Megan McArdle, on today’s outburst of mass media bloviation on climate change:

If fifty-four newspapers had wanted to make a serious statement about the environment that their readers were sure to pay attention to, they might have stopped printing and distributing their energy intensive product for a day.

Andrew Sullivan takes a break from spelunking in Sarah Palin’s reproductive tract to provide us with highly superficial social scientific analysis:

Ezra Klein asks:

Is there any evidence that financing wars brings them to a quicker close? Any papers examining this question?

From Bruce Bartlett’s column last week:

History shows that wars financed heavily by higher taxes, such as the Korean War and the first Gulf War, end quickly, while those financed largely by deficits, such as the Vietnam War and current Middle East conflicts, tend to drag on indefinitely.

How about a more plausible explanation: Korea and Gulf War I were conflicts against state actors that fought using traditional military tactics, while Vietnam and the Middle Eastern conflicts (particularly in Afghanistan) were/are conflicts mostly involving indigenous, non-state resistance movements or terrorist cells with some degree of local popular support (the Viet Cong, Iraqi Shiite and Sunni extremists and al-Qaeda, and the Taliban and al-Qaeda, respectively) that are engaged in unconventional warfare. The mode of funding would seem to have little to do with conflict length. Particularly since World Wars I and II were also funded by massive deficit spending, yet U.S. involvement in both conflicts was comparatively brief (although not on the order of Gulf War I).

Besides, the Johnson-Nixon era’s massive expansion of the deficit-financed American welfare state would be a serious conflating factor in attributing Vietnam’s success or failure to its funding approach, much as the effects of the Bush tax cuts likely dwarfed Iraq and Afghanistan spending as a source of the increased budget deficit over the past eight years and change; the liberal CBPP think-tank attributes the effects of one year (2004) of the Bush tax cuts as being $276 billion in reduced tax revenues (and thus increased debt), far more than the annualized cost to the Treasury of both conflicts combined even based on the most pessimistic estimates.

The Economist on former CNDer-turned-EU foreign policy czar Catherine Ashton and the double standard that seems to apply to the former communist fifth column in the West:

The real scandal, though, is the West’s continuing amnesia about the cold war. Given the Soviet Union’s history of mass murder, subversion, and deceit, it is astonishing that even tangential association with Soviet-backed causes in the past does not arouse the moral outrage now that is still so readily evoked by connections with the (undisputedly revolting) regime in South Africa. Most CND veterans see their peacenik days, at worst, as romantic youthful idealism. Warm-hearted but soft-headed, maybe: but better than being cold-hearted and hard-headed.

That is a shameful cop-out. Imagine a 1980s Europe where CND had triumphed, with left-wing governments in Britain and Germany scrapping NATO, surrendering to Kremlin pressure and propping up the evil empire. Her opponents complain that Lady Ashton is ineffective. As a CND organiser, that may have been a blessing.

This phenomenon is hardly unique to Cold War era; witness the continuing relative whitewash of Stalin’s crimes in comparison to Hitler’s for the most obvious example thereof. Or the vague sympathy—rather than outright revulsion—that seems to accompany much writing by western Sinophiles about Mao’s rule of China.

Prof. Karlson quotes from a Chronicle debate over the question, Are Too Many Students Going to College?, specifically the reaction of W. Norton Grubb of Berkeley:

We do have a moral obligation, emerging from several centuries of concern with equity in a highly inequitable country, to make access to and completion of college more equitable. But rather than proclaiming College for All, we should be stressing High School Completion for All, emphasizing that such completion requires either college readiness or readiness for sustained employment—or for the combination of the two that has become so common.

The whole debate would be valued reading for our political masters, who seem to have a different idea.

