These are from Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 in front of the Marine Officers Selection Office in Berkeley.
I hate to feed into Code Pink's narcissism and report on their stuff at all, but this was a bit too funny to pass up. It's a short photo report, but we'll need some context. Here's two recent announcements for the event today, in pink italics, with my comments in normal text.
From the web:
Title: Mission Accomplished: One Year Testimonies at the MRS
START DATE: Wednesday September 24
TIME: 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location Details: MRS (Marine Recruiting Station)
64 Shattuck Square
Berkeley
(On Shattuck Ave just south of University where Shattuck runs one-way and
north - also 2 blocks north of downtown Berkeley BART)
Event Type: Protest
Contact Name zanne joi
Email Address mzsam [at] bayareacodepink.org
Phone Number 510-524-2776
CodePINK and our allies have prevailed!
Prevailed? On what planet?
Major protest operations at the MRS have been ended, one year since covert
military recruiting operations were first uncovered in Berkeley!
So they're giving up. Note that "protest operations" have been ended, not the USMC office. "Covert" and "uncovered" is funny - it's a storefront on a major street and was there for months before Code Pink noticed it - but I guess they have to do anything they can to make it sound like they accomplished anything. Notice they've already declared victory as an April Fools prank and the media was dumb enough to show up - not today, they were on their own. (If you want to see the April 1st nonsense, Zombie covered it.)
Update: in a weird little twist one of the local free papers misquoted the above line in its events column - leaving out the word "protest" which totally changes the meaning of the line to indicate that the USMC office had closed. And some bloggers picked up on that and started spreading the story that the office had closed without, oh, actually checking (because if you can't trust a free newspaper's events column, who can you trust? - although at least the non-moonbat blogs were skeptical). In any case, the USMC office was open for business today - there were people inside working when I was there - and I know at least two people who called them to verify that they're not going anywhere including over at This ain't Hell who has more details on this aspect of the story.
Our coalition is now engaged in dis(as)sembling and deconstructing the U.S.
military, making the world safe and secure!
So they're giving up. (I'm not even going to touch the idea that the world would be safe and secure if only you removed that pesky US military.)
Our city and our coalition are proud of these accomplishments!
No they're not proud of your antics, and there were no accomplishments. You're just lucky the tree sit was even more embarrassing and nobody's given you press in months.
Come to our One Year End Recruiting Commemoration Wednesday, Sept 24th noon
at the MRS* to honor these courageous Peace Activists!
Share and hear testimonies from the front lines of our most memorable,
meaningful, insightful actions, episodes, and occurrences over the past
year.
For more information and to participate, just BE THERE or call 510-524-2776.
*The MRS is located at 64 Shattuck Square, Berkeley, on Shattuck Ave just
south of University where Shattuck runs one-way and north - or two blocks
north of the downtown BART.
And in email...
Dearest CodePINKers:
Believe it or not, this week marks the end of a whole year of actions at the
MRS* to END RECRUITING, END WAR!
Tomorrow, Wednesday, Sept 24th, we will gather in front of the MRS at noon
and begin to commemorate our work this past year.
Some of us will call it "Mission Accomplished: Testimonies from the front
lines"! Others will call it one year of Berkeley community activism. Still
others will call it "Where we've been and where we are going to!"
All of us will acknowledge and honor both the activists and the over 120
actions we took to END RECRUITING, END WAR at the MRS since we uncovered
it's existence last September.
There's that "uncovered" language again. And 120 actions is interesting since it's been a year, and they were claiming they'd be there every day, which means only on a third of the days did they have a single person there. Keep in mind most of the time they might have 1-2 people there, so it's not exactly difficult to claim coverage.
Bring your most inspiring, memorable, favorite actions/stories; your photos
and articles; your passions and successes. We will sing with Betsy Rose and
others. And we will eat cake as well! Feel free to bring drinks to share!
So it's BYOB and claims of cake. If there was cake, it was gone by the time I got there, darn it.
We need a battery-operated lap top to play a couple of dvd's on too!
They can't arrange their own laptop? (And as opposed to what, a non battery operated laptop?) Isn't that some kind of sign that your organization doesn't have a lot of resources when they have to ask somebody to bring a laptop?
Please join us for this important event.
What we do know for sure, it is one year later, we are MUCH deeper in debt,
many more lives have been destroyed, Lund is gone but another has taken his
place, and the hope of the Democrats are talking of ending the occupation of
Iraq in 2010 - maybe.
*The MRS is at 64 Shattuck Square, Berkeley (on Shattuck Ave just south of
University where Shattuck runs one-way and north - also 2 blocks north of
the downtown Berkeley BART)
ZANNE Sam Joi
work for peace; hold all life sacred; eliminate violence
Typical summer day at the USMC OSO.
So let's check it out. As always one nice thing about the blog format is I can go wide and show you the whole picture. That's the protest over on the left.
It's actually the largest turnout I've seen in months by a factor of five or so. There are around 15 folks. Note that they don't have a city issued parking spot anymore (it expired July 1st I think) but they can't block the sidewalk so they're just kind of crammed in between two cars - one's parked way back in its spot and one way forward to hold the space.
Of course, many of those are truthers, not code pink members. Less than half of the group appears to have any pink at all on them. I see two truther signs, a truther bumper sticker on the big sign and a couple of truther t-shirts. And unless they're standing behind somebody I don't see any of the code pink founders or such that used to come. Update: Of course they didn't come. They were meeting with Ahmadinejad. Silly me.
Here's that bumper sticker just in case nobody believes me. Oh, and if you're wondering where the 1.2 million figure comes from, I have no idea and I hunted around a bit. Even if you take the seriously flawed moonbat funded Lancet study, and asssume the same rate of deaths to this day (you know, despite the surge and all) - and there are websites that do that same crazy jump - you don't get that many deaths. But I've noticed there's a kind of stats inflation on protest signs, and every time I see a figure it's bigger than last time. Trying to apply logic to this stuff can drive you crazy so I'm just going to leave it at that.
So that's that - I'm sure they'll protest there if they want to have an event and don't have anywhere else obvious to do it, but they're no longer protesting on a regular basis. Really this is no different than it's been for months, but it's kind of nice to have a formal wrap up. Mmmm... closure....
Thanks to some folks who were kind enough to link to this latest entry... Michelle Malkin, This Ain't Hell, Weasel Zippers, and CHUD Busters. (My apologies if I missed everybody - I don't have any kind of automatic trackback system). Also, here's a plug for a funny shirt.
You can contact me at info (at) ProtestShooter.com
