HERE’S AN INTERESTING COMPARISON of antiwar marches with the anti-Chavez marches in Venezuela.

STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY: Here’s more on the new wave of campus activism.

ROBERT FISK IS UNHAPPY because Arabs don’t seem to mind a U.S. liberation of Iraq all that much. Why can’t they share the fierce anti-Americanism of people who don’t live under dictators?

(Via Fisk’s biggest fan.)

ALEX KNAPP THINKS that Oliver Willis would kick Al Franken’s ass as the new liberal radio talk show host.

I agree, but I still think that Oliver is made for TV. I think he should replace Phil Donahue. In fact, I just saw Donahue “debating” Pat Buchanan on war, so I think that Oliver should replace Phil Donahue right now.

THE YALE DAILY NEWS REPORTS A NEW DEGREE OF STUDENT ACTIVISM, probably as a result of the war.

SMELL THE BLOG? Obviously a Spinal Tap fan.

TRAFFIC COPS for outer space. This is actually a very good thing. The space debris problem is very real. These “engineering” rules, as they’re called, reduce the production of debris substantially. I think that ultimately, we’re going to need liability rules that punish the creation of space debris, and something much like maritime salvage law that will encourage people to clean it up. But this is a good start.

ANDREA SEE has gone over 250 days without smoking. Congratulations!

HOW STUPID IS JACQUES CHIRAC? That’s the question.

UPDATE: More evidence for the “pretty dumb” side — he seems to be losing it:

At Mr Annan’s hawkish stance, Mr Chirac stood up and, with Gallic passion, began a defence of the French position.

Flinging his arms up and down, he declared that war was a terrible thing and that thousands of innocent people would lose their lives in a second Gulf war. “It is a question of life and death,” he said.

It was suggested that, at this point, the most dramatic moment of the evening occurred. Silvio Berlusconi, the diminutive Italian premier, eyeballed Mr Chirac and insisted: “I’m just as concerned about life and death as you are.”

He asked the French president to consider what happened to innocent people in Bali and in New York’s twin towers.

Then, the normally mild-mannered Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach, interjected and pointed out that the only person getting away with defying the will of the international community was Saddam.

He added that the weapons inspectors could not go on indefinitely.

By this time, Mr Chirac was positively steaming at the pro-American forces reigned against him. But there was more.

Jan Peter Balkenende, the new Dutch prime minister, underscored the hawkish line, saying the issue was Iraq’s full compliance and that it was now just a matter of weeks, not months, before the matter had to be resolved. “We have to reinforce the pressure on Iraq,” he said.

Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar also called for international cohesion, pointing out that the UN had only got so far with the Iraqi dictator by threatening force.

Then, Tony Blair said his piece, deriding the 12 years of deceit by Saddam and stressing he had to come into compliance “100%”.

Looking at his colleagues one by one, he told them bluntly: “There is no intelligence agency of any government around this table that does not know that the government of Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Jacob Golbitz writes:

By scolding the leadership of these countries for daring not to toe the E.U. line and indicating that this display of independence may jeopardize their pending E.U. membership, the President of France is merely calling attention to the fact that when looking at E.U./U.S. conflict over Iraq, his eastern neighbors recognize the stronger horse.

It’s beginning to seem like an emerging theme of 2003 is a race to irrelevance between the United Nations and the European Union. Right now it looks a little close to call.

Indeed.

THIS BODES ILL FOR THE (IRAQI) WAR EFFORT:

Saddam Hussein was last night reported to have placed his defence minister and close relative under house arrest in an extraordinary move apparently designed to prevent a coup.

Iraqi opposition newspapers, citing sources in Baghdad, yesterday claimed that the head of the Iraqi military, Lieutenant-General Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Jabburi Tai, was now effectively a prisoner in his home in the capital.

The minister’s apparent detention, also reported by Cairo-based al-Ahram newspaper, is surprising. He is not only a member of President Saddam’s inner circle, but also a close relative by marriage. His daughter is married to Qusay Hussein, the dictator’s 36-year-old younger son – considered by many as his heir apparent.

