In the future, I may have to reiterate the Northern part of Northern Ireland when I talk about the concepts of sovereignty and federalism.

However, if you ever pull a stunt like showing up in my office to conduct a three-hour debate over my grading policy you can rest assured that the one thing you shouldn’t expect as a consequence is more lenient grading from that point forward. Moreover, I have a very strong suspicion that most college professors would take the same position.

I thought most of the remaining cast did admirable jobs as well. I’ve seen some criticism of Ellen Page’s character, Quaid’s cynical daughter Vanessa, being essentially another riff on Juno McGuff, which seems a bit unfair to me; other than being high school kids who aren’t as smart as they think they are (that last part may be redundant), there isn’t a lot of commonality; Vanessa strikes me as Tracy Flick meets Mary Richards, complete with the bad dinner parties, with a dash of Alex Keaton for good measure (left unexplained is how Vanessa picked up the apparently-recessive Republican gene in her family), while Juno’s at least a partially-functional wannabe hipster. I also enjoyed Thomas Hayden Church’s turn as Quaid’s loser brother Chuck and the small role played by David Denman, formerly Roy on The Office.

The only character I really didn’t get was Sarah Jessica Parker’s, who to my mind hasn’t done anything worthwhile on the screen since 1995 or so (I count her role in L.A. Story as the ditzy So-Cal skater girl SanDeE* as the apparent pinnacle of her acting career, although she was also pretty good in Extreme Measures); it’s certainly not all that clear why Quaid would be be drawn to Parker’s character except out of sheer laziness in finding someone else to date, although her character’s motivations are somewhat clearer. The vague feeling she’s going to go blab it all in the next scene in graphic detail to Samantha, Miranda, and whatever-the-hell-Kristin-Davis’-character-is-called doesn’t exactly help either. But my Parker issues didn’t detract overly much from the film, which really doesn’t dwell on her character much anyway, as this movie operates on the rule that the female romantic lead has no scenes that don’t in some way relate to her romance with the male lead, a rule which I think I read in the blogosphere years ago but can no longer find. So, overall, I recommend the film.

It’s extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this. They are not as interested in getting beyond the racial question, in changing the hopes and dreams of black America, as they are in exploiting it for partisan advantage. Their response to the first major black candidate for president tackling the old racial politics? “We don’t believe him.”

To my mind, the “cynicism” is warranted (and, by the way, it’s a cheap shot to lump Glenn Reynolds—who has spoken very positively of other black Democrats, like Harold Ford—in with the Corner crowd and the odious Michelle Malkin) because, fundamentally, the question is which Obama is genuine. He’s spent two decades in Jeremiah Wright’s pews, and there are two plausible interpretations of that: he sat there all that time thinking “bullshit, bullshit, bullshit” while Wright preached his nonsense about CIA conspiracies to infect blacks with AIDS and spread crack in the inner cities and was being politically expedient in using that as a platform for reaching out to a black community skeptical of his African-American bona fides as a half-white, half-black-but-not-black-American politician, or he’s being politically expedient now reaching out to whites and Hispanics who are rather more troubled by Wright’s bullshit (and the related bullshit spread by Sharpton and Jackson) than he genuinely is. Neither interpretation squares well with the Sullivanesque interpretation of Obama as the Great Black Hope who will unite all the races in the quest for the one ring to rule them all, or at least a quick exit from Iraq or something.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Obama is a bad person or isn’t telling the truth now; hell, even if he is a liar on this one issue he’s still an order of magnitude more genuine a person than Hillary Clinton, who skillfully combines all of her husband’s artistry for compulsive dishonesty with none of the used-car-salesman charm that made it at least vaguely palatable. But it’s somewhat harder to square Obama the presidential candidate with Obama the inner-city politician than it is to square, say, Ford, who never had to pander as much to the black establishment (in large part because of his father’s coattails) before becoming a DLC-style centrist in Washington.

Update: Timothy Sandefur makes largely the same points, but far more eloquently (particularly with 100% fewer uses of the word “bullshit”), while Johnathan Pierce at Samizdata critiques another part of Sullivan’s argument.

