My friend Scott Huffmon passed along by email a link to an article in the Middletown, N.Y. Times Herald-Record: Young Republican’s party plan crashes:

An aide to Orange County Executive Edward Diana is under fire after he and his friends invited some of the nation’s brightest Young Republicans to what was advertised as a booze-soaked sex bash in Boston.

The controversy surrounding Diana’s 24-year-old staff assistant, Karl Brabenec, started at the Young Republicans national convention July 11, when his friends distributed fliers “for lots of beer, liquor and sex” at a party dubbed, “Karlpalooza ‘03.”

Since then, copies of the incriminating invites have surfaced in Orange County, prompting cries of disgust from women’s groups, county legislators and fellow Republicans.

I guess I can see how a flier that called on young women to “wear as little clothing as possible” might be construed as offensive by some. Meanwhile, Brabanec supporter Laura Vance has come out swinging against Brabanec’s assailants:

A few, like Orange County Young Republican Treasurer Laura Vance, who called the Times Herald-Record and a WTBQ talk show yesterday, came to Brabenec’s defense. Vance said most of the criticism had come from political rivals, and she brushed off the Republican Women’s comments.

“They’re a bunch of old hags, and I’ll tell them that to their face,” Vance said. “I’m a woman, and I don’t feel offended. The party never even went on. It’s unfair to make a big deal of something back home that happened on someone’s vacation.”

By that logic, I guess Chrisapalooza ‘03 in Ann Arbor is on (woo-hoo!). It’s not like anyone back in Oxford could be offended by an evening of drunken debauchery taking place 700 miles away, right?

Then again, maybe in light of the Las Vegas “What happens here, stays here” ad campaign, maybe Vance isn’t too far off the mark.

As I noted here, placing issues of fundamental political debate in a society beyond the realm of ordinary politics is a monumentally stupid idea. That goes for economic and social rights like those proposed in the EU constitution, and it goes too for gay marriage, as Michael J. Totten points out.

(Michael is probably wrong about the political support for gay marriage in the public; CNN reported today steep declines in support for all sorts of “gay agenda” items in recent polls, perhaps as part of a post-Lawrence backlash. I suspect it will be 20-30 years before most Americans come to accept the idea of gay marriage, due to generational effects.)

I know why conservatives want to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage, just as they wanted to amend the Constitution to permit Congress to ban flag desecration, and want to use an amendment to ban abortion. Fundamentally, conservatives don’t trust the Supreme Court to leave politically contested issues to the people’s representatives, and perhaps they are right in that regard. But tying the hands of future generations is not the right approach.

Instead, let me offer a simple statement as an amendment: “Nothing in this Constitution shall compel the United States or any state to recognize a marriage formed contrary to federal statutes, nor shall this Constitution require the recognition of any marriage not between one man and one woman.” If Congress decides in 2040 (or 2005, for that matter) that they want to do the right thing and repeal Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, such an amendment would permit that while stripping the Court of any means to legislate an alternative definition of marriage in the meantime.

Bobby A-G, subbing for Alex Knapp at Heretical Ideas, tries to defuse the complaints about President Bush’s use of the word sin in reference to homosexuality.

One thing that has stuck with me since our family reunion in May was what one of my relatives-by-marriage* said about sin: in God’s eyes, all sin is equal, whether it’s murder, taking His name in vain, or telling a lie. (In some ways this resembles Orthodox Judiasm’s approach to Torah law; it’s all or nothing.)

One can legitimately debate whether or not homosexuality is objectively a sin, or whether it ought to be one. But in the belief systems of most Christian sects, it is considered one, the opinions of non-believers notwithstanding. I think Bush’s point was that the severity of the sin doesn’t matter, again because God doesn’t care about the severity (or even acknowledge it)—He only cares about the sin. And everyone sins. So those who would condemn gays for being sinful without condemning themselves too for their own sins would be hypocritical.

Of course, since Bush allegedly doesn’t nuance [sic], I may be reading far too much into this.

My friend Scott emails to note that there is one unpardonable sin: blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost, if your denomination swings that way).

