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From Democracy Now: Anaheim Police Kill 2 Latinos, Wound Protesting Residents:

Police in the California city of Anaheim are facing allegations of murder and brutality after fatally shooting two Latino men over the weekend and firing rubber bullets at crowds of protesters. On Saturday, Anaheim police shot and killed 24-year-old Manuel Diaz after he reportedly ran away from a group of officers who confronted him in an alleyway. Diaz was unarmed. One witness reported that Diaz had his back to the officers when he was shot in the buttocks. Police then allegedly fired another bullet through his head as he fell to the ground. Two of Diaz’s sisters demanded justice for their slain brother.

Correna Chavez: "Once they even shot him in the leg, and he went down, the cop continued and shot him in the head. Like, what is that about? My brother did not have a weapon on him at all."

Lupe Diaz: "These cops need to know what they’ve done to us, to our family, especially my mom. And we’re going to speak for him, and we’re going to bring this to justice."

Hours after Diaz’s death, a chaotic scene broke out when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at a crowd of local residents protesting the shooting. A number of people were wounded, included several children. Video was taken of a police dog rushing a man trying to protect his infant child. More than 24 hours after Diaz’s death, police shot dead another Latino resident in Anaheim, Joel Acevedo. Police say Acevedo was suspected in a car robbery. The circumstances around his death remain unconfirmed.

And here's more with some updates from Raw Story: California police fire into crowd of women and children during near-riot:

A near-riot broke out in Anaheim, California on Saturday after a police shooting left one man dead and angry witnesses began throwing bottles at police offers. Police responded by firing bean bags and rubber bullets into a crowd of terrified women and children and even loosed a police dog on one woman and her baby.

Residents, who have recently been complaining about alleged police violence, told KCAL 9 News that Manuel Diaz was running away from police who had attempted to speak with him when he was shot from behind with a bullet that hit him in the buttocks. He fell to his knees and was struck in the head by another bullet. Police handcuffed the motionless man and he was taken to the hospital, where he died three hours later. [...]

Update: On Sunday afternoon, protesters gathered in the lobby of the Anaheim Police Department chanting “No justice, no peace” and “Justice for Manuel.”

The demonstration came at the same time as a police press conference, during which it was announced that two officers involved in the fatal shooting have been placed on paid leave, pending a full investigation of the incident. Police Chief John Walter also indicated that the dog which rushed into the crowd biting people had accidentally escaped from a police vehicle.

“We are extremely sorry for the people who were bit,” Welter stated. “The city will be responsible for all medical bills associated with the dog. The canine officer responsible for the dog is devastated by this.”

More at our sister site Occupy America here: Anaheim Police Open Fire on Innocent Men, Women & Children.



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On this weekend's The McLaughlin Group on PBS, after host John McLaughlin asked his panel whether or not the Occupy Wall Street is going to have any impact on the upcoming presidential race next year and whether the movement is "transitory or enduring", Pat Buchanan responded by comparing the movement to the demonstrations we saw in the 1960's, proving once again that he still hasn't quit reliving his days from back in the Nixon White House.

BUCHANAN: It's going to be very damaging to the President for this reason if he gets too close to it because it’s going end very, very badly with these folks in the winter, and they’re not going to be getting publicity, they’re going to be acting up and acting badly, like the worst of the demonstrators in the 60's.

MCLAUGHLIN: You mean overnight camping? Things like that?

BUCHANAN: Well not just overnight camping. They’re going to start fighting with the cops.

Eleanor Clift followed up by noting that it was a Iraq veteran and not the police who was harmed during the Occupy Oakland protests and asked Buchanan which side he was going to blame for that. And both Clift and Page responded the they believe the group has staying power. As Page noted, they've already succeeded in changing the debate in America from deficit reduction, which is all you heard from these Villagers in the corporate media, to income disparity and the wealth gap, as demonstrated by the fact that they were even having that very conversation during this segment.

