"Welcome" to the Twin Cities



You can also view on line the entire rally as covered by C-SPAN. There were wonderful speeches from a wide variety of activists who are doing everyday on the ground work to end this crazy war.

I begin with this picture. It's meant to show something important. There are hundreds if not thousands of people in this photo. They are marching through St. Paul expressing their anger and determination to end the war against Iraq. That is a huge number of people and they have something important to say. I got that image off flicker. Here's the image I got from my local newspaper, the StarTribune:



By Jim Gehrz, Star Tribune

Caption: Police officers, dressed in riot gear, gathered outside the Minnesota Children’s Museum in downtown St. Paul on Monday. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman praised the officers’ overall performance.

Now tell me, which one of these is spectacle?

To follow events in the police state of Minnesota, please check often to the following websites:

Twin Cities Indymedia

The Uptake videographers

The Minnesota Independent

Cold Snap Legal

Lindsay Beyerstein is blogging the RNC.

Nezua from The Unapologetic Mexican is blogging the RNC.

And for some AWESOME! commentary of the acceptance of violence in our society, please check it this post and the comments from the always interesting Brownfemipower. She riffs off a post by Cara of The Curvature who comments on the video of Amy Goodman getting arrested and says the following:

...the simple fact is that she didn’t do anything to deserve arrest. And yet, at the RNC, arrested she was.

THAT right there is important. Over and over again in the last few days I have watched video after video showing indivudals who have done absolutely nothing wrong getting arrested. How does that happen? Well maybe it happens because of what the StarTribune photographer chose to see in that photo above. Maybe the glorification of police power leads to the over-application of police power.

Although I gotta admit I like the stripe of pink hanging below the female cop's jacket on the right. Is it a hidden message that she's actually a member of Code Pink?