Politics

From NY1 – there’s a video too.

The police waited 15 minutes before arresting them. Interesting.

A dozen AIDS activists were arrested outside Madison Square Garden Thursday afternoon after they stripped off their clothes and blocked traffic.

The men and women, members of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) said they staged the demonstration in front of the site of next weekÂ’s Republican National Convention in order to protest the Bush administrationÂ’s policies on AIDS.

“This protest is to tell the naked truth to President Bush and the Republican Party,” said ACT UP member Robert Dabney, who kept his clothes on to talk to reporters. “Our protestors are demanding number one that the president support full debt cancellation for the poorest nations in the world.”

The protestors were standing naked in the street for almost 15 minutes before police put them in handcuffs. Traffic, already slowed by sporadic closures in the area for security preparations, stood at a standstill in the meantime.

ACT UPers were also involved in the anti-Bush banner released in Grand Central last week.

Another cool protest today: a banner outside the Plaza Hotel.

I grabbed that image from the local NBC affiliate, which seems to have some good coverage of both protests.

Also, a new Quinnipiac poll says 71% of New Yorkers think protesters should be allowed to use Central Park during the convention. 68 percent approve of nonviolent civil disobedience!

House Speaker Dennis Hastert at Ground Zero in ’01 with Rudy Giuliani and Gov. Pataki.
AP

Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House and chairman of the Republican National Convention, says in a new book that New York politicians were guilty of an “unseemly scramble” for cash after 9/11.

David Sirota has more.

I love this story. I heard about it on the radio yesterday.

Bright blue tarps, painted with glaring yellow letters, are going up on dozens of rooftops in Brooklyn, under the flight paths into busy New York airports. Thousands of delegates and convention guests peering down at the city might see messages like “No more years” and “Re-defeat Bush.”

“We just hope that they’ll look down and ask themselves, ‘Why, why do they feel so strongly? Why is it that New York feels this way?’” said Genevieve Christy, who has painted more than 80 banners since thinking of the idea a few weeks ago.

The movement is so popular in her neighborhood that Christy, a 57-year-old consultant, is putting orders on a waiting list. She even brought supplies with her on vacation so she could keep working.

The NYC police and firefighters don’t have to worry about barricades, or someone telling them when and where they are allowed to protest.

From today’s New York Times:

And in recent weeks, the mayor has been drawn into another protest battle, with firefighters and police officers who have trailed him at his public events, holding loud and sometimes raucous demonstrations. Last week, they even gathered outside his home at 1 a.m., clearly violating the city’s noise code by yelling loudly and at length.

During at least two other protests, police officers and firefighters moved freely without barricades, at times blocking traffic in the street. A group of police officers and firefighters also swarmed the mayor outside a community meeting, forcing his detail to hustle him into his S.U.V., which was momentarily blocked before it pulled out.

No firefighters or police officers were arrested at any of these events. By contrast, during that same time, four women were arrested after trying to hang an antiwar banner from a hotel window in Midtown, and four other protesters who erected a tent near the south end of Central Park to protest Bush administration economic policies were arrested and detained for hours. The Police Department said that police officers and firefighters had not been given any special treatment.

The city has been signaling that it will deal with convention protesters forcefully, permit or no permit.