Peaceful protest only. Protesters start setting businesses on fire in US, they should be prepared to become human target practice. Obama will not be able to protect them.
There is a huge difference saying you are friends with left wing protestors who are basically pro labor and saying a radical terrorist who murdered thousands of people is my friend. I don't consider any radicals my friends. I don't think it's a stretch calling labor your friends.
Perhaps I misread the "tone" of your comment re my leftist friends. If you were referring merely to those who labor, sure, I think of them as friends.
You have a right to stand in the corner of a park and make a speech protesting the government. You don't have the right to come into my neighborhood at 3AM with a sound truck making the same argument. Time and place restrictions are constituional, provided they are reasonable. Interestingly, we are seeing a trend among the hard left to try to erode that distinction. They assemble a mob outside John Boehner's house. They assemble another mob and travel out to the Maryland suburbs to protest in front of some guy's house, with only a scared teenager home alone inside. The SEIU thugs hire homeless people to stand outside a hotel in downtown Washington and make a deafening racket all day. They do the same thing outside numerous office buildings because their demands have not been met by the building owners. Reasonable people would say it is extortion, not legitimate demonstrating, but the government does nothing. There is nothing in the Constitution that guarantees mobs a right to shut down a city or a state government, Wisconsin-style. In fact, such a right would be totally anithetical to the Founders' concepts of ordered liberty. Of course, modern day leftists have only contempt for the principles that made our country great, so they make idiotic statementslike yours, equating mob coercion with lawful attempts to present grievances. We all know that if Tea Party people had done any of this, there would be a hue and cry from Obama on down through their media cheerleaders decrying the "violence", etc. They reacted that way last summer when ordinary voters had the temerity to ask tough questions of the congressmen-for-life who pretend to represent us.
Violence alone is an insufficient condemnation. Looking at history you can see that people "speak to power", often with laudable requests, until they are blue in the face and get no reply. I don't condone it, I think it's regrettable, and I'd like to see this kind of thing headed off with a bit more planning. People all over the world are getting scared.
I was pleased to see the actual union protest went through without much real fuss they made their point and went home, the anarchist mob however should have been baton charged but of course these mobs are largely comprised of our future lawyers, scientists and proffesional class so they normally get a free pass.
I think it's safe to say that for the most part extremists are always with us at some steady percentage of the whole of the discontented. For that and other reasons it's probably best to not have a lot of discontent. ; )
Ricter, are you intentionally ignoring the point those on the right are making? It's not that there was a protest or that there are extremists on both sides, it's that the media ignores the violence and riots on the left and yet portrays tea party rallies as Armageddon. You don't see the duplicity? Really?
What "ignoring"? I saw the news last night and this morning, there's a lot of it re the violence, the damage, the cost, the police response, and analysis. But in general I am tiring of all the finger pointing.
Ricter if you had a Tea Party rally one day, and a left wing rally the same day somewhere else, and you had to bet your life on which one would end up with more violence and destruction, which one would you bet on? It would be a no brainer in my book, there was not a single incident of Tea Party violence caused by them at one of their rallies, and there was no destruction either. Yet every time these left wingers get together they inevitably bring with them hundreds of thousads, or millions of dollars in damages. Admittedly the wisconsin protests were somewhat peaceful, but they still ended up bringing millions of dollars in cleanup, any time there is a G20 summit the city who was unforttunate enough to have to host it, will end up having millions of dollars in damages all caused by lefties, and it is a guarantee to happen every single time.