Glenn Reynolds reports on his test drive of the Mazda RX-8 sports car. When we were in England, Dad bought an RX-7 (1981 model, I think), which would have been shipped back to the U.S. to be my first car if the entire undercarriage hadn’t rusted out. That was a fun car to ride around in.

James Joyner thinks it’s mildly amusing. Brett Marston thinks it’s gay bashing. What is it? A quote from a speech by House majority leader Tom DeLay:

While everyone else got the memo that big-government, blame-America-first liberalism died with disco, the Howard Dean Democrats still want to party like it’s 1979!

Maybe we should thank the Democrats for shedding their moderate clothing to reveal their true Swinging-Seventies selves.

But frankly, America doesn’t need a president in a hot-pink leisure suit.

I’m just mystified where you get “gay bashing” from here. None of the Democratic presidential candidates are gay or even rumored to be gay. And hot pink leisure suits are probably best associated with pimps and/or lame straight guys (anyone remember the “Leisure Suit Larry” games?), not gay people. Sure disco started out as a gay phenomenon, but plenty of straight people were involved too—otherwise, you’d never have seen movies like “Saturday Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive.” (Whether this is a good or bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Then again, maybe my decoder for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’s “code words” got lost in the mail, or they cut me off for not paying my dues…

Brett clarifies:

To me it seemed like a pretty clear reference to Dean's stand on civil unions, and a few other people who heard the comments thought so as well.

I personally don’t see the reference; Howard Dean is about more than just gay civil unions, and IIRC every Democratic candidate has said he or she supports civil unions (if not gay marriage outright). Nor is gay marriage implicated in “big-government, blame-America-first liberalism,” the object of DeLay’s critique of the “Howard Dean Democrats.” So I’m still mystified.

Josh Chafetz of OxBlog thinks Georgy Russell is the ideal next governor of California. It doesn’t hurt that her blog is far more interesting than Howard Dean’s. And she owns my book* (by the window)!

I think I’m in love. In a platonic way, of course…

A few miscellaneous items:

1. Lots of talking heads seem to be running around saying that it’s a fait accompli that the Democratic nominee in 2004 will be “pro-war.” Either the fix is in or these commentators are letting their fantasies get in the way of electoral reality, which shows that both Iowa (caucuses = activists) and New Hampshire (almost-favorite son) are in the Dean column.
2. However, running against the war in Iraq is electoral suicide in the general election. As I already pointed out, the Democratic base (not to be confused with Democratic activists and Naderites) believes Saddam was heavily involved in terrorism against America and our allies, and every day Americans die from fedayeen tactics in the Sunni Triangle will only reinforce this impression.
3. Contrary to the beliefs of Howard Dean, higher taxes do not stimulate the economy, excepting the housing market in suburban Virginia and Maryland. People may not have been gung ho for tax cuts, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be annoyed when you promise to raise their taxes again, especially if it’s to pay for things they already have (like health insurance).
4. There are real issues to run on against Bush that won’t alienate the swing voters in the South that Al Gore drove off by the busload in 2000. Play up the Saudi connection. Run against the incompetence of the Justice Department and CIA (and shift the “Bush lied” meme in that direction). And keep abortion and guns out of the campaign.
5. Corollary: continue to whine about Florida in 2000, and you will lose again. Nobody likes a sore loser. Especially when you’ve got real issues to run on, like the Terrorist Connection That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

I pride myself on trying to learn something new every day. This weekend was a particular bonanza of new factual information—some significant, some not. I present it all and let you decide what’s important and what isn’t.

• Ypsilanti was originally called “Watertown,” but was renamed in honor of a hero of the Greek revolt against the Turks.
• Talent at volleyball is apparently not genetically-determined.
• Ypsilanti’s student ghetto is less impressive than Ann Arbor’s—but somewhat more like a real ghetto.
• Eastern Michigan University’s PhD program in psychology is only three years old.
• It’s hard to identify words that rhyme with statistical terms.
• Some peoples’ buttocks are apparently located half-way up their backs.

