WE’RE GOING ABOUT IT ALL WRONG! If we’re going to invade Iraq, we’re supposed to impose our films first.

Hmm. Well, maybe this one.

EVERYBODY’S HAVING FUN WITH PHOTOSHOP.

HERE’S A REPORT OF AN ANTI-IRAQ PROTEST at Northwestern.

MATT CRANDALL is predicting disaster for France.

I MEANT TO LINK THIS EARLIER: Talking Dog’s annotated guide to the blogosphere. I’m glad I’m not the one who has to keep it up to date!

FOLLOW THE MONEY: Byron York looks at where Not In Our Name gets its funding.

JOSHUA CLAYBOURN EXAMINES ANTI-AMERICANISM IN EUROPE as a function of extreme anti-American slant in European media.

SAKHAROV’S ADVICE: Michael Barone raises some good points. Excerpt:

Sakharov’s advice to American policymakers: “Do not trust governments more than governments trust their own people.” . . .

Many people said in the 1970s that Latin Americans were unsuited for democracy, in the early 1980s that East Asians were unsuited for democracy, in the late 1980s that Eastern Europeans and Russians were unsuited for democracy. Many people worried in 1945 that the Germans and Japanese were unsuited for democracy. There were reasons for their doubts and fears. But the United States took chances on democracy, transforming Germany and Japan into decent independent nations we can live with and helping to move Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Russia in the same direction. We have no choice now but to do the same, first in Iraq and then in other parts of the Middle East.

Read it all.

I THINK IT’S UNPATRIOTIC to publish secret intelligence documents like this one just to get the story ahead of other people. This could do great harm to American intelligence operations in Iraq if Iraqi intelligence agencies find out about it. I sure hope that they don’t.

AFRICAPUNDIT is a new blog dedicated to, you guessed it, things African — like the spread of radical Islam in Nigeria.

UPDATE: Then there’s this bit of Africa-related news.

TIM BLAIR IS CHEERING CAMERAMAN NUMBER TWO — plus, Robert Fisk accidentally says something true!

BILL QUICK is running a Four Horsemen of the Ablogalypse photoshop contest — follow that link to find out how to enter. And click on this image to see it full-size.

Me, I’m still wondering: Which way do you ride a Pale Horse? English? Or Western?

MICHAEL KELLY’S report on the crushing of debate in America is now up on the Atlantic Monthly website. Many blogs are mentioned by name.

PUNDITWATCH IS UP! Don’t miss the “best quip” section.

MARK KLEIMAN’S FATHER PASSED AWAY Friday night. Mark has a moving eulogy on his site. Please join me in extending the condolences of the Blogosphere for his loss.

GROUCHY MEDIA has a rather bellicose pro-war video that I imagine some will like, and some will be horrified by.

THERE’S A NEW SMARTERHARPER’S INDEX UP.

HAS PATTY MURRAY been proven wrong? PrairiePundit thinks so.

UPDATE: Oops, now his archives are hosed. Here’s the page link. It’s currently the top post.

THOUGHTFUL COMMENTS for and against war, from Colby Cosh.

UPDATE: Then there’s this from Tom Paine.

FROM THE “THIS SUCKS” DEPARTMENT: Sonic Foundry, maker of terrific audio software that I use a lot, is in financial trouble. Well, lots of companies are, these days, but they have terrific products in their Acid music software (I did the music for my wife’s documentary, largely using Acid Pro 4.0, and it rocks) and they’ve just released their new Vegas Video 4 video-editing software, which is rumored to be great, and to have an integrated DVD-authoring package that actually works, something not to be taken for granted. I’d hate to see them go under. How come so many companies with crappy products manage to stay in business?

By the way, if you’ve used Vegas 4, especially with the DVD-authoring feature, please drop me an email and let me know how it works.

And if you’re a turnaround expert — go save ‘em! They’ve got consistently great products, an excellent reputation, and a lot of happy customers. That should be worth something, right?

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I read your post on Sonic Foundry. They are one of my customers, so I thought I’d give you a little hope. They have great ideas but horrible business skills. They have brought on people to help them with this. Sonic Foundry is stripping away its business units that lose money so that they can focus on their core business. It may also be noted that they are “plugged into” the local and state political structure. I suspect that they will get enough help so that they can restructure and come out stronger. The have a great product and a loyal customer base. They just need to focus.

Of course, they could botch it all up. It wouldn’t be the first time a great company was sunk by bad business decisions.

I hope they make it. They make great stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Techblogger Jim Zellmer has some observations. And another reader points out that even if Sonic Foundry dies, the technology will probably live on. No doubt. But still, I’d like to see them survive.

THOSE L.A. BLOG PANELS MUST BE GOOD, because apparently everyone’s too drunk/hungover to write about them that night or the next day. But here are Rishawn Biddle’s predictions.

UPDATE: Luke Ford, by virtue of skipping the big party at Heather Havrilesky’s, was neither drunk nor hungover and so has posted some comments.

