Parliamentary procedure doesn't, in general, baffle me; and three months interning on the Hill 'way back when, plus my permanent news obsession, have left me with a moderately clear understanding of Congressional procedures. (My Ph.D. in political science added nothing to that knowledge; I must've been sick the day we covered Congress in class.)

But I have no understanding of the rules governing the Senate organizing resolution. How can it possibly be that committee chairs can't turn over without Democratic approval? Could an outgoing-majority party just hold onto committee chairmanships (and budgets, and majorities) forever? Is this a norm of civility-- "because we like to think of the Senate as a gentlemanly club we like to agree on the rules of the game in advance"? Or is it, as reports seem to suggest, an actual procedural rule that both parties must agree to the organizing resolution?

I remember that in 2000 Lott agreed to an organizing resolution that Republicans were none too happy with, and that it governed the change in party control a few months later. If he'd negotiated harder, could he have gotten a resolution that would have preserved Republican control of committees after Jeffords' switch?

In short: at what point could a floor majority ram through an organizing resolution? Is there any such point? What's the longest it's ever taken to get the resolution approved?

Congress trivia junkies and Congress scholars (overlapping but non-identical groups), whaddayknow?

UPDATE 1: Decided to look around for the answer. What seems to me the relevant section of the Senate standing rules doesn't mention anything about supermajorities or consensus rules. But the words "organizing resolution" don't appear, so I'll keep looking. Elsewhere, I see the following:

ch. 25 section. 4 par. (c) By agreement entered into by the majority leader and the minority leader, the membership of one or more standing committees may be increased temporarily from time to time by such number or numbers as may be required to accord to the majority party a majority of the membership of all standing committees. When any such temporary increase is necessary to accord to the majority party a majority of the membership of all standing committees, members of the majority party in such number as may be required for that purpose may serve as members of three standing committees listed in paragraph 2. No such temporary increase in the membership of any standing committee under this subparagraph shall be continued in effect after the need therefor has ended. No standing committee may be increased in membership under this subparagraph by more than two members in excess of the number prescribed for that committee by paragraph 2 or 3(a).

But that only seems to apply when the sizes of committees are being increased.


UPDATE: Chris Lawrence says that there's nothing especially obscure or exotic going on.

I think the issue is that the organizing resolution, like almost everything else
in the Senate (except, I believe, conference reports), is subject to filibuster.

Since the organizing resolution is your basic party-loyalty activity (like voting for your party's leader for Speaker of the House), the options are: a) one party has 60 votes and can pass the resolution unanimously; b) unanimity, as dictated by agreement between the party leaders, or c) paralysis.

Reader David Isaacson independently suggested the same thing.

Makes sense to me-- except in that it-doesn't-really-make-any-sense-at-all way...

UPDATE AGAIN: This makes rather more sense to me. A Congress scholar who wishes to remain anonymous writes:

Regarding your query, the answer likely lies in the fact that the Senate
is considered to be a "continuing body" unlike the House, which must
pass (or re-pass) its standing rules in each Congress. Only a third of
the membership is new each Congress, so the rules carry over from
Congress to Congress. If you parse the rules closely, you will see that
there is generally little reference to parties (majority & minority).
In particular, there are no rules against having minority party members
chair committees, a condition we witnessed as late as the early 20th C...

Binder and Smith have a good discussion of the continuing body issue in
Politics or Principle (Brookings, 1997). They discuss the issue in the
context of the difficulty of enacting cloture reform (reform of Rule
XXII). As a pragmatic matter, the Democrats won't be able to hold on
the committees indefinitely, but they are trying to extract as much as
they can.

The filibuster seemed insufficient as an explanation; it couldn't account for the continuing validity of the old organizing resolution since, in general, one Congress cannot bind its successor. But the Senate isn't ever binding its successor; it's binding "itself." Very interesting...

There'd something a little odd about Princeton economist Alan Krueger devoting his whole NYT column to plugging the research of currently-on-the-job-market Princeton grad student, Erica Field-- if not for the fact that she's working on a really exciting and important topic, the impact of Hernando de Soto's land-titling reforms on labor market participation in Peru, and for the fact (not mentioned in his column, but apparent from her CV) that he's not one of her advisors.

