I caught some important news late Friday afternoon (And I've got a cold right now and nothin' better to do!). The City of St. Paul would take all applications for demonstrations and space in parks on March 3rd. Naturally the City put out the news very late on Friday to keep it off the news radar. There are only a few days to offer some kinds of finalized plans for the permitted use of public space during the Republican National Convention.
http://www.stpaul.gov/...

Since the process apparently involves a drawing/lottery, it may be a good idea for many groups of people (bands?) to enter into the lottery system and win space/time in a park.

A big adventure is at hand: I and two friends are going down to Iowa right now. We are going down there to see what is going on and wander around. I just figured out to upload videos directly from my phone, and we will have other tech items to capture the Iowa Caucus scene.

Videos will be posted to YouTube consistently under the username HongPong unless we get bored/and/or thrown out @ http://www.youtube.com/... . We will also have some updates posted on http://www.hongpong.com .

My friend Bobby "the Captain" is a strong Ron Paul supporter. I, Dan Feidt, am suspicious of the whole scene, and Andy French is a renegade philosopher. With one Ron Paul and two agnostics in the mix, what will happen?

Anyone on the scene or having a tip for us, can send us a buzz at 6513387661@myhelio.com or 651-338 7661.

Thanks for your interest!

Many people don't like Hillary Clinton because she seems dodgy and shady. Her background at the Rose Law Firm in the 1980s has really not been examined, because the American press, the GOP and the Democrats don't want to once again wheel out the huge, Bush-powered empire of 1980s corruption labeled Iran-Contra.

However, the truth will reveal itself. The corporate fronts, the paper trails, and most persuasive of all, government documents like these freely available FOIA CIA docs candidly talk about how branches of the scandal were set up in Arkansas. Hillary is not clean here. It's a heavily censored discussion between GOP Rep. Leach of IOWA, the CIA and the DIA. There ain't a real smoking gun, but this should be enough to prove to any sane person that more of these documents are out there. Can we get some sunshine on this??!! Can we get this into the Iowa scene??

To get this document: go to http://www.foia.cia.gov
Search for "Barry Seal" in the document search box up top.
Select the first result: "BRIEFING FOR REPSENTATIVE JAMES LEACH (R-IA) REGARDING MONEY LAUNDERING IN ARKA"

The weirdest stuff shows up @ my day job, Politics In Minnesota. The design of transportation systems carries its own ideology: the routes, exit placement, the eminent domain actions, the financing, carpool or toll road lanes; all these issues loom large in Minnesota, especially since no one can agree how to pay for needed work. St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood, the heart of the black community, got split in half by I-94, and many people today fear similar effects from massive new roads. Recently, people on the 'fringes' of the left and right who might be considered hostile to corporate globalization have talked about a 'NAFTA Superhighway' project which would link Mexico, Canada, and the United States, but little hard evidence illustrates how this plan could work.

"Haven't you heard? We're the white hats now!" -- Utility lobbyist at State Capitol hearing this afternoon

Today marked a milestone in the pursuit of America's renewable energy policy, as I watched the Democratically-controlled Minnesota State Senate Committee on Energy, Utilities, Technology and Communications pass Senate File 4 moments ago, a bill which mandates about 25% of Minnesota's electricity will come from renewable sources by 2020, and the gradient of renewable energy will rise every few years until then. This will be America's most aggressive renewable electricity policy, once it passes the Legislature.

I'm just dropping a quick message for the Dkos. Right now I am working for the little publishing operation Politics in Minnesota, which runs off a bi-annual directory of all state legislators and districts, as well as lobbyists, capitol press corps, maps and election (and demographic) stats.

As of today I have done around 50 interviews, or about 1/4 of the 201 state legislators in 67 Senate districts and twice as many representatives.

The Senate has been under DFL control for a while, but the House flipped to the DFL very strongly this November, with major pickups in mid-range suburbs like Burnsville and outstate.

Anyhow I have a few more interviews left to run, and basically I am getting the sense that this is an extremely policy-oriented, very liberal and highly organized operation that is only in its third week of existence. I have a ton of very specific information about how all these new structures are materializing, as of course the House GOP had to fire about 150 staffers who were all replaced by partisan Dems on the state payroll.