WILL ANTIGLOBALIZATION LEAD TO DEPRESSION? Jim Bennett writes:

Today the collapse of the Cold War international order, the rise of global terrorism and the backlash to globalization have among them raised the specter of a shrinkage, or even collapse, of globalization — one perhaps even more catastrophic than the reversal of globalization from 1914 through 1945. Such a collapse, greatly limiting the international flow of goods, capital, and people, would have a number of consequences.

One repercussion would be a global depression probably surpassing the severity and breadth of the 1930s. The second would probably be the return of empire as a strategy for securing resources and security. These two are familiar from history.

The third would be the elevation of weapons of mass destruction, but particularly nuclear weapons, to an effective requirement of sovereignty, and to create an arms race to develop countermeasure, such as ballistic missile defense, and new, hard-to-counter weapons of mass destruction.

Gee, that’s something to look forward to. Another reason to end this quickly.

PRO-WAR RALLIES

Thousands rallied Saturday in support of President Bush and U.S. troops in a possible war against Iraq, turning their criticism to anti-war protesters and France’s opposition to military force.

About 2,000 people turned out at an Orlando rally that featured a reading of the Gettysburg Address, while another 1,000 prayed and marched in Pensacola.

“I was so saddened to see so many in our nation not supporting our troops and our country,” said Naval Warrant Officer David Wolff, a Desert Storm veteran who arrived at the Pensacola rally in uniform. “This is very uplifting.”

Rallies were also held in Indianapolis and Washington state, where more than 2,000 people gathered for a pro-war rally in Bremerton, home to a naval station where the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson departed last month.

And somehow they managed to organize them without enlisting A.N.S.W.E.R.

UPDATE: Here’s more:

The Pensacola rally was a grass-roots effort coordinated by Milton resident Sam Mullins, while the Orlando event was put on by the talk-radio station WFLA-AM.

“There’s a silent majority out there that really hasn’t had a vehicle yet to get their voices heard, and that’s what this is all about,” radio host Shannon Burke said. “These are people who love their country, and they’re just here to share that.”

No reports of any stilts or giant puppets, though. Don’t these people know how to run a protest?

TOM LANTOS is arguing against appeasement, and criticizing the Germans and French.

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE ABLOGALYPSE: I love this.

I was holding out for Pestilence, but I’ll take whatever.

Considering the source, it’s an honor indeed.

UPDATE: Andrea Harris is savaging Sawicky for sexism!

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments thread here:

The Weasel-Riders of the Apocalypse!

Sophistry, Petulance, Derision, and Angst!

Heh.

ANOTHER DICTATOR FOR SADDAM: Chirac’s got quite a coalition going here.

Meanwhile others are saying:

“America speaks with passion for democracy which is something that you miss in Europe,” said Linas Linkevicius, Lithuania’s foreign minister, whose office decor includes a blue baseball cap with “Mr Nato” emblazoned above its peak.

“You cannot find the passionate defence of democratic values that you get from George W Bush and the likes of John McCain in Europe. There is a sense of welcome and understanding in America while Europe makes clear that it cannot be bothered with smaller nations.”

Except Mugabe’s, of course.

UPDATE: Meanwhile Der Spiegel is reporting that Schroeder has been covering up knowledge of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, to which there is a German connection.

FORGET THE GRAMMY AWARDS! BlogCritics has the Critiquees! Much, much cooler — and without a lifetime achievement award for Michael Jackson.

SCOTT ROSENBERG WRITES:

So thanks to the Online Journalism Review for striking one more blow toward granting anti-Semitism some badly needed credibility. It’s this kind of careful vetting of sources that has made the OJR into the power that it is today.

Hey, antisemitism is in style this year.

UPDATE: Trent Telenko has some thoughts on the growing fashionability of anti-Semitism, and what to do about it.

JIM HENLEY POINTS to an Institute for Justice suit over business subsidies. It’s an excellent post. In reply, Eve Tushnet comments on:

a pattern you could see regularly in New Haven–taxes very high (and, in NH, so was union agitation). Major employer or potential employer threatens to leave/not come. City negotiates special tax incentive deal, a.k.a. taxpayers are basically paying for this particular business to stay/come. Big business stays/comes. Big business is happy! Small business, lacking special deal, closes. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Yes, this is the “skybox liberalism” (though plenty of big-business conservatives like it, too) that someone was pointing out earlier.

MATT WELCH writes that newspapers are abandoning their non-rich readers:

In 2003, publishers are far more concerned with making sure their readers are rich. The New York Times, for example, boasts to advertisers its readership “is almost three times as likely as the average U.S. adult to have a college or post-graduate degree, more than twice as likely to be professional/managerial and almost three times as likely to have a household income exceeding [US]$100,000.” Those robust demographics are nurtured by a series of discriminating editorial choices — special issues devoted to food, money, design, “The Sophisticated Traveller … Lives Well Lived,” and so on.

The skew is even more pronounced outside New York, where most daily newspapers are local monopolies that don’t share the Times’ journalistic aspirations. Sunday magazines, especially, are open-handed insults to the have-nots, with their landscape architecture spreads and write-ups of US$200 brunches. Internet sections come and go based on the tech-sector marketing climate of the moment (as opposed to the amount of online activity, which continues to boom). Murder victims in the ghetto are lucky to merit single paragraphs on B5, while affluent college kids struck by stray bullets are memorialized above the fold. . . .