From TigerHawk’s reaction to the furor surrounding the Stupak anti-abortion amendment to the House version of the health care bill:

The real problem, of course, is that this fight reveals the ugly truth of statist health care: That personal medical decisions are no longer a matter of private bargaining, but of political argument. The fight over abortion funding is not an exception, it is a harbinger. Medical decisions are becoming more ethically complex and culturally contentious, not less. Do you really want the legislature deciding who may pull what plug, whether men can get drugs for longer-lasting erections, or whether functional neurosurgery to treat depression, addiction, or obesity is a good idea? Speaking only for myself, I would rather that my employer dangle these benefits in its campaign to retain me than have the matter settled by some clown Congressman from a safe seat in a distant state.

Somehow I don’t think TigerHawk is the only one with similar sentiments.

As Steven Taylor notes, the third-party candidacy by Doug Hoffman in New York’s 23rd congressional district seems to have backfired, delivering a solid Republican seat for generations to Democratic candidate Bill Owens.

While some conservatives like my Twitter pal (and OG blogger) Jayvie Canono have suggested that Republican nominee Dede “Scozzafava would’ve been a vote for the Dems,” one of the iron laws of contemporary politics in the House is that the vast majority of the time, even the most liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats vote with their party. Would Hoffman have been a more reliable Republican vote than Scozzafava? Probably. But Owens, if he’s anything like the vast majority of his future colleagues, will almost certainly vote with the Democrats more than 90% of the time; even the most “disloyal” Republicans only break from their party around 35% of the time while the vast majority only defect less than 10% of the time. In other words, conservatives have probably traded a reasonably Republican vote in the House for a reliably Democratic one, which in the grand scheme of things is not likely to be smart politics.

Agence France-Presse reports that the sorta-kinda-coup leader in Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, has accepted a deal that will return sorta-kinda-ex president Manuel Zelaya to the presidency, although the deal still has to be approved by the Honduran Congress; however, the BBC‘s reporting suggests things are not quite so definite as AFP would have us believe.

I find myself in total agreement with Dan Drezner’s thoughts on Sen. Tom Coburn’s deeply asinine proposal to save less than $10 million per year by eliminating the National Science Foundation’s funding for political science research.

Of course, you can probably take this as self-interested pleading since I have been the direct beneficiary of approximately $1500 in (taxable) NSF-funded stipend money and an indirect beneficiary of its funding by having access to the American National Election Studies. And I’ll freely concede that in my ideal universe, the federal government wouldn’t spend $10 million/year on political science research, but in that same universe the government wouldn’t spend hundreds of times that amount on Medicare prescription drug benefits, enforcing about 90% of the regulations of OSHA, building “infrastructure to nowhere,” bailing out every dying domestic industry, and subsidizing the activities of the world’s best-paid farmers.

And, I’d be rather more impressed if Coburn (or his staff) actually understood what the ANES did in the first place; the funding (all of about $1 million per fielded survey, which includes several thousand face-to-face interviews with voters across the United States) doesn’t fund data analysis but the collection of original data that nobody else collects because pollsters—unlike social scientists—don’t really care why people hold the opinions they have. If the ANES simply duplicated the work of Gallup, Harris Interactive, Zogby, Research 2000, and the dozens of other polling houses doing work for political candidates and the media I’d gladly agree that the spending was misplaced. And if the Census Bureau weren’t legally prohibited from collecting much of this information (for good reason, I might add) a case could be made that using their resources would be less costly.

But the reality is that the “basic science” that Coburn thinks is having resources diverted away from it for frivolous research on understanding our political system is the type of research with practical applications that has the least necessity for governmental subsidy. Materials science research on “bone that blends into tendons,” “next-generation biofuels,” and “microchip-sized fans” are examples of applied research that can be easily commercialized where the private sector is essentially freeloading on the taxpayer—I see no obvious reason why medical implants companies, major energy concerns, and Intel or IBM or Texas Instruments (respectively) couldn’t fund these research projects themselves since there are fairly obvious financial benefits to them in the short-to-medium term. Certainly there’s a better case to be made for “market failure” in providing most social scientific research than there is for “hard” science research—which still receives the lion’s share of funding and is often supported not just by NSF, but also the Department of Energy and other federal research funds that dwarf the $10 million/year spent on the study of political phenomena.*

If there is a valid critique to be made here, it is that the NSF has strayed from being focused on grants for “basic” science into the applied and pedagogical realms that are beyond the NSF‘s core mission and are best left to private industry and other government agencies such as the Department of Education, respectively.

