Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bob Novak, who for reasons inexplicable to me is still walking the streets of this great nation instead of rotting in jail for contempt of court, states the obvious in a column that can only be characterized as “random 3-graf thoughts from Bob Novak.” Here’s the whole item of interest:

Analysts at the Republican National Committee have sent this warning to the House of Representatives: The party is in danger of losing 25 seats in the 2006 election and, therefore, of losing control of the House for the first time since the 1994 election.

Although some Republicans on Capitol Hill believe the RNC is just trying to frighten them, concern about keeping the present 232–202 edge pervades GOP ranks. The second midterm election of an eight-year presidency often produces heavy congressional losses for the party in power.

A footnote: Rep. Christopher Shays, re-elected from his Connecticut district last year with 52 percent, is considered by colleagues as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent. Other especially shaky GOP House members include Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania and Rob Simmons of Connecticut.

I doubt there are even 25 competitive House seats in the nation, much less 25 occupied by Republicans. Not to mention that the “midterm loss” theory has gone 0–2 since the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives; in 1998, the Democrats picked up seats during the impeachment debacle, while Republicans gained in 2002 during the slowest “rush to war” in human history. I suppose it’s possible that the historical midterm loss trend will return, but I wouldn’t try to predict it 20 months in advance regardless.

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey has a mostly positive review of The Motorcycle Diaries. Politics aside, as I mentioned in my review at the time, the “buddy film” character of the piece makes it most enjoyable, and it’s fair to say that the film doesn’t really take much of a political stand beyond making young Guevara the center of the story—which, I suppose, is pretty much inherent in a biopic.

Previous discussion of the movie here and here.

A nasty thunderstorm this morning, in addition to tripping the master circuit breaker on my apartment (hidden behind a panel on my outside electric meter, instead of hiding in the circuit breaker box in my laundry room), killed a power strip in my bedroom and my microwave oven, both of which were pretty close to being on their last legs anyway. So now I’m the proud owner of a new GE microwave oven from Wal-Mart, which seems roughly equivalent in features and wattage to the old microwave.

As you may have noticed, I’ve done some minor futzing with the stylesheet recently. The big changes are a new header image that replaces the Magnolia and Tennessee flags with a cartographic theme, made with scans* from my Michelin 2005 Road Atlas, that better uses PNG alpha transparency; frames around each post; and the “recent Flickr photos” box at the top of the page, currently featuring my camera phone photos from today and the ones I took on my aging Olympus C-2100UZ camera in New Orleans.

Had a fun day today at Mal’s St. Paddy’s Parade in downtown Jackson with glowing Kamilla, object-of-glow Andy, adjective-defying Kelly, and Friday (Kelly’s dog), including a 3 mile stroll from the humble abode and back that compensated for the HAC being closed today. For your edification, here are a few photos from my camera phone of the beautiful people (i.e. not me) frolicking in West Street Park after the parade.

Those under the impression that limiting legislative sessions to 90 days every two years would reduce legislative stupidity have another thing coming, apparently:

The Friday night lights in Texas could soon be without bumpin’ and grindin’ cheerleaders. Legislation filed by Rep. Al Edwards would put an end to “sexually suggestive” performances at athletic events and other extracurricular competitions.

“It’s just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they’re shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down,” said Edwards, a 26-year veteran of the Texas House. “And then we say to them, ‘don’t get involved in sex unless it’s marriage or love, it’s dangerous out there’ and yet the teachers and directors are helping them go through those kind of gyrations.”

Under Edwards’ bill, if a school district knowingly permits such a performance, funds from the state would be reduced in an amount to be determined by the education commissioner.

Edwards said he filed the bill as a result of several instances of seeing such ribald performances in his district.

One is forced to wonder if Edwards was among those protesting Elvis Presley back in the 50s. On the upside, I initially misread the headline as “Lawmaker Seeks to End Sexy Cheerleaders,” which would seem to eliminate any purpose for having cheerleaders to begin with. (þ: OTB and others.)