Now that Childers has placed first in the first round of the contest, it appears the gloves have come off with GOP ads linking Childers to two recent winners of the not-very-coveted National Journal “most liberal senator” award, John F. Kerry and Barack Obama. Childers is now trying to distance himself from the national Democratic party and Barack Obama in particular, but it’s questionable how effective that tactic will be over the course of the campaign. Childers also has to contend with the real likelihood that he will win the special election amid low turnout, only to be turfed out in six months when the presidential contest will bring out more of those GOP-leaning voters and Davis will have a big stack of roll-call votes showing Childers having an 80%+ agreement in his voting record with Nancy Pelosi; I can almost imagine the ads now.

That said, I will quibble with Dan Drezner’s half-suggestion that Obama run with the “it’ll only save you $30” talking point. My general feeling is that when politicians have belittled dollar figures in the past—most notably when the first $300 tax rebate was being proposed way-back-when (2002?)—voters outside the beltway bubble generally seem to think that they have better ideas about how to spend the money than folks in Washington do, especially when they're not making a six-figure government salary. That said, I think the talking point works better when it’s a relatively non-transparent tax like the 18.4¢/gal federal gasoline excise tax that generally isn’t broken out on receipts rather than a check that shows up in the mail.

It’s an incredible story and I’m honored to have helped raise awareness about Burma’s plight. Over all it was a really fun and eye-opening experience!

As Joel McHale would say, she’s famous for having a big ass and a sex tape—not for having a high IQ.

McCain’s tax cuts—which include the extension of the Bush tax cut and the repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax, neither of which are included on CAP‘s cool McCain thermometer—dwarf the spending plans of the Democrats before you even look into his programs (or his war agenda). But that’s rarely mentioned, because the media doesn’t really view tax cuts as spending in the way they view new social programs as spending. [emphasis added]

I’ll hazard a guess that outside Klein’s brain, nobody views tax cuts in general as government spending. I suppose a refundable tax credit, like the earned income tax credit, would be a form of government spending—but that’s not a “tax cut” in the same sense that reducing one’s tax liability (say, by repealing the AMT) is a tax cut.

I propose a very simple criterion for government spending: if the government cuts you a check for more money than you paid in tax withholding and estimated tax contributions, that excess is government spending. The rest… well, that’s taxes.

Incidentally, the guy is trying the “I didn’t know who these people were” defense on for size, but something doesn’t quite ring true:

“I’ll speak before any group that invites me,” [Republican nomination-seeker Tony] Zirkle said Monday. “I’ve spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta.” ...

Zirkle said he did not know much about the neo-Nazi group and that his intention was to talk on his concern about “the targeting of young white women and for pornography and prostitution.” ...

The event was not the first time Zirkle has raised controversy on race issues. In March, Zirkle raised the idea of segregating races in separate states. Zirkle said Tuesday he’s not advocating segregation, but said desegregation has been a failure.

Well, as long as he’s not advocating segregation, just proposing it, I guess that’s OK. (I guess that’s of the opposite ilk as denouncing-without-rejection.)

Zirkle is apparently also not a fan of sex toys, using the term “divorce aids” as a term for dildos—apparently unironically, considering he himself is one (yes, I’ve used that joke before). A direct quote from his demented website:

I may also call attention to the fact that one of the biggest commercial frauds is that divorce aids market themselves as being for “novelty purposes only” so that they can avoid all consumer safety inspections; yet ,they then go to court and claim they have a 1st Amendment so called right to privacy to abuse their bodies. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19333870/page/2/ Who knows what toxic chemicals these women are inserting into the most intimate areas of their bodies and how many men chase children because they can not find comfort from an adult women. [sic]

This guy’s campaign is the gift that keeps on giving.

REMINDER: 2008 Ole Miss Football Renewal Deadline

Alas, I’m not one of those rich alumni who can afford to jet in from Laredo to Oxford seven or eight times a year. Or even once for that matter.

So if Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), who comes close to calling former President Clinton a racist, who believes that African Americans think that the Clintons “are committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win,” who says these things in multiple venues (Reuters, the New York Times).... still won’t endorse and still won’t call for Clinton to drop out, should it surprise us that other superdelegates are even more shy?

Personally my suspicion is that a large part of the non-commitment by the superdelegates is that it goes against the way politicians deal with the tough issues—in large packs like roll-call votes where they can be at least somewhat anonymous. There is no “safe vote” now—or at least there’s nothing that is obviously the safe vote—so why commit now when in a few weeks you might have the political cover to commit after the heat is over?

