SOME PEOPLE ARE CALLING for the arrest of Jean Chretien for war crimes prior to Bush’s Canada visit.

Seems a bit silly to me, but then there’s a lot of that kind of silliness up north lately.

“THE NEWS WARS OF 2010 WERE NOTABLE for the fact that no actual news organization was involved.” A short, and somewhat cautionary, history of the media future.

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS BEATS OUT ALEXANDER: Of course, some people wonder if Spongebob is gay, too. . . .

UPDATE: Rather more sophisticated observations, here.

MICHAEL JORDAN’S BIG BROTHER is going to Iraq.

AS I SAID EARLIER, I’ve done all my Christmas shopping so far right here. Now I see that Wal-Mart sales have been disappointing this weekend. Are lots of people shopping online, or are people just buying less?

I’d report on how crowded the parking lots at the malls are, but I haven’t been there, so I can’t. But there may be a tie-in to this column from last year, too.

UPDATE: The Wal-Mart story seems to be much ado about not much, according to Kevin Brancato’s Wal-Mart blog. He links this story, too, suggesting that many people expected slower sales this year because last year people had tax rebate checks in hand.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader James Wink emails:

I have an alternate idea of what is happening to Wal-Mart. They have devalued their brand: Wal-Mart is a place to go for the necessities of life. Target has pulled a brilliant move in placing itself as a more prestigious and higher quality brand covering the same economic demographics. While people would be more then willing to buy milk at Wal-Mart, they would prefer to buy the better quality jewelry at Target considering the cost factor is reasonably comparable. I managed to do no shopping on Black Friday (like you Amazon got a majority of my money) and spent my morning walking that trails at Great Falls and then meeting my wife in DC for lunch.

Two years ago I did a considerable amount of shopping at Wal-Mart in the Norfolk area where their Super centers are comfortable places to shop. When I moved to the Northern VA area, where there are no Super Wal-Mart, my one trip to Wal-Mart was an exercise in claustrophobia and crowd control (and this was in September not Dec). Target represents an place that is far more comfortable to shop in: the aisles are clean and wide and there are usually enough cashiers to ensure a speedy experience. The cost is marginally more but is more then worth the psychic cost of going to Wal-Mart.

Yeah. I’ve never understood the fashionable hatred of Wal-Mart, but I’ve also never really liked shopping there.

MORE: This article from Forbes suggests that Wal-Mart’s problems are Wal-Mart’s problem: “In an effort to defend its profits, the world’s largest retailer did not discount as deeply on a wide array of products as it has in the past. That hurt sales the day after Thanksgiving, the official start of the holiday shopping season, as other competitors like Sears, Roebuck and Co. lured shoppers with deeper price cuts. Customers tend to be price-sensitive and go to Wal-Mart to take advantage of the blitz of deals.”

A CRACKDOWN AGAINST PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTESTERS IN UKRAINE? King Banaian has a roundup at the SCSU Scholars site.

UPDATE: Veronica Khokhlova: “I wished Bono had come over here – man, wouldn’t that be cool…”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Drezner has a lengthy and disturbing roundup on the geopolitics involved.

HUMAN TELETUBBIES: This is just wrong.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT in Canada.

UKRAINE UPDATE: David Warren writes:

The damage that has been done to the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, should not be overlooked. He invested more political capital than was wise by heavy-handedly supporting both President Kuchma in the Ukraine, and Alexandr Lukashenko, the authoritarian president-for-life of Belarus — the two “Little Russias” from the old Soviet Union.

Ukrainian events remind Russians of how much fraud was involved in their own last election.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More on fraud here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more, with photos, here:

WHAT HAS MADE THE SITUATION an international crisis is the heavy-handed Russian interference in the election. Russia’s involvement is so beyond the pale that two former presidents who led revolutions against Soviet-installed puppet governments in their own nations–Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Lech Walesa from Poland–have waded in on the side of Yushchenko.

Havel sent a letter which was read by Yushchenko at an evening demonstration in which he urged Yushchenko and his followers to continue their fight. Walesa arrived in Kiev two days later to support Yushchenko. He spoke twice to the crowds at Independence Square. The situation reminded him “of the struggle that we carried on with Solidarity in the 1980s,” he said.

Read the whole thing.

THIS SOUNDS LIKE GOOD NEWS:

A South Korean woman paralyzed for 20 years is walking again after scientists say they repaired her damaged spine using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood.

I hope it pans out. (Via Pirate’s Cove).

I AGREE: Tom Brokaw is giving bad advice.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING TIDBIT ABOUT ALEXANDER: It was subsidized by the French government:

Jeunet had pointed out that director Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great received funding from the French government despite not being filmed in France or in French.

Judging by the reviews, I don’t think the return on that investment is going to be very good.

UPDATE: Hmm. I wonder if this Barbie movie — and matching robot cat, Serafina — got French subsidies: “Whenever her on-screen counterpart appears during the DVD film ‘Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper,’ the $40 furball starts to purr and chat — and she can do it in French, too ..” reports PrestoPundit. Hey, it would be a better investment than Alexander — Barbie’s a proven performer.

