Kate Malcolm makes a great point about academic legal writing (and, consequently, about academic writing in general):

Many scholars get away with loads of stuff that makes little to no sense simply because the reader’s [sic] have been conditioned to believe that such incoherence is a sign of higher-level thinking. WRONG. If it doesn’t make sense, it sucks.

A common failing of academic writing in general—and I say this as someone who’s been up to his neck in political science journal articles for the past five years, which often manage to combine the excessive verbosity of a Faulkner novel with the impenetrability of an economics paper—is that people confuse saying a lot with saying something worthwhile. This is particularly pronounced in political science, where the norm seems to call for repeating one’s points ad nauseum in a discipline where journal space is at a premium.

That being said, one of the virtues of the dissertation process is that since you normally have to explain what you’re doing to someone who doesn’t study your discipline (the outside reader) is that the opposite temptation—to assume your reader knows what you know about the discipline as a whole and where your work fits into it—is tempered considerably, which helps in coming up with a coherent explanation of why your research matters (the “rodent sphincter test,” as an ex-colleague colorfully described it).

This New York Times op-ed news story alleges that some analysts think the mobile bio-weapons labs aren’t mobile bio-weapons labs; instead, they think Saddam Hussein used them to produce hydrogen gas for use weather balloons. This apparently because you need clandestine mobile facilities to make hydrogen for weather balloons, stationary factories being unsuitable for the task.

Only two people are quoted by name, neither of whom have anything to do with the investigation. So, until proven otherwise, any rational observer should consider the rest of the quotes to have been made up by Jayson Blair—er, “Judith Miller and William J. Broad.” By the way, “Miller” allegedly was in two places at the same time (“Iraq” and “Kuwait”) while writing the story, while “Broad” was supposedly reporting from “New York.” To top it all off, the article also reads the minds of unnamed “critics” instead of bothering to find any to quote (on background or otherwise). It’s all typical, Pulitzer-quality (or at least Sulzburger-quality) Times journalism. Sign me up for a subscription!

Dan Drezner thinks the way to repairing the rift between the U.S. and the “International Community” (that’s France to those not who don’t have their international relations decoder rings handy) is for the U.S. and Europe to take “concerted action against any authoritarian government that thinks it can exploit divisions within the West to crack down on their own populations.”

That’s a lovely sentiment, as far as it goes, but I’m not sure it’ll work in practice. Take Dan’s three examples of prominent problem children in the international community:

1. Cuba: The country that the Europeans and Canadians have been propping up ever since the Russians withdrew their support in the early 1990s, and one of the few remaining dictatorships in the western hemisphere. The new EU sanctions hardly compensate for decades of the international community thumbing its nose in Washington’s direction by fêting Castro.

2. Zimbabwe: The country whose serial-human-rights-abuser-slash-dictator Jacques Chirac invited to Paris to take part in his “Africa united against America” summit on the eve of the Iraq war.

3. Burma: The country whose leaders have been spending most of the last decade courting European companies, and where French-Belgian oil giant TotalFinaElf (remember them?) has allegedly been involved in laundering the dictatorship’s drug money.

So, forgive me for not being all that optimistic about the prospects for Euro-American cooperation on democratization, even though I agree with Dan that this is one area in which U.S. and European (noncommercial) interests clearly coincide.

Greg Greene of the Green[e]house Effect takes a look back from two months away at the fallout from the Sean-Paul Kelley plagiarism mini-scandal. In the comments the debate is shaping up as: was Sean-Paul a Jayson Blair, a Rick Bragg, or something completely different? And, can (or should) the blogosphere adequately police itself to make sure others don’t repeat The Agonist’s mistake?

Via Glenn, it’s nice to see my good Republican friends in Congress haven’t been reading Article I of the Constitution lately. Not that the Democrats have either, but at least they’ve been consistent since they rejected the doctrine of enumerated powers around the time of FDR.

Also, Jacob Levy points to a rare worthwhile Corner post that debunks more conservative arguments for federal regulation of abortion.

As I predicted, Howell Raines is out the door, along with Times managing editor Gerald Boyd, who I actually expected to stay on. It was more than the ten days that I estimated in that earlier post (as Joy helpfully points out), so I can’t claim any real prescience on the issue. That’s why I’m a political scientist, not a media studies guy.

Now back to explaining how Dutch voters with varying levels of political sophistication attribute responsibility for coalition performance… at least I can do that.

