Brock rather optimistically wrote below:

The presumptive nominee, John Kerry, deserves credit for voting in favor of NAFTA. I hope he has the courage to stick by what he knows is true: that tariffs and other protectionist measures do more harm to the country than good.

Brock apparently missed tonight’s Democratic debate, in which Kerry virtually repudiated NAFTA by advocating wider use of its environmental and labor side-agreements for protectionist ends—even though, in fairness, he was the best of a horrible field on that score. I’ll let Alex Knapp speak for me on Democrats’ commitment to our nation’s international agreements on trade:

You know, for a bunch of people who criticized Bush for being unilateral on military issues, they sure are eager to act unilaterally in rescinding our international obligations on trade issues. Or does international law not mean anything to these candidates?

Of course, since France is also a highly protectionist country, any issue where we agree with France but repudiate agreements with other countries apparently doesn’t meet the Democratic definition of “unilateral”.

Prof. Jim Lindgren of Northwestern dropped me an email responding to this post*. Lindgren writes:

I appreciate your thoughtful comments on Somin's note posted on the Volokh Conspiracy.

As you know but your readers might not, the two leading academic cross-sectional surveys are the American National Election Studies (ANES) from the Univ. of Michigan (which Somin used) and the General Social Survey (GSS) from the University of Chicago (which I used in my note to Instapundit). Political scientists naturally tend to use the ANES, while sociologists tend to use the GSS, with the rest of the social sciences using both to a substantial extent.

Each have their advantages and disadvantages. In my opinion, because the ANES is taken around the time of national elections, it is better for understanding elections and voting. Because the GSS is not taken around election time, it is better for understanding how large political groups, including Republicans and conservatives, tend to think at times other than the few months on either side of a national election. For this reason, the GSS trends in political orientation tend to be far more stable than the ANES data on this question, which are unreliable in their high variability from election to election. [Greg Caldeira (political science, Ohio State) and I are doing a paper on this phenomenon.]

Your observation about independent leaners behaving more like party adherents than weak identifiers as a Republican or a Democrat is true of voting as revealed in the ANES. It is not true as a generalization for issues across the board (it varies by issue).

For example, in the 1994–2002 GSS, independents who lean Democratic are like Republicans in their high performance on vocabulary and analogical reasoning tests. Leaners to either party tend to fall between Republicans and Democrats in their educational level. Independents who do not lean either way usually score down with the Democrats, either below them or between strong and not too strong Democrats.

That is why my analyses usually discuss types of people, rather than treating liberalism/conservatism and party identification as left/right ordinal or interval variables.

First, I’d like to thank Prof. Lindgren for his correspondence.

Second, I’d like to clarify that I advisedly used the word behavior; opinionation (such as issue positions) and attitude-holding are not behavior, and it is true that the relationship Bartels notes between party identification as measured by the “standard” 7-point scale and voting behavior may not apply to opinionation or attitude-holding.

I think the observations about Democrats are interesting, because I suspect they reflect a bifurcation in “strong Democratic” identifiers: on the one hand, you have groups who are identified with the Democrats on the basis of social affiliation, such as the poor, most minority groups, the working class, and organized labor; on the other, you have highly-educated people with “social consciences” who have a more psychological attachment to the Democratic party on the basis of ideology. This certainly doesn’t seem like an original observation, although I’m not sure anyone has shown it empirically rather than impressionistically (citations welcome).

In other viewer mail, another Chicago correspondent—Debian developer/economist Dirk Eddelbuettel—notes an article in a recent week’s Economist ($) on statistical significance versus substantive significance, a distinction social scientists probably need to pay more attention to. (Also see this week’s letters page.)

