Among them was a call for the government to set Parliamentary elections for next spring and enter into negotiations for other power-sharing changes.

Last year, Mr. Saakashvili and Parliament amended the Constitution to extend the Parliament’s term to next fall — officially, to align Parliament with the presidential election cycle — an act that the opposition said will make the legislature illegitimate when the term it was elected to expires in the spring.

“If we allow a sitting Parliament to extend its term for these months, this may happen again and again,” said Giorgi Khaindrava, a former government minister who is now in the opposition. “Changing their term while in office violates a fundamental principle of democratic systems.”

The demonstration signaled a significant degree of popular discontent with Mr. Saakashvili and his government, which inherited a country in near ruin four years ago and embarked upon an ambitious set of reforms.

Mr. Saakashvili, a lawyer educated at Columbia University, has steered his post-Soviet country sharply toward the West, seeking admission to NATO and the European Union, while moving against corruption at home, especially in the police.

He has often said he hoped to model his country’s development after the experience of the Eastern European countries that were once under the Kremlin’s yoke, and to bring democracy and free markets to the Caucasus, a region with a history of corrupt, brutal and autocratic governments.

He has set new standards for education, increased tax collection and revenue-generation, improved the readiness of the country’s once feeble army and repaired Soviet-era infrastructure to the degree that the country, once plagued by blackouts, now has a reliable electricity supply.

But some of the reforms have made him enemies, and he has alienated several prominent politicians, who find him domineering and abrasive. His opponents accuse him of hoarding and abusing power, and of running the nation through a clique that will neither tolerate dissent nor engage in dialogue with the opposition, which Mr. Saakashvili has repeatedly made clear he despises and considers weak.

“The biggest shortcoming for us,” he said in an interview on Wednesday, “is that that we failed to grow up a real, mature opposition. The problem with them is that they have no real national leaders.”

The arrest last month of a former defense minister who had criticized Mr. Saakashvili and accused him of crimes also galvanized the opposition. The former minister later recanted on national television and was freed on bail, and left Georgia this week under circumstances still in dispute.

The government insists that the former minister was guilty. But the case has raised questions about whether the police and prosecutors had received political instructions, which the government strongly denies.

The government also faces pressure from rising prices and lingering underemployment, and over complaints about a weak judiciary that many government officials concede lacks independence and which the opposition says remains corrupt. Economic conditions remain difficult enough that many Georgians travel abroad for work.

Western diplomats said their initial estimates put the crowd at 40,000 to 50,000 people; the opposition claimed to have assembled at least 100,000. Either number rivaled the size of the demonstrations that brought Mr. Saakashvili to power and vastly exceeded the government’s predictions.

“Proceed as if we’re not going out of business,” said Tom Alex, the group’s president.

But he did not sound confident. In Austin, 360 miles east, the state’s general land commissioner was collecting bids to do what conservationists say is all but unheard of — selling a state wildlife preserve to a private buyer.

The property, which could be sold as soon as Tuesday, is the Christmas Mountains Ranch, a 9,270-acre tract abutting Big Bend National Park near the Rio Grande. It was given to the state in 1991 and leased to the nonprofit association of local residents to patrol.

The pending sale of the property, which is limestone hills and Chihuahuan Desert scrublands, has created an uproar.

The dispute pits the donors of the land, the Conservation Fund and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, against a pistol-packing commissioner adamant about preserving hunting and firearms rights on the property, even at the cost of denying the land to the National Park Service, although Texas ranks 44th in park land.

The state has less than 2 percent of its area in protected state and federal land, according to the Trust for Public Land, a conservation group.

“We have never encountered this before,” said the president of the Conservation Fund, Larry Seltzer, voicing hope that Texas would still back off the sale or convey the preserve to the Park Service, which is seeking Congressional authorization to acquire it.

The state’s land commissioner, Jerry Patterson, who has been pushing the sale, promised, “We’re going ahead with the auction.” But Mr. Patterson has called a news conference for Monday to announce the bids and discuss a possible compromise.

The wilderness in dispute is little known to Texans. Even Mr. Patterson said he had never set foot there, although he said he had flown low over it at the controls of his plane.

Named, one legend has it, by long-ago travelers who spent a winter holiday there, the Christmas Mountains — hills, actually — share a storied corner of Texas where Comanches staged moonlight border raids, the Mexican revolution spilled onto American soil in the early 20th century and miners hollowed the desert for quicksilver ore.

Today, the preserve lies largely inaccessible within the 225,000 acres of posted homesteads known as Terlingua Ranch, and sandwiched between the 800,000 acres of Big Bend National Park and the 300,000 acres of nearby Big Bend Ranch State Park.

A permanent conservation easement attached to the property when it was given to the state bars buildings and any development, power or telephone lines, mining, off-road vehicles or any improvement of the unpaved roads. Hunting was allowed, but only to “maintain a sustainable population of healthy native species.”

Over the years, poachers depleted the game. But a drive through the preserve with Mr. Alex, an archaeologist, and his wife, Betty, a wildlife biologist, showed a flourishing desert ecoculture of quail, mule deer, mice and the occasional bobcat and tarantula. The flora include oaks and junipers in the canyons, cactuses and a pharmacoepia of medicinal plants.

