Rrrrrghhh. (intelligent commentary from the editor.)

Glad those 2 groups are working to help the people arrested. This sounds like China to me - not America.

Please be careful! Guard yourselves and your equipment well. If you look at who has been targeted so far - including i-Witness — you will see that the danger is not hypothetical, especially for those who expose the wrongdoing of authorities.

Take care.

Take care, all of you.

Shocking, but not surprising. Take care please and keep us posted.

Thanks for keeping our eyes on the ball. Take care everyone, but do not flinch! They are trying to intimidate us.

Bob in HI

So much for “Minnesota Nice”. Don’t forget that this is the home of “Powerline Blog” here.

Are you sure your in the United States? That shit doesn’t happen in a free country!

Digg this post

Intelligent ditto from an editor’s fan.

Plus, if any of my friends in the corporate media happen by here and read about this and I discover you are not reporting it I will wonder outloud to your mom and dad, children and grandchildren whether you are spineless Vichy sellouts or simply don’t value the Constitution (where your press freedom comes from.

Lindsay, you and your fellow bloggers/journalists are doing an incredible job. Thank you for your intrepid patriotism.

God motherfucking damn! Welcome to AmeriKKKa 2.0. I thought we were through with this shit 30 years ago. This is what happens when you do not nail the evil doers to the barn wall.

Yep. Even when someone snaps a picture of a lone peaceful protester staring down an M-1 tank or water cannon, the cameras will be in the sheriff’s office before it hits the Internet. Where are the NY Times, the CNN, the ABC camera people? They can’t all be in Iraq or Afghanistan, though that experience may be required to cover the Minneapolis convention.

Why in 2008 must we ask the federal courts to intervene in preventive detentions, mass arrests, and mass warrantless seizures of recording equipment, as if this were an Alabama schoolhouse confrontation in 1963? Then again, neocon Republicans are a cancerous outgrowth of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, so the parallel may be exactly right.

Also: If you have a cell phone and want your conversations around that phone to have a chance of being private.. you must turn off and remove the battery from the phone.

WTF is John McCain afraid of people will photograph outside the convention former Rep Mark Foley, Sen Larry Craig and Sen Dave Vitter doing a four way with Gannon at an airport bathroom?
I thought John was skipping his convention anyway and was going to play storm chaser?

Impressive display of government suppression of freedom of assembly, free press, and free speech. And right here in Amerika, in the heartland!

Martial law, concentration camps, and real police-state terror can’t be far behind.

Only patriots carry camera phones….

We saw a low level and isolate, but ugly, bit of this authoritarian repression during the Democratic convention. Wonder what will happen with the real authoritarians. Hope it does not get too bad.

Saw poll numbers that said women were more skeptical of Palin than men, and I do wish I had typed in a comment Friday that this is exactly what I thought would happen (darn!). Again, we see the wisdom of the of media celebrities not fulfilled. I guess being a millionaire celebrity with no visible employable skills or contact with the real world other than booze facelifts and cocktail parties with the in set will do that to you.

Why can’t Paris be a talking head? At least she can pick a good staff to do some good work.

I think best way to attack Palin is to simply point out her extreme conservatism:
-extreme anti-choice (so much so that I think she is really one of those Christianist person-at-conception people who will go after birth control -I HOPE SOME ONE ASKS HER ABOUT THIS!)
-crypto-creationist who wants politcal interference in the schools (I don’t mind intellegent design in a class on religion but it ain’t science)
-global warming denier

Also, my Alaska branch says she totally bungled her big development project in Wasillia -bungled the land deal for a city project, built city building on land she didn’t own, and then lost a lawsuite after she tried to use eminent domain to take it away from the developer who bought it fair and square.

She is a wingnut.
She has the same ethics and and competence as Bush/McCain.

Lindsay, thanks for your great work and for keeping us and the world informed.

I’m pretty sure you already know this, but just in case:

The popos at these huge protests obviously fear media coverage. One way I’ve seen photojournalists (and medics) evade arrest/detention longer is to work with a “spotter buddy”: the buddy watches for popos coming from the rear, while the medic/journalist(s) do their work.

Be well and goddess protect you.

