The boss is running for governor of North Carolina in 2008.

Via Craig Newmark, who (like me) would “pay cash money to see him debate the Republican and Democrat candidates.”

An interesting post that just showed up in Google Reader is this lengthy reaction by Jacob Levy to Walt and Mearsheimer’s piece on the Israel lobby; I think here’s the meat of Levy’s argument:

They proceed to address this puzzle [of favorable U.S. policy towards Israel] with a slippery—I do not say sloppy—ambiguity between explanatory and evaluative claims.

The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.

This is, I think, the worst paragraph of political science I’ve read in many years. The best, most-justified policies don’t automatically spring into being at the end of the policy-making process. An all-things-considered judgment that X is the best policy is essentially irrelevant to one’s ability to predict whether or not X will be adopted. Political and policy-making actors aren’t, indeed couldn’t possibly be, such purely disinterested promoters of the public good that they could promote it all the time without any organized support—even assuming that they all agreed with each other, and with M&W, about what the public good consisted of. They often need organizational and material support from interest groups even to do [what they take to be] the right thing. ... From the fact that a policy needed a lobby to support it, one can infer nothing about the policy’s justifiability.

Not to mention that the authors missed a good opportunity to use the subjunctive voice. What writer on earth would pass that up?

Today’s Duke Chronicle editorial calls for the firing of AD Joe Alleva as a response to the culmination of scandals involving both the men’s lacrosse and baseball programs. They also go with the photos story, despite (again) not having seen the photos themselves, and report on a protest across from the 610 house by members of a local church, which explains why I saw a camera crew setting up there during my Sunday afternoon walk.

In not-entirely-unrelated news, one of Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong’s opponents in the May 2 primary has been subpeonaed in an appeal of a decade-old murder case:

Former Assistant District Attorney Freda Black has been subpoenaed to explain in court today why she allegedly broke a promise to a murder suspect years ago, and also to answer allegations that she checked another homicide defendant out of the county jail, drove him around town and treated him to chicken and pizza.

The allegations are contained in court paperwork filed by convicted killer Gregory Wayne Bagley, who is serving a life prison sentence and now contends he deserves a new trial.

Bagley says he was convicted in 1994 not because he was guilty, but “due to devious, deceptive, malicious acts” and trickery by Black. He implies that her kindness toward the other homicide suspect, Alton Antonio Bell, was an attempt by Black to sweet-talk Bell into testifying against him.

Considering that Nifong will be lucky to get any votes in the primary at this point—the black community and the Righteous Townie set don’t think he’s done enough (going into hiding for the last week probably wasn’t the best election strategy), and the innocent-until-proven-guilty crowd thinks he’s a grandstanding fool—I guess we can just go ahead and give this thing to African-American attorney Keith Bishop. The winner of the primary is unopposed in the general election; you’ve gotta love the one party South.

Thanks to Silflay Hraka and John in Carolina for their kind words and links; both have interesting posts of their own on the Duke lacrosse rape allegations (which I linked earlier this sentence) that are worth reading.

Steven Taylor and Bryan S. take different sides on the issue of leaks; I think Bryan has the better argument:

“Unnamed Sources” damage the credibility of journalists, who often use such sources on stories that have absolutely no real need for such anonymous sourcing. From a political perspective, leaking is not so problematic. From the journalism perspective, it is a cancer on the Washington press corps, which has shown itself craven by not refusing such charades.

On the lighter side, Joy went to see Death Cab and Franz Ferdinand on Saturday night and has reactions to the evening. Now if I can just get tickets for Jimmy Eat World’s next tour my belated transformation into an emo kid will be complete.

Go read the cover of this month’s issue of Reason and then report back to me on the most egregious problem with it. Besides my concern that Reason had finally surrendered to the neo-Malthusians, that is.

The apologia by Kenyon College’s dean of admissions for her college’s policy of discriminating against female applicants in favor of promoting campus gender balance has raised hackles from traditional opponents of affirmative action and proponents alike. Closer to my regular reading lists, Laura of 11D also reacts.

My sense is that Ms. Britz’s argument, like most supporting affirmative action of any kind as an end in and of itself (or those justifying it in any terms other than as a narrowly-focused effort to redress past discrimination at institutions that engaged in such discrimination in the past), falls on its face, but that Kenyon—as a private institution—ought to be able to pursue whatever admissions policies it thinks are appropriate, no matter how misguided the college may be. Of course, whether or not taxpayers ought to subsidize those policies directly or indirectly, which they do at Kenyon and most other institutions of higher education in this country, is another question entirely…

Priceless: DSG forum attracts no attendees:

High hopes were not met as candidates for Duke Student Government’s 2006–2007 executive offices crowded around an empty lecture hall in the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy Wednesday night.

