So some Amer­i­can rocks up and Syd­ney stops. There were more police than civil­ians in some parts of Syd­ney last night (Cir­cu­lar Quay), pub­lic trans­port is stopped, pri­vate vehi­cles are allowed in, and it must have cost an absolute for­tune in overtime.

All for some Amer­i­can power-behind-the-throne. If he’s going to be the key string-puller, he should at least stay invis­i­ble so we don’t need to con­cern our­selves with his (admit­tedly unwel­come) presence.

They were block­ing all use­ful traf­fic (but let­ting pri­vate cars through? Bizarre…), and claimed to have been using snif­fer dogs on the cars they were let­ting through. Yeah, right. I didn’t see a sin­gle dog last night. I was wear­ing a back­pack the whole evening. OH, LOOK, THERE GOES A TERRORIST!

No-one stopped me…

Then, after hav­ing blocked off half of the north­ern CBD, police stop a protest from going ahead on the grounds that it’s going to cause traf­fic chaos. Like that was a con­sid­er­a­tion a few nights back.

And, whilst I’m on this lit­tle soap­box, what on earth is a “law­ful protest” about? “Oh, here you go, protest in a nice lit­tle out –of-the-way place where no-one can see you, much less be seen by the per­son you’re protest­ing about/to. Just… stay away from the Rocks and everything’ll be okay.”

Because I’ve seen so many rabid gun-toting uni-students try­ing to blow up the US pup­pet­mas­ter. Nev­er­mind that Aus­tralia has far-more-sane gun-control leg­is­la­tion than the US does… John Howard isn’t the cen­tre of all this rub­bish when he trav­els to the US, even, and yet over here we’ve got to keep unarmed pro­tes­tors a good cou­ple of kilo­me­ters from their tar­get in case they pull out… well, something.

Mean­while, I don’t know whether I should be sat­is­fied or frus­trated that I was wear­ing a con­spic­u­ous black back­pack all evening around var­i­ous protest sites and didn’t get glanced at once.

Go home, Cheney. You’ve wasted enough of Sydney’s time and resources already.