Why am I getting a weird feeling of dejà vu from reading the New York Times’ alleged sneak preview of Tuesday’s UN speech by George Bush?

According to the officials involved in drafting the speech, for an audience they know will range from the skeptical to the angry, Mr. Bush will acknowledge no mistakes in planning for postwar security and reconstruction in Iraq. ... In the speech, Mr. Bush will repeat his call for nations — including those that opposed the Iraq action — to contribute to rebuilding the country, but he will offer no concessions to French demands that the major authority for running the country be turned over immediately to Iraqis.

Wow. Maybe he’ll also storm out of the room in anger and call people in the audience names.

Steven Taylor of PoliBlog notes a Wall Street Journal editorial on Iraq’s al-Qaeda ties and the capture of Abu Abbas on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, my friend Scott Huffmon forwards a collection of quotes from administration officials that juxtapose 9/11 with Iraq (Scott therefore wins the longstanding Signifying Nothing “no-prize” for forwarding evidence of the adminstration linking Saddam and 9/11). Perhaps more interesting is the associated article discussing how the public’s belief in a 9/11-Saddam connection came about. Key graf:

A number of public-opinion experts agreed that the public automatically blamed Iraq, just as they would have blamed Libya if a similar attack had occurred in the 1980s. There is good evidence for this: On Sept. 13, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent suspected Hussein’s involvement—even though the administration had not made a connection. The belief remained consistent even as evidence to the contrary emerged.

Or, as I am fond of saying, when it comes to politics, it’s all heuristics.

I’m spending most of this afternoon slowly unravelling whatever went wrong with upgrading one of our boxes from Red Hat 7.3 to Red Hat 9. Main problem: none of Red Hat’s GUI administration tools work—they all die with segmentation faults. Neither did sendmail (which I promptly booted out in favor of postfix.)

In the process of straightening everything out, I installed apt-rpm. We’ll see if that makes the system slightly more administerable (is that a verb noun?).

The mystery deepens. Apparently, somehow the PyGNOME installation is hosed. However, it's only intermittently hosed; most of the Red Hat admin tools segfault, but some don't (they're just oddly buggy, like the Package tool that won't let you select things in the Details view). And Foomatic-GUI runs just fine (once wget is installed—no, don't ask me why). Damn strange.

After last night’s loss to Houston (by a score of 42-35), the Mississippi State Bulldogs appear to have blown their best chance for a road win this season, and fall to 0-3 for the season (and 3-13 in their past 16 games). There are some serious problems down in Starkville, made all the more plain by fired defensive coordinator Joe Lee Dunn’s level of success in Memphis this year with arguably lesser talent.

Working slightly in State’s favor is the fact that their next three games are at home. However, looking at their opponents, things may not be quite so simple:

• Next Saturday, Louisiana State rolls into Starkville fresh off the heels of a 4-0 start and a hard-fought victory over the defending SEC champion Georgia Bulldogs. The question isn’t whether LSU will win—it’s by how much?
• October 4, Bobby Johnson’s now 1-3 Vanderbilt squad comes to Starkville in search of its first SEC win during Johnson’s reign in Nashville. (They face Georgia Tech at home this weekend, which this season is a winnable game for the Commodores.)
• October 11 is Homecoming. More specifically, it’s homecoming for Joe Lee Dunn as Memphis (currently 2-1, and likely to be 4-1 by then) comes to town in search of a season sweep of the SEC.

Then come road tests at Auburn and Kentucky, a bye week, a home date with Alabama, two weeks in a row against current top-25 teams Tennessee and Arkansas on the road, and finally the Thanksgiving Egg Bowl match against Ole Miss. Given the current level of Mississippi State’s play, they’d be hard pressed to beat any of these teams.

Realistically, the home dates against Vanderbilt and Ole Miss are probably the most winnable, the former since Vanderbilt hasn’t exactly been tearing up the gridiron either and the latter due to the in-state rivalry. The current Sagarin ratings* only favor Mississippi State in its games against Vandy and Memphis, the latter only because the Bulldogs have home field advantage.

People used to call State the “Vandy of the West.” They’re not any more—State is almost certainly worse.

Colby Cosh doesn’t quite ask a question worth considering:

It’s clear enough that a majority of the Liberal caucus is opposed, right or wrong, to gay marriage in principle. The same could probably be said of the Opposition; yet we’re to have gay marriage in Canada all the same. It does make you wonder what the point of sending MPs to Ottawa is.

Or, for my non-comparatively-inclined friends, a hypothetical translation into the American political context:

It’s clear enough that a majority of Democrats are opposed, right or wrong, to gay marriage in principle. The same could probably be said of the Republicans; yet we’re to have gay marriage in the United States all the same. It does make you wonder what the point of sending Congressmen to Washington is.

Alec Saunders, on the other hand, doesn’t think gay marriage is a legitimate subject of political debate; the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada’s equivalent to the U.S. Bill of Rights (plus a healthy dollop of the 14th Amendment, minus those pesky 2nd and 3rd amendments that were at least partially motivated by anti-British sentiment), has spoken—or at least been interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada to speak in that way.

What’s interesting to me is that Alec’s a self-identified “traditional conservative” while Colby is generally libertarian in his outlook, yet they take the opposite sides on this issue to those you’d expect Americans with those political leanings to take. (Incidentally, my position is closer to Alec’s, simply because legislative bodies are at their worst when enacting social and economic regulation; the “Do Something” instinct too often prevails over common sense in these cases.)

