I think Michele and Dean have it covered.

Me? I’m going to try to do a bunch of things that would piss Osama off. That is, if he wasn’t worm food already (even those bozos in Lebanon who kidnapped hostages back in the 80s knew how to get newspapers to prove the video was recent). Among them:

• Go to work.
• Eat some pork products.
• Watch some college football.
• Work on my dissertation.
• Live.

One thing I won’t be doing: this:

A vigil, sponsored by the UM Activist Coalition, will also be at 6:15 p.m. on the porch of the Croft Institute for International Studies building.

“It will mostly be a silent-type vigil,” Greg Johnson, member of the coalition and blues curator, said. “It's just in honor of all those who died on Sept. 11 and all those who died in resulting policies that have occurred.” [emphasis mine]

Following the vigil, a panel discussion, co-hosted by UMAC and the Croft Institute, will explore “September 11: Two Years Later. What has Changed – where do we go from here?”

Moderated by executive director of the Croft Institute, Michael Metcalf, the panel discussion will include Nirit Ben-Ari, an Israeli peace activist, Omar Bada, a Palestinian peace activist and UM economics professor Katsuaki Terasawa.

(a) What in the fuck do Israeli and Palestinian peace activists have to do with 9/11? I honestly could give so little of a shit about people who celebrated in the streets when they learned about the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. (b) I’m not participating in any vigil in honor of the Taliban and Ba’ath Party (two groups many of whose members who have—most deservedly—died as a result of said “policies”). What an amazing display of questionable taste by Croft to have any involvement in this crapfest.

Virginia Postrel points out the absurdity of the FCC’s “equal time” regulations, which apparently extend to forbidding satire of the California governor’s race by Craig Kilborn’s Late Late Show on CBS. No excerpts—just go Read The Whole Thing.

She also reminds us what the War on Terror is actually about:

The fundamental conflict is over whether the systems of limited, non-theocratic, individual-rights-bsed governments that developed over centuries in the West are good or bad.

Just in case Noam Chomsky or Ramsey Clark (or, for that matter, Howard Dean) had confused the issue for you…

Christopher Genovese writes about his tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center today; it’s definitely worth a read—and not just because the people who pay my salary have experiments running out there.

Tim Lambert does a pretty good job demolishing John Lott’s latest evasions; I think the key quote (buried in Lambert’s effort to prove that Lott played games with a table) is here:

Plassmann was kind enough to reply. He conceded that no significant results remain after correcting the coding errors and did not know why Lott had removed the clustering correction [from his Stata .do file]. I also posted my question on the firearmsregprof list (also CC’d to Lott because I am very courteous). No-one there knew of a reason either.

However—accepting that Ayers and Donahue do it right—there’s still the issue of null results. More guns may not mean less crime, but the results clearly show that more guns don’t mean more crime either, and the signs indicate that concluding “more” has less support than concluding “less,” although you’d have to be an idiot to come to either conclusion based on the Ayers and Donahue corrections to Lott’s results (that’s why we call them “not statistically significant”). Then again, “More Guns, No Effect On Crime—Either Way” isn’t a very sexy book title.

More fundamentally, the “null results” return the issue of gun rights back to the realm of philosophy, the area where all rights ought to be debated in the first place. My view is that public policy is, and should be, the subject of empirical debate, while (in general) fundamental rights and liberties should not. An example: even if we proved empirically that 99.9% of coerced confessions were made by people who actually committed crimes, that would not be a valid justification for law enforcement to violate the 4th and 8th amendments to the Constitution.

CalPundit has more. I’ve also clarified that the Ayers and Donahue corrections to Lott’s results are not their results (which I haven’t looked at in any great detail, although I did download their data and stare blankly at the Stata files for a few minutes a few months back when it came out; I do remember them logging everything, which at least proves they learned their stats from economists).

Link via InstaPundit.

