FROM THE BBC REPORTERS’ WEBLOG:

I think President Bush will see it as quite a satisfactory day. Just as the pictures of the demonstrations overemphasised their importance, as there was only a small amount of demonstrators, so the pictures of him with the Queen will overemphasise the strength of his welcome. There was hardly anybody in the streets to see him, because he wasn’t in the streets himself. . . .

The mayor Ken Livingstone has just got up on his feet. There are about 200 people here at City Hall. He said this is just how he envisaged it. . . . [More on Livingstone here.]

A relatively small number of protesters have made their way down The Mall towards Buckingham Palace where they have effectively been cut of by the substantial police numbers who have been visible all day today.

Several hundred people would perhaps be a generous assessment of how many people made it there.

They’re promising 100,000 for tomorrow. We’ll see.

SAY WHAT YOU WILL ABOUT BUSH, he’s no Scrooge. That’s not a good thing, though.

FRASER NELSON WRITES IN THE SCOTSMAN:

Today, sober critics of America will be marching – fuelled by concern over what they see as an ill- educated cowboy visiting war on parts of the world previously at peace. The key to their mindset is their definition of war and peace.

There was, of course, no peace in Iraq while Saddam Hussein was using starvation as a weapon to kill hundreds of thousands of Shia infants and his goons were throwing enemies into torture chambers, en route to mass graves.

But these atrocities featured little on our television screens, thus making little impact on the public consciousness. To protesters, victims of dictatorship do not count in the way that the casualties of war count. They are blind to Arab-on-Arab oppression.

Using the crude mathematics of lives, the war in Iraq has already saved more than it has lost. Aid sent by Mr Bush, funded by the US taxpayer, has vaccinated four million Iraqis and fed 100,000 undernourished mothers.

In a country where one child in eight did not survive their fifth birthday, America is intervening. Aid replaces UN sanctions, which protesters say they preferred in place of war.

Saving lives by vaccination and healthcare can only hope to become as glamorous as the anti-war movement. In Britain, the wars against drugs, disease and poverty can only dream of arousing protests equivalent to today’s display in London.

Those callous protesters, so uncaring toward the poor and the sick.

LEVY LAUNCH OF “LIBERTARIANS FOR LIEBERMAN” LOOMS: Sorry, I couldn’t resist the alliteration.

ED CONE SUMS UP Howard Dean’s Internet strategy, calling it “one of the most effective marketing efforts in the history of national politics, and the most sophisticated online campaign to date.”

That seems about right to me. The other Democrats are way behind, and so is the Bush campaign.

A READER EMAILS:

So, it will be interesting to see whether big media cover the absence of protesters after drumming up expectations, change the subject, film it so that it looks like a big crowd or just interview Harold Pinter.

The NPR story that I just heard didn’t mention any numbers — it just interviewed protesters. From that alone, anyone used to reading Pravda could have figured out that the numbers were small. . . .

The BBC has numbers, though:

Police estimate that about 1,200 people staged a protest through Oxford city centre on Wednesday night against the war in Iraq and President Bush’s visit to Britain.

A US flag was burned during that demonstration and an effigy of the American president was toppled and set on fire.

About 500 people took part in a march in Manchester against the president’s visit.

Interestingly, though, there are no numbers for London, making me suspect that other reports of 200-350 protesters are about right. Not very impressive, really. I suppose a quarter-million might suddenly show up tomorrow, but I rather doubt it.

But even if they do, they won’t match the much greater number who showed up to protest the hunting ban. . . .

UPDATE: Charles Austin emails:

Maybe I’m just hypersensitive too it, but what I found most striking was how much time NPR devoted to some truly pathetic protestors compared to the time they spent on the President’s speech. You can almost imagine that they laid out their schedule much earlier in the day and then had to really struggle to fill those 2 minutes with something, anything, that sounded like a protest.

Yes, I don’t think the protester interviews helped the cause.

LT SMASH has more on the Saddam / Al Qaeda connection. “While I’m not an intelligence analyst, I have read literally hundreds of intelligence summaries in the course of my military career.” He thinks the case is pretty strong.

