Scavenging for wonderful

Well, I didn't get much writing done yesterday, because of my political rant and the need I felt to keep leaving myself post-length comments all day. Whew. Now for something completely different.

I was inspired by Tone's post to think of three wonderful things to start off the day. Not being in Oslo where apparently weather vanes run away to have adventures, and one can just look out the window and see dragons passing like great shadows beneath the surfaces of lakes, I will probably have to just make up wonderful things this morning. Let's see.

1. sitting down with a big cup of coffee and a really fun idea that has got my fingers twitching to start writing something unexpected. Just for fun, just for today. (Maybe. Then again. . .) There are wishes in it, and strings of teeth, and a scar from a bullet wound, and blue hair in pigtails, and mean widows who would probably taste like wild boar sausage if you were to eat them. Which of course you wouldn't. Gross.

2. discovering a nice new snack! It is very bright green, and translucent, and is served in dainty dishes and eaten with a spoon. The recipe was brought by aliens back in the 1950s, and was intended as a weapon against humanity -- they had already used it to depopulate six other planets and take over, but to their dismay, humans were not only immune to its toxicity, but they liked it. Especially the children. Because it jiggled.

3. geese who fly really, really high. I think there must be a reason they go so high. Perhaps they are ferrying souls to the cloud cities. They are the only means of passage. Goose taxis to heaven.

Thanks, Tone. (If you haven't visited her blog, you're in for a treat. I think her imagination is in my top-five favorite imaginations of all time!)

Do you want to share some wonderfulness too? Tag, you're it!

[Update] WAIT. HOLD THE WONDERFUL.
I wanted to move on to wonderful, but it's not possible, not with what's happening in the Twin Cities right now at the Republican convention. Protesters are being savagely beaten and arrested -- illegally, brutally. This should not be happening in America, people. Please, sit up and pay attention to this and care. We have a legal right as American citizens to protest. We have a right to organize! Peaceful left-wing political groups and student houses were being preemptively stormed by SWAT teams even days ago. Houses. Offices. Groups like Food Not Bombs. Now, students are being bludgeoned on the streets. There's tear gas and rubber bullets. F***.

This very unsettling video is of the arrest of Democracy Now producer Nicole Salazar, an accredited reporter with every legal right to be there, with a prominent press pass that should have made the police leave her alone. You can hear her screaming "Press! Press!"

Here's video of the arrest of her boss, Amy Goodman, when she went to try to find out why her producers had been violently arrested. If you don't know who she is, click her name. The point here is that both she and her producers were accredited journalists with all the appropriate press passes, fully sanctioned by the RNC (not to mention the Constitution) to be there. At the time of her arrest here, Amy Goodman was even wearing her security badge from the floor of the convention; police took it away to shut her up (without issuing a receipt for it, which is illegal) and did not return it later. For this incident, she has been charged with a misdemeanor. Her producers, for filming the protests, were bloodied, man-handled, arrested, had their camera batteries taken away, and have been charged with felony riot counts. Yes. In America.

Talking about the arrest:

In other video, police at press conferences are denying that credentialed journalists are being arrested. They lie to your face, people. When dissent is not allowed, when media is repressed, this is dictatorship. The Bush Administration has been squelching protest for years, and so many Americans don't seem to care. There is so much hatred on the Right toward "hippie peaceniks" -- and a vicious kind of Roman Coliseum delight in the repression of dissent. A wonderful local broadcaster, Thom Hartmann, reported from the Twin Cities today that he saw Republican conventioneers applauding as a student had his head stomped into the ground by riot police. With minor exceptions, these have been peaceful protests turned into chaos by police brutality and tear gas.

Read HERE for a good play-by-play of what's been going on with the protests.

This pulled from dailycos. READ THIS:
"As the police attacks on protesters in Minnesota continue -- see this video of the police swarming a bus transporting members of Earth Justice [see update below], seizing the bus and leaving the group members stranded on the side of the highway -- it appears increasingly clear that it is the Federal Government that is directing this intimidation campaign. Minnesota Public Radio reported yesterday that "the searches were led by the Ramsey County Sheriff's office. Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Today's Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically "aided by informants planted in protest groups." Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force -- an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI -- was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate "vegan groups" and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry."

People, if the major national media is choosing not to show you this, look for it elsewhere. In the age of the internet, the news is there to be found, even if the corporate media chooses not to show it.