CalPundit is shocked, simply shocked to learn that the people who run Fox News send out a daily memo on how each day’s stories will be covered. Of course, the print media don’t need similar memos; that’s why they have these mysterious people called “editors” who read and edit everything before it goes into print.

In other shocking news, I hear that some media outlets use “focus groups” to help select news anchors, rather than simply hiring the best-qualified journalists for the job.

Steven Taylor, here and here, and Matthew Stinson both do me the favor of explaining why I’m not a huge fan of the Stars and Bars Southern Cross. Steven says it far more eloquently than I could:

My question to those who are adamantly in favor of the flag: why? What does it uniquely mean to you about your Southern heritage? And even if it means something dear to your heart, isn’t whatever it is you wish to extol being tainted by what the flag signifies to others?

I think a lot of white Southerners do, deep down, recognize that; hence why I often hear comments like “the blacks are just pretending they’re offended by the flag” or “I know one black guy who isn’t offended, so I really don’t think blacks in general are.” So I think the key to change here is not necessarily to get whites to change their views about the flag, but rather to convince them that blacks’ views on the flag are genuinely-held, rather than a fabrication of the NAACP and the SCLC and professional race-baiters like Al Sharpton.

Meanwhile, if you’re not entirely sick of the gubernatorial campaign, you can read this Emily Wagster Pettus piece on the Rebel flag’s role in the gubernatorial race. And, as a special bonus, Amy Tuck finally signed that affidavit saying she’d never had an abortion (no, don’t ask… I don’t even pretend to understand what that’s all about).

I normally don’t bother with announcing blogroll changes or additions, but I have to make an exception for Matt’s spiffy new Movable Type-powered site®. Très slick.

The downside is that those of you with alpha-blogroll switched on will have to scroll down to visit him in the future, since he’s forfeited his lead positon in the sort order to Michele. (How do you switch on—or off—alpha-blogroll? Simply visit the handy-dandy config page where you can also set your timezone and preferred stylesheet.)

Mississippi goes to the polls in six days to elect a governor. And, if we’re really lucky, the people—not the House of Representatives—will elect this one.

On the issues I personally care about, the candidates are about indistinguishable. As Sid Salter points out, Ronnie Musgrove is essentially running—at least in white precincts—as a Republican who accidentally got the Democratic nomination. Maybe that’s just as well; for better or worse, there aren’t many Mississippians who share my, dare I say extremist, views on personal and economic liberty. There just aren’t that many Mississippians who are pro-choice (never mind that you can’t get a legal abortion in this state outside of Jackson, making the abortion issue essentially moot), pro-gay marriage, anti-Stars and Bars, and against burdensome economic regulations (like the absurd situation that has essentially shut down the distribution of wine and liquor in the state because our state liquor monopoly can’t make its computers work right). I’d worry if the major parties thought they could run a candidate who would appeal to me.

Ironically, if Ronnie Musgrove lived up to the reputation his detractors pinned on him, I might actually be tempted to vote for him. The truth of the matter, though, is that Musgrove barely lifted a finger to promote the new flag; he endorsed it and then went into virtual hiding until the referendum went down in flames in April 2001. Don’t get me wrong—I think the referendum was doomed to failure no matter how much effort was put into backing it. And I recognize that the referendum was largely engineered to forestall the initiative drive to amend the constitution to make the current flag virtually unalterable—an option still on the table should the legislature decide to mess with the flag again. But make no mistake: Ronnie Musgrove did no more than was absolutely required to keep his ass from getting grief from the Legislative Black Caucus.

Similarly, if Ronnie Musgrove had so much as lifted a finger to help blacks in this state I might be tempted to vote for him. Now, I understand Ronnie’s going to get 90% of the black vote just for having a (D) next to his name on the ballot. What has he done to deserve it? Turning the health department into a racial fiefdom may have helped some well-connected blacks in Jackson, but it’s hard to see how a sharecropper in the Delta benefited from that.

