Via Matthew Stinson, I note that both CalPundit and Andrew Sullivan have discovered that Haley Barbour’s been photographed with members of the organization best known as the white collar Klan.

I guess it’s time for me to move back into the undecided column again, even given my severe reservations about having another term of Ronnie Musgrove.

Alex Knapp isn’t impressed either. Expect more on this topic from me today…

Meanwhile, Jacob Levy is morbidly curious about the Council’s fixation on the Frankfurt School. I was confused because the only major Institute for Social Research I’d heard of is at Michigan; I'm sure they'd love it if they could be ascribed such influence on human society. (For the record, the Institute for Social Research in question is this one.)

The Colonel Reb debacle just took an ugly turn. Guess who’s coming to dinner?

The first officer of the Nationalist Organization plans to be the keynote speaker and leader for a Colonel Reb rally Oct. 30 in the Union Plaza.

The rally “Support Colonel Reb: On the Field or Bust,” may also have an open-mic for student supporters to speak as well, rally organizer Richard Barrett said.

“This is an assault on the traditions of Ole Miss, the heritage of the South and the way of life of America, and yes, that is a big deal,” Barrett said.

And who is the “Nationalist Organization,” you may ask? Apparently, it’s a rebranding of Barrett’s racist white pride group, the Nationalist Movement. Needless to say, our friends at SaveOleMiss.com are distancing themselves from Barrett:

“Richard Barrett never went to, or graduated from, Ole Miss,” [Colonel Reb Foundation honcho Brian] Ferguson said. “He is not a part of our family and has no voice in this matter. I’m sure that if the chancellor allowed Colonel Reb to be back on the campus of Ole Miss, that he would smack racists like Richard Barrett with his cane.”

I have a small bit of sympathy for the position Ferguson et al. are in; I’m sure most of the Colonel’s supporters don’t have racist motivations, although I do think that sometimes they forget that the Southern virtue of civility toward their neighbors applies here, as in any other situation. (I genuinely can’t understand the motivation behind people continuining to do something that they know that other people are offended by.) They don’t deserve to get tarred with the same brush as Barrett and his ilk. But just as the principled opponents of the war in Iraq got tarred with the brush of the ANSWER crowd, the Colonel’s supporters are stuck with it now, and how they respond will reflect on their character much more than their actions to date have.

Daily Mississippian columnist Steven Godfrey is singling out the Ole Miss fraternities and sororities for their lackluster support of the Rebels at Homecoming. Quoth Godfrey:

For all the commotion (and emotion) being thrown about regarding a simple mascot, the student body has done little to show their strength inside Vaught-Hemingway stadium when it's needed. (When's it needed? All the time.)

Call me crazy, but logic holds that if you're so passionate about your football mascot, you are in turn passionate about your football team.

So who's to blame?

Why, the greeks of course. …

The fact is that the greek community showed up en masse on Saturday only to witness the homecoming court ceremony, a meaningless event saturated by greeks that served to only bestow useless titles upon (you guessed it) greeks.

Then, as soon as the pomp and circumstance subsided, the navy blazer and high heel crowd bolted on the team they claim to love just as much as Tiger fans love their LSU, or Auburn fans theirs, or any other conference school sans Vandy.

Meanwhile, Sigma Chi pledge Reid Waltrip is recovering from a mysterious head injury he sustained last Monday night on Bid Day; by all accounts, Waltrip is lucky to have survived the blow.

Columnist John Wilbert, on the other hand, blames the scheduling of lackluster non-conference opponents for the lack of fan support. (Not that this theory explains why a significant chunk of the stadium left in the third quarter of the Rebels’ eventual loss to Texas Tech, mind you.)

Boomshock points out that Saudi Arabia’s $15 million PR blitz intended to rehabilitate its reputation may not have had the intended effects.

One sure illustration of the practical limits of statistics is to take a look at the football statistics* compiled by the NCAA, in particular the defensive statistics. For example, take a look at Ole Miss’ season statistics through six games.

The statistic most people have been focusing on is the Rebels’ pass defense, which is giving up 345 yards per game—dead last in the NCAA (117 of 117). Yet in the past two games, the Rebels have only given up 17 points and basically shut down their opponents’ passing games; if they’re the worst pass defense in the country, shouldn’t they have been lit up by Florida and Arkansas State?

