What amazes me about yesterday’s protests in Chicago is that plans for direct action have been in the works for weeks among anti-war groups around the country.

Heck, one only needed basic cable to hear speaker after speaker call for anti-warriors to “shut it down” on C-SPAN last weekend. Yet Chicago police somehow were asleep on the job, inconveniencing thousands of Lake Shore Drive commuters.

It just goes to show how ignored the anti-war movement is in this country that they could openly be planning these direct actions and go pretty much unheeded.

That said, what the protesters in Chicago did and how they did it was pretty cool. Somehow they pulled it off without all the usual jerkiness and violence so common to such efforts. It made for great television, which is precisely what they were going for.

I’m not exactly sure what the direct actions accomplish, though. Millions around the world protested a few weeks ago and Dubya called it a focus group. Congress already surrendered any say over the war to the president. It’s in his hands now, and he’s not listening to anything anti-warriors have to say.

So … what? We can either focus on this war and trying to cause a ruckus and annoy city residents who have pretty much no say in the conduct or the decision to go to war, or we can make sure Iraq is the last war of its kind by developing an alternative to endless, destructive war in the Middle East.

Will the Fawell guilty verdict change how politics is practiced in Illinois? Only if U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald doesn’t let it end with him and goes after former Gov. George Ryan, as is much rumored.

Otherwise, the lesson to politicians will simply be to let your underlings do what they want, just don’t give the go-ahead to shred documents, as Ryan — who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by admirers of his death penalty stance — did.

Some hawks might interpret the market’s two-day rally as a sign that the war’s actually good for the economy. Au contraire.

The markets are just now pricing in where they would have been all along before the uncertainty about a possible war had never come about. The only possible benefit of the war — an increased oil supply coming out of a rebuilt Iraq — could have been achieved by simply lifting the sanctions on Iraq.

Quoth Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld on the limitless movie franchise possibilities of the war with Iraq.