I know I’m a fan of Condorcet voting, but this is a ridiculously confusing vote, even by Debian standards.

I guess I’ll vote 2145376, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to explain 2145376 to anyone else on the planet.

As expected, Paul Johnson just became the latest victim in the “terrorism by beheading” campaign operated by al-Qaeda.

Reaction: Moe Lane said it best. As far as I’m concerned, the Saudi government’s response should be to immediately execute every single person whose release was demanded by the terrorists. My moral qualms about such a policy in general (I would actively oppose the U.S. engaging in such a policy, for example) don’t extend to actions by the Saudi regime, who routinely show less mercy to Saudis, guest workers, and western ex-pats accused of dubious crimes under their rule. We already know the Saudis have zero respect for human rights; such a policy seems like an excellent complement to a-Qaeda’s policy of zero respect for human life.

Both Alex Knapp and James Joyner (writing at Tech Central Station, so feel free to dismiss accordingly) think the 9/11 commission’s standard of proof for al-Qaeda involvement in, well, anything might be just a tad too high.

As for Saddam himself:

Saddam’s government was never the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism. Iran and Saudi Arabia far outstripped him in that regard. Nonetheless, the fact that Saddam Hussein actively supported Islamic terrorists has been an article of faith since the Carter Administration. Indeed, Iraq was one of the original five states (along with Iran, Libya, Syria, and Cuba) on the original “Patterns of Global Terrorism” list compiled by the State Department in 1979. Saddam was a major sponsor of various terrorist groups, including the PLO, Hamas, and the Abu Nidal Organization.

Read the whole things.

Steven Taylor:

Can we say “matching funds are dead”? I bet we can. There can be no doubt that after Bush in 2000 (and ‘04) and Kerry and Dean this time, that the presidential primary matching-fund process created by the FECA is essentially dead. At best it is campaign welfare for medium-to-low wattage candidates.

While we spend a while hashing out what we’re going to do about this travesty, Congress and the Federal Election Commission might do well to heed the words of baseball guru Bill James, on a completely unrelated topic, the balk rule:

Q: Can you elaborate on how/why the balk rule doesn’t work? Thanks

Bill James: The rule manifestly fails to achieve its goals. It’s one of those rules that, when it didn’t work, they tried to fix it. When that didn’t work, they fixed it again, and they fixed it again, and they fixed it again.

At some point they should have stopped and tried something else, but they didn’t, so they stuck history with a rule which (a) is almost totally unintelligible, and (b) is arbitrary in its enforcement.

In principle, trying to prevent one player from decoying another is a dumb idea. The balk rule is like a rule in basketball that says (a rule that would say… theoretical example) that if you fake a shot, you have to take the shot; otherwise it is travelling. That would be a dumb rule. The balk rule is basically the same thing, only applied to baseball. [emphasis mine]

I think the bolded passage pretty much sums up the state of campaign finance law in the United States in 2004.

Mark A.R. Kleiman:

So now we have a choice, as voters: Are we going to ratify the decision to make torture (described in various weaselly ways) part of the policy of the United States, or are we going to reject it by replacing those responsible?

Great idea, but what’s our guarantee that a Kerry administration wouldn’t engage in the exact same behavior, if not worse? Where are Kerry’s condemnations of Gitmo? (Everyone’s condemned Abu Gharib, so that doesn’t count.) Mrs. Kerry (the ex-Republican) seems rather more forceful than Sen. Kerry. And, if Kerry is going to try to outflank Bush on terror, is it plausible that he can simultaneously promise to get tougher on al-Qaeda while renouncing the current means by which the U.S. is getting tough on terror?

Throwing the bums out is a great idea… so long as we’re not bringing in new bums that are equally bad, if not worse.

Collin May has a capsule review of tonight’s English-language debate among the major party leaders in Canada; by all accounts, nobody really stood out or got bloodied.

Reminder: the second Memphis Bloggers’ Bash is tomorrow at the Blue Monkey on Madison (in the heart of Midtown Is Memphis), starting at 6:30 p.m. Be there, or, er, be somewhere else.

Jeff Jarvis asks:

Now it’s time that a social scientist or a pollster to measure the passion of our opinions—and an issue better come out pretty high on that passion scale before any reporter can say it’s deeply divisive.