In Colby’s case, I might explain his preference for legislative involvement as vestigial sentiment for the idea of parliamentary sovereignty—the idea that the final arbiter of the Law is the legislature, as is embodied in Westminster parliamentary tradition. But I find Alec’s position a bit more perplexing, although I can perhaps understand his disinterest in the use of this particular issue by the embryonic Alliance of Progressive Conservatives (or whatever the hell they decide to call themselves). God knows I cringe every time the Republicans pull the same stunts, although in Mississippi the Democrats usually join in the fun too, so here it’s essentially a wash.

Then again, the Smug Canadian reads Colby’s comments differently. So what do I know?

Glenn Reynolds throws up his hands at the latest round in the John Lott feud:

What I’d like is to see an authoritative look at this by a disinterested party. I’m not qualified to provide that. I’d like to see someone who is come forward and sort all of this out.

Anyone motivated enough to “come forward and sort all of this out” would, by definition, no longer be disinterested. The only thing I can think of: rename all the variables and give the dataset and the alternate specifications to an econometrician (or six)—preferably one who has lived under a rock the past ten years.

Anyway, rather than volunteering myself—not only because this whole debate is too political for anyone with my political leanings to be considered objective (despite my rather ambivalent personal attitudes towards guns), but also because I don’t personally find “public policy” questions that interesting to study and because, well, I do have a dissertation that I’m supposed to be finishing revisions on this weekend—I’ll just recommend reading this book on the politics of gun control (a research topic I find more interesting than simply the effects of gun ownership), because (a) it’s pretty good and (b) one of the members of my dissertation committee co-edited it.

TEXAS [1-0] 31, Arkansas [1-0] 17

Actual score: 28-38. Arkansas pulls off the major upset in Austin; although Texas is hampered with a one-dimensional offense, it was still quite unexpected. Arkansas could be the team to watch for in the SEC West, especially compared to its performance last season that saw the team basically luck its way into the championship game.

VANDERBILT 17 [1-1/0-1], Auburn [0-2] 16 [JP/GamePlan]

7-45. Vanderbilt reverted to form, and Auburn figured out how to score touchdowns again.

GEORGIA [2-0] 35, South Carolina [2-0] 24

31-7. USC got blown out between the hedges.

FLORIDA [1-1] 62, Florida A&M [1-1] 3

63-3 (ooh, so close!). FAMU did soundly win the halftime, though.

OLE MISS [1-1/1-0] 42, Louisiana-Lafayette [0-2] 7

59-14 (would have been 62-14, but Cutcliffe was feeling merciful). The news of the game was Jamal Pittman's solo 69-yard, 9-play touchdown drive. Oh, and Manning had an obscene QB rating.

ALABAMA [1-1] 31, Kentucky [1-1] 20

27-17, more or less as expected. The Pillsbury Throw Boy was no match for Mike Shula's team in his first Tuscaloosa win.

LOUISIANA STATE [2-0] 65, Western Illinois [2-0] 14 (revised)

35-7. Again, more or less as expected, although you might have expected LSU to put up more points. Maybe they're saving them for Georgia...

TULANE [1-1] 56, Mississippi State [0-1] 54 (6 OT)

31-28. Tulane, as expected, pulls off the "upset". MSU's skid is now at 8 weeks, and counting.

Conference standings: Georgia currently has sole posession of the SEC East lead, while Ole Miss and Auburn are tied for first in the West (with undefeated Alabama ineligible for postseason play). No teams are yet mathematically eliminated from a division title, but Vandy is trying very hard to be the first.

This week's games, highlighted by a CBS double-header. Fans of other teams will have to listen to the radio. You know the drill...

FLORIDA [2-1] 31, Tennessee [2-0] 21. [CBS]

The traditional SEC East powers line up for their first conference games of the season in Gainesville. UT has looked unimpressive in its two wins, so I go with Florida because of (a) home field and (b) playing Miami tough (but demerits for getting outscored 28-0).

Georgia [3-0/1-0] 24, LOUISIANA STATE [3-0] 17. [CBS]

LSU is somehow favored in this contest, mainly due to the legend of "Death Valley." However, they don't call it Death Valley when it's a 2:30 kickoff, and UGA looks unstoppable as of late.

Kentucky [1-2/0-1] 41, INDIANA [1-2] 10.

Kentucky takes out its frustrations on perennial Big Ten punching bag Indiana in Bloomington, where it's a fair bet that Wildcat fans will rule the stands.

ALABAMA [2-1/1-0] 35, Northern Illinois [2-0] 14.

Alabama isn't Wisconsin. Shula now has a winning record in Tuscaloosa.

TEXAS CHRISTIAN [2-0] 35, Vanderbilt [1-2/0-2] 17.

The Vandy team that lost to Auburn last week probably couldn't beat SMU, much less TCU.

SOUTH CAROLINA [2-1/0-1] 38, Alabama-Birmingham [1-2] 7.

Lou Holtz convinces his team they're actually facing Alabama-Tuscaloosa, so they go out and pulverize the opposition. (Lou's mistake last week: the team thought he said they were playing Georgia Tech.)

HOUSTON [2-1] 38, Mississippi State [0-2] 31.

The Bulldogs somehow find a way to blow a fourth-quarter lead for the second game in a row as they work through I-A trying to find a team they can beat. Unfortunately for State, Louisiana-Lafayette isn't on their schedule this year. Or should that be "unfortunately for ULL"?

