'Civil disobedience' = buckets of urine

News from Minnesota:

At least five suspected leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee, a self-described anarchist group, were taken to the Hennepin County jail, and another was being sought, said Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher.
On Saturday afternoon, he displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine. . . .
Fletcher . . . stressed that he and other agencies had informants planted inside this and other groups for "a long period of time."

(Via Hot Air.) I went to Denver for the DNC, but skipped the RNC in part because I thought a Republican convention would be boring, especially in St. Paul, Minn. Looks like these peace-loving "activists" were intent on proving me wrong.

That the cops in Minnesota had infiltrated the protest groups is hardly surprising; law enforcement used to do this kind of stuff all the time. Undercover infiltration fell out of favor after the COINTELPRO revelations of the '70s, but was revived after the anarchist anti-globalization protesters turned violent at Seattle.

It was obvious to me that the Denver police had infilitrated the protest groups there. Monday afternoon, while walking down 16th Street on our way to PJHQ, we noticed squads of riot police forming up on the street corners. This seemed like an overreaction at the time, but about an hour later, we got word that the protesters at the Civic Center had marched toward 16th Street but been blocked by police. Clearly, the police had advance warning that this unannounced march was in the works, and moved to prevent the protesters from disturbing the diners and shoppers on 16th Street.

Ed Morrissey is right that news of police infiltration has probably generated extreme paranoia among the protesters. This was one of the tactics that busted up the KKK. When I lived in Georgia, I was friends with a high-ranking policeman who told me that if five people showed up for a Klan meeting, three would be police informants and a fourth would be an undercover FBI agent. I suppose the "progressive activists" in Minnesota would object to this comparison, but buckets of urine are hardly the tools of protected First Amendment speech.