It’s so hard to switch jobs. Job mobility is so low that you can’t salve your ego by telling yourself that your current job is merely a waystop en route to something better.

Academics have virtually no control over where they live. They usually seem to go where the best job is, regardless of whether or not the local area suits them. In many cases, this further focuses them inward on academia, because there aren’t all that many other people around who share their interests.

[I]t’s all terribly zero sum. Any article a colleague gets into a good journal is one less slot for your articles; any good tenure-track job secured by a friend is one less job you an apply to. All industries involve competition for market share, of course, but few have such a fixed supply of both jobs and customers.

Another important factor identified by one of Megan’s commenters is the incentive structure of the position itself:

People with PhD’s are [not] trained to be teachers. They’re trained to research—whether that research be population migrations in sub-Saharan Africa or Syriac poetry. The only way one has any possibility of “moving up’’ in the academy is to publish books or articles that few will read but those who do read them have a good amount of control over your future employment. This research is a job in itself, and it easily consumes 80 hours a week.

Yet within the broader world (and among your students) you are known primarily as a teacher. You teach graduate and undergraduate courses, you grade essays or problem sets, you meet with students, you participate on committees. Many academics find this quite meaningful and another job unto itself, but it has little or nothing to do with promotions, ability to change jobs, etc.

Certainly as I’ve considered tenure-track positions over the last four years these issues have been at the front of my mind. At the low end of the perceived status hierarchy, the incentive structures for gaining tenure and getting another job are almost entirely non-overlapping (to the point that some items that count as tenurable “research” at my future institution wouldn’t count at all in any category when being considered for a position at another institution)—in large part because there are no external metrics for anything but research. Another employer has no real way to determine whether or not I’m a good teacher except (a) by reading the teaching evaluations which I provide to them (and which are inevitably cherry-picked to include the most positive evaluations) out of any institutional context, (b) by presuming that if I weren’t a good teacher I wouldn’t have a job, or (c) by bringing me in and having me teach a class (which has its own problems). Service has even less in terms of definable metrics.

Further, the first and second factors I borrowed from Megan overlap. There is a non-negligible chance that even if I were to decide the first day I arrived at my future job that I hated it and wanted out, I could nonetheless not be able to secure another job but, because of the non-overlapping criteria for tenure and mobility, get tenure—at which point the potential mobility for academics drops even further, particularly in the upward direction on the status ladder (downward parachutes tend to have softer landings as long as you’re not at the bottom to begin with). This fear isn’t entirely rational, in that there are other job options for most academics (for-profit teaching, community colleges, secondary-school teaching accreditation, and non-academic work), but given that the academic job market is arbitrary and capricious there is no guarantee that merit (which to external observers is generally defined as “count and placement of peer-reviewed publications” and little else) will win out over less merit-based factors, such as perceived political leanings, the status of the institution where the person is teaching at, where the person got their undergraduate degree, etc.

1. Superbad
2. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
3. Walk Hard (tie)
   Forgetting Sarah Marshall (tie)
   Talladega Nights (tie)
6. Knocked Up (which I found amusing but not hilarious)
7. Anchorman (which I really didn’t get at all)

Considering that the top five movies on that list are among the ten funniest movies of the past decade, that’s hardly a bad list for FSM to be on.

The other thing I’d note is that clearly Segel has most heterosexual guys’ dream job. He gets to make out with Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell in the same movie, and he gets to make out with Alyson Hannigan every week. Personally I’d try to figure out a way to get that job without having to go full frontal in two scenes, but I suppose sacrifices must be made.

Update: Reader Brian Baggett reviews the film, as does Alan Sepinwall (whose work I’ve enjoyed since his NYPD Blue reviews on Usenet in the 1990s).

Also, Ezra Klein quibbles with part of the ending of the film. Potential minor spoilers follow:

I also blame the president for having to park farther away on St. Charles than I normally do this morning, even though it’s probably really just due to my arriving later than usual and the campus being crawling with admits checking out the university before forking over their parents’ hard-earned bucks to the Tulane Educational Fund.

My clip-on sunglasses and glasses case have also disappeared into the ether. I have rather less hope of finding them, but given that the clip-ons were less than $10 at Wal-Mart I’m less worried about them.

Update: I found the headset this afternoon—it had somehow ended up on a shelf of the bookcase my charger is on behind the books. And I replaced the clipons at the Wal-Mart in Elmwood this afternoon. All is now right in my world. Well, as right as ever.

