Ok, somebody riddle me this: why would you go to the trouble of producing campaign signs that call yourself by two different names? And, yes, Ward 7 city councilwoman Margaret Barrett-Simon, I’m asking you:

I’m at a loss…

I can appreciate the value of this Debian package to the fairer sex, but I have to admit the disclaimer is pretty amusing:

NOTE: This program is not a reliable contraceptive method. It does neither help to prevent sexual transmision diseases like AIDS. It is just an electronic means of keeping track of some of your medical data and extract some statistical conclusions from them. You cannot consider this program as a substitute for your gynecologist in any way. [emphasis mine]

I think if you’re the sort of person who would confuse a computer program with the Pill, a condom, or a gynecologist, the disclaimer really isn’t going to help you very much.

Saturday’s New York Times reports on the withdrawal of the Christian Democratic Union from Italy’s center-right coalition government under Silvio Berluconi. The withdrawal may lead to either a new government or fresh elections, the latter of which would probably favor a center-left coalition under former prime minister Romano Prodi. The CDU, however, is sending mixed signals about its withdrawal, so it’s possible Berlusconi will be able to maintain the coalition if he makes some policy changes.

As James Joyner points out, Italy hasn’t exactly been known for stable post-war governments, so if Berlusconi’s coalition collapses, it would hardly be unprecedented. (Italy manages to muddle through the instability largely because it has a remarkably strong civil service.)

I really love it when my students give me extra work to do—in this case, an hour of fighting with OCR software and Word’s “compare documents” feature so I have evidence to take to the dean on Monday. To coin a phrase, I plan to shoot ‘em all and let the Honor Council sort ‘em out.

John Quiggin asks, “Why hasn’t Labour introduced preferential (single transferable) voting in Britain?” It’s actually a fairly good question, although I think Quiggin answers it later in his post:

Sooner or later, there will be a hung Parliament, and the price of LDP support will be full-scale proportional representation. If Labour introduced preferential voting without being forced to, it would not only cement LDP support but would greatly weaken the case for PR.

Labour, however, doesn’t need to make a deal yet—and, judging from the past 100 years of British electoral history, a hung parliament where Labour needs the LDP either to form a coalition or to sustain a minority government isn’t likely to come about anytime soon. So why help the LibDems today if you can put off an accomodation until later, perhaps much later?

Jacqueline has two completely NSFW quizzes for her readers. I’m not entirely sure what my scores (which you will pry from my cold, dead fingers) said about me.

It’s probably not good when your boss reads something in the newspaper he doesn’t like:

President Bush said Thursday that he had been surprised to learn in the newspaper of his administration’s decision last week to require Americans to have passports to enter the country from Mexico or Canada by 2008. He said he had asked the State and Homeland Security Departments to look into other means of tightening border security.

I’m not at all convinced that passports are really any more secure than driver’s licenses anyway; my passport (from September 1998) doesn’t have any biometric data on it whatsoever, and neither does my 2004-vintage driver’s license. That said, I’m not sure that requiring passports will increase delays at the border—checking a passport shouldn’t take any more time than checking any other photo ID, unless for some reason the government insists on stamping the passport.

Keith Taylor has a discussion of a number of Bill Bryson’s books up at Dean’s World; like Taylor, I’m a big fan of Bryson’s writing, although I haven’t gotten around to reading a few of his more recent books yet.

As James Joyner notes, the Census Bureau today released statistics on the estimated growth rates of U.S. states and counties; the nitty-gritty is at the Census Bureau website, while the fastest-growing counties are the focus of attention for many in the media. Only one Mississippi county, DeSoto County (bordering Memphis), ranked in the top-100 nationwide in growth.

To flex my R skills, I put together a map of Mississippi counties and their growth rates, reproduced below the fold.

As you might have expected, among the fastest-growing counties were the suburban counties—DeSoto County near Memphis, Rankin County and Madison County near Jackson, and the Gulf Coast counties (Harrison, Hancock, and Jackson). Absolutely stunning is the turnaround in Tunica County, the only Delta county to post a positive growth rate; it’s growing at a 9% clip. Meanwhile, the hollowing-out of the Pine Belt, much of the hill country, and most of the Delta continues apace.

Steven Taylor notes that both houses of Connecticut’s legislature have approved civil unions bills in the past week, while James Joyner links a Reuters piece on the introduction of a same-sex civil unions bill with bipartisan support in the Oregon legislature. No word yet on when the Mississippi legislature plans to get in on this trend…

James Joyner has been pulling together various articles detailing which of our elected representatives have relatives on the campaign payroll. Suffice it to say that Sanders and DeLay aren’t the only ones…

Previous discussion here.

