Mom sent me a forwarded email with this photo attached:

It really speaks for itself…

Update: Dad sends this link from Ocala in a similar vein.

Via Prof. Shugart: play the Redistricting Game. I smell an Intro to Politics assignment for the fall…

A few of my fellow EITMers and I went to see the last performance of Much Ado About Nothing in Forest Park last night. I’d never seen Shakespeare set in the Wild West before, but it worked somehow. However, my reward for seeing Shakespeare was a mosquito bite on my scalp which has been bothering me all day.

I’d plan on taking some antihistamine, but if tomorrow is like today was I’d be out like a light—it probably didn’t help that the afternoon included a 90-minute lecture that could be basically summed up in a sentence as “econometric models that are misspecified and have omitted variables are incorrect in really bad ways, so don’t do that.” Perhaps it was a useful refresher for those who have forgotten the Gauss-Markov assumptions, but it did less for me in my insufficiently-caffeinated state.

As promised, the review is up at OTB. I wasn’t terribly impressed with the book, although I’d imagine that those less familiar with the case would think it was better.

Via The New York Times and QandO, I just learned that Mike Nifong has quit as Durham County’s DA, apparently in the hope that the state bar will be lenient with him at his ongoing ethics trial. Good riddance.

In quasi-related news, one of my projects for this weekend is to review the book about the case by Don Yaeger for Outside The Beltway.

Update: CNN and others report that Nifong's trial ended Saturday with him being disbarred.

∂x/∂θ = Chris’ head exploding. I’m pretty sure the last time I did any serious calculus was about 13 years ago; today I got to reacquaint myself with the chain rule and the product rule (at least I could remember how to partially differentiate polynomials). I may have to go to Borders, pick up Calculus for Dummies, and hide it under my desk (so as not to embarrass myself in front of the young whipper-snappers in the room) if this keeps up.

The Missouri Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the city of Clayton can’t seize and hand over several parcels of land in downtown Clayton to private developers who are too cheap to pay market value for land to expand Centene Corporation’s headquarters. According to the article, Centene may look elsewhere instead, but unless they’re willing to go somewhere that’s genuinely blighted—say, about 70% of the city of St. Louis—they’re probably bluffing.

I got my Express Mail refund today, although it took at least 30 minutes out of my life at the Clayton post office. On the upside, I did pick up some of those fancy Jamestown 41¢ stamps while I was there, as well as having the rather amusing experience of seeing someone who had brought in at least 20 first-class letters stamped with both a 39-cent stamp and a Forever stamp.

After the postal service ordeal, I ate lunch at Lampert’s Plush Pig BBQ on Forsyth, which was reasonably good although a bit pricey (Hog Heaven in Daytona was substantially better).

EITM today was nicely bifurcated; I understood everything this morning (basically a review of mathematical statistics through Bayes’ Theorem) but a lot less this afternoon (basically a review of game theory through comparative statics), although my vague recollections of my undergrad calculus and differential equations helped somewhat. Lesson of the day: I probably should have crammed in a game theory class at ICPSR.

I also learned today that walking back home from the Metrolink station in the middle of summer at 4:45 pm while carrying a full backpack is not very much fun. Tomorrow’s plan: park and ride, the environment be (partially) damned.

I’ve now uploaded two sets of photos from Daytona: one general set and a separate set from the Daytona Cubs game I saw Wednesday night.

For reasons I don’t entirely comprehend, I decided to spend another week of my life grading the free response portion of AP American Government exams; this year, we’re in Daytona Beach, instead of Fort Collins, which is quite a transition.

The accommodations here are much nicer (a beach resort hotel instead of an un-air-conditioned dorm), but the catering here is substantially inferior, particularly for picky eaters or those with dietary restrictions. There’s more to do around the grading site—whether it’s lazing around the beach, taking in a single-A baseball game, or spending an hour or two riding go-karts and playing skee-ball and mini-golf. Indeed, other than the food—something that is easily worked around for a few bucks a day—the only real downside here is that the beer is better in Fort Collins.

Alas, uploading photos will have to wait until I have a more reliable connection, probably when I’m back in St. Louis in a couple of days. The lobby’s free wifi signal carries up to my room somewhat intermittently, and I’m not inclined to sit around the lobby while they all upload.

It took the postal service four days to carry out the “guaranteed overnight delivery” of an Express Mail letter from St. Louis to New Orleans. Regular first class mail probably would have arrived more quickly.

