Another brief word from SF area. Protesters have been out all day and are still out tonight---about seventeen hours worth. Moderate numbers for here, several thousand it looks like (from the news), but a thousand or so here and several hundred there and all over the place add up, keeping the cops jumping all day and most of the evening. It looks like the usual sort of spotty scuffles, but it's been going on all day so that is why the number of arrests (1300?) are high.
Mayor Brown is pissed because of the disruptions and the fact that most local politicians are also against the war. There were also actions in the East Bay, Berkeley and Oakland, and the South Bay, San Jose.
Protests are planned for tomorrow on into next week.
Personally, I went to work today and we dug out an old tv to watch the war and protests like competing sporting events. After a hour or so we decided the war news was mostly rightwing bullshit (CNN) and turned it off. I did have some fun calling my shop buddies commie simps, playing at switching roles which got a few laughs. What I was playing on was their hatred of Bush, which in the twists of politics here, puts them realistically almost as far left as a real commie simp---provided you start from Bush's rightwing---if you follow that. So my joke was half enough true to make them laugh. In other words they hate Bush enough to almost qualify as working class Left.
Chuck Grimes