Author: Glenn Hauman

Let’s see, two journalists were killed when US troops shelled a hotel. We’ve already lost David Bloom and Michael Kelly. At least one other journalist from the BBC was killed.

Do those numbers seem a bit high to you?

Take
a good look at this photo. It’s an AP photo by Paul Sakura. She bears
wounds she says she got after she was fired on by police during a
anti-war protest in Oakland, CA. This one.

Police opened fire with non-lethal bullets at an anti-war protest at
the Port of Oakland Monday morning, injuring several longshoremen
standing nearby.
Police were trying to clear protesters from an entrance to the docks
when they opened fire and the longshoremen apparently were caught in
the line of fire.
Six longshoremen were treated by paramedics and at least one was
expected to be taken to a hospital. It was unclear if any of the
protesters was injured.
“I was standing as far back as I could,” said longshoreman Kevin
Wilson. “It was very scary. All of that force wasn’t necessary.”

Let me say that again. Police opened fire on protesters.
Now, look at that woman above. I’m willing to bet $50 I know who it is.
I think I went to college with her. The rest of the circumstances fit.
But you know, it doesn’t matter if I know her or not. This woman was
fired on by police for speaking out against the war.
Look at the location of the bruises. At best, her jaw has probably been
dislocated. A few inches up and her eardrum would have been ruptured
from impact, or her eye.
There are a few folks who are convinced that the War in Iraq won’t be a
replay of the Vietnam War. To which I say… really?

From the Chicago Tribune:

Despite promises that the war in Iraq will make the United States
safer from terrorism, residents of the city most affected by terrorism
are far less enthusiastic for the war than other Americans. And the
more personally a New Yorker was affected, the weaker the impulse seems
to be for avenging the more than 2,800 lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
New York’s antiwar chorus includes many lower Manhattan residents,
Sept. 11 survivors and others like the immigrant dishwashers, busboys
and cooks who lost their jobs at the Windows on the World restaurant.
A poll released this week showed that just after the conflict began,
New Yorkers became more supportive of the war and President Bush’s
handling of the conflict. Still, even as about 70 percent of all
Americans back the war, just 47 percent of New Yorkers support it,
while 49 percent oppose it….
“`Rally `round the flag’ is the resounding cry heard throughout the
nation. In New York City, that cry is muted,” said Maurice Carroll,
director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Many New Yorkers with direct ties to the Sept. 11 attacks say their
painful experiences helped form antiwar opinions….
Maria Weisbin, a book editor who has lived six blocks north of the
trade center site since 1979 recalled her husband screaming for revenge
from the rooftop of their apartment building as they watched the towers
burn and collapse.
She supported the war to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan. “I could
throttle bin Laden myself,” said Weisbin, 53.
But she and her husband oppose the war in Iraq, she said, because they
believe there is no connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Sept. 11 attacks.
[emphasis mine]
“We have come the closest of anyone in America to seeing war in our own
neighborhood,” Weisbin said. “We don’t want our grief to be used.”

“People are fooled into believing that they are powerful when they are
members of a powerful state, or when they are soldiers wielding
powerful weapons or when they have real or imagined connections to
people in powerful positions. Powerless boys in uniform feel powerful
when they think of the empire they represent; powerless masses imagine
themselves powerful when they cheer the dictator who suppresses them;
powerless bootlickers feel powerful when they think of the mighty
personage whose boots they lick. But democracy doesn’t meaning
‘feeling’ powerful. It means holding real power.” – C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy

by way of wood s lot and Wealth Bondage.

Peter David
notes:
\\An anthrax scare was caused at Random House and Del Rey (where
Kathleen [his wife] works) today when a package was discovered brimming
with white powder.
Turns out the package was postmarked April 1, and preliminary testing
on the substance comes back negative. Apparently it was someone’s idea
of an April Fool’s Joke.\\
Mean, cruel, and outright dumb– but on the other hand, who would have
thought a major book publisher would have actually opened an
unsolicited manuscript?

