Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? Yeah, the ol’ McCain and RNC keywords in the last post sure caused a spike on the hit meter for this here site. But no one left a comment. Well, I hope that just means everyone got a laugh out of it, from both sides of the political aisle. One thing that’s definitely happened in politics is a complete absence of humor.
Here’s a few photos from an afternoon spent in downtown St. Paul during the RNC for the day job. Asked the restaurateurs how they were doing, and, by and large, they said “Shitty.” In addition to a large area being baracaded from automobile traffic, the powers-that-be erected a 10 foot fence in a wide perimeter around the Xcel Energy Center. It made it difficult to get around, that’s for damn sure. I recall reading in the paper in the week running up that all areas would be open to foot traffic. Er, no. And if you wanted to get from the west side of the Xcel to the east, and you didn’t have security clearance, your option was a mile-out-of-your-way walk down by the river on the south, or John Ireland boulevard on the north. Nice. Anyhoo, enjoy. And we’ll be back with regular commentary later this week. BBHQ just invested in some new equipment.
The button folks. They have a company, design and sell ’em. They were out in Denver, too, for the DNC. When I find their names I wrote down, I’ll post ’em. Nice folks.
Trojan had a booth in a parking lot urging folks to “get it on”—the agenda, that is. As is discussion about safe sex. A pretty good point, considering Palin’s stance on abstinence-only sex education. Which has worked out well for her daughter. Anyhoo, part of the booth was a relay race, where contestants raced to a night stand for a condom, ran back to the display table and rolled the condom onto a banana. This here is two Wyoming delegates, if I recall correctly. She kicked his ass!
And this here was the problem for many restaurateurs on West Seventh Street, west of the Xcel Center, and other restaurants on the east side of Xcel toward St. Peter Street: This here big ass fence, with only one access gate for credentialed peeps. Restaurant owners said they weren’t told by the city about this. And city officials said the RNC didn’t tell them about the fence (the concrete barriers restricting auto traffic was understood) until 24 hours before the start of the show. Nice. These restaurants were expecting about 50,000 people wandering around. Most said it was worse traffic than a regular week. And many delegates just hopped in the reserved coaches for the trip to Minneapolis.
Here’s that one gate at one corner of the Kellogg/West Seventh intersection. Again, only credentialed people in or out, and if you were a delegate or reporter coming out who wanted to get to a restaurant on the other side of the street, you had to walk down about two blocks to the end of the barricades, then come back up the other sidewalk. Many opted for the bus ride across the river.
Hey! Ben Stein!
Hey! Snipers!
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