John Cole thinks Dean’s going to win the Democratic nomination. I guess if I had to put my money on anyone, I’d probably put it on Dean too—even though there are some Democrats who don’t think Dean is credible on national security. But when credibility on national security in the field of candidates is solely differentiated by whether or not you served in a war that half of the Democratic primary voters don’t remember (hi, John Kerry!) and the other half opposed, I don’t believe that’s much of a handicap.

Mark Kleiman writes:

If a republic is to maintain itself as a republic, rather than degenerating into an oligarchy or party dictatorship, it must be the case that the party in power can’t reliably maintain itself in power. Imagine, just as a hypothetical, a republic whose campaign finance system gave a big natural advantage to whichever party was most favorable to big personal wealth and corporate interests. Imagine further that the party favorable to those interests managed to get control of both the executive and the legislative branches. Now imagine further that the leadership of that party had no scruples about exploiting to the fullest its powers to help friends and punish enemies, in the interest of making its dominance permanent.

He goes on to claim that this is currently the case. Of course, it was also the case for the Democratic Party between 1961 and 1969; the Democratic Party between 1977 and 1981; and the Democratic Party between 1993 and 1995. In each case, the Democrats had the unqualified financial backing of “big personal wealth and corporate interests,” “control of both the executive and the legislative branches,” and “no scruples about exploiting to the fullest its powers to help friends and punish enemies.” Furthermore, unlike the Republicans today, these Democratic majorities had a Supreme Court that was broadly inclined to promote their social and economic agenda (even during the brief Clinton period). Yet, amazingly, we still have a republic, despite all of these shocking assaults on the separation of powers.

I won’t dispute the fundamental truth of Madison’s insights in Federalist 10. But a few years of unified government isn’t going to undermine the republic today, especially when the party in control of that government is essentially continuing the substantive policies of the previous Democratic administration with some fiddling at the margins of the tax code.

Following the lead of others (including Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim), I’ve added a feed of the new syndication format without a name to Signifying Nothing. This should also give Jeff a new test case for his Straw patch.

For the moment, it’s here (since it’s currently generated by the LSblog RSS module); it will probably move to a separate URL once the format (and name!) have been finalized.

Speaking of RSS, it must be very, very sad to live in the place Dave Winer does.

BigJim writes on the Rebel Flag, Colonel Reb, and “From Dixie With Love” (not to be confused with “Dixie” — the mp3 doesn’t do it justice).

CalPundit tries to figure out what it means to be moderate. Money quote:

First, there’s a difference between policy moderation and rhetorical moderation. John Kerry, for example, is probably about as liberal as Howard Dean if you look at his actual policy positions, but Dean uses more fiery rhetoric. Likewise, aside from a regrettable weakness for sarcasm, my writing tends to be pretty sober compared to someone like Atrios. But on actual political positions, we’re fairly close.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I take Kevin seriously but would rather get hit by a bus than visit Atrios again in my lifetime, and hence why Kevin actually has a decent shot at persuading me that he’s right on the issues.

James at OTB has more, including a money quote of his own:

Indeed, the mere fact that we spend a lot of time thinking, let alone writing, about politics and have developed somewhat coherent positions almost by definition puts us into the extremes.

I’d probably elide the “almost.” Having a coherent personal belief system puts you in the tails of the bell curve, at least relative to the public at large. I think moderation is more a function of whether you allow the belief system to dictate how you feel about people who don’t share your beliefs, and not so much what the content of your belief system is. Which, incidentally, gets back to what I was saying about political sophistication and perceived media bias.

Kieran Healy is looking for feedback on a paper he plans to present at the August meeting of the American Sociological Association. The paper’s definitely worth a read, even if you’re not a sociologist or an open source geek.

James at OTB links to a Mark Steyn piece in today’s Washington Times in which Steyn argues that Howard Dean will peak soon. I’m not particularly convinced, mainly due to the lackluster Democratic field and the diminished appeal of potential Dean vote-splitter Ralph Nader to the “progressive” fringe (or, as Dean would put it, “Democratic wing”). And, with the highly compressed primary schedule, there’s a good chance Dean could remake himself into a centrist in time for Labor Day 2004 if the party grandees don’t panic and bring in an outside candidate as the nominee.

Dean Esmay, meanwhile, also ponders (the other) Dean’s prospects (via One Hand Clapping).

My 10th high school reunion is coming up next weekend. Now I need to come up with my brief “what the hell have I been doing the last ten years” speech. I’ve got the two-word version—“not much”—but I feel the need to stretch it out a little. Perhaps I should borrow from the description my fellow classmate Keith just sent me via e-mail: “still alive and as sarcastic as ever.” It has a ring to it, don’t you think?

