Steven Taylor has posted the pre-Iowa edition of the Toast-O-Meter™. Also of interest: Jeff Quinton is keeping his eye on all things South Carolina.

David Bernstein writes that the best deal for vegetarian fast food is the Taco Bell bean burrito at 79 cents.

I haven’t set foot in a Taco Bell in several years, myself. But if you are fortunate enough to live in a city with a Back Yard Burgers franchise, I highly recommend their Gardenburger. BYB is a little more expensive than the usual fast food dreck, but this is definitely a case of getting what you pay for.

One of the jobs I’m applying for next year is a post-doc in lovely State College, Pennsylvania.

“Where’s State College?” you may ask. Funnily enough, as Kevin of Wizbang! notes, at least one U.S. Airways Express pilot apparently has the same question…

Robert Prather thinks the best solution to the District of Columbia’s electoral quandry is something I’d call “electoral retrocession”: the district’s residents would be considered residents of Maryland for the purposes of electing senators and representatives.

I can see several potential problems with this arrangement:

1. The residents of the District of Columbia would have no say in the redistricting process of Maryland.
2. Although it’s likely Maryland would treat D.C. as a unified entity in creating a single-member district, there are nefarious reasons not to do so—for example, by attaching majority-white but still overwhelmingly Democratic Ward 3 to the Montgomery County suburbs to further dilute Republican voting strength in the Maryland suburbs.
3. The amendment, as proposed, requires Maryland’s assent to become active. No other constitutional amendment has ever required the assent of a particular state to become effective. (The only reasonable explanation for this provision: Maryland might legitimately argue that its equal suffrage in the Senate is being deprived by the amendment.)
4. Any state on the threshold of losing representation has an interest in not supporting the amendment.
5. The Democratic Party’s interests are better served by whining about the lack of representation of D.C. than adding a single guaranteed-to-be-a-Democrat member of the House of Representatives—especially if the net effect is to reduce the number of guaranteed electoral votes for the Democratic presidential nominee by three.

The first two problems could be solved by making D.C. residents eligible to vote in senatorial contests in Maryland, and adjusting the amendment to allocate a single representative to D.C. exclusively (while having no effect on Maryland’s representation in the House). The House could expand its membership by one (from 435 to 436) by statute to solve the “threshold” issue. The last problem could be solved by giving the Democrats the “carrot” of retaining D.C.’s 3 electoral votes—which, combined with an extra House member, are probably more valuable to the Democrats than two senators they’re most unlikely to get any other way.

Also on the D.C. topic: the D.C. Board of Elections has released ward and precinct-level results for the non-binding D.C. primary. I’d imagine some political scientist who knows something about ecological inference might just be able to use the precinct-level data to predict Al Sharpton’s likely share of the African-American vote in other states, if he were bored enough.

This is today’s entry in the Beltway Traffic Jam.

As Will Baude (among others) notes, Charles Pickering got a recess appointment to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals today, bypassing the anticipated filibuster of his nomination by the Senate for now. While national Democrats have strongly opposed the nomination, he has attracted significant support from many Mississippi Democrats—who, unlike their national counterparts, usually need at least some support from moderate-to-conservative whites to stay in office.

Also, feel free to read my past Pickering posts.

Both David Janes and Pieter Dorsman have interesting posts on the case of Maher Arar, a citizen of Canada and Syria who was detained in New York on his way back to Canada from a trip to Tunisia. Arar was subsequently deported to Syria, jailed, and released, according to this CBC timeline. Katherine R, one of the bloggers at Obsidian Wings, has also been dissecting the story for a few days now (more here).

I honestly don’t know what to make of all of this. I have a sneaking suspicion that elements of the Canadian intelligence apparatus were trying to get the U.S. to do some of their dirty work for them, because the Canadian government would never let them get away with it on their own, but there’s also the distinct possibility that U.S. authorities were freelancing. It’s all deeply weird.

