Ryan Gabbard of the Audhumlian Conspiracy (whose layout always makes me think I’m reading Crescat Sententia) notes that a film adaptation of Asimov’s I, Robot is going to be on movie screens this summer, starring Will Smith. I saw the trailer at Return of the King and it was moderately amusing—it was produced in the form for an ad for a domestic robot. Hopefully it will turn out well, although I have disturbing thoughts of that awful Robin Williams robot movie from a few years back, Bicentennial Man.

UPDATE: Gabbard also notes that a series of movies based on the Foundation novels is in development. (I only count seven Asimov-written Foundation novels, not eight, though: Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation’s Edge, and Foundation and Earth.) Also of note: Alan Tudyk, who played Wash on Firefly, is part of the I, Robot cast.

Unlearned Hand of En Banc draws my attention to Brian Leiter’s weblog. Leiter is apparently a philosophy professor of some repute at the University of Texas at Austin.

Leiter plans to “start a blogroll for the handful of blogs [he] actually now read[s].” Unlearned Hand observes that Leiter’s selections seem to reflect a belief “that only people with doctoral degrees are qualified to talk about anything publicly,” although political scientists are apparently fail to make the grade under the special proviso that political scientists are mentally inferior to individuals who have earned philosophy degrees (which I guess means Leiter will probably only read Brock’s posts here at Signifying Nothing—although Brock is only ABD, so maybe he doesn’t count in Leiter’s world). I for one wish the best of luck to Leiter in his quest to tame the blogosphere.

And that is the first and last bit of thought I ever plan to devote to Leiter. Next?

James Joyner excerpts at length from a Stuart Taylor National Journal piece on the Supreme Court’s latest entry into the fray of legislative redistricting by state legislatures and the courts, Vieth v. Jubelirer. Much of Taylor’s discussion echos the discussion in the amicus brief of Bernard Grofman and Gary Jacobson, two political scientists who know a thing or two about legislative redistricting.

Also of interest: Erick Erickson’s post on the oral argument in the case.

I’ve finally bothered to tar up the latest snapshot of LSblog, everyone’s favorite completely database-driven blogging package, which I’m calling 0.8. New features since 0.7.1:

• The Atom 0.3 syndication format is now supported.
• Automatic generation of FOAF data for the weblog.
• Customizeable post excerpts for syndication and trackbacks.
• Improved administration interface, including tracking of sent trackback pings (to avoid duplicates) and management of inbound trackbacks.
• LSblog now serves XHTML 1.0 throughout.

You can download the latest release here. The main requirements are Python 2.2.2 or 2.3; PostgreSQL 7.3 or 7.4; and the psycopg database adaptor.

Both Matt Stinson and Robert Garcia Tagorda (via Matt Yglesias, who has substantive comment at TAPped and who in turn links Jon Chait’s Dean-bashing blog at TNR—got all that straight?) note the Franklin Foer cover story in The New Republic on Howard Dean’s secularism and how that will affect his campaign for both the Democratic nod and the White House.

Robert responds to Yglesias’ suggestion that the eventual Democratic nominee at least pretend to have devout religious faith by wondering whether or not Dean has the temperment to pull it off—and I generally agree with Robert that he probably doesn’t. Stinson (who I’d normally call “Matt,” but we’ve got too many Matts running around in this post), on the other hand, asks the interesting question:

The question left unasked in Foer’s piece is whether Dean might seek to balance against his secularism in the general election with an evangelical-friendly VP. Would a Methodist like Edwards suffice?

My guess would be no—it’d have to be someone who wears his religion on his sleeve for it to make a real impact with the public. An interesting finding of the 2000 American National Election Study is that Americans consistently misidentified the religion of both Bush and Gore: Gore was overwhelmingly believed to be a Methodist, while Bush was believed to be a Baptist. In fact, Gore—like Bill Clinton—was an avowed Southern Baptist, while Bush is a Methodist. (No, I’m not just raising this point to show the American public is stupid. Bear with me.)

Now, let’s play political psychologist and explain why people would have this apparently glaring misbelief. Most people see Baptists, and particularly Southern Baptists, as more evangelical than Methodists—because most, in fact, are; they don’t call the United Methodist Church the “Home of the Ten Suggestions” for nothing. But in the persons of Bush and Gore, the typical relationship was reversed: unlike Clinton, Gore never really wore his religion on his sleeve, while Bush often talked about his personal faith. Coupled with the heuristic that says “the Democrats are more secularist than the Republicans,” and the lack of widespread publicity about the specific branch of protestant teaching the candidates followed, the typical voter would be led to conclude that Bush was a member of more evangelical branch of protestantism (like the Southern Baptists), while Gore was part of a more traditionalist strain (like the Methodists).

