GRASSROOTS ANTI-WAR RALLY IN DC-- MOST POLITICIANS FLEE TOWN

It was a march inside the Beltway but it wasn't a march of the Beltway... of course. I bet that other than Kucinich there wasn't a presidential candidate around-- just real life Americans with real life worries about war and making a living... plus a few celebrities and politicians who aren't afraid to relate to real people. You'd never catch a Biden or, these days-- oh, how the times have changed-- an Obama at one of these. Maybe when those demanding an end to Bush's aggressive wars reaches beyond the mere 70% and into the 80s Obama will join. And when you get to 90% even Hillary will show up. Biden? Uh... never. He doesn't relate to actual people or what they feel or think or want. He's just pure Beltway. When I was a kid we would wonder if Johnson or even Nixon was paying attention. No one cares if Bush is pays any attention; he is a complete nonentity and this is about leading Congress-- and they need leading-- to the inevitable, and the inevitable is not the Biden-Hagel-Levin nonbinding symbolic bullshit.

Hillary, currently polling 4th in next year's unpredictable, uncontrollable Iowa caucuses-- which she would be avoiding if she had advisors who weren't brain-dead retreads-- was on the meet and greet circuit in Iowa today. And Giuliani was speaking in front of a small, bored crowd of small town Republican fatcats in New Hampshire. (He was dressed in men's clothes.)

John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and a small handful of Democratic legislators were at the rally where between 100,000 and 500,000 people marched peacefully demanding an end to Bush's war and an end to congressional complicity. Jane Fonda and Jesse Jackson were greeted like heroes." More Hollywood celebrities showed up at the demonstration than buttoned-down Washington typically sees in a month. Actor Sean Penn said lawmakers will pay a price in the 2008 elections if they do not take firmer action than to pass a nonbinding resolution against the war, the course Congress is now taking. 'If they don't stand up and make a resolution as binding as the death toll, we're not going to be behind those politicians,' he said. Actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins also spoke."

Right wing blowhards in the media and on their blogs are trying to claim the march was a failure, of course, but the Washington Post, which writes there were less than half a million people, reported that "during the march that followed the rallies, it stretched the entire length of the route from the Mall to the east front of the Capitol and back to the Mall." Naturally CNN has a hot new cookie recipe to cover so they are passing on the march-- besides a sexual assault by a priest... in Las Vegas... a CNN wet dream! Funny Sad that the BBC has more serious coverage than American corporate media.