AVS Forum poster “10frog” has posted a detailed side-by-side comparison of the Digital Stream DTX-9900 and Zenith DT900 digital television converter boxes, which may be useful for those of you who have taken my advice and gotten your government coupons. Both boxes are available at RadioShack (but typically each RS only carries one of the two—most of the RS’s around New Orleans seem to carry the Digital Stream box); the Zenith is allegedly available at Circuit City and the apparently-electrically-identical Insignia NS-DXA1 is on the shelves at Best Buy.

Meanwhile, Slashdot is claiming that at least one of the CECB peddlers on the Internet is a scam artist.

Longtime Signifying Nothing staple Margaret Soltan samples a recent export from Oxford, Mississippi. I can’t say that the shirtless men were of particular interest to me during my six years on campus, but I suppose the general sentiment is well-taken.

My LinkedIn and Facebook self-questioning of the day: should I friend* people who I just know from the blogosophere or email? I generally don’t add people I haven’t had a significant interaction with (defined loosely as “a conversation I can remember” or “we consumed sufficient alcohol that we probably had a conversation I cannot remember any more” or “significant online interaction over time”), but maybe I should make more exceptions.

Similarly, Flickr’s new Find Your Friends feature turned up one of my friends who happens to live here but disappeared off the face of my planet (but not the planet, judging from recent photos) about a year ago—indeed much of the reason I came to Tulane instead of another job with a bit more job security in the Mid-Atlantic was because I figured I’d have at least one friend here. I apparently figured wrong… although Flickr now believes otherwise.

I also saw friends in Chicago—a few new ones, now added to Facebook, and a few old ones, either already there or too tragically hip to be there in the first place. Shoutouts in particular to SN readers Dirk, Jennifer, Nick, and Sara, and possibly some of my lurkers too embarrassed to fess up to reading the blog to my face.

* I assume it is now safe to use the word “friend” as a verb. (OS X 10.5’s version of The New Oxford American Dictionary says it’s ok… and actually a revitalized archaic form.)

Dan Drezner today, on Democratic posturing on trade:

Just to repeat myself:

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Democrats cannot simultaneously talk about improving America’s standing abroad while acting like a belligerent unilateralist when it comes to trade policy.

A close second, from the same source: “A bitter irony of this latest kerfuffle is that this will likely be the most prominent mention of Colombia during the presidential campaign—just as the NAFTA imbroglio will have been the most prominent mention of Canada.”

Jeff Jarvis considers donating money to the Titanic Hillary Clinton’s campaign and notes it is a violation of the canons of journalistic ethics:

What do you say: venial sin or act of grace?

Sorry, the correct answer is c: a waste of your hard-earned money. Thanks for playing, though!

Rick Hasen notes that Linda Greenhouse’s replacement as the New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter will be Adam Liptak. Somehow referring to Supreme Court justices as going Times-native as suffering from “The Liptak Effect” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily.

Surely this and its ilk are a really bad put-on. Or John took the same bad acid trip that Sully took a couple of years earlier after Bush broke his heart over gay marriage; it’s not exactly easy to see the difference.

Then again, I’m sure he makes more in a week from BlogAds than I’ve seen in five years from Google Ads, so who am I to argue with success?

Choropleth map. Amazing that I got through 32 years of my life without knowing what to call a geographic map that you use to illustrate quantitative data (like this one from the Midwest paper or this one from a few years ago). And, since nobody outside cartography knows what “choropleth” means, I’ll probably never use the term again either.

I’ll just take it for granted that some idiot leftists will decide that John McCain’s presence in Memphis today on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King is a really deeply-coded appeal to racists. Your challenge: guess their rationale in the comments. Bonus points if you can work in the concept of James Earl Ray not being the lone gunman/involved in a conspiracy/also being the shooter in both Kennedy assassinations and making Ted run off the road at Chappaquiddick. Super bonus points if you can somehow tie Hillary Clinton’s simultaneous presence in the same city to a plan orchestrated by The Man to make Barack Obama look bad.

James Joyner at my occasional-blogging-home of OTB takes note of the controversy surrounding an advertisement by Absolut Vodka which ran in a Mexican newspaper.