I'm a big, big believer in de Soto's title-reform agenda for Peru and most of the rest of the developing world. As Krueger notes, the effect Field has found isn't the main one de Soto predicts. But the effects are all of a piece; property titling lends security and stability to the lives of the most vulnerable. It makes sense that protection of basic physical security and protection from invasion precede labor market entry, which in turn precedes credit market entry. More former squatters having regular and documentable sources of income now means more former squatters who make plausible mortgagors in a few years; collateral is a necessary but often not sufficient condition for credit market access, since creditors would rather know how the loan is going to be serviced than to know that they're going to end up foreclosing.

Oddly, Krueger only mentioned Peruvian government studies of the credit market access question, and he reports that there's been no evidence of an improvement yet. But Field's list of working papers includes one on this question, and while the results aren't huge, they do seem to be present.

Do Property Titles Increase Credit Access among the Urban Poor? Evidence from Peru”(with Maximo Torero, mimeo, Princeton University, September 2002)

Abstract: The Peruvian urban titling program provides a dramatic natural experiment for testing the theory that credit rationing can be remedied by strengthening institutions governing property rights and increasing the collateral value of landholdings. This paper conducts an evaluation of early program impact on the likelihood of obtaining formal credit and on the interest rate at which formal credit can be obtained. Staggered program timing within cities enables us to construct comparison groups in program and non-program neighborhoods via propensity score based on observable criteria in loan applications. We then estimate the average treatment effect of property titling on credit access using kernel-based and nearest neighbor matching methods, looking separately at the impact among commercial and non-profit lenders. Our results suggest that among non-profit lenders land titles increase loan acceptance rates by 12% but have no influence on borrowing costs. Meanwhile, loan acceptance rates of both standard commercial banks and informal lenders are unaffected by residential ownership status, although interest rates in commercial banks appear slightly lower for title-holders. We attribute this pattern to the higher profitability of small loans for microfinance lenders with localized strategies for dealing with informational and enforcement costs and to greater public sector familiarity with the government titling effort.

NB: This is not an area of academic expertise for me; I read de Soto's translated works, but those aren't pieces of technical economics. I gather that Field is among the first economists to subject the reforms to rigorous testing; I haven't read her papers, and they don't seem to have been through peer review yet. With that proviso noted, here's the paper Krueger is talking about.

UPDATE: Brad deLong is impressed with Field's work as well.

Every so often bloggers self-indulgently list wacky combinations of search words that have led people to their sites.

My recent results yield some politics, some political philosophy, and some Lord of the Rings stuff (especially Haldir, for some reason-- maybe his name doesn't appear online as frequently as those of most characters, and so this site pops up early on the web searches). The one I really can't figure out combines politics and LotR:

narsil sword pakistan

What on earth was the occasion for searching for these words in combination?

UPDATE: According to reader Bert Wiener:
Pakistan is where a lot of replica
and fantasy 'cutlery' is produced. Perhaps someone is
looking for a site that's producing the shards of
Narsil. Now THAT's a serious collector!

More plausible than anything else I've heard. This year I've been bombarded by catalogs selling replica elven-rings and Lorien-brooches and Sting and so on. I don't remember anything selling a replica of the sword that was broken when it was still broken, though...

With the Democratic presidential field almost complete, I offer my first NH primary prediction, 55 weeks in advance. Richard "Eyebrowless Man" Gephardt, who utterly failed to connect with NH voters in 1988, will utterly fail to do so again in 2004. Protectionism, unionism, and midwestern agriculture subsidies just aren't the core issues for NH Democrats. He will finish no better than fifth, behind at least Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, and Dean. In the 1984 NH Democratic primary there were Democrats who finished behind write-ins for Ronald Reagan on the Democratic ballot. Success for Gephardt in NH will be finishing ahead of write-ins for Bush, and ahead of Al Sharpton; and he might not pull those off.

The NYT has mostly lagged behind the Washington Post on coverage of the Indian trust fund scandal, but it gave the most recent developments the coverage they deserve.

Dan Drezner has a round-up of coverage of the American Economics Association and American Historical Association annual meetings. The last couple of weeks have also, of course, seen the annual meetings of the American Association of Law Schools, the American Philosophical Association (East), and the Modern Language Association (see coverage here). This means grad students in all those disciplines have been going through the hazing ritual known as conference interviews. Dan's happy that the APSA meets at the beginning of the school year because over Labor Day the reporters who write snarky academic-mocking articles are still on their August vacations. I'm happy about it because it means that political scientists are spared that miserable (for candidates and interviewers alike) intermediate step in the job search process...