And, a few unanswered questions:

• If you redact 28 straight pages from a report, and everyone with half a brain already knows what those 28 pages say, what exactly was the point of the exercise?
• If Miller High Life is the “Champagne of Beers,” what is the Cold Duck of beers?
• Why do women travel in pairs?
• Is Bob Graham really running for president, or is this just an elaborate joke that nobody has let me in on?

James at OTB links to a Washington Post op-ed by George Will that argues that the proposed European Union constitution is fundamentally flawed. Will’s central point:

The more detailed a constitution is in presenting particular political outcomes as elevated beyond the reach of changeable majorities, the more quickly it is sure to seem dated.

The more quickly, too, it is sure to feed extremist sentiment from those effectively disenfranchised by the enshrinement of certain ideological predispositions in the constitution. In other words, this constitution, by placing so many societal choices beyond the realm of regular political debate, is a recipe for the continued growth of the anti-democratic neo-Fascist movement in Europe—no doubt precisely the opposite goal to that of Valery Giscard d‘Estaing and his fellow delegates to the convention.

I don’t know what’s worse: the fact I can’t sleep, or the fact that the meteorologist currently on The Weather Channel, a reasonably attractive woman named Jen Carfagno, has a fan site. Actually, multiple fan sites. And a Yahoo! discussion group, with no fewer than 319 members, that describes her as “terminally cute.”

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t poke fun, considering I have a website full of photos of pavement. Glass houses and all…

Those of a more serious bent may want to know about the progress MLG&W is making restoring power in Memphis. In addition to Brock, my mom and grandparents are still without power as well; their neighborhood has started a betting pool on when their power will be restored.

Virginia Postrel points out the real problem with the god-awful Psychological Bulletin piece:

As someone who believes social science can and does discover new truths about how people live and think, I find this sort of idiotic research particularly appalling. It teaches the general public that social science is bullshit. (It also demonstrates that university press offices can be really stupid about what they choose to publicize.)

That hits on the head why I find the research so egregious. It frankly makes me embarrassed to be a social scientist. It gives more ammunition to the people who want to dismiss good social scientific research, not to mention those who allegedly study politics who have neither respect for, nor understanding of, empiricism.* The only good news surrounding this study is that at least nobody thinks these professors were political scientists.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg makes the point that dogmatism and simplicity are hardly the province of conservatives alone.

Thanks to Kevin of WizBang! and a little bit of cleverness on my own part, you can now manually enter a TrackBack to any post here at Signifying Nothing; just click on the TrackBack link on the entry (it looks like « and has a tooltip saying “TrackBack”), then click on the “Register a TrackBack manually” link. The needed manual URL will be filled in for you; all you need to enter is the post’s permalink URL, the title of your post, an excerpt, and the name of your blog. Ideal for those of you still slumming on Blogger or other weblog tools that don’t support TrackBack.

One of the more bizarre questions revolving around the Iraq war is that there is a large proportion of the American public who believe that Saddam Hussein was involved personally in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the foiled attack on the White House.* This belief persists despite there being no evidence of a direct link, no statements by any credible source that there is a direct link, and repeated refutations of a direct link. (Many leftists want to pin this belief on the Bush administration, but I don’t think the charge sticks without showing that Bush et al. deliberately fostered this belief; there’s simply no evidence of that.)

Being a good empirical social scientist, I was curious about who would believe this assertion. Again, I used the second March 2003 CBS/New York Times poll (conducted March 5-7, 2003). The poll doesn’t have much useful data for testing any psychological theories, but a sociological model seemed to work fairly well. I produced both maximum-likelihood (ML) and MCMC estimates; since the ML estimates were basically identical to the MCMC estimates (the missing data problem was less acute in this model), for ease of interpretation I stuck with them. Here are the probit results (I’m too lazy to build a proper table from the R output; sue me):

            Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) -0.01797    0.26186  -0.069 0.945277
pid         -0.09596    0.04594  -2.089 0.036699 *
college     -0.27348    0.14702  -1.860 0.062858 .
male        -0.62078    0.14587  -4.256 2.08e-05 ***
black        0.17079    0.17603   0.970 0.331934
catholic     0.05115    0.11446   0.447 0.654921
jewish      -1.18340    0.49424  -2.394 0.016649 *
atheist     -0.41736    0.14938  -2.794 0.005208 **
haskids     -0.04056    0.10507  -0.386 0.699462
agecat       0.01696    0.05475   0.310 0.756710
libcon       0.25993    0.07314   3.554 0.000379 ***
pid:college -0.10990    0.05790  -1.898 0.057699 .
pid:male     0.12066    0.05629   2.144 0.032059 *
---
Signif. codes:  0 `***' 0.001 `**' 0.01 `*' 0.05 `.' 0.1 ` ' 1
N: 782
Percent correctly classified: 64.83%
Proportional reduction in Error: 27.25%
McKelvey/Zavonia Pseudo-R^2: 0.214

Jewish and atheist voters are significantly less likely than Protestant voters (the omitted reference category) to believe Saddam was personally involved in 9/11, while there is no difference between Catholics and Protestants. Conservatives are significantly more likely to believe in the Saddam-9/11 link than liberals.

The other significant effects are expressed in interactions between multiple variables. I estimated interactions between gender (male) and party identification (pid) and between level of education (college) and party identification. These effects are shown in this graph. The horizontal axis is the respondent’s party identification, where 0 is “strong Republican”, 1 is “independent leaning Republican”, 2 is “true independent”, 3 is “independent leaning Democratic”, and 4 is “strong Democrat.” (Age is set to the mean value; other variables are set to the modal category.)

Males in general, particularly male Republicans, are much less likely than females to believe the Saddam-9/11 link, regardless of education level. However, among Democrats, the primary difference is between the college educated and the less-well educated, with the gender difference being relatively small.

What does this mean? There are a few possibilities. The most compelling one is that people who don’t know are guessing, drawing on some vague association between Saddam Hussein and radical Islam. The demographic variables may be indicators of attentiveness to the media; those who pay more attention to the media may have a more nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern politics. The partisan effects suggest that some voters may be projecting their own belief systems onto the question; strong Republicans may be projecting hawkish attitudes onto questions about Saddam, while strong Democrats may be projecting a belief that Saddam isn’t a threat onto him, at least among the better-educated.

More generally, the results suggest that trying to argue Saddam wasn’t linked to terrorism may be a losing strategy among their own base for Democratic presidential candidates that opposed the war or are having second thoughts now. Strongly Democratic voters without a college education are more likely than not to believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and it will be difficult to reeducate them on this point. These findings suggest that however candidates like Bob Graham and Howard Dean try to spin things, many Democratic voters think Saddam Hussein was a legitimate target in the war on terror, and they will cross these voters at their own peril.

Then again, maybe all these people think Saddam was involved in 9/11 because his regime actually was, at least to some degree.

Sorry, I meant to write up the results from the Saddam-9/11 analysis last night so I could post them here today. In the meantime, though, you can look at the pretty graphs. Not sure if they’ll make much sense without the writeup though…

Just in case you were wondering, I haven’t driven off Brock. As I’m sure almost nobody outside the city knows (especially if you get your news from the blogosphere), most of Memphis has been without power since early Tuesday morning. Hopefully Brock will be back in the next few days as power there gets restored.

As promised, I went off and played with the data on whether or not voters believed that Iraq's WMD threat justified war. Since it had the most questions on the issue, I used ICPSR Study #3755, better known as the second March 2003 CBS/New York Times telephone poll (1010 total respondents; conducted March 5-7). As I anticipated, no questions directly dealt with whether or not Iraq had been obtaining bits and pieces for nuclear weapons, or even mentioned the word "nuclear" at all; the popular phrase at the time was "Weapons of Mass Destruction," a term left undefined by any of the questions.

