[PoliticsinMinnesota.com - I wrote this up for work] One major dynamic of political action these days is the constant battle of perception over whether a given demonstration or political organization is really an authentic "grassroots" wildfire rising up from the people. As one local tea party supporter put it to PIM, this is really a "liberty movement," not a partisan movement, but are political opportunists of every stripe trying to reshape perceptions?

The first argument from detractors is often a claim that their opponents are really getting played or co-opted by a fake grassroots "astroturfing" operation staged by "the usual suspects," namely public relations firms, think tanks and the other institutional infrastructures dedicated to propagating ideas and influencing policy.

The Congressional Research Service is an obscure wonky staff office (annual budget: $100 million!) of the U.S. Congress that releases policy analyses on a variety of subjects, but these reports are traditionally not released to the general public. If you somehow caught word of something good in one of their reports, you had to either get it through skeezy Beltway info peddlers or via the offices of your congressional representatives. Interestingly, the CRS has lobbied to prevent its own work product from going out to the general public.

Fortunately, the rockstars at Wikileaks.org have gotten ahold of BILLION DOLLARS of research, more than 6000 new documents out there. Here's the chronological index, the alphabetical index, and OpenCRS.com must be having a party right now. NICE!! (And if you have a spare dime, increasingly popular/legally embattled WikiLeaks could really use it!) If anyone finds anything interesting, post it!! (h/t cryptome.org)

The appointment of George Mitchell as special Middle East envoy for the Obama administration was fantastic news: everyone was afraid that lame squares like Dennis Ross or Martin Indyk would end up calling the shots, in particular since a lot of AIPAC-style foreign policy wonks appeared to be saturating new appointments. Fortunately, Mitchell is a serious guy, and he's already been working the case for years, so he knows who's who and what the angles are. Since the Obama administration appears to be avoiding the total rejectionism and "surrender first, then we'll talk" neo-conservative approach, an entirely new tray of carrots and sticks have appeared! And thus, Israel and HAMAS are falling all over each other to offer cease-fire terms: HAMAS wants a year, and Israel 18 months! Mitchell is expected to roll up his sleeves and head over there next week.

Here's a grim scene: A new video surfaced of Oakland, CA police detaining several people -- and suddenly fatally shooting one of them. The video was shot from the open door of a train car, and its angle and long running time clearly show that nothing much was going on. (FLV here)

[Originally posted @work.] A little while after noon today, the State Canvassing Board began evaluating the challenged U.S. Senate race ballots. Some cookies and coffee are making the rounds; they just joked the cookies made everyone more amicable.

On the ballot where someone marked "Mickey Mouse" for president, and made a small dot on Al Franken's oval, Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnuson is getting a little snarky: "This isn't a voter who cared a lot... or maybe cared too much, I don't know." The small dot was ruled, with a dissenting vote, to not constitute a vote for Franken.

For the most part, things are moving along fairly smoothly, and generally everyone seems to be in good spirits. Franken's lawyer, Marc Elias, has gotten razzed for being blustery at press conferences (most memorably in a great MinnPost article by Jay Weiner), but he seems cool and collected today, as does U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman's team. Evidently, these lawyers know that ticking off judges is a bad move.

Several outlets are streaming live: WCCO, the Star Tribune, and The Uptake are all putting up video feeds. The Uptake also has a nifty live chat widget going, as does Bob Collins' News Cut.

Several heavily disputed ballots have been set aside to evaluate later: it's probably a wise move to drill through the easier challenges first. The Franken campaign touted a report by one of the AP's Capitol writers, Brian Bakst, which suggested that their camp might finally have the edge because of around 200 easily determined ballots in his favor. Of course, the Coleman camp doesn't buy it.

Gold finally posted its biggest gain in three months last week. On December 2nd, goldbugs said gold futures went into backwardation, which suggests supplies are drying up. What does this mean? I can't possibly claim to get this stuff; however, there are crazy bastards trying to spark a COMEX futures gold 'bank run' of sorts.

The artificially tilted gold market could likely get a huge thrashing at the end of the month. The idea: everyone trades on gold and silver futures - bets of delivery at a certain price and time. Normally all these bets get rolled over to cash and extended into the next cycle -- so the gold that's being bet on never has to leave the reserves.

Yesterday the Chicago window workers' sit-in looked like it was gaining momentum - national press, a huge deal, an icon of a nation whose economy is parked in free fall as companies get denied the credit lines needed to keep rolling debts over. Now, that demonstration is off the news.

Today, former Democratic Alabama governor Don Siegelman's appeals case started: he got yanked out of office, convicted in a faulty process by the corrupt local U.S. Attorney's office, and tossed in prison. Siegelman also off the news.

Fellow Agonistas, there's one documentary you should check out, perhaps even before you go vote tomorrow (if you choose / are able to do so). We worked really hard over the last seven weeks to get this feature on the violent repression of political dissent at the Republican National Convention out the door. "Terrorizing Dissent: Election Cut" was produced by Twin Cities Indymedia and Glass Bead Collective of New York, along with several other collectives and Indymedia chapters, cut from hundreds of hours of footage that people gave us.

There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet André Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.