Now, let’s look at the 2004 Democratic field. The only serious candidate with a clear religious bent is Joe Lieberman, whose Jewish faith is well-known (and was correctly identified by most voters in the 2000 ANES). The rest aren’t really clearly identifiable as men of faith… and religious voters are much more likely to favor candidates with strong faith (like Bush) over secularists like Dean or other, less devout candidates. Even if a candidate like Edwards who can make some claim of religious belief is on the ticket, most voters aren’t going to think of him as more religious than Bush. So it seems unlikely that religious considerations would be effective for Dean (or another Democrat) in assembling the ticket.

ICPSR has put together the Social Science Variables Database, which has got to be the coolest tool I’ve seen in a long time. It includes 30,000 variables in more than 70 studies. Want to find out what Americans think about Iraq? No problem.

Also cool: easy access to all the data I used in my dissertation.

As Steven Taylor notes, a recent poll shows Howard Dean with a (statistically insignificant) lead in South Carolina, where voters will head to the polls on February 3rd. If Dean can hold the lead over a deeply divided field, it may be the knockout punch he needs to secure the nomination—and may go some way to rehabitating Dean’s image in the South.

Dan Hoover of The Greenville News had a lengthy piece this weekend on what the S.C. primary means to the leading contenders, including quotes from several intelligent political scientists, including legendary Southern politics experts Merle and Earl Black and fellow Ole Miss Ph.D. Scott Huffmon.

UPDATE: Of course, South Carolina blogger Jeff Quinton has more links on the SC primary than you can shake a stick at.

Dean’s World has uncovered the shocking truth about a Libyan terror plot foiled by an American scientist in 1985.

Val of Val e-diction thinks the latest unilateral withdrawal proposals by the Sharon government are part of an orchestrated, but clandestine, plan involving the British and U.S. governments as well to force the Palestinians to come to the negotiating table with realistic expectations. I don’t know if I necessarily believe that, but it’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

From a Wall Street Journal article today on federal fuel economy regulations, and the perverse incentives they create for auto makers:

While light trucks represent 36% of all registered vehicles, they are involved in about half of all two-vehicle crashes with passenger cars, highway safety regulators say. In such crashes, over 80% of those killed were in passenger cars.

So if you bought that SUV for “safety,” just keep in mind that you bought that safety at the expense of the safety of others.

And if you bought it just so you would look cool … well, you don’t.

UPDATE: James at OTB correctly points out that the statistics I cite don't make it clear to what degree the 80/20 death ratio in SUV-car crashes is a matter of a higher fatality rate in cars vs. a higher survival rate in SUVs, comparing with car-car crashes.

The source for the WSJ factoid wasn't hard to track down. It's from the Feb. 23 testimony of the Administrator of the NHTSA before a Senate commitee. Here's a better statistic that the WSJ should have used, one which does support my thesis:

When controlling for impact location, and comparing light trucks to passenger cars of comparable weight, we found that light trucks were more than twice as likely as a car to cause a fatality when striking a car.

Daniel Drezner has an analysis of the polling numbers on gay marriage that leads him to believe that an effort to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage will fail. He may be right—if that is, indeed, what the actual amendment proposed does. Of course, there is no real movement on an amendment—and the necessity of an amendment, the proviso attached to the president’s support, has yet to be shown.

One thing to be seen is the Massachusetts legisature’s response to the court decision that legalized same-sex marriage—and whether the court will accept a civil unions provision as a substitute. If the state legislature implements Vermont-style civil unions, and the court accepts them, there’s no immediate federal issue—the only states that have to accept civil unions under “full faith and credit” are ones who already have them. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief until the next state court goes “off the reservation,” and no amendment is necessary.

But what if the Massachusetts legislature does implement full-fledged same-sex marriage? Then it becomes a “full faith and credit” question, which asks the Supreme Court whether Congress can decide what things are subject to full faith and credit—in other words, whether the existing federal Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional. If the Supremes say yes, again no amendment is immediately necessary—however, some states may still face the question of whether their state constitutions require them to recognize same-sex marriages, the same question faced by the Massachusetts court, which starts another iteration.

Now suppose instead the Supremes decide DOMA is unconstitutional. Then necessity becomes the mother of invention—and the question becomes, what form will the amendment take? An outright ban on same-sex marriage is one possibility; another is a narrower amendment that allows the states to decide what marriages performed outside their own states they will recognize.

