Stay Classy, St. Louis; Soviet Amerika Ed.

This is just stupid beyond belief.

A Washington Post reporter who was arrested at a restaurant last year while reporting on protests in Ferguson, Mo., has been charged in St. Louis County with trespassing and interfering with a police officer and ordered to appear in court.

Wesley Lowery, a reporter on The Post’s national desk, was detained in a McDonald’s while he was in Missouri covering demonstrations sparked by a white police officer fatally shooting an unarmed black 18-year-old.

A court summons dated Aug. 6 — just under a year after Lowery’s arrest — was sent to Lowery, 25, ordering him to appear in a St. Louis County municipal court on Aug. 24. The summons notes that he could be arrested if he does not appear.

Arresting and charging reporters for doing their jobs is what happens in Russia and other Third World shitholes.

But it's becoming clearer and clearer to the casual observer that what we have in this country is, indeed, a police state. The cops view themselves as above the law, above reproach, and certainly not accountable to some pesky reporter with a press card and a tablet.

I'd almost like to see this case go forward, for maybe, somewhere along the way, a sober judge might look at the prosecutors and say "what the fuck, over?" But I have less and less faith that would happen. Between the Wars on Drugs and Terror, we have, mostly willingly, surrendered almost every Constitutional protection that once existed. I have no doubt that there are tens of millions of people who think that arresting reporters for reporting inconvenient truths is just peachy.