Since people are Googling… Wonkette! has swiped the results from NRO. The Kerryman is kicking ass.

Bear in mind, however, that at least in Tennessee voters are permitted to vote early up to two weeks before the election; to my knowledge, there was no exit polling done of early voting sites. Not that it’d make much difference in the results, as early voters are only about 1/4 of the electorate, but in a close race it might matter.

Poliblogger Steven Taylor responded yesterday to my post on conservatism and the 2004 election. First he examines my argument with regard to divided government:

Chris makes an argument, that I have often heard, that the solution to the problem of insufficient fiscal conservatism is the return of divided government. However, I would note that in the twentieth century divided government has been the norm, and, likewise, deficits and ever-increasing spending has also been the norm, calling into question the idea that divided government results in curtailed spending. The only exception (at least in regards to deficits) was during part of the Clinton years, during which we did, in fact, have divided government. However, as I have argued before, the balanced budgets of those years were primarily a function of unexpected economic growth, not a tremendous feat of fiscal restraint the resulted from divided government. For that matter the Reagan era, one of divided government, is usually considered the hallmark of deficit politics.

Causality is difficult to prove here, but I don’t think that—necessarily—you can argue that the Clinton years were a fluke. Reagan was president with a Democratic House and a Senate that was sometimes under Republican and sometimes under Democratic control. The Democrats of the 1980s were hardly a model of fiscal responsibility—and coupled with Reagan’s fetish for supply-side economics, the two together created a giant deficit between them. As I stated in my earlier post, effective fiscal conservatism rests on control of the House and Senate—something that Reagan didn’t enjoy, but Clinton did. That Clinton also benefitted from a favorable economy that he had little control over doesn’t change the fact that Republicans in Congress were much more willing to say “no” when Clinton wanted to throw money at problems than they are today.

And I do think that in terms of national security one would see a rather substantially different world under a Kerry administration. That alone is sufficient reason to heed my prior advice. And do think that he is serious in his campaign rhetoric regarding foreign policy. Remember: this is the guy who voted against the first Gulf War even though Saddam has invaded Kuwait. I think that he is highly reticent to use force and does not have the temperament needed to fight the war on terror.

This is an argument I acknowledged, albeit somewhat glibly, in my post. But to a large extent I think a Democratic president is now stuck prosecuting the War on Terror forcefully, or he risks going down in history as a miserable failure the likes we haven’t seen since the late 1970s. Not that that’s much comfort if you think Kerry will get us all killed between now and January 2009, mind you. (I think the more likely scenario is that Kerry will simply fail to follow through with al-Qaeda and do the minumum necessary to protect the homeland, leaving us with a mess at the end of his term.)

[On domestic policy:] However, there would still be important differences. For example: the judgeship issue and I don’t just mean in regards to specific social conservative issue (although abortion is important to me), but just the general idea of having judges who at least make an effort to simply judge the law and let legislators legislate. I consider this to be rather significant.

I think the odds of either Kerry or Bush getting the nominees he wants on the bench are rapidly approaching zero at this point; however, Kerry or Bush might be able to accomplish a bit with recess appointments. The open question is whether or not the next president will dare make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court when Stevens keels over.

And a side note the “social conservative” issue: prostitution really isn’t that much of an issue for the DoJ, so that strikes me as a non-starter of an example. And in regards to the drug war (which I oppose on efficacy grounds, btw), a Democratic president is unlikely to function any differently than a Republican one on that one. From Nixon to the present the funding for the drug war has simply grown, and while Carter discussed support for legalizing marijuana, the basic approach to illegal drugs has been be pretty consistent across partisan lines. Indeed, the massive increase in funding to Colombia under “Plan Colombia” was under Clinton.

My example sucked because I actually meant to write “pornography.” Don’t mind me, my brain’s in deep freeze. But I suspect a Kerry administration would not prosecute either the War on Drugs or the War on Porn with the zeal that Ashcroft has shown. Of course, if you’re a SoCon that’s a bug, not a feature.