If you're near a radio, go listen to Tom Palmer, Jonah Goldberg, and my colleage Richard Epstein on WBEZ's Odyssey, discussing libertarianism. UPDATE: So far I've heard mention of Kant, Locke, Pareto, Jeremy Waldron, Joseph Raz, "the crooked timber of humanity" (Isaiah Berlin's favorite phrase), and Cosmo the Wonderdog. UPDATE AGAIN: A couple of thoughts about Jonah and libertarianism. First, Jonah complains that libertarians get a lot of mileage out of emphasizing drugs as an issue (i.e. by appealing to pot-friendly college students). But, in a discussuion of the difference between conservatism and libertarianism, it seems to me that it's Jonah who's getting mileage out of emphasizing drugs, and the supposed libertarian premise that all individuals are always rational that's neatly disproven by drugs. Conservatives have also: supported sodomy laws, opposed gay marriage and adoption, supported censorship of a variety of sorts (Jonah's proud of this), and supported criminalizing scientific research involving the use of stem cells. Conservatives and libertarians also (by and large, not perfectly) disagree about abortion. In none of these cases is the intuition "drugs=irrationality" available as an argumentative shortcut. Second, Jonah complains that libertarians do less policing of the movement's boundaries than do conservatives (or at least the conservatives at NR). It's true that there hasn't been one libertarian organ that has held the quasi-authoritative position that NR has traditionally held among conservatives. When one wanted to know the conservative position on whether Pat Buchanan was an anti-Semite, one went to NR.

On the other hand, libertarian factions have had no shortage of mutual policing, reading each other out of the movement, etc. Picking up the habit from the Ayn Rand circle, many libertarians have been quite eager to declare where the boundaries are. The Rothbard group tried to read Cato and everyone affiliated with Koch out of the movement; Misesians declare Hayekians to be apostates; anarchists vs. minarchists, and so on. I've got my own boundary: the lewrockwell.com gang of confederatistas and apologists for slavery, police brutality, and immigration restrictions lie outside of it.

I'd've been curious to hear the rest of what Jonah had to say. Who is it he thinks libertarians should have been excluding but haven't been? And what's the argument that all this policing (easily ridiculed as the narcissism of small differences, letting the best be the enemy of the good, the enforcement of ideological litmus tests, and simple factionalism) is an unalloyed good.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Of course, NR's policing of its boundaries sometimes leaves something to be desired. John Derbyshire, anyone?

Regarding Chris Bertram's ongoing discussion of racial intermarriage rates: it's worth noting that the two groups whose out-marriage rates are being compared ("blacks"-- i.e. African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants and descendants of immigrants-- in the UK and "blacks"-- those two groups plus African-Americans-- in the U.S.) are of different sizes. Blacks in the UK are, I believe, something in the neighborhood of 2-3% of the total population. Blacks in the U.S. are something in the neighborhood of 10-12% of the population.

All else being equal, out-marriage rates tend to be much higher among smaller populations. There are fewer in-group members to choose from, fewer whom one meets at school or at work or at play. Of course marriage isn't a matter of randomly selecting a mate from the population at large. But those elements of it that resemble randomness push in the direction of higher exogamy rates from proportionately smaller populations.

Note too that the way the statistic is being expressed-- proportion who marry out-- may be biased. It's very likely that if you asked what proportion of whites marry blacks, the answer would be higher in the U.S.-- because, again, of the different relative populations. (There are many fewer whites relative to blacks in the U.S. than in the U.K.) Would the answer be as much higher as the black share of the U.S. population is higher than the black share of the British population? I have no idea. I know there are ways to statistically normalize for this sort of thing, but I don't offhand remember what they are...

I doubt that these population-proportion differences are the whole story. But they're undoubtedly part of it. The raw comparison of exogamy rates among British and American blacks doesn't show very much.