Things that doesn’t merit posts of their own:

1. Despite my previous complaints about ESPN’s hype machine, I’m finding that Playmakers is actually a pretty good show, despite its obvious handicaps: a completely unsympathetic lead character, a few less-than-stellar performances, and production that at times screams “low budget.” On the plus side, the writing is good, the main storylines are plausible, and there are interesting characters. It ain’t Any Given Sunday or North Dallas Forty by any stretch of the imagination, but as a weekly diversion it isn’t bad.
2. Yes, the SEC predictions sucked. And, yes, I’ll have more tomorrow, in time for this weekend. A big shout-out to Tommy West and the gang at my undergraduate alma mater for playing their guts out against the Rebels.
3. In retrospect, I was a bit harsh in my latest Berkeley post. When I get a chance in the coming days, I plan to revisit it.
4. When thinking of Israel and the Palestinians, one thing that always springs to mind is that old Robert Frost poem: good fences make good neighbors (hardly an original thought, though). My advice, cruel as it may seem, is to put up the security fence, let the Palestinians fight among themselves until they run out of things to kill each other with, and then deal with whoever emerges at the end. The benefit here is that the Israelis don’t have to take the blame for killing Arafat, since he wouldn’t last five minutes in a Palestinian civil war.

Next in this space: I have something to say about Colonel Reb. And it won’t be pretty.

Elections for student body governments are, historically, very low-turnout affairs, for reasons that anyone who’s read the political science literature would predict: it is a low information environment, there are no party labels, and—to top it off—virtually nothing is at stake. With these conditions, it’s a miracle anyone votes in them at all. So the Ole Miss ASB decided to pump up the turnout a bit by adding a non-binding referendum on the future of the school’s mascot, Colonel Reb, to the ballot. And, lo and behold, there was a bump in turnout:

Almost 94 percent of the students who voted Tuesday’s non-binding special opinion poll held by the ASB want to keep Colonel Reb as the school’s athletic mascot.

Of the 1,687 student[s] who participated in the poll only 103 of them favored discarding the mascot, or one in 17 students.

The moral of the story: never underestimate the power of a mascot to get people to vote. But at least two people are taking this election seriously:

Keith Sisson, publisher of The New Standard, and his attorney spent much of Tuesday evening videotaping every move made by the ballot box from the Colonel Reb polling. Sisson also was allowed to place a signed evidence seal over the ballot box to verify to him that the box had not been tampered with.

Mr. Sisson apparently has confused Oxford with Chicago. It’s a common mistake. No word yet on whether the ACLU will be joining a suit on ballot security in this important, nay, crucial election.

Patrick Carver, posting at Southern Conservatives, has a somewhat different take on the poll.

Well, I spent most of the last two hours diagnosing when this PostgreSQL bug happens, since it just bit us in the butt rather badly. Now hopefully we can get it fixed…

On Monday, the Rebels opened practice to the public, and about 75 people showed up (I would have been among them but got stuck trying to fix a broken Dell Inspiron laptop for a faculty member). One of the “team managers“—a nebulous-sounding title that means nothing to me—wasn’t too pleased about the low turnout:

Team manager Russell Cook was glad that the coaches and staff allowed fans to come watch an open practice. He wasn’t pleased with the turnout.

“I think with a school population of approximately 15,000 students, you think that a few more than 50 or 60 could show up,” Cook said. “A lot of them probably didn’t want to support the team or attend after the loss last week. I think that’s a poor show of support. There are still 10 games left in the season and we still have a great team.

“They come out here every day, hell or high water, and work hard to get better. For people to just give up because of one loss is not the right thing to do.”

Now, maybe there are a few other explanations as to why so few people showed up. For one thing, the only announcement I saw was buried in the back of the Daily Mississippian, and this was a one-off event. And, in general, the football coaches don’t seem to be particularly interested in having students (or anyone else, for that matter) around to watch practice, as is evidenced by the giant opaque screen they put around the practice fields. (Never mind that I can see everything they’re doing from my office window.)

If the Rebel coaches want students to be interested in coming to practice and supporting the team, they should have a regularly-scheduled, free “open practice” session at the stadium, open up the concessions, and maybe even let manageable groups come down to the sidelines or end zone so they can take a look at that fancy new artificial turf we have. They could learn something here from the basketball program, which goes to much greater lengths to drum up fan support.

Sure, fans have to do their part—like showing up for the out-of-conference slate, including this Saturday’s home opener against Louisiana-Monroe. But a more welcoming attitude on the part of the team would be a big help as well.

