Cops were good both Saturday and Sunday, but 100 arrests at Critical Mass and 1000 yesterday...WTF. Still no reports of violence, so it sounds like the policy handed down (from Bloomberg, I guess) was hands off on the weekend and arrest everyone during the week. I wonder how many people will actually be charged with anything. Scary.

Big Media Matt has a post on how political demonstrations are stupid. IMHO, he's doing one of those things where you say something you know everyone on "your side" will disagree with to prove that you are deep enough to not hew to the party line. Norm Finkelstein wrote about this phenomenon in an essay on Chris Hitchens. The idea is, a truly principled person, while generally aligned with one social or political movement or another, will at times follow her principles to conclusions that contradict those movements' stated positions. This leads to the conflation of controversial positions and consistent principles, which in turn leads to some people making controversial statements in order to increase their perceived credibility. So you get Michael Moore making sexist comments, Chris Hitchens (when he was still a liberal) taking anti-choice positions, or Matt encouraging the extinction of spotted owls.

Of course, when taking a controversial stance on any issue, it is vital that you present your view as being more realistic, more firmly based in common sense and reason, than those who buy into the conventional wisdom. Thus did liberal hawks paint the anti-war left as irrational dreamers, to such an extent that, amidst spreading acknowledgement that Iraq was a mistake, those who argued so at the time are still marginalized. This is why I was so happy to see Digby's response. Digby is a poli-sci nerd and a hardcore partisan; he is no radical lefty, and approaches everything in terms of what benefits the Democratic Party the most. Yet, from this pragmatic POV, he feels that protests are valuable.

Just removed a few long paragraphs about how I was stressed. I was, but it has been resolved. I did learn that I will likely have to take more of a leadership role in dealing with "house stuff" than perhaps I would have liked. This may involve bringing back my award-winning group accounting program I developed in college. I will probably port it from Pearl to C#, just because. Because I am a dork.

Hm, alternate Republican delegate on C-SPAN just (well, Monday night, when I was writing this) said she's always been a Republican because access to good public education, regardless of race or class, is important to her. I knew the GOP was planning on presenting a more moderate face at their convention, but damn...from what little I saw of her, I'd vote for her over Kerry any day.

Reading about "The Tank," the place they have set up for liberal bloggers covering the RNC, it sounded very much like this community theater/art space I'd gone to a party at just the weekend before last. Ezra at Pandagon posted a picture today that confirms it. Sort of a weird coincidence.

My gf's mother was holding her purse for her, and absent-mindedly put an open bottle of root beer in it and then walked around. By the time this was discovered, a wallet, a mobile phone, a CD player, probably a magazine or two, part of a pack of cigarettes and some matches were ruined. Bummer.

I have burned Lunix 10, and now am merely awaiting a day when I feel like screwing everything up to install it. FYI. I also have only one more batch of computers to take to Office Depot for recycling. Also FYI.

I'm about to go down the street to do phone banking for Kerry. I haven't done that in years. Should be fun.