Well, I watched the debate tonight. Random thoughts after brief reflection follow.

To those of you who want to take my advice below on refusing to be “spun”—don’t click on the “Read More” link.

Both Katherine R and Sebastian Holdsclaw of Obsidian Wings are rightly horrified that the so-called “9/11 commission bill” includes provisions that may lead to the institutionalization of the abuses that Maher Arar was subjected to by Syrian authorities, with the apparent complicity of both the United States and Canadian governments.

This isn’t a “Republican” or “Democrat” problem—most members of both parties are going to vote for this bill, because they want to look like they’re “doing something” about terrorism. But this is something that is simply unconscionable. Let your senators and representatives know that this is not how America is supposed to do things and is completely unacceptable.

There’s more on the bill in today’s Washington Post.

As others have mentioned, it appears that the Montréal Expos are headed to Washington. But, while I’m generally not in favor of Congress meddling in D.C.‘s business (and think some sort of resolution needs to be made to the district residents’ lack of congressional representation), I think I could make an exception for a law blocking the district government’s ill-conceived and completely unnecessary handout package for the team. You don’t have to believe me; believe AEI’s Scott Wallstein, or Cato’s Doug Bandow, to name just two experts, virtually all of whom have concluded that stadium subsidies don’t lead to worthwhile economic benefits—and, particularly in the case of D.C., divert resources that could be better spent on serious social ills.

Here’s one for the “credit where credit is due” department: New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney won’t be partaking of Spin Alley after the debate tomorrow night, a move applauded by Ryan Pitts of The Dead Parrot Society and Jay Rosen. I agree with both; in fact, I’d almost take it a step further. Ryan writes:

A debate like this is supposed to be about the candidates persuading the voters, each of whom needs to individually assess whose policies and attitudes they’d like to see for the next four years.

Ryan emphasizes the word voters, but I almost think the emphasis should be on the phrase individually assess. Spin, “news analysis,” and the like tend to get in the way of that process, rather than informing it. So my advice to voters would be to watch the debate, and then switch off your TV and not read the reports and op-eds about it the next few days. And, if you can’t spare the time, then reading the reports and op-eds (and blog posts!) is worthless anyway—the entire point of the debate process is to give unfiltered insights into the candidates, and putting an interlocutor between yourself and the candidates will distort the image.

In fairness to Ryan, he’s speaking from the journalist’s perspective—but choosing not to be spun is something the voter can do just as easily. Switching off Matthews or Hannity or Crossfire is just as important for the voter as Nagourney avoiding “spin alley” is for the reporter.

James Joyner is amused that the DoD is testing the use of blimps for surveillance in Washington, something he believes was pioneered by the Goodyear Corporation several decades ago. I just wonder how much the toilet seats onboard cost.

Mr. Mike is apparently back in business at Half-Bakered and has a little project for his readers to help out with this fall. I think I speak on both my and Brock’s behalf in welcoming Mike back.

The only woman on Sex and the City I found even vaguely attractive turns out to be a lesbian. I guess I should just keep telling myself the attraction was due to her being the only redhead. (þ Electric Venom)

Update: Several correspondents have pointed out that they considered Kristin Davis (“the brunette”) attractive as well. I suppose she was above the Mendoza line.

Jeff Quinton notes that the AA West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx may be headed to Greenville, South Carolina, as a result of their AA team being headed to the greater Jackson area (specifically, Pearl, just across the eponymous river from Jackson) and becoming the Mississippi Braves.

Incidentally, the Diamond Jaxx franchise started out as the Memphis Chicks, who hit the road after no new stadium was forthcoming in Memphis; the Bluff City came out ahead on the deal by luring the Cardinals into awarding a AAA franchise, the Memphis Redbirds, and building a privately-financed, state-of-the-art baseball stadium, AutoZone Park.

David Adesnik of OxBlog takes note of today’s David Brooks NYT column arguing—from the historical precedent of El Salvador—that even a flawed “partial” election in Iraq could nonetheless lead to more stability and put the country on the road to democracy. In particular, Adesnik disagrees with Phil Carter’s argument against such a “partial vote.”

One interesting historical example cited by none of the authors is the fact that federal elections were held, as scheduled, in the Union states during the American Civil War. If credible elections could be held in a country undergoing a massive internal rebellion 140 years ago, I don’t see a realistic impediment to a “partial” vote encompassing over 95% of Iraqis—if the number were in the range of 60%, I could see a credible argument against holding elections, but if we’re just talking about Fallujah and a couple of other areas in revolt, I don’t think that’s a meaningful impediment to legitimacy.

