Glenn Reynolds today links to three articles in the Stanford Law Review that argue over John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime thesis. Normally in these disputes it’s hard to say much of anything without having the data at hand; thankfully, Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III have posted their data (warning—ZIP file) at Ayres’ website, so hopefully someone—who has more time on their hands than me and isn’t supposed to be writing a dissertation on a completely different topic at the moment, mind you—can make heads or tails of what’s going on.

My preliminary assessment (as a political scientist who plays an econometrician on TV and spends most of his time running limited dependent variable models): without knowing any of the authors’ statistical training, I’d be very reluctant to draw any conclusions from their writing alone, but Ayres and Donahue appear to be onto something. However, analyzing statistical models with fixed effects can be nasty business, particularly since theoretically the asymptotics that regression analysis relies on aren’t fulfilled (the number of independent variables in a fixed effects model increases as a function of the number of observations, rather than being constant) and throwing lots of atheoretical dummy variables into a model runs the risk of soaking up variance that really ought to be attributed to a substantive effect—but that applies equally to both sides in this debate.

I’m not quite sure why Ayres and Donahue use areg instead of xtreg in Stata to estimate fixed effects, but it shouldn’t make a substantive difference (it just makes the specification a bit harder); more generally, I’d be more comfortable if everyone involved used some sort of vaguely modern time-series analysis (ARIMA, VAR, cointegration—even Box-Jenkins!), but maybe I’m just weird that way. I assume the dependent variables are logged since economists log everything for some odd reason (perhaps just to make the regressions harder to interpret). It’s not entirely clear how any of the authors treat missing data.

Anyway, someone else will have to take over from here… this is far too much thought for a debate I have absolutely nothing invested in.

Julian Sanchez writes on this issue as well; I agree that this problem with his research (if borne out by the evidence) bothers me much more than the basically silly “Mary Rosh” business or other complaints (some of which seem to be based more on his political views on issues other than gun control).

Also, to clarify for the hardcore econometricians in the audience, by “time-series” I meant cross-sectional time-series or panel analysis. (Political scientists don’t get particularly worked up about the CSTS versus panel distinction in general, mainly because we tend to deal with much more of the latter; this data is closer to CSTS but has properties of both—large number of units, but also a fairly large number of time-points.)

Scott Johnson, whose Feedster is one of my favorite blog resources, has a good essay entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Watch CNN Any More.” It’s about a week old, but I just ran across it now.

As I mentioned in the update to my last post on Rick Santorum, Pieter at Peaktalk said Bush could get himself in a lot of trouble by defending Santorum’s statement. Well, Andrew Sullivan links to an AP report from this morning; according to the report, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said:

The president believes the senator is an inclusive man. And that’s what he believes.

A similar report appears on the Reuters newswire. Needless to say, Sullivan isn’t happy. I just think the president’s needlessly carrying water for someone (like Trent Lott) who can’t be bothered to help himself.

Of course, if Bush did cut Santorum loose, Kevin Drum would just see it as another in a long line of Bush betrayals of people who’ve helped him in the past but fell in disfavor. But I could live with that…

Wind Rider at Silent Running (as they say, the blog, not the 1970s Bruce Dern vehicle that’s one of my mother’s favorite movies) thinks Santorum is being unjustly pilloried; my response is over there in his comments. Glenn Reynolds links to another defense, as does Matthew Yglesias; my response is not to even post a direct link.

Jacob Levy and Dan Drezner discuss today the unrealistic portrayal of academics in popular entertainment (in particular, on Friends, where apparently Ross is a paleontologist—not to be confused with a neoconservative, even though he’s Jewish [Ed: groan.]). From Dan’s post:

However, the story line that really frosted me was from a few years ago, when Ross was sleeping with an undergraduate. If the caricature of academia in the Blogosphere is a collection of tenured radicals, the caricature of academia in popular culture is a collection of lecherous white male [sic] who inevitably bed one or more of their students.

This is true across mediums. …

There is no fighting it; if a fictional character is a white male professor, nine times out of ten he’s sleeping with the co-ed.

I suppose this portrayal reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of academics. While it is true that many professors do seem to get romantically involved with students, usually they are graduate students (which don’t fit the popular definition of “co-ed“); there just isn’t enough contact between undergraduates and faculty at most schools for such relationships to take root, particularly considering the ethical issues involved with relationships involving a current student. Grad students and faculty, on the other hand, are expected to socialize with each other and collaborate closely on scholarly projects, but relationships among them are not exactly widespread. That’s not to say they don’t happen, but they’re much less frequent than popular entertainment portrayals would make them appear.

