The saga of Sucks.com

As the owner of Jennifer
Lopezsucks.com, Microsoft
sucks.com and about 600 similar domains, Dan Parisi is the master of all things sucky. So far the courts are respecting his empire.

By Amy Standen

Michael Bloomberg couldn’t stop Dan Parisi. Lockheed Martin couldn’t either, and hundreds of other companies haven’t even tried — yet, that is.

Parisi, working from a small office in Secaucus, N.J., is playing an increasingly important role in the ongoing debate over Web addresses. On Tuesday he won the right to the domain name MichaelBloombergsucks.com, which he’s owned since 1999, despite the efforts of the New York mayoral hopeful to stop him. ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — the international nonprofit corporation that usually oversees such disputes, was also helpless.

If ICANN is a ship lost in the stormy seas of domain registration, Parisi is the shark circling below. A sharp critic of the much maligned organization, Parisi only surfaces when one of the domains he owns, like MichaelBloombergsucks.com, comes under fire. Meanwhile, while others debate the merits of certain suffixes, and wring their hands over who would own what URL, Parisi simply collects them.

To date, he’s amassed NYTimessucks.com, Giulianisucks.com, Pepsisucks.com, TacoBellsucks.com, Nikesucks.com, NBAsucks.com, AceHardwaresucks.com, OprahWinfreysucks.com, HomeDepotsucks.com, RalstonPurinasucks.com and more than 600 others. Parisi has spent $100,000 on his Sucks.com sites, and a little less than that defending them.

Type in a Parisi-owned sucks address and you’ll arrive at Sucks.com, the clearinghouse site where Parisi has built a veritable super-picket line with hundreds of complaint forums to join. Bash Bush in the Government Sucks forum, Netscape in the Netscape Sucks forum, Jennifer Lopez in the Jennifer Lopez Sucks forum, the entire nation of Ukraine in the Ukraine Sucks forum and on and on. Even companies or organizations whose sucks sites Parisi doesn’t own get dissed here, in forums like RIAA Sucks or McDonald’s Sucks.

Depite the success of this teeming monument to disgruntlement, Parisi — who, prior to the Internet boom made his living as an environmental consultant and asbestos remover — is still searching for ways to finance Sucks.com. At the moment, the money comes from WhiteHouse.com, which Parisi has built into a popular porn site. But, now that it’s legal, online gambling may prove to be the next source of funding. “For some reason,” muses Parisi, “the connotation of the porn is a lot worse than the gambling. You don’t see politicians at porn conventions, do you?” In any case, it might help Parisi improve his standing among ICANN officials, not that he cares too much about what they think.

Parisi spoke to Salon from his New Jersey office, where he reveled, briefly, in the Bloombergsucks.com victory and plotted a name change for Sucks.com.

So you won the rights to the MichaelBloombergsucks.com site.

The site doesn’t really make much money, so if you win, it’s good for other people who use the site, but it doesn’t really do anything for us, you know.

I didn’t think [the court proceeding] would be as nasty as it was. This was actually a really nasty case. If you run a site like Sucks.com, there’s obviously going to be stupid things posted there, and they tried to sue [on the grounds that] those things being posted on the site as showing that we’re tarnishing them. There’s like 100,000 posts on the [MichaelBloombergsucks.com] Web site, so one-tenth of 1 percent of them — you’ve got some idiots posting them.

But these ICANN people who rule these cases are screwy anyway. They rule any way they want.

One thing about us being involved in these sucks things is that at least we’ve won two cases. There’s been like 20 of these sucks cases that have been in front of ICANN and almost everyone else has lost. We won this one and we won the one against Lockheed [for Lockheedsucks.com]. The third is WalMartsucks.com — he won.

Why do you think you won this one?

Because obviously we’re spending the money and, you know, we have a free speech site up there. But what they’re basically doing at ICANN is they’re saying, “OK, someone has a trademark for something; if you have any variation of it, we don’t care if anybody thinks it’s affiliated with it or not, we call it an infringement.”

We said, “This is a free speech site. We didn’t take it to infringe against anybody, because, obviously, we have 700 sucks names. It’s not a way to go after Michael Bloomberg.” We said, “How did we know two years ago, when we registered the name, that this guy was going to run for mayor? What, we have a crystal ball or something?” ‘Cause that was their argument, you know, that we were trying to sabotage his campaign.

