Blogger triumpalism at it’s finest.We made it to the dictionary!!:

A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year’s presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster’s list of the 10 words of the year. Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks,” was one of the most looked-up words on its Internet sites this year. Eight entries on the publisher’s top-10 list related to major news events, from the presidential election—represented by words such as incumbent and partisan—to natural phenomena such as hurricane and cicada.

…so how could they be angry over losing it? Apparently some universities have taken humbrage at the thought of losing federal funding if they refuse to let military recruiters on their campuses. Given that the federal government’s primary mission is defending the country, and that these universities are feeding at the federal trough, it seems only natural that the feds would require access for recruiting as a condition of getting the money.

The free speech argument is the lamest thing I’ve ever heard. No one is stopping them from speaking; they’re simply saying it might cost them federal funds if they don’t give the military access. They can say whatever they want, just not on the federal nickel.

A 1995 law, known as the Solomon Amendment, bars the federal government from disbursing money to colleges and universities that obstruct campus recruiting by the military. As amended and interpreted over the years, the law prohibits disbursements to all parts of a university, including its physics department and medical school, if any of its units, like its law school, make military recruiting even a little more difficult. Billions of dollars are at stake, and no university has been willing to defy the government. Indeed, several of the law schools that are members of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, the group that sued to block the new law, have not been publicly identified.

Among the institutions willing to be named are the law schools of New York University and George Washington University. The law faculties of Stanford, Georgetown and several other law schools are also members of the group. E. Joshua Rosencranz, who represents the plaintiffs in the suit, said the reluctance of several of his law school clients to be identified publicly was driven by fear. “They don’t want retribution that is exacted behind closed doors by faceless bureaucrats and vindictive politicians,” Mr. Rosencranz said.

George Will has yet another column, this one in Newsweek, on the merits of the filibuster, even against judicial nominees:

The president should renominate all 10 appellate-court nominees who have been filibustered, and he should vow, like General Grant, to “fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.” Norman Ornstein, a student of these things, says Senate Republicans could force Democrats to conduct the kind of filibuster Southern Democrats conducted against civil-rights legislation in the 1950s—talking around the clock, the obstructionists and their opponents sleeping on cots in the Capitol, the Senate paralyzed. There has never been such a spectacle in the era of C-Span and saturation journalism on cable 24 hours a day. Do Democrats want to make 2005 the year of living dangerously? Seventeen of their 44 seats are at risk in 2006—five of them in states Bush just carried.

Even so, it’s something I could respect if the Republicans and President Bush would hold their feet to the fire and force an old-fashioned filibuster: make them sleep in the Senate chamber. Bring business to a halt and fight it out. I doubt the Republicans have the ‘nads to do so.

George Will has a good piece on the leftward tilt of academia:

Academics such as the next secretary of state still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.”

Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations—except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome.

They do indeed cultivate diversity—in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.

I guess congratulations are in order for my co-blogger, and host, Chris. He’s an Ole Miss alum and his team just whipped mine in the Egg Bowl. Even if State wins every Egg Bowl until I die there’s no way we’ll get a winning record against the evil ones.

On the bright side, Nebraska just finished its first losing season in 43 years.

Second link þ PoliBlog.

Well, maybe they do: they should have secured the royalties agreement in advance. I guess it was just a matter of time.

A group of former London state school children who sang on Pink Floyd’s 1979 classic “Another Brick In The Wall” have lodged a claim for unpaid royalties.

Twenty-three teenage pupils from Islington Green School secretly recorded vocals for the track, which became an anthem for children with the chorus “We don’t need no education.”

On hearing the song, the headmistress banned the pupils from appearing on television or video—leaving them no evidence and making it harder for them to claim royalties—and the local school authority described the lyrics as “scandalous.”

Jeralyn has a great discussion going on at her place regarding the ICC. I am almost inalterably opposed to it—it’s an abomination and an attempt to alter our form of government outside the amendment process—and here’s what I had to add:

My hostility to the ICC is pretty well known from a few weeks ago when we had a massive thread on the subject. I loath the idea and see it as inconsistent with self-government. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good description of the UN itself.

One point we didn’t touch on: how could such a court ever be considered constitutional? Wouldn’t we be, in effect, creating a court higher than our own supreme court? Yeah, yeah, I know all about the “if your country fails to act” stuff attached to the ICC, but if the supreme court refuses to act that doesn’t mean they haven’t answered. They’ve answered and the answer is no.

Besides, there is only one punishement for a president carrying out his duties while in office: impeachment. He can still be prosecuted for violating laws we recognize, but does international law qualify? I doubt it.

It’s pretty much a non-issue anyway. There’s no way we’ll ever ratify that treaty and Congress has already passed the Invade The Hague Act to allow the President to use the military if they nab our soldiers or officials.

She’s frequently wrong, sometimes embarrassing and even lies on occasion, but this time Dowd is right and The Professor has taken an unnecessary swipe at her:

Somebody tell me what quantity of explosive material they have found through these strip searches, because I’ve got a hunch it’s zero. How many billions are they wasting on this?

