Steven Taylor has a followup tonight to my post on academic titles from a couple of days ago; James Joyner comments as well.

The Baseball Crank plays whiffleball with some Bush AWOL critics. In the process, he notes this Jackson Baker piece in the Memphis Flyer, picked up by Kevin Drum of CalPundit.

For the uninitiated: Baker is both the bête noir and inspiration of Memphis blogger Mike Hollihan; the classic quote about the Flyer is that the alt-weekly “has never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” I caught Baker redhanded flat-out distorting quotes from politicians back during the Tennessee “tiny towns” debacle in 1997. Baker is the worst kind of political reporter: a man who virtually fellates his sources in print, an unabashed Democratic partisan, and a man who routinely substitutes innuendo for fact. While his work is often amusing, if you’re looking for credible, nonpartisan reportage or commentary without an ideological axe to grind I’d suggest going to Atrios or The 700 Club first.

Update: Dean Esmay has more, indicating that the end may finally be near.

This weekend’s Herculean coding task: port Textile 2.0 syntax to Python. Mark Pilgrim ported the 1.0 syntax, but has since put the project aside due to limited time. The Perl module is 2260 lines, not including the POD-formatted docs (I guess I’ll have to make that a docstring), so my work is cut out for me.

Anyway, it’s a welcome distraction from job applications…

The folks at The Dead Parrot Society can now safely run their diff between the new and old versions of the blogroll. I’m not going to name names, but I purged a few people whose blogging had ceased to have any value to me. (I also purged a few blogs that have been dead for several months.) Once the Kerry zippergate and Bush AWOL stories go away, I will consider restoring the removed blogs, if it turns out I start visiting those sites again. Judging from visits today, however, I think I made the right decision.

Oh, while we’re linking photos of interns: I never had sex with Connie Mack (or any other senator, member of the House, or anyone else in the District of Columbia). Hell, I never even met the guy. Signed his name a lot, though…

Well, I’m the last one to pick up on this outside the mainstream media. Random, barely-articulated thoughts:

• I don’t buy the Republican smear theory. For starters, Wes Clark’s people have been shopping it for a while, and I’m pretty sure Clark isn’t a Republican (or a Democrat, for that matter).
• I think James Joyner is right: only Republicans can suffer actual career damage from bimbo eruptions.

Anyway, the old aphorism always holds: “where there’s smoke there’s fire… at least, unless someone’s installed a smoke machine.”

One of the things that came up tonight at the big bloggers’ bash (an event that slipped my mind much of today, mind you) was the whole issue of titles. Brock noted some disparity in how academic titles are used in the north and south. And, recently, a fellow blogger in private correspondence rather strenuously objected to my recent Ph.D.-dropping in the blog and elsewhere.

This issue was rather more problematic in my ABD and pre-ABD teaching days. I wasn’t “Dr. Lawrence” or “Prof. Lawrence,” yet my students insisted on using those titles—even though I routinely told them to just call me Chris. I certainly wasn’t “Mr. Lawrence” either, being only a few years older than my students, while my academic title—instructor—hardly made an appropriate salutation either. Now, of course, I am at least “Dr. Lawrence”—“Prof. Lawrence” will have to wait until the fall, or possibly even longer if I go and play post-doc or end up at one of the one-year appointments that uses the rather Anglophile title “lecturer.”

As far as the north/south thing goes, I think some of it has to do with the difference in being in an undergraduate institution to going to grad school. But it may partially be a southern thing as well; I still have trouble calling some of my now-former professors by their first names. Then again, that could just be a “me” thing.

I’m still somewhat conflicted on the issue my friend raised, however. Part of me says, “I just busted my ass for six years, I earned this title, and I’m damn well going to use it whenever possible.” On the other hand, I can see how it might lead some to think I’m trying to confer false additional legitimacy on my opinions; I didn’t magically become more expert on all matters political the afternoon of my dissertation defense, after all.

Further complicating matters is being on the job trail: since there’s a statistically significant improvement in my hiring prospects based on having the doctorate “in hand” entering a job search, it’s advisable to ensure that hiring departments are aware of that fact—and given the level of attention that is generally given to application packets on a first screening, repetition of that fact as often as possible is worthwhile. So if you correspond with me at my university email address, you’re quite likely to see the “Dr.” appellation, at least until I accept a (now-hypothetical) job offer.

David Janes has the latest on the Sci-Fi Channel’s new Battlestar Galactica plans. Woo-hoo!