I’m glad to see I’m not the only college professor who is sick and tired of TIAA-CREF’s current advertising campaign. In particular, I’m not entirely convinced that one prof lecturing to a room of 200-plus bored undergraduates (the centerpiece of one of these ads) is “serving the greater good,” or even the individual good of anyone involved in the process. Plus, given most college faculty’s antipathy-to-outright-hostility toward Division I athletics, one suspects TIAA-CREF’s members might question the organization’s expenditure to help pay CBS’s bills for airing the tourney.

Prof. Karlson’s point about the “greater good” being served by such things as comparative advantage and a market-based economy, in addition to doctors and college professors, is also well taken.

In terms of the tournament itself, color me deeply pleased that two of America’s most overrated basketball programs, Syracuse and Kansas, both got spanked by rank outsiders today.

Truly bizarre:

A painter working at David Letterman’s Montana ranch was charged Thursday with plotting to kidnap the talk-show host’s toddler son and nanny and hold them for $5 million ransom.

Kelly A. Frank, 43, was being held on a felony charge of solicitation, among others.

Montana Department of Corrections spokeswoman Sally Hilander said the plot was uncovered when someone Frank had approached about the plan informed local police.

They’re throwing the book at this guy:

In addition to the solicitation charge, Frank also is charged with felony theft for allegedly overcharging Letterman for painting, and a misdemeanor charge of obstruction for lying to an investigator who first contacted him about the alleged plot. [emphasis mine]

Mind you, this isn’t the first time nutjobs have gone after Dave:

For years, Letterman was targeted by a stalker who called herself “Mrs. David Letterman” and broke into his Connecticut house at least seven times.

Margaret Ray eventually pleaded guilty to breaking and entering. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she served 10 months in prison and 14 months in a mental institution. In 1998, she committed suicide at age 46 by kneeling in front of a train.

As Steven Taylor says, this is insane.

The hooked-up “humanitarian” outfit called M-Quality has decided to withdraw its request for a cool half-mil in state loans after adverse media attention to its dubious business plan of exporting ”‘poultry, beef, lamb and pork skins’ to the Carribean as a humanitarian service.”

Steven Taylor is putting out feelers for someone who knows international political economy for a potential gig at Troy State University. If you’re interested, you know where to find him…

Now it’s public, I’d like to congratulate my cousin Melvin Patrick Ely, author of Israel on the Appomattox and professor of history and African-American studies at the College of William and Mary, on winning the Bancroft Prize in American History. More here.

Every time I start looking at Jefferson, like earlier today, it ends up leading me elsewhere. Today, I found this. If you’re interested in deism, or something similar, take a look.

Had a nice early dinner tonight with my colleagues-slash-friends Suzanne, Peter, Kamilla, and Kelly at Hal and Mal’s to celebrate some good employment news, the precise details of which I’m not ready to share with all the readers of Signifying Nothing just yet.

Topics of discussion included such eclectic topics as hair (Kelly’s good, mine bad), the spatial properties of glowingness (I made an argument that glow is a multidimensional concept that has, at least, romantic and vocational axes, while others disagreed), coattail effects, the incumbency advantage, metrics of success, whether “free love” and pot was all it was cracked up to be in the late 60s and early 70s, sumo wrestling as a career option, and the geography of Ann Arbor. Damn I’m going to miss these folks.

Like many, I’ve had my doubts about the potential success of the war in Iraq. In fact, I had them last Fall in Cass’s comments section back when she was at Jet Noise. I never thought I would see Michele go wobbly, though.

Michele is apparently experiencing buyer’s remorse over having voted for President Bush back in the Fall. She’s even starting to question us going to war in Iraq. Coming from one of the founders of The Command Post, a post I manned in the runup to the Iraq War, it’s more than a little astonishing.

Here’s Michele on her reasons for experiencing buyer’s remorse:

Social Security. Bankruptcy. The insistence of the far right that they have some kind of religious mandate now and we need to revert back to our Christian roots and morals. And yes, Iraq.

• Social Security: it’s not clear to me why there should be any remorse here. Bush’s support for private accounts is one of the worst kept secrets in the world. He’s favored them since the 2000 race. Lately, I’ve started to question the need for the accounts myself, but I can’t claim that Bush’s support for them is a surprise.

