Gary Farber points out the latest foreign policy coup—literally—of our one-two punch of drug czar John Walters and attorney general John Ashcroft: the toppling of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada of Bolivia. Maybe if we’re really lucky, his replacement won’t turn out to be a Castro or Chávez. But, I’m not holding my breath…

Greg Wythe (GregsOpinion.com) notes a Washington Post account looking at the Texas and Colorado redistricting plans; notably, it quotes a lot of political scientists, instead of the legal scholars that generally appear in these accounts.

Notable quote from the article:

Whatever the answers, Thomas E. Mann, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, said that the Texas and Colorado experiments in multiple redistricting could have profound political consequences.

“If this is sustained, what we will have is a form of arms race where there is no restraint on keeping the game going on throughout a decade,” Mann said. “You ask, who wins in this process? This is a process designed not for citizens or voters but for politicians. It will lead politicians to say there are no limits. I think it threatens the legitimacy of democracy.”

I think this is the natural consequence of the Supreme Court’s muddled post-Baker jurisprudence: insistence on exact population equality between districts, despite the huge known sampling error of the Census making that equality essentially meaningless; a ridiculous level of deference to partisan gerrymanders coupled with the unclear dictates of the Voting Rights Act and vague, O‘Connoresque prohibitions against racial gerrymanders—which, due to bloc voting by African-Americans, are virtually indistinguishable from partisan gerrymanders; widespread abandonment of any conception of geographic compactness or geographic logic as desirable features for districts; naked partisanship by the federal judiciary; and a general failure to incorporate anything that political scientists who do applied and theoretical research in the field contribute. No wonder it’s a giant playground for political opportunists from both parties.

I still think the only viable way to eliminate this mischief is to incorporate an element of proportional representation into the system—even two or three seats in a state the size of Texas, elected by “top up” proportional representation, would be enough to both undermine the possible benefits of partisan gerrymanders and ensure that incumbent-protection gerrymanders don’t lead to a sclerotic delegation.

The Commercial Appeal on Sunday extracted its head out of the buttocks of the Turley-Belz-Lightman Memphis land-speculation elite just long enough to take a look at the city’s abuse of eminent domain as part of the massive, taxpayer-subsidzed Uptown redevelopment project—a project that wouldn’t exist without said land-speculation elite—near St. Jude. Money graf: a quote from Henry Turley, one-third of the prop-spec Axis of Evil, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the early 20th century “slum clearance” movement:

Henry M. Turley Jr., one of the private developer partners in the Uptown project, said there’s a clear public interest in clearing out blighted areas, and it’s imperative that municipalities use the legal tools available to them. He believes that governments aren’t using eminent domain enough in consolidating tracts large enough for redevelopment.

Collaborating in this shameful exercise are everyone’s favorite Memphians, the Memphis Housing Authority (slogan: “Nobody found guilty of corruption in 7 days!”). Quoth MHA executive director Robert Lipscomb:

Lipscomb said the authority is careful to protect individual property rights while at the same time not unduly enriching those who might try to stall and make a windfall.

Damn straight, Robert; the only people allowed to make a “windfall” in this are Turley and Belz. Heaven forbid any poor bastard who actually had to live in Uptown before the city decided to clear the place out benefits from the exercise.

The Clarion-Ledger today has polling data showing Barbour ahead of Musgrove, but in a statistical dead heat. Telling stat:

Experts say Musgrove needs to make inroads among white voters, 25 percent of whom said they’re backing the governor.

Bad prediction:

Musgrove holds another advantage. If neither candidate gets a majority, the election would wind up in the Democratically controlled Mississippi Legislature, just as it did in 1999, [Jackson State political science professor Leslie] McLemore said. “If it goes to the House, Musgrove will win it.”

Actually, if it goes to the House, dollars to donuts says either they elect the plurality winner (even if that means quite a few conservative Democrats have to switch parties) or we have a nice, long period of protracted litigation in federal court that ends with the plurality winner ending up in office anyway.

Blogospheric navel-gazing is always a pleasant diversion; today, Dan Drezner looks at the dispute over whether or not “portals” are the way to go for budding bloggers. Dan correctly points out that only a few bloggers can sustain the level of traffic needed to make the “portal” approach worthwhile—and this applies as much to the “techbloggers” as it does to the “warbloggers” that the Ecosystem statistics are biased towards.