There are three forms of selection bias at work here. The first form of selection bias is that opposing teams are passing because their rushing offense is going nowhere (the Rebels are ranked 11th, conceding just 82.5 yards/game on the ground). The second form is that the Rebels have faced two of the country’s most pass-happy offenses: #1 Texas Tech and #13 Memphis, and this hurts their pass defense statistics; the #116 pass defense, North Carolina State, also faced Texas Tech. And the third form is that teams tend to pass when they are behind; the Rebels led both Memphis and Texas Tech by double-digit margins in the second half of both games, so those teams passed even more than usual.

If you just look at the numbers, you’d think the plan to beat Ole Miss would be to pass. But unless your quarterback is as good as B.J. Symons or Danny Wimprine, that may not work; heck, Florida’s Chris Leak, whose passer rating is better than Wimprine’s, threw three picks to the secondary. On the remaining schedule, LSU’s Matt Mauck and MSU’s Kevin Fant are the only QBs known as good passers; Arkansas’ Matt Jones is primarily an option quarterback, as is South Carolina’s Dondrial Pinkins, Auburn’s Jason Campbell is a mediocre passer, and Alabama will be lucky if its third-string QB can suit up with the injuries that plague that team. So exploiting this weakness—if it actually exists—is not something that these teams are likely to be able to accomplish.

Jackson Clarion-Ledger columnist Sid Salter points out that if Ronnie Musgrove had his way on free trade, there’d be no Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi.

Michael Totten thinks Glenn Reynolds is off-base in complaining about the use of the word “conservative” to describe reactionary movements in countries like Russia and Iran. Michael writes:

“Conservative” is a disposition, not an ideology, and so its meaning is always relative to the local context. Conservatives defend the existing political order against change. That is their function.

That is true. However, the meaning of “liberal” is also relative to the local context, but American media don’t describe parties like Germany’s Free Democrats or the Netherlands’ VVD as “liberal,” even though they are (in the classical sense of the term); they’re called things like “economic conservatives” or “free-marketeers,” to translate the term into the American context. And this is appropriate; describing them as “liberal” would be misleading to an American audience.

And, however much the moralizing tone of the hardline elements of the Iranian regime remind us of the fascistic tendencies of the domestic reactionary right’s Two Pats (Buchanan and Robertson), describing this element as “conservative” is similarly misleading. There are plenty of adjectives that properly describe them: five, off the top of my head, are reactionary, theocratic, hard-line, illiberal, and authoritarian. And except possibly the fourth, none of them would mislead an American audience into thinking they share the beliefs of Americans who consider themselves to be conservative.

ESPN.com is reporting that Boston College is likely to become the 12th member of the ACC on Sunday, once an official invitation from the conference is made official. BC was one of the three schools originally expected to leave the Big East for the ACC (along with Syracuse and Miami), but Virginia state politics played a role in getting the BC and Syracuse invites recinded in favor of Virginia Tech. However, since word came down from NCAA honchos that the ACC’s proposal for a title game with only 11 members would not be acceptable, the writing has been on the wall that the ACC would seek another member (as the economics of expansion only made sense with a title game included).

Incidentally, this may cause the Big East to reconsider their haughty rejection of Memphis’ interest in membership. The only problem now is that the Big East may need schools like Memphis, Louisville, and Cincinnati more than they need the Big East.

In other football news, ESPN.com somehow thinks the Rebels scored −7 points in the fourth quarter of their 55-0 rout of the Arkansas State Indians.

It’s now official.

Apparently, researching guns makes you adopt alternate personas that defend your work. Or maybe it’s just being an academic fraud that does…

One of Karl Marx’s most famous aphorisms is that capitalism would eventually collapse due to its own internal contradictions. While old Karl wasn’t a very good prescriptivist (ask the Russians or the Chinese), he did come up with a useful coinage. And, today, Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk takes up that theme in discussing the future of Canada, on the day that the leaders of Alberta and British Columbia signed an agreement on interprovincial cooperation that might be the precursor of a secessionist movement in the Canadian West. One telling reason why the provinces might cooperate:

Almost one-quarter of Canada’s population lives in the two provinces. In 2002, Alberta and B.C. produced $300-billion worth of goods and services, one-third of the national total.

