With a transfer of power due in DC - - - Things a pair of dead black men are reported to have said.

Frederick Douglass: (1857)

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. And these wrongs will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Now for something wholly unrelated, here is a picture of Susan Gaertner, who has the will and ambition to want to be Minnesota's next Governor.




Full, honest candor and disclosure is the gold standard showing who you are.

Click to enlarge the left image. Read it. You too can take the "RNC 8 Geartner Truth-in-Advertising site search test." But hurry, while things last. The site's sight may be updated. Simply start here, then enter your search term.

RNC 8 - - - A failure of communication.

wikiquote.org

Captain: You gonna get used to wearin' them chains afer a while, Luke. Don't you never stop listenin' to them clinking. 'Cause they gonna remind you of what I been saying. For your own good.
Luke: Wish you'd stop bein' so good to me, cap'n.
Captain: [lashing out with his stick] Don't you ever talk that way to me.


democracynow.org, dated Sept. 4, 2008 (italics added):

AMY GOODMAN: Here in St. Paul, Ramsey County prosecutors have formally charged eight members of a prominent activist group with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism. The eight members of the RNC Welcoming Committee are believed to be the first persons ever charged under the 2002 Minnesota version of the federal PATRIOT Act. The activists face up to seven-and-a-half years in prison.

Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner announced the charges at a news conference Wednesday.

SUSAN GAERTNER: Through this week, I’ve seen much about my great city to celebrate, but it also, in some ways, has been a sad and painful time for my community. We have watched as a few lawless people tried to overshadow the peaceful protests and the exercise of free speech rights by thousands of law-abiding citizens. Some of the people who allegedly planned illegal acts to disrupt the convention and our community were thwarted last week when law enforcement agencies executed warrants and made arrests at several locations. Today, my office has charged eight persons with the felony crime of conspiracy to commit riot in the second degree for their alleged criminal activities as members of the RNC Welcoming Committee. All but one of those persons are currently in custody.

AMY GOODMAN: According to the National Lawyers Guild, the criminal complaints filed by the Ramsey County Attorney do not allege that any of the defendants personally engaged in any act of violence or damage to property. Instead, authorities are seeking to hold the eight defendants responsible for acts committed by other individuals during the opening days of the Republican National Convention.

Most of the activists were arrested over the weekend in preemptive house raids. None of the defendants have any prior criminal history involving acts of violence. Authorities are basing their case on paid informants who infiltrated the group. The eight activists charged are Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Gullen-Givens, Erik Oseland, Nathanael Secor, Robert Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald and Max Specktor.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher explained the terrorism charges.

SHERIFF BOB FLETCHER: It allowed us to execute search warrants last Saturday, as you know, on the leadership of the Welcoming Committee. And frankly, that—severing that leadership from the organization skills from that entire process was huge, because a lot of these anarchist groups that came here were supposed to be dedicated to different intersections, different sectors of the city. And by taking those maps away really made it harder for them to coordinate their assault on our city. And we only removed ten percent of the problem, but the ten percent we removed was the coordinating aspect of it.

AMY GOODMAN: Two guests join me here in St. Paul, Minnesota: Bruce Nestor is president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and David Bicking is the father of Monica Bicking, one of the eight activists charged with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism. David Bicking lives in Minneapolis.

Welcome, both, here to our studios at Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, SPNN, public access. Well, why don’t we start with you, Bruce Nestor? Explain the significance of these charges.

BRUCE NESTOR: These charges are very significant for any political activist or anybody that cares about the right to organize politically or for freedom of speech. By equating plans or stated plans to blockade traffic and to try to disrupt the convention with acts of terrorism, the conspiracy nature of the charge, where you punish people for what they say or advocate, but not for what they do, really creates a possibility that anybody organizing a large-scale demonstration, at which civil disobedience may be a part of it or where other individuals may then engage in some type of property damage, creates the potential that all those organizers can be charged with these conspiracy charges and face significant penalties.

AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean, “in furtherance of terrorism”?

BRUCE NESTOR: In Minnesota, that was a law passed after the attacks in New York on September 11th. It kind of tracks the definition in the federal PATRIOT Act, which is any criminal act, in this case at least a felony, that’s designed to influence or coerce public opinion or to disrupt a public assembly. And so, my guess is that the charge is based upon the idea that there was an attempt to disrupt the RNC, which would be treated as a public assembly, even though they didn’t apply for a permit under St. Paul public assembly laws to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: David Bicking, your daughter Monica is one of the eight. First, can you talk about her, talk about her activities?

DAVID BICKING: Yeah. My daughter Monica is a wonderful person, very concerned—

AMY GOODMAN: How old is she?

