A new Locust Fork Band date has just added for Frida, April 7, at Fletcher’s on Birmingham’s Southside, formerly Dugan’s, at 8:30 p.m.

The Black Warrior Riverkeeper group is urging citizens to reject the reappointments of Sam Wainwright and Dr. John Lester to the state Environmental Management Commission and urges people to contact their state senators and lobby to keep Pat Byington on the commission and reject Laurel Gardneron.

The Alabama Senate Confirmations Committee did not vote on Governor Riley’s proposed appointments to the commission Thursday, due to calls from the opposition, according to Nelson Brooke, a spokesman for the group. Senators Rodger Smitherman and Ted Little led a filibuster that helped prolong the vote, he said.

The Senate Confirmations Committee may make their decision on next Tuesday.

For more information, check out BlackWarriorRiver.Org

Read the AP story here.

Thousands of people are expected to converge on Atlanta on Saturday, April 1, for the Southern regional “march for peace in Iraq and justice at home,” according to organizers.

About 75 Alabamians will meet in Birmingham to take the “Peace Bus” to this event, including riders from Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery, Anniston and smaller towns around the state, accirdubg to Diane McNaron.

The bus going to Atlanta will leave Saturday morning at 7:30 a.m. from the Ullman parking lot at UAB between 12th Street and 13th Street South on University Blvd. The bus will stop in Oxford/Anniston to pick up riders as well.

In Atlanta, marchers will gather at the King Center at noon and march to Piedmont Park for a rally. Headlining the list of almost two dozen speakers will be Representative John Conyers of Michigan; Dr. Joseph Lowery, convenor of the Coalition for the People’s Agenda; U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney; Ann Wright, former U.S. Army colonel and diplomat who resigned in opposition to the Iraq war; and Damu Smith, cofounder of Black Voices for Peace.

Organizers promise a “vibrant, colorful” march with giant puppets, hundreds of signs and banners and drumming groups of different cultures. Exhibits at the rally will include “Eyes Wide Open,” created by the American Friends Service Committee, hundreds of combat boots and civilian shoes commemorating the 300 plus US National Guard and 100,000 plus Iraqi civilian war deaths; the Iraq Memorial Wall with the names of 2200 plus U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq; and a 500-foot Peace Ribbon honoring slain U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

The April 1 date was chosen because it falls between two anniversaries: The U.S. attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968.

“Dr. King knew that poverty, hunger, homelessness and lack of health care in America would never be solved as long as thousands of lives were being wasted on war,” said Rev. Timothy McDonald of First Iconium Baptist Church of Atlanta. “He knew that cities and levees could not be rebuilt while billions of dollars were being spent on destruction.”

Over 125 peace, civil rights, faith, student, labor, veterans and other groups from six Southern states (including the Alabama Peace and Justice Coalition) have endorsed the march, including Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Concerned Black Clergy of Metropolitan Atlanta; Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council; United Auto Workers Region 8; Military Families Speak Out; Iraq Veterans Against the War; the Democratic Party of Cherokee, Gwinnett and Harris Counties (GA); People’s Hurricane Relief Fund; and student groups at Decatur, Grady and Paideia high schools and at Georgia State University, University of West Georgia, Oxford College and University of Tennessee.

Many groups will be represented at the march, including the National Lawyers Guild, the North Alabama Peace Network, the Alabama Peace and Justice Coalition, the Birmingham Peace Project, NOW Central Alabama Chapter, Alliance for Democracy, The Politically Incorrect Cabaret, The Campaign to End the Occupation, The Birmingham Freethought Society and the Progressive Democrats of America, Alabama Chapter.

More information about this event is available online at Georgia Peace.Org

All I have to say right now is, after phase two of spring cleaning in The Bunker: “The Bush years,” that’s what it is. We will look back on this as “the Bush years.”

I guess if you are selling a lot of insurance these days, or high priced gas, or legal drugs as a pharmaceutical company - not a local druggist now losing money and doing more comperized paperwork under the Bush get reelected drug plan - you might like “the Bush years.”

Maybe if you are an arms merchent you like the Bush years.

Me? I’m staining the concrete floors and putting in a urinal … piss on it …

To the editor:

The Alabama legislature is well on the way to passing a fetal protection bill which will make it murder to kill a fetus - meaning that if a pregnant woman is killed that the killer will be charged with two murders. Unfortunately, this will not protect the fetus from being killed.

But another bill on the way to passage can protect those fetuses. This bill will protect anyone who kills someone they think is threatening them in their home or vehicle.

The answer to the weakness of the fetal protection bill will be solved if we just add the word “womb” to the “home or vehicle” clause in that bill. They we can require doctors to implant little guns in every pregnant woman so that little bugger can defend itself.

That’s the Alabama way, at least in an election year.

Rev. Jack Zylman
Southside, Birmingham