LT SMASH thinks that Al Qaeda has made a strategic blunder by turning its attacks on Muslims. That’s my feeling, too. Let’s hope we’re both right.

WILL MICHAEL MOORE DEFEND COL. ALLEN B. WEST? I’m sure he will.

EUGENE VOLOKH IS FISKING THE NINTH CIRCUIT — just keep scrolling.

THE MICHAEL JACKSON CHARGES: A deliberate distraction from the London protests? I link, you decide. . . .

THE NANOTECH BILL HAS (in the new Senate version) passed the Senate with no debate. Next stop, the President. I think it’s a pretty good bill, and I’ll probably write something longer about it soon. Here’s a link to the text of the bill.

PEOPLE KEEP SENDING ME LINKS to Brian Anderson’s City Journal piece on the culture wars, which indicates to me that (1) there’s a lot of interest in that topic; and (2) people don’t scroll down a lot. Anyway, the Slate/NPR program “Day to Day” has an interesting interview with Anderson and Tim Noah, which you can hear here.

WAGNER JAMES AU sends this story with the headline “Former Axis of Evil Soccer Team Beats Current Axis of Evil Soccer Team:”

But nothing equaled having to answer to Iraq’s former National Olympic Committee president, Uday Hussein, the son of Saddam who kept a jail and torture center at the national sport headquarters and often beat and humiliated athletes who performed poorly.

“It’s no longer a secret: We played every match with the fear of punishment, an intense psychological pressure,” says Mowafak Nuri, a defender for the national side and top Iraqi club Al Zawra, who retired last year. “The Olympic Committee chairman destroyed the performances of the national team.” . . .

Last weekend, the country’s Olympic team – for players under 23 – moved on to the next round of qualifying with a 4-1 defeat of North Korea. In a measure of Iraqi soccer mania, that relatively minor victory set off burst after burst of celebratory gunfire around Baghdad on Saturday night.

They seem quite happy. Also about the not-being-tortured part.

PHIL CARTER WRITES that Al Qaeda is evolving in troubling ways.

JONAH GOLDBERG SAYS I’m not a conservative. True enough. I’m not sure that Andrew Sullivan meant otherwise, though.

MORE ON THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT’S FAILURE:

A new poll shows support for the war in Iraq has slightly risen in the past two weeks, with 56 percent of Americans now saying the situation there was worth going to war over. Fifty-four percent of Americans said that at the beginning of the month.

Similarly, the Gallup poll shows a majority of Americans say the decision to go to war was the right thing to do, compared with 31 percent who disagree. Seventeen percent say it’s too soon to tell.

What’s more, 48 percent of Americans now say the war in Iraq has made the U.S. safer from terrorism, up from 45 percent last month.

On the other hand, right after it we hear this:

All this as polls show the President’s current approval rating — 50 percent — is tied for the lowest of his presidency.

Hmm. So Bush isn’t that popular, but support for the war is up, despite protests, “Bush lied,” quagmire-talk, etc. I think it’s because the antiwar protesters have turned people off. And there’s evidence for that in the same story:

American and British Journalists in London have infiltrated the groups preparing to protest against the President there.

They report that the London Action Resource Center — describing itself as non-violent — has taught demonstrators how to charge police lines and has discussed whether or not the hurling of petrol bombs constitutes an act of violence.

This sort of thing doesn’t sell.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston has more. And don’t miss this piece by Amir Taheri, either.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader sends this link to a story about tens of thousands at the Toys ‘R’ Us parade and adds:

The protesters in London (and their leftist supporters in the media) are just pathetic. I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, and saw a much bigger crowd for the Toys `R’ Us Holiday Parade in Times Square, early on a cold Saturday morning. My wife and I could barely push through the crowd to get to the subway as we set out for a day of sightseeing. It says something when a crowd of five-year-olds with their mommies is more intimidating than your crowd of protesters.

As someone who’s spent a lot of time with five-year-olds, I’m not so sure. . .

But Iain Murray is covering this and says that the turnout is looking bigger than he thought, though still nowhere near 100,000. And Kris Murray wonders: “Were there protests like this during the height of the IRA terrorist attacks in London against the British government’s military intervention in Northern Ireland?” I don’t think so.

