Kelley of suburban blight thinks the President’s plan to spend $1.5 Billion to encourage people to get and stay married is a waste of money, as does Amanda Butler of Crescat Sententia. On the other hand, Sully thinks it’s a great idea that nonetheless further proves the administration hates gay people (no, really, I’m not making that up, although it might be a slight exaggeration).

Me? I’m with Kelley and Amanda. Give me the $6 this idiotic program will cost me and every other American and I’ll decide to get married when I damn well please, thank you very much. I even promise not to marry Britney Spears (or Paris Hilton or Xtina) and annul the marriage 55 hours later.

Lefty Joe Conason thinks Bush is going to the Moon and Mars for oil (hint: if you’re looking for hydrocarbons like methane, they’re probably in the outer solar system—they don’t call them “gas giants” for nothing). Righty Brendan Miniter thinks the Mars trip is a great way to solve osteoperosis. Conrad points out that both men are idiots.

James Joyner, inquiring about the I-95 tanker explosion today, asks:

How one drives a tanker truck over a barrier from an overpass, I’ll never know.

It’s actually pretty simple. The tanker apparently hit the barrier on the overpass at excessive speed, which made it crash through the barrier of the flyover ramp from the I-895 Harbour Tunnel Thruway southbound to I-95 southbound and land on the northbound lanes of I-95 below. The concrete barriers on bridges and highways, like metal guard rails, are designed to deflect vehicles back onto the roadway to avoid catastrophic crashes like this, but there’s only so much force a static barrier can deflect.

Incidentally, similar accident in 1998 in Memphis, on the one-lane ramp that connects I-40 to the north side of the Memphis 40/240 loop, claimed eight lives, and is the impetus for rebuilding the I-240/40 Midtown interchange to move the 90° turn to ground level.

Of further interest:

• Baltimore’s NBC4 has posted a collection of images from the crash.
• Microsoft TerraServer has an aerial photo of the interchange; the ramp at the top is the one the tanker fell off. I-95 is the road running SW-NE, while I-895 leaves directly to the east.

Since Ron Suskind’s alleged tell-all book has come out, Paul O’Neill, the ex-treasury secretary whose revelations the book is based on, has taken to the talk-show circuit in an attempt to disavow many of the more sensational quotes from the book.

• James Joyner is among those noting O’Neill’s pointed non-endorsement of the Democratic opposition.
• O’Neill is dragging out the “Ron Suskind’s name is on the cover” defense for the allegations that he leaked Treasury Department documents.
• John Cole notes that many of O’Neill’s revelations aren’t that revelatory, while Matt Stinson compares doves’ jumping on the O’Neill story with hawks’ leaping onto Iraqi WMD revelations as they appear.

Then again, maybe O’Neill’s just preemptively defending himself from the hit squad Kevin Drum thinks has been sent after him by Karl Rove.

As I’ve noted before, there’s a Democratic delegate selection rule that requires 15% support in a congressional district for a candidate to receive delegates. However, as the Commissar notes, the caucus procedure isn’t exactly a single-ballot electoral situation, according to Carl Hulse of The New York Times:

The chairman of the caucus determines the “viability” threshold for groups backing each presidential candidates, which in most cases will be 15 percent of the number of people attending. Caucusgoers then have 30 minutes to divide into preference groups for the candidates. If some groups supporting candidates do not reach the 15 percent level, those people then have up to half an hour to realign with other campaigns.

At this stage, the pressure will be on the newly liberated caucusgoers to enlist with another candidate. In a deeper layer of strategy, some participants might even align with a candidate they are not that wild about to cut into the count of those who most threaten their first choice.

At the end of 30 minutes, the preference groups are counted again and the delegates are apportioned by multiplying the number in the preference group by the number of delegates up for grabs in a precinct, then dividing by the total attending the caucus. In cases of ties, delegates can be awarded by flipping a coin or drawing straws.

The Commissar expects this will lead to some strategic behavior, as groups of voters who might prefer other candidates may coalesce around a single “ABD” candidate to counter the Dean groundswell. Yet there are a couple of obstacles to such a process:

1. This process only happens at caucus sites, rather than at a higher level of aggregation. Gephardt may get the nod at one location, Edwards at another, and Lieberman at a third.
2. The caucuses only elect delegates to county conventions; as The Green Papers notes, the process for choosing congressional district and statewide delegates happens in late April, by which time the nomination will essentially be decided—and thus almost all of Iowa’s national convention delegates are likely to opt for the presumed nominee at that point, rather than following the caucus-goers’ preferences.

