A few links for those with an interest in goings-on in Canuckistan. Peaktalk is disappointed that the Conservatives have moved to the left on health care, thus forestalling a much-needed national debate on Canada’s health care system. Meanwhile, Collin May of Innocents Abroad is pretty much flooding the zone with current poll results and analysis; barring a major reversal in the next 3 weeks, it’s looking more and more like the Tories will win a plurality and be able to form a government with the support of the Bloc Québecois (as outlined here)—inspired debate or no.

Also of potential interest (and joining the blogroll, at least through the end of the month): Alexandra Taylor, who comes recommended by Colby Cosh, and Points of Information, a group blog recommended by Alexandra.

A direct quote from Peter Jennings, not more than one minute ago:

We’ve kept half an eye on the [hockey] game, but we’re very, very deeply involved in President Reagan’s death.

Sheesh, I knew the media was liberal, but I think that’s just going too far…

The inevitable has happened: Ronald Reagan has passed away. Dan Drezner invites comment on Reagan’s legacy—personally, I think his greatest contribution was rehabilitating the Republican Party after the twin disasters of Watergate and Ford’s pardon of Nixon, to the extent that the GOP was able to survive the scandals of the 1980s with far less damage.

Vance of Begging to Differ summarizes Paul Krugman’s latest column with the following two-line statement:

Bush really doesn’t care about the explosion of federal spending or the possible consequences. He does care, though, about getting reelected.

In other words, first-term presidents, like members of Congress, are “single-minded seekers of reelection,” to borrow David Mayhew’s classic phrase.

Meanwhile, Alex Knapp links to an Onion piece that pretty much summarizes how I suspect about 75% of the voting public feels about November.

Both Dan Drezner and Amanda Butler (Dan’s research assistant) respond to some grade-A dipshittery from commenters with ideological axes to grind who are pissed off that the empirical results of Dan’s survey don’t comport with their normative views of how the universe ought to be.

More thoughts on libertarianism and the efficacy of the Libertarian Party from Will Baude, who is looking for some sort of cross-party soft-libertarian caucus to take up the mantle of advancing libertarianism. He also writes:

I’d also like to see a group with the microphone and legitimacy of a national party that didn’t run fringe candidates but rather conducted in-depth research into the voting records and announced positions of candidates in every house, senate, and presidential race, and announced how closely they hewed to libertarian orthodoxy (on those things—unlike, say, war—where such an orthodoxy exists).

The Republican Liberty Caucus does this—or at least did this for a while—by compiling two “interest group” ratings for legislators—one each for economic and personal liberty.* Not sure if they still do it… anyway, I used the ratings in at least one iteration of the now-legendary impeachment paper. Unfortunately you can’t find RLC publicity standing on the street outside their headquarters, much less in the halls of power or the public discourse; however, I think that Republicans who want to push their party in a more libertarian direction won’t find a better place to put their money.

Doug Allen wonders what the best future approach for the Libertarian Party is. In the comments on Allen’s post, Skip Oliva writes:

The LP’s flaw is that they focus exclusively on electoral politics, which is a high-cost, low-yield means of communicating your message when you’re a third-party. I’d like to see more LP activism in things like administrative law (which is where I focus my attention) and areas that aren’t the focus of popular and media attention, areas that could use some principles to shine a light on government abuse.

I think the larger question is whether a political party (e.g. the LP) is the best vehicle to advance those goals in the contemporary U.S. political system. I have previously written why I think not; rather, I think the best front is to support organizations like the Institute for Justice and the Cato Institute that work on the legal and interest articulation side of the spectrum. Groups like Cato and IJ have institutional advantages over political parties for pursuing goals outside the electoral process—most notably, the ability to attract tax-deductable donations.

Sean Hackbarth has some thoughts on Allen’s post as well.

James Joyner finds large gatherings of bikers to be something of an inconvenience but nonetheless, in this instance, in service of a worthy cause. He’s got a link to a WaPo account of the Rolling Thunder biker rally, which I suppose will be nothing new to those of us with Harley aficionados in the family. I was previously unaware that Rolling Thunder made political endorsements, however.

Dan Drezner takes a look at the results of the survey of the blog-reading habits of media professionals he conducted with Henry Farrell, and has some surprising findings.

One minor caveat to his analysis: I don’t think the Daily Kos counts as a “newly emerging blog,” as it’s been around longer than I have, although the current “community” format for it inspired by Kuro5hin (and powered by the same software, Scoop) is relatively new.

