I’m afraid I don’t have the Olympic Fever, which is just as well as I much enjoyed the wrap-up of Arrested Development on Fox Friday night (in glorious HD), including Gary Cole’s uncredited cameo as the taxi driver in Iraq, along with everything coming full-circle, the in-jokes, Justine Bateman, Pete Rose, and the shocking revelations.

The good news for those of you who are fans of Michael Cera (George Michael) and Alia Shawkat (Maeby): they show up on Veronica Mars next month for an episode.

Every day, I fast forward through the first 10–15 minutes of SportsCenter to finish PTI (suck on it, Dan Patrick!). The last two days, I’ve seen Pedro Gomez’s visage in the middle of the NHL betting ring story segment and both days I started to wonder what Barry Bonds’ involvement in the whole affair was. It was like seeing Shelley Smith reporting on something other than Shaq or Jim Gray reporting from somewhere other than Kobe Bryant’s ass or Pete Rose’s garbage cans.

By the way, if I just randomly came up with a fake Hispanic name, I think it would be “Pedro Gomez,” which I’m pretty sure is the equivalent to “John Smith” when you want to check into a hotel under a pseudonym in Mexico. (Not to be confused with Michigan State football coach “John L. Smith,” whose first name I believed was actually something like “Johnnel” for about two years.)

My email today included something that seems dangerously close to a teaching award:

Recently you should have received an invitation to the first HOPE Banquet sponsored by Residence Life and Housing Services. The celebration will be held on [redacted].

HOPE stands for Honoring Our Professors’ Excellence, which is the entire purpose of the evening. Each of our Resident Assistant and Graduate Assistant student staff members were offered the opportunity to nominate one Duke faculty member to be invited to this event. The students were asked to select a faculty member who has made a tremendous impact upon them, either inside or outside of the classroom. You were nominated as one of those faculty.

Between this and going to the Teaching and Learning Conference, I may be drummed out of political science (or at least the methods section) in short order…

From Dale Franks, at the end of a lengthy post concurring-in-part and dissenting-in-part with a post by Jon Henke:

[O]ur choice is between Republicans who are willing to easily betray our principles in order to fight the Global War on Terror, and Democrats who are unwilling to fight a Global War on Terror at all.

And, the counterpoint from Jon Henke:

Remember: the people who told us that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were all Taliban, captured on the battlefield or otherwise terrorists are the same people who swear, really, that the domestic surveillance program is “solely for intercepting communications of suspected al Qaeda members or related terrorist groups.”

We can trust them, because they would never mislead us.

But, hey, we get to keep our tax cuts!

Love Monkey has apparently been canned after three episodes. It’s a shame, since I thought Tuesday’s episode was the best so far—and, like I said before, it was nice seeing Tom Cavanaugh and Judy Greer again.

Shorter Tom Smith: I don’t know whether or not the president’s domestic spying program is actually, you know, legal or constitutional, but since members of Congress sometimes put electoral considerations ahead of the law, the concerns of the elected representatives of the people of the United States are to be completely dismissed, because a few executive branch political appointees (and I) think that the program initiated by their boss is somehow consistent with the Constitution under some sort of complete hand-waving, “anything goes” Article II doctrine that makes the court’s interpretation of the Commerce Clause in Wickard v. Filburn seem like a restraint on congressional authority.

Shorter Jeff Goldstein and Wall Street Journal editorial board: Separation of powers is for idiots.

One more thing: the first person to reply with “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” needs to come up with an argument, not a slogan.

Update: A perhaps-related post from Venkat at Begging to Differ.

A former student at Millsaps asked me to help her out with avoiding retaking basic stats in her master’s program today, so I had to go hunting for all the information, including the catalog description. Weirdly enough, not only is my course website still lurking around at Millsaps, but I am still listed in the 2005–06 catalog as a professor in the department (see page 25 of the PDF). If Google (which is probably sentient at this point) thinks I still work there, does that mean I actually do and just don’t know it?

