Well, this award will definitely make Michael Moore even more insufferable than he is already. And, here’s your “laugh test” moment:

“I did not set out to make a political film,” Mr. Moore said at a news conference after the ceremony. “I want people to leave thinking that was a good way to spend two hours. The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics.”

I’m sure that’s what Leni Riefenstahl said too.

The nice thing about being a lazy blogger is that if you want to fisk something, chances are someone else—in this case, Nick Troester—will have beaten you to it. But, lest I be accused of excessive laziness, allow me to pile on. The piece in Slate is called “Why We Hate Voting: And how to make it fun again,” by Thomas Geoghegan. Here’s a free hint: anyone who confuses civic duty with “fun” isn’t very normal to begin with. Shall we commence?

Usually, the outcome of a presidential election “depends on the turnout of the Democrats.” So says Nelson Polsby of the University of California-Berkeley. For once, I agree with a political scientist. I take Polsby to mean “Democrats” as a term of art for “most people.” By “Democrats” he means people with hourly jobs, high-school dropouts, high-school grads, single moms, single dads—anyone at or below the median household income.

But let’s narrow “Democrats” to people way down the income ladder, whose voting rate is usually less than 40 percent. Waitresses. Claims adjusters. College kids with loans. If the turnout among these people hits 50 percent, the Republicans are in trouble. Get it up to 60 percent, and Bush won’t even come close.

Actually, I think Dr. Polsby means “Democrats,” as in people who are predisposed to vote for Democratic candidates. In political science terms, we call these people “party identifiers”—they have a psychological attachment to their preferred political party. And we’ve called them party identifiers ever since 1960, when The American Voter came out.

I’ll grant that some earlier research, known as the Columbia school or sociological approach, argued that vote choice was largely a function of socioeconomic status, but The American Voter showed demography to be a rather distant causal influence on vote choice. Only African-Americans (a group oddly omitted from Geoghegan’s definition of “Democrats,” though perhaps this omission is understandable when you realize that he’s dealing with the limosine liberal set who read Slate) show the sort of bloc voting in American society that Geoghegan attributes to American social and economic groups. Union members and “blue-collar” workers, for example, are only weakly Democratic, as are singles, on the order of 60–40. And even then there can be significant cross-over effects; the “Reagan Democrats” were hardly a myth.

I know that the country’s turned to the right. But we’d still have the New Deal if voters were turning out at New Deal-type rates. (Between 1936 and 1968, voter turnout in presidential elections fell below 56 percent just once. Since 1968, it has never exceeded 56 percent.) So how can Democrats get the turnout of all eligibles up to 65 percent?

I doubt that seriously. One important causal factor Geoghegan omits is the lowering of the national voting age in 1970, which brought in a new cohort of voters who were unlikely to vote. Moreover, recent scholarship suggests that low apparent turnout in the U.S. is due to an increase in the non-eligible population (felons and non-citizens, which aren’t part of the “voting age population” used for redistricting) and the use of frequent elections (U.S. jurisdictions average at least one election per year, including local and state elections and primaries, while most other industrialized democracies only have elections, on average, every two years—and typically have elections for national office at different times from elections to local offices). The fact that the U.S. holds elections on weekdays rather than weekends is also an important factor in lowering turnout.

What are Geoghegan’s remedies?

First, offer two ballots, a long one and a short one. Let’s call the short one Fast Ballot. President. Congress. Governor if there’s a race on. That’s all. You’re done. Someone else will vote the long ballot.

Nick already explained what an idiotic idea this is. But in many states (including, I believe, Illinois), you can vote a party-line ballot just as easily. It seems more productive to encourage the adoption of (or return of) party-line boxes on ballots, then. (You can thank the Progressives for getting rid of party-line voting in many states.)

His second remedy apparently revolves around making the entire election process an excuse to go on a bender. No, I’m serious:

One free drink. Let’s take the 10 biggest population centers. In each one, set up a business-type council, full of media types and celebrities, to push voting. In September and October, have them sign up bars and restaurants to put up a red-white-and-blue logo on Election Night. What does the logo mean? With your ballot stub, first drink is on the house. Soon everybody will want to have a logo, the way in the New Deal, businesses showcased the Blue Eagle. Put the word out on college campuses. Get them to compete to throw the biggest party. Pump it up, the way we’ve done with Halloween.

