If anyone ever tells you to take seriously the comments of a former British cabinet member, here’s a new counterexample to add to your arsenal (along with the ravings of Robin Cook and Claire Short):

[Former Northern Ireland secretary] Mo Mowlam has called on the British and American governments to open talks with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Bear in mind, of course, that Ms. Mowlam’s former bailiwick (i.e. trying to stop the Provos and Loyalists from killing one another and returning responsible government to Ulster) is hardly a model of efficiency and good order, even today. It might also be worth bearing in mind that, to open talks with Mr. bin Laden, first we’d probably have to find him. Even the peacenik Liberal Democrats aren’t buying this lousy bill of goods:

Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell criticised Ms Mowlam’s remarks.

“What possible result would there be from sitting down with al-Qaeda?” he asked.

“Their intention is to destroy the liberal values upon which our way of life is based.

“You cannot negotiate with those whose aim is your own destruction.”

It’s nice to see good sense is alive and well in at least some quarters across the pond.

Link via Jeremy of Who Knew?

Heidi Bond lets loose the BLINK tag but somehow fails to incorporate Microsoft’s one-upping of Netscape’s non-standard HTML ante: the sublimely evil MARQUEE tag.

Apropos of the substance of Heidi’s post, given the vista of my career options at the moment, a job as an “evil minion” seems like a reasonable option.

Anyone who tells you that email propogation is instantaneous should consider this Received trace:

Received: from X.Y.edu
        by sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu (8.12.10+Sun/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i38G1LAf017356
        for <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>; Thu, 8 Apr 2004 11:01:21 -0500 (CDT)
Received: from a.b.c.d
        by X.Y.edu (8.12.9-20030924/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i36JvaK3027962
        for <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>; Tue, 6 Apr 2004 14:57:37 -0500 (CDT)

In other words, the email took 44 hours, 4 minutes to get here (well, 44:08 if you count the 5 minute fetchmail cycle on my inbox). I probably could have gotten a paper letter sent first class from X.edu (within a day’s drive in a neighboring state) in less time.

Jeff Jarvis gives a pretty good flavor of the complete joke that the 9/11 Commission is. For all the people who say George W. Bush is a moron (and Lord knows I agree with that assessment in a lot of ways), he was certainly correct to resist both this idiotic commission and its pointless cousin foisted on us by Congress, the Department of Homeland Security.

Tim Sandefur gets straight to the heart of things: the commission is simply “a symposium of blowhards.”

Ryan of the Dead Parrots notes the increasing use of anti-plagiarism software tools in academe (to fight the scourge of term-paper copying, something noted by Brock yesterday), the use of which apparently may be spreading to newsrooms to catch journalist-plagiarists (though obviously it won’t catch the Jayson Blairs of the world, who generally invented stories rather than copying them directly).

I have somewhat mixed feelings about these services. On the one hand, they do combat a real problem, and one that potentially damages the academic process. But, like Ryan, I wonder if requiring students to turn these papers in using these services (as a former colleague of mine is doing this semester) creates a presumption of guilt; funnily enough, I’d actually be more comfortable if I (the instructor) were the person submitting the papers to TurnItIn.com, rather than having my students do it. Maybe I’m weird that way.

Josh Barro (one of the Harvard Republicans) points out the reason only one person died when the City of New Orleans derailed near Yazoo City yesterday: practically nobody was aboard:

[The train carried 68 passengers and 12 crewmembers.] That works out to 7.56 passengers per car and 5.67 passengers per crew member. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few passengers are enticed by a train that can take them from New Orleans to Chicago in just 19 hours and 5 minutes. If this train is any indication of ridership on Amtrak’s routes outside metropolitan corridors, it’s no wonder its director says it needs a $1.8 billion dollar subsidy to continue operating in 2005.

They particularly aren’t enticed by a train that costs $182 to ride round-trip, $320 if you want to ride on the lower level, and a whopping $520 if you want to have a bed to sleep in. By contrast, you can fly non-stop round-trip to Chicago from New Orleans next weekend for $398… or, if you’re willing to do some advance planning, you can fly round-trip for $244 over a weekend in May. Not to mention that your trip will be almost 17 hours shorter in duration.

Or, you can ride Greyhound, completely unsubsidized,* for $138 round trip—and, if you pick the right bus, it doesn’t take much more time than the Amtrak train.

