If you thought security was onerous at the Democratic convention in Boston, security in New York sounds like it will be a nightmare. Any thoughts we had of blogging the protests live from New York have evaporated. While authorities should be able to prevent a severe attack, the security hassles just aren't worth the aggravation attendant to being there. There likely will be more freedom of movement in Beirut. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

New York on High Alert for GOP Enclave

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At the end of August, more than 5,000 New York City police officers, many of them armed with rifles and leading bomb-sniffing dogs, will flood New York's subway system, commuter trains and Penn Station, the nation's busiest train terminal, which lies just below the convention center.

Another 5,000 officers will patrol New York streets, the giant round arena of the Madison Square Garden convention site, city bridges, tunnels, hotels, landmarks and the sites of protests that are scheduled to be staged all over Manhattan....Some of these officers will carry hand-held radiation detectors. Others will be screening cars randomly for explosive devices.....Swaths of major thoroughfares in midtown Manhattan, including Seventh and Eighth avenues, will be closed to traffic for hours at a time....

Madison Square Garden will be surrounded by concrete walls and 6-foot- tall metal mesh barriers. Delivery trucks and some 200 buses that will shuttle delegates and reporters to the site will stop between two metal walls, where video cameras will inspect their undercarriages for bombs. People entering the site will have to go through metal detectors and leave behind even unlikely potential weapons like hairspray, bottled water and umbrellas, which "could be used in an improper manner inside the convention."

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Besides, we'd rather save our money to go to the October 1 Vote for Change Concert in Philadelphia. If anyone can help us out with tickets, we'd be very, very grateful.