Sunday’s New York Times has the goods on Saddam Hussein’s corruption of the oil-for-food program. Sample highlight:

In the high-flying days after Iraq was allowed to sell its oil after 10 years of United Nations sanctions, the lobby of the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad was the place to be to get a piece of the action.

That was where the oil traders would gather whenever a journalist, actor or political figure would arrive in Iraq and openly praise Mr. Hussein. Experience taught them that the visitor usually returned to the hotel with a gift voucher, courtesy of the Iraqi president or one of his aides, representing the right to buy one million barrels or more of Iraqi crude.

The vouchers had considerable value. With the major oil companies monopolizing most Persian Gulf oil, there was fierce competition among smaller traders for the chance to buy Iraqi oil. And as long as Iraq kept its oil prices low enough, traders could make a tidy profit, even after buying the voucher and paying the surcharge.

“We used to joke that if you get one million barrels, you could make $200,000,” Mr. Faraj, of SOMO, added, referring to a period when the vouchers sold for about 20 cents per barrel. “And yet the ones who got it were those people who used to come here and praise Saddam for his stand against imperialism.”

Read the whole, sad, damning thing. (Link via InstaPundit.)

Well, after two days of trying, I finally got someone on the phone at Best Buy… and I will be getting a replacement laptop. Now to work out details; I have my eye on this one.

Steven Taylor has this week’s edition of the Toast-O-Meter; we’re firmly in the denouement stage here, folks.

Ken Waight of lying in ponds notes that two political columnists recently worked themselves into contortions to avoid criticizing their favored parties in their columns, while Matt Yglesias thinks Glenn Reynolds doesn’t go out of his way to criticize the right* enough.

Steven Bainbridge, in the course of congratulating Steven Taylor on his promotion, makes the following observation:

When I was up for tenure (a nerve-wracking time, even worse than sweating out the bar exam), a senior colleague told me that getting tenure didn’t change anything in your life except that you stopped thinking about tenure. I didn’t believe him, but it turned out to be true. If you’re internalized the norms of teaching and scholarship, you don’t change what you do. You just keep teaching and writing.

This seems like an odd analysis; the grant of tenure* doesn’t remove the incentive to publish, teach, and perform service at a high level (in the various department and college-prescribed ratios); while it is true you can no longer be fired for failing to do those things as proficiently, most associate-level professors at least aspire to promotion to full professor and the prestige and monetary rewards associated with that rank, which requires a similar level of effort (as between assistant and associate) to attain. Thus, we would rationally expect that professors would be more likely to slack off after promotion to full professor, rather than after achieving tenure.

I’ll be supporting Branden Robinson’s candidacy for Debian Project Leader for 2004–05; more details on the pending elections will be available sometime over the weekend, including the platforms of Branden and the other two candidates, Gergely Nagy and incumbent DPL Martin Michlmayr.

I’m also considering writing an academic paper on Debian’s use of Condorcet vote counting, although I haven’t quite decided which way to go with it.

Huzzah and kudos to Steven Taylor of PoliBlog, who will be granted tenure and promoted to the rank of associate professor on August 1.

Tyler Cowen notes that not every Ph.D. program is a gateway into eternal adjuncthood.*

* Nor, really, is political science, my complaints about enriching the U.S. postal service notwithstanding.

Matt Stinson looks at the importance of branding, drawing from his ongoing experiences in China. He also leaves off with this disturbing thought:

In the future, China will be the biggest market for PBR. This scares me more than anything else I’ve seen here.

Hey, it could be worse. It could be Schlitz…

From Martin Devon a few days ago: a New York Times article on how TiVo designed their signature “peanut” remote control. I agree with Martin—it’s by far the best remote control I’ve ever used, and the only reason (besides the cost) I haven’t ditched my array of remotes for a universal all-in-one solution.

The only problem I’ve seen: the little plastic thingy on the TiVo button comes off after several years’ use—so far, it’s happened to two of the three TiVo remotes I’ve had. Oh, yeah, and it eats batteries like no remote I’ve ever used—probably because it gets far more use than any remote I’ve ever had before.