More on this theme from Henry Farrell, Andrew Gelman, and Joshua Tucker.

Update: There are further thoughts in this vein from Steven Taylor and Charli Carpenter. Farrell points out that this isn't the first time the NSF political science program has been a target. And "Miss Self-Important" takes an ambivalent view.

Our esteemed governor apparently thinks there isn’t a recession in Texas. I’ll gladly concede that the economy here is doing significantly better than in many other states, but the idea that there’s no economic downturn here is either optimism run amok or crazy talk. Perhaps both.

In response to a Ross Douthat column both Alex Knapp and Steven Taylor are skeptical that the 2010 midterms will be a “repeat” of the 1994 GOP takeover of the House. While I agree that the fundamentals are somewhat less rosy for the Republicans this time around, there are a few reasons to expect a significant Republican rebound that will endanger the practical center-left majority in Congress:

• Even if the economy recovers significantly by November 2010, it is unlikely that most voters will “feel” the recovery underway for months after the low point. The nature of retrospective voting is to look over a 12-to-18-month period, which means that either the improvement will have to be drastic or be well underway already. Both of these scenarios seem unlikely at best.

• Any Democratic achievements during this Congress are unlikely to have a practical impact on voters by November 2010. In the case of health care reform that might be to the benefit of the Democrats, as they can take credit for action without the likely transition costs being apparent to voters by then. However, aspects of the “stimulus” that affect voters beyond the Democratic base (e.g. organized labor in the construction industry) are going to be largely invisible—few important stimulus projects, even the “shovel ready” ones, will be getting a ribbon-cutting between now and then. One achievement, the payroll tax reduction stimulus, was virtually invisible to most workers, and will bite a lot of retirees in the butt in April 2010 when the IRS comes to collect the taxes that weren’t withheld at the time, something unlikely to endear the Democrats or Obama to seniors already upset over the potential for Medicare spending cuts.

• While the Republicans need 40 House seats to recapture a majority, recapturing even half of that could produce a working “winning coalition” with Blue Dogs on fiscal issues that will endanger any White House plans that can’t pass in the next year (which, at this point, is probably most of them). The Democrats’ filibuster-proof Senate supermajority is exceedingly unlikely to outlast the midterms, even considering that a Republican takeover is unlikely too.

• Finally, as a practical concern, the Republicans are also likely to do well in major states’ legislative races that coincide with the presidential midterms, putting them in the driver’s seat for the 2010–12 redistricting battles in their states that will affect the Congresses Obama will have to work with beyond 2012 (assuming he seeks and wins reelection). Coupled with likely GOP pickups in California due to the new “nonpartisan” redistricting process there, Republicans should be well positioned as a result of the 2010 elections to gain more seats in 2012 (due to reapportionment) and 2014 (due to traditional midterm loss).

The bottom line: although I agree with Alex and Steven that a Republican takeover is not really in the cards, I suspect the practical impact—chastening a Democratic president into matching his bipartisan rhetoric with some truly bipartisan proposals—of the midterms will be much the same, minus the impeachment silliness that typified the later Clinton-GOP House years.

Update: A commenter clarifies that the California redistricting commission only applies to the state legislature, not congressional redistricting.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has officially launched her campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination against incumbent Rick Perry. Given the general disarray of the statewide Democratic Party, this one may be for all the marbles.

þ: Texas native-in-exile Steven Taylor.

Andrew Gelman shows 2008 figures that indicate that there is virtually no relationship between income and self-reported ideology in the U.S. electorate.

