The libertarian/modcon reaction to George Bush’s “Mars shot” proposal has been generally negative , Dan Drezner, and Robert Garcia Tagorda for a sampling; the Crescat crew is conflicted, to say the least). And I largely agree—not so much because it’s an inefficient allocation of resources, although it is, but because the “pork” isn’t really a public good.

When Washington earmarks $X million dollars to build a highway in someone’s district, or grants funds for a flashy new federal courthouse somewhere, at least the pork has a public good quality: everyone benefits, or has the potential of benefitting, in a meaningful way. But the space program doesn’t create a public good; instead, it redistributes money from taxpayers to people with “Ph.D.” at the end of their names—Robin Hood in reverse—with only the vague promise that the public will see benefits. (Whatever benefits there are, however, will likely be patented, with the royalties devolving to the contractors—not the government to compensate for the “seed money” from the grants.)

The small upside in this is that at least we’re trying to help Dennis Kucinich find his way back home… who says Americans aren’t a generous people?

Due to a combination of disorganization, lack of interest, and tight finances, I’m not in New Orleans this weekend for the SPSA conference. Steven Taylor, however, is, as are (I presume) a number of friends of mine—and, judging by the emptiness of Deupree Hall this afternoon, all of the Americanists in our department are there too.

It’s nice to hear, at least, that SPSA has found a conference hotel with in-room high-speed Internet access (now, if only the Palmer House in Chicago had it…).

Note to potential presidential candidates: don’t go on obscure Canadian political panel shows—your comments may return from the past to bite you in the ass.

Link via Matt Stinson.

Will Baude is documenting Dan Drezner’s use of profanity in the classroom. I think I’ve used “pissed off” and variants of “shit” in lectures, but never anything stronger. On the other hand, I’m sure my students have used far worse terms in reference to me…

Well, I have to give Howard Dean (or at least his M.D. program) some credit: at least he doesn’t think life begins at childbirth like his fellow Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark does (also see James Joyner ). Clark not only believes that life begins at childbirth—he thinks that was the Supreme Court’s holding in Roe v. Wade (which, er, it wasn’t—in fact, the court found that third-trimester abortions were almost never constitutionally protected, something often lost in the grand abortion debate). I’m about as pro-choice as they come, but I can’t go so far as to endorse borderline infanticide. Though, I have to say that scholars who buy the legalist model will love Clark’s endorsement of stare decisis as the sole legitimate approach to judicial decision-making.

I think Howard Dean’s advisors had the right idea by telling Dean to shut up for a while. Clark’s problem is that he can’t do the same, because his persona still isn’t well-defined enough.

Kate Malcolm thinks colons are a scourge in academia. Anecdotal point: my vita lists twelve different works (my dissertation, a working paper that I plan to send out for review Monday, and ten conference papers). My dissertation’s title doesn’t contain a colon; the working paper does. Six of the conference papers have colons in their titles; two have a question mark that functions as a colon; and two lack colons completely.

Of the colon titles, though, only two fit the “witty title, sober subtitle” pattern: one was a co-authored piece that I didn’t pick the title for (which is one of the question-mark titles), and the other uses aliteration in the main title. The remainder contain colons because of allusions to other works (two pieces that are extensions or responses to published material), to set up the context that a theory is being tested in (e.g. “Impeaching the President: The Influence of Constituency Support on a Salient Issue,” where the substantive situation being analyzed isn’t the key focus, but it is the “hook” for the theories being tested), or because I wanted to downplay the authoritativeness of the work.

All that being said, colons are probably overused. Perhaps as full-text indexing of journal articles becomes more widely adopted, including the integration of the SSCI into other databases, colons will become less widespread.

Update: One of the co-authors I impugned above, fellow Ole Miss alum Scott Huffmon, writes:

Obviously, an exception should be made for those of us who feel it is both sport and imperative to come up with the most annoying paper titles. I actually had to harass Bobbi [our other co-author] into that title. I told her, “It may sound and look stupid, but I’m not submitting a title without a colon…it’s tradition.” John White and I decided we would try to put as many colons in titles as possible after a guy … wrote a conference paper titled (the post colon subtitle may be off, but the pithy pre-colon title is correct), “How Bubba Votes: The Voting Behavior of Southern White Males.”

I plan to continue my quest for the most annoying and stupid paper title possible by incorporating unneeded colons whenever possible. I stand defiant in the face of your punctuationist discrimination.

Viva la colon!!!

If this doesn’t prove academics have too much time on their hands, nothing will.

