I have to wonder if ascending to a leadership post in the Senate requires contracting Tourette’s syndrome. The latest moron: Rick Santorum (R-PA), whose attitude toward homosexuality is (and I quote, believe me I wish I was making this shiz-nit up):

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) 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.

The most charitable interpretation of this quote (which apparently refers to the Supreme Court’s upcoming case that might overturn the unfortunately-named Bowers v. Hardwick, Lawrence v. Texas—no relation) is… scratch that, there is no charitable interpretation. The dude’s a moron, or high, or something. Compare this made-up quote:

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to drink alcohol within your home, then you have the right to do blow, you have the right to deflower virgin cheerleaders, you have the right to drink bongwater, you have the right to sunbathe naked on your front lawn. You have the right to do anything.

It makes about as much logical sense. Possibly more.

James Joyner has more; he finds a bit more logical consistency in Santorum’s statement than I give him credit for.

You can read a more benign intent into the quote from the more recent article that most have linked from; however, the original wire story (linked above) puts a bit more context around it—and Santorum’s definitely staking out a vehemently anti-gay position. Also: Matthew Yglesias, along with most of the blogospheric left, isn’t particularly surprised.

Eugene Volokh thinks it’s a faux controversy. Just to be clear, my objection isn’t so much to the position Santorum stakes out as it is to the choice of activities he implicitly compares homosexuality to. For example, heterosexual sodomy, premarital cohabitation, and the sale of sex toys are sexual acts whose constitutional protection might follow from overturning Texas’ sodomy statute, yet Santorum doesn’t complain about them—even though those acts are considered morally questionable in some quarters and remain technically illegal in certain states, including Mississippi; see e.g. Mississippi Code 97-29-105 (distribution of sex toys illegal—up to a year in jail, plus fines), 97-29-59 (“unnatural intercourse”—up to ten years at Parchman, where presumably more “unnatural intercourse” would take place) and 97-29-1 (cohabitation illegal—up to six months in jail, plus fines).

Via John Cole. A bit of surfing with Lexis-Nexis failed to turn up the original source for this quote; it apparently came directly from an interview with this reporter.

Kevin “CalPundit” Drum, at his spiffy new Movable Type digs (this ought to be a new trademark, a correlate to “Blogger Permalinks Aren’t Working” and “Read the Whole Thing”), favorably discusses Dick Gephardt’s almost-but-not-quite-Hillarycare plan. The nicest thing I’ll say about it is that at least it isn’t single-payer.

Universal healthcare is the lefty nirvana that won’t die, for some odd reason, even though it has no natural constituency. The dirty little secret in the health insurance debate is that most people who don’t have it are young, not poor, and healthy, and hence don’t need it. What universal healthcare is fundamentally about is dragging these people into the risk pool to further subsidize the healthcare of the old and chronically ill. Everyone gets to sleep better at night knowing we’ve cut per capita expenses on healthcare while ignoring the fact that we’ve added 30 million new payees who didn’t need to be in the system in the first place. (The more I write about it, the more I realize that this is lefty nirvana: find people to subsidize something you want, and pretend they’re getting something out of it too.)

What would I do instead? Give people access to low-cost catastrophic insurance coverage (with a high deductable) and a dollar-for-dollar AGI deduction for routine medical care and out-of-pocket expenses. Not quite as sexy, but it has the advantages of not creating perverse incentives to get higher tax credits (“we’ll just reincorporate in Delaware to get the full 100% credit”) and placing more pricing pressure in the hands of health care consumers, rather than oligopolistic HMOs and insurance companies.

On Wednesday, Koigi wa Wamwere will speak on the “Western Betrayal of Democracy and the Rule of Law in Africa” at the Croft Institute here at the University of Mississippi; a little more information is at the campus newsdesk.

Just FYI, I’ve taken the $7.95/month drain on my finances and complete waste of money that BellSouth calls “Caller ID with Name and Number Delivery” off of my landline. But you’re still going to get my answering machine. And it’s muted. So nyah.

I realize none of the telemarketers who call me read my blog, but I felt the need to vent publicly, since I won’t be speaking to any telemarketers on the phone.