This finding is subject to the usual caveats: namely, that everyone thinks they’re moderate, that most people really don’t think about politics in ideological terms (at least in the broad categories of “liberal” and “conservative”), and that these ideological terms themselves are fuzzy categories capturing multiple underlying political orientations to begin with. But at first blush it does contradict the accepted wisdom.

This evening’s exercise in compare and contrast.

The textbook public policy process (seriously, whip open any book with "Public Policy" in the title, or any college intro to American government text that covers policy, and you'll see this or a paraphrase):

1. Define the problem.
2. Propose alternative solutions.
3. Promulgate some specific solution as law.
4. Implement the solution.
5. Figure out if it works. Rinse and repeat if necessary.

The health care reform process thus far:

1. The problem is defined, sort of. “Health care is broken and/or really expensive.” I mean, seriously, nobody has even defined the problem in any more specific way that remotely relates to the bills being proposed. Textbook stage 1 problem statements would resemble “Americans have to fill out ridiculous amounts of paperwork every time they get within 300 feet of a doctor” or “People treat emergency rooms like places they should go when there isn’t an actual emergency situation.”
2. Instead of considering policy alternatives, throw a lot of stuff that is largely unrelated except having something to do with “health care” into a giant, opaque bill. Actually, several of them. Several of which manage to solve problems that nobody has identified, like “older Americans will be forced to see a counselor every five years so they can have a depressing conversation about dying” without giving an explanation of either how this is a good idea or how it saves anyone money. Although it does solve the problem “how can various rent-seeking groups get all of the population to use their services on a regular basis?” which isn’t really a health care problem, but I digress.
3. Yell and scream a lot about how everyone is trying to murder their political opponents, old people, and/or key Democratic voting blocs, and particularly about how people are being unpatriotic by yelling and screaming at each other.

Thus, I conclude that the policy process model is actually prescriptive, not descriptive. No wonder nobody asked me to teach policy again in the fall. (I lack faith that stages 4 and 5 will correspond to the official versions either, should we see those.)

Chris’s probably silly (and completely non-libertarian, which is an under-appreciated asset for potential policy solutions in D.C.) health care plan:

• Allow anyone who wants it to be covered by Medicaid. Make everyone over the current Medicaid eligibility thresholds who chooses to enroll pay for it using some formula scribbled in the margins of a draft copy of this post. Every time someone who doesn’t have insurance shows up at an emergency room, they get a stern talking to about signing up for Medicaid or something else while they’re sitting on their butt anyway during triage. People who do this for minor ailments get the stern talking to several times before they are seen so they get the point, and a brochure stapled to the crap they leave with. People who continue to show up without insurance for minor ailments get escalated to meet Mike Tyson and then receive immediate treatment (for Tyson, not the minor ailments).
• Allow anyone who loses his or her job to buy into COBRA until becoming employed by an employer offering health care or becoming eligible for public assistance through Medic*. Throw money at people receiving unemployment benefits to buy in.

Voila. Everyone who wants it can now afford insurance and has access to it. That was two paragraphs. We can put that in legislature-ese and make that a 30-page bill. The rest of the nonsense is about “cost control” which isn’t going to happen in practice, since we can’t compare costs to counterfactual reality (the world without “cost control” or other worlds with different “cost control”). This crap is going to be ridiculously expensive no matter what, and whatever costs we might be able to control (doctors using two little band-aids instead of one big one, prescribing the Really Awesome Cholesterol Drug instead of the Not Quite So Awesome Cholesterol Drug That Doesn’t Work But Is Cheaper In Theory, throwing people in the Really Fancy Scanner rather than just having them sit on some film and swallow some U-238) are rounding errors in that.

Besides, Hugo’s paying so who cares?

While I can’t say I agree much more with her politics “judicial philosophies” than those of the man who nominated her, nonetheless congratulations are in order for Sonia Sotomayor becoming the first Hispanic and third woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. All I can hope is that in what are likely to be many years on the court that she will come to understand that her job is not to promote a particular party’s political agenda, but instead to act as a bulwark against executive and bureaucratic excess and majoritarian zeal in Congress and the states in the fine, but somewhat spotty, tradition of her best predecessors on that bench.

