I never thought that I'd find myself at two o'clock in the morning, hanging solo on a corner in uptown Charlotte, having two kind older black women telling me to stop preaching about war and the prison industrial complex. Yet there I was, one block from the Charlotte Convention Center, hailing a taxi for two sixty-something Georgia peaches who had missed the shuttle back to their motel.

While Democrats were masturbating one another last night, pretending that America is not at war and that the current administration is a friend to all immigrants, about 100 wet and wild protesters hit the concrete despite rain by the bucketload and a tough day in the streets. By Tuesday evening, more than a dozen activists had been arrested outside of the convention, including some immigrants' rights picketers who caused a scene as delegates filed inside.

It wasn't a conspiracy that more protest news didn't come out of the Republican National Convention. There weren't utterly significant events to report, let alone a larger bloodbath for journalists to hang a week of coverage on. Considering the circumstances, authorities in Tampa weren't all that unreasonable; the few arrests that did go down could have been avoided if protesters heeded simple requests from cops.

The 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions were all about the bloggers. Mainstream reporters even wrote articles about their scrappy young counterparts, who in turn provided some long overdue alternative coverage to the mostly mundane quadrennial festivities. Four years later it was Twitter that was red hot, though mostly only insiders, reporters, and attendees took advantage of the service, since it had yet to fully click with the American public.