Jon Krosnick at Ohio State (a social psychologist/political scientist) has published at least a half-dozen papers on attitude importance (e.g. “the passion of our opinions”) over the past 15 years. So, my suggestion to the pollsters would be: go forth and read Krosnick.

I’d also suggest that they go back and read Converse on attitudes and nonattitudes and “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” but I suspect they read—and forgot—such things long ago; they certainly don’t need me reminding them.

The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.

There’s a petition drive is underway in Colorado to allocate the state’s electors in proportion to candidates’ popular vote. All I can find is the title as it will be presented to voters; I can’t find the actual text of the proposal (including any minumum threshold requirement or whether there will be “bonus” electors for the plurality winner), so it’s hard to judge what the impact of the plan will be.

I suspect the substantive effect of such provisions, if adopted in every state, would be minimal across the board; while candidates might arguably be more inclined to focus on the most populous states, I’m not sure that the actual benefit of such a strategy would be very large. Instead, the sensible strategy would be to focus on states where you’re close (say within 100,000 votes) to gaining an additional elector, and it’s not at all apparent that these states would be more likely to be large.

At the individual level, I suspect PR for the electoral college would somewhat increase turnout in relatively lopsided states like Massachusetts and Mississippi, and somewhat decrease it in perennial “swing states” like Florida and Ohio, but I think that would have more to do with campaign effects than any sort of utility calculus by voters.

Incidentally, there’s probably a good undergraduate or first-year graduate student paper in an analysis of the effects of various electoral college allocation systems (PR, bonus PR, congressional district, plurality), with particular focus on elections with relatively large third-party voting (1948, 1968, 1980, 1992, 1996, and 2000).

More from Daniel Geffen, James Joyner, DavidNYC, and Jane Galt.

Eugene Volokh gives the legalist’s reasoning as to why the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Newdow v. Elk Grove; I still believe the original plan of the justices who voted for cert was to also reach a substantive conclusion on the constitutionality of the pledge requirement (perhaps in line with Thomas’ concurrence), but Scalia’s recusal threw a wrench in the works of that happening.

Meanwhile, Alex Knapp agrees with Dahlia Lithwick that the more important issue settled in the case may relate to the majority’s newfound respect for the principle of federalism, at least in the area of family law.

News like this makes me happy I decided to get an apartment in Belhaven rather than living in Ridgeland or northeast Jackson.

Of course, knowing my luck, this coming year will be the year Jackson finally decides to fix Fortification Street (which drives like it was last resurfaced during the Nixon administration) and they find the cash to stick in all the speed humps and roundabouts they want to put in the neighborhood.

Contrary to my expressed preference in the case, the Supreme Court decided to duck the case by pretending that Michael Newdow lacked standing to bring the case in the first place, a decision that essentially concedes (at least in the mind of this attitudinalist) that the Court couldn’t muster five votes to keep “under God” in the pledge without using the bogus “standing” issue. Indeed, Stevens’ justification for the 8–0 ruling (Scalia recused himself) amounts to a non sequitor:

When hard questions of domestic relations are sure to affect the outcome, the prudent course is for the federal court to stay its hand rather than reach out to resolve a weighty question of federal constitutional law.

How, exactly, does the question of who has custody over Mr. Newdow’s daughter affect whether or not the pledge of alliegance is constitutional? Whether or not the child’s mother approves of the pledge is irrelevant to the legal issue at hand.

One suspects, however, that this holding action won’t settle the argument for good, as I’d imagine Mr. Newdow will find another athiest parent with uncontested custody, or a high-school student of majority age, to bring a similar case in the near future.

Update: Stephen Green, Eugene Volokh (via Anti-Climacus), Jacob Levy, Mark of Memphis Red Blogs, Steven Taylor, and Spencer of Mediocrity’s Co-Pilot also have posts on the decision.

I think the interesting political question here is why the Supremes granted certiorari in the case; the standing issue certainly could have been decided without an oral argument, and perhaps even without briefs (the case simply could have been reversed and remanded). I don’t want to post too much about my thoughts, because I think this might be a good discussion topic in Con Law in the fall when we talk about the structure and powers of the Court, even though the content of the semester focuses on topics other than civil liberties (except economic regulation, which is covered).