I don’t know whether to be ticked off at the sheer incompetence or happy that I’ll be getting my $16.25 in postage back.

The Times-Picayune has a lengthy interview with departing Tulane sports law prof Gary Roberts, in which he predicts the New Orleans Hornets will be leaving the Crescent City in the next five years, soon to be followed by the New Orleans Saints. Roberts also talks about the continued viability of Tulane’s intercollegiate sports programs, the BCS, and the effects of the newly-introduced NCAA Academic Progress Rate.

Timothy Burke, in a post I’ve been meaning to link and comment on for over a week, makes an interesting point about curricula: just because something isn’t in the requirements for a degree or major doesn’t mean it won’t be de facto required because of other structural features of the curriculum. I think this is valid in relatively small departments/colleges, or where the offerings are otherwise constrained for odd reasons—both SLU and Duke offer a relative paucity of American politics courses, for vastly different reasons; the offerings in my field at SLU are probably in practice slimmer than they were at Millsaps!

That said, there are some issues to be confronted. I think much of the disappearance of required courses can be laid at the feet of faculty members; many of us—myself included—would rather not teach a gen ed or disciplinary survey like Introduction to American Politics, favoring either a “fun” course or something that coincides more closely with our research interests (or both). And I think it’s fair to say that our evaluations are better in non-mandatory classes, “fun” or not—the mean evals in my Congress course in the spring were probably a full point better than in my other two classes, despite Congress being a significantly harder course—which I think reflects student preferences for more focused and narrow classes on “sexy” topics and creates further incentives for faculty to dismiss the core. Unfortunately, the end result is that you can easily end up with seniors who are trying to wrestle with the big questions but don’t have the basics down—one infamous example was a political science major who, on a senior capstone exam, apparently had no conception of what the United Nations was.

And while I broadly agree that in a liberal arts curriculum (which is what undergraduate political science programs aspire to be part of, whether we’re at a community college, a state university, Berkeley, or Williams College) the mastery of skills is probably more important over the long run the mastery of knowledge, I think we’re shortchanging our students if they escape our curricula without understanding the basics concepts and debates in their major and minor fields.

In case you need more than just the headline, the New Orleans Times-Picayune has thousands of words to reiterate that point for you.

If you believe Billy Hollis, not much, although his practical positions on trade and immigration policy might appeal to some trade unionist elements of the Democratic coalition.

Part II in the Ron Paul series.

I’ve spent more time today than I meant reading through some books I checked out at the library and fiddling with (read: completely overhauling) my Southern Politics syllabus.

The primary challenge of the exercise is keeping the readings manageable after adding two recent books (Woodard’s The New Southern Politics and Lassiter’s The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South) and adding readings from the new edition of Bullock and Rozell’s The New Politics of the Old South; I probably have 2000 pages on the syllabus, even after some chopping. I still need to add some stuff on the 1866 riot, 1874 White League coup attempt, and the 1900 Robert Charles Riots in New Orleans—and not get too bogged down in history while I’m at it.

Hit and Run links a New Republic profile of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, popular with the right’s equivalent of the Netroots but apparently not attracting as many fans from libertarian ranks. Michael Crowley explains why:

But libertarians are a fractious bunch, and some hardcore activists have mixed feelings about the man now carrying their banner. For instance, libertarian purists generally support a laissez-faire government attitude toward abortion and gay marriage, as well as “open border” immigration policies and unfettered free trade. Yet Paul opposes gay marriage, believes states should outlaw abortion, decries high immigration rates, and has called himself “sort of” a protectionist. (These divergences may be explained by Paul’s socially conservative East Texas district, which lies adjacent to Tom DeLay’s former district and which President Bush last carried with 67 percent of the vote. Being pro-choice simply doesn’t fly there.)

As a result, Paul’s candidacy leaves some of his erstwhile libertarian fans cold—particularly the intellectuals who congregate in Washington outfits like the CATO Institute or Reason magazine. “He comes from a more right-wing populist approach,” explains Brian Doherty, a California-based Reason editor and author of Radicals for Capitalism, a history of the libertarian movement. “Culturally, he strikes a lot of the more cosmopolitan libertarians as a yokel.” (Doherty himself is a Paul admirer.)