Like Brock, I can’t be excited about the Libertarians’ nomination of Michael Badnarik. And his enthusiasm for non-alcoholic beer makes me wonder about some other possible faults he may have—like, perhaps, support for the designated-hitter rule or liking the taste of broccoli.

Elsewhere: MNSlog misidentified Brock as a Republican (thanks for correcting it ☺), Q and O considers this evidence that the LP is a collection of “losertarians,” and Brian J. Noggle reminds us that he and his wife met Badnarik earlier this year in a basement. Oh, and some dude named Glenn Reynolds has some links. Heh.

I learned from Mike Hollihan that the Libertarian party has nominated Michael Badnarik for president.

So despite my threats, I won’t be voting Libertarian in November. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone who doesn’t respect the eighth amendment.

UPDATE: According to the Blogcritics article linked to above, "Badnarik is clearly a genuine connoisseur of N/A beer." Like I said, he's a crackpot.

Here’s a statement to ponder (no fair reading the source first):

The Madrid railway bombings were perceived by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to have advanced their cause. Al Qaeda may perceive that a large-scale attack in the United States this summer or fall would lead to similar consequences.

That, to me, reads pretty much like a statement of fact: al-Qaeda may believe (correctly or incorrectly) that a large-scale attack on the United States will advance their cause. I think they’d be incredibly wrong on that point, but, nonetheless, I think it’s a fair statement for a politician to make.

Robert Garcia Tagorda documents nicely Al Gore’s minor Ahmed Chalabi problem—namely, that he also treated Chalabi as a credible figure in the Iraqi exile community, at least until it came time for him to follow Howard Dean down the road of ex-DLCer dementia.

For the record, I found Chalabi less than credible, and was hardly a fan of Judith Miller’s Iraq WMD reporting, largely based on information provided by Chalabi’s pals, at the time either.

Both Nick Troester and Brian J. Noggle note Michelle Malkin’s Wednesday TownHall.com column on the literati set’s embrace of Jessica Cutler (“Washingtonienne”) and Ana Marie Cox (“Wonkette”). I’m not sure I agree with everything Malkin says, but I too find something slightly unseemly about this glorification of skanking one’s way to the top.

Apropos of the same topic, Sara Butler wonders if Culter’s actions are another strike against female interns in Washington who want to be taken seriously.

Update: Joy Larkin agrees with Malkin as well.

Geitner Simmons finds David Broder finally figuring out that those of us who somehow figured out that McCain-Feingold was a disaster waiting to happen were right.

Of course, many of the parties involved—President Bush included—thought the Supreme Court would bail them out of having made such a terrible piece of legislation. They were wrong, and now we’re all stuck with the consequences—the establishment of sham media organizations (NRA News, Air America Radio) to circumvent advertising restrictions, the undisclosed funnelling of cash to 527 organizations, the granting of even more institutional advantages to incumbent politicians, and the further emasculation of the American political party system. Coupled with the Court’s unwillingness to curtail the increasingly fraudulent redistricting practices of state legislatures, one might realistically despair of the prospects for legitimate republican government.

Well, the big election north of the border is finally on, after months of buildup. Matt Yglesias has an ongoing discussion in his comments; I generally agree that it’s the Liberals’ election to lose, and the structural features of Canadian politics favor the Liberals emerging as the largest party—even if they don’t receive an absolute majority of the 308 seats up for grabs. There is widespread disaffection with the Liberals—in part due to several financial fiascos, in part because neither current prime minister Paul Martin nor ex-premier Jean Chrétien had a large fan club to begin with, but that’s unlikely to translate into a plurality win for the new Conservative Party of Canada, and the largest party is almost certain to be the one invited by the governor-general to form a government.

Realistically, there are about five possible governments that could emerge:

• A majority Liberal government. If you’ve got money to wager, this is the odds-on favorite, even with the horrible approval ratings the Liberals have. Requires an outright majority (155+ seats).
• A Liberal-New Democratic Party coalition. The problem with this arrangement is that Martin is trying to move the Liberals to the right and repair relations with the United States; the NDP is populated by hardcore leftists and harbors strongly anti-American sentiments, which would radically complicate Martin’s attempts at rapproachment. Realistically only likely if the Liberals win below 150 seats, but still have a plurality.
• A minority Liberal government, depending on floating support on individual pieces of legislation. Probably unstable over the long term, but more politically palatable than a Liberal-NDP coalition, and increasingly likely if the Liberals are very close to a majority (say 150–154 seats).
• A (probably short-term) Conservative-Bloc Québecois government. Both parties favor devolution of power from the federal government to the provinces, and a short-term agenda focusing on these issues—increased provincial autonomy, reform of the Senate to make it an elected body—might be palatable. In the long term, though, the contrast between the Canadian nationalist Conservatives and the Québecois nationalist Bloc along with the contrast between Conservative laissez-faire economics and BQ social democracy, would force new elections—but ones where both parties would be institutionally advantaged due to an elected upper chamber acting as a check on the (presumably Liberal) new government.