Maybe Kirk Murphy could do a post about things to do and not to do when the police are hassling yo for political reasons.

Wake up Amerikkka, smell the coffee crematoriums firing up. Just like last time fascist authoritarians were in power. If you think the outcome will be different, you are deluded.

Hi Kirk I did not see you until after I posted:)

How many Americans will the republicans kill during the week of their Convention? If I was a republican, I would be embarrassed.

Be careful, be smart, be safe and keep bring us the real news….

Dugg.

Great writing Lindsay!!!

ColdSnap Legal Collective are the police claiming that they made threats to McCain, brought weapons to the RNC convention what?

Listening to Fred Thompson parrot the Republic talking point that Palin is more qualified than Obama because of her ‘executive’ experience, I was struck by the fact that she has more executive experience than McCain. If the Republics insist on this line of attack against Obama, I hope soemone turns it back on McCain.

Are there any Democrats out there? The counterattacks must powerful and sustained starting now. Time is wasting. Letting the Republics once again shape the debate will fail spectacularly. The talking heads are always ready to carry the Republic water, no mater how absurd.

You cannot be a Republic and still be able to feel embarassment.

re: Palin

Water (purportedly) breaks in Texas, gives a speech any way, makes her way to the airport to board a commercial flight, layover in Seattle, then on to Alaska…elapsed time, 11 hours minimum.

If you believe that one, I’d like to sell you a “Bridge To Nowhere!”

For those in safe areas in Minneapolis, what’s your experience with mobile or wi-fi internet access? For those intrepid enough to stick with it, I hope you have access, as well as to thumb drives, etc., to download and offload your witness to others.

Assume, of course, that all the digital weapons at the government’s disposal — to defend us against cyber and other “terrorisms” (aka, to keep BushCheney in power) — are being used domestically. Keep reports, even chatter, clean, factual and on point. Save the editorializing and commentary until you are in a safer zone. That applies to what’s supposed to happen at this convention as well as to the lobbyist-funded private parties, and the statistically inevitable, but isolated criminal conduct. No one need tell you that allowing domestic political protest is not in this administration’s playbook.

Where’s the White House press corpse? They can’t all be filming tailpipes leaving the Big Easy; that’s what their colleagues are for. If the US press is happy to sleep in on a Sunday afternoon, is the same true of Canadian and other foreign press? They, too, must be in Minneapolis in droves to cover the Gooper convention.

Glenzilla is all over this.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/.....11928.html

Creeping Fascism

The voices of the past, on Recognizing the Unrecognizable…

“You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.”

“Those,” I said, “are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’”

“Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

“Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it.”

_________________
How ironic then that the persecuted have become the persecutors, using the tactics of their former oppressors to destroy those they wish to control and/or exterminate. 9/11 was their Reichstag Fire (a near-perfect False Flag Operation - but for the “Dancing Israelis”), the pretext to launch their plan – rooted in revenge and greed. But they have taken it one step farther, compelling others to do the job on their behalf.

God motherfucking damn!

make that two of those….

*And* I gotta go to Court - on Sunday.

Goddamn that too. bbl

Some of the activists I know use cell phones with wi-fi and “beam” out every cell phone pic as it is taken. Of course, the cell cameras are far inferior (I’m told) to the cameras professional photjournalists use.

We are everywhere — and we have cameras.

Republics have been willing to believe that Bush stopped drinking through sheer willpower, in spite of all the evidence that he still drinks.

KirK beat me to it - good advice - try to travel with someone with video camera capability.

Be safe!

Lindsay, thank you so much for this reporting!

Where are the protesters being held County Jail for example tries to keep non violent people and people who may be violent but are doing only county time
in one section.
But sometimes if the jail is full or the police are trying to scare you they lock new people with the group expected to go straight to state prison those guys tend to be more violent.
Plus this is a three day weekend I would expect the jails to have people sleeping on the floor with mats in all the cell blocks.

Great point, Badwater. The neo-republicans of today feel no compassion for anything unless it’s an oil tank.

Plus you have to wait until Tuesday for a hearing. Old time police trick. I remember it from my youth. May have to start dredging up memories and skills I though I left far behind me.

OT, but C&L has a great smackdown of McCain up here.