Buchanan and his ilk have been using the tactics of divide and conquer and fear for political gain in order to divide the working class against each other for decades now. I'm sure he's hoping they'll manage to do the same thing by demonizing the Occupy Wall Street movement as we've from him and his cohorts on Fox and in the right wing media ever since the movement started picking up steam and they could no longer ignore them completely.



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You can take Bill O'Reilly's dismissal as the best endorsement Occupy Wall Street can get.

Here's O'Reilly from this Monday's show pretending that he's ever had anything besides derision, belittlement, mockery or scorn for the people out there protesting Wall Street, ever since the movement they would have preferred to ignore started.

O'REILLY: I'm an independent, alright? And I looked at this group in the beginning and gave them a shot and wanted to know what they were all about, but once they started to attack our personnel here, including John Stossel and and Geraldo and all of that, I said, you know what? I don't want any part of these people.

I guarantee you ninety percent, ninety percent of Americans Juan are saying the same thing... we don't like them, we don't trust them, we think they're radicals and if anybody throws in with them, we're going to vote against that anybody. And that's what's going on on Juan.

WILLIAMS: No. But remember, about sixty percent of Americans tell pollsters, they are in fact in sympathy with the idea...

O'REILLY: Wait until you see the new poll on it.

WILLIAMS: … with the idea that the Wall Street people are a bunch of greedy bums.

O'REILLY: Wait until you see the new poll on it. Okay? It ain't gonna' be that sixty. It's going to be down to forty or thirty five, and the more loons like you saw over the weekend... and they will. Because to continue, Mary Katharine to get themselves in the media, they've got to do this stuff. The media's tired of this story now!

WILLIAMS: If they become anarchists... if they are doing stuff like in that video...

O'REILLY: They're already anarchists Juan! Want do you want them to do? Burn the house down?

Media Matters has been monitoring Fox's coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement and has more on that here -- A Guide To The Smear Campaign Against Occupy Wall Street:

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SNL took a shot at New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his response to the Occupy Wall Street protests, painting him as deciding to use the protests as a way to promote New York tourism and now being supportive of the protesters.

The best one I think was the attempt by the city to run the protesters out of there permanently because they wanted to clean park:

BLOOMBERG: Whatever you may have heard, I want to make demonstrators as welcome and as comfortable as possible. Yet, sometimes things do not go as planned. This week my office had arranged to clear the park of protesters so the area could be power washed. The protesters became upset and some went so far as to suggest that the power washing was simply a ruse to break up the demonstration. Nonsense. As all New Yorkers know, various parts of the city are routinely power washed. Power washing is a New York institution and without it, the Big Apple would lose its reputation as the world's cleanest and most thoroughly sanitized city – with streets, as the saying goes, you can eat off.

SNL also had Bloomberg suggesting that he's really not all that rich and the protesters go show up at other rich people's homes that they should be upset with besides himself such as George Soros, Jamie Dimon and Alex Rodriguez.

SNL is always pretty milquetoast when it comes to them weighing in on the political issues of the day and this was no exception, but the fact that the movement made its way to the opening segment of Saturday Night Live at least means that for now, those out there protesting are garnering some national attention and that hopefully their concerns are not going to be ignored by the media and easily dismissed as just some fringe movement that does not represent the frustrations of a good deal of the American public.

The fact that Bloomberg was being mocked as opposed to the protesters as we've seen from Fox, who sneers at them 24/7, is at least a step in the right direction with our political dialog and hopefully gets more people to pay attention to why they're out there to begin with and looking into it if they haven't been paying attention already.



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Project much Eric? I think Bolling's doing his best to replace Glenn Beck as the most petulant talking head on Fox News. Filling in for Neil Cavuto, Bolling brought in Fox regular Star Parker to call the Occupy Wall Street protesters a bunch of immature, smelly children who are lazy and don't want to work.

The "get out and get a job" meme to mock the protesters seems to be the latest talking point out of all the conservative pundits out there sneering at the people who've taken to the streets. Parker's done pretty well for herself going from being on government welfare to wingnut welfare, which apparently pays a lot better. Not everyone is willing to sell their soul to be a right-wing talking head though, Star.

