Lily Malcolm catches Washington Post writer David Finkel using a tone of “bemused ironic distance” in reference to a Texas suburbanite, in addition to commiting the cardinal sin of perpetuating the Red State-Blue State myth. I mean, at least Finkel could make himself useful and perpetuate obsolete but at least empirically-based theories of political culture, rather than crap peddled by two-bit media-hound hacks whose research doesn’t dignify the term.

Alex Knapp is not at all impressed with the spread of touchscreen voting and thinks it will ultimately create more problems than it solves; I generally agree, especially given the less expensive and superior alternative: optical mark recognition (OMR) machines, which are essentially glorified Scantron machines that read ink circles instead of pencil marks. Put an OMR scanner or two in each precinct, and the only other equipment you need are some pens and the proper machine-readable paper ballots. Not to mention that the audit trail is trivial: all you need to do is hang on to the ballots after they’re scanned.

Hei Lun of Begging To Differ wonders why conservatives are so worked up over the Specter-Toomey showdown in Pennsylvania. At some level, I suppose it’s the question northern liberals had to ask themselves in the 60s and 70s: do we continue to support conservative southern Democrats, and thereby retain our numerical superiority in Congress and keep the tent “big,” or do we follow our principles and try to get northern-style liberals to win the primary—and risk losing our majority by getting outflanked by the Republicans in the general election.

That said, a Specter defection to the Democrats would only be harmful to the GOP if it was a trigger for defection by the other northeastern Republicans (and therefore tipped the balance in the Senate), and the strategic calculus for Bush is such that the Olympia Snowes of the world will wonder—quite rightly—whether they would be next on the ideological purity “hit list” if Bush had endorsed Toomey over Specter.

On balance, I think both parties benefit from having moderates on their rosters—both for the public relations benefit of being able to claim something is “bipartisan” (a label that the media will apply to any legislation that has even one across-the-aisle supporter) and because they allow the parties to be competitive in areas that they otherwise wouldn’t be; Santorum-style conservatism may be viable for both Senate seats in Pennsylvania (though I suspect many Pennsylvanians think one Santorum is plenty), but it wouldn’t fly as well in other swing states.

I’ve been tied up preparing for this job interview the last couple of days, so I haven’t gotten around to posting about the Iraq situation. Thankfully, Steven Taylor read my mind in his critique of the decision to hand over power on June 30th without figuring out who would be getting the power first (though the silver lining in this process is the belated jettisoning of Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq’s Charles de Gaulle wannabe), as well as his consideration of how the UN’s involvement in the handover is undercutting John Kerry’s position on Iraq.

John Kerry is in denial over his ownership of a sport-utility vehicle. Like any responsible husband would, he blames his wife…

Surprisingly, though, he does fess up to owning a Dodge 600, a giant piece of 1980s Detroit iron that probably gets less gas mileage than his wife’s late-model Chevy Suburban.

Steven Taylor finds John Kerry discussing Vietnam in the oddest of places. My question: does the analogy make Cajuns “Charlie”?

Professor Bainbridge thinks some branches of government are more co-equal than others:

Reading the accounts of the Supreme Court’s oral argument yesterday on the Guantanamo prisoner appeal, I am struck yet again by the unweening arrogance of the US judiciary. Set aside the substantive merits of the case, of which I believe Justice Jackson’s aphorism “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” more than adequately disposes (see also my friend and colleague Eugene Volokh’s more substantive critique). Instead, consider how offended some members of the Court seemed to be by the notion that any aspect of American life might lie outside their reach. Breyer, for example, complained: “It seems rather contrary to an idea of a Constitution with three branches that the executive would be free to do whatever they want, whatever they want without a check.”

Apparently only the Supreme Court is “free to do whatever they want… without a check.” If five of the nine unelected old men and women on that court agree, they can strike down any law or executive action. And our elected representatives have essentially no power to constrain them other than the impractical route of amending the Constitution.

In actuality, our elected representatives have a great deal of power to constrain the judiciary: they may, for example, limit its jurisdiction, expand its membership (“court packing”), reduce funding, split circuits, and take myriad other actions designed to frustrate the court. Lower court judges can, and often do, defy the clear precedent set forth by the Supreme Court. Congress and the president routinely ignore the intent of Supreme Court decisions like INS v. Chadha. The Supreme Court has no police power to compel compliance with its decisions; President Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Little Rock, not Earl Warren, while President Jackson gave the (figurative, if not literal) finger to the Court when it told him to stop deporting the Cherokees.