Reports of the general’s arrest came amid signs of growing apprehension in Baghdad that the Iraqi army, including the elite Republican Guard, might desert in the event of an attack on Iraq.

Apparently, the psychological-warfare efforts are working.

PARAPUNDIT WRITES: “The problem for classical liberalism today is that technological advances are making it easier to create conditions in Western societies that are outside the range of allowable conditions needed for a liberal society to survive.”

Not proven, but troubling — even before you get to the asteroid-weapons stuff.

ASTEROIDS AS WEAPONS: Just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about.

BIGWIG thinks Saddam is using an outdated playbook.

TED BARLOW IS RIGHT.

I’ve noticed that I — and other people across the spectrum — am getting more hatemail lately. I’ve also noticed that the blogosphere seems more polarized.

I get so much email that I’m losing the battle to keep up with it; I seem to have crossed some critical threshold a couple of weeks ago. But I’ve always tried to make a special effort to read the critical email, so as to avoid becoming isolated. As it gets nastier (and believe me, it has) it gets harder to do that.

Surely people can’t think that nasty, name-calling email is going to persuade anyone. Is the purpose to drive people off the Web? (It worked with Megan McArdle, but I suspect not for long). Or is it just that the emailers are such pathetic losers that they can’t help themselves? I suspect the latter.

They probably kick cats, too.

UPDATE: Matt Johnson has a suggestion:

I think you should create an adjunct website to instapundit.com (probably under a different URL altogether) and allow all email to go directly to that site. The site would be viewable by all — email addresses would not be hidden. You should also have a search engine that encourages people to search by name and email address. Next time they decide to send you a hateful email, they’ll have to make a simple calculation: is it worth it to have that email seen by friends, family, and employers?

Additionally, you could also provide the same functionality to other bloggers who are also beseiged by hate email. Naturally your search engine would detect emails and names of individuals who are repeat offenders across multiple sites — frankly I think you should rank them as well…the top 100 hate emailers across the entire blogosphere. :)

Instead of BlogStreet, we could call it BlogGutter!

UPDATE: Now here are some folks who are setting a good example.

ANOTHER PEACEBLOG DEBUTS with much fanfare. (Well, if an email begging for a link counts as “fanfare.”) Personally, I don’t find it very persuasive, but you can decide for yourself.

UPDATE: If you like that one, you’ll probably like Thomas Paine, too.

THE AXIS OF WEASELS MUST BE UNRAVELING, because Jacques Chirac is responding with his trademark bluster and whining:

BRUSSELS, Belgium – French President Jacques Chirac launched a withering attack Monday on eastern European nations who signed letters backing the U.S. position on Iraq, warning it could jeopardize their chances of joining the European Union (news – web sites).

“It is not really responsible behavior,” he told a news conference. “It is not well brought-up behavior. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet.”

Don’t they understand that the European Union is supposed to be led by France? Heh.

UPDATE: Related developments?

DIPNUT SAYS HE’S IDENTIFIED THE NEXT ROBERT FISK. I’m not sure whether that entitles him to a medal, or a sound thrashing, but he does go on to demonstrate that Fisk is a verb as well as a noun, these days.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, John Pilger has identified the enemy.

OVER AT GLENNREYNOLDS.COM, I’ve got more on the Union County, Tennessee religious-discrimination case.

UPDATE: A local reader emails:

This case you mention today — the one Margaret Held is handling –I know this little girl well and also her parents. She endured literal hell at school. And this family is one of the finest I know. They are salt of the earth and Union County is lucky to have them living there. Too bad their neighbors don’t realize that. I hope Margaret does indeed clean their clock (Union County schools, I mean).

Meanwhile fellow Rocky Top Brigade bloggers Last Home and LeanLeft have more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: So does Knoxville blogger InstaLawyer.

XENI JARDIN REPORTS on Saturday’s “live from the Blogosphere” conference in L.A., at which the Pyra/Google deal was unveiled.

UPDATE: And here’s a page of photos from the event, by Mark Frauenfelder.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here are more photos from Susannah Breslin.

THE CROSS-BLOG DEBATE on war is rounded up here and (promised for later today) here.