The bottom line is: Ronnie Musgrove isn’t a liberal, in any sense of the word. He’s only a Democrat because that’s what you needed to be to get elected to the state senate in Panola County. His own press is 100% accurate: “conservative, independent.” He makes 1980s-era Al Gore (not to be confused with the Y2K model) look like a McGovernik. Which is a shame, because you could do worse than 80s Al Gore.

Which brings me to what’s behind Door #2: Haley Barbour. If Musgrove is “conservative, independent,” Barbour is “conservative, conservative.” He is what he is. Those who criticize him for BlackHawkGate seem to miss the point; if Ronnie’s schedule had worked out properly, there’d be matching photos up at the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website: one with Haley’s beaming mug, and another with Ronnie’s right next to it. My general assessment of Barbour is that he’s a cipher as far as what he’d do in office. Oddly enough (for those who stereotype such things), Barbour’s Washington experience makes him by far the more worldly of the two candidates.

And, ultimately, I think that’s what this state needs. If only Nixon could go to China, maybe only someone like Barbour can come back to Mississippi. Someone needs to tell my fellow Mississippians that it ain’t 1962 any more, and that message isn’t going to be well-received coming from a Democrat. I don’t know if Haley Barbour is the man to deliver that message, but I sure as hell know that Ronnie Musgrove isn’t. So for governor, Haley Barbour (R) it is.

In other races:

• In the battle of the barking moonbats, aka the lieutenant governor’s race, I’ll be voting for Barbara Blackmon (D), mainly because I know she won’t win.
• For secretary of state, Eric Clark (D/I) because he seems competent enough. Wish he’d do something about all the Java on his pages though…
• For attorney general, I honestly don’t know.
• Auditor: Phil Bryant (R/I).
• Treasurer: Gary Anderson (D).
• Agriculture commissioner: dunno, don’t care; they’re all State graduates anyway…
• Insurance commissioner: don’t know.
• Public service commissioner, northern district: we have a public service commission?
• Transportation commissioner, northern district: Bill Minor (D).
• District attorney: I don’t even know which district I’m in. Sigh. Guess I have to figure that out.
• State senator: Gray Tollison (D)—I think former Oxford mayor Pat Lamar’s a twit. Demerits for his brother running my water company into the ground, though.
• State representative: some jackass who shares my name (the joy of spending the $15 filing fee to run… priceless).
• Constitutional amendment #1 (deborking the College Board): no, because I’m in a contrarian mood.
• County offices: no clue.

I thought the only dilemma I was going to be faced with this week was figuring out which side I despised more in the Colonel Reb Foundation versus Richard Barrett dispute (it’s Barrett, by a hair, although I have to give mad props to the Foundation for giving Barrett a new excuse to come to Ole Miss in the first place). Now, however, comes word that Donald Luskin is allegedly siccing a lawyer on Atrios; in this one, I think I have to feel sorry for the lawyer.

They’ve apparently kissed and made up. How sweet…

I probably will have next-to-nothing to say for the next 24 hours too, but I can’t pass up a free chance to swipe some of Kate’s traffic Thursday. There’s a not-so-secret project nearing fruition here at the Oxford branch of SN; that’s all I’m going to say (I don’t want to jinx it…).

CalPundit notes the demise of the inept Iain Duncan-Smith as leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Four or five years ago I would have recommended Chris Patten for the thankless job of replacing him, but I think he’s since caught Mad Bureaucrat Disease (aka Brussels Spongiform Encephalopathy). Ah well, there’s always Lord Jeffrey Archer—as a convicted pathological liar, he’s well-qualified to be a British political leader.

I’m familiar with “run to the left in the primaries, then to the right once you’ve secured the nomination” as a viable campaign strategy for presidential candidates; however, Howard Dean may be going a bit far, n'est-ce que pas? That is, unless the Klan vote really is the swing vote in the South…

I don’t actually share Sharpton’s view that Dean’s agenda is “anti-black”—at least, it is no more (or less) anti-black than the Democratic agenda at large. Still, I found the story moderately amusing…

Meanwhile, Kate notes that Dean is pandering to the “metrosexual” voting block, a demographic apparently defined as straight men who’ve seen at least one episode of “Queer Eye…” or “Playmakers.”

