First, thanks to Sheddhead for the essay and great pictures. 

This would have been sooner, but I’m kinda’ new at this digital stuff and uploading on a public site, etc.

As Sheddhead said, the day turned out beautiful, although a little brisk.

I did not attend the Union Park Rally, or the march, but instead went early to Federal Plaza, where all protestors ultimately gathered.

Early arrival at Federal Plaza

There’s more:

Although, there was media everywhere, the coverage was scant and the Chicago Tribune’s video did not do justice to the event.  The video and other news stated that there was a poor turnout, only about 5,000 people.  I knew better and I spoke to the office of the organizers yesterday.  The 5,000 figure was based on numbers at Union Park while Jan Shakowsky was speaking (3rd speaker).  As time grew on, busload after busload arrived to join the rally and the march.  Once under way, the march gathered people all along the route. 

The Mounted Police Arrive at Federal Plaza

While the march was going on, Federal Plaza began filling up to capacity.

Crowds growing!

Once the marchers arrived, there was an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people, according to the organizer’s office.  “It was the largest turnout Chicago has ever had!”, he said.

The Marchers Have Arrived!  The Plaza was filled.  Crowds overfilled streets.

View Toward Platform

View looking North on Dearborn Street

View looking South on Dearborn Street

The event was extremely well organized and the speakers, from all walks, i.e., labor leaders, a couple of Congressmen, religious leaders, veteran groups, ethnic groups, etc.  The speakers were passionate and dynamic.  The crowd was heated with enthusiasm and conviction.

Stacey Hafley, Midwest Military Families Speakout, with other MFSOs, IVAW, VVAW and Vets for Peace on Stage at Fed Plaza

I recall Congressman Danny Davis speaking about John Conyers, Jr.  He mentioned that Conyers had been working on impeachment articles prior to January, 2007, but that Nancy Pelosi had taken impeachment off of the table even prior to January, 2007.  I took it as an attempt to somehow alleviate any fault of Conyers in a way.

I noted that just about every speaker said that Congress should not be intimidated and urged everyone to keep the pressure up on Congress. 

The last speaker was a Reverend, whose name I cannot remember, but he is a well known activist in the Chicago area.  His deliverance and passion was awesome and his last words were, “They must be impeached.”

End of Rally!

Looking Back at the End!

Hope you’ve enjoyed! All I can say is it was great to be there and a part of this great rally. 

You can click on the photos for larger size(except for the 1st one)

Also, see www.oct27chicago.org for video and more pictures (some of mine, too.)

Kos writes a timely piece on cults of personality:

when your hero turns out to be not so perfect after all, clinging to that fiction can’t possibly reflect well on you. Understand that these candidates are all human, thus imperfect. Understand that they have free will, thus will do things you will disagree with. And that’s okay. Politics is about weighing the good and the bad and going with the best we have. There is no such thing as “perfect” in this biz.

Feel free to rationalize every stupid thing your candidate does, but don’t expect the rest of us to go along with it. All of the Democrats have done stupid things and smart things. I mean, Chris Dodd announced his candidacy on Don Imus, for chrissakes. And yes, when they do those stupid things, some of us will be right there talking about how stupid those things are.

We’re not Republicans, “carrying water” for their leaders and keeping their mouths shut as they drag the nation into the gutter. And we certainly shouldn’t be like the 24% dead-enders, who still cling to Bush despite all evidence of him being the worst president in our nation’s history.

Hear! Hear!

Some news and OPEN THREAD.

1. Ribbit. Ribbit. Great News! Scientists in New Zealand have discovered a possible cure to a deadly disease that has been destroying much of the world’s population of frogs and other amphibians. Kim Griggs, BBC News science reporter, reports from Wellington, New Zealand of a Frog killer fungus ‘breakthrough’. The breakthrough is chloramphenicol, which is a common antibiotic used for humans as an eye ointment. “The researchers found frogs bathed in the solution became resistant to the killer disease, chytridiomycosis. The fungal disease has been blamed for the extinction of one-third of the 120 species lost since 1980.”

   “We found that we could cure them completely of chytrids,” said Phil Bishop from the University of Otago. “And even when they were really sick in the control group, we managed to bring them back almost from the dead.”

