Kudos to those who have gone to Denver to protest – they have abandoned the “freedom cage” and simply gone elsewhere to do their business. The guarded enclave sits empty. (One person wrote in the book where protesters were supposed to log in, “MLK ‘I have a dream, that one day, all free speech will be done in cages.”) Meanwhile, helicopters churn overhead and the Democrat Party has expanded its reach to two blocks beyond the Pepsi Center. They take protesters very seriously, working hard to make sure they are out of sight and ear shot.

I’m conflicted about protesting. I have two objections: For one, it’s a sign of powerlessness. People who have power don’t have to take to the streets in order to engage other powerful people. They go through normal channels. Secondly, the news media has always been drawn to the weirdest hairdo and teeshirt – smart people with solid ideas are cast with nut cases, and all are painted as extremists. It’s how we marginalize discontent.

On the other hand, I like to see a good time spoiled. The riot in Chicago in 1968 contrasted very nicely with the staid liberals inside going on about their business of nominating a war candidate. The contrast was the message. If that is the objective of the protesters in 2008, it is worthy.

But I don’t get that. I don’t see unity. I see a fractured and powerless left doing the only thing it knows how to do. The right has nothing to fear from the left until the left finds leaders and learns how to organize effectively.

Still, Democrats should not have an easy time of it. The liberals are at it again, nominating another war candidate, and that fact needs to be broadcast. But the left needs to be careful – the Democrats never did address the issues raised by Ralph Nader in 2000 – the rightward pitch of the party, its abandonment of progressive causes. They merely spat on him and disowned any who followed him. The Democrat Party has power, and those who dare hold them accountable will pay a price. They will be ostracized.

It’s a choice. Be inside, be wrong. Be right, be gone. Catch 22. That’s all.

All of that said, the left really needs to reinvent itself. Protests and signs and mace and billy clubs are the symbols of a time when there was no 24 hour news cycle or Internet. Taking to the street with a megaphone is reflexive – I don’t know the answer, but I know that is not it.

Creativity, dude. Creativity. Get some.

As an avid reader of both Orwell and Jacques Ellul, I’m used to the idea of thought control in our society. But it’s always fun and entertaining to see how public opinion is formed, and how people keep their real attitudes cloaked. Fear of being out of the mainstream is a powerful motivating force.

We’ll now be subject to a TV gala called the Democratic National Convention. There will be speeches and floor shows, and the party will attempt to show the country how it is unified now. The leaders will parade about spouting empty phrases, and journalists will duly record them. There might be a “gaffe” or two (as when John McCain didn’t know how many houses Cindy owns). Someone might say something that is true. Don’t count on it. The stage production we call a convention is a professionally designed lap dance. It titillates us but leave us wanting. It’s an unfulfilled dream. Barack Obama is long on hope, short on delivery.

If we want to be mainstream, we must submerge our clearest thoughts into the abyss. We push them off into barb-wired free speech zones somewhere deep in our subconscious.

“Free speech zone” – that’s an Orwellism if ever there was one. The phrase speaks volumes – it says that we can only exercise our right to speak freely away from the mainstream and out of earshot. But it says even more than that – if the chained and heavily guarded area in Denver where they allow protests is where we exercise free speech, then everywhere else is where we don’t.

Oh, I hear all the fluttering of journalistic wings as practitioners of the once honorable profession dissect the horse race and analyze every aspect of the presidential contest except the actual issues. They are forbidden to go there, they know it, they have internalized it. They must know on some level that they are frauds and impostors. Otherwise they would not react with such anger and hostility when someone points out the obvious – their lips are surgically stitched to the butts of the powerful. Their eyebrows have been shaved so as never to arch in surprise or express disbelief. If they were to really do journalism, burrow and investigate, ask hard questions and write hard-hitting pieces on real issues, they’d wind up in a free speech zone.

We don’t outlaw free speech in this country. That would be too obvious. We’re much smarter than that. We merely marginalize it.

Mainstream media and bloggers (those who are allowed in have been vetted and screened) will be in Denver’s Pepsi Center these coming few days. There’ll be floods of words, but none so interesting as the drowned out voices of the protesters kept far away, the ones who really know what free speech means. The people behind those chain link fences are doing what respectable journalists would never think of doing: they are taking risks.

In China they don’t have to be coy. They merely outlaw protests. What we do is grotesque – a far cry from the freedom we once experienced in the 50’s and 60’s. Democrats, poised to take power, are asleep at the wheel again. Much better for us if our leaders laid their cards on the table, and if we behaved as people in dictatorships everywhere behave, looking down at our shoes, knowing the truth but too smart to speak it. Much better that than somnambulism.