The contenders arrived at Sanford prepared to share their platforms with members of student organizations, who traditionally choose candidates to endorse.

No students were present, so the forum was cancelled.

Perhaps Duke students are more Downsian than I give them credit for being at times.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that Legos could become a flashpoint of political debate. Live and learn, I suppose.

I think we may have a winner for dumbest statement by a politician in 2006 already, and it’s only mid-March:

“Gerry Adams should not have been on a terror watch list,” said [U.S. Rep. Brian] Higgins [(D-NY)].

Just because the guy and his best pals in the IRA don’t advocate blowing up Americans (well, at least not Catholic Americans, or Americans who don’t make the mistake of going to London) doesn’t make him à priori not a terrorist and therefore exempt from the Full Osama treatment.

Apparently, American politicians of both major parties get a free pass when they’re running political cover for the IRA's cheering section—even when they’re the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Just in case you were still wondering if Washington was actually serious about the War on Terror in All Its Forms…

Sometimes when you vote in a legislative body, the smart move is to vote for final passage of something that’s not entirely perfect—not, mind you, because your vote matters in the final outcome, but because whatever symbolic value your stand will have will be lost in the muddle of the discussion (see Cleland, ex-Senator Max for the prototypical example).

The administration made exactly this mistake when it chose to vote against the establishment of the new U.N. Human Rights Council yesterday, and went down to ignomious defeat by a 170–4 margin (with three abstentions, two from current human rights cesspools Belarus and Iran, and one from probable future human rights bad boy Venezuela), despite some quite legitimate objections to the new body’s election rules, which had been watered down since the original proposal by Kofi Annan.

So, instead of registering these complaints through some procedure other than voting against final passage of the resolution, the administration instead generated negative public relations fodder like a headline blaring that this represents a ”[h]uman rights defeat for [the] US” and a lede that states that the no vote was an effort to “derail” the formation of the new body, when in fact the administration did not try to derail it at all, instead (further going against “type”) supporting the original proposal from Annan (by the way, that is not an atypical read on the vote).

Bear in mind that, unlike the Kyoto situation (where many of the signatories and ratifiers have no ability to abide, and/or no intention of abiding, by the spirit or letter of the text, and thus not making a fraudulent U.S. commitment was the correct decision) this vote was a purely symbolic exercise—one that, probably wouldn’t have bought the U.S. any real goodwill had it gone the other way, but nonetheless wasn’t worth generating additional gratuitous animosity toward the U.S.

As for the domestic politics angle, the constituency for a “no” vote in this particular instance was about six people, all of whom were going to vote for Pat Buchanan or some Constitution Party lunatic anyway; the mainstream anti-UN crowd in the GOP coalition already was placated by the Bolton appointment, and this vote wouldn’t have made any real difference with them.

Over at QandO, Dale Franks mocks James Miller’s idea that what the voters are clamoring for is a space elevator—for starters, the name “space elevator” needs to go, since who wants to spend a week listening to The Girl from Ipanema while they trundle towards geostationary orbit?—and McQ does a post-mortem on the DP World ports deal.

The latter of course points out the futility of trying to ask the American public questions about Middle Eastern politics; if the average American has the emirate of Dubai (which has been a consistent U.S. ally for its entire existence) equated to al Qaeda in their heads, what hope could he or she possibly have of meaningfully distingushing between Saddam Hussein (a known bad guy) and al Qaeda?

NRO has gallantly lept into the debate about the academy with a blog that, at the very least, should be as worthy of being relentlessly mocked as “The Corner.” Case in point would be this nonsensical post from Joel Malchow, who can’t even figure out what particular phenomenon (co-ed dorms? co-ed dorm rooms? co-ed bathrooms?) he is complaining about, only to make the statement that “like unisex showers, co-ed dorms are generally met with very little interest among students.” Proudly spoken like a man who’s never seen Undeclared. Or gone to college.

If that weren’t enough, the decision to grant posting privileges to the terminally vapid Kathryn Jean Lopez is surely the death knell for this project as any worthwhile contribution to debate over the current state of the academy.

þ: Orin Kerr and Stephen Karlson.

If I were a Republican strategist, I’d be doing everything I could to help the Democrats play Don Quixote by trying to censure—or even better, trying to impeach—the president. Start the impeachment hearings today and load them up with Bush-bashing witnesses like George Galloway, Cindy Sheehan, Scott Ritter, and Ramsey Clark.

