style – Take Two

The Washington Post has an article today on the arrests of demonstrators in NYC during the Republican Convention. The article describes how a large majority of the people arrested by the NYPD were in fact completely innocent of any crime. It is not a crime to demonstrate, unless you live in North Korea or, apparently, New York City.

The keeper quote from the article is this wonderful quote from our Repulican Mayor Bloomberg:

Bloomberg has acknowledged that police may have arrested some innocent bystanders, but he suggested that it was partly their fault.”If you go to where people are protesting and don’t want to be part of the protest, you’re always going to run the risk that maybe you’ll get tied up with it,” he said on a weekly radio show on WABC.

What the f***?

-TPP

You have no privacy

The sorry state of privacy in the United States is once again demonstrated by the US Department of Transportation dismissing a complaint against Northwest Airlines. Northwest Airlines was one of the airlines supplying the US Government with passanger data, against their stated policies and expectations of their customers, to help “fight the War On Terrorism”.

Do you know who is using your information and how?

-TPP

Cops arrest criminals – NYC Republican Convention style

A firsthand report from a peaceful demonstration in Union Square Park on August 31st 2004 shows how the cops trawled, literally, the demonstrators into a sidestreet, blocked both ends of the street with orange netting and arrested everyone, after sitting them down on the street for more than two hours, then bused with city buses to temporary holding pens at Pier 57.

People were arrested in several locations of the city in exactly the same way.

Apparently the whole thing was planned beforehand, but when the arrested got to Pier 57, it was clear the cops had not planned that part too well or simply didn’t care about people’s medical emergencies, lack of sleep or feeding the detainees with proper food.

The detainees are the same people, who were held in custody too long and subsequently caused a Supreme Court Judge fine New York City $1,000 per detainee for not releasing them.

Funny how the democratic convention in Boston didn’t produce such “results”.

-TPP

National call-in date to fight the INDUCE Act

The people at Save Betamax are trying to organized a national call-in day on Tuesday Sept 14th. Spread the word and call your congress critter this Tuesday.

The INDUCE Act, for those of you who live under a rock :), is the piece of legislation written by the RIAA and MPAA lackies making illegal any device or act that could potentially be used for piracy. That would include writing about methods of piracy, supplying parts to digital music players, manufacturing mp3/wma/aac players, VCR players, DVD recorders, Tivo and anything else RIAA/MPAA thinks might fall under the proposed law.

-TPP

God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat.

One thing that really, really bothers me about the republicans this election year, is how they’ve somehow adopted Christianity as the official party emblem.

It is as if non-republican is less of a Christian and as if the republican party was on a mission from God sent to save all liberals, democrats and other non-believers from eternal damnation. The religious right is acting as if George W. Bush was the reicarnation of Jesus Christ himself.

When exactly did God become a republican?

-TPP