An interesting development in college football today as Fox Sports has won the bidding for the next BCS contract for 2007–10, including three of the four “plus one” title games. ABC retains its contract through 2014 for the Rose Bowl games, including the national title game in 2010 (to be played in Pasadena).

Is this a sign that Fox is planning to get serious about college football more generally? To date, Fox’s involvement in the sport has been limited to a schedule of second-tier Big XII and Pac-10 matchups on its cable outlets (along with some Division I-AA matchups) and broadcast rights to the Cotton Bowl. It’s likely that at least one major conference, like the Pac-10, would be interested in a national Saturday afternoon slot to compete with the SEC-CBS contract—thus avoiding the limited 3:30 coverage associated with ABC’s programming. Plus, Fox would be hard-pressed to come up with an exclusive announce team that works four days a year, suggesting that regular season college football on Fox is coming sooner rather than later.

Throughout the anglosphere the word “liberal” has been used scornfully for the past few decades and, interestingly, it’s used the same way in Europe, though for a different reason. We all know that it’s used as a proxy term for socialist, panty-waist, etc. in the U.S. However, in the rest of the world the left uses it in its original meaning as a term of scorn; globalization (capitalism) is known as neoliberalism and has been known to spark riots from time to time.

“Liberal” is a term of contempt in much of Europe as well—even though, strangely enough, it usually denotes the opposite tendency. Rather than being keen on taxes and public spending, European liberals are often derided (notably in France) for seeking minimal government—in fact, for denying that government has any useful role at all, aside from pruning vital regulation and subverting the norms of decency that impede the poor from being ground down. Thus, in continental Europe, as in the United States, liberalism is also regarded as a perversion, a pathology: there is consistency in that respect, even though the sickness takes such different forms. And again, in its most extreme expression, it tests the boundaries of tolerance. Worse than ordinary liberals are Europe's neoliberals: market-worshipping, nihilistic sociopaths to a man. Many are said to believe that “there is no such thing as society.”

Yet there ought to be a word—not to mention, here and there, a political party—to stand for what liberalism used to mean. The idea, with its roots in English and Scottish political philosophy of the 18th century, speaks up for individual rights and freedoms, and challenges over-mighty government and other forms of power. In that sense, traditional English liberalism favoured small government—but, crucially, it viewed a government’s efforts to legislate religion and personal morality as sceptically as it regarded the attempt to regulate trade (the favoured economic intervention of the age). This, in our view, remains a very appealing, as well as internally consistent, kind of scepticism.

Will Wilkinson has a great post on negative liberty and the welfare state that I largely agree with:

However, I think that among the best argument for robust negative or liberty rights, i.e., for institutionalized constraints on coercion, is that a reliable system of negative rights over time creates more abilities, opens more paths of feasible possibility for individual lives, than most alternative systems of rights. Like Friedman and Hayek, I’m in favor of a modest and well-designed social safety net. However, political systems built around positive rights tend toward sclerosis, thereby reducing rates of economic growth, and a high rate of economic growth, along with (negative) liberty and stability, is part of the trinity of primary political goods (says me). Furthermore, a system of positive rights, conceived as a system of guarantees, is often self-defeating, because it cannot overcome systemic moral hazard problems that, independently of growth problems, turn out foreclose many of the possibilities for life that the system of guarantees was meant to open.

I’m now listeneing to AC/DC. Not exactly 80s, but still good.

To begin with, thanks to Chris for inviting me along as a co-blogger. We share a lot of the same points of view, though I’m more of a statist than him, I suppose.

I’m still in school and time is scarce, but I’m going to try this group blog thing and see how it works. I think it’ll be fine and certainly beats maintaining a site of my own.

One of the things I’ve missed the most about blogging is seeing things of interest and not being able to tell people about it. Take, for instance, this post over at Volokh. I read that yesterday—follow the links, it’s a parody of a leftist / humanist denial of objective reality (it’s from academia, of course)—and was dying to blog about it.

Well, enough nostalgia. Thanks to Jeff for the early link and to James Joyner for the kind words of encouragement.

Speaking of Jeff Goldstein, I’m listening to Journey right now. How 80s am I? Ok, so I wasn’t done with the nostalgia…

Is amending the constitution to permit naturalized citizens to run for president gathering momentum? Both Kriston of Begging to Differ and Robert Tagorda take note of the group Amend for Arnold and Jen (referring to the governors of California and Michigan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm, respectively), spotlighted in today’s New York Times by William Safire.

