"St. Paul is a free country!" cried a resident of Iglehart Avenue, a neighborhood street in St. Paul, Minn., as she watched her next-door neighbor's house being overtaken by police officers on Saturday afternoon. Just one in a series of house raids over a 24-hour period the weekend before the Republican National Convention, St. Paul police surrounded the private home with weapons drawn, detaining people in the backyard, while journalists, activists and neighbors -- including several children -- looked on.

Their crime? None whatsoever. No one was trespassing or engaging in acts of civil disobedience. Instead, members of I-Witness Video, a New York-based media watchdog group that records police activity in order to protect civil liberties, were holding an organizing meeting at 949 Iglehart, the home of St. Paul resident Mike Whalen, when armed police officers arrived in the early afternoon and ordered their surrender.

Among them was Eileen Clancy, founder of I-Witness Video, as well as a producer with Democracy Now! DN! host Amy Goodman and her staff had just arrived at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport when they received word that producer Elizabeth Press was in the house and being threatened with arrest.

An urgent alert had been sent by Clancy:

This is Eileen Clancy. ... The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms …

... We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house detention of media activists and reporters.

By the time we arrived at the 900 block at Iglehart Ave a short while later, the people in the house had been handcuffed and taken out back. Police officers could be seen sitting in unmarked cars, blocking off the residential street, where a growing crowd of observers gathered in front and across the street from the blue house with green columns, straining to get a glimpse of what was happening.

With two officers flanking the entrance of the house, it was hard to see anything -- but moments later, a woman emerged from the house next door. "You guys go in my backyard," she called out. "They're handcuffed back here!" With that, the crowd rushed around to the back, where over a short chain-link fence they spotted the handcuffed group, seated and surrounded by stoic police in sunglasses.

"These are nice people," the neighbor admonished the cops. "These are good people."

Sitting with her hands behind her back, Clancy spoke calmly and deliberately as she described what had happened and answered questions from people on the other side of the fence. Someone asked whether they had been read their Miranda rights. "Fuck no!" yelled one of the detainees.

As Press would later explain, a pair of police officers had actually shown up at the house earlier that day, at 11 in the morning, asking about the owner of the house. One of them identified himself as being with the FBI. "I think that was them just checking out the scene at the house," said Press, who videotaped the officers coming to the door. They claimed to want to question a former resident about an action that had occurred a few months earlier. "We're not here from the convention," one officer said. Nervous I-Witness members didn't know what to make of it -- "We were like, this is f-d up let's get out of here," recalled Press -- but they chose to finish their meeting anyway. anyway. It was only when they were getting ready to leave that the police showed up, some 20 officers this time, with guns drawn....

All told, six raids took place in St. Paul in 24 hours, resulting in six arrests. (Read about the other raids here.) On Sunday, the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent out a press release announcing that it is "seeking prompt judicial review" of the "preventative detentions" of the six people arrested, all of whom remain on "probable cause holds" in the Ramsey County Jail. According to the press release: "In Minnesota, a probable cause hold can be ordered by a police officer without a prosecutor or a judge reviewing a criminal complaint. Due to the arrest occurring on a weekend holiday, all six citizens can be held until Wednesday, September 3, 2008, without the filing of a formal charge."...
Go to the link; you need to see the pictures of the cops, which I'm having trouble posting today.

Sunfell on LJ notes the police seizure of the Permibus, which is used to teach people sustainable living.

Pecunium, on LJ, has trenchant comments on the treatment of protesters both at the DNC and the RNC.

Daily Kos has a thorough overview with many links. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune says the raids were "aided by informants planted in protest groups". [I wrote months ago about police plans to put undercover agents in every group that works for peace in the US; there was recent news coverage here in Maryland about the Maryland State Police doing surveillance on Quakers and on meetings at the Electrik Maid, a gathering place that happens not to be in Maryland but across the street in DC.]

According to Yahoo, "Police in riot gear battled hundreds of protesters with pepper spray and smoke bombs and arrested 130 people on Monday at the start of the Republican presidential convention."

Officers on horseback, motorcycles and bicycles chased a group of rock- and bottle-throwing protesters who broke off from a peaceful march of up to 10,000 people through downtown St. Paul.

Protesters, some hiding their faces with black kerchiefs, smashed shop windows, overturned garbage cans and vandalized police cars. Some pushed a flaming dumpster into a car with police in it, officers and witnesses said.

Police said 130 people had been arrested. The charges ranged from trespassing to property damage and assault, a spokeswoman said. One officer was punched in the back and another was overcome by the heat, St. Paul police chief John Harrington said.

Demonstrators marched from the Minnesota state capitol to the heavily barricaded Xcel Center, where John McCain accepts the Republican presidential nomination later this week. Public safety officials put the crowd at 8,000 to 10,000.

Ten thousand people. Did you see anything about this on your local news? How about your national news? Anyone? I sure didn't.

Here is the Unconvention, which gives people a chance to look at a different side of events.

For those of you reading this who do not believe what I am writing, I ask you to remember the late 1960s, when peaceable people were injured and killed by out-of-control police who were given leeway to do what they wanted to "those dirty damned kids". If you do not remember those days, welcome back to them. The difference now is that it's not just uncontrolled National Guard soldiers shooting into a crowd, or Chicago cops breaking bones with nightsticks, it's the combined forces of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and your local cops, many of whom were not born during the 1960s and thus have no historical perspective on violence against innocent people.

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I am not going to link to articles concerning Sarah Palin's daughter; her sex life is not public business. Her mother's views are.

Daily Kos puts together the pieces concerning Sarah Palin's religious views. She is aligned with Joel's Army, about whom I wrote recently, the Assemblies of God (which are Dominionist), Eagle Forum (the oldest Dominionist political group aside from The Family), as well as the deceptively misnamed Feminists for Life (which is profoundly anti-feminist and wants women to get pregnant and stay home.) This is why McCain wanted her for VP, to bring in people with those views.

Washington Monthly notes that Republican voters don't like her, or the script she's supposed to follow. Her supposed proximity to Russia is irrelevant; she's never been there, or done anything concerning international relations. She's the ultimate also-ran; McCain wanted Lieberman and the state GOP chairs said now, so he tagged her to make himself look good. Mind you, he tagged her without having anyone check her out -- nobody even took the time to go to Alaska and read news stories about her to find out how she did in her previous jobs.

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Reasons not to have glass facades on houses. Growing your own fruit. California's green chemical intiative.