For the record, I have seen exactly one episode of Friends in my life, and found it to be a thoroughly unremarkable experience, despite the fact that both David Schwimmer and Lisa Kudrow are talented actors who have done good work in other settings (Schwimmer had a good, if brief, run on NYPD Blue and Kudrow is a very talented actress, as all six people who have seen The Opposite of Sex know).

David Carr of Samizdata takes apart the BBC’s director general, Greg Dyke, for his pathetic defense of the tax-funded broadcaster’s “objectivity” and monopolistic practices.

The Laughing Wolf has more, tying Dyke’s comments to Eason Jordan’s perfidity.

Carl Bernstein, the lesser half of Woodward and Bernstein, is quite upset that students at UIUC were apparently able to deduce who Deep Throat was. (Link via Glenn Reynolds.)

Dan Drezner has caught up with the Santorum debacle today; as usual, he has good points, pithily stated.

TV punditry, on the other hand, seems rather disconnected from what IMHO is the real issue here. Now, granted, as CalPundit says, “virtually every single paragraph has something to shake your head at.” But it’s odd that much of the head-shaking is still directed at the statement produced with the reporter’s inserted (gay) in the most famous quote in the interview, which reads in the transcript as follows:

We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, [sodomy] undermine[s] the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.

(I’ve cleaned up the second sentence because it’s fairly clear he’s talking about the act of sodomy, even though the original quote reads “they undermine”—a less charitable interpretation might read it as “[homosexuals] undermine,” but I don’t think a reading in context supports that interpretation; the word “homosexuals” only appears in the reporter’s question, and isn’t even mentioned in this paragraph of his response. But as Glenn Reynolds points out, the quote’s very incoherent.)

He’s clearly talking about “the right to consensual sex” here, not just between homosexuals, transsexuals, bisexuals, or what-have-you, but everyone. Most Americans—whether the Supreme Court thinks so or not—almost certainly think they have such a right. (Of course, most Americans also think they have the right to choose the members of the Electoral College, despite the plain text of the Constitution indicating the contrary, so maybe we should take this argument with a grain of salt.)

Now some of Santorum’s defenders, including those on Special Report with Brit Hume today, have trotted out Justice White’s 5-4 majority opinion in the unfortunately-named Bowers v. Hardwick (478 U.S. 186, 1986), which is the Supreme Court’s controlling precedent in Lawrence v. Texas (no relation). Justice White writes:

And if respondent’s submission is limited to the voluntary sexual conduct between consenting adults, it would be difficult, except by fiat, to limit the claimed right to homosexual conduct while leaving exposed to prosecution adultery, incest, and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in the home. We are unwilling to start down that road. (195-96)

The statute at issue in Lawrence, unlike that in Bowers, only applies to “deviate sexual intercourse” between individuals of the same gender. It is distinctly possible that the Supreme Court will overturn it on equal protection grounds, as the current justices did in another gay rights case by a 6-3 margin in Romer v. Evans (517 U.S. 620, 1996), without even reaching the “right to consensual sex” question; however, that would not strike down existing state laws like Mississippi’s that do not restrict the statute to a particular gender. But how far-reaching would a “right to consensual sex” be?

1. Adultery and pre-marital sex would almost certainly have to be legalized. However, statutes against these acts, like those against heterosexual and homosexual sodomy, are basically unenforced, so the practical impact of this right on legislative authority would be minimal.

2. Incest among sterile adults would probably be protected by the right. However, incest involving minors would almost certainly not be (a law prof would have the citations to cases); the same goes for statutory rape laws. Forbidding incest involving the possibility of procreation among adults would be more problematic with a “right to consensual sex,” but I’d imagine it’s doable as a public health issue.

3. Polygamy (including bigamy), as distinguished from polyamory, involves more than a “right to consensual sex.”

Of course, the scope of this “right” largely depends on how broadly the Supreme Court decides to draw it and what sort of scrutiny they want to employ. My gut feeling is that the Griswold and Stanley lines will be augmented with Romer to produce a fairly narrowly-drawn decision that focuses on the 4th Amendment interest in personal privacy in one’s home, while arguing that the strict scrutiny standard applies as much to that 4th Amendment interest as it did to the 1st, 14th, and 15th Amendment interests at stake in Romer. It may open the door for challenges against laws like those Santorum cites, but I doubt the Court will go beyond the Texas statute in the case at hand.

