Alex Tabarrok says he wants to move to Switzerland to take advantage of the low taxes and the declining marginal income tax rates. (Declining as a function of income, that is.)

He may want to reconsider, after the xenophobic Swiss People’s Party gained 11 seats in the recent Parlimentary elections, making them the largest bloc in the governing coalition.

On the subject of marginal tax rates, could one of the econo-bloggers perhaps explain the argument in this paper that declining marginal rates are a property of “optimal tax systems“? The paper completely lost me, so you’ll need to explain it in short words that a mere philosopher turned computer geek would understand.

I’m willing to reconsider my view that an income tax with increasing marginal rates strikes the best balance between fairness and minimizing economic disincentives.

Martin Devon has his latest overview of how the nine dwarves are doing in the race for the Democratic nomination in 2004.

Today is the second day with nothing new in the mainstream media about the Haley Barbour/Council of Conservative Citizens flap. (Today’s Clarion-Ledger pieces on the campaign both focus on voters’ lack of interest in the campaigns’ attack ads: see here and here.)

Bloggers like Kevin Drum and Atrios who jumped on the story early no longer seem interested in giving it any traction, probably because “their guy” looks about as bad as Barbour does. I can’t really blame them—after all, since it’s not about a party but rather about a whole state political elite that lends groups like the CofCC credibility, there’s no real “story” any more, if by “story” you mean “something to beat over the head of Republicans.” Moderates indeed.

The message is clear: those Mississippians who care that an avowedly racist organization is actively involved in the campaigns of both major parties in our state will receive no support in trying to get rid of this cancer from other folks—whether in the mainstream media or the blogosphere—unless there’s some partisan “win” involved. Thanks. We appreciate it.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere:

• Skip Perry thinks Barbour wearing a state flag lapel pin isn’t as big a deal as some are trying to make it out to be.

My earlier posts are here.

Matt Stinson tears into CalPundit for his risible suggestion that he, Paul Krugman, and Atrios are “moderates” (see also John Cole). Allow me to add my two cents.

Newsflash to Kevin (and anyone else in punditry under the misguided impression they are moderate): nobody with a well-developed political ideology is a moderate. By definition, if you are liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, communist, Enviro-wacko, batshit neocon, or whatever the hell Pat Buchanan and Bob Novak are (paleo-pseudo-con?), you cannot be moderate. George Bush isn’t moderate. Nor is Colin Powell, Janet Reno, Howard Dean, Glenn Reynolds, Megan McArdle, or Kevin Drum. Nor am I.

Most Americans—and most people the world over, in fact—don’t have consistent, ideological belief systems. The absence of those belief systems makes them moderate, because they just react to whatever’s going on in the political ether; if you’re lucky, you might be able to pin their beliefs to some overarching fundamental value (“hard work“, “equality“, “liberty“).

There are only two types of true moderate: people who don’t care about politics, and centrist politicians (and this latter class of people generally care less about politics than they care about keeping their jobs—I defy you to explain the behavior of Arlen Specter or Olympia Snowe otherwise). Bloggers and New York Times columnists aren’t. Anyone who cares enough about politics enough to post several essays a day explicating his or her worldview is not a moderate, and neither is anyone who’s taking time away from his academic career to publish two incoherent essays a week in America’s flagship newspaper.

Said people may be swell, wonderful, good fun at parties, open-minded, and paragons of virtue and erudition. It is not a sin to have an ideology; in fact, it is a good thing. So please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you don’t have one.

My co-blogger has equated Richard Stallman’s proposed abolition of copyright with slavery. Kevin Aylward has equated Stallman’s agenda with Communism.

Both are being unfair to Stallman.

First, let’s look at Aylward’s charge of Communism. Aylward writes:

Stealing the product, regardless of the extreme moral relativism employed by Stallman, is wrong. And he’s not just talking about teenagers downloading copyrighted materials on Kazaa, he wants the remove the rights of the content producers as well. Your output as an artist (or programmer) belongs to EVERYONE. Replace the word EVERYONE with STATE and what do you get?

Communism

Who owns the air we breathe? “No one” would be the best answer. “Everyone” might be just as good. But that’s hardly the same as the air being owned by the state, and it does not make the USA a Communist nation.