I'm extremely reluctant to present results for two main reasons. The first is that there was a huge amount of missing data; many respondents failed to answer a number of the questions, so there is less information available (I worked around this problem by using a Bayesian data augmentation model rather than a typical maximum-likelihood approach). The second reason is that I believe the question wording of most of the items on the survey make a recursive model somewhat inappropriate; many of the questions appear to tap the same underlying dimension, which is basically whether or not the respondent trusts the administration, and the causality is not at all clear. Nevertheless, there are a few interesting findings. So here goes:

(Coefficients are probit coefficients, as the dependent variable is dichotomous. All variables are yes/no "dummy" variables unless otherwise described.)

A few words for those who aren't accustomed to regression results. The left-hand column is the variable that is believed to have an independent effect on the dependent variable (in this case, support for the U.S. going to war in Iraq). The next column shows the magnitude of the mean effect of that variable. The final columns show the "credible interval" (similar to the "confidence interval" in frequentist interpretations), which basically says that there is a 95% chance that the true coefficient lies within that range of values. If the credible interval doesn't include zero (i.e. both values are positive or both are negative), we can say that at least 19 out of 20 times, the effect in the population at large would be in the direction of the sign (i.e. positive or negative).

What does this model tell us? Generally speaking, people who believed the U.S. had presented sufficient evidence of Iraq's WMD programs, trusted Bush to handle the Iraq issue, and believed Iraq's weapons to the a threat to the U.S. were more likely to support a conflict than those who didn't. (This finding was also robust across all of the various scenarios for war proposed in the survey; the dependent variable here posited no particular configuration of events.) A couple of other effects approach significance: belief that the administration was fully forthcoming, that the UN inspections were ineffective, and the respondent's age (older voters being less likely to support a war).

More interesting is what it doesn't tell us. The effects of education and gender are insignificant; men were no more likely to support the war than women, and more educated people are no less likely than less educated people. Perhaps most interesting, and possibly problematic for anti-war Democrats, especially if the "Bush lied" theme fails to stick, is that there was no independent effect of partisanship; this suggests that "Bush Democrats" (we might call them "WOT Democrats" if we wanted to be cute like Larry Sabato) were just as enthusiastic for war as "Bush Republicans." And, the people who believe Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks were no more likely to support war than those who didn't.

In my next post, I will present a more interesting model from the same dataset, looking at the question on Saddam and 9/11.

Via Lily Malcolm of The Kitchen Cabinet, who is currently fearing the Virginia bar exam:

“I went to Wal-Mart for the first time. I always thought they sold wallpaper. I didn’t realize it has everything. You can get anything you want there for really, really cheap.” ~ Socialite Paris Hilton.

As Lily put it, “And Target will really blow her mind.” So would Meijer (who I am not, nor have ever been, employed by; alas, I must admit I did work for both Target and Wal-Mart in the past).

In this post, I defended the research of four psychologists on the psychological determinants of conservatism. After reading the actual article in question, a response, and their response to the response, I am convinced I was in error in defending their work as not being politically motivated. The authors’ response to the critical response is particularly awful. Anyone who can make the following statement with a straight face is clearly partisan:

Sticking with contemporary American politics, it has been observed that Republicans are far more single-mindedly and unambiguously aggressive in pursuing Democratic scandals (e.g., Whitewater, the Clinton–Lewinsky affair) than Democrats have been in pursuing Republican scandals (e.g., Iran Contra, Bush–Harken Energy, Halliburton). (authors’ response, 391)

Iran-Contra resulted in prison terms for many its participants; with the exception of some peripheral figures (most notably, the self-martyring Susan McDougal and the otherwise-corrupt Jim Guy Tucker), Whitewater and Monicagate combined produced none. The authors also somehow forget about the Watergate scandal, doggedly (and rightly) pursued by Democrats, which brought down Richard Nixon and contributed to the defeat of Gerald Ford in 1976. Furthermore, citing Paul Krugman’s NYT op-eds twice as an authority on whether conservatives are more dogmatic than liberals doesn’t pass the laugh test.