-- Gary Sick, October Surprise (p 226)

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I have never understood why "normal" people are supposed to believe that the Iranians let the hostages go during Reagan's inauguration because he intimidated them, but then Reagan quickly pivoted to sell them all those weapons in the 1982-1986 period traditionally known as "Iran Contra". [Crossposted @ hongpong.com]

We were about to call it a night, and had drifted past a CNN rerun of Bill Nye and Larry King rambling about UFOs. Suddenly this secret variant of CNN known as "CNN International" broke in, and unknown anchors announced Barack Obama has arrived in Afghanistan. They said their staff had only learned in the last 30 minutes - it is still not on Google News (although the Wapo called it "coming days").

With a little luck our guy from Registan can peer sideways at the spectacle there? First post?!

Ok here's a pretty good one. From Cryptome.org, which appears to be the only place regularly monitoring the Federal Register (essentially like a cash register receipt declaring new and exciting autonomous plots of the executive branch agencies... Once it's in the Register, it's Reality!)...

Well, in this case there are marvelous new proposals from the SEC for so-called "ratings agencies," aka groups of shady morons agreeing everything is fine, truly sure that blocks of goo can inflate in value through Magic Confidence in Bubbles.

I will really miss The Wire. We are gonna watch the last episode the second it comes on OnDemand in a couple hours whenever they finally post the episode. Damn.

At the end of the second-to-last episode, Clay Davis tells Detective Freamon that Levy, the gangsters' lawyer has been buying secret documents from someone at the Courthouse. My guess is that the Judge was selling the documents -- that would bring the plot full circle, since the Judge and Detective McNulty set the whole plot in motion at the very beginning of the series' first episode. The Judge has been signing the wiretaps all along, hence The Wire merely working out to supply info to the highest bidder, would be a pretty good final joke.

Hey everyone, I caught some important news late Friday afternoon (And I've got a cold right now and nothin' better to do!).

The big news is that 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/convention/rncpermits.html

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.

Hey all I am wandering around with my friends in Des Moines today, and finally in a press conference I got Ron Paul to rip on the war on drugs and recorded it for the Internets. Apparently there is a YouTube lounge in the convention center and we are going to demand entrance despite our lack of credentials.

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/hongpong . 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?

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??

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. PIM first reported in July that a Twin Cities lawyer, Nathan Hansen, used Data Practices Act requests from MnDOT to get several rounds of documents released regarding NASCO, the North American Super Corridor Coalition, a non-profit organization based in Texas. Hansen has kept at it (here's his blog), filing a lawsuit to leverage the release of more documents, more of which finally came out recently. We have packaged everything MnDOT released into a ZIP archive of PDFs (60 MB!).

Sometimes, weird old FOIA documents are just awesome, especially when it involves something that the regular people would never touch. Not the usual Agonist fare, but sure to make you smile: Today, RAND Corporation wins! From AboveTopSecret.com, pretty much the biggest conspiracy super-forum on the nets! Source: FOIA archive- Soviet paranormal research briefing by the RAND Corporation.

For a while I have suspected the Russians were into the really cool bio-energy mystery sciences, a subject I cannot believe someone has made a hokey TV movie out of. I found some other funny stories of Soviet electromagnetic conspiracies and also NSA docs about UFOs. There's just a special place in my heart for the weird declassified documents, is that so wrong?

Barry Seal's Ghost Sez: Silence Speaks Louder Than Words!

Lookie here! Barry Seal surfaces in CIA documents with suspicious questions all around: Methinks this is a pretty good find in the CIA FOIA archives: Let's find out what Iowa Rep. James Leach wanted the NSA and CIA to tell him about Barry Seal, Iran-Contra and Mena operations. Our source for this heavily redacted file is the CIA Freedom of Information Act stash of documents. I did a search for Barry Seal and I felt pretty pleased that a chestnut like this popped right up.

This document really takes a cross-section right across the Reagan-era Mena Arkansas drug-trafficking allegations, and that alone makes it interesting. Anyone trying to debunk the Barry Seal Planet of conspiracies should have to face this CIA document as hard evidence that the bizarre connections were there for all to see. And its subsequent release by the CIA indicates they consider it all "blown" at this late date anyway. Crossposted from Hongpong.com

Ian's Pentagon boondoggle commentary reminds me of the story about the grizzled storyteller who persuades the listener to keep coughing up silver pieces, to keep hearing more episodes of the story. The storyteller's job is to create the sensation or perception that a truth is being revealed, or some kind of psychological void is filled for the listener. The listener keeps forking the silver, even if they're already hungry.

Some narratives are more important than others. In 2000, cig manufacturer RJ Reynolds got indicted by the EU for having a boardroom-level corporate strategy to sell cigarettes to international mafias, and take payment from laundered drug money accounts. The US media didn't give a damn - they get plenty of longterm revenue from bluechips like RJR. (Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ads come to mind)

"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.

More after the jump.

I'm just dropping a quick message for Agonistas. 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.

My perspective on Thailand is filtered by my dad's experience in Chile, when he was hitchiking after college in the summer of 1973. There were CIA guys hanging around Santiago bars, and he recalled US Navy ships stationed offshore. The evidence is pretty clear that Nixon and Kissinger were supportive of the plot. My dad, sensing trouble, cleared out of there around Sept. 3 or so, a week before the Pinochet's coup.

My point here is to wonder about the links between the Thai coup leaders today and the U.S. unified combat command of the region, AKA USPACOM. What messages went between PACOM and Thailand this week as the Prime Minister was in New York? It wouldn't be the first time that a PM was at some American-related function as gears suddenly spun to get rid of him.

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.”
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”

Vanity Fair:

"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.