“Daily newspapers have effectively dropped the bottom quintile or perhaps a third of the population,” wrote communications professor Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a chapter of the 2002 book Into the Buzzsaw.

It’s worse than the Digital Divide — it’s the Newsprint Divide!

ISAAC NEWTON PREDICTS the end of the world in 2060. But I’ll be too young to die!

HERE’S A NICE ARTICLE on Ashley Cleveland, whom I’ve liked ever since I heard her first CD, Big Town, which is just great.

SOME PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY with my earlier linkage of a Mark Steyn quotation about the left and East Timor. (Here’s one post, and here’s another). But I have to say that those Australians worrying that Osama will make them targets because of Iraq do seem uninterested in mentioning that one of his big complaints was the liberation of East Timor.

If the complaint is that Steyn paints the entire antiwar left as stupid and dishonest, well, that’s a pretty broad brush, and I’m certainly willing to agree that there are plenty of exceptions. That’s why I’ve been offering those parts of the movement advice. I have to say, though, that a brief dip into the hatemail (accusing me of getting money from Exxon and — this is rich — Shell) that it’s produced has convinced me that the “stupid” part is large indeed. Or at least vocal.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Max Sawicky has managed to draft a response that doesn’t contain the terms “instacrap” or “instacracker,” so I guess I should be pleased.

ANOTHER UPDATE: You can see what Steyn was talking about here and here. I was too lazy to run down these posts, but reader Michael Levy wasn’t.

OFF TO TAKE MY DAUGHTER for a haircut. Back later. I’ll even try to attack the built-up email.

REPORT FROM THE NEW EUROPE:

Instead, last night, the Slavi Show (a ridiculously popular, super-cool, totally mainstream, late-night show here: like David Letterman, but with an 80% viewing audience), spent half the night making fun of Jaques Chirac. Slavi (who looks like the Mr. Clean guy), dressed as Napoleon, looked up and read the Bulgarian definition of “infantile.” He’s been doing it all week.

Keep it up, Slavi!

HOWARD MORTMAN WRITES that SUV drivers are “America’s newest heroes.”

Don’t tell Arianna Huffington.

UPDATE: And don’t tell her about these shirts either.

ANOTHER L.A. BLOGOSPHERE PANEL, this one featuring “Cathy Seipp and the Seven Blog Dwarfs,” in Matt Welch’s felicitous phrase. It’s tonight, so if you’re in L.A. check it out. What else are you gonna do on a Saturday night?

RAVENWOLF BLOGS about becoming an American citizen. Drop by and offer your congratulations!

JOSH MARSHALL has an extensive interview with Ken Pollack on Iraq. It’s well worth reading.

YEAH, blogging’s been lighter than usual for the last couple of days. I’m not in Stephen Green’s rest-up-for-the-war mode, but my real job has kept me busier than usual, and I’ve had family stuff going on too. It happens.

WENT OUT TO DINNER AFTER THE CONFERENCE, with the lovely InstaWife coming along. Just got home. Now to bed.

Blogging, and email, will be dealt with tomorrow. Good night!

THE CONFERENCE IS BACK UNDERWAY — that’s Mark Tushnet to the right, who’s talking now about constitutional enforcement without judicial review. Well, sort of. The whole thing will be webcast later, which reduces the need for real-time blogging — and it seems a bit rude to do too much typing while people are talking. That also means that I’m not replying much to email, so it may back up. Sorry.

(Mark Tushnet, though a very eminent legal academic, is probably best known in the blogosphere as Eve Tushnet’s father. Take a look at this picture of Eve and see if you can spot a resemblance.)

More later, as time permits.

If you’re bored in the interim, there’s a new post up over at GlennReynolds.com — involving some friendly advice for antiwar protesters. And it really is friendly advice.

LUNCH IS OVER and the program hasn’t started yet, so here’s an amusing link to the George W. Bush LibertyMeter over at Radley Balko’s site. It’s a graphic illustrating how Bush’s policies contribute to liberty, or not, and it’s based on Radley’s opinion entirely objective!

Here’s a link to Radley’s explanation of how it works. I like it!

OKAY, HERE’S A QUICK ONE during the break — a report that anti-American Arab countries like Libya and Iraq, plus Iran, are coordinating with Hugo Chavez in an oil-based counterplot.

I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s plausible (it’s the kind of thing I’d do if I were them). I think that Chavez’s dictatorial nature is reason enough to want him out of power. But if he’s collaborating with America’s enemies, then there’s another reason, now isn’t there?

I’M BLOGGING from the Marbury v. Madison symposium here at the University of Tennessee law school. Right now William Nelson (pictured at right, courtesy of my digicam) is speaking, and he’s talking about juries, and the way in which jury supremacy came under attack in the 1790s as the “elites” found that juries were insufficiently deferential, something he connects to the Sedition Act. Very interesting stuff.

Sadly, Bill Van Alstyne fell ill and won’t be here. That also means that my talk has been extended, which may limit my conference-blogging this morning. More later. (You can always read Lileks if there’s not enough for you here).

