Little reported on…except by themselves (and here)…were the arrest of several journalists, including Amy Goodman at the 2008 Republican Convention. Their crime was committing acts of journalism, which is obviously dangerous within a city block of a gathering of the GOP.

There’s an interesting detail in the IG Report on FBI’s investigations of peace groups that suggests FBI was asking OLC for an interpretation of the approval required before conducting a riot-related investigation.

Back in 2007, at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly (the church’s big annual national gathering), I had the remarkable experience of hearing Amy Goodman moderate a panel of extraordinary gentlemen. One was Daniel Ellsberg. One was Mike Gravel, then a contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. And the third was Robert West, a former president of Beacon Press, which is owned by the UUA.

I was in the front row for this spellbinding bit of group storytelling, along with my daughter, then not yet quite 17. “This is what heroes look like,” I told her. “Take a good look — because this is what your faith and your family will expect of her on the day that history knocks on your door and insists that you take a stand.”

Rep. Grijalva is doing what we always ask progressives to do.  While others stood by and watched Van Jones and Yosi Sergent and a huge piece of progressive infrastructure swept away by capitulation to Glenn Beck’s McCarthyist tactics, he’s fighting.

Let him know we need more of that.

In January Amy Gooman’s guest Allan Nairn described to Democracy Now’s audience how in 1999 Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama’s Intel Czar pick, had repeatedly supported Indonesian generals commanding Indonesian death squads in Timor, rather than obey his Commander-In-Chief’s lawful orders to tell our client generals in the Indonesian military to shut down their death squads. Today the NY Times reports that last Thursday, as Obama released the torture memos and his Adminstration told us the torture failed to produce useful results, Admiral Blair told the intel community the exact opposite. Who does Dennis Blair serve – America’s elected leaders, or the torture and death squad operatives?