Via Jacob Levy, I learn that Henry Farrell has reorganized his directory of scholar-bloggers by discipline. That’s something of a Herculean task, one that can lead to fistfights if one isn’t careful. For example, you won’t catch me discussing whether you can be opposed to empiricism and still be a political scientist—so I’ll refrain from talking about the Perestroika movement, and just direct you to Mr. Pravda’s comments instead.

For the record, I am a political scientist who studies mass political behavior, legislative behavior, political institutions, and political methodology. In a pinch, you can call me an Americanist, but I also study comparative politics—one of the three analytical chapters of my dissertation (The Role of Political Sophistication in the Use of Heuristics by Voters) looks at the role of political sophistication in the voting behavior of the Dutch electorate. My fundamental bias is toward empiricism (qualitative or quantitative, although I do much more of the latter—having data is nice), perhaps due to my undergrad days studying hard science and mathematics.

What I’m not: a normative political theorist. I’m afraid any APSR article with the word “Locke” in the title will fly straight over my head. Nor am I any good at game theory.

Geitner Simmons at Regions of Mind links to an interesting Clarion-Ledger article on a perceived opening for black candidates in statewide races in Mississippi in 2003. (Obligatory Merle Black quotes included.)

My gut feeling since the Lottroversy went down has been that 2003 would be a bad year for Democrats, particularly black Democrats, in the state. It’s early days yet, but if the GOP doesn’t successfully mobilize the latent feeling among many whites in Mississippi that Lott was unjustly pilloried (as they’ve failed to do so far), this election season could turn out to be a bonanza for the Democrats.

What Bill Hobbs said. Not that I’d expect the Tennessean to know any better…

I guess this means I won’t be getting a job at Virginia. Ah well, I’ll live.

Bitstream has generously donated a nice set of professionally-designed typefaces to the GNOME project and the larger free software community. The monospace font is particularly nice—I just changed my default PuTTY font to it.

Eugene Volokh looks at the possibility that a DARPA contract with OpenBSD was cancelled due to anti-war activism by OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt. Another possible explanation is that much of the work was farmed out to non-US citizens, including de Raadt, apparently in violation of the grant’s terms. A third possibility is that another aspect of de Raadt’s notoriously abrasive personality was involved. (More on this story is at Slashdot, of course.)

Bitter Bitch is very skeptical about Yale student Katherine Lo’s efforts to extrapolate a widespread stifling of dissent from a single incident; Ms. Lo’s account sounds more like the writings of Michael Moore than those of Mahatma Ghandi.

Lily Malcolm of The Kitchen Cabinet (and Yale Law) has more:

Obviously, if students are really breaking into other students' rooms weilding two-by-fours, they should be dealt with severely. On the other hand, it seems to me that anti-war folks would need to be awfully skittish to sense a general environment of intimidation at Yale.​​​​​ Anti-war people are not what you'd call a tiny minority here.

Moxie has found another obituary that the Smoking Gun’s investigation missed. You can almost imagine it including this quote from CNN’s chief news executive, Eason Jordan: “He tried to assassinate our own Brent Sadler, but otherwise he really wasn’t that bad a guy.”

I’m for it too. But wireless vibrator blogging would be right out. And I just don’t know what to think about penis blogging; however, I think Eason Jordan is somehow blameworthy.

However, I think I’ll just stick to misanthropic ramblings with occassional links to light relationship blogging (and, of course, hot Mox photos) for spice.

The InstaMan links to Bruce Fierstein’s discussion of CNN World Report, a lovely program mostly consisting of English-language propaganda clips from third-world state-run broadcasters. Unlike Fierstein, I distinctly remember it being broadcast on U.S. CNN until fairly recently (well into the 1990s), probably until CNN International was forked off to become a separate network (instead of a jumbled amalgam of CNN’s domestic network and CNN Headline News, which it was in the early 1990s).

CNN International does get some domestic play, running on CNNfn during the overnight hours. The best I can tell of it is that it’s a bad imitation of BBC World, basically redoing CNN with Commonwealth accents and commercials while doing a mid-Atlantic hybrid of American-style and British-style reporting and succeeding at neither.