Somehow I missed Eugene Volokh’s post on the whole “conservatives are stupid” kerfuffle. There are a few caveats in order with this use of ANES data:

1. Partisanship is not ideology. While the two concepts are correlated highly in the United States, a “strong Republican” is not necessarily a conservative. (The correlation has improved over time, however, as the South has dealigned.) The ANES does include an ideology item.
2. The partisanship scale used by the ANES has a weird inflection point noted by Larry Bartels several years ago: “weak identifiers” are generally more independent in their behavior than “independent leaners.”
3. Political knowledge is not general knowledge (as Volokh’s correspondent notes). Again, while general knowledge is correlated with political knowledge, the latter is only one component of the former.
4. There are numerous disputes over whether “quiz-type” political knowledge questions properly tap overall respondent knowledge about politics. Read chapter 2 of my dissertation if you need all the morbid details. Read the appendix of chapter 4 if you want to see how various types of questions performed in a 1998 Dutch election survey that uses a larger battery of questions than the contemporary ANES (I suppose the Dutch are more willing to subject themselves to quizzes than Americans, although Delli Carpini and Keeter disagree).

The GSS data cited in this InstaPundit post is more dispositive, although I am not as familiar with the GSS—and there may well be caveats that Prof. Lindgren does not mention or is unfamiliar with.

The latest Toast-O-Meter is up with a special Valentine’s Day theme, courtesy of Steven Taylor. As always, it’s the comprehensive review of everything you tried to tune out about the primary campaign over the last seven days.

I’m off shortly to Memphis to argue with Best Buy for what should be a new laptop, probably something Centrino-based (woo-hoo!).

Update: Well, that went well… not.

The Baseball Crank plays whiffleball with some Bush AWOL critics. In the process, he notes this Jackson Baker piece in the Memphis Flyer, picked up by Kevin Drum of CalPundit.

For the uninitiated: Baker is both the bête noir and inspiration of Memphis blogger Mike Hollihan; the classic quote about the Flyer is that the alt-weekly “has never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” I caught Baker redhanded flat-out distorting quotes from politicians back during the Tennessee “tiny towns” debacle in 1997. Baker is the worst kind of political reporter: a man who virtually fellates his sources in print, an unabashed Democratic partisan, and a man who routinely substitutes innuendo for fact. While his work is often amusing, if you’re looking for credible, nonpartisan reportage or commentary without an ideological axe to grind I’d suggest going to Atrios or The 700 Club first.

Update: Dean Esmay has more, indicating that the end may finally be near.

Oh, while we’re linking photos of interns: I never had sex with Connie Mack (or any other senator, member of the House, or anyone else in the District of Columbia). Hell, I never even met the guy. Signed his name a lot, though…

Well, I’m the last one to pick up on this outside the mainstream media. Random, barely-articulated thoughts:

• I don’t buy the Republican smear theory. For starters, Wes Clark’s people have been shopping it for a while, and I’m pretty sure Clark isn’t a Republican (or a Democrat, for that matter).
• I think James Joyner is right: only Republicans can suffer actual career damage from bimbo eruptions.

Anyway, the old aphorism always holds: “where there’s smoke there’s fire… at least, unless someone’s installed a smoke machine.”

Something that’s come up in the past here at SN is the relative dearth of conservatives in academe and its causes. The meme went out in full force today; for a sampling, see Steve at Begging to Differ (who makes a compelling argument that the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Grutter applies equally to viewpoint diversity in the academy—and thus is highly suspect, since the Court would never make such an argument about political views), Andrew Sullivan, Pandagon, Stephen Karlson, Tightly Wound, and Kieran Healy for starters. Not being much of an ideologue myself, I’ll just step away from the fray.

A lot of people have egg on their face over this one. Lots of bloggers staked their reputations, in some way, on it, and we utterly failed. The latest, and perhaps the most high-profile, blogger to acknowledge it, is Dan Drezner.

No, I’m not talking about WMD in Iraq. I’m talking about John Kerry’s cakewalk to the Democratic nomination. A month ago, everyone thought that Dean was going to win this thing, even though (as we now know) his poll numbers started eroding about that time.