Well, it’s come to this. The lessons one thought learned (one hoped by them, not us) were not. We did learn. Hence we’re here now, re-teaching the government (Minnesota, this time), that the game is on.

Pre-emptive raids and arrests…how very American. Not. Let’s show them.

True the police also can set your bail real high to hold you a lawyer can get that number knocked down.
So get a lawyer is my advice a good lawyer in a situation like this is the best investment you can make.

Wow. It really takes effort to make Alex Jones look prophetic. Not intending to desparage the man, but I’d much rather he be considered batshit crazy.

I guess I typed in old news. A Ms. Jane Hamsher mentioned the reverse gender gap issue earlier this morning. And FDL is doing very important work in documenting the KGB/Stasi tactics that will be employed.

Well, here might be new news, I just heard McCain in the radio say that he picked Palin because she was his ’soulmate’? This is an obviously lie. These old crooks are getting despearate.

And, frankly, that statement is an insult to Palin, and even though McCain is lying, I hope it is not true. From what I know, I have a higher opinion of her than McCain, thought that is not saying a lot, by now.

This might backfire though. So, they lock up the organizers? If they were really planning protests, that means there are a lot of the previously organized in the vicinity who will now be pissed off and unorganized.

If there were mass protests planned, and the masses show up this could be ugly.

Peterr is upstairs at the Mothership!
The Last Line of Obama’s Speech

This blog, of course, is on the G-men’s Watch List. No doubt, it’s also part of the arrest and detention list that Mr. Cheney considers a vital part of his continuity of (his) government plans.

If you can’t say anything nice about someone, say nothing at all, or at least remember the phone numbers of three friends and read and re-read your Constitution. And work on your Spanish and Arabic, useful in places like Cuba and Syria.

http://www.ccrjustice.org/
http://www.usconstitution.net

1,752 DAYZ AND THE KILLIN’ GOEZ ON AND ON AND…

Firepup Freedom Fighters:

To everyone out there that wants ta recapture some meaning for Labor Day, come and join us at the State Capitol hill in St.Paul tomorrow at 1100. Fear is the great equalizer for fascism…political terrorism only works if it reduces the number of citizens willing to act. The political police will be out in full force and the agent provocateurs and the Amerikan brown shirts will be there, but the larger the crowd the less likely it will be that these cowards will risk pissin’ their pants in public. This is a moment for folks to walk the talk and get the backs of fellow citizens who truly WILL be puttin’ their bodies on the lines unless enough of us show up.

For all you “post modern” citizens who missed the ’60’s, sat it out in fear when ya had the chance ta stand up back then or were jest plain wrong about the whole thing, tomorrow is your chance to get on the right side of history…God is givin’ us another chance ta get it right!

And if you believe in prayer use it for our fellow citizens on the Gulf Coast ‘cuz prayer will be at least as effective as our fascist government in keepin people safe…for the rest of you, bring your hope and your anger to St. Paul tomorrow and show solidarity with the folks in the path of the storm (in a manner of speakin).

KEEP THE FAITH AND PASS THE AMMUNITION, THERE IS NO COMPROMISING WITH FEAR!!

just here a few minutes for a drive by. if this has already been posted, my apologies. some of you may have read the update from starhawk i posted yesterday. her emails are now being posted at her webpage, so you can get them there and i won’t post anymore full length ones. just fyi - starhark is an amazing writer and activist and in my experience, she writes these updates only when everyone else is grabbing a couple hours of sleep.

i’ve been getting email updates all day about their bus getting seized last night. here’s the latest. i post it here at the bottom of the thread especially for the phone numbers in the hopes that ian or others in a position to report on this will see them.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

