Via Instapundit and Tim Blair, Keith Richards is lashing out at Paul McCartney for canceling an Australian tour. The Stones tour will go on.

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has lashed out at former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney for calling off an Australian tour because of the Bali bombings.

"I say to Osama and the boys bring it on, evaporate me," Richards said on the eve of the band's Australian tour. "If it gets to the stage where these guys are dictating if we rock or not, then forget about it.

"If McCartney uses these guys as an excuse, he should give it away. Don't give them the power. I can't wait to tour Australia, even if they take out my plane on the way there."

And, you gotta love the guy on his attitude on age.

He and Jagger turn 60 this year, drummer Charlie Watts will be 62 in June and guitarist Ron Wood, the baby of the band, turns 56 the same month. Critics have claimed they are too old to rock, but Richards said: "I don't care what anyone is saying. Man, we are never going to give it away. You tell them down there that Mr Richards is still very up for this gig."

Ok, so we love Mick and Keith no matter what. Always have. We found the live concert last night at Madison Square Garden, shown for free on HBO, nothing short of mesmerizing. There will likely be repeats in the coming weeks, don't miss it.

Update: Via Drudge, Mayor Bloomberg is fuming that Keith Richards and Ron Wood smoked a few cigarettes on stage while perfomring and sent cops to issue summonses but they had already split...lighten up, Mayor, it's only rock and roll.

Don't miss Pontificator on the necessity of the Democrats filibustering against all of Bush's right wing judicial nominees.

The San Francisco Chronicle takes aim at the Total Information Awareness program in an editorial today - here's some, but go read the whole thing.

Medical histories. Financial records, including individual transactions. Security cameras. Divorce files and college transcripts. The tracking of cell- phone calls and toll-booth passages. Reading habits, as culled from library records and bookstore purchases.

Bits of information from these and other sources, when combined, can produce a comprehensive profile of an individual. It also could be misleading, dangerously so, if some of the input is inaccurate. Yet the Bush administration appears determined to steam ahead toward an unprecedented system of data-mining under the direction of former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, a major figure in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal during the Reagan administration.

The prospect that an American can be identified as a suspect through a flawed database is particularly chilling in view of the USA Patriot Act, which gives authorities sweeping new powers to conduct searches without notifying the subjects -- and even detain "enemy combatants" without judicial oversight....

The issue is not whether Americans feel comfortable in giving vast new surveillance powers to President Bush, John Ashcroft or any other leader. The founding fathers knew the folly of trusting basic freedoms to the benevolence and wisdom of people who happen to be in power at any given moment.

"A government of laws," declared John Adams, our second president, "and not of men."

That admonition should apply to the government's latest attempt to exploit advancements in technology -- and fears of terrorism -- to track the everyday lives of Americans.

And read Sen. Patrick Leahy's letter to Ashcroft about how little Congress has been told about the data-mining plan, and what's wrong with it.

Moreover, as Federal law enforcement agencies obtain public source and proprietary data for mining, the sheer volume of information may make updating the data and checks for reliability and accuracy difficult, if not impossible. Reliance on data mining by law enforcement agencies may produce an increase in false leads and law enforcement mistakes. While the former is a waste of resources, the latter may result in mistaken arrests or surveillance. Such mistakes do occur, even without data-mining.1 In short, while the only ill effect of business reliance on outdated or incorrect information may be misdirected marketing efforts, data mining mistakes made by a law enforcement agency may result in misdirection or misallocation of limited government resources and devastating consequences for mistakenly targeted Americans.

The Denver Post is calling it " the largest war protest since Vietnam"--in huge letters, on the front page. Good for them.

Intervention Magazine has this first hand account by senior editor Regis T. Sabol, which begins:

From the grounds in front of the US Capitol, on the Mall, a sea of a quarter million Americans -- regardless of the number that the networks are reporting -- braved biting cold under a beaming sun to oppose the Bush regime's plan to invade Iraq "any day now." They came in fleets of buses, from cities large and small, from north and south, east and west. Twenty-five buses came from Brooklyn alone, with another 50 from the Big Apple itself. Minneapolis boasted a caravan of 45 buses while tiny Rhode Island had 15 buses, all carrying protestors to the Capitol. One bus traveled north from Gulf Port, Mississippi picking up passengers along the way in Alabama and delivering them to the center of resistance in the nation's capital.....

Here is the New York Time's account.

The Chronicle has this report of events in San Francisco. Check out this picture of the crowds. And here, in their own words, the protesters sound off on Bush.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Texas put two men to death last week and has 16 more scheduled for injection by the end of April, putting the state on a record-setting pace at a time when capital punishment has come under increased scrutiny elsewhere. Even as the decision to empty Illinois' death row continues to reverberate, and as the Texas Legislature prepares to deal with a new U.S. Supreme Court prohibition on executing the mentally retarded, the Lone Star state's death penalty system churns forward with machine-like efficiency.