In other words, the per-capita contribution to national GDP of Alberta and British Columbia is 50 percent higher than that of the rest of Canada. And now, these provinces face serious damage to that economic power in the form of Ottawa’s insistence on ratifying the Kyoto accord, which will undercut their advantages in natural resource production.

One is reminded of the situation of the American South prior to the Civil War. To say it was about slavery is both true and to miss the point; the abolition of slavery would have severely damaged the economies of the Southern states, and the leaders of the southern states saw no alternative for preserving their economies but secession. They gravely miscalculated in thinking that the rest of the country would accept that, and quite clearly were wrong to have adopted slavery as the basis of their economies in the first place, but to them secession was preferable to economic collapse.

Is this analogy perfect? Not really. Canada’s central government doesn’t have the military power to prevent secession, and probably wouldn’t be permitted by its Supreme Court (or, more likely, by the United States) to use it even if it did, and the global warming issue is not as morally unambiguous as slavery. But the fundamental lesson—that preserving a region’s economic strength may be a cause for secession—is still valid.

Brett Cashman, while expressing sympathy for Rush Limbaugh’s addiction to painkillers, has this to say:

But what I will say is this: to the extent that Rush is the target of a criminal probe into the sale and use of illegal drugs? This is an example of chickens coming home to roost. Rush has long been an inveterate drug warrior, and has trash-talked crack addicts and suggested that drug offenders are just like ordinary criminals. Well, Rush, it’s looking like you may be one of those drug offenders, now. Should we treat you like an ordinary criminal?

I’d rather not, personally. But so long as conservatives insist on being at the vanguard of the War on Some Drugs, crap like this is going to continue to happen.

That sounds about right to me. And it’s not just conservatives; after all, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, both drug users in their youth, weren’t exactly unenthusiastic drug warriors either.

(The snarky side of me would attribute Rush’s addiction to all that time he spent hanging out with former cocaine addict Michael Irvin on Sunday NFL Countdown.)

Steven Taylor dislikes Newsweek’s hit piece, Stephen Green (VodkaPundit) is also critical (for slightly different reasons), and Arthur Silber, who wants Rush to go to the Big House (not, mind you, the one in Ann Arbor), engenders an interesting discussion.

Mike Hollihan has been repeatedly exposed to Ronnie Musgrove’s ad campaign, and notes that the Musgrove campaign is trying to tap nativist sentiments to keep him in office. Musgrove barely won in 1999 against former congressman Mike Parker, who a number of my friends (more knowledgeable than I about Mississippi politics at the time) considered a closet Klansman. Haley Barbour is going to be a stiff challenge for him.

Overall, I think Musgrove’s been a bit of a mixed bag. He’s let the legislature get away with papering over a huge budget deficit in the coming fiscal year (in no small part due to a huge increase in education spending in the election year budget), and he’s run a number of state departments like a racial spoils system for certain state legislators—most notably, the state’s health bureaucracy. On the other hand, he’s held the line on taxes and mostly behaved sensibly, although his ad campaign is becoming a giant embarassment.

I think the big strike against Barbour is that he’s never held a major office in the state. Both candidates have been spending obscene amounts of effort in this campaign courting the Christian right, so that issue (which normally would dispose me to vote for Democrats) is a wash. On the other hand, the real power’s arguably in the lieutenant governor’s office, where the race is between apparent raving lunatic Amy Tuck (R this week) and Barbara Blackmon (D). And, generally, Barbour has run a less sleazy campaign than Musgrove. So unless something changes in the next month, I’ll probably be voting for Barbour.

Not Quite Tea and Crumpets has some interesting thoughts on this year’s races too. I’d forgotten about the $50 million that Musgrove and his pals in the legislature swiped from the Department of Transportation to balance this year’s budget (so if you want to know why our state’s highway projects are behind schedule, that’s one big reason).

