The Denver Police Union is selling this t-shirt to raise funds and gloat about their brutish behavior at the DNC. The front of the shirt bears the R-68 logo encased in a circle/slash. The police claim that the t-shirt was made after the convention as a funny joke, but at a recent R-68 meeting founder Glenn Spagnuolo claimed that he saw the shirts prior to the start of the convention and that every police officer wore one under his uniform during the DNC.
The dishonesty and arrogance of the Denver PD isn’t surprising in the least, but their abject stupidity is a little shocking. Do they forget that they’re defendants in several legal cases arising from their inappropriate behavior during the convention? Do they think that these t-shirts won’t betray their thuggish attitude toward protestors? I can only imagine that their legal counsel isn’t happy about this little fundraiser.
I think police violence should be met with even greater retaliatory violence. It’s the only thing the bullies/cowards seem to understand.
Well the first amendment rights do have limits and to seek those limits is a form of self-abuse. In America, selling T-Shirts to make money seems OK with me! I want one of those T-shirts extra large please. Is that possible Marie Walden?
“The edge is not the extreme; it is the boundary between old, tired beliefs and new, unexplored territory. Those on the edge of the pack are the wild ones whose positions provoke a rethinking of assumptions, who spark epiphanies and change lives. These are the people I want to know.” You definitely want to know me! I seek all of that within grassroots constitutional law as this ongoing raping of our Constitution is getting really old! What those cop bullies did, I do not know, but it is a two-way street, meaning there are bad cops and good police officers. I just want that T-shirt to remind me, it is OK to be on the edge of the pack with our constitutional framers.
While I do support their right to be stupid and ignorant, it is however frightening to see our “public servants” basically becoming thugs of the state. Hitler would be proud of this group of people. This is just more evidence of the building tyranny and a general hardening of hearts that is rampant among the military and police forces of our nation. I am deeply patriotic, and that is why things like this are disturbing. Our government is intended to be an agent of the people, not vice versa. We are amidst the same problems that gave rise to this great nation from the beginning, yet people want to take sides and treat things like they are at a football game. I hope people will start to open their minds and question themselves and the team for which they are playing.
Stephen, I couldn’t agree more with what you are saying here. To me it has been greatly disturbing to see so many getting themselves into the Rah! Rah! Rah! mode like cheerleaders at some sort of bizarro high stakes college football game. And like at a football game, the political game between the two corporatized political teams is just about as meaningless as whether Texas wins, or Oklahoma does? It is a game and not much besides that.
We do need a political system that is a democracy in action and not a football game though. But I see those who voted for the Democrats no more inclined in going in that direction than the Sarah Palin of religious nuts crowd is. Instead, they are looking for easy solutions, and a football game is just that. It is an easy ‘solution’ to dealing with boredom, depression, and the lack of substance to life in America.
I strongly disagree with Jonah’s idea that the next 11 weeks of Dubya’s reign is in any way the real danger we face. No, Jonah, it is the next four years that is the danger to us all. I strongly disagree with the bash the Republicans notion that John McCain-Sarah Palin actually fed into. The Democrats of Obama-Biden-Clinton offer no more solutions than they would have had to the real situation now being faced.
And above all, I disagree with the Democrat Party’s refrain of victory that we should all work together to bring about change. Translated easily enough, that means that they plan to only advance the same program as before. They will be advancing the Republican Program and are looking to work in bipartisan manner with these Dixiecrat corporate forces as they continue the bipartisan American program of terrorist aggression and international militarism. That’s what the Democrats have been doing for the last 16 years… no make that for way more than a century! That is Obama’s political agenda….to do it better than Dubya was doing.
Tony, what makes you think that you are more qualified to address the issues we face than anyone else? What superior knowledge do you possess? What lofty government experience or education enhances your resumé? What workable solutions do you offer?
Watching you bitch and moan and mock and deride doesn’t move anyone to action. Even with insight on your side, your words rarely educate, elucidate, encourage, or motivate anyone. People need inspiration and a shared vision to work toward new solutions. You are not a change agent. You are an arrogant know-it-all, like Dubya.
‘Tony, what makes you think that you are more qualified to address the issues we face than anyone else? What superior knowledge do you possess?’
Let’s see, Marie? I have been an antiwar protester for some 4 decades now. Does that qualify me to possibly have an opinion in your eyes about the meaning of yesterday’s election results that differs from your own? Apologies that as an American dissident that I might not have the stature of a Noam Chomsky here at NMT with you, but I think that I have been involved in protest politics a tad longer than you have, Dear.
Now let me turn around and ask you your own question and observe what the real answer to it might well be.
Marie, what makes you think that you are more qualified to address the issues we face than anyone else? What superior knowledge do you possess?
Might the answer be that you once married a rich doctor and that others did not? That just doesn’t cut the mustard much with many of us at all, Marie.
I am being rude here, but one gets tired of having you always interject personal abuse (instead of any real political commentary) into your disagreements with others.
What does protesting war have to do with anything?
I don’t pretend to have superior knowledge about much of anything, nor do I rant and mock and scoff at other people’s beliefs. You are wise about a whole host of issues, and we could all benefit from hearing your perspective, if only you could tone down the condescension and actually explain what the higher road would be. Instead you use lots of !!!!!! to tell us all how stupid and uneducated we are????? And offer no loftier ideologies!!!!!
The only thing that being married to a rich doctor qualifies me to speak about are the particular difficulties I encountered being married to one particular rich doctor. And I don’t think that would be appropriate, or interesting to anyone.
‘What does protesting war have to do with anything?’
Marie, it has everything to do with what a Left political blog in the United States should be about. It has everything to do with what being a political dissident in this country means. It has everything to do with who I am, in short.
I doubt that you would have asked this question of somebody like Daniel Berrigan or like Noam Chomsky, both who have like me, spent decades of their lives at much risk to their careers and even their ability to stay alive itself, all to continually oppose US imperialism? I take it as a ‘rant and mock and scoff’ on your part that I even have to start to tell you that I consider it an important thing that I do, too, having spent over 40 years protesting one war after another in our society’s continual global combat against other peoples. That came at no small personal cost to me to keep up this activity, that you and others disparage as being meaningless.
Let me say just one thing about Not My Tribe and my participation here. that if I considered it incapable of being anything more than yet another cheerleading blog for Democratic Party tied liberalism, I wouldn’t waste my time for a second writing here but would voluntarily take a hike. That is why I can’t just sluff off your personal insults about me being merely grumpy, negative and defective in character when I speak out and analyze the Democratic Party flip the public has just been convinced by Big Money to make. Should I just say,
‘Oh Marie, you are so right. I am now being too negative and too grumpy to say such bad thinks about such a hero as Barack Obama are now’ ???
Should I do that… simply because you don’t understand and haven’t figured out what protesting war has to do with anything?
The long and short of it is, Marie, that I have been thinking about how the US destroys other peoples’ lives and trying to find ways to oppose it more effectively for all of 4 decades now, so why are you still at the first letter of the alphabet here understanding this, and asking folk innocent questions? Have a little humility (which is what you are supposedly asking of me) and stop being offended by what I might be writing about and think some little about why it actually does mean something to be protesting warfare that our robbed taxes are buying? Why it does mean something to ‘waste’ our time trying to help those who cannot help themselves, simply because they are poor and under attack far away from where you and I live?