I’ve managed to kill two posts in the middle of writing them today (one of which was no-thanks to Windows XP SP 2 deciding to pop up a dialog right before I pressed Enter). I think that’s a sign that I need to take a break…

Coming tomorrow: the semi-legendary Midwest paper (once I figure out why my sem specification isn’t working—I think I know why now, but I had to think about it all afternoon), a semi-review of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 beta, and probably more rants and ravings on the state of the nation and the world as I work off nervous energy prior to the two phone interviews I have scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

I think this bug report contains the most glaringly obvious statement in the history of software:

I’ve been trying out reportbug, and it’s not perfect. [emphasis added]

Not that I recall ever claiming that reportbug was perfect, mind you, but still…

Via Electric Venom and InstaPundit, it looks like things are taking a bit of an ugly turn in Baghdad today.

Update: Wretchard at Belmont Club has some worthwhile thoughts on the matter.

Well, ain’t this lovely? (Via John Cole.)

Alex Knapp links a lengthy analysis of the Iraq Survey Group’s work in Iraq that raises a lot of very important questions, to wit:

US forces participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom had the latest chemical detection gear, including chemical detection paper, chemical agent detector kits, improved chemical agent monitors, and sophisticated Fox Chemical Recon Vehicles. Some American GIs remembered well the shortfalls of this equipment in Gulf War I. Now all of these older devices had been improved, and new and more accurate devices had been issued. In fact, some mobile Army labs had highly sensitive mass spectrometers to test for suspicious substances. Who could argue the results of repeated tests using these devices without explaining how DoD had apparently been ripped off by contractors for faulty products? Apparently, the ISG could and did.

One of the reported incidents occurred near Karbala where there appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area of 55-gallon drums of pesticide. In addition, there was also a camouflaged bunker complex full of these drums that some people entered with unpleasant results. More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to nerve agent. A full day of tests on the drums resulted in one positive for nerve agent, and then one resulted in a negative. Later, an Army Fox NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] Recon Vehicle confirmed the existence of Sarin. An officer from the 63d Chemical Company thought there might well be chemical weapons at the site.

But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into non-existence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers six feet underground. The “agricultural site” was also co-located with a military ammunition dump, evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.

The bottom line is that Saddam’s troops apparently needed to use a lot of “pesticides” for rather mysterious reasons. Definitely RTWT™.

According to this HealthDay article, San Antonio, TX, “has the highest rate of binge drinking—imbibing till you’re drunk—in the entire United States.”

Congratulations, San Antonio! I certainly tried to do my part while I was there.

The rest of the top ten: Grand Forks, ND; Milwaukee, WI; Austin, TX; Sioux Falls, SD; Davenport, IA; Cedar Rapids, IA; Duluth, MN; Lincoln, NE; and Springfield, MA.

David Bernstein, among my co-blogger’s least favorite Volokh Conspirators, links a New York Times piece on the passage of the House version of the transportation reauthorization bill.

Now the article is written by “David Stout,” whose job apparently is to rewrite AP copy for the NYT website; to my knowledge, “his” articles never appear in print (and “he” may just be a pseudonym for a group of copy editors). What’s weird about the article? Let’s pull out some excerpts:

Regardless of the real figure, President Bush has threatened to veto the measure as too costly at a time that he and Congressional Republicans are supposed to be serious about holding down the federal deficit.

I believe this is a run-on sentence, to begin with. And the second half of the sentence looks like an editorial comment, not news reporting.

“Thirty billion, when you are cutting the deficit in half in five years, is real money,” Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the other day, apparently with no humor intended.

“The other day” seems rather imprecise for dating a quotation for a newspaper article. And the statement that this was said “apparently with no humor intended” is a complete non-sequitor. (The quote appears to have been cribbed from this Carl Hulse article dated April 1.)

The highway-spending bill enjoys wide support among Democrats and Republicans alike because the members of both parties have something in common: their constituents use highways (and bridges and bike paths and other incidentals wrapped into the bill.)

Again, another strange paragraph; this one isn’t even punctuated correctly—the “incidentals,” by the way, include the entire Federal Transit Administration; a rather large “incidental,” wouldn’t you think? Strange.

(Hulse’s article in Saturday’s paper is far more coherent.)

