The blogs bursting in air

This is the big day for the Open Letters Blogburst, an online collection of open letters from weblogs to our congresscritters asking why the rush to war.  30+ letters online already, and growing.  With lots of resources to help you write your own letter.

Here’s mine:

Open letter

Why Iraq and why now? 

There’s no evidence linking Iraq to bin Laden.  In fact, Iraq is a secular state and opposed to radical Islam.

There’s no evidence that Iraq has or is making nukes.

There is no evidence that Iraq is doing anything unusual or is making any hostile moves.

This country has never launched a first strike pre-emptive attack.  Yet we are are poised to do just that - because of a “threat”, Iraqi nuclear weapons, that does not yet exist. This is madness - coupled with greed for oil, lust for power, and the extreme Christian fundamentalism of much of the Bush administration.  This unprovoked attack on another country is guaranteed to upset the balance of power across the planet, and lose us what few allies we still have..

Stop the madness.  Do not invade Iraq.

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In Florida, Democrats Jump On Bush Gaffe.

Democrats “pounced on” Gov. Jeb Bush (R), “taunting the governor with his own tape-recorded words saying he has ‘devious plans’ to ignore voters if they approve a popular state amendment requiring smaller public school class sizes,” the Palm Beach Post reports. “It was a potentially devastating revelation in the final weeks of a close gubernatorial race in which improving education — especially reducing class size — has been the central issue of the campaign.”… [Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]

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War Protests Happening in Historic Fashion.

This past weekend protests were staged in major and minor cities all around the United States by the group Not in Our Name, with tremendous turn out. But it is hard to get a picture of this from the media, who present a haphazard vision of the movement at best.

Reuters did carry a story on the protests in New York Central Park, which they listed as having 10,000 people — though pictures and people on the ground indicate that the group was at least 20,000 and perhaps as high as 50,000. But despite covering the success of the protests in New York, Reuters ignored the tens of thousands of people in other regions. The New York Times did cover what happened in Central Park, leading in to the story with the statement that those in the know said it was larger than protests in the Vietnam era (people I spoke with in Los Angeles said the same thing here), but the story was relegated to the New York Regional section, failed to mention the protests in other major cities across America, and ended with a statement by a protester de-claiming the amount of people present and wishing that it would have been more. The title claims only “thousands” protest — significantly under-counting even the Reuters undercount of 10,000.

The AP was much stronger on covering the protests across America and on the west coast — though again it tended to under-count the actual turn-out. Further, its own coverage of New York was weak. Major outlets like ABC news and CNN ran parts of the AP stories, but with no single article documenting the massive amounts of country-wide protest over the weekend, the picture presented was of a couple-thousand people staging a p.5 demonstration.

Of course, with President Bush set to announce his war plans this evening on television, such widely successful protest makes it difficult for the editors of corporations like the New York Times to honor the facts without dis-arming their constituents. But the fact of the matter is that the American people are turning out for public demonstration against this war in a way that has not occurred since Vietnam. This is page one material and the fact that the New York Times would choose to run a piece on Laura Bush’s literary room over and above the protests only goes to show that the Chomsky/Herman propaganda model remains in effect and that big media is not to be trusted as a major source on important political issues. [Blog Left: Critical Interventions]

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Peace hopes dim as missile fired into crowd

Hmm yes, firing missles at people does tend to put a damper on peace…

In a blow to new peace efforts, Israel launched its deadliest military strike in three months yesterday, killing at least 13 Palestinians and wounding dozens of others.

The attack came despite United States warnings that such actions could harm plans to attack Iraq.

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L.A. protest coverage

The L.A Times today ran a long, balanced story on the Not In Our Name demonstration, with a big photo, on the front page of the California section.  Excellent!

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Northern Ireland peace plan near collapse

If there were a political equivalent of lobbing a hand grenade into the middle of Northern Ireland’s devolved assembly, then the events surrounding the weekend’s drama at Stormont would certainly come close.

The images of baseball-capped policemen and women stampeding down the marble staircase after searching Sinn Fein’s offices on Friday, with the party’s health minister, Bairbre de Brun, screaming after them, said it all - terrorism at the heart of democracy. Now it looks doubtful whether that fledgling democracy, already under attack from hardline unionists, can survive.

Police had already seized hundreds of documents and arrested three men and a woman in dawn raids on their homes, among them Denis Donaldson, Sinn Fein’s chief administrator at Stormont and a former IRA prisoner, who appeared in court last night, charged with five counts of having information likely to be of use to terrorists.

This has the potential to car bomb ugly, dead bodies in the street ugly, rather quickly.

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Imagine my excitement

Bin Laden: Youths of God preparing more strikes

And in the same article, this tidbit

Meanwhile, it was reported last night that Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, has been warned by his attorney-general that military action against Iraq to force a regime change would breach international law.

The clear advice from Lord Goldsmith and Harriet Harman, the solicitor general, places the Prime Minister in a potentially “impossible position”, according to the Financial Times.

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Craft ‘rammed’ Yemen oil tanker, says BBC

Yemeni officials say they do not consider the blast an act of sabotage.  But Captain Peter Raes, managing director of France Ship, told BBC News Online it would be “near impossible” for an accidental explosion to have taken place, and that explosives were likely to have been on board the vessel which crashed.

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