Jim MacDonald points out in Electrolite’s
comments:
\\I’ve figured it out. Why the Iraqi conscripts are fighting to the
last ditch rather than surrendering, why people who fled Saddam’s
terror are returning to fight on his side, why Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr
al-Hakim, the leading Iraqi Shiite cleric, has sent instructions to his
supporters and secret cells in Basra, Najaf, Karbala and other southern
Iraqi cities not to start an uprising or support the American-led
coalition in any way.
It’s Ann Coulter’s fault.
Listen to her, back in 2001:
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them
to Christianity.”
That got transmitted worldwide.
So the good folks of Iraq are looking at that and saying, “Okay,
gotcha. ‘Kill their leaders,’ check. ‘Invade their countries,’ check.
Any reason to think they aren’t planning to convert us to Christianity
too? Nope. Allah akbar!”
Poor fellows, they live in a place where what’s in the newspapers and
on TV is what the government wants to put in the newspapers and on TV.
How were they to know Coulter’s a nutjob who’s only speaking for
herself rather than stating official government policy?\\
Me, I tend to use one of the numerous lessons of 9/11: when your nation
is attacked by outside forces, people in the country will rally around
a leader even if he is a brutal moron who gained power by dubious
means.

This was forwarded to me by my mother:
“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy,
the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup,
France is accusing the US of arrogance, and Germany doesn’t want to go
to war.”
Feel free to add your own signs of the apocalypse in the comments
thread.

Y’know, in a time when where there’s a lot of chatter about the US
engaging in a war against Islam, is it too much to ask that our weaponry not have names from the Old Testament?

Not content with airing and syndicating Rush Limbaugh, now Clear Channel is sponsoring pro-war rallies?
\\ Some of the biggest rallies this month have endorsed President
Bush’s strategy against Saddam Hussein, and the common thread linking
most of them is Clear Channel Worldwide Inc., the nation’s largest
owner of radio stations.
In a move that has raised eyebrows in some legal and journalistic
circles, Clear Channel radio stations in Atlanta, Cleveland, San
Antonio, Cincinnati and other cities have sponsored rallies attended by
up to 20,000 people. The events have served as a loud rebuttal to the
more numerous but generally smaller anti-war rallies.
The sponsorship of large rallies by Clear Channel stations is unique
among major media companies, which have confined their activities in
the war debate to reporting and occasionally commenting on the news.
The San Antonio-based broadcaster owns more than 1,200 stations in 50
states and the District of Columbia.
While labor unions and special interest groups have organized and
hosted rallies for decades, the involvement of a big publicly regulated
broadcasting company breaks new ground in public demonstrations.
“I think this is pretty extraordinary,” said former Federal
Communications Commissioner Glen Robinson, who teaches law at the
University of Virginia. “I can’t say that this violates any of a
broadcaster’s obligations, but it sounds like borderline manufacturing
of the news.”
A weekend rally in Atlanta drew an estimated 20,000 people, with some
carrying signs reading “God Bless the USA” and other signs condemning
France and the group Dixie Chicks, one of whose members recently
criticized President Bush.
“They’re not intended to be pro-military. It’s more of a thank you to
the troops. They’re just patriotic rallies,” said Clear Channel
spokeswoman Lisa Dollinger.
Rallies sponsored by Clear Channel radio stations are scheduled for
this weekend in Sacramento, Charleston, S.C., and Richmond, Va.
Although Clear Channel promoted two of the recent rallies on its
corporate Web site, Dollinger said there is no corporate directive that
stations organize rallies.
Clear Channel is by far the largest owner of radio stations in the
nation. The company owned only 43 in 1995, but when Congress removed
many of the ownership limits in 1996, Clear Channel was quickly on the
highway to radio dominance. The company owns and operates 1,233 radio
stations (including six in Chicago) and claims 100 million listeners.
Clear Channel generated about 20 percent of the radio industry’s $16
billion in 2001 revenues.\\

According to oblivio Google had this on its website for a few minutes this AM:

If it was a hacker, I’m suddenly concerned for Google’s security. If it
was Google itself, go them, just keep it up longer, would you? Or are
you afraid of a Dixie Chicks style backlash?