Until this weekend, I didn’t know who Barbara Cubin was. Now I do. This is the best they could do in Cheney’s former seat?

More, of course, at your one-stop shop for Republican shoe-eating coverage. There seems to be some debate as to whether she was just making a poorly-thought-out analogy or something worse.

Trent Telenko of Winds of Change.NET has an interesting post on the battles on the 3rd Infantry Division’s “Thunder Run” through southern Baghdad last Monday. Not only was it a more ferocious battle than reported last week, it turns out to have been as lopsided as the armored Battle of 73 Easting in Gulf War I. Trent writes:

Let’s put this in perspective. An American service company was ambushed not once, but several times in on a road in close urban combat. It was pinned down in penny packets that were not mutually supported. They were operating under rules of engagement that required warning shots before engagement and the smoke from burning vehicles cut line of sight to 300–400 meters. When the smoke cleared, there were 300 dead Iraqi paramilitaries in front of the support company made up of mechanics, clerk-typists, staff officers & NCOs for two dead Americans.

Compare that to the performance of conscript Russian armored forces in the first battle for Grozney in Chechnya where a Russian Motorized Rifle Regiment was wiped out with 95% of its 150 armored vehicles destroyed.

Or to the results of “Blackhawk Down” in Mogadishu where 18 American Special Forces died at the hands of the Somali Aideed clan.

Wow. Simply wow. RTWT™.

As a political methodologist (the part of The Discipline™ that specializes in probability and statistics), I probably ought to be more interested in baseball than I am. After all, baseball is the most stats-intensive sport in the world by far, largely because it consists of a large number of repetitions of people doing basically the same things—hitting, fielding, and pitching—over and over again, and large numbers of repetitions mean you can make good generalizations from the data. Of course, early in the season, your generalizations can be pretty bad.

David Pinto at Baseball Musings looks at the example of the Kansas City Royals, who are the only remaining undefeated team in the majors, with eight wins so far, but who have been predicted to only win 66 of 162 (or 40.74% of their games). It turns out that there’s an 11.1% chance that a team winning 66 games would have an eight-game winning streak during its season, which most statisticians would attribute to being within the realm of random chance (generally we like 5% as a cutoff).

For fun, extending it to a 9-win streak reduces it to 4.65% (below the 5% level), or just about 1 in 22. At that point, I’d be pretty confident that the Royals will win more than 66, since in 21 of 22 seasons a team that would eventually only win 66 would never have a 9-game winning streak.

For R geeks: evaluate either 1-dbinom(0, 155, dbinom(8, 8, 66/162)) or sum(dbinom(1:155, 155, dbinom(8, 8, 66/162))), depending on your mood. You should get 0.1110256. Change the 155 to 154 and the 8s to 9s to evaluate the 9-win streak hypothesis.

The Royals’ winning streak did end at nine games. Also, David Pinto talks some more about confidence levels (and generously links here) in this post; note that if the prediction had been 67 games, the probability of a 9-win streak would edge above the 5% confidence level (to 5.31%), which indicates both the arbitrariness of a chosen confidence level and that the Royals could still stink up the joint.

Jed Roberts correctly points out that David and I make an invalid independence assumption in the streak calculations that potentially overestimates the probability of a given streak occurring during a season. David also carries a lengthy comment from Michael Weddell on the significance of the Royals’ streak.

Need an explanation for the behavior of Robert Fisk and Eason Jordan? Look no further than Bitter Bitch’s interesting catalog discovery. Suddenly, it all makes sense!

Winds of Change.NET is carrying a guest entry by C. Blake Powers that thinks CNN may have revealed some things about its apparent collaboration with the Saddam regime to try to divert attention from others:

Somebody wants the obvious story pursued. Somebody is willing to live with the howls of outrage and calls for boycotts and such that will be generated. Why? Why are they willing to live with this? What scares them so badly that this is preferable?

