There’s a metaphor about holes and digging that I think Jim DeMint needs to seriously consider paying attention to. Better yet, the partisan nitwits at Redstate are still backing the guy.

Spin rule in effect.

Jayson Javitz finds shocking evidence of opinion polls themselves being biased (þ: Viking Pundit). I’ll leave it to Signifying Nothing’s capable readership to identify the problems with this analysis. Free hint: Javitz has “six more examples” that didn’t fit in the limited space in the margin, or something.

A couple of words for my friends at Redstate: bad timing.

Gays and lesbians should not be allowed to teach in public schools, Republican Jim DeMint said Sunday in a U.S. Senate debate.

The remark came late in the first debate between DeMint and Democrat Inez Tenenbaum — a testy and acrimonious hour that broke little new ground on their positions on most issues.

DeMint, a Greenville congressman, said the government should not endorse homosexuality and “folks teaching in school need to represent our values.”

The good news is, at least someone’s patriotism was questioned in the debate. (Couldn’t have a good debate without some patriotism-questioning.)

Tenenbaum, the state education superintendent, called DeMint’s position “un-American.”

DeMint said after the debate that he would not require teachers to admit to being gay, but if they were “openly gay, I do not think that they should be teaching at public schools.”

Tenenbaum later told reporters that “the private life of our teachers should stay private. I was shocked to hear him say that.”

And we have a nominee for “bad paraphrase of the day”:

College of Charleston political scientist Bill Moore said DeMint’s position would be unconstitutional…. [I didn’t truncate the quote; the ellipses are in the original. Go figure.]

No, DeMint’s position isn’t unconstitutional. A law that implemented DeMint’s position might be—presumably, Lawrence v. Texas and Roemer v. Evans would be controlling precedent, but I don’t think the Supreme Court has ruled that employment discrimination against homosexuals is unconstitutional.

The most amazing thing about this whole situation: Congress has virtually nothing to do with the hiring practices of local school districts (which are solely state and local responsibilities, even under cooperative federalism), so why on earth was this even being debated in the first place? Sheesh.

Oh, and for the donors who contributed to DeMint’s campaign via the Redstate effort, I have three more words: ask for refunds.

Again… there be spin below the fold.

Matt Stinson has some interesting commentary on both George Soros’ misleading BlogAd campaign and his distinct lack of popularity in east Asia. Matt also laments his inability to watch Meet The Press; I’d suggest some sort of P2P solution, but one suspects the popularity of Sunday talkers is a little lower than that of Buffy among the tweener and hard-up set that dominates filesharing culture.

Well, I watched the debate tonight. Random thoughts after brief reflection follow.

To those of you who want to take my advice below on refusing to be “spun”—don’t click on the “Read More” link.

Both Katherine R and Sebastian Holdsclaw of Obsidian Wings are rightly horrified that the so-called “9/11 commission bill” includes provisions that may lead to the institutionalization of the abuses that Maher Arar was subjected to by Syrian authorities, with the apparent complicity of both the United States and Canadian governments.

This isn’t a “Republican” or “Democrat” problem—most members of both parties are going to vote for this bill, because they want to look like they’re “doing something” about terrorism. But this is something that is simply unconscionable. Let your senators and representatives know that this is not how America is supposed to do things and is completely unacceptable.

There’s more on the bill in today’s Washington Post.

As others have mentioned, it appears that the Montréal Expos are headed to Washington. But, while I’m generally not in favor of Congress meddling in D.C.‘s business (and think some sort of resolution needs to be made to the district residents’ lack of congressional representation), I think I could make an exception for a law blocking the district government’s ill-conceived and completely unnecessary handout package for the team. You don’t have to believe me; believe AEI’s Scott Wallstein, or Cato’s Doug Bandow, to name just two experts, virtually all of whom have concluded that stadium subsidies don’t lead to worthwhile economic benefits—and, particularly in the case of D.C., divert resources that could be better spent on serious social ills.

Here’s one for the “credit where credit is due” department: New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney won’t be partaking of Spin Alley after the debate tomorrow night, a move applauded by Ryan Pitts of The Dead Parrot Society and Jay Rosen. I agree with both; in fact, I’d almost take it a step further. Ryan writes:

A debate like this is supposed to be about the candidates persuading the voters, each of whom needs to individually assess whose policies and attitudes they’d like to see for the next four years.