More generally, I return to my previous criticisms based on the press release. They repeatedly use single indicators to represent latent constructs. They aggregate across nations without regard for contextual factors. They present bivariate correlations as evidence of causation (just having a bazillion similar correlations does not demonstrate causation). They dismiss exceptional cases out-of-hand, rather than attempting to explain them in terms of their research design (although they do make a half-hearted effort to do so in their response to the critics). They make no effort to integrate any of the previous hypotheses into a well-specified model.

And, to top it all off, most of the research is based on student populations, who are almost certainly atypical of the public at large in terms of their level of political socialization (an important explanation of conservatism in their half-baked theory). Anyone who thinks conservative extremists are less integratively complex than liberal extremists hasn’t had the dubious pleasure of reading both FreeRepublic.com and DemocraticUnderground.org (two popular cesspits for extremists on the right and left respectively, in case you haven’t had the pleasure). Coupled with a lack of any serious understanding of any of the research done on ideology outside psychology (Converse barely rates a footnote, while nothing newer than McCloskey and Zaller, a 1984 piece, is cited from the political science literature), this turkey doesn’t fly.

One hopes, not knowing the journal hierarchy in psychology, that the Psychological Bulletin is the intellectual equivalent of toilet paper among the APA’s journals, but somehow I doubt that. The editor and reviewers who allowed this garbage to be published ought to be embarrassed.

John Jay Ray, a well-published political psychologist in his own right, has been savaging the piece at Dissecting Leftism.

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has a lengthy response to Tyler Cowan’s (Volokh Conspiracy) libertarian counter-argument against the federal do-not-call list; Will Baude (Crescat Sententia) and Radley Balko (The Agitator) have other, thoughtful libertarian arguments against the do-not-call list.

I don’t have any particular thoughts to add on either side. I do wonder why Mississippi went ahead and created a separate, state-specific do-not-call list this year that covers less types of marketing and fewer numbers (only residential landline telephones) while the FTC action was pending; undoutably the program is solely an election-year boondoggle that a few incumbents can point to to justify their continued occupation of space in the legislature.

However, as a self-interested social scientist, these events may significantly improve the response rates for telephone surveys (which have dropped substantially since the telemarketing industry took off), so at least the part of me that likes getting publications has no problems with the do-not-call list whatsoever.

The ever-popular Agonist Watch is back with a vengeance, complete with a $500 reward for identifying its author and responding to a backlog of mail and blog posts.

Wyeth alerted me to this post in which he says:

John Lott—whose survey evidence for More Guns, Less Crime disappeared in a mysterious computer hard drive crash*—is trying to make the case that an armed Iraq is a safe Iraq:

“Yet, despite Iraqis owning machine guns and the country still not under control, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out that Baghdad is experiencing fewer murders than Washington, D.C., where handguns are banned.”

Let’s forget for a moment whether it is good politics to tell the American people that you want Iraqis to have as many guns as possible at a time when our soldiers are being killed every day by those guns.

Let’s focus on a smaller point—are John Lott’s statistics even accurate? Is the murder rate in Washington DC higher than the murder rate in Baghdad?

Now, it’s possible to know anecdotally what the approximate murder rate is without having detailed statistics available from a central agency. Presumably someone in Baghdad is still making out death certificates, and deaths are being investigated. So, if there are fewer than 262/365 (0.72) murders per day on average (i.e., a murder is only reported every other day, or less often), the murder rate is lower in Baghdad than in Washington.

You can reasonably argue about the causal mechanism; I suspect murder rates could be lower for more complex reasons than “everyone’s armed” (for example, many of the sociopaths who would otherwise be inclined to commit murder were likely Saddam Fedayeen recruits and have been wiped out by the 3ID and others, or maybe it’s just part of the post-war adjustment to a new government by the population). But I’m not sure quoting a statement by a senior administration official is, in and of itself, a lie; at worst, it’s disingenuous support for one’s own position, particularly in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary.