Greg Weeks is somewhat surprised by some of the numbers that Gallup found in a survey of Latin Americans in 2008 regarding the likelihood of their country experiencing a military coup:

Honduras had the second highest percentage of people (29%) who agreed that the country was moving toward a coup (behind Bolivia at 36%).

Those countries are not surprising. But 11% of Chileans? And 14% of Colombians? And then 11% in Costa Rica, where the military was abolished before most of its citizens were even born?

I’m not particularly surprised by these numbers. Not so much because the region is inherently unstable, or even because media coverage of events elsewhere perhaps has had a fear-inducing effect, much as the media hysteria surrounding the disappearances of random white teenage girls or the omnipresence of Chris Hansen has fed public fears well out of proportion to the actual threats to children and young adults.

Instead, because an appreciable percentage of the public falls into one of the following categories: having difficulty understanding the questions being posed; really, really wanting the interviewer to shut up and leave them alone; or genuinely holding rather crazy beliefs. To identify one example, approximately 6% of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings were staged, an idea far more preposterous (to my mind at least) than the idea that Colombia might experience a coup in the not-so-distant future.

It’s also possible there were some contextual effects in the survey that aren’t clear from Gallup’s description of it. It seems likely the question was posed in the same survey reported here on self-perceptions as “socialist” or “capitalist,” which may have had the effect of priming the responses of the interviewees—to say nothing of whether or not the typical democratic citizen understands the labels “capitalist” or “socialist” in any meaningful way. By emphasizing this area of conflict the survey may have led respondents to believe left-right conflict in their nations is more salient than it really was, and thus that military intervention might happen.

And, finally, while Costa Rica lacks formal armed forces, the country’s Fuerza Pública and separate special forces detachment sound a lot like military forces to me—and certainly could function sufficiently like one to toss Oscar Arias on a plane headed elsewhere if they were so inclined.

So to my mind it really isn’t overly surprising that a sizable percentage of average Chileans, Costa Ricans, and Colombians—particularly those who are disengaged from politics—would reportedly be willing to agree with the proposition their country is headed towards a coup.

(Updated to clarify that Costa Rica’s Fuerza Pública and special forces are separate from each other.)

The Economist on the F-22 vote:

The secretary of defence did not want to add to the programme. Nor did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nor did the Air Force’s two senior leaders. Yet 40 senators still thought they knew better.

Now, I’m convinced that on the merits, the “anti-more-F-22s” side is easily on the right side of the debate, but nonetheless in a representative democracy it properly is the elected officials—including the 40 pro-F-22 senators, however misguided—who should be deciding whether to spend billions of taxpayers’ money on weapons systems, and not members of the armed forces or a political appointee who’s never been elected to or sought public office. Certainly I hope The Economist is not suggesting that senators and representatives should always defer to the preferences of the military and the executive branch, even when their views are held in unanimity.

As an aside, the F-22’s demise also will prove a useful lesson to Lockheed and other defense contractors in the future: next time, ensure the contract’s jobs are in as many states as possible.

Your War on Drugs Headline of the Day: Sheriffs pray for an end to border violence. Because Lord knows all the billions of dollars we’ve spent to try to end it haven’t even come close to working…

I think we can now reasonably call the Zelaya kerfuffle a coup d’état, if only for the simple reason that once men with guns start showing up at broadcasters getting them to shut off their signals, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re up to something beyond the realm of ordinary democratic politics.

Of course, that also means that Hugo Chávez’s concerted efforts to marginalize the private, pro-opposition broadcast and print media in Venezuela would be evidence in favor of his having pulled an autogolpe, albeit one with a hamfisted assist from the opposition’s ill-advised election boycott a few years back.