The next three paragraphs are horror incarnate. It's like we wrapped everything wrong about the whole last six years into one little ball and fucking nuked the world. Seymour Hersh's latest:

Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”

Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”

"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," says Melvin Goodman, the former C.I.A. and State Department analyst. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew." Both Rice and Hadley have declined to comment.

The story of the Niger forgeries is definitely woven into the major Bush Administration scandals - the fake war intelligence, the AIPAC spy scandal, the Chalabi-defector manipulations, and it directly spawned the Valerie Plame scandal. When Plame's husband publicly called out the forgeries, Scooter Libby and others "outed" his wife as a CIA agent, more or less because they wanted to "play dirty" to defend fake elements of the war propaganda, such as the forgeries.

Oddly enough, I was watching American Pimp earlier tonight, and those guys are small fry compared with corrupt DC defense contractors. When I said earlier that MZM, the corrupt contractor that hooked up Duke Cunningham with a house and lotsa goodies, had its fingers in many separate scandal pies, well, I didn't think that included a 15-year prostitution ring with a Homeland Security-approved limo service and late night, cigar chomping prostitute "bacchanalias" at the Watergate with CIA Director Porter Goss. Evidently, reality has come along to make me look tame. Here's the latest: (it's nothing you can't find easily, I really just wanted to put in my art + POLL)

Here are two crucial elements of the current political environment that have to be fully confronted.

One: There are clandestine U.S. military operations in Iran today - which Congress really has no clue about, and are not at all in our country's interests. This is insane.

Two: The military has a specific psychological warfare campaign to manipulate the perception of the "Abu Musab al Zarqawi" figure in Iraq - and the American audience is an official target of this psychological warfare, the Washington Post rather explosively confirms today. This indicates that PSY OPS planning and operations are integrated into the basic structure of how the U.S. media is fed information by the Pentagon. Your brain is currently contaminated with the results of military psychological operations. This is also insane.

Christopher Robert Hicks and Jacob Paul Martinez, both 19 and of Gillette, Wyo., stand accused of murdering 16-year-old Bryce Chavers on the orders of Kent Alan Proffit, who Chavers was supposed to testify against in a third-degree sexual assault trial. Proffit allegedly asked the men to kill Chavers in return for helping them get out of trouble with a drug dealer. Saturday deputies charged all three men with killing 19-year-old Jeremy Forquer, who they were worried would "snitch" on them about unknown activities. They also charged 15-year-old Michael Frank Seiser with accessory after the fact and with Chavers' murder. Hicks, Martinez and Proffit could all face the death penalty.

Retired generals and admirals subject to special investigation by Pentagon surveillance/ intelligence team. Retired top U.S. generals and admirals planning to attend a December 7 meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, an office and hotel complex next to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, have drawn the interest of a special investigation by special agents of the Department of Defense. According to informed sources, the meeting, described as a "retreat," is to be attended by a number of former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former heads of intelligence agencies, and key members of the U.S. Congress, including Sen. John McCain...

I missed the Green Day concert in St. Paul on Friday. It sounded like a hell of a good time, made particularly special by Billy Joe Armstrong's connections to the area: his wife is from New Brighton, and I have heard on reasonably good authority that he purchased a house on Summit Avenue. Star Tribune reported Saturday:

St. Paul was where he wrote some of the songs for the politically charged "American Idiot," the Grammy-winning album that is the best-selling nonrap CD of the past year, with more than 4 million copies sold. In the summer of 2003, he had walked around the track at Macalester College in St. Paul, writing the songs in his head.

The song "Holiday" always made a lot of sense to me - it must have been because I was living down the street when he wrote it! :-) So what's my real point today? The image of Senior Demon Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is an essential element of the Bush Administration's strategy to manage perceptions of their disastrous war - diverting blame and creating an attractive 'negative image'. Zarqawi is one of the principle Hollow Lies of the war.(crossposted @ hongpong.com)

The government officially ordered Jewish settlers to leave Gaza today, and thousands refused to budge. Within 48 hours the forcible removal of everyone who hasn't yet left will begin, and it's anybody's guess as to what will happen. The following looks at some of the intersecting tactical, religious and sociological problems for Israel, including the very real threat of rebellion within the Israeli Defense Forces. It's a long post, but damn, this situation is complicated.

