Stephen Green has seen the light; I officially welcome him to the dark side of the force, in which the spectre of Larry Sabato is exorcised from our dreams and we content ourselves with the knowledge that we don’t know the unknowable (þ: OTB).

But, if you absolutely insist on your electoral college wargaming ways, Andrea Moro’s site is at least fun to look at, plus it uses Monte Carlos for the satiation of your inner gambling jones.

Heh (þ: TigerHawk).

Pat Robertson talked to Paula Zahn today, and boy did he let loose a doozy:

“And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ‘Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.’ ”

Robertson said the president then told him, “Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.”

Now, I suppose Robertson could be completely and totally demented by this point (I mean, he is the guy that blamed 9/11 on gay people, and I doubt his mental faculties are on the rebound); either way, it’s fairly clear that at least half of the people participating in this alleged conversation had no grip on reality.

I have to say, my initial reaction to this Patrick Belton OxBlog post was a determination to go and vote against the Perestroika slate of candidates for the APSA council.

Then I read the bios and found out that my good friend Jim Johnson had nominated both of these candidates. So I committed heresy and only voted for three candidates: the two Perestroikans and the only nominee not at a top-25 institution—even though I found the identity politics paragraph in his bio both tedious and pretentious, he saved himself with the statement “I fear that the proposals of some in the [Perestroika] movement could result in less diversity in the APSA leadership.” Gotta have some balance in the end.

I have to admit that, even though I think the shots at Kerry for being “French-looking” are a bit cheap, this is incredibly amusing, at least at the “boneheaded strategy” level if nothing else.

My wife found an eleven-year-old mix tape that I made for her when we were first dating.

Side A:
The Beatles, Revolution
The Rolling Stones, Ruby Tuesday
David Bowie, Candidate
King Crimson, Matte Kudasai
The Who, Odorono
John Lennon, Imagine
Bob Mould, Sunspots/Wishing Well
Ween, Don’t Laugh (I Love You)
Pixies, Here Comes Your Man
The Who, Bargain
Frank Zappa, Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance
David Bowie, All Saints

Side B:
Peter Gabriel, The Feeling Begins
The Who, Squeeze Box
The Rolling Stones, Brown Sugar
David Bowie, Big Brother
Butthole Surfers, Hurdy Gurdy Man
Brian Eno and John Cale, Spinning Away
Velvet Underground, Sweet Jane
Ween, Marble Tulip Juicy Tree
The Who, Behind Blue Eyes
Frank Zappa, In France
King Crimson, The Sheltering Sky

Looking back, I’d say my musical tastes have remained fairly consistent. I don’t listen to music as much as I used to, but The Beatles, The Who, Bowie, and Zappa are still frequently in my CD player. And I still think that the Eno/Cale album, Wrong Way Up, is the best album of the 90s.

The only group on the list that really didn’t age well for me is Ween. I threw in The Pod about a month ago, and all I could think was "I used to listen to this noise?"

Do kids these days, with their MP3s and their iPods, still make mix tapes for their girlfriends/boyfriends?

Tim Sandefur writes:

[Robert] Bork is contemporary conservatism. This is the great tragedy of conservatism. ...

The cure, you see, for the misery of homosexuals in a society which condemns homosexuality, is to ratchet up the persecution. This is the logic of Torquemada, for Christsake! How can this man be taken seriously? And yet he is not only taken seriously; he is the intellectual leader of today’s conservatives.

I don’t personally have a great handle on the whole “nature versus nurture” argument myself (either way, I’m wired up to be attracted to women who invariably treat me like a doormat, but that’s neither here nor there), but if there’s even the possibility that homosexuality is an innate trait, I find the Borkian conviction that being homosexual is legitimate grounds for persecution to be loathsome. And, even if homosexuality is a chosen behavior, I think notions of individual autonomy in consensual activity far outweigh any aggregate community interest in discouraging that activity.

Today’s New York Times provides more evidence that the Selective Service Administration has way too much time on its hands. Choice quote from the article:

In 1987, Congress enacted a law requiring the Selective Service to develop a plan for “registration and classification” of health care professionals essential to the armed forces.

One wonders what Senator Kerry’s vote on this piece of legislation was… I’ve tracked it down to Senate roll call #384 in the first session of the 100th Congress (on what became P.L. 100–180), but I don’t have the roll calls for that Congress at my fingertips at home (where I am today, since it’s fall break).

Steven Taylor writes:

[I]t is a mystery to me as well as to how any voter could be undecided at this juncture.

I think there are essentially two classes of undecided voters: the uninformed undecideds, who (more likely than not) will probably stay away from the polls in the end, unless some element of the political zeitgeist manages to work its way into the cerebellum; and the informed undecideds (probably a smaller category), who are essentially ambivalent between the choices on offer in this presidential election, but who will probably vote nonetheless.