Mark 3:29 But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation (King James Version)

Matthew 12:31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. (King James Version)

This lapsed Methodist learns something new every day…

The AP reports that the proposed Senate energy bill includes provisions that double the use of ethanol in gasoline.

Advocates, like the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, claim that blended gasoline does not lower fuel efficiency in practice. Quoth the CRFA:

Studies with 10% ethanol-blended gasoline show that actual fuel efficiency is essentially identical to that of regular (ethanol free) gasoline. Yet ethanol contains less caloric energy than gasoline, which should, theoretically, result in poorer fuel efficiency. The discrepancy results from the greater efficiency with which ethanol-blended gasoline is burned during engine operation.

This advocacy site claims a 2% reduction in efficiency, but that it is “a small price to pay for a cleaner environment.”

On the other hand, some auto enthusiasts believe that ethanol lowers the fuel efficiency by ten percent or more (negating the savings on gasoline, and effectively increasing the cost to operate the vehicle per mile), although it does increase the octane rating of the gasoline. And anything that feeds more money to ArcherDanielsMidland (motto: “We keep the Sunday shows on the air.”) and our obscenely over-subsidized farming industry leaves me somewhat skeptical.

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry (via Michael J. Totten, where a good discussion continues in comments) notes the attempted war crimes prosecution being brought before the International Criminal Court (not to be confused with the International Court of Justice or the International House of Pancakes) by a group of Greek lawyers over the war in Iraq. The target? Not Saddam Hussein or any of his henchmen (you know, real war criminals). Instead, it’s Tony Blair.

As Michael writes:

Say what you will about the Iraq war. Say it wasn’t worth it if you must. Gripe about proceduralism if that’s what you care about most.

But liberating an enslaved people from a genocidal monster is not a crime against humanity. It put an end to crimes against humanity.

Placing bleeding-heart liberals like Tony Blair in the same moral category as Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot won’t garner a whit of sympathy from the United States for any court that might take such arguments seriously.

Meanwhile, Matthew is concerned that the court is just another forum for lefty whinging against Global Capitalism:

I don’t like the ICC for reasons like the scenario played out in the story above; as it stands now, too many leftists view international courts as just another protest venue. While some of them break storefront windows in Montreal, and others clash with police officers in Genoa, still others make themselves heard by issuing asinine charges of “crimes against humanity” against persons whose primary crime is disagreeing with the left-wing worldview. For them, the ICC is less a criminal court and more an International Illiberal Activities Committee, which begs the question, who are the McCarthyites now?

Now, the ICC statute (for all its faults) does have safeguards against gratuitous prosecutions, including allowing the U.N. Security Council a virtual veto over any prosecution by the ICC. And, as Kevin Drum points out in Michael’s comments, “If the fact that idiots can file lawsuits were enough to discredit a court, we’d be reduced to settling cases in the United States by peering at goat entrails.” (Of course, the fact idiots can file lawsuits has been one of the major arguments for “loser pays” and other tort reform proposals in the U.S.)

But, the safeguards have limits. If the ICC accepted a frivolous prosecution against a signatory state, and a U.N. Security Council member decided to veto a prosecution against one of its own citizens (for example, if Britain vetoed the Blair prosecution, or charges were brought against Jacques Chirac over France’s intervention in Cameroon and France decided to veto), people would legitimately be concerned about a “cover up.” So the bias of the court, and the Security Council, will be to pursue even the most frivolous prosecutions against Security Council members, so the court will retain the appearance of neutrality.

Perhaps the ICC will deny this particular prosecution on the grounds than U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 authorized member states to take decisive action against Iraq. But if it does so, it risks undermining its credibility with its core constituency—the internationalist activists, like those who brought this prosecution, who genuinely believe that International Law (as decided solely by them; democracy be damned) can and will be made to justly govern nations.

When I went to open a bank account Tuesday here in Ann Arbor, a block of items on the giant contract in which you sign away your firstborn were described by the manager as being required by the PATRIOT Act. Specifically, it asked whether or not each account-holder was a U.S. citizen and for each account-holder to state their occupation (which, in my case, because the manager seemingly didn’t understand the term “teaching assistant,” became “teacher”). No proof of citizenship was required—in fact, they didn’t even ask me to prove that the SSN I gave was mine.

