Harvard student blogger Matt Bieber has written yesterday that he was baselessly arrested by Hudson police while at a Mitt Romney event on January 9. Police said that he was identified by campaign staff as someone who was present at a previous protest which Bieber claims to have not attended. His experience is published at his blog here.
The previous protest that he was alleged to have been at could have possibly been one which I had attended in a journalistic capacity. Occupy New Hampshire participants had gathered outside of Romney’s campaign headquarters on Elm Street in Manchester. Some protesters waived signs over the windows while the presidential candidate talked to supporters inside. This occurred during the initial occupation of Veterans Park back in October.
The facts in Bieber’s case are vaguely similar to the circumstances that resulted in the arrest of Dave Ridley at the Radisson in Nashua on May 25.
At a campaign stop in Keene, NH – Rick Santorum is asked if he’s ever googled himself. He’s also serenaded by the Shire Choir. Stay tuned to FreeKeene.com for a longer video showing more of what happened at the campaign event when the Shire Choir sang during his speech.
Working in Democratic politics can do strange things to libertarians. Part of the job is selling libertarian economics to hardcore liberals– and that’s a daunting task. Perhaps impossible. It led me to re-evaluate major aspects of my libertarianism (Liberals support x. Libertarians oppose x. But is libertarian philosophy really opposed to x?) and take a much closer look at liberal ideas.
When I started, I was already skeptical of some core libertarian arguments, due to my near-obsession with academic economics. My work with liberalism opened the floodgates. Eventually I was forced to admit that I was probably wrong in advocating free market anarchism and adopted a position awkwardly in between liberalism and libertarianism.
Since then I’ve struggled to find a way to describe my views. “Left-libertarian” was an obvious candidate, but it seems that most people using the term are anarchists, and I’m not nearly that radical. Taking a cue from Will Wilkinson, I started to use “liberaltarian“. But, in many cases, people simply interpreted that as “libertarian”, defeating the purpose.
For a while, if asked, I would just shake my head and laugh nervously. Finally I gave up and called myself a liberal.
Satirical supporters of republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich were prevented from attending a speaking event at the Radisson, where Gingrich accepted the endorsement of NH House Speaker William O’Brien. I arrived at the event just as the supporters were being ejected, and found that they made for a much more interesting story than what would be occurring formally. See my footage below of the Pro-Gingrich rally outside of the Radisson on December 21.
Harvard student blogger Matt Bieber has written yesterday that he was baselessly arrested by Hudson police while at a Mitt Romney event on January 9. Police said that he was identified by campaign staff as someone who was present at a previous protest which Bieber claims to have not attended. His experience is published at his blog here.
