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.