You can find a summary of the Marbury decision and why it’s important here; and you can find a link to the full text of the opinion here.

PEACE PROTESTS IN MINAS TIRITH:

“We need more time for diplomacy,” said a key member of the Middle-Earth Security Council, Saruman the White. “I am not convinced by the evidence presented by my esteemed colleague, Gandalf the Grey, or that the Dark Lord Sauron presents an imminent danger to the peoples of the West.”

Heh.

SORRY FOR THE LIGHT BLOGGING yesterday. I was a bit under the weather. I’m better today, but it’s the Marbury symposium. I plan on blogging from the conference, though.

MORE SOPHISTICATED MEASUREMENT = smaller crowd size estimates. No doubt there will be much dispute over this.

UPDATE: Told you so. And here’s more.

JOSH CHAFETZ points out that American foreign policy is playing well with Iranian students. Now there’s a switch.

NEW EUROPE: Geitner Simmons writes:

Just was 9/11 has proven to be a clarifying event for Americans (awakening most of us to a better appreciation of national security matters), so the show of Gallic arrogance toward the Eastern Europeans has been a clarifying moment for Europe. The differences in vision for “Old Europe” and “New Europe” have been thrown into high relief.

Indeed.

JAY MANIFOLD HAS POSTED A REPLY to my TechCentralStation column from yesterday.

A POET FOR THE WAR SPEAKS.

THE SAMI AL-ARIAN CASE: Eugene Volokh says it well.

HEH. I’d read about this, but here’s the picture.

HAS THE LEFT SPLIT IN TWO? Very interesting post.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE:

If we’re seeking lessons from the past to help us deal with Saddam Hussein, then the way we dealt with Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia in 1935 is – as the Prime Minister understands – the place to look. I was particularly reminded of my own Abyssinia moment when I read about Saturday’s anti-war march – hauntingly matched by the Peace Ballot of 1935, the national referendum in which millions voted for peace at almost any price, thus unwittingly persuading Hitler and Mussolini that bold predators had not much to fear.

Then, as now, the authority of what was then the League of Nations and is now the United Nations was at stake. Then, as now, many felt reluctant to take action against a dangerous dictator, even with the authority of a body like the League or the UN, lest it lead to war. Then, as now, our difficulties were compounded by the duplicitous behaviour of the French.

In 1935, after many brave words and much wriggling, we fudged it. So Mussolini took all he wanted in Abyssinia, without hindrance. He and others drew conclusions from this display of impotence.

Vegetius’ famous statement, “if you want peace, prepare for war,” is usually read as evidence that preparation for war promotes peace. But it’s also true that too visible a wanting of peace tends to bring on war.

ADAM YOSHIDA is offering a Virtual March for Victory in response to the “virtual march for peace.”

EVELYN SAYS that antiwar feminists are betraying women.

SUSANNA CORNETT has taken my advice and signed up with MoveOn.org. She’s also sending pro-war faxes via TrueMajority.com.

Make your voice heard!

DAVE TROWBRIDGE IS asking for your help.

JACOB T. LEVY notes the bright side of Turkish intransigence: It opens the way to freeing the Kurds!

DICK GEPHARDT HYDROGEN CAR UPDATE: As I mentioned yesterday morning I emailed Gephardt’s campaign to ask where the hydrogen for the hydrogen cars would come from. No reply. I called yesterday afternoon and got referred to his Congressional office. No answer there, but today I called and spoke with a PR person who promised that someone else would call me back.

I’ll let you know when I hear something, but it’s sounding less and less like a carefully crafted plan.

UPDATE: If I don’t hear from Gephardt’s folks soon, I’m going to start doubting this story.

MORE ON VENEZUELA over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: I don’t know if these charges regarding Chavez and Al Qaeda are true, and I’m inclined to be pretty skeptical. But someone should look into them.

MOVEON.ORG has made it easy for you to express your support for the war. Just go here and register. There’s also some advice here.

UPDATE: Yes, I know that MoveOn is an antiwar group. But you don’t have to be antiwar to use their site. . . .

Nukevet has more advice.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky is organizing a Virtual March on Hollywood!

SOMEBODY AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT gets it. Bravo.

“PEACE” PROTESTS MAKE WAR MORE LIKELY:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 19 — President Saddam Hussein’s government, apparently emboldened by antiwar sentiment at the U.N. Security Council and in worldwide street protests, has not followed through on its promises of increased cooperation with U.N. arms inspectors, according to inspectors in Iraq.

No Iraqi scientist involved in biological, chemical or missile technology has consented to a private interview with the inspectors since Feb. 7, the day before the two chief U.N. inspectors arrived here for talks with Iraqi officials. The United Nations also has not received additional documents about past weapons programs, despite the government’s pledge to set up a commission to scour the country for evidence sought by the inspectors, U.N. officials said.

Useful idiots? Looks that way to me.

ASSASSINATIONS AND ARRESTS OF OPPOSITION FIGURES: All in Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is making it more obvious that he’s a dictator.

If it were “all about oil,” we’d have invaded there already. If it’s about human rights, then the time is coming. . . . And where are the “human rights” groups? Not making the kind of noise they’d make if a U.S. ally were involved, that’s for sure.