Peter W. Davis has a guest post at Electric Venom, giving his perspective on what’s changed—and what’s still the same—in the Democratic Party over the past fifty-odd years. A brief—unedited—excerpt:

Up until the 1948 Presidential election there were two kinds of campaigns run in the Southern Democratic Primaries. One type was a candidate making a speech about how he was going to clean out the County Courthouse and bring paved roads, electricity and honest law enforcement to the rural and small town population of the day. They talked about running water and jobs and opening hospitals. These candidates seldom won. This was the Harry Truman Wing.

The other kind of candidate—of the Strom Thurmond wing—won their elections by shouting “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!”[*] A memory of George Wallace’s first campaign for an elected office comes to mind. He tried to win the primary by talking about jobs, clean running water and paved roads. After losing the election he swore he’d never be outniggered again. He wasn’t.

I don’t know that I agree with all his conclusions, but it’s definitely worth reading.

[*] Like Peter, I’m not very comfortable with putting that word in this post. However, in this case I think it’s important—precisely because of its shock value. I don’t think you can truly understand how vile the campaigns of men like Maddox, Wallace, and Thurmond were unless you’re confronted with their rhetoric in all its unadorned ugliness.

Pejman Yousefzadeh isn’t very impressed with Josh Marshall’s logic in arguing that the administration lied about Iraq’s possession of biological and chemical agents. Now, one could plausibly make the argument that the administration lacked sufficient evidence to reach the conclusion that Iraq had WMD, but that’s not the same thing as lying, which—as Pej points out—requires someone to (a) know A is false and then (b) claim A is true (or vice versa).

So, Josh’s argument basically boils down to: the administration didn’t really think there was WMD in Iraq, but expected to find some WMD when they got there to cover their story that there was WMD in Iraq. This is like saying you don’t honestly expect Wendy’s to be selling hamburgers, but you expect Wendy’s to just happen to have some hamburgers lying around the store when you visit to back up your false claim that Wendy’s does, in fact, sell hamburgers.

Josh may be on firmer ground in questioning the credibility of Judith Miller, the New York Times’ ambassador for all things WMD (and whose very existence has been called into question in this weblog). To her credit, though, at least her stories haven’t described the grand vistas of pyramids and pagodas that we’d expect to be present in a Jayson Blair account. (Although, I must say that I find Josh’s belief that Miller’s reporting has helped the case of the hawks laughable.)

Matthew has the list. My fave:

[Y]ou joke about chasing away “Bruce Bueno de Mosquitos” when spraying on insect repellent.

The whole list is pretty good. However, I make my sacrifices to a statue of Neal Beck. To each his own…

My friend and former colleague Scott Huffmon, an assistant professor of political science at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., gives his perspective on Strom Thurmond’s legacy:

Couple of brief points about Strom (as an expert on southern politics…):

1. [Steven] Taylor is wrong, he never actually had to use the bucket that had been placed in the cloak room during his 24 hr 18min filibuster (he had purged his body of all excess water by drinking hardly anything and taking constant steam baths for days prior)
2. He forgot about the wrestling match with [Ralph] Yarborough about [Leroy] Collins’ appt to the Community Relations [Service] in the wake of the CRA of 1964
3. Strom DID change…he was the first white southern member of Congress to hire a black staffer (in 1971), he was a supporter of the national MLK Jr. holiday in 1986, and he voted to extend the VRA in 1991
4. it is correct that he is not known for sponsoring any landmark legislation, but he DID serve his constituents amazingly well…including black constituents…eventually
5. even as a segregationist governor, he helped SC with a business friendly approach that helped alleviate the pain of being virtually abandoned by the navy and bringing SC kicking and screaming out of an agricultural based economy
6. his REAL impact on the political landscape came with his prominent switch to the Republican party in 1964 along with his help in developing the “southern strategy” (with aid Harry Dent) ...this paved the way for white conservatives across the South to switch parties and irrevocably changed the state of presidential politics, the nature of the Republican party, and (by default with the exodus of southern conservatives) the Democratic party.

Obviously, I am appalled by 90% of his life and career, but to say that he had limited national impact is a fallacy. For good or ill, this man fundamentally altered politics in America.

(I've added a few links and clarifications in brackets.)

B. at ShinySideUp likes the new look here at Signifying Nothing. It’s based on the appearance of Daniel Drezner Part 2, and is only ten CSS directives (736 bytes, including comments and @imports) on top of the old stylesheet. If, by some chance, you liked the old look, feel the need to mix it up a little, or don’t particularly enjoy doing timezone conversions in your head, you can always set your preferences.

Nevada Gov. Kerry Guinn (R-Neptune) is worse than fellow Republican outer-solar-system resident Don Sundquist (R-Pluto), according to Bill Hobbs. It’s some mean feat, but Bill has the goods:

A group of legislators is willing to raise taxes, just not enough the would-be dictator of Nevada wishes, so he’s going to court to make them do it, claiming the state constitution requires them to vote for the higher taxes because it requires sufficient taxes to balance the budget.