I’ve been trying to come up with a decent essay exam question for my constitutional law class tying Korematsu together with the whole debate over Michelle Malkin’s book. I tend to agree with the assessment that Malkin is incorrect, although I do it in the “fact-free” perspective that encourages me to trust experts like Eric Muller rather than from the perspective of actually having read the book.

The slippery bit to me is that—reading between the lines of Muller’s snarkiness and Malkin’s disingenuity—Malkin seems to argue that the indefinite detention of some Americans of Islamic faith would be legitimate, and that other forms of racial profiling targeted at all Muslim-Americans would be legitimate, but full-scale removal of Muslim-American populations wouldn’t, and I’m not sure Korematsu speaks to that. In my mind, though, Korematsu is bad law anyway, and I don’t think anyone other than Thomas and possibly Rehnquist would support reaffirming it today—Scalia, to judge from his partial dissent in Hamdi, would probably be viciously opposed.

Anyway, I’ve basically concluded the question is a bust and I’ll have to move on to ask something more fruitful about some other cases. Since I already have a Hamdi question I think Korematsu is no great loss—and a clever student or three will probably work it in without my asking, anyway.

I’m beginning to be increasingly fascinated by a certain strand of argument in the blogosphere. It started with Andrew Sullivan’s thoroughly non-sensical attempts to argue that conservatism necessarily required support for gay marriage, detoured through lectures by non-Christians to Christians about the necessity of their support for a particular American political party, and may have reached its apogee with a series of posts at Crooked Timber (made, incidentally, by people who make no pretense of being libertarian) alleging that any libertarian who supports the war in Iraq isn’t a libertarian.

What I find utterly fascinating about the last is that it originates from the longstanding view from left-liberals that the “wrong” (read “pro-war”) libertarians—folks like Glenn Reynolds, Virginia Postrel, Colby Cosh, and the libertarian-leaning Samizdatans—have dominated the blogosphere at the expense of the “right” (read “anti-war”) libertarians like Julian Sanchez, Jim Henley, and (never explicitly stated, perhaps because he actually says nice things about capitalism) Radley Balko. My general view is that expressed by Guy Herbert:

I was under the impression that libertarianism is a political orientation (opposite: authoritarianism) rather than a coherent ideological position.

Granted, I think there are people (Objectivists, for example, or the Libertarian Party) who conceive of libertarianism as a “pure” ideology, untainted by concerns motivated by the real world, but I don’t think most self-identified libertarians are among them. Of course, when the primary goal of one’s posting on libertarianism isn’t to analyze that political orientation, but rather to delegitimize it, I can see why one would want to hold it up to higher standards of conformity than liberalism or conservatism would be subjected to.

The New York Times reports that Jay Leno will be replaced by Conan O’Brien on The Tonight Show. The bad news? We have to put up with five more years of Jay—Conan doesn’t take over until the end of Jay’s contract in 2009. (þ Jeff Jarvis)

Incidentally, the NYT article is written by Bill Carter, whose The Late Shift recounting the Johnny Carson succession struggle remains one of my favorite books on the TV business.

Update: James Joyner also reacts, wondering why NBC has made Jay a five-year lame duck. One suspects it was to ensure O’Brien didn’t jump ship.

Amber Taylor is quite chagrined at the latest apparent incident of plagiarism among the faculty of Harvard Law School, this time apparently perpetrated by noted constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe.

She also has joined the growing number of young women eschewing most makeup, a trend I have noticed increasing in popularity among the undergraduate set. The always-hip Crescat Sententia is, as is typical, the nexus for discussion of this societal trend.

Steven Taylor has comment on a complaint by a student at another college that a class cancellation was not announced via email. Steven writes:

I also find it amusing because as a professor who does use e-mail quite extensively (and yes, I do send it when I know I have to cancel, if at all possible), many of [my] students don’t always read it. Further, most of my colleagues don’t maintain mailing lists for their classes, so couldn’t send a mass e-mail if they wanted to do so.

I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the pervasiveness of e-mail at Millsaps, even if I could do without the idiosyncracies of Microsoft Outlook and its web interface. We have mailing lists for every class and—critically—the students have been acculturized into using and checking it. Of course, it helps that almost everyone lives on campus and virtually everyone who does has a computer in their room, if not one of their own.

Quote of the day, regarding a group of Mississippi Democrats who plan to endorse George W. Bush on Monday:

“Most of them are has-beens,’’ [Bill] Wheeler said of the Mississippi Democrats for Bush. “They are not your hard core Democrats. They are flip-floppers. They blow with the wind.’’