To be honest, I cannot conceive a situation arising in which the net policy desires of conservatives of any stripe would be furthered by a Kerry win, unless they occurred by sheer serendipity.

Serendipity works. I don’t think Bill Clinton particularly wanted to show fiscal restraint in the 1990s, but a funny thing happened as a result of his perpetual head-butting with Congress. If John Kerry had proposed No Child Left Behind, or the Medicare drugs bill, in the exact same form that Bush had, he’d have been laughed right out of Congress by the Republicans—and deservedly so. It may only be a marginal difference, but the difference between trying to give the president a record to run on and trying to deny the president something to take credit for may just be enough to encourage Congress to keep spending in check.

Now, if you’re someone who wants Roe and Goodridge to go away, this may not be enough to affect your vote. But if you’re someone who’s indifferent, or for that matter realistic, on social issues—let’s face it, Roe and Goodridge aren’t going away, because another two Scalias will never make it onto the Supreme Court—it’s something that might be worth considering. (On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that some people, including my esteemed co-blogger, who want more Breyers on the Court have made much the same argument. So your mileage may vary, as they say.)

Apparently hackers are also part-time epistemologists. My general feeling on the issue is that any enterprise that generally uses the scientific method to discover capital-T Truth is a “science.” Mathematics does this, ergo it is a science.

Then again, others differ; Rose-Hulman describes itself as “one of the nation’s top undergraduate engineering, science, and mathematics colleges,” implicitly arguing that mathematics is not a science (and neither is engineering—which I suppose is a whole debate of its own).

Apparently blogroll editing has become a spectator sport. Free hint: set your blogroll order preferences to “Alpha” so it’s easier to tell the differences.

Andrew Sullivan thinks that the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment would ban even legislatively enacted civil union statutes, such as Vermont’s.

Keith Burgess-Jackson accuses Sullivan of hysteria:

Andrew Sullivan has lost his bloody mind. In today’s blog (see here), he gives a hysterical misreading of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, then chastises The New York Times for not misreading it the same way.

How Sullivan could misread this simply worded amendment boggles my mind. His lack of legal training may explain some of it (does he not have legally trained friends?), but I think there’s more going on. His otherwise sound intellect fails him repeatedly when it comes to homosexual marriage (or homosexuality generally). Please, Andrew, get a grip. You’re embarrassing yourself.

Prof. Burgess-Jackson may want to take note that Eugene Volokh thinks the FMA admits just such a reading:

And if courts do treat the ambiguous phrase “incidents of marriage” as referring to the benefits, burdens, and practices that have traditionally accompanied marriage, then legislative civil union statutes may well become unconstitutional or at least unenforceable: As I said before, government officials would be prohibited from construing the statute according to its literal text, as providing some of the traditional benefits of marriage to unmarried couples. And if someone goes to court to challenge the official’s refusal to provide such benefits, then the court court would likewise be forbidden from construing the statute according to its literal text.

So is Prof. Volokh being "hysterical" as well? Has he too "lost his bloody mind"? Is his "otherwise sound intellect failing him"? Or maybe it’s Prof. Volokh’s "lack of legal training"?

UPDATE: Prof. Burgess-Jackson's Mea Culpa.

Greg of En Banc links a short paper on the economics of student evaluation forms. Ole Miss just transitioned from paper “bubble sheet” forms handed out in-class to an opt-in online system somehow tied into our all-knowing but completely-screwed-up SAP campus management system.

Last I heard, compliance with the evaluation procedure was sharply lower—something I think would lead to a non-random error that biases responses downward, as students who disliked a class will probably be more likely to bother filling out the evaluations. On the upside, at least you don’t have to keep the original copies of the evaluations around for the written comments—which is a good thing, since the university managed to shred one semesters’ worth of evaluations a couple of years back, making those written comments lost to history.

Steven Taylor thinks conservatives need to learn to love the Shrub, since otherwise they may well receive eight more years of Clintonism. On the other hand, if you’re a conservative—not necessarily a Republican, mind you—a spell of divided government might well be desirable.

