An arrest should be merely an arrest, not a street-conviction or a street-sentencing-and-punishment. This story about the pepper-spraying of an 84-year old Occupy protester in Seattle makes me think that at least some police officers have decided to render their own version of justice on the street, rather than take protesters into custody using the minimum amount of force necessary.
Listen carefully to the #OWS protesters and the journalists trying to cover this story: More from Free Press:
The NYPD is using more than words to fight journalists. This morning, five reporters were arrested, another was put in a choke hold, and others were subjected to police harassment. Journalists are being swept up in ongoing police actions happening right now in New York City. In fact, since the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement two months ago, 18 journalists have been arrested2, 3 and countless others have been roughed up, tear-gassed and pepper sprayed. There have even been reports of police using high-powered strobe lights to disable video cameras and stop people from recording their actions.
Matt Taibbi describes the motivation of the Occupy Protesters:
But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
As reported by Common Cause and Bob Edgar:
[T]hree members of our Supreme Court were guests last Thursday at an annual fundraising dinner sponsored by the Federalist Society, a self-styled association of conservative and libertarian lawyers that is providing much of the intellectual firepower behind efforts to overturn the landmark health care reform law passed last year. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were honorees and speakers at the black tie event and Justice Samuel Alito, a regular at Federalist Society gatherings, was in the audience, according to a program prepared for the dinner.Edgar anticipates the question of whether this activity is ethically acceptable. The quick answer is that justices on the United States Supreme Court are not subject to any code of ethics:
[This activity] clearly violates the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges, a set of ethical standards the Supreme Court helps enforce on lower federal courts but has refused to impose on itself.
The UK Guardian offers this story and this sobering two-minute video demonstrating global warming: