Of all the several good reasons for wearing a bag over your head while voting for the incumbent, curious staffing decisions are one of the more overlooked. Handing the financial sector over to some Wall Street lapdogs. Listening to Bob Rubin on anything. Putting the deficit commission in the hands of lobby-slick Erskine Bowles and the Undead Alan Simpson. But as far as I'm concerned, chief among these reasons has to be the current president's putting the spectacularly overrated Rahm Emanuel in charge of the White House staff. Emanuel hasn't breathed a breath of air in public service when he wasn't a self-aggrandizing and nasty bit of work.

So it was with some glee that I noted on Thursday evening that a judge in Chicago handed Mayor Rahm his head on a stick as regards the "model" response of the mayor and his police force to the Occupy movement in that city. And he did so with a flourish....

Cook County Associate Judge Thomas Donnelly ruled that the city's curfew law was unconstitutional and that the city selectively enforced it. He noted police had cracked down on the protesters' tent camp when the park closed at 11 p.m., but had not moved against others who stayed in the same park past that hour at other times — including those who had come to see Barack Obama after he won the presidency three years earlier. "The city arrested no one at the Obama 2008 presidential election victory rally, even though the Obama rally was equally in violation of the curfew," Donnelly wrote.

Oops. A mark, that surely will leave.

Handing someone like Emanuel his own police force is a genuinely terrible idea. Handing him the Chicago P.D. was handing a toddler a hand grenade. Judge Donnelly is not the only jurist who largely agrees....

Chicago officials contrasted the police warnings and calm handling of the arrests with previous problems the city had with demonstrations, all the way back to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when officers clashed violently with protesters. Earlier this year, the city settled a lawsuit for $6.2 million in connection with the arrest of 700 people during a 2003 Iraq war demonstration. The settlement came after a federal judge called the department's handling of the protests "idiotic."

What makes this ruling worth celebrating, outside of the obvious schadenfreude, which is considerable, is its ringing vindication of the idea of the public space, not merely as a place for recreation and Lollapaloozing, but also in its original conception as a place where citizens can congregate for the purpose of exercising their First Amendment rights of political association and political petition. It also pointed out that the abridgement of constitutional freedoms doesn't necessarily have to come with a billy-club to the noggin. Bureaucracy will do in a pinch.

He noted Grant Park's long history as a gathering spot for protests and other assemblies. "It constitutes the quintessential public forum," he wrote, adding that the city curfew failed to allow other opportunities for late night assemblies. Donnelly also criticized the city for subjecting the protesters to "constantly changing rules and regulations that ended in a directive that they had to be constantly moving in order to protest." He said that implied the city was attempting to discourage the protest.

Of course, the schadenfreude alone is worth it.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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