Vigil in front of City Hall, all out for tomorrow!!!

I've been watching KTVU at 6-7am, and they had very decent coverage.

You can see retired Col. Anne Wright there wearing the gray coat.

The reporter was letting people from two sides each briefly speak (one would wonder if they will allow the third side, the Westboro baptist Church who is expected to make an appearance later today, also have a minute. They call the marines rapists and murderers).
They let Wright, a 29yr army officer, and another marine who just got back from Iraq talk, where he described how it's ridiculous to talk about free speech for marines (who are the government, rather than a citizen who is protected by the first amendment *from* the government) because the marines don't allow any form of free speech for enlisted people, and they lie to their prospects. I saw Rusty, a Vietnam vet, in the crowd.

They had an angry mom carrying photos of her son, and Melanie Morgan who was babbling about convening a grand jury and putting Berkeley city council under charges.
The overall presentation seemed to have a lot of unreasonable people shouting, and you really would wonder if they'll last all day.

At their 8am news summary, KTVU is reviewing what has happened in the first three hours.

They showed the police intervening when a stocky man with white t-shirt and yellow hat on the flag-waving side had stepped into the street to knock over a teenager on a bicycle. The high school is adjacent to the park, so you would imagine that 3,000 students are arriving around this time. The reporter said it was a pretty aggressive and unwarranted move, but they didn't have actual footage of the incident.

I noticed the rightwingers were calling for people to be there at noon for the cameras, fyi. Their interest was the media coverage.

Actually- they asked for people to show up at 5am.

For everyone safely viewing at home (or a lucky job with computer access) in their chair, KPIX has a live-link where they have a camera just set up in the park, without the reporter interfering. On a PC, I could only hear sound at first, but now the picture is working.
There is a lot of honking by people driving by, and occasionally something is happening to the side which warrants screaming. Mostly there is chanting, and people walking back and forth. It does look like there are more people now at 10am than at 7am.
The bizarre media aspects of this made me want to avoid it. I'm glad so many well-spoken ex-army members are there. It isn't easy to turn around the way this was twisted into being reported to the country as simple minded troop bashing. They had Debbie Lee, a gold star mother on, and she was hugging the picture of her son and talking about how she will join him in heaven, and how hateful Berkeley people are.

click on the 'live footage' link which is up here on Tuesday http://www.kpix.com

Oh well, the local politicians cave. Big deal. But we must continue. The Marines are an authoritarian and imperialist institution and they have no right to even exist!