Ironically, even though I know with almost absolute certainty my vote isn’t going to be pivotal in this election, I’m still vacillating between three options:

• Voting for Bush, because (a) I don’t want to spend the next four years hearing Democrats whine about Bush not winning the popular vote again and (b) despite his screw-ups, he’s the only serious candidate dedicated to sticking it out in Iraq.
• Voting for Kerry, because (a) Bush deserves to be punished for his screw-ups, (b) gridlock might lead to more fiscal discipline and none of Kerry’s promises being enacted into law, and (c) my current colleagues probably expect me to vote for him, and I need all the help I can get when it comes to landing the tenure-track job here.
• Voting for Badnarik, because even though he’s a complete and total lunatic and completely wrong on Iraq, it would send a (marginal) directional message to both parties that they can’t take libertarian votes for granted.

There’s more on this theme from the lovely and talented Jane Galt.

Update: Additional thoughts (on Badnarik, at least) abound from Will Baude and Will Wilkinson, both quasi-inspired by Matt Yglesias, while Carina of An Inclination to Criticize supports the “honking bozo” Badnarik.

I previously posted on this theme ten months ago, and that post has much to recommend it… even if I did not quite predict John Kerry’s descent into Deanesque moonbattery at the time.

No doubt to the infinite shock of all attentive observers, the president of Belarus has won a referendum removing the country’s two-term limit for presidential service, which essentially is a precursor for him to be elected dictator-for-life; in a separate ballot for the national legislature, no opposition candidates won election to the body. Unsurprisingly, observers from the OSCE found numerous irregularities in the vote.

In not-entirely-unrelated news, today’s Clarion-Ledger carries a column on preparations for the November 2nd ballot here in Mississippi, and I’ve spent most of the past weekend working putting together an exit poll—somehow I managed to cram 46* legible questions on both sides of a sheet of letter paper.

Now, the heavy lifting begins after the final end of the Ayers lawsuit. Personally, I was never very clear on what the plaintiffs actually wanted (I suspect they would have been content with a segregated, “separate but truly equal” system), but in the end it ended up as more of a desegregation case than an equal financing case.

I tend to think that this state needs to focus its limited resources on K-12 education and community colleges, providing scholarships for the truly needy to attend four-year institutions while making the middle and upper class pay something close to “retail” for university educations, and shutting down or privatizing the non-doctoral institutions (Alcorn State, Delta State, Mississippi Valley State, and Mississippi University for Women). Unfortunately I think Ayers is a hindrance, not a help, toward those goals.

Former Malaysian dictator prime minister Mahathir Mohamad endorses Kerry, while syphilocon Pat Buchanan and Russian dictator president Vladimir Putin endorse Bush.

Update: Xrlq points out that Arafat may be backing Kerry, although I haven’t seen this reported in mainstream media, so I’m somewhat skeptical (☣: LGF). And, Iran endorses Bush. My head is starting to hurt.

The New York Times endorses John Kerry Anybody But Bush. I think Michele’s reaction pretty much mirrors my own:

Even our nation’s vaunted media can’t come up with enough cogent reasons to vote for Kerry other than he’s not George Bush.

In general, the calculus of strategic voting dictates that people should vote so as to minimize the chances of their least preferred (but “electable”) candidate taking office. From that perspective, at least, the Times’ position makes sense.

Meanwhile, The Belgravia Dispatch advances an alternative perspective (þ: Andrew Sullivan).

Do you vote for Kerry in the hopes of getting divided government and fiscal responsibility, or do you vote for Bush and help keep Kerry in Congress, where—if all 99 of Kerry’s Senate colleagues did as little as he did—genuine limited government would be far more likely?

Mike Rappaport writes:

Critics of the Patriot Act are forced to acknowledge that it was passed by wide margins in the Congress, including by Democrats. Their explanation is that it was passed in the wake of 9–11, which undermined Congress’s judgement. The antiterrorism legislation passed during the Clinton Administration is also explained as having been passed as a response to Oklahoma City. In both cases, the claim appears to be that Congress enacts improper legislation when overreacting to a visible public event or problem.

What is interesting is that this is the same explanation often given for the passage of environmental legislation. CERCLA is passed after Love Canal, the Clean Water Act is enacted after the Cuyahoga River bursts into flames, etc.

Interestingly, although the same phenomonon is at work, liberals and conservatives tend to view these cases differently. Liberals think that the environmental emergency teaches the public about the problem, but believe the terrorist act undermines their judgment. And visa versa as to conservatives.

Of course, I think both classes of legislation are instances of “Do Something” prevailing over good judgment.

Jason Kuznicki comments on a strange exchange between Pete Coors and Tim Russert:

Russert: "You see no inconsistency between sponsoring male nude revues and fetish balls and opposing gay adoption and gay marriage?"

Coors: “I don’t.”