I, like Dan, think Will Baude’s comment is worth repeating:

Tyler Cowen thinks that there are so many good blogs out there nowadays that the most widely-read blogs will be those that “cream-skim” (that is, taking the most useful posts from a wide variety of blogs).

Pardon, but an RSS feed can do that. The reason I don’tread Instapundit is that I don’t particularly agree with Glenn Reynolds about what’s wheat and what’s chaff. Look at my blogroll, which contains a number of fairly low-circulation blogs, and you could probably guess that.

I think the value of “portal blogs” will be somewhat reduced when people figure out how to do category-based aggregation (or topic-based aggregation) of RSS feeds—ironically, bringing weblogs closer to the early 1980s topic-based discussion format pioneered on Usenet before much of its value was destroyed by trolls, crapflooding, and spam. Where the portal blogs like Instapundit will still win, however, is in the area of editorial control—separating the wheat from the chaff, to borrow Will’s phrase—by not only saying “this post is on a topic you may be interested in” but also “this post is a good post on that topic.” To some extent you can add some of that control by filtering the aggregated RSS material against a trusted OPML list, but it’s still not quite the same thing as having a human editor.

In the end category-based aggregation (CBA) will not only help end-users, it will also make it easier for portal editors to pick and choose from a wider variety of blogs. I don’t know how many blogs Glenn Reynolds reads a day, and I suspect he gets most of his links to less-well-known blogs from reader submissions. A mere mortal can only read so many blogs, even with an RSS reader. CBA should make it easier for the portal editor (and for everyone else) to scour more of the breadth of the blogosphere for good material, which should be a win for everyone involved—more eyeballs for budding bloggers and higher quality material for the portals.

No time for detailed predictions, I’ll just cut to the chase…

• KENTUCKY over Mississippi State. I might give State the edge in Starkville, but fundamentally the Wildcats are playing better football.
• GEORGIA over Alabama-Birmingham. Duh.
• Tennessee over ALABAMA. The Tide haven’t been rolling—they’ve been rolling over. Expect that to continue today in Tuscaloosa, even against an overrated UT squad.
• OLE MISS over Arkansas. Ground-happy attacks have gotten nowhere against the Rebels this year, and unless Matt Jones has become a much better passer in the past seven days it could be a long night at Vaught-Hemingway for Jones and the Razorbacks.
• LOUISIANA STATE over Auburn. Should be a classic battle, but in the end I think home field—night in Death Valley—gives LSU the edge here, particularly if Auburn thinks they can get away without a passing game.
• SOUTH CAROLINA over Vanderbilt. There’s nothing quite like a visit from the Commodores to rejuvenate your spirits after being eliminated from the conference title race.

As always, there’s good stuff at the SEC Fanblog as well.

Donald Sensing has an interesting post looking at a Washington Times report that Israel may have deliberately attacked an American naval vessel collecting sigint for the NSA in 1967 during the Six Days War. Donald has some fodder for the conspiracy theorists (slightly Dowdified, since I didn’t want to blockquote all of the post):

In fact, why Israel would want to attack Liberty has been explained. Ariel Sharon, now Israel’s prime minister, commanded an Israeli armored division during the war. ... According to researcher and author James Bamford …, Sharon’s division slaughtered a large number of Egyptian soldiers it had captured as prisoners, clear war crimes. ... The killings were reported to Tel Aviv by radio. ... Bamford makes a very strong case that the Israeli government attacked Liberty in order to sink it, thus destroying the evidence of Sharon’s crime.

Definitely a must-read.

One of the sound-bites being paraded around is on whether particular Democratic candidates are “credible” on national security. The latest iteration of this theme was expressed by Joe Biden, who said:

[T]he candidates have to “demonstrate that they have a foreign policy, a security policy, that is coherent and is grown up, that we can handle the bad things out there in the world.”

But what is credibility? In this voter’s mind, it’s not strictly speaking about Iraq: by my standard, you could be credible but have opposed the war in Iraq. To me, I think credibility boils down to whether or not the candidate believes that other countries get to veto the use of American military power to achieve an objective that is in the national interest. Ultimately, this question—not the war question—is where many of the Democratic candidates lose their credibility with me.