DAVID BICKING: —very committed. She’s twenty-three. And she and all the people—I mean, the people they have charged here are not criminals. They’re some of the best people in our society. She’s really dedicated to her activism. She’s experienced activist already. She’s come about this through her own experience in her life over a long time. She is always concerned about the feelings of others.

She has done some travel abroad. And when she was eight, we were in Ecuador for four weeks, and she saw the poverty and the children begging, but also humanized it by playing with the children, the maids in the, you know, inexpensive hotels there. She has—went to Honduras for eight weeks after her junior year to work in a very remote village, humanitarian work.

After high school, she took off a year before college and worked as an intern with the American Friends Service Committee, which is a Quaker peace group. She was based in Chicago and helped in their organizing and their peace work and liaison with other groups.

So she has a lot of experience, and she’s really seen what it means when—you know, the United States’ actions through war, through injustice at home, through poverty and how that’s affected people’s lives. And it’s affected her very deeply. And so, she’s strong. She’ll get through this one way or the other.

AMY GOODMAN: Is she still in jail?

DAVID BICKING: She is still in jail right now.

AMY GOODMAN: When was she picked up? How was she picked up?

DAVID BICKING: She was picked up on Saturday morning at 8:00 in the morning. She was staying in her house, which she had just bought a month before. And there were several roommates there and a whole bunch of people who had come in for the week. And at 8:00 in the morning, they were woken out of a sound sleep. The police came banging through the back door, held everyone at gunpoint. They had automatic weapons, assault rifles, forced everybody—ordered them to the floor, face down, handcuffed them behind their backs and then proceeded to search the entire house, just ransack everything.

When I got there forty-five minutes later, she and her boyfriend Eryn and a housemate, Garrett, were already in one of these big black SUVs they have, you know, and were taken off to jail just after that. And then, for the next hour or so, they released the other people in the house one by one, after photographing them, checking ID and searching them.

Then the search of the house went on for another like six hours probably, as they carted all sort of stuff out of the house. I watched, you know, as they took things out of the garage. There were old tires. I suppose those could be burned someplace. You know, there were just the sort of things homeowners would have, especially people fixing up a house. Many cans of paint, each which was patiently labeled and loaded onto the truck. It was just an absurd, absurd overreaction.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the RNC Welcoming Committee?

DAVID BICKING: The RNC Welcoming Committee is a group that defines itself as anarchist or anti-authoritarian. And she was working with them very closely, as were these other people. They saw their role as facilitating the protests and the actions around the Republican National Convention this week. Their major function was to help other people from out of town come and express what they wanted to express and do what they wanted to do to protest or to resist the convention.

So they spent a lot of time setting up housing, medics, legal support, child care, but, of course, also—and of more interest to the authorities—helped coordinate some strategies, helped people brainstorm about what sorts of things could be done or what would be effective. And so, members of the Welcoming Committee traveled around the country meeting with similar groups around the country to talk to them so that people could, as a whole, come to some agreement of how—not necessarily all use the strategy, all the same tactic, but how their actions could be coordinated, instead of at odds with each other. So, they were not planning the activities of this week, but rather helping others to plan and forming some sort of consensus so that this could all work and people could come here and do what they planned to do.

AMY GOODMAN: How much time do they face?

DAVID BICKING: Up to seven-and-a-half years under these charges.


_____________

We cannot all be perfect. Few are. Yet, there is a difference between being innocent and being guilty of heinous crime meriting seven years of prison.

There is disproportionate meanness of the state toward people basically only saying that injustice exists, and at times convenes.

Huckabee. His book, "Do the Right Thing." Current reading.

I just got it from the Anoka County Library Rum River Branch. They have a good library system, whatever else you might not like. It's on a 10-day circulation, being a popular item, non-renewable. Huckabee and Ron Paul are the interesting part of the GOP. Palin is schlock, others saying they will cut your taxes are walking cliches. They have a strong candidate positioned to run for the Obama Senate seat when it is next up. Ex-navy spook, Naval Intelligence Service being their spook-shop designation.

But the GOP has too many Michele Bachmann sorts, still, even with past elections.

John Boehner is Newt, without the hair. Equally sincere.

Newt and Jack Kemp shared - I think it could be a toupee, since I have never seen pics of the two of them together. I think it's one toupee that Newt and Kemp share; each getting it on alternate days. Perhaps not.

If the GOP becomes competitive, Huckabee might be one voice and Ron Paul the other that say quite different things from one another, but also different from plain vanilla GOP anti-choice divisiveness and theocratic agenda, for the wealthy to enjoy, the deluded to vote for. I may write a book report. I may not.

Initial results on a Google Alert set for "RNC 8."

Just the raw links, make of them what you will. Here, here, here (well written), here, here, here and here. I think I got the seven links arranged in order, without misdoing things - one omitted, another posted twice.



