Note to potential presidential candidates: don’t go on obscure Canadian political panel shows—your comments may return from the past to bite you in the ass.

Link via Matt Stinson.

Will Baude is documenting Dan Drezner’s use of profanity in the classroom. I think I’ve used “pissed off” and variants of “shit” in lectures, but never anything stronger. On the other hand, I’m sure my students have used far worse terms in reference to me…

Well, I have to give Howard Dean (or at least his M.D. program) some credit: at least he doesn’t think life begins at childbirth like his fellow Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark does (also see James Joyner ). Clark not only believes that life begins at childbirth—he thinks that was the Supreme Court’s holding in Roe v. Wade (which, er, it wasn’t—in fact, the court found that third-trimester abortions were almost never constitutionally protected, something often lost in the grand abortion debate). I’m about as pro-choice as they come, but I can’t go so far as to endorse borderline infanticide. Though, I have to say that scholars who buy the legalist model will love Clark’s endorsement of stare decisis as the sole legitimate approach to judicial decision-making.

I think Howard Dean’s advisors had the right idea by telling Dean to shut up for a while. Clark’s problem is that he can’t do the same, because his persona still isn’t well-defined enough.

Kate Malcolm thinks colons are a scourge in academia. Anecdotal point: my vita lists twelve different works (my dissertation, a working paper that I plan to send out for review Monday, and ten conference papers). My dissertation’s title doesn’t contain a colon; the working paper does. Six of the conference papers have colons in their titles; two have a question mark that functions as a colon; and two lack colons completely.

Of the colon titles, though, only two fit the “witty title, sober subtitle” pattern: one was a co-authored piece that I didn’t pick the title for (which is one of the question-mark titles), and the other uses aliteration in the main title. The remainder contain colons because of allusions to other works (two pieces that are extensions or responses to published material), to set up the context that a theory is being tested in (e.g. “Impeaching the President: The Influence of Constituency Support on a Salient Issue,” where the substantive situation being analyzed isn’t the key focus, but it is the “hook” for the theories being tested), or because I wanted to downplay the authoritativeness of the work.

All that being said, colons are probably overused. Perhaps as full-text indexing of journal articles becomes more widely adopted, including the integration of the SSCI into other databases, colons will become less widespread.

Update: One of the co-authors I impugned above, fellow Ole Miss alum Scott Huffmon, writes:

Obviously, an exception should be made for those of us who feel it is both sport and imperative to come up with the most annoying paper titles. I actually had to harass Bobbi [our other co-author] into that title. I told her, “It may sound and look stupid, but I’m not submitting a title without a colon…it’s tradition.” John White and I decided we would try to put as many colons in titles as possible after a guy … wrote a conference paper titled (the post colon subtitle may be off, but the pithy pre-colon title is correct), “How Bubba Votes: The Voting Behavior of Southern White Males.”

I plan to continue my quest for the most annoying and stupid paper title possible by incorporating unneeded colons whenever possible. I stand defiant in the face of your punctuationist discrimination.

Viva la colon!!!

If this doesn’t prove academics have too much time on their hands, nothing will.

I’m a bit late to the story of Pete Rose admitting he bet on baseball—a story that was actually supposed to be embargoed until his appearance on ABC’s Primetime Live, but no matter (earlier reactions include John Cole’s and Michele’s; everyone in my blogroll who has an RSS feed and had something to say about it is listed here) . I think Larry Ribstein’s reaction one of the more interesting, though I don’t think it gets to the heart of the problem with stated betting on baseball.

That Rose bet on games involving the Reds is the big “no-no” issue; if he’d simply bet on other teams, he’d have received a one year suspension. The key question is what is the harm to Baseball from Rose’s bets?—and, by Baseball, I mean the institution that everyone has been saying Rose sullied. Since nobody claims he actually bet against the Reds, it’s hard to charge him with throwing games; he may have had an extra incentive to win in games he wagered on, but that isn’t throwing a game, and unlike other sports baseball betting is normally on the “money line”—you pick straight-up, not against a point spread—so “point shaving” (or “running up the score“) isn’t an issue. (You can also bet other sports, like football, on the money line, but that isn’t very popular.) Rose’s interest as a bettor coincided with his unbiased interest as a manager.