This is not, mind you, a call for blanket unilateralism. When other countries share our objectives, and are willing to cooperate with us in achieving those objectives, we can and should work with them to do so. But when other countries clearly have different objectives than those of the United States—as was the case in the Iraq war, where a number of middle-power states wanted to pursue commercial ties with the Saddam regime and were plainly unwilling to commit their own resources to containing that regime’s ambitions for rearmament and obtaining non-conventional weapons—an American president would be deeply unwise to allow them to decide whether and how American military force should be used.

Lauren Landes, guesting at Patrick Carver’s Ole Miss Conservative blog, notes that Haley Barbour has picked up endorsements from 42 state Democrats, angering the state Democratic Party leadership. The list of Barbour endorsers is here. In general, it looks like a list of has-beens and small fry; notably, no current member of the state House or Senate appears on the list.

Meanwhile, Eric Stringfellow continues to blast Haley Barbour from the pages of the Clarion-Ledger.

Dan Drezner is mildly in favor of lifting the trade embargo on Cuba. While I think he slightly overestimates how totalitarian the Cuban regime is—I think it’s done a very effective job of brainwashing much of its populace, and it is almost as brutally oppressive toward political dissidents as the North Korean (DPRK) regime, but I don’t think it has as effective a repression apparatus as North Korea has or some of the old Soviet client states (most notably Romania) had, and by all accounts there’s a degree of economic freedom at the margins absent in the DPRK—I agree that simply removing the embargo won’t lead to miraculous political change. However, it will deprive Castro and his Hollywood apologists of their one legitimate grievance against the United States government—and, for that reason alone, the sanctions regime should be removed.

More thoughts on this are at YankeeBlog and OxBlog.

Pat Forde has an interesting piece up at ESPN.com that takes a look at how the Rebels’ season may be shaping up this year; like Forde, I’m cautiously optimistic, and I think this Saturday’s game against Arkansas (6:15 Central on ESPN2) will be a bellweather for the rest of the season.

Joy approvingly points to a Wall Street Journal piece by Walter Mossberg that starts by saying:

Windows is riddled with security flaws, and new ones turn up regularly. It is increasingly susceptible to all kinds of viruses, malicious Trojan horse programs and spyware. As a result, Windows users have been forced to spend more of their time and money supporting their computers.

Almost every week, they are supposed to install patches to the already patchy operating system to plug these security holes. And every few months, it seems, Windows users must quake in fear as some horrible new virus is created by the international criminal class that constantly targets Windows.

But for consumers and small businesses, there’s a simple way out of this endless morass: Buy an Apple Macintosh computer. There are no viruses on the Macintosh’s excellent two-year-old operating system, called OS X. And the Mac is a terrific computer—as good as, or better than, Windows for the typical computing tasks important to mainstream users.

Now, Mossberg does correctly point out that OS X isn’t completely immune from virii, trojan horses, worms, and the like (sometimes collectively referred to as “malware,” although these days pretty much any “malware” will just be called a “virus” even if it isn’t one). But his argument still rests on a few problems:

1. The “security through obscurity” fallacy: “In addition, Macs constitute such a tiny share of the world’s computers that they just aren’t an attractive target for virus writers and hackers.” True enough; however, that never stopped people from writing malware for earlier versions of the Mac OS, nor did it stop malware on a plethora of relatively obscure platforms in the past (at its peak, the Amiga probably had more virii going around than PC operating systems of the day, despite a much smaller market share).
2. “OS X doesn’t enable users—or hackers who hijack user accounts—to alter certain core files and features of its Unix underpinnings.” True enough; however, as OS X users get used to typing their password to gain administrator access (as they are prompted to do with every Apple-sponsored update), social engineering hacks—like fake update prompts—will be easy enough for malware authors to incorporate into their tools.
3. OS X ships with a lot of software that traces its lineage back to the 1970s Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) of Unix; while some of it has been audited, most notably by the OpenBSD project, some of it has not been. Until the past decade, network security was just not a serious concern of Unix programmers, and there could easily be holes lurking in some of the software included, particularly in server-side applications (which, to Apple’s credit, are normally disabled by default).

OS X, and other Unix-based and Unix-like operating systems like Linux, are no panacea for bad security practices in general. As Microsoft improves the lackluster security of its offerings, it is likely that we will see more problems as the proverbial “honeypot” that is Windows becomes less appealing to hackers.

