I spoke to the local Optimist Club at lunch today about the 2004 elections in Mississippi and nationwide; I had a few interesting questions and I think it well. Now if I can just get myself on TV I can be a media star like my personal hero Larry Sabato.

Scott Althaus and Devon Largio have an interesting article in this month’s issue of PS: Political Science and Politics that advances an alternative (and, in my mind, more convincing) explanation of why the public links Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks than the “Bush lied” meme. It’s only five pages, so, ATSRTWT.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger has an interesting story based on an interview with Judge Neal Biggers, Jr., who presided over the Ayers desegregation case. Interestingly, a shutdown of both MVSU and MUW was on the table in the mid-1990s, but Biggers rejected that as part of the solution because he doubted the College Board’s sincerity in planning to shut them down. He also echos a point that I’ve made repeatedly over the years (and which has been a major roadblock to finalizing the settlement):

“The remedy for the situation was not to enhance segregated facilities, but to desegregate the facilities. Some of the plaintiffs, it seemed, wanted equal, segregated facilities,’’ [Biggers] said.

Greg Ransom writes:

STEVE CHAPMAN opposes the war and opposes the death penalty, so he’s voting Democrat for President for the first time in his life. He also quotes David Boaz of the CATO Institute, “Republicans wouldn’t give Kerry every bad thing he wants, and they do give Bush every bad thing he wants.” Many anti-war and pro- civil liberties libertarians are refusing to vote for Bush. A good many of these folks have always voted a straight Libertarian Party ticket. Now some are switching tickets for John Kerry. Passing strange. All I can figure is that more than a few became libertarians out of the nightmare of the Vietman experience, and now some are Coming Home to anti-war leader John Kerry. That, at least, is a first try at a plausible hypothesis. Let me know if you have a better one.

Well, if your choice is between two nanny-statist fucktards, but only one of them (in one’s mind) cares about civil liberties, I’d go for the pro-civil-liberties fucktard personally. At least, if I were confined to voting for a fucktard, or were the sort of person who used that word in casual conversation.

Paul Glastris at Political Animal floats a plan for National Service.

Dammit, if there’s one issue* that we liberals should be in 100% agreement with the libertarians on, it’s conscription. Unlike taxation, conscription (whether or not it offers non-military service as an option) really is tantamount to slavery.

If we really have the need to fight another damn war, the fair thing to do is to raise military salaries until we have enough volunteers, and raise taxes and/or cut other government services to pay the increased salaries. One generation should not be expected to bear the entire burden.

Jeff Quinton notes that an investigation shows that around 60,000 voters appear on the voter rolls in both North Carolina and South Carolina.

One thing that always strikes me about the “double registration” stories is that most of the issues are clerical ones; for example, I registered to vote down here when I moved to Jackson, and I don’t have the faintest clue whether or not the county clerk bothered to tell the folks up in Oxford to invalidate my registration there. For that matter, I might still be on the voting books in Florida or Tennessee.

Radley Balko and Tyler Cowen both explain why they won’t be voting for Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik. Balko:

I’m sorry, but I’m just not convinced that either Badnarik or the LP speaking on behalf of libertarianism to a national audience with limited exposure to the ideology would ultimately be good for libertarianism, the philosophy.

This is a guy who gives seminars advocating that the federal income tax is optional, who refuses to use zip codes, who says he’d blow up the UN building “after giving occupants a week to vacate,” who has equated FDR to Hitler, and who suggested we chain convicted felons to their beds until their muscles atrophy.

It gets worse. For more, check here and here.

I’ll gladly cast my ballot with the LP when the LP offers a candidate who isn’t an embarassment to libertarianism.

Cowen:

Nonetheless I must offer p = 0 when I ponder the chance that I vote for Badnarik. If I don’t like a picture, I’m not going to hang it on my wall. I gladly supported Ed Clark in 1980, let’s hope that the LP once again puts up a serious candidate.

A pointed non-endorsement of two candidates for president of the United States, and an announcement of the slate of electors for president this half of Signifying Nothing will—despite grave reservations—be voting for. And, perhaps most importantly, a disclaimer that should be attached to all serious scholars’ endorsements or non-endorsements of candidates for political office.

Since when have Methodists decided to take up the mantle of papal excommunication? The mind boggles.

Stuart Benjamin has the goods. Interestingly, Kull et al. omit one very plausible explanation why Kerry supporters are more “correct” than Bush supporters: Kerry simply, by sheer coincidence (or deliberate plotting—nobody fields am opinion poll in which they don’t have some expectation of the marginals), shares the perceived positions of the poll majorities, and there really isn’t much between-group variance on those points.