Ryan emphasizes the word voters, but I almost think the emphasis should be on the phrase individually assess. Spin, “news analysis,” and the like tend to get in the way of that process, rather than informing it. So my advice to voters would be to watch the debate, and then switch off your TV and not read the reports and op-eds about it the next few days. And, if you can’t spare the time, then reading the reports and op-eds (and blog posts!) is worthless anyway—the entire point of the debate process is to give unfiltered insights into the candidates, and putting an interlocutor between yourself and the candidates will distort the image.

In fairness to Ryan, he’s speaking from the journalist’s perspective—but choosing not to be spun is something the voter can do just as easily. Switching off Matthews or Hannity or Crossfire is just as important for the voter as Nagourney avoiding “spin alley” is for the reporter.

Mr. Mike is apparently back in business at Half-Bakered and has a little project for his readers to help out with this fall. I think I speak on both my and Brock’s behalf in welcoming Mike back.

I’ve been trying to come up with a decent essay exam question for my constitutional law class tying Korematsu together with the whole debate over Michelle Malkin’s book. I tend to agree with the assessment that Malkin is incorrect, although I do it in the “fact-free” perspective that encourages me to trust experts like Eric Muller rather than from the perspective of actually having read the book.

The slippery bit to me is that—reading between the lines of Muller’s snarkiness and Malkin’s disingenuity—Malkin seems to argue that the indefinite detention of some Americans of Islamic faith would be legitimate, and that other forms of racial profiling targeted at all Muslim-Americans would be legitimate, but full-scale removal of Muslim-American populations wouldn’t, and I’m not sure Korematsu speaks to that. In my mind, though, Korematsu is bad law anyway, and I don’t think anyone other than Thomas and possibly Rehnquist would support reaffirming it today—Scalia, to judge from his partial dissent in Hamdi, would probably be viciously opposed.

Anyway, I’ve basically concluded the question is a bust and I’ll have to move on to ask something more fruitful about some other cases. Since I already have a Hamdi question I think Korematsu is no great loss—and a clever student or three will probably work it in without my asking, anyway.

I’m beginning to be increasingly fascinated by a certain strand of argument in the blogosphere. It started with Andrew Sullivan’s thoroughly non-sensical attempts to argue that conservatism necessarily required support for gay marriage, detoured through lectures by non-Christians to Christians about the necessity of their support for a particular American political party, and may have reached its apogee with a series of posts at Crooked Timber (made, incidentally, by people who make no pretense of being libertarian) alleging that any libertarian who supports the war in Iraq isn’t a libertarian.

What I find utterly fascinating about the last is that it originates from the longstanding view from left-liberals that the “wrong” (read “pro-war”) libertarians—folks like Glenn Reynolds, Virginia Postrel, Colby Cosh, and the libertarian-leaning Samizdatans—have dominated the blogosphere at the expense of the “right” (read “anti-war”) libertarians like Julian Sanchez, Jim Henley, and (never explicitly stated, perhaps because he actually says nice things about capitalism) Radley Balko. My general view is that expressed by Guy Herbert:

I was under the impression that libertarianism is a political orientation (opposite: authoritarianism) rather than a coherent ideological position.

Granted, I think there are people (Objectivists, for example, or the Libertarian Party) who conceive of libertarianism as a “pure” ideology, untainted by concerns motivated by the real world, but I don’t think most self-identified libertarians are among them. Of course, when the primary goal of one’s posting on libertarianism isn’t to analyze that political orientation, but rather to delegitimize it, I can see why one would want to hold it up to higher standards of conformity than liberalism or conservatism would be subjected to.

Quote of the day, regarding a group of Mississippi Democrats who plan to endorse George W. Bush on Monday:

“Most of them are has-beens,’’ [Bill] Wheeler said of the Mississippi Democrats for Bush. “They are not your hard core Democrats. They are flip-floppers. They blow with the wind.’’

While Wheeler may be accurate in that regard (a point I made when a similar group endorsed Haley Barbour in 2003), I wonder if it’s all that wise for a Kerry campaign official to be using terms like “flip-floppers” in public.

I read Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (previously mentioned here) last night—and, for a book by political scientists, it’s both exceptionally well-written and probably accessible to a general college-educated audience. What may be the most compelling thing about the book is that even though I knew pretty much all the evidence that was outlined by the authors, I was still floored by the evidence Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope bring to bear.