Well, in addition to preemptive ass-coverage for when it comes out that CNN has been collaborating for access in other world capitals (and anyone who’s heard a CNN Havana bureau report knows they’re toeing Castro’s line as closely as Jane Arraf toed Saddam’s), it’s possible—and I stress possible—they’ve been complicit in identifying opposition figures within Iraq, thus endangering them, or have provided information streams beyond broadcast information to enemy forces. One possibility: it’s hard to believe that CNN didn’t know where its embedded reporters were located, although that information wasn’t aired, and that information could have been covertly passed to Baghdad, either through Iraqi moles or deliberate acts by CNN employees.

Then again, maybe there isn’t really more to the story (beyond the widespread, and valid, critique of CNN’s so-called “sanctions coverage”). But some enterprising reporter may want to start digging, nonetheless.

In response to my posting regarding my good friend and fellow graduate student Sean-Paul Kelley, a reader of Signifying Nothing was kind enough to write a response.

Subject: Hey, Asshole!

Well, hey to you too, “Hamilton K. Barton <GPIKNIK@aol.com>”. However, I suppose that since I’m only Cc’d, he’s probably actually calling Sean-Paul an asshole, since that’s whose address appears on the To line. Ah well, I’ll live.

Do you have to actually leave your house to participate in the APSA, ACM, or the SPSA (non card carrying) organizations. When you are dealing with something as actual in fact as war, the events are so in your face, ( look at the cameras on Fox and MSNBC some time and tell them that they are not plagiarizing each other) and true to life, that we all seem to have the same reality of what we see and hear. The events are so intensely real, it is almost impossible to not have the same exact response as the person next to you, or the person 5,000 miles away. When someone is trying to keep us informed as diligently as Mr. Kelly is, you can hear the troops have overtaken Saddam Int. Airport, and quickly type “Troops have overtaken Saddam Int. Airport!” A Blogger is a Blogger. Mr. Kelley has actually put himself in a position to be a contributing member to society positively affecting other peoples financial state in this tumultuous economy and still keep us informed. If he were to give us information based on emotion, (Sean Paul Kelly is a Flaming Asshole, I have butted heads with him before.) I would probably have some complaints.

You’ll notice that those cameras on Fox and MSNBC have text in the corner saying who actually set up the cameras, like “Abu Dhabi TV” for example. You see, it would be plagiarism if they just stole Abu Dhabi’s work and pretended that it was their own. Like Sean-Paul stole Stratfor’s work and pretended it was someone else’s.

And, actually, I called Sean-Paul a “Flaming Jackass.” Sheesh. Get your facts straight before sending hatemail.

Why don’t you spend some more time actually criticizing the crap that you put on your web site instead of the information on others? You remind me of the type of little piss ant pussy that got your ass so constantly kicked in high school that you have nothing else to do besides keep hiding yourself behind degrees and titles which give you a false sense of importance. One of the many reasons that I am sending you this response to your totally off base criticism, is that I am presently listening to an interview with Mr. Kelly on an interview on the Jack Ricarde show on 550 KTSA. You reap what you sow. See me in 15 years when you are still chasing acronyms to put behind your name and Mr. Kelly is affecting the world with legislation and charity.

Hmm. Well, hopefully he’ll actually be doing his own work then, instead of just taking Stratfor’s work and passing it off as developed from his own independent sources.

A blogger passes on information and, and yes, he admitted to using information from others. He is not in Iraq, Dumb Ass! He does not by trade benefit from passing on information. We benefit by his ability to pull together information and interpret this information from his, yes education. Not his meaningless titles.

Yes, it’s always nice to benefit from taking credit for something you didn’t do yourself. For example, I’m so inspired by your defense of Sean-Paul that now I’m planning to just retitle someone else’s dissertation instead of writing my own. After all, as long as I get a job it doesn’t really matter if I stole someone else’s work to get it, no?

I really would like for you to bring your backwoods mississippi (no capitals on purpose, and one of my partners was born in miss., and got out as soon as he could) ass to Texas and see how a real state works without the benefit of having to hide behind the revenues of gambling.