POLICE SEIZE PERMIBUS

Press Contacts: Stan Wilson, Delyla Wilson, Megan Wilson 406-721-8427

At approximately 6:25 pm on August 30, 2008 Minneapolis Police, Minnesota State Troopers, Ramsey County Sheriffs, Saint Paul Police, and University of Minnesota Police pulled over the Earth Activist Training Permaculture Demonstration Bus (Permibus) by exit 237 on Interstate 94. Initially the police told the people on the bus to exit. When the people on the bus asked if they were being detained they were told that they were but police were unable to provide justification. When asked why they pulled the bus over they refused to answer. After repeated requests to explain why the bus had been stopped Officer Honican of the Minneapolis Police explained that this was just a routine traffic stop though he did not explain the reason for the traffic stop. The police then told Stan Wilson, the driver and registered owner of the Permibus that they were going to impound the bus in case they wanted to execute a search warrant later. After more than an hour of being questioned by Stan and Delyla Wilson as to the legalities of their detainment and the impoundment of the Permibus, the police then informed Mr. Wilson that the bus, which is legally registered as a passenger vehicle in the state of Montana, was being impounded for a commercial vehicle inspection. Shortly afterward Sergeant Paul Davis, a commercial vehicle inspector arrived on scene. Despite the polices insistence that the reason for impoundment was for a commercial vehicle inspection the Permibus crew were not allowed to remove anything from the bus including computers, toiletries, and 17-year-old Megan Wilson’s shoes. The police finally allowed the animals to be removed from the Permibus before it was towed, leaving the Permibus family standing beside their chickens and dogs, homeless on the highway.

The Permibus was relocating from the Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis, where they had spent the day teaching Urban Permaculture, to a friend’s house in Saint Paul for a well deserved break before appearing at the Peace Island Picnic on September 4th. The Permibus has been in the Minneapolis area since August 2nd when the crew appeared at the Midtown Farmers Market for a morning of Permaculture education including Permaculture 101, chicken care, seed ball making for kids, and the Permi-puppet show. During the past month the Permibus has parked at several local businesses and, as a neighborly gesture of respect for local police, Mr. Wilson contacted the appropriate precincts just to let them know the Permibus was in the area and had permission from the business owners to be parked on their lot. Through this, as well as other casual discussions with Minneapolis and Saint Paul police officers, the Permibus crew found the local police to be interested and respectful. However on August 30th all that changed when, for no apparent valid reason the police pulled over and seized the Permibus. After the incident Stan Wilson said, “If the combined law enforcement of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Ramsey County, and the State of Minnesota can pull over and impound a vehicle and home used to teach organic gardening and sustainability, one has to wonder what it is our government really fears. After all, we seek to teach people that the real meaning of homeland security is local food, fuel and energy production. For that we have had our lives stolen by government men with guns.”

As of now, after repeated requests to be present at any vehicle inspection, with an list of what they are inspecting for, as well as requests to be served any warrants for searches of the vehicles prior to a search and to be present during the search the Permi-family has been unable to ascertain the current status of the Permibus. On site Mr. Wilson was told that Officer Palmerranky was the inspector in charge of the case and would determine if the Permi-family’s rights protecting them from unreasonable search and seizure would be respected. Neither Officer Palmerranky nor his supervisor has yet to return Mr. Wilson’s calls. The loss of her home and possessions is particularly difficult on seventeen-year-old Megan Wilson. Megan, a shining example of what this country asks of today’s youth, has dedicated herself to making positive changes in the world. She was the youth keynote speaker at the Local to Global conference in Phoenix AZ, has taught conflict resolution at youth shelters and is the outreach coordinator for the Skills for a New Millennium Tour, the family traveling educational project. Megan believes that, “While I understand that the world we live in is not as it should be I strive to live and teach in a way that shows the world how life could be. What I don’t understand is why I can’t get dressed for an evening out with friends in my own home without armed men stealing my life out from under me.” The Permi-family, along with their dogs and Permaculture super-hero chickens are currently being housed by folks in the Twin Cities.

The Skills for a New Millennium Tour is a family education project that travels around the United States teaching homesteading, citizenship, and life skills at farmers markets, community gardens, churches, intentional communities, schools, and in people’s living rooms. The Skills Tour is a donation supported project dedicated to providing tools for sustainable living, including Permaculture, to anyone who is interested, regardless of income. “We believe that any solution that is not accessible to the poor and urban areas is not a real solution for the future,” states Delyla Wilson. Permaculture is a design system with ethics and principles that can be applied to food production, home design, and community building in order to increase sustainability in food production, energy production, and social systems. The Permibus is a rolling demonstration of small scale sustainable living with three people, three dogs, three chickens, and a box of worms as permanent residence. The chickens and worms are part of a closed-loop food productions composting system that supports the Permibus’s traveling garden. For more information on the seizure of the Permibus, the Skills for the New Millennium Tour, or Permaculture, the Wilson’s can be reached at 406-721-8427 or through email at skillstour@gmail.com. You can also see pictures and read stories about the last six months of their educational adventures at permibus.livejournal.com. To our supporters: First we ask that as many people as possible
contact precinct one in Minneapolis, MN at 612-673-5701 and Mayor
Rybak at