Dear Fellow Republican,

You are among a select group of Republicans who have been chosen to take part in the official CENSUS OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

How did I get on this mailing list? I’m a registered Democrat fer cryin’ out loud! Most of the money-begging letters I get are from the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, and I know the GOP isn't buying mailing lists from them. The only conservative publication I subscribe to is the Wall Street Journal.

I wonder if they'll figure it out when I return the survey, in the postage-paid envelope, with a check for one cent and all the wrong answers checked. “Should small businesses be encouraged to grow and hire more workers?” Umm… “No.” Mwahahaha!

I also can’t figure out how I got on the mailing list for 1-800-JACK-OFF. Perhaps the two are related. Could the GOP be buying their mailing lists from phone sex companies?

Tyler Cowen notes some interesting statistics on the months during which one is most likely to die of a given cause. You’re most likely to die an accidental death in August, and most likely to drown in July.

No surprise on the death by drowning statistic. Several children drown every summer in Memphis when it starts getting hot.

On the other hand, you are most likely to fall to your death during December. Tyler wonders whether that statistic is driven by holiday suicides flinging themselves off buildings and bridges, but I suspect there’s a simpler explanation. December is the month in which people climb up on the roof to hang holiday lights and other decorations.

Tyler doesn’t speculate on November, the month during which you are most likely to be shot. At first I thought maybe this has something to with family arguments over Thanksgiving dinner. But then I remembered: deer season!

Sunday’s Memphis Commercial Appeal endorsed Ronnie Musgrove for Mississippi governor. I’m sure that’ll help Musgrove big time in DeSoto County—a county full of people who moved there to escape from the establishment, “let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya” mentality the CA fosters north of the border.

Insult-the-CA-day continues here at Signifying Nothing as we learn that the Commercial Appeal has decided—stop the presses—to rename its website to CommercialAppeal.com. Whether this is a concession that the overtly boosterish “GoMemphis.com” was a bad fit for a city with a massive inferiority complex is left unsaid.

Gary Farber points out the latest foreign policy coup—literally—of our one-two punch of drug czar John Walters and attorney general John Ashcroft: the toppling of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada of Bolivia. Maybe if we’re really lucky, his replacement won’t turn out to be a Castro or Chávez. But, I’m not holding my breath…

Greg Wythe (GregsOpinion.com) notes a Washington Post account looking at the Texas and Colorado redistricting plans; notably, it quotes a lot of political scientists, instead of the legal scholars that generally appear in these accounts.

Notable quote from the article:

Whatever the answers, Thomas E. Mann, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, said that the Texas and Colorado experiments in multiple redistricting could have profound political consequences.

“If this is sustained, what we will have is a form of arms race where there is no restraint on keeping the game going on throughout a decade,” Mann said. “You ask, who wins in this process? This is a process designed not for citizens or voters but for politicians. It will lead politicians to say there are no limits. I think it threatens the legitimacy of democracy.”

I think this is the natural consequence of the Supreme Court’s muddled post-Baker jurisprudence: insistence on exact population equality between districts, despite the huge known sampling error of the Census making that equality essentially meaningless; a ridiculous level of deference to partisan gerrymanders coupled with the unclear dictates of the Voting Rights Act and vague, O‘Connoresque prohibitions against racial gerrymanders—which, due to bloc voting by African-Americans, are virtually indistinguishable from partisan gerrymanders; widespread abandonment of any conception of geographic compactness or geographic logic as desirable features for districts; naked partisanship by the federal judiciary; and a general failure to incorporate anything that political scientists who do applied and theoretical research in the field contribute. No wonder it’s a giant playground for political opportunists from both parties.