UPDATE: Here’s more. Also here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Randy Paul points out that human rights groups have complained. But, as I say, it’s not the kind of noise they’d make in other circumstances. Compare the attention to this with the attention that Guantanamo got, for example, or the complaints about Israel.

But here, via Randy, is a link to Human Rights watch’s comments. Not bad — but after the way the various human rights groups postured prior to the Afghanistan invasion and over Gitmo, it’s going to take a lot to impress me with their evenhandedness.

ROBERT PRATHER HAS MOVED. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

Also, I note that he’s plugging Oliver Willis’s new novel, Valley Girl. The first two chapters are available for free download at this link, so check it out.

I WAS ALWAYS A FAN OF WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS. Perhaps I was wrong to be.

UPDATE: Here’s a partial defense of one of Douglas’s claims.

AMERICAN DIPLOMACY — not so simplistic:

Compared to Parisian diplomatic contempt, American efforts begin to look remarkably deft. No sooner had France and Germany established their common opposition to American aims, for example, than the U.S. characterized them as “Old Europe” even as it worked to bring a “New Europe” into plain view. Now that Chirac has made his countermove—telling upstart Europe it should be seen and not heard—the American and British governments look like a pair of pretty smooth operators. . . .

France’s problem isn’t the upstart applicant counties and their supposed “allegiance” to Washington; major EU member states with successful economies also stand with the U.S. France’s problem is French global pretension: Chirac wants applicant nations to kiss his ring. The applicant nations see the EU as being about a democratic Europe of which they are a part, while France perceives the EU as being an instrument of French global stature. Currently, it can boast primarily of maintaining a neo-colonial presence in Africa, and of suppressing the struggle for independence in Corsica. Running Europe would considerably brighten its resume.

Well, I can’t entirely blame them for wanting to keep Corsica. After all, it’s the home of Laetitia Casta. (LATER: Iain Murray emails that Laetitia Casta is now a tax exile living in London. Seems fitting, somehow.)

UPDATE: Here’s a summary of angry reactions from the New Europe courtesy of the BBC. And as proof that the French are on their way out, Molly Ivins is defending them.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dwight Green emails:

Thanks for posting the Molly Ivins link where she defends France. While I hate the phrase, she constantly proves that she just doesn’t get it. Repeatedly. Yes, many wonderful French people died in World War I and World War II. But she fails to ask the question “why?”

The folly of French leaders this century has been the single-most reductive thing to the population (and stature) of France. The beef that Americans have with “the French” isn’t with your average French person… it’s with the iincompetence of their leadership. Since the average American isn’t immersed in French culture (contrast that to the bombardment of American ‘culture’), the view here is shaped by the posturing and silliness that is their lleaders.

He’s right, of course. Meanwhile reader Gautam Mukunda emails:

I just wanted to mention to you that Ivins is (as usual) factually inaccurate, not just inane. France had more (and better) tanks than Germany. What it did not have was any sort of doctrine of how to use them. It wasn’t poor equipment, but an inability to think through the consequences of the equipment that they did have, that doomed France in 1940.

De Gaulle, interestingly enough, actually made a decent stab at inventing the first effective anti-blitzkrieg doctrine during the German assault. He was (IIRC) an armored regiment commander in the French Army. It was just too little, too late.

Yes, the French military defeat was — like so many of the diasters of the 20th Century — not the fault of circumstances so much as it was the result of the arrogant ineptitude and shortsightedness of French leaders.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ross Douthat at The American Scene writes that Ivins’ is the worst column ever. Oh, I don’t think she’s accomplished quite that much.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Molly: “She said one thing accurately, but it was by mistake.”

TOMORROW WILL BE THE ANNIVERSARY OF DANNY PEARL’S MURDER. Today, his father observes:

In a world governed by reason and leadership, one would expect world leaders to immediately denounce such racist calls before they become an epidemic. However, President Bush was the only world leader to acknowledge the connection between Danny’s murder and the rise of anti-Semitism: “We reject the ancient evil of anti-Semitism whether it is practiced by the killers of Daniel Pearl or by those who burn synagogues in France.” No European head of state rose to John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” with the morally equivalent statement “Today, I am a Jew.”

Not surprisingly, our unguided world has seen an alarming rise of anti-Semitic activity in the past year. Tens of millions of Muslims have become unshakably convinced that Jews were responsible for the Sept. 11 attack. Egypt’s state-controlled television aired a 30-part program based on the notorious anti-Semitic book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and Egyptians were fed another fantasy, that Jews are plotting to take over the world. Syria’s defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, released the eighth edition of his book, “The Matzah of Zion,” in which he accuses Jews of using the blood of Christians to bake matzah for Passover. And on the sideline, while these flames of hatred were consuming sizable chunks of the world’s population, traditionally vocal champions of antiracism remained silent.

Silent, and increasingly discredited.

UPDATE: Here, courtesy of reader Gregory S. Taylor, is a link to the Daniel Pearl foundation.

HOMELAND SECURITY CONCERNS may be destroying model rocketry.

