Roundup of TN Blogs and Roundup of Americans By Republicans

The weekly roundup of the best in Tennessee blogs from Tenn Views is - as much of the nation last week - taking on the most-watched televised political convention ever. Rather than reprint all of it, you can click here.

However, for this Sunday, how about the news of SWAT Teams are out in force in pre-emptive strikes against groups the Republicans perceive as real threats.

Writer Glenn Greenwald has been on the scene:

"There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined."

Wonder how they did this? The RNC working with the FBI decided these folks are terrorists - because, you know, it's the Axis of Evil Vegetarians that threaten us.

"Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force -- an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI -- was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate "vegan groups" and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

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"Yet how is our own Government's behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation's establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?"

I was thinking of offering a speech to the Republican Convention just as I did for the Democrats. Perhaps a virtual speech is best - of course it may mean being threatened with raids and jail time.

Just the legacy of the Republicans in the White House, folks, nothing to see here, move along.