SFGate.blog October 27, 2011
Firebrand TV commentator Keith Olbermann says Oakland Mayor Jean Quan should resign for "having betrayed everything she had supported and all those who supported her" by allowing police to violently clear out downtown protesters.
"There is no excuse, there is no justification, there is no rationalization for being the mayor who may have begun the great march back in this country to the days when mayors like Sam Yorty of Los Angeles and Hugh Addonizio in Newark and Richard Daley of Chicago stood back as their police incited, bullied, overreacted and brutally assaulted protesters at the height of the civil rights and antiVietnam movements," Olbermann said. "Those protests began nonviolently, positively, with singing and marches and cooperation with the authorities.
"But the police, like the police in Oakland, California, this week, they injected the violence, and it escalated and echoed and soon there just wasn't one Iraq vet in a hospital with a fractured skull," he said. Olbermann, whose show is on CurrentTV, then went on to suggest people died at the Oakland protest, which is not true.
Olbermann says Quan can't be held responsible for everything the the police did, but by supporting the police she is "endorsing and assuming for herself the responsibility for whatever havoc the out-of-control police officers have wrought."
Olbermann says Quan must fire interim Police Chief Howard Jordan or resign.
Quan's representatives were not immediately available to respond to Olbermann's remarks. Quan, who was in Washington, D.C., when the raid took place, said at a news conference Thursday that her input was limited.
"I only asked the chief to do one thing: to do it when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators," she said.
http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2011/10/27/olbermann-calls-on-quan-to-resign-after-occupy-protest/?tsp=1
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm