Yesterday the Democratic National Convention wrapped up not with a speech but, as it has every night, with a long list of parties. One of the best events this week was “Big Sky Night: The Montana Party.” Elk burgers were served (the skilled conventioneer could pass five days in Denver without spending a dime on food), a local Missoula beer was on tap, marshmallows were roasted on the deck, “A River Runs Through It” played silently on big screen TVs, and Governor Brian Schweitzer closed down the bar.

Less impressively, U.S. Senator Max Baucus—continuing a dubious tradition of senatorial musical acts—joined the Drive-By Truckers on stage and sang “Folsom Prison Blues.” The performance by the chair of the Finance Committee did, however, put Republicans on notice.

For years, GOP senators have dominated the Capitol Hill airwaves. Orrin Hatch, the dean of Republican musicians, has released several albums. The Singing Senators, a group known for their dynamic live performances, achieved even more fame. Eventually the patriotic quartet was torn apart by internal strife, headline-grabbing scandals, and legal difficulties. Nonetheless, the group’s legacy is solidified in the party of Lincoln.

But decades of single party control over the Federal Government’s music industry presents challenges for the GOP. With the Singing Senators’ demise, there is a serious leadership void. Hatch remains an icon, but the party is in need of new voices. Many fans have also come to feel that the GOP takes their supporters’ loyalty for granted. And in this year of change, some Republican fans are willing to give Democrats a listen.

Baucus’ broadside indicates the opening of a new front in Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean’s “50 State Strategy.” It’s too early to tell if the American listening public will embrace this new, unproven voice from the Rockies. But one thing is certain: Republicans have their work cut out for them next week in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Nothing is left to chance in this era of political conventions. Back in the day, party conventions were unpredictable. The presidential nomination was still up in the air when delegates arrived in the host city and it frequently took many rounds of voting in the convention hall to settle on the party’s standard bearer. Fist fights occasionally broke out on the floor between upset delegates supporting different candidates. Party leaders in the infamous “smoke filled rooms” tried to control events, but a fantastic or dramatic speech could catapult an underdog to the nomination.

There aren’t many surprises at conventions anymore. Not only do the parties settle on their candidates months in advance, but these days every detail is orchestrated for the television audience. On Tuesday—“Hillary’s night”—I had access to the media room in the Pepsi Center. Hours before the headliners took the stage, transcripts of all the speeches were printed and made available to members of the press. This practice allows reporters to file stories or write up their commentary before a speech is actually delivered. Minute by minute schedules are also provided. Every speech delivered here in Denver—with the partial exception of the Clintons’—has been thoroughly vetted, and in many cases completely written, by the Obama campaign.

The audience is also managed. Everything that takes place in the hall is carefully orchestrated to convey the right image to the American public. The audience’s enthusiasm and cheering is monitored by party operatives stationed in each section. Homemade signs are not allowed to be brought into the hall—too much risk of going “off message.” Rather, official signs are passed out by convention planners wearing reflective yellow vests and the audience is coached on how and when to display their enthusiasm.

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Complaining about the ironies of airport security has long been a national pastime. Security inside the hall at the Democratic National Convention includes similarly bizarre rules. I had a Floor credential for last night’s session. It’s a great ticket—only a Delegate Floor pass, because it comes with an actual seat, is better. My Floor credential was one of several hundred that allow access to the areas around the delegates’ seats, but are standing room only. The only problem with such a ticket is that security prohibits standing. Any non-delegate on the floor is urged to “keep moving.” Frequently the polite security personnel urged us to not lose hope and that despite the crowded conditions we could still reach our destination, as though we all had a specific place we were headed to on the other end of the floor. This was not the case. Okay, at 3:00—when the convention opens each day to a nearly empty hall so obscure county commissioners can make one minute speeches—maybe nobody is paying any attention to what’s happening on stage. But for the last two hours each night when the headliners are giving their speeches, everyone just wants a clear line of sight to watch the proceedings. Hardly anyone was actually trying to get anywhere. Thus, to comply with the security directive in the least direct manner possible, everyone on the convention floor slowly shuffles back and forth doing endless laps. Of course, this doesn’t actually lessen congestion, it merely creates slow-moving congestion.

Anyone with experience making fake IDs in high school will feel right at home here at the Democratic National Convention. That’s because fabricating and bootlegging credentials—the passes needed to enter events—has long been considered good sport at party conventions. The fake ID industry, of course, is largely geared towards underage kids looking to get their hands on alcohol. Here in Denver, though, the goal is access. Credentials to the convention hall are the biggest prize but most of the associated parties and events also require an invitation and an accompanying credential for admittance.

Surprisingly, fake credentials are quite effective. Getting past the Secret Service may be tough, but at most events—including the main sessions at the Pepsi Center—many of the “security” personnel inside the Secret Service’s perimeter are essentially untrained volunteers, many of whom are looking for better access themselves.

An official looking piece of paper carried in a lanyard around your neck is required for any attempted event crashing. Credential fabricators employ several different strategies:

1. Create your own credential to fool security. Successfully crashing events with approach carries the most prestige in the credential fabricating community. Michael Keaton’s character in The Paper was convinced that “a clipboard and a confident wave will get you into any building in the world.” At party conventions a computer generated, professional looking, laminated credential goes a long way. All the better if your fake credential says “ACCESS” or “VIP” and is adorned with ostentatious American flags and bar codes. In an effort to be prepared for different kinds of events, credential fabricating entrepreneurs frequently come up with a generic “Democratic National Convention” credential as well as a separate media credential.

2. Hoard real credentials to stub in your friends. This approach can only be implemented if you have access to more than one real credential. Because event security doesn’t require a secondary admission check (e.g., stamp on the hand) and there is no rule prohibiting re-entry, the same credential can be used by many people, so long as a legitimately credentialed person can enter and exit multiple times to hand off the second credential to waiting friends.

3. Use a credential from a different event. This approach doesn’t require much work but is also the least likely to succeed. Nonetheless, it can work if the fabricator is dressed appropriately and approaches the security personnel with a sense of entitlement and purpose. Some fabricators choose to substitute an attitude of earnest confusion in place of purposeful entitlement in hopes of winning a sympathy admission (e.g., “Oh no, I accidently brought the wrong credential! This is so disappointing because my friends Jerry and Debbie are already inside!”).

4. Copy a real credential. The Pennsylvania delegation is legendary in this category and is known for having the most elaborate operation. For several conventions running, a number of Keystone State delegates have been assigned to the “credentials committee.” Their job has been to rent the most high-tech copy machine available and mass produce hundreds of copies of one of their state’s allotted and legitimate convention hall credentials for each night.

Serious divisions have emerged in the left-wing protest community gathered here in Denver for the Democratic National Convention. As reported earlier, Recreate ’68 (R68) held its signature rally early Sunday morning. The wistful, geriatric-led event was as edgy and authentic as Woodstock ’99. The only thing missing was corporate sponsorship.

But now some real protesters have arrived. Last night Unconventional Denver—“a network of anarchists and anti-authoritarians”— organized and executed their first major event of the week. Young and idealistic, Unconventional Denver seeks radical change and views R68 as mired in the past and part of the protest community establishment. By all accounts, the Unconventional Denver rally was a success. Police officers in riot gear used pepper spray to subdue rock-carrying protesters, 100 of whom were arrested. Unlike Sunday morning, there were no Kum-Ba-Yah moments or bell-bottoms. It’s probably a good thing Griff Jenkins wasn’t there.

I spoke with one Unconventional Denver protester this morning in a coffee shop as he watched network news footage of last night’s altercation on his Mac. The teenager happily explained how he was “bashed to shit” by the police. Fortunately, he appeared to have made a full recovery. The young anarchist also recounted seeing police officers fire rubber bullets into protesters’ faces at point blank range. Thus far, I’ve been unable to confirm the veracity of this report. He also scoffed when I asked whether he was affiliated with R68: “No way, man. [Last night’s event] was an anarchist thing.”

It’s unclear whether the Unconventional Denver forces will be able to mend fences with the R68 camp and unify the left-wing protest community in the last three days of the convention. Operatives from both camps are working on a compromise that can appeal to both R68’s older, predominantly white protesters and Unconventional Denver’s younger multicultural protesters. Well aware that right-wring protest organizations are typically better organized and funded, insiders feel that a united left-wing is critical if effective protests are to be held throughout the fall campaign.

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CNN and Fox News have each rented and taken over popular Denver restaurants close to the Pepsi Center for the week. Incidentally, I also found evidence that CNN, in what may be another attempt to adapt to the ever changing media environment, has revamped its business model and branched out into the food business. Is it too much to hope that Lou Dobbs gets transferred to this new division?

I visited the Fox setup at Braun’s Bar and Grill a few days ago. The main stage has been constructed outside on risers to broadcast Fox’s heavy hitters like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity with a Pepsi Center backdrop. Inside, the main floor has been transformed from a swanky bar into two studio sets. Several large flat screen TVs—reportedly costing $70,000 each (apparently, they come equipped with the latest in technological advances)—ensure that no Fox employee has to endure a moment without a high definition transmitted image of the arguments taking place on the set several feet away.