I still think the only viable way to eliminate this mischief is to incorporate an element of proportional representation into the system—even two or three seats in a state the size of Texas, elected by “top up” proportional representation, would be enough to both undermine the possible benefits of partisan gerrymanders and ensure that incumbent-protection gerrymanders don’t lead to a sclerotic delegation.

The Commercial Appeal on Sunday extracted its head out of the buttocks of the Turley-Belz-Lightman Memphis land-speculation elite just long enough to take a look at the city’s abuse of eminent domain as part of the massive, taxpayer-subsidzed Uptown redevelopment project—a project that wouldn’t exist without said land-speculation elite—near St. Jude. Money graf: a quote from Henry Turley, one-third of the prop-spec Axis of Evil, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the early 20th century “slum clearance” movement:

Henry M. Turley Jr., one of the private developer partners in the Uptown project, said there’s a clear public interest in clearing out blighted areas, and it’s imperative that municipalities use the legal tools available to them. He believes that governments aren’t using eminent domain enough in consolidating tracts large enough for redevelopment.

Collaborating in this shameful exercise are everyone’s favorite Memphians, the Memphis Housing Authority (slogan: “Nobody found guilty of corruption in 7 days!”). Quoth MHA executive director Robert Lipscomb:

Lipscomb said the authority is careful to protect individual property rights while at the same time not unduly enriching those who might try to stall and make a windfall.

Damn straight, Robert; the only people allowed to make a “windfall” in this are Turley and Belz. Heaven forbid any poor bastard who actually had to live in Uptown before the city decided to clear the place out benefits from the exercise.

The Clarion-Ledger today has polling data showing Barbour ahead of Musgrove, but in a statistical dead heat. Telling stat:

Experts say Musgrove needs to make inroads among white voters, 25 percent of whom said they’re backing the governor.

Bad prediction:

Musgrove holds another advantage. If neither candidate gets a majority, the election would wind up in the Democratically controlled Mississippi Legislature, just as it did in 1999, [Jackson State political science professor Leslie] McLemore said. “If it goes to the House, Musgrove will win it.”

Actually, if it goes to the House, dollars to donuts says either they elect the plurality winner (even if that means quite a few conservative Democrats have to switch parties) or we have a nice, long period of protracted litigation in federal court that ends with the plurality winner ending up in office anyway.

Blogospheric navel-gazing is always a pleasant diversion; today, Dan Drezner looks at the dispute over whether or not “portals” are the way to go for budding bloggers. Dan correctly points out that only a few bloggers can sustain the level of traffic needed to make the “portal” approach worthwhile—and this applies as much to the “techbloggers” as it does to the “warbloggers” that the Ecosystem statistics are biased towards.

I, like Dan, think Will Baude’s comment is worth repeating:

Tyler Cowen thinks that there are so many good blogs out there nowadays that the most widely-read blogs will be those that “cream-skim” (that is, taking the most useful posts from a wide variety of blogs).

Pardon, but an RSS feed can do that. The reason I don’tread Instapundit is that I don’t particularly agree with Glenn Reynolds about what’s wheat and what’s chaff. Look at my blogroll, which contains a number of fairly low-circulation blogs, and you could probably guess that.

I think the value of “portal blogs” will be somewhat reduced when people figure out how to do category-based aggregation (or topic-based aggregation) of RSS feeds—ironically, bringing weblogs closer to the early 1980s topic-based discussion format pioneered on Usenet before much of its value was destroyed by trolls, crapflooding, and spam. Where the portal blogs like Instapundit will still win, however, is in the area of editorial control—separating the wheat from the chaff, to borrow Will’s phrase—by not only saying “this post is on a topic you may be interested in” but also “this post is a good post on that topic.” To some extent you can add some of that control by filtering the aggregated RSS material against a trusted OPML list, but it’s still not quite the same thing as having a human editor.