Russert: “None whatsoever?”

Coors: “No.”

Russert: “And you’re comfortable sponsoring those kinds of events? That’s part of traditional family values?”

Coors: “Look, this is a very—you know, people are going to have a lot of different ideas about what this is all about. But it is about recognizing that everybody—everyone in this country—should be valued for what they are, and I believe that’s the way we recognize it at our company.”

Kuznicki writes:

When Coors Brewing, an organization with a long and very poor record on gay issues, suddenly sponsors a raunch fetish party, they are valuing us for who we are. But when we ourselves demand to be treated as ordinary people--That's an attack on the traditional family.

In a sense, it’s the hidden curse of diversity. For years, we insisted on the essential difference between gay and straight. We demanded that gays must be accepted as different.

Then some people apparently got the message: Gays are acceptable only if they are these strange, hypersexualized, fundamentally sub-human creatures. We can dance nude on stage or wet ourselves in public—but when we try to get married or raise a family, man, that’s sick.

The attitude of Pete Coors towards gays reminds me of Homer Simpson: “I like my beer cold, my TV loud and my homosexuals flaming.”

The total number of car shootings on Sam Cooper Blvd. between Hollywood and Tillman has risen to twelve, including one van which was hit by a bullet last night.

UPDATE: Make that thirteen. This WMC story has the best details of any I've seen so far:

It's been happening between Tillman and Hollywood as drivers head West and the damage is consistently on the passenger side. Police are investigating 12 cases in which drivers had damage to their vehicles. The 13th report came from a women who says she saw a flash and heard a loud boom.

Apparently comparing George W. Bush to the developmentally-disabled is a popular sport on the caring, sensitive left:

“He wasn’t the angry Bush of the second debate or the retarded Bush from the first,” [Daily Show host Jon] Stewart said.

Then again, maybe Stewart falls under the South Park exception.

Amber Taylor is underwhelmed by Jim Lindgen’s performance thus far at The Volokh Conspiracy, although unflattering comparisons to such paragons of Volokhness Clayton Cramer, Cathy Seipp, and Cori Dauber have not (as of yet) been made.

For what it’s worth, I think Jim is a good blogger and (at least from my correspondence with him in the past) a smart guy, but I don’t think he fits in particularly well at the Conspiracy; then again, I never really thought Jacob Levy fit in well there either.

According to the Clarion-Ledger, a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center indicates Mississippi Supreme Court justice Kay Cobb and U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker spoke at a Council of Conservative Citizens event in Byhalia, Miss. (a small town southeast of Memphis) four years ago, and that a sitting Republican member of the state legislature, Tommy Woods, is a member of the organization. (Woods is apparently something of a “joiner”; he’s also a Mason, Shriner, and a Gideon.)

The so-called “white-collar Klan” and its sponsorship of the quadrennial “Blackhawk” political rally was an issue in last year’s governor’s race, and Sen. Trent Lott’s links with the group added to the firestorm after his appearance at Strom Thurmond’s birthday celebration in 2002.

Maria Farrell isn’t too happy with her introductory statistics course. There are a couple of points in the comments to her post that I think are key:

• “Statistics is a practice, not a toolkit.”—Bill Tozier.
• “I wonder if the obscurity is partly a result of a lack of the why of statistics.”—Randolph Fritz.

I was in my chair’s office today talking about how my methods class was going, and the second point was one we both hit upon.

Next year, I’d like to move more in the direction of applied data analysis. This year I’ve been doing baby steps in that direction—every student has a CD with R Commander, and I show how to use R Commander to do every statistical procedure we go over by hand… for the moment, I’ve been using the Chile data set included in the car package as my “guinea pig” data.

I also think that students do better when the professor is engaged and enthusiastic about the material; this, of course, applies to any class from intro on up, but I think it’s particularly important when the class is one that students approach with some degree of resistance.

Heidi Bond points out a few cool uses of statistical theory to show probable electoral college outcomes, including this site by Andrea Moro, an econ prof at Minnesota; I actually had more-or-less the same idea a month ago, but was too lazy to do anything with it.

I would have figured Stephen Bainbridge was too smart to agree with a question with a premise this ignorant of history:

More to the point, will judges be returned to their historical role as neutral interpreters of the Constitution and precedent, or will the imperial judiciary be revitalized and extended for decades?

Judges as “neutral interpreters of the Constitution and precedent”? When, exactly, did the Supreme Court ever act like neutral interpreters of the Constitution? John Jay sat around on his buttocks all day while he was the first Chief Justice, but I don’t think this is the mythical “neutral interpretation” period.

Wow, this is pretty gutter politics, even by Southern—and particularly west Tennessee—standards. Apparently the accused candidate denies any involvement. (þ: A Millsaps student from the district via email.)

Update: The Special Olympics organization is not amused; more details from the AP and Bill Hobbs.