Auburn [3-2/2-0] 27, ARKANSAS [4-0/1-0] 21 [JP/GamePlan]

Tommy Tuberville's Auburn Tigers roll into Fayetteville trying to keep their recent hot streak alive. Both teams spend most of their time on the ground, so this will probably be a fairly low-scoring affair (particularly due to neither team having a very proficient passing QB). I give Auburn the edge, mainly because they've faced more adversity than the Razorbacks in recent weeks.

VANDERBILT [1-5/0-2] 31, Navy [3-2] 20.

Despite Navy's win over Air Force last week, I have to give the edge to the home team in this one, if only because the Commodores deserve a I-A win this year, and this is their best remaining chance for one.

OLE MISS [3-2/2-0] 51, Arkansas State [3-3] 13.

The Rebels face their final tune-up before starting into the heart of their SEC schedule. Expect the Indians to be held to a couple of field goals against the first team defense, with a late TD against the second team. Sophomore QB Micheal Spurlock should see significant playing time in the 3rd and 4th quarters.

Memphis [3-2] 31, MISSISSIPPI STATE [1-4/1-1] 21.

Memphis comes into town with a “revenge game” mindset motivated by Memphis defensive coordinator Joe Lee Dunn, who took the fall for State's 3-8 2002 campaign. While State comes off a win against Vandy-of-the-east Vanderbilt, Memphis is a more complete team all-around (that nonetheless inexplicably lost to UAB last week) than either the Commodores or this year's Bulldogs.

Southern Mississippi [3-2] 24, ALABAMA [2-4/1-2] 17.

The Golden Eagles have a golden opportunity to catch a Crimson Tide team riddled by both injuries and an ineffective offense (and which may be looking ahead to its road date with Ole Miss on October 18). Mike Shula's honeymoon in Tuscaloosa could be over if Alabama can't execute this week.

LOUISIANA STATE [5-0/2-0] 31, Florida [3-3/1-2] 21 [CBS].

One thing's certain: if the Gator team that played in the second half of its game with Ole Miss last week is making the trip to Baton Rouge, they're in serious trouble. The good news for Florida is that if they can execute this week, and Georgia beats UT, they're back in the SEC East race.

Georgia [4-1/2-1] 28, TENNESSEE [4-1/2-1] 21 [ESPN2].

The premiere matchup of the week, this game is likely to crown the SEC East champion (barring a comeback by Florida). Ultimately Georgia has played better in tight games than UT, and aren't afraid of hostile road games, and thus I give the edge to the Bulldogs.

Matthew Stinson has the definitive word on the topic in comments at Dan Drezner’s place.

Pejman dissects Krugman’s latest. Apparently Krugman has concluded that it is truly impossible for him to be both honest and polite at the same time, at least when writing for the New York Times. Wow. Simply wow. You’d think that acquiring that skill would be a prerequisite for finishing grad school.

The search for a replacement mascot for Colonel Reb is over, according to Friday’s Daily Mississippian. His replacement: nothing. Advantage: me.

Russell Fox, a political scientist at near-neighbor Arkansas State University (whose football team is about to be Ole Miss’ sacrificial lamb for Homecoming), has a lengthy post that makes a reasonably strong case why recalls are a bad thing. As I posted before, I think the tenets of representative democracy are compatible with the recall power, but I can see where an unchecked recall power might harm our system of government, and in some ways I can agree with Russell that the California procedure was a “mess.” (Arguably, the state’s bizarre super-open primary system added to the mess by creating a situation where neither party nominated a decent candidate in 2002.)

I guess the big, open question is how to avoid the “mess” while still retaining a credible threat to lame-duck politicians and permitting a fair selection of candidates on the replacement ballot.

Steve Verdon thinks there are some flaws in Russell’s argument.

I’m not thinking clearly enough today to post a full set of predicitions for this weekend’s games, but I will go ahead and pick SOUTH CAROLINA over Kentucky tonight (ESPN), by a score of 31-21. No particular reason, except that Kentucky has underperformed to date, while USC has at least looked respectable in its SEC losses. Neither team is going to Atlanta this year, but USC has a decent shot at a bowl if it can win this one and compile a respectable record.

George Will spends his valuable op-ed space in The Washington Post whining about California Republicans abandoning conservative orthodoxy.

You play to win the game. Hello? You play to win the game.