For example, if I say “Bill Clinton says he did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” that doesn’t make me the liar; it does make Bill a liar, unless you want to quibble over the definition of “sex.” In February 1998, it would have been reasonable for me to take Clinton’s statement at face value. Today, even in the light of compelling evidence to the contrary, unless I say “this proves Bill didn’t have sex with Monica” I’m still not a liar.

So, unless someone has statistics showing that the current murder rate in Baghdad is greater than 0.72 people per day (which translates to just over five murders per week), John Lott isn’t necessarily a liar. It is, however, distinctly possible that Lott is wrong. Now, if Lott is subsequently informed that Rumsfeld is factually incorrect, yet continues to repeat the claim, then it would be reasonable to claim he is lying.

Again, a review for those of you just joining us here at SN: lying requires foreknowledge that you are making a factually incorrect statement. Being wrong just requires that the statement being made (or quoted) is factually incorrect. In other words, lying requires intentional deception on behalf of the speaker in addition to factual incorrectness.

James Joyner (in trackback below) makes an important point:

Of course, univariate analysis is silly. Baghdad and Washington are hardly comparable cities. Indeed, one would expect a lower homicide rate in a police state than in a free society.

Indeed. And, that would be a worthwhile critique of Lott’s analysis, which gets to the whole “causal mechanism” thing I discussed above. The best I can say for Lott (if you accept his claims about the dispensation of the survey data, which I find dubious but not entirely improbable) is that he’s a sloppy social scientist—albeit perhaps not an not extraordinarily sloppy one, given the pure sludge that often is passed off as strong evidence in many peer-reviewed journals.

InstaPundit approvingly links to a post by the Angry Clam, who is “pissed off” about a study conducted by psychology professors at Berkeley, Stanford and Maryland that purports to describe the psychological determinants of conservatism.

I’ll admit that the press release linked to by the Clam makes the research seem rather simplistic, and some of the editorializing by assistant (i.e. untenured) professor Jack Glaser seems inappropriate. And, frankly, I think the researchers are really describing what Virginia Postrel calls “staisism” rather than conservatism. Say what you will about the Contract with America and the post-1994 Republican majority, but planning to roll back decades of creeping socialism is hardly a conservative position (in their terms); the neo-liberal policies of Britain’s successive governments since 1979 are not exactly “conservative” either, even though many of them were pioneered by the political right. And, as a political scientist, I’m not entirely sold on the idea that J. Random Psychologist is qualified to do research on political concepts, just as I’d have serious concerns if a political scientist tried to perform psychotherapy. To top it all off, I generally despise meta-analysis as a research technique, but that’s neither here nor there.

At the same time, though, the research itself, rather than the stupid commentary it was dressed up with in the press release, doesn’t seem (from its description) excessively political. I’d rather read the article (which appeared in the May 2003 Psychological Bulletin, according to the table of contents) and draw my own conclusions, thanks.

James at OTB reports that Uday and Qusay Hussein are history. Good riddance to the both of them.

Will Baude at Crescat Sententia notes a spat between Ward Connerly and U.S. Rep. John Dingell, apparently prompted by this statement of Dingell’s:

The people of Michigan have a simple message to you: go home and stay there. We do not need you stirring up trouble where none exists. Michiganders do not take kindly to your ignorant meddling in our affairs.

I seem to remember a lot of Southern politicians complaining about the role of “outside agitators” back in the civil rights movement during the 1960s (a fact I wouldn’t have expected to be lost on anyone who wasn’t completely ignorant of Southern history), as Connerly points out rather dramatically in his response.

As for the substance of Dingell’s statement, I wasn’t checking any driver’s licenses but it sure seemed like a sizeable proportion of the Michiganders at Dean’s place Saturday night were planning on supporting Connerly’s initiative drive.

Daniel Drezner has a challenge to those have criticized his take on the whole “sixteen words” theme that the left has been trying to make fly for the last week:

The power of the critique against Bush would be strengthened if it could be shown that a significant fraction of the American public—as well as the legislative branch—supported action against Iraq only because of the claim that Hussein’s regime had an active nuclear weapons program.

