For those of you concerned that protests at the GOP Convention will hurt Dems.

Remember that the protests at the Dem Convention in 1968 didn't exactly hurt Nixon's bid for the White House.

I don't approve of violence (especially as a first tactic), obviously, but protest and disruption have been part of our Americain heritage and often the only way we could get people to sit up and take notice.

Where would African Americans be today if the civil rights movement forty years ago hadn't marched, protested, and yes, occasionally scuffled?

Women did not obtain the right to vote by sitting around the dining room table and politely asking their fathers, brothers and husbands if they could please have that privilege.

Many factors influenced popular opinion on Vietnam, but protests showed people disaffected by the war that they were not alone in their condemnation.

Would we have a customary 40-hour work week, vacation time, and kids in school instead of a factory if workers had approached management with a "pretty please?"

Some of you may not approve of the disruptive methods of public protests when they interrupt while someone is speaking, but don't jump to conclusions and fear the results. I truly believe this damages McCain and the Republicans beating war drums far more than it will affect the Obama/Biden ticket.

I think it brings attention to the issues and the media really had not made the protests a "Democratic Party" issue.

THEY will have won.

The issue isn't street protests equals bad. The problem is when the street protest is the activism. As in, the only component. At this point, all effective street activism has a very strong message component where you build up the protests, where you use other media, whether its blogs or text messaging or ethnic media in the case of the immigration protests to sort of build a narrative, and have a single, unified, clear and direct message that can break through the media clutter. So in the immigration protests, you didn't have people running around with "Legalize Hemp" and "U.S. out of Palestine" and all that usual crap that muddles up your typical protest to the point where you don't even know what people are protesting because of the cacophony of noise.

So it's not that I'm averse to the protests, I'm averse to the let's everybody get on the street and make a lot of noise and somehow that's supposed to change people's minds. It hasn't worked that way in a long time.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/09/04/kos/