A march by a busload of neo-Nazi activists on Constitution Avenue yesterday wreaked havoc on a balmy afternoon in the nation's capital, bringing traffic to a halt, filling the streets with hundreds of police officers and provoking an ugly confrontation on the sidelines that resulted in at least three arrests.
About 30 marchers from the Michigan-based National Socialist Movement, waving red swastika flags and shouting, “Sieg Heil!” emerged about 2:30 p.m. from a bus
one block from the White House and strode toward the Capitol, flanked by thick cordons of police walking the route in riot gear and hundreds of officers on horseback, bicycles and motorcycles.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080420/news_1n20nation.htmlPresident Bush's "First Amendment zones" were not a new development for Knoxville. Police and Secret Service agents have been restricting protesters across the country to zones variously called "protest zones" or "free-speech zones" or, as in Knoxville, "First Amendment zones" for the president's appearances.
The fact that they're not new, however, doesn't make them any more palatable. In a country that reveres free speech as a basic tenet, it is an insult to limit that right to particular areas or zones. To paraphrase a comment made by a protester in Pennsylvania, we thought all of America was a First Amendment zone.
When Bush visited West View Elementary School on Mingle Avenue in Knoxville Jan. 8, the announcement was made that protesters would be kept at a state building parking lot at Middlebrook Pike and Mingle Avenue several blocks - or about one-third of a mile - from the school.
Although the parking lot of the State Plaza Building at Middlebrook and Mingle originally had been designated as a First Amendment zone, about 30 minutes before Bush's motorcade arrived, police ordered the protesters to move some 150 feet west, out of sight of the motorcade.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0125-02.htmSo let me get this straight; Neo-Nazis are given free reign, police escorts, are able to march in front of the White House, but Anti-Bush protesters are kept out of sight and in cages?