Next, let’s look at Chris’s charge of slavery. Chris writes:

Taking away that choice by requiring them to give away their work—Stallman’s ultimate utopia—is morally indistinguishable from telling programmers they are slaves. That Stallman would have the state feed and clothe the authors of software and other works makes it no less slavery than if the system were operated by rich white plantation owners.

Let’s just set aside the fact that the vast majority of software development is not creation of software for sale. Part of my job is software development, but the stuff I develop would not be of the slightest interest to anyone but my employer. (As a matter of fact, the software I develop for my employer is in the public domain.)

In most countries, the state claims a monopoly on law enforcement. If you want to be a cop, you have to work for the state, and accept the state’s terms of employment. Cops are fed and clothed by the state. Does this make them slaves? No, because they have the option of getting some other job.

Personally, I would not be in favor of completely abolishing copyright. But Stallman has something interesting and valuable to add to the ongoing dialog about copyright protection. And unfair accusations of Communism and slavery do nothing to further that dialog.

I wrote here:

On the other hand, given Musgrove’s own admission of past participation in the rally, I find it hard to fault Barbour for attending it this year. And—barring further revelations—I’m willing to give Barbour the benefit of the doubt.

But, within hours, I also wrote:

Yet despite these ties, many politicians—black, white, Democrat, Republican—continue to attend the rally, as the Magnolia Report correctly notes. As I’ve noted before, however, this is exactly the sort of thing the Council thrives on: the appearance of respectability. Getting its members in positions to glad-hand political candidates is what they want, and the Black Hawk Rally was a prime opportunity. And it’s time that Mississippi’s politicians told the Black Hawk folks once and for all, thanks but no thanks.

A bit of explanation is in order. When I wrote the first post, I was still buying Bill Lord’s allegation that the rally and barbecue were separate events, with the rally sponsored by groups unaffiliated with the Council; I don’t consider this allegation credible any more.

If I were to rewrite my first statement in terms of what I know now, I would have to say that I fault Haley Barbour for attending the rally, as I fault any other candidate for public office who attended it in the past—including Ronnie Musgrove, who’s damn lucky that his smiling face isn’t plastered on the Council’s website right next to Barbour’s. (Barbour does rack up some extra sleaze points for his failure to demand his picture be removed from the site.)

Now, you can make an argument that a principled voter should turn to one of the third-party candidates in the race. However, as a group they’re all fairly unappealing: neither the Green Party nor the Reform Party deserve even the miniscule amount of added credibility that my vote for their candidates would give them, and the other alternative is running under the slogan “Keep the Flag, Change the Governor.”

More to the point, in a close, winner-takes-all election it is irrational for voters to cast a ballot for a candidate with a negligible chance of winning the election if they have transitive preferences among the candidates with non-negligible chances to win—which is political science speak for “vote for a major-party candidate if you prefer him or her over one of the other major-party candidates.” And in this campaign—taking into account my policy preferences and the fact that on most issues of consequence Musgrove’s position is more illiberal* than Barbour’s—at the moment I still have to give a small edge to Barbour, notwithstanding his pathetic handling of this situation and refusal to come out forthrightly against the Council’s use of his picture.

Kevin Aylward does me the huge favor of explaining my distaste for Richard Stallman’s agenda. Indeed, in my opinion, the key reason why producing free software is morally superior to producing proprietary software is that the author is making the choice to give away the fruits of his labor for the benefit of others.

Taking away that choice by requiring them to give away their work—Stallman’s ultimate utopia—is morally indistinguishable from telling programmers they are slaves. That Stallman would have the state feed and clothe the authors of software and other works makes it no less slavery than if the system were operated by rich white plantation owners.

In the mainstream media today:

• The DeSoto Times Today carries a writeup of its editorial board’s Friday meeting with Ronnie Musgrove.
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a lengthy article on the state gubernatorial race, which explains where the “Keep the Flag, Change the Governor” signs and bumper stickers came from:

  This year, in addition to [Green Party candidate Sherman Lee] Dillon, there’s a Reform Party candidate, Shawn O‘Hara, and John Thomas Cripps, who’s running on the memory of the 2001 state flag referendum, in which voters resoundingly turned down a design—favored by Musgrove and most of the state’s business community—that would have removed the Confederate battle emblem. His posters urge voters to “Keep the Flag, Change the Governor.”

• Delta Democrat Times columnist Amy Redwines considers her vote. She writes in part:

  I used to be happy to live here, as did a lot of other young people. But that was before I grew up and began to understand what kind of situation this state is in. I love Mississippi, and it will always be my home.