In other academic news, I just landed an interview at a liberal arts college in the Midwest for a one-year position in American politics and political behavior. Jobs, as they say, are good, and jobs higher up in the USN&WR rankings from Millsaps are priceless—even if there should be giant confidence error bounds on the rankings.

I am now the proud owner of two tickets to see Death Cab For Cutie (with Franz Ferdinand) on April 7th at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Would that finding a date for the second ticket was so easy as getting the ticket in the first place…

Some folks are making a big deal about U.N. ambassador John Bolton’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize, for no good reason. As Eugene Volokh pointed out when Stanley “Tookie” Williams’ Nobel nomination was being ballyhooed, the pool of people who can nominate Nobel Peace Prize candidates is rather broad, and includes all professors of the social sciences: I, for example, could nominate Friday for a Nobel if the spirit moved me to do so.

Some wags might argue that a dog would be more deserving than many past recipients of the prize, much less random nominees.

While doing some work on a small project for the Director of Undergraduate Studies of our department, I stumbled across this course in the undergraduate bulletin and my first thought was “this would be a really cool class to teach.”

The new Monday Night Football booth is Mike Tirico, Tony Kornheiser, and Joe Theismann, along with two sideline reporters (Michele Tafoya and Suzy Kolber); this apparently clears the way for Al Michaels to stay with John Madden as the latter moves to NBC‘s Sunday night broadcast. Say what you will about Tirico’s alleged personal sleaziness, but he’s a good play-by-play guy, and the idea of Mr. Tony on an open mike for three hours a week is entertaining in and of itself (even though this may require TK to start watching some sports again).

Speaking of Mr. Tony, one wonders if a rapprochment with ESPN Radio might be in the offing; either way, canning Eric Kusileus or Colin Cowherd (or preferably both) needs to be on the agenda.

þ: Balloon Juice and others.

It looks like I soon will be able to move to South Dakota and become an affirmative action hire. I can hardly wait…

þ: InstaPundit, who doesn’t even find this heh-worthy.

The news that the Duke-UNC game is available in high-definition on ESPNHD, but will be blacked out in Durham in favor of Jefferson Pilot’s craptacular standard definition broadcast (which, no doubt, will be poorly upconverted to HD on our CBS affiliate), has tipped the balance in favor of me watching House on Fox (in HD) at 9 rather than via TiVo delay.

This is one of those days I wish I were a Nielsen family.

Leopold Stotch has some thoughts on meritocracy in academe. At my end of the food chain, my perception is that I’ve more often lost out on positions because search committees (or deans), for whatever reason, want people from “name schools.” The only time I’ve heard gender or race discussed on the job trail is in reference to other positions that I didn’t apply for. However, I have had my graduate program insulted to my face through backhanded compliments of my other achievements in interviews (“well, normally, we wouldn’t hire someone from Mississippi, but since you have that ICPSR thing…”).

Me, just over nine months ago:

It wouldn’t be particularly surprising to see [Mike] DuBose move up to head coach [at Millsaps] sooner rather than later, as rumors of current head coach David Saunders moving on to a I-A assistant coaching job have been circling for a while—recently, he was rumored to be on the shortlist for Ed Orgeron’s staff at Ole Miss.

The Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, yesterday:

Former Alabama coach Mike DuBose is running his own football program in the NCAA again.

DuBose was promoted Friday at Jackson’s Millsaps College, a Division III school, to replace David Saunders. DuBose was Millsaps’ defensive coordinator last season.

Saunders left Millsaps after three seasons to take over as linebackers coach at Ole Miss [working for Ed Orgeron - ed]. The departure created the opening for DuBose to move into his first college head coaching position since 2000, when he was forced out after four tumultuous seasons in Tuscaloosa.

It’s almost a shame I couldn’t predict my own career prospects at Millsaps so easily…

After a sucktacular first half, the second half of Super Bowl XL managed to restore my faith in the game. And, while the turnout at the party was minimal (consisting solely of Nick and myself), I think it was fun nonetheless—mercilessly mocking Al Michaels and John Madden is best done with an audience, methinks.

I wish I could say the same about ABC‘s presentation. Thank God that Chris Berman and Stuart Scott won’t be within 100 miles of this game for the forseeable future.