I’m a bit late to the story of Pete Rose admitting he bet on baseball—a story that was actually supposed to be embargoed until his appearance on ABC’s Primetime Live, but no matter (earlier reactions include John Cole’s and Michele’s; everyone in my blogroll who has an RSS feed and had something to say about it is listed here) . I think Larry Ribstein’s reaction one of the more interesting, though I don’t think it gets to the heart of the problem with stated betting on baseball.

That Rose bet on games involving the Reds is the big “no-no” issue; if he’d simply bet on other teams, he’d have received a one year suspension. The key question is what is the harm to Baseball from Rose’s bets?—and, by Baseball, I mean the institution that everyone has been saying Rose sullied. Since nobody claims he actually bet against the Reds, it’s hard to charge him with throwing games; he may have had an extra incentive to win in games he wagered on, but that isn’t throwing a game, and unlike other sports baseball betting is normally on the “money line”—you pick straight-up, not against a point spread—so “point shaving” (or “running up the score“) isn’t an issue. (You can also bet other sports, like football, on the money line, but that isn’t very popular.) Rose’s interest as a bettor coincided with his unbiased interest as a manager.

Now, some have argued that because Rose didn’t bet on every single game, and that he apparently got inside information from other managers (including those in the AL—the Reds are an NL team, and before interleague play intelligence on AL teams was pretty useless for NL managers), his behavior is somehow corrupting to Baseball. Because Rose didn’t bet on all games involving the Reds, the argument is that bookies knew that the Reds were less likely to win the game. Even if that’s true, it’s hard to see how Baseball is harmed. The victim is whoever was on the losing side of the bets lodged by Rose’s bookies because of the informational advantage they had—unless Baseball was betting on games, they weren’t harmed at all. Similarly, Rose’s intelligence on other teams only harmed other bettors—not Baseball. And, ultimately, since virtually everyone who was involved was violating numerous state and federal laws against sports wagering—the harm was to people who were already engaging in illegal conduct. If a thief breaks into a drug dealer’s house and steals his TV, the thief’s criminal act doesn’t absolve the dealer for buying home electronics from the proceeds of his own illegal act.

Now, there are other reasonable arguments against Rose’s betting: that it potentially created the appearance of corruption: for example, that it placed him in a position where he might be able to throw games to have his gambling debts reduced. But there doesn’t seem to be evidence that Rose threw games—and, in general I find “appearance of corruption” arguments specious. You can also argue that Rose harmed Baseball as an institution by denying the allegations for 14 years and impugning the credibility of his accusers and other opponents, including then-NBC reporter Jim Gray (who now spends his time about as far up Kobe Bryant’s ass as Ahmad Rashad was up Michael Jordan’s). And Rose’s frequent appearances in Cooperstown, New York haven’t exactly endeared him to the MLB brass. But Rose’s betting, alone, apparently had no ill effects on Baseball.

Update: John Jenkins disagrees with my assessment, as does David Wright via email; both raise essentially the same point (I'll quote John’s post):

Rose's gambling on the Reds changed the way Rose managed games. Baseball has a 162-game season. When Rose had money riding on a game, he would obviously be managing to win that game at the expense of future games. Suppose Rose was clinging to a one-run game going into the ninth and his closer had pitched the last three days straight and his arm was sore. Rose might pitch the guy to win that game because he had money on it, and then cost the team 3 games over the next 2 weeks that they could have won if that pitcher could have rested that day.

I do agree that having money riding on the game might pervert Rose’s incentive structure—and my overlooking that fact may go to show you how much I really care about baseball as a game. On the other hand, Rose’s mediocrity as a manager is such that he might have made decisions that were weak over the long term anyway, even without the monetary incentive to do so.

Another update: Brian of Redbird Nation makes a compelling case for a shorter-than-lifetime ban for Pete Rose.

Did Sen. Clinton get too much—or not enough—heat for her (badly delivered) joke in a fundraising speech that Mahatma Gandhi worked for two years at a St. Louis convenience store?

My gut feeling is that it was rather innocuous. But it does raise the interesting question of double standards: as Keith Olbermann asked David Brock (no relation to my co-blogger, Brock Sides) on Countdown this evening, what if it was Bill Frist, or another Republican without a “bigot paper trail,” who made the remark instead of Hillary Clinton? Brock evaded the specific hypothetical, but I think it would have fit into the “Republicans are bigoted” narrative—lending itself to the sort of wire or NYT story that says the comment, while minor, fits into a long line of statements by Republicans (Lott, Thurmond, Santorum…). By contrast, nobody’s story on Hillary’s comments is going to bring up Robert Byrd’s segregationist past or his more recent “N-word” episode.

