by Kieran Healy on October 29, 2004
I know this is late in Blog Time, but this Pentagon response to the debacle of the “looted high-explosives cache”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/politics/29bomb.html?hp&ex=1099108800&en=7b767c25018de326&ei=5094&partner=homepage is too good to pass up:
bq. The Pentagon also notes that it has destroyed 400,000 tons of munitions from thousands of sites across Iraq, and that the explosives at Al Qaqaa account for “one-tenth of 1 percent” of that amount.
Now let’s say I move house next month, pack everything into a trailer and drive to, oh, Florida. I arrive to discover I have left my 9-month-old daughter behind in Tucson. Not to worry! She weighs less than 20lbs and this is but a tiny fraction of the total weight I successfully shipped across the country. A negligible error!
by Daniel on October 29, 2004
About two hours after the Osama video hit the newswires, and the good old Iowa Electronic Markets have marked down the two DEM04 contracts from about 48% to 44%. Ouch.
By the way, there might be a small prize for the first CT reader to find an online use of the “see, Kerry agrees with Bin Laden” talking point that is no doubt being lined up on the Mighty Wurlitzer …
by Ted on October 29, 2004
Zizka has a great tagline on his blog: “Uncool when uncoolness is necessary.” We’ve reached that point. This is a goddamn outrage. GOP apparatchiks in Ohio may face prosecution for making false claims in their challenges to hundreds of new voter registratrations. Their challenges were thrown out at the initiative of the Republican members of the Board of Elections, proving that not every single thing on Earth is about politics. Completely unacceptable.
And this… I really hope that it’s revealed to be a parody, or a forgery, or something. Even the Kossacks are suspicious. It’s so over the top, it’s like seeing a recruiting poster for COBRA.
by BillG on October 29, 2004
Election notes from Columbus, OH. Last week, John Kerry was in Katzinger’s, the deli around the corner from my house. Tonight he and Bruce Springsteen are at Ohio State University (OSU).
10/28/04 2:33 PM EST. I get a robot phone call from Ken Blackwell, the (Republican) Ohio Secretary of State. Big deal: Clinton called last night. If Ohio is Florida 2004, Blackwell will be Katherine Harris. I know you are thinking, “Das eine Malals Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce,” but Harris nailed farce, so Ken has his work cut out for him. He reminds me that I can only vote in my correct precinct and asks if I know where this is (Me: “Yes.” Ken: “Excellent. Goodbye”). Some Ohioans view this an attempt to suppress the vote by getting people to worry about where they should go. That seems paranoid.
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by Kieran Healy on October 27, 2004
“Gallimaufry tells you how”:http://marykay.typepad.com/gallimaufry/2004/10/protect_the_vot.html.
by Chris Bertram on October 26, 2004
Many of the British blogs are currently debating whether Charlie Brooker’s joke (or “joke”, depending on your pov) about Presidential assassination was funny, not funny, tasteless, stupid, etc. “Michael Brooke”:http://michaelbrooke.com/ , “commenting at Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/10/23/getting_lower.php offers some much needed context for the benefit of people who’ve never actually held a copy of the Guardian’s listings supplement in their hands.[1]
bq. … it appeared on page 52 of their pocket-sized listings guide, in equally pocket-sized print, in a slot normally occupied by facetious demolitions of TV programmes (which was certainly the spirit in which I read it this morning). Unfortunately, this distinction is somewhat blurred by the more egalitarian online version.
Such attempts to minimize the affair would cut no ice with FrontPage magazine! They begin “their coverage”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15659 thus:
bq. The Left’s campaign of hate and defamation against the American president has hit a new low: a major media organ of the international Left, edited by an associate of Bill Clinton, has called for President Bush’s assassination.
And after foaming at the mouth for a few more paragraphs they finish:
bq. This final American connection lays everything in place: The president’s leftist opponents – foreign and domestic – feel they have a sacred duty to rig elections around the world to their liking. And if their advice is scorned, they have the right to pursue what Clausewitz called “politics by other means”: physical warfare. The development is not a healthy one for democracies on either side of the Atlantic.
fn1. The Guardian’s listings supplement is not just ephemeral, it is, in my experience, almost useless. It is supposed to be regionally sensitive, so that you don’t have to wade through all the Cardiff cinema listings if you live in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, the Guardian appears to have a policy of distributing the various editions randomly, so there is very little chance that the one actually on sale locally pertains to that region.
by Ted on October 25, 2004
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a bloodthirsty terrorist. He was well-known before the war in Iraq. In fact, we knew that he had a base in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq, where we operated freely. Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN leaned heavily on Zarqawi to make the case for war. But it begged the question: why didn’t we take out Zarqawi’s base before the war?
The Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002, giving the administration a series of options for a military strike on the camp Mr. Zarqawi was running then in remote northeastern Iraq, according to generals who were involved directly in planning the attack and several former White House staffers. They said the camp, near the town of Khurmal, was known to contain Mr. Zarqawi and his supporters as well as al Qaeda fighters, all of whom had fled from Afghanistan. Intelligence indicated the camp was training recruits and making poisons for attacks against the West…
But the raid on Mr. Zarqawi didn’t take place. Months passed with no approval of the plan from the White House, until word came down just weeks before the March 19, 2003, start of the Iraq war that Mr. Bush had rejected any strike on the camp until after an official outbreak of hostilities with Iraq. Ultimately, the camp was hit just after the invasion of Iraq began.