Speaking of OS X, Mark Pilgrim has a lengthy overview of what’s new in OS X 10.3 (aka Panther).

Warning for those offended by “France-bashing”: the extension of this post contains some.

Two months ago, Daniel Drezner noted the split over whether the European Union is an international organization or a supranational authority among IR scholars (my answer, when asked to provide one when I took an International Organizations course in the Spring of 1999, was “Yes and Yes“), and that upcoming events in France and Germany would help settle that question—in particular, whether those countries would be punished for violating E.U. treaty commitments.

Today, Glenn Reynolds notes that France is getting a free pass for violating the “growth and stability pact” that members of the single European currency agreed to; as Pieter Dorsman at Peaktalk noted yesterday, this isn’t exactly popular with smaller countries like the Netherlands who actually abided by their commitments to the pact.

Colby Cosh plays Excel number-cruncher and takes a look at the likely electoral impact of the merger between the Progressive Conservatives and Alliance north of the border. The raw math suggests the new party be able might deprive the Liberals of an overall majority in Parliament (though probably not by enough for the Conservatives to form a government), on the basis of the support for its candidates in past elections when they ran as members of separate parties. Of course, there’s still a campaign to be run, which no doubt will affect the numbers substantially.

Randy Barnett and Jacob Levy get into an admittedly “Cornerish” discussion of Star Trek in its various forms. My general reactions:

1. As episodic science-fiction, TNG generally surpasses the original series (TOS), particularly in later seasons as Roddenberry’s obsession with T&A and perfect characters recedes in favor of “modern Trek.”
2. However, as characters, the TOS cast is more well-rounded than TNG, perhaps in part because the roles were less balanced (the Kirk-Spock-McCoy axis was more prominent, whereas in TNG you have Picard and then everyone else at just a half-step below that level). Worf is really the only character other than Picard who you have a good handle on.
3. As a series, DS9 wins hands-down, particularly in later seasons, because of the continuous storyline.
4. Voyager works occasionally at some levels as episodic Trek, but the inevitable “reset button” device often detracts from attempts to take risks, and attempts to assemble a coherent narrative over time are lackluster. On the plus side, Jeri Ryan rises above her puerile skin-tight outfit to create a well-defined character as Seven, and some of the supporting cast create a well-defined set of characters (the Doctor, B‘Elanna, and Tom Paris in particular).
5. Much of the Voyager critique applies equally to the first two seasons of Enterprise. Arguably, Season 3 Enterprise is closer to what Voyager should have been, but even then there are parts that don’t work. The “Xindi arc” does, in its defense, seem to be better constructed so far than other arc attempts on Trek (other than DS9).

So what would I like to see from Trek? Obviously, more attempts at continuous storylines. They work elsewhere in episodic television, so why not in science fiction? Part of that may just simply be the fault of early TV sci-fi in the U.S.: fare like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, which was inherently episodic. Roddenberry’s innovation in the original series was to bolt this episodic format onto use of the same cast and backstory from week to week, and essentially the same formula has persisted in modern Trek (except on DS9).

The obvious counterpoint in American sci-fi is J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5, which took the “arc” concept to its ultimate end: a planned-out, epic storyline spanning the life of the series (a recent attempt to do something similar, although perhaps less structured, was Joss Whedon’s Firefly). However, I don’t see Trek going in this direction either.

One place where Trek might learn from is Stargate SG-1. Like Trek, it essentially eschews preplanned storylines. Unlike Trek, however, its episodic format often leaves open ends that can be picked up later, that in retrospect create a continuous storyline. The producers and writers can go back in new episodes and continue any of a dozen storylines from older ones, creating stories that both stand alone and stand together. With relatively few exceptions, Trek hasn’t done this, but it’s something that might work well in the context of Enterprise once they deal with the Xindi threat.

Tom Maguire , Robert Musil, and Dan Drezner are not particularly impressed with Paul Krugman’s latest missive to the readers of The New York Times, in which he defends explains blames George W. Bush for Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s anti-Semitic diatribe in front of the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s recent summit.

Dan points out that Mahathir has basically made a career of using anti-Semitic rhetoric to bolster his reign as head of Malaysia’s one-party state*, a career that well-precedes George Bush’s presidency, has generally been chummy with the Bush administration (as Mark Kleiman pointed out a few days ago, rather unhelpfully if you’re trying to defend Krugman’s ignorance of contemporary U.S. foreign policy), and has “no domestic flank to protect” seeing as he’s leaving office in November—although it’s unclear whether Mahathir will continue to pull the strings in Malaysia, as his neighbor Lee Kuan Yew continues to do in Singapore.