As for World Report, it always struck me as relatively harmless so long as the viewer was consciously aware that it was basically government propaganda. Unfortunately, CNN never made much of an effort to identify it explicitly as such, only billing it as “uncensored and unedited” but not mentioning that it was CNN who wasn’t doing any of the censoring or editing and that the production choices weren’t CNN’s. In other words, not unlike CNN’s behavior in Baghdad, where you got “uncensored and unedited” reports from the events and places Baghdad Bob wanted you to broadcast; since nobody in Atlanta was leading the reporters around by the nose, it was apparently perfectly legitimate reportage in CNN’s eyes.

I’m for it.

One problem the left has faced in trying to prevent some of the excesses of the Ashcroft-led assault on civil liberties is their inability to get the instinctive libertarians, including libertarian-leaning Republicans, on their side. Part of the issue may be rhetorical: by framing the issue as a problem with Ashcroft, many on the right will instinctively react to it as partisan bickering rather than a serious issue that needs to be addressed; this is hardly helped by the perception that objections to Ashcroft’s policies are played up for fundraising efforts by the ACLU and other left-wing interest groups. Part of the issue may be a failure of many in the left to take seriously libertarian claims that they have a distinctly different view of the role of the state than conservatives, and thus are dismissive of the left’s ability to gain allies.

So it’s somewhat heartening to see the folks at TalkLeft talking about building coalitions with politicans and citizens outside the traditional left to defeat “Son of PATRIOT” and other Ashcroftian idiocies—and, as Glenn Reynolds points out, Ashcroft’s idiocies have plenty of willing allies on the “left” too, including Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. It’s clear that civil liberties are a good fund-raising issue for the left, but Democrats in Congress mostly aren’t sticking their necks out for them—if they were, they’d be filibustering the RAVE act being inserted into the AMBER Alert bill in addition to a couple of relatively minor judicial nominees.

If the policies are going to be fixed, it’s going to require a full-court press, not just from the left but also from the people on the right who are more likely to be listened to by a Republican administration. That means building long-term, cross-party coalitions that care about these issues that transcend the historically “left” and “right” interest groups in Washington and can build a real pro-civil liberties caucus in Congress that isn’t hostage to a particular party.

Charles Murtaugh makes much the same point today (22 April), far more eloquently than I did:

Too often, liberal bloggers dismiss the libertarians as sleeper GOP activists, but I continue to be impressed by how much common ground there is between liberal and libertarian critics of the Bush administration's excesses. It's a shame that so many liberals allow tax cuts and tort reform to separate them from potential allies—conservatives, it's worth noting, don't let disagreements about abortion and drugs deter them from cautiously embracing the libertarians.

The blog.lordsutch.com Word of the Day: logrolling. Liberals might want to try it sometime…

Mark Pilgrim links to his latest Dive into XML column on XHTML at XML.com. I’m still not sold on the value of this spec, and the prospect of a non-user-writable HTML is bothersome to say the least as a html-helper-mode junkie, but at least some of it, including the <l> and <nl> elements, seem to be useful ideas.

However, I’d personally prefer more focus on getting CSS3 finished and implemented—at least Mozilla, Opera and Safari (and by extension Konqueror, since it’s also based on KHTML) are going in the right direction, although I’ve had to back out a few of my CSS hacks because Safari seems to have regressed in its handling of them (since text-transform: lowercase now works while font-variant: small-caps doesn’t, even though the latter can legally be implemented simply by mapping the content back to uppercase—even IE does that much).

Colby Cosh notes today that secession is the underlying threat being made by leading Alberta politicians as part of an aggressive effort to repatriate more powers from Ottawa, following the lead of on-and-off secessionist Québec. With many in the province upset with the Liberal Chrétien government’s hamfisted approach to, well, virtually everything (including energy policy, a particular concern in Alberta), this is something that people with an interest in Canadian politics should definitely keep an eye on.