How much did you spend to keep MichaelBloombergsucks.com?

This case cost us $5,000. And thinking about spending $5,000 on a name that doesn’t bring you any money, you know, you’ve got to think about that. At the beginning, I didn’t want to spend it, but then I said, “Well, I gotta do something about it.”

These ICANN people let anyone go after anyone for anything. Someone can file against you for anything, and if the board people feel like giving it to them, they can.

Did you ever meet Michael Bloomberg?

No, I’ve never met him. The only communication I’ve had is with the attorneys. I think he has three or four of them working on it.

In general, do you get a lot of threatening mail from companies whose Sucks.com sites you own?

Some companies like the sites. Intel has gone on the record saying that they like the site; they have no problem with it. And I have a letter from American Express saying that they thought it was a good site too. They thought it was fair use. And we have these other people writing letters always trying to start trouble, but no one’s really going to take this to a federal court, ’cause I don’t see how they’d win. So they just send letters to you to try to scare you.

What kind of response have you had from Microsoft?

None. Nothing at all.

What are your plans for the Sucks.com site?

I may change it to Americasucks.com because I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from people saying they think Sucks.com is a porn site.

I’m debating what kind of features I could add. Like I’m debating adding a way that people could write letters directly to the company, maybe e-mail congressmen, senators, stuff like that. The problem is the money aspect, you know? I gotta use money from our business to pay for this. And that’s a problem, especially given the way the dot-coms are going right now.

The only two things that are making money right now are the adult sites and the gambling sites. I’m looking into that myself, gambling, because especially with Nevada in the process of legalizing it, I think that [online gambling] is going to be very big.

How did you first get into the Sucks.com business?

I went to one of the first ICANN meetings — this was about two years ago when they met in Boston. And I just had a bad feeling when I saw those people. I just had a bad feeling that this was gonna be a run around the Constitution, which is what I think it was made to be. So I started taking these names. Then one thing led to another. You know, you spend money on these things, one at a time, and then after a while you realize you spent a lot of money on this. I never expected to spend $100,000 on this, which is what I ended up spending.

I actually had a site called Infolook — I wanted to set up, uh, what’s that, a portal site. [I had] Infolook and Megasearch and none of them ever made any money. Unless you have venture capital funding, whatever site you set up, it’s never gonna go anywhere. I realized that the hard way.

Then I thought about the WhiteHouse.com site one day. There’s a diner right by my house called the White House Diner which I used to drive by every day. So I called the guy who owned the domain, and we worked out a price and I bought it.

WhiteHouse.com was supposed to be a free speech site, that was my original idea. And what happened is nobody went to the Web site and I didn’t make any money with it. Then I read this article in USA Today about how adult sites were making all this money. So I went to my attorney and I said, “You know, I gotta make some money. Can I do this?” And he said, “I don’t see a problem with it.”

We lost money for the first seven, eight months and then it started paying for itself and making money.

Do you have a favorite domain?

I always like the Microsoftsucks.com one. We started that when the government was cracking down on them originally. One of the biggest ones is Chinasucks. Chinasucks.com is very big right now.

But the biggest one we have right now is actually Governmentsucks.com.

There’s a lot of good posts, but we have a lot of idiots. So I started to restrict words. I took swear words out of there; I took out phone numbers. I took the N word out, because they were saying we were racist. There’s not that many; it’s like 75 words. I didn’t want to do it; there’s a lot of people mad on our boards about this, but what am I gonna do? If these people are going to come after us, and use these posts against us — you can’t have the whole board shut down just for 1 percent of the people.

Do you read Parisisucks.com?

I read it. They’re all mad about the censor. They say different things, like I have the I.Q. of an 8-year-old or something. Eh, what are you gonna do? [Laughs]

: Amy Standen is a writer living in Oakland, Calif. More Amy Standen

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NY press corps yuks it up with Bloomberg

After the arrest of 26 journalists at Zuccotti Park, the mayor jokes about it with reporters

By Michael Tracey

Michael Bloomberg yucks it up (Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar)

Topics:Occupy Wall Street, Michael Bloomberg, Occupy Movement

[UPDATED BELOW]

On Tuesday, one lucky group of New York City journalists were treated to an evening of drinks, pizza squares, and funny gift exchanges at Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s annual Holiday Party for local press.

In attendance this year were reporters from the New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, CBS, Fox, and other outlets. The journalists, no doubt straining to retain their “objectivity” throughout, were able to schmooze with dignitaries such as Bloomberg’s longtime partner Diana Taylor (who sits on the Board of Directors for Brookfield Properties, the retail firm that partially owns Zuccotti Park) and Paul Browne, spokesperson for the New York City Police Department.

Bloomberg made sure to crack a few jokes at the expense of Occupy Wall Street, whose encampment he ordered forcibly cleared on November 15, by way of a surprise paramilitary style raid. Reporters attempting to cover the police action were harassed, assaulted, and barred from viewing the area — for their own protection, Bloomberg later claimed. (Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who represents the Financial District, has since called on Attorney General Eric Holder to launch an investigation.) All told, police arrested at least ten journalists.

In response, the New York Times, along with The Associated Press, the New York Post, the Daily News, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones & Company, WABC, WCBS, and WNBC sent a strongly worded letter to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly denouncing the NYPD’s conduct during the raid.

None of this stopped New York City’s press corps from laughing it up with the mayor last night.

“I know only five of you in here have actual press credentials,” Bloomberg reportedly quipped, a reference to his office’s assertion that a mere five of the twenty-six journalists arrested overall displayed city-issued press passes.

“There were so many little jokes” about OWS over the course of the night, Nida Khan, a reporter/producer who attended told me. “You could see the awkward reaction from people in the room. Some laughed at these jokes, others were just uncomfortable.”

Bloomberg bestowed “gag gifts” upon a number of journalists, quipping that they “are reserved only for ‘the one percent,’” according to Fernanda Santos, an education reporter for the New York Times. Santos herself received a fake Department of Education “VIP Security Pass.”

“I had no reservations going to the party,” Santos told me. “It’s a good time and a fun tradition the mayor’s press office started some years back.”

In return, Dave Seifman, a longtime columnist for the New York Post, presented Bloomberg with gag gifts on behalf of “Room 9” — the group of journalists who regularly cover City Hall. Rich Lamb, of CBS Radio, served as his “Vanna White,” according to an attendee.

One of the gifts was a tarp that Seifman said “they picked up from the Sanitation Department on the West Side,” Khan recalled. This, of course, was a mocking reference to the NYPD’s forced seizure of tarps, tents, laptops, and many other items in Zuccotti Park, which were thrown into sanitation trucks and dumped in a massive pile at a warehouse-type facility on West 57th Street.

Bloomberg draped himself in the tarp and posed briefly with it, attendees said. Todd Maisel of the New York Daily news tweeted a photo of Bloomberg smiling from ear-to-ear.

The meeting is presumed to be off-the-record, though no formal guidelines are unstated, according to several journalists who were there. Maisel, the photographer, described the mood as “light-hearted.”

“The mayor sometimes deals with tough issues with humor,” he said. After taking the photo, Maisel told me, one of Bloomberg’s aides came over and expressed concern to him about the optics. “They try to deflect bad press from the mayor. But the mayor — he doesn’t care that much.”

And on the menu, according to an attendee?

“Pulled pork on tortilla chips, shrimp dumplings, pizza squares with sausage, pizza squares with mushrooms, and some kind of spicy (buffalo?) chicken stew, served in small white cups with a slice of jalapeno pepper on top.”

Sounds delicious!

UPDATE: This article originally stated that 26 journalists were arrested during the Nov. 15 raid on Zuccotti Park. In fact, 26 journalists have been arrested since the beginning of the movement, while at least 10 were arrested on that particular day. The article has been changed to reflect this.

: Michael Tracey is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, Reason, The American Conservative, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter @mtracey More Michael Tracey

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Mayor Bloomberg’s army

The mayor of New York and his police commissioner reveal just how comfortable they are with autocracy

By Alex Pareene

Michael Bloomberg (Credit: AP/Richard Drew)

Topics:Michael Bloomberg, New York, New York City, NYPD, Police

Billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his own army! No, it’s not a private security firm, like Blackwater. It’s actually, according to the mayor, the New York City Police Department.

Bloomberg, again threatening vaguely to make that presidential run that the American people are decidedly not calling for, told MIT last night that he doesn’t even need to be president, because all of his autocratic desires are fulfilled by running America’s most populous city as his private fiefdom.

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

I’m not entirely sure what he means by having his own “State Department.” The city’s independent nonprofit tourism agency, maybe? But he didn’t mention that his army also comes with its own international (and questionably legal) intelligence-gathering apparatus, just like the CIA and FBI, except without any sort of oversight, congressional or otherwise.

Bloomberg, of course, is being a touch ironic, but he’s also not wrong. The NYPD has a 1,000-man army within its increasingly militarized ranks. It has tanks, combat rifles, anti-aircraft weaponry, non-lethal anti-terror sound cannons, and, supposedly, a submarine. And it’s all under the command of one guy, Ray Kelly, who answers solely to one other guy: Mike Bloomberg.

Bloomberg’s conception of the NYPD as “his army” explains a lot. Like why he thought it’d be OK to deploy them to Bermuda to help police his weekend home. (That plan was scuttled … once it leaked to the press.) Or why he thought it appropriate to use the NYPD to prevent demonstrators from … drumming on his block, one night.

If you want a sense of precisely how distanced from accountability NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly is, his response to being interrupted by a protester while addressing a Columbia class is illuminating. Faced with footage of police brutality, Kelly grinned and joked around.

A few minutes later, another student asked Kelly why most people who are arrested are incarcerated for “drug crimes.” Dinkins said he didn’t understand the question, and things got confrontational between the student, Kelly, and Dinkins pretty quickly. The student’s SIPA colleagues were not pleased—a few students and a TA asked if she was registered for the class. “No,” she said, “but I do have a question.”

Commissioner Kelly, still grinning, leaned over to another guest for today’s class, New York District Attorney Cy Vance, and loudly whispered, “Says something about the security of this school, doesn’t it?”

(Yes, that’s former Mayor David Dinkins, who himself once faced a revolt of entitled police officers chafing at the prospect of being held accountable for law-breaking and corruption.)

In case Kelly is unfamiliar with the easily available data regarding what his massive army actually does most days, the NYPD makes more arrests for possession of marijuana than for any other crime. Marijuana possession is used as a pretext to sweep up and arrest tens of thousands of black men every year. And the commissioner pretends he’s totally unaware of that fact, even as his department defends the practice as necessary for our safety.

Powerful (and popular) commissioner Kelly has basically escaped every NYPD scandal with his reputation unsullied. Mayor Bloomberg is generally treated by most of the local press as though the fact that he surely means well excuses all manner of illegal activities, lax oversight, and contempt for civil liberties and the law.

Harry Siegel, in a good recent piece on how the recent scandals of the NYPD are actually generating some negative ink for once, actually undersells the recent revelations:

The overly-aggressive response to the Wall Street “occupation”—which began with arresting dozens on the Brooklyn Bridge, proceeded to involve the pepper spraying of protesters, and concluded with a forced media blackout and the arrest of several reporters during the final, middle-of-the-night militarized “clean up” and Thursday’s “day of action”—may yet tip the scales toward a more normalized relationship between the city and the NYPD. It is the culmination of a scandal-ridden year. A partial list of the past year’s troubles includes the trial of two cops accused of rape; a leak-hindered internal affairs investigation into a ticket fixing conspiracy that some rank-and-file officers responded to by spitting on lawyers in the courthouse; a belated outcry over the frequently intrusive stop-and-frisk policy focused on poor and minority neighborhoods; revelations of the department’s secret intelligence program to collect information on Muslims; and the rough arrest of a black City Council member at a parade.

This leaves out, to name one major recent scandal, the 14-year NYPD veteran recently found guilty of planting drugs on an innocent subject. (It also leaves out a third cop credibly accused of rape.) (And the eight officers recently charged with smuggling guns — and cigarettes! — into the city.)

At the crooked narcotics detective’s trial, a retired cop claimed the practice of planting drugs to inflate arrest numbers was widespread, yet another unintended consequence of our data-driven mayor’s insistence on an NYPD that measures success by the number of people — predominantly young black people — subjected to the criminal justice system. The mayor has, in the past, dismissed serious criticisms of his “CompStat” system with ad hominem attacks on police unions.

In New York City, of course, each bad cop, or ring of bad cops, or unruly mob of bad cops is treated as an outlier. This is a press — especially the tabloid papers — that has long simply not cared that the NYPD routinely lies to journalists as a matter of departmental policy. It is widely known, for example, that arrest and ticket quotas exist, NYPD denials being approximately as worthless as a summons mistakenly issued to someone with Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association connections. Police statements on violent incidents are routinely contradicted by video evidence. Kelly feigns ignorance of his department’s methods of maximizing marijuana arrests.

But an army thinks differently than a simple civilian police force. They’re accountable only to their commanders, and not to the citizenry.

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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Liberty Park can be anywhere

The Occupy movement has much to gain from its symbolic eviction. But only if it evolves beyond Zuccotti

By Todd Gitlin

A pedestrian takes a picture of an empty and closed Zuccotti Park in New York, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011.

A pedestrian takes a picture of an empty and closed Zuccotti Park in New York, Nov. 15, 2011. (Credit: AP/Seth Wenig)

Topics:Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, Michael Bloomberg

Forcibly dispersed in the wee, dark hours of Nov. 15, as pesky journalists were shoved away by the police, the occupants of Zuccotti Park — aka Liberty Square — were surely reminded that Michael Bloomberg was not only the mayor but, when all was said and done, possibly the best-known 1-percenter in Greater New York.

The mayor held a press conference later to say: “The First Amendment protects speech. It doesn’t protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.” Previously, the mayor had declared: “New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself. What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.” The protesters, he went on, had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.” I suppose it could be said that any demonstration makes a given space “unavailable to anyone else.” And as for “expressing yourself,” well, that’s not what the First Amendment says, either.

In the originalist spirit of Associate Justice of the U.S .Supreme Court Antonin Scalia, let’s go to the text. Undeniably the mayor had one thing right. The First Amendment protects speech. It also prohibits “abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” There can be no doubt but that the occupants of Zuccotti Park were peaceably assembling and that their purpose was, in the broad sense, petitioning, though some of them don’t like dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on the de facto demands they are making on the authorities by the very act of congregating in their vicinity. As for incidents of violence and other illegal acts that took place in the square, the police were within their rights to interpose criminal justice, but not to sweep the square of tents, sleeping bags and other personal property. Even one New York Times columnist who thinks that eviction was “to a point … defensible” calls the mayor and police chief Ray Kelly “imperial,” which is not a compliment, even in the Empire City.

But now that Mayor Bloomberg has joined the mayors of Oakland, Denver, Portland and Salt Lake City as agents of dispersal, the larger question preoccupying not only the occupiers but their larger concentric circles of supporters, as well as the chattering classes, is: Now what? What’s the relation between the turf and the movement? Both known and unknown unknowns abound, but it cannot be taken for granted that the expulsion is bad for the movement. To the contrary: Odds are that the expulsion — from a place very far from Eden — will function as a pick-me-up, driving greater numbers to the Nov. 17 actions planned by MoveOn and other groups for lower Manhattan and 300 other sites nationwide.

Movements wither when they don’t evolve, and they evolve when they learn intelligently how to avail themselves of opportunities and adapt to changes in the environment — an ensemble of several moving parts (supporting groups, politicians, police). In fact, as many occupants and commentators have pointed out, Zuccotti was already having a hard time managing, and was looking more unruly with the passing days. Although the local community board overwhelmingly endorsed the occupation, not a few residents were annoyed by undisciplined drumming (reportedly by a few drummers who, even after the general assembly voted restrictions, insisted on their absolute right to drum whenever and wherever they liked — an unwitting echo of Michael Bloomberg’s la ville, c’est moi).

Since Sept. 17, there have been so many moving parts in the evolving ensemble known as Occupy, each rubbing against the others in a whole ecology of protest, that predictions are foolhardy. But there’s a good chance that the great sprawling hard-to-pin-down Occupy movement is well along in the learning process and that it can gain more than it loses by leaving the Zuccotti/Liberty campground.