It’s the equivalent of the “soda/pop/Coke” question for roadgeeks: what do you call a highway with fully-controlled access (i.e. a road like Germany’s autobahns, French autoroutes, British motorways, or American interstates), a freeway or an expressway ? The preferred engineering term is “freeway,” but “expressway” has quite an established tradition in many parts of the eastern U.S.—including much of the south. (Georgia is the only southern state that consistently refers to its freeways in public by that name, although “freeway” does seem to have gained some limited currency in Alabama as well.)

Yet “freeway” creep may be happening in Memphis. The Commercial Appeal‘s Tom Bailey Jr. uses the term in this Go weblog entry, and it’s used more often than “expressway” in the associated article in Friday’s CA.

Bailey also notes Dan McNichol’s visit to Memphis to view the Midtown interchange reconstruction. McNichol is the author of the 2003 book The Roads that Built America. McNichol’s book struck me, when I looked through it at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago, as a more road-friendly but ultimately less engrossing take on the subject than Tom Lewis’ 1997 Divided Highways, which accompanied the PBS series of the same name.

Both books, alas, overlook the second great phase of freeway building that is now getting underway: not just the “Big Dig” style projects that will rectify the mistakes of the past, but also the grand plans like Interstate 69, Interstate 49, and Interstate 73/74, as well as the Trans Texas Corridor. These are the routes that will apply the lessons of Overton Park and the Vieux Carre without compromising the central goals of the Interstate system—improving mobility, bringing economic opportunity, and increasing safety.

Alex Tabarrok has just had a co-authored paper published that uses a simulation-based approach (using simulated “placebo laws”) to help test whether the effects of certain types of dummy (binary) variables in a time-series are statistically significant. It seems like a fairly interesting approach, which I’ll have to bear in mind next time I do any time-series stuff (most of my data tends to be cross-sectional, however).

And, the substantive topic of Alex’s paper will no doubt be of interest to those who want to fight over John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime.

Will Baude ponders the procedure of assigning students to discussion sections. My gut reaction is: “don’t have discussion sections”—none of the political science courses I ever took had them, and I’m not really all that sure they add much value for anyone involved in the process. I suppose they provide a way to get grad students some teaching experience to slap on the vita without having to give them the responsibility of teaching a real course and running the risk that their first outing will be an unmitigated disaster.

Such things do happen, mind you, but I’d rather grad students crash and burn during a lecture early in their careers rather than emerging from school with zero experience besides asking ten undergrads to discuss their feelings about Plato’s allegory of the cave*—and then crashing and burning repeatedly on their way to being unceremoniously canned at their third-year review.

By the way, my recommended procedure is to have the discussion sections listed separately in the schedule of classes (or, as a bookkeeping exercise, each lecture-discussion combo is considered a separate course even though the lectures all meet at the same place), so students sign up for them directly. This neatly avoids the issue of schedule conflicts since, if the scheduling program is doing its job, there won’t be any.

Michael Jennings discusses the slow but steady progress of LEDs in replacing traditional incandescent lights. As he notes, they’ve become particularly common in traffic signals because they are brighter, last much longer, and have significantly lower power consumption than traditional lights.

Stephen Green ponders whether Howard Dean’s candidacy is stagnating in the face of surges from Wesley Clark (in New Hampshire, as he’s had the whole state to himself while the rest of the Dems pander to Iowans prior to next Tuesday’s essentially meaningless precinct caucuses) and John Edwards (who’s picking up endorsements and favorable media coverage in Iowa).

At this point, the narrative for Iowa is pretty much written:* Edwards surges to a surprisingly strong third-place finish, and Dick Gephardt fails to live up to expectations in his own back yard against Dean, effectively starting the “death bells” for Gephardt’s campaign—with the nails to the coffin coming when he finishes spectacularly poorly in New Hampshire.