Since it’s Flag Day, it must also be my “half-birthday,” a useful modern invention for those of us with December birthdays who got cheated by fate out of a proper commemoration of our actual birthdays. (Interestingly enough, both of my parents and my first cousin also have December birthdays, and my birthday is exactly between my parents’ birthdays. Numerologists would have a field day with all this, of course.)

Dan Drezner discusses a Chronicle article ($) on the newspaper clippings that academics post on and around their doors. When I had an office door, my postings were on the mundane side: office hours, a Wall Street Journal editorial on eminent domain abuse in Mississippi, and a couple of forgettable political cartoons. After 9/11 they were joined by a printed U.S. flag that the university administration sent out en masse. Perhaps I will be more creative at Millsaps.

Laura of Apartment 11D’s art discussion goes after ‘performance artist’ Andrea Fraser, who’s blazing a trail only previously trod by the likes of Linda Lovelace, Traci Lords, and Ron Jeremy.

The Texas Department of Transportation plans to install free WiFi hotspots at all of its highway rest areas, after a pilot project at 4 rest stops along U.S. 287 found them to be a hit with the motoring public.

Please, for the love of God, will someone tell Tom Tolbert that his suit is the most hideous thing ever seen on American television.

Eric Muller starts hypothesizing about MemoGate:

This is the sort of thing one might expect to see a young lawyer do in a “brainstorming” sort of memo—and that one would expect to see a more senior lawyer react to by saying, “Very creative. I like how you’re thinking outside the box. But none of this is going to fly in the real world. Please go back and rewrite this into something we can actually use.”

The memo is marked “draft”—so maybe all of this too-clever manipulation of hornbook law ended up in the back of a filing cabinet of non-starter ideas. Somehow I don’t think it would have been leaked if that were true, though. [emphasis mine]

Alternative hypothesis: today is June 11, 2004, a mere 144 days before a presidential election. This memo is highly embarrassing to the Bush administration (at least in the opinion of those who already don’t much care for said administration; the jury’s still out on whether rank-and-file swing voter cares about Jose Padilla and Iraqi detainees). Lower-level functionaries in major government departments are known to be core Democratic voters. Ergo, any embarrassing material—even if it was never used to justify administration policy—is worth leaking, especially considering that Abu Gharib was finally moving off the front pages in light of progress in the political situation in Iraq.

Counter-hypothesis: today is June 11, 2004, the week of Ronald Reagan’s death. The memo is highly embarrassing to the Bush administration, but about the most damning piece of the paper trail that ties administration actors to extra-legal torture by CIA and military intelligence operatives. Leak it now, and the news will be buried along with Reagan, as the only media outlets who will still care in a week will be ones with known partisan taint like The New Yorker, and thus, any such accounts will be immediately discounted by otherwise-swayable Republican elites.

Will Collier notes that the ILECs won a Pyrrhic victory at the Supreme Court that will let them raise the fees they charge wireline competitors… not that it will help them in the long run.

I have BellSouth at present, like Will did; I’m trying to figure out a way to ditch wireline service when I move to Jackson next month. BellSouth’s nominal $16.55 local unlimited calling service actually is around $30, once all the bogus fees and taxes are piled on—including the absurd $1.87 a month fee I’m charged so they won’t give out my phone number in the directory. Vonage is looking awfully appealing, although I’m still not sure if my TiVos will play nicely with it or not.

I’ve been generally happy with BellSouth’s DSL, even though their occasional hardware screw-ups are annoying, but Earthlink has a great deal on cable Internet in Jackson which I can’t pass up ($29.95 per month the first six months, then $41.95 per month, with no equipment to buy). Now just to figure out how I can get my DirecTV hooked up with all the trees around and it being a rental property. Hopefully the DirecTV movers’ deal will cover that.

Needless to say, Mr. Neimeyer’s Wednesday column, which referred to the recently deceased Ronald Reagan as “the anti-Christ,” attracted a rather colorful exchange on the Letters page of the Daily Mississippian.

Thursday:

• Sgt. Chris Hankins.
• Prof. William F. Shugart II (yes, that William F. Shugart II).