This is, no doubt, the point where our good buddies the Perestroikans will come out and say this proves, once and for all, that attempts at a science of politics are futile (one suspects they might also think a science of chemistry is futile, but that is neither here nor there). And, if I were someone who believed that the ultimate test of science is prediction rather than explanation, I might agree with them. But in all good science, when our observations don’t conform with our theories it’s a good time to revisit our hypotheses. The hypothetical reasons why Dean should win were sound:

1. Dean will win the nomination because he’s got the support of the base: This was the clearest argument for Dean’s candidacy. He had a massive fundraising advantage. Dean had captured the energy of the Internet and young people. He captured the anger of many Democratic rank-and-file voters against both Bush and the Iraq war.
2. Dean has organization: Dean had spent all of 2003 setting up a formidable organization in Iowa; the only candidate who was close was near-native-son Dick Gephardt.
3. The primary schedule favors Dean: Coming off an anticipated win in Iowa, most observers expected him to surge into New Hampshire and create an air of inevitability around his campaign.
4. Dean was a governor: Three of the last five Democratic nominees were state governors. In a field where Dean was the only governor, the prediction that Dean would win would be reasonable.
5. Dean has elite support: Throughout the fall, establishment Democrats jumped on the Dean bandwagon. Elites don’t generally hand out endorsements, particularly in primaries, unless they’re pretty sure they won’t be shown to be incorrect.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to Boston. As we now know, none of these things came to pass. Why?

1. We overestimated the base: Dean’s base was deep, but not very broad—perhaps 20% of the Democratic electorate. Dean’s gambit to widen his appeal—being the hardcore “anti-war” candidate not named Kucinich—backfired when Saddam Hussein got dragged out of a foxhole in mid-December. Dean correctly recognized that Democrats were anti-war, but not why they were anti-war: much of the Dem base doesn’t really oppose the war on principle; instead, they oppose it mostly because George W. Bush called the shots. I’d call this the “process” critique of the war, and one that John Kerry was able to capitalize on by being downright shifty with his votes and rhetoric.
2. Organization didn’t matter in Iowa: Somehow a lot of Iowa Democrats got excited about the campaign without getting very excited about the candidates themselves, and when it came time to vote the undecided voters chose Kerry and Edwards—two candidates whose operations in Iowa were weak.
3. The primary schedule favored a New Englander: Kerry essentially borrowed the Dean playbook—convert a win in Iowa to unstoppable momentum coming out of New Hampshire as a “favorite son.” Kerry also benefitted from the unexpected nature of the Iowa win—a Dean victory in Iowa would have been expected, and the momentum bump would have been far smaller.
4. Endorsements don’t matter: The big kahuna, Bill Clinton, stayed out, so the endorsements Dean picked up from has-beens like Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and (maybe) Jimmy Carter were devalued.
5. Dean pissed off the Iowans: Not just in making stuff up when asked about his connection with military veterans, but in old videotapes where Dean had an all-too-candid moment in revealing that the Iowa caucuses are mainly an excuse for presidential candiates to go and kiss farmers’ asses for months on end.
6. Finally, Democrats recognized that Republicans were teeing up for Dean: Anyone with half a brain knew that Dean was Karl Rove’s dream candidate: an inexperienced opponent, prone to displays of short temper and highly vulnerable on social issues and defense policy. Democratic voters, who are desperate to be rid of Bush, siezed on electability as the one and only issue that matters—and decided a patrician senator from Massachusetts, like party idol/martyr JFK, was preferable to the thumb-shaped Vermont wonder in that department.

I think the bottom-line lesson here is that peoples’ political behavior is both idiosyncratic and hard to predict. Perhaps more importantly, I won’t call for an investigation of my fellow political scientists for blowing the search for the Democratic nominee if you won’t.

This is today’s entry in the OTB Beltway Traffic Jam.

Jeff Jarvis asks:

Why are we not hearing libertarians and conservatives—supposedly all in favor of freedom and less government—screaming about the attempts to interfere with media and the threat to free speech this brings. Do we really need hearings on Janet Jackson’s breast? Do we really want the government to say who can own which press? C’mon. I don’t care if you don’t happen to like the media you now see; do you really want goverment regulation of what you can hear and then what you can say? To the barricades, people….

My answers: 1. No. 2. [Strawman] The government already does. 3. Not really.