• As a matter of general principle, lame-duck DPLs shouldn’t be making appointments. This issue is ameliorated somewhat because DPL delegations—unlike “midnight judges”—can be revoked at any time, but it strikes me that whatever legitimacy a DPL has from the developers evaporates once a new DPL-elect has been designated. I can only speculate why this happened in this case, so I won’t bother.
• Second, while Debian has a very strong tradition of developer sovereignty, with many aspects of the project being self-organized rather than originating with appointments from upon high, it seems to me that certain aspects of core infrastructure can’t be managed in this way.
• Third, the appointment does little to relieve the excessive concentration of power in the core of Debian; if anything, Anthony Towns’ apparent resignation in the wake of Jörg’s appointment worsens the situation. Ensuring there is proper vetting of people with access to important infrastructure is important, but at the same time I find it difficult to believe that there are only a half-dozen or so Debian developers who are trustworthy enough to be system administrators, account managers, or archive maintainers (several of them occupying overlapping positions). That, rather than a lack of technical tools, has been a problem of note within Debian since, oh, the days of my youthful vigor within Debian (which are long since past).

In any event, congratulations to all the new Debian developers—and I’ll avoid pondering for too long why one person’s appointment to an unrelated group would suddenly break the logjam of developer application approvals.

The only thing the signatories got wrong was where to send the letter. The letter should have been addressed to the American public. After all, this debate, which came in the flurry of all the tabloid journalism of the past several weeks, was the most-watched of the 2008 presidential campaign. The public got what it wanted.

I’d add the caveat that if there were any substantive policy differences of consequence between Clinton and Obama, this might actually be a worthwhile complaint about the Pennsylvania debate. However the policy debate at present between the two candidates is over minor semantic differences between public policy agendas at levels of detail that will have to be negotiated with other policy actors years down the road. I dare say the nuances of the differences between the two candidates’ health care policies will have the same impact on the average American as whether or not Obama wears a flag pin or not.

Actually, given chaos theory the presence or absence of a flag pin might actually impact the weather in six years’ time. No such hope exists for whether or not there is an individual mandate buried in the health care plan that gets sent to the Hill and then immediately thereon to the nearest shredder.

And since when is a 69 a failing grade? Are these idiots on crack? (And by “idiots” I mean the school board; I already can guess the answer for the students.)

Memphis’s Interstate BBQ is the best airport joint in America btw. It’s near gate B14—look for the long line of NWA pilots!

The real reason to fly through Memphis is the Lenny’s in the main part of the B concourse (near gate B3 I think). Either way, most of the guys in line in Memphis are probably Pinnacle pilots, not Northwest folks.

As for the “goner” status of the Memphis hub for Northwest, first Delta will have to figure out how to ditch all their regional jet contracts and find a way to continue Northwest’s tradition of soaking Memphis consumers without keeping the same availability of nonstop flights and rolling out the red carpet for Southwest—all those Shelby plates on cars at airport lots in LIT and BNA are just a hint of the level of business they could do out of Memphis against a retreating Delta.

I just finished listening to an abridged version of Clinton’s autobiography (I just couldn’t commit to the full thing). There are two things that are glaringly clear. First, it’s all the evil “far right’s” fault. Everything. It is never Clinton’s fault. Second, and more relevant here, is that in 1992, Clinton was running a VERY similar campaign to Obama. Had Hillary been in the race, there is no doubt that he would be have mocked her as the establishment candidate. He would have been right, and he would have won. He would have done so using words, which he was at one point pretty good at. And he would have argued that a new generation was ready to have a turn in Washington. Sound familiar?

The Hornets on Tuesday night reached a goal that seemed impossible just three short months ago: pushing the team’s average attendance past the magic 14,735 opt-out number in the franchise’s lease agreement.

It came after the Hornets registered their sixth consecutive sellout and their 12th in the past 17 games as 17,388 fans saw the Hornets beat the Los Angeles Clippers 114–92 to win the franchise’s first division title, secure at least the No.2 seed in the upcoming playoffs and push their average attendance to 14,738 since Dec. 1.

But don’t worry, George, a year’s absence from the NBA will just make Seattle’s hearts grow fonder (and consequently your wallet fatter when you ditch town like we all know you will).