And, while some libertarians criticize Paul from the left on social issues, others are swiping at him from the right over the war. “Will Libertarianism Survive Ron Paul?” asked one article on the America’s Future Foundation website, before continuing, “Paul’s prominence threatens to make his blame-America instincts the defining characteristic of libertarianism in the public imagination. If libertarianism becomes inextricably associated with radical pacifism, will young people with classically liberal instincts be discouraged from serious political engagement?”

The question facing this libertarian-minded voter who’s likely to vote in the GOP presidential primary: if I wasn’t inclined to vote for Pat Buchanan, why would I vote for Ron Paul, given that on almost all the issues that matter their positions are virtually indistinguishable?

I just added reCAPTCHA to the blog, which should cut back on some of the comment spam issues around here immensely; this solution means your commenting also has the nice side-effect of helping to digitize old books that can’t be OCRed reliably by computers.

Since this should eliminate the spam problem, I’m also going to allow comments on posts up to four weeks old; the previous limit was 10 days, which might have been a tad short. Please send me an email if something is broken; my testing was reasonably thorough (considering it only took me about 45 minutes to add the code, since there wasn't much to do at my end), but you never know on these things.

Thanks to Adam Rossi-Kessel (via Planet Debian) for the tip.

An anonymous commenter on the rumor mills posted a link to EconJobMarket.org, which seems like a semi-promising attempt to create a service that partially bridges the gap between online job listing sites and credentials services like Interfolio.

To my mind, the ideal site would function more-or-less like Interfolio from the candidate’s point of view: you submit a virtual “packet” for each job, which can be accessed by the receiving department as a web page, an email with every item in the packet as an attachment, or (for departments in the dark ages) a paper file sent to the department.

Indeed, Interfolio functions like this now, but hardly any political science departments are registered to receive packets on there (only one job I applied for last year, at New College of Florida, accepted electronic applications via Interfolio). My expectation is that EconJobMarket.org will have similar problems achieving buy-in from departments, as would any political science equivalent not coordinated by APSA.

Meanwhile, APSA‘s eJobs system has about 80% of the needed infrastructure, but as far as I can tell the association has no interest in saving job candidates and departments time and money by finishing the job, even though I’m sure they could get people on the market to pony up $50+ a year for such a service.

I belatedly took the advice of Frequent Commenter Scott and changed the photo on my professional page while I was doing my regular updates. It’s not quite this casual, but I do have to maintain at least a modicum of dignity.

Probably the most prominent feature of the past 30–40 years of American politics has been the near-simultaneous rise in party unity in the House and the evolution of aggressive majority-party control of the chamber.

To wit, the Democrats under Nancy Pelosi are behaving more-or-less identically with the Republicans under Newt Gingrich. John J. Pitney, Jr., chronicles the “old-boss, same-boss” dynamic here, with special demerits for Pelosi’s would-be right-hand-man, Jim John Murtha, who was given a pass on violating House rules on decorum after threatening retribution against a GOP lawmaker who proposed stripping funding from a pork project in Murtha’s constituency.

That isn’t to say that the majority party controls everything, even in the House; the bipartisan backers of bringing home the bacon appear to be behind this move to relocate pork-stuffing to conference committees, which will immunize pork provisions from being amended out of legislation. The Porkbusters Weenies™ are nervous, but as a political scientist, I’m just surprised it took the House that long to decide to lard up appropriations in conference.

There’s nothing like the impending showing of one’s apartment to motivate some long-overdue spring cleaning.

Now if I could only figure out a way to create myself some similar incentive structures for doing research I might actually have a productive summer.

As it is commencement day at SLU, it is an appropriate time to say congratulations to all of my former students at Millsaps, Duke, and SLU who have received their degrees this month. I hope that none of my former Ole Miss students were still working on their degrees—but if so, congratulations to them too!

One unanticipated side-effect of wearing academic regalia in public (and having a relatively youthful appearance, to boot) is being congratulated for having graduated—three times, in total.

Perhaps I should have just basked in the glory rather than insisting on correcting everyone, particularly since to the layperson the distinction between a doctoral gown and the vestments of new graduates is mostly invisible (and in the case of new PhDs, nonexistent save for the hood coloring and designs, which represent SLU for the graduates but the degree-granting institutions for faculty).

Those big brawls in the Taiwanese parliament? As fake as Jan Levinson’s new breasts.

þ: Battlepanda, who suspected it all along.