Two teams have the week off:

NCAA Infractions Committee [∞-0] $12,000/player, AUBURN [1-2/1-0] 0.

Tommy Tuberville's gang spends the off week under a cloud as former coach Terry Bowden is on record saying that boosters paid signing bonuses to Auburn recruits in the 1980s and early 1990s. Apparently that's against the rules... go figure!

OLE MISS [2-1/1-0] spends the week preparing for pass-happy Texas Tech to come to Oxford for the team's second night game in a row, as there will be no TV for the game (ESPN2 is instead opting to show the humiliation of Mississippi State by LSU). Continued noises from the coaching staff suggest that sophomore RB Jamal Pittman, who accounted for a large chunk of Ole Miss's second-half yards against ULM, will be in the starting lineup.

Tech's game against NC State will be televised Saturday at 11 CDT on ESPN2. As NC State's offense is similar to that of Ole Miss, although perhaps even more pass-oriented, it may be a good preview of how the game in Oxford is likely to turn out.

Foomatic 0.6.3 is now available at both Savannah and here; it has also been uploaded to Debian unstable.

The main new feature in this release is the display of information from the LinuxPrinting.org printer database when in the printer make/model browser, using a GtkHTML2 widget. A screenshot of the new functionality is here.

Here's an updated screenshot of the current, more OS X-like main interface:

The revelations of five-figure cash payouts to Auburn players (more on the story here) have Pete Holiday at the SEC Fanblog speculating about what sort of penalties Auburn could face from the NCAA:

This, of course, raises an interesting question: If a team commits major violations while on probation, how does the punishment work? Death Penalty? Forfeiture of X seasons from the time of the violation? Bowl Ban / Scholarship cuts for upcoming seasons? My guess is that the NCAA has no idea how they’d handle it and would resort to whatever would be least-consistent with their previous rulings.

In the comments, an discussion has broken out: can the NCAA’s infractions committee impose meaningful sanctions on Auburn? Jeff Quinton of Backcountry Conservative thinks not:

Is the NCAA willing to invoke the death penalty now though? When the last round of Alabama investigations started those rumors it came out that the Death Penalty would be something the NCAA would avoid if at all possible because of the impact on revenue it would have on other schools in the SEC.

Kevin Donahue, however, says:

I don’t think the NCAA would think twice about handing out the death penalty to an SEC team. If they don’t crack the whip in this case, when could they ever?

Assuming the Auburn investigation amounts to something, and bearing in mind the continuing investigation of Alabama and inquiry targeting Mississippi State, it is quite possible that half of the SEC West will be on some form of probation in 2004. Clearly the existing penalties aren’t having sufficient deterrent effect on boosters and programs.

But the “death penalty“—the forced shutdown of the football program for at least two years—isn’t likely to happen. Now that big money has found NCAA football and basketball, college athletics is run like a business, particularly in the SEC, the most profitable league in the country.

Jeff is right that the death penalty would hurt revenue, even at the other SEC schools, due to the sharing of bowl, tournament and television receipts. But that’s not necessarily the NCAA’s motivation—the NCAA doesn’t see a dime of that money.

The NCAA’s fear is that the SEC and its member schools, faced with a “death penalty” situation and losing a significant chunk of their funds, would jump ship and encourage members of the rest of the Big Six conferences to form a new basketball-football semi-pro league beyond the influence of the NCAA. Combined with a number of schools from the Big 12, C-USA, and the ACC, a “super SEC” of 24 or so teams would have a lock on most of the talent with NFL and NBA potential in the southeast and a large market that is underserved by both pro leagues.

So for now the NCAA will try to muddle through. But soon an SEC school is going to be found to have done something so egregious that the NCAA has to impose the death penalty to maintain its credibility. And that day will be the last day of college sports as we know it in the southeast.

ESPN.com Page 2 writer Jim Caple was in Oxford for the ULM game. Shockingly, he had the same reaction to the evocation of Blind Jim Ivy as justification for retaining Colonel Reb that I did:

Plain, old-fashioned college student resentment against an administration making a decision over their heads is a significant part of this. But when [Brian] Ferguson talks about Colonel Reb being a tribute to an old black man named Blind Jim Ivy who sold peanuts around campus during the first half of the century (when blacks weren’t allowed to attend classes), he begins to lose me.

His conclusion:

Colonel Reb is offensive. He has to go.

If his supporters really appreciate the damage Colonel Reb brings to the school and state they love so dearly, they would welcome a new mascot, a mascot that all students can embrace, enjoy and look to with a sense of pride instead of embarrassment.

The California Recall has prompted a few questions about various polling techniques. As someone who’s put in his fair share of hours doing telephone survey research, and has heard a version of the “pitch” from Harris Interactive from one of their in-house statisticians*, I thought I’d try to clear up some confusion.

The “traditional” way of doing political polling these days is a system called “random digit dialing.” Basically, to get the number of respondents they need, professional pollsters call several thousand households from a list of residential numbers prepared by companies like Survey Sampling Inc.; if you’re feeling cheap, there are other alternatives that can be used (with a much higher non-response rate). (Before RDD, we did stuff like what Zogby did in Iraq recently; that sort of quasi-random “man on the street” interviewing is common in non-industrialized countries, and essentially the same as contemporary exit polling in the United States.)