One might also point out that the question selection seems deliberately designed to elicit “known false” perceptions by Bush supporters and that some of the definitions—for example, “a major WMD program”—are in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, Iraq did have a major WMD program in the 1980s and 1990s, all credible intelligence information suggested that program continued underground in some capacity after UN inspectors left in 1998, there is at least some evidence that elements of that WMD program were transferred to Syria during the 2003 conflict, and it is crystal-clear that Saddam Hussein’s ambitions to have “a major WMD program” were just on hold until the Franco-Russian alliance was able to dismantle the remaining sanctions on Iraq.

Finally, it’s entirely possible the whole exercise captures non-attitudes galore. My 2004 MPSA paper suggests (admittedly, using a model that needs some additional work, once I learn how to do latent class analysis) that perceptions of threat from the Saddam Hussein regime were largely the product of partisan attitudes, rather than having an independent origin.

Pieter Dorsman returns to the theme of US-Canadian relations and counterterrorism, and—as always—makes some very good points worth reading.

Dan Drezner and that terrorist group that keeps beheading people in Iraq have both come out for John Kerry. Meanwhile, Scipio voted for “moonbat lunatic” Michael Badnarik.

Eric Muller is speechless. I think it could be worse: “One Nation Not Under The U.N.”

Incidentally, photoshops welcome...

Taegan Goddard wonders if voters are stupid; Andrew Cline replies:

I do not believe that citizens are lazy or stupid. The problems of the electorate are multiple and complex. But let me suggest one possibility among many why Americans appear to know so little about their own government and fail to participate in its running: We are fat and happy.

There are a number of different perspectives on the importance of political knowledge; in particular, the “rational public” perspective of Samuel Popkin and the “affective intelligence” perspective advanced by a number of scholars suggest that political knowledge is relatively unimportant, although there are many scholars who challenge both theses. That said, I reach a roughly similar conclusion to Andrew’s on the last page of my dissertation:

[T]he desirability of a society in which political issues are so critically important that they require the attentiveness of large segments of the public seems relatively low; consider highly polarized societies like contemporary Israel and Venezuela, where it is unlikely there are any voters without opinions on the Palestinian peace process or on the soft-authoritarian Chávez regime, respectively, where the outcome of elections is literally a question of life or death in many voters’ minds. Perhaps we should count our blessings that the most salient mainstream debates in the United States today are over the future of entitlement programs for the elderly, the level of restriction that will be placed on abortion, and where and under what conditions same-sex relationships will be acknowledged by the government—and that our pluralist system permits voters to focus their interests on particular policies that directly interest them. This suggests that rather than creating institutions that might lead to a more conflicted or polarized society, the interest of democracy would be best served by giving citizens the tools to participate in public debate, but leaving it up to them whether their participation is strictly necessary. (132)

This also is another excellent opportunity to pimp the Signifying Nothing book of the month.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger drops some quotes from Republican ex-presidents on us compiled by Richard W. Dortch. Identifying the glaring problem with his article is left as an exercise for the reader.

Messrs. Baude and Dilts seem to have the better of their argument with Josh Chafetz over whether or not voting for non-viable candidates in plurality elections is, in fact, voting; that behavior may not be rational qua Downs, but it is nonetheless casting a vote—albeit, perhaps, not a decisive one in the two-party contest. I also tend to think that expressive ballots may, nonetheless, have instrumental effects; one suspects Bill Clinton and Congress might have cared quite a bit less about balancing the budget in the mid-90s had not Ross Perot received approximately 20% of the vote in the 1992 presidential election.

And, for those who are missing it, there’s a lively debate over same-sex marriage going on in comments below.

Matt Stinson kindly gives a detailed exegesis of the Democratic corrollary to Lawrence’s Cardinal Rule of Evaluation of the Bush Administration, which begins thusly:

If there is a single phenomenon that links together political rhetoric from Bush critics this election, it’s their willingness—dare I say obsession—to find in any and all events disadvantageous to Democratic fortunes the hand of Karl Rove.

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

David Adesnik asks:

Why not give one electoral vote to the candidate with the most votes in each congressional district (plus two electoral votes for the state-wide front-runner)?

Because I don’t think America needs yet another incentive for state legislatures and courts to engage in partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts.

For what it’s worth, I favor (if there needs to be anything at all, a point I’m somewhat dubious on) “proportional-lite”; allocate the representative-based electors based on proportional representation, and give the two Senate-based electors to the plurality winner. This has the nice bonus of retaining the psychological effect of Duverger’s Law, as winning the plurality is guaranteed to gain a big bonus.

Of course, I think it’d be fun to run unpledged electors and get back to the system the Framers intended, just to see everyone whine about it. (There seem to be provisions permitting separate slates of unpledged electors in Mississippi law, at least, but it’s unclear how you’d qualify such a slate.)