Update: * Both Stephen Karlson and a reader point out that there is a gross subsidy to the highway system (i.e. almost all highways are paid for by the state and federal governments); my point was, however, that the net subsidy is essentially zero, as all highway spending in the United States (except expenditures on low-volume local streets, which are usually supplemented by local property taxes—such streets would be necessary even in a less car-dependent society, mind you) comes from state and federal motor fuel taxes, which are borne by highway users such as Greyhound; in fact, highway taxes also pay much of the budget of the Federal Transit Administration, which is responsible for mass transit in urban areas. Apologies for any confusion.

Is there anyone who thinks this plan is a good use of time and resources?* I realize that the fungibility of resources (a fancy way of saying the ability to “walk and chew gum at the same time”) is often overrated, that DOJ‘s “porn surfers” wouldn’t be much help in the War on Terror, and there is a bit of a dark side to the “legit” pornography industry that takes advantage of young (but legally adult) women from abusive backgounds, but a crackdown on dirty movies seems like a pretty stupid idea nonetheless. I personally would have no beef with a crackdown on “kiddie porn” and the like, but as Glenn Reynolds points out the Ashcroft plan goes far beyond this eminently reasonable target to go after such examples of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Porn” as Skinemax and Spectravision.

But, if we must do this, I think David Adesnik’s solution of having the ex-Taliban Gitmo detainees do the, er, heavy lifting seems appropriate. And I suspect the reaction of Josh Barro of the Harvard Republicans reflects that of most young conservatives: a healthy dollop of “what the hell are they thinking?”

One of the phone interviews this afternoon seemed to go well; the other felt like a train wreck in slow motion. As of now, both of the phone interviews I’ve had with departments that used a speaker phone seemed to go poorly; the second department today used a real conference call, which went much better.

Now the waiting game begins…

Well, it’s not going to go down as the best paper I’ve ever written, but here’s the Midwest paper in all its glory. Now I have to prepare for those back-to-back phone interviews this afternoon…

One of the posts I inadvertently trashed during the composition stage yesterday was essentially the same as this Steve Verdon post.

It coulda been worse… I could have come out as Krugman.

Have I mentioned how much I hate writing the front half of research papers? I guess this means I should find a frequent collaborator who likes writing literature reviews but hates data analysis…

(On the other hand, maybe I should just publish in economics journals… that discipline apparently considers three sentences to be a long lit review.)

I won’t spoil the whole Midwest paper for you, but here’s the pretty path diagram of the LISREL model. Guess the coefficients and standard errors—it’s fun for the whole family!

Actually, the most amazing thing about the paper is that the model works, despite the suboptimal polling data it’s based on—almost all of the manifest variables are dichotomous or trichotomous.

I’ve managed to kill two posts in the middle of writing them today (one of which was no-thanks to Windows XP SP 2 deciding to pop up a dialog right before I pressed Enter). I think that’s a sign that I need to take a break…

Coming tomorrow: the semi-legendary Midwest paper (once I figure out why my sem specification isn’t working—I think I know why now, but I had to think about it all afternoon), a semi-review of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 beta, and probably more rants and ravings on the state of the nation and the world as I work off nervous energy prior to the two phone interviews I have scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

I think this bug report contains the most glaringly obvious statement in the history of software:

I’ve been trying out reportbug, and it’s not perfect. [emphasis added]

Not that I recall ever claiming that reportbug was perfect, mind you, but still…

Via Electric Venom and InstaPundit, it looks like things are taking a bit of an ugly turn in Baghdad today.

Update: Wretchard at Belmont Club has some worthwhile thoughts on the matter.

Well, ain’t this lovely? (Via John Cole.)

Everyone’s favorite ex-Klansman, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), is back in the news, on the occasion of casting his 17,000th vote in the United States Senate (rumors that the vote was the one completing the wholesale transfer of the federal government to West Virginia are greatly exaggerated).

As when Trent Lott got a bit effusive in praising the longeivity of Strom Thurmond, though, this has become an event where a number of Senators decided “to heck with nuance,” and got a bit too enthusiastic about all of Sen. Byrd’s life.

