Brett Cashman, while expressing sympathy for Rush Limbaugh’s addiction to painkillers, has this to say:

But what I will say is this: to the extent that Rush is the target of a criminal probe into the sale and use of illegal drugs? This is an example of chickens coming home to roost. Rush has long been an inveterate drug warrior, and has trash-talked crack addicts and suggested that drug offenders are just like ordinary criminals. Well, Rush, it’s looking like you may be one of those drug offenders, now. Should we treat you like an ordinary criminal?

I’d rather not, personally. But so long as conservatives insist on being at the vanguard of the War on Some Drugs, crap like this is going to continue to happen.

That sounds about right to me. And it’s not just conservatives; after all, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, both drug users in their youth, weren’t exactly unenthusiastic drug warriors either.

(The snarky side of me would attribute Rush’s addiction to all that time he spent hanging out with former cocaine addict Michael Irvin on Sunday NFL Countdown.)

Steven Taylor dislikes Newsweek’s hit piece, Stephen Green (VodkaPundit) is also critical (for slightly different reasons), and Arthur Silber, who wants Rush to go to the Big House (not, mind you, the one in Ann Arbor), engenders an interesting discussion.

Mike Hollihan has been repeatedly exposed to Ronnie Musgrove’s ad campaign, and notes that the Musgrove campaign is trying to tap nativist sentiments to keep him in office. Musgrove barely won in 1999 against former congressman Mike Parker, who a number of my friends (more knowledgeable than I about Mississippi politics at the time) considered a closet Klansman. Haley Barbour is going to be a stiff challenge for him.

Overall, I think Musgrove’s been a bit of a mixed bag. He’s let the legislature get away with papering over a huge budget deficit in the coming fiscal year (in no small part due to a huge increase in education spending in the election year budget), and he’s run a number of state departments like a racial spoils system for certain state legislators—most notably, the state’s health bureaucracy. On the other hand, he’s held the line on taxes and mostly behaved sensibly, although his ad campaign is becoming a giant embarassment.

I think the big strike against Barbour is that he’s never held a major office in the state. Both candidates have been spending obscene amounts of effort in this campaign courting the Christian right, so that issue (which normally would dispose me to vote for Democrats) is a wash. On the other hand, the real power’s arguably in the lieutenant governor’s office, where the race is between apparent raving lunatic Amy Tuck (R this week) and Barbara Blackmon (D). And, generally, Barbour has run a less sleazy campaign than Musgrove. So unless something changes in the next month, I’ll probably be voting for Barbour.

Not Quite Tea and Crumpets has some interesting thoughts on this year’s races too. I’d forgotten about the $50 million that Musgrove and his pals in the legislature swiped from the Department of Transportation to balance this year’s budget (so if you want to know why our state’s highway projects are behind schedule, that’s one big reason).

Matthew Stinson has the definitive word on the topic in comments at Dan Drezner’s place.

Pejman dissects Krugman’s latest. Apparently Krugman has concluded that it is truly impossible for him to be both honest and polite at the same time, at least when writing for the New York Times. Wow. Simply wow. You’d think that acquiring that skill would be a prerequisite for finishing grad school.

Russell Fox, a political scientist at near-neighbor Arkansas State University (whose football team is about to be Ole Miss’ sacrificial lamb for Homecoming), has a lengthy post that makes a reasonably strong case why recalls are a bad thing. As I posted before, I think the tenets of representative democracy are compatible with the recall power, but I can see where an unchecked recall power might harm our system of government, and in some ways I can agree with Russell that the California procedure was a “mess.” (Arguably, the state’s bizarre super-open primary system added to the mess by creating a situation where neither party nominated a decent candidate in 2002.)

I guess the big, open question is how to avoid the “mess” while still retaining a credible threat to lame-duck politicians and permitting a fair selection of candidates on the replacement ballot.

Steve Verdon thinks there are some flaws in Russell’s argument.

George Will spends his valuable op-ed space in The Washington Post whining about California Republicans abandoning conservative orthodoxy.

You play to win the game. Hello? You play to win the game.

Now go get your panties in a bunch elsewhere, George. Because—to paraphrase my personal hero Peyton Manning—your idiot orthodox conservative Republican kickers got liquored up and couldn’t win elections to save their lives. You win with what you have that can win. And if that means you’ve got to elect a Dick Riordan, a Rudy Giuliani, or a Arnold Schwarzenegger, since you’re gonna go down in flames with a Bill Simon or a Tom McClintock, then hold your nose, deal with it and stop whinging like a spoiled brat. Because the people of California, and the California Republican Party, are immeasurably better off than they were 24 hours ago while Gray Davis was selling the state off a bit at a time to every single person who stuffed a C-note in his g-string.