How exactly this procedure will prevent terrorism is something of a mystery to me.

The current conventional wisdom on the right side of the blogosphere is that the 28 pages (not to be confused with the 16 words) were classified as a political calculation to undermine the Saudis.

I don’t know what to think about this theory. On the one hand, it ascribes far more intelligence to the administration than its critics usually credit it with (so if this turns out to be the actual strategy, those critics will say it was all Karl Rove’s idea). On the other hand, I can’t think of a good domestic political reason to cover for the Saudis, since their support in the U.S. generally doesn’t extend beyond their bought-and-paid-for segments of the Washington establishment (so if this turns out to be a domestic politics thing, the president’s supporters will say it was all Karl Rove’s idea).

So, I honestly don’t know what’s going on. But regardless it’s fun to watch the Saudis twist in the wind.

Georgy Russell (Signifying Nothing’s preferred candidate for governor of California) asks today:

I continue to be misquoted, and to have my quotes taken out of context. What’s up with that?!

Amazingly enough, there is no record of Russell having been interviewed by Maureen Dowd.

In all seriousness, when I ran for Congress three years ago, one report described my beliefs as being pro-prostitution (despite nary a mention of prostitution by me). I guess that’s what I get for having a platform plank calling for the legalization of all forms of consensual sex among adults.

Meanwhile, James (whose site I use as a substitute for blogging about things myself, since he has a comparative advantage in such matters) has a post with info on a number of the non-famous candidates for governor.

James Joyner thinks it’s mildly amusing. Brett Marston thinks it’s gay bashing. What is it? A quote from a speech by House majority leader Tom DeLay:

While everyone else got the memo that big-government, blame-America-first liberalism died with disco, the Howard Dean Democrats still want to party like it’s 1979!

Maybe we should thank the Democrats for shedding their moderate clothing to reveal their true Swinging-Seventies selves.

But frankly, America doesn’t need a president in a hot-pink leisure suit.

I’m just mystified where you get “gay bashing” from here. None of the Democratic presidential candidates are gay or even rumored to be gay. And hot pink leisure suits are probably best associated with pimps and/or lame straight guys (anyone remember the “Leisure Suit Larry” games?), not gay people. Sure disco started out as a gay phenomenon, but plenty of straight people were involved too—otherwise, you’d never have seen movies like “Saturday Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive.” (Whether this is a good or bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Then again, maybe my decoder for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’s “code words” got lost in the mail, or they cut me off for not paying my dues…

Brett clarifies:

To me it seemed like a pretty clear reference to Dean's stand on civil unions, and a few other people who heard the comments thought so as well.

I personally don’t see the reference; Howard Dean is about more than just gay civil unions, and IIRC every Democratic candidate has said he or she supports civil unions (if not gay marriage outright). Nor is gay marriage implicated in “big-government, blame-America-first liberalism,” the object of DeLay’s critique of the “Howard Dean Democrats.” So I’m still mystified.

Josh Chafetz of OxBlog thinks Georgy Russell is the ideal next governor of California. It doesn’t hurt that her blog is far more interesting than Howard Dean’s. And she owns my book* (by the window)!

I think I’m in love. In a platonic way, of course…

A few miscellaneous items:

1. Lots of talking heads seem to be running around saying that it’s a fait accompli that the Democratic nominee in 2004 will be “pro-war.” Either the fix is in or these commentators are letting their fantasies get in the way of electoral reality, which shows that both Iowa (caucuses = activists) and New Hampshire (almost-favorite son) are in the Dean column.
2. However, running against the war in Iraq is electoral suicide in the general election. As I already pointed out, the Democratic base (not to be confused with Democratic activists and Naderites) believes Saddam was heavily involved in terrorism against America and our allies, and every day Americans die from fedayeen tactics in the Sunni Triangle will only reinforce this impression.
3. Contrary to the beliefs of Howard Dean, higher taxes do not stimulate the economy, excepting the housing market in suburban Virginia and Maryland. People may not have been gung ho for tax cuts, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be annoyed when you promise to raise their taxes again, especially if it’s to pay for things they already have (like health insurance).
4. There are real issues to run on against Bush that won’t alienate the swing voters in the South that Al Gore drove off by the busload in 2000. Play up the Saudi connection. Run against the incompetence of the Justice Department and CIA (and shift the “Bush lied” meme in that direction). And keep abortion and guns out of the campaign.
5. Corollary: continue to whine about Florida in 2000, and you will lose again. Nobody likes a sore loser. Especially when you’ve got real issues to run on, like the Terrorist Connection That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