Tom, on the other hand, engages in full-scale fisking of Krugman, wondering if Krugman actually read the speech in question. Robert Musil does some fisking of his own, suggesting we could find quite a few alternatives to Mahathir as a “forward-looking” Muslim leader, and isn’t all that impressed by Krugman’s attempt to whitewash Malaysia’s brutal policies imposed on its ethnic Chinese minority as some sort of high-minded affirmative action program.

I’m not a huge aviation buff, but growing up around the Air Force it’s hard not to at least have some passing interest in the topic. Apropos of that, Michael Jennings has a long, informative post about the Boeing 757, which will no longer be produced after 2004.

Also at TransportBlog, Patrick Crozier has a post that attempts to compare the safety records of various jet aircraft. As he notes, the figures are “a bit dodgy because there will be quite a few of the more modern planes that haven't crashed yet.” Or, in econometrician-speak, there’s right-censoring of the survival data. Nonetheless the figures suggest aircraft are getting safer over time, as we’d probably expect (due in part to better materials, more rigorous safety inspections, and improved automation of aircraft).

Daniel Drezner and Roger Simon have been mixing it up over their favorite films.

I’ve had a list of 10 movies sitting on my personal home page for a few years; for sake of comparison, here they are (in semi-random order); all of them made in the past 20 years:

1. Lone Star (John Sayles) – Examining the secrets of a small Texas town on the Rio Grande.
2. Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh) – Examining the secrets of some really messed up people in London.
3. Fargo (Coen Brothers) – A kidnapping gone bad with a very pregnant cop investigating it.
4. A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton and John Cleese) – British lawyer gets involved with a band of jewel thieves.
5. Blood Simple (Coen Brothers) – Woman gets caught cheating on her goofy husband with an almost-equally goofy guy by a psychotic private investigator.
6. Exotica (Atom Egoyan) – Canadian tax inspector hangs out at a strip club.
7. Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell) – English guy with eccentric friends falls in love with gorgeous American woman.
8. Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarentino) – Airline stewardess gets busted for running drug money for Samuel L. Jackson with a goofy beard.
9. The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan) – Canadian lawyer investigates the aftermath of a horrific bus accident, while he deals with demons of his own.
10. Zero Effect (Jake Kasdan) – World’s weirdest detective (with sidekick who does most of the real work) investigates what happened to a CEO’s keys.

Not a lot of overlap (just one movie) with Dan’s list. If I made a “top 20,” though, I’d probably have Say Anything, Courage Under Fire (which Denzel Washington deserved an Oscar for), Groundhog Day, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan on my list too. Rounding out the 20, I’d have to add Pulp Fiction, Hoop Dreams, Insomina (the original version with Stellan Skaarsgard), The Spanish Prisoner, Out of Sight, and Gattaca. And probably 50 other movies too that should have made the cut. And if I took off the 20-year restriction…

Tom at Crooked Timber has a good piece on Diebold’s shenanigans with its electronic voting machines. Partsanship aside, I inherently distrust any voting machine that doesn’t keep a paper trail—whether we’re talking about those big old lever-based things that Mayor Daley loved so much or modern touchscreens.

Venomous Kate: smarter, classier, and better-looking than Ann Coulter.

I kid you not (OK, maybe I kid you a little)… Gary Farber has the scoop.

Mississippi is unique among the states in retaining an elected transportation commission. The state is divided into three commission districts, and each district elects a commissioner who serves a four-year term. The retirement of incumbent commissioner Zack Stewart has created a heated race in the northern district, with two major-party nominees vying for the post:

• Bill Minor, a Democrat from Holly Springs (Marshall County) who has served in the state legislature since 1980, most recently as chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.
• John Caldwell, a Republican from Nesbit (DeSoto County) who is a two-term county commissioner.