And—by the way—this goes too for my idiot friends on the left who are going to nominate George McGovern, I mean Howard Dean, for the presidency because they’re still pissed off about Iraq, instead of actually (gasp) focusing on someone vaguely electable. And we all know how well that choice turned out…

Patrick Carver dissents in part and concurs in part. And Boomshock posts on how he learned to stop worrying and love the recall, or something like that at any rate.

I posted my sketch of a theory of perceived media bias a few months ago; now Gallup has done me a favor and produced a poll that suggests I may be onto something. Take a look-see at the results:

Now, unfortunately, there’s nothing to show the causal mechanism here (i.e. why conservatives and liberals perceive the media’s biases differently). But it’s an interesting look at the question, nonetheless.

Link via Andrew Sullivan (although I think I saw it cited earlier somewhere else).

Stephen Green links to this Roger L. Simon post that alleges:

What we are witnessing is the beginning—the early movement—in the death of the two-party system as we know it. This is a revolt of the pragmatic center. And that is a good thing for the American people because those parties and the media that feed on them have indeed become a form of nomenklatura. They depend on each other. They are the mutual gate keepers of an old and sclerotic bureaucracy from which their jobs flow in a system of patronage as elaborate as the Czar’s. No wonder watching CNN tonight I felt as if I were watching a wake. They are threatened by what is going on—as they should be.

I don’t know that I believe that. Any good political scientist will tell you that we’re probably overdue for a realignment—but realignments rotate the societal cleavage lines, finding a new way to split the center; they generally don’t produce “the pragmatic center” versus “everyone else.”

Realignments are fundamentally about changes in the issues that separate voters between the parties. Now, maybe the “war/no-war” issue is a possible realignment pivot; I honestly don’t know. It certainly sees political figures of all stripes squabbling within their own parties more than usual. But that’s not anything to do with the “pragmatic center.”

Yet, arguably, the pragmatic center won in California. That was largely due to the ballot format, and in particular due to the fact that party activists were not the gatekeepers for candidates to receive a major-party label on the replacement ballot. Look at the figures: six of the top seven candidates in the replacement ballot had a party affiliation, and five of the seven were affiliated with a major party; the top five major party candidates received 94.3% of the vote, the Green party candidate received 2.8%, while the highest independent tally (0.6%) was for Huffington, who essentially ran as a Democrat. If primary voters, comprised mostly of Republican and Democratic activists, had been able to be gatekeepers for the ballot—as they are in virtually every other partisan election in the United States—chances are the “pragmatic center” option wouldn’t have even made it on the ballot, even though it’s fairly clear Schwarzenegger was the Pareto winner* of the election.

Unless the pragmatic center can break down these barriers to entry for their preferred candidates, or establish a viable third party label (something Schwarzenegger probably isn’t interested in heading, particularly after the Ventura debacle), chances are that the major parties—and particularly the party activists who control them—will continue to win almost all elections.

Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk has some interesting thoughts on this topic as well, including a cautionary tale about single-party democracy in his adopted homeland. And, I particularly like Matthew’s reaction to something Michael J. Totten said:

This isn't really recall-related, but Michael Totten follows up on Simon's post with a "can't we all just be nonpartisan?" plea, and cites increasing complexity as a reason to move toward a more nuanced politics. That's fine for folks like Michael, but there's a downside to increased complexity—most consumers of political information have little time to think about complexity, and instead receive their information in little bite-sized pieces. It's this famine of depth which encourages hyperpartisanship, as gut reactions predominate over reason. If anything, the trend isn't toward the death of the two-party system as we know it, but toward the creation of an increasingly polarized and anti-intellectual pair of party masses, along with a highly informed politically moderate elite (i.e. folks like Michael and Roger), who occupy the position of “kingmaker” in future elections.

That sounds about—and, dare I say, scarily—right.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds’ semi-blog at MSNBC thinks the recall is an effective way to upset special interest politics-as-usual; I think that, again, goes to the format of the ballot, which allowed a moderate figure to run with a party label without significant initial support from that party’s activists. The other major candidates, however, were in hock to established state interests: Bustamante with the Old Left and racial unity groups, McClintock with the Christian right, and Camejo and Huffington with the Sierra Clubbers. In any event, generally speaking I don’t have a problem with organized interests influencing politics, even if the playing field could be made more level. (And I’d slightly quibble with Mancur Olson’s interpretation of Japan’s interest group structure; by the accounts I’ve read, the post-war kieretsu were not too different from the business cross-holdings prior to the war. Olson’s probably correct when it comes to the bigger picture, however.)