Now go get your panties in a bunch elsewhere, George. Because—to paraphrase my personal hero Peyton Manning—your idiot orthodox conservative Republican kickers got liquored up and couldn’t win elections to save their lives. You win with what you have that can win. And if that means you’ve got to elect a Dick Riordan, a Rudy Giuliani, or a Arnold Schwarzenegger, since you’re gonna go down in flames with a Bill Simon or a Tom McClintock, then hold your nose, deal with it and stop whinging like a spoiled brat. Because the people of California, and the California Republican Party, are immeasurably better off than they were 24 hours ago while Gray Davis was selling the state off a bit at a time to every single person who stuffed a C-note in his g-string.

And—by the way—this goes too for my idiot friends on the left who are going to nominate George McGovern, I mean Howard Dean, for the presidency because they’re still pissed off about Iraq, instead of actually (gasp) focusing on someone vaguely electable. And we all know how well that choice turned out…

Patrick Carver dissents in part and concurs in part. And Boomshock posts on how he learned to stop worrying and love the recall, or something like that at any rate.

I posted my sketch of a theory of perceived media bias a few months ago; now Gallup has done me a favor and produced a poll that suggests I may be onto something. Take a look-see at the results:

Now, unfortunately, there’s nothing to show the causal mechanism here (i.e. why conservatives and liberals perceive the media’s biases differently). But it’s an interesting look at the question, nonetheless.

Link via Andrew Sullivan (although I think I saw it cited earlier somewhere else).

Mike is pretty non-plussed with the replacement mascots being proposed by the administration (and, I for one, basically agree, even though unlike Mike I think the Colonel is embarassing—though I’m more embarassed by the idiots who rally around him than the Colonel image itself). My solution is basically the same one I proposed for the flag mess: replace it with nothing. We don’t need a state flag and we certainly don’t need a mascot. I mean, Auburn’s got six of them but, in the end, they’re still stuck with Tommy Tuberville.

The SEC FanBlog has a post on this as well.

Stephen Green links to this Roger L. Simon post that alleges:

What we are witnessing is the beginning—the early movement—in the death of the two-party system as we know it. This is a revolt of the pragmatic center. And that is a good thing for the American people because those parties and the media that feed on them have indeed become a form of nomenklatura. They depend on each other. They are the mutual gate keepers of an old and sclerotic bureaucracy from which their jobs flow in a system of patronage as elaborate as the Czar’s. No wonder watching CNN tonight I felt as if I were watching a wake. They are threatened by what is going on—as they should be.

I don’t know that I believe that. Any good political scientist will tell you that we’re probably overdue for a realignment—but realignments rotate the societal cleavage lines, finding a new way to split the center; they generally don’t produce “the pragmatic center” versus “everyone else.”

Realignments are fundamentally about changes in the issues that separate voters between the parties. Now, maybe the “war/no-war” issue is a possible realignment pivot; I honestly don’t know. It certainly sees political figures of all stripes squabbling within their own parties more than usual. But that’s not anything to do with the “pragmatic center.”

Yet, arguably, the pragmatic center won in California. That was largely due to the ballot format, and in particular due to the fact that party activists were not the gatekeepers for candidates to receive a major-party label on the replacement ballot. Look at the figures: six of the top seven candidates in the replacement ballot had a party affiliation, and five of the seven were affiliated with a major party; the top five major party candidates received 94.3% of the vote, the Green party candidate received 2.8%, while the highest independent tally (0.6%) was for Huffington, who essentially ran as a Democrat. If primary voters, comprised mostly of Republican and Democratic activists, had been able to be gatekeepers for the ballot—as they are in virtually every other partisan election in the United States—chances are the “pragmatic center” option wouldn’t have even made it on the ballot, even though it’s fairly clear Schwarzenegger was the Pareto winner* of the election.

Unless the pragmatic center can break down these barriers to entry for their preferred candidates, or establish a viable third party label (something Schwarzenegger probably isn’t interested in heading, particularly after the Ventura debacle), chances are that the major parties—and particularly the party activists who control them—will continue to win almost all elections.

Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk has some interesting thoughts on this topic as well, including a cautionary tale about single-party democracy in his adopted homeland. And, I particularly like Matthew’s reaction to something Michael J. Totten said:

This isn't really recall-related, but Michael Totten follows up on Simon's post with a "can't we all just be nonpartisan?" plea, and cites increasing complexity as a reason to move toward a more nuanced politics. That's fine for folks like Michael, but there's a downside to increased complexity—most consumers of political information have little time to think about complexity, and instead receive their information in little bite-sized pieces. It's this famine of depth which encourages hyperpartisanship, as gut reactions predominate over reason. If anything, the trend isn't toward the death of the two-party system as we know it, but toward the creation of an increasingly polarized and anti-intellectual pair of party masses, along with a highly informed politically moderate elite (i.e. folks like Michael and Roger), who occupy the position of “kingmaker” in future elections.

That sounds about—and, dare I say, scarily—right.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds’ semi-blog at MSNBC thinks the recall is an effective way to upset special interest politics-as-usual; I think that, again, goes to the format of the ballot, which allowed a moderate figure to run with a party label without significant initial support from that party’s activists. The other major candidates, however, were in hock to established state interests: Bustamante with the Old Left and racial unity groups, McClintock with the Christian right, and Camejo and Huffington with the Sierra Clubbers. In any event, generally speaking I don’t have a problem with organized interests influencing politics, even if the playing field could be made more level. (And I’d slightly quibble with Mancur Olson’s interpretation of Japan’s interest group structure; by the accounts I’ve read, the post-war kieretsu were not too different from the business cross-holdings prior to the war. Olson’s probably correct when it comes to the bigger picture, however.)

Tyler Cowen has the scoop on the Economics Nobel prizes, which are being given to the inventors of two time-series econometrics techniques: ARCH and cointegration. As Tyler points out, Granger is more famous (perhaps even infamous) for his contribution of the concept of “Granger causality”; the typical joke is that, by the Granger defintion, summer “Granger-causes” fall (or autumn, if you don’t live in North America).

Anyway, very cool stuff; I’m not a time-series guy myself, mainly because there isn’t all that much great cross-sectional time-series data on mass political behavior at the individual level, but ARCH and cointegration are a big deal for political scientists looking at things like presidential approval and aggregate voting behavior over time, and the Nobel is well-deserved by both.

Via Calblog, I found this neat county-by-county map of the recall results; there’s all sorts of cool tables available here. It’d be nice if our state could put together something similar for this year’s gubernatorial race too.

Rather than talk about the California recall results directly—a topic I can add little to the existing discussion on anyway—I’ll just point to my August post on how recalls are compatible with representative democracy. And if California Democrats want to try to kickstart a new recall election against Schwarzenegger immediately—something they can probably gather enough signatures for to qualify for the ballot, but will probably have major problems attracting support from the voters (and which probably will be an unneeded distraction in a year when the party will need to focus on getting out the state’s vote for a Democratic nominee)—more power to them.

Kevin Drum also thinks an Arnold recall would be a distraction from the Democrats’ 2004 campaign.

Just speaking for myself, the more whining I hear out of Democrats about “stolen elections” the more likely I am to vote for Bush just to spite them—bearing in mind that now, frankly, I could probably easily be convinced to vote for a sane Democrat like Joe Lieberman or even Serb-warlord-coddler Wes Clark. So, yes, California—and the maturity of Democrats’ response to having an ineffectual, embarassing governor of their own party who was a willing captive of Old Left interest groups quite deservedly tossed from office—will matter for me, and many other fence-straddlers, in 2004.

Today’s Memphis Commercial Appeal contains a typical rendition of one of the fundamental problems with the newspaper: it confuses the op-ed page with a forum for writing news pieces that are completely unsourced. Today’s example: its editorial on the selection of a route for Interstate 69 through the city, which somehow in 527 words manages to avoid taking a position on absolutely anything. Let’s start at the beginning:

AN ADVISORY committee’s proposed route for the extension of Interstate 69 through metropolitan Memphis offers a compromise that should provide some satisfaction to the highway’s proponents in Tennessee as well as Mississippi. The recommended route is actually two routes: one through downtown Memphis that would get the I-69 designation and an outer loop to be called I-269.

Indeed it should. Did it occur to anyone at the CA to interview these proponents so we can be sure? Or are we just engaging in wild speculation here?