The absolute worst thing that can happen (and I put the odds of this at about zero) for the Republicans is that the impeachment effort succeeds and the GOP can get rid of an unpopular lame-duck whose approval ratings are dragging down the whole party. The best? Well, remember the 1998 mid-term elections, when Bill Clinton had 80% approval ratings after all his dirty laundry was aired in public.

Only the Democratic Party could conclude that their main problem in the 2004 election was that the people who nominated John F. Kerry were too white:

An influential Democratic committee on Saturday endorsed the idea of adding as many as four state primaries and caucuses to the early presidential nominating season, now dominated by Iowa and New Hampshire.

The goal, they said, was to add more racial, ethnic, regional and economic diversity to the process of choosing a Democratic nominee.

Iowa, whose caucus marks the opening of the nominating season, and New Hampshire, which holds the first primary, have long been criticized as far too homogeneous and atypical to exercise such a powerful influence over the process.

Back-to-back victories in those states can set a candidate on a glide path to the nomination — as they did for Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts in 2004 — before the bigger and more diverse states weigh in.

And, just to prove that the DNC is in complete disarray, they can’t even figure out what the problem is in the first place:

The commission also debated using bonus delegates to reward states that move their contests back in the season. This is an effort to deal with another criticism of the nominating process — that it is too “front-loaded,” with too many states bunched together in the early weeks.

So, the problem is that the nomination process is too front-loaded, so the solution is to have six states decide nominees before February 5th, instead of two. My mind truly boggles at the concept.

I hesitate to give advice on this matter to either major party, but the party that figures out first that the primary and caucus process is a giant waste of time and money and goes back to using the conventions to select nominees will probably end up nominating much more credible candidates.

Orin Kerr links an Independent on Sunday article that claims the administration is planning to shut down the prison camp at Gitmo. Color me skeptical, to say the least.

Sunday’s New York Times returns to its recent modus operandi of serving as an advertising platform for its reporters’ books with an article revealing Saddam Hussein’s thinking on the eve the U.S. invasion of Iraq, derived from Cobra II by reporter Michael Gordon and army Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor (Ret.).

There’s not much terribly new here if you were paying attention, and I’m not really sure it adds anything to arguments on either side of the conflict—although it does perhaps give further credence to the argument that intelligence agencies worldwide were obviously going to have a hard job figuring out that Saddam Hussein didn’t actually have WMD when he was trying his darnedest to make everyone think he did. Of course, the obvious followup question, left unanswered in the article, is why Saddam would dismantle his WMD arsenal while maintaining the fiction he hadn’t—wouldn’t it have been wiser for him to simply to keep the WMDs and stonewall the inspectors?

þ Orin Kerr.

As Duke recovers from the visit of David Horowitz, freshman Oliver Sherouse writes about the best post-mortem of his visit that one could hope for, featuring among other observations this gem:

SAF wants free speech, but only if you agree with them. They want to tell us about this secret conspiracy that involves our professors shouting liberal dogma in every class, ostensibly without us noticing. They want to “educate” their professors on how to profess.

At least a portion of the Duke community acquitted themselves rather poorly at the event as well, although the promised partial nudity from members of the crowd failed to materialize (alas). It makes me almost sad that I was wedged inside a full MD-80 during the event.

As of this posting, I am one of 290 Debian developers who have thus far bothered to vote on the first General Resolution of 2006, which will state Debian’s position on the GNU Free Documentation License and decide whether (and under what conditions) GFDL-licensed documents will be allowed in Debian’s “main” distribution.

My sense is that the spirit of the Debian Free Software Guidelines is most consistent with the interpretation embodied in Amendment A—I seriously doubt the Free Software Foundation will go after people who distribute GFDL-licensed documents on DRMed media and the “transparent formats” issue is probably a non-issue in practice, judging from the distinct lack of interest by the FSF in going after people who violate the GPL’s “you must make source available for three years” rule, but the invariant sections rule is clearly non-free and cannot be ignored.

Unfortunately (or, fortunately, depending on your perspective) this means Debian users will not have access to most of the documentation that uses invariant sections—primarily those documents distributed by the FSF themselves. On the upside, it will at least spare our users from having reams of Richard Stallman’s political rants foisted upon them and their hard drives in exchange for the privilege of having the Emacs manual available.

So, anyway, here’s how I voted, since it will be public at the close of the vote anyway: 2143—or, in other words, Amendment A [GFDL allowed if invariant sections not used] > Original Resolution [GFDL not allowed at all] > Further Discussion > Amendment B [anything GFDL'd goes].

