Oh, now this makes me feel safe and secure
The mighty wurlitzer reports that if you want to protest against the Democratic Party at the (pretend) convention in Boston, you're perfectly free to do so, if you're willing to do it from inside a sealed cage under the green line El.
As much as the idea of locking fascists up appeals to me, I'm still kind of old fashioned about not wanting to lock people up until they've done something wrong; and last time I checked, freedom of assembly still was written into the US Constitution. I'm sure that freedom of assembly was written into the Soviet Constitution too, but I always thought there was a little bit more than state-mandated judaism (plus spinoffs; if the religious bigots in the USA ever realized that their G-d was the same G-d of the Jews, they'd rip the mandatory worship off the coin of the realm and the pledge of allegence so fast that there'd be burn marks in them.) that separated the United States from the largest and most spectacular of the many shining examples of how to run a centralized state into the ground.
I'm sure the fascist convention in NYC will be worse, but that doesn't excuse this stunt. The Democratic party should have just cancelled the convention when the whole idea of locking down Boston was floated.
update
Via a website called cpr4democracy, an article with pictures of the thrice-damned "free speech zone." Nice little democracy we had there; too bad we broke it.