So, in the grand scheme of things: Iowa decides virtually nothing, and essentially is as important as today’s eminently forgettable D.C. non-binding primary, yet it’s been the center of media attention for two months. Great.

A few weeks ago, I promised a response to a Jonah Goldberg Townhall.com piece whining about ignorant voters. Now, as Brett Marston points out, Goldberg is advocating bringing back literacy tests on The Corner (just in case you needed another reason besides John Derbyshire not to send Bill Buckley any of your hard-earned cash). Quoth Goldberg, in typical cacophonous Corner fashion:

Hear, hear for Jon [Alder] on that score. But I’d go one better. I think it’s about time we toughened up the requirements for voting. Literacy tests, poll taxes and the like may have once been legitimately suspect because they were used to disciminate against blacks. But today, I simply see no principled reason we couldn’t apply some sort of test to everybody. Indeed, I would be more comfortable having newly naturlized immigrants decide the future of this country at the ballot box than leaving it up to, say, typical white 18-22 year-olds. I know that the immigrants can pass a civics test. I have no such confidence in the kids at my local malls.

Quoth Brett:

Democracy at the NRO. The poor and uneducated need not apply. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Since I know nobody’s going to read my dissertation to find out what I think of the elitist line of argument, let me simply state that:

1. Citizens have no “civic duty” to be informed about politics.
2. Citizens have no “civic duty” to vote.

Not only is it irrational for voters to learn about politics, it’s downright immoral to insist that people participate in the political process, especially since, for J. Random Jackass working at the meatpacking plant, the marginal difference between Howard Dean and George W. Bush is zero—no matter how much Dean and Bush try to tell him otherwise.

You want to know why people say they don’t know enough about particular candidates? It’s because we (political scientists, media types, and what have you) insist that it’s important that they know the minutae of Howard Dean’s foreign policy views or Wes Clark’s tax plan or Dennis Kucinich’s DSM-IV diagnosis. The dirty little secret of politics is people don’t make decisions based on that stuff—even if they do know it. Ultimately, it’s more about “who do I trust more,” “whose politics seem closest to mine,” and “do I prefer people who look like thumbs over people who resemble chimps” than “Bush is going to give me $32.65 more take-home pay a week than Dean.” Which is as it should be. There are enough of us warped political junkies as it is; let’s not add to the population.

Update: Brett Marston has more thoughts on this topic. Incidentally, if you—like Brett—“still want to read [my] dissertation,” it's all online here, along with pretty much everything I’ve written for conferences (or otherwise had my name slapped on).

Notice to any prospective employer who got here by Googling my name:

It’s been nearly ten years since Memphis State University inexplicably became the University of Memphis, and it’s still causing problems. Case in point: my Ole Miss transcript, which (in addition to not having my degree posted on it yet, despite noting that I passed all my exams, completed by dissertation, and had it approved by my committee) claims I previously attended “The University of Tennessee Memphis,” an institution that doesn’t even exist: the Memphis campus of UT is properly styled The Universty of Tennessee Health Science Center, while the University of Memphis isn’t even part of the UT system for political reasons that make zero sense to me.

The young woman I discussed this problem with today at the registrar’s office did promise to change it—but the university’s new computer system (thank you, SAP) doesn’t know about the name change. End result: it’ll read “Memphis State University” on any future transcripts I receive. Someone, somewhere is smiling. That person is not me. I’m annoyed that I’m going to spend the rest of my life as a graduate of a university that requires me to include this sort of crap on my vita:

B.A., Political Science, The University of Memphis (formerly known as Memphis State University), 1998.

In addition to all the bloviating on the left and right over same-sex marriage (or “marital equality” as Chris Geidner of En Banc would have me call it—even though that sounds more like a call for the imposition of community property laws to me), the other excitement in the non-heterosexual world has, of late, been over lesbians.

Apropos of this topic, Matt Stinson ponders whether the “L” word stands for “lipstick” in title of the new Showtime series (which I guess would be in the opposite direction of Showtime’s other gay-themed series, “Queer As Folk”), while Conrad reveals that Russian duo TATU aren’t really lesbians, but they’re breaking up anyway.

Signifying Nothing has recently joined the prestigious neighborhood known as Conrad’s blogroll. In addition to leading the sort of swinging lifestyle that I can but hope to emulate, Conrad is a fellow alumnus of the University of Mississippi.

More coherent thought later today, perhaps…