Brian J. Noggle muses about Subway’s decision to stop giving out “Sub Club” stamps in some markets. Considering the existence of superior competitors, like Jimmy John’s and Lenny’s (to leave aside national chains like Quizno’s, Blimpie, and Schlotsky’s), I think Subway may be making just a minor tactical error here.

In this otherwise sensible Clarion-Ledger op-ed praising Bill Cosby for his recent remarks imploring poor blacks to do more to help themselves, Ole Miss and Marshall prof Burnis R. Morris pulls out a strawman to joust with:

However, I fear Cosby’s comments will be taken out of context and open a floodgate of criticism against the disadvantaged. Cosby’s constructive criticism is useful because of his credentials, but all messengers don’t wish success for the poor.

Are there really that many people out there who “don’t wish success for the poor” beyond the lunatic fringe like the Klan, who are hardly a large segment of society who can “open a floodgate of criticism”? Libertarians and conservatives (and even many liberals) favor welfare reform, and even cutbacks, not because they don’t want the poor to be successful, but because they believe that existing welfare programs don’t actually help the poor become more successful, instead miring them in a cycle of poverty and dependency.

One can legitimately debate the merits of these reform proposals (see, for example, this Tyler Cowen post on taxes and public assistance in industrialized democracies), but implying the goal of most reformers is to hurt the poor is pretty asinine.

Ahem.

Rather, just like “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the Confederate battle flag motif used in Southern state flags, it was a belated addition of the Eisenhower era. Both the cross and “under God” were added as part of a wave of religious iconography that swept the nation in the 1950s in response to fears of “godless communism,” while the Confederate flag was added to demonstrate contempt for the growing civil rights movement — and to rally local support for continued enforcement of Jim Crow laws.

(Minor) point of fact: the Confederate battle flag emblem was first incorporated in the Mississippi state flag on February 7, 1894—Mississippi’s legislators must have been quite prescient to forsee a conflict over civil rights arising in another six decades or so.* The only other state to incorporate the battle flag “motif” into its own was Georgia, which did so in 1956; however, the use of Confederate imagery in the Georgia state flag dates back to 1879. No other state adopted the battle flag in part or whole, although South Carolina put up the flag in 1962 over its statehouse, but never incorporated the design into its flag.

Dan Drezner is having trouble figuring out why Nicole Kidman is going through a bit of a dry spell on the dating scene. My working hypotheses:

• Men think she looks like Virginia Woolf when not wearing makeup.
• She’s too young for Russell Crowe.
• Her gaydar is broken (insert your own Tom Cruise joke here).

Update: Xrlq in comments points to this Kim du Toit post, which blames the drought on her previous association with Lenny Kravitz.

James Joyner ponders at a distance the following hypothetical exchange:

• A says to B, “I have X.”
• B says to A, “So I’ve heard.”
• A says to B, “And I have to offer it to someone.”
• B says to A, “Funny how that works.”
• A says to B, “If I offered you X, would you take it?”
• B says to A, “No, I wouldn’t take it.”

Here’s your ontological question: did A offer X to B? If not, what is the substantive difference between “If I offered you X, would you take it?” and “Would you like X?” if A intended to offer X to B had B answered in the affirmative?

My advice to Dan Drezner: move to Mississippi (or Utah or Massachusetts), where your vote won’t matter anyway. (Of course, the cynic might say that the likely prospect of massive voting fraud in Chicago makes Dan’s vote not much more likely to make a difference.)

Having said that, casting even a meaningless directional vote for Michael Badnarik is going to be tough, for reasons explained by Jacob Levy* (via Will Baude), even though—if push comes to shove—I’m slightly more inclined to write in “Stephen Harper” (q.v.) or “Condi Rice” than vote for either Bush or Kerry in the event I don’t vote for Badnarik.

Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong and the Volokh Conspiracy (at the moment, Tyler Cowen and Eugene Volokh) ponder the “alternative history” question of what the world would be like without a successful American Revolution. I don’t have much to add, but it’s an interesting concept to ponder. My gut feeling is that separation was inevitable by 1820 or so; the resources of the period (most notably, the lack of real-time communication and fast intercontinental transportation) probably just couldn’t sustain any form of unified government over an area separated by thousands of miles of sea.

Innocents Abroad has an interesting guest post from Steven Teles about what tangible benefits John Edwards can bring to the Kerry campaign. Chief among them: quite possibly the Florida panhandle.

Also, the Clarion-Ledger wastes ink interviewing a bunch of people* who agree that Mississippi isn’t in play, so Edwards being on the ticket isn’t going to change the disposition of the state’s six electoral votes. But at least it gets this quote:

Hinds County Democratic Party Chairman Claude McInnis said he hopes Edwards will attract Mississippi voters to the Democratic ticket.

“This is a strange voting state. Almost every need in the state is Democratic — Medicare, public education, social services — yet voters vote Republican,” he said.

“I hope Edwards can reach people here. We’re ready for something different.”

One suspects that if the average Mississippi voter didn’t think the national Democratic party stood on a platform of abortion-on-demand, gun-grabbing, and letting the Supreme Court decide every other issue that ought to be decided through the political process, they might be willing to pull the lever (or dimple the chad or beat the hell out of the touchscreen, as the case may be) for Kerry-Edwards.

Say what you will about Formula 1 racing, but Michael Schumacher has taken things to a whole new level; as BigJim points out, he’s won nine of the ten F1 races this season. This past weekend, he managed to take one more pit stop than the rest of the field and still left everyone in his dust. This guy is simply unreal.

Though you have to hand it to his teammate, Rubens Barichello, for the most audacious on-track move of the race, a nifty pass that gave him third place on the next-to-last turn before the chequered flag.

Well, the ice maker is fixed, with plastic tubing this time so we won’t be having another lightning strike (through it, at least) in the next week, and the DSL seems back to normal after a reboot or two.

In addition to damaging the copper pipe that feeds water to my icemaker, the lightning also took out one of the two inputs on the DirecTiVo in my bedroom, one output of the multiswitch on the dish, and (apparently) put my DSL modem in flakeout mode, where it loses sync once every 10–20 minutes.

The good news is I’m ditching the DSL and my current dish when I move to Jackson at the end of next week. The bad news is I was hoping to use the DirecTiVo in Jackson, but, since the primary input was the one that was fried, it’s not going to be a happy camper any more after the next time my power goes out. Now off to get a replacement pipe at Home Depot and some dinner…

According to this story at IOL, Japan’s defense ministry plans to release it’s annual white paper in manga (comic book) format.

"We'd like to be able to reach the younger generations, those in their 20s and 30s," a ministry spokesperson said.

“We hope the public reads the report so that we gain their understanding,” Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba was quoted by Kyodo news agency as telling a news conference after the white paper was released.

Yes, I’ve become enough of a blogging whore to do the “daily roundup” post. At least for today.

• Michael Jennings uses soccer to explain how messed up British television regulation is.
• Kevin Aylward ponders the deeper meaning of the John Edwards “sigh of relief” from Democrats. Who’d have thought the “electable” guy would need the help of one of the less electable guys to become more electable?
• Also on the Edwards front: Stephen Bainbridge thinks John Edwards needs a new middle name. I suspect he overestimates the number of Americans who have been sued lately.
• Matt Stinson somehow got wind of all this in China, and reveals he doesn’t particularly miss the smiling countenance of Larry Sabato.
• Steven Taylor preferred Gephardt, but seeing as he wasn’t voting for Kerry anyway…
• Amber Taylor (presumably unrelated to Dr. Taylor) rounds up International Kissing Day in the blogosphere.
• Sebastian Holdsclaw ponders lies, George Bush, and Michael Moore.
• Dan Drezner warns wanna-be Larry Sabatos that they may be in danger of being schmoed.
• Finally, on a lighter note: it’s just like Dewey Defeats Truman, but without the Chicago machine resurrecting the dead to vote!