That raises the larger question: that of whether the dominant narratives are biased. “Republicans are mean” is a pretty easy narrative to fit any story about Republicans into: the administration wants to “put arsenic in drinking water”; Republicans are “cutting benefits.” But there’s not really a “Democrats are mean” narrative: nobody left of NewsMax would write that “Democrats’ plans for higher trade barriers will impoverish the third world,” “the Clinton Administration’s plan to increase regulation of NOx particles will cost the economy $X billion per life saved,” or “Kyoto, if fully implemented, would only decrease global temperatures by 0.X degrees Celsius in 2100.”

I don’t really know the answer to that. And it’s possible Republicans benefit from other dominant narratives: a Republican who took Howard Dean’s position on the war might be ascribed more credibility. These media narratives may just be the long-term results of what John Petrocik calls “issue ownership”: efforts by the major parties to sieze the position held by the median voter on particular issues. It is possible that because Democrats “own” racial issues, they insulate themselves from attack for being insensitive on race, just as Republicans’ ownership of law-and-order issues can protect them from the “soft on crime” charge.

Meanwhile, Steven Taylor didn’t see how the joke might be construed as funny.

If you sent me any email between Monday night and Tuesday evening, roughly from midnight to 6:00 PM CST, and it was important (and/or you expected a reply), please send it again.

Thanks!

Michelle Branch is the latest celebrity who I can’t take home to Mom, thanks to the friendly folks at Maxim (link probably not work-safe)—even under the massively hypothetical circumstance that I had a shot.

In other MB news, if you like her latest single “Breathe,” you can get seven different remixes of the song in addition to the album cut on an “EP” CD. Funny how the vinyl lingo still persists in the music industry…

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports that, despite rumors that Ole Miss head coach David Cutcliffe is on the shortlist in the latest iteration of the Nebraska head coaching search, Pete Boone hasn’t gotten any calls seeking permission to interview Cut. I rather think Cutcliffe—whose reputation is mostly as a quarterbacks and pro-style offense guru—is a poor fit for Nebraska and its option-oriented attack; then again, Cutcliffe is 3–2 against the Big 12 since coming to Ole Miss—with both losses (and one win) coming against Texas Tech, so he’d probably do OK in that conference, and Nebraska probably has much deeper pockets than Ole Miss does.

All that said, I can’t see Cutcliffe going to Nebraska—the scrutiny is just too intense in Lincoln, if the Solich firing is anything to judge by. By contrast, all Cut has to do in Oxford is have a winning SEC record next year (admittedly, not something I’d wager much money on, even with a favorable schedule); if he manages that, he’ll probably be elevated to the height of Johnny Vaught in the Ole Miss coaching pantheon.

First we have MoveOn.org’s silliness; now, Matt Stinson and Dan Drezner rightly are among those who condemn Ralph Peters for his absurdly over-the-top, not to mention downright offensive, New York Post column that explicitly compares Howard Dean’s followers on the Internet with the Gestapo and brownshirts. It’s sure going to be a busy week for the PR wings of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL…

Peter Northrop of Crescat Sententia considers whether or not Britney Spears would have benefitted from a college education. Of course, the snarker in me would speculate that Ms. Spears would have attended Louisiana State University, given her affinity for the institution, despite rumors that she is a fan of Ole Miss quarterback Eli Manning—I’ll leave the rest of the joke to you.*

Snarkiness aside, I don’t think it is necessary or sufficient for people to have an undergraduate education, even though it would certainly be in my economic interest for more people to go to college (as it would increase the demand for political scientists), and I suspect much of the attitudinal maturity associated with college education has more to do with the experience of being “on one’s own” for four years than it does with the undergraduate curriculum.

Update: It turns out that Mr. Alexander attends Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, better known as “the place where I-12 and I-55 intersect.” Trivia point: SELU is part of the burgeoning “University of Louisiana” system,† but didn’t adopt the name (unlike UL-Lafayette and UL-Monroe).

The California Yankee has been keeping up with developments in the rather unusual Supreme Court case known as M. K. B. v. Warden, et al..

Link via VodkaPundit, who has two theories on why the case is being hidden from public view. Also see the New York Times account by Linda Greenhouse (linked by Ca. Yankee in another post).

