From Danny on the MarxMail listserv. He was there and not happy about what he saw. (If you think you might be offended by Bad Words, then you best not read the whole post.)

As their roadies tuned up and they were all set to go on, however, the fascist police occupation that now rules the Twin Cities during the RNC refused to allow them to take the stage. They even cut the power to the event, though organizers had a permit for it to go until 7pm, well after Rage would have played. They claim that since Rage wasn’t on the permit, somehow they had the right to prevent them from playing, which is, well, ridiculous police state nonsense.

I will say that the RNC has been full of important political lessons for the people of the Twin Cities, including the role of the police, the ends to which the government is willing to go to prevent us from effectively protesting, and the serious gap between the myth of democracy in this country and the reality.

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Hawaii swaps coal power plant for biomass

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Even with good news, a big rally fizzled and the DOW ended down 25. Which seems odd, except a major commodities hedge fund blew up and, you guessed, beleaguered Lehman Brothers owns 20% of it. Just what they needed while trying to do a desperation sale of some or all of themselves before they have to report earnings in two weeks.

Andy at the Yellow Brick Road opines.

And Lehman is damaged, at the worst possible moment. No, I don’t think Lehman will go belly up, but the market will. I think the next bear market leg will start very soon, maybe even this week.

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From Twin Cities Indymedia Live Wire

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 19:53 Police Have Alerted Area Hospitals that they are going to begin gassing the crowd.

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 19:45 RATM/Poor Peoples’ March- one protester snatched, organizers ask ppl in black to leave march or move to back

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 19:41 Taser used at RATM/Poor Peoples’ March

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 19:34 Police use pepper spray at Poor People’s March

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 19:33 7th & cedar 50-100 riot police in front of the march as it heads up 7th. No reported violence.

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 19:32 15+ Jane/John Does have been hunger striking all day to get anemic Jane Doe medical treatment. She passed out, still being denied treatment!

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 19:11 Rage Against the Machine just took 200 people on unpermitted march toward river. They are chanting, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” UPDATE now marching with Poor People’s March towards Excel Center, 2-4000 people. UPDATE Tons of riot cops heading east on University.

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 19:01 Riot Cops surround concert at the capital, refuse to allow Rage Against the Machine to take the stage

Tue, 09/02/2008 - 18:56 Mobile Broadcast News (independent media) bus is being raided

This is starting to sound like when the MC5 took the stage at Chicago 68 DNC…

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The McCain team used little more than a Google Internet search as part of a rushed effort to review Palin’s potential pitfalls.

McCain campaign cancels Palin appearance, Phyllis Schafly not happy.

“I think this is clearly somebody in the McCain campaign who doesn’t understand where the votes are coming from,” Schlafly told ABC News. “They only told me this at 10 o’clock last night, and it was a call from somebody down-the-line in the McCain campaign.

Is Palin not ready for prime time? Something else? The excuse given was she was busy on her VP acceptance speech, but hey, she could bungee in for an hour then leave, politicians do that all the time. Schafly is a serious player on the Republican Right and not to be trifled with. Is this yet another last-minute ill-thought-out decision by Maverick McCain (who by now is starting to resemble a stray calf walking around in circles)?

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sole purpose appears to be to intimidate.

I don’t know who is running this show but it smells like the Feds have been taking lessons from the pre-Olympics Chinese to me.

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Now available. (Windows only for now.)

Silicon Valley Insider sums it up correctly

Google launches cloud operating system ‘Chrome’ and calls it a “browser”

Google wants you to do everything in the cloud. Chrome is a major step in that direction. Microsoft should be worried.

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John Robb

Very cool demonstration from Minnesota of how police forces have been militarized. In addition to the five fold growth in SWAT forces since the 90’s, there’s been a shift in attitude. All likely due to a misdirection of  GWOT [Global War of Terror] Homeland security $$ and thinking towards domestic protest. The side effect: The heavy handed approach here will cause a quick shift protest to the open source/disruption model if things deteriorate. Protest is dead.

Note: Robb means “very cool” in the sense that it proves his point.