James at OTB links to a Washington Post op-ed by George Will that argues that the proposed European Union constitution is fundamentally flawed. Will’s central point:

The more detailed a constitution is in presenting particular political outcomes as elevated beyond the reach of changeable majorities, the more quickly it is sure to seem dated.

The more quickly, too, it is sure to feed extremist sentiment from those effectively disenfranchised by the enshrinement of certain ideological predispositions in the constitution. In other words, this constitution, by placing so many societal choices beyond the realm of regular political debate, is a recipe for the continued growth of the anti-democratic neo-Fascist movement in Europe—no doubt precisely the opposite goal to that of Valery Giscard d‘Estaing and his fellow delegates to the convention.

Virginia Postrel points out the real problem with the god-awful Psychological Bulletin piece:

As someone who believes social science can and does discover new truths about how people live and think, I find this sort of idiotic research particularly appalling. It teaches the general public that social science is bullshit. (It also demonstrates that university press offices can be really stupid about what they choose to publicize.)

That hits on the head why I find the research so egregious. It frankly makes me embarrassed to be a social scientist. It gives more ammunition to the people who want to dismiss good social scientific research, not to mention those who allegedly study politics who have neither respect for, nor understanding of, empiricism.* The only good news surrounding this study is that at least nobody thinks these professors were political scientists.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg makes the point that dogmatism and simplicity are hardly the province of conservatives alone.

One of the more bizarre questions revolving around the Iraq war is that there is a large proportion of the American public who believe that Saddam Hussein was involved personally in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the foiled attack on the White House.* This belief persists despite there being no evidence of a direct link, no statements by any credible source that there is a direct link, and repeated refutations of a direct link. (Many leftists want to pin this belief on the Bush administration, but I don’t think the charge sticks without showing that Bush et al. deliberately fostered this belief; there’s simply no evidence of that.)

Being a good empirical social scientist, I was curious about who would believe this assertion. Again, I used the second March 2003 CBS/New York Times poll (conducted March 5-7, 2003). The poll doesn’t have much useful data for testing any psychological theories, but a sociological model seemed to work fairly well. I produced both maximum-likelihood (ML) and MCMC estimates; since the ML estimates were basically identical to the MCMC estimates (the missing data problem was less acute in this model), for ease of interpretation I stuck with them. Here are the probit results (I’m too lazy to build a proper table from the R output; sue me):

            Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) -0.01797    0.26186  -0.069 0.945277
pid         -0.09596    0.04594  -2.089 0.036699 *
college     -0.27348    0.14702  -1.860 0.062858 .
male        -0.62078    0.14587  -4.256 2.08e-05 ***
black        0.17079    0.17603   0.970 0.331934
catholic     0.05115    0.11446   0.447 0.654921
jewish      -1.18340    0.49424  -2.394 0.016649 *
atheist     -0.41736    0.14938  -2.794 0.005208 **
haskids     -0.04056    0.10507  -0.386 0.699462
agecat       0.01696    0.05475   0.310 0.756710
libcon       0.25993    0.07314   3.554 0.000379 ***
pid:college -0.10990    0.05790  -1.898 0.057699 .
pid:male     0.12066    0.05629   2.144 0.032059 *
---
Signif. codes:  0 `***' 0.001 `**' 0.01 `*' 0.05 `.' 0.1 ` ' 1
N: 782
Percent correctly classified: 64.83%
Proportional reduction in Error: 27.25%
McKelvey/Zavonia Pseudo-R^2: 0.214

Jewish and atheist voters are significantly less likely than Protestant voters (the omitted reference category) to believe Saddam was personally involved in 9/11, while there is no difference between Catholics and Protestants. Conservatives are significantly more likely to believe in the Saddam-9/11 link than liberals.

