They were also outnumbered in North Carolina.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll emails: “As Richard Geno and I discussed in my video (and I saw firsthand), the pro-socialized medicine protesters were very much outnumbered in San Jose on Sunday. Scroll to about 5:20 in the video for our conversation, as well as the footage I shot at the scene.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader points out that last time ACORN sent out the troops they were outnumbered by the media. Yeah, but the media are their troops too, right? So I’m not sure that one counts . . . .

Maybe Honduras should ask for foreign volunteers to help defend it. A sort of Lincoln Brigade . . . .

But hey, it’s not as if Marshall pretends to be balanced or nonpartisan. And there are plenty of other bloggers to cover it. On the other hand, a lot of Big Media folks rely too narrowly on TPM and Kos. . . .

My Capresso grinder, by the way, just quit working the other day. I mean, when you turn it on it makes noises and things go round and round, but somehow no coffee gets ground. I took it apart, cleaned everything and saw no problems, and put it back together, but it still doesn’t work. Maybe I’ll go with that KitchenAid.

Much of the White House press corps spent the Fourth schmoozing with White House staffers, catching performances by the Foo Fighters and Jimmy Fallon, and watching the fireworks from the most exclusive vantage point in the D.C. metro area, all off the record—not to mention off-the-Facebook and off-the-Twitter. These are the same people who just a week ago were whining in the press briefing about Obama’s malicious and dastardly attempts to “control the press.” . . .

There is a cosmic irony at work here: The party was “closed press.” (Ha!) It was covered, under onerous restrictions, by a pool reporter—the Baltimore Sun’s Paul West. West was ushered in by White House staffers for a mere 40 minutes, so he could record the president’s remarks. He was kept in a pen so that he wouldn’t run amok and interview someone. He shouted questions at Obama as he worked the rope line, which the president ignored. Then he was taken away. West wrote up his blindered account of the party and then e-mailed it to the White House press corps, many of whom were actually at the party, outside of the pen, hanging out with all the other guests. And then, because they had temporarily signed away the right to do their jobs in exchange for facetime with staffers, a few cold Stoudt’s American Pale Ales, and some corn on the cob, their news organizations picked up that pool report and used it to tell their readers what happened at the party. This is how the press covers the White House.

Covers, sucks up to, whatever. Jack Shafer, call your office!

Which means, I don’t have to have the scales fall from my eyes over the President’s decision to claim “post-acquittal detention power.” To be sure, I agree with Mark Kleiman (no, that is not a typo) that we can keep prisoners of war for as long as necessary, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Obama Administration is essentially going to engage in show trials when it comes to a lot of the detainees affected by its most recent decision on detainee policy. In the strictest sense, the legal status of the detainees is affected by whether they are found guilty or not-guilty in these trials, but as Kleiman writes, if someone has engaged in warfare against the United States, that person “should be held as long as the conflict lasts, even if that turns out to be forever.” So irrespective of the outcome of a trial, the defendant will remain in prison, and that will mean that many of those trials are going to have no effect whatsoever on the lives of the defendants in question. And that means that the Obama Administration’s guarantee of a fair trial or due process for these defendants is utterly meaningless.

And yet, before the election it was a matter of fierce moral urgency. Plus this: “It looks like Dick Cheney was right. Despite Candidate Obama’s promises, President Obama does not have, and never had any intention whatsoever to give up the powers of the ‘Imperial Presidency.’”

And I love this:

Investigators asked Trinity whether he was claiming executive privilege, something that could only be authorized by the president. Trinity answered again that it was a White House “prerogative.” When the investigators pointed out that, in the words of one aide, “there is no legal basis whatsoever” for such a claim, Trinity still declined to answer.

Remember the fierce moral urgency of replacing Bush with Obama so we’d see an end to this sort of thing? I do . . . .

We’re just going to ignore the phrase “public journalists,” OK? It’s a bizarre formulation — as opposed to, what, private journalists? — but he probably meant something like “citizen journalists,” and we’ll just mark it down to speaking off the cuff. But why, representative of us readers, is it kind of unfortunate that Schultz gave Jarvis a lot of ink? Back to Diadiun:

“… which I thought was kind of unfortunate because Connie’s column is read by 25- or 30,000 people a month, which has to be many times more than this guy gets on his blog, and she gave him more publicity through that column than he would get on his own anytime.”

Thirty thousand readers a month “has to be many times” what Jarvis gets on his blog? Wait, that sounds like one of those unsourced, unreported assumptions you might get from … from … A BLOGGER! Diadiun actually started to say “is,” but than corrected himself and phrased it “has to be.” That was an admission, however subconscious, that he didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. He was guessing to make his point.

Why is it so common for print people who criticize the low standards of the Web to go on the Web and say and write things they would never say or write in print? Does Diadiun just guess at stuff in his newspaper column?

Since Jarvis has more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, I would guess that Schultz’s 30,000 monthly readers, as reported by Diadiun, do not dwarf Jarvis’ readership. But I don’t like to guess — even in a blog! — so I did something crazy. I got all newspapery and responsible. I asked Jarvis how many readers he has.

“My web stats say I had 106,000 unique vistors in May,” Jarvis answered via e-mail. “I had about 20,000 RSS readers, last I knew,” though he confessed to having forgotten his password to re-check that figure.

I suspect that a lot of bigger-deal columnists than Diadiun have smaller readerships than Jarvis’s. Newspaper circulation numbers are padded to begin with, but those numbers don’t reflect how many people read any particular part of the paper. Does everyone who picks up the New York Times turn to Maureen Dowd? I doubt it. But everyone who reads Jeff Jarvis reads Jeff Jarvis.

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle reports: “I’m not going to comment much on my employer’s salons except to say that I’ve been to them, and there’s no scandal there. At the paid ones, where the journalists talk, the journalists dictate what we say, and the sponsors are told they have no control. At the unpaid salons, it’s–well, it’s an off the record briefing, of the sort that every other journalist is well familiar with. Either way, I’ve never said or done anything that I wouldn’t say at a regular interview, and neither have the other journalists.”

Looks to me like David Bradley is leaving no revenue source untapped. . . .

UPDATE: Viewers liked Kotkin’s use of the term “Soft Putinism” to describe today’s politicized media. I prefer the term “An Army of Ezra Kleins.” . . .

UPDATE: Locusts.

Plus, Best Americana Music of the Year… So Far. The latter reminds me that the Nebraska Guitar Militia really needs to put out another album.