RDD worked pretty well for polling until computers arrived on the scene in the mid-80s along with the hardcore telemarketing industry. In the past two decades, response rates have dropped off sharply, requiring more calls to get a valid sample for statistical inference. Coupled with answering machines and caller ID, the effectiveness of RDD for getting a truly random sample has been undermined.

The Internet allows a few new options. Internet survey delivery allows respondents to complete surveys at their own convenience, and also permits the delivery of non-verbal stimuli (like photographs, long blocks of text to be read, and drawings), which is useful for experimental designs. The drawback is that just sticking a survey on the Internet will result in a non-random sample, the most notorious instance of which is the abomination known as the “web poll.” Since respondents to web polls self-select, we have no idea how representative they are of the public at large.

Two groups in the U.S. have tried to tackle the non-random response issue from different directions. Knowledge Networks (KN) solves the representativeness problem by only offering the surveys to a randomly-selected sample of households. Rather than recruiting a new batch of respondents for each survey (like in a traditional phone survey), KN has a rolling panel of several thousand households that participate in studies. They are provided with free WebTV service for the duration of their panel membership, and in exchange must participate in a certain number of surveys. The surveys are delivered via WebTV to the household. (This approach is basically the same as that employed by the Neilsens for television ratings.) As in a traditional phone survey, some weighting is done to adjust the sample to account for stratification and clustering effects. KN’s co-founders are Stanford University professors Norman Nie and Douglas Rivers; Stanford apparently has an arrangement for reduced-cost surveys with KN due to this relationship (at least judging from the number of Stanford professors and graduate students I see at conferences using KN-based experimental and survey data).

The other approach, employed by Harris Interactive, is to do post-hoc adjustments through a technique called “propensity weighting.” Harris has a truly Internet-based panel with a larger membership than KN’s panel (some of the difference in membership size is due to Harris also doing survey work outside the United States; however, they also use bigger samples for each survey for other reasons which I’ll get to shortly). Surveys are administered via the user’s web browser in response to invitations, and participants receive points for participating in surveys and also get entries in regular drawings for cash prizes. Instead of ensuring that participants are representative of the population at large, Harris uses propensity weighting to reweigh respondents based on their demographic and behavioral characteristics and the frequency of those characteristics in the population at large (weighting schemes for other survey techniques are generally based on the design of the sampling procedure). It is important to emphasize that Harris’ technique is not based on random samples. However, propensity weighting is designed to make the sample behave “as if” it was selected randomly.

Which technique is better? All of them have flaws, particularly if trying to reach certain subpopulations like the homeless and indigent (Harris’s technique might find the occasional homeless guy who checks his email at the library; KN and RDD would never catch him). For voting research, however, all of the techniques would probably fare better. Generally speaking participation is correlated with the variables that would be associated with having a telephone, a stable household, and Internet access. To the extent that some population groups are less likely to be online, propensity weighting should adjust for that (in the case of Harris).

Earlier this year, Political Analysis had an article that compared all three techniques, which found that generally RDD, KN, and Harris provided estimates of population parameters within the reported margin of error, with a few notable exceptions. For inferential statistics (trying to figure out the relationships among variables), which is generally what political scientists are interested in, the sampling issues are relatively unimportant, but for the descriptive statistics (trying to figure out what the population-at-large is like) pollsters and the media care about, there may be more important issues that weren’t addressed in the PA piece.

But generally both KN and Harris appear to have credible techniques that have been backed up with actual election results, so their conclusions are as likely to be correct as those of traditional surveys like the Field Poll and L.A. Times.

Today’s winner: the Toronto Star (in fairness, they were only picked on because they were in Google News; I wasn’t planning on continuing the north-of-the-border focus):

WASHINGTON—U.S. President George W. Bush conceded for the first time yesterday that the United States had no evidence indicating Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

In related news, I concede for the first time today that I have no evidence that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez plan to get married. Or that they don’t plan to get married. Or that they ever had sex, for that matter.

Vocabulary tip of the day: concession requires the retraction of a previously-held position. For example, Andrew “008” Gilligan conceded that he “sexed up” his own reporting about the alleged “sexing up” of the British government’s mojo-riffic weapons dossier. Bill Clinton conceded that he did have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky (although not in quite so few words, or at least not without employing unusual definitions of “is”, “alone”, and “sex”). The United States conceded its claim to British Columbia. Richard Nixon conceded that the United States was no longer interested in defending South Vietnam.

Show me evidence of George Bush claiming that “Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the Sept. 11 terror attacks,” and then you can use the verb concede. Until then, you can use other language, like “reiterated” and “smacked down Dick Cheney for saying stupid things on Meet the Press.”

Then again, this is the country that gave us Alanis Morissette’s definition of “irony,” loosely translated as “anything that sucks ass.” So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that “concede” is Canadian for “says something that contradicts something we imagined that the speaker said earlier because it would be consistent with our political belief system.”

My copy of Virginia Postrel’s new book, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, had shown up in a box on my chair by the time I got to work this morning. I’ve only gotten through the Preface, but it’s been a good read so far. (I would have sat down at one of those nice new tables they have on the rear porch of Weir Hall and read some more, but a half-dozen other people had the same idea I had. They weren’t reading Virginia’s book, though.)

