TRAVEL ADVISORY: I strongly advise any and all liberals against traveling to Wisconsin unless you are going to be civilly disobedient in which case, prepare for arrest.
Scott Walker has been arresting people lately. Over 200 to be exact, including a fourteen-year-old, several older women (remember Texas?), a member of the Madison City Council, and a journalist.
Apparently, Scott Walker has never heard of the First Amendment. Which is not surprising considering Michele Bachmann’s thoughts on this country’s history.
The journalist, Mathew Rothschild, was covering the protests. Here is an except from his story:
Then I saw some state police officers move in to arrest a couple of the Raging Grannies, including my friend Bonnie Block.
So, as I’ve done every time I’m covering the capitol, I started to take pictures of the officers making the arrest. And then I followed the officers as they took Block, handcuffed and still defiantly singing, toward the elevator.
I was hoping to get a picture of Block as she entered the elevator, the kind of picture that has been taken many times in the last couple of weeks.
But the police officers said to stand back. I said I was a journalist, the editor of The Progressive magazine.
“You can’t be here,” they said.
“I’m with the press,” I said. “I have a right to be here.”
Whereupon, without a warning that I’d be arrested, Officer S. B. Mael grabbed my hands and put them behind my back, cuffed them, and said, “Obstruction.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Block said, as she was put in the elevator.
“This is getting absurd, guys,” I said to the officers, who refused to engage with me.
They took me to the basement of the capitol, frisked me, and put me in a chair.
I looked up “Obstruction charge” which got me to “obstruction of justice” on the Free Legal Dictionary:
A criminal offense that involves interference, through words or actions, with the proper operations of a court or officers of the court.
Rothschild states that he was doing something he had done for weeks before: taking pictures. Arresting a person is not a private thing-why would it be, with all those adds for public arrest records online?
The real reason is this: they want to fend off all the big publications so that the protests will die down.
So I request, my dear reader, for you to mention these protests and arrests on your blog/Facebook/Twitter/whatever, or even with your friends so that people know these protests are taking place and about what Scott Walker’s doing.
Want another incentive? Scott Walker will be up for re-election in 2014. Wisconsin needs a governor who will respect freedom of assembly, speech, and the press. Or not Scott Walker. Believe me, I’ve not even started talking about abortion.
Let’s just hope nobody arrests Democratic campaign workers.
Stop Right-wing Extremism 