One of your partners? Are you sure you don’t live in Utah?

As for Texas, it’s a fine state, and I’m proud to have it in the union. Where would I be without my good buddy Laurence, for example? (And I love all my friends in Utah too, even the polygamous and polyamorous ones!)

Please just mind your own business, and don’t pull others down to make yourself look more worthy than you really are.

Ok, I promise never to mention any wrongdoing I ever see anyone else engage in ever again in my life.

Humility: def. Knowing exactly who and what you are, coupled with a sincere desire to become what you could be.

Wow. Did you get that from a motivational poster?

Look forward to your response.

You’re reading it, Hamilton. Thanks for writing!

It turns out that my opinion of former U.N. weapons inspector and alleged part-time pedophile Scott Ritter operates according to Zeno’s dichotomy paradox: every time I think I’ve reached the absolute lowest possible opinion of him, it turns out that really there’s still a few more microns to go. From The Command Post today (emphasis mine):

The [youth] prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children—toddlers up to pre-adolescents—whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.

That’s right: according to Scott Ritter, it’s OK to leave kids in squalor and misery, for the greater moral cause of preventing war. If this doesn’t fundamentally discredit the thinking of the radical anti-war movement, I’m not sure what could.

Patrick Carver was fortunate enough to catch up with Antonin Scalia, and get his autograph, after his speech at Fulton Chapel here at the University of Mississippi Thursday; a somewhat different take is from an anonymous reader at How Appealing.

I’m not entirely sold on “original intent” as a jurisprudential philosophy, nor am I really sold that Scalia practices it (he may believe he practices it, but as a good student of political psychology, and judicial behavior in the attitudinal tradition, I’m unconvinced). But by all accounts Scalia is a smart guy, and possibly next in line to be Chief Justice of the United States, so it’s certainly nice that he dropped by. (I would have been there but I’ve been sicker than a dog for the past three days; I must have caught something in Chicago.)

In my never-ending quest to confuse readers by blogging about Canadian politics, I present the news (via Pieter) that New York Governor George Pataki and Ontario Premier Ernie Eves have called for a security perimeter encompassing the U.S. and Canada, to streamline border controls between the two countries.

The report comes fresh on the heels of poll results suggesting 65%* of Canadians favor the idea of a security perimeter; in the same poll, 73% also favor tougher immigration policies.

Perhaps the more interesting pattern of this story: Google News finds that both the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail in Canada give it play, while among U.S. papers, only the Buffalo News, the Ithaca Journal, and a minor New York-based paper appear to have picked up the news.

* Poll conducted April 4–6, n=500, margin of error ± 4.5% with a 95% confidence level.

The lighter side of liberation? From today's USA Today: apparently, a patrol came upon a private zoo in Baghdad on Thursday, and found some starving animals. But beasts cannot live by MREs alone:

Apparently, the MREs didn’t satisfy the animals. The soldiers ended up pulling live sheep from a nearby pen and pushing the animals into the lion compound. While the soldiers looked on, the young lions pounced on and killed two of the sheep, fending off the cheetahs and the bear for the spoils.

There are some more anecdotes, including a report on a raid on a schoolhouse and a patrol through the “Saddam City” shanty town, named for its ex-slumlord.

CNN’s chief news executive, Eason Jordan, reports on 13 years of intimidation, torture, and attempted murder of CNN reporters and photographers on Friday’s New York Times Op/Ed page. A stomach-turning sample (apparently reported at the time; however, I don’t remember reading about it):

Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for “crimes,” one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family’s home.

But remember, kids, since Saddam’s thugs didn’t rip babies from incubators he’s actually not a bad guy.

Andrew Hagen has an excellent post on this story.

I will say (snarky comments on the BBC aside) that I’m not sure what CNN could have done differently; it’s not fair for critics to expect them to hang innocent people out to dry in a totalitarian state. Maybe if Bernie and Peter hadn’t been so enthusiastic about hanging out in Baghdad twelve years ago some of it might have been avoidable, but it’s a big might.