The thoughts I had, in pseudo-random order:

• Most of those annoyed the ad are Republicans. Abraham Lincoln and many other early Republican leaders first made their name in politics as Whig opponents of the Mexican-American War (which was seen at the time as partially motivated by southern slaveowners to grab some more land south of the Missouri Compromise line).
• I look forward to Absolut’s ad for the U.S. market, commemorating the 54° 40’ or bust campaign.
• Look for every irredentist movement in the world to have their own T-shirt spoofing the ad soon.
• One of these days I need to write up my half-thought-out blog post on the border fence. But not today… I’m off to the Art Institute to see the Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer exhibitions.

I didn’t think these guys were serious at first… but this journal showed up in my mail today with my regime stability and presidential government article in it. Those who don’t read Russian or Ukrainian will probably find the English-language version a bit more digestible. (I think the translator added some stuff to the article, but damned if I know what it means.)

At least three regular Signifying Nothing readers will find their names on the first page, below, although two will have to transliterate for themselves.

Can’t get enough junk to read from me here? FriendFeed is your new Chris Cyberstalking ally; sign up today.

It is done. Or at least as done as it’s going to get before the conference. Now I can work on overheads or something on Tuesday before the big trip.

A sneak preview of part of my Midwest paper, for all zero of you waiting for it at the edge of your seat:

Suffice it to say I’ve spent more of this morning trying to figure out how to get R’s maptools package to merge the raw data with the cartography than I did on the actual data analysis, which was actually quite easy, even though the MCMC took forever.

By the time I start my new job in the fall, it appears that the department chair, college dean, and (now) provost will all be different people than those I interviewed with a month ago.

I can’t say I’m likely to get all that excited by Gallup’s numbers that allegedly show Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s supporters will engage in mass defections to John McCain in November if their preferred candidate doesn’t win the Democratic nomination. For starters, it reeks of the same whininess we were hearing back in ancient history (i.e. about six weeks ago) when we were told on good authority that Republicans who supported Romney/Thompson/Giuliani/Huckabee wouldn’t vote for McCain in November. A little smooth talking by the eventual nominee will get the base on board for November.

More importantly, most partisan voters are going to figure out that at some level their party’s nominee is preferable to the opposition’s candidate. For all Republicans’ complaints about McCain on issues like campaign finance reform, the Bush tax cuts, and judicial nominations, from the perspectives of the campaigners Obama and Clinton are at least as bad on those issues, if not worse, and they’re bad on many issues where Republicans agree with McCain too. For Democrats upset about Clinton’s triangulation or Obama’s lack of substance on the War in Iraq, the various spiritual advisors of those candidates, the level of armed attack Clinton was under when she visited Bosnia, or the detailed nuances of their plans to nationalize health care, again those differences pale in comparison compared to the prospect of voting for John “1000 Years” McCain. The real partisans will come home in November, once the nomination campaign sideshow is through, provided the process in the end is seen as reasonably fair.

Now, I may eat my words if one candidate somehow gets the Democratic party convention to unseat fairly-selected pledged delegates or otherwise makes an end-run around the established rules, but if that happens the Democrats will have much more serious problems in November than a bit of negative campaigning that will quickly be forgotten once the Democratic-leftist-liberal noise machine lines up behind the nominee—as much of the Republican acrimony has already moved to the wayside as most of the GOP-rightist-conservative noisemakers have gotten on board, to the point that the only real McCain complaints that show up on my RSS feed these days are coming from libertarians, centrists, and the Democratic side of the aisle.

Nick on the unbearable lightness of office hours:

Another office hours, another students-not-showing-up-even-though-they-emailed me. I will resolve to no longer be surprised if this happens.

My modal office hours visitation score over my career is zero. The mean isn’t much higher, although I find amazing bursts of interest when I’ve passed out take-home exams or have a research paper due, particularly in my research methods classes.

That said, I am not complaining about this state of affairs (beyond the fact that it ties me to my desk at times I might otherwise choose not to be so tied), although I encourage the movement of most potential student meetings to email; as my ex-boss repeatedly points out, with appropriate Internet-shouting emphasis, WORK IS WHAT WE DO BETWEEN MEETINGS.

While fiddling around with my style sheets this morning, I discovered this web page which will allow you to calculate the right font-size-adjust value to specify in CSS for any locally-installed font, although I think the page only works with Firefox at the moment.