  We need a person in the governor’s mansion who can make this state do a 360-degree turnaround. If that doesn’t happen, we will continue to slide downhill.

  People already think Mississippi is chock full of backward rednecks and bigots, but there is more to the people here than those superficial perceptions.

• Jackson’s alt-weekly, the Free Press has an extensive comment thread on the Barbour/CofCC/Blackhawk situation.

In the blogosphere and thereabouts:

• Not Quite Tea and Crumpets wonders if the New York Times Magazine is seeing racism where there’s really partisanship in airing complaints about Haley Barbour’s discussion of the “Musgrove-Blackmon ticket.”
• Patrick Carver elaborates on the theme, noting that Blackmon and Barbour have opposite positions on the tort reform issue; if Barbour’s going to move tort reform through the Senate, he’ll probably need a reform supporter in charge of the chamber—and Blackmon is no fan of tort reform.
• MississippiPolitical.com helpfully compiles a list of people who have attended CofCC-sponsored events (a veritable “who’s who” of Mississippi politics); there’s also a lengthy commentary that is skeptical about Barbour’s protestations of ignorance.

This post will be updated throughout Sunday; previous posts can be found here.

I haven’t had much to say about the Gregg Easterbrook situation—Daniel Drezner, as always, does a good job explaining the background while Matt Stinson has a roundup of reactions.

I think the more interesting angle here is ESPN’s pathetic reaction to the flap, and in that I generally agree with Jonah Goldberg (yes, I did a double-take writing that sentence too), who said:

[C]reating a climate where offending Jews automatically results in your termination will do far more to hurt Jews in this country than anything which might have resulted from Easterbrook’s original comments.

No new mainstream media coverage today of the Haley Barbour/Council of Conservative Citizens flap; the best resource is still Friday’s Associated Press report by Emily Wagster Pettus, who covers the Mississippi political beat for the AP. (Abbreviated versions have appeared elsewhere, including in today’s New York Times, but for the whole context I recommend reading the full version.)

However, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger’s lead editorial Saturday calls on Barbour, and other Mississippi politicians, to repudiate the Council. They write, in part:

Separatist groups — whether predominantly white or black — have no place in modern Mississippi. Neither do groups that preach hatred and distrust of religious groups.

The CCC is entitled to its views and enjoys all First Amendment rights to publish and display what it pleases on its Web site. But, at some point, Mississippi’s political elite in both parties need to stop winking and nudging over the CCC’s obvious entrenchment at the Black Hawk political gatherings and decide if they want to be identified with white supremacist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine carries a lengthy, mostly negative profile of Barbour. It contains something that might be some more grist for the mill:

According to [Gene] Triggs, the once thriving town [Yazoo City] has never recovered from the period of school integration in the 1970’s and 80’s, when many whites, like Haley and Marsha Barbour, packed their children off to the private academies that were opening across the state. “Any parent has the right to send their kids where they can get the best education,” Triggs says, but keeping your kids in public school “was one positive stand a person could take to make the community better. I felt he should have exerted some leadership, and he never did.”

Around the blogosphere, things have also gotten quiet; apparently, some of those who jumped on for partisan advantage are having trouble trying to justify Democrats’ past participation in the rally, including appearances by Ronnie Musgrove and attorney general Mike Moore. However, there are at least some new posts:

• David Niewart (Orcinus) thinks this is another incidence of Republicans’ “congenital racism” showing itself.
• Josh Chafetz of OxBlog (in a post I somehow missed yesterday, probably because they don’t have a useful RSS feed) says “I condemn that kind of morally obtuse idiocy outright, and it would be really nice if some major players in the national GOP could put some pressure on Barbour to apologize.” Chafetz isn’t particularly enamored of Musgrove either, and suggests that “decent people” consider a third-party candidate (not that any of them are likely much better…).
• Greg Wythe looks at the NYT Magazine piece (scroll down a ways to see the discussion).
• Mark of Not Quite Tea and Crumpets thinks the election has gone “to hell in a handbasket”.
• LeanLeft asks if Mississippi can be given back in light of Musgrove’s past participation in the rally. (Back to who? The Indians?)

My posts on the topic, in reverse chronological order, appear here.