The real problem, as I see it: the Super Bowl halftime show should have had a TV-14 rating. The sporting events exception in the broadcast media’s self-imposed guidelines shouldn’t apply to entertainment within sporting events.

As to whether or not I’m going to the barricades? No. Because at the moment, this is all a public masturbation exercise by John McCain and the other usual suspects. Call me back when there’s legislation that makes it out of committee.

Martin Devon of Patio Pundit catches the New York Times engaging in a bit of fantasy in suggesting that John “I don’t need the South” Kerry can, er, carry Tennessee in November. Said fantasy is based largely on an interview with Kerry campaign co-chair and Congressman-for-life-if-he-wants-it Harold Ford Jr. Quoth the Times:

The state has tended to vote Republican and has two Republican senators. Mr. Gore lost here in 2000 by four percentage points, but some say the issues will be different this time and that Mr. Kerry is a different candidate from Mr. Gore. And last year the state elected Mr. Bredesen, a Democrat, as governor, and he has become enormously popular.

“Some” might also note that Kerry is much further to the left than Gore ever was (until he got Deanentia), and Bredesen largely won because (a) his opponent, Van Hilleary, was an incredibly weak campaigner and (b) his predecessor, Don Sundquist, managed to turn the Republicans’ names into mud in the state by becoming a tax-and-spend liberal in his second term.

Also amusing: the article misspells the name of Vanderbilt University political scientist John Geer.

Since people are Googling… Wonkette! has swiped the results from NRO. The Kerryman is kicking ass.

Bear in mind, however, that at least in Tennessee voters are permitted to vote early up to two weeks before the election; to my knowledge, there was no exit polling done of early voting sites. Not that it’d make much difference in the results, as early voters are only about 1/4 of the electorate, but in a close race it might matter.

Poliblogger Steven Taylor responded yesterday to my post on conservatism and the 2004 election. First he examines my argument with regard to divided government:

Chris makes an argument, that I have often heard, that the solution to the problem of insufficient fiscal conservatism is the return of divided government. However, I would note that in the twentieth century divided government has been the norm, and, likewise, deficits and ever-increasing spending has also been the norm, calling into question the idea that divided government results in curtailed spending. The only exception (at least in regards to deficits) was during part of the Clinton years, during which we did, in fact, have divided government. However, as I have argued before, the balanced budgets of those years were primarily a function of unexpected economic growth, not a tremendous feat of fiscal restraint the resulted from divided government. For that matter the Reagan era, one of divided government, is usually considered the hallmark of deficit politics.

Causality is difficult to prove here, but I don’t think that—necessarily—you can argue that the Clinton years were a fluke. Reagan was president with a Democratic House and a Senate that was sometimes under Republican and sometimes under Democratic control. The Democrats of the 1980s were hardly a model of fiscal responsibility—and coupled with Reagan’s fetish for supply-side economics, the two together created a giant deficit between them. As I stated in my earlier post, effective fiscal conservatism rests on control of the House and Senate—something that Reagan didn’t enjoy, but Clinton did. That Clinton also benefitted from a favorable economy that he had little control over doesn’t change the fact that Republicans in Congress were much more willing to say “no” when Clinton wanted to throw money at problems than they are today.

And I do think that in terms of national security one would see a rather substantially different world under a Kerry administration. That alone is sufficient reason to heed my prior advice. And do think that he is serious in his campaign rhetoric regarding foreign policy. Remember: this is the guy who voted against the first Gulf War even though Saddam has invaded Kuwait. I think that he is highly reticent to use force and does not have the temperament needed to fight the war on terror.

This is an argument I acknowledged, albeit somewhat glibly, in my post. But to a large extent I think a Democratic president is now stuck prosecuting the War on Terror forcefully, or he risks going down in history as a miserable failure the likes we haven’t seen since the late 1970s. Not that that’s much comfort if you think Kerry will get us all killed between now and January 2009, mind you. (I think the more likely scenario is that Kerry will simply fail to follow through with al-Qaeda and do the minumum necessary to protect the homeland, leaving us with a mess at the end of his term.)

