So, when do I get my apology from ESPN for their declarations over the past month that this year’s University of Southern California team is the greatest in the history of college football?

Oh, and huzzah and kudos to the Texas Longhorns on the occasion of their victory.

I’m safe and sound in the Hotel Intercontinental Buckhead, which may be the first conference hotel I’ve ever been at that’s actually worth what I’m paying for the room (you’re paying for the lobby at the Palmer House in Chicago; the rooms aren’t anything special).

As is the nature of the small universe that political scientists inhabit, the first person I saw in the lobby, other than the receptionist, was Bill Jacoby.

Now I’ll be incommunicado while watching the Rose Bowl. If it’s anything like the other BCS games have been, this will be a real barnburner.

Prompted in part by this BBC story on Winston Churchill’s position on whether or not Gandhi should have been allowed to starve if he went on hunger strike, and the Gitmo hunger strikes, I am forced to ask about the strategic considerations behind going on a hunger strike. If a prisoner voluntarily refuses to be fed for some basis other than the food itself (i.e. I could see why a Muslim might refuse to eat pork or non-halal beef), why does their captor have an obligation to feed them? More importantly, why does anyone care?

As the 2005 NFL season draws to a close, so too do the existing television contracts. John Cole tries to sort out the details as they relate to the ESPN/ABC family of networks, which also include the end of NFL SuckTime PrimeTime and its presumed migration to the Monday NFL Countdown slot on Mondays.

I wonder if the idea of combining Chris Berman and Stuart Scott’s powers of suck on the new Monday NFL PrimeTime will cross the minds of the ESPN powers that be. If so, we may observe some sort of implosion of the universe, as Berman’s lame nicknames (and combover) and Scott’s bogus street talk (and Urkel glasses) converge to form an intellectual black hole in Bristol on a weekly basis.

Maurice Clarett, the hero of the 2002 Ohio State national championship team, is wanted by police for allegedly robbing two people at gunpoint in Columbus early New Year’s morning, according to ESPN.com. At the time, Clarett was apparently on the cusp of signing a deal to play in NFL Europe in the hopes of returning to the NFL proper; one suspects that opportunity has now evaporated completely.

Sunday’s New York Times carries this article about “merit aid” at liberal arts colleges that pretty much reflects a year’s worth of faculty meetings at Millsaps, the centerpiece of which was often discussion by the dean of problems with our 40-odd percent “discount rate,” which largely reflected our inability to squeeze all of retail out of parents who could afford Millsaps’ relatively light (by liberal arts college standards, at least) sticker price.

þ: Amber Taylor, who is miffed at the Times for its strategy in selecting which colleges to discuss.

Update: Lurker and forthcoming co-author Dirk points out this Daniel Gross post that takes note of a rather serious incongruity between the headline and the article in question.

ESPN.com’s John Clayton ponders the NFL playoff format, which has contributed to a Week 17 full of uninteresting contests. While Clayton is lukewarm about expanding the playoffs (a position I agree with), he does have a more interesting suggestion:

Another idea that should be tossed around is seeding the playoffs by victories instead of giving the division winners the top four seeds. Most of this weekend’s games are meaningless because teams that have locked up home games for the playoffs will rest their key players .

If the Patriots had to worry about playing in Jacksonville instead of opening the playoffs at home against the Jaguars, they might have a big sense of panic heading into this weekend’s game against the Dolphins. Too many of this weekend’s games are like preseason games.

I’d favor a smaller adjustment: guaranteeing the top two seeds to the best two division winners in each conference. In practice, it is unlikely that this would be much different from Clayton’s proposal.

I’ve made it to Marianna, Florida, which means I’m most of the way between mom’s and dad’s on the Great Holiday Roadtrip. So far, except for getting caught in rush hour traffic south of Birmingham, it’s been a pretty uneventful journey.

Most of the Alabama portion of the journey was accompanied by Steve Martin’s Shopgirl on four unabridged audio CDs, a recommendation from my dinner companion a few nights ago, which I purchased at the Barnes & Noble in Hoover. Not having seen the movie yet, I am curious how well it makes the transition to the big screen, as Martin uses very little dialogue in the original novella. Thematically, it may be something of a companion piece to Martin’s 1991 L.A. Story, although that film was much more broadly comedic than Shopgirl—which, at least in book form, is more poignant and melancholy than laugh-out-loud funny.

The Berghoff Restaurant in the Chicago Loop is closing at the end of Februrary; residents and tourists visiting the Windy City in late April may encounter herds of disoriented political scientists trying to locate other restaurants at which they can eat.

þ: TigerHawk

I’m still alive.

I had a nice Christmas here in Memphis, and now I’m getting ready to head down to Florida for New Year’s. I’ve made a bit of progress on a few projects; the main fun will be wrapping up my SPSA papers over the next few days.

Happy holidays from Signifying Nothing to you, my (mostly) beloved readers.

While talk of impeachment over the evolving NSA wiretapping scandal (and satellite scandals, like the “let’s assume all our Muslim neighbors are harboring nukes” scandal) may be a bit premature, a bit more “bitch-slapping” seems perfectly in order; Steven Taylor explains.

Incidentally, if the Democrats in 2001 and 2002 had paid half the attention to protecting our civil liberties that they did trying to protect union workers in the Homeland Security reorganization, they’d probably have a lot more credibility as presidential critics today.

