“For me this is a season of hope,” Kennedy declared, “new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few. New hope.”

“And this is the cause of my life,” he went on, his voice strengthening and reaching his familiar cadence. “New hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American — north, south, east, west, young, old — will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”

A video tribute to the senator preceded his speech and was introduced by his niece, Caroline Kennedy, whose early endorsement of Obama proved crucial in his drive to the nomination.

Watch the entire Kennedy package on this C-SPAN video:

Here’s a transcript of Kennedy’s speech, provided by the DNC:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Caroline.

My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans, it is so wonderful to be here.

And nothing — nothing is going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight.

I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America, to restore its future, to rise to our best ideals, and to elect Barack Obama president of the United States.

As I look ahead, I am strengthened by family and friendship. So many of you have been with me in the happiest days and the hardest days. Together we have known success and seen setbacks, victory and defeat.

But we have never lost our belief that we are all called to a better country and a newer world. And I pledge to you — I pledge to you that I will be there next January on the floor of the United States Senate when we begin the great test.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

For me this is a season of hope — new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few — new hope.

And this is the cause of my life — new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American — north, south, east, west, young, old — will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.

We can meet these challenges with Barack Obama. Yes, we can, and finally, yes, we will.

Barack Obama will close the book on the old politics of race and gender and group against group and straight against gay.

And Barack Obama will be a commander-in-chief who understands that young Americans in uniform must never be committed to a mistake, but always for a mission worthy of their bravery.

We are told that Barack Obama believes too much in an America of high principle and bold endeavor, but when John Kennedy called of going to the moon, he didn’t say it’s too far to get there. We shouldn’t even try.

Our people answered his call and rose to the challenge, and today an American flag still marks the surface of the moon.

Yes, we are all Americans. This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. And we can do it again.

There is a new wave of change all around us, and if we set our compass true, we will reach our destination — not merely victory for our Party, but renewal for our nation.

And this November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans, so with Barack Obama and for you and for me, our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.

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Code Pink member Alicia Forrest arrested by Denver police during the Democratic National Convention. (Photo/Jason Kosena)

The Denver city attorney’s office dropped criminal charges Wednesday morning against a Code Pink demonstrator who was videotaped being slammed to the ground by a baton-wielding Denver Police officer during a protest at the Democratic National Convention, The Denver Post’s Howard Pankratz reports. Alicia Forrest, a 22-year-old Arizona resident, faced charges of interfering with police and could have been sentenced to a year in jail, her defense attorney said.

Forrest was “whisked away” by police after an officer ordered, “Back up, bitch,” and shoved her to the pavement in Denver’s Civic Center Park on Aug. 26, according to the Rocky Mountain News videographer George Kochaniec Jr., whose video of the incident sparked outrage and an independent review of the police officer’s use of force.

Here’s the video:

In September, Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey decided against filing charges against Officer Scott Stewart, finding Forrest grabbed Stewart’s baton and disobeyed an order to back up as another protester was arrested. Forrest “failed to comply with repeated lawful police orders to move back,” Morrisey’s office said. “She then grabbed an officer’s baton, pushing it away. The officer pushed back, using the baton, and the woman fell to the ground.”

In the video, Forrest can be heard saying, “Do it again,” before Stewart strikes her in the chest with the baton, sending her sprawling. Moments later, he says, “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“If the First Amendment stands for anything, it stands for the right to peacefully protest without being bashed violently with a baton by a police officer,” Forrest’s defense attorney, Dan Recht, said in a statement Wednesday.

After police disputed whether the 30-second video accurately depicted the scene surrounding Forrest’s arrest, Kochaniec posted a three-minute, uncut video with narration describing the events and a momentary pause when he says he repositioned his camera.

Code Pink is a women-led grassroots movement whose pink-clad members engage in street theater to promote peace and social justice.

Forrest’s criminal charges were among the last to be resolved after Denver police arrested 154 demonstrators during the DNC, according to Brian Vicente, the director of the People’s Law Project, a group that organized legal defense for the bulk of protesters.

“Quite a few pled guilty,” Vicente said, “but 63 fought the cases. Of those, our attorneys won 41 of the cases and the city convicted 22.” Eight of the convictions were deferred judgments, Vicente said — basically guilty pleas that erase from defendant’s records after a period without additional arrest. Roughly a half dozen cases are still pending, Vicente said, including defendants who never showed up for trial. More than 40 attorneys volunteered through the group to defend demonstrators.

