If you want to know what the future would be like if Liberals could give America an extreme makeover look no further than the UK. They are a few years ahead of the curve on multicultural, politically correct nonsense. Read this and see if you can imagine hearing this idiocy spilling out of the mouth of some limp-wristed Democrat politician:

Notice that they did not say one word about law enforcement. It boils down to this: Liberals want you to surrender to criminals to save money.

... in Berkley of all places! Read the whole story at the San Francisco Chronicle:

Berkeley's infamous tree-sitters have been hit with a rude surprise since they came down to earth: Judges are socking them with thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees.

UC Berkeley estimates it spent more than $800,000 on police and other security measures during the 22 months sitters were up in the trees. The university spent $40,000 alone on the scaffolding that went up around the final tree during the last day of the protest this month.

Now, the school wants its pound of flesh.

"It's really vindictive," said an attorney for some the sitters, Dennis Cunningham. "They don't have this kind of money."

Maybe, but university lawyer Michael Goldstein isn't making any apologies.

"We've asked the judge to throw the book at them," Goldstein said flatly.

So far, most of the 15 to 20 protesters arrested in the past year have been hit with fines of about $100 for trespassing and little or no jail time.

Once they were back on the street, however, the university hauled them back into court on contempt charges for violating an order issued in October by Judge Richard Keller of Alameda County Superior Court that banned people from sitting in the trees or doing anything to help the protesters already up in the branches.

The university is also seeking as much as $10,000 from each of them for its attorney fees.

Lawyers on both sides said the tree-sitters' chances of beating the contempt charges are slim.

As Cunningham noted, "You were either up in the trees or not. What's to argue?"

To which Goldstein added, "Who said free speech is always free?"

Amen to that.

The right of peaceful protest has been for decades a shield for criminal activity by the Left. You can almost get away with murder as long as you are "raising awareness" or "speaking truth to power." Maybe if we actually enforce the law, people will respect it. Maybe if we start holding all of these "brave" social activists accountable for their actions, we might find that they aren't quite so brave after all. Hopefully, we'll start see some indictments for the RNC protesters soon.

Can you smell the Social Justice in the air?

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post has an excellent article about the Palin/Ahmadinejad protest story:

LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women's unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.

Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari'a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.

The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.

They should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.

 

Read it all here...

• Student Forced to Remove American Flag T-Shirt
  

  Officials at the Merced County school confirmed Thursday that Jake Shelly was forced to take off a red, white and blue tie-dyed American flag T-shirt on Tuesday. The shirt said nothing offensive, just: “United States of America, Washington, D.C.”

  The school’s assistant principal issued Shelly a bright yellow T-shirt that read “DCV: Dress Code Violator” to wear for the rest of the day. He was given his shirt back after classes ended.

  “It was really embarrassing and humiliating to have to wear that all day — and just for supporting your country,” his sister Kaycee Shelly said.

  Kaycee Shelly told members of the media at lunchtime that her brother was overwhelmed and did not want to do any more interviews.

  Earlier in the day, he was speaking with a local news station when an unidentified teacher walked up to him, ripped off the microphone clipped to his shirt and told him he was not allowed to talk to the media.
  

• MCAS foes renew call to scrap test
  

  BOSTON - Dozens of education professors in the state’s public college system are calling on Gov. Deval Patrick to scrap the MCAS test.

  The teachers point to preliminary data showing that half the state’s public schools have failed to make adequate progress toward meeting federal No Child Left Behind standards for at least two years in a row.

  That’s up from 37 percent a year ago.
  
  

• Fifth Grader Suspended For Wearing Anti-Obama Shirt
  

  An 11-year-old boy in Colorado was suspended from school after he refused to take off a shirt that read, “Obama is a terrorist’s best friend.” His father says that the school is violating his son’s First Amendment rights.

  Daxx Dalton, a fifth grader at Aurora Frontier K-8 School in Aurora, Colo., wore the homemade shirt on a day when students were asked to show their patriotism by wearing red, white and blue, according to MyFOXColorado.com.

  When he was given the choice of turning the shirt inside out or being suspended, Dalton chose suspension.
  

  Dann Dalton, the boy’s father — a “proud conservative” who has taken part in anti-abortion protests — told MyFOXColorado.com that the school is making a mistake by suspending his son.

  “It’s the public school system,” he said. “Let’s be honest, it’s full of liberal loons.”