Phone: (612) 673-2100 or
call 311 or call (612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis

and demand the immediate release of the Permibus.

We are also in desperate need of donations. Though we do not yet know
the full cost of getting the permibus returned we know that it will
include tow fee, impound fees, and legal fees. To donate contact us
directly for a local address or…
Donate On-line:
Go to: www.earthactivisttraining.org/donate.htm

Click on: Donate Now!

Under “Gift Information” write: Permibus
Under “Please send acknowledgment of this gift to” write: skillstour@gmail.com

Donate by Mail:
Make check payable to: A.C.T.
On the “For” line write: Permibus
Send check to: A.C.T. 1405 Hillmount St. Austin, TX 78704

Please note, as covered elsewhere, that our friendly Blackwater Boys are rearing to go down to the Big Easy and make it safe for developers. For residents? Not so much. Hurricanes? Just another opportunity for Haley Barbour to jack up his and his firm’s his former firm’s lobbying fees.

I could not agree with these quotes more; they are the best and most accurate I’ve seen on any blog or commentary, and should be repeated over and over. At 62, retired, I’ve seen a lot come and go but it’s the creep of authoritarianism that goes unrecognized, even in a democracy, until it’s too late. I believe we’ve been watching it happen here, but few realise what is really happening. To paraphrase a statement I believe the Nazi minister of propaganda, Goebbels made, any group of people can be led in the direction you want them to go, if you keep repeating the message, even in a democracy; in fact, it may even be easier in a democracy.

I believe - and TC Indymedia is reporting - that the bus has been released.

Thanks for this note. And thanks to all who are able to contribute. The rhetorical spear point is nothing without a true and weighty shaft behind it.

excellent. thanks. have been away from the web most of the day and have only been checking my email. just wanted to make sure the phone numbers got out.

Anyone with connections to Minnesota’s considerable tourist industry –

much of which depends on independent outdoorsy types as well as white collar hotel conventions, what with all those lakes and rivers, and all that huntin’, chute-in’ and fishin’

– could help by reminding them what a black eye the GOP’s storm troopers are giving the state. Tourists might well choose to spend their hard-earned dollars touristin’ somewhere’s else.

This is NEWS that we live in a Police State?

Really?

No Democrat will dare to bust up Blackwater,Inc.

No Democrat will dare to bust up the Prison-Industrial Complex.

While Republicans demand billy-clubbing demonstrators, the Democrats just simply appreciate the quiet of NO DEMONSTRATIONS. It allows them to go about their Contributor’s Business … namely giving their constituents “The Business”.

If you’re prepared to learn the entire truth, most of it, sadly, is here:

http://plungerspeaks.com

Everything you have known is based on a lie.

David Rockefeller is one of the few who knows the entire truth.

The Administration’s actual PLAN is to kill some of the protesters this week - on purpose - Kent State style. It’s not written down anywhere, but they know that the actions that they have taken and the measures they have put in place (hiring inexperienced hot heads as “deputies”) will lead to killing, then rioting, then Martial law, then more rioting in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, etc. followed by a big false flag explosion (assume Sears Tower - on 9/11 perhaps?), and then total martial law - nationwide.

The surprise in the forthcoming “October Surprise” is that it is coming in September. How’m I doin’ so far, Karl?

This is what David Rockefeller, Karl Rove, Michael Ledeen and the rest of the CRAZIES have planned for you. Elections? How quaint…just like the Geneva Conventions.

Send your civilian airliners to Iraq to fly your National Guard Troops home where they belong - PROTECTING YOUR NATION FROM THESE DOMESTIC ENEMIES.

They are urgently needed to put down this coup.