This is Portland.
Is it so hard to believe the contingent of tantrum throwing bandana brats went looking for a fight?

If this was actually the police state they fantasize about living in we woudln't even be having this conversation.

Suppression, eh? Ex-cellent.

I've been in the Twin Cities for the past two weeks, not related to the convention, but I still saw plenty of frustrating police activity, without even particularly looking for it.

In the most obscene example, I witnessed a ring of bike cops encircling a huge group of about 150 people in a public park (not the streets!). Most of the people were begging to leave but the cops wouldn't let them and wouldn't give them any reason why they were being held. I almost got caught in it as I walked through the park, but missed it by a few minutes. It seemed completely arbitrary.

After holding them there for about an hour they finally swapped out the bike cops for riot cops and slowly started shrinking the ring. Then they got on the loudspeaker and said "you are under arrest. Please sit on the ground with your hands behind your and wait to be processed." Then they handcuffed them all one at a time. It was really absurd.

I've seen similar things enough (albeit on a smaller scale) to remain mostly unsurprised, but it was still infuriating.

Which article are you reading, D?

The MN one - I'm just referring to the fact that Portlanders are quite familiar with the whines of the perenially indignant.

D uses a worn-out M.O. here. He exaggerates the argument he opposes (where is police state mentioned in the article? it isn't, just police action) in order to try to discredit it. Don't buy into it, it debases a critical conversation about our freedom. His claim about police states is also wrong. As someone who has lived in an authoritarian country, I can attest that people continue to converse and blog about abuse of power. It might behoove D to consider that freedom isn't free; you have to work to keep it alive.

Perhaps he / she has simply never been at the other end of the abuse. It is hard for people who have not felt their freedom curtailed to relate to people who have.