I got a fax today from a group called Mississippians for Economic Progress (I’d like to meet the Mississippians who oppose economic progress, by the way) who want me to sign a tort reform pledge. The copy of the pledge I got calls for these state law changes (I’ve shortened some of the planks):

1. Reasonable caps on non-economic damages that may be awarded.
2. Protection for manufacturers and sellers of products from punitive damages if they have complied with specifically applicable government regulations.
3. Elimination of joint and several liability.
4. Additional protections [for retailers and distributors who] sell and distribute products manufactured by others….
5. Numerous changes… to stop the joining of numerous parties’ claims and forum-shopping.
6. Prohibition of multiple punitive damage awards for the same conduct.
7. Greater protection against liability for property owners and businesses for intentional wrongful acts of others on their property.
8. Enforcement of arbitration agreements.
   

I know some libertarians like Radley Balko don’t like tort reform proposals (although often on federalism grounds, which wouldn’t apply to a state-level tort reform bill), but some do. And I’m not generally a huge fan of candidates for public office signing “pledges” (maybe the “Contract with America” turned me off of that idea, back in my more liberal-leaning days). But none of these planks (except possibly #6) seem particularly objectionable. So I guess I’ll have to sit and ponder this one.

James Joyner links to a WaPo account of just how peachy things are going at the Department of Homeland Security. In short, it’s about as peachy as Antarctica (as opposed to, say, Georgia, which is just crawling with peaches):

Six months after it was established to protect the nation from terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security is hobbled by money woes, disorganization, turf battles and unsteady support from the White House, and has made only halting progress toward its goals, according to administration officials and independent experts.

To its (slight) credit, the administration initially resisted calls for this bureaucratic boondoggle to be implemented, which mainly came from Congress’s “Do Something” Party. Who are they? Every politician (Republican, Democrat, or whatever) who, when confronted with a problem, immediately shouts “Do Something” without stopping to think whether or not that Something is actually a good idea. The Do Somethingers brought us every executive branch reorganization since the New Deal, and I’m pretty sure they’re batting an 0-fer in terms of improved bureaucratic effectiveness. (Not that this excuses the administration’s failure to follow through on the reorganization, however.)

So now the “Do Something” gang has brought us the Transportation Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the PATRIOT Act, which combined have increased national security by exactly bupkiss. I guess that’s why Congress deserves that 4.1% pay raise…

Signifying Nothing’s 155-member (and growing) blogroll has simply gotten too long to be manageable. So, rather than cut people, I’ve decided to be fairly meritocratic and just trim the displayed blogroll to the last N hours of updates, where N is currently 36 (and may drop even lower). That cut it down to a slightly-more-manageable 85 entries (as of a few minutes ago).

The full blogroll can be seen on this version of the page, which looks suspiciously similar to the old front page, and all of the blogs that provide RSS feeds will still appear in the OPML feed. However, this change means that people who don’t ping services like blo.gs or weblogs.com will just disappear into the ether; Den Beste-land is now off the front page permanently.

I hope this change will produce a better experience for our readers.

I know virtually nobody reads my blog, but you saw this AP reporting here six weeks ago. However, something odd struck me in the article:

President Bush and members of his administration suggested a link between the two [Saddam and 9/11] in the months before the war in Iraq. Claims of possible links have never been proven, however.

Bush et al. have suggested a direct link between the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda, most famously during Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations earlier in the year. To my knowledge, they have never suggested a direct link between Hussein and the 9/11 attacks (and I’ll gladly link to any credible source that contradicts this statement). Both myths—the mass public’s belief that “Saddam was involved in 9/11” and the leftists’ “Bush said Saddam was involved in 9/11“—seem to persist despite any evidence to support them. The former is explainable as voters using heuristics to fill in the gaps in their knowledge; the latter mostly seems to be a partisan screen connected to the “lefties are smarter than Bush” belief system.

What’s amazing is that the former belief is widely rejected by political and media elites, but the latter seems to have gained widespread acceptance, to the point the allegation can appear routinely in AP articles without supporting evidence. Yet exactly the same body of evidence underpins both beliefs, and it supports neither conclusion.

This week’s Newsweek has a fairly convincing explanation for why Saddam gravely miscalculated before the war:

U.S. DEFENSE AND Security sources tell NEWSWEEK that high-ranking former Saddam aides have told U.S. interrogators that Saddam believed the only assault President George W. Bush would ever launch against Iraq was the kind of low-risk bombing campaign that the Clinton administration used in the former Yugoslavia.