Something that’s come up in the past here at SN is the relative dearth of conservatives in academe and its causes. The meme went out in full force today; for a sampling, see Steve at Begging to Differ (who makes a compelling argument that the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Grutter applies equally to viewpoint diversity in the academy—and thus is highly suspect, since the Court would never make such an argument about political views), Andrew Sullivan, Pandagon, Stephen Karlson, Tightly Wound, and Kieran Healy for starters. Not being much of an ideologue myself, I’ll just step away from the fray.

A lot of people have egg on their face over this one. Lots of bloggers staked their reputations, in some way, on it, and we utterly failed. The latest, and perhaps the most high-profile, blogger to acknowledge it, is Dan Drezner.

No, I’m not talking about WMD in Iraq. I’m talking about John Kerry’s cakewalk to the Democratic nomination. A month ago, everyone thought that Dean was going to win this thing, even though (as we now know) his poll numbers started eroding about that time.

This is, no doubt, the point where our good buddies the Perestroikans will come out and say this proves, once and for all, that attempts at a science of politics are futile (one suspects they might also think a science of chemistry is futile, but that is neither here nor there). And, if I were someone who believed that the ultimate test of science is prediction rather than explanation, I might agree with them. But in all good science, when our observations don’t conform with our theories it’s a good time to revisit our hypotheses. The hypothetical reasons why Dean should win were sound:

1. Dean will win the nomination because he’s got the support of the base: This was the clearest argument for Dean’s candidacy. He had a massive fundraising advantage. Dean had captured the energy of the Internet and young people. He captured the anger of many Democratic rank-and-file voters against both Bush and the Iraq war.
2. Dean has organization: Dean had spent all of 2003 setting up a formidable organization in Iowa; the only candidate who was close was near-native-son Dick Gephardt.
3. The primary schedule favors Dean: Coming off an anticipated win in Iowa, most observers expected him to surge into New Hampshire and create an air of inevitability around his campaign.
4. Dean was a governor: Three of the last five Democratic nominees were state governors. In a field where Dean was the only governor, the prediction that Dean would win would be reasonable.
5. Dean has elite support: Throughout the fall, establishment Democrats jumped on the Dean bandwagon. Elites don’t generally hand out endorsements, particularly in primaries, unless they’re pretty sure they won’t be shown to be incorrect.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to Boston. As we now know, none of these things came to pass. Why?

1. We overestimated the base: Dean’s base was deep, but not very broad—perhaps 20% of the Democratic electorate. Dean’s gambit to widen his appeal—being the hardcore “anti-war” candidate not named Kucinich—backfired when Saddam Hussein got dragged out of a foxhole in mid-December. Dean correctly recognized that Democrats were anti-war, but not why they were anti-war: much of the Dem base doesn’t really oppose the war on principle; instead, they oppose it mostly because George W. Bush called the shots. I’d call this the “process” critique of the war, and one that John Kerry was able to capitalize on by being downright shifty with his votes and rhetoric.
2. Organization didn’t matter in Iowa: Somehow a lot of Iowa Democrats got excited about the campaign without getting very excited about the candidates themselves, and when it came time to vote the undecided voters chose Kerry and Edwards—two candidates whose operations in Iowa were weak.
3. The primary schedule favored a New Englander: Kerry essentially borrowed the Dean playbook—convert a win in Iowa to unstoppable momentum coming out of New Hampshire as a “favorite son.” Kerry also benefitted from the unexpected nature of the Iowa win—a Dean victory in Iowa would have been expected, and the momentum bump would have been far smaller.
4. Endorsements don’t matter: The big kahuna, Bill Clinton, stayed out, so the endorsements Dean picked up from has-beens like Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and (maybe) Jimmy Carter were devalued.
5. Dean pissed off the Iowans: Not just in making stuff up when asked about his connection with military veterans, but in old videotapes where Dean had an all-too-candid moment in revealing that the Iowa caucuses are mainly an excuse for presidential candiates to go and kiss farmers’ asses for months on end.
6. Finally, Democrats recognized that Republicans were teeing up for Dean: Anyone with half a brain knew that Dean was Karl Rove’s dream candidate: an inexperienced opponent, prone to displays of short temper and highly vulnerable on social issues and defense policy. Democratic voters, who are desperate to be rid of Bush, siezed on electability as the one and only issue that matters—and decided a patrician senator from Massachusetts, like party idol/martyr JFK, was preferable to the thumb-shaped Vermont wonder in that department.