No doubt, the Progressives are rolling over in their graves at this idea (you can thank them, too, for laws that require bars and liquor stores to be closed on Election Day in some states). In most (all?) states, it’s illegal to offer an inducement for voting—even if that inducement is given without regard to vote choice. From a theoretical point of view, I don’t think such laws are worthwhile—in fact, I actually wrote a paper on Philippine politics once that argued (in part) that citizens ought to have the right to sell their vote to the highest bidder. Regardless, this proposal is simultaneously idiotic and impractical (and illegal, to boot; not that that’s ever stopped any campaign tactic in the past, mind you).

Furthermore, the premise that any of this will help the Democrats is, simply put, absurd, and borders on patronizing: apparently, Geoghegan conceives of the Democratic base as a bunch of louts who can only be encouraged to vote if they are given a really dumbed-down ballot and are promised a pint of Pabst Blue Ribbon for their trouble. If this is what Democratic elites think of their own supporters, they should count their lucky stars if any of them bother to show up in November to cast a ballot for John F. Kerry—assuming he deigns to accept the nomination before then, that is.

Setting maxfail 0 in /etc/ppp/peers/dsl-provider will save you hours of headaches. Trust me on this.

Mainly this is a post to say “I’m not dead.” But it will also contain a few random thoughts:

• Ole Miss beat LSU 7–6 tonight in the first of a three game weekend series. The Rebels are hoping to finish the regular season with an outright SEC regular season title, a high seed in the SEC tournament, and positioned to host an NCAA Regional in early June.
• I’m almost done reading Measuring America, probably the first recreational book reading I’ve done in about a year.
• Never in my life has the term “fabulous” been applied (by me or someone else) to scheduling a meeting, but it happened this week. This was the result. Ok, it’s not the world’s spiffiest website, but it’ll do.
• The Power of the Blogosphere: it’s pretty safe to say I’d never have pondered this question (probably NSFW) at Note-It Posts without Dana’s prompting.
• The Power of the Blogosphere Part Deux: Russell Arben Fox has some typically thoughful comments on public education in Arkansas and in the nation.

Oh, last, but not least: I would have posted this several hours ago but my DSL connection went down inexplicably.

Nick Troester apparently missed the point of being in the National Honor Society in high school: the only reason to join NHS was to have some extracurriculars to put on your college application.

My amusing NHS anecdote: the fact I wasn’t a member of NHS was actually something of a surprise to my classmates—and the Forest High NHS adviser. Everyone just assumed I had the GPA to get in, being one of the class geniuses and all, but I never did. Except for my name on a few plaques here and there, where quantitative measures were not the sole measure of merit, my academic honors are, in fact, quite limited—no Phi Beta Kappa, no cum laude, no Pi Sigma Alpha membership to speak of. Yet still they let me stay in school long enough to get a Ph.D. Go figure.

Apropos of the same post, I also went down to the worst defeat in Forest High School history* when I ran for senior class president, the event that kicked off my part-time career as an also-ran political candidate.

To answer Will Baude: My fundamental position on comments remains unchanged. However, the software that drives Signifying Nothing (and the neglected Bazaar), LSblog, needs a comments feature, and this is the only place I have to test it. So, you will be subjected to it during testing.

I don’t plan on opening comments on every single post during testing, mind you. That, of course, is also a test. And then we’ll go back to our old, comment-free existence and live happily ever after, unless Brock decides he likes comments.

BTW, I can add a cookie pref to not show comments to you, if you want it.

Well, we’ll try this whole “comments” thing for a day or two (against my better judgment, mind you) and see how it goes. If nothing else, it will give me a chance to play with the IP blacklist feature.

It’s actually a pretty slick setup under the hood… you can use HTML or Textile markup, or intermingle the two, and you’ve got a reasonably complete subset of HTML to work with (no DHTML or images, but pretty much all the text formatting stuff is there, with the exception of CSS). About the only thing missing is a preview function, and that’s just because I’m pretty much lazy.

So, here’s your topic to start with, a good British telly question: was/is Julia Sawalha hotter on Absolutely Fabulous or Jonathan Creek? (And no spoilers on Jonathan Creek, please, we’re hopelessly behind on this side of the pond.)

Tony Randall is dead. His death is clearly a loss for humanity at large, and for those of us who were fans of his work. On the other hand, since I had the foresight to pick him in the Dead Pool… score!

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…