There were cops everywhere. Some stood in packs around their police cars, others patrolled the fenced-off perimeter on foot while motorcycle cops circled the block in pairs. There were reinforcements outside LAPD’s massive headquarters, conveniently located across the street from City Hall…

When a riot squad from the New York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. The NYPD deployed “counterterrorism measures” to mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti…

Most don’t realize that much of the abuse happened while protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media. And the disgraceful truth is that lot of the abuse was police sadism, pure and simple…

Update: Yasha Levine was released from prison on bail, and is heading back to his apartment. The experience was worse than he’d expected, but he’ll explain more on that as soon as he’s back and able to focus. Looks like…

UPDATE: Yasha was finally freed on bail just a few minutes ago, after two nights in jail, He just told me he’s exhausted and yet still quite shocked by how harshly the protesters were treated after the embedded reporters were…

I spent this past Sunday night reporting from Occupy LA, along with at least 2,000 others who came in solidarity to help the camp stand up to a threatened LAPD raid.  The defense of the camp, or the battle to…

So let’s return to Barker. He can’t even spell “hippie” correctly. He’s presumably a libertarian (the anti-immigration and “53%” identifiers are tells). Libertarians profess to be against the coercive use of state power, yet Barker eagerly advocates inflicting severe injuries onto protestors with no due process. So he looks to be an authoritarian and a hypocrite.