Maybe we’re not at the Philip K. Dick level of technology yet. But how about some positive profiling? If airport security can have a watch list for the bad guys, why can’t it develop a watch list for the good guys? Can’t there be a database of trustworthy American frequent travelers who are not going to secrete things in their bras? After all, no one is going to sneak anything in there without our knowledge. Can they at least get a screen?

True, there’s nothing in her column that’s original—the good guy list was proposed a couple of years ago when I was traveling all the time and actually cared—but it is being brought up at a good time (which is, all the time) and it does succinctly describe several current problems with airline security. It also describes security deficiencies elsewhere. I want to retain the credibility to criticize her in the future, so I’ll skip poking her on this one.

There’s been a good deal of speculation around the blogosphere that North Korea is somehow on the ropes. I will be thrilled if this is actually the case, but, as in the title to this post, it’s hard to know what’s going on due to people’s motivation. Why would Mr. Kim order his own portraits removed? It’s counterintuitive, but he could be doing it to give a false impression of weakness or a false impression of instability. Perception matters in negotiations, as does perception of motive.

If the countries that are allied against North Korea re-enter the negotiations with too much self-confidence—an increased perception of success—they might act in ways that help make those expectations true. For instance, they might give in to previously failed strategies, like bribing the Norks to get rid of their nukes. It would give Mr. Kim a little breathing room at home by alleviating some starvation and would give us the hope that he might dismantle his nukes, in spite of his past behavior.

I’m really hoping that North Korea is near collapse—it would be a gift to the world and the North Korean people—but I won’t hold my breath. We’ve been at a standoff with them for more than 50 years; I don’t expect it to change soon. I’ll believe it when it happens.

that The Guardian sees the last election as a vote against the Enlightenment or that they think the Enlightenment’s a product of leftism.

And, on the other side of the pond, through Europe. We don’t have so many Christian fundamentalists any more. Compared with the American religious right, Rocco Buttiglione, the withdrawn Italian Catholic candidate for European commissioner, is a dangerous liberal. But we do have Islamic fundamentalists, in growing numbers. And, I would say, we have secular fundamentalists: people who believe that to live by the tenets of Islam, or other religions, is incompatible with what it is to be fully human, and want citizens to be educated and the state to legislate accordingly. While I have been in America, the possible consequences have been played out on the streets of prosperous, pacific, tolerant Holland, with the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the counter-attack on an Islamic school. If America has its culture wars, its Kulturkampf, so do we. And ours could be bloodier.

So the expressions of European solidarity after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks ( “Nous sommes tous Américains” ) should acquire a new meaning and a new context after the November 2 2004 elections. Hands need to be joined across the sea in an old cause: the defence of the Enlightenment. We are all blue Americans now.

(þ Political Theory Daily Review)

I read an article, which I received via Google News, about Gmail. When I finished reading I was surprised to find that it came from a high school paper in Maryland. Very well done.

Alex Tabarrok has an excellent post that explains the reason that the cost for most medical procedures skyrockets: third-party payers, including both government and private insurance.

Why the price decline in this market and not others?  Could it have something to do with the fact that laser eye surgery is not covered by insurance, not covered by Medicaid or Medicare, and not heavily regulated?  Laser eye surgery is one of the few health procedures sold in a free market with price advertising, competition and consumer driven purchases.  I’m seeing things more clearly already.

I’ve been a Steelers fan since childhood and still follow them to this day, though not as intensely as in the past. That’s starting to change, especially now that the election is over.

By the mid-80s I was wishing that Chuck Noll would disappear from Pittsburgh. He did some really great things, including creating the best football team of the 1970s. He was a phenomenal coach; he just overstayed his welcome.

Bill Cowher, at an unbelievably young 47, is not even near his prime and has shown a good ability to adapt that Noll didn’t have. Once the Steelers hit the skids in the early 80s he was unable to change with the times. Cowher has already proven he can adapt and I hope to see him on the Steelers’ sidelines for a long time to come:

Cowher’s career seems certain to end where it began, in his home town, where he and his wife, Kaye, have raised their three daughters, but with a contract extension and a team on a roll, that day isn’t likely to come soon.

“I don’t ever want to lose my passion for the game,” he said. “I love competing on Sundays. The losses are still agonizing. That never changes. But I still enjoy doing the work every day. I feel blessed to be doing something I love to do. I’ve got a great balance in my life right now, and I’m too young to stop. Anyway, they tell me retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I’ve been reading about the weak dollar for more than two years and yet we have somehow managed to avoid economic armageddon. In fact, what’s concerned me more is the weird insistence on the part of China to peg their currency to ours at a very low value. Over the short term it hurts us by making China’s imports cheap and destroying jobs. Over the long term it causes China to destabilize their banking system by trying to maintain the peg against the dollar as it drops.