Jeff at Caerdroia calls CNN’s behavior a “betrayal of trust,” and he makes a credible, damning case:

Yet through all of this behavior, for over a decade, CNN would have us believe that they did everything they could to bring us the truth? Shame! Shame on CNN. They cannot now be trusted with any news from any nation willing to brutalize its own people, because they have shown that in such a situation, they will sell out any principle for the opportunity to get stock footage and meaningless interviews. Worse yet, by not reporting these events, CNN encouraged them to continue, and thus became complicit in torture, attempted murder and suppression of the truth.

If they had avoided all local entanglements, they wouldn’t have gotten themselves in this mess in the first place. A policy like that might kill the market for local stringers in totalitarian states, but it would beat the alternative of getting the local stringers killed by a mile.

The more I think about this (including reading the Glassman piece), the more pissed off I am at CNN. I'm with D.C.—they’re coming off the dial at the Lawrence household. By TNR’s account, it appears that CNN reporters were lucky not to be caught on-air fellating Saddam Hussein. If Gulf War I put CNN on the map, Gulf War II should take them off it.

Links via the Command Post. More linkage via Technorati.

Howard Bashman of How Appealing asks:

By the way, am I the only one who prefers “an URL” to “a URL” (Dixie Chicks excluded)?

The short answer: probably not.

My general rule: use an when the vowel sound is pronounced at the beginning of the subsequent word, and a otherwise. In the case of “H”: an hour, but a hat. “Y” is also potentially problematic, although usually in English it is not pronounced as “i” at the beginning of a word—but one might refer to, or call one’s self, “an Yglesias fan.”

But letters at the beginning of abbreviations could be a bigger issue: “A”, “E”, “I”, and “O” have clear vowel sounds at the beginning, while “U” is pronounced like yew, with the “yuh” sound for y. So “a URL” seems more appropriate to me, if you speak it as a collection of letters—e.g. U-R-L. However, if you pronounce it like the name or title “Earl,” an would work better, and there seems to be a good number of people (techies and non-techies) out there who do.

Incidentally, common British practice would uppercase an abbreviation to be spoken as initials—e.g. USA—and capitalize an abbreviation prounounced like a word—e.g. Nato—but that’s not used west of the pond, so there’s no obvious guide except knowledge of the language. Some also argue that the latter type of abbreviation is the only type that can be called an “acronym,” a position I am agnostic on.

Kevin Drum is apparently upset because the media had the audacity to actually show the action in TV footage of the Saddam statue toppling, and attributes this to “the duplicitous role of the media” in a U.S. government propoganda effort (apparently influenced by the non-existent U.S. minders brought in by the Marines to replace the Iraqi ones that fled that morning).

Then again, maybe they zoomed in because you can’t see anything worth photographing in a wider shot. But that wouldn’t fit a conspiracy theory, so I’ll just have to be skeptical about that.

Josh Chafetz at OxBlog finds that things may not be as they first appear in Atriosland. Imagine that!

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (via Jim Treacher):

You would think there would be very few people anywhere who would be upset by today’s news from Baghdad. But, as has become obvious, beyond those who merely and honestly sought peace or greater consensus, there remain groups who were invested in the idea that the Coalition couldn’t, or shouldn’t, succeed.

In other words, not a really good day to be French.

(Unless, of course, you’re The Dissident Frogman or Merde in France.)

CNN just ran videophone footage, narrated by Martin Savidge, of Marines attempting to blow up a statue of Saddam Hussein (apparently identical to the one pulled down near the Palestine Hotel; they must have mass-produced them somewhere). After an attempt to pull it down with a tank failed, they tried plan B: C4.

When the smoke cleared, there was a gaping hole in the crotch area of the statue. Savidge couldn’t stop laughing. Somehow, I think the Iraqis will be content to leave it be.

