Portland? For Realz?

I don’t know, I think it can really only be considered coordinated in the loosest possible sense. It’s a bunch of mayors with a similar problem — their major donors are threatening to pull further support unless they do something about the damn hippies — so they chat among themselves to figure out what they can get away with. And the police are apparently more than happy to break some hippie-commie-anarchist heads.

The mayors all rest easy in the knowledge that photographs of protesters with bleeding heads and granny after she’s been pepper-sprayed will not be seen by the majority of Americans, and many of those that do see the pictures will be easily persuaded to believe that they are an anomaly or the protesters must have done something to deserve it. At the end of the day, it’s not the opinion of the 99% that concern them, it’s the opinion of their donors that counts.

TJ/ Oh, hey. Just wanted to brag let you know that I met a Tahrir Square protester today. He’s 27 years old and studying in the states. When did he join the protest? When the gov’t turned off their cell phones. There’s much more to the story, but yeah, that’s when the kids got pissed. His mother was marching before he was.