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In Minneapolis/St. Paul, there’s been plenty of democracy suppression over the last few days, with various police forces raiding homes and gathering points of groups planning to protest the Republican National Convention. Glenn Greenwald covers the bases here, and also has a follow-up about Federal involvement.

As pointed out in a letter to Glenn, this isn’t new by any means (nor, I suspect, is it restricted to the Republican convention—I’d be rather surprised if the same stuff happened around the DNC). It also goes back a lot further than the letter-writer suggests (they cite 2000 as the starting point).
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I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight this evening. I had mixed feelings about Batman Begins—I loved the first half of it and hated the second half. The Dark Knight was different: the parts I hated and the parts I loved were mixed together throughout the film.
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This story about CBS Outdoor refusing art billboards in Minneapolis/St. Paul is quite illustrative of how tightly the public sphere is controlled in this country. CBS worries, essentially, about offending some powerful Republican patrons—at least, that’s my guess, it might not even get to that level of conscious thought.
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This was on Boing Boing, but I think it’s a good enough article that it’s worth posting anyway. Writer Joshuah Bearman has posted a PDF of his Harper’s article about Pac-Man and classic arcade game mastery. It’s well-written and compelling, and of course the fact that people still play those games so compulsively decades after their heyday is fascinating.

The United States outspends the next five or ten countries on the list combined when it comes to military spending. However, I’ve always been sceptical about translating this into actual military power, because it seems that tremendous amounts of waste clearly go on… even if other countries waste a percentage of their own military budgets on boondoggles and industrial subsidies, I suspect that the US is even worse due to the huge amount of money concerned.
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When I hear the name Joe Biden, I don’t have good impressions. I think of a long-term Democrat who’s thoroughly absorbed into the party machine, and into the ruling machine. For the detail work, though, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Jonathan Schwarz, Dennis Perrin, and Radley Balko (who I don’t read regularly, but whose commentary on Biden and the “Drug War” seems solid).

The New Republic has an interesting article on how John McCain, as a political creature, emerged—essentially, he married his political ambitions to those of his second wife’s family. There aren’t huge shockers about Cindy McCain in the article (it’s not like the piece Vanity Fair did on Judi Giuliani), but as a background piece on McCain and people like him, it’s quite good.

In addition, Glenn Greenwald does the necessary work on contrasting how right-wing commentators treat some men who marry into wealth differently from others.

I’m glad to see that billmon is blogging again, after a long hiatus. I recommend his most recent article, Anatomy of A(nother) Fiasco, an overview of recent American responses to the strife between Russia and Georgia.
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I’m usually pleased when I stumble across questions that it seems can only be answered by Freebase or a lot of work—even though I don’t see Freebase as being primarily for casual searching/browsing in the way that Wikipedia is, it’s always nice when I come up with a casual question (one that might come up in conversation, say) that suits the site very well.
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Roger Federer is no longer the world number one. Rafael Nadal took the number one ranking today after being in the number two spot for longer than anyone else in history. Nadal’s ascension was guaranteed at least two weeks ago, thanks to poor recent results from Federer, some quirks in the ranking system, and Nadal’s continued fantastic form.

Federer was the world number one for longer, consecutively, than anyone before him: 237 weeks, from 2 Feb 2004 until 17 Aug 2008. The previous men’s record was 160 (Jimmy Connors), more than a year shorter than Federer. Steffi Graf had a record of 186 consecutive weeks at number one, just under a year shorter than Federer.
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