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.