Try as they might, MoveOn.org’s webmasters seem to have trouble keeping “Bush=Hitler” videos off their website. Matthew Stinson thinks the organization is rapidly becoming the John Birch Society or Council of Conservative Citizens of the left, while One Fine Jay ponders whether or not MoveOn.org is a “mainstream” Democratic organization.

Then again, we all know Bush is the worst Reichschancellor in history, so maybe they have a point…

Andrew Sullivan’s return to the Daily Dish also marks a return to his cataloguing of conservatives who have shown the slightest bit of discomfort about a federal marriage amendment. Me, I’d wait until the test case for the federal Defense of Marriage Act—passed with Bill Clinton’s signature, no doubt because he expected it to be ruled unconstitutional (shades of Bush’s idiotic stance on McCain-Feingold)—makes it to the Supremes, because I’m pretty sure the second it dies 5–4 on equal protection grounds pretty much every conservative Sullivan counts as an ally on the FMA will suddenly rethink his or her position.

I sometimes wonder if Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post actually report news from the same country.

Like Martin Devon of Patio Pundit, I just wasted half an hour of my life in a hotel room watching Wesley Clark on MSNBC’s Hardball. Martin writes:

I’m listening to Wes Clark on Hardball… and he makes Howard Dean look good. Say what you will about but Dean but he says what he means and he means what he says. With Wes Clark you get the sense that he’s just making shit up. Right now he’s talking about how he would have caught Osama by now, and how he wouldn’t have gone into Iraq. As most of you know, Clark’s early pronouncements weren’t nearly so clear. I’m sorry—he just sounds like an opportunist.

I’ve never been a big Wes Clark fan, even back when I thought that he was a Republican. You know how Dems knock Joe Lieberman as “Bush-lite“? Clark is “Dean-lite.” I don’t see why Clark as any more electable than Dean. Clark has military experience, but that isn’t as good as Dean’s experience as a governor. And Clark is so darn whiny—fingernails on chalkboard.

I particularly enjoyed the moment where Clark, in response to a question from Matthews about what sanction would have been appropriate for Bill Clinton (who quite clearly committed perjury, even if there’s a legitimate argument, that I’m not unsympathetic to, that he never should have been in a situation where he would commit it), launched into a two-minute stump speech that was completely nonresponsive to the question.

Also amusing was Clark’s analysis of the policy formation process of the Bush administration, which seemed to be cribbed directly from a Paul Krugman column (although spiced up with numerous references to nebulous “sources” that Clark is apparently privy to). And I’d love to hear how Clark would have caught Osama bin Laden by now; something tells me he wouldn’t have been hanging out with the Special Ops guys doing the dirty work in the theatre, and the 4th Infantry isn’t interchangeable with the Green Berets—so even if most of the army were stateside instead of patrolling Iraq, I doubt it would make much difference.

Clark also kept going on about his foreign policy gravitas relative to that of George W. Bush; said gravitas was apparently based on (a) being in Europe when the Europeans were rolling their eyes at the Lewinsky scandal and (b) obeying the orders of his civilian masters who had gravitas of their own. I say “apparently,” because he assumed the audience would believe he had foreign policy gravitas on the basis of alleging it alone.

I have to agree with Martin—Clark is “Dean Lite.” Crank up the toaster oven on this guy…

James Joyner notes the existence of something called the “ClarkBot”, the author of which encourages Clark Dittoheads to engage in something called “rapid response.” No doubt Bush and Dean variants aren’t far behind…

John Fund argues in his OpinionJournal Political Diary column today that James Carville and Terry McAuliffe created Howard Dean’s candidacy—a phenomenon already noted this week by The New York Times, as I discussed here. Then again, if you didn’t see it in the Times—which probably describes most Wall Street Journal readers—it’s new to you! Fund gets into the mechanics:

[Moving the Iowa and New Hampshire contests to January] meant holiday-distracted voters would have only a few weeks to pay attention to the actual race once the New Year’s bubbly wore off. That meant that for all of 2003, liberal party activists were in the driver’s seat when it came to deciding who would raise the most money and be anointed the front-runner in media coverage. That turned out to be Mr. Dean, who tapped into activist rage over the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and lingering anger over the disputed Florida recount in 2000.

But while “Bush loathing” is almost universal among Democratic partisans, it resonates with only about 20% of the electorate. Many of the people who don’t approve of Mr. Bush’s handling of his job are turned off by bitter attacks against him.