Unsurprisingly, the Command Post is on this too.

Dan Drezner and Donald Sensing note that the Iraqis have a message for the “human shields.” Salam Pax would be proud.

My sole comment on today’s events: I watched the Berlin Wall come down. This is better.

Think Baghdad Bob is gone? Think again.

Via The Command Post (in comments).

Oliver Willis calls on both anti-war and pro-war Americans to hold the administration to its commitment to create a free and democratic Iraq. I wholeheartedly agree.

Later, Stephen Green lays out what the Iraq War means for the region. No blockquotes; Read The Whole Thing™.

(Think of these two posts as two sides of the same coin—for what Stephen suggests to suceed, we must make the commitment that Oliver correctly implores us to.)

Josh Chafetz of OxBlog reports on a violent incident where apparently several thugs armed with a 2×4 broke into the dorm suite of an anti-war female student at Yale University, apparently in an unsuccessful effort to attack her and remove an upside-down American flag she had placed in her window. Simply despicable.

Speaking of despicable, the examples of subhuman garbage that are making bogus “your kid is dead” phone calls deserve to be dropped from B2s onto one of Saddam’s presidential palaces. Or, since they apparently don't approve of cultural imperialism, we should just send them to Basra with “human shield” tattooed on their foreheads in English and Arabic and watch how long they last. And throw in the aforementioned thuggish sleazebags from Yale too. (Via Ken Layne.)

Mark Kleiman, rightly taking to task an effort to strengthen the already-draconian federal sentencing “guidelines,” asks:

Note to my libertarian friends: WHEN ARE YOU GUYS GOING TO WISE UP AND STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN?

Ironically, he gives the answer earlier in his own post:

This is truly horrible public policy, but if it can’t be killed quietly in conference I’m not sure I’d want the Democrats to self-immolate over it.

If the Democrats aren’t willing to have the testicular fortitude to stand up for their alleged social liberalism, why should anyone who cares about social liberalism vote for them? We had eight years of Bill Clinton, during which I dare say he advanced the frontiers of personal liberty exactly none; he went along with the War on Drugs, he frequently jumped at the opportunity to portray himself as “tough on crime,” and he acquiesced in the continuing “federalize everything” drive that the alleged states-rights Republicans and freedom-loving Democrats in Congress led. The most generous thing anyone can say about personal freedom during the Clinton administration under Janet Reno is that at least it wasn’t as bad as John Ashcroft, and it’d be a stretch even to say that with a straight face.

In short, Mark thinks Democrats need to choose their battles—but I’m not sure they’ve chosen one yet.

This month’s How Appealing “20 Questions” interview is with Mississippi Supreme Court justice Kay Cobb of Oxford. It’s a fascinating interview, and Howard Bashman, as always, asks some pretty insightful questions.

Glenn Reynolds reports that Sean-Paul Kelley, a.k.a. The Agonist, has apparently plagiarized some of his war updates from Stratfor’s paid reports. He has since apologized and, according to him, worked out an arrangement with Stratfor that allows him to continue posting some of their proprietary content.

(I’ve butted heads with Kelley in the past, so I’m hardly an objective observer. Suffice it to say that certain aspects of his writing—amply catalogued by Colby Cosh, or in my referenced posts—rub me the wrong way. However, I was charitable in linking him at the beginning of the war, and honestly thought he was providing a valuable service.)

A larger issue is raised by Daniel Drezner in his reaction:

As a graduate student in international relations, Kelley knew (or should have known) he was in the wrong as he was lifting Stratfor’s content, and he was in the wrong again when he initially tried to deny the plagiarism.

The problem Kelley faces now, as he admits in his apology post, is his loss of credibility (which, at least in my judgment, is pretty severe). As a member of the academic community, few things will damage one’s reputation more than presenting someone else’s ideas as your own. The big question is: if Kelley has fabricated and fibbed in his weblog, can the academic community trust him to be an honest researcher? That’s a very tough question, and it’s one that Kelley will need to have a good answer for—not just for his readers, who rightfully will question whether his reporting on the war effort can still be trusted, but also for his professors and potential employers, whether he decides on an academic or professional career.