Anyway, this one will be fascinating to watch, and—thankfully—it’ll all be over in about a month, unlike the slow-motion trainwreck on this side of the border.

Well, this award will definitely make Michael Moore even more insufferable than he is already. And, here’s your “laugh test” moment:

“I did not set out to make a political film,” Mr. Moore said at a news conference after the ceremony. “I want people to leave thinking that was a good way to spend two hours. The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics.”

I’m sure that’s what Leni Riefenstahl said too.

The nice thing about being a lazy blogger is that if you want to fisk something, chances are someone else—in this case, Nick Troester—will have beaten you to it. But, lest I be accused of excessive laziness, allow me to pile on. The piece in Slate is called “Why We Hate Voting: And how to make it fun again,” by Thomas Geoghegan. Here’s a free hint: anyone who confuses civic duty with “fun” isn’t very normal to begin with. Shall we commence?

Usually, the outcome of a presidential election “depends on the turnout of the Democrats.” So says Nelson Polsby of the University of California-Berkeley. For once, I agree with a political scientist. I take Polsby to mean “Democrats” as a term of art for “most people.” By “Democrats” he means people with hourly jobs, high-school dropouts, high-school grads, single moms, single dads—anyone at or below the median household income.

But let’s narrow “Democrats” to people way down the income ladder, whose voting rate is usually less than 40 percent. Waitresses. Claims adjusters. College kids with loans. If the turnout among these people hits 50 percent, the Republicans are in trouble. Get it up to 60 percent, and Bush won’t even come close.

Actually, I think Dr. Polsby means “Democrats,” as in people who are predisposed to vote for Democratic candidates. In political science terms, we call these people “party identifiers”—they have a psychological attachment to their preferred political party. And we’ve called them party identifiers ever since 1960, when The American Voter came out.

I’ll grant that some earlier research, known as the Columbia school or sociological approach, argued that vote choice was largely a function of socioeconomic status, but The American Voter showed demography to be a rather distant causal influence on vote choice. Only African-Americans (a group oddly omitted from Geoghegan’s definition of “Democrats,” though perhaps this omission is understandable when you realize that he’s dealing with the limosine liberal set who read Slate) show the sort of bloc voting in American society that Geoghegan attributes to American social and economic groups. Union members and “blue-collar” workers, for example, are only weakly Democratic, as are singles, on the order of 60–40. And even then there can be significant cross-over effects; the “Reagan Democrats” were hardly a myth.

I know that the country’s turned to the right. But we’d still have the New Deal if voters were turning out at New Deal-type rates. (Between 1936 and 1968, voter turnout in presidential elections fell below 56 percent just once. Since 1968, it has never exceeded 56 percent.) So how can Democrats get the turnout of all eligibles up to 65 percent?

I doubt that seriously. One important causal factor Geoghegan omits is the lowering of the national voting age in 1970, which brought in a new cohort of voters who were unlikely to vote. Moreover, recent scholarship suggests that low apparent turnout in the U.S. is due to an increase in the non-eligible population (felons and non-citizens, which aren’t part of the “voting age population” used for redistricting) and the use of frequent elections (U.S. jurisdictions average at least one election per year, including local and state elections and primaries, while most other industrialized democracies only have elections, on average, every two years—and typically have elections for national office at different times from elections to local offices). The fact that the U.S. holds elections on weekdays rather than weekends is also an important factor in lowering turnout.

What are Geoghegan’s remedies?

First, offer two ballots, a long one and a short one. Let’s call the short one Fast Ballot. President. Congress. Governor if there’s a race on. That’s all. You’re done. Someone else will vote the long ballot.

Nick already explained what an idiotic idea this is. But in many states (including, I believe, Illinois), you can vote a party-line ballot just as easily. It seems more productive to encourage the adoption of (or return of) party-line boxes on ballots, then. (You can thank the Progressives for getting rid of party-line voting in many states.)