The other significant effects are expressed in interactions between multiple variables. I estimated interactions between gender (male) and party identification (pid) and between level of education (college) and party identification. These effects are shown in this graph. The horizontal axis is the respondent’s party identification, where 0 is “strong Republican”, 1 is “independent leaning Republican”, 2 is “true independent”, 3 is “independent leaning Democratic”, and 4 is “strong Democrat.” (Age is set to the mean value; other variables are set to the modal category.)

Males in general, particularly male Republicans, are much less likely than females to believe the Saddam-9/11 link, regardless of education level. However, among Democrats, the primary difference is between the college educated and the less-well educated, with the gender difference being relatively small.

What does this mean? There are a few possibilities. The most compelling one is that people who don’t know are guessing, drawing on some vague association between Saddam Hussein and radical Islam. The demographic variables may be indicators of attentiveness to the media; those who pay more attention to the media may have a more nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern politics. The partisan effects suggest that some voters may be projecting their own belief systems onto the question; strong Republicans may be projecting hawkish attitudes onto questions about Saddam, while strong Democrats may be projecting a belief that Saddam isn’t a threat onto him, at least among the better-educated.

More generally, the results suggest that trying to argue Saddam wasn’t linked to terrorism may be a losing strategy among their own base for Democratic presidential candidates that opposed the war or are having second thoughts now. Strongly Democratic voters without a college education are more likely than not to believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and it will be difficult to reeducate them on this point. These findings suggest that however candidates like Bob Graham and Howard Dean try to spin things, many Democratic voters think Saddam Hussein was a legitimate target in the war on terror, and they will cross these voters at their own peril.

Then again, maybe all these people think Saddam was involved in 9/11 because his regime actually was, at least to some degree.

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has a lengthy response to Tyler Cowan’s (Volokh Conspiracy) libertarian counter-argument against the federal do-not-call list; Will Baude (Crescat Sententia) and Radley Balko (The Agitator) have other, thoughtful libertarian arguments against the do-not-call list.

I don’t have any particular thoughts to add on either side. I do wonder why Mississippi went ahead and created a separate, state-specific do-not-call list this year that covers less types of marketing and fewer numbers (only residential landline telephones) while the FTC action was pending; undoutably the program is solely an election-year boondoggle that a few incumbents can point to to justify their continued occupation of space in the legislature.

However, as a self-interested social scientist, these events may significantly improve the response rates for telephone surveys (which have dropped substantially since the telemarketing industry took off), so at least the part of me that likes getting publications has no problems with the do-not-call list whatsoever.

Wyeth alerted me to this post in which he says:

John Lott—whose survey evidence for More Guns, Less Crime disappeared in a mysterious computer hard drive crash*—is trying to make the case that an armed Iraq is a safe Iraq:

“Yet, despite Iraqis owning machine guns and the country still not under control, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out that Baghdad is experiencing fewer murders than Washington, D.C., where handguns are banned.”

Let’s forget for a moment whether it is good politics to tell the American people that you want Iraqis to have as many guns as possible at a time when our soldiers are being killed every day by those guns.

Let’s focus on a smaller point—are John Lott’s statistics even accurate? Is the murder rate in Washington DC higher than the murder rate in Baghdad?

Now, it’s possible to know anecdotally what the approximate murder rate is without having detailed statistics available from a central agency. Presumably someone in Baghdad is still making out death certificates, and deaths are being investigated. So, if there are fewer than 262/365 (0.72) murders per day on average (i.e., a murder is only reported every other day, or less often), the murder rate is lower in Baghdad than in Washington.

You can reasonably argue about the causal mechanism; I suspect murder rates could be lower for more complex reasons than “everyone’s armed” (for example, many of the sociopaths who would otherwise be inclined to commit murder were likely Saddam Fedayeen recruits and have been wiped out by the 3ID and others, or maybe it’s just part of the post-war adjustment to a new government by the population). But I’m not sure quoting a statement by a senior administration official is, in and of itself, a lie; at worst, it’s disingenuous support for one’s own position, particularly in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary.

