The article explores the issue of a citizen journalist and activist being arrested arrested for photographing a parade. The arrest has raised many issues of freedom of the press, how police intelligence is handled and so on.

This story covers a vital first-amendment and fourth-amendment issue. First, Kudos for covering it in a serious way. Second, the really chilling part, sort of buried in the story, is that it is obvious that the police overstepped their bounds by classifying people who "might disrupt" the event as being in the same class as actual death-threat candidates. The police chief should be fired, to make an example of him. The article does not go into the broader trend, evidenced in NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's imposition of open air cages dubbed, in elegant oxymoronic terms, "free speech zones." This creeping extension of executive privilidge, from the President, to governors, to lowly mayors, like other forms of corruption, will ... More »

small bore view of the political climate here in CT and the once brave and independent Hartford Courant.

This story covers an important event, with reasonable detail. The story is a little hard to follow; it isn't easy to keep track of the affiliations of some of the individuals. The most significant failing, however, is the lack of any quotation from the blog entry that allegedly threatened to disrupt the event. The reader shouldn't have to go looking for that.

I come from a very conservative family, and I now associate mostly with staunch liberals. Both groups have always warned not to trust the government too much to protect free speech, and always to be watchful for speech-oppressive abuses of power. Therefore this is an important story.