It seems these troublesome RNC 8 kids set up a website [aka free speech] and talked a lot and were seized by law enforcement before any of the eight took one real physical act in violation of traditional criminal law. I don't believe there was even any jaywalking. I could be in error.

Conspiracy to damage property in furtherance of terroristic aims and intent to terrorize now arguably is the sort of thing that is real cause to pull people off the streets and into jail. Isn't it? The Nazis had their rule of law - judges in robes, governmental prosecutors to screen and filter charges leveled by policing authorities, all the trappings of justice that we have - and they had so many laws that everybody was guilty of violating something - and they had explicit and clearly written and duly passed statutory law against Jews and Aryans intermarrying with terms of "hard labor" as a penalty. It was a state policy to regulate such behavior, and they never stopped running their courts even in wartime.

The basic question is what do you criminalize and when do you say, "Wait for a real action that is out of line with traditional criminal law and a threat to civil protection, to orderly traffic, to something real and actual and not potential or hypothetical, and then arrest the actual perpetrators, and do that before jugging kids who had the misfortune to be talking around a police infiltrator."

What concrete wrongful acts are alleged against these eight defendants?

How free is speech, really, if you can be pulled off the streets before a "Norm brought hockey back to Minnesota" love-in event has even started, because you were talking about it?

Talking in ways a suit with a badge did not like.

A hypothetical question since we know the Gaertner-Fletcher answer, eight kids were treated as they were for talking, and that is how "free" speech without a traditional criminal act is in Gaertner-Fletcher land.

It fits a bit uncomfortably, for me.

The RNC 8 basically, stripped of a lot of rhetoric, were saying the people running things don't really know what they are doing and probably are not making good decisions and things should be more decentralized. Not those words, those thoughts. And not a window broken by any one of them in the record I have seen publicized, not the hurling of a single hard object at a window or a cop. No playing with matches.

Prior restraint. And only that. Over speech.

Let's be fair. Look at it from the other side. Make the opposing argument. Clearly people suggesting such things, talking that way, should be put away -- and throw away the key.

It is how you keep order on the eve of a civic event. Yet we are about to entirely change our national executive, in days, and how are some talking now? It's a fair question.

See, here, here, and (because we should be particularly hard on those criticizing things that impact directly on national security) here. I say we arguably might be too soft in not criminalizing and putting complainers away for a long time, long enough so that they come out of the privatized prisons of the criminal justice system with a respect for the right we have, to maintain a status quo without a lot of whining and discord. It is maintaining order. Law and order. It is a goal in any complex nation, in any cohesive society.

And these brash offenders do it, their criticism, by setting up a website, then using it to deliberately question how things get done. How official acts are done, or how they should be done.

It is interference and we should tolerate none of it. Some in Congress might even question fundamental loyalties, and absent an oath, how can we really ever be sure, of basic loyalties?

Buckley v. Veleo, stripped of its rhetoric said "Money talks." It is protected speech to mix money into politics. But these kids, they were talking words, not tendering cash.

Money talks, fine; people talk, not okay?

Humpty Dumpty's fallen, Ms. Gearther; so try putting him back, at least, instead of blithely following your statutory cookbook about cooking an omelette.

The term is "prosecutorial discretion" and it does not only mean how heavy can you stand on little folks. It means be discerning of subtleties, where lack of good manners really is not a crime.

I suppose the hammer and nail old sayings are still valid - if the only tool you have is a hammer every situation looks like a nail; and the zaibatsu Japanese addition, the nail that stands up gets hammered down.

Opinions differ.


_______UPDATE________
I realized I had done an entire post without saying "Nasser Kazeminy," and thought to myself, "Why do that?". So, just a string of disjointed and unconnected words thrown together haphazardly: Buckley v. Valeo, Nasser Kazeminy, Jeff Larson, lavish dress, lavish manners. Nothing to bind the words together nor to relate them in any relevant way to a post on criminality (actual per some statute or merely in the eye of the beholder).


_______FURTHER UPDATE_________
Screenshot, from the WaybackMachine (click to enlarge and read):



Any reader in favor of police brutality is asked to leave a comment.

An intent to "use this opportunity to make the changes we thirst for manifest and take root before us, making the Republicans/Democrats (whatever you want to call them) obsolete," that's there on the screenshot. I live in Minnesota's Sixth District. The DFL offered revolving-door lobbyist Elwyn Tinklenberg as if fit for Congress. The GOP offered opportunist divisionary theocrat Michele Bachmann for the same purpose.

They don't need anarchists. They are, each party, hard at work doing their best to make themselves obsolete. Successfully so, approaching now irrelevance, with obsolete merely down the road absent some kind of change in the DFL, (with the GOP lost in its unyielding sin of subservience to balance sheets and income statements of almost any kind, true or false, Madoff until crashing being just fine). How can these self-proclaimed young anarchists do more harm to the two parties in my district, than they have done to themselves - with Elwyn Tinklenberg and Michele Bachmann? That's not a rhetorical question. Give me a cogent answer, please. The district is a national laughingstock. Bless Bob Anderson and his courage.

