I’ll bet you 10 quatloos that if you eat Thanksgiving dinner with right wing relatives one or more will make the baiting comment, “You know, the police never had to use tear gas on the tea partiers.”

TV news loves conflict. It’s exciting! What they don’t love is doing actual research and real reporting about the conflict. “We’ll leave that for the suckers at Frontline six months from now. Look! Behind you! A fire and people in hoodies running away! Are you getting all this?”

Information like who is causing the conflict, their motives and objectives are not really their forte. They do love the shots of rocks and tear gas being thrown, they don’t really care who is throwing them.

The police will object to this kind of video for many reasons including the fear that an undercover cop might be in danger if he is in another undercover operation. That’s really not our problem. The police made a decision to use an undercover cop in this way and they got caught. The MSM might agree with the police and refuse to run a story which would amplify the undercover cop’s identity, but now the protesters know and some of the public following along at home will find out, giving them more sympathy for the protesters and more suspicion of the police’s claims.

This morning there was a raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment.

In Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza (renamed Oscar Grant Park by the occupiers), the folks at Occupy Oakland were attacked by Oakland police about 4 am this morning. The police surrounded the camp with vans, hummers and riot cops, declared the camp an “unlawful assembly” and proceeded to use smoke bombs to force the camp to disperse. Downtown Oakland was sealed off with Oakland City Center reportedly shut down to prevent people from coming down to protest the eviction.