Invesco stage

Two insider campaign accounts published this week take readers behind the scenes when Obama aides quashed a stage design that involved purple runway lights, even more massive pillars and a pulsating screen that would have bathed the nominee in an unearthly glow. At a critical moment in the race, when strategists were trying to beat back the McCain campaign’s charges that Obama was “the world’s biggest celebrity” and imbue the nominee with gravitas, the original stage sent precisely the wrong message, according to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza. “[It] looked like a set from ‘Deal or No Deal,’” said an Obama staffer.

Two days before Obama’s acceptance speech, in Denver, Jim Margolis, a top media consultant to the campaign, went to inspect the stage at Invesco Field. McCain’s aides had successfully turned the Greek columns ringing the stage at the stadium into a story about how a godlike Obama would be speaking from a “temple.” But when Margolis arrived he realized that it was even worse than that. “I walked in and turned to look at the stage, and they had put in purple runway lights all the way around the whole stage, up across all the columns and it looked like a set from ‘Deal or No Deal,’” he said. “And in back of them, where he would walk out, there was a colored horseshoe that was lit that would have gone around him. And in back of that was a sixty-five-inch plasma monitor that would change colors. And for a guy who is being torpedoed every day about celebrity and Hollywood this was straight out of a Hollywood set. My mouth just dropped open.” Margolis ordered the producer and the set designer, who had worked for months on the design, to remove the screen and the purple lights and generally make the stage look less like a Hollywood production.

Newsweek reporter Evan Thomas, embedded with the Obama campaign and embargoed from writing about what he saw until after the election, tells the same story from a different perspective in a fascinating, lenghthy narrative printed in this week’s edition and available on the magazine’s Web site.

At Invesco Field in Denver, the production staff of the Democratic National Committee proposed erecting enormous white columns on either side of the podium with all sorts of lights and adornments. To Axelrod, the whole setup looked like an over-the-top version of ancient Greece — or, more likely, a scene set from the movie “Star Wars” — and he asked for something more modest and sober, simple but presidential. The designers came back with some white columns that vaguely resembled the arcade between the West Wing and the White House, still a little presumptuous, perhaps, but better than trying to re-create Mount Olympus.

As it turned out, the set won at least grudging praise for its resemblence to the White House portico and it didn’t distract much, if at all, from Obama’s speech. Still, it’s a wonder how close the whole event came to resembling a Las Vegas review, minus only the dancers.

Barely six and a half weeks ago, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) had just concluded on an historic high note, the polls were tied, and we’d never heard of Troopergate, aerial wolf-killing, John McCain was running an honorable campaign and the economy hadn’t yet locked up.

Relive those innocent days in this 15-minute video released late last week by the Obama campaign. “Four Days in Denver” follows Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden and their families behind the scenes:

The back of a commemorative DNC T-shirt sold by the Denver Police Protective Association bears the slogan 'We Get Up Early to Beat the Crowds - 2008 DNC.' (Photo/Ernest Luning)

The group called for an investigation into the T-shirt and asked officials to “discipline” those involved. In addition, the group demanded that “police training regarding civil liberties be reevaluated, because it clearly has not achieved its intended effect.”

The front of a commemorative DNC T-shirt sold by the Denver Police Protective Association bears the logo '68 with a slash through it, representing opposition to demonstrators' interest in reviving the spirit of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. (Photo/Ernest Luning)

Nearly 2,000 of the shirts have been distributed, a DPPA employee said Thursday afternoon, and 100 more are on order. The shirt was given away to Denver Police Department officers and has been sold to officers from other departments for $10.

Denver Det. Nick Rogers, vice president of the police union, told the Rocky Mountain News on Thursday he hadn’t received any complaints about the shirts and said it’s common for Denver police to produce commemorative T-shirts after big events.

During the DNC, police arrested 154 protesters. On Tuesday, the Denver District Attorney declined to prosecute a Denver officer caught on videotape shoving a Code Pink demonstrator to the ground with his riot baton during the DNC.

From the Recreate 68 statement:

The people of Denver were assured by the city that it would respect First Amendment rights during the DNC, and that that police officers were being trained to do so. The actions of police during the DNC, which involved numerous violations of people’s right to freedom of speech and assembly, put the lie to those promises. And now this appalling, tasteless t-shirt shows why. The members of Denver’s police union clearly have no respect for the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

Here’s the video shot by the Rocky Mountain News of a Denver officer slamming a Code Pink demonstrator to the ground:

Westminster-based Security With Advanced Technology (SWAT), which supplied crowd-control guns and ammunition to security forces during the Democratic National Convention, will join forces with California-based PepperBall, a manufacturer of crowd-control devices, which predictably specializes in making guns that fire balls filled with pepper irritants.