Right now, a confrontation with eight distinct militant sides or command groupings is about to materialize, and I can only guess at how the complex operation will play out among these eight major forces: (crossposted hongpong.com)

More online sources, links and news about the intrigues below the fold...

Fortunately, I just got a new cell phone from Sprint. This will probably be essential among the concrete canyons of the delirious city. My new number is 651 338 7661. The phone also gets email @ dfedt01@sprintpcs.com . Why dfedt? They made a typo. So maybe I will get that fixed later. I will try to figure out a way to send emails to my website, that would be slickest.

So now comes the difficult part. How do I justify this trip? What do I expect?

I am not traveling to New York City to carry a sign. I have felt irresistibly drawn to the site ever since the Republicans made their disgusting announcement so many months ago. How could they dare to convene in this scarred landscape? What were they trying to prove?

Military surfers took their fiercest interest yet, as I got hits from korea.army.mil, as well as nipr.mil, a mysterious firewall developed by the DoD, as detailed in this blog. andrews.af.mil and eglin.af.mil, maxwell.af.mil, Andrews, Eglin and Maxwell Air Force bases I would presume, also stopped by. gate5-sandiego.nmci.navy.mil, the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, also came thru to the site. blackhawk.goodfellow.af.mil is the most badass sounding. Multiple mach blog surfing??

It looks like all three branches of the federal government, the Australian defense department and several bits of the military think that HongPong.com is just fantastic!! Considering I'm so lazy, that's one hell of an impact.

From further afield in the .mil we get even more interesting entries:

walker-cache.korea.army.mil

gateway5.osd.mil - Office of Secretary of Defense??!?!?

iern.disa.mil Defense Intelligence Services Agency

And the granddaddy hit of hits:

cache1.iraq.centcom.mil

Ladies and gentlemen, CENTCOM was here. Thank you.

Crossposted @ hongpong.com

Upon downloading (try this link via Suprnova.org if you want it) I found that there are three video files. On a Mac these all play very nicely using the great video program VLC. The main video file is suitable for burning onto a VCD that can play in most modern DVD players, using something like Roxio Toast.

The first video is a statement from Moore at a press conference describing his position on sharing the movie. He said that he was all right with it as long as no one was making profit off his labor. The second video is a short sample showing the recording's quality, a standard feature of these pirated Internet movies. There was also a text file with all the usual movie piracy ring jibba jabba ("POT" is their handle), and of course the film itself, at about 650 MB.

It was somewhat different than the theatrical release, but at least 90% of the final images are intact. (Maybe a little less: the film's edges are rather cropped but the top subtitles are generally visible, and during the wrenching scene with the bereaved Iraqi mother calling God's wrath down on the houses of America, the camera tilts down for the captions)

The section about Ashcroft and the Patriot Act, including his reading of it from the ice cream truck, was gone. The controversially 'slanted' montage of Iraqi children flying kites and other happy stuff isn't there. Instead it cuts roughly from the mechanic dude who says that ya can't trust your friends, right to the exploding government buildings in Baghdad. I was most disappointed that much of the excellent music was gone ("Roof on Fire"), or at a very low level ("Shiny Happy People"). Sadly it's missing such bits as the tense post-airport shutdown music and, in particular, the haunting back-and-forth piano line in the Florida classroom. Instead the sound levels of those clips are higher, which makes some of the Iraq scenes even more jarring. The film's credits are entirely missing after the dedication screen.

If you want the proper, immersive cinematic experience, frequent a real theater like my neighbor the St. Paul Grandview. If you resent giving Mr Moore money, have no theater within 40 miles, want to back up claims for or against the movie, or are planning to write the next great grad student paper on it, live under some repressive or un-Hollywoodified regime overseas, you should probably download this to check out what's going on. You basically have Moore's explicit permission. However, it is not authoritative and not nearly as funny without much of its music.