One such quote is from Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Ct.). Unfortunately, there’s a bit of controversy regarding the provenance of the quote. So, to set the record straight, here is the complete text of Sen. Dodd’s remarks, from Thursday’s edition of the Congressional Record:

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I add my voice as well to my seatmate, if I may. I sit in this chair by choice. Senator Byrd sits in his chair by choice as well, but he makes the choice before I do. I wanted to find out where he was going to sit so I could sit next to him. I did that because I wanted to sit next to the best, to learn everything I possibly could about the ability of this institution to provide the kind of leadership I think the country expects of us.

Several thoughts come to mind. This is a day of obvious significance in the number of votes that have been cast, 17,000, but it is far more important to talk about quality than quantity. Quantity is not an insignificant achievement, but the quality of my colleague and friend’s service is what I think about when the name ROBERT C. BYRD comes to my mind.

I carry with me every single day, 7 days a week, a rather threadbare copy of the United States Constitution given to me many years ago—I can’t even read it well now; it is so worn out—I may need a new copy—given to me by my seatmate, ROBERT C. BYRD. I revere it. I tell people why I carry it because it reminds me of the incredible gift given to me by the people of Connecticut to serve in this Chamber, to remind me of the importance of an oath we all made, and that is to do everything we can to preserve, protect, and defend the principles upon which this Nation was founded. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my mind, is the embodiment of that goal.

It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation’s 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.

I join my colleagues in thanking the Senator from West Virginia for the privilege of serving with him. He has now had to endure two members of my family as colleagues. Senator Byrd was elected to the Senate in 1958 along with my father. He served with my father in the House. I have now had the privilege of serving with Senator Byrd for 24 years, twice the length of service of my father. That is an awful lot of time to put up with members of the Dodd family. We thank Senator Byrd for his endurance through all of that time.

There is no one I admire more, there is no one to whom I listen more closely and carefully when he speaks on any subject matter. I echo the comments of my colleague from Massachusetts. If I had to pick out any particular point of service for which I admire the Senator most, it is his unyielding defense of the Constitution. All matters come and go. We cast votes on such a variety of issues, but Senator Byrd’s determination to defend and protect this document which serves as our rudder as we sail through the most difficult of waters is something that I admire beyond all else.

I join in this moment in saying: Thank you for your service, thank you for your friendship, and I look forward to many more years of sitting next to you on the floor of the Senate.

I yield the floor.

In any event, you can find potentially embarassing quotes from about half the Senate in the series of effusive comments about Sen. Byrd.

Alex Knapp links a lengthy analysis of the Iraq Survey Group’s work in Iraq that raises a lot of very important questions, to wit:

US forces participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom had the latest chemical detection gear, including chemical detection paper, chemical agent detector kits, improved chemical agent monitors, and sophisticated Fox Chemical Recon Vehicles. Some American GIs remembered well the shortfalls of this equipment in Gulf War I. Now all of these older devices had been improved, and new and more accurate devices had been issued. In fact, some mobile Army labs had highly sensitive mass spectrometers to test for suspicious substances. Who could argue the results of repeated tests using these devices without explaining how DoD had apparently been ripped off by contractors for faulty products? Apparently, the ISG could and did.

One of the reported incidents occurred near Karbala where there appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area of 55-gallon drums of pesticide. In addition, there was also a camouflaged bunker complex full of these drums that some people entered with unpleasant results. More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to nerve agent. A full day of tests on the drums resulted in one positive for nerve agent, and then one resulted in a negative. Later, an Army Fox NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] Recon Vehicle confirmed the existence of Sarin. An officer from the 63d Chemical Company thought there might well be chemical weapons at the site.

But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into non-existence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers six feet underground. The “agricultural site” was also co-located with a military ammunition dump, evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.

The bottom line is that Saddam’s troops apparently needed to use a lot of “pesticides” for rather mysterious reasons. Definitely RTWT™.

David Bernstein, among my co-blogger’s least favorite Volokh Conspirators, links a New York Times piece on the passage of the House version of the transportation reauthorization bill.

Now the article is written by “David Stout,” whose job apparently is to rewrite AP copy for the NYT website; to my knowledge, “his” articles never appear in print (and “he” may just be a pseudonym for a group of copy editors). What’s weird about the article? Let’s pull out some excerpts:

Regardless of the real figure, President Bush has threatened to veto the measure as too costly at a time that he and Congressional Republicans are supposed to be serious about holding down the federal deficit.

I believe this is a run-on sentence, to begin with. And the second half of the sentence looks like an editorial comment, not news reporting.

