I didn’t get much chance to blog my activities at and around the RNC yesterday – so I’m going to try to catch up now.<\/p>\n
Around 2:15, my boss called us all into a meeting to tell us the City had told the company to send all employees home at 3PM, anticipating trouble with the 4PM “anti-war” rally.<\/p>\n
“Score<\/em>“, I thought, despairing that I’d ever\u00a0 <\/em>get to cover a genuine protest at this convention.<\/p>\n I headed out on the street, and called Marty Owings, host of Radio Free Nation<\/a> over on Blog Talk Radio and started chasing leads.<\/p>\n And chasing.<\/p>\n And chasing.<\/p>\n We started by running to Harriet Island – where Colleen Rowley’s party had pretty well broken up.<\/p>\n So it was down to Mears Park, where the anarkids had massed on a couple of previous nights.\u00a0 Zilch.<\/p>\n I figured we should just hang around the entrance on 6th and Market, which had seen so much of the action earlier in the week.<\/p>\n As we were crossing Wabasha, we saw a couple of “street medics” – anarkids with red crosses taped on their clothes, carrying Holly Hobby Junior First Aid kits – walking toward the Capitol, chattering on their walkie-talkies.<\/p>\n “Score<\/em>“, again.\u00a0 We followed them to the Capitol, where the 4PM “Anti-War” rally, the one we talked about in July<\/a>, was about to get underway. A terrible rap\/jazz band was trying to channel Rage Against The Machine, playing to a crowd that was (someone call Molly Priesmeyer<\/a>) about 99.5% white.\u00a0 No, I’m not kidding; I counted.\u00a0 I saw exactly two Afro-Americans in the crowd, and two more later.<\/p>\n The “band” was trying to whip the crowd into a frenzy with their tributes to (I’m not making this up) Hugo Chavez and Eugene Debs.<\/p>\n There was no need to caricature them.\u00a0 And given the amount of pot smoke I smelled, I don’t think there was much chance of “Frenzy”, at least not yet.<\/p>\n I moved up on the hill next to the stage, and watched the crowd – and the little knots of cops massing down on Ireland and Cedar.<\/p>\n Suddenly – around 4;30 – a group of a dozen Saint Paul bike cops rolled up the Mall through the middle of the crowd.\u00a0 Thirty yards from the stage, they veered stage-right into the crowd, and apparently grabbed a couple of protesters (sources say they’d been followed after committing some act of vandalism or criminality downtown).\u00a0 The entire crowd – probably 4-500 at this point – raced over around the dozen cops, who formed a circle around their quarry.<\/p>\n I turned around; two groups of riot cops (20-30 each) poured out of the capitol in full gear, and raced down the steps, pushing a path through the crowd and formed another circle around the bike cops.\u00a0 Off to stage left, a group of mounted cops charged across the grounds, leading another group of riot cops on foot.\u00a0 They formed a double cordon around the bike cops – one facing in, the other facing out, and escorted them over toward John Ireland, where a couple of Saint Paul black and whites came to take the suspects away.<\/p>\n I went down on the capitol grounds as the crowd went back to “enjoying” the shrill, hectoring speeches.\u00a0 The cops disenagaged with a lot of synchronize shouting and banging of gear, in an almost-tribal display of macho that, I won’t lie, made me proud to be an American.\u00a0 They pulled back to the top of the capitols steps, behind the stage.<\/p>\n I met Kevin Ecker<\/a> and Leo Pusateri<\/a>, about the time word came to us that their permit to use the capitol grounds was going to expire at 5PM.<\/p>\n As a loudspeaker truck went onto the capitol grounds to inform the crowd, the whole mass started moving south toward Constitution Avenue with almost terrifying (at the moment) speed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I didn’t get much chance to blog my activities at and around the RNC yesterday – so I’m going to try to catch up now. Around 2:15, my boss called us all into a meeting to tell us the City had told the company to send all employees home at 3PM, anticipating trouble with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-days-of-adolescent-rage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}