I just got back from a day-long excursion to Jackson, with the twin goals of scoping out apartment complexes and showing one parental unit around the Millsaps campus. Fun but tiring.

It’s Monday, so that means same-sex marriage is on in the Bay State. For suitable discussion, see James Joyner, Steven Jens, OxBlog, and Kevin Drum. For apoplexy, go visit Clayton “Even Worse Volokh Conspirator than David Bernstein” Cramer.

Say what you will about George and Laura Bush, but I suspect at least they raised their daughters to wear underwear when appearing in public (NSFW), even if they did use fake ID’s around Austin while attending UT (shock, horror, college undergraduates drinking under the age of 21).

What’s even more scary is that, aside from the obvious attributes on display, Ms. Kerry looks pretty much like a younger John F. Kerry in drag.

Update: More at Outside the Beltway and Ogged, the latter of whom blames flash photography for the explicitness of the photo.

Like Moe Lane, I generally take Seymour Hersh’s journalism with a huge grain of salt—and immediately suspected a fresh round of “inside the beltway” fingerpointing as the source for the latest revelations, which purportedly trace the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib all the way to Donald Rumsfeld’s desk. Now, however, I’m not so sure. And, clearly if Rumsfeld (or his inferiors, like Defense Undersecretary Stephen A. Cambone) condoned or specifically authorized the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib, he/they should be fired and prosecuted—and if the president won’t can him/them, Congress can and should impeach and remove Rumsfeld (and/or Cambone) from office.

More at OTB and Matt Yglesias.

Steven Taylor notes that WordPerfect 12 has just been released, even though it last gained a new feature, by my estimation, circa WordPerfect 9.

These days, if I have to use a word processor (which usually means, “I have to read someone else’s Word file”), I’ll use either OpenOffice.org or StarOffice; now that they have native PDF export, they do pretty much everything I need a word processor to do. But pretty much anything I write myself (from letters to my vita to conference papers) I end up doing in LaTeX these days.

Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber solicits contributions for the best political philosophy and (normative) political theory articles of the past decade.

I roughly estimate two dozen nominations so far. Exactly one of them appeared in The American Political Science Review. Open question: is there any subfield of political science that is well-represented by the travesty that is the contemporary APSR?

Hei Lun of Begging to Differ, in response to a commenter of Jeff Jarvis’, hypothesizes that the only voter whose intended vote choice has been changed by Howard Stern’s tirades against the Bush administration—never mind that many of his tormentors are Democrats in Congress and in the FCC—is named Jeff Jarvis. That sounds about right.

Some polling outfit made the mistake of calling James Joyner. Hilarity ensues.

Has anyone else been getting unsolicited bulk emails from an outfit called RatherBiased.com, which appears to be some sort of anti-Dan Rather site?

Just curious. They’re about to be introduced to my procmail filter…

Will Baude continues to justify Crescat Sententia‘s “No Comments” policy, for essentially the same reason that SN doesn’t carry comments. Well, that and the fact I don’t have the Copious Free Time™ necessary to remove troll infestations from my comments.

However, there is some fiddling behind the scenes here to add a comments facility to everyone’s favorite blogging platform, LSblog, because other bloggers are not similarly enlightened. Once that’s done, probably this weekend, I’ll release a new tarball, as there appears to be renewed interest in alternatives to Movable Type. Once the rudiments of the comment code are finished, I may open comments on a couple of posts (including this one) for testing purposes.

Something I’ve discussed here on the blog on occassion, and when I had dinner with the chair/other half of the department at Future Employer™, is my wrestling with what it means to be “the professor”—the assumed expert in all things political, even those things far afield from my relatively narrow specialization. Being “the professor” does, in and of itself, create an expectation of authority—I’m the jackass standing at the front of the room, pontificating about congressional committees or Ted Lowi’s typology of domestic public policy, and that confers some natural (and perhaps unearned) authority.

That, of course, will get a young faculty member far. But sometimes it’s not enough. I taught—or, at least, was scheduled to teach—a class the afternoon of 9/11, and I didn’t have the first thing to say that made any sense, yet I was the one my students turned to for answers. If asked today, I couldn’t begin to explain the pure evil behind the beheadings of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg at the hands of al-Qaeda, or the vile acts of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. I suppose the best I can do is cope as best as I can, even if sometimes I won’t be the universal expert my students expect I should be.

Being at the ass-end of a CDMA 1X wireless link is even worse than dialup (about the same throughput, but around 400 ms latency on pings). But at least it’s (cough) free and easy, at least until my phone battery drains and I need to recharge it…

As you may have noticed over on the sidebar, I’ve accepted a one-year position as a visiting assistant professor in the political science department at Millsaps College (formerly known as BCITS), a private, selective liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi, starting in August 2004. I’m really looking forward to working with my fellow faculty and future students while I continue the search for that elusive tenure-track job in the fall—don’t worry, the “soap opera” will continue on that front, at least!

