Categorical Aperitif

OK—stand back while I apply the electrodes to this thing and try to zap it back to life.

***lightning flashes, lights flicker, dramatic music swells***

It's alive...It's alive...etc.

OK. Mmm-hmm. Ahem. *adjusts hair* *adjusts tie* *adjusts underwear* Actually, I'd wanted to kick-start this thing again last week, but Tropical Storm Fay intervened. Ye gods, what a bitch. At first, all the forecasts had her hitting on the west coast of Florida, no big deal for us on the east central coast. Then the forecasts kept shifting east, and she was going to go through Orlando, and then she was going to go through Titusville, until finally she wound up coming right at Melbourne, parking herself offshore for a couple of days, and drenching us with about two feet of rain: lots of flooding, schools closed, etc. Long story short: I will never scoff at "a mere tropical storm" again.

On top of other things, I've also been dealing with my elderly uncle. He had a bad fall about a month ago—bad cut on one hand, broken thumb on the other hand, and two cracked vertebrae in his neck—and has been in hospital and rehab ever since. Supposedly, I'll be taking him home tomorrow. After several weeks of rehab center living (and rehab center food), I know he'll be glad to get back to his own apartment, even if he still has some weeks of recovery ahead.

I haven't seen much of the Democratic Convention yet—I hope to catch the Obama and Springsteen show tomorrow night—but I have been listening to the coverage on Democracy Now!, which has expanded to two hours daily while covering the conventions. I don't have cable, so the blabfests on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are, mercifully, not an option, nor do the old-time networks hold much appeal—not even PBS, as the thought of "analysis" by Mark Shields and David Brooks makes me throw up a little just typing this. *urp* Anyway, those looking for serious convention coverage could do a lot worse than to tune in to DN! this week and next. Highlights so far:

• Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald talk about trying to crash the AT&T Blue Dog Democrats Thank-You-for-Retroactive-Telecom-Immunity bash;
• Harper's publisher Rick MacArthur dishes up some real dirt on Obama—his connection to Chicago machine politics, his embrace of Joe Lieberman, etc., that is, not that "he's an America-hating secret Muslim" crap;
• Jeremy Scahill is turned loose with a camera team and drives Senator Carl Levin into the conventionally wise arms of Joe Klein.

Oh, and apparently the innovation in "security" this year is police officers who are kind of, um, secret:

JACOB [from Berkeley Copwatch]: 99 percent of the officers tonight that are operating—look behind me—have no identification, which is against the law. An officer has to be identified by a badge or a nameplate. If you look behind me at all these sheriffs, there is not one of them identifiable. As you can see, these guys could hurt us at any given time, and we would not know how to hold them accountable. We can’t identify these guys. These guys are operating with complete impunity.

EILEEN CLANCY [I-Witness Video]: Well, what we saw last night was that people had planned to be out in the streets demonstrating, and the police obviously were aware it, because they were out in huge numbers. Some people have told me they think that the police outnumbered the demonstrators as much as two-to-one or more.

The police, in the last couple of days in Denver, have been carrying extraordinary array of armaments. The federal government gave Denver $50 million for security, and the police are wearing all spanking new uniforms and riot gear and carrying grenade launchers for teargas and things like that.

But one of the things we’ve seen that’s really troubling is that, well, last night, I have never seen so many police officers with so little identification. We have provided photographs of police officers not wearing appropriate identification and nameplates to the ACLU and the People’s Law Project here in Denver, and they are doing an investigation of it.

I even saw, I mean, police officers with—bicycle police officers with nunchucks, which is a lethal martial arts weapon, and they had them, and they were, you know, in their hands and ready to go last night.

One of the people from Rochester Indymedia told me that he saw essentially sort of a plume of smoke over the demonstrators that were boxed in by the police, so they were trapped. They were not allowed to leave. They were not given a dispersal order. One of our camera people spoke to a police officer, asked what type of gas, and they were told it was CS gas. This is the kind of thing—it’s quite dangerous, of course, to use on, you know, just the random members of the public. So it’s—there were ninety-one arrests at that location.

What we had seen for the prior couple of days is very few arrests but a tremendous amount of harassment: vehicles being stopped; identification being requested; searches being done on vehicles and people without consent; people thrown down on the ground in handcuffs, held for awhile and then let go.

And part of the problem is, when they just let them go like that, there’s no really record of who that police officer was, what the basis for the detention was. And, you know, you can’t even really sue. What the heck are you going to do? You don’t know who stopped you, almost. You don’t know what it was about. But it’s very intimidating. It’s very much harassment. In some cases—in one instance, at least, one group of people was told they were on a terrorist watch list. So those people—some of those people were detained, and some of those people have been arrested.

Of course, Democracy Now! was the first place I heard about the "Gitmo on the Platte" revelations. Listening to them sometimes is like hearing the slow death rattle of America, I swear. But it's still preferable to Chris Matthews.