Today on the show, we discussed the lessons we’ve learned thanks to the government’s reactions to two completely different protest strategies.

As the brilliant cartoon posted above shows, the nutjobs with guns get all the media attention, while the peaceful protesters demanding that we do something to insure the planet will still be inhabitable by humans when our grandchildren come of age are ignored. But that’s the smaller lesson learned here.

We also now know, thanks to actual events, that peaceful, nonviolent practitioners of civil disobedience as a means of protest against a corrupt system that reward the criminals and punishes the innocent will be met with brutal militarized police force, but the police will back off when confronted by armed separatists and self-described militia members taking up arms against them while calling for a violent second American revolution.

That’s the definition of opposite world, and it’s playing out in real time.

Today, we get the story of the brutal treatment of Cecily McMillan who was manhandled and violated by at least one member of the NYPD when they responded to peaceful protesters in Zuccotti Park on March 17, 2012 with brute force in full militarized regalia.

McMillan was convicted on Monday on charges of assault on a police officer, but circumstances tell us the wrong person was arrested, tried and is now waiting to hear how much of a 2-7 year sentence she’ll have to serve:

The prosecution argues that McMillan deliberately elbowed an officer in the eye. McMillan’s defenders say she only did so after the officer grabbed her breast, and that she has the bruise to prove it. There is a grainy YouTube video of her arrest, but it does not settle the competing interpretations.

Nice way to uphold the laws of the land… or not.

This morning, David Neiwert, senior editor at Crooks & Liars and a contributing writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center (and author of numerous books on right wing American extremism), has been writing about the incendiary situation at the Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada:

Something is seriously wrong in Kansas, er, Nevada…

Susie Madrak of Crooks & Liars also joined in this morning as she does each Wednesday. Today, we talked a bit about the White House report on Climate Change, the disconnect I wrote about above, and Monica Lewinsky’s forthcoming article about her infamous experience as an intern in Bill Clinton’s White House.