Somehow, I don’t see all those Democrats who were incensed that the Texas Rangers were sent out to round up legislators who were blowing off quorum calls being all that upset about this development.

It’s time for the Carnival of the Vanities XLI at Amish Tech Support. Next week’s stop: the always-insightful Winds of Change.NET.

Brian Micklethwait has a discussion of the privacy issues associated with highway tolls up at The White Rose. Congestion pricing and toll finance are goals that libertarians support, but there are some potential drawbacks to these ideas in the modern “surveillance state.”

The Dissident Frogman reports on his vacation in Normandy, and notes the disappearance of the American flag from le Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie (a place I had the honor to visit about 13 years ago).

Does this bother me? Perhaps a little. But the Americans who died liberating France, like the Americans who died liberating Iraq, died so the French people and their government would be free to make their own choices. That the French don’t always make the decisions we’d like for them to make is a part of that freedom.

So are they being ungrateful? Yes. Spiteful? Undoubtably. But the freedom they were given was a gift from us (and the British, Canadians, and Poles and others who fought along side us)—the greatest gift America can give the world—and we can no more expect them to use that gift the way we’d want than we can expect a friend to not throw a birthday gift in the back of the closet. And I’d much rather have the French—and the Iraqis—free to decide their own fate in the world, and sometimes getting it “wrong,” than continuing to live under totalitarian rule.

Link via Matthew @ A Fearful Symmetry.

Eugene Volokh thinks that this behavior is worse than the whole “Freedom Fries” nonsense that took place on these shores. He’s probably right on that score at least. Meanwhile, judging from the trackbacks, maybe I’m the only one feeling even vaguely charitable.

Megan wonders why the Germans don’t come in for near as much bashing in the blogosphere. My guess is because (a) they didn’t tell everyone who disagreed with them that they were “missing a good opportunity to keep quiet” and (b) they aren’t French. Now, granted, the second reason is far more compelling if you’re English than if you’re American, but I don’t really pretend to understand it either.

The Dissident Frogman has some important amplifications and clarifications (via Amy).

Mark Pilgrim has removed all the namespaced elements from his RSS feeds. Presumably this makes them non-funky, although the funkiness of the now-elided (but valuable) content:encoded seems debatable—which, I guess, is the whole problem with the “funkiness” issue. One man’s duplication is another man’s way of expressing alternative representations of the same data. (Mark, to his credit, does write up separate excerpts, so they are generally more valuable than your run-of-the-mill “chopped off plaintext representation of the HTML” excerpt feed, like mine.)

He explains:

I want to do all sorts of fancy things that RSS doesn’t allow for. Sure, I could shoehorn a bunch of stuff into namespaces and call it RSS, and it would be, technically; I’ve been doing that for months now. But that’s fundamentally the wrong approach; I see that now. I need a format that is geared for power users like me. It will still have a relatively simple core (probably not as simple as RSS, I mean, how could it be?) but it will have a wide array of well-defined extensions, well-documented, well-maintained, well-organized, and (I hope, someday) well-supported.

Now, I’m not sure where the “power user” line is at; I’m not much of a power user in the grand scheme of things, and even I’d like to see straightforward support for things like geographic and hierarchical aggregation, a unified content model (so my syndication feed, posting API, and TrackBack metadata would share the same code), and sensible treatment of multiple content payloads. I’m not even sure RSS works well for much of anything beyond the “My Netscape” design it started out as. But with RSS and “Echo” soon to be available, people can use the latter when they need to go beyond RSS’s capabilities—without accidentally breaking compatibility with apps that can’t grok advanced features like XML namespaces. And that, my friends, is a Good Thing™.

Matthew has a stance on marriage—gay or straight—guaranteed to annoy anyone who’s never read Locke (and probably some of them, too). I won’t spoil it; just go RTWT™.

James Joyner likes the idea in principle, but is concerned about some of the implementation of the details. Given the burgenoning industry surrounding pre-nuptial agreements, I’m not sure we’re that far from solving those problems. And, in terms of inheritance, avoiding probate is largely a matter of having a proper will, and with the inheritance tax on the way out the door the potential tax issues are greatly simplified for people in most states.

Overall, it seems to this non-lawyer like most of the practical benefits of marriage (excepting the tax benefits) are largely duplicated in existing contract law; the trick is to create a “civil union” contract that contains those provisions—durable power of attorney, the method of disposal of assets upon dissolution, etc.