Meryl Yourish, a Command Post contributor, has more:

Kelley's plagiarism is a blow to the credibility of the blogosphere. And it should be big news in the blogosphere. The Agonist has been a high-profile, high-visibility blogger since the start of the war. The war has caused his popularity surge. His seemingly uncanny line to information (now revealed to have been lifted whole cloth from Stratfor) helped him achieve that high visibility. And he still has it. The blogosphere has barely mentioned this.

Even more coverage is out there via Feedster and ThreadTrack, including takes from Dean Esmay (whose site was later DOSed by an Agonist reader), Andrea Harris (who, like me, recalls the “bloodthirsty warbloggers” incident), Grasshoppa, Amish Tech Support, Acidman, Letter from Gotham, Nicholas Jon, N.Z. Bear, Andrew Hagen, Gregory Harris, The Blogs of War and the Washington Post’s Filter column.

More reaction: Bill Middleton has a lengthy essay on his personal experiences with both Stratfor and Kelley; it doesn’t reflect very well on either. Also, Greg Greene notes that Kelley ought to be happy he’s not at Virginia.

Even more: Donald Sensing reviews the situation. Also, Meryl is planning to watch Kelley’s ecosystem rankings over the next few days; the morbidly curious can also monitor his traffic stats, which appear to be down sharply today (although there remain several hours to go, so take that with a grain of salt; an hourly report from yesterday doesn’t appear to be available for comparison purposes).

Yet more: somehow I forgot to link Ken Layne, and Wylie in Norman explains why people should care. And, The Fat Guy thinks Dean Esmay was being too nice.

Meryl subsequently, and correctly, points out that Tuesdays are often slower than Mondays for blogs; however, a look at his monthly traffic doesn't show as big of a Tuesday dropoff last week, and his week-on-week traffic has dropped substantially. However, there are plenty of other explanations: people could be bored with the war, for example, or they may have switched to getting their news from the better-sourced and more prolific Command Post, or the half-eyewitness, half-unsourced statements accompanied by wild speculation of the Beeb warblog, to name just two. Meryl also links to Mac Diva’s reaction, who raises an important point:

Technocrati [sic] currently lists The Agonist with 547 inbound blogs and 850 inbound links. His numbers dwarf those of all but the most popular blogs. They nudge the hard-working and honest Josh Marshall and DailyKos down in the ratings.

Indeed.

Dean Esmay has more to say; he makes some important points about copyright law (which, if people are going to learn from this mess, might be the one bit of good to come out of this), and he largely echos Mac Diva's reaction, in that a lot of other people’s honest work has been overshadowed by his meteoric rise to fame, much of it on the back of plagiarized material.

Someone has started an Agonist Watch weblog; it has a good roundup of links. In particular, he(?) links to a good discussion at TinyLittleLies. Also of note: RadioFreeBlogistan’s roundup.

Via Agonist Watch: MSNBC’s weblog central picks up the story. Also, Mac Diva is incredibly unimpressed with A Clever Sheep’s defense of Kelley, and notes that USA Today’s web column has picked up the story.

“VodkaPundit” Stephen Green thinks Venomous Kate “has this one exactly wrong.” And Agonist Watch links to Jim Bassett’s take, which makes you wonder if Dean Esmay was so far off the mark. Because, remember kids, it’s OK to take advantage of someone else stealing—just as long as you don’t do it yourself.

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.NET explains why he still links to the Agonist, and the Inscrutable American reacts too.

Yet more, via Agonist Watch: CalPundit weighs in, and Matthew Yglesias has a second post on “Plagiarism in the Age of Google”; meanwhile, Tiny Little Lies has a vicious takedown of the state of liberal thought in the Blogosphere (*cough* Atrios)—which IMHO paints too broad a brush, but one can only read the latest Dem (or GOP, for that matter) talking points so many times without vomiting.