Stephen Green has seen the light; I officially welcome him to the dark side of the force, in which the spectre of Larry Sabato is exorcised from our dreams and we content ourselves with the knowledge that we don’t know the unknowable (þ: OTB).

But, if you absolutely insist on your electoral college wargaming ways, Andrea Moro’s site is at least fun to look at, plus it uses Monte Carlos for the satiation of your inner gambling jones.

Heh (þ: TigerHawk).

Pat Robertson talked to Paula Zahn today, and boy did he let loose a doozy:

“And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ‘Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.’ ”

Robertson said the president then told him, “Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.”

Now, I suppose Robertson could be completely and totally demented by this point (I mean, he is the guy that blamed 9/11 on gay people, and I doubt his mental faculties are on the rebound); either way, it’s fairly clear that at least half of the people participating in this alleged conversation had no grip on reality.

Tim Sandefur writes:

[Robert] Bork is contemporary conservatism. This is the great tragedy of conservatism. ...

The cure, you see, for the misery of homosexuals in a society which condemns homosexuality, is to ratchet up the persecution. This is the logic of Torquemada, for Christsake! How can this man be taken seriously? And yet he is not only taken seriously; he is the intellectual leader of today’s conservatives.

I don’t personally have a great handle on the whole “nature versus nurture” argument myself (either way, I’m wired up to be attracted to women who invariably treat me like a doormat, but that’s neither here nor there), but if there’s even the possibility that homosexuality is an innate trait, I find the Borkian conviction that being homosexual is legitimate grounds for persecution to be loathsome. And, even if homosexuality is a chosen behavior, I think notions of individual autonomy in consensual activity far outweigh any aggregate community interest in discouraging that activity.

Today’s New York Times provides more evidence that the Selective Service Administration has way too much time on its hands. Choice quote from the article:

In 1987, Congress enacted a law requiring the Selective Service to develop a plan for “registration and classification” of health care professionals essential to the armed forces.

One wonders what Senator Kerry’s vote on this piece of legislation was… I’ve tracked it down to Senate roll call #384 in the first session of the 100th Congress (on what became P.L. 100–180), but I don’t have the roll calls for that Congress at my fingertips at home (where I am today, since it’s fall break).

Steven Taylor writes:

[I]t is a mystery to me as well as to how any voter could be undecided at this juncture.

I think there are essentially two classes of undecided voters: the uninformed undecideds, who (more likely than not) will probably stay away from the polls in the end, unless some element of the political zeitgeist manages to work its way into the cerebellum; and the informed undecideds (probably a smaller category), who are essentially ambivalent between the choices on offer in this presidential election, but who will probably vote nonetheless.

Ironically, even though I know with almost absolute certainty my vote isn’t going to be pivotal in this election, I’m still vacillating between three options:

• Voting for Bush, because (a) I don’t want to spend the next four years hearing Democrats whine about Bush not winning the popular vote again and (b) despite his screw-ups, he’s the only serious candidate dedicated to sticking it out in Iraq.
• Voting for Kerry, because (a) Bush deserves to be punished for his screw-ups, (b) gridlock might lead to more fiscal discipline and none of Kerry’s promises being enacted into law, and (c) my current colleagues probably expect me to vote for him, and I need all the help I can get when it comes to landing the tenure-track job here.
• Voting for Badnarik, because even though he’s a complete and total lunatic and completely wrong on Iraq, it would send a (marginal) directional message to both parties that they can’t take libertarian votes for granted.

There’s more on this theme from the lovely and talented Jane Galt.

Update: Additional thoughts (on Badnarik, at least) abound from Will Baude and Will Wilkinson, both quasi-inspired by Matt Yglesias, while Carina of An Inclination to Criticize supports the “honking bozo” Badnarik.

I previously posted on this theme ten months ago, and that post has much to recommend it… even if I did not quite predict John Kerry’s descent into Deanesque moonbattery at the time.

Now, the heavy lifting begins after the final end of the Ayers lawsuit. Personally, I was never very clear on what the plaintiffs actually wanted (I suspect they would have been content with a segregated, “separate but truly equal” system), but in the end it ended up as more of a desegregation case than an equal financing case.

I tend to think that this state needs to focus its limited resources on K-12 education and community colleges, providing scholarships for the truly needy to attend four-year institutions while making the middle and upper class pay something close to “retail” for university educations, and shutting down or privatizing the non-doctoral institutions (Alcorn State, Delta State, Mississippi Valley State, and Mississippi University for Women). Unfortunately I think Ayers is a hindrance, not a help, toward those goals.