There’s a big brou-ha-ha going on over the future of syndication on the web, (basically) with a lot of sensible people on one side and Dave Winer (and a few other people) on the other. The way I see it, Dave had the chance to make RSS 2.0 a proper specification by fleshing out all of the corner cases and promulgating a complete spec. Instead, he went off on rants about “funkiness” and namespaces, and decided to flip out and spew paranoid FUD after Tim Bray and a few others suggested he wasn’t the easiest person in the universe to work with (in other words, he basically decided to prove their point).

Anyway, whenever the dust settles (which may be fairly soon), LSblog will support the new specification in addition to the multitude of RSS variants already supported—some “funky,” some not-so-funky. More importantly, we’ll have a specification we can point at that more than one person alive can definitively say is being adhered to (or not).

Kate has more:

Note to Dave: Yes, you created an amazing technology. Now shut up before you alienate anyone who might be interested in using it and appreciating your work for what it is.

Steven Jens is the latest to discover the general cluelessness of the man who is “probably the most quoted college professor in the land,” according to his press clippings. (And what’s with “probably”? The Wall Street Journal has Lexis-Nexis; use it!)

Now, he might be right that some states are already locks. Assuming the Republicans don’t nominate Howard Dean, they’ll win Mississippi, and assuming the Democrats don’t nominate Pat Buchanan, they’ll win the District of Columbia. Since neither of those nominations are happening, those are probably safe bets. But, for example, I don’t buy that states like Virginia and Ohio are Bush locks—and adjacent Michigan is a Democrat lock—in a “highly competitive contest.”

More fundamentally, I think the “red state–blue state” dichotomy is highly flawed, although it may be convenient shorthand. Voters are highly heterogeneous in all but the least populous states. To the extent it is meaningful, it only reflects the artifacts of the disproportionality of the “winner-takes-all” nature of the electoral college (in 48 of the 50 states) and the current unwillingness of the national Democratic party to compete for the median voter in the South.

Kieran Healy laments the quantity (and quality) of scholarly works at popular and collegiate bookstores. I completely sympathize; our on-campus bookstore (outside of the textbook section) is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from a mainline Barnes and Noble—except that the selection sucks. And that's despite the competition from Square Books.

Steven Taylor, in response to Bryan’s post at Arguing with signposts…, makes some fairly good points about the legacy of the late Strom Thurmond.

I’m not sure that it requires a political scientist’s perspective, although I’m sure that prominent specialists in southern politics like the Black brothers (Merle and Earl) may have more insight than others. He, like any other politician of any longevity, had a fairly good mastery of the nuts and bolts of politics: most notably, securing a “personal vote,” including attending to constituency service and bringing home the pork. Beyond that, though, political science offers no special insight.

I can see why he was a polarizing figure. In many ways, he represented the worst of the Republican Party, both in the casual appeal to racism in his campaigns and in his selective approach to the principles of federalism. In other ways, like George Wallace and others of his era, he eventually built a bridge between the races—even though they weren’t particularly concerned about burning it when they weren’t in the position of needing black votes. Few can argue with the proposition that he stayed in the Senate far longer than he needed to, and far longer than he was of any value to the institution.

On the other hand, as Jeff Quinton argues, Strom-bashing for some is a convenient shortcut to southerner-bashing in general. Racism lurks beneath the surface all over the country and is not the sole province of our part of it (George Wallace got plenty of votes outside the South). Strom may have been a particularly prominent exemplar of those attitudes, but many Americans of his era—whether in Philadelphia, Miss. or Philadelphia, Pa.—had those same attitudes.

I can’t be particularly charitable to Strom, because the fundamental wrongness of the system he and others like him helped perpetuate far outweighs the good he eventually did. Do I think he deserves to rot in hell? No. God has forgiveness for each of us. But I think I—and history—would look far more charitably on him if he had used his power and leadership to promote racial equality at a far earlier date.

Via OTB and others, I discovered my best matches for 2004:

1. Libertarian Candidate (100%)
2. Bush, George W. – US President (82%)
3. Sharpton, Reverend Al – Democrat (50%)
4. Gephardt, Cong. Dick, MO - Democrat (50%)
5. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (49%)
6. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (48%)
7. Lieberman Senator Joe CT - Democrat (47%)
8. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (43%)
9. Kucinich, Cong. Dennis, OH - Democrat (42%)
10. Phillips, Howard – Constitution (39%)
11. Graham, Senator Bob, FL - Democrat (23%)
12. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol IL - Democrat (15%)
13. LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. – Democrat (-6%)

Judging from the negative number on LaRouche, I think there are some bugs yet to be worked out…

As is apparently all the rage these days, I have added inline trackback to Signifying Nothing and LSblog. I’ve also put together a Blogger-esque CSS file, which moves the sidebar to the left if you’re into that sort of thing.

Also, look for an LSblog 0.6 release sometime in the next few days, just as soon as I get done with some dissertation revisions…