I ought to make this a daily feature… today’s lowlights:

• Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) thinks his November election opponent looks like Uday or Qusay Hussein. Only if Dr. Mongiardo is loading his patients in the wood-chipper, methinks.
• UW-Madison sophomore Audrey Seiler was responsible for her own alleged kidnapping.
• Oh, yeah, well-connected Democratic party hack/consultant Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is subhuman scum.

Quagmire? Well, maybe for the soon-to-be ex-Parrots of Fallujah.

Josh Chafetz and Andrew Sullivan have been having a bit of a back-and-forth over whether the gas tax should be raised. As Josh pointed out yesterday, such a tax would be highly regressive, particularly hitting the working poor in rural communities that don’t have mass transit.

It would also be bad policy for another reason: the gasoline tax is essentially a user fee. Most of the revenues of the federal gas tax are returned to the states (according to a rather arcane formula that just happens to shift funds from rural America to the Northeast) to pay for the federal share of major highway construction and resurfacing projects, while the rest of the money helps pay for the federal mass transit subsidy (thus, Mr. Sullivan, who doesn’t operate his own vehicle, receives a massive subsidy from those of us who drive). Diverting gas tax revenues to the general fund would arguably be even more crooked than diverting money from the Social Security tax to pay for the defense budget, or taking FICA receipts and using those to operate the postal service.

And, while I generally share their dislike for the sport utility vehicle (though am puzzled why comparably gas-guzzling vehicles like minivans escape their wrath), raising the gas tax would be a very crude instrument for reducing demand for SUVs: while people do respond to price signals over the long term, over the short run the demand for gasoline is rather price inelastic. But if your animus for the SUV is motivated by its gas-guzzling properties, rather than its appearance, you’ll be happy to know that Toyota will be introducing a hybrid gas-electric SUV next year, the Highlander Hybrid, which will provide “the fuel economy of a four-cylinder compact sedan.”

Update: Stephen Karlson properly takes note of the market-distorting effects of the rather arbitrary division between cars and trucks in the CAFE standard, which “effectively preclude some sport-ute and minivan drivers from substituting one size downward” to station wagons and large sedans.

Von in pondering the continual PR nightmare that is the Bush administration observes:

Thank God there’s some good economic news—and that Kerry is so freaking weak as a candidate.

I suppose if you’re a Republican, that might be worth being thankful for. But, it seems to me, the completely lackluster nature of John F. Kerry would be a serious drawback if you wanted to be able to vote for a credible alternative to Bush this fall without holding your nose.

I spent most of the evening out at a bonfire (out in the boonies of Panola County) with some friends, some beer, and some hot dogs. A few choice observations:

• Coat hangers, even when straightened out, are rather non-ideal implements for roasting hot dogs.
• Every picture my camera phone takes in the dark looks like a blurry Bigfoot photo. I should get in touch with the National Enquirer.
• Endorsement: a former student of mine from a few years back (in fact, the only one that took two different classes with me) said he liked my class because I “wasn’t a communist,” presumably in comparison to my more liberally-inclined colleagues in the department. I should slap that on the vita.
• The young woman who the host of the shindig was pursuing was apparently quite disappointed that her current boyfriend was getting married.
• Around 9:45, several people went for a beer run. When they returned 30 minutes later, it was opined that this was a rather long time to head to the gas station just down the hill. The conversation then went as follows: “We had to go to Bumf*ck to get the beer.” “We’re already in Bumf*ck.” “Well, we had to go to West Bumf*ck.”

Just another night in the soap opera that is my life.

I’ve set my TiVo for the lovely Ms. McArdle’s appearance on CNNfn Friday morning.

Since Sebastian Holsclaw is reposting some of his early stuff at from his own blog at Obsidian Wings, I’ll take the opportunity to repost my response to his post. I wrote:

Sebastian Holsclaw says that many pro-lifers "muddy the waters of the abortion debate". Those on the pro-choice side, on the other hand, "poison the well of the debate".

Now that’s not fair and balanced, is it?

But anyway, Sebastian is a good addition to Obsidian Wings, which has of late become one of my three favorite blogs (pushing out the Volokh Conspiracy).

Question for other bloggers out there: how do you prefer to be referred to in other blogs? First name and last name? First name only? Last name only? Title with name?