Bolling: As the bailouts continue there, the protests continue here. My next guest says, 'what part of broke, don't these spoiled children understand?' Syndicated columnist Star Parker joins me now. So Star, they do seem like petulant little children. It's not fair to us, we hate Capitalism. (His words) Well, how about going out and trying to find a job instead?

And what would one of theses shows on Fox be if they didn't kowtow to Wall Street as well to try to explain their behavior to their viewers. It's not the bankers fault that they took all sorts of risks, over-leveraged themselves and crashed our economy and then tightened up lending standards where small businesses couldn't get loans after we bailed them out. No, the problem is they're over-regulated. Yeah, that's the ticket.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Please keep the Solidarity Pizzas coming. We're up to 22 cities and counting.)



What a shock... Fox News appears to have again lied to us about how they were treated by the protesters in Wisconsin. From Raw Story and there wasn't a better headline for this than the one they already posted -- Fox News reporter appears to have lied about being ‘punched’ by protester:

Fox News has been making a lot of hay about one of their reporters allegedly being "punched" by a protester in Madison, Wisconsin.

Turns out, that didn't happen.

Mike Tobin, reporting from amid the massive demonstration on Friday, claimed that one of the protesters "punched" him in the arm. In another broadcast, he claimed a man threatened to break his neck.

In both cases, supporting evidence for these claims was not broadcast -- yet still, Tobin's reports have been widely cited across conservative blogs that seem eager to depict union workers as hateful and violent.

What's worse, Tobin's allegation that he was assaulted might have slipped past without rebuttal were it not for a camera-equipped bystander, who captured the scene.

Turns out, someone merely touched his shoulder, as evidenced in the video below. The incident he claimed was a "punch" could instead be described as a pat, at most.

That was apparently enough for him to later declare that even after being "punched, he was just too nice of a guy to press charges.

More there so go read the rest but as Raw Story and our own Dave Neiwert also reported, apparently Fox anchors and reporters really don't like it when Madison protesters tell the truth that Fox lies to their viewers. Too bad they also feel the need to make up being punched by them as well. It looks like they're taking a page straight out of Andrew Breitbart's school of "journalism" here.



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Wisconsin state Senator Glenn Grothman apparently doesn't think much of the protesters spending the night in the capitol building and used the excuse that they're just a bunch of "slobs" trashing the building as the reason why Governor Scott Walker decided to lock them out.

Apparently this is something he's been throwing out there a lot lately as this blog which is devoted to tracking him has taken note of -- What did Glenn Grothman get wrong this week? .

I guess after this greeting he got from the protesters today while trying to enter the capitol building that they were locked out of, he's even less happy with those "slobs". I refuse to link to him, but this video is posted at The Gateway Pundit's site, or as Media Matters calls him, the Dumbest Man on the Internet, under the breathless headline Breaking: Wisconsin GOP Senator Glenn Grothman Mobbed at Wisconsin Capitol. I guess if by "mobbed" you mean followed and having a bunch of people yell "Shame!" at you and then after being talked to by one of the Democratic congressmen and some others, people leaving with chants of "Peaceful protests!".

Tensions are running high right now in Wisconsin, but I didn't see anyone looking like they were going to threaten the Senator. I'm sure he doesn't like being followed or yelled at by a large group of people and I'm quite sure that's an extremely intimidating situation for anyone to find themselves in. That said, it doesn't look like anyone was out to do any physical harm to him either. When you're out to destroy people's livelihoods and they're upset with your for it, sometimes democracy is messy and you're going to end up with pissed off people yelling at you.

It's funny how the right seemed to love this stuff when it was bused in teabaggers screaming at Democratic members of Congress during the health care debate, one of them apparently armed that wingnut and now sadly CNN contributor Dana Loesch defended here, or when there were gun nuts showing up outside an Obama rally in Phoenix with assault rifles, but when one of their own elected officials who catered to them has a group of actual grass roots protesters yelling at him, he's being "mobbed" by some dangerous crowd of "union thugs." Quite the double standard out of these so-called "lovers of democracy" I'd say. Guns and threats of shooting someone and lots of yelling by our side sponsored by the Koch brothers, that's just freedom of speech. For union members who aren't packing heat but just making a lot of noise, not so much.

