What is that all about?

There are some puzzling things going on that I hear from the internet but not from the mainstream media.

In Denver, three men with a large camera hollowed out to contain a gun, high-powered rifles and ammunition, and stating they were planning to kill Sen. Obama during the convention, were arrested. They were caught with a little meth. The federal attorney, an old colleague of Karl Rove, chose not to charge the men with anything serious. "They are 'meth heads' and weren't ever a serious threat." That got about twenty seconds on one of the nightly news programs.

Meanwhile in St. Paul, armed police and sheriff department squads of two to three dozen men surrounded and disrupted peace groups who had rented homes in the Twin Cities. Pictures showed up on the internet but not on TV.

Thousands of protesters paraded peacefully in St. Paul but I never heard a word about them in the news. Thousands? No notice to the rest of the world on the public media. . . .

At another demonstration that started peacefully, the police moved in sweeping up everyone "that was in their way." Two of those people were wearing press credentials and were preparing to video the gathering when the police moved in. Those two, one with a Hispanic name and one with a Middle Eastern name, were being physically hassled when Amy Goodman who is a well known journalist (also wearing press credentials) came up to the officer who injured her staff only to herself be arrested. The video is on YouTube . . . but not on television.

One of the guys involved in the "Swift Boating" of Sen. John Kerry, Ted Sampley, is quoted as saying that John McCain has never fully disclosed the "extent to which he cooperated with the Vietnamese." Sampley is also angry with how McCain actively advocated for normalization with Vietnam after the war, an action which essentially ended efforts to return POW/MIAs, despite "credible evidence" that there were Americans still alive there.

The Manchester GUARDIAN printed an interview with Sen. Joe Biden who reaffirmed that in an Obama administration, the Attorney General would research what is already known to see if any of the things done by the Bush Administration were criminal, such as torture, rendition, etc. Too bad Manchester is in England! This hasn't been reported here.

Did you know that Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who still has delegates ready to vote for him instead of Sen. McCain, held rallies in Minneapolis that brought more people than the Republican National Convention? The rallies were planned after the planning committee for the RNC offered no place on the program for Rep. Paul. If it hadn't been for the internet, I wouldn't have known it either!

A new ad involving a former Vietnam POW mentions that not long after Sen. McCain was captured, Ho Chi Min died. The new government was not nearly as cruel in their treatment of POWs as Ho had been.

I've only seen these bits online myself. But I don't have the resources to research the issues and background which the media have to check out the meaning of these bits.

Maybe I'm getting old and incompetent but when I run into things like the above that seem to be newsworthy, but are not noted in the press or network news, I really have no idea what that is about.