Initially welcomed by Democrats and Republicans alike when it was announced in September, Mr. Mukasey’s nomination appeared close to being derailed this week over his repeated refusal to declare to senators that the interrogation technique known as waterboarding was torture. Waterboarding simulates drowning and is reported to have been used by the C.I.A. against a few top leaders of Al Qaeda.

Five Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, including its chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, have announced their intention to oppose the nomination when it comes to a vote before the panel. The vote is now scheduled for Tuesday.

In declaring Friday that he would vote against Mr. Mukasey, Mr. Leahy said that “no American should need a classified briefing to determine whether waterboarding is torture.”

“I like Michael Mukasey,” Mr. Leahy added. “I wish that I could support his nomination. But I cannot.”

The White House welcomed the announcement by Mrs. Feinstein and Mr. Schumer, which appeared to give Mr. Mukasey the margin of support he needed to win approval in the Judiciary Committee, which has 10 Democrats and 9 Republicans.

Lawmakers had predicted that if Mr. Mukasey’s nomination was moved to the full Senate, he would easily be confirmed to replace Alberto R. Gonzales, who stepped down in September in the wake of a series of scandals.

“Judge Mukasey is exceptionally qualified and would be an outstanding attorney general,” a White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said late Friday. “He deserves a vote from the full Senate, where we are confident he would be confirmed.”

Mr. Schumer, who had proposed Mr. Mukasey’s name to the White House for the Justice Department post and had initially championed his nomination, was under increasing pressure from all sides this week to make clear where he stood. His meeting with Mr. Mukasey appeared to be a last-minute effort to rescue the nomination.

Mr. Schumer’s role as the main Democratic champion of the nominee had become especially thorny for him when Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, announced this week that he would oppose Mr. Mukasey, while the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, suggested that he, too, would vote against the nomination because of Mr. Mukasey’s unwillingness to label waterboarding as torture.

Democratic Congressional aides said Mrs. Feinstein, who has broken ranks with her party’s leaders in the past, decided earlier in the week that she would support Mr. Mukasey’s nomination and withheld an announcement until Friday, in coordination with Mr. Schumer.

Not the hard prison labor you might expect, but at an average age of 74 — with the oldest at 88 — these were not typical inmates. Work was kept light, and if any felt ill, they could lie down nearby on a tatami mat. Prescription drugs, wheeled walkers and a stretcher were also kept on hand, as well as a box of “discreet, underwearlike” adult diapers.

“In our workshop for the elderly, we definitely receive preferential treatment,” said one 76-year-old, who works six hours a day, or two hours less than younger inmates with more strenuous jobs. “In general, you know, the conditions are much, much more severe.”

Not the hard prison labor you might expect, but at an average age of 74 — with the oldest at 88 — these were not typical inmates. Work was kept light, and if any felt ill, they could lie down nearby on a tatami mat. Prescription drugs, wheeled walkers and a stretcher were also kept on hand, as well as a box of “discreet, underwearlike” adult diapers.

“In our workshop for the elderly, we definitely receive preferential treatment,” said one 76-year-old, who works six hours a day, or two hours less than younger inmates with more strenuous jobs. “In general, you know, the conditions are much, much more severe.”

Not the hard prison labor you might expect, but at an average age of 74 — with the oldest at 88 — these were not typical inmates. Work was kept light, and if any felt ill, they could lie down nearby on a tatami mat. Prescription drugs, wheeled walkers and a stretcher were also kept on hand, as well as a box of “discreet, underwearlike” adult diapers.

“In our workshop for the elderly, we definitely receive preferential treatment,” said one 76-year-old, who works six hours a day, or two hours less than younger inmates with more strenuous jobs. “In general, you know, the conditions are much, much more severe.”

Not the hard prison labor you might expect, but at an average age of 74 — with the oldest at 88 — these were not typical inmates. Work was kept light, and if any felt ill, they could lie down nearby on a tatami mat. Prescription drugs, wheeled walkers and a stretcher were also kept on hand, as well as a box of “discreet, underwearlike” adult diapers.

“In our workshop for the elderly, we definitely receive preferential treatment,” said one 76-year-old, who works six hours a day, or two hours less than younger inmates with more strenuous jobs. “In general, you know, the conditions are much, much more severe.”

Not the hard prison labor you might expect, but at an average age of 74 — with the oldest at 88 — these were not typical inmates. Work was kept light, and if any felt ill, they could lie down nearby on a tatami mat. Prescription drugs, wheeled walkers and a stretcher were also kept on hand, as well as a box of “discreet, underwearlike” adult diapers.

“In our workshop for the elderly, we definitely receive preferential treatment,” said one 76-year-old, who works six hours a day, or two hours less than younger inmates with more strenuous jobs. “In general, you know, the conditions are much, much more severe.”

Not the hard prison labor you might expect, but at an average age of 74 — with the oldest at 88 — these were not typical inmates. Work was kept light, and if any felt ill, they could lie down nearby on a tatami mat. Prescription drugs, wheeled walkers and a stretcher were also kept on hand, as well as a box of “discreet, underwearlike” adult diapers.

“In our workshop for the elderly, we definitely receive preferential treatment,” said one 76-year-old, who works six hours a day, or two hours less than younger inmates with more strenuous jobs. “In general, you know, the conditions are much, much more severe.”