Now, some have argued that because Rose didn’t bet on every single game, and that he apparently got inside information from other managers (including those in the AL—the Reds are an NL team, and before interleague play intelligence on AL teams was pretty useless for NL managers), his behavior is somehow corrupting to Baseball. Because Rose didn’t bet on all games involving the Reds, the argument is that bookies knew that the Reds were less likely to win the game. Even if that’s true, it’s hard to see how Baseball is harmed. The victim is whoever was on the losing side of the bets lodged by Rose’s bookies because of the informational advantage they had—unless Baseball was betting on games, they weren’t harmed at all. Similarly, Rose’s intelligence on other teams only harmed other bettors—not Baseball. And, ultimately, since virtually everyone who was involved was violating numerous state and federal laws against sports wagering—the harm was to people who were already engaging in illegal conduct. If a thief breaks into a drug dealer’s house and steals his TV, the thief’s criminal act doesn’t absolve the dealer for buying home electronics from the proceeds of his own illegal act.

Now, there are other reasonable arguments against Rose’s betting: that it potentially created the appearance of corruption: for example, that it placed him in a position where he might be able to throw games to have his gambling debts reduced. But there doesn’t seem to be evidence that Rose threw games—and, in general I find “appearance of corruption” arguments specious. You can also argue that Rose harmed Baseball as an institution by denying the allegations for 14 years and impugning the credibility of his accusers and other opponents, including then-NBC reporter Jim Gray (who now spends his time about as far up Kobe Bryant’s ass as Ahmad Rashad was up Michael Jordan’s). And Rose’s frequent appearances in Cooperstown, New York haven’t exactly endeared him to the MLB brass. But Rose’s betting, alone, apparently had no ill effects on Baseball.

Update: John Jenkins disagrees with my assessment, as does David Wright via email; both raise essentially the same point (I'll quote John’s post):

Rose's gambling on the Reds changed the way Rose managed games. Baseball has a 162-game season. When Rose had money riding on a game, he would obviously be managing to win that game at the expense of future games. Suppose Rose was clinging to a one-run game going into the ninth and his closer had pitched the last three days straight and his arm was sore. Rose might pitch the guy to win that game because he had money on it, and then cost the team 3 games over the next 2 weeks that they could have won if that pitcher could have rested that day.

I do agree that having money riding on the game might pervert Rose’s incentive structure—and my overlooking that fact may go to show you how much I really care about baseball as a game. On the other hand, Rose’s mediocrity as a manager is such that he might have made decisions that were weak over the long term anyway, even without the monetary incentive to do so.

Another update: Brian of Redbird Nation makes a compelling case for a shorter-than-lifetime ban for Pete Rose.

Did Sen. Clinton get too much—or not enough—heat for her (badly delivered) joke in a fundraising speech that Mahatma Gandhi worked for two years at a St. Louis convenience store?

My gut feeling is that it was rather innocuous. But it does raise the interesting question of double standards: as Keith Olbermann asked David Brock (no relation to my co-blogger, Brock Sides) on Countdown this evening, what if it was Bill Frist, or another Republican without a “bigot paper trail,” who made the remark instead of Hillary Clinton? Brock evaded the specific hypothetical, but I think it would have fit into the “Republicans are bigoted” narrative—lending itself to the sort of wire or NYT story that says the comment, while minor, fits into a long line of statements by Republicans (Lott, Thurmond, Santorum…). By contrast, nobody’s story on Hillary’s comments is going to bring up Robert Byrd’s segregationist past or his more recent “N-word” episode.

That raises the larger question: that of whether the dominant narratives are biased. “Republicans are mean” is a pretty easy narrative to fit any story about Republicans into: the administration wants to “put arsenic in drinking water”; Republicans are “cutting benefits.” But there’s not really a “Democrats are mean” narrative: nobody left of NewsMax would write that “Democrats’ plans for higher trade barriers will impoverish the third world,” “the Clinton Administration’s plan to increase regulation of NOx particles will cost the economy $X billion per life saved,” or “Kyoto, if fully implemented, would only decrease global temperatures by 0.X degrees Celsius in 2100.”

I don’t really know the answer to that. And it’s possible Republicans benefit from other dominant narratives: a Republican who took Howard Dean’s position on the war might be ascribed more credibility. These media narratives may just be the long-term results of what John Petrocik calls “issue ownership”: efforts by the major parties to sieze the position held by the median voter on particular issues. It is possible that because Democrats “own” racial issues, they insulate themselves from attack for being insensitive on race, just as Republicans’ ownership of law-and-order issues can protect them from the “soft on crime” charge.

Meanwhile, Steven Taylor didn’t see how the joke might be construed as funny.