The father of the jackalope has died.

As usual, it’s hard to get a sense of the size of the crowd in DC yesterday from news reports. And I can’t seem to find any aerial photos anywhere. But here’s a shot from San Francisco, and it looks like an impressive turnout to me…

Update: Max was at the DC march and has a first-person account here. There are also several reports at Stand Down.

Been meaning to post this since a reader sent it in last week. According to this Knight Ridder poll, 83% of the American people cannot correctly answer the question, “How many of the 9-11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens?”

Interestingly — at least, according to this poll — even in the depths of such appalling ignorance, only a third of the public supports war with Iraq without UN backing. (With UN support, that number jumps to — yes — 83%. )

“Governor Ryan’s action was shockingly wrong,” Mr. Lieberman said in an interview on Friday. “It did terrible damage to the credibility of our system of justice, and particularly for the victims.”

Story here.

Me, I’d think the thirteen wrongly convicted death row inmates might have done more damage to the credibility of the system. Not to mention the Chicago police officers who tortured suspects until they confessed.

But Joe Lieberman thinks it is the acknowledgement of the system’s flaws which damages the credibility of the system.

Pathetic.

I really hope this guy isn’t the Democratic nominee in ‘04.

I can’t imagine that anybody would say, We’re going to war because there are 11 empty warheads, probably left over from 10 years ago. These warheads are not the nuclear weapons we’ve been warned about. They travel about 12 miles.

But this is being used as a pretext for a decision that’s already been made at high levels of the U.S. government to change the government in Iraq. It has nothing to do with, boy, we’re — we are really worried about these little chemical warheads that’s going to cause a holocaust in the Middle East.

Most disturbing thing is that Secretary of State Powell, a lot of people were relying on to keep some sanity, played the good soldier this week and said that at the end of the month, there would be more evidence. If there’s more, if there’s evidence, why not put it out now?

* * *

But the last thing that the hawks inside the administration, and their friends outside the administration, want is a coup d’etat that would replace Saddam Hussein. They want a war as a manifestation of U.S. power in the world and as a sign that the United States is capable of changing the balance of power and the political map of the Middle East.

There’s no question that the last thing they want is Saddam Hussein put on a plane and taken away.

* * *

Talking to a senior official, and he said to me, he said, Well, if we don’t hit in Iraq, where are we going to hit? And they — it’s a desire that the United States, the superpower, is going to manifest its authority to the rest of the world.

Listen, I just feel that this potential — this war, I just trust it comes off easily. But I have trepidation that it won’t be easy, and there’s going to be a terrible consequences from it.

— Robert Novak on The Capital Gang, via Atrios. Transcript here.