FInally, the BBC article Chris draws his inferences from isn't very carfeul about this kind of thing. The claims made on behalf of Britain are:
1) "one of the fastest growing mixed-race populations in the world"
2) "Data from the 2001 census due to be released later this year is expected to confirm that Britain has one of the highest rates in the world of inter-ethnic relationships and, consequently, mixed race people. By 1997 already half of black men and a third of black women in relationships had a white partner according to a major study of ethnic minorities published by the Policy Studies Institute (PSI). It also revealed that other inter-racial relationships were flourishing with a fifth of Asian men and 10% of Asian women opting for a white partner."

I can't find the PSI study. But notice that there's no mention at all of white rates of exogamy. Nor is there any mention of interracial marriages as a share of all marriages. The inference that the UK has an especially high share of mixed race people in its population is therefore especially dubious. It might be true; but I doubt it, and even 100% exogamy rates among blacks wouldn't necessarily make it true.

Don't miss this comment on Paul Craig Roberts (and, indirectly, on pseudo-libertarian confederatistas like Lew Rockwell) by Eugene Volokh. I might have, had Mark Kleiman not drawn attention to it.

On the other hand, that Eugene piece does some damage to Mark's notion that "liberals have less appetite than conservatives for spending time listening to affirmations of what they already believe. We're the non-church-going group, remember?"

This idea strikes me as utterly implausible; but of course I lack data to back up my intuition. I will relate one anecdote, though. Most of the regular New Republic readers I know are conservatives or libertarians or Republicans, not left-liberals or progressives or socialists-- despite the fact that I know more of members of the latter group of groups. And it's not because the conservatives and libertarians find more that they agree with in TNR; it was, after all, a magazine-length campaign brochure for Al Gore for a couple of years. But a bunch of progressive-left folks I know are so uninterested in reading anything pro-Israel or anti-identity-politics or New Democratic that they haven't picked it up in years, preferring instead the American Prospect or the Nation. For me, TNR is at the top of the must-read pile; it's smart and witty and insightful and often important. It seems to me that people who read only NR or Reason are fewer and further between than are people who read only the Prospect or the Nation.

And please, avoid the jokes about TNR really being a right-wing magazine...

John Derbyshire has been Cornering away on how much he liked Bored of the Rings, the Harvard Lampoon-published parody. In one of his posts he comments

I mis-remembered the last name of Dildo, hero of Bored of the Rings. His full name was, in fact,
Dildo Bugger. Any suggestions that my mis-recollection of that name is yet more evidence of my
well-known obsessive aversion to certain practices, will be sturdily refuted.

I'm open to contradiction here. Maybe it's a generational thing. But I think this post is more accurate than Derbyshire understands. I, at least, found BotR dumb and, well, boring. Like a great deal of Lampoon material, it reads like something Beavis and Butthead would have written after they learned to write. ["Heh. Hehheh. Dude, you wrote 'dildo.'"] And I think that level of humor gets a lot of its appeal (for those to whom it appeals) out of the laughing embarrassed shock of reading even allusions to sex in general and to sex one takes to be kinky or perverse in particular. In short, it's not the misrecollection that provides evidence of Derbyshire's obsession; it's the fact that he found the book funny in the first place.

For what it's worth: laloca beat Andrew Sullivan to the punch on expressing the suspicion that Herb Ritts' death, reported as being caused by pneumonia in the papers, was HIV-related, and the concern that the major papers are returning to HIV-euphemizing.

Geekdom stuff that's funny, insightful, thought-provoking, or interesting: Pejman on Star Wars here and here. David Brin on Tolkien.

We interrupt the blogging holiday for this special occasion...

Y'know, Randy Cohen's (The NYT Magazine's "Ethicist" columnist) obituary for Ann Landers almost had me liking him, for a minute.

Then he pulled this:
"By presenting her views in the form of an innocuous advice column, not as politics but as common sense, she operated as a sort of stealth progressive.
"This is not an easy thing to do. Shortly after my own column began, it was denounced in several right-wing periodicals, in once case under the headline "'The Ethicist' Better Termed 'The Marxist.'" I may have suggested,,, in passing, that 'corporations donate to charity to buff their images' or 'clean air-- why not?' Apparently ideology-detecting radar has become more acute since Ann Landers began or perhaps, with the country veering so far to the right, qualifications for Marxism have been lowered substantially, like some sort of ideological grade inflation."

