She was the star attraction at a press conference Monday morning in Pittsburgh with four other journalists who were arrested and say their equipment was intentionally damaged. According to a joint press release by Twin Cities and Pittsburgh Indymedia, the Glass Bead Collective and the Thomas Merton Center, at least six journalists were arrested, including one other Minneapolis-based Indymedia reporter.

Update: According to Twin Cities Indymedia reporter Nigel Parry, Nathan Monkelien is the other local arrested in Pittsburgh. He’s still in jail on $8,000 bail and faces two felony aggravated assault charges, a level-3 misdemeanor for disorderly conduct, and a level-2 misdemeanor for resisting arrest and failure to disperse. Monkelien was carrying a camera, he adds, and was swept up in the same arrests as Hill, who was released from jail.

Here’s an interview with Hill posted at YouTube. You can also follow her exploits with Keystone State cops (and other G20 law enforcement) at Twitter and Facebook.

They’re wearing riot gear in London and they’re talking recounts in New York. It’s all so St. Paul, last fall.

St. Paul to London

Demonstrators, massed in the capital city to protest a gathering of people who wield political power, met police wielding riot-control weaponry. A bank’s windows were broken. Peaceful crowds were trapped by police moving in pincer formations.

It could have been the Republican National Convention (RNC), September 2008, in  St. Paul, Minn.. But it was the G20 Summit, April 2009, in London, England.

Differences: A man died in London after he collapsed in an area police had hemmed in. (Natural causes, one protester said; thrown bottles hampered police medics’ efforts, police said.) And the United States of America has a Bill of Rights that’s supposed to guarantee freedom of speech; England doesn’t.

Uncanny similarity: For their summit, the G20 leaders selected a London location that people call the ExCel Centre. The RNC took place at St. Paul’s Xcel Center.

Minnesota to New York

As Election Day turns into The Day After (and the day after that), the margin between two candidates dwindles to less than a half-percent of the total votes cast. Fundraising for a recount and charges of election-stealing ensue.

Sounds like the Minnesota U.S. Senate election, November 2008 — but it’s New York’s special congressional election, April 2009, where Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by a mere 25 votes.

Differences: New York doesn’t count its absentee ballots until after Election Day and gives overseas ballots an extra couple of weeks to arrive — leaving thousands of votes still to include in the canvass. (Minnesota counts all absentee ballots on Election Day and accepts none that arrive any later.) And President Obama made a last-minute robocall that could have made the difference with Election Day returns. (Candidate Obama made no such pitch for Franken.)

Uncanny similarity: The parallel universes are converging as Republicans fall back on discredited election-stealing charges from the Al Franken-Norm Coleman dispute to prime the cash pump for New York’s post-election drama. (Democrats, presumably slightly less prone to getting riled since they hold slim leads in both races, are so far making a more generic fundraising pitch in New York.)

Video and text excerpts after the jump.

Greenwald:

In one sense, all of this drooling rage is nothing more than the familiar face of extreme right-wing paranoia … But it’s now inflamed by declining imperial power, genuine economic crises, an exotic Other occupying the White House, and potent technology harnessed by right-wing corporations such as Fox News to broadcast and disseminate it widely and continuously.

The United Kingdom’s Guardian:

Britain’s most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming “footsoldiers” in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become “viable targets”. So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

Beck, tracing the origins of a future American civil war to a Republican governor’s refusal to take federal stimulus funds:

We have military exercises going on in Iowa right now. We have a battalion, I believe, in Maryland. People are training for civil unrest all over the country. I believe the answers they give, and they say: “This is for this sort of this kind of unrest or this kind of unrest.” Except, we just had in our stimulus package, a way for, if your governor says no to the money, the legislature can go around the governor and go right to the feds. It’s this kind of thing that would make the federal government say, you know what, we can call up the National Guard. We don’t need your governor to do it. Do you believe those scenarios or is this crackpot stuff?