Dan Drezner ties together the twin themes of less-than-civil bloggers and bad comment hoodoo recently discussed in these parts.

One thing I will say, as a veteran of online fora in general (as an ex-MUD administrator and someone who’s been a part of Usenet since 1992), social problems rarely have good technical solutions. Technology can help—particularly when battling other forms of technology, like comment spam—but dealing with people and their idiosyncracies is a whole other beast.

As far as the negativity Dan has observed and been subjected to in academia, I have to say I’ve largely been spared it (although I will say I was deeply annoyed with the completely worthless one-line review I received for a manuscript once); I don’t know if that’s a function of one’s subdiscipline or perhaps just an example of my relative youth in things academic.

Update: More on this theme from Matt Stinson, who's strongly tempting me to join him in the media black hole that is mainland China.

Somehow, a lightning strike by my house a few minutes ago managed to burst the copper tubing between my wall and the ice maker in my fridge. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.

Update: Things have also been deeply flaky with the DSL since the lightning strike. Grr…

One thing I’ve been kicking around in my head lately while I’ve avoided working on my R&R is that there’s a qualitative difference between the chief executives chosen in presidential systems versus those from parliamentary regimes. In general, it seems (offhand) that parliamentary systems produce better leaders, but I’m not sure why.

Consider the United States. I can think of only one truly great president during the modern two-party era, and it’s Abraham Lincoln. And he’s only great because he won the Civil War. The rest seem to be a succession of mediocrities, a few of whom are “great” solely in relation to their presidential peers. FDR was better than Hoover, but he couldn’t hold a candle to Winston Churchill (though, I suppose, he was better than Neville Chamberlain). Reagan beat the crap out of everyone since Kennedy, but—let’s face it—he was a mediocrity compared to Margaret Thatcher. Bill Clinton or Tony Blair? No contest, Blair by a mile. Hell, John Major was better than 41 and 43 combined.

Lest we consider this a solely American phenomenon, let’s cross the pond and consider the succession of political hacks and nobodies that have led France as president since World War II. De Gaulle is only memorable because he was a jackass of the highest order. Mitterand? Chirac? Great leaders only in their own minds. Give me Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl, or even Gerhard Schröder any day.

I don’t have a good reason why this should be the case. Maybe it the experience of herding cats as a legislative leader makes prime ministers and chancellors better national leaders than the CEO-like experience of being a governor (the most common path to power our presidential system). Then again, Chirac was a party leader in parliament for years, and the experience seems to have improved him little. So, perhaps it’s just “grass is greener” syndrome—something to ponder the next few months while these two mediocrities duke it out.

James Joyner excerpts at length from the latest wisdom from on high produced by the great Oracle of our age, Dr. Larry Sabato, who James bylines (fairly appropriately) as “a TV talking head who sometimes teaches political science at UVA.”

I actually don’t really disagree with Sabato’s assessments (if North Carolina is in play, Bush is essentially fucked—by that point, any normal vote model tells you he’s already lost the swing states), but what’s with all this “we” crap, kemosabe?

Besides, I don’t think Edwards is on the Democratic ticket for regional considerations—he’s there because the base loves his stump abilities, which work just as well in Detroit as they do in Durham.

Lest I be seen as too hard on Matt Yglesias, Pejman Yousefzadeh provides the counterpoint. Surely he must recall the 2000 presidential campaign, during which our current president had less command of the names of foreign leaders than my then one-year-old cousin did.

Well, you’ve got to concede that at least Matthew Yglesias freely acknowledges his newfound status as a Democratic party hack:

Three, and most least importantly, I’d gone way out on a limb with the Gephardt-bashing and wasn’t looking forward to needing to defend him after all once he got the nomination.

Yes, heaven forbid that Yglesias actually not defend the indefensible. After all, there’s an election to be won, so who wants to be stuck with taking a stand on principle?