I also watched a bit of the CBC news on Newsworld International this morning—a rerun of last night’s National, with Peter Mansbridge looking appropriately dour, as always. Apparently the Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, Canada’s two main parties of the right, are making another run at a merged organization, tentatively to be named the Conservative Party. I’m not sure that it will fly. The PCs seem to me like warmed over British “one nation” Tories, while the Alliance seem more like the Texas GOP minus the libertarian instincts. More importantly, the Liberals are positioned to capture the median voter in Ontario and Quebec, which is where the votes are anyway under Canada’s system of not-quite-proportional allocation of seats in Parliament. So even if they pull off the grand alliance, I’m not sure it solves much in the long run. (Then again, I’ve been half-expecting Canada to collapse due to its own internal contradictions for the past decade. Of course, states with even less reason to exist, like Belgium, have persisted as well. Blame the Treaty of Westphalia.)

I also learned that a tenth dwarf was added to the presidential race on the Democratic side down here, some guy from Arkansas who apparently is a lot like Howard Dean but spends more time hanging out with war criminals (the latter part I learned from Matthew; Peter didn’t mention that part).

But that story got less play than news that (a) everyone in the media and Parliament is now treating Paul Martin like he’s the prime minister, instead of Jean Chrétien, and (b) Canada’s opening seven more consulates in the United States next year. Amazingly they’ve just gotten around to adding Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States. Apparently they’re also opening up in a place called “Raleigh-Durham,” which I was under the impression were actually two distinct cities. Then again, so once were Buda and Pest. Or, for that matter, Toronto and Etobicoke.

Mike Hollihan had running coverage of the hostage situation at Dyersburg State Community College yesterday. Nice job, Mike!

By the way, the current scoring is: Hollihan 1, GoMemphis Blogs 0 (forfeit, they didn’t show up for the event).

Kevin Drum has posted his interview with Paul Krugman. But the best example of Krugman’s worldview is actually from his new book, the Great Unraveling:

In fact, there’s ample evidence that key elements of the coalition that now runs the country believe that some long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist….Consider, for example….New Deal programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance, Great Society programs like Medicare….Or consider foreign policy….separation of church and state….The goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no social safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don’t teach evolution but do teach religion and — possibly — in which elections are only a formality….

Needless to say, the revelation in the interview that he regularly reads Atrios won’t come as much of a shock after that paragraph.

Daniel Drezner has more.

Glenn Reynolds unearths some good old-fashioned media manipulation. Of course, is it truly manipulation if the media outnumbers the subject (and manipulator) ten-to-one?

Samizdata reports that the people of Sweden have voted 56-41% against joining the single European currency, with turnout in the 80-85% range.

Try this drive on for size, from the fourth quarter of last night’s Ole Miss-ULM game:

               Kuecker, Tyler kickoff 58 yards to the UM7, Mike Espy return 24 yards to the
               UM31 (Richard, Damien;Payne, Gerard).
      M 1-10 M31   OLE MISS drive start at 09:38 (4th).
      M 1-10 M31   Jamal Pittman rush for 7 yards to the UM38 (Williams, S.).
      M 2-3  M38   Jamal Pittman rush for 16 yards to the ULM46, 1ST DOWN UM
                   (Hardman, T.;Shine, Nico).
      M 1-10 L46   Jamal Pittman rush for 5 yards to the ULM41 (Moore, Travin).
      M 2-5  L41   Jamal Pittman rush for 2 yards to the ULM39 (James, Chad).
      M 3-3  L39   Jamal Pittman rush for 2 yards to the ULM37.
      M 4-1  L37   Jamal Pittman rush for 18 yards to the ULM19, 1ST DOWN UM
                   (Williams, S.).
      M 1-10 L19   Jamal Pittman rush for 11 yards to the ULM8, 1ST DOWN UM
                   (Williams, S.).
      M 1-G  L08   Timeout Louisiana-Monroe, clock 05:50.
      M 1-G  L08   Jamal Pittman rush for 7 yards to the ULM1 (Robinson, L.).
      M 2-G  L01   Jamal Pittman rush for 1 yard to the ULM0, TOUCHDOWN, clock 05:01.
                   J. Nichols kick attempt good.

                                ================================
                                LOUISIANA-MONROE 14, OLE MISS 59
                                ================================

--------------- 9 plays, 69 yards, TOP 04:37 ---------------

Paul Krugman, in an apparent effort to rehabilitate his image in the blogosphere prior to the publication of his interview with Kevin Drum, had his research assistants write pens a ten page NYT Magazine article on tax policy. Robert Prather and Matthew Stinson have reactions, while Markus has a roundup of other reactions too. I think Prather is on to something when he writes:

That’s why I’m not bothered by the current “starve the beast” phenomenon; I know we will raise taxes in the future and am not bothered by it as long as it is accompanied by reform. The current system puts a $200 billion burden on the U.S. economy and is itself debilitating.

Matthew’s reaction concentrates on Krugman’s attempt to compare the U.S. tax situation with Alabama’s (a specious comparison at best; by all accounts, Alabama’s tax system is even more regressive than that non-income tax states like Florida and Texas, resembling Mississippi’s in its apparent progressivity coupled with absurdly generous deductions for itemizers), and notes that national conservatives’ meddling in Alabama will be counterproductive in the long run:

National conservatives attacked Riley and his tax referendum hoping this would become another Prop 13 moment of anti-tax consensus. This was wrong-headed and dare-I-say destructive to the Republican cause over the long term in Alabama. Think about it: the middle class people who voted down the tax increase, who, inexplicably, were going to have their taxes lowered by the referendum, are the same people who demand the kinds of government services that the tax increase was designed to pay for—education, law enforcement, and infrastructure. When Gov. Riley has to make cuts in these essential services, the fickle voters (Are there any other kinds?—ed. No.) will turn against Republicans in favor of moderate Democrats who will promise to restore funding.