Or, for that matter, the kind of low-risk bombing campaign that the Clinton administration used repeatedly against Iraq during the 1990s. Or the same kind of campaign that was waged against al-Qaeda (and unfortunate Sudanese businessmen). Why was he so confident?

Saddam was also confident that France and Germany would pressure the Americans to retreat from this course, leaving Iraq shaken but Saddam still in power.

Which, of course, nicely dovetails with Daniel Henninger’s Friday column discussing the Democrats’ foreign policy credibility shortcomings:

Democrats have been urging “cooperation” and “consultation” for 40 years. Maybe in this election we’ll finally find out what this means. Democrats strongly imply that the mere process of talking with the U.N. or even with an enemy such as North Korea constitutes success. The cardinal Democratic sin in foreign policy is to “alienate our friends.”

In his announcement address, Sen. Kerry said: “I voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations. I believe that was right—but it was wrong to rush to war without building a true international coalition.” What does this mean? Faced with a real threat to American security, will John Kerry wait, talk and consult, no matter how many months or years it takes until Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and Kofi Annan are standing with him on the bridge?

I don’t doubt that a President Kerry or even a President Dean would deploy the U.S. military on relatively modest missions—a Haiti or Liberia, or Somalia. But an Iraq war? A strike and follow-through against North Korea? After Vietnam and no matter that September 11 happened, and no matter what the merits, Mr. Kerry and the others (perhaps excepting Sen. Lieberman), give the impression they would not act, or not act in time. They would consult, specifically with France, Russia, Germany and the U.N. secretary general.

There is no way to know with certainty whether any of them would act on the scale of the Iraq war on behalf of American security. But Mr. Kerry has usefully raised the issue. It won’t be sufficient to say they would have “done things differently.” The real question is whether they would do it at all.

No matter how much discussion Washington is willing to engage in with “allies” and “partners,” the fundamental fact remains that Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein are perceived to be less of a threat by most other countries than they are by the United States. Subordinating U.S. security interests to those of less threatened states (or at least countries that think they are less threatened; France and Germany are probably more at risk from attacks by Islamic fundamentalist terror groups than the United States is) is not a sound foreign policy—as the behavior of Saddam Hussein, emboldened by nearly a decade of the U.S. engaging in that sort of foreign policy, clearly demonstrates. In other words, a Saddam that took U.S. threats seriously might actually have been containable.

OpinionJournal link via Econopundit.

Virginia Postrel’s appearance with Tony Snow this afternoon was quite enjoyable. One thing that struck me—in addition to the fact her nail polish matched her blouse again (both were red this time)—was her noticeable (but slight) Southern accent; most Southerners who go on to non-political success in the wider world seem to lose theirs, or perhaps never had them in the first place—an interesting sociological theory worth testing.

Toilet brushes were discussed, but there were no props on-set.

Since Dan Drezner has linked to this post (thanks Dan!), perhaps I should post a more extensive reaction. I do think one thing Dan picked up on is that the non-opinion programming on Fox News tends to be more “hard news” oriented than CNN’s; granted, there's considerable fluff on the schedule (hence why it’s wise to switch to Olbermann and the like on MSNBC during primetime), but Brit Hume and Tony Snow more than compensate for it, and there isn’t as much “fairness and balancing” on those shows.

As for Virginia’s presentation, I think she did a good job, and it seemed like Tony Snow had been well-briefed beforehand, which always helps. I really don’t have too much else to say about it, except that I’m looking forward to reading the book (I have a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate that expires next month, so I’d best order it soon).

Steven Taylor of PoliBlog uses rational choice theory as a jumping-off point for a discussion of Tuesday’s tax reform referendum in Alabama. It’s an interesting piece, and it’s a shame that no dead-tree media picked it up for publication.

Link (now fixed) via James Joyner.

The Hartford Courant has an article in today’s edition featuring three Connecticut roadgeeks (Scott Oglesby of Kurumi, Douglas Kerr of GribbleNation.com, and Owen McCaughey of Nutmeg Roads); if you have some interest in this unusual hobby, it’s probably worth a read (free registration required).