So, what’s the New Hampshire narrative? Today’s polls still show Dean with a statistically-significant, but rapidly eroding, lead over Clark. If Dean and Clark finish within single digits of each other, Dean fails to live up to expectations—and has to hope that Clark, Edwards, and Gephardt divide the South Carolina electorate enough for Dean to finish #2 behind Edwards. If, on the other hand, Dean gets a double-digit win over Clark in New Hampshire, that’s probably enough to make him the designated frontrunner and tip the balance in the non-S.C. February 3rd primaries through favorable media.

Stay tuned, things are about to get interesting…

* Update: Ok, maybe not… where the heck did Kerry come from?

VodkaPundit Stephen Green plays with Excel’s mapping feature to draw some electoral college maps on the (not unreasonable) presumption that the relative strength of the Republicans and Democrats in each state is unchanged since 2000. Fun stuff.

Marybeth links a Joel Klein piece on the fun and excitement that is the Iowa caucuses. Classic quotes:

To explain how it all works, Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver is going around the state holding practice caucuses. At his workshop last Tuesday at the library in Clive, a suburb seven miles west of Des Moines, about 50 people showed up, several of them young enough to be my parents. Most of these folks already knew how caucuses work and just wanted a refresher course. Clive needs to get itself a bowling alley.

As Culver, 37, a former history teacher, began with an hour-long PowerPoint presentation on the history of the caucus going back to 1846, a sign-language interpreter flashed signs — even though not a single person in the room was deaf. It hit me about 15 minutes into the speech that the sign-language guy must have realized no one there was deaf, but by that time it was too embarrassing to just stop. So he kept going, his bravery a further testimony to the lengths Iowans go through just to get David Broder to visit.

At least Bob Putnam would approve!

For the second hour, Culver had the audience stage a fake caucus. It turns out the Republican caucus is really simple. They pass around ballots, count them and go home to watch Everybody Loves Raymond while the Democrats are still reading their rules. I predict the state will eventually be 100% Republican.

Once all the candidates have at least 15%, a formula Culver describes as “needing a Ph.D. in math to understand” is used to determine how many delegates each candidate gets. The percentage of delegates each candidate gets is the number reported in the media. Then the media, for reasons that are unclear, pretend that has something to do with whom the country wants to be President.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of shit Ackerman and Fishkin want to foist on America. Thanks—but no thanks.

Kelley of suburban blight thinks the President’s plan to spend $1.5 Billion to encourage people to get and stay married is a waste of money, as does Amanda Butler of Crescat Sententia. On the other hand, Sully thinks it’s a great idea that nonetheless further proves the administration hates gay people (no, really, I’m not making that up, although it might be a slight exaggeration).

Me? I’m with Kelley and Amanda. Give me the $6 this idiotic program will cost me and every other American and I’ll decide to get married when I damn well please, thank you very much. I even promise not to marry Britney Spears (or Paris Hilton or Xtina) and annul the marriage 55 hours later.

Lefty Joe Conason thinks Bush is going to the Moon and Mars for oil (hint: if you’re looking for hydrocarbons like methane, they’re probably in the outer solar system—they don’t call them “gas giants” for nothing). Righty Brendan Miniter thinks the Mars trip is a great way to solve osteoperosis. Conrad points out that both men are idiots.

James Joyner, inquiring about the I-95 tanker explosion today, asks:

How one drives a tanker truck over a barrier from an overpass, I’ll never know.

It’s actually pretty simple. The tanker apparently hit the barrier on the overpass at excessive speed, which made it crash through the barrier of the flyover ramp from the I-895 Harbour Tunnel Thruway southbound to I-95 southbound and land on the northbound lanes of I-95 below. The concrete barriers on bridges and highways, like metal guard rails, are designed to deflect vehicles back onto the roadway to avoid catastrophic crashes like this, but there’s only so much force a static barrier can deflect.

Incidentally, similar accident in 1998 in Memphis, on the one-lane ramp that connects I-40 to the north side of the Memphis 40/240 loop, claimed eight lives, and is the impetus for rebuilding the I-240/40 Midtown interchange to move the 90° turn to ground level.