Via Calblog, I found this neat county-by-county map of the recall results; there’s all sorts of cool tables available here. It’d be nice if our state could put together something similar for this year’s gubernatorial race too.

Rather than talk about the California recall results directly—a topic I can add little to the existing discussion on anyway—I’ll just point to my August post on how recalls are compatible with representative democracy. And if California Democrats want to try to kickstart a new recall election against Schwarzenegger immediately—something they can probably gather enough signatures for to qualify for the ballot, but will probably have major problems attracting support from the voters (and which probably will be an unneeded distraction in a year when the party will need to focus on getting out the state’s vote for a Democratic nominee)—more power to them.

Kevin Drum also thinks an Arnold recall would be a distraction from the Democrats’ 2004 campaign.

Just speaking for myself, the more whining I hear out of Democrats about “stolen elections” the more likely I am to vote for Bush just to spite them—bearing in mind that now, frankly, I could probably easily be convinced to vote for a sane Democrat like Joe Lieberman or even Serb-warlord-coddler Wes Clark. So, yes, California—and the maturity of Democrats’ response to having an ineffectual, embarassing governor of their own party who was a willing captive of Old Left interest groups quite deservedly tossed from office—will matter for me, and many other fence-straddlers, in 2004.

One of the things that critics who accuse America of being an imperial power should consider—repeatedly—is that the United States has not engaged in a war for territorial acquisition since 1898, and has given, or at least offered, independence to every territory captured since the Mexican-American War. The states of Western Europe and Japan were restored to sovereignty, and left free to their own devices, even when those aims contradicted ours; to name just two examples, Japan was left free to erect high barriers to imports from America, while France was allowed to pursue an independent foreign policy that often is at odds with that of the United States. Imperial powers don’t tolerate these sorts of things, as the Hungarians and Czechs could testify about their Russian overseers or Tibetans (and, increasingly, the people of Hong Kong and Macau) could point out about their masters in Beijing.

Another data point, from Glenn Reynolds: Reuters reports that Iraq’s civilian authorities want a GSM-based mobile phone system; GSM technology is generally produced by European manufacturers, while the rival CDMA system has strong backing from American companies. It will be Iraq’s first public mobile phone network, as the Saddam Hussein regime did not permit use of mobile phones by members of the public.

Of course, Reuters never misses a chance to accentuate the negative:

A functioning national phone system, which Iraq has lacked since Saddam Hussein was toppled in April, could also allow guerrillas fighting the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq to organize themselves better on a national level. The U.S. Army says guerrilla groups are only locally organized at present.

For good measure, it also notes:

The choice of Kuwaiti companies to help run the phone network is a controversial one in a country where many Iraqis still resent their small southern neighbor after years of tension following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

No Iraqis, of course, are quoted as finding this decision “controversial.”

Reuters spends much of the report going off on complete tangents that have nothing to do with mobile phones, discussing such disparate topics as unemployment, Vladimir Putin, and a U.N. draft resolution on Iraqi reconstruction.

RCR News has a report with additional details (which, somehow, manages to stay on-topic).

From Dissecting Leftism and Marginal Revolution, we learn that Conservatives are happier than Liberals. I like my hypothesis better than Tyler Cowen's.

Since our European “allies” are such big fans of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, as Michele suggests, let me make a proposal: free Mumia, strip him of his American citizenship, and exile him permanently to France. If we’re really lucky, he’ll kill Roman Polanski, which will (a) solve the problem of getting Roman back to answer those child molestation charges and (b) prove once and for all that Mumia is just a run-of-the-mill, murdering scumbag who happens to possess a modicum of literacy. What’s not to love?

Matthew points out the inevitable fly in the ointment—that Mumia would be fêted as a great hero. I suspect the more likely outcome is that Mumia would be a short-term fetish object for the hard Euroleft and then fade quickly into oblivion after they moved onto the next cause-of-the-week—at least, until such time as Mumia convinced himself of his inherent badassitude and got himself killed venturing into the slums of Marseilles.

Gary Farber points out a New York Times piece that, while going out of its way to kiss Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet’s ass, indicates Valerie Plame had a ‘non-official cover’, which is CIA-speak for “Plame posed as a civilian expert under her own name while actually working for the CIA.”

