Henry

As Michael Froomkin says, the headline of this Washington Post editorial is admirably blunt.

A Defining Moment for America: The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

Both Michael and (as usual) Marty Lederman have more.

Michael Bérubé tosses out an aside in a post on Raymond Williams and culture.

bq. Left media critics make much of the fact (to take a random example) that millions of Americans believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and I have heard any number of my colleagues adduce this as evidence of the Foxification of national discourse. But the curious thing is that on September 12, 2001, millions of Americans believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and Iraq’s refusal to denounce the attacks didn’t exactly reassure those people. The question remains, then, of whether Fox News actively recruits people to the “Iraq was involved” agenda, or whether it simply confirms the Cheney-Rice conspiracy theorists in what they already believe.

As it happens there _is_ evidence that Fox News has a real and quite substantial effect on people’s politics (albeit on voting behavior rather than the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories). Stefano Della Vigna and Ethan Kaplan have a paper (pdf ) which compares voting in the 1996 and 2000 presidential and senate elections in towns where Fox News was introduced on cable and in towns where it wasn’t. They argue that there isn’t any substantial difference between the two different groups of towns besides the introduction or lack of same of Fox News, providing a sort of natural experiment. However, there are significant _ex post_ differences in the degree to which people in these towns then vote for Republicans. Between 1996 and 2000, Republicans gain between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points more of the vote in towns with Fox News than in towns without it. DellaVigna and Kaplan reckon that Fox News persuaded between 3% and 8% of its audience to vote Republican.

This short Jack Balkin essay seems to me to be the best thing I’ve read on the relationship between blogging and scholarship.

Law professors now agonize over whether blogging constitutes legal scholarship and what this will do to the legal academy. They needn’t bother. The real threat to quality comes not from the medium of blogging itself but from using citation counts, links, page views, and downloads as measures of merit. People won’t just apply these criteria to judge blogs. They will also apply them to standard-form legal scholarship online. Blogging, in fact, is sui generis. It blurs the traditional boundaries between scholarship, teaching, and service because it transcends the normal audiences and expectations of legal scholarship. Over the years, legal scholarship has become an increasingly self-contained community where scholars write only for each other. Bloggers have burst out of that model: they talk to many different audiences, they teach the world about law, and they perform a public service by drawing attention to the legal and policy issues of the day. Blogging may give scholars publicity that gets their work a look. But it will not by itself generate a scholarly reputation or make a scholarly career—at least, that is, until social and technological change thoroughly reconstitute our standards of merit. … The wrong question to focus on is whether hiring committees should count blogging as legal scholarship. The right question is how we should re-imagine our vocation as professors of law in light of new online media. Should we continue to speak mostly to ourselves and our students, or should we spend more time trying to teach and influence the outside world?

I’m thinking about these questions because I’m deciding whether or not to list a very small part of my blogging – the seminars that I’ve organized and am organizing around academic books – on my cv as some form of academic activity – perhaps under the heading of “unconventional publishing.” Any thoughts?

Two interesting pieces.

First, Open Democracy on the release of Ramin Jahanbegloo from prison in Iran. I blogged about Jahangebloo a couple of months ago; he was finally let out, but gave an interview immediately afterwards “admitting” that foreign agents had attended his seminars, that his work could have been useful to attempts to overthrow the government in Iran etc. According to the article, the authorities threatened to confiscate his house and the house of his mother if he didn’t give an interview of this kind, supporting the authorities’ story to some extent (although notably not confessing to spying). Thanks to my friend Carl Caldwell for the link.

Second, this piece by David Glenn in the Chronicle on an academic who’s landed in some controversy because of her book which argues that the progressive movement’s reliance on paid canvassers is hurting it. The Fund for Public Interest Research, which is the organization described in her book, has sent a certified letter to the academic’s department, alleging that she didn’t protect the organization’s anonymity. It does sound as though the academic should have been more careful to protect the anonymity of the organization than she was (although it perhaps would have been impossible to do this properly), but it also sounds as though the Fund’s real beef with her isn’t that the book revealed who it was, but that it was vigorously critical of the organization. The Fund has a pretty dubious track record over issues such as allowing its staff to unionize. For more blogospheric discussion, see here, here, here and here.