His second remedy apparently revolves around making the entire election process an excuse to go on a bender. No, I’m serious:

One free drink. Let’s take the 10 biggest population centers. In each one, set up a business-type council, full of media types and celebrities, to push voting. In September and October, have them sign up bars and restaurants to put up a red-white-and-blue logo on Election Night. What does the logo mean? With your ballot stub, first drink is on the house. Soon everybody will want to have a logo, the way in the New Deal, businesses showcased the Blue Eagle. Put the word out on college campuses. Get them to compete to throw the biggest party. Pump it up, the way we’ve done with Halloween.

No doubt, the Progressives are rolling over in their graves at this idea (you can thank them, too, for laws that require bars and liquor stores to be closed on Election Day in some states). In most (all?) states, it’s illegal to offer an inducement for voting—even if that inducement is given without regard to vote choice. From a theoretical point of view, I don’t think such laws are worthwhile—in fact, I actually wrote a paper on Philippine politics once that argued (in part) that citizens ought to have the right to sell their vote to the highest bidder. Regardless, this proposal is simultaneously idiotic and impractical (and illegal, to boot; not that that’s ever stopped any campaign tactic in the past, mind you).

Furthermore, the premise that any of this will help the Democrats is, simply put, absurd, and borders on patronizing: apparently, Geoghegan conceives of the Democratic base as a bunch of louts who can only be encouraged to vote if they are given a really dumbed-down ballot and are promised a pint of Pabst Blue Ribbon for their trouble. If this is what Democratic elites think of their own supporters, they should count their lucky stars if any of them bother to show up in November to cast a ballot for John F. Kerry—assuming he deigns to accept the nomination before then, that is.

Back in March, I reported that Memphis Congressman Harold Ford, Jr., was among those in attendance at a coronation ceremony for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington.

According to local reporter Jackson Baker, Ford is denying having been at the ceremony. Baker quotes Ford as saying, “Unfortunately, public officials’ names often get used without their permission.”

Be sure to check out the blog of Moon-watcher John Gorenfeld.

Like Moe Lane, I generally take Seymour Hersh’s journalism with a huge grain of salt—and immediately suspected a fresh round of “inside the beltway” fingerpointing as the source for the latest revelations, which purportedly trace the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib all the way to Donald Rumsfeld’s desk. Now, however, I’m not so sure. And, clearly if Rumsfeld (or his inferiors, like Defense Undersecretary Stephen A. Cambone) condoned or specifically authorized the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib, he/they should be fired and prosecuted—and if the president won’t can him/them, Congress can and should impeach and remove Rumsfeld (and/or Cambone) from office.

More at OTB and Matt Yglesias.

It’s a little early to nominate entries for Best Blog Post of 2004, I suppose, but I think it will be hard to beat Mark Kleiman’s list of five epistemic principles for thinking about politics:

1. Being aware of your own tendency, and those of your allies, to demonize the opposition.
2. Being more skeptical of news that tends to confirm your presuppositions, and more credulous of news that tends to challenge them, than is comfortable.
3. Trying to imagine how the people whose actions you dislike can see those actions as justified.
4. Discounting somewhat, in figuring out how far you're justified in going to make sure your side wins, your subjective certainty that you're right. Given that means and procedures are immediate and easy to see, while outcomes are hard to see, this means giving more weight to means and procedures, and less to outcomes, than a simple decision analysis based on your current beliefs would justify.
5. And still, in spite of your carefully-cultivated doubts, fighting hard for what you believe in, because if the people capable of irony allow irony to demobilize them, the fanatics will win.

Hei Lun of Begging to Differ, in response to a commenter of Jeff Jarvis’, hypothesizes that the only voter whose intended vote choice has been changed by Howard Stern’s tirades against the Bush administration—never mind that many of his tormentors are Democrats in Congress and in the FCC—is named Jeff Jarvis. That sounds about right.

Some polling outfit made the mistake of calling James Joyner. Hilarity ensues.

Alex Tabarrok links to a debunking of the rather lame “smart states voted for Gore” hypothesis—on the basis that there’s no state-level IQ data for anyone to reach such a conclusion.

However, there is individual-level data in the 2000 American National Election Study, conducted by the University of Michigan, and this data supports an opposite conclusion: the mean level of both intelligence and political information-holding for Gore voters was lower than for Bush voters. Not much lower, mind you, but the difference is statistically significant.

Steven Taylor has apparently decided his life isn’t complicated enough, so he’s decided to rile up the legions of Confederate apologists in the blogosphere, using that whole “logic” and “documentary evidence” thing to prove—quelle horreur—that the Civil War, was in fact, about slavery, and there’s no way to explain it otherwise. Start here, then go to the front page, because there’s a zone-flood in progress.