Officials in Mississippi, backed by the state’s congressional delegation, say they would prefer a horseshoe-shaped loop for I-69 between Millington and Hernando to improve transportation and bring new economic activity to eastern DeSoto and Marshall counties. Memphis officials have not opposed an I-69 bypass, but have lobbied for a downtown route for the new highway, which eventually will link Canada to Mexico through eight U.S. states.

Well, the basic facts, at least, aren’t in question.

Much of the Shelby County portion of the proposed outer loop is built or under construction. The Tenn. 385 loop, which includes Paul Barret Parkway, would become I-269 at Millington, connecting to a new section of Tenn. 385 that is under construction between Arlington and Collierville.

It might have been worthwhile to clarify that part of Tenn. 385—the Nonconnah Parkway—won’t become part of I-269. That, you know, would actually be informative.

South of Collierville, a road would have to be built through the northwest corner of Marshall County and across northeast DeSoto County. The new road would cross I-55 north of Hernando. Work on the highway west of that point is under way, with grading, drainage and bridge work on the stretch that runs from U.S. 61 to Interstate 55 expected to be complete by November 2004.

Good to know our friends at the CA at least read the DeSoto Times, as a reader of the CA wouldn’t actually know this from their previous reporting on the topic. (For the record, we’re four paragraphs in, and there has yet to appear a single opinion.)

Much of its route through Memphis is paved. From Millington, a new stretch of the highway would be built to just below Frayser, following a path west of U.S. 51. From there it would use existing freeways, starting with the connector between U.S. 51 and the I-40/240 loop, merging with I-40/240 and then following I-55 South, picking up I-269 traffic north of Hernando, then heading southwest into the Mississippi Delta.

“Much of its route through Memphis is paved?” And the rest is a cowpath? Are there dirt freeways in Shelby County?

Temporarily, the new highway would be a welcome addition to the regional transportation system for suburban Memphis residents. Local commuters spent an average of 36 hours waiting in traffic in 2001, according to a report released last week by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. That’s about 15 hours less than the average urban commuter wasted, but no doubt more than the typical local commuter would prefer.

As the I-69 project encourages more development on the fringes of the metropolitan area, however, its advantages to the commuting public will wane. Particularly in Marshall and DeSoto counties, where new stretches of roadway would be built, I-269 could exacerbate the urban sprawl that has had considerable impact on the quality of life, culture and economics of Memphis and surrounding communities.

Never mind that Mississippi officials already planned to build a freeway along the I-269 route anyway, starting in 2009. Besides which, I suspect most people in Marshall and DeSoto counties prefer the “urban sprawl” to what was there before, since those counties didn’t really have much of an economy before it.

Interestingly enough, the Commercial Appeal isn’t very upset about a new stretch of roadway between Memphis and Millington, which is likely to be a larger sprawl magnet, seeing as that area will be much more accessible to downtown than southeastern DeSoto County is. One suspects they’re on better terms with Millington City Hall.

And the environmental impact of the highway has not been sufficiently explored. The road’s proponents maintain I-269 could have a positive effect on air quality, by relieving some of the congestion that a single, downtown route would create. Its effects on wetlands and farms could become sources of contention, though, before a final decision is made.

Uh, I call bullshit. The Tennessee and Mississippi departments of transportation have been studying the highway proposal in detail since December 2000. They have produced a Draft Environmental Impact Statement that discusses the “effects on wetlands and farms,” among other topics, which will be (a) very large and comprehensive and (b) available at area libraries later this fall, once it is approved by the Federal Highway Administration.

By late this year, a draft environmental impact statement must go to the Federal Highway Administration. Public hearings early next year could finally provide the information needed to determine what’s best for Memphis and neighboring communities.

Uh, hello? The Technical Advisory Committee has already determined “what’s best for Memphis and neighboring communities.” That’s why they made the decision to go with the “system alternative.” The public hearings are designed to determine whether the public agrees with that choice—there have already been two other sets of public meetings designed to find out what alternatives the public would like to see considered.

By the way, that’s where this “editorial” ends. What does the CA think? Who knows? But if you’re going to be an opinion leader, it probably helps to have an opinion in the first place.