What we are seeing now on the streets outside the RNC is the open source / disruption model -decentralized, fast-moving, linked by technology. In Left terms, it’s a mostly leaderless bottom-up anarchist political model rather than the top-down Marxist model with the cadre in control.

Robb is right, protest in the sense of thousands marching in the streets probably is dead. It’s become ineffective and pointless.

FutureJacked (who is no Leftie)

Wow. The Powers That Be have become so insecure that big protests are now considered dangerous and a threat. In the past, huge protests and civil disobedience were a way to vent frustration and send messages - great ways to do that, in fact, that usually kept the property damage at a minimum.

For some reason, the elites seem terrified of any sort of dissent these days. It’s amazing and unnecessary. By crushing these protest groups through pre-emptive strikes, you are are making the same mistake the Forest Service made back in the 20th century [by not allowing controlled burns], you are priming the political landscape with the tinder for a huge firestorm in the future.

Indeed. what are the elites so afraid of? At the police press conference yesterday they actually said police officers were frightened by masked criminals. I am not making this up. A phalanx of cops in riot gear is scared of a few unarmed kids wearing black bandanas over their faces?

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“I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know, my mother had me when she was 18. And how family deals with issues and teenage children that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics”

Maybe Bristol Palin’s life is a disaster now. Mine was when I was 17. And I got through it. Can’t imagine what it would have been like trying to do that had partisan zealots slimed me because they had a political grudge against my mother.

The mother is fair political game, the daughter isn’t.

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From the San Francisco Chronicle

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How bad is it in the Twin Cities?

Glenn Greenwald

Here’s a woman being pepper-sprayed at close range by a marching legion of police while standing on the side of the road holding a flower.

Yup, she was just standing there holding a flower, and some alleged human of a cop sprayed her in the face with a mega-dose of tear gas for no reason.

The police and the RNC are out of control. Of course there will be lawsuits and the police will end up paying millions. In the meantime, we need to make sure this story gets into mainstream media and stays there.

Let’s make a lot of noise about this. We need to make an issue about it.

PS News sources from the Twin Cities (for those who may have missed them.)

Theuptake Live video from cell phone cameras as it happens via Qik. (Quite amazing technology, isn’t it?)

Twin Cities Indymedia Lots of breaking news. One of the best organized Indymedia sites I’ve seen.

Coldsnaplegal On the streets, twittering the news as it happens.

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Yesterday, I attended a meeting organised by the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. Speaking were:

Temuri Yakobashvili, State Minister of Georgia for Reintegration
Radoslaw Sikorski, Foreign Minister of Poland
Radoslaw Sikorski, Foreign Minister of Poland
Matthew Bryza, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs
Vladimir Chizov, Russian Ambassador to the European Union
Eckhart von Klaeden, the foreign-affairs spokesman of the CDU-CSU

This is an interesting line-up and the sparks flew.

Poland and the US felt that Georgia had fallen into a trap by responding to Russian provocation and had used passports, given to South Ossetians, to fuel the situation.

The Russian ambassador made some startling claims, that they didn’t use excessive force, their actions ’saved lives’ and that theywere trying to calm the situation and reduce tension. He justified their actions by saying Kosovo was a precedent.

The US State Dept representative pointed out that the South Ossetian army was commanded by Russian officers.

Russia claimed it didn’t want to start a second cold war, and that wouldn’t happen because that was a clash of incompatible ideologies, something that doesn’t exist today. The Polish foreign Minister disabused that by saying there is something of a clash because the EU seeks to remove borders, not to redraw them.

He also detected a hardening of Russian authoritarianism and wondered if there was a competition between the Russian President and Prime Minister.

Listen to the meeting: The Future of Georgia (mp3 38mb 1:23:15) First speaker is Temuri Yakobashvili, State Minister of Georgia

Photos of the Meeting: Flickr Set

Photos From Gori from our contact

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No-fly lists and photo IDs are supposed to help protect the flying public from terrorists. Except that they don’t work.

Bruce Schneier, noted security expert, explains why.

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