Via Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy, I learn of the Social Science Research Network, which sounds really neat except for the fact that, erm, they don’t actually seem to have much to do with social science: the category that springs to mind when describing the eight groupings of disciplines is “business administration,” not social science.

Maybe this reflects my own personal biases, but at a minimum I’d expect a site for social science to include at least one of sociology, psychology or political science, which I suspect most laypeople (except maybe Jane) would identify as social sciences before such fields as marketing (which, I’ll grant, is closely related to psychology and not-so-tenuously related to political science, even though there’s little direct cross-over), legal studies (which stands more-or-less on its own), and maybe even economics (which cross-pollinates with Chicago/Rochester-school rat-choice political science and through econometrics into political science).

The Invisible Adjunct has a fascinating discussion ongoing about an article that shows 1 of 5 entering history grad students come out with a tenure-track job (just the sort of article, by the way, that will have my parents throwing themselves in front of trucks, even though the odds of someone who’s been through grad school and has Ph.D.-in-hand getting one are much, much better).

Do grad students get properly warned of this at the outset? I don’t know. Certainly one of my more vivid memories of my first seminar was a professor telling us to look at the person to our left and the person to our right and ourselves, and realize that only one of us was going to last. In the case of my incoming class, the attrition was even more pronounced; of the dozen or so students in my 1998 incoming class, one colleague and I are ABD and one other colleague was attending another institution, last I heard; the rest have disappeared, without even an M.A. between them.

Here’s the much-promised 0.5 release of LSblog. I can’t remember exactly what’s new, beyond the blogroll support, so you’ll have to figure that out for yourself. Get it here. It’s all free software under the GPL, except the stuff that says it isn’t (which is generally old-style Python licensed stuff grabbed from various places on the net).

Once I’m at a stopping point on the dissertation, I’ll probably get back to hacking on LSblog some more. In the meantime, if you have patches, suggestions, or comments, send ’em my way.

Via Technorati, I found that J. at Silver Rights (who may or may not be the same person as “Mac Diva”) apparently thinks I’m being an apologist for Charles Pickering, on the basis of a Washington Post article that reveals absolutely nothing new about the controversial 1994 case in which Pickering quite rightly objected to giving the (arguably) least responsible perpetrator of an admittedly vile act the harshest sentence of the three young men involved.

I stand by my position that Pickering is being unjustly pilloried. If the Democrats dislike him for his politics or his overall jurisprudence, that is a fair objection; however, I don’t think this particular case is in any way emblematic of either, but instead has been blown out of proportion because screaming “racist” is easier than articulating philosophical objections to the appointment of a sitting district judge to a higher court.

If Democrats (and “J.”) genuinely believe he is a bad judge and the racist they claim him to be, they should be calling for his impeachment and removal from office, not pretending he’d be objectionable if sitting on an appeals court in New Orleans but O.K. to keep in office so long as he can only affect peoples’ lives as a trial court judge in Mississippi.

Victor at “Balasubramania’s Mania” somehow interprets this post as me “stand[ing] behind Pickering.” To the extent I agree with Pickering’s position that the sentencing “guidelines” (and anything that’s mandatory fails to meet any reasonable definition of the word guideline) are idiotic and lead to perverse outcomes, including in the particular case that these dustups are over, I suppose I am.

But I also think there are valid objections that can be made to Pickering’s appointment, and I stand by my position that if Pickering is as bad a judge as the Democrats think he is, then they should be arguing that he has no business sitting on a district court either, where he is in a position much more likely to harm minorities on a day-to-day basis (in sentencing and in the conduct of trials, for example) than on an appellate court. That they haven’t suggests that they don’t really take the racism charges against Pickering seriously, but instead find them a convenient way to object to his nomination without making the same objections they would have to make against every other Bush nominee and pretending that there is a substantive difference between Pickering and the others on those grounds alone. In short, I’d like to see more intellectual consistency here. (And surely if Pickering were a racist, there would be more than one case out of the thousands he’s presided over that would provide evidence of that.)

So, my message to Democrats remains the same: if you believe he’s unfit to serve on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, by definition he’s also unfit to serve as a district court judge. Be consistent, call for his impeachment and removal from office, and find some additional evidence, and then I might take your objections seriously. Until then, the whole situation reeks of inside-the-beltway politics and “easy,” gratuitous Mississippi bashing.