It seems to me, at the simplest level, that different sorts of conservatism require the control of different branches of government. Fiscal conservatism rests largely on control of Congress; if you keep spending and taxes down, there isn’t much the White House or Supreme Court can do about it. Social conservatism, on the other hand, rests on control of the presidency and the judiciary; the Justice Department effectively decides to what degree morals violations (like prostitution and drug crimes) are prosecuted, while the judiciary effectively sets the limits of what personal behavior Congress and the states can regulate.

There are, of course, other issues to base one’s vote on; the Clinton administration fiddled while North Korea and Iraq burned during the 1990s, instead expending political capital on dubious adventures like Haiti (which is now in more of a mess than when I was a wee intern in D.C. being briefed on this problem 9 years ago) and saving the Europeans’ asses in the Balkans. And, at the moment, it’s hard to tell if Kerry’s campaign-trail pronouncements are simply part of a red-meat distribution effort to keep the Deaniacs on the Democratic bus through November or actually serious foreign policy views—if you believe they’re the latter, you might think twice about jumping on the divided government bandwagon.

But, given that Congress is essentially a lock to remain in Republican hands for the forseeable future,* if you’re not much of a social conservative and you make under $200k it’s hard to see what you’d lose under a Kerry (or Edwards) administration.

This is today’s entry in the BTJ™.

Oh, goody, YAFNC. The browser that changes its name every season is now at 0.8. Download it early and often. No word yet on whether Clint Eastwood plans to sue.

Now off to dig through some SQL tables to rename this topic of the blog…

The Toast-O-Meter for this week has arrived, courtesy of Steven Taylor, although the bread is apparently borderline stale at this point due to Charter Communications’ ineptitude.

In other Campaign ’04-related news: Venomous Kate is perched on the fence for now, for a long list of reasons (via Dan Drezner, who’s doing some fence-sitting of his own).

Dan Drezner isn’t buying rumors that al-Qaeda has an unspecified supply of tactical nuclear weapons, but recommends vigilence nonetheless; the Belgravia Dispatch has similar thoughts.

I don’t have anything to add to either analysis; it seems rather implausible that the group would have such weapons yet not use them—if not against the United States, then certainly against Israel, which would seem to be an easier target. To paraphrase the Dispatch, terror groups generally aren’t known for their strategic geopolitical wherewithal, and mutually-assured destruction is pretty meaningless as a deterrent when your territory is a few hundred square miles of borderline-uninhabitable territory to begin with and you have a martyr complex to boot.

Will Baude and Tim Sandefur are engaged in a bit of a running battle with the Curmudgeonly Clerk over whether or not individual libertarians’ having moral positions constitute a betrayal of their commitment to not legislate on the basis of morality.

I tend to agree with Tim that the Clerk is confused on a number of points, and leave the detailed critiques to Tim and Will. My main, and unoriginal, observation would be that “societal acceptance” is something that is relatively independent of legality. (My second observation would be that Reason was a far better arbiter of libertarian thought under Virginia Postrel’s editorship, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Update: Tim Sandefur responds. Actually, after I wrote the above sentence, I realized that the word “arbiter” doesn't quite characterize my thought; I meant something closer to “exemplar.” Indeed, contra Jonah Goldberg (and his bloviation that National Review polices the boundaries of conservatism*), I don’t necessarily think libertarian thought needs an arbiter.

I’m seriously considering a thorough cleaning of the blogroll in the next few days. Who won’t be going: people who have linked us, and people who have interesting blogs. Who will: people whose blog content I can predict before even clicking through the link.

Then again, I might actually do something vaguely productive like work on the near-mythical impeachment paper instead…

Via Mark: advice on how to make Mozilla Firebird feel and behave faster.

