Monday morning

Monday, a quarter of eight in the morning.

So, the first thing on the list for yesterday was the protests, International ANSWER, the highly successful protest wing of the Stalinist Worker’s World Party, was having a march from the Boston Common to the entrance to the forbidden zone. About three hundred people showed up, mostly of the lunatic fringe of the movement, all of whom were giving out, or more usually selling, flyers and leaflets. They almost outnumbered the spectators. The only reasonably sane people there were PeTA who aren’t, actually, and some guy who was promoting a woodchuck for President, people having screwed up for so long.

Not being able to take it any longer, I took a walk around the common. It seems that as a deterrent to terrorism, the city government had decided to remove all the garbage bins. True, littering is preferable to blowing people up, but having to carry my detritus around was a bit annoying.

So, being mostly fed up with the extreme left, I decided to bring things down a notch, by going to see Peter Camajo, the "Watermelon" [green on the outside red on the inside] who is currently Reform/Independent candidate for Vice President. This was down at UMass, which was still hosting the Commie-Fest™ I’d attended the previous day. I figured that a good political speech would get me in the right mood for the receptions later that day.

Camajo stood out. He was the only person in the entire room wearing a suit. He went into his spiel with gusto. The message was a simple one: There was no real difference between Kerry and Bush and therefore people should vote for the person they most agree with. According to him, Kerry was far worse than Bush, both were tools of the evil international capitalist conspiracy, and were far more antidemocratic than the Republicans as they didn’t want to let the Nader-Camajo ticket on the ballot and were trying to do all they could to actively sabotage the efforts, clearly , the man was pissed off.

This was bile that was carefully aimed. He went on about the San Francisco mayoral race from last year when the Green candidate nearly won, and went on and on as to how the Democratic candidate "cheated" by getting help from the national party and getting all the bigwigs to speak and soliciting absentee ballots. As to the charge that the GOP was financing the Nader campaign, he said: "We’ll be happy to give back every cent we got from the Republicans, provided the Kerry campaign does the same thing."

That wasn’t going to wash.


Then he took questions, mostly hostile ones from people to the left of him, this was Commie-Fest™ after all, and it seemed he wasn’t pure enough. But the crowd itself was mostly supportive. Since it took so long, getting back for the 56 state/territorial receptions became problematic. I missed California, and was limited to just going to the Pennsylvania and New Jersey ones. The former was at the State Capitol building and was hor’derves and liquor, and features Mrs. Kerry thanking the state for her first husband’s political career, The crowd went wild. Then I tried to find the Newsweek reception, but for security reasons, they gave out the wrong time to the press. So I went down to Feniel hall mall and the concert. The place had ten times the people as the early afternoon protest march and featured, among others, the Ojs and the Boston Pops. Really cool.

Finally, we went to the New Jersey reception which featured a really decent buffet. I why I’m here, after all.

Today’s schedule is first: The California breakfast, followed by the noon DC statehood reception for lunch, some other thing for high tea, and following that he head over to the Fleet center for the real thing….