Open Season

Just because the charges have been dropped, don't think the cause for outrage has gone away.

Charges Dropped Against Democracy Now! Journalists - Investigation Needed

The St. Paul City Attorney's office announced Friday it will not prosecute Democracy Now! journalists Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman also issued a statement Friday that "the city will decline to prosecute misdemeanor charges for presence at an unlawful assembly for journalists arrested during the Republican National Convention."

Both announcements come two weeks after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention where over 40 journalists were arrested while reporting on protests taking place outside the convention center.

However, as Chris Bowers put it on Open Left:

An investigation is indeed necessary, but I am already pretty sure about what happened:

1. In August, protesters at the 2004 RNC successfully won police brutality lawsuits against the New York City police department.


2. So, a few days later, the Republican Party indemnified the St. Paul police for up to $10 million in the event that charges of police brutality would be brought against them.


3. Then, at the convention, the police went out and illegally beat up $10 million worth of progressives, including progressive media. It was a free beating for them.

He also includes a video of Democracy Now! report Nicole Salazar being chased, clubbed, and possibly kicked by police, ignoring her cries of "Press! I'm with the press!"

(Somewhere I came across an even more appalling video of a woman presenting a flower to a marching column of riot-geared police, one of whom responded by pepper-spraying her, twice. If I find it again, I'll try to post it here.)

Remember: The Bush party is America. Dissent is thoughtcrime. Look what you've made us do.

The Hoynes Test

One of the main plot-lines of the third season of The West Wing was the ramp-up of President Bartlett's re-election campaign. Episode 3-17, "Stirred"*, focused on the electoral question of whether to replace the sitting Vice President, John Hoynes, with a new candidate. The campaign manager (Bruno Gianelli) very much wants to replace him and has the numbers to prove that there are several other candidates who would help the ticket more.

We know from previous episodes that Bartlett and Hoynes still bear mutual animosity because of some things they said about each other during the primaries four years earlier; and we know that Hoynes is a recovering alcoholic, and by the end of the episode so does Bartlett. Despite this, Bartlett is adamant that Hoynes remain in his position. When asked why, he writes four words on a piece of paper, hands it to Hoynes, and walks out to other business, the whole matter settled for him.

The four words summing up why Hoynes remains on the ticket?

"Because I could die."

You can be sure that not even for an instant did John McCain--the oldest man to seek the presidency, who has had recurrent instances of cancer--consider the Hoynes Test. Not even for five seconds before making the announcement did McCain think, "If I die, can this person be a good president?" He craves power the way the Hamburgler craves the tasty flesh of Mayor McCheese, and anything that advances his own power he will seize without a second's hesitation. Palin was put on the ticket to suppress the post-convention bump that Obama was already enjoying, and to provide a distraction to the ADD-addled children of the campaign press; you, and your government, and the future of America, weren't even fleeting thoughts in the dimmest recesses of his brain.

You are nothing except the object over which McCain wants to rule.

"Because I could die"? If McCain dies, the world can go to hell, as far as he cares. After him, the floods.

Edited to add: More on these topics from TNH.

*This is a fan transcript. It's pretty accurate, though I noticed that it gives "deficit hogs" for "deficit hawks".

An observation on Crowley's Ægypt

(Cross-posted to johncrowleyreaders@yahoogroups.com)
I recently re-experienced The Solitudes by listening to Crowley's (crowleycrow's) reading of it for Blackstone Audio (which I cannot recommend highly enough), and I came away with a tentative connection within the text.

In chapter two of Fratres (part 3 of The Solitudes), as Pierce is sorting his books, we get a description of the cover illustration of the magnum opus of his mentor, Frank Walker Barr, Time's Body, a four-volume historical work which prefigures all of the four-volume versions of Ægypt (Crowley's own and the two unstarted versions by novelist Fellows Kraft and by Moffet himself). The description is of a single painting cut into quarters:

. . . here a man pleaded before lictors; dark Miltonic beings with bat wings fled away; a flight of angels, or anyway tall and noble ladies, draped, and winged with heavy, pigeon-gray wings, climbed en masse toward an obscurity in the picture's center, where four corners of the volumes met.

In the next chapter, Rosie reads Kraft's memoir (which I think is entitled Sit Down, Sorrow, but I'm not sure), wherein he describes

. . . the church of San Pantalon . . . a Baroque ceiling painting done in eye-fooling perspective by one Fumiani, whom I have heard of in no other context. . . . it must tell the story of the Saint, though what that story is I have never learned. Despite the convincing upward leap of its perspective, it . . . has a hallucinatory dark clarity, the figures distinct and solidly modeled, the pillars, flights of stairs, thrones, tripods, and incense-smoke so real that their great size and swift recession from the viewer is vertiginous. Most remarkable of all is that, except for a central flight of angels, there is no obvious religious import to any of it . . . Nothing but these huge antique figures, associated in a story more than portraying one; pondering, judging, hoping, seeing, alone. The flight of angels ascends not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky.

(Note that "eye-fooling" is the English translation of "tromp l'oeil", the term for works of art which appear to be things other than they are.)

I think these two paintings are the same.

Giovanni Antonio Fumiani was real, as is his painting, as is the story of San Pantalon ("the all-compassionate", a martyr of the third century who, through that Church, lent his name to the old Venitian in the commedia dell'arte, and through that character to the word "pants"). It's hard to find a good reproduction of the painting--I haven't been able to find a book on Fumiani, and despite the scale of the painting it merits only a crowded half-page in the volume on The Art of Venice I could find through the NYPL. But all of the elements that Pierce notes on the cover of Time's Body are present in the Pantalon painting.

Kraft notes the legend that Fumiani died falling from a scaffold while creating his painting; this might not be true. But that legend echoes through Ægypt. And the flight of angels ascending to a heaven which is empty, unfinished, uncompleted, possibly by the death of its author, possibly because completion is impossible, is a metaphor central to the resolution of the novel as a whole. And the sudden, unexpected, unstated connection between two things, just beneath the surface, waiting for people to notice, is a method central to the novel.

It's like a damn fractal. Anywhere you dig in, you find the same patterns repeated at different sizes.

A word from our president-to-be

Courtesy of a friends-locked post kent_allard_jr.