This isn't the first time that Cohen has feigned astonishment that the mean right-wingers picked on him and claimed that it was because of views like support for clean air. He milked this story in the introduction to his book, and then ran the relevant exerpt as an article in The Nation. It read in part:

"Virtue, it turns out, is the exclusive property of the right. This was brought to my attention just a few months after I began writing "The Ethicist," a weekly column in The New York Times Magazine, when it was denounced by four periodicals, each more right-wing than the last--the weekend Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, Reason (the presumably ironically named magazine of the Libertarians) and the online version of National Review, where it was named the Outrage Du Jour, under the headline: "'The Ethicist' Better Termed 'The Marxist.'" I may have earned this encomium by suggesting that public education was worthwhile, or perhaps by favoring breathable air. Or air. (Admissions requirements for Marxism have apparently been lowered precipitately, like some kind of ideological grade inflation.)"

Cute. And, like the comedy writer he used to be, he doesn't let a good punchline go. (Cohen has no training in ethics or any related field; the title "The Ethicist" has always struck me as making an unwarranted claim to be offering expertise rather than Landers-style common sense.) The problem is that this punchline is a crock.

I wrote one of those alleged right-wing hit-pieces, for Reason. (You can read it here.) The views for which I criticized him included that it was unethical to fire a temp worker whose shoddy performance was reflecting poorly on everyone ["if anyone's acting unethically here, it's your boss; it is ignoble to force people into soul-deadening, pointless, poorly paid jobs....Organizing work into tedious, repetitive tasks, (that is, the division of labor-- JTL) while profitable for the few, makes life miserable for the many; some political economists have called it a crime against humanity." ] and that giving to charity was morally wrong because the more charitable activity there is, the more easily the state abandons public projects. That's not warm fluffy clean-air stuff. The division-of-labor-as-crime-against-humanity line is probably what led NRO to call him a Marxist.

My beef with him then was that he kept telling people that their individual choices (to defraud or not, to fire or not, to give or not) were morally irrelevant, because of the radical injustice of the economic system. This, I argued, took him out of the realm of being an ethicist-cum-advice-columnist and into the realm of being an op-ed columnist. My beef with him now is that he feels sorry for himself that the right-wingers were so mean to him, but he lies (and keeps telling the same lie) about why that happened. He doesn't stand up for, or modify, or mention, the views that were criticized.

Cohen, of course, has a much wider readership than I do. But as long as he keeps bringing up that he was attacked, I'll keep reminding whoever I can what he was attacked for; clean air it wasn't.

Today at noon Central time, I'll be on Odyssey , on WBEZ 91.5 in Chicago (and simulcast at other NPR outlets? I'm not sure; but it can be listened to online.) discussing freedom of association, inclusion and exclusion, and the relationships between associational life and broader democratic communities. There's some call-in time available (1.888.859.1800). UPDATE: The show can be listened to at the Odyseey archives here

SPOILERS HO.

Those who don't yet want to know about the Two Towers movie, skip on by.

My brother called me last night-- my brother who's been downloading all the making-of documentaries from the web as they were made, not waiting for them to appear on DVDs-- and was very, very dismayed. I'll bet he's not the only fan who is. But I'm not.

The first thing to remember is: Ten years ago, if I'd told you there would be a beautiful, live-action, convincing, big-budget movie of The Two Towers; that tens of millions of people were going to watch a movie that included correct Elvish and Entish; that the Battle of Helm's Deep was going to become one of the handful of best cinematic representations of a battle, ever; you'd've told me I was nuts. Don't lose sight of the forest for the ents.

Second: Gollum. This Gollum is not only an astonishing technical achievement, integrated seamlessly into a live-action movie and setting a new, very high bar for successful CGI. It's also an emotionally compelling performance, and sets a new standard in that way as well. (The froglike critter from the Rankin-Bass cartoons now seems shockingly inadequate.)

Third: the physical reality of Edoras and of Helm's Deep. Edoras is the equal of the first movie's Shire, and even better than the first movie's RIvindell or Lorien.

Fourth: Grima. Brr...

Fifth: Don't compare this version of the Two Towers with the version of Fellowship that you watched last week on DVD. Compare it with the version you watched in the theaters last December. There'll be an extended DVD release of this one, too; and Jackson now has enough of a record that we should trust and be excited about that longer movie.

All of that said...