I’ve been using the following convention. I use first and last name the first time I refer to another blogger in a blog post. I use just the first name on subsequent references, unless the person has a high-status title, such as “Professor” or “Doctor,” in which case I use title and last name.

For some reason the blogosphere seems more familiar than the world of print. I’d never, for example, refer to David Brooks as “David,” but I find it difficult to refer to Will Baude as “Baude.”

Just for reference, I’m fine with being called “Brock.”

Will Baude today heard of the Peabody ducks for the first time.

I’ll count this as the tie-breaker for the Memphis Schelling point. I had two votes for the gates of Graceland, and two votes for the lobby of the Peabody.

You have heard of Graceland, right, Will?

Today’s Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports that a bill authorizing toll roads in Mississippi is working its way through the legislature, and seems to have a pretty good chance of passage this year—it has the support of the entire (separately elected) Transportation Commission, and it’s already passed the full Senate and the House Transportation Committee.

So far, the only two projects singled out for tolling are a seven-mile connector between the state port at Gulfport and I-10 on the coast and the proposed airport connector between downtown Jackson and the metro airport in Rankin County. However, the bill opens the door for other projects to be tolled as well, provided there is a nearby free alternative, which means Mississippi’s part of the Memphis Outer Beltway, new Highway 304 between Collierville and Hernando, is a serious candidate, as the tolls would enable construction to begin years sooner than otherwise planned.

James Joyner of OTB notes the debut of the apparently sincerely-named “Air America Network,” the much vaunted left-wing alternative to right-wing talk radio, featuring such noted radio personalities as Al Franken and Janeane Garafalo (no sarcastic comments about “faces made for radio,” please!).

The good news is, if you’re a lefty excluded from the Air America commercial broadcast footprint (for example, in such minor broadcasting markets as Washington, D.C.), is that this fine programming is also available nationwide on XM Radio Channel 167, under the slightly less stupid (and more honest) name “XM America Left.” I may or may not tune in (I generally despise talk radio as a format, so bet on “may not”; plus, you’d have to pry me away from XM’s great music offerings, not to mention ESPN Radio), but if I do I’ll probably post a review. At least the morning lineup looks like it has some potential…

Russell Arben Fox has a lengthy summary of an article from February’s American Political Science Review, “Election Time: Normative Implications of Temporal Properties of the Electoral Process in the United States,” by Dennis F. Thompson.

Unlike my usual practice when it comes to the APSR (which is to scan the table of contents, find nothing of immediate interest to my research agenda, and then dump it onto the stack of journals—yes, I’m a bad political scientist when it comes to journal-reading), I actually read the article, and while I’m not quite as enthusiastic about Thompson’s conclusions as Russell is (particularly because I don’t at all buy the argument that campaign finance regulations, no matter how strict, will put an end to the “permanent campaign”), I agree that Thompson does make some worthwhile contributions to the debate, including a strong argument that partisan gerrymandering is fundamentally antidemocratic.

I do wonder, however, where one buys a single copy of the APSR, as Russell implores his readers to do. My advice: go to your local college’s library and read it for free.

Dean Esmay points out this interesting post by Citizen Smash, in which he talks to his local congresswoman, Susan Davis, about requiring government contractors to obey the law on the treatment of guardsmen and reservists when they return from active duty, or risk losing their government contracts.

There’s more at Phil Carter’s Intel Dump website:

In an ideal world, we’d have nothing but good corporate citizens, and there’d be no need for this kind of law. Indeed, I believe that most American corporations do the right thing when it comes to their reservist-employees. Yet, there are companies out there that don’t do the right thing, and it adds insult to injury when we allow those companies to profit from taxpayer money.

I concur with Phil: write your representative and your senators and tell them you want them to support this proposal. Better yet: call either their Washington office or local field office.

The Commercial Appeal (reg. required) yesterday took the admirable, if belated, stand that tossing a ton of public money at yet another publicly-funded sports facility wouldn’t be a great idea (at least, not for now). At issue is the deteriorating 1965 Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium (which dates from prior to my parents’ attendance at then-Memphis State University). The editorial says:

A major overhaul could cost 125 million or more. …

Councilman Rickey Peete suggested spending 5 million for minimal repairs if the work would buy a few more years of use.

The CA endorses the third option. But let’s go look at the benchmark for comparison:

It should be noted that the University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, one of the largest stadiums in the country, has seen 16 renovations since 1921, according to the school’s web site. Renovations apparently have served UT well, since there are enough seats for 104,079 fans.