The other question, somewhat lost in the debate, is how Congress will demand ratification. Dan’s analysis assumes that Congress will require ratification by state legislatures, as is normally the case; however, the procedure used for ratification of the 21st Amendment (the repeal of prohibition)—ratification by special state conventions in 38 states—is also available, which turns ratification into more of a referendum process. In such a scenario, same-sex marriage opponents have an advantage in elections to these state conventions: not only are the opponents more numerous in most states; they also are more passionate about the issue. And unlike other failed amendments—think of the Balanced Budget Amendment, the flag desecration amendment, or even the Equal Rights Amendment—more people genuinely care about the issue. That could be enough to tip one or two states that Dan enumerates into the “yes” column, particularly for a narrowly-tailored amendment that simply says “my state gets to decide whether or not to recognize a same-sex marriage performed elsewhere.”

That being said, Dan is essentially correct to point out that amending the Constitution is a long, drawn-out process with a lot of veto points along the way. But a relatively large, passionate group can succeed in doing so, and I think the chances of a narrow amendment succeeding are fairly strong.

As anyone who’s viewed Signifying Nothing’s sidebar can probably guess, I don’t think much of the homeland security threat level thingy—mainly because it’s a bogus five-point scale, since we all know it’ll never fall below yellow nor go higher than orange (making it a dichotomous variable for all practical purposes, a weakness that James Joyner expounds upon here), but also because it’s essentially meaningless to the public at large. That being said, Dean Esmay does have a bit of a point worth considering.

Steven Taylor’s latest PoliColumn in the Birmingham News attempts to explain the undercurrent of anger in the Democratic Party. In particular, he notes one factor that many have overlooked: the impotence associated with losing control after decades of dominance, particularly in Congress.

The fourth reason for Democrats’ anger, and perhaps the most abstract—but in many ways the most significant—is their deep abiding frustration that the Democratic Party as a whole is experiencing in its role as the minority. Since the 1994 midterm election, the Democratic Party has not controlled the House of Representatives, and only briefly controlled the Senate (and then only because of the defection from the Republican Party of Jim Jeffords of Vermont).

For a party that convincingly, and often by dramatic margins, controlled the House for four decades, and indeed for 29 of 36 Congresses since the New Deal era (1933) and the Senate for all but eight years of that same period, this lack of control is a devastating fact to which I would argue they have not yet adjusted.

To reiterate: Prior to 1994, the last time the Democrats lost control of the whole Congress was in 1953, and that loss of power lasted a mere two years. Given that many members of Congress were in Congress during the era of Democratic domination, it is hard to forget those halcyon days of power.

Of course, anger has been a driving force in American politics since, well, the Mayflower landed, occasional “eras of good feeling” notwithstanding. To the extent there’s more anger in the political ether these days, it probably reflects the relative parity of the parties more than any clear change in tone.

One other point Steven raises in passing is that Democrats “considered [Bush] something of a dim bulb.” This point should not be minimized. Few things are more frustrating than being outsmarted by someone you regard as mentally inferior—and when it’s been happening for three years on a near-daily basis, it’s got to chafe mightily.* Yet there is no sign that Democrats have given up on the “dim bulb” theory—which must make every defeat seem even more frustrating.

Nothing like scooping yourself. D’oh!

The Commissar has a masterful political analysis of The Return of the King. Laugh-out-loud line:

Did enjoy Robert Fisk’s review, “After movie let out, I fell in with a bunch of Orcs, and they beat me up. And I don’t blame them; I would have beaten myself up, too.”

Da.

Nice to see Congress has nothing better to do these days (via Gary Farber).

Matt Stinson identifies the source of Howard Dean’s foot-in-mouth syndrome.

Will Baude is less impressed than usual with my thoughts on the relative value of legalistic and attitudinal approaches to the law and, by extension, on the whole Guantanamo Bay thing.

First, to clarify, I was making an empirical rather than a normative argument. The nature of the Supreme Court is mixed—when there is a clear, controlling precedent that was ignored by a lower court, the behavior of the Court is usually to reverse and remand the decision without scheduling an oral argument (sometimes known as the “Ninth Circuit Smackdown” manoeuver), and when the lower-court decision was legally correct and consistent with precedent, the Court doesn’t grant certiorari. However, when the Court does grant cert—admittedly something it only does in a small minority of cases—the decisions are much more likely to be based on attitudinal considerations, or what normal people call “politics.” That’s the nature of the beast: work hard enough, and you can find a precedent for anything, or find a reason why Case X is distinct from the precedent that decided Case Y. If we’re going to analyze the Court’s decision-making, it should be viewed through this prism. This is one area—and perhaps the only area—where I think a number of political scientists understand more about the judiciary than lawyers do.