That being said, one possible reason for Riley’s plan’s failure was that the new tax system proposed in the referendum wasn’t constrained with an effective check on the legislature’s ability to increase taxes at its whim in the future. If the root cause of a lot of middle class discontent with the plan was a (probably well-earned) distrust of the Alabama legislature, the failure to include a Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights or some other device to check tax increases was a major oversight in the plan.

The game tonight was fun, although an early downpour made things in the stands a bit wet throughout the game—because of the humidity, nothing seemed to dry out. Pretty much as I expected, the Rebels took out their frustrations on ULM, and there were fewer dropped passes. The secondary still gave up some big plays that they shouldn’t have (including two 20+ yard TD passes); however, the run defense continued to impress, holding ULM to 39 yards on 30 carries, including stopping ULM from getting a first down on the ground from both 3rd and 1 and 4th and 1.

Jamal Pittman continued to make his mark at RB, seeing action in the 3rd and 4th quarters—while you could credit some of the offense to a somewhat tired ULM D, Pittman put together a string of strong runs from scrimmage unmatched by McClendon, Turner, or Pearson.

Both Micheal Spurlock [sic]* and Ethan Flatt saw time at QB; Spurlock played the end of the third and much of the fourth (and went 3-4, 35 yds passing with one TD, although he mostly handed off to Pittman), but Flatt came in with about 6:00 left in the game (and continued handing off to Pittman). The Manning-Collins connection was on fire as always (2 TDs), but Taye Biddle also caught several long passes (like the one he dropped in the Memphis game), one of which went for a TD. Manning (22-26, 356 yds passing) passed for 3 TDs and scored a rushing TD on a five-yard, third down scramble.

The Rebels [2-1/1-0] now have an off-week before facing Texas Tech in Oxford on September 27. Although gametime is currently listed at 6:00 (same as ULM), campus scuttlebutt has it that kickoff may be pushed back to 8:00 (Central) with the game televised on ESPN2. Anything beats 11:00 am in my book…

Around the rest of the league, Auburn racked up an impressive win over Vandy (helped in no small measure by stupid penalties on the part of the Commodores); Auburn’s defeat of Vandy puts them in a tie for first in the west with Ole Miss. Alabama handled Kentucky at home, giving Mike Shula at least one more week in Tuscaloosa (Alabama and Kentucky are ineligible for postseason play and the conference title, making the game essentially moot in the standings). In the East, Georgia took the early-season conference lead after handing the South Carolina Gamecocks a defeat, moving to 3-0 overall.

In non-conference action: Arkansas defeated ex-SWAC foe Texas in Austin, 38-28, in what may be the upset of the day in college football. LSU took care of I-AA foe Western Illinois while Florida brutalized I-AA Florida A&M. And, in a game that just went final, Tulane edged Mississippi State 31-28 in N’Orleans.

I’ve made a few minor changes to the stylesheet and underlying code:

• Entries are now color-coded by author, comme le Volokh Conspiracy: I’m this color, while this is Brock’s color. No, I’m not identifying the colors by name, since Brock and I may decide to change them around a bit.
• I’m now using borders for link underlining, like Matthew does at A Fearful Symmetry. I haven’t decided if I like it yet or not; there may be more experiments to come.

A final note: some people seem to find the default font size of Signifying Nothing too big. This is apparently the result of two factors:

1. Browser default font sizes are too big in general. IE, Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird default to a 16 point font, which is close to reasonable if you are legally blind or your monitor is a JumboTron, but otherwise a tad on the large side (I usually adjust it to the 12–14 point range).
2. Because of the first item, many people include FONT tags or CSS to reduce your font size to something that’s reasonable (Outside the Beltway does this noticeably, rendering it mostly unreadable using my default font size). Unfortunately that shoots to hell the accessibility advantages of CSS over proprietary tags.

I don’t have any perfect advice here. No browser that I know of lets you do CSS or font size overrides for particular sites, which seems like an odd oversight, since CSS is designed to allow user overrides of settings. However, all major browsers have font size adjustments in their menus you can use on an ad hoc basis to compensate for font drift between sites.

Frankly, for the longest time I was planning to keep my mouth shut about Colonel Reb. Just let everyone run around complaining about the supposed duplicity of Chancellor Robert Khayat and AD Pete Boone. Scream at the top of their lungs about how heritage was getting kicked to the curb once again in the name of political correctness. Blah blah blah.

Then I visited the improbably named SaveOleMiss.com. Not SaveColonelReb, mind you, but SaveOleMiss. Let’s start with the front page, shall we?

We are thrilled that you care enough about your input on Mississippi’s flagship university in regard to their totally irrelevant characterization of our beloved mascot Colonel Reb. On behalf of the Colonel, we are glad you want to get involved!

First of all, if that statement is indicative of the literacy level of members of this campaign, the Colonel’s in pretty big trouble. That first sentence doesn’t even parse (try it!). But, nonetheless, we can read on:

After you take the time to read the history of the Colonel, we hope you will take some real action that will have results.

Ok, fair enough. Let me go and read the history of the Colonel:

Noted University of Mississippi historian David Sansing has long pointed out that the model for the original Colonel Rebel emblem was a black man. Blind Jim Ivy was a campus fixture until his death in 1955.