  According to Zogby, this is part of a political realignment that Bush is attempting to engineer. Maybe so, but it seems like a far more difficult solution to the problem than is needed (for more see here, here and here) and that the effort to reform Social Security would be better spent working on Medicare, which is a far bigger problem.

• Bankruptcy: this is a little more bothersome, but not as much as Michele seems to think. From what I’ve read, the credit card companies are refusing to accept any responsibility for the people they give cards to. This seems a bit unfair, and I would like for it to be different, but it’s not something to get worked up over. The best solution is to limit your use of credit cards and you won’t have to deal with the bankruptcy bill. If there’s more to it than that, please let me know.
• The religious right: Michele and I apparently read different publications. Even if the religious right thinks it has a mandate, what are they gonna do? Throw people in jail for going to the wrong church, or for not going at all? I’ll be in there with all of the other sinners.

  On gay marriage it seems that they mostly want it to be handled at a state level. Some want it outlawed nationwide, but it’ll never happen. They couldn’t even get the FMA out of the Senate last Fall and it doesn’t outlaw gay marriage; it simply guarantees that it’s left to the states. The optimal answer here is to let the states decide and that appears to be what is happening.

  Abortion is another item, but again, the religious right doesn’t seem to be intent on outlawing it nationwide; they simply want it returned to the states, which is all that would happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned. The real problem is that the courts intervened in this process thirty years ago and tried to fashion a consensus where none existed. And it’s still a huge issue today precisely because the Court intervened, rather than leaving it to the states. If someone tries to do the opposite and outlaw it nationwide before a consensus exists, I’ll be screaming about it as well. Until then, I won’t worry about it.

• The Iraq War: this is the most inexplicable of Michele’s gripes. Finally, after months and months of nothing but bad news, the idea of freedom in the Middle East seems to be getting a bit of traction, and part of it can be traced to the reelection of President Bush. By reelecting President Bush we told the rest of the world that we can’t be rolled and that we’ll remain committed to what we started. The people in other countries in the Middle East have taken this to heart and are acting on this and other events to work for freedom. How is this sneaking past Michele?

  Like Cass said, it’s gut check time. All we have to do is be resolute in our jobs as computer jockies and let the troops know that what they are doing is not in vain. I can do that.

I love my students most of the time, but I’ve got to hand it to the guy who sent me an attachment today with the title IMFUCKED.WPS. Actually, the title is very appropriate, as I wasn't able to open the file using OpenOffice, Word, or WordPerfect; you can’t grade what you can’t read. Thankfully (for the student, at least), a bit of googling implicated Microsoft Works as a possible producer of this document, so maybe I can figure out a way to get it into OpenOffice so I can print the thing.

I love Mississippi politics sometimes. Case in point: yesterday, the idiots we elected to our House of Representatives approved a bond package that features a $500,000 loan to some newly-incorporated outfit without even an office:

M-Quality Inc. is a “humanitarian group” and will perform work in the Caribbean, House Ways and Means Chairman Percy Watson, D-Hattiesburg, said about the 4-month-old company. Watson said that is all he was told about M-Quality by one of the firm’s incorporators, Dr. Roy Irons, president of the Mississippi Port Authority board of commissioners.

Corruption? Pshaw. Nothing to see here, move along.

I’ve been a big fan of Condi running in 2008 for some time now. The issue has been popping up everywhere since Sunday and has never really gone away at all (Condi's rather lengthy, and tortured denial didn't help).

Condi has some negatives for a Republican—she’s pro-choice and supposedly supports affirmative action—but the positives outweigh that by a great deal. Foreign policy is a great starting point and I’ve seen no indication that she would be all that different than most free-market Republicans.

On the abortion issue, which is usually a deal killer for most Republicans in the primary, Condi isn’t nearly as far out as many Democrats, which usually involves abortions on demand up until the baby crowns. Also, she won’t get elected in a vacuum and will have to pay attention to the pro-lifers. When it comes down to it, Republicans are far more reasonable than the Democrats on the issue and I hope the Republicans aren’t marginalized in the same way the Democrats have been due to their hard-headedness on the issue.

