Finally, the alternative media is coming alive!  Alternet is leaping on the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon, and urging its readers to do the same.

Arun Gupta issues “a clarion call to join the protests,” and a longer story by Sarah Jaffe shows how the heavy-handed police techniques and lack of attention from the press have not dampened the protesters’ determination, and if anything have drawn more people to the cause.

Truthout.org doesn’t have the protest on the front page, but they did reproduce a very disturbing video from msnbc, with anchor Lawrence O’Donnell, certainly no radical, standing up for the protesters in the strongest terms.

It’s the people wearing the badges that are the troublemakers, O’Donnell says, accusing the police of “unprovoked police brutality.”  The provocation, he observes, was having a video camera running.

There is NOTHING illegal in recording a peaceful protest.

Americans, we have to stand up for our freedom of speech.

It’s time to tell Mayor Bloomberg, a Wall Street type if there ever was one, that this is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.

If you want to send the Mayor a letter, this is how.  And protesters, maybe it’s time to send a contingent over to the new Tammany Hall.