How exactly are Barack Obama’s problems with Jeremiah Wright a swift boating? I like Obama about as much as your average Republican-leaning academic blogger with libertarian leanings, but it’s hard to see that there’s much that’s unfair about attacking a political candidate who willingly associates himself on a weekly basis with a pastor who frequently crosses the line that separates legitimate critiques of American race relations and delusional paranoia.

James Joyner made much the same point Thursday, in reference to a YouTube video that’s been making the rounds and the basis for Sullivan’s defense of his favored candidate:

Does the video play on the fears that some whites have about angry black men? Sure. Mostly, though, it seeks to undermine Obama’s portrait of himself as mainstream. It’s more than a little unfair but that’s the nature of these mashups. It’s no different than the various ads of one candidate morphing into an unpopular politician that we’ve seen over the years. And it’s frankly much tamer than the infamous 1964 ad that implied Barry Goldwater would get us annihilated in a nuclear war or the 2000 NAACP ad featuring the daughter of James Byrd stating that “when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.” Goodness, I’m not sure it’s even as insidious as the “3 a.m.” ad that the Clinton campaign ran to such good effect last month.

All that said, if the McCain campaign wants to shit-can some guy on their payroll who shared that video on Twitter, that’s their prerogative; any campaign that can’t keep their employees on-message is doomed to controversy—ask Amanda Marcotte, or for that matter John “Two Americas But Stuck In Third Place” Edwards.

Via my Facebook friends feed, I discovered this New York Times book review by Janet Maslin of William Poundstone’s Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair. Money grafs from Maslin’s review:

Mr. Poundstone’s book asks one overriding question: “Is it possible to devise a fair way of voting, one immune to vote splitting?” The answer requires some historical context: a brief history of elections gone terribly awry.

Mr. Poundstone’s chronicle of spoilers concentrates on presidential elections that delivered the opposite outcome from the one most voters seemed to prefer. This goes from explaining how abolitionist vote-splitting in 1844 put the slave-owner James Polk in the White House to showing how a consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, helped to elect “the favored candidate of corporate America,” George W. Bush, in 2000.

Since at least 5 out of 45 presidential elections have gone to the second-most-popular candidate because of spoilers, Mr. Poundstone calculates a failure rate of more than 11 percent for our voting system. “Were the plurality vote a car or an airliner,” he writes about this traditional method, “it would be recognized for what it is — a defective consumer product, unsafe at any speed.”

Any book that earns a favorable blurb from Ken Arrow is probably worth a read.

As mentioned below, I added a web fonts stylesheet to the blog for users of Safari 3.1 and later; however, there’s a deviation between the specification and Safari’s behavior, it seems. The spec says that you should specify a local font to use if available instead of downloading using the full font name of the local font (e.g. “DejaVu Sans Bold Oblique” or “Inconsolata Medium”), but Safari seems to only work right if you specify the family name (“DejaVu Sans” or “Inconsolata”). I think this is a bug in WebKit, and will file a bug report as soon as I get a password to do so, but the specification may be misleading here.

Update: Bug report filed.

For the bleeding-edge Safari and Opera users in the audience, I decided to add CSS3 Web Fonts support to the blog, providing a decent set of fallback fonts for readers; I’m currently using the freely-available DejaVu Sans and Inconsolata typefaces, with the stylesheet designed to only download the fonts if they are not locally-installed already. (Most Linux distributions these days at least include the DejaVu fonts; the next version of Debian will include a ttf-inconsolata package as well.)

Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, the city’s first African-American mayor, subject of Marcus Pohlmann and Michael Kirby’s Racial Politics at the Crossroads, and the longest-serving city executive in Memphis history, will be resigning on July 31, according to the Commercial Appeal and WREG Channel 3. The reason for Herenton’s resignation is not yet clear, although the CA website indicates that ”[r]ecently a federal grand jury exploring Herenton’s ties to a city contractor has served subpoenas at the Memphis Area Transit Authority offices.”

There are, to steal John Edwards’ shopworn phrase, indeed “two Americas,” and the controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright and presidential contender Barack Obama has brought that to the surface, most prominently in the latter’s speech Tuesday in which he discussed the distinction between the African-American experience and the experiences of whites in this country. I haven’t had time to read all the commentary the speech has generated, and probably won’t, but I will at least commend my OTB co-blogger James Joyner’s take as well as that of Marvin King.

