Month: August 2004

We’re busy setting up our connections here on Blogger’s Corner and having the normal IS issues experienced by anyone who uses LANs. The convention is making their best efforts to get the problems straightened out, but in the meantime I’ve found a wireless portal that works for the moment. Right now I’m sharing a table with some pretty impressive bloggers — Kevin Aylward from Wizbang, Matt Margolis from Blogs For Bush, and Scott Sala from Slant Point.
I already caught up with Generalissimo Duane and we’re sitting directly across from the Salem booth. I’ve met Tony Snow from Fox, who immediately recognized my name — which floored me. I’ll report later on the breakfast with Matthew Dowd and the interesting speech and Q & A we had this morning.

I had an opportunity to get out on the street early this morning when I went downstairs to get a much-needed cup of coffee to bolster my blogging. I took a few pictures that were necessarily a bit fuzzy, as the light was still pretty faint and the flash resulted in poor illumination of the scenery.
You can see the calm on the streets that likely will be absent during the day today, as more traffic and protests will jam the sidewalks around the convention site. The first picture is from the hotel looking down 33rd, and has the Empire State Building in the background. You can see that the street itself is completely barricaded:

This picture is straight across from the Hotel Pennsylvania, where they’re allowing vehicle traffic for the moment. I expect this to be barricaded later on today:

In order to get in and out of the protected area, I have to show my photo ID and my room key at all times. They are serious about securing this event, and believe me, it’s comforting.

The New York Times reports on what I missed with my late arrival yesterday, the day before the opening of the Republican National Convention, but the unnerving effects of having a half-million people in the street certainly accounts for the tension I felt on my arrival:

A roaring two-mile river of demonstrators surged through the canyons of Manhattan yesterday in the city’s largest political protest in decades, a raucous but peaceful spectacle that pilloried George W. Bush and demanded regime change in Washington.
On a sweltering August Sunday, the huge throng of protesters marched past Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican National Convention opening today, and denounced President Bush as a misfit who had plunged America into war and runaway debt, undermined civil and constitutional rights, lied to the people, despoiled the environment and used the presidency to benefit corporations and millionaires.
The protest organizer, United for Peace and Justice, estimated the crowd at 500,000, rivaling a 1982 antinuclear rally in Central Park, and double the number it had predicted. It was, at best, a rough estimate. The Police Department, as is customary, offered no official estimate, but one officer in touch with the police command center at Madison Square Garden agreed that the crowd appeared to be close to a half-million.

Robert McFadden glosses it up just a bit when he calls it “peaceful”, as the police department had to contend with protestors throwing ball bearings and marbles onto the street where their mounted units deployed, and spot incidents of violence occurred along the two-mile protest. Later on, of course, the hard-core protestors that couldn’t be satisfied with merely marching had to come back for more:

After the march, hundreds of protesters in a more belligerent mood made their way to Times Square and blocked the entrances of two Midtown hotels, while another group harassed Republican guests at a party at the Boathouse restaurant in Central Park. … At a news conference last night, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said there had been about 200 arrests, mostly for disorderly conduct, though nine people were charged with felony assaults on officers who were seizing a 10th suspect for setting a small fire outside the Garden, and 15 members of an anarchist group called Black Block were arrested after they knocked down police barriers and hurled bottles at police lines at 34th Street and Avenue of the Americas.

What we have here is the last gasp of the people who have been proven wrong by history over and over again — and I think they know it. United for Peace and Justice, as McFadden reports, organized nuclear-freeze protests all during Reagan’s terms in office, attempting to achieve peace through appeasement. (Hugh Hewitt noted last night that counterprotestors should carry pictures of Neville Chamberlain, but at least Chamberlain finally learned from events.) The anarchists likely participated in the Seattle-WTO protests last decade, and they still insist on protested free trade even though it helped advance the American and world economy for more than a decade now.
Now we have all of the foaming political Luddite masses in one place here in New York, and the nation can see what they represent — a retreat not just to September 10th, but a return to isolationism and protectionism that died with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Most of the protestors were born into a world defined by American power, as I was. Unfortunately, most of them have never studied the history of the world before that, where international power vacuums encouraged by the illusions of “internatoinal law” promoted by weak multilateral organizations led to chaos, war, genocide, and the deaths of tens of millions of people.
I’m sure I’ll see plenty more of the chaotic and barely peaceful protests while I’m here. I’ll bring you pictures of anything that comes up, but I can tell you that nearby the hotel and Madison Square Garden, the NYPD are on the job and not taking anything for granted. In fact, after further reflection, the two most welcoming people in my long odyssey last night were the young officers on the barricades who kept me from getting to the hotel but took the time to chat with me about the city they obviously love.