Transcript below the fold.

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Arpaio threatens to jail immigration law protesters

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Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he would not hesitate to arrest protesters that were blocking his jail.

"It appears that there are groups, individuals that are gearing up for some civil disobedience if this law does take effect," Stephanopoulos noted Wednesday. "Are you prepared for that? What are you going to do about it?"

"Yeah," replied Arpaio. "I'm ready for it. I hear a rumor they want to block my jails. So, if they want to block the jails, they can have a little trip in the jail."

"So, we're not going to put up with any civil disobedience just because they want to show -- give a message through the media about this situation that is occurring here in Arizona."



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Chris Matthews allows 2nd Amendment protesters Larry Pratt and Skip Coryell to dig their own hole while trying to get them to explain what freedoms are being taken away from them and what right the 2nd Amendment protects. The one thing that's obvious from watching them is that their irrational fears and blind hatred for the President has little to do with anyone taking away their guns.

For a reminder on who these guys are, here's what David Neiwert shared with us on Pratt back in August of 2009.

But then, that shouldn't be terribly surprising. As hate-group expert Brian Levin, the second guest, tries to explain, the GOA has a long history of right-wing extremism, dating back to the days in the 1980s when it was part of Willis Carto's white-nationalist operation. The main figure in all this was GOA's longtime and current leader, Larry Pratt.

Moreover, as the ADL explains, Pratt actually played a critical role in the formation of the militia movement in the 1990s:

In 1992, Larry Pratt, leader of a radical gun- rights group [the GOA] and an advocate of the formation of militias, issued a statement in the wake of the Rodney King riots urging the Los Angeles Police Department to "take advantage of what the Founding Fathers called the unorganized militia" in order to forestall further unrest. Many people initially joined the fledgling militia movement largely as a way to protect more aggressively their right to bear arms; even today, gun-related issues dominate many of the newsletters published by militia groups.

The SPLC has more on Pratt.

David Corn has this on Skip Coryell:

On April 19, an assortment of gun-rights groups will mount the Second Amendment March at the grounds of the Washington Monument. On the Web site for the march, its founder, Skip Coryell, calls it a "peaceful" event. But these folks, as the Violence Policy Center points out in a new report, are pushing a virulent strain of anti-government extremism that certainly could drive a body to take violent action.

Last month in an article for Human Events, a conservative magazine, Coryell noted that one aim of the march is to imply the threat of violence:

My question to everyone reading this article is this: "For you, as an individual, when do you draw your saber? When do you say "Yes, I am willing to rise up and overthrow an oppressive, totalitarian government?"

Is it when the government takes away your private business?

Is it when the government rigs elections?

Is it when the government imposes martial law?

Is it when the government takes away your firearms?

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating the immediate use of force against the government. It isn't time, and hopefully that time will never come. But one thing is certain: "Now is the time to rattle your sabers." If not now, then when?

... I understand that sounds harsh, but these are harsh times. ...

I hear the clank of metal on metal getting closer, but that's not enough. The politicians have to hear it too. They have to hear it, and they have to believe it.

Come and support me at the Second Amendment March on April 19th on the Washington Monument grounds. Let's rattle some sabers and show the government we're still here.

Notice that Coryell says he's not advocating the immediate use of force against the government. That sure makes it sound like he's revving up the gun-rights troops for possible rebellion down the road.

Transcript below the fold.

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March 23, 2010 CBC The National

Right-wing antagonist Ann Coulter cancelled a University of Ottawa address last night after organizers decided it wasn’t safe to speak.

The move followed boisterous demonstrations outside that sponsors of the appearance feared could turn violent.

“There was a risk there could be physical violence,” said Canadian conservative activist Ezra Levant, who was scheduled to introduce Ms. Coulter.