I like the one theory in the first link the Google Alert yielded, see opening paragraph; the suggestion that local minions of government are pressed to show some kind of return on investment. Bang for the buck in return for all the tax money spent on police presence - personnel and equipment.

Gallons and gallons of pepper spray do cost money. Nobody manufactures and distributes tear gas for nothing. It's just not done. There's the balance sheet, now Fletcher-Gaertner give us an income statement, with public impact having arguable but real cash value.

Planning costs, state homeland security bureaucrats given salaries from the fisc, all that adds up especially in multi-million state deficit times.

Without show trials, how can we justify?

Joe Stalin knew how to hold show trials.

Susan Gaertner is an amateur.

Manufacturing in a malaise, but at least Boeing is still Boeing, helping balance of payments - - always prime and on time?

Malaise, Detroit, and Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound." But Boeing is Boeing; or is Boeing not?

Boeing was Boeing. That we know.

But is the luster waning, is tarnish present, is sloth one of seven deadly sins?

It's a question that's been blogged, and not by novices. And not by professional nit-picking nay-saying nabobs of negativism. Worse, far worse. By analytical mechanical engineers. An apparent chorus. They can be hard. Blunt. Direct.

Merciless and unyielding.

Probably intended as an insider thing, my hope is that linking to it will not cause the author to pull the post - post here, comments, here.

Too much Dream in the Dreamliner? Not enought schedule discipline to getting the ---liner part of it onto the line? You decide.

Gaza - Minnesota Independent blurbs, naming names.

Kieth Ellison. Betty McCollum. Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich seems to take the strongest position. McCollum, well, she sure hung Al Franken out to dry. No problems with lobbyist El Tinklenberg. Other than that, why care what she says especially pablum press releases.

Credit Polinaut for the links.

________UPDATE_________
http://kucinich.house.gov/

The disproportionate dimension of things appears to be the Kucinich focus.

The children of Palestinians and the children of Israel both deserve life. But the lives of the children of Gaza are cynically discounted as "human shields". Massacres are being rationalized. Israel's "moral high ground" in Gaza, a growing pile of small bones in a graveyard.

The Administration knows Israel is using US weapons, paid for by US taxpayers, with disproportionate force creating a collective punishment of Gazans, assuring an escalation of conflict, clear violations of the Arms Export Control Act.

Israel was given U.S. weapons on condition they would not be used for aggression or escalation. The outgoing Administration must finally stand for the rule of law, not the rule of force.

Italics added. Same "disproportionate" concerns, Lionel Beehner – Wed Dec 31, 2008, identical text published two places, here and here. That is after the Israeli air campaign began, before the ground campaign.


_______FURTHER UPDATE_________
The contrary view, here. This google. It seems a timely question; 136,000 google hits.

Call of the Wild.

The primordial Fairbanks Newsminer has the photo-report: A kerosene heater? What would Jack London say?

There is this:

The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierce conditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control. He was too busy adjusting himself to the new life to feel at ease, and not only did he not pick fights, but he avoided them whenever possible. A certain deliberateness characterized his attitude. He was not prone to rashness and precipitate action; and in the bitter hatred between him and Spitz he betrayed no impatience, shunned all offensive acts.

On the other hand, possibly because he divined in Buck a dangerous rival, Spitz never lost an opportunity of showing his teeth. He even went out of his way to bully Buck, striving constantly to start the fight which could end only in the death of one or the other.

Early in the trip this might have taken place had it not been for an unwonted accident. At the end of this day they made a bleak and miserable camp on the shore of Lake Le Barge. Driving snow, a wind that cut like a white-hot knife, and darkness, had forced them to grope for a camping place. They could hardly have fared worse. At their backs rose a perpendicular wall of rock, and Perrault and Francois were compelled to make their fire and spread their sleeping robes on the ice of the lake itself. The tent they had discarded at Yea in order to travel light. A few sticks of driftwood furnished them with a fire that thawed down through the ice and left them to eat supper in the dark.

Close in under the sheltering rock Buck made his nest. So snug and warm was it, that he was loath to leave it when Francois distributed the fish which he had first thawed over the fire. But when Buck finished his ration and returned, he found his nest occupied. A warning snarl told him that the trespasser was Spitz. Till now Buck had avoided trouble with his enemy, but this was too much. The beast in him roared. He sprang upon Spitz with a fury which surprised them both, and Spitz particularly, for his whole experience with Buck had gone to teach him that his rival was an unusually timid dog, who managed to hold his own only because of his great weight and size.

Spitz is the one in front of him, in line. Buck always knew to protect his back. All before Brokeback Mountain.