NEW YORK CITY, 10:56 PM ET: I have finally eaten dinner on what had to have been one of the longest and most frustrating travel days in my life. The fact that I’m blogging is in itself a minor miracle.
Earlier today, while I was airport blogging about the vacuity of Dan Rather, I received a very kind and generous e-mail from two CQ readers (husband & wife) who wanted to make a large donation for the trip but had been stymied by the Amazon system. They wanted to pay for part of my hotel room instead, so I told them where I was staying. Fortunately I was on line when I got a reply. They had called the hotel and found out that they’d canceled my reservation — and the airport had just announced preboarding for my flight.
I got on my cell phone and called the Hotel Pennsylvania’s reservation desk to find out what the hell happened. They informed me that since I had not shown up for Saturday night, my reservation had been cancelled. I informed them that I had called Saturday morning and confirmed my reservation, starting Sunday night August 29th through Friday morning. After a long and tense conversation, the manager finally stepped in and reinstated my reservation just as I boarded the plane.
The flight was mostly uneventful, and we landed at JFK in Queens at about 6:15 ET. I had dinner plans with several other bloggers at a Brazilian restaurant in Manhattan for 8, and I knew I’d be pushing it no matter what. I made my only mistake at this point and called a SuperShuttle rather than a cab or a limo, which would have taken me right to the hotel. Instead, I got bundled in with several other travelers coming into Manhattan, including a nice Minnesota college graduate who is moving to the East Village to work in the apparel business. It took until 8:30 for the driver to drop me off, and thanks to the street closings around Madison Square Garden and the Hotel Pennsylvania, he dropped me off two blocks from the hotel.
Tonight is warm and just a bit muggy but not bad walking weather, so I cheerfully set out to walk the last bit. Several police officers cheerfully stopped me and asked for my ID and proof of my hotel reservation, and since I didn’t print out my e-mail (who knew?), they would not let me pass. I called the hotel on my cell phone and asked them to send someone down to rescue me. The two young NYPD officers were complete gentlemen, keeping me company with small talk and pointing out some of the landmarks from 33rd and 6th. After a half-hour, I started to think that help was not on its way, and called the hotel again. They told me that the PD wouldn’t let them come down that way to get me, but the other end of the hotel was open to street traffic and that I could walk down to 34th and come in on 7th.
So off I trudged.
After finally arriving at the hotel, I made a beeline for the desk, thinking I could still make it for drinks if I hurried. When I try to check in, of course, no one could find my reservation. The manager had to come out and get it straight, which took no griping from me, and I went up to my room, exhausted. The first thing I wanted to do was to access my e-mail so I could find out where the group was planning to go for drinks … and that’s when I’d discovered that my room had no Internet access.
Bear in mind that the entire point of my being here is to blog the convention, and you’ll get an idea of the desperation I felt at this point.
I call the desk, who connects me to someone else, and the conversation goes like this:
Me: I don’t have an RJ-45 connector in my room.
Helpful and Concerned Hotel Employee: Uh-huh.
Me: How do I get Internet access?
HCHE: You can use dial-up.
Me: No I can’t, I don’t have a dial-up account. I’m staying here because you have high-speed Internet access.
HCHE: We only have DSL on two floors, sir.
Me: Then move me to another floor.
HCHE: We don’t have any more rooms available, sir. You can use the WebTV system in your room if you want to access the Internet.
Me: I need to use my laptop.
HCHE: The WebTV is the only high-speed Internet access you can get from your room.
Me: How much is that to use? [The high-speed access is $10/day.]
HCHE: Five dollars.
Me: A day?
HCHE: For thirty minutes.
Me: Let me speak to your manager.
After repeating much the same conversation with the manager, I finally blew up and said, “The Republican National Committee invited me here to report on the convention, which requires me to have Internet access. I suspect that they reserved me a room with it, which I probably had until you guys cancelled my reservation on me.”
They moved me to another room, and a nicer one at that, and so I’m blogging now. However, I will be hitting the sack in a few minutes so I can get up early for the bloggers’ breakfast tomorrow — otherwise I won’t get my credential, and I’ll spend my week being the chew toy for Gunther The Killer Canine Officer instead of bringing you the best of the RNC.
I should have a better day tomorrow, because Lord knows, it’ll be hard to top this one.