As should be pretty obvious by now, I’ve conceded the Fifty Book Challenge. I did get ten pages of Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist read while waiting for my car’s oil to be changed today in Collierville, but the ruthless efficiency of Mathis Tire and Auto (in and out in less than 20 minutes, including a tire rotation, for $17.50 or so) precluded any further reading. Except for the stuff I’m being paid to read, it may be a while before I get back in the reading groove.

Colby Cosh, on the uneasy relationship between social conservatives and the exercise of judicial review:

Can’t social conservatives tell the difference between judicial activism that expands the power of the state—like adding newly-invented “protected grounds” to discrimination law—and judicial activism that inhibits it?

Nah. What they care about is that the power of the state be used for their own preferred ends.

Like all good social science, it generalizes to both sides of the 49th parallel.

One job application: several hours and several dollars I’ll never see again.

One phone interview: thirty minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Seeing that position readvertised: priceless.

The UK has decided to keep records of virtually all vehicle movements in the country and retain the data for at least two years.

Steven Taylor, who pointed out the story, notes a transatlantic difference in attitudes:

Certainly, this underscores a key difference between European and American sensibilities: we are currently having a major debate over whether the NSA should ever listen in on the domestic end of an international phone call with a suspected al Qaeda operative, and the British are to keep records of where everyone is driving.

Of course, the NSA surveillance (which, admittedly, I have serious qualms about—indeed, even the FISA warrant process seems suspect, even though there is serious selection bias that plagues simplistic analysis of its statistics) is almost certainly considered by Europeans, including Britons, as yet more evidence of Bushitlerism.

Barry Burden notes that party identification explains too much variance in vote choice these days:

The old Michigan triad of partisanship, issues, and candidate evaluations as an explanation for vote choices is proving less useful in recent days. The main reason is that party identification and the vote are practically one and the same. In the 2000 and 2004 NES data, better than 90% of partisans voted for the presidential candidate of their party. In 2004 only 40 respondents (7% of partisans) voted against their stated party identification.

He sets out a few intriguing directions for future research on party identification.

That’s where I’ll be tonight, along with all the other cool kids in the Mid-Southern blogosphere.

Scipio writes:

This is roughly… equivalent… to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we’re going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn’t work out, we’ll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

Funnily enough, I think this actually has happened to me on both the job and romantic markets.

Good luck trying to figure this one out on your own without asking the registrar’s office: WF pattern classes in Spring 2006 first meet on Friday, January 13th, not Wednesday, January 11th.

Good thing I put a slack day in my in-progress methods syllabus.

Julian Sanchez gets to the heart of my thoughts about the New York Times story on the NSA’s spying on Americans/terrorists (depending on who’s doing the framing):

[W]hy on earth did the Times, apparently at the Bush administration’s request, sit on this story for a full year? The supposed reason for the request is that the revelation would threaten national security by tipping off terrorists. But… about what? About the fact that the government is seeking to wiretap suspected terrorist[s]? To whom does this come as news? We all know law enforcement can get secret wiretap warrants through a FISA court; the only reason to expect terrorists to change their behavior now that they know wiretaps are happening without warrants is if we think they’ve somehow broached the secrecy of the FISA courts. That seems unlikely—at any rate, unlikely to have been known about and still persisted for several years. So what kind of plausible difference to our national security could it make if terror suspects who know they might be targeted for eavesdropping with a warrant learn they might be targeted without one?

Good question. Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein and James Joyner call for frogmarching of the leak culprits, since just what we need is another fake beltway scandal as the counterpoint to the Plame nonsense.

Tyler Cowen offers some tentative answers.

Orin Kerr:

[F]our years after the Patriot Act was passed, a meeting of everyone who thinks of the Patriot Act as actual legislation could be held in my kitchen.

Murray Edelman couldn’t have said it better himself.

Stephen Karlson has two posts on the academic food chain that are worth juxtaposing.

I strongly suspect that “upward mobility” as pursued by the [Southwest] Missouri States and Memphis States, er “Universities of,” of the world (not to mention the place whose offer I politiely declined) is only going to end in tears. To bring up your median ACT scores (and thus mobilize upward), you need to sell high-scoring students on coming or discourage low-scoring students from entering; the former is difficult, in these days of declining state subsidies to the mid-majors and below (reducing their cost advantage over the top-tier publics and the private alternatives), and the latter is politically infeasible in this era of “access.” So, the best they can hope for is a secular trend of improving ACT scores more generally—which hardly is going to improve their relative positioning much.

Changing the name on the letterhead is unlikely to have much effect, either; the day Mississippi Southern College became the University of Southern Mississippi was no watershed event in its academic prestige. There might be something to be said for ditching names like “the University of Western Outer Mongolia at Altay” (substituting appropriately for Altay the name of any other “alternative” campus of some “real” university) for “Altay University,” but this is not as common a case as one might expect.

Nor is it all that clear that the “upwardly mobile” have much clue what they’re striving towards. [Southwest] Missouri State’s “mission statement” expressing fealty to the concept of being “a multipurpose, metropolitan university providing diverse instructional, research, and service programs” is nice, but I’m damned if I know what a “multipurpose, metropolitan university” is supposed to be. The cynic might read “multipurpose” as “rudderless” and “metropolitan” as “unsure if it’surban, suburban, or rural.” Then again, “operating a diploma mill for kids who couldn’t get into Mizzou, and stoking the egos of those who could have gone to Columbia by giving them a free ride and straight A’s” probably doesn’t look as quite as good when going up for reaccreditation…

The average final grade in my research methods class this semester was 92.66% (an A-).