I ALMOST FORGOT! It’s National Ammo Day.

It’s not too late to go out and pick up a case of 12-gauge.

LAME ANTIWAR PROTEST UPDATE: Here’s another British blog report:

England’s Sword has some reports of the rather pitiful showing by the ‘peace’-protestors in London today. It wasn’t just London.

There was a peacenik demonstration next to the war memorial in the centre of Swindon this lunchtime: all of a dozen middle-aged protestors. So far, so normal. After all today was a work day. The amusing thing was that the demonstrators were outnumbered two to one by an ad hoc crowd of teenagers and young people who were jeering and heckling them, along with shouting out pro-war slogans. In fact the protestors chanting was drowned out despite their having a loud hailer.

Ah, the world turned upside down.

SADDAM AND OSAMA: Stephen Hayes has more.

GAY MARRIAGE: So what do I think about a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage? I’m against it. And I disagree with Jim Miller that allowing gay marriage constitutes an “endorsement” of gay marriage, any more than allowing Anna Nicole Smith to marry constitutes state endorsement of marrying for money.

I suspect that proponents of the Amendment think that they need to lock in a bar against gay marriage while they still have the votes (though I rather doubt that they, in fact, do). I think that lock-in is a bad idea on that sort of thing. That’s also why I’m not crazy about this being done by judicial action. I would prefer to see gay marriage legalized via legislation, which I think will happen anyway in the not-too-distant future. But it’s easy for me to take the long view on this, since I’m not a gay person who wants to get married. (Eugene Volokh has a, typically, more refined take on this).

Perhaps it’s a blind spot on my part, but I just don’t see how gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. It seems to me that it’s the opposite, and that gay marriage will strengthen marriage overall. And I do think that the Massachusetts opinion is entirely defensible, as I said yesterday. Indeed, had I been on that Court I might have voted that way — though I probably would have written the opinion in terms of limitations on governmental power, rather than expansive notions of equality — had the case been before me. [There goes your shot at a judicial position! — Ed. Like it was there to begin with. . . .]

Predictions: The (federal) constitutional amendment project will fizzle. A more interesting question is whether Massachusetts voters will amend their state Constitution to overrule the decision. It’s fairly hard to amend the Massachusetts Constitution, but not that hard. Should they succed, it will be a major blow to gay marriage efforts, since a gay-rights opinion that can’t survive in Massachusetts isn’t likely to fly nationwide. I predict that the decision will stand, though it may well be close.

More general punditry — this helps Bush, and hurts Democrats. Democrats are divided on gay marriage (black voters are, I believe, among the most hostile to it, and so are older voters), but they have a powerful gay-rights constituency. I don’t think the effect will be big, though. To me this seems like the kind of issue that would be bigger in a non-Presidential election year. With a war on, and bigger issues on the table, I don’t think it’s going to drive the elections.

That’s my take, anyway.

WINDS OF CHANGE offers a Central Asia survey with all sorts of links and information about goings-on in the region. That stuff tends not to be very well-covered, so if you want to keep up, be sure to check it out.

NICK CONFESSORE IS picking on TechCentralStation (well, really in the process of picking on James Glassman) over in the Washington Monthly.

It’s hard to know exactly what he doesn’t like about TCS — other than, you know, the fact that a lot of its authors disagree with his politics — but it seems to have something to do with the fact that it’s not a non-profit, instead relying on some sort of new innovation called “sponsors”(cleverly concealed <a href=”here on the TCS website!) to pay the bills. But he doesn’t really critique any actual articles, or supply much in the way of specifics.

All I’ll say is that I’ve written for TCS for nearly two years, and they’ve never told me what to write. Occasionally the editor, Nick Schulz, will suggest a topic — last week he suggested that I write something about the Federal Marriage Amendment, and I stupidly declined, not realizing what a big issue it would be this week — but it’s certainly hard for me to discern any Subtle Corporate Agenda in those suggestions.