By comparison, the 62,380-seat Liberty Bowl has been twice renovated since it was built, according to the university.

To the best of my recollection, Neyland’s renovations were financed with money from boosters… and UT, which attracts 100,000 fans per game, needs the space—heck, they could probably sell another 20,000 seats if they had the space to install them. The Liberty Bowl, however, is lucky to attract 30,000 fans per Memphis home game in a typical season: last year, the team set a record by attracting an average of 40,262, a figure skewed by both the presence of the Ole Miss home game on the schedule (which attracted 51,914 fans, many of whom weren’t big Tigers supporters) and the Tigers’ atypically good performance in 2003. Don’t count on more than 35,000 per this year. (Stats from here.)

More to the point, the editorial doesn’t mention the real driving force behind a new stadium for the Tigers: keeping up with the Joneses. Or, in their case, keeping up with the Louisville Cardinals and their privately-financed Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium, which manages to seat 42,000 fans in comfort (i.e. still above the realistic attendance level the Tigers can expect regularly) at the bargain price of $65 million—half the estimated cost the CA cites for an all-new stadium. (Louisville’s stadium is actually a “horseshoe” that can eventually be expanded with additional end-zone seating, similar to the current configuration of Ole Miss’ larger 60,580-seat Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, also paid for by private donations.)

Unlike Louisville’s boosters, however, the Highland Hundred want to dig into their fellow citizens’ pockets to pay for their new deluxe stadium. Why shouldn’t they? Michael Heisley, a man with no ties to Memphis at all, was able to schmooze and finagle his way into getting taxpayers to pony up for the FedExForum, leaving the Pyramid (which, admittedly, is a horribly designed basketball arena building) to do nothing except blind passing airline pilots with the reflection from its roof. Now all the Hundred have to figure out is how to shoehorn a football stadium west of Danny Thomas Blvd. and they’ll be all set!

Robert Garcia Tagorda helpfully notes the geographic illiteracy of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, who somehow managed to include the Philippines and Thailand among a list of countries aiding and abetting terrorists in one of those stupid “fundraising polls” that are included in letters soliciting donors.

Robert’s right: the only fitting word is “idiotic.” Especially when you consider that, as Conrad of The Gweilo Diaries points out, the Philippine government just broke up a major terrorist plot involving Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaeda affiliate group.

Dan Drezner assesses Richard Clarke’s book thusly:

Richard Clarke is the perfect bureaucrat. I mean that in the best and worst senses of the word. In the best sense, it’s clear that Clarke was adept at maximizing the available resources and authority required to do his job, given the organizational rivalries and cultures that made such a pursuit difficult. In the worst sense, Clarke was a monomaniacal martinet whose focus on his bailiwick to the exclusion of everything else is phenomenal.

Dan also provides more ammunition for those of us who think Dick Cheney should get the boot—not just because he’s deadweight on the ticket, but also because he “ha[s] inserted himself into the National Security Council process in a way that deliberately or accidentally sabotaged the decision-making process.”

As Glenn Reynolds might say: double-ouch.

Update: Hei Lun of Begging to Differ has more on Clarke’s alleged Republican credentials (frankly, mine are better). Special bonus: yet another takedown of Josh Marshall’s risible assertion that “I have no stake in Richard Clarke.”

Colby Cosh ponders whether or not the new Conservative Party north of the border is properly thought of as “Tory.” Colby notes the key problem:

The problem is that by equating “Conservative” with “Tory” we basically discard the useful 20th-century concept of a “Tory” as someone who is Anglophile, monarchist, elitist, ceremony-loving, truly conservative about certain institutions, and committed to property and the existing class order.

Canadian Conservatives, he argues, haven’t really been “Tories” since John Diefenbaker’s rule in the 1950s, and, indeed, the new “Conservative Party” is even further from the Tory ideal. Of course, arguably, it’s not even conservative any more, at least in the sense of defending the established Trudeauian order. Neither are the Liberals very liberal, for that matter, except when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money on boondoggles like the $1 billlion CDN national gun registry.

Mike Hollihan of Half-Bakered links a pretty good Nashville Scene bio/interview of Memphis’ Harold Ford, Jr., a likely candidate for U.S. senator in 2006.