It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it… not that I’m entirely sure what I’ve done is very good, but I have a lit review chapter where before I had nothing, and I’ve spent most of the weekend struggling with the analysis chapter I’d done the least amount work on—which will have a lengthy lit review of its own that I think I’m close to being able to write.

It turns out nothing concentrates the mind like a quiet corner of the second floor stacks in the John D. Williams Library—just me, an ethernet cable, a waist-high stack of photocopied articles and books, and my laptop. I’m beginning to really believe I can get this thing done. Would that everything else in life were so simple…

In other news, I’ll be TAing a four-week course in July and August at ICPSR. So it would be nice to finish this stuff before I have to head to Michigan, because I know I’ll never accomplish any dissertation stuff there.

I’ve been granted a brief reprieve on my magnum opus distinguishing between the psychological and rational choice perspectives on the meaning of “political sophistication.” The good news is that means my dissertation chair (probably) won’t kill me. The bad news is more light bloggage for the next few days…

In the meantime, I will leave you with a few random thoughts, most of which will make no sense unless you’ve experienced the same things I have in the past week:

• Vanderbilt may have the most screwed up political science department in the history of man.

• I need more Canadians in my life.

• Replacing Opryland with Opry Mills was a Good Thing™.

• I don’t think Andrew Johnson sounded like Fred Thompson.

• Greene County, Tennessee, may be the most beautiful place on earth.

• Nothing beats sitting around a warm campfire eating S’mores with family.

I agree wholeheartedly, 100% with James. Particularly if you’re one of the gazillion people on the blogroll at the right who isn’t listed at BlogMatrix, since that’s the only other way I’ll know to read your new posts. (I do read RSS feeds in Straw, but only at home; if you have one, please consider this your public notice to start using content:encoded so I don’t have to fool with launching my browser.)

Also, consider this your notice not to expect much, if any, bloggage for a while; I’m headed up to East Tennessee for a family reunion, and I still need to finish this dissertation chapter. So, at best, you may see a few snarky comments with attached links.

Ok, now this is just completely lame.

I’m supposed to have a chapter of my dissertation done in the next thirty hours. Don’t expect a lot of blogging between now and Tuesday night.

In the meantime, feel free to visit some of the newer entries on my blogroll. Or click on some of the pretty buttons.

I’ve redesigned the right sidebar to use a bunch of buttons from Steal These Buttons (converted to PNGs). For now, the buttons I created that aren’t available from that site are available in a ZIP file here in PNG and GIF formats.

Jonathan Foreman writes on the New York Post op-ed page about some serious problems in the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). If it’s accurate—and the legion of “state-versus-defense” pissing match stories we’ve heard over the past two months that amounted to nothing and Foreman’s inability to correctly name the agency suggests it may not be—it’s a very troubling situation, one that Andrew Sullivan and others are right to be concerned about.

And if the eight-pointed star that Foreman is complaining about turns out to be the logo in the upper-left corner of this page, which is part of the Great Seal of the United States, I’ll be even less impressed with his account.

The Imperialist Dog is the rare specimen that enjoyed his experience in research methods:

Of course, the vast majority of undergraduates hated the class and panned it (disclosure: I liked it and got an A-). They are apparently happy being spoonfed and unable to analyze data for themselves. Given the tendency to take the easiest possible path, the department will probably make the class an elective at some point, then abolish it entirely.

Everyone doesn’t need to know how to do multiple linear regression, but a knowledge of what terms mean (sampling, confidence interval, etc.) and how data may be manipulated would prevent some of the more egregious deceptions perpetrated by misusers of statistics.

One of the things I bumped into teaching the equivalent course here at the University of Mississippi is that a lot of the students didn’t seem to get the point of the statistical portion of the course (which may have been partially my fault, since it was my first time teaching the course). Understanding why we’d want to test hypotheses and talk about variances is perhaps more important than the actual algebra involved, but I’m not sure you can have a solid understanding of the former without comprehending at least some of the latter. (That’s not to say I know the formulas for most of these things off the top of my head; that’s why we have R and Stata, not to mention Greene and Kennedy.)

I firmly believe nobody should draw any conclusions from survey data unless they fully comprehend what the terms “margin of error” and “confidence interval” mean. Furthermore, anyone who ever uses the results of a “web poll” to decide or justify anything more important than the SportsCenter showcase highlight ought to be publicly executed.

The Atlantic Coast Conference has officially decided to raid the Big East, adding Boston College, Miami, and Syracuse to the mix to create an SEC/Big 12-style “superleague” with a conference title game in football.