Meryl Yourish still thinks Kelley is ducking the issue. For your edification, compare Kelley’s stats with The Command Post’s; there’s a definite drop-off between the trends that can’t be attributed just to the war.

Via AW: The People’s Republic of Seabrook apparently received an email from Kelley that suggests WaPo media columnist Howard Kurtz is looking into the situation.

Atrios Hesiod is involved now. Happy happy, joy joy. (It’s not really about the plagiarism, you see—it’s really all about the stats.)

(Note Blogger archive breakage on some of the links; hack up the URLs accordingly. Also, I'm limiting my links to those that seem to have a particularly original take; however, Agonist Watch seems to be collecting everything.)

Daniel Drezner has a good post on the relationship between The Discipline™ and blogging. For my part, I can only say that if people I know in the discipline are aware of this blog, they haven’t mentioned it to me, much less had anything to say about it (with the sole exception of one recent Mississippi Ph.D.). Of course, my little corner of the blogosphere is a bit more obscure than Daniel’s, which may account for some of it; my status as a grad student (ABD, mind you), as opposed to a faculty member, may also be a contributing factor. But, the URL is in my .sig, so maybe I’ll get some more traffic from fellow political scientists over time.

I’d also say that, like Dan, I don’t see this blog as a forum for heavily-footnoted discussions of concepts in political science; for example, if I start blathering on about an aspect of the Michigan Model (the “funnel of causality,” anyone?), remember that I’ll likely be glossing over four decades of caveats, revisions, and extensions. But, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll try to make the occasional forays into the murky depths of political science bearable.

David Adesnik at OxBlog notes that Josh Marshall is sticking up for John Kerry’s inane statement calling for “regime change” at home, as well as abroad. (However, Adesnik’s a bit more surprised than he should be at this development, given Marshall’s partisan credentials.) For those who’ve been under a rock or hung over for the last few days, Kerry said:

What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein [sic] and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.

Now, as a political scientist, “regime change” has a fairly specific meaning: the change from one system of governance to another. For example, France had a regime change when the Fourth Republic became the Fifth in 1957, while Alberto Fujimori transmuted Peru’s democracy into a dictatorship after his “self-coup” in 1992. In normal political discourse, the government of a democracy isn’t referred to as a “regime,” although one might refer to a particularly centralized administration as a “regime” to make a political point (e.g. the “Blair regime” might be assailed by critics; however, a neutral observer would call it the “Blair government” or “Blair cabinet” instead). Webster’s Unabridged (1913) defines a regime (which still had its accent at that time, as it was imported from French) as:

Mode or system of rule or management; character of government, or of the prevailing social system.

By most definitions of “regime,” Kerry would be calling not just for the replacement of the executive, but of the entire government—a government in which he serves as a senator, and in which he has a great deal more influence than the man on the street. It’s the sort of rhetoric one would expect from a commenter at a popular lefty blog, a discontented minor foreign politician, or perhaps on a sign at an anti-war protest, rather than from a serious presidential candidate. And while it may be a cute piece of rhetoric for pandering to the Democrat base now in the nomination chase, it won’t be much help if Kerry wins the nomination, because you can bet it’ll be the centerpiece of a Bush-Cheney ad campaign in late 2004.

Random, not-very-sober thoughts from the Midwest:

• I got to meet Dan Drezner for a beer Friday afternoon. He’s definitely cool enough to be blogrolled everywhere.

• Thursday, I got the chance to see Dirk Eddelbuettel again (we had a nice dinner at Wildfire near my hotel). Always fun to hang out with a fellow Debianista social scientist.

• The Iowa crowd is a riot.

• If I ever figure out women, you’ll be the first to know.*

• And last, but not least: seven drinks is waaaay too many in an evening.

* If you think this applies to you in particular — probably, although it applies to at least four others by my count.