“BLIX HANDED THE ADMINISTRATION THE SMOKING GUN:” Josh Marshall has a lengthy and very interesting interview with Kenneth Pollack up on his site.

ARNOLD KLING has a column on “Economic Idiotarianism” — and, yes, that’s the actual title.

“EUROPE’S STUMBLING FOREIGN POLICY:”

This week, an attempt by the EU’s foreign ministers to renew sanctions against Zimbabwe collapsed because France wanted an exemption from the travel ban to enable President Robert Mugabe to attend a Franco-African summit in Paris.

The EU’s whole relationship with Africa was thrown into confusion, with an EU-Africa summit to be hosted by Portugal in April under threat. If France was allowed to receive Mugabe, the Portuguese wanted the same right.

But the leaders of the UK, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain are all likely to boycott a summit attended by Mugabe, which would transform the event into an embarrassing display of European disunity.

There’s much, much more. I think that in the disunity of Europe here, and especially in the letter supporting the U.S. on Iraq released by eight European heads of state that I mentioned earlier, we’re seeing some very effective diplomacy by the United States. With an unwitting assist by France. I’ll have more on that later today.

UNILATERALISM: “Activists” are criticizing Bush’s $15 billion AIDS plan for Africa as unilateralism because he’s not passing the money through, um, “activist” groups. Puhleez.

MORE ON THE WELFARE-TERRORISM CONNECTION: Mickey Kaus, call your office!

AXIS OF WEASELS MERCHANDISE? But of course!

OIL? YOU PATHETIC SAP. It’ really all about antigravity.

BLOGS AND MONEY: Here’s an interesting article that talks about Nick Denton and Henry Copeland, among others who plan to make money off of weblogs by methods other than mentioning their Amazon and Paypal donation-buttons. Though Andrew Sullivan’s “Pledge Week” does get a mention.

IT’S NOT YOUR FATHER’S BULGARIA, apparently.

WHAT? YOU HAVEN’T SUBSCRIBED to the new Welch / Layne paper yet? Why the hell not?

UPDATE: Here’s a review of the prototype issue, from the Christian Science Monitor.

AUSTIN BAY has some important observations on why beating Iraq will likely be a deathblow to an already weakened Al Qaeda.

STEVE VERDON (permalinks not working) notices something I hadn’t — my traffic for this month has already surpassed its previous monthly high. This will no doubt disappoint some, who seemed to be hoping that InstaPundit had passed its peak.

Of course, traffic here won’t keep growing forever, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised (or, for that matter, all that disappointed) to see it level off or even decline as the blogosphere grows. This is the Internet, and nothing is forever. (Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy disappointing those folks this time; I’m only human.)

It’s especially interesting, though, in light of this figure from this OJR piece, showing big-media traffic trends. What’s interesting is that they look a lot like mine, only with a few more zeros. I wouldn’t have guessed that.

ARTHUR SILBER is mad as hell about Bush’s AIDS proposal.

HERE’S OSAMA BIN LADEN’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS. I give it an A.

AHEAD OF BUSH: Orrin Judd notes that John Kerry is crying “material breach.”

GEORGE CLOONEY: The Rachel Lucas interview — but how did she get him to open up like that?

UNILATERALISM, MY ASS!

Here’s a BBC story pointing out that France is, essentially, using the threat of its Security Council veto to frustrate the many European nations that support the U.S. on Iraq.

AOL TIME WARNER LOST NEARLY $100 BILLION IN 2002.

Advantage: InstaPundit, which was nearly $100 billion more profitable than AOL last year! Quick, get out the press release!

[Kaus already did this schtick last year — Ed. He already did the Ed. schtick, too. . . .]

HESIOD DOESN’T GET IT, so I’ll try to speak very slowly:

Antiwar protesters aren’t Communists by definition.

But A.N.S.W.E.R. and the WWP basically are. (And of the extra-nasty Stalinist variety.)

Communists are, in my opinion, as bad as Nazis: mass murder, totalitarianism, etc. (And calling them “Marxists” instead doesn’t fool anyone.)

Going to a march organized by Communists doesn’t make you a Communist, any more than going to a march organized by Nazis makes you a Nazi.

But knowingly going to either one makes you icky. And calling it McCarthyism when people point that out, or point out that the Communists really are Communists, makes you either dishonest, or stupid.

Clear enough?

(I should also note that I’ve tried to call attention to non-icky voices opposing the war. I think they’re wrong about the war, but it’s okay to be wrong. It’s not okay to be in bed with Stalinists or Hitlerites.)

LILEKS:

The line that clarified everything: I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country – your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.

It brought to mind Susan Sarandon’s ad, in which she argues against a military effort to depose Saddam. “What,” she asks, “has Iraq done to us?”

Aside from shoot at our pilots, and attempt to kill an ex-President, I’ll grant that they’ve done no more to us than Hitler did to the US in the 30s. But that’s not the point. Sarandon has turned into the very thing her ilk decries: an insular self-satisfied wealthy Westerner who couldn’t care less what happens in other countries, as long as no Americans get a nick.

Her, and a lot of her colleagues.

FRANCE IS BLOWING IT IN ITS NEOCOLONIALIST UNILATERAL ACTION IN AFRICA:

Just when it was reveling, downstage-center, as a marquee player in international discussions on Iraq, France has collided with an African crisis that may more cruelly mark out the limited character of its diplomatic and practical powers.

This reality bites: A French-engineered peace agreement meant to bring to calm to the Ivory Coast after a months-long rebellion – signed here with the trappings of inviolability over the weekend in the presence of President Jacques Chirac and a handy phalanx of plumed Gardes Republicaines – has imploded.

This article is damning. The French military force is called “invisible,” the word “neocolonialist” is used, and, most humiliating of all, it says that France was “outfoxed” in the diplomatic negotiations. The Ivory Coast, it suggests, indicates the limits of French power.

Check out the photo accompaning this article with signs calling Chirac a criminal and boosting the USA. And doesn’t it figure that the French have their own Republican Guard. . . .?

THE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION has a dialup connection that’s now getting 24kbps. Ugh. More later.

DAVID BOAZ is condemning the anti-choice movement in strong terms.

THE GRUMPY LEFT: This writer in the Star Tribune is getting tired of the Judean People’s Front aspects of, well, lots of lefty causes:

I also began to wonder where the left gets its harshness — a know-it-all style of dark grievance-dom that has increasingly come to define the peace movement. It was on my mind because I had seen this belief system in full bloom two nights earlier, as I watched a replay of the day’s big Washington, D.C., antiwar demonstration. . . .

I just wish that every gathering of my lefties didn’t have to become such a tedious exercise in cause-linking, chant-bullhorning and supposed truth-telling. I have the fantasy of a progressive cause with no Youth and Student Coordinator, no West Coast Representative, no brother from the movement in the country to the south and no presumption that words like Solidarity, Network, Action and Uprising are always to be treated as gospel, the code words that say we are all the same.

(Via Fraters Libertas).

“CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES” — a roundup of the week’s best (self-nominated) blog entries — is over at Dodd Harris’s this week. Check it out!