Ok, this is something that’s been bugging me the past week: someone I ran into at APSA (I forget who) said that Evanescence is a Christian band. I don’t see it. I suppose you could read the lyrics of some of the songs on Fallen that way, but then again you could read “Big Yellow Taxi” as a pro-environmental song too—even though the feeling it engenders in me is to go to the radio station and set fire to all of their copies of the song, which would probably release all sorts of industrial chemicals into the atmosphere. And it hasn’t given me the irresistable urge to go to church or anything. So I’m just very confused.

Anyway, here’s a Rolling Stone article that didn’t clarify the situation for me in the slightest.

Mike at Half-Bakered (who I’m glad to see back blogging) has a nice long rant about the current state of Trek, one I’m in general agreement with. However, the casting of Daniel Dae Kim as one of the recurring Marine characters on Enterprise may at least make that storyline salvageable; he’s probably best known in the genre as Lt. Matheson (the first officer who was a telepath) from the underrated Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade.

Today’s flap: Andrew Sullivan said, based on news that federal employment is at its peak since 1990:

The sheer profligacy of this administration continues to astound. If you’re a fiscal conservative, Howard Dean is beginning to look attractive.

Matthew Stinson thinks this is hogwash, James Joyner is just bemused, and Alan of Petrified Truth doesn’t think Dean’s record of fiscal conservatism is exactly what it’s cracked up to be (a position I generally agree with). But Matthew’s assertions seem to be a bit clouded by his partisan biases:

Did Andrew ever stop and think that perhaps the reason why the federal government payroll has gained a million contracted workers is that the government has to pay for the war on terror?

Either this is a non-sequitor or Matthew is trying to make a giant leap of logic here. The federal government payroll has been swelled by non-contract workers due to the War on Terror—the civilians who used to handle baggage screening, for example, are now federal employees working for the Transportation Security Agency. Surely there are some contract jobs are related to defense spending, but not all of them are; the WaPo account says:

Instead, much of the surge is attributable to increases in anti-terrorism efforts and defense spending, which accounted for 500,000 of the new jobs, the study found.

So 50% of the jobs have nothing to do with defense or homeland security. That’s not a very good number if you’re trying to defend the growth of government under Bush 43, and the sort of thing likely to contribute to the general discontent with the administration from Republicans and Republican-leaning libertarians that Dan Drezner noted yesterday in his blog.

Now, you can certainly quibble with the measurement in the Brookings study: does every professor—and associated research assistants—whose research is supported by a grant from DoE or NSF count as a “federal employee”? Do the contractors who construct federal-aid highways count? How about state and local employees—and private-sector workers—whose jobs are partially paid for by federal money, or whose jobs wouldn’t exist without federal laws (which would drag in hundreds of thousands of private-sector workers who monitor corporate compliance with federal mandates)? And, certainly, the population has risen substantially since 1990, so as a percentage of the total workforce government isn’t as big an employer as it was in 1990, even by the Brookings methodology. But for someone alleging he’s going to cut government, Bush sure has a funny way of doing it.

I started doing these a couple of seasons ago for a mailing list I subscribe to; now, since I have a blog, I’ll be posting them here too…

Yes, they’re back… the worst game predictions on earth. (Sorry, last week kinda snuck up on me.) No SEC games this week, so Ole Miss is still in the bizarre position of leading the conference by virtue of its early opener against Vandy. On to the predictions… home team in caps; record and TV in brackets. Listed in order of kickoff.

• Ole Miss [1-0/1-0] 24, MEMPHIS [1-0] 21 [ESPN2]: Ole Miss travels by bus this week to face a longtime foe on the road that cares more about the rivalry than the Rebels do. The home team is, by all accounts, much improved over last year’s disappointing squad and is beginning to gel under its relatively-new head coach. However, it will be home-away-from-home for the Rebels, as the stadium will be a sea of red. And, in the end, despite the Rebels’ continued lack of a running game, the opponent’s QB will be outmatched by Manning and some creative defense.

  Of course, this exactly the same description I could have written about last week’s Ole Miss-Vanderbilt game in Nashville. Hence, I predict exactly the same outcome, although I don’t expect the need for late heroics by Jonathan Nichols this week. Field conditions in the Liberty Bowl Memorial Oven will no doubt be unpleasant; if you have a line on heatstroke deaths, take the “over.”