I think the bottom-line lesson here is that peoples’ political behavior is both idiosyncratic and hard to predict. Perhaps more importantly, I won’t call for an investigation of my fellow political scientists for blowing the search for the Democratic nominee if you won’t.

This is today’s entry in the OTB Beltway Traffic Jam.

Jeff Jarvis asks:

Why are we not hearing libertarians and conservatives—supposedly all in favor of freedom and less government—screaming about the attempts to interfere with media and the threat to free speech this brings. Do we really need hearings on Janet Jackson’s breast? Do we really want the government to say who can own which press? C’mon. I don’t care if you don’t happen to like the media you now see; do you really want goverment regulation of what you can hear and then what you can say? To the barricades, people….

My answers: 1. No. 2. [Strawman] The government already does. 3. Not really.

The real problem, as I see it: the Super Bowl halftime show should have had a TV-14 rating. The sporting events exception in the broadcast media’s self-imposed guidelines shouldn’t apply to entertainment within sporting events.

As to whether or not I’m going to the barricades? No. Because at the moment, this is all a public masturbation exercise by John McCain and the other usual suspects. Call me back when there’s legislation that makes it out of committee.

Dean Esmay, who’s gone (back?) to college to get a degree so he can go back to working in the same job he used to be employed in before the tech bust, wonders if society overvalues the B.A. and B.S. degrees these days. Several bloggers have responded, including Dr. Joyner and Dr. Taylor. Kevin McGehee points to the dumbing down of high school as part of the cause, and certainly that is part of it; I think at some level, the creation of “honors” programs and the like in high school has not so much resulted in a better education for the upper tier of college-bound kids (although I suspect it has to an extent) as it has a lowering of expectations for the rest. And, to some extent, a lot of colleges have brought it on themselves by instituting remedial programs rather than requiring students who don’t have the necessary skills to succed in a four-year institution to attend a community college before coming for their undergraduate education.

On the other hand, while I wasn’t exactly thrilled about some of the classes I took as an undergraduate at the time, particularly in the sciences (I loathed physics with a passion, particularly mechanics), they gave me a lot of the background I’ve needed to succeed later on in life. Granted, until two months ago what I was doing in life was learning more stuff so I could be prepared to teach undergraduates and do cutting-edge research in political science, but I think a lot of that training would have been valuable no matter what I decided to do with my life.

Martin Devon of Patio Pundit catches the New York Times engaging in a bit of fantasy in suggesting that John “I don’t need the South” Kerry can, er, carry Tennessee in November. Said fantasy is based largely on an interview with Kerry campaign co-chair and Congressman-for-life-if-he-wants-it Harold Ford Jr. Quoth the Times:

The state has tended to vote Republican and has two Republican senators. Mr. Gore lost here in 2000 by four percentage points, but some say the issues will be different this time and that Mr. Kerry is a different candidate from Mr. Gore. And last year the state elected Mr. Bredesen, a Democrat, as governor, and he has become enormously popular.

“Some” might also note that Kerry is much further to the left than Gore ever was (until he got Deanentia), and Bredesen largely won because (a) his opponent, Van Hilleary, was an incredibly weak campaigner and (b) his predecessor, Don Sundquist, managed to turn the Republicans’ names into mud in the state by becoming a tax-and-spend liberal in his second term.

Also amusing: the article misspells the name of Vanderbilt University political scientist John Geer.

Since people are Googling… Wonkette! has swiped the results from NRO. The Kerryman is kicking ass.

Bear in mind, however, that at least in Tennessee voters are permitted to vote early up to two weeks before the election; to my knowledge, there was no exit polling done of early voting sites. Not that it’d make much difference in the results, as early voters are only about 1/4 of the electorate, but in a close race it might matter.

Poliblogger Steven Taylor responded yesterday to my post on conservatism and the 2004 election. First he examines my argument with regard to divided government:

Chris makes an argument, that I have often heard, that the solution to the problem of insufficient fiscal conservatism is the return of divided government. However, I would note that in the twentieth century divided government has been the norm, and, likewise, deficits and ever-increasing spending has also been the norm, calling into question the idea that divided government results in curtailed spending. The only exception (at least in regards to deficits) was during part of the Clinton years, during which we did, in fact, have divided government. However, as I have argued before, the balanced budgets of those years were primarily a function of unexpected economic growth, not a tremendous feat of fiscal restraint the resulted from divided government. For that matter the Reagan era, one of divided government, is usually considered the hallmark of deficit politics.