As I understand it (monetary theory is not my bag, man) the process involves printing additional yuan (or renmimbi) and simultaneously issuing new debt to soak up the new currency. I’ve heard these referred to as “wash transactions” or something similar. The additional debt that China must issue becomes untenable and destabilizes their banking system. Asset prices collapse, bank failures abound (because many debts are tied to asset prices) and the country enters a deflationary spiral, not unlike Japan in the 1980s. A spiral they have yet to recover from fully.

China raised interest rates for the first time since 1995 or 1996 a few weeks ago, so I was still under the impression that we were seeing 1980s Japan play itself out, only this time with China. Now, though, Robert Samuelson (and many, many others) is harping on it and I generally trust his judgment:

First, the American economy has grown faster than other advanced economies. Since 1990 U.S. economic growth has averaged 3 percent annually, compared with 2 percent for the European Union and 1.7 percent for Japan. America’s higher growth sucks in imports; Europe’s and Japan’s slower growth hurts U.S. exports.

Second, the global demand for dollars props up its exchange rate, making U.S. exports more expensive and U.S. imports cheaper. Indeed, many countries, particularly in Asia, fix their currencies to keep their exports competitive in the U.S. market. Instead of allowing surplus dollars to be sold on foreign exchange markets—lowering the dollar’s value—government central banks in Japan, China and other Asian countries have purchased more than $1 trillion of U.S. Treasury securities. Private investors have also bought lots of U.S. stocks and bonds. All told, foreigners own about 13 percent of U.S. stocks, 24 percent of corporate bonds and 43 percent of U.S. Treasury securities.

Up to a point, this arrangement benefits everyone. The world gets needed dollars; Americans get more imports, from cars to clothes. But we may now have passed that point. Hazards may outweigh benefits. The world may be receiving more dollars than it wants. A sell-off could spill over into the stock and bond markets and cause a deep global recession. Here’s how.

Throughout the anglosphere the word “liberal” has been used scornfully for the past few decades and, interestingly, it’s used the same way in Europe, though for a different reason. We all know that it’s used as a proxy term for socialist, panty-waist, etc. in the U.S. However, in the rest of the world the left uses it in its original meaning as a term of scorn; globalization (capitalism) is known as neoliberalism and has been known to spark riots from time to time.

“Liberal” is a term of contempt in much of Europe as well—even though, strangely enough, it usually denotes the opposite tendency. Rather than being keen on taxes and public spending, European liberals are often derided (notably in France) for seeking minimal government—in fact, for denying that government has any useful role at all, aside from pruning vital regulation and subverting the norms of decency that impede the poor from being ground down. Thus, in continental Europe, as in the United States, liberalism is also regarded as a perversion, a pathology: there is consistency in that respect, even though the sickness takes such different forms. And again, in its most extreme expression, it tests the boundaries of tolerance. Worse than ordinary liberals are Europe's neoliberals: market-worshipping, nihilistic sociopaths to a man. Many are said to believe that “there is no such thing as society.”

Yet there ought to be a word—not to mention, here and there, a political party—to stand for what liberalism used to mean. The idea, with its roots in English and Scottish political philosophy of the 18th century, speaks up for individual rights and freedoms, and challenges over-mighty government and other forms of power. In that sense, traditional English liberalism favoured small government—but, crucially, it viewed a government’s efforts to legislate religion and personal morality as sceptically as it regarded the attempt to regulate trade (the favoured economic intervention of the age). This, in our view, remains a very appealing, as well as internally consistent, kind of scepticism.

Will Wilkinson has a great post on negative liberty and the welfare state that I largely agree with:

However, I think that among the best argument for robust negative or liberty rights, i.e., for institutionalized constraints on coercion, is that a reliable system of negative rights over time creates more abilities, opens more paths of feasible possibility for individual lives, than most alternative systems of rights. Like Friedman and Hayek, I’m in favor of a modest and well-designed social safety net. However, political systems built around positive rights tend toward sclerosis, thereby reducing rates of economic growth, and a high rate of economic growth, along with (negative) liberty and stability, is part of the trinity of primary political goods (says me). Furthermore, a system of positive rights, conceived as a system of guarantees, is often self-defeating, because it cannot overcome systemic moral hazard problems that, independently of growth problems, turn out foreclose many of the possibilities for life that the system of guarantees was meant to open.

I’m now listeneing to AC/DC. Not exactly 80s, but still good.

To begin with, thanks to Chris for inviting me along as a co-blogger. We share a lot of the same points of view, though I’m more of a statist than him, I suppose.

I’m still in school and time is scarce, but I’m going to try this group blog thing and see how it works. I think it’ll be fine and certainly beats maintaining a site of my own.

One of the things I’ve missed the most about blogging is seeing things of interest and not being able to tell people about it. Take, for instance, this post over at Volokh. I read that yesterday—follow the links, it’s a parody of a leftist / humanist denial of objective reality (it’s from academia, of course)—and was dying to blog about it.

Well, enough nostalgia. Thanks to Jeff for the early link and to James Joyner for the kind words of encouragement.

Speaking of Jeff Goldstein, I’m listening to Journey right now. How 80s am I? Ok, so I wasn’t done with the nostalgia…