The urban planner Peter Marcuse, a strong supporter of the movement, has cautioned against “fetishizing” Zuccotti Park. He usefully distinguishes among seven functions of the movement:

A confrontation function: “taking the struggle to the enemy’s territory, confronting, potentially disrupting, [its] operations.” That means the Wall Street area, for which Zuccotti Park was and remains, obviously, a convenient launch-pad.
A symbolic function as a visible testimonial to a line of argument and a way of looking at the world.
An educational function, promoting debate and clarification, toward the end of clarifying what the 1 percent and the 99 percent mean, and how that infernal cleavage developed.
A glue function, “creating a community of trust and commitment to the pursuit of common goals.”
An umbrella function, “creating a space … in which quite disparate groups can work together in pursuit of ultimately consistent and mutually reinforcing goals — … a political umbrella, an organizing base for an on-going alliance, not just a temporary coalition, of the deprived and discontented.”
An activation function, “inspiring others to greater militancy and sharper focus on common goals and specific demands … providing space for … cross discussions among supporting groups and interests, organizing … events in support of … reforms that point [toward] Occupy’s own ultimate goals of change.”
A model function, “showing, by its internal organization and methods of proceeding, that an alternative form of democracy is possible.”

Hey, whoever said that organizing movements is simple or mindless?

Marcuse goes on to say that only the confrontation function required Zuccotti Park as such, and even that is far from clear. There do need to be meeting places, sites where people of different dispositions brush up against each other and stay in touch. Zuccotti offered advantages — Wall Street proximity, for one — but at a cost: very limited sunlight, leading one prominent supporter I know to publicly call it “hell’s half-acre.” There are other public places, even ones with symbolic resonance. (By some accounts, after all, on Sept. 17, when the occupation began, Zuccotti Park wasn’t the first choice — it was Plan B.) As Peter Marcuse writes, “the defense of the permanent and round-the-clock occupancy of a specific space can lead to a fetishization of space that make the defense of that space the overwhelming goal of the movement, at the expense of actions furthering the broader goals that that space is occupied to advance.”

As for the model function, the utopian, communitarian spirit, it can thrive in many spaces. Now that the symbolism has been established in the public mind, some token encampment through the winter probably makes sense, but Liberty Square can be movable; Zuccotti has no patent on liberty. Anyway, it would be foolhardy to think that the tent-city way of life Zuccotti has promoted is a way of life that the 99 percent cottons to. It’s that 99 percent that needs, continually, to be assured that the movement speaks to and for them.

All the old questions remain. What of demands, programs, platforms? How will the movement relate to an election year? How can it contain violent outbursts? How can it maintain itself over time? How can the leaders who have emerged through the occupations cultivate their skills and withstand all the pressures that realities place on leaders? These are not problems that can be solved by turf. They are the givens, the questions that coil at the heart of any movement; and they are, and remain, ours.

: Todd Gitlin teaches at Columbia University and is the author, most recently, of "The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election" (co-authored with Liel Leibovitz), and a novel, "Undying." More Todd Gitlin

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Daily News cheers Occupy Wall Street raid, until Daily News reporter is arrested

"Bravo" says New York newspaper to NYPD eviction, just before the NYPD jails one of their own

By Alex Pareene

New York City police officers arrest a protestor affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement as he tries to return to Zuccotti Park, in New York November 15, 2011. (Credit: Eduardo Munoz / Reuters)

Topics:Occupy Wall Street, NYPD, Michael Bloomberg, Media, Media Criticism, Police

When the NYPD, on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s orders, raided and evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park last night, the editors of the New York Daily News, the city’s ostensibly liberal tabloid newspaper, cheered.

“Bravo to Bloomberg’s Occupy Wall Street eviction,” goes the headline on its editorial published this morning.

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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Court order allows Occupy Wall St. protesters back

Judge issues injunction allowing demonstrators back in Zuccotti Park just hours after they were evicted

By Colleen Long and Verena Dobnik, Associated Press

Occupy Wall Street protesters clash with police near Zuccotti Park after being ordered to leave their longtime encampment in New York, early Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011. (Credit: AP/John Minchillo)

Topics:Occupy Wall Street, Michael Bloomberg, New York City, From the Wires

NEW YORK (AP) — The National Lawyers Guild says it has obtained a court order that allows Occupy Wall St. protesters to return with tents to a New York City park.

The guild says the injunction prevents the city from enforcing park rules on Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city knew about the court order but has not seen it. He says the city plans to go court immediately.

Zuccotti Park was cleared overnight so that crews could clean it. Bloomberg says that was done “to reduce the risk of confrontation.”

He says the city had planned to allow the protesters back in the park after it was cleaned. Under the city’s plans, protesters would not be allowed to use tents, sleeping bags, or tarps and would have to follow all park rules.

: More Colleen Long
: More Verena Dobnik

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