• Virginia [1-0] 35, SOUTH CAROLINA [1-0] 27 [JP]: I know nothing about either of these teams, but this seems as good a guess as any. A seven-point win over Lousiana-Lafayette doesn’t inspire confidence in Carolina’s likely performance against Big Six competition.

• GEORGIA [1-0] 38, Middle Tenn. State [0-1] 17: Despite a record of competing fairly solidly against SEC competition, MTSU falters down the stretch against Georgia’s ball-control offense.

• Auburn [0-1] 21, GEORGIA TECH [0-1] 17 [ABC regional]: Two early-season disappointments meet in downtown Atlanta. I back Auburn on a coin-flip, since they lost to better opposition.

• Marshall [1-0] 24, TENNESSEE [1-0] 17 [ESPN2]: The MAC gets its big chance to prove it can play with the big boys. Against an overrated UT squad, they might actually pull it off. Upset special alert.

• ARKANSAS [0-0] 42, Tulsa [0-1] 14: It won't be the most exciting game in the universe, but Arkansas cruises in its opener. Ex-SWAC foe Texas next week will be more of a challenge.

• VANDERBILT [0-1/0-1] 31, UT-Chattanooga [0-1] 14: If Vandy plays like they did against Ole Miss last week, they should pound UTC. However, if Vandy plays like they play against every other team, this one could be close.

• Oklahoma [1-0] 35, ALABAMA [1-0] 17 [ESPN]: The Sooners come into Tuscaloosa for the Tide’s real home opener. However, this isn’t your father’s Bama team, and Mike Shula isn’t the Bear. Or even Jack Nicklaus, for that matter. The Crimson Tide’s tune-up against USF’s barely-I-A squad isn't much of a leading indicator; this will be the big indicator of whether Alabama is going places or just sulking. My money’s on the latter.

• KENTUCKY [0-1] 35, Murray State [1-0] 10: I-AA Murray State drives most of the way across the state to get pounded in Lexington for the Wildcats’ home opener, then faces a long drive back. Pretty scenery though.

• MIAMI (Fla.) [1-0] 49, Florida [1-0] 21 [ABC]: FireRonZook.com’s hit counter explodes by half-time as Brock Berlin dismantles Ron’s NFL-depleted team, picking up where Ken Dorsey left off. But at least last week Zook put up Spurrier numbers…

• ARIZONA [1-0] 21, Louisiana State [1-0] 17 [TBS]: A close game that would probably go the other way if it were played under the lights in muggy Red Stick, rather than the dry desert heat.

• MISSISSIPPI STATE [0-1] 1, MSU Scout Team 0 (by forfeit): Kevin “I can get you a deal on snow tires” Fant and Jackie Sherill lick their wounds down in Starkvegas after losing to Oregon and having their retinas damaged by Oregon's hideous unis. State had better get some wins now before the Bayou Bengals come calling September 27.

As always: remember, kids, these picks are just for fun. So no wagering!

Why do Virginia Postrel and Glenn Reynolds suddenly care about the two-week Memphis blackout in late July and early August? Simple: the New York Times had an op-ed about it.

(Virginia’s reaction is common. I got stares of disbelief when I told people in Ann Arbor about the Memphis power outage when the Great Northeast Blackout hit the town. “Surely we would have heard about this,” was the common refrain.)

Of course, Signifying Nothing readers knew about it at the time, even though half of SN (Brock) was offline due to the power outage and the other half (i.e. me) was 750 miles away.

Until today, I was pretty sure who I was planning to vote for in Mississippi’s governor’s race. Now, after last night’s semi-debate here at Ole Miss, I’m not so sure:

[Musgrove] also said Barbour worked vigorously in his 20 years at the Washington, D.C. lobbying firm he helped found, in support of policies that hurt Mississippi. He said the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) were “terrible policy” that sent 41,000 Mississippi manufacturing jobs to Mexico. “He wasn’t here to see the devastation brought on by NAFTA and GATT,” Musgrove said.

Now it’s true that the governor’s office has next to nothing to do with free trade. However, backwards, protectionist thinking on trade is about the last thing Mississippi needs in the governor’s office—especially since, without GATT (which actually predates Haley Barbour by several decades) and the WTO, we probably wouldn’t have the Nissan plant near Canton that Musgrove regularly touts on the campaign trail.