1955, you might note, is seven years prior to James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi in 1962. Just in case you were keeping score at home. (Something tells me Sansing wasn’t quite as sympathetic to Colonel Reb as this account suggests, either.)

Jim Ivy became an integral part of the University of Mississippi in 1896. Born in 1870 as the son of African slave Matilda Ivy, he moved from Alabama to Mississippi in 1890.

One hopes Matilda Ivy wasn’t a slave when her son was born, that occurring five years after the Civil War and all. But then again, news travels slow down here.

Ivy was blinded in his early teens when coal tar paint got into his eyes while painting the Tallahatchie River Bridge. Ivy became a peanut vendor in Oxford and was considered the university’s mascot for many years.

Wow. Guy loses sight, sells peanuts, becomes campus mascot. What a lovely rags-to-riches tale. (Incidentally, he would have been 20 when he moved to Mississippi, yet somehow got coal tar paint in his eyes painting the Tallahatchie River Bridge, which is in Mississippi, in his early teens. This story doesn’t exactly track. Moving on…)

Ivy attended most Ole Miss athletic events and was fond of saying, “I’ve never seen Ole Miss lose.”

At least you can’t accuse Jim of being politically correct…

Ivy was very much a part of the Ole Miss scene in 1936 when the editor of the school newspaper proposed a contest to produce a new nickname for Ole Miss teams, then known as The Flood.

“Very much a part of the Ole Miss scene”? Was he hanging out at the Billiard Club with the frat guys on Saturday nights? I’m guessing not, since this was 1936.

According to Sansing, “If you look at the photo of Blind Jim in the three-piece suit, with the hat, there’s a striking resemblance. The original Colonel Rebel emblem is a spitting image of Blind Jim Ivy, except for white skin.”

He should sue! Oh, wait, he’s (a) blind and (b) dead. I guess that isn’t happening.

So they whitewashed Blind Jim and turned him into Colonel Reb. Wow. What a beautiful story. It’s so touching, it almost reminds me of a minstrel show or Amos ‘n’ Andy (which, perhaps not coincidentally, was part of the social mileu at this time).

Colonel Reb soon became an honor all over campus. In the 1940’s the tradition of voting for Colonel Reb and Miss Ole Miss were the highest honors students could bestow on their fellow attendees. Still elected every fall by the student population, many notables of the history of Ole Miss have earned this honor including former NFL standout Ben Williams. “Gentle Ben” was also the first black football player at Ole Miss.

That’s nice, a black man was elected Colonel Reb (or perhaps Miss Ole Miss; the phrasing is rather unclear!). Poetic justice for Blind Jim, I guess.

It was also during this time that one student each year at Ole Miss dressed in a Confederate uniform and paraded down the sidelines exhorting the Rebel faithful to cheer for their winning team.

Well, back before you could buy alcohol in Lafayette County, I guess that was about the only fun thing to do on weekends.

Jim Ivy would be proud we remember him today.

Either that or really pissed off that he hasn’t been earning royalties on the commercial exploitation of his image. Or at least a whiteface version of it.

But it gets better. We find out that taking action has had an effect elsewhere:

This past spring the University of Massachussetts had the same problem as Ole Miss.

What, a mascot that reeks of nostalgia for the days of Jim Crow and resembles a blind man who never would have been allowed to set foot in a classroom on the campus except as a member of the custodial staff? Actually, no; the guy looks more like Paul Revere (to review, he won his war). But I will award 2 points for chutzpah.

Also helpfully provided by the “Colonel Reb Foundation” are directories of home phone numbers for university officials, members of the Athletic Committee, and the members of the IHL board. Just in case the spirit moved site visitors to start harrassing members of the university community over a stupid mascot.

Yep, Jim Ivy would be damn proud. What an embarrassing display of exactly why the mascot needs to be changed in the first place: it’s a rallying point for idiots who care more about symbols than people and long for the past instead of contributing to the future. If this group is representative of the people who want to “Save Ole Miss,” then Colonel Reb—and Ole Miss—isn’t worth saving.

It doesn’t exactly help that the content of their site is plagiarized from at least two other sites.

Patrick Carver posts a thoughtful response. I think “buck-toothed inbred racially-insensitive slack-jawed yokels” is a bit beyond my characterization; most of the people waving around Confederate flags and shouting “Save Colonel Reb” during the game that I noticed were well-dressed, old-money, not-very-sober frat boys and sorority girls. Nary a buck-toothed yokel among them. On the other hand, the people who designed that site seem to have not paid much attention in high school English class; surely the Save Colonel Reb campaign can find someone whose level of literacy would exceed that displayed on Atrios’ comment board, and who might actually understand that a long screed about how Colonel Reb is a whitewashed black man might seem slightly offensive to people who haven’t grown up in the South (where whites having black friends and acquaintances while using racial epithets to describe them in all-white company hasn’t exactly died out).