Conrad of The Gweilo Diaries notes the reopening of an investigation into the 1955 Emmitt Till murder; Till’s murder by white supremicists is generally regarded as a catalyst for the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

Today, the Clarion-Ledger website carried a long article on the reopening of the case.

Amber Taylor takes note of a new way to figure out blacked-out words in redacted documents and the new Yale typeface.

When I’m rich and famous, I’ll probably buy a license for Economist, although for now I’m using FontSite.com’s University Old Style (a.k.a. ITC Berkeley Old Style) for a lot of my correspondence and papers.

Alex Tabarrok links to a debunking of the rather lame “smart states voted for Gore” hypothesis—on the basis that there’s no state-level IQ data for anyone to reach such a conclusion.

However, there is individual-level data in the 2000 American National Election Study, conducted by the University of Michigan, and this data supports an opposite conclusion: the mean level of both intelligence and political information-holding for Gore voters was lower than for Bush voters. Not much lower, mind you, but the difference is statistically significant.

APSA wants $237 from me for my membership renewal and to register for the 2004 annual meeting. I should have stayed unemployed…

You can tell you’re a political science geek when you get all gushy about a review copy of a political science textbook…

Steven Taylor has apparently decided his life isn’t complicated enough, so he’s decided to rile up the legions of Confederate apologists in the blogosphere, using that whole “logic” and “documentary evidence” thing to prove—quelle horreur—that the Civil War, was in fact, about slavery, and there’s no way to explain it otherwise. Start here, then go to the front page, because there’s a zone-flood in progress.

Commencement was hot and icky… think of sitting and standing for two hours in a solid black, winter-weight cap and gown. Gov. Haley Barbour’s address was a tad more political in spots than I might have liked, but I think his message—“believe in God, believe your country and your state, and believe in yourself”—was a good one. (I half expected entire departments to walk out when, at one point in the speech, he categorically rejected moral relativism.) People who study rhetoric would have had a field day with his speech. I can definitely see how he does well on the stump—Ronnie Musgrove never struck me as much of an orator, and that alone may have made the difference between them in the last gubernatorial race.

In other news, it looks like a neighborhood cat has adopted me, and I haven’t the faintest clue why. My original working hypothesis was that it’s one of my friend Alfie’s cats, and it recognizes me from having visited his place, but I don’t think this is one of them. If it’s still here tomorrow, I’ll have to figure out something to do with it—I’m shocked the neighborhood pack of dogs hasn’t killed it, though.

Well, that was something. Somehow, though, the rental service managed to give me the wrong color hood (white instead of dark blue)... a problem rectified after the ceremony by swapping hoods with someone who didn’t plan on attending the commencement exercises in the morning.

Plus, I got to catch up with a couple of people I’d met in other departments along the way who finished this past year. And, I learned that Brock missed out on getting the coolest looking regalia on display by far ☺.

Josh Chafetz asks the $64,000 question in American public opinion polling:

[W]hat, exactly, is the point of continually doing nationwide polls when all that matters are the states? I mean, I know nationwide polls are a lot cheaper, but just making up the results would be cheaper still, and only marginally more relevant.

Well, I don’t know that nationwide polling is truly irrelevant; the state-level poll results would be close to a simple linear function of the national polling number, although the effects of campaign advertising—concentrated in the “battleground states”—will cause divergence from linearity.

But due to statistical theory, and the closeness of presidential elections, you’d have to survey a lot more people to get accurate state-level data… realistically, a sample less than 500 per state is useless, which means polling 25,500 people (including D.C.) per survey—and you’re still getting a sampling error of ±4.5% per state. So the best that you can do is pretty much what’s done in practice—you do national surveys augmented by state-level surveys in states that are a priori believed to be close.

Stephen Karlson has the latest missive from Shelby Thames to his faculty, staff, and students at Southern Miss. With any luck, maybe the four new members of the IHL board will decide this stooge is far more hassle than he’s worth.

Michael Jennings watches a lot of movies aimed at the teen set in the hopes of spotting future stars—or at least, that’s his excuse. Like Michael, I am perplexed at the lack of success Alicia Silverstone has had in her career—of course, I thought Blast from the Past was one of the best romantic comedies in recent years (enhanced by Dave Foley’s role as Alicia’s “queer eye for the straight gal” roommate), and was probably one of a dozen people to actually see the film, so that may be the problem.

Xrlq is the latest blogger to bemoan the continued decline of Reason magazine under Nick Gillespie’s tutelage.