For example, if I say “Bill Clinton says he did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” that doesn’t make me the liar; it does make Bill a liar, unless you want to quibble over the definition of “sex.” In February 1998, it would have been reasonable for me to take Clinton’s statement at face value. Today, even in the light of compelling evidence to the contrary, unless I say “this proves Bill didn’t have sex with Monica” I’m still not a liar.

So, unless someone has statistics showing that the current murder rate in Baghdad is greater than 0.72 people per day (which translates to just over five murders per week), John Lott isn’t necessarily a liar. It is, however, distinctly possible that Lott is wrong. Now, if Lott is subsequently informed that Rumsfeld is factually incorrect, yet continues to repeat the claim, then it would be reasonable to claim he is lying.

Again, a review for those of you just joining us here at SN: lying requires foreknowledge that you are making a factually incorrect statement. Being wrong just requires that the statement being made (or quoted) is factually incorrect. In other words, lying requires intentional deception on behalf of the speaker in addition to factual incorrectness.

James Joyner (in trackback below) makes an important point:

Of course, univariate analysis is silly. Baghdad and Washington are hardly comparable cities. Indeed, one would expect a lower homicide rate in a police state than in a free society.

Indeed. And, that would be a worthwhile critique of Lott’s analysis, which gets to the whole “causal mechanism” thing I discussed above. The best I can say for Lott (if you accept his claims about the dispensation of the survey data, which I find dubious but not entirely improbable) is that he’s a sloppy social scientist—albeit perhaps not an not extraordinarily sloppy one, given the pure sludge that often is passed off as strong evidence in many peer-reviewed journals.

Will Baude at Crescat Sententia notes a spat between Ward Connerly and U.S. Rep. John Dingell, apparently prompted by this statement of Dingell’s:

The people of Michigan have a simple message to you: go home and stay there. We do not need you stirring up trouble where none exists. Michiganders do not take kindly to your ignorant meddling in our affairs.

I seem to remember a lot of Southern politicians complaining about the role of “outside agitators” back in the civil rights movement during the 1960s (a fact I wouldn’t have expected to be lost on anyone who wasn’t completely ignorant of Southern history), as Connerly points out rather dramatically in his response.

As for the substance of Dingell’s statement, I wasn’t checking any driver’s licenses but it sure seemed like a sizeable proportion of the Michiganders at Dean’s place Saturday night were planning on supporting Connerly’s initiative drive.

Daniel Drezner has a challenge to those have criticized his take on the whole “sixteen words” theme that the left has been trying to make fly for the last week:

The power of the critique against Bush would be strengthened if it could be shown that a significant fraction of the American public—as well as the legislative branch—supported action against Iraq only because of the claim that Hussein’s regime had an active nuclear weapons program.

Ok, since I’m likely to be terribly bored at some point in the next day or two, and considering I’m sitting not-very-far from the computers the data is housed on, I’ll look at the February 2003 CBS/New York Times Poll, along with several others from the period after the State of the Union, and see what I can find. I can’t give any evidence on the behavior of legislators, but I can at least examine whether the public’s opinion was conditional on WMD, and nukes in particular—assuming the right questions were asked.

Warning for the faint of heart: I may present regression results in addition to the marginals.

One common refrain, particularly from the left of late*, is that our press isn’t adversarial enough when dealing with politicians; they look to the British press, and in particular the BBC (as that is the only example sizeable numbers of Americans have been exposed to), as an exemplar of the adversarial style they want to see emulated.

Those who advocate this style, however, may want to consider Jeff Jarvis’s damning collection of links that suggest that the Beeb’s quest for sensationalism and ratings—if not an ideological bias—led it to claim that the Blair government had “sexed up” reports on Iraq’s weapons capabilities before the war. At the center of the controversy is a dead weapons inspector, David Kelly, and one of the BBC’s wartime correspondents in Baghdad, Andrew Gilligan, whose performance in a pathetic cloak-and-dagger display I belittled during the war. Now, some portions of the American media are hardly better—the reliance on barely-sourced, anonymous information from deep background has become a staple of reporting in “flagship” newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, perhaps due to every reporter thinking he’s going to become a star like Bob Woodward—but outside the most partisan papers (the occasional crusades of the Raines-era NYT, the Washington Times and the New York Post spring to mind), no American outlets have matched the Beeb’s propensity for grinding its ideological axe.