“Thirty billion, when you are cutting the deficit in half in five years, is real money,” Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the other day, apparently with no humor intended.

“The other day” seems rather imprecise for dating a quotation for a newspaper article. And the statement that this was said “apparently with no humor intended” is a complete non-sequitor. (The quote appears to have been cribbed from this Carl Hulse article dated April 1.)

The highway-spending bill enjoys wide support among Democrats and Republicans alike because the members of both parties have something in common: their constituents use highways (and bridges and bike paths and other incidentals wrapped into the bill.)

Again, another strange paragraph; this one isn’t even punctuated correctly—the “incidentals,” by the way, include the entire Federal Transit Administration; a rather large “incidental,” wouldn’t you think? Strange.

(Hulse’s article in Saturday’s paper is far more coherent.)

I ought to make this a daily feature… today’s lowlights:

• Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) thinks his November election opponent looks like Uday or Qusay Hussein. Only if Dr. Mongiardo is loading his patients in the wood-chipper, methinks.
• UW-Madison sophomore Audrey Seiler was responsible for her own alleged kidnapping.
• Oh, yeah, well-connected Democratic party hack/consultant Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is subhuman scum.

Quagmire? Well, maybe for the soon-to-be ex-Parrots of Fallujah.

Josh Chafetz and Andrew Sullivan have been having a bit of a back-and-forth over whether the gas tax should be raised. As Josh pointed out yesterday, such a tax would be highly regressive, particularly hitting the working poor in rural communities that don’t have mass transit.

It would also be bad policy for another reason: the gasoline tax is essentially a user fee. Most of the revenues of the federal gas tax are returned to the states (according to a rather arcane formula that just happens to shift funds from rural America to the Northeast) to pay for the federal share of major highway construction and resurfacing projects, while the rest of the money helps pay for the federal mass transit subsidy (thus, Mr. Sullivan, who doesn’t operate his own vehicle, receives a massive subsidy from those of us who drive). Diverting gas tax revenues to the general fund would arguably be even more crooked than diverting money from the Social Security tax to pay for the defense budget, or taking FICA receipts and using those to operate the postal service.

And, while I generally share their dislike for the sport utility vehicle (though am puzzled why comparably gas-guzzling vehicles like minivans escape their wrath), raising the gas tax would be a very crude instrument for reducing demand for SUVs: while people do respond to price signals over the long term, over the short run the demand for gasoline is rather price inelastic. But if your animus for the SUV is motivated by its gas-guzzling properties, rather than its appearance, you’ll be happy to know that Toyota will be introducing a hybrid gas-electric SUV next year, the Highlander Hybrid, which will provide “the fuel economy of a four-cylinder compact sedan.”

Update: Stephen Karlson properly takes note of the market-distorting effects of the rather arbitrary division between cars and trucks in the CAFE standard, which “effectively preclude some sport-ute and minivan drivers from substituting one size downward” to station wagons and large sedans.

Von in pondering the continual PR nightmare that is the Bush administration observes:

Thank God there’s some good economic news—and that Kerry is so freaking weak as a candidate.

I suppose if you’re a Republican, that might be worth being thankful for. But, it seems to me, the completely lackluster nature of John F. Kerry would be a serious drawback if you wanted to be able to vote for a credible alternative to Bush this fall without holding your nose.

I spent most of the evening out at a bonfire (out in the boonies of Panola County) with some friends, some beer, and some hot dogs. A few choice observations:

• Coat hangers, even when straightened out, are rather non-ideal implements for roasting hot dogs.
• Every picture my camera phone takes in the dark looks like a blurry Bigfoot photo. I should get in touch with the National Enquirer.
• Endorsement: a former student of mine from a few years back (in fact, the only one that took two different classes with me) said he liked my class because I “wasn’t a communist,” presumably in comparison to my more liberally-inclined colleagues in the department. I should slap that on the vita.
• The young woman who the host of the shindig was pursuing was apparently quite disappointed that her current boyfriend was getting married.
• Around 9:45, several people went for a beer run. When they returned 30 minutes later, it was opined that this was a rather long time to head to the gas station just down the hill. The conversation then went as follows: “We had to go to Bumf*ck to get the beer.” “We’re already in Bumf*ck.” “Well, we had to go to West Bumf*ck.”

Just another night in the soap opera that is my life.

I’ve set my TiVo for the lovely Ms. McArdle’s appearance on CNNfn Friday morning.