Of course, if it were a really subtle corporate agenda, I might not notice. In fact, I might write articles that I thought were my own idea, but that really advanced the Subtle Corporate Agenda. But let’s not get paranoid, here. If that were true, I would have written a nonspecific article in some other publication, pretending at criticism but actually announcing that TCS was really good at advancing the agendas of its paying sponsors, thus encouraging more companies to become paying sponsors. Hmm. Hey, you don’t think. . . . ?

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner, who writes for TCS from time to time, wonders if he’s a paid lobbyist (not paid much, if he gets what I’m getting!) and observes:

One surprise for me, given that Confessore contributes to Tapped, is that he failed to mention Tech Central Station’s willingness to recruit its contributors from the blogosphere. Flipping through the authors, I saw a fair number of bloggers that are TCS contributors — Radley Balko, Joe Katzman, Lynne Kiesling, Arnold Kling, Megan McArdle, Charles Murtaugh, Virginia Postrel, Glenn Reynolds, Rand Simberg, Eugene Volokh, and Matthew Yglesias. I’d like to think that explains part of Tech Central Station’s success.

[Oh no! Drezner’s outed Yglesias, the TCS mole at TAPPED! –Ed. It’s a policy mag — with an ideology! I’m selling this story to Oliver Stone. . . .] And, as with Drezner, my only real interaction — except for an occasional email with the graphics guy — has been with Nick Schulz. I’ve never even gotten an email from Glassman, much less anyone else.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sasha Volokh notes an ad from TomPaine.com sounding the same theme [TomPaine.com? Aren’t they funded by Bill Moyers, and doesn’t he “lavishly” fund The American Prospect which funds Confessore? — Ed. Shh. Leave the conspiracy theories to those guys. I’m sure it’s perfectly innocent.] and he’s thinking of suing them — for not using his name when they quoted his piece. Yes, “be sure you spell my name right” only works if you mention the name.

Megan McArdle weighs in, too. But the best line is from her comments section: “This is probably a sign that TCS is having a real impact: the ad hominems have started.” Heh. Indeed.

Michael Totten has comments, too.

Pejman Yousefzadah responds with a Fisking. Unlike Confessore, Pejman points to actual articles, and everything.

Personally, I think the whole affair looks like what my ethics book calls Petty Blifil. And thanks to the coolness of Amazon, you can follow that link and read what that means.

WAR AND RECONCILIATION: My Civil War post from yesterday produced this response by Donald Sensing.

THE “THINKING MAN’S CRUZ BUSTAMANTE” — Ouch.

BROADEN YOUR BLOG HORIZONS SOME MORE by visiting this week’s Blog Mela, hosted by Suman Palit. It’s a festival of Indian blogging!

MORE ON THE FLAGGING AND OBSOLESCENT ANTIWAR MOVEMENT: Iain Murray reports that London protests are pretty small.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh posts an email from the scene:

We are living in the heart of things — in Trafalgar Square — and, for what it’s worth, can report that there is nothing of any substance going on at all. It’s quite quiet — people are going about their business, but the usual buzz of tourist activity has slackened a bit. The first round of scheduled protest events involved a big talk by prominent left-leaning activists, and drew about 2,000 people. Then, about 1,000 marched through Oxford Street to protest the Bush Administration’s environmental policies. The thousands who were supposed to greet him at Buckingham did not materialize — there were maybe 100. Right now (Wednesday afternoon), just after the President’s big talk, there are a few hundred people milling around Trafalgar Square, a women’s prayer circle, and some people congratulating themselves for putting red-dye in the fountains (get it?). The crowd is a little bigger than the crowd two days ago, who were protesting the ban on feeding the pigeons, but certainly smaller than the crowd last month, who were protesting tuition hikes at universities. The cops were cracking up. There was supposed to be a big “alternative state parade” of cyclists and other folks, but it seems to have fizzled.

Hmm. What if they had an anti-war and nobody showed up?

BAGHDAD GRAFFITI:

There are the occasional anti-American slogans, some in misspelled English – like “Dawn USA” – but mostly President George W. Bush is hailed as a liberator, especially in the neighborhoods of the Shia majority historically brutalized by Hussein.

Samplings of the Arabic slogans include: “Down Saddam the infidel and long live Bush the believer!” “A thousand Americans but not one Tikriti,” referring to residents of Hussein’s hometown.

