Following up on James's post on the subject, here are some links to recent news about police raids in the Twin Cities of activist houses. They are knocking down doors and coming in with semi-automatic weapons to arrest people and confiscate belongings, including computers, journals, and political pamphlets. They have also arrested National Lawyer Guild lawyers trying to find out more information.

• Main spot for coverage in the Minnesota Independent. One story: Crackdown begins: Food Not Bombs house among Saturday raids. You can follow them on twitter also.
• Salon's Glenn Greenwald on the story
• Lindsay Beyerstein for Firedoglake
• Video from Theuptake

Here is one video from a visit by Glenn Greenwald to a house after it was raided:

At one time we pretended to have a constitutional republic (see previous post) but now we're not even pretending. Check out this paragraph from an AP story on the raids:

Protester Michelle Gross said a fourth home, this one in St. Paul, was being raided Saturday afternoon. Two people were outside the home in handcuffs while police awaited a search warrant, she said. St. Paul police spokesman Tom Walsh said a search warrant was being executed but could not confirm whether anyone had been arrested.

Meanwhile, I don't even see this story on the home page of Daily Kos. Boing Boing, which normally covers such things, and did so regarding Tibet protests in Beijing, is ignoring this and giving us crap like moon-cake USB sticks. Shameful.

It's not only the Twin Cities where the police are out of control. Check out this video and story of an ABC reporter in Denver being shoved and arrested by a uniformed, cigar-smoking cop.

Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.

OK, I'm done. Enjoy your election, people. This is disgusting, and I hear nothing from any of our elected officials. They like things this way. Keeps everything tidy.

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said, even though the Democratic Party was set to have a majority in both houses of Congress, that "impeachment is off the table"? As Lewis Lapham said at the time,

Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over of as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or a subpoena. We can't "lay out a new agenda for America" unless we know which America we're talking about, the one that embodies the freedoms of a sovereign people or the one made to fit the requirements of a totalitarian state....

Like it or not, and no matter how unpleasant or impolitic the proceedings, the spirit of the law doesn't allow the luxury of fastidious silence or discreet abstention....

The Constitution doesn't serve at the pleasure of Representative Pelosi any more than it answers to the whim of President Bush, and by taking "off the table" the mess of an impeachment proceeding, the lady from California joins the president in his distaste for such an unclean thing as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Rightly understood, democracy is an uproar, the argument meant to be blunt, vigilant, and fierce, not, as the purveyors of our respectable opinion would have it, a matter of liveried civil servants passing one another polite synonyms on silver trays.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are unilaterally disarming against the GOP, which has no qualms about using nasty tactics. The Obama campaign told Dennis Kucinich to remove this line from his speech:

They're asking for another four years -- in a just world, they'd get 10 to 20.

Related: Glenn Greenwald on what's missing from this convention:

First, there is almost no mention of, let alone focus on, the sheer radicalism and extremism of the last eight years. During that time, our Government has systematically tortured people using sadistic techniques ordered by the White House; illegally and secretly spied on its own citizens; broken more laws than can be counted based on the twisted theory that the President has that power; asserted the authority to arrest and detain even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and hold them for years without charges; abolished habeas corpus; created secret prisons in Eastern Europe and a black hole of lawlessness in Guantanamo; and explicitly abandoned and destroyed virtually every political value the U.S. has long claimed to embrace.

Other than a fleeting reference to such matters by John Kerry in a (surprisingly effective) speech which most networks did not broadcast, one would not know, listening to the Democratic Convention, that any of those things have happened. Even our unprovoked and indescribably destructive attack on Iraq, based on purely false pretenses, has received little attention. Those things simply don't exist, even as part of the itemized laundry list of Democratic grievances about the Bush administration. The overriding impression one has is that the only things really wrong during the last eight years in this country are that gas prices are high and not everyone has health insurance. Those are obviously very significant problems, but they are garden-variety political issues which don't begin to capture the extremism that has predominated in this country under GOP rule, and don't remotely approach conveying the crises on numerous fronts the country faces.

CBS Outdoor decides billboards such as this one by Suzanne Opton as part of her billboard project cannot be run during the Republican National Convention.

[Click here if you don't see the video]

Minneapolis police confiscate equipment, notes, and computers from the Glass Bead Collective without their consent. The collective are the people who released the video of an NYPD officer assaulting a bicyclist. The Minneapolis police officer told them they were confiscating their belongings for "Homeland Security" reasons.

Via Paul Schmelzer. Go here if you don't see the video above. Actually you might as well click on that link anyway if you want to see wacky comments. "Obama is 100% Marxist" for example. In this country anyone who wants something other than a banana republic with a rich elite and no middle class is a crazy lefty.

And better yet, why does anyone consider her a Democrat or a liberal or even a rational human being? As BooMan says:

I still run into old friends occasionally that not only think Maureen Dowd is a good columnist but that she is a liberal and uses her column to advocate for the Left. Without fail, these friends are busy people that have not spent the Bush years reading alternative media and blogs. They're somewhat like Democrats that were trapped in amber sometime in 2000-2001, just before the rise of the Blogosphere. They have puzzled about why Dowd spent the last three months of the 2000 campaign writing about how horrible Al Gore was as a candidate, but then they remember those zingers she put down on Dick 'Big Time' Cheney and his geographically-impaired sidekick. Ooh...that felt sooo good.