Here are some stats on Texas:

"Of the 823 executions nationwide since [1976] Texas has carried out 291 -- or 35 percent. Nearly two-thirds of those executions have taken place in just the last six years. In 2002, Texas put 33 men to death, nearly half of the U.S. total and far more than Oklahoma, the second-busiest state, which killed seven people." "Since 1997, 186 have been executed. During that period, only eight months passed without an execution here. Another 442 men and eight women remain on death row."

16 more are scheduled for execution by May. We are going to tell the story of one of them later today, so please check back.

Check out Body and Soul's Strange Brew of headlines--showing that truth definitely can be stranger than fiction.

"Hundreds of thousands of Americans opposed to waging war in Iraq rallied on Saturday in several cities demanding the White House back down and give U.N. weapons inspectors a chance....."

"Though U.S. opinion polls have shown broad support for ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a Newsweek survey released on Saturday found 60 percent of Americans want to take more time to explore nonmilitary solutions.

"A TIME/CNN poll also found 49 percent of respondents thought Bush was doing a good job handling the Iraq situation, while 44 percent thought he was doing a poor job."

Here's a wrap-up with details of marches in U.S. cities and around the world.

Media Horse has the latest on Bush's continuing decline in approval ratings. And some praise for CNN's Aaron Brown who told viewers last week that none of the reasons justifying the first Gulf War are present this time around.

Update: My DD notes these are the lowest approval ratings since Bush took over the White House.

Don't forget, tonight HBO is broadcasting the Rolling Stones' Madison Square Garden concert live --for free. 9pm EST.

Update:8:20 p.m. MST: Gimme Shelter: War, children, is just a shot away...electrifying performance.

Put this on your calendars now: The Murder of Emmett Till will air on PBS Monday, January 20, 2003 at 9:00 pm, EST, check local listings for the time in your area.

A synopsis of the crime:

In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till, a teen from Chicago, didn't understand that he had broken the unwritten laws of the Jim Crow South until three days later, when two white men dragged him from his bed in the dead of night, beat him brutally and then shot him in the head. Although his killers were arrested and charged with murder, they were both acquitted quickly by an all-white, all-male jury. Shortly afterwards, the defendants sold their story, including a detailed account of how they murdered Till, to a journalist. The murder and the trial horrified the nation and the world. Till's death was a spark that helped mobilize the civil rights movement. Three months after his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, the Montgomery bus boycott began.

[note: we will be adding to this throughout the day]

"One protester held a sign that depicted King and read "I have a dream!" The sign's opposite side showed President Bush and read "I have a nightmare."

On the International Protests:

Moscow photo

Paris Photo

World-wide War Protest photos, courtesy BBC

Atrios has great pictures of today's war protesters from around the world. Big turnout--we are grateful and filled with pride for them. ( update: Per Atrios in the comments section, these photos are from the last protest march--he was clear, we misunderstood.)

Some of the slogans on banners:

A banner in Moscow declared: ''Iraq isn't your ranch Mr. Bush.''

In contrast, three dozen people showed up at a support the war rally at the Washington Monument.

Should Ashcroft be going for the death penalty for an attempted crime that was never completed?

That's what's happening in the trial of "Brian Regan, the former Air Force sergeant accused of attempted espionage on behalf of Iraq, Libya and China, and of mishandling national defense information." ABC Reporter Beverly Lumpkin notes,

Here are the two most significant facts about this case:

Regan is charged only with attempted espionage; and yet

The government is seeking the death penalty if he is convicted.

This, despite the fact that since the death penalty was reinstated for espionage in 1994, there have been 10 people convicted of completed acts of espionage, some gravely serious, for whom nevertheless the government did not seek death. "

The defense argues:

Why is the government so adamant that a man whose letters were so replete with spelling errors that they can't be read with a straight face, a man only charged with attempted espionage, should nevertheless face death if convicted? The defense team has made many impassioned arguments about this point. In one pleading, the defense wrote, "If the government has its way, Regan will be the first of scores of persons convicted of espionage even to be considered for execution since 1953, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death. … [T]he damage Regan is alleged to have caused is dramatically less than the harm caused by recent spies Robert Hanssen, Harold Nicholson and Ana Montes, and significantly less than that caused by every other person charged with espionage since enactment of the federal death penalty."

The case is in the jury selection (voir dire) stage now.

Update: Digby agrees this is overkill (sorry for the pun) and asks, what's next, the death penalty for double parking? He also points out, if the espionage was never committed, how can there be any victims?