The existence of this disconnect is, of course, nothing new in American politics—indeed, perhaps the oddest feature of modern American political history is that for a few years enough of the gap between the two Americas was bridged to bring the Civil Rights Movement to fruition and partial accomplishment of its goals. But as we all know, even that bridge was a fleeting one; in a small bit of serendipity, the Memphis Commercial Appeal revisited a point by which that bridge was largely washed away, the 1968 sanitation worker’s strike.

The paper’s (somewhat unsatisfactory, largely for its failure to recognize that even if white leaders in Memphis—including the CA editorial board—had seen it as a form of civil rights protest, rather than a labor action, they still would have seen it as a threat to public order) effort to address its own coverage of that strike here and here addresses the fundamental disconnect: most blacks saw the Civil Rights Movement as a means to an end, getting redress for the economic and social injustice of slavery and subordination, while whites primarily saw it (in the south) in terms of a challenge to the established political order or (outside the south) primarily focused on securing equal rights in a more classically liberal sense, such as equal standing before the law and the right to participate in the electoral process. As such, the post-Voting Rights Act movement found itself caught between a black community that didn’t think the movement had achieved enough and a white community that thought the movement had either achieved plenty—or, once the issues moved beyond abstract principles to more concrete implementation, such as integration of schools in redlining-induced de facto segregated communities across the nation, too much.

The unenviable challenge, I think, that Obama (and to a large extent, the Democratic Party he represents) faces is the need to move the debate beyond race—in other words, to diminish the importance of white-black differences—while simultaneously addressing the deep-seated, and in my mind broadly justified, demands of the black community for economic empowerment. Without diminishing the perceived racial differences—and, by extension, convincing working-class whites in the traditional Democratic coalition that economic empowerment is not a wealth transfer from them to blacks, a case that may be harder to make given that virtually any such empowerment (if in the form of government intervention) would necessitate increased federal taxation—the left has no hope of building a viable coalition that can do more than fiddle at the margins.

Update: As Megan McArdle indicates, that challenge won’t be a pretty one either, at least for those of us who don’t think the Smoot-Hawley Act was one of the high points of the Hoover administration’s response to the Great Depression:

And then he has to go and make possibly the stupidest remark in this entire campaign—or at least, Best in Class (you can't really expect him to outdo a television anchor.) "This time we need to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you will take your job, it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit."

This is jaw-droppingly, head-shakingly, soul-cringingly, "Oh my God, maw, I think my eardrum just exploded" stupid.

"Don't be afraid of the people who don't look like you—be afraid of the people who don't look like you, and have the nerve to live somewhere else." They'll sneak over the border at night, steal your job, and sell it to some wetback hooker in Juarez.

I understand the political logic that forces Barack Obama to spend a fair amount of time hating on trade. But I sort of feel--call me a starry-eyed idealist though you will--that a speech urging Americans not to hate and fear people who are different from them, should perhaps itself forgo urging Americans to hate and fear people who are different from them. You know, to set a good example for the children.

Megan might be reading in a bit more xenophobia than Obama intended, but it’s a very short bus ride these days from being a Democratic presidential contender to a Dobbsian/Paulian/Tancredian foaming-at-the-mouth zero-summer-slash-Minuteman-wannabe.

Via the rumor blog, I discovered The Grad Cafe, a website aimed at potential grad students in a variety of fields. For the potential political scientists in the audience, I found this post by “realist” and a reply by “eve2008” to be particularly of interest and largely congruent with my battle-tested views on the subject. (Reality is harsh. Deal with it.)

In terms of graduate admissions, I particularly would emphasize the importance of strong training in research methods at the undergraduate level—if your BA program doesn’t require a rigorous methods course (and many top departments don’t), take it anyway or if unavailable go to another department and take their equivalent course (e.g. econometrics, stats for psych/sociology/marketing). I’d also argue that some experience writing a real research paper either in a course or as a capstone/honors thesis is important. Even with weak GREs and a less-than-stellar GPA, those two would be enough to get into an MA program where you can prove yourself “worthy” of admission to get a placeable PhD.

For the morbidly curious, I believe the tenure-track placement record for my PhD program in the last seven years or so is 2 state school BA/MA/MPA programs (both for fall 2008, one of which is me), 2 state school BA programs (fall 01 and fall 04?), and 1 private BA program (fall 06). Our MA graduate who went on to another PhD program placed in a PhD program (fall 07). Not bad for a low-ranked program, overall.