Granted, I haven’t been very impressed by Barbour either so far, but coupled with both candidates’ absurd posturing over the Ten Commandments monument (apparently, in their world, Montgomery is now in Mississippi)—silliness I would have thought Musgrove would be above—I’m going to have to move firmly back into the “undecided” column.

Randy Barnett, one of the burgeoning field of Volokh conspirators, links to a Larry Solum post that explains what’s fundamentally wrong with the filibuster as currently constituted:

The contemporary filibuster is a polite affair. Charles Schumer does not talk through the night, bleary eyed and exhausted. Why not? Couldn’t the filibuster be broken if the Republicans forced the Democrats to go 24/7? No. Because the 24/7 option actually gives an advantage to the minority. Why? In order to force a 24/7 filibuster, the majority must maintain a quorum at all times, but the minority need only have one Senator present to maintain the filibuster. So 24/7 both exhausts and distracts the majority, while allowing the minority the opportunity to rest and carry on their ordinary business. [Emphasis added.] No modern filibuster has been broken by the 24/7 option. For more on this, see my post entitled Update on Filibusters.

Putting the onus on the filibustering party to sustain the filibuster would be a reasonable, fair reform to the rule, much more so than other proposed reforms (adjusting the number of senators required or reducing the scope of what floor actions can be filibustered). And Larry is not very optimistic about what happens now:

But is it too late? Have we moved so far down the spiral [of] politicization that it is impossible to turn back? At this stage in the game, it seems unlikely that Democrats would trust a Republican nominee who presented herself as committeed to the rule of law. And given the Republican perception that the Democrats have unfairly escalated the confirmation wars, it seems unlikely that Republicans will forgo the opportunity to attempt to find confirmable candidates for judicial office who are committed to the political agenda of the right. Charles Schumer rang the bell and its peel has been heard far and wide. Both sides now seem committed to a judicial selection process that concieves of the federal judiciary as the third political branch. Not the least dangersous branch, but the most dangerous branch. The branch that carries out a political agenda with the security of life tenure and the power of final decision about Constitutional questions. Can that bell be unrung? I wish that I could say “yes” with confidence, but alas, I cannot.

Is the politicized judiciary anything new? Scholars have debated that question for the past thirty years, with very mixed results. But certainly the willingness of both parties to use the courts as a vehicle for their partisan agendas has increased in the past two decades. And, ultimately, the electorate (or perhaps a few senators who are more concerned about the institution than their own careers, a dying breed by any measure) will have to settle the argument by giving one side the sixty senators it needs to either fix or abolish the filibuster, as the current situation is likely to get far worse before it gets better.

Dan Drezner appears to be very desparate to get people to visit his spiffy new* Movable Type-powered site. Case in point? This post about Britney Spears’ apparent unconditional support for the Bush administration. Quoth Britney:

[Bow-tied geek that fits CNN’s definition of “conservative” Tucker] Carlson then steered the interview to politics, asking Spears if she’d supported the war in Iraq. Spears answered, “Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.” She declared that she trusts President Bush, but when asked about the president’s political future, Spears told Carlson that she doesn’t know if he’ll get re-elected.

Then again, in an industry where your level of political sophistication is apparently measured by whether or not you wear a T-shirt that reads F.U.T.K. and how many times you praise Michael Moore’s latest film, I can’t say this attitude is particularly disturbing. At least she didn’t say she was embarassed to be from the same state as Mary Landrieu and Eli Manning. Them’s fighting words.

Since Brock asked nicely, I’ve wrapped up version 0.7.1 of LSblog in a tarball. As always, if it breaks, both pieces are yours. This version is still Python 2.2-friendly (I think), but works unmodified under Python 2.3 without icky DeprecationWarning messages.

In addition to Python, it requires PostgreSQL and the PsycoPG database adapter; also, a few bits haven’t been ported to the CGI backend yet (the cookie setting stuff is the main oversight), so Apache 2.x’s mod_python will probably also be nice. Actually, it also needs CGI because I haven’t been bothered to port the trackback script to add mod_python support. And you’ll probably want to set up cron jobs to run checkblogroll.py and (optionally) checktechnorati.py, just for entertainment value.