Edgar Ray Killen, the man due to be tried for the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman this summer, apparently checked out of the hospital today after a month’s recovery from being smited while out on a hunting expedition near his home.

May his recovery continue with all deliberate speed so he can be tried, convicted, and rot away in Parchman as he undoubtedly deserves.

James Joyner and Jeff Jarvis are up in arms that Fox network censors have allegedly insisted that Pamela Anderson’s nipples be “taped down” on her new sitcom Stacked that debuted tonight (without my viewership), lest viewers be offended by her attributes sticking out.

While I agree with the general principle at stake here—indeed, who is going to tune into a show starring Anderson who doesn’t want to see her nipples?—I am forced to wonder why this problem exists in the first place. I suppose the issue could simply be that soundstages for TV shows are notoriously chilly, to compensate for the heat radiated by the lights and other equipment, or it could be that Anderson has atypically attentive nipples*—I know of a few young women with this “problem” myself, and it’s not one you can really point out to them.

I guess the moral of the story is to let the nipples soar; besides, the show will probably be canned in six weeks anyway.

And so it begins… the round of newspaper stories saying “my congressman is too as corrupt as your congressman.” First up, the Bennington Banner finds U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, DEIN-Vt., having a bit of a DeLay problem of his own:

Rep. Bernard Sanders used campaign donations to pay his wife and stepdaughter more than $150,000 for campaign-related work since 2000, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Jane O’Meara Sanders, his wife, received $91,020 between 2002 and 2004 for “consultation” and for negotiating the purchase of television and radio time-slots for Sanders’ advertisements, according to records and interviews.

Approximately $61,000 of that was “pass through” money that was used to pay media outlets for advertising time, Jane O’Meara Sanders said in an interview. The rest, about $30,000, she kept as payment for her services, she said.

Carina Driscoll, daughter to Jane O’Meara Sanders and stepdaughter to the lawmaker, earned $65,002 in “wages” between 2000 and 2004, campaign records show.

Frankly, I think the whole “family consulting” thing is a non-story, but if the Good Government types want to get their undies in a bunch about politicians putting their families on the campaign payroll, let’s have everyone’s cards on the table. (þ: Jeff Goldstein)

I bought a pack of Zeiss Lens Cloths at Wal-Mart yesterday to clean my glasses. The box says it contains 50 lens cloths, and was just under $3. Each lens cloth is individually packaged in strips of three, and I received 17 strips (yes, I counted), so I actually bought a box of 51 lens cloths.

I am at a loss to explain this discrepency. Would people be confused by a box that says it contains 51 cloths? Or, alternatively, would people be so excited by the bonus lens cloth as to feel like they’d gained some sort of karmic reward? Inquiring minds apparently want to know…

I apparently missed the big excitement in the Chicago art scene last week; the Secret Service, however, didn’t:

Organizers of a politically charged art exhibit at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery thought their show might draw controversy.

But they didn’t expect two U.S. Secret Service agents would be among the show’s first visitors.

The agents turned up Thursday evening, just before the public opening of “Axis of Evil, the Secret History of Sin,” and took pictures of some of the art pieces—including “Patriot Act,” showing President Bush on a mock 37-cent stamp with a revolver pointed at his head.

When isn’t a death threat a death threat? When it’s an artistic statement, apparently. Thankfully, exhibit curator Michael Hernandez de Luna has his priorities straight:

“It frightens me… as an artist and curator. Now we’re being watched,” Hernandez said. “It’s a new world. It’s a Big Brother world. I think it’s frightening for any artist who wants to do edgy art.”

Hernandez said he hopes the public sees the exhibit as a whole—and not just about one man or even one country. Some works Hernandez thought would be more controversial challenge Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church. Others look at Nazi Germany and the killing fields in Cambodia.

He refused to talk about the 2001 incident, when he was suspected of being involved in a fake anthrax stamp that shut down an area of Chicago’s main post office. Hernandez and another Chicago artist routinely sent fake stamps through the mail, then sold them for thousands of dollars.

Man, I can so feel my free speech rights being trampled even from here.

Update: Jeff Quinton, who inexplicably hasn't trackbacked, has a roundup of posts.

Meanwhile, this guy doesn't seem to get the point; if I create an image of the president (George Bush, Bill Clinton, whoever) with a gun to his head, I'd pretty much expect a visit from law enforcement; there's this little thing called incitement to imminent lawless action, you know. If the image were of John Kerry or Hillary Clinton, I’d imagine the David Niewarts of the world would be screaming for the feds to investigate—and I’d agree with them.

