Larry Lessig has a must-read post in his blog about the decision-making in Eldred v. Ashcroft (decided Wednesday, 7-2 in favor of the respondent).

As a good political scientist, I probably should point out that Larry's search for principle on the court is perhaps overly optimistic; the Spaeth attitudinal model suggests that the conservatives on the court would side with big business — and a Republican administration filing a supportive brief — regardless of principle. In terms of attitudinal signals, the plaintiffs' argument was sunk by the predominantly leftist amici. (Of course, being a good law professor, Larry probably doesn't buy the attitudinal model.)

Having said that, like Larry I can't reconcile Eldred with Lopez (a case that I believe was correctly decided on the merits), and I agree that the majority should at least have made an effort to do so; the point of having a “limited” government is that the limits must be meaningful, no matter what enumerated powers we're talking about. On that principle alone, the majority decided Eldred wrongly.

Glenn Reynolds makes much the same point (at least, one similar to mine) in his latest piece for MSNBC.com.

In today's Bleat, James Lileks takes on John Le Carre. He also has discovered Safari's apparent ability to take down websites at will (but I think he's joking).

The New York Times reports that the Senate has finally passed an organizing resolution. You'll be forgiven if you fail to make any sense of this paragraph:

The agreement reached tonight gave the Democrats much of what they requested, allowing them 49 percent of the committee salaries and letting them avoid the need to lay off staff members. But Republicans got extra money to operate the committees, bringing their share of the money to about 60 percent — less than the usual two-thirds, but more than the 51 percent the Democrats had originally proposed.

If you're thinking “the math isn't adding up here,” you're right. By contrast, the Washington Post's report is not only more pithy, it also makes more sense.

The big question is: what are the committees spending money on besides committee staff salaries? I mean, there's only so much you can spend on toner for the laser printer.

Earlier coverage here.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal spins the news that George W. Bush will oppose the Michigan admissions quotas with the following headline: “Bush to contest 'quota' program that aided Ford.” Not, mind you, Gerald Ford (who's from Michigan) or Ford Motor Company; instead, U.S. Rep. Harold Ford, Jr.

Money quote from the article:

Ford has said in the past that he benefited from affirmative action, but he declined to discuss his LSAT score or grade point average.

Here's a hint: he flunked the bar on his first attempt. Meanwhile, you may want to read about the admissions policy of fellow Big Ten member Indiana University.

(Via Instapundit:) MSNBC reports on North Korea's prison camps, estimated to hold at least 200,000 dissidents.

Our long local nightmare is over; Eli Manning's coming back for his senior season. No word yet on whether David Cutcliffe promised to find something better than the prevent offense in return.

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal reports, you decide. (Via Midwest Conservative Journal.)

On Friday, January 10, the Department of Finance and Administration reported a press release in which it stated that “December revenues were $33.8 million more than the budgeted estimates.” In other words, the state is running a budget surplus, largely due to the sales tax increase approved by the legislature in 2002.

Imagine my surprise the next day when the Commercial Appeal failed to even mention this good news. Of the state's three major newspapers, only the Nashville Tennessean bothered to let the state's taxpayers know that the state's budget crisis is essentially over. Instead, we have been treated to a long line of stories saying that retail sales are down (even though they are, in fact, higher than last year's) and that the state faces massive budget problems (mostly due to spending on the bloated TennCare program and court orders to equalize education funding in rural districts).

I guess printing good news would detract from your paper's mission to impose an income tax with no spending limits similar to California's (a state facing a $36 billion budget shortfall over the next 18 months). Your readers deserve an honest reporting of the facts, not suppression of information to further a political agenda.

For more details on this story, see Bill Hobbs' weblog. We'll see if they print my letter; I'm not holding my breath.

Hattiesburg American opinion editor Rich Campbell asks and answers that provocative question in a column in yesterday's paper, in response to the national Democrats' opposition to the Pickering nomination, supported by many Mississippi Democrats (seen at How Appealing).

It's a pretty good question, and one that reveals the friction in the median voter problem: Mississippi Democrats like Mike Moore, Ronnie Musgrove, and Ronnie Shows have very different interests in getting elected than many Democrats in other states, much as Republicans in New England aren't well-served by being associated in their voters' minds with the Christian Coalition wing of the party. In the long term, this may lead to either realignment or the development of regional or state parties; at some point, except in the Delta, no Democratic candidate will be able to appeal to a median voter simply due to the association with the national party — Gene Taylor could conceivably be the last white Democrat the state elects to Congress ever, and at the state level a similar phenomenon could easily emerge.