That seems idiotic to me — like most things being done under the “homeland security” umbrella.

MSNBC. MARGO KINGSTON. INDYMEDIA. And now my Shermanesque march through the lefty media continues, with an oped column in — yes — The Guardian.

Or maybe I’m just a lefty after all. An Abbie Hoffmanesque one. I blog, you decide.

PUT MY DAUGHTER TO BED tonight. No news there, but it reminded me how fast she’s growing up. We used to read together — we went through the Harry Potter books and the Narnia books and so on many many times. But now she reads to herself. She just finished a book about Molly, a plucky little girl who made it through life on the home front during World War Two. Tonight, she read to me from a book about Emily, a plucky little girl who made her life in the Jamestown Colony.

Then she got out her old “Arthur’s Bedtime Stories” book and had me read the (Arthurized) Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood, and The Princess and the Pea, complete with all the voices and sound effects I used to do every night. She knows she’s growing up, too, and she’s not quite ready to leave that behind. Yet.

HERE’S A REPORT that NASA really is going ahead with plans for the Orbital Space Plane as a replacement for the Shuttle. Rand Simberg will be thrilled.

SNEAK PREVIEW: Other people won’t be able to read this for a few hours, but subscribers to InstaPundit Premium ™ — which is, er, everyone — can read this story on InstaPundit from my local alt-weekly now. It says I sometimes come across “as an Abbie Hoffmanesque cyber-Yippie for the information age.”

Yeah, that’s me!

TONY BLAIR IS TAKING ADVANTAGE OF CHIRAC’S CLUMSINESS:

A soothing letter by the British prime minister, Tony Blair, to leaders of the East European countries lined up to join the Union has been widely interpreted as an attempt by Britain to cement friendships among the EU’s future members. . . .

France’s Le Figaro newspaper described Blair’s letter as a ‘‘affront’’ to Chirac.

Blair sent his letter to the 10 countries set to join the Union next year as well as the three other official candidates, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey.

In it he said he regretted that future members of the Union were not invited to a special EU summit meeting Monday dedicated to the question of Iraq.

‘‘As you know, I had argued that you should be present and able to contribute fully to the debate,’’ Blair said. . . .

Chirac’s harsh words were reported verbatim in newspapers in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and other eastern capitals.

In Hungary reports of Chirac’s outburst were especially ill-timed, coinciding with the start of an official government campaign to convince voters to say ‘‘yes’’ to joining the European Union in a referendum April 16.

And Bulgaria showed its displeasure by summoning France’s ambassador Wednesday in protest. President Georgi Parvanov told the ambassador that he was concerned about Chirac’s ‘‘emotional statement,’’ according to the Associated Press. . . .

‘‘There’s definitely a feeling in Europe that Chirac disastrously shot himself in the foot with his outburst,’’ said Everts of the Center for European Reform in London. ‘‘France was on a roll and Britain was on the defensive. But Chirac threw it all away.’’

Chirac’s comments were not a slip of the tongue, some diplomats said, but part of a concerted campaign by France to weaken ties between East European countries and the United States — and by extension Britain.

Heh.

I JUST NOTICED that InstaPundit got a favorable mention from Margo Kingston, who calls it a “prominent U.S. website.”

IF YOU’VE GOT A BROADBAND CONNECTION, be sure you watch Evan Coyne Maloney’s antiwar protest vlog.

I think web video journalism is the wave of the future. This is proof.

AUSTRALIAN WINEMAKERS are poised to clobber the French. Or they will be, after they read this column by Tim Blair.

UPDATE: Nick Schulz emails:

On two separate occasions in two different wine shops I overheard people saying to each other they would avoid the French wine selections – Italian and Australian were fine with them. We dined one night with a woman of French ancestry who said she was ashamed of her heritage, wouldn’t drink French wines anymore, won’t eat French cheeses either.

I thought this was all a little much after a while – a bit juvenile, perhaps. But something changed that. After overhearing one older gentlemen in a Publix – a big grocery store in Florida – say to his wife he wouldn’t buy French wines, I said to him “I understand your sentiment”. He tracked me down five minutes later in another part of the store to explain himself. He was a member of the 82nd Airborne. He had stormed the beaches in France and he and some of his buddies marched all the way to Berlin. The attitude of the French at this time – when the United States was asking for help – was simply incomprehensible to this guy. He understood it may not mean much, buying Barolo instead of Bordeaux. But the little gestures can sometimes mean a lot, especially when made by a stooped, withered old man who’d not only served his own country but served Europe as well. As for me, no more Beaujolais at Thanksgiving. I’ll bet a lot of other American feel similarly.

With so many excellent Argentinean, Chilean, Australian — and Bulgarian! — wines available, it’s not much of a sacrifice.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Chirac, et al., are underestimating the depth of hostility they’re creating, and I think they expect it to blow over a lot faster than it, in fact, will.

ANOTHER DRUG-RELATED DEATH:

SAN ANTONIO — A teenage girl, shot and killed by federal drug agents, was a victim of excessive force from law officers who were investigating her father, relatives and friends say.

Ashley Villarreal, 14, died on Tuesday evening after family members requested that she be taken off life support at Wilford Hall Medical Center.

