Police State USA

From Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald of Salon, this amazing story:

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.

Please note that these are people merely suspected of exercising free speech. Note that what was being seized was not bomb-making materials, but political pamphlets.

This is very depressing.

For anyone interested in following what's happening to the RNC protesters, I highly recommend the Indymedia network, specifically the Twin Cities Indymedia site. I mention it because there's apparently no mainstream media coverage of this whatsoever (with the arguable exception of the Minneapolis Star Tribune). Indymedia, of course, is all over it - and they've had plenty of journalists arrested already.

Let's be clear about what's happening: Law enforcement officers are cracking down on would-be legal protesters to protect a political party that's intimately entwined with innumerable corporations. Very fascistic. Very authoritarian. Very American.

UPDATE: CNN has a blurb.