This is a message to my old friends trapped in amber. Maureen Dowd doesn't root for Democrats. She uses her column to mock Democrats, drive wedges between Democrats, and to reinforce negative stereotypes about Democrats. Yes, she is somewhat irreverent and she does her share of blasting Republicans. Occasionally, when her righteous ire is up, she can really let the Republicans have it. But you can start a count now. It's August 13th. Dowd does two columns a week. If she doesn't take any time off, she'll write thirty-three more columns between now and the election. I guarantee you that the majority of them will not be helpful to the cause of Barack Obama. Today's column is about as unhelpful as it gets.

Dowd is also the columnist that said, in the run-up to the 2000 election:

Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating.

A1one: mural on the Tehran-Karaj Expressway, Tehran 2007 (image courtesy www.kolahstudio.com)

• Hrag Vartanian has a terrific interview with Iranian street artist A1one on the ArtCal Zine

• The New York Review of Books has just republished Norman Mailer's coverage of the 1968 party conventions for Esquire. I have only ever read "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" from these writings.

Bonus image from sent by, not by Jay Blotcher, of Jay Boy Greetings:

Gov. David A. Paterson, who has made advancing gay rights as central to his policymaking, was greeted enthusiastically at the gay pride parade in New York. James Estrin / The New York Times

Today was the first time a serving New York governor marched in the gay pride parade. He has walked in the parade, on and off, since 1976! I would like to think my headline above just made some conservative idiot's head explode.

From the NY Times:

If there was ever any doubt that gay people form one of Gov. David A. Paterson's most loyal and enthusiastic constituencies, that doubt was erased on Sunday by the howl of a drag queen on Fifth Avenue.

The drag queen, standing at the foot of the steps to the New York Public Library dressed in a green Afro wig, a red miniskirt and candy-cane-striped stockings, had the duty of announcing the notables marching down Fifth Avenue in the gay pride march.

She introduced Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, and the onlookers who had gathered along the parade route politely applauded.

But when she bellowed, "Let's hear it for the governor of New York, David Paterson!" the crowd roared.

...

Sunday was not the first time Mr. Paterson marched in a gay pride parade. He said he attended his first parade in 1976 at the urging of a gay friend and had walked in them on and off ever since.

"Back then, we would march in the back," he said. "But then we learned that wasn't cool because you couldn't hear the music in the back. So we moved up." He added that in those early years, he did not generate quite the same amount of attention from the crowd.

Here is an excerpt from a related NY Times story from two weeks ago.

Gov. David A. Paterson's decision to direct state agencies to recognize marriages of same-sex couples elevated his status in the eyes of many gays and lesbians to something of a celebrity.

But Mr. Paterson has unexpectedly discovered that some of the people who are most grateful to him for issuing the order are, in fact, parents with a gay son or a lesbian daughter.

The governor said in an interview last week that he had been approached by several people who expressed their gratitude. "What struck me were the straight people who came up to me," he said. "This has happened four or five times since. They'll say: 'We're so glad you did this. Our daughter is gay or our son is gay.' I found that to be so very touching."

One evening two weeks ago, while he was having dinner with his wife, Michelle Paige Paterson, at a restaurant at 105th Street and Broadway, the governor said, a man and a woman approached him, introduced themselves, and then each hugged him. Their son was gay, they told Mr. Paterson, and they wanted to let the governor know how thankful they were about his policy.

...

The one memorable phone call that Mr. Paterson said he received shortly after his order became widely publicized was from the Rev. Al Sharpton, a supporter of civil rights for gay people. Mr. Paterson said Mr. Sharpton called to offer thanks, but also to take a friendly jab at the governor for disclosing that he became comfortable around gay people at a young age because two close Paterson family friends were gay.

"He was calling on behalf of Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald, saying I'd be in trouble for outing them," Mr. Paterson said, referring to a gay couple who often took care of him and his brother, Daniel.

"He loves you, and he needs money!"

"Results like this do not belong on the resumé of a supreme being."

[click here if you don't see the video above]

I'm so glad the primary season is over. Here are a couple of video highlights explaining why.

Last night (from AMERICAblog):

Newsweek's Howard Fineman just said on MSNBC at 8:35pm Eastern that the Clinton campaign is demanding that Hillary be offered the VP position, which she will then decline, and then Fineman quotes the Clinton campaign as saying "don't you dare offer it to another woman." Isn't that special. Apparently, Hillary was only planning on breaking her own personal glass ceiling. For the rest of you, you can break you own.

From HuffingtonPost in March, in which Hillary Clinton says McCain is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama.

I'm not really interested in hearing how the wife of the President who gave us the Defense of Marriage Act and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and who herself voted for both the Iraq War and the PATRIOT Act, is some kind of hero for women, liberals, or queers. She's not even showing up for some pretty important Senate votes on abortion.

Plus, don't even get me started on white women from privileged economic backgrounds talking about how they are second class citizens unlike black people.

Via Eyeteeth I learned about the My Yard Our Message project in honor of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.

As a stark counterpoint to the "scripted democracy" of this fall's GOP nominating convention, a project by mnartists.org, the Walker Art Center and the UnConvention is inviting people of all political stripes and artistic abilities to create yard signs to coincide with the RNC -- and, fittingly, the 50 designs getting the most online votes will be produced and distributed around the Twin Cities and near the convention site.

Here are two of my favorites.

by awesome designer Andy Pressman

by Barry McMahon