Causality is difficult to prove here, but I don’t think that—necessarily—you can argue that the Clinton years were a fluke. Reagan was president with a Democratic House and a Senate that was sometimes under Republican and sometimes under Democratic control. The Democrats of the 1980s were hardly a model of fiscal responsibility—and coupled with Reagan’s fetish for supply-side economics, the two together created a giant deficit between them. As I stated in my earlier post, effective fiscal conservatism rests on control of the House and Senate—something that Reagan didn’t enjoy, but Clinton did. That Clinton also benefitted from a favorable economy that he had little control over doesn’t change the fact that Republicans in Congress were much more willing to say “no” when Clinton wanted to throw money at problems than they are today.

And I do think that in terms of national security one would see a rather substantially different world under a Kerry administration. That alone is sufficient reason to heed my prior advice. And do think that he is serious in his campaign rhetoric regarding foreign policy. Remember: this is the guy who voted against the first Gulf War even though Saddam has invaded Kuwait. I think that he is highly reticent to use force and does not have the temperament needed to fight the war on terror.

This is an argument I acknowledged, albeit somewhat glibly, in my post. But to a large extent I think a Democratic president is now stuck prosecuting the War on Terror forcefully, or he risks going down in history as a miserable failure the likes we haven’t seen since the late 1970s. Not that that’s much comfort if you think Kerry will get us all killed between now and January 2009, mind you. (I think the more likely scenario is that Kerry will simply fail to follow through with al-Qaeda and do the minumum necessary to protect the homeland, leaving us with a mess at the end of his term.)

[On domestic policy:] However, there would still be important differences. For example: the judgeship issue and I don’t just mean in regards to specific social conservative issue (although abortion is important to me), but just the general idea of having judges who at least make an effort to simply judge the law and let legislators legislate. I consider this to be rather significant.

I think the odds of either Kerry or Bush getting the nominees he wants on the bench are rapidly approaching zero at this point; however, Kerry or Bush might be able to accomplish a bit with recess appointments. The open question is whether or not the next president will dare make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court when Stevens keels over.

And a side note the “social conservative” issue: prostitution really isn’t that much of an issue for the DoJ, so that strikes me as a non-starter of an example. And in regards to the drug war (which I oppose on efficacy grounds, btw), a Democratic president is unlikely to function any differently than a Republican one on that one. From Nixon to the present the funding for the drug war has simply grown, and while Carter discussed support for legalizing marijuana, the basic approach to illegal drugs has been be pretty consistent across partisan lines. Indeed, the massive increase in funding to Colombia under “Plan Colombia” was under Clinton.

My example sucked because I actually meant to write “pornography.” Don’t mind me, my brain’s in deep freeze. But I suspect a Kerry administration would not prosecute either the War on Drugs or the War on Porn with the zeal that Ashcroft has shown. Of course, if you’re a SoCon that’s a bug, not a feature.

To be honest, I cannot conceive a situation arising in which the net policy desires of conservatives of any stripe would be furthered by a Kerry win, unless they occurred by sheer serendipity.

Serendipity works. I don’t think Bill Clinton particularly wanted to show fiscal restraint in the 1990s, but a funny thing happened as a result of his perpetual head-butting with Congress. If John Kerry had proposed No Child Left Behind, or the Medicare drugs bill, in the exact same form that Bush had, he’d have been laughed right out of Congress by the Republicans—and deservedly so. It may only be a marginal difference, but the difference between trying to give the president a record to run on and trying to deny the president something to take credit for may just be enough to encourage Congress to keep spending in check.

Now, if you’re someone who wants Roe and Goodridge to go away, this may not be enough to affect your vote. But if you’re someone who’s indifferent, or for that matter realistic, on social issues—let’s face it, Roe and Goodridge aren’t going away, because another two Scalias will never make it onto the Supreme Court—it’s something that might be worth considering. (On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that some people, including my esteemed co-blogger, who want more Breyers on the Court have made much the same argument. So your mileage may vary, as they say.)

Apparently hackers are also part-time epistemologists. My general feeling on the issue is that any enterprise that generally uses the scientific method to discover capital-T Truth is a “science.” Mathematics does this, ergo it is a science.

Then again, others differ; Rose-Hulman describes itself as “one of the nation’s top undergraduate engineering, science, and mathematics colleges,” implicitly arguing that mathematics is not a science (and neither is engineering—which I suppose is a whole debate of its own).

Apparently blogroll editing has become a spectator sport. Free hint: set your blogroll order preferences to “Alpha” so it’s easier to tell the differences.

