Just got off the phone with a friend in St. Paul...

[TygrBright]

...and I thought her experiences might be of interest here.

My friend, D, is a lawyer with a small firm headquartered in downtown St. Paul. Her 20-year-old daughter, A, works in one of the big downtown hotels.

She got up a some ungodly cowmilking hour to get A to work so she could supply coffee to all the GOPpie bigwigs and Old Media fatcats, I think (though she didn't cop to this) partly because she had "Mom worries" about her kid biking or busing down there with all the foofooraw rumored to be coming off. She had to work anyway (lawyers don't necessarily get Labor Day off) so it all worked out.

She dropped off A at the hotel and parked her car and stopped into the office and then it was more like a normal breakfast time so she headed out to see what was goin' on in the streets. What was going on was a lot of milling around by cops, media people, and protesters.

Thing One Everyone Should Know About What Went On In Saint Paul Today:
As D spent a lot of time explaining to Jane Hamsher and Glen Greenwald, it must be made clear to all that the responsibility for stupid, fascistic, stormtrooperlike, irresponsible law enforcement behavior belongs, first and foremost to Mr. Moran himself, Bob Fletcher and the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department. Second, to the Minneapolis police 'on loan.' A distant third, to the various alphabetical Feds, the National Guardsmen, and the State troopers. A very distant --but significant-- last, to the Saint Paul Police and the City government.

As a St. Paul expatriate who spent many tooth-gnashing, hair-pulling years attempting to dislodge Bob "The Neanderthal" Fletcher from various elected offices and/or prevent his election, this makes perfect sense. D's description of Bob: "A man with massive, terminal testosterone poisoning" is entirely accurate. Add in an IQ approximately equivalent to his belt size and you can see the problem. The convention provided Bob with a chance to muscle into a national spotlight and now he's busy making the entire metropolitan Twin Cities law enforcement community look like the Alabama State Police, circa 1965.

*******************

D ran into the aforementioned bloggers at or near Mickey's Diner and chatted them up for awhile, then strolled around to observe the various knots of protesters and the various groups of law enforcement marshalled in preparation (or, in the case of the RCSD and the MPD, provocation) for the various scheduled and unscheduled marches. She took a lot of pictures and when she sends them to me I'll post them here.

Eventually it was getting hot and her camera was running out of batteries and she went into Macy's for a frozen yogurt. Practically no one in Macy's. Practically no one anywhere in downtown St. Paul except in the streets.

She came out and headed toward her office in the hope of finding some batteries there and realized that things were heating up a little.

Thing Two Everyone Should Know About What Went On In Saint Paul Today:
D's other daughter, B, was scheduled to march with the big, permitted, organized peace march and she got regular updates on that march. Which was, as it was designed to be, peaceful. In fact, most of the protest groups were nonviolent and polite almost all day. The media spent little time covering those, however. Not enough blood, doncha know.

Some groups, OTOH, DID get out of hand. D was appalled to witness the window-smashing going on. A quote from her: "I can understand smashing windows that represent the capitalist establishment, but the Minnesota Composers' Forum?" Apparently some of the anarchist types weren't exactly hewing to a strict script, although according to D they seemed very well-coordinated.

Here's the thing about that:

Saint Paulites (and I know, 'cause I used to be one, and my family still are some,) are not going to take kindly to such thoughtless destructiveness. Not even the radical liberal lefty-type ones. They might have been able to forgive smashing a few Ecolab windows or a Macy's window or two (although all but the most lefty-liberal-commie-anarcho-sympathizers would still deplore such un-nice behavior,) but the Composers' Forum? Come on. That's going to lose them any tolerant sympathy they might have been able to scrounge up and give a real black eye to the legitimate protesters.

*************

D began to get worried about A, who was about to get off work. There weren't any of the right kind of batteries at the office so she decided to head for home since it was getting hot (in the 90s today and in Saint Paul that also means humid.) Just then the phone rang and it was A, who stated "The buses don't seem to be running by the hotel and I can't get through to Kellogg because they have it blocked off."

D instructed A to walk down to her office building and she'd come down to the street to meet her and they could go home together. She called B, just to check how the big peace march was going, and B said "Don't worry, Mom, I'm in the middle of the little old ladies brigade here and all is going as planned, perfectly safe," etc.

She went down to the street level and started out to meet A. There was a large, and excited-looking knot of protesters at one intersection. She called A, they connected by cell phone, 'here I am' wave-wave, they met up. An ominous noise behind them. At the other intersection, a very large knot of Ramsey County Sheriff personnel in full riot gear, helmet shields deployed, riot batons at the ready, body shields up, black marias in the offing, scary-looking equipment to hand.

D and A decided they'd better get the hell out of Dodge, but the only building on the street open was D's office building. They ducked in, and clued the art gallery owners on the first floor into the incipient riot. The gallery folks had, with touching faith, kept everything open in the hope of getting some art appreciators in and maybe selling an art thing or two, but as D gently informed them, the population of downtown St. Paul today wasn't exactly in the mood for aesthetic consumption.

D and A went up to the skyway and looked down on the riot, which was by this time beginning to materialize. D cussed that her batteries were dead and she hadn't been able to find any at the office, and A grabbed her cell phone. "I got my phone, I can take a picture with that!"

Thing Three Everyone Needs To Know About What Went On In Saint Paul Today:
Except that when A got her phone out, there was a funny message on the screen. "No service available. Phone locked."

"Mom, my phone is locked. I can't unlock it. It won't work."

Mystified, D pulled out her phone. "No reception."

Both phones were fully charged.

Now, when D described this peculiar phenomenon to some innocent, nice, politically inexperienced Saint Paul friends they engaged in a few minutes' idle speculation that perhaps the bandwidth was terrifically overloaded with lots and lots of people making calls all at once.

Except, as D pointed out to me, "Hell no. When the bridge collapsed everyone in the Twin Cities hit their cell phones at once and got through just fine, thanks."

The only conclusion we could draw (and I hope that someone will be able to offer credible refutation, because I'd really hate to think that Saint Paul authorities would not sink so Constitution-floutingly low, when the authorities in the much larger Denver metropolitan area seemed to feel no similar compulsion,) is that they were deliberately jamming cell phone reception and transmission in the downtown Saint Paul area today.

There's a phrase for that, and it's not a pretty one:

UnConstitutional prior restraint on protected speech.

I certainly hope that's not the case.

******************

Anyway, D and her daughters got home safely. They live close to downtown in the West Seventh neighborhood. She noted that the helicopters had stopped circling about an hour before she called me, but while we were on the phone they started up again.

"It's like a ****ing police state here. Was it like this in Denver?"

"Not that I noticed."

"Damn."

I'll let y'all know if any more interesting updates emerge from Saint Paul throughout the week.

informatively,
Bright