Today was pretty much a blah day; nothing much to comment on, really. I did go shopping at Wal-Mart (mostly diet soda, milk, and juice, along with the tax program and a couple of sweaters that were on sale; no SimCity 4 yet, natch). I thought about going to see Narc, for which the previews looked moderately interesting. Otherwise, I killed time by riling up some I-69 idiotarians at HoosierTalk, and watched the new Stargate SG-1 episode, “Unnatural Selection” (not really what I expected at all, but it was good nonetheless).

Tomorrow's project will be to try to get the business back on the rails again. I can hardly wait...

blog.lordsutch.com is now syndicated via Janes' Blogosphere; however, David's code doesn't seem to understand the nuances of my markup. Until LSblog takes over the world by storm (don't hold your breath), don't expect to find the pretty links to stuff I talk about on other peoples' sites. (I tried to figure out what was special about the markup on other sites that helped Janes' pick things out, but gave up. Email me if you know what I need to do.)

Also, blog.lordsutch.com is registered at GeoURL, which is generating a fair amount of referral traffic.

Jacob T. Levy is wondering about the wrangling over the Senate organizing resolution:

In short: at what point could a floor majority ram through an organizing resolution? Is there any such point? What's the longest it's ever taken to get the resolution approved?

I think the issue is that the organizing resolution, like almost everything else in the Senate (except, I believe, conference reports), is subject to filibuster. That means either the Republicans need to get 60 votes (to override a filibuster) or do it by unanimous consent.

My guess is that they only have 52–54 votes for whatever they want to do at the moment; the Dems are holding out for basically the sweetheart deal they got from Lott in 2000 (which they promptly reneged on when Jeffords defected). They may also be tied up over a few other things — like judicial nominations.

So that's why (a) this is taking so long and (b) you'll never see a provision that forbids a change in control of the chamber due to a defection until one party has a wide enough margin. (However, if any party does ever get a 60-vote majority again, which I don't see anytime soon, you'll probably see a permanent rules change that either stops the chamber from being reorganized mid-session or forbids filibusters of organizing resolutions.)

The irony here is that Senate committees are relatively powerless; you can amend to your heart's content on the floor (unlike in the House), so they really only function as gatekeepers due to mandatory referral of legislation. (Hence why I made fun of Trent Lott's new job a few days ago — one he won't have until the organizing resolution is approved.)

I don't know the answer to the last of Jacob's questions; Senate control has gone over a few times in the past fifty years or so, but until the 1980s partisanship in the Senate wasn't very intense. I've certainly never heard of it being a problem in the past.

Two additional points: as far as I can tell, the organizing resolution has historically been adopted by unanimous consent (which suggests it is subject to a filbuster), and there was protracted wrangling over the OR when Jeffords defected in 2001.

Glenn Reynolds suggests that the White House was behind the spin on David Frum's Right Hand Man, misleading the media into thinking that the book was critical of the administration's policy (reported by Matt Drudge and others).

I'm reminded of the Bill Clinton videotape deposition during Monicagate — you remember, the one where he allegedly stormed out of the room, according to “highly-placed White House sources.” While the tape was still a major embarassment (nobody could really cover up for stuff like defining the term “is”), he looked positively serene compared to the pre-spun version of the event.

About seven hours ago, Indiana Gov. Frank O'Bannon announced that the preferred alternative for Interstate 69 between Indianapolis and Evansville will pass through Bloomington along the Indiana 37 corridor. For more details, see blog.lordsutch.com's sister site I69Info.com.

All-in-all, I think it's a good decision for Indiana. But, the fighting isn't over yet; lawsuits (or at least the threat thereof) will likely delay the project through much of the coming year.

Ivan G. Osorio writes on National Review Online that Venezuelan Fujimori-emulator* Hugo Chávez may have funneled money to al-Qaida via the Taliban, disguised as humanitarian aid.

I've blogged before on Hugo Chávez here; link from PejmanPundit.

* = I'm sidestepping the debate about whether or not Chávez is a dictator; he's definitely in the caudillo category, though.

The university computer network seems to be have been suffering from “return of students to their broadband connections”-itis this afternoon. But now, we're back and better than ever!

By the way, the flag at the top of the new title graphic is the Magnolia Flag, which was adopted as the first state flag in 1861, and continued to fly over the state until 1894 (until the current flag was first adopted). For a bit of history on Mississippi flags (up through 2000), see this article by noted Mississippi historian David Sansing.

