  Now here is an insightful view by an earlier poster: "protests don't do shit. " There are so many reasons why your post was ignorant its hard to know where to begin. How about first off, lumping all protests together is like lumping ALL political parties together and saying "man, political parties don't do shit. " There are many different kinds of protests, comprised of many different kinds of people working for many different goals using many different tactics.
Let me give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant to clarify that you were talking about short term political street protests. Even within that much more limited scope there are still a wide range of possibilities we could be talking about. What I come across most of the time when I hear people making these reactionary (and frankly socially conservative) remarks is that 1: they have little to no experience actually being at or involved with protesting, and 2: they think they know the intended goals of the protesters but in reality are projecting their own wishes for the future on the protesters and then pointing their finger when said protesters fail to live up to the critic's goals. I would say that you are dead wrong that nobody cares about protesters. Its clear by the overwhelmingly brutal police presence (every fucking time) that someone is indeed taking notice. Which brings me back to my earlier post and the point therein (which was obviously lost on you Cole): There are huge demonstrations at the rallies for both major political parties in the country and both will be met by violence from soldiers working for the government, and paid for by our tax dollars.
I think this raises some interesting questions as to what the hell is going on. Back on subject, please note that I haven't even attempted to go into reasons behind the effectiveness of any tactics such as protesting/lobbying voting/etc. But I do have three questions for you: 1) Towards what ends do you think the DNC and RNC protesters 'don't do shit,' your ends or theirs? 2) What do you think the protesters' goals are? And what are your goals within the same scope? and 3) Assuming they could be used towards the same ends, what is preventing someone from, say, doing both protesting and lobbying? 
