Occupy gets ugly and YouTube weighs in

Today the news from Oakland was bad. The Occupy movement seems to be hitting a critical mass of police intolerance.

This story from PBS news covers the developments pretty well. The Newshour reports that the Oakland Police department denied using flashbangs to disperse the crowd. Notice, they don't deny hitting Scott Olsen, a Marine Corps veteran with a tear gas canister.

This video pretty convincingly shows the police tossing the flashbang right into the crowd that has gather to help Scott:

I noticed something pretty interesting about the YouTube video. The number of views didn't seem to be going up, but somehow the number of "likes" were. I took this screen shot at 4:36 this afternoon, and as you can see YouTube says it only has 308 views but somehow 1,658 people have "liked" this video: (you can click on the screen shot to see the full size)

This is either some kind of bug or YouTube is not telling us the truth about how many times this video has been watched.

I took this screen shot 8:09 and the video still only has 308 but now has almost 3,000 likes:

Draw your own conclusions.

Does anyone have another explanation for what is happening here? Does the video still say it only has 308 views when you watch it?

My submission for Occupy Wall Street

Much of the mainstream media coverage of the #occupywallstreet movement has focused on the lack of clear policy goals for the movement.

I propose this set of specific policy proposals and will challenge anyone to a debate on their merits.

Don't let this political cartoon encapsulate this unique opportunity to demand real and lasting political change from our leaders.