[On domestic policy:] However, there would still be important differences. For example: the judgeship issue and I don’t just mean in regards to specific social conservative issue (although abortion is important to me), but just the general idea of having judges who at least make an effort to simply judge the law and let legislators legislate. I consider this to be rather significant.

I think the odds of either Kerry or Bush getting the nominees he wants on the bench are rapidly approaching zero at this point; however, Kerry or Bush might be able to accomplish a bit with recess appointments. The open question is whether or not the next president will dare make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court when Stevens keels over.

And a side note the “social conservative” issue: prostitution really isn’t that much of an issue for the DoJ, so that strikes me as a non-starter of an example. And in regards to the drug war (which I oppose on efficacy grounds, btw), a Democratic president is unlikely to function any differently than a Republican one on that one. From Nixon to the present the funding for the drug war has simply grown, and while Carter discussed support for legalizing marijuana, the basic approach to illegal drugs has been be pretty consistent across partisan lines. Indeed, the massive increase in funding to Colombia under “Plan Colombia” was under Clinton.

My example sucked because I actually meant to write “pornography.” Don’t mind me, my brain’s in deep freeze. But I suspect a Kerry administration would not prosecute either the War on Drugs or the War on Porn with the zeal that Ashcroft has shown. Of course, if you’re a SoCon that’s a bug, not a feature.

To be honest, I cannot conceive a situation arising in which the net policy desires of conservatives of any stripe would be furthered by a Kerry win, unless they occurred by sheer serendipity.

Serendipity works. I don’t think Bill Clinton particularly wanted to show fiscal restraint in the 1990s, but a funny thing happened as a result of his perpetual head-butting with Congress. If John Kerry had proposed No Child Left Behind, or the Medicare drugs bill, in the exact same form that Bush had, he’d have been laughed right out of Congress by the Republicans—and deservedly so. It may only be a marginal difference, but the difference between trying to give the president a record to run on and trying to deny the president something to take credit for may just be enough to encourage Congress to keep spending in check.

Now, if you’re someone who wants Roe and Goodridge to go away, this may not be enough to affect your vote. But if you’re someone who’s indifferent, or for that matter realistic, on social issues—let’s face it, Roe and Goodridge aren’t going away, because another two Scalias will never make it onto the Supreme Court—it’s something that might be worth considering. (On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that some people, including my esteemed co-blogger, who want more Breyers on the Court have made much the same argument. So your mileage may vary, as they say.)

Steven Taylor thinks conservatives need to learn to love the Shrub, since otherwise they may well receive eight more years of Clintonism. On the other hand, if you’re a conservative—not necessarily a Republican, mind you—a spell of divided government might well be desirable.

It seems to me, at the simplest level, that different sorts of conservatism require the control of different branches of government. Fiscal conservatism rests largely on control of Congress; if you keep spending and taxes down, there isn’t much the White House or Supreme Court can do about it. Social conservatism, on the other hand, rests on control of the presidency and the judiciary; the Justice Department effectively decides to what degree morals violations (like prostitution and drug crimes) are prosecuted, while the judiciary effectively sets the limits of what personal behavior Congress and the states can regulate.

There are, of course, other issues to base one’s vote on; the Clinton administration fiddled while North Korea and Iraq burned during the 1990s, instead expending political capital on dubious adventures like Haiti (which is now in more of a mess than when I was a wee intern in D.C. being briefed on this problem 9 years ago) and saving the Europeans’ asses in the Balkans. And, at the moment, it’s hard to tell if Kerry’s campaign-trail pronouncements are simply part of a red-meat distribution effort to keep the Deaniacs on the Democratic bus through November or actually serious foreign policy views—if you believe they’re the latter, you might think twice about jumping on the divided government bandwagon.

But, given that Congress is essentially a lock to remain in Republican hands for the forseeable future,* if you’re not much of a social conservative and you make under $200k it’s hard to see what you’d lose under a Kerry (or Edwards) administration.

This is today’s entry in the BTJ™.