In any event, congratulations to the Pittsburgh Steelers on the occasion of their well-deserved win, and to Jerome Bettis for capping off his career with a Super Bowl victory.

Mind you, I’m not just using that title because the Venezuelan dictator-wannabe says President Bush is worse than Adolf Hitler. Nope, it’s because of his economic ignorance:

Chavez, a retired army paratrooper who often accuses Washington of trying to overthrow him, warned he could shut Venezuelan oil refineries in the United States and sell oil for the U.S. market elsewhere if Washington cuts off ties.

If Chávez really wants to cut off his regime’s flow of refinery profits (via Citgo) from the U.S., I suspect the administration would be more than happy to oblige him. Moreover, since any such effort on his part would surely be countered by the administration seizing Venezuela’s U.S. assets, including Citgo, I think it’s a rather empty threat from Caracas.

EDSBS links to the news that legendary Ole Miss coach Johnny Vaught has passed at the age of 96. His 190–61-12 record (.757 winning percentage) over 25 years will almost certainly never be bested by a Rebel coach.

Leopold Stotch duplicates it for the masses who aren’t APSA members.

It’s Serenity, but with Muppets.

The piece that Dirk and I wrote for The Political Methodologist on Quantian is now out in the Fall 2005 issue, along with a mostly-glowing review of Stata 9 by Neal Beck that no doubt will annoy the R purists, as he suggests he will be ditching R in favor of Stata in his graduate methods courses; a review of a new book on event-history analysis by Kwang Teo, whose apartment floor I once slept on in Nashville; and an interesting piece on doing 3-D graphics in R.

In other methods news, I had the privilege (along with a packed house) of hearing Andrew Gelman of Columbia speak this afternoon on his joint research on the relationship between vote choice and income in the states, which uses some fancy multi-level modeling stuff that I have yet to play much with.

Incidentally, it was fun to see someone else who uses latex-beamer for their presentations; I could tell the typeface was the standard TeX sf (sans-serif) face, but I wasn’t sure which beamer theme Andrew was using off-hand.

What possible value could a search committee for a non-tenure-track teaching position find in a sample of my research? I’ll concede that recommendations are valuable (if something of a chore to orchestrate), but I simply fail to see how a writing sample could be of any use whatsoever.

Today’s Duke Chronicle reports on the results of Ted Roof’s latest efforts to dupe impressionable 18-year-olds into coming to Durham to play a sport other than basketball rebuild Duke’s football program on the recruiting trail, said efforts yielding (of all things) a pair of Swedes. As in kids from Sweden. I shit you not. I didn’t realize Malmö was such a hotbed of gridiron talent…

Meanwhile the best football player on campus is still pursuing the revenue sport Duke doesn’t suck at. Go figure.

Will Baude asks why President Bush asked for Congress to pass the line-item veto in last night State of the Union address. He advances six semi-plausible explanations for why Bush would have done so.

Let me propose a seventh (and far simpler) explanation: Bush wants Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that provides for the line-item veto. Yes, it is relatively unlikely to happen, but then again I don’t see the Supreme Court flip-flopping on Clinton v. New York (or letting Congress get away with weaseling around it) as any more likely.

It seems I spoke too soon; the financial powers that be apparently are unconvinced that keeping around a visitor to do something (teach sections of undergraduate methods) that perhaps a dozen or more of the department’s tenured or tenure-track faculty members are nominally qualified to do needs a bit more justification, particularly in the midst of a “budget crunch,” at least by “university that has more money than the Queen of England” standards. Nothing definite, but playing the odds in the presence of asymmetrical payoffs for misprediction seems like a bad idea at this point—potentially wasting hours of my life on applications beats potentially having to beg for a job at Best Buy or Red Hat, any day.

On the upside, a whole new vista of postdocs and one-years have been opened to me. Happy happy, joy joy.

Incidentally, I’m reminded of one of my favorite NewsRadio quotes: “You can’t take something off the Internet. It’s like taking pee out of a swimming pool.”