While not entirely fair, I have to admit Jacqueline’s title for this post about the Battlestar Galactica miniseries gave me a good chuckle.

Plus, I want to find this gym where I can watch my own DVDs while I’m on the treadmill…

Gordon Smith writes:

When I entered academe just over a decade ago, almost every law school had a standard teaching load of four courses or 12 credit hours per year. In the past decade, the norm among top law schools has shifted to three courses or 10 credits per year.

The average political scientist teaches a 4–4 (or eight courses per year); at the moment I teach a nominal 3–3,* but with directed readings every semester and an honors thesis to supervise it’s more like a 4–4. Perhaps the most direct equivalent to law school teaching, in departments with MA programs, usually only nets a 3–3; it’s only in the somewhat rarified air of Ph.D. programs that the 2–2 load that Smith says is typical for law schools is common. Even in Ph.D.-granting departments, however, faculty rarely teach just graduate students.

Don’t know if this means anything important, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Just what we need: Plame redux. Or, as the Associated Press put it, “[s]enators may have blown the cover of a covert CIA officer” at the confirmation hearings for U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton on Monday. Yay.

Update: False alarm.

Dan Drezner links a New York Times Style section piece that Will Baude rightly characterizes as “bizarre” on something called a “man date”—or, at least, something that isn’t really called that, since the reporter made up the term. (Compared to Mitch Albom, Ms. Lee is a piker.)

Perhaps the most bizarre part is the coinage of calling it a “date”—the only sort of non-romantic dates I’ve ever heard of before involve people under the age of 10, and even the term “play date” sounds fundamentally stupid to me. I’ve certainly had dinner with people and been confused about whether or not it was actually a date, but I have never experienced that confusion at dinner with someone I wasn’t interested in romantically.

Monday’s Telegraph carries a report that the Saddam loyalists in the Iraqi insurgency may be willing to give up their fight in exchange for Saddam not getting the death penalty. (þ: memorandum)

Meanwhile, the real Olympic bomber, Eric Rudolph (not to be confused with Richard Jewell), avoided the death penalty for his mid-90s bombing spree in Alabama and Georgia this week by revealing information, including the location of weapons caches, to federal authorities.

Of course, if monsters like Saddam and Rudolph aren’t going to get the death penalty (even if they deserve it—an argument that could easily be made for both men), I’m not at all convinced that anyone else should get it—even putting my philosophical problem with the death penalty aside.

It’s occurred to me recently that there seem to be basically two different types of people: the sychronous and the asynchronous. Synchronous people like to have conversations; they want to deal with things “in the present,” then move onto other things. Asynchronous folks, on the other hand, want to correspond and have some time to think things over; at the extreme, they won’t use the telephone even for simple matters due to the risk of bothering someone when they’re otherwise disposed.

Then again, maybe these are just manifestations of the broader traits of extroversion and introversion; I suspect most introverts (like me) prefer email to phone calls and IMs, while most of the extroverts I know aren’t much for email—they might read it, but good luck getting a response amounting to more than one sentence. Of course, these days you can’t really be just one or the other—although I do long for a return of the days of the handwritten letter sometimes.

Well, I made it back safe and sound from Chicago, despite initially forgetting (1) checkout was at 11 am instead of noon and (2) my flight was at 1:10 pm instead of 1:40 pm when I decided to sleep in this morning—I figured if I was spending $164 a night for a bed (and surprisingly little else, beyond gratis high-speed internet that was only free because of my newfound Silver HHonors status), it had better be used as much as possible.

The flights were uneventful—I dozed through much of the flight from O’Hare to Atlanta, and managed to read all of Lewis Black’s book Nothing’s Sacred during the rest of the trip, since I felt unmotivated to continue with Empires of Light for now. Despite the storms the day I left, everything was just fine at home.

The SEC FanBlog passes on speculation that Ole Miss may favor ending the annual series with the University of Memphis, which (at least the Tigers believe) is contractually required to continue until 2011. While the matchup has been quite compelling in recent years, it’s clearly more of a benefit to the Tigers, who benefit from the national exposure and $45 ticket prices (a three-fold increase over regular pricing for Tiger home games) a home date at the Liberty Bowl with the Rebels brings, than a rebuilding Rebel squad that will need all the help it can get to be bowl eligible in 2005.

This is some pretty damn hideous carpet, even by institutional standards—my grad student office at Ole Miss had hideous carpet too, but at least it was more-or-less one color.

Actually, there was also some hideous solid orange (well, modulo the bits with various stains) carpet at the Museum of Contemporary Art today, but the little sign claimed it was a deliberate choice of an artist so I guess that makes it pardonable.