Of further interest:

• Baltimore’s NBC4 has posted a collection of images from the crash.
• Microsoft TerraServer has an aerial photo of the interchange; the ramp at the top is the one the tanker fell off. I-95 is the road running SW-NE, while I-895 leaves directly to the east.

Since Ron Suskind’s alleged tell-all book has come out, Paul O’Neill, the ex-treasury secretary whose revelations the book is based on, has taken to the talk-show circuit in an attempt to disavow many of the more sensational quotes from the book.

• James Joyner is among those noting O’Neill’s pointed non-endorsement of the Democratic opposition.
• O’Neill is dragging out the “Ron Suskind’s name is on the cover” defense for the allegations that he leaked Treasury Department documents.
• John Cole notes that many of O’Neill’s revelations aren’t that revelatory, while Matt Stinson compares doves’ jumping on the O’Neill story with hawks’ leaping onto Iraqi WMD revelations as they appear.

Then again, maybe O’Neill’s just preemptively defending himself from the hit squad Kevin Drum thinks has been sent after him by Karl Rove.

As I’ve noted before, there’s a Democratic delegate selection rule that requires 15% support in a congressional district for a candidate to receive delegates. However, as the Commissar notes, the caucus procedure isn’t exactly a single-ballot electoral situation, according to Carl Hulse of The New York Times:

The chairman of the caucus determines the “viability” threshold for groups backing each presidential candidates, which in most cases will be 15 percent of the number of people attending. Caucusgoers then have 30 minutes to divide into preference groups for the candidates. If some groups supporting candidates do not reach the 15 percent level, those people then have up to half an hour to realign with other campaigns.

At this stage, the pressure will be on the newly liberated caucusgoers to enlist with another candidate. In a deeper layer of strategy, some participants might even align with a candidate they are not that wild about to cut into the count of those who most threaten their first choice.

At the end of 30 minutes, the preference groups are counted again and the delegates are apportioned by multiplying the number in the preference group by the number of delegates up for grabs in a precinct, then dividing by the total attending the caucus. In cases of ties, delegates can be awarded by flipping a coin or drawing straws.

The Commissar expects this will lead to some strategic behavior, as groups of voters who might prefer other candidates may coalesce around a single “ABD” candidate to counter the Dean groundswell. Yet there are a couple of obstacles to such a process:

1. This process only happens at caucus sites, rather than at a higher level of aggregation. Gephardt may get the nod at one location, Edwards at another, and Lieberman at a third.
2. The caucuses only elect delegates to county conventions; as The Green Papers notes, the process for choosing congressional district and statewide delegates happens in late April, by which time the nomination will essentially be decided—and thus almost all of Iowa’s national convention delegates are likely to opt for the presumed nominee at that point, rather than following the caucus-goers’ preferences.

So, in the grand scheme of things: Iowa decides virtually nothing, and essentially is as important as today’s eminently forgettable D.C. non-binding primary, yet it’s been the center of media attention for two months. Great.

A few weeks ago, I promised a response to a Jonah Goldberg Townhall.com piece whining about ignorant voters. Now, as Brett Marston points out, Goldberg is advocating bringing back literacy tests on The Corner (just in case you needed another reason besides John Derbyshire not to send Bill Buckley any of your hard-earned cash). Quoth Goldberg, in typical cacophonous Corner fashion:

Hear, hear for Jon [Alder] on that score. But I’d go one better. I think it’s about time we toughened up the requirements for voting. Literacy tests, poll taxes and the like may have once been legitimately suspect because they were used to disciminate against blacks. But today, I simply see no principled reason we couldn’t apply some sort of test to everybody. Indeed, I would be more comfortable having newly naturlized immigrants decide the future of this country at the ballot box than leaving it up to, say, typical white 18-22 year-olds. I know that the immigrants can pass a civics test. I have no such confidence in the kids at my local malls.