In the end category-based aggregation (CBA) will not only help end-users, it will also make it easier for portal editors to pick and choose from a wider variety of blogs. I don’t know how many blogs Glenn Reynolds reads a day, and I suspect he gets most of his links to less-well-known blogs from reader submissions. A mere mortal can only read so many blogs, even with an RSS reader. CBA should make it easier for the portal editor (and for everyone else) to scour more of the breadth of the blogosphere for good material, which should be a win for everyone involved—more eyeballs for budding bloggers and higher quality material for the portals.

No time for detailed predictions, I’ll just cut to the chase…

• KENTUCKY over Mississippi State. I might give State the edge in Starkville, but fundamentally the Wildcats are playing better football.
• GEORGIA over Alabama-Birmingham. Duh.
• Tennessee over ALABAMA. The Tide haven’t been rolling—they’ve been rolling over. Expect that to continue today in Tuscaloosa, even against an overrated UT squad.
• OLE MISS over Arkansas. Ground-happy attacks have gotten nowhere against the Rebels this year, and unless Matt Jones has become a much better passer in the past seven days it could be a long night at Vaught-Hemingway for Jones and the Razorbacks.
• LOUISIANA STATE over Auburn. Should be a classic battle, but in the end I think home field—night in Death Valley—gives LSU the edge here, particularly if Auburn thinks they can get away without a passing game.
• SOUTH CAROLINA over Vanderbilt. There’s nothing quite like a visit from the Commodores to rejuvenate your spirits after being eliminated from the conference title race.

As always, there’s good stuff at the SEC Fanblog as well.

Donald Sensing has an interesting post looking at a Washington Times report that Israel may have deliberately attacked an American naval vessel collecting sigint for the NSA in 1967 during the Six Days War. Donald has some fodder for the conspiracy theorists (slightly Dowdified, since I didn’t want to blockquote all of the post):

In fact, why Israel would want to attack Liberty has been explained. Ariel Sharon, now Israel’s prime minister, commanded an Israeli armored division during the war. ... According to researcher and author James Bamford …, Sharon’s division slaughtered a large number of Egyptian soldiers it had captured as prisoners, clear war crimes. ... The killings were reported to Tel Aviv by radio. ... Bamford makes a very strong case that the Israeli government attacked Liberty in order to sink it, thus destroying the evidence of Sharon’s crime.

Definitely a must-read.

One of the sound-bites being paraded around is on whether particular Democratic candidates are “credible” on national security. The latest iteration of this theme was expressed by Joe Biden, who said:

[T]he candidates have to “demonstrate that they have a foreign policy, a security policy, that is coherent and is grown up, that we can handle the bad things out there in the world.”

But what is credibility? In this voter’s mind, it’s not strictly speaking about Iraq: by my standard, you could be credible but have opposed the war in Iraq. To me, I think credibility boils down to whether or not the candidate believes that other countries get to veto the use of American military power to achieve an objective that is in the national interest. Ultimately, this question—not the war question—is where many of the Democratic candidates lose their credibility with me.

This is not, mind you, a call for blanket unilateralism. When other countries share our objectives, and are willing to cooperate with us in achieving those objectives, we can and should work with them to do so. But when other countries clearly have different objectives than those of the United States—as was the case in the Iraq war, where a number of middle-power states wanted to pursue commercial ties with the Saddam regime and were plainly unwilling to commit their own resources to containing that regime’s ambitions for rearmament and obtaining non-conventional weapons—an American president would be deeply unwise to allow them to decide whether and how American military force should be used.

Lauren Landes, guesting at Patrick Carver’s Ole Miss Conservative blog, notes that Haley Barbour has picked up endorsements from 42 state Democrats, angering the state Democratic Party leadership. The list of Barbour endorsers is here. In general, it looks like a list of has-beens and small fry; notably, no current member of the state House or Senate appears on the list.

Meanwhile, Eric Stringfellow continues to blast Haley Barbour from the pages of the Clarion-Ledger.