Now, assuming this is true, the obvious question is why anyone with Robert Novak’s phone number in their Rolodex would know this. Novak may have some cachet as a columnist, but his shifting politics over the years suggest he should have few friends in this—or any other—administration. It’s even more puzzling why her CIA job would apparently have been common knowledge in Washington circles if Plame did have a non-official cover—or, for that matter, why an undercover operative would draw attention to herself by making donations to political candidates that must be disclosed to the public by law.

Frankly, I think the only way this mess is going to get sorted out is if the FBI and/or Congress follow Glenn Reynolds’ suggestion and start subpeonaing the journalists involved in breaking this story, starting with Novak. And, if they don’t like it, maybe they should put the heat on their sources. And, in the end, I suspect these sources will look a heck of a lot more like David Kelley than Karl Rove—two small fish whose reputations were puffed up to make a story sound more sensational than it really was.

Dan Drezner, as always, has the latest on the machinations surrounding the Plame/Wilson affair. I don’t have too much to add, since I’m immersed in a fun college football Saturday that has seen the David Cutcliffe Season Survival Meter (current value, as always, in the sidebar) skyrocket by no less than 25 points.

I really don’t know what to make of this whole Valerie Plame business—I remember reading the original Novak piece God-knows-how-long-ago and found it a bit of a head-scratcher (to say the least). And I’m no more enlightened now, perhaps in part because of the four Tylenol PM’s I took last night that somehow knocked me out for a good eighteen hours. So I’ll just point you to Daniel Drezner’s post, which (a) has a good collection of links and (b) displays an appropriate balance between outrage and confusion.

Why am I getting a weird feeling of dejà vu from reading the New York Times’ alleged sneak preview of Tuesday’s UN speech by George Bush?

According to the officials involved in drafting the speech, for an audience they know will range from the skeptical to the angry, Mr. Bush will acknowledge no mistakes in planning for postwar security and reconstruction in Iraq. ... In the speech, Mr. Bush will repeat his call for nations — including those that opposed the Iraq action — to contribute to rebuilding the country, but he will offer no concessions to French demands that the major authority for running the country be turned over immediately to Iraqis.

Wow. Maybe he’ll also storm out of the room in anger and call people in the audience names.

Steven Taylor of PoliBlog notes a Wall Street Journal editorial on Iraq’s al-Qaeda ties and the capture of Abu Abbas on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, my friend Scott Huffmon forwards a collection of quotes from administration officials that juxtapose 9/11 with Iraq (Scott therefore wins the longstanding Signifying Nothing “no-prize” for forwarding evidence of the adminstration linking Saddam and 9/11). Perhaps more interesting is the associated article discussing how the public’s belief in a 9/11-Saddam connection came about. Key graf:

A number of public-opinion experts agreed that the public automatically blamed Iraq, just as they would have blamed Libya if a similar attack had occurred in the 1980s. There is good evidence for this: On Sept. 13, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent suspected Hussein’s involvement—even though the administration had not made a connection. The belief remained consistent even as evidence to the contrary emerged.

Or, as I am fond of saying, when it comes to politics, it’s all heuristics.

Colby Cosh doesn’t quite ask a question worth considering:

It’s clear enough that a majority of the Liberal caucus is opposed, right or wrong, to gay marriage in principle. The same could probably be said of the Opposition; yet we’re to have gay marriage in Canada all the same. It does make you wonder what the point of sending MPs to Ottawa is.

Or, for my non-comparatively-inclined friends, a hypothetical translation into the American political context:

It’s clear enough that a majority of Democrats are opposed, right or wrong, to gay marriage in principle. The same could probably be said of the Republicans; yet we’re to have gay marriage in the United States all the same. It does make you wonder what the point of sending Congressmen to Washington is.

Alec Saunders, on the other hand, doesn’t think gay marriage is a legitimate subject of political debate; the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada’s equivalent to the U.S. Bill of Rights (plus a healthy dollop of the 14th Amendment, minus those pesky 2nd and 3rd amendments that were at least partially motivated by anti-British sentiment), has spoken—or at least been interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada to speak in that way.

What’s interesting to me is that Alec’s a self-identified “traditional conservative” while Colby is generally libertarian in his outlook, yet they take the opposite sides on this issue to those you’d expect Americans with those political leanings to take. (Incidentally, my position is closer to Alec’s, simply because legislative bodies are at their worst when enacting social and economic regulation; the “Do Something” instinct too often prevails over common sense in these cases.)