PROTESTS: One of my less-nasty but overly-prolific lefty emailers (note — it’s not more persuasive when you email me four times) keeps demanding to know why I don’t write about the protest numbers.

The answer: because I don’t believe them. The issue of estimating protest numbers was done to death in the blogosphere last time around, and I don’t see any reason to revisit it. I did mention the estimate of 500 protesters in Knoxville here even though when I went by at the protest’s scheduled starting time there were only 30 or 40. But the News-Sentinel number was an “organizer’s estimate” and reader Elizabeth Hill says it’s bogus:

My daughter and I were traveling up Kingston Pike on Saturday about 1:30 and there were no where near 500 people. Like you said , they were spread out around that corner but it couldn’t have been more than 200. When we left the Kohl’s shopping center around 2:00Pm they were all gone. Something I thought was interesting, besides the historically dubious slogans and lame cliché ridden signs, was that no cars were honking in response to some of the protestors waves and signs saying “Honk for peace.”

However, when we came by and the anti-war people were gone, there were a few Pro-war people and all you could hear were drivers honking in support.

Was the Knoxville News-Sentinel report of the “organizer’s estimate” wrong? Who knows? 500 is a lot of people — Knoxville sometimes gets more than that for pro-life demonstrations, but that’s about the only thing that turns out crowds that big besides football — and there’s no way to settle it. The same holds true with all of these things. (It’s not very good, but here’s a photo from 11 of the corner that allegedly had 500 protesters a bit later. Could they have shown up later? Sure. Is it likely that they showed up, were counted, and then vanished before Ms. Hill drove by? Not very.)

What impressed me about the Knoxville protest was that — when I went by, at least — it seemed free of the nastiness that marked protests elsewhere.

UPDATE: InstaLawyer Doug Weinstein was there at 11:30 and says he saw about 150 people, but certainly not 500.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a pretty good article on estimations of crowd size, from the Seattle Times. “In this murky field, one thing is fairly clear: Organizers often overestimate, McPhail said.”

HOWARD COBLE UPDATE: I kind of fell behind on this story, but here’s a column from the News & Record about Coble’s run-in with “Weblog Nation.”

Meanwhile, the debate between CPO Sparkey of Sgt. Stryker and Eric Muller continues.

OUR PANEL ON THE PATRIOT ACT HAS BEEN CANCELLED, because the speakers are snowed in in DC. It’ll be rescheduled, I’m told. That’s a bummer, but on the other hand, I’m already snowed under — with work, not snow, we’ve had floods but not a blizzard — and can use the extra time.

AZIZ POONAWALLA IS CLAIMING CREDIT for the Google/Pyra buy. Well, sort of.

Now that Google has seen the value of tapping into the blogosphere, I think that a lot of other folks will want to, too. One good way would be via Henry Copeland’s BlogAds program, which lets advertisers reach select audiences with highly desirable demographics for next to nothing. (No, I don’t get anything for touting BlogAds, I just think it’s cool.)

If you’re an advertiser, or might be, check it out.

OKAY, THIS NEW REALITY SHOW strikes me as even dumber than its predecessors, if that’s possible:

“American Candidate,” which debuts in January on Rupert Murdoch’s FX network, rides the reality-TV bandwagon by staging a competition to pick a faux presidential candidate. The wannabes — with no official announcement, 5,000 people have already written in — will be whittled down to 18 finalists, all but one of whom will be voted off the political island through phone and Internet polls.

Of course, there’s this:

“A reporter said to me, ‘Do you mean to tell me our next president is going to be selected by television?’ ” Cutler recalls. But that, arguably, is what happens now. In other words, a process filled with fake media events and ginned-up publicity might illuminate how the real thing works — especially if it’s more interesting than watching Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards, Lieberman et al. trudge through Iowa cornfields.

Hmm. They’ll need a Simon Cowell type for the show. . . .

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis thinks the show is brilliant. He also thinks I’ll be “gleefully quoting” its candidates. Well, you know, I said it was dumber than previous reality TV shows. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will also be dumber than the real campaign. . . .