Regardless I am less inclined to read the tea leaves as saying that Chávez has lost interest in Zelaya’s cause as others, although I suspect by the time the whole business is settled (probably with an agreement to hold a referendum on a constituent assembly explicitly excluding the possibility of an amendment to allow presidential reelection) Zelaya’s term of office will have come to an end. At this point Zelaya can probably derive more value down the road in continuing to garner sympathy in continued exile through the election than in returning to Honduras’ presidency as a lame duck with virtually no support from Congress, the military, or the courts.

Update: Greg Weeks also points out that Chávez too probably “wins” more from Zelaya not returning to power, which would dovetail nicely with others’ observations that he is throwing Zelaya under the bus.

Isn’t anyone else still curious whether or not Sonia Sotomayor is still a secessionist*? Our esteemed governor was—quite rightly—recently ridiculed for his ramblings in that direction, and the idea that someone who could be appointed to the Supreme Court who apparently doesn’t (or at least didn’t) believe that her people should be a part of the United States seems a bit odd. This, to me, would seem to be the more important question than her views on the value of descriptive representation or her apparent inability in Ricci to preemptively read the minds of her soon-to-be colleagues on the Court.

* I realize that the historical circumstances of Puerto Rico’s association with the United States are not entirely comparable with those of the incorporated states, and thus that there is more legitimacy to be given to the idea of Puerto Rican self-determination and to providing some sort of finality of its status.

One of the things I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around in the Great Was-It-A-Coup?-Debate of 2009 is where the line between “legitimate transfer of power” and “coup” in this case lies. I’m willing accept the judgment by Latin Americanists of better repute than I (which would be all of them, since I really am not a Latin Americanist even though I live closer to Latin America than most it seems) that whatever happened is on the “coup” side of that line, but I wonder where the line itself was exactly. A few brief stabs at the threshold:

1. Using the military. If the Supreme Court had ordered the civilian police to arrest and deport Zelaya, rather than the armed forces, and they had done so, would the events have still constituted a coup?
2. The exile. Had the Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest and detain Zelaya, but not ship him off to Costa Rica, would the events have still been a coup?
3. The combination of using the military and the exile.
4. The lack of explicit text regarding how to deal with presidents exceeding constitutional authority. Had the Honduran Constitution stated who was responsible for removing politicians from office who supported a constitutional amendment (and who got to decide what proposals constituted such violations) that might lead to alterations of term limits on the presidency, would the events that transpired have still been a coup?

And a few brief stabs at what seem not to be the thresholds:

1. Illegal actions by the president. Pretty much everyone except Zelaya seems to agree that his efforts to hold a referendum on constitutional change were not permissible under Honduran law; this is reinforced by the fact that another branch of government (the Congress) does have the power to propose such a referendum but chose not to. (One could make an argument that if no branch of government was assigned a legitimate governmental power not enumerated in the constitution, the executive might inherently have that power—but that clearly is not the case in this circumstance.)
2. Support by other, accountable, civilian branches of government. Both the elected Congress and the Supreme Court have endorsed the transfer of power, apparently without any coercion by the military.
3. Overwhelming popular opposition to the move. At best, the Honduran population seems fairly divided over whether or not Zelaya’s removal was legitimate.

In related news, Costa Rican president Óscar Arias has agreed to mediate the crisis with the consent of both Zelaya and the interim Honduran government.

I really don’t have any particular insight to add to others’ discussion of the sorta-kinda-maybe coup d’état in Honduras, but Steven Taylor (both here and here) and Greg Weeks have had some fairly insightful posts on the matter.

While I’d probably say that many Hondurans’ fears that maybe-ex-President Zelaya was plotting in some way to perpetuate his own rule at the expense of democratic accountability—as both Hugo Chávez and Álvaro Uribe have recently done in the broader region—were possibly justified, employing the military to raid his house and toss him on an airplane in the middle of the night doesn’t exactly strike me as the most measured response by the other branches of government. On the other hand I’ll gladly concede that the Honduran constitution appears to be a giant mess of epic proportions (amendment by decree and the lack of an impeachment mechanism being among its defects) that didn’t exactly help in avoiding an escalation of the situation to the use of extralegal means.