In Colby’s case, I might explain his preference for legislative involvement as vestigial sentiment for the idea of parliamentary sovereignty—the idea that the final arbiter of the Law is the legislature, as is embodied in Westminster parliamentary tradition. But I find Alec’s position a bit more perplexing, although I can perhaps understand his disinterest in the use of this particular issue by the embryonic Alliance of Progressive Conservatives (or whatever the hell they decide to call themselves). God knows I cringe every time the Republicans pull the same stunts, although in Mississippi the Democrats usually join in the fun too, so here it’s essentially a wash.

Then again, the Smug Canadian reads Colby’s comments differently. So what do I know?

Glenn Reynolds throws up his hands at the latest round in the John Lott feud:

What I’d like is to see an authoritative look at this by a disinterested party. I’m not qualified to provide that. I’d like to see someone who is come forward and sort all of this out.

Anyone motivated enough to “come forward and sort all of this out” would, by definition, no longer be disinterested. The only thing I can think of: rename all the variables and give the dataset and the alternate specifications to an econometrician (or six)—preferably one who has lived under a rock the past ten years.

Anyway, rather than volunteering myself—not only because this whole debate is too political for anyone with my political leanings to be considered objective (despite my rather ambivalent personal attitudes towards guns), but also because I don’t personally find “public policy” questions that interesting to study and because, well, I do have a dissertation that I’m supposed to be finishing revisions on this weekend—I’ll just recommend reading this book on the politics of gun control (a research topic I find more interesting than simply the effects of gun ownership), because (a) it’s pretty good and (b) one of the members of my dissertation committee co-edited it.

My copy of Virginia Postrel’s new book, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, had shown up in a box on my chair by the time I got to work this morning. I’ve only gotten through the Preface, but it’s been a good read so far. (I would have sat down at one of those nice new tables they have on the rear porch of Weir Hall and read some more, but a half-dozen other people had the same idea I had. They weren’t reading Virginia’s book, though.)

I also watched a bit of the CBC news on Newsworld International this morning—a rerun of last night’s National, with Peter Mansbridge looking appropriately dour, as always. Apparently the Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, Canada’s two main parties of the right, are making another run at a merged organization, tentatively to be named the Conservative Party. I’m not sure that it will fly. The PCs seem to me like warmed over British “one nation” Tories, while the Alliance seem more like the Texas GOP minus the libertarian instincts. More importantly, the Liberals are positioned to capture the median voter in Ontario and Quebec, which is where the votes are anyway under Canada’s system of not-quite-proportional allocation of seats in Parliament. So even if they pull off the grand alliance, I’m not sure it solves much in the long run. (Then again, I’ve been half-expecting Canada to collapse due to its own internal contradictions for the past decade. Of course, states with even less reason to exist, like Belgium, have persisted as well. Blame the Treaty of Westphalia.)

I also learned that a tenth dwarf was added to the presidential race on the Democratic side down here, some guy from Arkansas who apparently is a lot like Howard Dean but spends more time hanging out with war criminals (the latter part I learned from Matthew; Peter didn’t mention that part).

But that story got less play than news that (a) everyone in the media and Parliament is now treating Paul Martin like he’s the prime minister, instead of Jean Chrétien, and (b) Canada’s opening seven more consulates in the United States next year. Amazingly they’ve just gotten around to adding Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States. Apparently they’re also opening up in a place called “Raleigh-Durham,” which I was under the impression were actually two distinct cities. Then again, so once were Buda and Pest. Or, for that matter, Toronto and Etobicoke.

Kevin Drum has posted his interview with Paul Krugman. But the best example of Krugman’s worldview is actually from his new book, the Great Unraveling:

In fact, there’s ample evidence that key elements of the coalition that now runs the country believe that some long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist….Consider, for example….New Deal programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance, Great Society programs like Medicare….Or consider foreign policy….separation of church and state….The goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no social safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don’t teach evolution but do teach religion and — possibly — in which elections are only a formality….

Needless to say, the revelation in the interview that he regularly reads Atrios won’t come as much of a shock after that paragraph.

Daniel Drezner has more.

Samizdata reports that the people of Sweden have voted 56-41% against joining the single European currency, with turnout in the 80-85% range.