Minor credits himself with leading the struggle for the passage of the 1987 Four-Lane Highway Program, which increased the state gasoline tax to 18.4¢/gal. with the increased revenues dedicated to relocating and widening nearly two thousand miles of state highways. (The 2002 reauthorization of the four-lane program, “Vision 21,” added over a thousand more miles to be constructed or widened in the coming two decades.) Minor’s slogan is “Keep Minor working for Mississippi highways“; a wag might say that Minor could easily keep working on them if he’d stayed in his safe Senate seat. (This Bill Minor may or may not be related to the other Bill Minor who’s a political columnist for the Clarion-Ledger.)

Unfortunately, Caldwell’s site seems to be Flash-driven, and none of my browsers are being very cooperative with Flash today. So I can’t really say much about his campaign.

I don’t think this race is going to be about issues; the public statements by both candidates have generally favored the same things: pursuing (and completing) Vision 21, constructing Interstate 69 through the Delta, and supporting the upgrade of U.S. 78 between Memphis and Birmingham to Interstate 22. One concern that neither candidate seems to have addressed is the state’s rural bridge problem, with a large number of rural bridges on county roads—many constructed in the 1920s and 1930s—beyond their lifespan and in dire need of repair. Another potential concern is that—reading between the lines—many people in the southern part of the state apparently thought that Zack Stewart was delaying projects along the Gulf Coast so more money could be spent up north; will a new commissioner ameliorate these tensions, or exacerbate them?

Since the issues don’t distinguish the candidates, what will? Although the Northern District is geographically large (see this map), the only major population centers are the Memphis urbanized area (DeSoto, Tunica, and Marshall counties), Tupelo, and the Columbus-Starkville-West Point “Golden Triangle” region. Minor probably has more name recognition overall due to his service in the legislature, and seems to have been more aggressive in getting billboards and signs; on the other hand, Caldwell is probably better-known in DeSoto County, the most populous county in the district by far.

Overall, I think Minor probably will win the election by a substantial margin on the basis of his better name recognition, if only because a lot of Mississippi voters haven’t been accustomed to voting a straight ticket (I think Barbour will win almost all of the counties in the northern district handily, with the exception of the heavily-black Delta counties; Panola County, the home of Ronnie Musgrove; and possibly Lafayette County, which is home to all six liberals in the state).

Patrick Carver has a set of predictions up for the upcoming Mississippi election. Below the lieutenant governor’s race, most of the down-ballot elections have gotten almost zero publicity, which will probably favor incumbents (Anderson, though, will probably be helped by black turnout, as Patrick notes).

One thing I will say is that if the election does go to the Mississippi House, I think the plurality winner will be chosen by them regardless. If Barbour wins a plurality, there are two many “yellow dog” Democrats who will be absolutely killed in 2007 if they don’t vote for Barbour. And if Musgrove wins the plurality, the 1999 precedent (where Musgrove was the slight plurality winner) suggests that black Democrats aren’t interested in making a deal with the Republicans to cut out the “yellow dogs” and elect a Republican governor. Obviously the Legislature needs to amend the system—frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t been ruled unconstitutional already because of Baker v. Carr—but I’m not holding my breath on that happening.

Joy has the scoop on plans by various government sponsors and the Internet2 project to try the first wide deployment of IPv6 (once called IPng) in the United States, expanding on efforts like the 6bone to see if IPv6 is ready for widespread use.

For now, tech-savvy users interested in experimenting with deploying IPv6 can obtain IPv6 service via Freenet6; you can even obtain your own public 2**48 address block if you’re so inclined—and, perhaps more importantly, if you’re prepared to deal with the security implications of having globally-routable addresses behind your home router. Freenet6 works by using a IPv6-in-v4 tunnel to get IPv6 traffic to the IPv6 backbone, then routing your packets normally.

As Joy notes, the IP address shortage is somewhat less critical in North America—largely because North American ISPs had huge allocations of IP addresses which they’ve been able to effectively subdivide and pass down using CIDR—but nonetheless we’ll need to make the transition eventually, if only so we can keep talking to the rest of the world.

Mark at Not Quite Tea and Crumpets posts his thoughts on last night’s gubernatorial debate, which is thankfully the last of the campaign season. He was rather underwhelmed by Ronnie Musgrove’s performance. (I missed the debate; hopefully C-SPAN will re-run it in the next day or so, but who knows?) The Jackson Clarion-Ledger also has an account of the debate.

In other gubernatorial news, Clarion-Ledger columnist Eric Stringfellow is unimpressed by Haley Barbour’s response to his picture being used by the Council of Conservative Citizens on their web site.