Update: Yglesias has updated his post to indicate he was joking on this point. I prefer to think of it as an inadvertently revealed preference, but since he went to Harvard and I didn’t, I shall give him the benefit of the doubt.

James Joyner echos my month-old hypothesis on weblog comments, writing in response to the decision to shut down comments at The Command Post:

Unfortunately, there seems to be a strange variation on the Gas Law with regard to blog comments: As blog readership expands, the quality of comments declines geometrically. When OTB had 500 readers a day, the vast majority of the comments—whether from people who agreed or disagreed with me—were quite good. With readership in the 5000–10,000 range, most comments are crap. Reading—let alone policing—the comments gets to be more trouble than it’s worth.

For my part, at least, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of acrimony and vitriol since enabling comments here at Signifying Nothing, but—then again—our little corner of the blogosphere only attracts about 1/40th of James’ daily readership.

It appears that the Kerry Veepstakes will come to an end today. Will Collier is betting on Gephardt, both Dan Drezner (who thinks Edwards is the man) and Matt Yglesias think Gephardt would be a bad choice, and Robert Garcia Tagorda is, as they used to say, afk.

I really don’t care much either way (except that it’ll be a relief to go from the endless McCain speculation to the endless explanations of why the selectee is inferior to McCain), but I think the better choice—grudges and ego aside—is John Edwards. I suspect this election is largely going to revolve around motivating the base to turn out,* and Edwards is far better on the stump with Democratic constituencies than Gephardt—or, for that matter, Kerry—is. Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion that Dick Cheney would wipe the floor with Gephardt in the veep debate, while I think Edwards could hold his own.

Chip Taylor notes the current congressional squabble over the distribution of highway trust fund money. He writes:

Of course, if every state got back exactly what its residents paid in, the main purpose of the federal tax and trust fund would be to allow the feds to dictate highway-related laws: drinking ages, BAC levels, open-container laws and the like. Come to think of it, that is likely the main purpose now.

Bingo.

Of course, now the sicko social scientist in me wants to construct an econometric model of state highway trust fund returns.

Ed Cone and OxBlogger David Adesnik are having a small tête-à-tête over Adesnik’s critique of a Onion piece entitled “American People Ruled Unfit to Govern.”†

Rather than wade into the animosity between Messrs. Cone and Adesnik, I think there’s an important corrective to be made to Adesnik’s unyielding “faith in the aggregate rationality of the American public.” Adesnik writes:

As I’ve explained before, the American public actually has a very strong record of rational decision-making:

Before the 1980s, it was taken for granted that the American public had volatile and incoherent opinions about politics, both foreign and domestic. By extension, this volatility and incoherence rendered Americans vulnerable to manipulation by both the media and the government.

In the 1980s, scholars began to discover that the premise of volatility and incoherence had led public opinion researchers to rely on methods that created an impression of volatility and incoherence even when there was none. In contrast, the United States had a rational public that derived its opinions on current events from a fixed set of values and updated its opinions when new information became available to it.

This conclusion reflects the research of America’s leading experts on public opinion, most importantly Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro.

I’m afraid Adesnik tells half the story; while a few of America’s leading experts on public opinion do agree on the existence of “aggregate rationality,” many others do not—including, ironically, the self-same Benjamin Page, whose more recent book Who Deliberates? argues that this aggregate rationality is skewed by the nature of public debate.

Perhaps the most promising effort to bolster the “responsible electorate” view is Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen’s work on affective intelligence, which largely rejects both aggregate rationality and the Michigan “normal vote” approach in favor of an explanation of politics based on emotional (or “affective”) reactions by voters.

That said, I generally agree with Adesnik’s view that the elitist perspective (captured by the Onion satire) of an American* public that is incompetent to manage its own affairs is inherently insulting; however, I’d argue that this is more the result of unrealistic expectations of a democratic public (fostered, ironically, in the writings of men like Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, often viewed as keen observers of the common man) than it has to do with embittered elitism per se.

More of interest here.

To echo Steven Taylor: Happy Independence Day #228.