Those old SNL “X-Police” skits seem rather prophetic, these days.

UPDATE: A reader notes that Mark Kleiman thinks that it’s too early to criticize the agents here. Well, maybe. But if we didn’t have a Drug War — which is a dreadful waste of time, money, liberty and lives — this wouldn’t have happened at all. When you decide that federal drug agents will run around with drawn guns, you decide that a certain number of innocent lives will be lost. Is that worth it? Sometimes — but not in the case of the Drug War.

UPDATE: Another reader points out that I’m agreeing with Atrios. Well, we lefty bloggers tend to agree! Sorry Pejman.

I VOTED FOR WHAT? Jacob Sullum points to outraged reactions from members of Congress who didn’t realize what the McCain-Feingold bill actually did. I love this.

INSTALAWYER REVIEWS the latest John Grisham novel, The King of Torts. Does he like it? Well, that would be telling.

SOUTH KOREAN LEGISLATORS are asking the United States not to leave.

HMM. I’m not so sure that this is a good idea. But maybe Chirac has been softened up enough to let it work.

“ONE MILLION U.S. TROOPS COULD DIE:” Reader James McKenzie-Smith sends the link to this story and notes:

Apparently, Iraqi anthrax is so powerful that it can kill every last one of the US troops in the Persian Gulf area not once but nine times each!

Maybe the US Army should send cats?

Heh. Who writes these stories? Oh, right, never mind. . . .

JAMES EARL JONES IS NO ALEC BALDWIN:

Jones, a former Army officer, drew perhaps the biggest round of applause after the subject turned to America’s showdown with Iraq. He said that war is sometimes necessary.

“All people have to be prepared,” Jones said. “If we are going to be the police, we also have to be the guardians. We can no longer play games. I was not against the war in Bosnia. I was against it taking so long. I was not against the war in Somalia. Again, it took too long, and we didn’t finish the job. We should’ve stayed and finished the job. About this pending war, I just think we should’ve finished that war the first time.”

Amen. (Follow the link for streaming audio).

IT’S BOLLYWOOD VS. THE TALIBAN: And I’m betting on Bollywood, even without the wet-burka scenes. And then there’s the rapidly-growing Nigerian film industry, whose themes aren’t exactly friendly to radical Islam.

These are two reasons why I think that those who seem, like Jim Pinkerton, to think that Islam is an insurgent force overcoming a decadent Christianity on its way to global domination are totally wrong. The Islamic world is, in fact, intellectually and spiritually impoverished (Iran has some good filmmakers, but they’re largely crushed by the mullahocracy, and beyond that, the Islamic world has very little to offer). The violence of radical Islam is a sign of decline, not a sign of vigor. For vigor, look to Lagos, Bollywood, or the global home of vigor: America.

THE RICE STUFF: Some interesing background on Condi Rice, who I still think should be on the ticket in 2004.

IT’S A LITTLE LATE (some of the pixels were caught in snowdrifts, I guess) but my TechCentralStation column is up. It’s about asteroids and ignorance.

MORE CHIRAC BACKLASH:

Diplomats and commentators likened Mr Chirac’s comments to Soviet-era edicts to Warsaw Pact countries and warned they would have a lasting impact on France’s standing and authority in Europe.

Czech Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda said in a retort to Mr Chirac: “We are not joining the EU so we can sit and shut up.” . . .

Romanian President Ion Iliescu led the attack on France, describing the President’s “outdated” views as an affront to democracy and free speech.

“Such reproaches are totally unjustified, unwise and undemocratic,” he told reporters in Brussels, after a meeting for candidate nations on Iraq. . . .

“In the European family there are no mummies, no daddies and no kids – it is a family of equals,” said Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.

Hmm. I guess Chirac needs to stop that “who’s your Daddy?” talk. . . .

DICK GEPHARDT, SPACE VISIONARY: Just watched Dick Gephardt’s campaign announcement, via C-SPAN. Good, solid speech — but why the Tina Turner shlock-rock afterward? — but with one passing comment worth blogging.

Gephardt said the usual stuff about dependence on foreign oil, yadda yadda, and then endorsed hydrogen cars. Hydrogen cars are fine but — as many pointed out after Bush endorsed them — the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. To make it, you need electricity, which either comes from burning oil (D’oh!) or from some other source, like nuclear plants.

Or it can come from space. Gephardt, in fact, called for an “Apollo program for energy independence.” That may have been a throwaway line (there’s nothing beyond it on his website), but space enthusiasts have been pushing solar power satellites, as a way of getting clean solar energy (it’s beamed to earth via microwave) that can be used to support a hydrogen-fuel economy, for years. (You can read more on the subject here, here, and here.)

Could this be what Gephardt had in mind? If so, he didn’t give any more hints. But if it’s not what he had in mind, then someone needs to ask him where the electricity for all that hydrogen is going to come from.

If it is what he had in mind, it’s a pretty good idea. In particular, a project like this — done right, anyway — would jump-start launcher development. The problem, as Rand Simberg has pointed out repeatedly, is that we’ve got a double-bind: launch systems need lots of launches to be economical, and to move up the learning and reliability curves. But when launches aren’t economical and reliable, it’s hard to come up with enough payloads.