Ok, since I’m likely to be terribly bored at some point in the next day or two, and considering I’m sitting not-very-far from the computers the data is housed on, I’ll look at the February 2003 CBS/New York Times Poll, along with several others from the period after the State of the Union, and see what I can find. I can’t give any evidence on the behavior of legislators, but I can at least examine whether the public’s opinion was conditional on WMD, and nukes in particular—assuming the right questions were asked.

Warning for the faint of heart: I may present regression results in addition to the marginals.

One common refrain, particularly from the left of late*, is that our press isn’t adversarial enough when dealing with politicians; they look to the British press, and in particular the BBC (as that is the only example sizeable numbers of Americans have been exposed to), as an exemplar of the adversarial style they want to see emulated.

Those who advocate this style, however, may want to consider Jeff Jarvis’s damning collection of links that suggest that the Beeb’s quest for sensationalism and ratings—if not an ideological bias—led it to claim that the Blair government had “sexed up” reports on Iraq’s weapons capabilities before the war. At the center of the controversy is a dead weapons inspector, David Kelly, and one of the BBC’s wartime correspondents in Baghdad, Andrew Gilligan, whose performance in a pathetic cloak-and-dagger display I belittled during the war. Now, some portions of the American media are hardly better—the reliance on barely-sourced, anonymous information from deep background has become a staple of reporting in “flagship” newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, perhaps due to every reporter thinking he’s going to become a star like Bob Woodward—but outside the most partisan papers (the occasional crusades of the Raines-era NYT, the Washington Times and the New York Post spring to mind), no American outlets have matched the Beeb’s propensity for grinding its ideological axe.

Moreover, as Peter Mandelson (no stranger to the harsh spotlight of Fleet Street and the Beeb) points out, the British media have contributed to a decline in public discourse in that country:

The viciousness that characterises the relationship between the media and politicians is turning people off politics and corroding our democracy. Everything in Britain is conducted in an overly adversarial way, from our courts to our Parliament, our industrial relations and our select committees. It is good theatre, but does it produce good outcomes? In this case, patently not.

The pervasive cynicism of the BBC and its fellow British media almost certainly have an effect on public perceptions of democracy. As a professional cynic myself, I can’t help but believe part of that attitude was formed as a result of my political socialization at the hands of the Beeb and ITN (the only other television news provider in pre-satellite-TV Britain). A healthy skepticism about the veracity of a government’s claims is good for democracy, but the consistent and corrosive cynicism embodied in the reporting on the motives of everyone and anyone in government or the public eye by the British media seems detrimental to that country’s long-term future.

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry has more on the blame game surrounding Kelly’s death.

James Joyner helpfully points out that the U.S. case for war in Iraq, as made in the State of the Union address—including the famous “sixteen words,” which until recently I thought was a mid-eighties Molly Ringwald vehicle—had very little to do with whether Saddam Hussein had obtained fissible materials from Africa.

In other news, the case for American secession from the British Empire really wasn’t about the fact that King George III had imposed a French-style civil code on the people of Upper Canada (the place now known as Québec). Nevertheless, that shocking claim made it into the Declaration of Independence:

FOR abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rules into these Colonies:

I guess that means we should start heaping dirt on Thomas Jefferson’s reputation. Oh, wait… never mind.

By some miracle, I’ve made it safe and sound to Ann Arbor. I spent Friday night with my friend Eric Taylor and some other wild and crazy guys in Bloomington, Ind., and most of Saturday night over at Dean’s blog party with all sorts of interesting folks in the western Detroit suburbs. I think I can safely report that a good time was had by all involved in both occassions.

I’m also relieved to see that Brock has been picking up the slack for me while I’ve been away (what timing!). More posting from me will appear in a little while…

By the way, if you are reading this in Ann Arbor, and you have a line on a room that’s available for the next four weeks, drop me an email at chris+aa@lordsutch.com. And, if you’ve replied to my email about the Bazaar, I’ll try to get back to you in the next day or so.