The Toast-O-Meter for this week has arrived, courtesy of Steven Taylor, although the bread is apparently borderline stale at this point due to Charter Communications’ ineptitude.

In other Campaign ’04-related news: Venomous Kate is perched on the fence for now, for a long list of reasons (via Dan Drezner, who’s doing some fence-sitting of his own).

Will Baude and Tim Sandefur are engaged in a bit of a running battle with the Curmudgeonly Clerk over whether or not individual libertarians’ having moral positions constitute a betrayal of their commitment to not legislate on the basis of morality.

I tend to agree with Tim that the Clerk is confused on a number of points, and leave the detailed critiques to Tim and Will. My main, and unoriginal, observation would be that “societal acceptance” is something that is relatively independent of legality. (My second observation would be that Reason was a far better arbiter of libertarian thought under Virginia Postrel’s editorship, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Update: Tim Sandefur responds. Actually, after I wrote the above sentence, I realized that the word “arbiter” doesn't quite characterize my thought; I meant something closer to “exemplar.” Indeed, contra Jonah Goldberg (and his bloviation that National Review polices the boundaries of conservatism*), I don’t necessarily think libertarian thought needs an arbiter.

In 11 days, we may no longer have Howard Dean to kick around any more. G33k-turned-law-student Joy has Dean’s numbers from Wisconsin (via dKos), and they don’t look pretty at all, with Dean’s “unfavorable” rating approaching 40%.

No, that isn’t a euphemism for masturbation; Xrlq has the details on the latest twist in the California grocery strike shenanigans.

Judging from the Plame leak investigation news, the idea of keeping Dick Cheney around seems more and more foolish by the day. He’s got no constituency in the base, Halliburton will always be an albatross around the administration’s neck with him around, and you can hang virtually every criticism of the administration on him—the WMD claims, Plame, corporate cronyism, the works—on his way out the door.

Not that I know who to replace him with, mind you…

Update: Robert Prather thinks I was a bit coy above in not naming Condi Rice as my preferred replacement. Certainly she would be preferable to Guiliani, I don’t see any of the “hard right” folks like Ashcroft or Santorum as being worthwhile, and I don’t really see any other credible candidates out there. On the other hand, making such a pick feels like nothing so much as jumping on the Panthers bandwagon last week did—for all I know, the right pick could be someone from left field (Fred Thompson?).

And, the Functional Ambivalent agrees that it’s time for Cheney to find a privately-financed, but still secure, undisclosed location.

Leave it to Michael Totten to write a post I have to respond to right before I feel like losing consciousness for the evening. Hopefully I’ll remember to say something about it tomorrow.

Apropos of the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s latest salvo in the Bay State’s same-sex marriage war, I suppose I should have something to say about the topic.

From a sort of policy-wonkish point of view, I tend to agree with Steven Taylor that it’s probably going to affect the presidential campaign in all sorts of nasty ways—not just because it raises the stakes by virtually ensuring there will be a DOMA challenge sometime during the election season, but also because it makes the ongoing judicial nominations battle even more intense, especially since this natural court* is waaaay overdue for someone to either retire or kick the bucket.

From the point of view of being someone who believes in democratic accountability, the idea of four justices in Massachusetts deciding the issue of same-sex marriage—based on their own state constitution alone, mind you—for the rest of the country is profoundly disturbing. The comparison to Loving v. Virginia (388 US 1; 1967) doesn’t wash, because that case was a decision reached by the U.S. Supreme Court. In practice, of course, much economic regulation is carried out this way—the product liability standards of the most plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction in Mississippi are de facto the product liability standards of the nation. That doesn’t mean I have to particularly care for its extension into other areas of law.

On the other hand, though, there’s a great deal of legislation that is outmoded, overly intrusive, or downright pure garbage on the books—and legislatures full of spineless creatures who are loath to stand up to excise these laws from the statute books. Sure, they could do the right thing and repeal Mississippi’s idiotic law that makes cohabitation by unmarried couples illegal (you can go to jail for six months), but why risk grief from Donald Wildmon and his dwindling band of morals police? These laws may be “uncommonly silly,” to borrow from Justice Thomas’ dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, but that silliness was obviously not evident enough to the Texas legislature for that state’s sodomy statute to be repealed. And, in the meantime, people go to jail or are fined on the basis of a law that most observers would concede is “uncommonly silly.” Ends do not justify means, but neither do means inherently justify ends.