HERE’S MORE ON THE LACK OF DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN ACADEMIA, and its consequences:

When John Kennedy brought to Washington such academics as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, McGeorge and William Bundy and Walt Rostow, it was said that the Charles River was flowing into the Potomac.

Academics, such as the next secretary of state, still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.”

Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations — except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome.

They do indeed cultivate diversity — in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.

Indeed.

UPDATE: A faculty reader emails: “We just hired a new vice president of diversity on campus and he’s about to start ‘diversity conversations.’ This could be a great opportunity to talk about diversity of thought, since they’re just now defining what diversity in Oregon means.”

Sounds like it could begin a useful conversation. I suspect that quite a few states will be having such discussions.

THIS STORY from the Baltimore Sun on the future of the news business post-Rather is worth reading in its entirety. Here’s a bit:

For Socolow, the rise of bloggers is the most exciting change in electronic journalism these days. And, he says, far from upending journalistic traditions, bloggers derive their greatest strength from a mainstay of the profession.

“For all the bad things that bloggers put out there [during the election], they have one really significant advantage over the dinosaur networks, which is their relationship to accuracy,” Socolow said. “The bloggers’ power is in their ability to fact-check mainstream journalism in a new way.”

The fallout from Rather’s Bush report is proof of that power: It was bloggers – not television or print journalists – who first questioned the authenticity of the documents on which 60 Minutes II based the segment.

“What’s more basic to journalism than fact-checking and accuracy?” Socolow says. “That’s what bloggers are providing, as the Bush-Rather story illustrates. CBS News – or The New York Times for that matter – never had to worry about its journalism being independently evaluated the way it is today on the Internet.”

That’s not as dramatic a story line as the end of network news. But another layer of checks and balances – even if ideologically driven – seems like a good thing for the public.

Yes. And if I were running a Big Media outlet I’d pay someone to surf the blogs (or check links to my own stories from blogs via technorati) and then make corrections when they found errors. It’s free, outsourced error-correction.

DAMIAN PENNY: “Does Protest Warrior have an Ottawa chapter?”

TOM HAYDEN SUGGESTS A GOAL FOR THE LEFT: Make sure we lose in Iraq! (“The anti-war movement can force the Bush administration to leave Iraq by denying it the funding, troops, and alliances necessary to its strategy for dominance. “) The good news is that, even on the left, not many people listen to Tom Hayden. Karl Rove hopes otherwise, though.

UPDATE: Hayden will no doubt be disappointed to discover that Zarqawi is running scared.

THOUGHTS ON BEING A PUBLIC UTILITY, at Ghost of a Flea.

UNSCAM UPDATE: The Belmont Club has an oil-for-food roundup. Kofi no, Havel yes!

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF has more on Ukraine events.

UPDATE: Veronica Khokhlova has photos — and I neglected to mention that she had an oped in the New York Times, too.

DAVID EDELSTEIN: “With Alexander (Warner Bros.), Oliver Stone has done what I never thought possible: He has made me feel pity for him.”

UPDATE: Donald Sensing offers another negative report:

Nephew said the movie was “incredibly bad.” How bad? This bad:

With about 15 minutes left to go, the projection system broke. The screen went blank and the sound quit. After a few seconds, when the audience realized that it wasn’t just a sudden gap between reels or the like, they clapped and cheered.

I felt that way about Sorcerer.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lots more bad reviews here.

THE BLOGOSPHERE BY THE NUMBERS: An explosion of growth. Good news for Henry Copeland, I guess!

DANIEL DREZNER has a Ukraine roundup, with links to earlier posts.

MUSIC REVIEW: I got a chance to give a good, thorough listen to John Fogerty’s new album, Deja Vu All Over Again last week, when I drove to pick up my grandmother. Overall, I didn’t think it was as good as I’d hoped. I’ve heard a lot of people compare it to Centerfield, but it put me more in mind of Eye of the Zombie, an album that was better than most people thought at the time, but not really up to Fogerty’s best efforts.

Deja Vu seems, like Zombie, to lack a theme. Some of the songs are good — I liked “In the Garden,” with its frankly retro approach, the best — but others, like “Nobody’s Here Anymore” (a somewhat geezerish rant against the Internet and cellphones), are just embarrassing. (There are streaming samples for all of these Fogerty albums — just follow the links). Overall, it’s worth buying if you’re a hardcore Fogerty fan and have to have everything, but otherwise I’d give it a pass. And if you’re looking for a first-rate post-Centerfield Fogerty effort, I recommend Blue Moon Swamp instead. It’s much better.

THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT UKRAINE on Northern Alliance Radio — click here to hear it. The main guest is King Banaian of SCSU Scholars, who has rather a lot of personal knowlege.

UPDATE: They just corrected me on the air to say that King isn’t a guest — he’s an every-other-week cohost on the show. My mistake!

ANOTHER UPDATE: If you missed the broadcast, you can hear it here.

I HEART BELLSOUTH: Our fax line is down. I called and spoke to a robot, which tested our line and said a technician would come. Half an hour later, and the guy’s here. Pretty impressive.