Interestingly, three proposed constitutional amendments have been introduced during the 108th Congress to do just that:

• U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder of Arizona Arkansas (and 6 co-sponsors) introduced H.J.Res 59, which would provide that “[a] person who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 35 years and who has been a resident within the United States for at least 14 years shall be eligible to hold the office of President or Vice President.”
• U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California introduced H.J.Res 104, which would provide that “[a] person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been a citizen of the United States for at least 20 years, and who is otherwise eligible to hold the Office of the President, is not ineligible to hold that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States.”
• U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah introduced S.J. Res 15, which would provide that “[a] person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been for 20 years a citizen of the United States, and who is otherwise eligible to the Office of President, is not ineligible to that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States” and include a seven-year limit on the ratification period. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the proposed amendment last month.

As a matter of general principle (leaving aside the merits of Schwarzenegger and/or Granholm candidacies, which seem to me to be rather tangential) I think any of these proposed amendments would be sound, and I hope Congress will seriously consider passing such an amendment in the coming months.

The more I read about the state legislature’s shenanigans, the more I am compelled to conclude that referring to extraordinary sessions of that body as “special” seems oddly appropriate.

Ole Miss AD Pete Boone isn’t even bothering with the fake “we’re 100% behind Coach Cutcliffe” spiel, according to Sunday’s Clarion-Ledger:

“Obviously, this season has been disappointing, but the important thing is for Coach Cutcliffe and I to get together soon after the final game and… not only to look at the season but also the program,” Boone said prior to Saturday’s Ole Miss-LSU game. “And then make whatever adjustments need to be made, whether it’s policy issues or procedure issues or human resource (staffing) issues.”

Mind you, I continue to believe, absent a large suitcase full of unmarked bills being delivered to Steve Spurrier from Dickie Scruggs, that Cutcliffe’s job is safe through next fall, simply because there’s nobody obviously better on the market who the Rebs have a shot at—while it’d be entertaining to see Mike Price get the job after his comeback at UTEP, the Rebel alumni are even less likely to be forgiving of Price’s alleged indiscretions than Bama’s were. Expect nothing more than some house-cleaning at the offensive and defensive coordinator slots and an “Independence Bowl or else” edict from Boone’s office.

I’m pleased to announce that Robert Prather, formerly blogging at Insults Unpunished, has agreed to join Signifying Nothing as a co-blogger; I’ll leave any further introductions to him. Robert’s posts will be this color. Welcome aboard!

Will Baude is taking issue with a favorable review by Pejman Yousefzadeh of Heaven on Seven, a restaurant I had a somewhat-decent lunch at with Dirk Eddelbüttel during my last visit to Chicago after our plans to eat at the restaurant in Millenium Park fell through.

I generally agree that the restaurant only provides a facsimilie of proper soul food, but given that travel to Mr. Baude’s preferred restaurants in the UofC area would not fit in the timeframe of Loop-area office workers (or academic conference attendees desperately attempting to arrange job interviews), sometimes the substitute is preferable just because the only viable alternative is starvation.

Is TV sci-fi back? PoliBlog’s Steven Taylor takes note of the recent improvements in Enterprise (or is it Star Trek: Enterprise?), Stargate Atlantis has had a fairly impressive first half-season, and I hear, since I wouldn’t want to go against the wishes of creator Ron Moore and use BitTorrent to download any episodes before the scheduled January U.S. debut, that the new Battlestar Galactica series is the most kick-ass TV sci-fi since Firefly.

Congratulations to Dan Drezner on finishing the draft of his second book. Now I feel strangely unproductive…

If you have a olemiss.edu address for me, it is going away in a few days. Update your address books accordingly.

Kieran at Crooked Timber is the latest to point to a UC-Berkeley study that represents the new Great Kerry-Really-Won Hope for the left; there’s apparent county-level evidence that Florida counties that used electronic voting had a greater increase in Bush support from 2000 than counties that used optical-mark scanning. Rick Hasen has dug up some skeptical responses from voting experts, while Patrick Ruffini notes the bivariate relationship counters the authors’ thesis.

Of course, Diebold and the other e-voting manufacturers could have forestalled all of this silliness from the start by including a paper trail in their equipment.

Update: Andrew Gelman says only two counties are driving the results: the adjacent Southeast Florida counties of Palm Beach and Broward, both of which have relatively large Jewish populations (and thus might have been disproportionately more likely to vote Democratic in 2000 for the Gore-Lieberman ticket than for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards ticket).

If there is such a thing as a “reality-based community,” Ole Miss AD Pete Boone isn’t part of it:

Ole Miss has taken a few beatings on and off the football field in recent months, but the program is not spiraling out of control, athletic director Pete Boone said Thursday.

“There have been some problems, and while these things have come in bunches (lately), I don’t think this is indicative at all of our overall program,” Boone said.