The core arguments will be (hopefully) relatively familiar to readers of this weblog: while political elites are increasingly polarized, the populace as a whole isn’t (and, if anything, are tending to converge on issue positions over time); the “red state-blue state” dichotomy is false; and the appearance of mass polarization is due largely to the relatively stark choices faced by voters today.

For good measure, the authors throw in some spatial voting theory to show that the increasing role of moral issues in voting behavior are due to changes in the political positions of the candidates themselves (or at least perceptions of those positions) rather than changes in the electorate. And they attribute these problems largely to the “amateurization” of political parties, which (they argue) have become rallying points for “purists” at the expense of moderation and the Downsian pursuit of the median voter—a phenomenon anyone who’s witnessed the vitriol hurled at the likes of John McCain and Zell Miller by their “fellow partisans” will surely attest to. The authors also delve into the pathologies of local politics, which tend to be even more captive to the whims of narrow interests.

Fiorina (writing alone, perhaps to insulate his more junior co-authors from having to defend these propositions on the job market) has a three-pronged prescription that he argues would lessen elite polarization: an end to partisan gerrymanders, opening the primary process to wider participation (and abolishing the use of party caucuses), and increasing voter turnout.

It’s a quick read—I read it in 90 minutes, although to be fair it is largely material from my field, so it might take the non-expert two hours. All in all I strongly recommend it to any serious student of politics (including, by definition, our readership).

Via Eric Muller, I ended up at the blog of Vox Day, self-described “Christian libertarian,” who is currently taking a lot of heat from conservative defenders of the new Ann Coulter over his challenge to her shoddy scholarship in her book In Defense of Internment.

In a September 15 entry, I read this:

If we're very, very lucky, in another 40 years we'll hear songs by female pop stars demanding the limiting of suffrage to productive, property-owning men of a certain age. Of course, the depths to which we'll have to sink in order for most people to realize how disastrous universal "democracy" has been for the nation will probably be more than a little unpleasant, and the chances that the masses will turn towards a dictatorial demagogue instead are probably, oh, around 666 to 1, but it's still nice to contemplate a potential silver lining in the massive black cumulonimbus looming in our collective (and collectivist) future.

Maybe Vox Day should get together with Alec Rawls. If they could get past the question of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, they'd have so much to discuss.

doesn’t mean he isn’t right.

And, no, I’m not just annoyed because Mr. Simmins belittles my profession…

The Washington Post editorial board rightly castigates both Bush and Kerry for their failure to speak publically about the need for a real democratic transition in Pakistan; coupled with events in Russia and the (quite possibly invented-from-thin-air by Robert Novak) Iraq withdrawal trial balloon, it’s not been a great week for democracy.

Professor Bainbridge, Sebastian Holdsclaw, Kevin Drum, and Matt Yglesias all agree that gerrymandering sucks. No argument there. Now let’s see what actually can be done about it…

Words fail me:

Visitors to next month’s Mississippi State Fair may gawk at their reflections in the Fun House, witness the Mississippi State Championship Mule Pull or shake hands with the key suspect in the Klan’s 1964 killings of three civil rights workers.

Learned lawyer Richard Barrett, who heads the white supremacist organization known as the Nationalist Movement, said Edgar Ray Killen has agreed to make an appearance at his organization’s booth in the Agricultural Building. Barrett plans to gather signatures there in support of Killen, who is under investigation but has never faced state murder charges in the June 21, 1964, deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

“He can possibly sign autographs and meet the crowd,” said Barrett, whose booth will be between those for the secretary of state’s office and the Mississippi Library Commission.

Both Joshua of Sandbox and Lemuel have picked up my quip about John Kerry left in comments at Dan Drezner’s place a week or so ago:

On the other hand, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Kerry (accused of flip-flopping) doesn’t actually flip-flop; he just simultaneously occupies multiple policy positions with a variable probability density function over policy space. So he doesn’t flip-flop; he Heisenbergs. In other words, he wasn’t for the war before he was against it; he was for it while he was against it.

Glad y’all enjoyed it! However, it now appears that Jay Tea of Wizbang beat me to the analogy.

Slashdot has posted its reader Q&A with Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik. Hilarity ensues.