Oh my God! They killed Haldir! You bastards!


The changes Jackson's made to the story of the second volume all seem to me to push in a common direction: characters who are not among the members of the Fellowship may not be heroic and important. They must be made either less brave and willing to face the war than they are in the books (Theoden, Treebeard, Elrond); more wimpy in an inchoate way (Eowyn); more morally dubious (Faramir-- this is the one that does the most damage); or less prominent (Eomer, whose friendship with Aragorn was sorely missed). This is largely so that our inspiring heroes-- Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Gandalf, and Pippin-- can perform unnecessarily dramatic rallyings-of-the-troops. This, in turn, is in large part because of the changes Jackson has introduced into Aragrorn's plotline (in turn largely motivated by the desire to make the Aragorn-Arwen love story more central, and to make Arwen more prominent). Instead of striding forth from Rivindell with the reforged Narsil in his hand ready to face his destiny, Aragorn has to grow into his leadership, with important help along the way from Arwen and the elves.

This is a very big change, and it's cost us in some significant ways. (I think it has, as one spillover, the loss of the full version of Boromir's and Faramir's dream even in the extended version, and the loss of the dream altogether from the theatrical versions.) It also makes a lot of sense, as a matter of movie-making. The three wholly independent plots of Two Towers are pretty hard to tie into a movie; as a stand-alone book, its climaxes come in funny places and each of the plots ends in a kind of funny place. What Jackson tried to do was to run the three plotlines in parallel, giving each a martial-action climax at the same point. (This was way Frodo and Sam got dragged to Osgiliath. As I mentioned, the Faramir subplot is seriously problematic.) And this structure of changes gives him the opportunity to do this. The arrival of Celeborn and the elvish archers can signal both a rallying of the elves and a rallying of the Rohirrhim. (Note to anyone who, like me, was worried by repeated reference to "the Rohans" in television commentary and printed reviews: the correct "Rohirrhim" is used in the movie.) More or less simultaneously, Merry and Pippin can directly cause Treebeard to become "roused," instead of merely serving as the pebbles that start the avalanche. Later, Aragorn can reinspire the Eomer-less Theoden to greatness-- a reinspiration that wouldn't have been nearly as dramatic had Theoden emerged from his encounter with Gandalf as confident as he did in the book.

So in the service of getting dramatically-timed and Fellowship- (especially Aragorn-)led rallies Theoden is reduced, the Elves are reduced, and the ents are reduced. In the service of getting a martial climax to Frodo and Sam's plotline, and of making sure that our growing-into-office Aragorn doesn't suffer by comparison, Faramir is worse than reduced. He's really betrayed. Since we're supposed to care about love stories: are we now going to feel nearly as happy about Eowyn getting Faramir as her consolation prize? (Maybe so, since she's been reduced as well.)

I'll freely admit: I liked the arrival of the elves at Helm's Deep. I'm not sure that it entirely redeems the weaselification of Elrond over the previous movie and a half; but it was pretty nice, and I understand why it was cinematically called for.

I think Gimli got mocked a bit too much; and I was not happy to have drawrf-tossing mentioned again-- or to have had it mentioned once. But I was clearly in the minority; the opening-day audience roared. And, again, I understand the cinematic demands. Had Gimli not been played somewhat for laughs, there'd've been nothing to lighten the hour-plus of the Helm's Deep plotline. Fine in the book, not so fine in what is, in part, an action movie.

I really missed the full Aragorn-Eomer conversation when they first meet-- though, of course, that conversation depends on Aragorn being willing to claim hios full title and bearing the Sword, so it had to go. I'm not very happy with Treebeard's character.

But the only thing that seemed to me really, really wrong was Faramir; and I don't think the desire to put Frodo and Sam into a battle justifies it.

But, manoman... can you believe we have a cinematic Faramir about whose characterization we can argue?

I thought Fellowship should've gotten both Best Picture and Best Director. I'm less convinced of Best Picture this time... but even more convinced of Best Director.

UPDATE: Heh. Bruce Baugh has a funny take on the discrepancies, though I don't think it really works. (In fairness, it's not really supposed to.)

I'm happy to see that the mostly-silent Volokh Conspirator, Michelle Boardman (whom I know and admire from 'way back in our days together at Brown) is back.