Heck, good money says that if the Supremes had done what almost all agree now is the right thing in Korematsu, and said Japanese-Americans were being deprived of their rights by being interred, it wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference. And, should the Court actually agree with the Gitmo detainees’ case, and if the hypothetical Reinhardt decision comes that some detainees should be released, I’m not expecting the administration to be in any hurry whatsoever to comply—more likely, they’ll just ship them off to the Mossad or something.

To assert that “our elected representatives have essentially no power to constrain” the courts is borderline absurd. Congress and the president have plenty of power—they just choose not to exercise it, given that both parties want to have a Supreme Court that is willing and able to do the dirty work of standing up to the voters when they demand “uncommonly silly” laws (that nonetheless get overwhelming legislative support) like flag desecration acts, public morals legislation, and the like.

Update: Brett Marston agrees with me, at least in part, citing additional constraints on the Court (most notably, that it is restricted to ruling on cases on its docket).

More wackiness from the Bay State gay marriage kerfuffle: now the plan is, remove the judges.

Link via Kate Malcolm.

Tyler Cowen links a New York Times piece on how researchers are using MRIs to look at how voters’ brains react to political ads, and it’s a pretty fascinating piece. Though I must quibble with this graf:

“These new tools could help us someday be less reliant on clichés and unproven adages,” said Tom Freedman, a strategist in the 1996 Clinton campaign, later a White House aide and now a sponsor of the research. “They’ll help put a bit more science in political science.”

Dragging fancy machines into the room has nothing to do with whether or not you’re being scientific. Somehow people have this warped view that you can only do “science” when you’re dressed in a lab coat and goggles and there are a few bunsen burners in the room, which is simply not the case.

Sid Salter had a piece in Sunday’s Jackson Clarion-Ledger on the byzantine structure of Mississippi’s alcohol laws—so byzantine, in fact, that the state tax commission (or the paper) apparently doesn’t know that Lafayette County, with the exception of the city of Oxford, is dry, not wet.

Alex Knapp links a rather amusing parody site, which contains this rather incorrect view of American political development:

The American Democratic system works as well today as it did when the electoral structure was laid out by the founding fathers. In fact, Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams all ran as “Democratic-Republicans”, this party originating today’s Democratic and Republican parties. Not since Zachary Taylor in 1848 has the Electoral College voted a third-party (Whig, in this case) candidate into the White House.

That ain’t exactly how it happened. The “Democratic-Republicans” actually started out—even more confusingly—as the Francophile, agrarian “Republicans,” as in “not monarchists,” with the associated implication that the Federalists* (Anglophile, commercial, concentrated in New England) were. They then became the Democratic-Republicans and finally the Democrats circa 1828, well after the last gasp of the Federalists. Until the late 1850s, the primary opposition party were the Whigs, a party that lacked much of an ideology except, perhaps, being a tad less populist than the Democrats of the time.

The Republican Party, established circa 1854, had no real connection to the Democrats—beyond a membership of disaffected Whigs, Democrats, and assorted other parties who joined to support a fiercely abolitionist platform and the presidential candidacy of John Fremont in 1856.

Still, it’s a cute site…

Another week, another Hamas leader dies with a generous assist from the Israeli Defense Forces. Funny how that works.

At Cafe Hayek, George Mason University economics professor Russell Roberts quotes James Surowiecki writing in the New Yorker about the Bush administration’s manipulation of economic statistics for political gain:

Statistical expediency and fiscal obfuscation have become hallmarks of this White House. In the past three years, the Bush Administration has had the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop reporting mass layoffs. It shortened the traditional span of budget projections from ten years to five, which allowed it to hide the long-term costs of its tax cuts. It commissioned a report on the aging of the baby boomers, then quashed it because it projected deficits as far as the eye could see. The Administration declined to offer cost estimates or to budget money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A recent report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers included an unaccountably optimistic job-growth forecast, evidently guided by the Administration’s desire to claim that it will have created jobs.

Prof. Roberts then goes on to praise Bush for this:

[T]his indictment of the Bush Administration is disappointing. I was expecting to read that Bush had leaned on the bureaucrats to redefine unemployment or some such measure in order to look good in November. But except for the BLS example, Surowiecki's examples are examples of where the Administration has made inaccurate forecasts that led to more palatable political results. That's a good reason to ignore most forecasts....