Commerical Appeal writer Bartholomew Sullivan does his best to put meat on the bones of claims that Republicans are planning an active campaign to “disenfranchise” black voters, but fails miserably, beginning with the subhead of his piece:

Paranoia strikes deep among black voters

“Paranoia” is defined as “a psychological disorder characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur.” In other words, the Commercial Appeal is essentially accusing black voters of being collectively insane. But never fear: the CA is on the case to, er, ease those fears, perhaps. Sullivan goes on:

Although Bush-Cheney campaign officials say the perception is baseless and that efforts are under way to further diversify the GOP, the strictly nonpartisan vote-protection effort is aimed at thwarting tactics that are perceived to benefit Republicans by targeting black voters likely to vote for the Democratic ticket. [emphasis added]

Strictly nonpartisan? Of course, it’s led by the ACLU and NAACP, two groups known for their wide, bipartisan membership.

Mississippi, “for obvious historical reasons,” will have teams of poll watchers on the ground as one of 14 “Priority 1” states, said Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law public policy counsel Kim Alton. Arkansas and Missouri are also “Priority 1” concerns.

In other states, including lower-priority Tennessee, the coalition is asking people with voting concerns to report them at (866) OUR-VOTE – (866) 687–8683.

Nothing like “obvious historical reasons” to want to oversee a vote, though one would suspect that Tennessee might also have some of those “obvious historical reasons,” being a state that had Jim Crow and all.

[The efforts of these groups are] all in response to the perception that not-so-subtle efforts – and at least one overt plan – are under way to keep black voters, who traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates, from having their preferences counted.

After that passage, one wonders if the purpose of this effort is to dispel or foment paranoia. Sullivan does go out of his way to quote a few moderately sensible figures, but manages to close with this quotation:

Asked about any such [voter intimidation] efforts in the Mid-South, Eliott M. Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way, said: “We’ve seen very little from there or anywhere else in terms of concrete signs of plans for voter suppression and intimidation. But that’s not unusual because these plans are designed to operate under cover until Election Day, when they’re sprung.”

One suspects these “plans” are about as concrete and likely to be made manifest as John Kerry’s “secret plan” to end the war in Iraq.

The left half of the blogosphere is in a tizzy over suggestions that Gallup is “oversampling” Republicans—allegedly deliberately, apparently since these folks think Frank Gallup thinks it’s a smart idea to destroy his business to help a particular party win the election.

The “oversampling” could have two, rather more innocent, explanations:

1. By random chance, Gallup may have gotten a sample that is more Republican than usual; the 95% margin of error for the poll given the sample size of 767 (for “likely voters”) is around ±3.5%—for “registered voters,” it’s around ±3.1%.
2. Partisanship may have “moved” as a result of the campaign. While early empirical studies such as The American Voter posited that partisanship was causally prior to vote choice, more recent research suggests that citizens’ partisanship changes over the course of a political campaign—people who are inclined to vote for Bush tend to become more Republican, while people who are inclined to vote for Kerry tend to become more Democratic. Thus the incidence of partisanship in the electorate may have actually moved in a Republican direction.

I’d also suggest that the incidence of “independent” voters appears to be relatively inflated, and probably includes a large number of voters with fairly strong partisan leanings; it is socially desirable to self-identify as an “independent,” and thus the polls (not just Gallup—all of them) tend to show more independent voters than truly exist, as “true” independents make up less than 10% of the contemporary elected. The NES-style “branching” partisanship measure appears to conform more reliably to the actual incidence of partisanship and partisan behavior in the electorate.

Ah, nothing like politics in the Sunshine State (þ Tim Blair):

Politics in Gainesville turned rough and tumble Thursday night when, police say, a social behavior [sic] sciences instructor – a Democrat – punched the chairman of the Alachua County Republican Executive Committee in the face. ...

[David] McCally is a part-time instructor in social and behavioral sciences at Santa Fe Community College who started in January, confirmed college spokesman Larry Keen. He will be “removed” from the classroom pending an administrative review on Monday, he said. [minor antecedent reference problem: is Keen being removed?]

A cursory Google search suggests that Dr. McCally, 55, is a history professor who’s lived the peripatetic life of a Ph.D. (see “Adjunct, Invisible”) at a variety of institutions in Florida, and is apparently the author of The Everglades: An Environmental History, which appears to have been received with some acclaim. Interestingly, he is not listed as a faculty member at SFCC, but is listed as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Florida and as having a Ph.D. from that institution.