Many taunt the deposed dictator: “Saddam the dirty, the son of the dirty, in which septic tank are you hiding now?”

Hussein’s family also comes in for abuse: “Where are your wife and daughters, Saddam? Are you pimping them in Jordan?”

“I like what I read,” said Karal Nadji, a Shia street vendor who sells shoes. “We appreciate Mr. Bush. We’re all waiting for the fruits of change.”

And there’s a slight variation on “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!”

A popular slogan comparing the politician with an Iraqi chickpea dish declares: “Neither Bush we want, nor Chalabi; we want beer and lablabee.”

Heh.

UPDATE: Regarding “Dawn USA,” above, reader Dave Schipani emails:

Hell, that’s not misspelled. It’s an echo of the Gipper – “It’s morning
in Baghdad”!

You know, that actually makes sense.

NOT YOUR FATHER’S WAR PROTESTS — I’ve got a post on the flagging and obsolescent antiwar movement — and the potent pro-war protests — up over at GlennReynolds.com.

CREAMY, BLOGGY GOODNESS: This week’s Carnival of the Vanities is up. Expand your blog-horizons!

TONGUE TIED links to a story about another hate crime hoax:

Evanston police arrested a Communication freshman Monday and charged him with felony disorderly conduct, alleging he lied about two hate crimes to bring attention to race relations on campus. . . .

Saide “made up” both incidents, Vice President for Student Affairs William Banis wrote in a press release issued Tuesday morning. Police charged Saide late Monday with two counts of felony disorderly conduct in connection with fabricating police reports about the incidents.

Saide confessed he falsified reports about the racist acts to initiate dialogue about racial relations on campus, said Chief Frank Kaminski of Evanston Police Department. Saide could not be reached for comment.

“Certainly his motivation was to bring attention to himself and his cause,” Kaminski said Tuesday at a press conference.

Well, he certainly achieved that. Of course, crying “wolf!” has its downsides, too.

MOURNING THE DEATH OF MP3.COM — my TechCentralStation column is up.

THE SENATE HAS PASSED A COMPROMISE NANOTECHNOLOGY BILL, and Howard Lovy has some information on it; I can’t find any more yet.

Meanwhile, StrategyPage reports that nanotech armor is being used in Iraq:

The nanofiber in the Humvee turrets looks like fiberboard, but it is 17 times stronger than Kevlar (which is itself six times stronger than steel). However, it’s going to be several years before the cost of the new fiber gets anywhere near Kevlar’s levels (about $50 per square yard of fiber). The experimental turrets are being used to see how the material stands up to field conditions (heat, cold, moisture, vibration and so on.)

Materials science is a lot more important than it is sexy, but this stuff is only sort of nanotechnology. It’s nothing akin to the molecular-manufacturing technology that people like Eric Drexler are championing. I’m afraid that too much of the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s funding is going to these short-term issues, and not enough is going to assembler technology and other things with longer-term payoffs. I don’t know if this is addressed in the bill as it passed.

UPDATE: Some comments from a nanotechnology researcher.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Managed to get a copy of the bill as passed in PDF form — it’s here. There’ll probably be some tweaking in conference, but no major changes are expected.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Nanotech magazine SmallTimes has an article on its website. Here’s a statement by Joe Lieberman on the bill. And Howard Lovy is posting updates and new information here.

AUSTIN BAY:

It’s 2003, and the president is George W. Bush, but the teeth-gnashing rhetoric is right of out 1983 and the “Euro-missile protests” against Ronald Reagan.

This month is the 20th anniversary of the Great Euromissile Crisis. Oh, the accusations! Reagan was stupid. Reagan was dangerous, a warmonger seeking the nuclear destruction of the USSR. Reagan was — good heavens — a unilateralist. Today, the mayor of London calls Bush “the greatest threat to life on the planet.”

Read the whole thing for more historical perspective.

JACK SHAFER ASKS: Why is the press avoiding the Weekly Standard’s intelligence scoop?

Why, indeed?

UPDATE: Another article in Slate notes that the Mohammed Atta Prague connection hasn’t gone away.