What does this mean for college football? It might put some pressure on the Pac-10 and Big Eleven Ten to add enough teams for a conference title game, a potentially problematic proposition for the Pac-10 due to geography and team quality (Boise State? Fresno State? UNLV? San Jose State?), but well within the abilities of the Big Ten (Pitt, Notre Dame, or Virginia Tech). It opens up the field a little for the BCS title game; with the rump Big East essentially demoted to mid-major status in football, no matter what conferences (C-USA, the MAC?) they try to raid in response, they’ll probably lose their automatic bid.

More importantly, it may prompt a more immediate shakeout in the lower end of Division I-A as the mid-majors react to the new alignment; new eligibility rules for I-A schools were likely to force some serious realignments in 2004 (principally in the Sunbelt and the 16-team MAC) anyway, but with the Big East probably fragmenting (with the basketball-only schools going their own way and the remaining schools likely to break up C-USA to get back to a reasonable size) there may be a knock-on effect as mid-major conferences like the MAC try to “move up” a notch and bring in up-and-coming programs like Southern Miss and USF. The coming two years should be very interesting both on and off the field.

Now, I’m not one who normally goes out on a limb to defend Paul Krugman. Heck, I’ve called him a snakeoil salesman in this weblog, so I’m hardly the world’s biggest fan. But I also think Eugene Volokh is right to disparage Neal Cavuto’s immature response to a drive-by insult at the end of Tuesday’s Krugman column in The New York Times.

I don’t disagree with Cavuto’s basic point—“Your World,” his daily Fox News show, has a designated commentary segment, and Cavuto’s comments were made during that segment, so he’s not under any obligation to be objective there, just as Krugman’s column’s presence on the op-ed page (and, some might argue, in the Times itself) relieves him of any obligation to be “fair and balanced” in that column. But I think Cavuto could have produced a more mature response. Similarly, I think Donald Luskin’s “Krugman Truth Squad” feature at his weblog and NRO would be far more effective if he limited the name-calling and stuck to the (frequent) instances where Krugman is clearly wrong or is distorting the truth to serve his left-wing agenda.

James Joyner agrees.

Radley Balko (of the excellent The Agitator) and I have been trading comments over whether ONDCP director (aka “Drug Czar”) John Walters violated state and federal laws by campaigning against Nevada’s drug legalization referendum last fall. In the course of the discussion, I dug up 21 USC 1703, which apparently gives the head of the ONDCP broad authority to oppose any efforts at legalization.

Anyway, the debate also raises some interesting broader questions about how much authority the federal executive branch has to meddle in state and local politics.

Iain Murray had an interesting post yesterday discussing the results of a study that showed that relatively few members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who are elected via proportional representation, felt tied to their constituencies. While there are ways to circumvent this problem (lowering the district magnitude—the number of seats elected from a constituency—may help), there is a tradeoff: reducing the number of seats also reduces the proportionality of the system.

Overall, I think the most effective approach to PR is to combine it with single-member districts, using a relatively small number of proportionally-allocated seats to offset some of the bias in seat allocation caused by first-past-the-post elections, without undermining the link between representatives and their electors.

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry has an interesting followup worth reading.

New York Times executive editor Howell Raines says he won’t resign. I give him no more than ten days.

Via InstaPundit.

The discipline’s favorite cynic has returned to H-POLMETH, this time with a brutal assault on the American Political Science Association’s new logo, which purportedly “is intended to represent APSA’s mission to bring together political scientists from all fields of inquiry, regions, and occupational endeavors within and outside academe in order to expand awareness and understanding of politics.” Exactly how three swooshes of orange is supposed to represent that escapes me entirely, but Mr. Pravda has seen through the layers of deception:

As I continue staring at the logo while uncorking my second bottle of wine, it all suddenly becomes clear. The point is obvious: there is no point. This design is intended to convey different ideas to different people. It is, in that sense, fundamentally democratic. Each of us can assign his or her own meaning to it. To the Quantoid, it can represent pure spatial logic. To the Perestroikan, it can signify the diversity of cultures and peoples. To the cynic, it can serve as a reminder of why it’s always a good idea to underreport your professional income when paying dues to the APSA.

Heh.

Geitner Simmons of Regions of Mind has an interesting post talking about a seismic shift in Minnesota politics, with the state GOP (er, the Independent Republicans) very much in ascendence.