their agents shit on what the flag represents, such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Elephantman:

But of course there are people like the woman in the video that Glenn Geenwald linked. She appered to me to be pushing her flower into the faces of the police at close range, and standing in their way as they attempted to pass. No one struck her or pushed her down. To move her away, an officer sprayed her with pepper spray from what appeared to be about five feet away. And so... what? She was not some little old lady on her way to church. She was a protester, pressing herself into the formation of police. The flower ruse was just that.

It is hard to see exactly where she was, but the police closest to her did not seem upset. The one that sprayed her from further back managed to do it without hitting the ones who were closer to her. So I doubt that she was really pressed into the formation. When he sprayed her the second time, she was well out of the way, and obviously not coming back.

If the shoe fits, it must feel pretty squishy.

If Obama were about "change", other than for his and his Cook County pals own good, he would have commented on these acts of facism by now.

A pretty toxic story about Palin, and McCain's apparent haste and panic in choosing her for his running mate. Apparently his vetting team arrived a day before he announced her. Front page of NYT online...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/us/politics/02vetting.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

I'll keep an eye open for it here in the threads.

Don't know how involved they'll want to be, but I have rec'd numerous emails from both Glenn and Jane, with fundraising requests, as well as calls to action. I suspect that between them, they have an extensive email list.

I'm now convinced that you are the smartest and most politically astute person I've seen post on this forum and quite possibly anywhere.

I really, really hope that you have children, genes like yours should be spread as widely through our remarkably shallow pool as possible.

And there are several other posters here who should be ejected from the gene pool because they leave a ring.

Its appalling that we're not hearing the truth about this from the MSM.

Who are these storm troopers? How many of them are contracted from Blackwater? Is this what the Administration has been planning with its revised FISA statute? I guess spying on Americans has taken on a whole new dimension. Who is going to ask the questions?

Where is Barack?

-- ljpljplj

We hear that childish refrain every time anything happens that needs to be attended to in some way. I'm hoping that Obama wins the presidency. And if he does, just as now while he is running for the presidency, I don't intend to cry to him every day to fix or to speak about every thing that ever happens that I think is unjust or wrong or whatnot. I'm hoping he won't be contrary or unhelpful, but I'm not expecting him to wipe our collective noses at every turn. Are you, ljpl?

These images and scenes are downright dystopian, like something out of a science fiction movie about a bleak police state of the future. Watching Amy Goodman, Amy Goodman, get arrested absolutely filled me with rage and sorrow.

Rarely has such an overwhelming and irrational fear of the people and what they represent been so blatantly on display.

All the government wants is for things to get out of hand so they can bring down the hammer, even if they have to start it.

-- thorn in the side

Yes. This.

I should also mention a couple more things: No contracted troops from Blackwater, but I did see some guys trying to look very official like, but they were wearing American Security patches on their uniforms. You had to look kind of close, but they were gazing upon the stormtroopers with envy. More info on these guys here: http://www.americansecuritycorp.com/

Without wanting to sound as paranoid as an Oliver Stone conspiracy-theory flick, I'd like to posit the following questions:

1. Why was the GOP so hot-to-trot to convene in Saint Paul in the first place? Through some still-unexplained skullduggery during the convention site selection process two years ago, the RNC mysteriously beat the DNC to the punch of selecting the Twin Cities, despite the fact that Minneapolis mayor R.T. Ryback had been in telephone contact with DNC chair Howard Dean throughout the day.

"The RNC selection came as a bit of a surprise. One Republican state party official expressed shock when the news first broke. One reason may be that both the RNC and the Democratic National Committee were both considering the Twin Cities for the convention. Twin Cities officials have long said that they would not host both conventions and Mayor R.T. Rybak says he was in close contact with the Democratic National Committee Chair, Howard Dean, but the Republicans beat the Democrats to the punch."

" 'We said along that we were in a bipartisan effort to get one of these conventions and that the group made the decision, we would go with," Rybak said. "We were in very aggressive conversations with the Democrats and I spoke with Gov. Dean twice today. They were planning to make a decision very shortly. The Republicans moved first.' " -- http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2006/09/27/gopconvention/

It would bear keeping in mind that Minnesota is a crucial swing state this election cycle.

2. Having sited its 2008 convention in the state that over the last sixty years can claim more noteworthy Democrats than perhaps any other state except Massachusetts, can the GOP be expected to do anything other than trash the Democratic Party's "home field advantage"?

3. What governmental body would willingly allow itself to be embarrassed in the national media by ordering its law enforcement agencies and its militia to go Gestapo, particularly if a nationally-reported tragedy took place in its jurisdictional area within the previous year? In other words, what entity would willingly squander its public goodwill by doing something stupid and Fascist?

4. Is it unreasonable to assume that the Federal government would not call the shots after awarding each convention host city $50 million?

5. As the Federal government is currently controlled by the GOP, it it a very great leap of logic to ponder that said government feels itself personally invested in staging a soul-stirring tableau of good conservative values, e.g. civil obedience, in triumph over evil liberal values, e.g. the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, press and religion?

6. Has the U.S. Government never employed double agents, infiltrators and the like to further its goals?

7. Is it possible that the Saint Paul Police Department, the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department, and the Minnesota National Guard have been bought off with both the Federal $50 million and the threat of GOP Governor Tim Pawlenty's budget veto pen?

And finally,

8. Could it possibly be that these Saint Paul RNC Convention imbroglios are the latest and greatest dirty political strategy from the Karl Rove & Co.? Its image reeling from eight years of disastrous GOP occupation of the White House, would the Republican party stoop so low as to arrange for riots in the streets at its convention and then a strong show of force from bought-off local law enforcement agencies to scare voters into electing its presidential candidate this November?

Hmmm.