Yet another Phoenix build for Linux (Intel 32-bit), although now it’s been renamed Firebird™. Download it here; as with previous builds, it is built with Xft and the Gtk 2.x toolkit and (optional) Xprint support. As always, you’ll probably need Debian unstable or something else very recent for it to run properly.

If you want to build your own copy from CVS, this .mozconfig file may be helpful. If you want to optimize it for your particular system, you’ll probably want to change the -mcpu=athlon to -march=whatever, but that may stop it from running on other CPUs.

They’re replacing the grass in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium with something called AstroPlay®, which is also used at Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium and at the Independence Bowl in Shreveport. Considering that the field looked like absolute crap at the end of last season (and looked pretty shabby during the Red-Blue Game this spring), I think they’re doing the right thing.

Matthew Yglesias (now back blogging after some nasty problems with Movable Type) has an interesting series of posts on voting systems.

Current federal law requires the use of single-member districts to elect the House of Representatives (per 2 USC 1 § 2c), but nothing in the constitution requires it—as the Supreme Court noted in Branch v. Smith (538 U. S. ?, 2003). Nor does federal law specify the mechanism for elections, although they must comply with the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as interpreted by Thornburg v. Gingles (478 U.S. 30, 1986), and related laws, which may rule out the use of majority-runoff elections in some circumstances.

Ceteris paribus, I’d favor some sort of mixed proportional representation/plurality system for House elections, like the “top-up” PR system used for elections to the Scottish and Welsh assemblies (also known as the Additional Member System); however, the best we can do in the House under current federal law is either approval voting or some other single-member district method (Condorcet or instant run-off being the most likely).

I had a moderately pleasant meeting with my dissertation chair this morning. The good news is that in terms of the data analysis, my dissertation is much closer to done than I normally think it is. The bad news is that I still need to wrap it up in flowery prose and write up a strong section on political sophistication, which I’ve basically been procrastinating on since last spring.

Still, it’s somewhat reassuring to know that at least I’m getting somewhere. It just doesn’t feel that way much of the time…

The Baseball Crank pithily sums up what’s wrong with everyone’s favorite members of the left fringe of the Blogosphere. (By the way, I personally recommend Matthew Yglesias or CalPundit if you want to read liberals who aren’t divorced from reality.)

It’s amazing that Meryl Yourish would get Atrios and Hesiod confused, no?

Franklin Foer (author of last October’s expose of CNN’s “propaganda hut” coverage of Iraq in The New Republic) writes in today’s Wall Street Journal on CNN’s record of obsfucation and lies in its Iraq coverage under the Saddam regime. He particularly lays into “Baghdad” Jane Arraf, the network’s longtime Iraq bureau chief:

When Saddam won his most recent “election,” CNN’s Baghdad reporter Jane Arraf treated the event as meaningful: “The point is that this really is a huge show of support” and “a vote of defiance against the United States.” After Saddam granted amnesty to prisoners in October, she reported, this “really does diffuse [sic] one of the strongest criticisms over the past decades of Iraq’s human-rights records.”

For long stretches, Ms. Arraf was American TV’s only Baghdad correspondent. Her work was often filled with such parrotings of the Baathist line. On the Gulf War’s 10th anniversary, she told viewers, “At 63, [Saddam] mocks rumors he is ill. Not just standing tall but building up. As soon as the dust settled from the Gulf War, and the bodies were buried, Iraq began rebuilding.” She said little about human-rights violations, violent oppression, or festering resentment towards Saddam. Scouring her oeuvre, it is nearly impossible to find anything on these defining features of the Baathist epoch.

And Victor David Hanson in NRO is hardly impressed with the rest of the media in Baghdad either (via Trent Telenko).

CalPundit isn’t very impressed with Rupert Murdoch either; nor am I.

Nice to see fellow GOLUM-ite Mark Turnage back blogging again!

I guess this means I should get off my butt and release LSblog, since Mark’s the first person who showed any interest in using it.

I’ve updated Foomatic-GUI to work with the changed autodetection code in the latest Foomatic printer databases, and made some minor additional fixes. Get it here.

I've also prepared debs of Foomatic 3.0.0rc1; you can download them from people.debian.org.