Quoth Brett:

Democracy at the NRO. The poor and uneducated need not apply. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Since I know nobody’s going to read my dissertation to find out what I think of the elitist line of argument, let me simply state that:

1. Citizens have no “civic duty” to be informed about politics.
2. Citizens have no “civic duty” to vote.

Not only is it irrational for voters to learn about politics, it’s downright immoral to insist that people participate in the political process, especially since, for J. Random Jackass working at the meatpacking plant, the marginal difference between Howard Dean and George W. Bush is zero—no matter how much Dean and Bush try to tell him otherwise.

You want to know why people say they don’t know enough about particular candidates? It’s because we (political scientists, media types, and what have you) insist that it’s important that they know the minutae of Howard Dean’s foreign policy views or Wes Clark’s tax plan or Dennis Kucinich’s DSM-IV diagnosis. The dirty little secret of politics is people don’t make decisions based on that stuff—even if they do know it. Ultimately, it’s more about “who do I trust more,” “whose politics seem closest to mine,” and “do I prefer people who look like thumbs over people who resemble chimps” than “Bush is going to give me $32.65 more take-home pay a week than Dean.” Which is as it should be. There are enough of us warped political junkies as it is; let’s not add to the population.

Update: Brett Marston has more thoughts on this topic. Incidentally, if you—like Brett—“still want to read [my] dissertation,” it's all online here, along with pretty much everything I’ve written for conferences (or otherwise had my name slapped on).

Notice to any prospective employer who got here by Googling my name:

It’s been nearly ten years since Memphis State University inexplicably became the University of Memphis, and it’s still causing problems. Case in point: my Ole Miss transcript, which (in addition to not having my degree posted on it yet, despite noting that I passed all my exams, completed by dissertation, and had it approved by my committee) claims I previously attended “The University of Tennessee Memphis,” an institution that doesn’t even exist: the Memphis campus of UT is properly styled The Universty of Tennessee Health Science Center, while the University of Memphis isn’t even part of the UT system for political reasons that make zero sense to me.

The young woman I discussed this problem with today at the registrar’s office did promise to change it—but the university’s new computer system (thank you, SAP) doesn’t know about the name change. End result: it’ll read “Memphis State University” on any future transcripts I receive. Someone, somewhere is smiling. That person is not me. I’m annoyed that I’m going to spend the rest of my life as a graduate of a university that requires me to include this sort of crap on my vita:

B.A., Political Science, The University of Memphis (formerly known as Memphis State University), 1998.

In addition to all the bloviating on the left and right over same-sex marriage (or “marital equality” as Chris Geidner of En Banc would have me call it—even though that sounds more like a call for the imposition of community property laws to me), the other excitement in the non-heterosexual world has, of late, been over lesbians.

Apropos of this topic, Matt Stinson ponders whether the “L” word stands for “lipstick” in title of the new Showtime series (which I guess would be in the opposite direction of Showtime’s other gay-themed series, “Queer As Folk”), while Conrad reveals that Russian duo TATU aren’t really lesbians, but they’re breaking up anyway.

Signifying Nothing has recently joined the prestigious neighborhood known as Conrad’s blogroll. In addition to leading the sort of swinging lifestyle that I can but hope to emulate, Conrad is a fellow alumnus of the University of Mississippi.

More coherent thought later today, perhaps…

Stephen Bainbridge has an eminently reasonable column on the pros and cons of Bush’s immigration proposal up at TechCentralStation; he also blogs the reaction from NRO’s Corner (a blog I generally find both too cacophonous and too conservative for my tastes). Speaking just for myself, any plan that has the potential to eventually eliminate the Soviet-style internal security checkpoints that have long been established in the southwest (and apparently have spread to northern border states as well) to combat illegal immigration and drug trafficking would meet with my approval.

It started with Glenn Reynolds linking an interview with libertarian activist Sabine Herold, the spokeswoman for the French organization named «Liberté j‘écris ton nom».

Now, Jeff Jarvis inquires in passing:

I was going to ask whether it was wrong of me to note that this French libertarian is a babe.

What I want to ask is: are we all that sure she’s French? Mlle Herold, if the photos are anything to judge by, apparently is familiar with the use of a razor.

This is my entry in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.