Elsewhere: John Carey (via John Sides) presents some data on extraordinary Latin American presidential replacements since 1990. It almost, but not quite, tempts me to dust off my old paper on stability and presidential government and add some new data, but I think it’s best for all involved if it just stays in Ukrainian, at least until I can find a sucker graduate student interested in collecting the data to update the damn thing to the present.

Dan Drezner’s prediction of things to come in Iran:

With the largest protests of the past week scheduled for tomorrow, I think this ends in one of two ways: the removal of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei from power, or bloodshed on a scale that we cannot comprehend.

Actually, come to think of it, those two outcomes are not mutually exclusive.

“The Red Pill” at Cadillac Tight gives some useful background information on how Iran’s political system is designed to work, which I expect will be of value to those trying to figure out exactly what is going on in Iran at the moment. For the uninitiated, it proves—if nothing else—that our system of checks and balances is not nearly as complicated a system as could be devised and made to work in practice; there’s also an interesting parallel to be drawn between the role of Iran’s Guardian Council and Madison’s proposed Council of Revision from the Virginia Plan, although the Guardian Council’s power to screen candidates for public office goes well beyond Madison’s plan.

The vetting function of the Guardian Council also raises some interesting questions about what sorts of qualifications for office are appropriate in a democracy. While the objective qualifications for public office in the United States are basically viewpoint-neutral (excluding the exemptions from onerous requirements to get on the ballot enjoyed by the two major parties in many states), other liberal democracies disqualify candidates or parties based on their political views—for example, national socialism is banned in Germany, while communists are banned in a few Eastern European countries—regardless of how palatable they may be to voters. Obviously these requirements exclude narrower ranges of opinion than does the Iranian system, but the question of where to draw the line does seem at least to be of academic interest.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: (re)watch Roger and Me and identify any content therein that would have averted General Motors’ current sorta-kinda bankruptcy, as its auteur claims it includes. I’m quite certain reopening all of GM’s mothballed plants in Flint and thereabouts—which I believe was Moore’s central demand of the film, although the whole business with the bunnies and the prison dinner party was a cute little sideshow—would have been comically ineffective in saving the company from its current travails, but what do I know?

Inspired by Angus at KPC.

John Sides ponders psychological explanations for the alleged murderer/assassin of George Tiller’s behavior, noting recent research on the motivations of extremists:

Is there some salient new “threat” that would have heightened Roeder’s concern about Tiller? Lots of research suggests that threat is a crucial motivator of violence. ... However, I’m not sure what the threat is in the case of [alleged assassin] and Tiller. Some have suggested that Bill O’Reilly’s criticism of Tiller is to blame.

I’ll freely admit that if I owned a commercial television network I wouldn’t give Bill O’Reilly a platform to express his views (as, for that matter, I’d cancel any programming that featured latter-day Know Nothing nativist Lou Dobbs or someone who spends most of his program, as far as I can tell, whining about the guy who kicks his ass in the ratings in the same timeslot—namely, Keith Olbermann).* Sides goes on to explain this theory is lacking too, in any event.

There is a reasonably plausible threat hypothesis, however; for the first time in eight years, there is a Democratic, pro-choice president in the White House who just happens to have nominated a left-leaning, presumably (if we are to believe the White House’s spin machine) pro-choice candidate to a vacancy on the Supreme Court, which is where (for better or worse) our political system has decided abortion policy is to be decided. I’d imagine if you’re just a wee bit crazy to begin with that might activate the super-crazy neurons a bit, even if it’s just related to hearing people on the news yammer on about the nomination “reigniting” the abortion debate.

Then again, maybe his dog told him to do it.

* Clearly my network would go out of business for lacking viewership, but nobody ever believed I had much television programming acumen anyway.