As something of a neo-institutionalist (despite my behaviorist credentials), the Fund-Nagourney thesis is pretty compelling. But I think the nature of the primary process in and of itself lets strong partisans set the tone for the general election campaign, even if they don’t always capture the nomination—consider the Buchanan insurgency against Bush 41 in 1992, which arguably helped kill Bush’s general election prospects. Even if we were talking about a traditional nominating schedule, Dean would be well-positioned to win, although the compressed schedule does make it less likely for the candidate who emerges from Iowa and New Hampshire to face a strong challenger when the campaign swings into the more populous—and arguably more typical—states.

Fundamentally, despite the “superdelegates” and other mechanisms implemented by the DNC to try to manipulate primary results to select electable nominees, a process that has only succeeded in a contested primary once since 1976, the Democrats have had a process that lends itself to capture by the strongest partisans since the McGovern Commission reforms in the early 1970s, which expanded the use of primaries by the Democrats, effects that were further enhanced by Jesse Jackson’s insistence on proportional delegate allocation after his relatively strong showing in the 1984 primaries didn’t translate into many delegates to the convention.

Link via Martin Devon, who has more on Howard Dean’s self-inflicted gaffes from an interview with Howard Fineman in this week’s Newsweek.

Dan Drezner wonders why Wes Clark isn’t catching flak for apparently advocating in the pages of the New York Times Magazine an international tribunal to judge Osama bin Laden—even though Howard Dean’s equivocation about the same topic drew derision from a number of quarters. Dan offers the following hypotheses:

1. What really attracted criticism of Dean was the equivocation about bin Laden’s guilt;
2. Dean’s the frontrunner, ergo he gets more flak;
3. Dean’s statement fits the dominant narrative of him being a foreign policy neophyte, while Clark’s statement does not fit the dominant narrative of him being a foreign policy professional—therefore, the latter quote gets overlooked.
4. Whatever you think of Clark’s answer, it’s clear that he cares about the question, and thinks the answer has important foreign policy implications. Dean thought the question to be unimportant.
5. It’s early in the news cycle.

The “dominant narrative” explanation seems to be the most compelling to me; however, Clark’s position is arguably consistent with the “foreign policy professional” narrative—I suspect there are civil servants at State who share Clark’s enthusiasm for an international tribunal to try bin Laden, as it fits the “terrorism as crime” schema for looking at the world. It’s also fair to say that the Des Moines Register Democratic debate—which Clark did not attend—probably fulfilled most peoples’ quota of “Democratic campaign news” for the day, thus burying the item. (Another explanation, that opinion leaders don’t pay that much attention to articles that appear in the NYT Magazine, as opposed to the main pages of the Grey Lady, is also potentially compelling.)

That being said, international tribunals are really only appropriate in circumstances where there is no existing judicial system that is competent to try the case. The case of bin Laden seems to me to be more consistent with that of the Libyan agents responsible for Lockerbie, who were tried under Scottish law because that was the jurisdiction in which the crime took place (the location of the trial was a political compromise to get Libya to extradite the agents responsible)—an international tribunal was inappropriate, as the Scottish judicial system is competent to try charges like murder and hijacking.

The larger question, I suppose, is whether bin Laden is properly seen as a “war criminal.” As bin Laden was not acting on behalf of a state actor (conspiracy theorizing about Saudi princes aside) in a zone of combat, I can’t see 9/11 as a “war crime” per se (it is a criminal act, and perhaps even an act of war—but my limited understanding of international law suggests that only states or state-like actors can commit acts of war); this would also suggest an international tribunal is inappropriate.

The end of the world is nigh: the University of Southern California and Louisiana State University are splitting the Division I-A college football championship due to a split between the AP and ESPN/USA Today polls. Mark my words: the Homeland Security Alert System is about to be bumped up a notch…

Also of vague interest: I finished in the top 10th percentile of the Sonic BowlMania Challenge, correctly predicting the outcomes of 18 of the 28 bowl games through a mixture of luck and foolhardiness (including putting 26 points on the Ole Miss Rebels, which—if we were talking about money—would be a very stupid course of action usually).

Virginia Postrel has reviewed Gregg Easterbrook’s new book for the New York Post, and came away rather unimpressed.

Alex Knapp compares season 5 of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the same season of Deep Space Nine. I generally concur with Alex’s assessment that DS9 is the better series of the two—however, it’s the only Trek series I’ve never seen every episode of, so I’m looking forward to seeing the series when it comes to SpikeTV later this year (especially since the DVD sets of Trek are remarkably overpriced, even when compared to genre series like Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5).

Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber is hosting an interesting discussion of libertarian principles on marriage and divorce that’s worth a read.