Obama Raises Money In San Francisco As Cops Gas Oakland Protesters
Here's what Barack Obama did Tuesday: An interview with teevee clown Jay Leno, followed by a flight to San Francisco to raise money from gazillionaire venture capitalists. Here's what the riot cops from 10 Bay Area police departments did on Tuesday night, just across the bay in Oakland: Fire "rubber bullets" on protesters demanding economic reforms, shoot "chemical agents" and "concussion grenades" at protesters demanding economic reforms, injure protesters reportedly including an Iraq veteran and somebody in a wheelchair and a child, and fire some bizarre "sonic cannon" developed by the Pentagon to torture foreign Arabs somewhere.
Denver was the last stop in a three-day swing that also took him to Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, a fundraising-rich tour that let him spend time with top Los Angeles celebrities and to get some media attention in the battleground states of Nevada and Colorado.
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The Western tour is one of Obama's busiest donor outreach trips of the season.
The San Francisco crowd "paid a minimum of $5,000 to attend" Obama's fundraiser. The appearance on NBC's Jay Leno show is apparently seen by millions of semi-dead Americans. But in Oakland, a few minutes away across the San Francisco bay, the network-affiliate news cameras of ABC and CBS were ordered to be shut off by the riot police commanders. The news crews obliged, and were then reportedly tear-gassed. And then, with the live video out of the way, the police reportedly announced to the crowd that they wereallunder arrest, and told to "submit."
This is not a repeat report of this morning's pre-dawn raid on the Oakland protesters.
And at least Obama's handlers and security and money counters know he's not even welcome by a lot of the Democrat bigwigs who bankrolled him (along with Wall Street) in 2008. There were some very interesting protests outside his sleazy fundraising stop in San Francisco:
In a powerful display of profound disappointment with President Obama, some of the Democratic Party's biggest donors gathered Tuesday - not inside his tony San Francisco fundraiser at the W Hotel, but outside on the sidewalks carrying signs in protest of his policies.
"I don't even know what he stands for," said Susie Tompkins Buell, a co-founder of the Esprit de Corps clothing company and one of the most generous Democratic Party donors in the nation - instrumental in backing such powerhouse progressive organizations as the Democracy Alliance and Media Matters.
The protesters and ex-donors had lots of complaints about Obama, starting with his administration's insane support of a sweetheart oil industry pipeline from the Canadian earth-raping tar sand extraction pits to Texas. Also on the gripe list: Obama's insane prosecution of California's legal medical marijuana dispensaries, Obama's torture of Bradley Manning and aggressive Orwellian prosecution of the very idea of Wikileaks, Obama's constant wars against every Muslim on Earth, and some other things we can't remember now because it's late and who can keep track of this guy's endless "disappointments." [ SF Gate / AP / SF Gate/ #OccupyOakland ]