While Wheeler may be accurate in that regard (a point I made when a similar group endorsed Haley Barbour in 2003), I wonder if it’s all that wise for a Kerry campaign official to be using terms like “flip-floppers” in public.

The drawback of rooting for two football teams is that you get doubly-annoyed when they both lose on the same day. Ole Miss (1–3) somehow managed to lose to Wyoming, 37–32 in Laramie on Saturday afternoon, while Millsaps (1–2) lost to Belhaven, 26–10* on Saturday night.

The only good football news is that I won my second consecutive national title (in three years) playing as Michigan in Dynasty Mode of NCAA Football 2005, based largely on the obscene 19-game win streak I have going.

Those of you with morbid curiosity about my academic career should read this comment. Other news: the books for my directed readings course finally showed up today, and I have been approved for $1200 of academic travel this year (so I guess that means I should put together a Midwest proposal in addition to the paper I’m presenting at SPSA in New Orleans). Now I need to go home and work on writing a couple of exams.

I read Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (previously mentioned here) last night—and, for a book by political scientists, it’s both exceptionally well-written and probably accessible to a general college-educated audience. What may be the most compelling thing about the book is that even though I knew pretty much all the evidence that was outlined by the authors, I was still floored by the evidence Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope bring to bear.

The core arguments will be (hopefully) relatively familiar to readers of this weblog: while political elites are increasingly polarized, the populace as a whole isn’t (and, if anything, are tending to converge on issue positions over time); the “red state-blue state” dichotomy is false; and the appearance of mass polarization is due largely to the relatively stark choices faced by voters today.

For good measure, the authors throw in some spatial voting theory to show that the increasing role of moral issues in voting behavior are due to changes in the political positions of the candidates themselves (or at least perceptions of those positions) rather than changes in the electorate. And they attribute these problems largely to the “amateurization” of political parties, which (they argue) have become rallying points for “purists” at the expense of moderation and the Downsian pursuit of the median voter—a phenomenon anyone who’s witnessed the vitriol hurled at the likes of John McCain and Zell Miller by their “fellow partisans” will surely attest to. The authors also delve into the pathologies of local politics, which tend to be even more captive to the whims of narrow interests.

Fiorina (writing alone, perhaps to insulate his more junior co-authors from having to defend these propositions on the job market) has a three-pronged prescription that he argues would lessen elite polarization: an end to partisan gerrymanders, opening the primary process to wider participation (and abolishing the use of party caucuses), and increasing voter turnout.

It’s a quick read—I read it in 90 minutes, although to be fair it is largely material from my field, so it might take the non-expert two hours. All in all I strongly recommend it to any serious student of politics (including, by definition, our readership).

doesn’t mean he isn’t right.

And, no, I’m not just annoyed because Mr. Simmins belittles my profession…

The Washington Post editorial board rightly castigates both Bush and Kerry for their failure to speak publically about the need for a real democratic transition in Pakistan; coupled with events in Russia and the (quite possibly invented-from-thin-air by Robert Novak) Iraq withdrawal trial balloon, it’s not been a great week for democracy.

Professor Bainbridge, Sebastian Holdsclaw, Kevin Drum, and Matt Yglesias all agree that gerrymandering sucks. No argument there. Now let’s see what actually can be done about it…

Words fail me:

Visitors to next month’s Mississippi State Fair may gawk at their reflections in the Fun House, witness the Mississippi State Championship Mule Pull or shake hands with the key suspect in the Klan’s 1964 killings of three civil rights workers.

Learned lawyer Richard Barrett, who heads the white supremacist organization known as the Nationalist Movement, said Edgar Ray Killen has agreed to make an appearance at his organization’s booth in the Agricultural Building. Barrett plans to gather signatures there in support of Killen, who is under investigation but has never faced state murder charges in the June 21, 1964, deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

“He can possibly sign autographs and meet the crowd,” said Barrett, whose booth will be between those for the secretary of state’s office and the Mississippi Library Commission.

Both Joshua of Sandbox and Lemuel have picked up my quip about John Kerry left in comments at Dan Drezner’s place a week or so ago:

On the other hand, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Kerry (accused of flip-flopping) doesn’t actually flip-flop; he just simultaneously occupies multiple policy positions with a variable probability density function over policy space. So he doesn’t flip-flop; he Heisenbergs. In other words, he wasn’t for the war before he was against it; he was for it while he was against it.

Glad y’all enjoyed it! However, it now appears that Jay Tea of Wizbang beat me to the analogy.

Brian J. Noggle is oddly intrigued by this Maxim photo shoot of Avril Lavigne. Mind you, compared to Michelle Branch she’s a prude…

Slashdot has posted its reader Q&A with Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik. Hilarity ensues.