Radley Balko has a spirited defense of the 9th Amendment that basically reflects my own views on the matter. And Pieter at Peaktalk points out the sticky position George Bush is in:

The GOP has to maneuver very carefully here in order to ensure that as many people as possible stay under the Republican umbrella and going out to bat for gay Americans just does not make electoral sense at this point in time. Yet, Bush may have lost some valuable voters over this issue and he will need to mend some fences over the next few months otherwise this issue will come back to haunt him during the campaign trail. By not disapproving Santorum’s comments, Bush will open himself to criticism that he believes that the government does have a role to play in people’s private lives and that may cost him more than just a few gay votes.

The Bitch Girls want to know…

The blogroll module in LSblog is now up-and-running, at least for display purposes—the table is in the database, and the update awareness (via Weblogs.com) is now working, but the admin interface stuff is going to take an hour or so more hacking. I’ll probably add the rest of the blogs I track via BlogMatrix in the next day or so, once I don’t have to manually INSERT them into the database from the psql prompt (so if your blog isn’t there yet, it may be coming in a day or so). In keeping with my effort to take advantage of CSS features, the styling for updated entries is done just in CSS—you can disable it in a user stylesheet if it’s particularly annoying to you.

By the way, the polling code will be in the LSblog 0.5 release under an MIT-style license; most of the infrastructure stuff that builds on external standards (TrackBack, the XML-RPC ping code, XML feeds, etc.) will eventually be licensed that way, with the GPL reserved for the frontend code (i.e. the stuff that generates the pages out of the database and the web-based admin code).

The backend code is complete, despite an hour-long power outage (whew!). Also, everyone who has blogrolled me (at least according to Technorati and the TTLB Blog Ecosystem) should be on the blogroll themselves now.

In case you’re curious, the blogroll order is determined by the last update of the blog (with the people who don’t ping Weblogs.com at the bottom). It only gets notifications every hour (at 25 after, currently), since otherwise Dave Winer will kill me and/or my Winer number will be incremented.

The battery in my car died today (more likely, overnight). Thanks to a neighbor and the helpful folks at Wal-Mart, I’m back on the road again. Pretty amazing that the battery lasted as long as it did—it was the OEM battery, manufactured by Hitachi of all people, so it had to be at least six years old.

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway kindly dismantles the latest ONDCP waste of taxpayer’s money, which I too witnessed while watching Special Report with Brit Hume (I TiVo it daily, mostly to watch the panel). Now the Drug Czar’s running ads that explicitly lobby for Congress not to change the drug laws using tax money. If a non-profit tried this crap, they’d have their tax exemption revoked faster than their head would spin. Truly disgusting.

Ken Layne is apparently the frontman for Blögger (whose next album should be called Scourge of the Busted Permalink). Meanwhile, Brian Emmett (in Ken’s comments) suggests that they tour with Batshit Ne0c0n, which presumably is The Corner’s house band.

Glenn Reynolds points to a post at WizBang that suggests perennial cable news also-ran MSNBC is moving to the right in a quest for ratings.

As perhaps the only American to have watched MSNBC regularly for the past few weeks (and not just to gaze into the eyes of Chris Jansing, mind you), I have to say that they’ve found a fairly winning formula of late—regular news updates every 15 minutes, coupled with decent analysis and good use of NBC’s newsgathering resources, without all the annoying sound effects that accompany Fox News’s coverage (which are downright comical when listening to the audio feed on XM). This despite the following liabilities:

1. Neither Buchanan nor Press represent any mainstream political movement in the United States (this also applies to CNN’s Bob Novak fetish).

2. Matthews is just plain annoying. I find his politics enigmatic at best.

3. Scarborough is sort of a lame ripoff of O’Reilly (he even does the “talking points” thing O’Reilly does) crossed with Fox’s weekend Kaisch show; the upside is he isn’t as annoying as O’Reilly.

On the other hand, they actually have some ethnic diversity (although my mom took some convincing that Lester Holt is black), unlike Fox’s Aryan Brotherhood approach to newscasting, and you actually get the sense that they take news seriously. (By contrast, Brit Hume and Tony Snow are the only two personalities on FNC that actually seem to act like they’re involved in a newscast. Compare that to John Gibson and Shepard Smith, who behave more like overexcited puppies than newscasters.)