Steven Taylor, who is apparently still recovering from some sort of flashback experience, points out that the real ballot-box news next Tuesday is likely to not involve the relative fortunes of 'Nam-John, Hick-John, Al, Dennis, and Lyndon.

These are just random, lack-of-sleep thoughts; I have no particular point, in case you were wondering.

Vance of Begging to Differ takes issue with FactCheck.org’s claim that the Bush administration’s claim that the average tax cut is $1,586 is “misleading,” because using the mean instead of the median† is improper. Vance writes:

I can think of a valid justification for either measure. If you’re trying to understand the overall economic effects of the tax cuts, for example, an average is entirely applicable.

In the case where data is “normally distributed”—following the “bell curve” known to statisticians—the mean and the median are essentially the same.* When they differ, the data is said to be skewed, and measures of central tendency and dispersion that assume a normal distribution (like the mean) are generally misleading, as they don’t properly describe the distribution. The income distribution, for example, is skewed right.‡

To cast things in non-mathematical terms, when people think about averages they are thinking in terms of things that are most typical, rather than in terms of distributions. And, in general, the median better reflects this perception of average than the mean. While there may be technical value to the mean for specialists and those who want to engage in further analysis, I think the median does a better job of reflecting the “most typical” observation in most data patterns.

Robert Prather is continuing his semi-quixotic effort to get Virginia Postrel back as editor of Reason; I wholeheartedly support any and all efforts in this regard.

My daily routine now goes something like this:

1. Visit the Chronicle jobs web site.
2. Visit HigherEdJobs.com.
3. Fight with APSA’s eJobs system to get it to show me the last few days’ postings—bearing in mind that the “show jobs posted in the last two days” function doesn’t actually work because their website’s database isn’t synced with the actual jobs database, so jobs actually “posted” today may have been entered into the system several days ago. Also bear in mind that the “Full Professor” job at Rockford College (that I didn’t apply for, hence why I’m mentioning it by name) is actually a junior-level position, that jobs that don’t list your field on the main list may actually be looking in your field when you get to reading the actual text of the posting, that the same job at one college is in the database twice. Oh, the “print” version of the page actually takes up more paper than the non-print version. (Did I mention that eJobs sucks?)
4. Write cover letter(s) as needed.
5. Make pretty mailing label(s).
6. Stuff cover letter, vita, and other requested materials in big manila envelope(s).
7. Weigh and put stamps on envelope(s).
8. If before 1 pm, stick envelope(s) in mail box. If before 4:30 pm, get in car and go to post office to stick envelopes in mail box.

Writing cover letters at this point is a simultaneously easy and hard process. It’s easy in the sense that after you’ve written 50 of the damn things, one you’ve already written is pretty close to the one you “need” for the particular job. It’s hard in the sense that you have to remember which of those 50 letters is the right one to massage for the particular job in question.

It’s also hard in the sense that you have to show some enthusiasm for the job on paper—which for me entails doing some basic research about the college and putting in some thought as to I’d fit in there, something that makes me a bit more emotionally invested in a process that more closely resembles a meat market than anything a reasonable person would want to be emotionally attached to. It’s hard not to go from “I’d enjoy the opportunity to teach at X because I can contribute in ways A, B, and C” to actually feeling like you’d enjoy going to college X—and thus running the risk of being disappointed if you don’t get to go to college X for whatever reason, even if it’s not the “dream job” you expect to be doing when tenure time rolls around.

I’m feeling terribly conflicted this morning. The Baseball Crank has a lengthy post on the same-sex marriage issue, in which he makes—and highlights—the following prediction:

Gay marriage will become the law of the land without any state legislature ever having voted it into law, without a majority of either house of Congress ever having voted in favor of gay marriage, without any statewide popular referendum ever having voted in favor of gay marriage, and without any state or federal constitutional provision ever having explicitly authorized it.