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution blogs on an Alan Krueger New York Times piece that reports on the latest research by Larry Bartels* on the effects of what he describes as “uninformed preferences” on voters’ decisions. Alex has some interesting thoughts on the substantive meaning of Bartels’ research, as does Robert Garcia Tagorda.

For what it’s worth, Bartels’ most famous piece on the topic (“Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections,” American Journal of Political Science, February 1996) concluded that low levels of information in the electorate had actually benefitted Democrats in presidential elections over the history of the ANES up to that point (I recall that this advantage gained the party an average of around 2% of the vote); that conclusion, however, may be time-bound.

John Cole adds his outrage to Matt Stinson’s regarding the Senate’s idiotic decision to require the Iraqis to pay back half of the $20 billion reconstruction aid package. Frankly, the idea is complete lunacy, for reasons both John and Matt ably articulate.

Today’s Associated Press report by Emily Wagster Pettus, coupled with similar reporting by The Washington Post’s political columnist Al Kamen, suggests that our friends at the Council of Conservative Citizens have been overblowing their ties to prominent politicians to puff themselves up. Indeed, the Council admitted as much:

Lord said the CCC does not endorse candidates and the Barbour picture was included on the group’s Internet site because the “Web master was just seeking some publicity for our organization.”

But the group did sponsor the Black Hawk rally, right? Well—not exactly:

Lord said the CCC held a separate barbecue the same day as the Black Hawk rally, which traditionally attracts a broad spectrum of candidates, Democratic and Republican. [emphasis added]

And what of the scandalous nature of the Black Hawk event? Democratic incumbent Ronnie Musgrove is no stranger to it:

Musgrove said Thursday he had attended the Black Hawk rally in the past but didn’t this year because of a scheduling conflict.

Did Barbour make a mistake? Sure; he shouldn’t have let himself get photographed with a prominent member of the Council. That’s Politics 101. And frankly I think he should ask the group, politely, to take his picture off the site, although legally he really can’t stop them from using it if they insist on doing so*.

So, to review, for those who don’t read blockquotes:

• The CCC doesn’t sponsor the Black Hawk rally. (The photo at their site suggests that the emcee of the rally, however, is the “Field Director” of the CCC.)
• Haley Barbour apparently wasn’t at the group’s barbecue, which is a separate event.
• Nonetheless, Barbour was photographed in a group with five other people, one of whom was the emcee of the rally and the “Field Director” of the CCC. (Whether Barbour was aware of his affiliation with the group is an open question.)

How does this affect my opinion of the matter? Obviously, I think Barbour should ask the group to remove the photo from their web site. And I’d like to see Mississippi politicians—Republicans and Democrats alike—stop attending the Black Hawk rally, since at the very least the organizers apparently have no qualms about inviting a person with a leadership position in the CCC to serve as emcee of the event.

On the other hand, given Musgrove’s own admission of past participation in the rally, I find it hard to fault Barbour for attending it this year. And—barring further revelations—I’m willing to give Barbour the benefit of the doubt.

* “Rea” in comments at Ricky West’s place says that Barbour would have legal recourse if the group didn’t remove the picture after he requested it. Since IANAL, I’ll take his/her word for it.

Today’s bullet-point summary of what’s happening in the saga of Haley Barbour’s apparent coziness with the Council of Conservative Citizens, better known as the respectable man’s off-shoot of the Ku Klux Klan (which I’ll update throughout the day as events warrant). All of my posts on this topic can be found here. Scroll down for new material as the day progresses; this post will stay at the top until Day 3.

In the mainstream media:

• The Clarion-Ledger Thursday morning has an extensive piece on the whole flap. Telling quote for those who want to single out Barbour and Republicans for criticism:

  [Democratic nominee Ronnie] Musgrove said Thursday he had attended the Black Hawk rally in the past but didn't this year because of a scheduling conflict.

• The Washington Post notes that the Council of Conservative Citizens’ ties to the Black Hawk fundraiser may have been exaggerated by the group:

  But Bill Lord, the council’s Mississippi field director and one of the folks in the picture, told our colleague Tom Edsall that it should be noted Barbour spoke to a rally not sponsored by the council but by the Black Hawk Bus Association and the Carrollton Masonic Lodge. The council sponsored the Black Hawk Barbecue at the same event, but that was a separate thing.