Administration lies are good when they lead to political results that Prof. Roberts likes.

(Link via Marginal Revolution.)

(Updated to correct Prof. Roberts' institutional affiliation and link to Marginal Revolution.)

My panel this morning ("Public Support for the Iraq War") was surprisingly well-attended (at least, compared to panels I’ve presented on in the past), and we had a good discussion despite the absence of our original chair/discussant due to a family illness.

You can browse the MPSA paper archive online; my panel was Section 13, Panel 13 (I can’t figure out how to make a direct link that won’t break); of course, if you’re only interested in my paper, you can get it here.

Dan Drezner takes a look at John Kerry’s “new and improved!” misery index:

Every index can be challenged on the quality of the data that goes into it, and the weights that are assigned to the various components that make up the overall figure. A lack of transparency about methodology is also a valid criticism. For example, in my previous post on the competitiveness of different regions in the global information economy, the company responsible for the rankings provides little (free) information on how the index was computed. That’s a fair critique.

Even when the methodology is transparent, there can still be problems.

This is a subject near-and-dear to my heart. In quantitative social science, your econometric model is only as useful as your indicators; a crappy indicator renders the whole model essentially useless.

Unfortunately, our ways of dealing with the problem of how well an indicator reflects a concept leave a lot to be desired; “face validity”—which boils down to “I think the indicator reflects the concept, so we’ll a priori assume it does”—is relied on, even by good scholars, to an extent that will make you blanch. Even seemingly obvious indicators, like responses to survey questions, are often woefully inadequate for measuring “true” concepts (in the case of public opinion research, attitudes and predispositions).

Building an index helps with some of these problems—if your measurement error—but introduces others (like ascribing valid weights to the items, as Dan points out). A few cool tools, like factor analysis and its cousin principal components analysis, are designed to help in finding weights, but even they have problems and limitations, most of which basically boil down to the fact that human judgment is still involved in the process.

Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia takes on virtually all the existing scholarship on Southern politics in the latest Claremont Review of Books—and, IMHO, comes up a bit short of proving his point to my satisfaction, although a proper treatment of the article will have to wait until sometime tomorrow.

I will note that Alan Abramowitz came to virtually the same conclusion* in “Issue Evolution Reconsidered” (The Journal of Politics, 1994), which was a rebuttal to Carmines and Stimson’s Issue Evolution, which, along with Huckfeldt and Sprague’s Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics is probably the classic academic work that promotes the “southern strategy” explanation for the Southern realignment—the Black brothers, however, see dealignment rather than realignment to the GOP, and in a lot of their discussion, they actually support what Alexander says, at least to some extent.

Link via Lily Malcolm (a recent victim of a minor paring knife accident).

One of the reasons why blogging has been pretty light this weekend—in addition to my spending the Easter holiday with family in Memphis—is that I spent much of Saturday doing the work I’ve been trained to do, in this case anonymously reviewing the text of a forthcoming political science textbook for a publisher.

While the text doesn’t focus on ideology, as a way to motivate the material (am I being vague enough?) it discusses the ideological divisions of the American public, and the contrasts among conservative and liberal thought on economic and social regulation—one of the fundamental topics in the study of political behavior in the United States. After reading it, something about that discussion clicked in my head, and suddenly the debate over the August 6th PDB—and the conviction by liberals like Kevin Drum that it contained the key information needed to prevent an attack, despite the clear absence of any “new” information that would suggest an attack of the magnitude of 9/11 (despite the sensationalistic account of Middle Eastern men taking photos of a building in New York—mind you, it was a federal office building, not the World Trade Center complex)—made a lot more sense.

Steven Taylor apparently had essentially the same thoughts on the matter:

While clearly much (most?) of the wrangling over the PDB is partisan in nature, much of the debate may also be ideological. Part of what defines a conservative in the political vernacular of the United States is skepticism about government, while liberals tend to think that given the right people and information that practically any problem can be solved by government. ...

