If you were lucky enough to be in St. Paul, Minnesota this afternoon then you know exactly what a perfect, beautiful day it was to walk around ineffectually and frustrated and accomplish absolutely nothing. Ahhh… What absolute bliss.

After leaving the airport, Michael and I took a quick stop by our hotel at the Mall of America.

Wow! It really is as big as they say! (Our hotel is over by the novelty socks.)

After we were all settled in, we drove into St. Paul to meet up with our friend Ben Domenech from Red State, who is good enough to ignore our leftist, atheistic, socialist ideologies in exchange for us ignoring the fact that he is wrong about everything in the world.

Once we got into town, we walked over to 7th Street near the convention center, where Ben was waiting for us in a bar. Unfortunately, we ran into a small problem…

…and by "small problem," I mean "gigantic metal fence completely blocking off 7th Street, effectively bisecting the city into two impenetrable halves, protected by National Guard soldiers."

I think that's The Rock there in the center.

As it turns out, just a little while earlier in the day, a group of about 9,000 anti-war protesters had decided to follow in the footsteps of other great change-makers like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi by going apeshit retarded crazy and busting the fuck out of a bunch of police vehicles (as well as the officers who drive them).

But I have a feeling that their message was well-heard by all the innocent Republican delegates who have absolutely no power whatsoever to remove troops from Iraq. I expect those troops to be re-deployed anytime now.

So, confused about how we were to proceed, we asked a very nice police officer how to get through, and he told us to follow the fence for about a billion city blocks to where it ended and we'd be able to walk around the locked down area.

This is where it ended.

But we did get a very picturesque view of the Xcel Energy Center.

And we got to hear this guy deliver his riviting, not at all soporifically monotone speech…

…before an adoring crowd of like-minded supporters.

By the way, that reminds me…

Why has nobody gotten around to impeaching that asshole Nixon yet?

C'mon! It's been, like, 34 years! Let's get get that guy out of there!