Are they ripping off the Fox formula? To an extent; MSNBC feels like the “kinder, gentler” FNC in a lot of ways. And the news-watching audience is older, wealthier, and skews more male than the population at large—all conservative demographics—so it makes sense to go after that audience, especially if you can attract an audience that might agree with FNC’s ideology but dislike the Fox “attitude” approach to news.

I dreamt this morning that Dave Letterman had set up a blog. Not quite as exciting as Michele’s dream, but equally incomprehensible.

Radley Balko’s latest FoxNews.com column celebrates a group that will make you shelve your lawyer jokes forever: Washington’s libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice. If you’re not familiar with them, just think of IJ as our answer to the ACLU. I suspect by the time I’m old and grey, IJ will have done more to expand personal freedom and individual rights than any other organization in American history.

Radley sums it up best: “These guys are right on every issue, and deserve a little sunlight.”

Steven Kruczek, whose blog The Grille I discovered via BlogMatrix, has a very interesting—and IMHO dead-on—take on what ails Republicans when they speak on legislative solutions to moral issues. The money quote:

Conservatives, it seems to me, have the same problem on moral issues as Liberals have on economic issues. Liberals see homelessness, poverty, or other suffering and say “something must be done!” Similarly, Conservatives see homosexuality or other acts they see as deviant and say “something must be done!” … Therefore the right, like Liberals for economic policy, turns to the government for solutions. Unfortunately, in both morality and economic redistribution, governments are no good at affecting [sic] solutions to these problems.

And this is where the right gets itself into trouble.

I can’t really do it justice here… just RTWT™. (And bear in mind that BPAW™.)

Johnny Two-Cents finds Santorum’s connection of the right to privacy to the Boston child molestation scandal the most bizarre part of the interview (and approvingly cites my snarky comment at Matt’s place on the two major parties). Like Kevin Drum points out, this has got to be the Most. Outrageous. Interview. Ever. The whole thing deserves a good Fisking (I wonder if Santorum thinks the right to privacy covers that?).

I made a few minor changes behind-the-scenes here at Signifying Nothing:

1. I’ve added a new “Best of Signifying Nothing” sidebar on the front page; the main criterion for inclusion is that I find the post particularly interesting, although posts that got major linkage will receive consideration as well. It’s heavily biased toward wordy entries, but otherwise should be fairly eclectic in content.

2. The title of this weblog is now just “Signifying Nothing.”

3. I’ve fiddled with the stylesheet some more; the most notable change is that blockquotes now have changebars next to them and aren’t red/orange/whatever you’d call this color any more. The underlying markup has also become a bit more semantic again, since it seems like most browsers can style <H3> credibly. (I also took out some commented-out cruft.)

4. A lot of the backend code has been made more customizable, in preparation for another LSblog release. Before that happens, I’ll probably sit down and write the blogroll code (which means I may present a blogroll while I’m testing things, even though I’m still not sold on having one).

So, to the extent you notice the changes, I hope you like them!

James Joyner at Inside the Beltway (and possible closeted roadgeek, judging from his header graphic) links to Bill Quick’s discussion of some recent recess appointments. Bill notes the direction the screaming is coming from has shifted with the partisanship of the head of the executive branch, and James thinks the recess appointment power has outlived its usefulness:

The recess appointment power is one whose purpose has long since passed into history. In the early days of the Republic, Congress adjourned for months at a time. It was inordinately hot in DC in the summertime in the days before AC, for one. For another, the Federal government didn’t have all that much to do. Of course, all that’s changed now.

Now, granted, the Senate is abusing its constitutional authority by filibustering nominees and otherwise stalling the process. So, in that sense, it balances out. But it doesn’t make it right.

I pretty much agree with that assessment. I’d have to check out a copy of Unorthodox Lawmaking by Barbara Sinclair—a must-read if you’re interested in the contemporary legislative process—but I’m pretty sure that the incidence of filibusters is increasing of late; at some point in the not-too-distant future, I’d expect a rule change to either narrow the scope of what can be filibustered or to limit the duration of a filibuster, but that largely depends on the majority leader’s willingness to force the issue by requiring “real” filibusters rather than the costless “virtual” filibusters that take place now. Make the senators sleep on cots in the cloakroom for a few nights—or not sleep at all—and I suspect they’ll decide to sharply curtail the filibuster rule in short order.