I think the first part of the Crank’s premise is incorrect—Massachusetts’ legislature will probably vote it into law later this year, albeit under court duress—but otherwise, there’s not a word there I’d disagree with. And efforts to analogize this “struggle for equality” with those of racial minorities don’t track—those groups were deliberately and systematically excluded from political participation through ordinary legislative channels, against the plain text of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution and numerous federal statutes, and thus their recourse to the judiciary was justified. Tyranny and oppression is being confronted with policemen on horseback, unjustly imprisoned, blasted with fire hoses, and lynching; being deprived of legal recognition of the fact you’ve set up housekeeping with someone of the same gender doesn’t quite fit into that category.

Is the only justification needed for anyone to get a victory in the courts something along the lines of “we couldn’t get the legislature to vote for it“? I find this a profoundly disturbing question. And I say that as one of the tiny minority of people in my state who would support legal recognition of same-sex marriages. What am I supposed to tell my students? “Well, the Supreme Court doesn’t trust your representatives to do what’s right, so they’ve decided to decide on everyone else’s behalf what your laws should be.” I don’t remember seeing that in Federalist 10.

On the other hand, I think Kate Malcolm is probably right that the judgment of history may well see those who oppose same-sex marriage today in much the same light as we (well, most of we at any rate) today see the segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. So in the end I end up just feeling conflicted about the whole thing.

I see someone else is trying to make a Python port of the Textile 2 syntax. My approach so far has been a straight port of the Perl code by Brad Choate, with some minor tweaks (using urlparse and mimetypes, for example), rather than trying to hack Mark’s existing module.

Now that I’ve been hacking away for a week (and am about 700 lines away from being done—I just started on format_table, which looks downright nasty), I’m becoming convinced that the smarter plan would have been to write a lexer from scratch for the Textile markup, rather than trying to use the regex-happy approach Choate used (which works far, far better in Perl than in Python).

I think Brock below is being a bit obtuse in claiming the President’s position on a federal marriage amendment is an endorsement of “enshrining anti-gay bigotry into the United States Constitution”—particularly since that self-same alleged anti-gay bigotry is essentially the law of the land as of February 25, 2004. And I also think it’s absurd to criticize the president for not living up to one’s own fantasies about him, as Andrew Sullivan has done.

Funnily enough, my thoughts on the matter, from a policy perspective, generally coincide with those of Steven Taylor—although I personally do not share Taylor’s “moral objections” to homosexuality. As a supporter of same-sex marriage, I firmly believe the process that has been used to this point by its more overzealous proponents—particularly the extralegal behavior of officers of the City and County of San Francisco—is likely to energize enough additional support for FMA for it to pass, particularly if, as I expect will happen, Congress calls for ratification by special state conventions.* But my emotional reaction to the president’s support for FMA is closer to Tim Sandefur’s—which was perhaps even stronger than Brock’s.

Elsewhere: Dan Drezner is hosting a discussion of the politics of the proposal.

In lieu of accomplishing anything worthwhile today (except more job applications), I replaced the server that Signifying Nothing runs on this morning. The previous server was a discontinued Compaq corporate desktop box (Pentium II 300 MHz) I picked up an eon ago for $400 from Buy.com with 160 MB of RAM and a noisy* 20 GB hard drive. The current server is a tower-case Pentium III, 450 MHz with 256 MB of RAM and a 60 GB hard drive that is basically the reconstituted version of a (then top-of-the-line) PC I paid good money for from Quantex about five years ago—the only newish components are two 10/100 Ethernet cards† and a spare CD burner I had lying around the house. I did a fresh Debian sarge install using the Beta-2 installer from CD-R (which went smoothly after I gave up trying to do a network install instead), then updated to unstable and a 2.6.3 kernel (the last part being the most painful step, since I had trouble with the initrd support until I finally gave up on that).

I was hoping the new box would be less noisy, but to no avail (fan noise has replaced drive whining)... I’ll probably have to clear some space and move the box under the desk to get some noise relief. Actually, what’s more likely is that I’ll get my replacement laptop in a few days then go back to rarely using the computer that is right underneath the SN box, so the noise won’t bother me any more.

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen has said the casino gambling is “not the solution” to Shelby County’s debt problem, and that he will oppose an amendment to the Tennessee Constitution to allow gambling in Shelby County.