2. More good news. Xan Rice in Nairobi, Kenya for The Guardian reports Uganda ‘averts tragedy’ with reversal of decision to clear virgin forest for biofuel. “Conservationists have hailed a decision by the Ugandan government to drop plans that would have allowed a private company to grow sugar cane for biofuel production on a protected forest reserve.”

   “This is a tragedy averted,” said Paul Buckley, head of the Africa programme at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “There are plenty of places to grow sugar cane, but not many tracts of virgin forest left in Uganda.”

   “The controversial proposal, which would have turned over 17,500 acres of the 74,000-acre Mabira forest to the Indian-owned Mehta Group, had caused alarm in environmental circles and stirred up racial tensions. Protected since 1932, the Mabira reserve acts as a vital catchment area for Lake Victoria, just eight miles south of the forest, and is home to more than 300 species of birds, 200 types of trees and nine different primates. Besides the biodiversity loss, local and international conservation groups claimed the forest’s value in storing carbon dioxide and mitigating global warming far exceeded any commercial gains from sugar cane production.”

Below the fold are stories about growing vegetables in Greenland, critter cameras, Lake Superior, and the nexus of birds and wind power in the Columbia River Gorge. That’s right! Two bonus stories today, making that a Four at Four first.

3. Sarah Lyall in Narsarquaq, Greenland for The New York Times reports Warming revives flora and fauna in Greenland.

   When using the words “growing” in connection with Greenland in the same sentence, it is important to remember that although Greenland is the size of Europe, it has only nine conifer forests like Mr. Bjerge’s, all of them cultivated. It has only 51 farms. (They are all sheep farms, although one man is trying to raise cattle. He has 22 cows.) Except for potatoes, the only vegetables most Greenlanders ever eat — to the extent that they eat vegetables at all — are imported, mostly from Denmark.

   But now that the climate is warming, it is not just old trees that are growing. A Greenlandic supermarket is stocking locally grown cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage this year for the first time. Eight sheep farmers are growing potatoes commercially. Five more are experimenting with vegetables. And Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests…

   Greenland, a self-governing province of Denmark, was settled by the pugilistic Viking Erik the Red in the 10th century, after his murderous ways got him ejected from Iceland. Legend has it that he called it Greenland as a way to entice others to join him, and, in fact, it was. It was relatively green then, with forests and fertile soil, and the Vikings grew crops and raised sheep for hundreds of years. But temperatures dropped precipitously in the so-called Little Ice Age, which began in the 16th century, the Norse settlers died out and agriculture was no longer possible.

4. Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post reports of New insights from creatures’ perspective. “Since Crittercam’s invention, researchers have attached the devices to more than 50 species of marine, terrestrial and flying creatures, including great white sharks, black bears and Hawaiian monk seals. More than 30 scientific groups in academia and government — in agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Agriculture Department — use Marshall’s invention to collect data and develop wildlife policy. Over the past 15 years, the devices have produced a number of significant new insights…

   Researchers have also used Crittercams to wage public relations campaigns aimed at humans. After capturing spectacular underwater footage by attaching cameras three dozen times to the backs of black sea turtles, Jeffrey A. Seminoff, an ecologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, held “movie nights” in the Mexican town of Bahia de los Angeles to persuade local residents not to eat the turtles.

   “This is a community where you could drive down the street and smell turtles cooking in pots,” Seminoff said. “We gave them a sea turtle eye’s view of habitat that’s outside their back yards. We had a campaign: each month, release one turtle. I think the Crittercam helped us achieve that.”

   There are Crittercam videos and more at the National Geographic website.

5. Reporting for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, Larry Oakes writes that Lake Superior struggles to remain free of pollutants. “Lake Superior is recovering well from ‘legacy’ pollutants such as DDT, but faces new threats from shoreline development that have harmed fish habitat and introduced new chemicals, scientists said this morning at a major conference. More than 400 scientists, teachers and natural resource managers are in Duluth this week for ‘Making a Great Lake Superior,’ a conference designed to clarify the issues and strategies for maintaining the health of the world’s largest lake.”