By the way (as part of my endless quest to make this blog vaguely pedagogical), the recess appointment power is buried in Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution:

The President shall have the power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions, which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Just in case you were wondering…

It’s post-modernist. It’s post-ablogolyptic. It’s post-literacy. It’s… the inimitable Puce. CLICK.

Originally found via Michele.

Now there’s a Puce Watch. Is nothing sacred?

As mentioned previously, Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has been getting a fair amount of defense from the libertarian parts of blogdom. However, the Left Leaner has dug up the transcript of the interview (via a Feedster search that led me to Atrios—I always knew he’d be good for something), and in some ways it’s even more damning. The actual text of what Santorum says:

AP: OK, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue that they should not have sex?

SANTORUM: We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.

The italicized part is the commonly-excerpted part. The reporter originally added the word (gay) to the statement, but Santorum is clearly coming out here in opposition to the Supreme Court stating that there’s a “right to consensual sex within your home.” Or, to clarify for those who haven’t had my civil liberties lecture, he thinks it ought to be constitutional (syn: legal, permissible) for a state to outlaw sex between consenting adults—any consenting adults.

But wait—it gets better. Let’s continue on the magical mystery tour of Rick Santorum’s constitutional philosophy:

It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold—Griswold was the contraceptive case—and abortion. And now we’re just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you—this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it’s my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that’s antithetical to strong, healthy families. Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, where it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

That’s right. Your personal liberty is less important than the government’s compelling interest in creating “strong, healthy families” like Rick’s. (Insert your own joke about social capital and communitarianism here. No offense, Bob Putnam.)

Then it just gets plain weird:

Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality…

AP: I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about “man on dog” with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.

I’m freaked out, and I’m only reading this sludge.

SANTORUM: And that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we’re seeing it in our society.

Let’s zoom in on this part: “The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions.” Chew on that for a while. Now let’s compare and contrast with a different view of what the state’s role should be:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The fundamental purpose of our government is to secure individuals’ God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not to decide what people get healthcare, figure out who’s more worthy of an air-conditioned house, or—for that matter—dictate what two consenting adults are allowed to do in their bedroom. Perhaps Sen. Santorum should think about that for a while.

Jacob Levy at the Volokh Conspiracy has more; he’s much less sanguine about Santorum’s comments than Eugene was (although in the latter’s defense, I don’t think Eugene had seen the interview transcript at the time).

Andrew Sullivan makes the same point in the midst of flooding the zone on Santorum. The sad thing is that if Santorum were talking about economic policy in the same terms (hypothetical: the state ought to have the right to limit people’s income to $100,000 per year), the usual suspects on the left would be cheering him on… which nicely dovetails with Eugene Volokh’s point here about why libertarians can’t be Democrats either.

Radley Balko (The Agitator) is equally unimpressed—and by that, of course, I mean thoroughly disgusted with the illiberal bullshit coming out of Santorum’s mouth.

In the midst of a serious post from Jane Galt’s Asymmetrical Information on whether Tom Daschle should stop calling himself a Roman Catholic, I found this laugh-out-loud statement (emphasis added):

Think of it like this: if you’re a Methodist, you don’t have to like the wedding service, and you can even tell everyone you don’t like it, even not use it, and you’re still a Methodist. But if you tell everyone the Bible is bunk and that Jesus guy was a real jerk, you may tell people you’re a Methodist, but you’re not one, and it would be reasonable for your clergy to ask you to stop so identifying, except that Methodists are far too polite to ever dream of such a thing.

I think Jane’s identified about the only part of Methodist teaching that might earn one who spoke in opposition to it opprobrium from the church. But I’m not sure that reproach would be much more than a stern talking to (if that). I suppose you can be thrown out of the United Methodist Church, but I’ve never heard of it happening.

Out of curiosity, I looked up what the United Methodist Church says Methodists believe; it was quite an interesting read for this semi-lapsed Methodist who has only taken Communion once in the past decade or so.

(As far as Daschle is concerned, I’m not a Catholic so I could care less what the Roman Church decides to do with him. But if you’re a Catholic and want to be excommunicated for whatever reason, I found this handy guide with a Google search.)

(Editor’s note: this post has been stirring around for about six weeks; I put it on the backburner after a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. I was inspired to resurrect and expand on this message by this Volokh Conspiracy entry contributed by Jonathan Zasloff.)