So what the hell are we supposed to do with this pyramid, now that it's not good enough for the UofM Tigers to play basketball in?

It didn’t surprise me that the President today endorsed enshrining anti-gay bigotry into the United States Constitution. What surprised me was that my already low opinion of the President would sink even lower when he did what I knew he would eventually do.

I have no call to feel betrayed. Only insulted that the President has publicly declared that the loving relationships of several of my friends and family members are worthless – loving relationships that are a lot more meaningful than many straight marriages I’ve seen come and go. But Andrew Sullivan does feel betrayed, and he has every right to feel that way.

The President has given the finger to Sullivan and to every gay American. America deserves a better President than this.

Eugene Volokh and David Bernstein bring our attention to a bizarre anti-semitic screed in AdBusters magazine.

I admit I’ve been pretty skeptical of claims that “neo-conservative” is just a new code word for “Jew,” but AdBusters has proved to me that, at least for some, it is.

Could anti-semitism become the kind of cultural cancer for the left that racism and anti-gay bigotry are for the right? Liberals, among whose number I count myself, should take the lead in denouncing this. We shouldn’t leave it up to the conservatives and libertarians.

The Secretary of Education (thank Dick Nixon for that great idea) talked to some governors today. His speech, er, didn’t go very well:

Education Secretary Rod Paige said Monday that the National Education Association, one of the nation’s largest labor unions, was like “a terrorist organization” because of the way it was resisting many provisions of a school improvement law pushed through Congress by President Bush in 2001.

To his credit, at least Paige isn’t bothering to claim he was “quoted out of context,” or similar such nonsense:

His initial remark was described by four governors and confirmed by the Education Department. “The secretary was responding to a question,” said Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paige. “He said he considered the N.E.A. to be a terrorist organization.”

But he did offer a sorta-kinda retraction later:

After his remark had begun circulating, Mr. Paige issued a statement saying he had gone too far in describing the union as a terrorist organization. “It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics that the N.E.A.’s Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind’s historic education reforms,” he said.

“As one who grew up on the receiving end of insensitive remarks,” said Mr. Paige, who is black and was born in a segregated Mississippi, “I should have chosen my words better.”

Now, in general I’ll be first in line to criticize the NEA, who are among the worst kind of rent-seeking interest group to pollute the waters of the Potomoc basin. Their lobbyists routinely try to delude the public into believing that their members’ best interests (which is what the NEA lobbys for) somehow coincide with the best interests of American children (which, more often than not, is what the NEA lobbys against).

However, the NEA is in no way, shape, or form a “terrorist group.” Al Qaeda is a terrorist group. Hamas is a terrorist group. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a terrorist group. Shining Path is a terrorist group. Terrorists generally blow stuff up, kill and maim people, and the like. The NEA, by contrast, is a group of middle-class workers who peacefully lobby for their preferred public policies through non-violent activity. They don’t even qualify for the mantle of “shakedown artist,” unlike leftist fellow-travellers like Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson. I think it’s time for Mr. Paige to ease himself into a nice, early retirement—not just because he’s the Education Secretary, but because this sort of rhetoric is on the level of the “Bush=Hitler” analogy and should be beyond the pale.

Elsewhere: John Cole agrees, Jonathan Wilde at Catallarchy.net thinks it’s about time someone told the truth, and David Bernstein misses the point entirely, as my co-blogger would probably expect.

The Volokh Conspiracy has added trackback links, courtesy of Technorati.

It’s about time. No matter how much I dislike some of the individual conspirators (or guest conspirators), the Volokh Conspiracy remains one of my favorite blogs. And trackback links are to me the innovation that sets blogging apart from other media. I frequently find that following trackback links is more enlightening than the forward links that bloggers themselves provide, and it's a great way to find blogs that you didn't know about before. For some reason, I'm much more likely to enjoy a previously unknown Blog B that comments on Blog A, which I already read and enjoy, than I am to enjoy an unknown Blog C that Blog A comments on.

James Joyner finds Howard Kurtz in today’s Washington Post acknowledging many of the same sins of the pundit class that SN did almost two weeks ago.