We’ll be doing a Crooked Timber seminar around the end of next month on Sheri Berman’s new book on the past and future of social democracy in Europe (now available from Powells and Amazon). The book itself is highly recommended, and should make for a fun and interesting discussion.

Making Light points us to Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars which in turn refers to the epic battle over what makes an Irish Breakfast an Irish Breakfast. It’s a lovely example of how Wikipedia should work. The bizarre and repulsive heresies of the fried kidneys and the baked beans are duly anathematized and dispatched into limbo. A blatantly political attempt to assimilate the meal that nourished our fathers under the rubric of the entirely inferior morning repast of the Hated Anglo-Saxon Oppressor is vigorously repelled. And a harmonious consensus finally prevails, which not only correctly identifies the proper constituent parts (sausages, rashers, eggs, mushrooms and black and white puddings), but contains much useful information (e.g. Iarnrod Eireann breakfasts, the great expense of) for the interested inquirer.

These are serious matters. When in Belfast, one of my uncles once spotted a colleague declining to partake of the Ulster Fry that was provided for breakfast, and instead ordering muesli – _with skim milk_. He knew at once that the man wasn’t to be trusted.

Eric Umansky (via Laura Rozen) has a great article in the CJR on how newspapers dealt with stories about torture and murder in Iraq. For example, this story about the _New York Times_.

Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.” Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”

Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.) “Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.” Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)

I see that Aaron Swartz is running for the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board. I’ve known his blog for a little while; he’s an occasional commenter here; he set up Rick Perlstein’s website and he created the New York Times Link Generator, beloved of bloggers who don’t want their NYT stories to succumb to linkrot. All of which is to say that any of you who qualify as a member of the electorate (400+ edits on Wikipedia; I don’t know about other Wikimedia forums rules), should seriously consider voting for him (note that this is a personal endorsement on my part; CT doesn’t do endorsements as a collective).

The New Republic‘s Open University blog is up and running. While I’m not at all a fan of the magazine itself in its Martin Peretz incarnation, this new venture has some very good people blogging for it, as well as others who’ll be quite interesting to watch from a safe distance.

Matthew Big Number of Blogs Yglesias is consolidating his efforts at a revamped MatthewYglesias.com. Update yer blogrolls accordingly.

This review is a year late – the delay is thanks to the birth of our first-born, the urgency of getting my own book into a fit state to be submitted to publishers, and repeated and extended fits of procrastination. I hope to be starting to review political science books more regularly from here on in, with a particular focus on books that touch upon areas that I do academic work on (EU politics, the politics of the Internet and e-commerce, institutional theory, trust), or that are topical for one reason or another. Some of these books are likely to be of interest to the general CT reader, some not.

Glyn Morgan, _The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration_ (Princeton University Press 2005), review beneath fold. Powells. Amazon.
[click to continue…]

I’ll be attending the APSA conference in Philadelphia, arriving Friday, and leaving Sunday morning. Below the fold is a list of panels that I thought looked interesting on the basis of a quick browse through the APSA website – feel free to add others in comments.

[click to continue…]

Mike Pence on evidence-based reasoning.

Mr. Pence argued that tax cuts help the poor by revving the economy. That may eventually prove true, but despite large tax cuts the poverty rate has risen in each of the last four years. “That’s anecdotal,” Mr. Pence said in an interview last fall. Then he offered an anecdote — a story President Reagan told about a pipe fitter pleased to see the rich prosper, “because I’ve never been hired by a poor man.”

… to Scott Page for somehow getting the Quarterly Journal of Political Science to publish an article discussing the concept of ‘phat dependence.’