SWAT’s business had suffered in recent years as it became involved in patent litigation with competitor PepperBall and had trouble bringing “less-than-lethal projectile guns to market,” according to the business journal.

A recent communique from the National Guard Bureau reveals that Army units from four states were in the Mile High City to assist federal and local law enforcement authorities with security and crowd control operations.

Units from Georgia, Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming worked with soldiers from the Colorado Army National guard during the massive political event:

As with almost any National Guard mission, units were prepared to assist military and civilians alike if authorities called upon them, task force officials said. They explained that in a civil support capacity, Guardsmen are capable of providing medical and security support, in addition to other specialties reserved for catastrophic events, such as site decontamination, personnel evacuation and medical triage.

…

Prior to setting up their equipment, the Guardsmen practiced donning and doffing their specialized personal protective gear and setting up and moving any external equipment in order to ensure they were ready to respond to an event if called by authorities.

Although military officials are still mum on just how many soldiers were stationed in Denver during convention week, The Colorado Independent reported leading up to the convention that the the state’s Army National Guard was planning to station at least 500 soldiers in facilities surrounding the city.

Strategically speaking, a stop in Southern Colorado helps the campaign for a few reasons. First, Hillary Clinton won Pueblo during the caucus and soothing over hard feelings in this strongly Democratic area will help turn out more voters in November, making up for losses in other parts of the state. Secondly, Pueblo shares a media market with El Paso county and Obama needs to answer the hugely successful rally last week by Palin and McCain in Colorado Springs.

Obama will likely use this stop to reach out to Hispanic voters and Pueblo’s high concentration of veterans — remember, Pueblo’s nickname is the “Home of Heroes.” In addition to earned media, McCain’s abysmal record on veterans issues should be easy enough to get out through mailers or inexpensive TV spots that would also reach military families in Colorado Springs.

The stop in Grand Junction really gets me excited. It shows Obama’s not willing to concede this area to McCain, and with the unbelievable fumble McCain made on renegotiating the Colorado River Compact this area could be in play. Not in the sense that Obama could win, but as Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli points out in the Grand Junction Sentinel article linked to above, “The strategy of winning in the West and in Colorado is not only to play to your base but to take the edge off areas you’re going to lose.”

Back in 2004 my good friend and the next State Rep. from Pueblo Sal Pace, at that time our Field Director for the Salazar race, said that if we hit 38 to 40 percent in Mesa County we’d win the election. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. If Obama does well in Grand Junction he’ll likely win the 3rd and then likely win the state, assuming he also wins the Democratic leaning 1st, 2nd, and 7th.

I give a lot of the credit for the Salazar victory in 2004 to our water strategy. We drew a strong contrast between lifelong farmer Salazar and his opponent who supported the water-grab Referendum A.

Grand Junction has its own media market, as does Pueblo/El Paso, and a few TV spots about how McCain wants to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact would have a huge impact in these areas. Look for Obama to mention it on Monday and look for a TV spot sometime before November.

Colorado Independent’s blogumnist (blogger-columnist) Jeff Bridges has worked in Democratic politics for the last 10 years, serving as communications director for two congressional races in Colorado and two governor’s races in the Deep South. Bridges also worked as a legislative assistant in Washington, D.C., with a focus on military and small business issues.

Read Jeff’s latest commentaries.

“Our police and Public Works crews engineered an extraordinary behind-the-scenes collaboration preceding and during the Democratic National Convention which thwarted plans of those intent on disrupting our city,” Hickenlooper said in a press release, referencing stock piles of potentially hazardous material that the police confiscated before and during the Convention. “We are extremely proud of these two agencies for their intelligent planning and performance.”

Yesterday, District 10 City Council member Jeanne Robb added to the accolades, calling the police work “cool-headed,” in a newsletter to her constituents.

So far, only at-large City Council member Doug Linkhart has voiced his skepticism about the law enforcement, questioning whether it was necessary for riot-ready cops to move throughout the city hanging onto the exteriors of SUVs.

“I don’t know if that was necessary,” Linkhart told The Rocky Mountain News last week. “I would only bring out the heavy artillery when we need it.”

But while city leaders seem largely content with the police effort, many protesters and their lawyers aren’t. Today, members of Re-create 68 announced their intention to file suit against the city and the officers for violating their constitutional rights to peaceful protest by using excessive force.