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SUBSTANTIATED RUMOR: Invesco Field—the Denver Bronco’s 75,000 seat stadium—will be remade with four stages for the convention’s Thursday night grand finale. One stage is reserved for Obama’s acceptance speech, a second will be used by all the other speakers on the agenda, and two are for musical acts.

UNSUBSTANTIATED RUMOR: Bruce Springsteen is one of those musical acts. While there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of credible evidence to support the Boss’ surprise appearance, it makes sense. For starters, Springsteen is currently on tour with the E Street Band and just played nearby Kansas City on Sunday. His next scheduled appearance isn’t until Saturday in Milwaukee. Second, Obama and Springsteen are smitten with each other. The Boss endorsed Obama back in April and the Illinois Senator frequently exits campaign rallies with the “The Rising” blaring in the background. Finally, it would be great politically. Springsteen is steeped in Americana and is especially associated with and loved by the white working class, a demographic that tended to back Hillary Clinton in the primaries and that pundits suggest Obama still needs to win over.

As I arrived yesterday morning at Recreate ‘68’s main event, I wondered if I had bad information about the start time. The umbrella organization seeking to unite various left-wing protest organizations that are just as upset with Senator Obama and the “Demopulicans” as they are with “Republocrats” was expecting as many as 50,000 people for a 9:00 AM “End the Occupation” rally followed by a three mile march. But only a couple hundred people were present, and of those, a slim majority appeared to be members of the media. Any doubts that I had arrived too early were erased a few minutes later when the first speaker took the stage right on time.

The Recreate ‘68 (aka R68) event was brimming with nostalgia for the good fights of decades past, and particularly those associated with the notorious 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where protesters and Mayor Daley’s police force were involved in violent clashes. Such backward looking sentiment, of course, was not present forty years ago in Chicago. In many respects, the progressive protesters of the Sixties had the opposite goal. They sought to dispense with traditional norms which were seen as corrupt and degrading. Like the original progressives of early 1900s, the Sixties protesters saw history moving in an inevitable and just direction. Looking to the past and resting on tradition had to be rejected because it threatened to slow this natural flow of progress and leave humanity mired in conflict. Not so with R68. R68 seeks to revive something rooted in the past—a return to a golden era of protest.

And that goal was reflected in yesterday’s speakers and crowd. Nearly all of the headliners were aging Baby Boomers and many were veterans of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s anti-war protests. Among others, the speaker list included Ward Churchill (the fired University of Colorado professor), Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, Ron Kovic (author of Born on the Fourth of July), and Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney. Only one speaker appeared to be under the age of 40. The same generational dynamic was evident in the assembled crowd. Students—the backbone of the Sixties protests—were in short supply. The 9:00 AM start time probably had something to do with it. While early mornings may be a way of life for the AARP members who planned and led today’s event, no college student would have selected such a start time. My guess is that early AM events weren’t the norm in ‘68.

The rally’s most spectacular event occurred when a Fox News team led by Griff Jenkins arrived midway through the rally. As Jenkins approached and tried to interview R68 organizers and speakers, he was besieged by protesters who had caught sight of the Fox logo on his microphone. In short order Jenkins was surrounded by shouting protesters (i.e., “Fuck Fox News”; “Fox News are corporate whores”; “Rupert Murdoch is a fascist”). This melodrama provoked a stampede as the assembled media rushed from the main stage to cover the nearby anti-Fox mob. One of Jenkins’ colleagues—unburdened by the scarlet Fox logo her boss was forced to carry—told me she was worried for his safety, but police quickly arrived on the scene and the protesters dispersed. Naturally, the media didn’t move an inch and began to interview Jenkins about his ordeal.

Hip-hop duo “dead prez” provided another memorable moment. Unfortunately, their act was plagued by Milli Vanilli issues. Music played and two voices were singing, but only one member of dead prez was holding a microphone in the vicinity of his mouth. The other dead prez ran to the side of the stage to examine a sound control panel midway through the first song and shouted to his partner, “We need to make sure this mic is on.” It wasn’t. But his recorded voice continued to emanate out of the speakers. By the third song, though, it was all systems go and the last ten minutes of the performance went off without a hitch. There was no encore.