Now to the substance of Patrick’s comments: Admittedly, I don’t care at all for the way the administration does business in general—not just on Colonel Reb, but also on various other issues: relegating the doctoral hooding ceremony from graduation to a separate event; implementing a "graduation tax"; increasing parking fees by administrative whim; having endless consultations with campus committees and then just deciding things by fiat; et cetera. Frankly, that’s old news as far as the way Pete Boone, Carolyn Staton, and Robert Khayat do business. And, basically, that’s what 99% of campus administrations do, albeit not to the point like here at Ole Miss where one has to be a Kremlinologist and/or a conspiracy theorist to figure out what’s happening next.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that the means make much difference in this case. Khayat could make a huge show about consulting the student body, alumni, what have you, but the fact is that the decision has already been made (and has been made ever since the start); that decision-making style is part of the Ole Miss campus culture under this administration. And, honestly, I don’t see a position for compromise here; either Colonel Reb is on the field or not. If he is, recruiters can use it against us and it’s another chip on the “Ole Miss is stuck in 1961” pile. If he isn’t, alumni get upset (though, I suspect that if Ole Miss winds up in Atlanta playing Georgia in early December, they won’t be that upset).

So, yes, the administration did a horrible job of (a) explaining what it’s doing and why and (b) consulting with people that might disagree with that choice. And, yes, that decision-making style sucks eggs. But since for just this once the Khayat-Staton-Boone group has reached a decision that I agree with on the merits, I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the show while (at least some of) the opposition make complete fools of themselves in response.

Ole Miss [1-0/1-0] 24, MEMPHIS [1-0] 21

Blaming Cutcliffe for the loss is probably too simplistic, but after three years of playing like he still has a running threat in the backfield instead of capitalizing on Manning's strengths it's quite appropriate as well.

Virginia [1-0] 35, SOUTH CAROLINA [1-0] 27

GEORGIA [1-0] 38, Middle Tenn. State [0-1] 17

Auburn [0-1] 21, GEORGIA TECH [0-1] 17

Marshall [1-0] 24, TENNESSEE [1-0] 17

ARKANSAS [0-0] 42, Tulsa [0-1] 14

VANDERBILT [0-1/0-1] 31, UT-Chattanooga [0-1] 14

Oklahoma [1-0] 35, ALABAMA [1-0] 17

KENTUCKY [0-1] 35, Murray State [1-0] 10

MIAMI (Fla.) [1-0] 49, Florida [1-0] 21

ARIZONA [1-0] 21, Louisiana State [1-0] 17

Net result: nada, since no SEC games were played. Ole Miss still (absurdly) leads the conference on the basis of its 3-point win over Vandy in August. However, now we have some SEC football to shake things up a bit...

This week's picks (home in CAPS, TV and record in brackets, in kickoff order):

TEXAS [1-0] 31, Arkansas [1-0] 17 [ABC]: The old SWAC foes face off in Austin. Arkansas may be competitive in the SEC West, but UT-Austin is likely to wipe the floor with them unless Arkansas can stop UT's offense.

VANDERBILT 17 [1-1/0-1], Auburn [0-2] 16 [JP/GamePlan]: One of the SEC's many Harvards of the South faces off against another Harvard of the South. Vandy has already proved it can win a football game and hang with an SEC foe; Auburn has done neither. Auburn loses as a result of Tuberville going for two; trickeration won't save Tommy now... SEC upset special of the week, except it's probably not really an upset at this point.

GEORGIA [2-0] 35, South Carolina [2-0] 24 [CBS]: The good news for Lou Holtz is that USC has looked very good so far. The bad news is that Georgia has looked even better. The winner gets bragging rights in the SEC East, at least for a week.

FLORIDA [1-1] 62, Florida A&M [1-1] 3: A first meeting between A&M and the Gainesville squad turns out more-or-less like A&M's meetings with FSU turn out... very badly for A&M.

OLE MISS [1-1/1-0] 42, Louisiana-Lafayette [0-2] 7: The Rebels take out their frustrations on one of the many University of Louisiana schools, and in the process prove exactly nothing about how they're likely to play when Texas Tech comes to Oxford on September 27.

ALABAMA [1-1] 31, Kentucky [1-1] 20 [ESPN]: Kentucky isn't Oklahoma, but they do give Bama some problems on the way to Mike Shula's first win in Tuscaloosa.

LOUISIANA STATE [2-0] 65, Western Illinois [2-0] 14: Welcome to Death Valley. (WIU is currently ranked #1 in Division I-AA.)

TULANE [1-1] 56, Mississippi State [0-1] 54 (6 OT): Former SEC member meets ought-to-be-former SEC member in a showdown in front of six people at the Louisiana Superdome.

And that, as they say, is the way it is.

Dan Drezner’s blog is a year old today. Congratulations and many, many happy returns!

Daniel Drezner has the scoop on a poll of Californians conducted by Knowledge Networks on behalf of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from August 28 through September 8 that finds Arnold Schwarzenegger in a commanding lead and the recall with 62% support, contrary to many polls that show Bustamante in the lead and the recall question in a dead heat. One possible explanation for the difference:

The Stanford/Knowledge Networks survey is the first to ask voters to choose from the same list of 135 candidates that they will see on election day. Previous polls have restricted voters’ choices to the top candidates and have allowed respondents to select “undecided” or similar options.

If this methodological difference alone* makes that large a shift in the results—and there is fairly good reason to believe that it does—then there’s good reason to believe that the existing polling is flawed, since this methodology more accurately reflects the balloting environment.

Meanwhile, SacBee columnist Daniel Weintraub thinks a Schwarzennegger-McClintock detente may be in the offing.

Robert of Boomshock has some thoughts on the meaning of the poll as well. As for Knowledge Networks’ methodology, I recommend this page which explains how their panel works; it's pretty dissimilar from Harris Interactive’s approach. KN in general has some pretty smart people on board (as, for that matter, does HI) who’ve put a lot of thought in how to make Internet-based surveys representative.