Dan Drezner is mildly in favor of lifting the trade embargo on Cuba. While I think he slightly overestimates how totalitarian the Cuban regime is—I think it’s done a very effective job of brainwashing much of its populace, and it is almost as brutally oppressive toward political dissidents as the North Korean (DPRK) regime, but I don’t think it has as effective a repression apparatus as North Korea has or some of the old Soviet client states (most notably Romania) had, and by all accounts there’s a degree of economic freedom at the margins absent in the DPRK—I agree that simply removing the embargo won’t lead to miraculous political change. However, it will deprive Castro and his Hollywood apologists of their one legitimate grievance against the United States government—and, for that reason alone, the sanctions regime should be removed.

More thoughts on this are at YankeeBlog and OxBlog.

Pat Forde has an interesting piece up at ESPN.com that takes a look at how the Rebels’ season may be shaping up this year; like Forde, I’m cautiously optimistic, and I think this Saturday’s game against Arkansas (6:15 Central on ESPN2) will be a bellweather for the rest of the season.

Joy approvingly points to a Wall Street Journal piece by Walter Mossberg that starts by saying:

Windows is riddled with security flaws, and new ones turn up regularly. It is increasingly susceptible to all kinds of viruses, malicious Trojan horse programs and spyware. As a result, Windows users have been forced to spend more of their time and money supporting their computers.

Almost every week, they are supposed to install patches to the already patchy operating system to plug these security holes. And every few months, it seems, Windows users must quake in fear as some horrible new virus is created by the international criminal class that constantly targets Windows.

But for consumers and small businesses, there’s a simple way out of this endless morass: Buy an Apple Macintosh computer. There are no viruses on the Macintosh’s excellent two-year-old operating system, called OS X. And the Mac is a terrific computer—as good as, or better than, Windows for the typical computing tasks important to mainstream users.

Now, Mossberg does correctly point out that OS X isn’t completely immune from virii, trojan horses, worms, and the like (sometimes collectively referred to as “malware,” although these days pretty much any “malware” will just be called a “virus” even if it isn’t one). But his argument still rests on a few problems:

1. The “security through obscurity” fallacy: “In addition, Macs constitute such a tiny share of the world’s computers that they just aren’t an attractive target for virus writers and hackers.” True enough; however, that never stopped people from writing malware for earlier versions of the Mac OS, nor did it stop malware on a plethora of relatively obscure platforms in the past (at its peak, the Amiga probably had more virii going around than PC operating systems of the day, despite a much smaller market share).
2. “OS X doesn’t enable users—or hackers who hijack user accounts—to alter certain core files and features of its Unix underpinnings.” True enough; however, as OS X users get used to typing their password to gain administrator access (as they are prompted to do with every Apple-sponsored update), social engineering hacks—like fake update prompts—will be easy enough for malware authors to incorporate into their tools.
3. OS X ships with a lot of software that traces its lineage back to the 1970s Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) of Unix; while some of it has been audited, most notably by the OpenBSD project, some of it has not been. Until the past decade, network security was just not a serious concern of Unix programmers, and there could easily be holes lurking in some of the software included, particularly in server-side applications (which, to Apple’s credit, are normally disabled by default).

OS X, and other Unix-based and Unix-like operating systems like Linux, are no panacea for bad security practices in general. As Microsoft improves the lackluster security of its offerings, it is likely that we will see more problems as the proverbial “honeypot” that is Windows becomes less appealing to hackers.

Speaking of OS X, Mark Pilgrim has a lengthy overview of what’s new in OS X 10.3 (aka Panther).

Warning for those offended by “France-bashing”: the extension of this post contains some.

Two months ago, Daniel Drezner noted the split over whether the European Union is an international organization or a supranational authority among IR scholars (my answer, when asked to provide one when I took an International Organizations course in the Spring of 1999, was “Yes and Yes“), and that upcoming events in France and Germany would help settle that question—in particular, whether those countries would be punished for violating E.U. treaty commitments.

Today, Glenn Reynolds notes that France is getting a free pass for violating the “growth and stability pact” that members of the single European currency agreed to; as Pieter Dorsman at Peaktalk noted yesterday, this isn’t exactly popular with smaller countries like the Netherlands who actually abided by their commitments to the pact.