Today’s CA features an article on the latest effort to make Mississippi’s seatbelt law a “primary offense”, which would permit law enforcement officers to pull over vehicles whose drivers or passengers were not complying with the law. The article notes:

Nationwide, states that switch from secondary to primary seatbelt laws report a 10- to 15-percent increase in seatbelt use, according to the National Safety Council, an Illinois-based advocacy group. In Alabama, seatbelt use climbed from 52 percent in the year before the state passed a primary law to 79 percent two years later.

However, NHTSA data suggests that figure is overstated: their 2003 survey shows an 8% differential between states with primary and secondary laws. And the Alabama figures seem downright implausible—although, given that seatbelt use is trending higher in all states, not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

There are no fewer than six different bills that would make the seatbelt law a primary offense; they mainly differ in (a) whether or not the maximum fine per vehicle would be doubled* and (b) whether or not non-use of seatbelts can be considered contributory or comparative negligence.

Since your DNS block doesn’t resolve back, and because you apparently have a Python bot that’s out of control downloading every page on this site, you’re now blocked at the IP level. Please email the management if you have a legitimate reason to be unblocked and/or you get your bot under control.

The California Yankee notes the revelation from Oxford University researchers that pigeons navigate the same way pilots do under VFR: they just follow the roads.

Which makes one wonder: how did pigeons get around before the Romans?

Sunday’s New York Times has a long article on the growth of low-fare airlines on the eastern seaboard, a trend that has largely bypassed Memphis, as this Memphis Flyer cover story from several years back documents. Although minor low-fare player America West and sorta-kinda low-fare (I’ve never seen one of their flights be cheaper than Delta) airTran do serve the market, no-frills big daddy Southwest has stayed out of Memphis for reasons generally unknown—although nearby Tunica Airport has hopes to lure Southwest to the Memphis market when it opens its full 8500-foot runway and full terminal in the next two years. There have also been indications that jetBlue will add Memphis to its lineup sometime in the coming year.

My neighbor Tom Bailey, a reporter at the Commercial Appeal, is doing some road-blogging on the CA’s web site.

My co-blogger has expressed skepticism about the Commercial Appeal’s in-house blogs in the past, although I can’t find the post. I can’t say anything bad about Tom’s blog, though, because he knows where I live. So let me just say “Prove him wrong, Tom!”

In light of the German cannibalism case, Will Baude ponders the public policy implications of irrational preferences, such as the desire to be killed and eaten. Will writes:

Anyway, my own inclination is to say that it’s a bad idea to pretend that such people held preferences other than the ones they actually do have, a bad idea, therefore, to keep them from harming themselves if that’s what they want to do. Even if the preference is irrational, it’s still a preference.

It seems to me there are three sorts of reasons that one might have a second-order preference not to have have a given preference.

1. A person might prefer not to have a desire because she knows the desire will go unfulfilled, and this lack of fulfillment causes mental anguish. One might desire to have sex with some movie star, but knowing this lust is certain to be unrequited, one would prefer not to have this desire. I don’t see much scope for paternalistic public policy in solving the problems created by these sorts of desires. And I wouldn’t call these desires irrational.
   
2. A person might prefer not to have a desire merely because of public policy itself, whether formally written into law or as part of informal societal mores. A gay man might prefer not to have the desire to have sex with other men, not because of anything inherently bad about gay sex, but because of the potential for being arrested (pre-Lawrence), or because of widespread bigotry against gays. In this case, public policy is the problem, and so there is no excuse for paternalism. Nor would I call these desires irrational.
   
3. A person might prefer not to have a desire because the desired entity is intrisically bad, i.e. it conflicts with other more strongly held prefernces, out of physical necessity. The German cannibalism victim might have desired to have a comfortable retirement sailing about the Mediterranean, but he could not fulfill both this desire and his desire to be killed and eaten. Many smokers wish to have a long life, but their desire to smoke is in conflict with this. It is in this category that we find the truly irrational desires.
   

Only when the unwanted desires are of the third type is there a prima facie case to be made for paternalistic public policy. In the third case, the public policy might actually be helping the weak-willed person fulfill their second order desire, thus resulting in greater utility (if we define utility in terms of satisfied preferences, or use satisfied preferences as a proxy for utility).

