In Minneapolis/St. Paul, there’s been plenty of democracy suppression over the last few days, with various police forces raiding homes and gathering points of groups planning to protest the Republican National Convention. Glenn Greenwald covers the bases here, and also has a follow-up about Federal involvement.

As pointed out in a letter to Glenn, this isn’t new by any means (nor, I suspect, is it restricted to the Republican convention—I’d be rather surprised if the same stuff didn’t happen around the DNC). It also goes back a lot further than the letter-writer suggests (they cite 2000 as the starting point).
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This story about CBS Outdoor refusing art billboards in Minneapolis/St. Paul is quite illustrative of how tightly the public sphere is controlled in this country. CBS worries, essentially, about offending some powerful Republican patrons—at least, that’s my guess, it might not even get to that level of conscious thought.
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Recently a Marietta, Georgia school has come under fire for allowing a student to publish, in the school newspaper, an opinion piece comparing homosexuality to Down’s Syndrome. School officials are standing by the decision despite the furor (and some national media attention) the piece has caused.
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This story about two Saudi Arabians “indecency monitors” getting pepper sprayed by a young girl they reprimand strikes me as too hilarious not to share.
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The story about a University of Florida student being tasered by campus police at a John Kerry speech is all over the net at this point. It’s fairly grotesque, although I think the UCLA campus library incident from last year was even worse. As then, however, one of the most disturbing things about it are the commenters who emerge to justify the violence perpetrated by the authorities.
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So a Swedish newspaper has gotten involved in a controversy over depictions of Muhammad, culminating in heated diplomatic exchanges, threats of boycotts, and bounties on the heads of the cartoonist and the editor. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Danish Jyllands-Posten uproar from late 2005, which led to death threats and fatal riots.
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I am completely disgusted by the outcome of the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case. It doesn’t seem that surprising, but the expansion of powers of school administrations is simply awful.
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I’ve covered some of this groud before, but I’ve been reminded of its importance once again, primarily in relation to free speech issues: when you prohibit something, and allow some authority to enforce that prohibition, you are also granting to that authority the power to define the thing prohibited.
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I saw this on Sunday night and it was excellent. I highly recommend it. (The full post contains spoilers, so don’t read this yet if you’re going to go see it.)
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Recently the Washington Times featured an editorial by Frank Gaffney (cached here) in which Gaffney called for an examination on “what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war”—after opening with a (fictitious!) quotation from Abraham Lincoln calling for the hanging of Congressmen who damage morale during wartime.
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A few years ago, I wrote this article about mame.dk closing. (mame.dk was a site hosting game files for MAME, an arcade game emulator.) I get more email in reference to that article than, I think, anything else I’ve put up. Most of the email is in agreement with my viewpoint, and some ask for where one can get ROMs now (sadly, I have no idea). Last week I got a negative email, from “Mark”, and decided to post it and my reply.
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Taken together, the following three links give a disturbing (and, probably, a disturbingly accurate) depiction of where the US is going:

Your tax dollars at work: http://www.ncix.gov/images/publications/posters/jefferson_poster_8×11.jpg (that’s an official government poster, see http://www.ncix.gov/publications/posters_calendars/posters/index.html)

Don’t stray from the message: http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2005_01_30.html#002025

Given what schools are like, is this any surprise? http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/01/31/students.amendment.ap/index.html

Obligatory Kant quotation in reference to that last one: “Freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity has been achieved.”

An article on the emerging security state (where I got the poster link): http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2152

And as always, the question that comes to my mind is “can I do anything effective about any of this?”

I got these from Cursor, a daily stop for me. The first one is about spectators being barred from the Olympic Games if they’re carrying the wrong brand of food, drink or merchandise:
http://www.halifaxherald.com/stories/2004/08/08/f202.raw.html.
The other is about Republicans not letting people into their rallies without loyalty pledges(!), which fits with their general mindset but is pretty amazing nonetheless:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/08/09/bush_backers_only_policy_riles_voters_at_rnc_rallies?mode=PF