Friday:

• Monty Horne.
• Steve Phillips.
• Kenneth Jones (who somehow manages to work in a reference to Matthew Shepard, thereby invoking what has to be the 21st century corollary to Godwin’s Law).
• Prof. David Sansing.

For what it’s worth, I was never a huge Reagan fan—I was more of a Thatcherite in my youth, albeit perhaps a bit more of a “wet” Tory than she was. But in a world with Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, and the entire leadership of the Chinese Communist Party still around, I think one can find much better candidates for the title “anti-Christ.”

I also think Dr. Shugart might have more properly addressed his remarks to Mr. Neimeyer for having written such ignorant drivel, rather than complaining that the paper failed to exercise proper editorial judgment—although the idea expressed by Mr. Jones that Dr. Shugart’s rather brief letter constitutes a “chill” on free speech only serves to highlight the widespread misconception among undergraduates that the right to hold an opinion somehow includes the non-existent “right” to have that opinion go unchallenged if articulated in public, no matter how ill-informed or poorly-argued it is.

The always-engaging Geitner Simmons has an interesting post on the links between South Carolina’s backward alcohol laws and über-segregationist Ben Tillman, who was pretty much the intellectual forebear to folks like Strom Thurmond and Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo in the 20th century.

The machine Signifying Nothing is hosted on had some serious surgery last night (a complete Debian sid reinstall onto some xfs partitions, a large memory boost, a case transplant, a “new” Maxtor IDE controller and new boot disk, and about a hundred other changes), since there was some mysterious flakiness I suspect had something to do with bad RAM and I had lots of decent parts sitting around that would be of better use on gateway (named for its role, not the company) than gathering dust. Oddly enough, everything still seems to be working after less than an hour of tweaks.

The only downside: if you commented or trackbacked (or posted, for that matter) after about 4 pm yesterday, your comment/trackback didn’t make it into the backup, so it’s lost. Well, not lost, but I’m not going to bother trying to get it out of the old PostgreSQL installation on the old boot disk.

Daniel Davies:

I wish Saddam Hussein was still in power in Baghdad because if this were the case, then about 3,000 Iraqis would have been murdered by his regime and would be dead, the roughly 10,000 Iraqis we killed ourselves would still be alive, and we would most likely be well on our way to formulating a credible, sensible, properly resourced plan for getting rid of him and handling the aftermath.

Sebastian Holdsclaw:

This is pure fantasy. European countries and the UN were not in the process of figuring out how to get rid of Saddam just before bumbling George Bush talked them out of it. In January 2002 France, Germany and Russia were talking about having sanctions removed from Iraq and trade and diplomatic relations normalized. Even if he were one of those people who is easily impressed by European words decoupled from actions he couldn’t take comfort in the words. There wasn’t even a large rhetoric-only anti-Saddam pose being taken by European governments. At best there was the admission that he had been somewhat naughty in the past and aren’t we glad that sanctions have brought him to heel.

We would not be ‘most likely be well on our way to formulating a credible, sensible, properly resourced plan for getting rid of him’ if only the U.S. hadn’t invaded in 2003. Unless of course by ‘we’ he means the U.S. acting unilaterally. I understand the need to protect the leftist conscience, but let us at least stick to semi-plausible hypotheticals like “If we were lucky Saddam might have choked on a chicken bone.”

Needless to say, this is engendering a good discussion—a lot of it from the eminently sensible Gary Farber, whose blog you really should read on a regular basis if you’re not already.

I have come to the conclusion that slippers just aren’t sold in the summer in Mississippi. They’ll probably have to wait until this coming winter and be a birthday gift.

The good news is, Hallmark had something nice that I think will work as a gift, even if it wasn’t exactly what was requested. Now I just have to figure out how to mail it…

Avril Lavigne, on Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit (a band name that seems oddly appropriate in light of this account):

“I mentioned to Fred that I was hungry, like, ‘I want an In-N-Out burger.’ “He had someone go out and get me a whole box of them, with fries. I was like, ‘Yeah!.’ Then he took a private jet out to one of my shows, expecting me to bang him. He was disappointed that I wouldn’t even go near him. He was a little pissed that I went to my room alone that night.”

That Fred’s one smooth dude, no?

Via Begging to Differ and Jeff Jarvis.