Moreover, as Peter Mandelson (no stranger to the harsh spotlight of Fleet Street and the Beeb) points out, the British media have contributed to a decline in public discourse in that country:

The viciousness that characterises the relationship between the media and politicians is turning people off politics and corroding our democracy. Everything in Britain is conducted in an overly adversarial way, from our courts to our Parliament, our industrial relations and our select committees. It is good theatre, but does it produce good outcomes? In this case, patently not.

The pervasive cynicism of the BBC and its fellow British media almost certainly have an effect on public perceptions of democracy. As a professional cynic myself, I can’t help but believe part of that attitude was formed as a result of my political socialization at the hands of the Beeb and ITN (the only other television news provider in pre-satellite-TV Britain). A healthy skepticism about the veracity of a government’s claims is good for democracy, but the consistent and corrosive cynicism embodied in the reporting on the motives of everyone and anyone in government or the public eye by the British media seems detrimental to that country’s long-term future.

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry has more on the blame game surrounding Kelly’s death.

James Joyner helpfully points out that the U.S. case for war in Iraq, as made in the State of the Union address—including the famous “sixteen words,” which until recently I thought was a mid-eighties Molly Ringwald vehicle—had very little to do with whether Saddam Hussein had obtained fissible materials from Africa.

In other news, the case for American secession from the British Empire really wasn’t about the fact that King George III had imposed a French-style civil code on the people of Upper Canada (the place now known as Québec). Nevertheless, that shocking claim made it into the Declaration of Independence:

FOR abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rules into these Colonies:

I guess that means we should start heaping dirt on Thomas Jefferson’s reputation. Oh, wait… never mind.

Bill Hobbs reports that flouting one’s own constitution is becoming increasingly popular out west; the latest convert to the cause is none other than Gray “My Ass Is Grass” Davis, who is apparently conducting a bizarre experiment to see how much lower he can drive his own poll ratings.

Regina Ip, Hong Kong’s odious secretary for security, is gone, and finance minister Antony Leung has been booted as well, according to the Financial Times. The Tung Chee-hwa deathwatch is now officially on. Money quote from the FT:

On Tuesday, a poll by the University of Hong Kong found that Ms Ip and Mr Leung were among the territory’s three least popular ministers. Mr Tung himself was the third member of that trio.

Anyone want to go for the trifecta?

Conrad is quite gleeful at the latest idiocies of China’s puppet regime in Hong Kong and its cheering section in the business community. Say what you will about the content of his message, but at least this guy has mastered the art of non-verbal communication.

Doug took the presidential candidate selector (fun for the whole family!), and somehow managed to get Lyndon LaRouche to come out as a zero. Either they’ve fixed the algorithm to properly clip the continuum to the 0-100 range, or Doug was just “lucky.” However, I still haven’t given up looking for people who match LaRouche, mainly so I can seek restraining orders against them.

Alex Knapp links to an excellent Randy Barnett piece at NRO explaining how Justice Kennedy’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas departs from the court’s post-New Deal attitude toward civil liberties. The teaser:

The more one ponders the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the more revolutionary it seems. Not because it recognizes the rights of gays and lesbians to sexual activity free of the stigmatization of the criminal law — though this is of utmost importance. No, the case is revolutionary because Justice Kennedy (and at least four justices who signed on to his opinion without separate concurrences) have finally broken free of the post-New Deal constitutional tension between a “presumption of constitutionality” on the one hand and “fundamental rights” on the other. Contrary to what has been reported repeatedly in the press, the Court in Lawrence did not protect a “right of privacy.” Rather, it protected “liberty” — and without showing that the particular liberty in question is somehow “fundamental.” Appreciation of the significance of this major development in constitutional law requires some historical background.

If you’re as big a fan of the Institute for Justice as I am, you’ll know that this is a Big Deal for liberty—on par with their efforts to get the Court to revive the privileges or immunities clause.