• An article on Barbour campaigning in DeSoto County in the Memphis Commercial Appeal makes no mention of the controversy. Nice to see the CA on the ball here as always.
• At least they’re in good company; the New York Times doesn't mention it either in their account of the gubernatorial race.

Around the blogosphere:

• Greg Wythe finds Barbour’s statement regarding the photo rather weak, to say the least.
• Atrios can’t “wrap [his] head around” the concept that the rally and barbecue are separate. In fairness, it doesn’t help in trying to understand things that the emcee of the rally was a Council of Conservative Citizens officer, but the rally itself isn’t actually sponsored by the CofCC.
• Alan at Petrified Truth says Barbour has coupled “stupidity” and “moral obtuseness”, on the basis of Fox’s version of the AP report.
• Ole Miss Conservative’s Patrick Carver thinks Barbour shouldn’t be “too harshly criticized” in light of the AP/WaPo revelations; however, he thinks Barbour should distance himself more forcefully from the CofCC.
• Ricky West (North Georgia Dogma) has a followup from his post yesterday arguing that Barbour should forcefully repudiate the Council and its views; he’s got a suggested script:

  Hey, it's easy - Bob Barr did something similar - you go on O'Reilly and Larry King and Chris Matthews and say "hey, I had my picture taken with a bunch of people whose views are repugnant. It was a barbeque for the bus association & the masons and their group was a separate thing. It was a mistake to have my picture taken with them, but there were hundreds of voters there - and I'm sure any politician will tell you that it can be confusing when you're in a large group, as the famous video of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky during the rope-line gathering will illustrate - and I was shaking hands and getting my picture taken with lots of them. Nonetheless, I demand that such a racist organization remove my picture from the site (even though it's legal to have it there) and I repudiate anything and everything it stands for".

  He also thinks Democrats should consider whether or not Ronnie Musgrove has some questions he should be answering too. Steve Verdon agrees.

• Mike Hollihan thinks Barbour is now toast.
• Steve Verdon says “the whole thing simply stinks.” Blog on the Bloch is of similar mind.
• The Carpetbagger Report (cool blog name, by the way) has a challenge for Barbour.
• Arthur Silber thinks Republicans should reconsider their party allegiance in light of the situation.

Glenn Reynolds points to this absolutely hysterical piece by Dahlia Lithwick that recounts one poor respondent’s efforts to alternately defend and avoid the reasoning of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in finding in his favor in a case where the respondent failed to come to the door when police knocked and announced themselves; the respondent wants to suppress the evidence from the search (under that pesky 4th Amendment).

The respondent’s lawyer didn’t exactly get off on a good foot here:

Randall J. Roske represents [Lashawn] Banks. He starts by warning the justices that this case is about whether their doors are sacred. This “next-time-it-could-be-you” tactic never works with the justices since they so rarely deal crack from their homes.

I think this exchange basically sums up how the respondent’s day went (after a long discussion of the fact that Banks was in the shower, and therefore didn’t hear the “knock and announce” by police):

Scalia has had it with the showers. “What does the shower have to do with it? Your constitutional reasonableness is the time it takes someone to complete a shower, dry himself, and grab a towel? Why is the shower relevant?” Roske replies that we have no idea how long Mr. Banks would have continued his shower.

“We don’t know and we don’t care,” retorts Scalia.

Needless to say, I’m not chalking up a win here for Mr. Banks.

Steven Taylor has a copy of a column he wrote on seeing Mikhail Gorbachev speak recently at Auburn University. In my youth I found Gorbachev a very interesting figure and read a couple of his books—for some odd reason, they had copies of them at the dinky base library at RAF Fairford. Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that the leggy brunette I had a thing for was a fan of Gorby as well. (Ah, my misspent youth…) Anyway, back from the digression… like Steven, I’m stunned by how much things have changed since then. And I think Steven has it more-or-less on the mark when he says:

The ironic thing about this new era, which in many ways is less threatening in absolute terms than the Cold War Era (terrorist are rather unlikely to destroy large parts of the world), it is more threatening to us in specific, personal terms (the odds of being on a plane, or being in a building that might be bombed has increased). And, aside from a perception of enhanced personal risk, the world itself is more unstable.