I’ll admit to being nothing more than a mildly interested outside observer of Israeli politics (extended family and friends notwithstanding). So I had to color myself a bit shocked upon reading this Jerusalem Post piece by Michael Freund, decrying a potential Pax Americana—not because of any deleterious effects on global peace and security, or even opposition to American hegemony per se—but because it would impose a two-state solution on Israel:

… George Bush has now positioned himself, and his presidency, on a clear trajectory. He aims to knock Saddam out of the box in the next few weeks, after which his goal will be to fulfill Yasser Arafat’s lifelong dream of establishing an independent Palestine.

Of course, Bush did stress that the new Palestinian state should be “truly democratic,” but given its track record of violence and corruption over the past decade, chances are that the Palestinian entity-in-the-making will be little more than just another old-style dictatorship.

This cannot be allowed to happen. But unless Israel acts now, it most certainly will.

Now, realistically, what are the alternatives to an independent Palestinian state? Clearly the current Israeli semi-occupation isn’t working. A “single state” solution is a non-starter in terms of domestic governability, absent a program of ethnic cleansing that would undercut U.S. support for Israel and likely encourage yet another war with surrounding Arab states—the current demographics just aren’t sustainable for the Jewish community to be comfortable in a single state. (A “greater Israel” with the Palestinians cowed or pushed out seems to have a great deal of vicarious support from the pro-Israel right in the U.S.; Laurence Simon and Charles Johnson seem to be its most vocal proponents in the blogosphere.) The Jordanians don’t want the West Bank back, for good reason, and it’s hard to think of another country to give it to that would be more acceptable than just letting Arafat run it. Perhaps the most workable alternative to Palestinian statehood is Labor’s “complete separation” plan, but in practice it’s about the same as Palestinian independence, albeit without any external recognition.

Is the “Roadmap”—a term that’s beginning to grate as much as Al Gore’s “lockbox,” by the way—the best way forward? I don’t know. You can make a legitimate argument that requiring parallel steps implies a moral equivalency between the two sides that plainly isn’t present; you can complain that Abu Mazen, the nominee for the prime ministership of the Palestinian Authority, is tainted by his association with terror—as, realistically, any credible Palestinian leader would be by this point; the Good Friday accords required Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams at the table to work, despite both mens’ past apologia for terrorism. But it’s telling that nobody has any better idea: it’s either the Roadmap or more of the intifada, apparently, and thus the Roadmap wins by default.

The Daily Telegraph reports in Tuesday’s paper that British anti-war MP George Galloway received over £375,000 ($586,000) per year in diverted oil revenues from the Iraqi government under the former Saddam Hussein regime, according to papers recovered from the Iraqi intelligence service in Baghdad. Galloway, responding to questions from the paper, suggests that the papers were forged.

Editorial comment: whoa.

News via The Command Post.

As promised: here it is. If you break it, both pieces are yours. It requires at least Python 2.2.2, the PsycoPG database adapter, and a recent PostgreSQL; you’ll get the best performance with mod_python, but most everything except the cookie setting can run as a CGI as well (and the administrative stuff only runs as CGI scripts at the moment).

Send any feedback to blog@lordsutch.com, and let me know if you deploy the code anywhere.

One of the vaguely neat things behind the scenes in LSblog is that each post has a topic attached to it, each of which is mapped to an Open Directory topic. Now if you’re just reading the site from the home page, this makes absolutely no difference in your life; the fun part is if you take one of the RSS 2.0 feeds and start aggregating the content into something bigger. The Open Directory topic information in the feed allows you to take my topic namespace and map it into a more universal namespace.

What is the potential upside of this? One thing you could do is create a “virtual group blog” based on full-content RSS feeds. For example, you could build something like the Command Post, but without the administrative overhead of setting up a dedicated Movable Type (or Blogger or LSblog or whatever) installation; just scrape the RSS feeds of the contributors, looking for posts matching Society/Issues/Warfare_and_Conflict/Specific_Conflicts/Iraq. Similarly you could aggregate all the content from a number of blogs that’s under the Open Directory’s Science/Social_Sciences/Political_Science into a political science scholar-blog. (You could also do this at the level of your own RSS aggregator, to create a topic-centered rather than author-centered view of weblog content.)

Another possibility would be to make searches more fine-grained. Feedster has a “war filter”; how about a Mississippi politics filter?

Where to go from here? At some point, integrating the existing framework with ENT seems like it might be necessary; I’m hoping someone else will do the translation from the Open Directory’s XML into OPML so I don’t have to do it myself. I’d also like to build a RSS aggregator backend into LSblog.