…in November, when some 10,000 union members and retirees demonstrated at a free trade summit in Miami. They were met by 2,500 cops brandishing new crowd-control weaponry, paid for in part by a little-noticed $8.5m appropriation tacked onto the Iraqi reconstruction bill. Videos taken at the scene show nonviolent protesters being beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and pepper-sprayed in the face.
The above from a The Guardian’s report of the planned NYC lockdown during the Republican National Convention.
And this also:
There’s a showdown coming to Manhattan. Backed by the most intense security the city has ever seen, the Republicans are about to turn the blue-state bastion of New York City into the backdrop for George Bush’s coronation. The RNC chose New York because it was the site of the September 11 terror attacks, which to Bush’s opponents and even some ordinary New Yorkers seems a brazen provocation.
On one side are 36,000 cops – a force that city councilman Peter Vallone Jr calls “perhaps the world’s 10-largest standing army”. On the other side are at least 250,000 protesters expected to converge on the city from all across the United States and Canada – a demonstration six times larger than the legendary antiglobalisation protests that rocked Seattle in 1999. They’re facing off at a time when police are increasingly adopting military tactics in response to protest, and protesters are responding likewise, conducting their own reconnaissance on Republican plans and plotting actions designed to hit where the cops are weakest.
The police have infiltrated the protesters, but the protesters have infiltrated the convention; according to anti-RNC organisers, they have at least two moles working undercover with volunteers the city has recruited to help makes things run smoothly at Madison Square Garden.
[snip]
Plans to oppose the convention are multiplying, suffusing activists with a giddy, growing tension. Marches and rallies, legal and illegal, are being planned for every day that the Republicans are in New York. There will be street theatre, including a Roman-style vomitorium in the East Village a few days before the convention starts, meant to signify Republican gluttony. Cheri Honkala, an organiser from Philadelphia, is mobilising homeless people, public housing tenants and others for a big, illegal “poor peoples’ march” on August 30. Activists are holding weekend workshops where direct-action novices practice street blocking, and DIY medics learn to treat victims of pepper spray and police violence.
No one knows where it’s all going – whether it will look like Chicago ’68 or Seattle ’99 or something altogether new. But activists see the coming conflict as history-making. “I want to see something so gigantic that it can’t be misinterpreted,” says Jason Flores-Williams, a political writer at High Times Magazine, who’s been playing a dual role as a journalist covering the movement and an organiser shaping it. An intense man in his 30s with a shaved head and silver earring, Flores-Williams recently published the High Times Activist Guide to the Republican National Convention, which is part primer and part call to arms.
No, it’s not going to be “here we go again.” This is going to be a “once in a lifetime.”

A friend of mine, a politically liberal single mother who often works two jobs, has a (now) young adult offspring who is learning disabled. My friend recently recounted a discussion with her politically conservative brother, who was ranting about how we don’t take enough responsibility for our lives and expect the government to take care of us. Ultimately, my friend’s response to her brother was –“are you going to take care of my daughter when I die?” Right now, she lives in a group home, works as a bagger in a supermarket, and gets SSI. The young woman is doing what she’s able to do, but she wouldn’t surivive without help from the government.
While conservatives argue against government support, they sure don’t seem to have any problem with government interference. What this conservative administration seems to have done is turned inside out the “social contract” that our constitutional republic is supposesd to protect.
I found this very informative essay about this “social contract,” that begins with
Between 1787 and 1791 the Framers of the U.S. Constitution established a system of government upon principles that had been discussed and partially implemented in many countries over the course of several centuries, but never before in such a pure and complete design, which we call a constitutional republic. Since then, the design has often been imitated, but important principles have often been ignored in those imitations, with the result that their governments fall short of being true republics or truly constitutional. Although these principles are discussed in civics books, the treatment of them there is often less than satisfactory. This essay will attempt to remedy some of the deficiencies of those treatments.
The Social Contract and Government
The fundamental basis for government and law in this system is the concept of the social contract, according to which human beings begin as individuals in a state of nature, and create a society by establishing a contract whereby they agree to live together in harmony for their mutual benefit, after which they are said to live in a state of society. This contract involves the retaining of certain natural rights, an acceptance of restrictions of certain liberties, the assumption of certain duties, and the pooling of certain powers to be exercised collectively.
Such pooled powers are generally exercised by delegating them to some members of the society to act as agents for the members of the society as a whole, and to do so within a framework of structure and procedures that is a government. No such government may exercise any powers not thus delegated to it, or do so in a way that is not consistent with established structures or procedures defined by a basic law which is called the constitution.
and then, later, this:
In his treatment of the subject, Locke tended to emphasize those violations of the social contract that are so serious that the social contract is entirely broken and the parties enter a state of war in which anything is permitted, including killing the violator. Today we would tend to place violations on a scale of seriousness, only the most extreme of which would permit killing. Some would even go so far as to exclude killing for any transgression, no matter how serious, but that extreme view is both unacceptable to most normal persons and subversive of the social contract itself, which ultimately depends not on mutual understanding and good will, but on a balanced distribution of physical power and the willingness to use it. Sustaining the social contract therefore depends in large part on so ordering the constitution and laws as to avoid unbalanced or excessive concentrations of power, whether in the public or the private sector.
I know very little about the intricacies of Constitutional law. However, what I do know of successful “social contracts,” whether on a family level, a neighborhood level, a community level, or a governmental level, those that work best include an understanding that those individuals who are not able to take care of themselves are taken care of by some agreement and contribution (according to ability) of the whole. To me, that kind of “my brother’s keeper” is the foundation of the Christianity that Bush so vehemently espouses. Yet, in action, he and his administration have managed to turn the essence of Christianity inside out as well.
How did so many patriotic “Americans” move so far to the right of that social contract cornerstone that they openly oppose the responsibilities of that contract to collectively help those who cannot help themselves?
Didn’t Christ say “as ye do unto the least of my brethren, ye do unto me?” I’m not a Christian, but Bush maintains he is. C’mon George and all you Christian conservatives, WWJD?

On April 25, 1953, the science journal Nature announced that James Watson and Francis Crick had discovered the double helix structure of DNA, the molecule that is fundamental to life. But absent from most accounts of their Nobel Prize-winning work is the contribution made by a scientist — molecular biologist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin — who would never know that Watson and Crick had seen a key piece of her data without her permission and that it would lead them to the double helix.
Fifty years later, “Secret of Photo 51” unravels the mystery behind the discovery of the double helix and investigates the seminal role that Rosalind Franklin and her remarkable X-ray photograph played in one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science
The above from the program description of NOVA’S The Secret of Photo 51.
We all know that history is the story of what happened told by the people in power. That fact was the impetus back in the 70s for “herstory” in contrast to “history.” But power, being what it is, put enough bad spin on that idea to set it back to where it still is today — excect when a non-mainstream public media outlet like PBS opens our eyes to the true stories.

Ron Reagan, Jr. in Esquire.
[snip]
Politicians will stretch the truth. They’ll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
[snip]
If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job