One thing I would note, however, is that global terrorism was alive and well during the Cold War too; ask the Israelis in Munich, American servicemen in Berlin and Beirut, West German politicians, the people who died on Pan Am 103 (and on the ground at Lockerbie), the people of Latin America, the Quebecois, or the British (both in Ulster and in Britain proper). I think the main difference from then and now is that the global projection capabilities of terror groups have improved, although I don’t think anything has really changed that makes terrorism more feasible—9/11, or its equivalent, could have happened in 1980. The important difference is that now there’s a group that simultaneously has the audacity,* motive, capability, and opportunity to carry out large-scale attacks on U.S. soil.

I really don’t want to “flood the zone” on this—I have far more interesting things to blog about, and it is a nice day outside—but Patrick Carver’s take is worth reading. He also finds one media account that suggests there’s more to the story—did the Council of Conservative Citizens exaggerate its ties to the rally? And what happened to the black attendees?

How much do Haley Barbour’s ties to the “white collar Klan” matter? Let’s play a game of Mississippi electoral math (courtesy of the U.S. Census):

Mississippi has just over 2 million people of voting age. 33.0% of the VAP is non-Hispanic black, 64.2% is non-Hispanic white, 1.3% are Hispanic, and 1.5% are “others” of various categories (including 0.5% mixed race). Barring electoral shenanigans, I think we can safely assume the Democrats capture almost all of the 35.8% Hispanic or non-white vote—say 95% of it.* Assuming non-differential turnout, that means about 34% of the vote is locked up already for Musgrove. (If anything, I would expect differential turnout in favor of blacks, as there are two black candidates on the statewide general election ballot.)

So, 66% of the vote is “in play.” Musgrove, who just needs 50% of the total vote to win, needs about another 16%; if you do the math (16%/66%), he only needs about 24.2% white support to win the election. Barbour, on the other hand, needs 75.8% white support, or the votes of just over three-in-four white voters.

Now, where is Barbour going to get those votes? Basically, we can divide white Mississippi into four bits: the Jackson area, the Gulf Coast, DeSoto County, and “everywhere else” (or rural Mississippi). Red meat—waving the Rebel flag, hanging out with the CCC, etc.—works for rural Mississippi; I suspect he gets 80%+ of the white vote in this area (except possibly around Musgrove’s old stomping grounds in north Mississippi), although how much flag-waving he’d need to do is debatable—Musgrove certainly didn’t endear himself with white voters when he limply backed 2001’s flag referendum. Red meat probably also is effective in the Jackson suburbs.

But what about the DeSoto and Gulf Coast regions? Does the CCC strategy cost him votes there? Probably not. The Mississippi press in general don’t spend a lot of time talking about the group, and most people in those parts get their media from neighboring states anyway. Most new voters moving to those areas—the “soccer mom” demographic, if you will—aren’t steeped in Mississippi politics.

Does Barbour absolutely need the CCC to get elected? I doubt it; the group really isn’t that powerful in the grand scheme of things. To the extent they have real political power, it’s because Mississippi politicians treat them as a legitimate organization. On the other hand, as long as Mississippi’s black vote remains largely monolithic (despite the disconnect between the views of rank-and-file black voters and the state’s black elite, particularly on social issues), I’m not sure the state’s Republicans will believe they can afford to lose even a single white vote. And, of course, blacks aren’t going to vote for Republicans in large numbers while the party panders to groups like the CCC.

Via Matthew Stinson, I note that both CalPundit and Andrew Sullivan have discovered that Haley Barbour’s been photographed with members of the organization best known as the white collar Klan.

I guess it’s time for me to move back into the undecided column again, even given my severe reservations about having another term of Ronnie Musgrove.

Alex Knapp isn’t impressed either. Expect more on this topic from me today…

Meanwhile, Jacob Levy is morbidly curious about the Council’s fixation on the Frankfurt School. I was confused because the only major Institute for Social Research I’d heard of is at Michigan; I'm sure they'd love it if they could be ascribed such influence on human society. (For the record, the Institute for Social Research in question is this one.)

The Colonel Reb debacle just took an ugly turn. Guess who’s coming to dinner?

The first officer of the Nationalist Organization plans to be the keynote speaker and leader for a Colonel Reb rally Oct. 30 in the Union Plaza.

The rally “Support Colonel Reb: On the Field or Bust,” may also have an open-mic for student supporters to speak as well, rally organizer Richard Barrett said.

“This is an assault on the traditions of Ole Miss, the heritage of the South and the way of life of America, and yes, that is a big deal,” Barrett said.