There’s an excellent factual article over at The Motley Fool on the 2003 tax cuts, much of which is devoted to helping you figure out how much you saved on Federal income tax vs. the year 2002. According to the article, I paid about $450 less this year than I would have given the 2002 tax tables.

Of course, I don’t really count it as a tax cut, given the profligate spending of the Republican Congress and admininistration. I figure I’ll be paying for it one way or another eventually.

In 11 days, we may no longer have Howard Dean to kick around any more. G33k-turned-law-student Joy has Dean’s numbers from Wisconsin (via dKos), and they don’t look pretty at all, with Dean’s “unfavorable” rating approaching 40%.

Today’s Daily Mississippian shoots 0-for-4 on op-ed page articles. Let’s review:

• The editorial contains this whopper of sheer idiocy:

  Though it remains controversial, especially among circles of Christians and other religious groups, evolution is still one of the most widely taught theories about the roots of the world. When origins taught to students, not only in Georgia but also nationwide, it should be maintained that evolution has not been accepted as scientific law.

• A non-sensical column that proposes that improving the electric grid will, in and of itself, cause a huge economic recovery. Special bonus for the moronic statement that a “dirty bomb” during a power outage could kill 250,000 people.
• A long screed about how Greeks don’t contribute to the university’s endowment, or something.
• Last, but not least, a letter to the editor defending rude behavior, so long as the reason for one’s rudeness is proselytization.

Now, generally I don’t read the DM op-ed page for enlightement anyway, but today’s edition may have been the first that actually had the result of making me stupider.

Tim Sandefur is collecting nominations for “the canon” —as he puts it, “the ten Supreme Court decisions every American (not lawyers or law students!) should read.” So far, Scipio’s list seems the most complete:

1. Marbury v. Madison
2. Dred Scott
3. Plessy v. Ferguson
4. The Slaughter House Cases
5. Brown v. Board of Education
6. Erie
7. Wickard v. Filburn
8. Texas v. Johnson
9. Printz v. US
10. (tie) Mapp v. Ohio and NY Times v. Sullivan

He also lists, as honorable mentions: Korematsu, Roe v. Wade, Flood v. Kuhn, Lopez, Bowers v. Hardwick, and Harper’s Lessee.

Turning first to the Top Ten: my recollection is that I’ve never mentioned Erie, Wickard, and Printz, and I’ve only mentioned Slaughter-House in passing (trying to explain why the privileges or immunities clause is in the 14th Amendment) in intro. From the honorable mentions, Flood and Harper’s Lessee didn’t make it either; nor, I think, does Korematsu (no doubt to the chagrin of Eric Muller) or Lopez, but it’s been two years since I last taught the class (Fall 2001—I taught methods in Spring of 2002) so it may have been mentioned. All of the cases that don’t make it in (except Korematsu and Lopez) are ones I’d have to stop and think about before remembering what they’re about.

Notable omissions from Scipio’s list that do make it into the lecture: Griswold, McCullough v. Maryland, Casey, some of the gerrymandering cases (Baker v. Carr, Shaw v. Reno, Thornburg v. Gingles spring to mind), Washington v. Davis, Bakke, Miller v. Johnson, and Bowers v. Hardwick. Chandra v. INS (the line-item veto case) may or may not get a mention when we talk about the executive branch, as might U.S. v. Nixon. Romer v. Colorado might be in there too. If I were lecturing today, I’d have to add Texas v. Johnson, of course.

This might (or might not) tell you something about the biases of the writers of political science textbooks. Intro, mind you, isn’t a con law class; I have 375 minutes in the semester to talk about civil rights and liberties, and a lot of that time is devoted to things outside the courts. Nor is con law really in my general field of expertise, although I could probably teach it to undergraduates in a pinch if absolutely needed.

No, that isn’t a euphemism for masturbation; Xrlq has the details on the latest twist in the California grocery strike shenanigans.

The one good thing about being unemployed is I don’t have to deal with this pathetic attempt at a voice mail system any more.