Next up: the elections for Debian Project Leader, featuring a smorgasbord of seven candidates.

Since I am off on an interview today, posting may be restricted to this linkfest:

• Hei Lun Chan of Begging to Differ dissects the NFL labor dispute to the bare essentials; if only he were as hot as Rachel Nichols, I might never need to watch ESPN again.
• Clint Ecker of Ars Technica reviews the Intel Mac mini for those who have not experienced for themselves the bliss that is Core Duo.
• The Solomon Amendment case was another 8–0 slam dunk for those right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, and probably the right decision on precedent (in my mind, it would be hard to strike down the Solomon Amendment but uphold much of the Civil Rights Act of 1964); overall, I tend to agree with Will Baude’s assessment that policymakers (explicitly excluding, being the attitudinalist I am, the Court) on all sides of the issue are wrong. Baude also ponders the possibility that private universities might choose to divest themselves of their law schools to avoid any adverse effect should they chose to continue to bar military recruiters.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

I’ve been remiss in noting the news of the passing of Harry Browne, the indirect recipient of my first two votes for presidential electors (in 1996 in Florida and in 2000 in Mississippi). Like Timothy Sandefur, I only met Browne once—in my case, at the LP’s 2000 post-election gala in Atlanta. That, of course, was prior to my conversion from idealism to neoinstitutionalism.

Stephen Jessee and Alexander Tahk, two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, have put together a website that attempts to estimate the ideological positions of Samuel Alito and John Roberts from their votes on the Supreme Court this term.

Perhaps the most interesting result thus far is that Roberts’ estimated ideal point (position in the unidimensional ideological space) is virtually indistinguishable from that of his predecessor as Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, although that is of course subject to change as more cases come along. (The Alito estimates seem to solely reflect the uninformative prior that Jessee and Tahk have placed on him thus far.)

Only one of my students was apparently aware of Paul Simon’s song “You Can Call Me Al” from Graceland; it came up when we were trying to figure out what to call Al Gore’s dad. Some didn’t actually know who Paul Simon is—the ex-senator or the singer.

Of course, I couldn’t manage to pronounce the name of Al Senior’s fellow senator Estes Kefauver, so I guess we came out even on this score.

Stephen Bainbridge inadvertently explains why we’re stuck with two parties of big government (although he doesn’t realize why):

The United States simply doesn’t need two parties of big government. It needs a party that stands for limited government, personal freedom in both the social and economic spheres, rule by elected officials rather than judges, the right to life, and a foreign policy premised on a hawkish realism rather than Wilsonian idealism.

Now, if that’s a platform that would attract more than 20% of the electorate, I’d be stunned. Not to mention that at least two pairs of Bainbridge’s planks are contradictory—one is just a tad more obvious than the other, mind you: the contradiction between “personal freedom in… the social… sphere” and “the right to life.”

Personally, though, I’m more entertained by the prospect of politicians who are willing to limit their own power, especially ones who know that they are more likely to be reelected if they compromise their own principles and indulge the rent-seekers in the electorate. There are maybe a half-dozen Republicans in Washington who believe in truly limited government on a good day, and they’re almost all (with the exception of Ron Paul, who has his own pathologies) on the Supreme Court.

From Dale Franks, at the end of a lengthy post concurring-in-part and dissenting-in-part with a post by Jon Henke:

[O]ur choice is between Republicans who are willing to easily betray our principles in order to fight the Global War on Terror, and Democrats who are unwilling to fight a Global War on Terror at all.

And, the counterpoint from Jon Henke:

Remember: the people who told us that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were all Taliban, captured on the battlefield or otherwise terrorists are the same people who swear, really, that the domestic surveillance program is “solely for intercepting communications of suspected al Qaeda members or related terrorist groups.”

We can trust them, because they would never mislead us.

But, hey, we get to keep our tax cuts!

Shorter Tom Smith: I don’t know whether or not the president’s domestic spying program is actually, you know, legal or constitutional, but since members of Congress sometimes put electoral considerations ahead of the law, the concerns of the elected representatives of the people of the United States are to be completely dismissed, because a few executive branch political appointees (and I) think that the program initiated by their boss is somehow consistent with the Constitution under some sort of complete hand-waving, “anything goes” Article II doctrine that makes the court’s interpretation of the Commerce Clause in Wickard v. Filburn seem like a restraint on congressional authority.

Shorter Jeff Goldstein and Wall Street Journal editorial board: Separation of powers is for idiots.

One more thing: the first person to reply with “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” needs to come up with an argument, not a slogan.

Update: A perhaps-related post from Venkat at Begging to Differ.