Media Horse has the latest on Bush's continuing decline in approval ratings. And some praise for CNN's Aaron Brown who told viewers last week that none of the reasons justifying the first Gulf War are present this time around.

Update: My DD notes these are the lowest approval ratings since Bush took over the White House.

Don't forget, tonight HBO is broadcasting the Rolling Stones' Madison Square Garden concert live --for free. 9pm EST.

Update:8:20 p.m. MST: Gimme Shelter: War, children, is just a shot away...electrifying performance.

Put this on your calendars now: The Murder of Emmett Till will air on PBS Monday, January 20, 2003 at 9:00 pm, EST, check local listings for the time in your area.

A synopsis of the crime:

In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till, a teen from Chicago, didn't understand that he had broken the unwritten laws of the Jim Crow South until three days later, when two white men dragged him from his bed in the dead of night, beat him brutally and then shot him in the head. Although his killers were arrested and charged with murder, they were both acquitted quickly by an all-white, all-male jury. Shortly afterwards, the defendants sold their story, including a detailed account of how they murdered Till, to a journalist. The murder and the trial horrified the nation and the world. Till's death was a spark that helped mobilize the civil rights movement. Three months after his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, the Montgomery bus boycott began.

[note: we will be adding to this throughout the day]

"One protester held a sign that depicted King and read "I have a dream!" The sign's opposite side showed President Bush and read "I have a nightmare."

On the International Protests:

Moscow photo

Paris Photo

World-wide War Protest photos, courtesy BBC

Atrios has great pictures of today's war protesters from around the world. Big turnout--we are grateful and filled with pride for them. ( update: Per Atrios in the comments section, these photos are from the last protest march--he was clear, we misunderstood.)

Some of the slogans on banners:

A banner in Moscow declared: ''Iraq isn't your ranch Mr. Bush.''

In contrast, three dozen people showed up at a support the war rally at the Washington Monument.

Should Ashcroft be going for the death penalty for an attempted crime that was never completed?

That's what's happening in the trial of "Brian Regan, the former Air Force sergeant accused of attempted espionage on behalf of Iraq, Libya and China, and of mishandling national defense information." ABC Reporter Beverly Lumpkin notes,

Here are the two most significant facts about this case:

Regan is charged only with attempted espionage; and yet

The government is seeking the death penalty if he is convicted.

This, despite the fact that since the death penalty was reinstated for espionage in 1994, there have been 10 people convicted of completed acts of espionage, some gravely serious, for whom nevertheless the government did not seek death. "

The defense argues:

Why is the government so adamant that a man whose letters were so replete with spelling errors that they can't be read with a straight face, a man only charged with attempted espionage, should nevertheless face death if convicted? The defense team has made many impassioned arguments about this point. In one pleading, the defense wrote, "If the government has its way, Regan will be the first of scores of persons convicted of espionage even to be considered for execution since 1953, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death. … [T]he damage Regan is alleged to have caused is dramatically less than the harm caused by recent spies Robert Hanssen, Harold Nicholson and Ana Montes, and significantly less than that caused by every other person charged with espionage since enactment of the federal death penalty."

The case is in the jury selection (voir dire) stage now.

Update: Digby agrees this is overkill (sorry for the pun) and asks, what's next, the death penalty for double parking? He also points out, if the espionage was never committed, how can there be any victims?

A chart of Bush's military record and non-service, prepared by Uggabugga is quite illuminating.

We found this tonight over at the Toronto Star which has been covering the trial of the American Air Force Pilots who accidentally killed Canadians in Afganistan last year while on a flight mission--a mission for which the Air Force doctors gave them dexadrine (speed, called "go pills") to fight fatigue.

It turns out that the Air Force also gives the pilots Ambien, sleeping pills, to come down from the dexadrine and then repeats the cycle the next day.

What will we learn next? That the pilots were routinely given morphine in case they got a headache? We can just hear them singing now, as they flew around Afganistan, "And I won't forget to put flowers on your grave."

Who needs a draft--when this gets out, there should be no shortages of enlistees.

This would be quite funny, were it not so pathetic....Ashcroft invoking Martin Luther King, Jr. to defend his civil rights record.

"From the first days of our administration, honoring the diversity of the American people has been a priority for President Bush and for me," Ashcroft said. ...The largely African-American crowd of Justice Department employees responded with restrained but polite applause.

He's lucky they didn't jeer.

"I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded... I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed... I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war." Dwight D. Eisenhower

Skippy reports on the hypocrisy in Ari Fleischer's statement that President Bush welcomes the war protests as a part of our democracy. Skippy gives lots of examples, and we'd like to bring back one from the past. But not before we recount the details of a successful war protest--to date, the nation's largest:

"Bolivian farmers blocked highways for a fifth day demanding their right to grow coca, from which cocaine is processed, as 20,000 retirees marched on La Paz demanding bigger pensions."

"Coca farmers wielding sticks and stones have battled with police using tear gas since Monday for control of a stretch of the key route through central Bolivia, high in the Andes. Growers of coca demanded repeal of a 1988 law prohibiting farmers from growing the leaves Andean indigenous people have chewed for thousands of years, also used in a non-narcotic tea thought to help fend off altitude sickness."

"But the leaves are not just a traditional plant; they are also a temptingly lucrative cash crop in South America's poorest nation."

Jim Castle, President of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, had this to say in a letter to the editor in Friday's Denver Post on Colorado Governor Owen's criticism this week of former Illinois Governor George Ryan's granting of clemency to Illinois death row inmates:

Clouded by rhetoric

We should all be troubled, but not surprised, by Gov. Owens' Monday-morning quarterbacking of Illinois Gov. George Ryan's clemency decision for inmates on death row in Illinois prisons.

Gov. Owens correctly pointed out that we are a government of laws and not of men. Clemency was chosen for the very reason that men, and not laws, had manipulated the system in Illinois to bring about death verdicts. Nearly half of all inmates on death row in Illinois were represented by attorneys who were later disbarred or suspended. Seventeen men have now been released from Illinois prisons after having been exonerated after they spent 173 years in prison. A review of the Illinois cases also showed widespread use of torture to exact confessions and prosecutorial misconduct in a vast majority of cases.

Gov. Owens is wrong when he says that Gov. Ryan put his opinions above those of the jurors, citizens and legislators. The moratorium was supported by 70 percent of Illinois residents. percent of Illinois voters had grave concerns that there were innocent people on death row.

The jurors who voted for the death penalty never knew that evidence had been hidden, that a confession had been manufactured or that the defense attorney had failed to investigate when they issued many of the death verdicts. I am sure if one were to interview these jurors, they would be angry at the role they were forced to play in a system designed for injustice. Perhaps, however, Owens is right that politicians, who have rarely been linked with courage, may have opposed clemency.

That's why Gov. Ryan issued the clemency order. He couldn't trust the next politician to do the right thing. I guess it is not surprising that Gov. Owens was not a supporter of Gov. Ryan's decision.

The lesson for Colorado in the Illinois experience is that - unless police are closely monitored, procedures designed to increase death sentences are rejected and unless adequate funding for indigent defense is guaranteed - we, too can become the next Illinois. Hopefully this message will not be clouded in the web of rhetoric.

And from another Post reader,

[The] casual reader might believe Illinois' governor had seriously miscarried justice, when in fact the commutations resulted in penalties equal to the harshest imposed in most of western Europe and several states in the U.S. Our Gov. Owen's comments are also misleading in that he equates life without to the freeing from prison of felons. Righteous indignation aside, lifelong incarceration is far from a bleeding-heart alternative to murder by the state.

And in other news related to the Illiniois clemency decision, we recommend reading :