And who is the “Nationalist Organization,” you may ask? Apparently, it’s a rebranding of Barrett’s racist white pride group, the Nationalist Movement. Needless to say, our friends at SaveOleMiss.com are distancing themselves from Barrett:

“Richard Barrett never went to, or graduated from, Ole Miss,” [Colonel Reb Foundation honcho Brian] Ferguson said. “He is not a part of our family and has no voice in this matter. I’m sure that if the chancellor allowed Colonel Reb to be back on the campus of Ole Miss, that he would smack racists like Richard Barrett with his cane.”

I have a small bit of sympathy for the position Ferguson et al. are in; I’m sure most of the Colonel’s supporters don’t have racist motivations, although I do think that sometimes they forget that the Southern virtue of civility toward their neighbors applies here, as in any other situation. (I genuinely can’t understand the motivation behind people continuining to do something that they know that other people are offended by.) They don’t deserve to get tarred with the same brush as Barrett and his ilk. But just as the principled opponents of the war in Iraq got tarred with the brush of the ANSWER crowd, the Colonel’s supporters are stuck with it now, and how they respond will reflect on their character much more than their actions to date have.

Boomshock points out that Saudi Arabia’s $15 million PR blitz intended to rehabilitate its reputation may not have had the intended effects.

Jackson Clarion-Ledger columnist Sid Salter points out that if Ronnie Musgrove had his way on free trade, there’d be no Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi.

Michael Totten thinks Glenn Reynolds is off-base in complaining about the use of the word “conservative” to describe reactionary movements in countries like Russia and Iran. Michael writes:

“Conservative” is a disposition, not an ideology, and so its meaning is always relative to the local context. Conservatives defend the existing political order against change. That is their function.

That is true. However, the meaning of “liberal” is also relative to the local context, but American media don’t describe parties like Germany’s Free Democrats or the Netherlands’ VVD as “liberal,” even though they are (in the classical sense of the term); they’re called things like “economic conservatives” or “free-marketeers,” to translate the term into the American context. And this is appropriate; describing them as “liberal” would be misleading to an American audience.

And, however much the moralizing tone of the hardline elements of the Iranian regime remind us of the fascistic tendencies of the domestic reactionary right’s Two Pats (Buchanan and Robertson), describing this element as “conservative” is similarly misleading. There are plenty of adjectives that properly describe them: five, off the top of my head, are reactionary, theocratic, hard-line, illiberal, and authoritarian. And except possibly the fourth, none of them would mislead an American audience into thinking they share the beliefs of Americans who consider themselves to be conservative.

Apparently, researching guns makes you adopt alternate personas that defend your work. Or maybe it’s just being an academic fraud that does…

One of Karl Marx’s most famous aphorisms is that capitalism would eventually collapse due to its own internal contradictions. While old Karl wasn’t a very good prescriptivist (ask the Russians or the Chinese), he did come up with a useful coinage. And, today, Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk takes up that theme in discussing the future of Canada, on the day that the leaders of Alberta and British Columbia signed an agreement on interprovincial cooperation that might be the precursor of a secessionist movement in the Canadian West. One telling reason why the provinces might cooperate:

Almost one-quarter of Canada’s population lives in the two provinces. In 2002, Alberta and B.C. produced $300-billion worth of goods and services, one-third of the national total.

In other words, the per-capita contribution to national GDP of Alberta and British Columbia is 50 percent higher than that of the rest of Canada. And now, these provinces face serious damage to that economic power in the form of Ottawa’s insistence on ratifying the Kyoto accord, which will undercut their advantages in natural resource production.

One is reminded of the situation of the American South prior to the Civil War. To say it was about slavery is both true and to miss the point; the abolition of slavery would have severely damaged the economies of the Southern states, and the leaders of the southern states saw no alternative for preserving their economies but secession. They gravely miscalculated in thinking that the rest of the country would accept that, and quite clearly were wrong to have adopted slavery as the basis of their economies in the first place, but to them secession was preferable to economic collapse.

Is this analogy perfect? Not really. Canada’s central government doesn’t have the military power to prevent secession, and probably wouldn’t be permitted by its Supreme Court (or, more likely, by the United States) to use it even if it did, and the global warming issue is not as morally unambiguous as slavery. But the fundamental lesson—that preserving a region’s economic strength may be a cause for secession—is still valid.