NYPD forcibly evicts Occupy Wall Street, banning Press

I think I'd go to court. Make a big deal out of it with the others as a group.

"Lesson in free speech"? The fuck does that mean?

I think the idea behind the city's proposal is "free speech doesn't work that way".

They need to go to court then and make a proper ruckus, then.

IMHO, it'll show they have more balls then when they were protesting (and they had them then, too.).

edited 22nd Dec '11 5:25:14 AM by LostAnarchist

I'm getting "page not found." Though I agree that they should probably take it to court.

^ Remove the spaces in the URL.

LA Times doesn't get along with our parser's autoformatting because it uses commas in its URL's. Pretty much any time you get a 404 coming off these forums, check the URL and kill

• spaces inserted after commas, or
• hyphen-spaces inserted from a line overflow

And most of the time it'll work fine.

edited 22nd Dec '11 12:35:24 PM by Pykrete

Yeah, ran into that problem before. Just not enough times for it to be my first thought.

Try here.

Go to court. "lesson" "free speech" don't go together.

I'm watching last week's episodes of The Colbert Report on their site; it turns out that Scott Walker has gone and suggested that when there's a protest, there should be a $50 fee on protestors per hour of protesting per cop present. So if you've got a protest of, say, 100 people and there are 20 cops, and the protest goes on for 6 hours, they would fine the protestors (20*50*6=) $6000, which would be $60 per protestor.

My suspicion is that cops make less than $50 an hour when they're watching over a protest (though I suppose they might make more than that during the weekend and the night shifts they have to pull,) so that would mean that the state would be making money off of protests. What a great idea.

Of course, Colbert knew how to improve on it while simultaneously solving the question of where protestors would get the money to pay for exercising the right they're being rather directly denied: corporate sponsors. I must say that Colbert's suggestion is no less ridiculous than that of mr. Walker.

Steven knows how to flip a story.

edited 24th Dec '11 10:00:17 AM by vanthebaron

I like the part where Walker gets to blame protesters for disproportionate police response.

Rule of thumb to identify a despot: Any given guy who seeks to suppress a protest instead of let it peter out on its own or actually listen to it and change policy accordingly.

What's funny here is that the parody and the legitimate source both sound just as crazy.

I'm laughing, but it's not really that amusing...because I have to live in this goddamn country.

edited 24th Dec '11 9:14:46 PM by drunkscriblerian

I'm glad that Scott Walker isn't exactly mainstream even for his party, at least with ideas like this. One could almost surmise that he's simply doing his darndest to appeal to the Tea Party movement and the ultra-Conservatives in his state.

Matt Taibbi on CEO responses to OWS.

Wow, that kind of makes me mad. These guys have apparently missed the point by the length of several football fields.

I hate to burst your bubble there, but those ideas are quite mainstream with the Republicans these days (not that anti-unionism is a new thing with them; I can point back to at least the '40s and still find anti-unionism with the Republicans).

It's just that, I think, most other Republicans saw how poorly it went for Walker (who may very well be kicked out of the Governor's chair soon) and decided that they didn't have quite enough power to do it en masse yet...

...and way to conveniently ignore why they're not paying income tax, asshole.

USAF, you should know that in a political party, as with the national and international scale, there are tides; sometimes a party will go one way, then partially as a reaction to that, when new leadership arises, it'll go to other way for a while, always on the hunt for the next generation of career politicians and the next generation of voters.

The Republicans are currently on a Right-wing wave that started with Bush and got a new, huge burst of speed when Obama got elected and started to try to find compromise (which, considering the timing, turned out to be a mistake.) That wave of Right-wing politics was further strengthened by the Tea Party movement, and not it's going still further as a response to OWS and the successes that Obama has recently reached.

The party will come back around to a closer approximation of their normal position, and many if not most of the politicians riding the wave now will reverse some of their positions when the party becomes less radical. Scott Walker seems to be one of the genuinely fuck-nuts Right-of-the-Right-wingers that are now doing what they want to do, instead of trying to go all the way to make sure that as many Social Conservatives as possible vote for him.

edited 26th Dec '11 4:35:13 AM by BestOf

This wave af far-rightism in the republicans started in the 80s, with Reagen, not with Bush junior.

Not to claim that I know a whole lot about Republican politics during Clinton's Presidency, but I'm given to understand that they went a bit Left there to appeal to Democrat voters who were potentially gonna go over. When that didn't work, they had to run with a Right-wing jerk to compete for a different set of voters than the Democrats.

In fact, I distinctly recall seeing reports that Newt Gingrich has been roasted about his "Leftist" manoeuvres (which is to say, co-operation with Clinton to get anything done at all) when he was Speaker of the House.

...And this has been another derail.

edited 26th Dec '11 8:59:47 AM by BestOf

They were less Right-wing back then but social conservatism was all the rage.

Nothing has really changed, in terms of zealotry. They merely shifted their goalposts.

Modern American Conservatism goes back to Goldwater and Buckley. Well before Reagan.

And of course, I was talking of movement within the party, alternately to the Left and to the Right.