MORE: Zach Barbera emails: “Forget the 100,000/30-40,000 question. I just want to know where are all the d@mn puppets?!? I thought we were promised puppets! Can’t these people do anything right?”

If there aren’t puppets, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

STILL MORE: Background on the protesters here and here.

MORE STILL: This story from the Times says official numbers are 70,000. I gather that the Mirror is claiming 200,000 — but, then, they claim that John Pilger is a journalist. . . .

HERE’S A LIVE WEBCAM VIEW of Trafalgar Square. Doesn’t look like 100,000 people to me, to the extent you can tell from one webcam. Nor to Andy at World Wide Rant.

UPDATE: This BBC story still says 100,000 are “expected” — but if you scroll down you’ll see that it’s really more like 30-40,000. That’s about 10% of the number who showed up to protest the fox-hunting ban. And yeah, I know these numbers don’t mean much in themselves. But the downward trend seems pretty clear.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Email from London suggests that protesters aren’t exactly overrunning the place. And here’s a photo from a London blogger’s office window that makes the turnout seem less than overwhelming, too. Reader Rick Bradley emails:

Is it just me, or are this week’s British protests strikingly reminiscent of the Martha Burk protests at the Augusta National this spring?

Yes, like the New York Times with Augusta, the BBC has been doing everything it could to pump turnout — only, it appears, to produce a rather disappointing number of actual protesters. Do you think the media are paper tigers?

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Henry Hanks emails that CBS Radio just now was

describing the numbers in London as “tens of thousands.” This morning an ITV reporter asked Bush why they hate him “in such numbers.” So will we be seeing a concession from the mainstream media that this turnout is far below expectations?

Oh, any minute, I’m sure.

STILL MORE: Here are some questions asked of Bush, presumably by the ITV guy:

Q What do you say to people who today conclude that British people have died and been maimed as a result of you appearing here today, shoulder-to-shoulder with a controversial American President?

And, Mr. President, if I could ask you, with thousands on the street — with thousands marching on the streets today here in London, a free nation, what is your conclusion as to why apparently so many free citizens fear you and even hate you?

Q Why do they hate you, Mr. President? Why do they hate you in such numbers?

I wonder how many people hate this guy after hearing that performance? The Group Captain, meanwhile, is sniggering.

STILL MORE: Reader Ken Zeitung accuses me of lying, because the BBC story linked above says 60-70,000 now. No, Ken. The BBC just revises its stories on the fly without indicating that it has done so. I don’t get as up in arms about that as some people do, but it does cause problems.

FLESHBOT IDENTIFIES chicks and guns as the new porn trend. (Work safe? Depends on where you work, I guess.)

CONGRATULATIONS TO DR. DAVID HOGBERG, who’s the second person I know — after Dr. Joshua Marshall — to get his Ph.D. while blogging. Proof, anyway, that blogging doesn’t have to destroy a person’s productivity in other arenas. . . .

BOY, A DOZEN AARP MEMBERS BURN THEIR MEMBERSHIP CARDS and it’s national news. I wonder if a dozen ACLU members burning their membership cards over the ACLU’s hypocrisy on the Second Amendment would get the same kind of media attention?

Okay, actually I don’t wonder at all. I don’t know enough about the prescription drug bill to have an opinion, though if the AARP likes it I’m inclined to be deeply suspicious, whatever its members think. But the AARP’s willingness to ally with Republicans suggests to me that its leadership thinks that GOP dominance isn’t a passing thing, and that it had better cease being so closely identified with the Claude Pepper wing of the Democratic Party. I think that’s probably bigger news than the card-burning.

ANDREW SULLIVAN is deeply, deeply unhappy with the energy bill. I haven’t followed it, but I don’t think that there has ever been an energy bill that was cause for joy, and given that the one thing I do know is that Tom Daschle is endorsing it because of a hike in ethanol subsidies I doubt this will prove any exception to that rule.