Paul Krugman, in an apparent effort to rehabilitate his image in the blogosphere prior to the publication of his interview with Kevin Drum, had his research assistants write pens a ten page NYT Magazine article on tax policy. Robert Prather and Matthew Stinson have reactions, while Markus has a roundup of other reactions too. I think Prather is on to something when he writes:

That’s why I’m not bothered by the current “starve the beast” phenomenon; I know we will raise taxes in the future and am not bothered by it as long as it is accompanied by reform. The current system puts a $200 billion burden on the U.S. economy and is itself debilitating.

Matthew’s reaction concentrates on Krugman’s attempt to compare the U.S. tax situation with Alabama’s (a specious comparison at best; by all accounts, Alabama’s tax system is even more regressive than that non-income tax states like Florida and Texas, resembling Mississippi’s in its apparent progressivity coupled with absurdly generous deductions for itemizers), and notes that national conservatives’ meddling in Alabama will be counterproductive in the long run:

National conservatives attacked Riley and his tax referendum hoping this would become another Prop 13 moment of anti-tax consensus. This was wrong-headed and dare-I-say destructive to the Republican cause over the long term in Alabama. Think about it: the middle class people who voted down the tax increase, who, inexplicably, were going to have their taxes lowered by the referendum, are the same people who demand the kinds of government services that the tax increase was designed to pay for—education, law enforcement, and infrastructure. When Gov. Riley has to make cuts in these essential services, the fickle voters (Are there any other kinds?—ed. No.) will turn against Republicans in favor of moderate Democrats who will promise to restore funding.

That being said, one possible reason for Riley’s plan’s failure was that the new tax system proposed in the referendum wasn’t constrained with an effective check on the legislature’s ability to increase taxes at its whim in the future. If the root cause of a lot of middle class discontent with the plan was a (probably well-earned) distrust of the Alabama legislature, the failure to include a Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights or some other device to check tax increases was a major oversight in the plan.

Daniel Drezner has the scoop on a poll of Californians conducted by Knowledge Networks on behalf of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from August 28 through September 8 that finds Arnold Schwarzenegger in a commanding lead and the recall with 62% support, contrary to many polls that show Bustamante in the lead and the recall question in a dead heat. One possible explanation for the difference:

The Stanford/Knowledge Networks survey is the first to ask voters to choose from the same list of 135 candidates that they will see on election day. Previous polls have restricted voters’ choices to the top candidates and have allowed respondents to select “undecided” or similar options.

If this methodological difference alone* makes that large a shift in the results—and there is fairly good reason to believe that it does—then there’s good reason to believe that the existing polling is flawed, since this methodology more accurately reflects the balloting environment.

Meanwhile, SacBee columnist Daniel Weintraub thinks a Schwarzennegger-McClintock detente may be in the offing.

Robert of Boomshock has some thoughts on the meaning of the poll as well. As for Knowledge Networks’ methodology, I recommend this page which explains how their panel works; it's pretty dissimilar from Harris Interactive’s approach. KN in general has some pretty smart people on board (as, for that matter, does HI) who’ve put a lot of thought in how to make Internet-based surveys representative.

I think Michele and Dean have it covered.

Me? I’m going to try to do a bunch of things that would piss Osama off. That is, if he wasn’t worm food already (even those bozos in Lebanon who kidnapped hostages back in the 80s knew how to get newspapers to prove the video was recent). Among them:

• Go to work.
• Eat some pork products.
• Watch some college football.
• Work on my dissertation.
• Live.

One thing I won’t be doing: this:

A vigil, sponsored by the UM Activist Coalition, will also be at 6:15 p.m. on the porch of the Croft Institute for International Studies building.

“It will mostly be a silent-type vigil,” Greg Johnson, member of the coalition and blues curator, said. “It's just in honor of all those who died on Sept. 11 and all those who died in resulting policies that have occurred.” [emphasis mine]

Following the vigil, a panel discussion, co-hosted by UMAC and the Croft Institute, will explore “September 11: Two Years Later. What has Changed – where do we go from here?”

Moderated by executive director of the Croft Institute, Michael Metcalf, the panel discussion will include Nirit Ben-Ari, an Israeli peace activist, Omar Bada, a Palestinian peace activist and UM economics professor Katsuaki Terasawa.

(a) What in the fuck do Israeli and Palestinian peace activists have to do with 9/11? I honestly could give so little of a shit about people who celebrated in the streets when they learned about the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. (b) I’m not participating in any vigil in honor of the Taliban and Ba’ath Party (two groups many of whose members who have—most deservedly—died as a result of said “policies”). What an amazing display of questionable taste by Croft to have any involvement in this crapfest.