The rally ended on that note and the march began several minutes later at noon. But for some protesters, marching three miles in 2008 isn’t as easy as it was forty years ago. Ward Churchill told me, “I cannot physically make the march because I had surgery … so I’m kinda hobbled. Three miles is more than I’m going to be able to do.” Fortunately, a smattering of teens and twenty-somethings had managed to roll out of bed and arrive in time for the post-rally march and reinforce sidelined protesting veterans like Churchill.

The Democratic National Convention formally kicks off this afternoon. I’ll be writing with daily updates exploring aspects of the convention that the cable news channels probably won’t cover. While the evening events in the convention hall get most of the attention, there is much more going on, including policy briefings, concerts, prayer breakfasts, late night parties, and protests.

The mainstream media is ready. On Saturday night thousands of members of the press were welcomed to Colorado with the quadrennial Media Welcoming Party held in their honor at a sprawling amusement park and hosted by the Democratic National Committee. Everything was free, including food, alcohol, rides, and carnival-style games. Not knowing where the event was being held, I expected something similar to the typical convention party: hotel ballrooms, tablecloths, wine and cheese. But the media party was all cotton candy and roller coasters. The combination of free alcohol and amusement park rides appeared to be a new and dubious combination for some members of the press corps.

By the party’s end, many members of the media—all adults—carried away large plastic garbage bags filled with stuffed animals. It’s much easier to win toys when you have unlimited opportunities to pop balloons with a dart or throw a ball through a hoop.

Vahid Majidi, head of the FBI’s weapons of mass destruction division, commenting on the uncertainty surrounding the FBI’s case against Bruce E. Ivins, the military scientist accused of being the anthrax killer:

I don’t think we’re ever going to put the suspicions to bed. There’s always going to be a spore on a grassy knoll.

In the New York Times Errol Morris is exploring the notion of photography as a weapon. In classic Morris style, he explores the topic in great depth and breadth, using Iran’s faked missile launch photo as the hook, but tying into related topics, too:

The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.

We looked at this topic in the Summer 2007 issue, with Chris Hondros’ “A Window on Baghdad” and Carolyn Cole’s “Someone Won’t Be Coming Home Tonight.” Cole wrote of her role as a photojournalist in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

Were there photographs we missed, images that could possibly have signaled the disasters ahead? I remembered touring with Saddam’s Ministry of Information, photographing Iraqi missile factories, suspected mobile weapons labs, and the infamous chemical drone. Who would have guessed that the dictator’s propaganda department might be telling the truth when they said there were no weapons of mass destruction? That wasn’t for us to say—or to know. We shot the pictures and sent them.

We just received the sad news that Mahmoud Darwish—the man described by Tom Sleigh in our pages as “the unofficial Palestinian national poet”—has died in a hospital in Houston following open-heart surgery. You can find Darwish’s stunning long poem, “With the Mist So Dense on the Bridge,” the title poem of his final collection, in our current issue. As more information becomes available, we will share it here on the blog, and we encourage all who knew Darwish—or read and were moved by his work—to share their thoughts and memories here.

By now making fun of hipsters is far too easy for anyone to bother, so the Canadian magazine Adbusters has taken things a step further. The current issue’s cover story, “Hipsters: The Dead End of Western Civilization,” (over-)written by one Douglas Haddow, spares us the niceties and . . . well . . . simply pins the decline of the West on their collective skinny shoulders. Seriously.

To document the fall of Western Civilization, Haddow did not speak with refugees in Iraq, or visit the melting polar icecaps, or chronicle life in Mexican border towns riven by drug violence—though Adbusters has, to their credit, covered these and other important issues. Instead, he attended a few parties in Vancouver, with the unspoken accusation that everyone around him was far too cool to care about aforementioned crises. His “reporting” amounted to asking people if they were hipsters or not. Naturally, most people said no, or gave him funny looks, or asked to see the pictures he had just taken of them with his digital camera. Haddow keeps his distance, as a trivial cast of characters floats around him: they smoke, make out with strangers, wear outlandish clothing, ride bicycles and like bands we’ve never heard of—oh, the horror! Haddow draws pithy, unflattering portraits of these laconic drunks, contrasting them—vaguely—with their counter-cultural predecessors, those heroic mytho-warriors of movements-gone-by, who “energetically challenged the status quo.” The essay—and it is an entirely speculative essay—is suffused with a treacly nostalgia for the past when young people shook the world. He implores the kids, “to abandon this vain existence and start over,” lest we all hit, “the colossus of societal failure.” Based on Haddow’s observations, these infantile, solipsistic youth comprise, “a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning.”

Hmm, maybe.

Then again, they’re at a club. What exactly was he expecting to find?

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