Were Gephardt’s words part of a very thoughtful plan, or just meaningless pap? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Gephardt looks even better now — it’s switched to Dennis Kucinich, who by all appearances should be Karl Rove’s favorite Democratic candidate. Jeez. “Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction! Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction! Poor health care is a weapon of mass destruction! Peace will protect the rights of workers!” And he’s delivering it in a half-shouting singsong that doesn’t go over very well.

Of course, Kucinich’s space platform — which involves a ban on “orbital mind-control weapons” — isn’t very impressive, either.

UPDATE: A reader suggests that I direct Kucinich to this page. Uh, okay, but I’m pretty sure he’s not an InstaPundit reader. I have, however, emailed Gephardt’s campaign to ask about his proposal.

FRIDAY’S THE MARBURY V. MADISON SYMPOSIUM at my law school, the University of Tennessee. I’ll be speaking, as will a lot of bigger shots. It will be available (though not in realtime) as streaming video, but I may try blogging from the conference.

PHILIPPE DE CROY has an interesting dialogue on the Estrada nomination, in which both sides come off badly, but in which it’s the Republicans who seem worse off.

I haven’t blogged much on this because — as I said a while back — I find it hard to take the whole judicial-confirmation battle scene seriously anymore. It’s a stylized combat that’s ultimately almost all politics. The discipline that was once provided by tradition, decorum, and propriety is now just about gone, for better or worse.

CONTINUING TO THUMB HIS NOSE AT THE EUROPEAN UNION, Jacques Chirac is entertaining Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe despite European sanctions that are supposed to bar such visits. But there’s a twist:

Peter Tatchell, the human rights campaigner, has formally launched a bid to put Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president, on trial in Paris for torture. . . .

Mr Tatchell filed his formal complaint with the French authorities just as Mr Mugabe arrived in Paris to attend a Franco-Africa summit. The two men are old adversaries. The last time they met Mr Tatchell was beaten up and left in a Brussels gutter after trying to intercept the president in a hotel lobby.

That’s our Jacques — soft on dictators, but tough on people who don’t like dictators. At least, he’s soft on dictators who might enter into lucrative oil deals, or lease French airplanes!

UPDATE: Here’s more on Chirac. Reader Chris Fountain emails that he’s disappointed with Chirac’s simplistic unilateralism.

JUST SENT OUT THANK-YOU EMAILS to people who have donated via PayPal over the past couple of months. I should have done it sooner, but I’m not very well set up for that kind of thing here. The Amazon donations, which used to be almost all I got, are anonymous unless someone affirmatively chooses to let me know, so I don’t get many emails from those. And until I took off the $2.50 cap on the PayPal donations, I hardly got any of those, either. I just wasn’t prepared and hadn’t even thought about how I’d handle the comparative flood of donations that came in when I made that change.

Anyway, I sent a nice thank you email to each donor — not a bulk mailing, but one at a time — which was inefficient but nice. What with the hatemail flood of recent weeks, it was very pleasant to sit down with a list of people who like the site enough to actually send money.

Thanks to reader Robert Liss for gently suggesting that I should do that. And thanks again to everyone who donated.

LESSON LEARNED:

As an otherwise impeccably “pro-European” Czech diplomat puts it, “One thing we learned from the 1930s—no more security guarantees from France.”

Heh.

MATTHEW HOY HAS A TABLE showing the various members of the United Nations Security Council in terms of ratings from various human rights organizations.

It’s pretty obvious why they don’t call it the “Freedom Council.”

GARY HART AND VIETNAMESE MANICURISTS: Drop by Virginia Postrel’s page for lots of interesting observations.

JONATHAN FREEDLAND, in The Guardian, is not afraid to tackle the tough question:

No, we need an answer to the argument which has become Tony Blair’s favourite in recent days: that war is needed to topple a cruel tyrant who has drowned his people in misery. In this view, the coming conflict is a war of liberation which will cost some Iraqi lives at first, to be sure, but which will save many more. It will be a moral war to remove an immoral regime. To oppose it is to keep Saddam in power.

This is a much harder case for the anti-war movement to swat aside. We have to take it seriously, if only because no slogan will sink the peace cause faster than “anti-war equals pro-Saddam”. And the anti-war movement has made itself vulnerable to that charge. Tony Benn’s patsy interview with the dictator was a terrible error, while aspects of Saturday’s rally hardly helped. Few speakers paid more than lip service to Saddam’s crimes; indeed, most seemed to regard George Bush as by far the more evil despot. Tariq Ali suggested regime change was needed in Britain more than it was in Iraq, while the official banners told their own story. “Don’t Attack Iraq,” they shouted, above a second line, “Freedom for Palestine.” Why was that not “Freedom for Iraqis”?

Why, indeed? Read the whole thing — it’s the sort of sharp self-criticism that the antiwar movement will need if it is to be taken seriously. Well, it’s a start, anyway.

UPDATE: William Sjostrom is less impressed. I guess it depends on your expectations.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, look who’s agreeing with Freedland.