Now, unlike the aforementioned cohabitation statute, or Texas’ sodomy statute, prohibitions against same-sex marriage are not necessarily “uncommonly silly.” They may not even be silly. If you’re someone concerned about the free association and free exercise rights of coreligionists, you might reasonably conclude that legalization of same-sex marriage might soon lead to judicial requirements that a church perform the sacraments of marriage for same-sex couples, even if such sacraments would be contrary to its doctrine. Marriage remains an important institution to millions of Americans; for every Britney Spears or J-Lo who makes a mockery of the institution, there are thousands of responsible, but sometimes imperfect, people who make their best effort to uphold it. It is not an institution to be altered lightly.

Nor do I personally find outcome-based arguments in favor of (or for that matter, in opposition to) same-sex marriage persuasive. As a matter of principle, I believe fundamental liberties should not be subject to cost-benefit analysis. Questions of whether gay marriage will “civilize homosexual men” or lead to higher divorce rates miss the point.

In the end, I don’t have an easy answer. My gut feeling, proponent of individual liberty that I am, is that if two people want to be married and they are consenting adults, that’s just fine with me. But I can see where reasonable people can differ, and I don’t know what I could say to make them think differently.

Apropos of Steven Taylor’s consideration of when President Bush will abandon the “Rose Garden” strategy and take the campaign to the road, it looks like the answer has been given: the president wil appear on Meet The Press this Sunday, according to tonight’s edition of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (yes, I'm part of his 0.3 share).

Of course, a wag might say he’s planned it to steal the thunder from Howard Dean’s “attempted return from the dead” campaign in Washington state.

Professor Bainbridge inquires:

Back during the anthrax scare, a lot of left-liberal commentators and bloggers rushed to the judgment that right-wing domestic terrorists with connections to the Bush administration were behind the anthrax attacks. I wonder what those same folks will say now that somebody has sent ricin to both the Republican President and the Republican Senate majority leader?

I think it’s a safe bet they’ll say the same, semi-mythical “right-wing domestic terrorists” are out to get both Bush and Frist because they’re not “right-wing” enough. Of course, then they’ll go right back to lumping Bush and Frist in with the Michigan Militia crowd.

Lots of interesting stuff out there today. I’m too lazy to comment on it all, so here are some links:

• Tyler Cowen has some interesting thoughts on immigration. I’m looking forward to his followup.
  
• Bad news: the health benefits of drinking seem only to apply to smokers and ex-smokers.
• Snark of the week: Wonkette suggests some alternate titles for Senator Bill Frist’s family history, Good People Beget Good People.
  
• Clayton Cramer: he’s not just anti-gay, he’s anti-science.
  
• Via Gnostical Turpitude (what is it with all these University of Chicago blogs, anyway?), here's a board game based on one of my favorite novels, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
  
• Via Hit and Run, I learned that Marvel and DC are claiming a joint trademark on the term "Super-Hero".
• And Slate has a page with some 1971 Doonesbury strips featuring John Kerry.

Somehow, Nickelback’s “Someday” seems oddly appropriate as a eulogy for Howard Dean’s campaign. Don’t believe me? Take a look-see at the lyrics:

How the hell’d we wind up like this
And why weren’t we able
To see the signs that we missed
And try to turn the tables
I wish you’d unclench your fists
And unpack your suitcase
Lately there’s been too much of this
But don’t think it’s too late

Nothing’s wrong
Just as long as you know that someday I will
Someday, somehow
I’m gonna make it alright
But not right now
I know you’re wondering when
You’re the only one who knows that
Someday somehow
I’m gonna make it alright
But not right now
I know you’re wondering when

See, it’s all so obvious when you look back…