David Sansing is not to be confused with noted Tennessee blogger Donald Sensing!.

Apple's new web browser, Safari, seems to do a pretty good job rendering websites; without comparing it side-by-side to Konqueror, the rendering seems better, although there are still some buglets in the CSS2 implementation. Notably, P:before renders differently than you'd expect; it treats it as a block-level element instead of inline, and text-transform doesn't seem to work right. However, that's better than IE6 does; it ignores them completely.

This paragraph is rendered with P:before (which I use for updates to existing entries in the blog). If you're using Opera 6 or 7, or any Gecko derivative (Mozilla, Phoenix, Chimera, K-Meleon), you'll see UPDATE: inset in the beginning of the paragraph. Internet Explorer (and the Windows HTML component it is based on) ignores it completely (I'm pretty sure Konqueror 2.2 and 3.0 does too). Safari renders it as a separate, blue paragraph like Update:.

The Washington Post has picked up the story of the Fairfax County bar raids for potential DUI offenders (via Glenn Reynolds). Notable for its absence: any evidence that the reporter contacted MADD for comment on whether they approved of these tactics. You'd think they'd be good for a quote or two; after all, it's their issue.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko decomposes statistics on “alcohol-related deaths” and finds that you're about four times more likely to die of accidental poisoning than be accidentally killed by a drunk driver if you're sober.

Fresh on the heels of their fare decrease, Amtrak is apparently having problems with passengers wielding polycarbonate knives. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Now you know why I'm driving to Charlotte next month.

Bitter passes on news that our friends at the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, better known as Amtrak, is cutting fares by up to 25% on certain routes (but not the ones anyone rides). You too can enjoy the pleasure of slowly travelling on someone else's schedule at prices comparable to fares offered by the major airlines. But at least nobody's going to be futzing with your package on the trip (or at least, they won't be TSA employees).

By the way, shouldn't that really be www.tsa.homelandsecurity.gov or something?

I won! My winning entry:

If women should be admitted as members of Augusta National Golf Club, why shouldn't men be admitted to [preppy New England womens' college]?

However, I can't condone the alcohol consumption associated with the judging. Binge drinking should be reserved for special occasions, like political science conferences and summers in Ann Arbor.

For a change, this year's Grammy nominations are moderately interesting; certainly there are a few choices to disagree with (for one, I don't see the appeal of Vanessa Carlton), but there's some good stuff nominated this year — 3 Doors Down, Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne, Pink, Bruce Springsteen, and Tonic all received multiple nominations (see the full list). And (perhaps) disturbingly, Eminem is starting to grow on me in small doses.

Daniel Drezner posts that John Zogby's overhyping his own numbers on the Democratic contenders. Trying to read anything into single questions in a survey with under 500 respondents is problematic at best, and it's downright foolhardy to draw any conclusions out of marginals that show virtually everyone in the poll in a statistical dead heat. Meanwhile, Jacob T. Levy speculates that Richard Gephardt will bomb spectacularly in New Hampshire.

Ah well, at least Atrios isn't yet predicting that we won't have a 2004 election. Maybe next week.

If the National Review polices the conservative movement, as Jonah Goldberg alleges (paraphrased by Jacob T. Levy), does that mean that the anti-immigrant views of Paul Craig Roberts and blatant anti-homosexuality and odd racial views of NRO contributor John Derbyshire fairly represent the modern conservative movement?

(Via Glenn Reynolds:) Clayton Cramer writes on the problems with Michael Bellesiles' research in Arming America; he concludes that a lack of critical analysis by historians (including poor quantitative reasoning skills) and political diversity within the discipline allowed Bellesiles' work to pass largely uncriticized. While his discussion largely centers around history, there are lessons for other disciplines — including political science.

I find political science to be a more politically diverse discipline than history (and most of the humanities and social sciences, with the exception of economics), perhaps due in part to the strong influence of economists on the quantitative part of the discipline, although the political left is predominant (the “right” of the discipline is mostly libertarian and neo-conservative; I have yet to meet a paleoconservative political scientist). However, there has been a backlash in the form of the “perestroika movement” over the past two years; for a lighthearted look, see “Some Thoughts on Perestroika on Political Science”. (For the record, I'm an empiricist who mostly does quantitative work.)

Glenn Reynolds (Sith Lord) passes on word that Knopf is stopping the print run of Arming America.