At issue is a record of off-the-field problems over the past couple of years that might even make Miami’s AD blush:

Since June of 2003, Ole Miss has had at least five players arrested (at least four on felony charges), has placed at least seven players on suspension for disciplinary reasons and has dismissed at least four members from the team.

Coupled with the Rebs’ on-the-field problems, it seems that David Cutcliffe’s leash is getting a lot shorter lately.

One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research.

I had one conversation with an undecided, sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the "mess in Iraq" he lit up. "We should have gone through Iraq like shit through tinfoil," he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: "I mean we should have dominated the place; that's the only thing these people understand. ... Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats."

Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush's failures as badly as Bush was.

Get that woman a thickburger!

Google has unveiled a new toy of interest to academics: a search engine that exclusively tracks scholarly articles. It’s not perfect, and it may not quite put the print journals out of business, but I suspect it’s another nail in their coffins (þ: Ars Technica).

Both Stephen “Screw the big tent now we’ve won” Bainbridge and Begging To Differ’s in-house Atrios-substitute Kriston agree that the House GOP shouldn’t have changed the rules to allow Tom DeLay to stay majority leader (#2 in the House) if he’s indicted by a Texas grand jury. And there’s more agreement from James Joyner and Andrew Sullivan.

It seems to me that the dopes on The Corner should have expended as much effort against this crap as they spent (and still are spending, at least in the personage of the MoDo-esque K-Lo) riling up people to call Congress to demand that they boot Specter. But the word “DeLay” doesn’t even appear on the page. Amazing how that works…

Tony Dungy bizarrely argues that the “towel-dropping incident” on Monday Night Football is some sort of “Jungle Fever” knockoff:

“No. 1, I think it was racial,” Dungy said. “I think it’s stereotypical in looking at the players, and on the heels of the Kobe Bryant incident, I think it’s very insensitive,” he added, a reference to the NBA star now facing a civil suit after criminal rape charges were dropped.

I give up. Everyone on this planet is apparently losing their minds.

I think it’s safe to say that if you’re a New York Giants fan in Mississippi you can cancel NFL Sunday Ticket for the forseeable future.

Jeremy Freese points out that receipts from Best Buy have become ridiculously long as of late—though, in Best Buy’s defense, Circuit City still manages somehow to have both longer and wider receipts.

Viagra and Oxycontin bottles will soon be tagged with RFID chips, under a new FDA initiative to discourage theft and counterfeiting.

"Right away, for the first time ever, a cop can say 'that bottle came from a crime scene and this suspect is in possession of stolen property'," [Purdue Pharma chief security officer Aaron] Graham said.

(Purdue Pharma is the manufacturer of Oxycontin, a narcotic.)

Maybe I’m missing something, but what will stop thieves from just removing the pills from the bottles and throwing the bottles away?

If the “war on drugs” didn’t have such a high cost in human freedom, the ineffectual antics of the drug warriors would be a laugh riot.

Guys, has your girlfriend dumped you for the boyfriend’s arm pillow? Don’t worry, the Kameo corporation of Japan has something for you, too. The amazing new girlfriend’s lap pillow will get you through those lonely nights without her.

(þ Pure Land Mountain, which doesn’t seem to have permalinks.)

Harry Lampert, creator of DC Comics superhero “The Flash” (the original Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick), is dead at the age of 88.

Mark A.R. Kleiman has a modest proposal for Democrats that makes sense:

Think about it: when you pass a car on the highway and see an American flag bumper sticker, what do you assume about the political views of the driver? Right. So do I. And so do all those voters whose behavior you simply can’t understand. At some level, many of them were voting for the party that wasn’t made uncomfortable by the sight of an American flag bumper sticker.

The habit on the anti-Vietnam War left of dishonoring our flag and honoring that of our enemies wasn’t really very widespread. But it wasn’t entirely made up, either. And its result was to allow the right to seize the flag as a partisan symbol, giving its candidates an advantage they still enjoy. If we want to start winning elections, the first thing to do is to recapture the flag for our side.

[After the Oklahoma City bombing, I proposed to the couple of contacts I had within the Clinton White House that the President should ask all Americans to fly flags and wear flag lapel pins as an anti-militia statement. But the idea went nowhere.]

So here’s my idea, which I offer to any seeker of the Democratic nomination for 2008 who wants to take it: ask your supporters NOT to put your bumper sticker on their cars without a separate American flag bumper sticker, or to wear your campaign button without an American flag lapel pin. Yes, that will make some of your potential supporters uncomfortable. But that’s exactly the problem we’re trying to solve.

He also has some thoughts on the role of ceremony in national unity that are worth reading.