Just for the record, according to Open Secrets, to date John McCain has taken in $19,560,538 from the financial sector – Wall Street investment banks, mortgage, savings and loan and insurance companies. That’s something we ought to be concerned about – that sector obviously wants special legislation (Social Security privatization?) and freedom from regulation. Those contributions are really a large collection of bribes from industry executives and PAC’s. McCain needs to be watched closely.

Which is why we have two parties. One keeps an eye on the other. Obama is watching McCain and will pounce on something like this. Influence peddling will be an iss ….. oh, hold on here. Strike that. Maybe not. Obama has taken in $22,501,165 from that sector. Guess he won’t be watchdogging.

Well, at least there’s Ralph Nader. At $30,071 he’s either cheaply bought or independent. He’ll use that money now to buy advertising on CNN … oh, wait. Probably not. CNN is not cheaply bought either.

As I have noted before, if the vote count in November is at all close, McCain will win. The reason is simple – the Republicans have the ability to flip enough of the vote using electronic voting machines to tip the election in his favor. In 2004, it appears that they flipped as many as four million votes, creating an eight million vote swing to Bush. (Democrats don’t think to do this sort of thing as they have usually led in the polls and haven’t needed to. But in years past, they have done election fraud too.)

The gold standard for elections, exit polls, have now been (predictably) dismissed as an accurate gauge of how voters really voted. Even though the United Nations uses them and the Carter Center relies on them, even though the Bush Administration used them in disparaging the outcome of Ukraine’s 2004 presidential elections, in the U.S. they are thought not to be accurate. At least after 1998. Up until that time exit polls were quite reliable (except in 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004, primaries in New Hampshire in 1992 and Arizona in 1996 – all vote counts oddly involving a candidate named “George Bush”. It’s a family tradition.)

Pollsters said that the discrepancies that showed Kerry the winner in 2004 and the Democrats even bigger winners in 2006 than they were were due to “Reluctant Republican Respondents.” In theory, though never borne out by research, Republican voters in Kerry districts were hesitant to open up to pollsters about their true vote due to intimidation by Democrats around them. It’s a little bizarre and ridiculous, but when there has to be something to explain something, that something can often be something invented on the spot.

Well, in 2008 the excuse for failure of exit polls is pre-programmed. It’s the Bradley Effect (not connected to the Brad Blog, where I learned of it.) This theory says that white voters are reluctant to admit that they won’t vote for a black candidate, and hence lie to pollsters. It is even said to affect voter responses to exit pollsters.

Given that our votes are counted in secret and that few people seem to think such a system, common in third world countries like Zambia, is at all odd, we should just get used to it. We’re going to hear a lot about the Bradley Effect as John McCain saunters into the White House to occupy the office that George W. Bush never won either.

Here’s a good article by Michael Neumann breaking down the various legalities involved in the Georgia conflict, and in general exonerating most Russian activities.

This passage caught my eye:

There is also a relationship between war as an immorally disproportionate response, or starting war for the wrong reasons, and all its consequences. When you start a war for the wrong reasons, you are responsible for all that follows, even the other side’s atrocities. Though the other side is to blame for its crimes, so are you. You don’t even have the right to kill in self-defense. If you are wrong to start a war, you don’t suddenly fall into the right just because, contrary to your expectations, it’s you, not the other guy, who has to defend himself.

The U.S., its sycophants and apologists, often scorn the Iraqis for various behaviors in the wake of the March 2003 invasion – looting and suicide bombings and kidnappings. Here’s the bottom line – the invasion was illegal and the U.S. was not defending itself when it invaded. It is therefore responsible for everything that followed – everything. That means all of the destruction of property, all of the hundreds of thousands of deaths, all of the refugees. All of it falls on Bush’s shoulders. How much more damage can one man do?

And Georgia, likewise, is responsbile for all that happened in South Ossetia .

I haven’t been posting lately. Here’s part of the reason:

That’s a picture of sunrise over Upper Quartz Lake in Glacier National Park last week. Taking in views like this while sipping on morning coffee is part of why we live in Montana, and why we put up with low pay and Roger Koopman.

Oh, and the huckleberries, twin berries, and thimble berries are ripe too. The hike to and from the lake took much longer than anticipated.

“I hope the day comes that you return to your wife and daughters and your country, and you’re able to be a provider, a father and a husband in the best sense of all those terms.” (Navy Captain Keith Allred, military judge in the trial of Salim Hamdan, a deer in the headlights whom the Bush Administration sought to imprison for life for driving Osama bin Laden’s pickup truck.)

There’s a presumption afoot in right wing circles that everyone in Guantanamo deserves what they are getting. Nice to see some justice at work. We don’t see much of it.

Note – the U.S. is still free to hold Hamdan as an “enemy combatant”, a classification made up on-the-spot in the crazed post-9/11 madness. It will be five months before we know if there is justice. If he’s not released, it will have been just a show trial.