That is how I titled the first thread I posted on Democratic Underground two days after I had been released from jail. I posted it in DU’s Photo Group forum, a subsection of the extensive liberal website that has more than 100,000 registered members. The DU Photo Group is where liberal photographers congregate and for the most part, avoid political discussion.
I had just posted another thread with photos and comments about the Anna Nicole Smith media circus that I had attended the afternoon of my arrest, which is why I started the thread on my arrest with the word “then”. Had I known the thread would end up taking the blogosphere by storm, I would have been more grammatically correct.
But at the time, it was basically a personal rant about what had happened the night of my arrest that I wanted to share with other photographers. One of the photographers recommended I post about the arrest in the General Discussion forum, better known as GD, where the bulk of DU’s members discuss the sad state of American politics.
I took that photographer’s advice and posted a more grammatically correct version of the story in GD, which turned into one of the most popular threads I have ever posted on DU since joining the site after the 2004 election, when I was seeking liberals who were just as angry as I was over Bush’s re-election. Hence my username “RaginginMiami”.
Meanwhile, someone posted the original thread from the Photo Group on www.digg.com and from there it ended up on www.boingboing.net, two extremely popular websites that I had never heard of until then.
Thanks to those sites, the world learned that a photographer named “RaginginMiami” was arrested for taking photos of cops against their wishes.36
