Off Limits

Colorado earned the title "The Holdout State" at last week's Democratic National Convention, after thirteen Dennis Kucinich delegates decided to stand by their man. And while Marilyn Megenity, maven of the Mercury Cafe, didn't hold back in the Beantown reports she phoned in to Off Limits (excerpted below), she, too, held out in one crucial area: She didn't streak through the Fleet Center, as some speculated she would.

Tuesday, July 27: An omen in the airport yesterday morning. My tarot cards were really good: I drew the emperor, who's a significant card, but also then the empress and the star. We just passed fifty people carrying this balloon that's a spine with things on it like "Health care for everybody" and "Fair trade," things like that, to try to get the Democratic Party to have a spine. When the convention lets off, there's all these parties for folks, thrown by lobbyists, you know. It kind of felt like LoDo on Saturday night at 1 am.

Wednesday, July 28: The police presence is huge, and there's hardly anybody here except for the Democrats. The locals have all stayed out of downtown, and the merchants are really suffering. They're making no money. There are cops everywhere -- everywhere. There are helicopters, dogs, cops dressed in military fatigues and camouflage. They created this free-speech zone that looks like a concentration camp. It's got barbed wire and fences and a roof on it. There's only two little entrances and exits, and nobody from the peace activist community will use it. Everybody's considering it an affront to go into something like that, so the only people who are using it are the anti-choice, anti-Semite homophobes. It's very bizarre to see that kind of protest there. There's one guy who protests who's pro-Bush in a big way. He's got an American flag suit on. They let him protest wherever he wants. But on the streets, he can't carry big signs unless he's got a permit.

Thursday, July 29: The corporate media analysis of the convention is really lame and really right-wing. It's been like speech-o-rama here. I was in the convention last night as a guest of the Kucinich delegation from Colorado, which voted thirteen votes for Kucinich. Al Sharpton rocked the crowd. Jesse Jackson did, too, but really, Al Sharpton was too much. The governor of Michigan, a woman, was really great, and Elizabeth Edwards is just really fantastic, and so is her husband, John Edwards. He's really like a sex symbol. He's articulate; he sticks his tongue out and licks his lips. He's really cute, but he says the right stuff. He's good. In the protest pen, there were godhatesfags.com people, and people with signs saying that 9/11 is a gift from God. The pro-Bush protester was allowed outside the protest pen. All the activists just boycotted it.

The area around the Fleet Center, it's called the armpit of Boston and is usually filthy and full of homeless, drunk derelicts. It was pretty cleaned up. Boston's really nice. Mass transit's fantastic. I wish we had some.

Went to the Women's Caucus. We're 58th of the countries in the world for federal representation of women in government, and the new Iraqi constitution that we're putting in over there will give those women automatic 25 percent representation. I got to be ten feet away from Elizabeth Edwards and Teresa Heinz Kerry the Great. These women are really committed to making the world better for us. They want us all to work hard for democracy this fall.

Went through this airport with my pro-choice, this-is-what-a-feminist-looks-like stuff all over my body. They didn't harass me.

I was just thinking how wonderful it is to be in a group of intelligent people and hear speech after speech after speech of people who are eloquently trashing the fascist Bush regime... It was really fun.

The letter of the law: Attention, greenies. The Colorado Green Party is not kicking you out, asking you to leave or otherwise requesting that the cherished "I" on your voter-registration card be replaced with a "D," or -- gasp -- an "R." Not even if it would mean pushing U.S. Senate candidate Mike Miles ahead of Ken Salazar, his better-funded and better-known Democratic opponent.

In July, a bunch of Boulder Greens sent a letter to the state party's entire membership roster, suggesting that fellow enviros temporarily register as Democrats so that they could vote for Miles in the primary, then return to Independent status. And that had a lot of the Green faithful seeing red. "The party has been trying to send out a letter for a while, but we're Greens -- we have no money," explains party spokeswoman Kirstin Marr. "So the very first piece of mail that Greens get is asking them to leave the party. Not everyone understands this type of nuanced strategy. It's not a bad political strategy from the Democrats' point of view, but it's not good for the Greens. It's a common kind of thing, but it's nothing that the Green Party supports."