Greg of En Banc links a short paper on the economics of student evaluation forms. Ole Miss just transitioned from paper “bubble sheet” forms handed out in-class to an opt-in online system somehow tied into our all-knowing but completely-screwed-up SAP campus management system.

Last I heard, compliance with the evaluation procedure was sharply lower—something I think would lead to a non-random error that biases responses downward, as students who disliked a class will probably be more likely to bother filling out the evaluations. On the upside, at least you don’t have to keep the original copies of the evaluations around for the written comments—which is a good thing, since the university managed to shred one semesters’ worth of evaluations a couple of years back, making those written comments lost to history.

Steven Taylor thinks conservatives need to learn to love the Shrub, since otherwise they may well receive eight more years of Clintonism. On the other hand, if you’re a conservative—not necessarily a Republican, mind you—a spell of divided government might well be desirable.

It seems to me, at the simplest level, that different sorts of conservatism require the control of different branches of government. Fiscal conservatism rests largely on control of Congress; if you keep spending and taxes down, there isn’t much the White House or Supreme Court can do about it. Social conservatism, on the other hand, rests on control of the presidency and the judiciary; the Justice Department effectively decides to what degree morals violations (like prostitution and drug crimes) are prosecuted, while the judiciary effectively sets the limits of what personal behavior Congress and the states can regulate.

There are, of course, other issues to base one’s vote on; the Clinton administration fiddled while North Korea and Iraq burned during the 1990s, instead expending political capital on dubious adventures like Haiti (which is now in more of a mess than when I was a wee intern in D.C. being briefed on this problem 9 years ago) and saving the Europeans’ asses in the Balkans. And, at the moment, it’s hard to tell if Kerry’s campaign-trail pronouncements are simply part of a red-meat distribution effort to keep the Deaniacs on the Democratic bus through November or actually serious foreign policy views—if you believe they’re the latter, you might think twice about jumping on the divided government bandwagon.

But, given that Congress is essentially a lock to remain in Republican hands for the forseeable future,* if you’re not much of a social conservative and you make under $200k it’s hard to see what you’d lose under a Kerry (or Edwards) administration.

This is today’s entry in the BTJ™.

Oh, goody, YAFNC. The browser that changes its name every season is now at 0.8. Download it early and often. No word yet on whether Clint Eastwood plans to sue.

Now off to dig through some SQL tables to rename this topic of the blog…

The Toast-O-Meter for this week has arrived, courtesy of Steven Taylor, although the bread is apparently borderline stale at this point due to Charter Communications’ ineptitude.

In other Campaign ’04-related news: Venomous Kate is perched on the fence for now, for a long list of reasons (via Dan Drezner, who’s doing some fence-sitting of his own).

Dan Drezner isn’t buying rumors that al-Qaeda has an unspecified supply of tactical nuclear weapons, but recommends vigilence nonetheless; the Belgravia Dispatch has similar thoughts.

I don’t have anything to add to either analysis; it seems rather implausible that the group would have such weapons yet not use them—if not against the United States, then certainly against Israel, which would seem to be an easier target. To paraphrase the Dispatch, terror groups generally aren’t known for their strategic geopolitical wherewithal, and mutually-assured destruction is pretty meaningless as a deterrent when your territory is a few hundred square miles of borderline-uninhabitable territory to begin with and you have a martyr complex to boot.

Will Baude and Tim Sandefur are engaged in a bit of a running battle with the Curmudgeonly Clerk over whether or not individual libertarians’ having moral positions constitute a betrayal of their commitment to not legislate on the basis of morality.

I tend to agree with Tim that the Clerk is confused on a number of points, and leave the detailed critiques to Tim and Will. My main, and unoriginal, observation would be that “societal acceptance” is something that is relatively independent of legality. (My second observation would be that Reason was a far better arbiter of libertarian thought under Virginia Postrel’s editorship, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Update: Tim Sandefur responds. Actually, after I wrote the above sentence, I realized that the word “arbiter” doesn't quite characterize my thought; I meant something closer to “exemplar.” Indeed, contra Jonah Goldberg (and his bloviation that National Review polices the boundaries of conservatism*), I don’t necessarily think libertarian thought needs an arbiter.

I’m seriously considering a thorough cleaning of the blogroll in the next few days. Who won’t be going: people who have linked us, and people who have interesting blogs. Who will: people whose blog content I can predict before even clicking through the link.

Then again, I might actually do something vaguely productive like work on the near-mythical impeachment paper instead…

Via Mark: advice on how to make Mozilla Firebird feel and behave faster.