One normative issue, then, is how judges on lower courts should behave. The U.S. judiciary is designed as a principal-agent system: there’s a Supreme Court, and inferior courts. The Supremes decide what The Law is, the inferior courts implement The Law, and the Supremes make sure The Law is implemented correctly. Due to workload, however, the Supremes don’t function as a pure principal—some decisions escape their notice, and sometimes the system is gamed to ensure they don’t actually function as the principal (for example, see Piscataway v. Taxman, where a case was deliberately removed from the system to avoid intervention by the principal). Because of this, politicians want to fill the lower courts with mini-Scalias and Reinhardts, rather than wishy-washy O‘Connors,which politicizes the lower courts to no end. Is this a good thing? Probably not. As much as is possible, the law ought to be based on regular, institutionalized procedures—based on laws passed by the legislature, common law, and precedent. However, at the pinnacle of the system, I’m not sure it can be.

However, the larger normative question in this particular case is whether or not Reinhardt (more properly, the 9th Circuit) is right to intervene. On balance, I’d have to say intervention is right. The cost to the administration to justify its action before the judiciary is minimal compared to the potential cost to human liberty if the judiciary defers to executive judgment. At some level, it’s the Carolene question: nobody to the political right of Dennis Kuchinich is going to stick up for the people at Gitmo. At another level, it’s a question of separation of powers—the executive is essentially asserting the right to do whatever it wants without effective oversight from either Congress or the judiciary, including inventing its own secret judicial system out of whole cloth. Surely this ought to be troublesome, particularly to lawyers like Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh, but their collective response seems to be “eh, it’s just Reinhardt” and micro-analysis of how, since we did the same thing with Germans in 1944, or because the sovereign status of Gitmo is subject to some obscure treaty provision, this is all just peachy.

Now, at some level I could care less about the people at Gitmo. I realize to some extent the foreign bleating about them would just be bleating about some other topic if we’d given them an all-expenses paid vacation at Club Med. As a diplomatic matter, I realize that we’re probably carrying water for the Australians and Brits with their detainees (god knows Tony Blair doesn’t want the headache of dealing with the British collaborators with the Taliban). The rest of the detainees are probably much better off at Gitmo than they would be in the hands of the Afghan, Saudi or Pakistani authorities—which is probably what I’d have done with them. That still doesn’t mean that I have to like it—or approve of the administration’s handling of the issue.

As Steven Taylor notes in the latest edition of the Toast-O-Meter, Howard Dean is leading the other Democratic contenders in a lot of national and state polls, including in the key early primary state of New Hampshire, even while his rivals—most notably Joe Lieberman—step up their attacks on him.

So far, attacks from the remainder of the pack have had little effect; however, if this AP account from the campaign trail in Iowa is to be believed, Dean may be starting to feel some heat:

Howard Dean appealed to fellow Democratic presidential candidates Saturday to stop the bitter attack politics that have come to dominate the race for the party’s nomination. The race needs “a little character transplant,” he said.

“It’s not necessary to tear down the other opponents,” said Dean, whose front-running campaign has come increasingly under fire from Democratic rivals.

However, it may be too late for his rivals to do anything about Dean’s long march to the nomination. It’s December 20th, only five weeks before the New Hampshire primary, and all the members of the ABD faction are still in the race, which—as I’ve explained before—is deadly to their collective chances of stopping Dean from gaining the nomination. The electoral rules are clear on this point: the more ways the anti-Dean vote is split in a state, the more delegates Dean will receive. Make no mistake: coalescing around a single ABD candidate won’t stop the Deaniacs’ lemming-like procession behind their leader, but it will mean that credible candidates will get more delegates—you need 15% of the vote in a Congressional district to get delegates, and judging by the polling numbers the only candidates who will be able to do that consistently are Dean and Sharpton, the latter due to the effects of majority-minority districts.

The bottom line: Lieberman, Kerry, and Edwards need to step aside today and let Clark and Gephardt have a fighting chance to get enough delegates between them to stop Dean, or it’s going to be a very long year for Democrats.

Henry Farrell discusses an apparent epidemic of ghost-written letters of reference being sent by professors on behalf of students. Thankfully, nobody’s ever asked me to write my own letter of recommendation—which is just as well, I suppose, as I’ve never been very good at self-promotion. Besides, seeing as I’m an only child, I get more than enough of that from my parents…

Ok, this has got to be the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long while (the whole thread is pretty funny, though).