Outside of Condi, the Republicans have a very shallow bench for 2008. In fact, the best candidate outside of Condi seems to be Jeb Bush. If Hillary runs, that will do away with a lot of the nepotism charges and make a run for Jeb easier.

As for Hillary, Condi could whip her with a corn stalk.

I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “state’s rights” since I view individuals as rights holders, so I generally use the word federalism instead. The Professor points to an article that makes the distinction. I’m simply marking it for later reading, and hoping it will be of interest to you.

Ryan dredges the Dead Parrots archives and finds this gem from last year (þ: Begging to Differ). Good thing I don’t have any reason to have any Cameron Crazy pride or anything, or else I might be insulted.

Ten-digit dialling came to much of Mississippi overnight. No reports yet of panic, although those most prone to panic are probably out in sheds in Neshoba County—and may be unable to call anyone to express their panic.

Exactly why the PUC went with the overlay instead of just splitting 601 again is one of those unresolved mysteries that probably should be resolved.

Final thoughts on New Orleans:

• Both Mike Munger and Dan Drezner have slightly more substantive posts about the panel.
• The “most unlikely sighting of a URL” award for my visit goes to John Brown’s New Orleans Sidewalk Astronomy, which was set up right next to our table at Café du Monde. It was a perfect evening for stargazing; perhaps we should have partaken.
• I do have a few photos from my stroll around New Orleans today; maybe I’ll post them at some point.
• We missed TigerHawk by 48 hours or so.

Sigh. Now back to the grind.

Today, I decided to continue to semi-unwind in New Orleans rather than driving straight back to Jackson. I think I ended up walking around downtown and the French Quarter for about four hours, although I spent much of that time at the D-Day Museum (excellent, and well worth the $14, even though I’d had the history of it before when I visited Normandy with my dad in 1990) and the aquarium (my five-year-old cousin probably would have enjoyed it, but I couldn’t exclude the $16 admission from my evaluation of the clearly kid-geared presentation; the jellyfish were neat, however). Also worth seeing is the New Orleans Holocaust Memorial, an interesting piece of public art on the riverwalk just downriver from the aquarium.

Had I decided to play tourist before 10 a.m. this morning—or if I’d realized that her cell number was in my cell phone before I was calling my dad on the way back to Jackson—I probably could have had the company of TLLJ, who I believe had similar plans for the day, although the simple pleasure of wandering about alone with one’s own thoughts should never be discounted.

As some may already know, I was one of three participants in a panel entitled “Can academics be bloggers? Can bloggers be academics?” at the Public Choice Society conference in New Orleans, organized by Mike Munger and co-starring Mike and Dan Drezner. I think we had a really good and interesting discussion with the audience, although I’m uncertain how much my participation really enhanced things.

I also had the serendipitous opportunity to catch up with the lovely Leslie Johns from NYU, a friend and fellow TA from ICPSR this past summer; Dan, Leslie, and I ended up having a nice dinner at Arnaud’s (which Dan kindly paid for), followed by some sort of alcoholic slurpee concoction from a Bourbon Street vendor and beignets at Café du Monde.

After a pretty up-and-down week, it was nice to have a low-stress conference and a day with some good company.

A few odds and ends:

• Had a nice time Friday night hanging out with my friend Kamilla and some of her fellow Baha’i at their mid-fast feast. Plus I got to show my massive dominance at Scrabble at the Video Café afterwards, although I don’t think anyone was really impressed.
• My friend Kelly (who also hung out with the Baha’i) is exhibiting some recent work as part of a show at Lemuria starting on Tuesday. Buy some of her stuff; it’s helping a good cause.
• I’ve got three tests to write and an honors committee progress meeting between now and Wednesday afternoon. Don’t expect lots of blogging in the meantime.
• There might be some really great job news I can share in a few days. Or there might not be, I’m not entirely sure yet. You’ll know it when you see it.

They wrote a report and everything!!

There’s been a lot of attention paid to this midterm meeting on the Lisbon Report, wherein the EU planned to catch up with the US on a number of economics measures. It’s apparently not working out (duh). Every time someone in the EU suggests substantial reforms, they’re shouted down as “neoliberals” (capitalists).

(þ: Tim Blair and The Professor.)

See also here, here, here and here.