[O]ne’s view of government clearly colors how one interprets these events. As a conservative (and as a student of government, here and abroad), I am highly skeptical of the ability of governments to successfully execute policy. Hence, I am unsurprised by governmental failures. I am not saying that policy can never be successful—it can. However, it rarely is an efficient process, and the more complex the undertaking, the more likely failure is to happen. At a minimum I know full well that government is not very good at processing information. ... However, it would seem that from the liberal point of view the problem isn’t government and its complexity, but rather the people who occupy government at a given moment. Now, I am not saying that that doesn’t matter—it does. But, I do not think, and believe that empirical evidence backs my position, that government becomes more efficient and efficacious just because one set of persons occupy positions of power. ...

And no, I am not arguing that government always fails. Although I would note that that tends to be the default position. I am not an anti-government libertarian, but I am highly skeptical about the ability of governments to do what they set out to do. Hence, I am not surprised wen governments fail. Liberals in the US context tend to be more optimistic about the abilities of government, and hence are more shocked when it fails. And, as noted, that failure is usually attributed not to systemic problems of governing huge numbers of people, but, rather, to those who are doing the governing. Hence, the fault must lie with Bush and Rice must be a “moron”, etc.

Obviously, unlike Steven I’m not a conservative—but I share the conservative skepticism that government power can be universally effective, or that it can always stop bad things from happening. Governments are comprised of people, and people are inherently flawed: they make mistakes, they aren’t omniscient, and they tend to make decisions consistent with their own personal interests. Aggregating a bunch of fallible people in a government, while reducing the possibility that one person’s mistake won’t matter, doesn’t eliminate it entirely.

I think the disappointment of the 9/11 commission is that, rather than trying to figure out how we can prevent future attacks and ensure the mistakes of 9/11 aren’t repeated, its members have decided to engage in alternating displays of grandstanding and ass-covering, and are seemingly more concerned with their job prospects in future administrations sharing their party affiliation than figuring out what structural and practical obstacles stopped policymakers from getting even all the unclassified information that indicated a plot was afoot on their desks.

Xrlq is kind enough to donate some of his web space to partisan hack valued former public servant Richard Ben-Veniste to discuss the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing. In other news, partisan hack valued random guy from California who somehow got The Washington Monthly to pay him to be a partisan hack blogger Kevin Drum seems to agree with Ben-Veniste-as-channeled-by-Xrlq, while partisan hack political scientist Steven Taylor disagrees.

Congratulations to Martin Michlmayr on winning reelection as Debian Project Leader; even though I supported another candidate in the election, I think Martin will continue to do good work for the project in this position.

Robert Prather agrees with Jeralynn of TalkLeft that the proposed Victims’ Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a bad idea, and I tend to agree with that assessment.

In general, the amendment seems to be an example of a solution that is in search of a problem. At the federal level, there is nothing in this proposed amendment that couldn’t be guaranteed by statute in federal criminal proceedings. At the state level, there is little evidence that states have failed to consider (and either accept or reject) the need for similar provisions in their jurisdictions, or have deliberately excluded the interests of crime victims from political debate, which is the general threshold I’d say you need to cross to justify a federal intervention into areas of traditional state sovereignty like criminal justice.

In any event, you can read the full text of the proposed amendment at THOMAS and decide for yourself.

If anyone ever tells you to take seriously the comments of a former British cabinet member, here’s a new counterexample to add to your arsenal (along with the ravings of Robin Cook and Claire Short):

[Former Northern Ireland secretary] Mo Mowlam has called on the British and American governments to open talks with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Bear in mind, of course, that Ms. Mowlam’s former bailiwick (i.e. trying to stop the Provos and Loyalists from killing one another and returning responsible government to Ulster) is hardly a model of efficiency and good order, even today. It might also be worth bearing in mind that, to open talks with Mr. bin Laden, first we’d probably have to find him. Even the peacenik Liberal Democrats aren’t buying this lousy bill of goods:

Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell criticised Ms Mowlam’s remarks.

“What possible result would there be from sitting down with al-Qaeda?” he asked.

“Their intention is to destroy the liberal values upon which our way of life is based.

“You cannot negotiate with those whose aim is your own destruction.”

It’s nice to see good sense is alive and well in at least some quarters across the pond.

Link via Jeremy of Who Knew?

Jeff Jarvis gives a pretty good flavor of the complete joke that the 9/11 Commission is. For all the people who say George W. Bush is a moron (and Lord knows I agree with that assessment in a lot of ways), he was certainly correct to resist both this idiotic commission and its pointless cousin foisted on us by Congress, the Department of Homeland Security.