Lynne Kiesling — an actual energy policy expert — has lots more, with collections of links here and here, and a post on ethanol here. Excerpt:

Ethanol does not help clean the air and it is not a renewable energy source. In fact, ethanol used for fuel generates formaldehyde, a toxic chemical. Our environment doesn’t need that kind of “preservation.” Ethanol mandates do nothing but benefit special interests at a very high cost to all Americans.

I prefer my ethanol in a nice Shiraz. Why aren’t we subsidizing that?

WRITING ON STEPHEN HAYES’ ARTICLE on the Saddam / Al Qaeda connection, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball are skeptical, saying that the case for such a connection is “decidedly not closed.”

Er, okay guys. How about treating it as open, then?

Meanwhile Tony Blankley wonders if the sudden increase in media skepticism toward leaked stories displayed in recent weeks has anything to do with the fact that all the leaks make Bush look good, or his critics look bad. Surely not.

And Pejman Yousefzadeh responds to the Hayes article by calling for more public disclosure of what’s known on the subject.

UPDATE: Hayes responds to Newsweek.

MY BROTHER’S BOOK ON AFRICA IN WORLD HISTORY is out. He’d be relieved, if he weren’t already deep in the throes of working on the next book.

He’s the smart one. I’m the good-looking one.

IRANFILTER is a collaborative Iranian blog set up by Hossein Derakshan.

WESLEY CLARK has a rather bloggish site going now. Or maybe it’s Slashdot-ish.

DAVID FRUM IN THE TELEGRAPH:

The anti-Bush demonstration in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was called for six o’clock, but at the appointed hour, journalists and camera crews substantially outnumbered protesters. . . .

The sharp-faced man answered with a superior air. “When you have a mass movement like this, it’s impossible for it to be captured by a small group.”

I looked up and down the south side of the square. The “mass movement” extended barely half the length of the railing. I’d seen larger crowds at poetry readings.

I’m not sure, but I think this must have been the Judean People’s Front. But here’s my favorite bit:

Mike (the name he gave) shrugged me off. “People in the Middle East are fighting because their own governments are repressing them. They come to feel that they have no alternative – and the mosque is always open.

“But I can’t help thinking that it’s just not very realistic that people are going to kill each other because they say my God is better than your God. Give people freedom and an opportunity for something better: that’s what they really want.”

I said: “You know, you sound exactly like Paul Wolfowitz.” He flinched.

And well he might.

MAYBE THIS IS WHERE THE PROTESTERS HAVE BEEN: It’s World Toilet Day.

MY REQUIEM FOR MP3.COM produced an interesting email from reader Kelly Robinson:

As an avid user of MP3.com for the last several years – I was chagrined to learn of its demise.

While I don’t terribly care what CNET does with the brand – I DO care about a) preserving the vast storehouse of excellent INDEPENDENT music and b) providing a viable means by which unsigned artists can promote and distribute their music.

To that end, we’re forming a consortium to see if we can’t save the archive and then create a “new” MP3.com of sorts that returns to it’s roots – the centralized and simple distribution of original, independent music.

We’re chasing down the folks at CNET and I have a message into Mr. Roberson, in the hopes of leveraging his passion for his “baby”.

That’s a great point. I’ll keep you posted if I find out more. I don’t think that there’s anything in the MP3.com Artist Agreement to prevent this.

Failing that, they should at least give a copy of the archive to the Smithsonian or something. It’s quite a comprehensive document of music history.

UPDATE: In a sort-of related note, Magnatune is an internet-based record label whose slogan is “we’re not evil.”

ELIOT COHEN WRITES ON THE COSTS OF CUTTING AND RUNNING IN IRAQ: He’s right, of course, which is why I’m not too worried that we’ll do it.

XENI JARDIN calls our attention to an example of, er, PC run amok in Los Angeles County:

One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words ”Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.

You can’t make this stuff up.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh: “It’s funny, but it’s also a bit scary.”

TONY ADRAGNA is back, and he’s got a post on the Massachusetts gay marriage ruling. Julian Sanchez and Nick Gillespie have interesting posts, too.

UPDATE: Bill Quick: “I now anticipate watching with wry pleasure as various conservative supporters of federalism jump through hoops as they try to explain why they hate this example of federalism so much, and why they hope desperately that it can somehow be overturned.”