Americans continue to disrupt and dissent from the stage-managed message of the convention:

Inside Madison Square Garden, on the convention floor, a dozen AIDS activists rose from amid the ranks of Republican youths this morning and blew whistles and chanted “Bush kills!” during remarks by the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card. A scuffle then broke out between the protesters and participants, and security officials removed the demonstrators, arresting 10 on charges that included assault and disorderly conduct, the police said. Officials said a camerman was injured, without offering further detail.

Away from the convention hall, thousands of demonstrators stood silently along the sidewalk in a column that stretched for miles to protest what they called the high rate of joblessness during the term of President Bush. Holding up pink slips of paper symbolizing job terminations, the line of demonstrators went from Wall Street, in downtown Manhattan, north about three miles to the Midtown area where the Republican National Convention is being held in Madison Square Garden. “The Next Pink Slip Might Be Yours!” the fliers read. “I’ve been unemployed before,” Gary Goff, 57, a data processor, told an Associated Press reporter. “I’m concerned that unemployment is going up so drastically under the Bush administration. I think Bush is a disaster for working people.”

Lidl forces Czech and Polish employees to mark themselves during their periods:

Lidl has once again shown its true face. Lebensmittelzeitung, the leading commerce weekly, tells that the German hard discounter has forced its Czech saleswomen to wear a special headband during their menstruation periods. Reportedly, this practice was imposed on the women workers also in Poland, which shows that the management in Germany must have known and approved of it. The headband was forced on the women workers to allow supervisors to identify when they had their monthly periods, as they were the only ones allowed to go to the toilet, without asking for special permission. Other workers cannot do this except during scheduled daily breaks. Lidl has stepped over the limits of good taste, says the German commerce industry weekly.

My first YDN op-ed of my junior year, condemning the disenfranchisement of felons from voting, is on-line here:

These disenfranchised voters, like the ones I met in Tampa, are disproportionately the underprivileged, disproportionately people of color, disproportionately those whose families are most threatened by government policies that reward the wealthy and punish the poor. And so the Republican stake in keeping them from the polls is clear, set forward flatly last year of the chairman of the Republican Party of Alabama: “we’re opposed to [restoration of their rights] because felons don’t tend to vote Republican.”

More disappointing is the complicity of Democrats in denying the vote from large and growing fractions — one in three or four of those I encountered in some neighborhoods — of their key constituencies. Cowed by the threat of seeming soft on crime, too many Democrats have proven themselves soft on democracy. And in so doing, they’re not only excluding potential voters, but alienating those voters’ neighbors and families, many of whom do not choose to vote on behalf of those who can’t but rather choose to abstain entirely in the face of seemingly bipartisan deafness to their communities’ concerns about policy and to the suppression of their right to change it.

This was the topic of a fair number of blog postings this summer, most of which were consolidated in some form here. Working on this article certainly led to some interesting conversations; let’s hope having it published will solicit some spirited response.

The number of arrests outside the Republican convention passes a thousand:

Protesters and civil liberties lawyers expressed concerns over what they said had been unfair and overzealous tactics in dealing with demonstrators who may not have had permits but were not violent. “It’s an example of the police suckering the protesters,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to the arrest of some 200 protesters who said they thought they were abiding by an agreement they had negotiated with the police as they marched from ground zero on Fulton Street. “It was a bait-and-switch tactic,” she added, “where they approved a demonstration and the protesters kept up their end of the bargain. They undermined people’s confidence in the police, and that’s a serious problem as we go forward.”…”We don’t know why we are being arrested, we were just crossing the street,” said Lambert Rochfort, who was among the protesters. “We were told if we don’t do anything illegal we would be allowed to march on the sidewalk and we did just that. Then they arrested us for no apparent reason.”

Let it be noted that The Nation prints ads for Fox News in pretty much every issue, but Fox News their ad. So much for “We report. You decide,” and for the free market, for that matter.

The Center for American Progress considers the relationship between Pfizer’s donations for Schwarzenegger’s accomodations in New York and the veto he’s mulling:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration threatened late Thursday that he would veto four bills designed to help Californians buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada unless the measures are amended. The signal was the administration’s first public stance on the populist measures, which have pitted doctors, labor interests and senior citizens against business groups and pharmacists, who are among the governor’s top backers. It was also the first public push to block a controversial bill from reaching Schwarzenegger’s desk in the final weeks of the session. The administration has been privately wrestling with how to stop controversial bills flowing from the Legislature to the governor.

President Bush flip-flops on whether he’ll win the war on terror:

President Bush tried today to stop the political fallout over his comments last weekend that the war on terror might not be winnable. Indeed, “we will win” that war, Mr. Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in Nashville. “We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war we did not start yet one that we will win,” Mr. Bush said. He spoke on the second day of the Republican National Convention in New York City, where Mr. Bush will deliver his nomination-acceptance speech on Thursday…The president’s unambiguous remarks today differed from those in an interview with Matt Lauer of the NBC News program “Today.” When Mr. Lauer asked him about the war on terrorism, Mr. Bush replied, “I don’t think you can win it.” The president went on to say, “I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.”

So much for being a steady leader in times of change.

Tom Gogola on Billionaires for Bush:

On Sunday the Billionaires opened their convention activities with a croquet game in Central Park before convening near the Plaza Hotel for a pre-march rally. A fake secret service agent shooed reporters away, “unless you are with Fox News-then step forward.” The chants ensued-“Four More Wars! Four More Wars!-and funny/biting signage unveiled: “Swift Yacht Vets for Bush,” “Privatize Central Park,” “2 Million Jobs Lost-It’s a Start,” “Free the Enron 7,” “No Justice? No Problem,” “Global Warming-Better Tans.”

The marchers rallied ’round and began to march down Fifth Avenue, passing Trump Plaza and numerous other wealth signifiers. The Hungry March Band blasted out “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and other Warbucks-approved tunes, as the well-dressed entourage hooted and hollered (it must be said, however, that some of the “billionaires” were more of the “grunge princess” fashion persuasion, cf. Courtney Love, Madonna.)…Ivan Aston Martin (aka Christopher Ditto, web designer) averred that some anti-Bushies don’t quite get the Billionaires for Bush shtick. No problem. “If there are Kerry supporters who don’t like us and get angry, that’s fine-they’ll be more likely to vote.”

Andrew Sullivan on the implications of the deliverer of the GOP’s invocation:

Is Dick Cheney the equivalent of a Nazi?

Keep this in mind while listening to Secretary of Education Rod Paige tomorrow night:

Now, as Correspondent Dan Rather reported last winter, it turns out that some of those miraculous claims which Houston made were wrong. And it all came to light when one assistant principal took a close look at his school’s phenomenally low dropout rates – and found that they were just too good to be true. “I was shocked. I said, ‘How can that be,’” says Robert Kimball, an assistant principal at Sharpstown High School, on Houston’s West Side. His school claimed that no students – not a single one – had dropped out in 2001-2002. But that’s not what Kimball saw: “I had been at the high school for three years, and I had seen many, many students, several hundred a year, go out the door. And I knew that they were quitting. They told me they were quitting.”

All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year, for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country. “That’s how you get to zero dropouts. By assigning codes that say, ‘Well, this student, you know, went to another school. He did this or that.’ And basically, all 463 students disappeared. And the school reported zero dropouts for the year,” says Kimball. “They were not counted as dropouts, so the school had an outstanding record.”