Tim Sandefur gets straight to the heart of things: the commission is simply “a symposium of blowhards.”

Josh Barro (one of the Harvard Republicans) points out the reason only one person died when the City of New Orleans derailed near Yazoo City yesterday: practically nobody was aboard:

[The train carried 68 passengers and 12 crewmembers.] That works out to 7.56 passengers per car and 5.67 passengers per crew member. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few passengers are enticed by a train that can take them from New Orleans to Chicago in just 19 hours and 5 minutes. If this train is any indication of ridership on Amtrak’s routes outside metropolitan corridors, it’s no wonder its director says it needs a $1.8 billion dollar subsidy to continue operating in 2005.

They particularly aren’t enticed by a train that costs $182 to ride round-trip, $320 if you want to ride on the lower level, and a whopping $520 if you want to have a bed to sleep in. By contrast, you can fly non-stop round-trip to Chicago from New Orleans next weekend for $398… or, if you’re willing to do some advance planning, you can fly round-trip for $244 over a weekend in May. Not to mention that your trip will be almost 17 hours shorter in duration.

Or, you can ride Greyhound, completely unsubsidized,* for $138 round trip—and, if you pick the right bus, it doesn’t take much more time than the Amtrak train.

Update: * Both Stephen Karlson and a reader point out that there is a gross subsidy to the highway system (i.e. almost all highways are paid for by the state and federal governments); my point was, however, that the net subsidy is essentially zero, as all highway spending in the United States (except expenditures on low-volume local streets, which are usually supplemented by local property taxes—such streets would be necessary even in a less car-dependent society, mind you) comes from state and federal motor fuel taxes, which are borne by highway users such as Greyhound; in fact, highway taxes also pay much of the budget of the Federal Transit Administration, which is responsible for mass transit in urban areas. Apologies for any confusion.

Is there anyone who thinks this plan is a good use of time and resources?* I realize that the fungibility of resources (a fancy way of saying the ability to “walk and chew gum at the same time”) is often overrated, that DOJ‘s “porn surfers” wouldn’t be much help in the War on Terror, and there is a bit of a dark side to the “legit” pornography industry that takes advantage of young (but legally adult) women from abusive backgounds, but a crackdown on dirty movies seems like a pretty stupid idea nonetheless. I personally would have no beef with a crackdown on “kiddie porn” and the like, but as Glenn Reynolds points out the Ashcroft plan goes far beyond this eminently reasonable target to go after such examples of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Porn” as Skinemax and Spectravision.

But, if we must do this, I think David Adesnik’s solution of having the ex-Taliban Gitmo detainees do the, er, heavy lifting seems appropriate. And I suspect the reaction of Josh Barro of the Harvard Republicans reflects that of most young conservatives: a healthy dollop of “what the hell are they thinking?”

David Bernstein, among my co-blogger’s least favorite Volokh Conspirators, links a New York Times piece on the passage of the House version of the transportation reauthorization bill.

Now the article is written by “David Stout,” whose job apparently is to rewrite AP copy for the NYT website; to my knowledge, “his” articles never appear in print (and “he” may just be a pseudonym for a group of copy editors). What’s weird about the article? Let’s pull out some excerpts:

Regardless of the real figure, President Bush has threatened to veto the measure as too costly at a time that he and Congressional Republicans are supposed to be serious about holding down the federal deficit.

I believe this is a run-on sentence, to begin with. And the second half of the sentence looks like an editorial comment, not news reporting.

“Thirty billion, when you are cutting the deficit in half in five years, is real money,” Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the other day, apparently with no humor intended.

“The other day” seems rather imprecise for dating a quotation for a newspaper article. And the statement that this was said “apparently with no humor intended” is a complete non-sequitor. (The quote appears to have been cribbed from this Carl Hulse article dated April 1.)

The highway-spending bill enjoys wide support among Democrats and Republicans alike because the members of both parties have something in common: their constituents use highways (and bridges and bike paths and other incidentals wrapped into the bill.)

Again, another strange paragraph; this one isn’t even punctuated correctly—the “incidentals,” by the way, include the entire Federal Transit Administration; a rather large “incidental,” wouldn’t you think? Strange.

(Hulse’s article in Saturday’s paper is far more coherent.)