CalPundit has posted some thoughts in response to my post on groupblogs.

It's grammar day at How Appealing and at Mark Kleiman...

The Nation has mostly been unreadable since Hitchens left, but this is a pretty sharp, funny review of the new D'Souza book.

Here's a link to a paper I published a couple of years ago on free speech and the symbols of the Confederacy and of the American history of race-terrorism. (When Cato VP David Boaz wrote an open-ed quoting the piece, it came to the attention of the Confederatista pseudo-libertarians at places like LewRockwell.com-- Lew Rockwell being a prominent pseudo-libertarian who endorsed the Rodney King beatings. Unfriendly comments and e-mails ensued. Judging myself by the enemies I kept, I was pretty pleased...)

Kieran Healey has a marvelous post tweaking anayltic philosophy; and Chris Bertram has a nice pair of posts on European expansion. His point about France is one I've been batting around in my head for the last week. There are all sorts of ways in which Turkey doesn't yet live up to what I take to be the decent liberal minimum of respecting human rights, or at least hasn't yet shown that it has changed its ways. But almost all of these it imported directly or indirectly from France, with the suppression of both religion and linguistic minorities high on the list. If I trusted the EU more, I'd have some sympathies with their reasons for continuing to exclude Turkey; as it is, I'm sort of dubious. (That doesn't mean, btw, that American security interests-- even legitimate ones-- should provide sufficient reason for the EU to extend membership.)

Not all free trade agreements, however, claim to rest on such a thick ideological foundation as the EU. Let Turkey into NAFTA!

Meanwhile: I've got my Two Towers tickets. It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the game that the free ticket that came with the Fellowship DVD wasn't compatible with buying advance tickets online-- which is of course necessary for opening-day seats. Guess I'll just have to go again. Dang.

Juan non-Volokh posted what seemed to me an implausibly sanguine account of the advantages of student-edited law reviews over peer-reviewed journals... but before I could get around to pointing out the difficulties in the argument, his fellow Conspirators Orin Kerr and Sasha Volokh had already done it, thus confirming both a point I made a long time ago about the similarity between blogging and peer review and the possibility I mentioned last week that the future belongs to groupblogs....

via Baggage Carousel No. 4, a paper on the population dynamics of Sunnydale, CA.

I can't muster the energy for anything new on the substance of the Lott problem, while we're waiting for this afternoon's press conference. So instead I'll kvetch about language, a la Jay Nordlinger or William Safire.

The WSJ editorial about Lott has as its subhed:
He must ask if he's still the best leader for the GOP.

Did I miss the memo announcing the abolition of the if-whether distinction? In the past six months or so, even venues that I expect to know better-- TNR, the WSJ, the Economist, the NYT, NR-- seem to have given up on the distinction entirely. (When there's an implied "or not," the proper word is "whether." When there's an implied "then"-- "If Trent Lott steps down, the GOP may have trouble finding a willing successor"-- the proper word is "if.") Do in-house stylebooks no longer even mention this? Do copy-editors no longer read stylebooks? I find this as jarring as that-which mistakes, and only a notch or two less jarring than the misuse of "disinterest." I can't see any good reason for the change, and can't understand why even usually-dependable editors seem to have given up on the distinction.

UPDATE: As far as I can tell, "I wonder if" is never correct. That is to say, I can't think of a correct sentence that would begin that way. This is among the most common ways of making the if-whether mistake. If your sentence or thought begins with "I wonder," [implied "then"] it should take "whether," not "if." I wonder whether there are any exceptions [implied "or not"]...

Coming next week: a response to Nick Shulz's Tech Central Station column on Rawls and foreign policy.

The debate over Rawls' ideas rarely spilled over into the realm of foreign policy.
And whether Rawls had strong feelings about, say, the war on terror or toppling
Saddam Hussein, I do not know. But Rawls' concern for the least well-off can -
indeed, it should - extend far beyond domestic political economy to the realm
of foreign policy. After all, he was positing universal principles, principles in
many ways useful and suitable for an examination of foreign policy.

Rawls did indeed have strong views on the relationship between the principles of Theory of Justice and international politics-- published in The Law of Peoples. That relationship doesn't turn out at all the way Shulz suggests here-- for reasons that some of Rawls' leftist admirers and critics have disputed but with which I (in large part) agree.