I saw one of these pizza baking machines today at Wal-Mart while doing the grocery shopping. I’m not sure that I could justify spending $50 for an object that does something my oven seems perfectly capable of doing on its own, albeit more slowly, but I can see some value to it for college kids and people with more tempermental ovens than mine.

Also on the topic of pizza: I’m pretty sure pepperoni isn’t supposed to contain chicken, yet the pepperoni on Tombstone pizzas has “chicken” listed as an ingredient. Someone in Italy should sue.

Michael Jennings has a fascinating post at Samizdata that explains, in part, why I’ve been to Stansted and Gatwick more times than I’ve ever been to Heathrow—and also, in part, why I haven’t set foot in any of those airports (or, for that matter, anywhere else outside North America) in 12 years.

To some extent, the practical problems Michael describes have been reduced by code-sharing and mergers; for example, I could now fly to Britain from Memphis—the relative boonies in American aviation, at least when it comes to "hub" airports—in several dozen different ways, the most convenient of which is probably to take the every-other-day Northwest/KLM flight from Memphis to Amsterdam then any of a number of flights to major British airports via KLMuk from Amsterdam.

Due to the power of TiVo, and my general laziness clearing out my Season Pass list, I’ve had a Season Pass for ESPN2’s “Cold Pizza” two-hour morning show since it started (set to “Keep At Most: 1” so I only kill two hours of space). That isn’t to say I’ve watched every show, mind you; many days, it goes straight into the digital dustbin. But, I’ve given it a shot, and it’s time to review the “good” and “bad”:

• Jay Crawford, the male co-host, is moderately competent.
• Kit Hoover, the female co-host, reminds me of an Ole Miss sorority girl—and a none-too-bright one, at that. (Plus, whatever variant of a southern accent she has is downright painful to listen to.)
• Leslie Maxey, the newswoman, is stuck with the thankless task of newsdrone. She seems reasonably competent when not reading the equivalent of the “local news digest of the national news” from the teleprompter, though.
• Thea Andrews, the catch-all person (I think her actual title is “national correspondent”), seems competent enough, plus she has sort of a Lauren Graham thing going on—as Dave Letterman would say, she’s “easy on the eyes”—and (IMHO) did a better job than Hoover when called on to fill in as co-host once.
• The “guest people do the weather” schtick doesn’t work at any level. Just pay Greg Proops whatever he asks to get him to do the job permanently—or let Andrews do it.
• Whoever thought this show needed a “sideline reporter” should be thrown in a spider hole in Iraq, along with the guy who does it. Apparently, it’s supposed to be funny to have a Jewish guy as the sideline reporter. Newsflash: it isn’t.
• Silly question for Disney: if you’re going to do a morning show, wouldn’t it make more sense to have it in ESPN, a.k.a. “The Mothership,” where it’ll get better ratings?
• Make the frickin’ show more about sports, and less like an obsessively tame version of “The Man Show.”

Frankly, if ESPN wants to do something better in the morning, I think the thing to do is something more like the Saturday and Sunday morning SportsCenter, maybe with a dash of the style of The NFL Network’s “NFL Total Access” (ironically, hosted by Rich Eisen, who was originally interested in the “Cold Pizza” gig): something more casual, but clearly a sports show for the morning viewer rather than a morning show that talks about sports. Put Crawford and Andrews in a casual studio, bring in guests, and have an experienced SportsCenter or ESPNews anchor (Michael Kim?) on hand for sports headlines and highlights at the top and bottom of the hour.

Steven Taylor finally got around to reading the Ehrlich piece I discussed below (in terms of Mickey Kaus’ reaction to it). Quoth Dr. Taylor:

The second problem [with his argument] is more profound: Erhlich seems not to understand American parties. Parties in the US are primarily three things: the candidates themselves, the officeholders who manage to win election, and, above all else, the voters who are willing to put those candidates into office. The institutional existence of the party (the party committee, and so forth) is really minor by comparison to the other aforementioned elements.

This is a restatement of the classic “tripartite division” of the party in political science: the party in the electorate, the party in government (which subsumes both the “candidates” and “officeholders” from Steven’s description), and the party organization (or institution). While parties are institutionally weak, as I reviewed in my previous post, that’s not the whole reality of the situation—parties still have a strong resonance in the electorate (even in the elite bits of the electorate, like the blogosphere: you’ll find relatively few nonpartisan “warbloggers”), and they still help organize competition both in elections and in government.

Anyway, go read what Steven said, as well was what Professor Bainbridge had to say too. (Bonus points: Prof. Bainbridge talks about one of my favorite topics, heuristics, and the value of those heuristics in political decision-making.*)