   Asked to identify the biggest threat to the lake, Mark Ebener, a biologist with the Chippewa–Ottawa Resource Authority in Sault Ste. Marie, said, “That’s easy: Invasive species, and one in particular. The original invasive species — ‘us’ — we are still the worst enemy of the (lake’s) aquatic environment.”

   Last Friday, Canada announced that “a large stretch of the rugged, pristine northern shore of Lake Superior will become the world’s largest freshwater marine protected area… The new conservation area will encompass about 3,861 square miles of water in a triangular shape south to the Canada-U.S. boundary. The region is home to peregrine falcons, bald eagles, herons and endangered trout species, as well as caribou, which is unusual for that part of Ontario. Beneath the water lies a number of historic shipwrecks.”

6. Gail Kinsey Hill of The Oregonian reports Wind farms generate bird worries. “The rapid expansion of wind energy farms in the Columbia River Gorge’s shrub steppes could put hawks, eagles and other raptors on a collision course with fields of giant turbines and their 150-foot blades…”

   As wind energy developers move into wilder areas along the gorge’s ridge lines, near canyons and amid shrub-covered rangeland, the potential for conflict rises. If bird studies confirm the fears of Oregon and Washington state wildlife biologists, the green-minded Northwest might be forced to weigh its pursuit of pollution-free energy against the toll on raptors and other birds.

   The numbers sound small: Nationwide, collisions kill about 2.3 birds of all varieties per turbine per year, studies show. In the Northwest, it’s about 1.9 birds per turbine. That could mean more than 3,000 bird deaths a year in the gorge.

   But birders say those numbers are meaningless because the totals make no distinction between abundant and rare species.

   As mentioned in Thursday’s Four at Four, The Guardian had a story about General Electric’s plans for giant wind turbines that quoted a GE vice president, Lorraine Bolsinger, saying “You can’t say no to everything.” Nuclear has many problems beyond just radioactive waste, dams kill salmon, coal is a greenhouse gas emitter and destructive to mine. How many raptors have starved because of low salmon populations? Now many bird deaths have been due to pollution from coal-burning power plants? So, what’s the solution?

So, what else is happening?

Light Emitting Pickle here to bring you the most recent open thread. First, a few words about Pickle Pony Parties:

Please do not recommend a Pony Party when you see one.  There will be another along in a few hours.

Top o’ the morning to y’all. As is the case every Monday morning, I found myself frantically assembling this morning/midday installment of the Pony Party, having conveniently ignored the myriad reminders triggered by Outlook yesterday. And so, once again, I don’t have much to say. So, in the spirit of this really being an open thread… take it away, folks!

BTW – when does daylight savings end this year? Wasn’t it the last weekend of October last year? Hmmm – maybe I’ll complain about that for this afternoon’s Pony Party! 😉

Rutgers University historian David Greenberg has an important column in today’s Washington Post:

You wouldn’t know it from reading the papers, but the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination is a confirmed right-winger. On issues such as free speech and religion, secrecy and due process, civil rights and civil liberties, pornography and democracy, this moralist and self-styled lawman has exhibited all the key hallmarks of Bush-era conservatism.

Rudy.

Greenberg points out that anyone who lived in New York while Giuliani was mayor- anyone who actually knows anything about Giuliani- knows that he’s neither liberal nor moderate. As mayor, he tried to crush liberalism. But everyone from James Dobson and Richard Viguerie, to ABC’s Jake Tapper, NPR’s Mara Liasson, washingtonpost.com’s Chris Cillizza has been playing along with the “liberal” framing. Greenberg says that framing always boils down to “three overblown issues — guns, gay rights and abortion — and even in those cases, his deviation from conservative orthodoxy is far milder than is usually suggested.”

But:

The “social” and “cultural” issues that divide Americans encompass much more than guns, gay rights and abortion. They include state support of religion; the legitimacy of dissenting speech; the president’s right to keep information secret; the place of fair procedures in dispensing justice. The Bush administration’s hard-line stands on these matters have polarized the nation as much as the Iraq war has. And on these issues, Giuliani is just as hard-line as the man he’d like to succeed.

And here’s the money quote- the framing we will need make our number one talking point, should Giuliani be nominated:

If you’ve managed to keep liking President Bush, you’d have no trouble loving President Giuliani.

(more) -tried to censor an art exhibit