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by Kieran Healy on October 25, 2004
A guy went by me the other day wearing a T-Shirt that read, “I bet you’ll vote _this_ time, Hippy.”
by John Q on October 25, 2004
I was thinking about the prospects for the US election and also about the probability of casting a decisive vote and it struck me that a situation like that of Florida in 2000 would have had a quite different outcome in Australia. In a situation where there were enough disputed votes to shift the outcome (and no satisfactory way of determining the status of those votes), the Court of Disputed Returns would probably order a fresh election. It seems to me that this is a better way of resolving problematic elections than attempts to determine a winner through court proceedings[1], though I’d be interested in arguments against this view.
In view of the long delay between election and inauguration, this solution would seem to be particularly appealing for the US. However, it seems clear from this page that the American constitutional tradition does not allow for such a possibility, preferring such devices as drawing the winner from a hat, if nothing better can be found. I wonder if there is a reason for this, or if it is just one of those things that doesn’t come up often enough for people to think about fixing it?
fn1. Obviously, once the situation arises, one side or the other will see an advantage in going through the courts, or allowing state officials to decide,and will oppose a fresh election. But ex ante, it seems as if agreeing to a fresh election in such cases would benefit both sides.
by Ted on October 21, 2004
A Bangladeshi immigrant put himself in the driver’s seat by paying a record US$360,000 at a city auction on Monday for a New York taxi medallion, which is required by the city to own a taxicab. Most cabdrivers in the city work for taxi fleets or lease time from a medallion owner.
Mohammed Shah, 44, mortgaged his house in the New York borough of Queens to help finance the purchase of one of 116 new taxi medallions sold to the highest bidders.
Madre dios. I’ve never lived in New York City, but I’m pretty sure that the city isn’t drowning in a sea of cabs. You don’t need to be a blue-skinned libertarian to see that artificial scarcity has some real consequences.
I know that Mayor Bloomberg’s got a lot on his plate, and I know that it’s unfair to personalize the NYC bureaucracy in the form of one man. But, still… he’s a shrewd businessman who came to office with relatively few political debts. From my distant perspective, he seemed to spend an awful lot of capital on necessary tax hikes and unnecessary smoking bans.
He was probably the last, best hope to phase out rent control and crazy cab restrictions, wasn’t he? Damn.
by Kieran Healy on October 21, 2004
David Post “complains”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_21.shtml#1098372619 that John Kerry was not at the game to see the Red Sox beat the Yankees:
bq. AND WHERE WAS JOHN? … I’m surprised that there hasn’t been much talk about why we didn’t see Kerry at any of the games. He’s the junior senator from Massachusetts; he’s got a bona fide reason to snap his fingers, get the front row seats, put on his sox cap and jacket, and root like an ordinary human being. What, he doesn’t want the national TV exposure?? Was he worried about alienating Yankee fans? I guess one shouldn’t make too much of what is “just a ballgame,” but really: to his constituents, this is the most important thing going on at the moment; he’s lived and worked in Massachusetts all his life; is he the only person in that category who wouldn’t take free tickets to see these games? I honestly don’t get it, and it does make me wonder about the guy.
Note the pincer movement here. On the one hand, Kerry should have been at the game because that’s what “an ordinary human being” would do. On the other hand, Kerry is not a regular guy, because he’s a senator, is running for President, and he could have snapped his fingers to get front row seats. So, either he snaps his fingers or he doesn’t. He chose not to, for whatever reason, and so leaves himself open on the flank David attacks: “who wouldn’t take free tickets… does make me wonder about the guy” and so on. But say Kerry _had_ snapped his fingers and gotten front row seats, his face on the Jumbotron and the inevitable TV News coverage. What then? It’s obvious. He’d have opened himself up to whinging on just the _opposite_ grounds, viz, “Isn’t it typical of an elitist Senator who hasn’t been to a game all season to just snap his fingers, get front row seats, and try to use the Red Sox’s historic victory as a campaign rally? A classier guy — any ordinary human being, really — would have stayed away and let the fact that the Sox beat the curse have the limelight.” Heads I win, Tails you lose.
by Henry Farrell on October 20, 2004
Two must read pieces by “David Glenn”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/fa04/glenn.htm and “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/10/american_conser.html (discussion below fold).
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by Ted on October 20, 2004
by Chris Bertram on October 19, 2004
What is the US Presidential election about? Well, one possible answer is that it is about which of George W. Bush and John Kerry would make the best President of the United States. Now there’s certainly room for disagreement about the relevant qualities to be best President, but much of the media and blogospheric discourse is couched in such a way as to appear to be discussing a matter of fact: best translates as “most competent”, “wisest” etc. I’m going to assume — for the purposes of this post alone and contrary to my saner instincts — that a matter of fact is indeed involved. Given that simplifying assumption, the matter of determining who would be the best President by a democratic vote is something we might justify by invoking “Condorcet”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet ’s jury theorem. According to the jury theorem (which I cite in Zev Trachtenberg’s formulation [1])
bq. the probability that majority is correct ( _Pm_ ) is given by the formula
v h-k/(v h-k+e h-k ), where number of voters = n = h+k , where _h_ is the number of voters in the majority, _v_ is the probability that each voter will give the correct answer, and _e_ is the probability that each voter will give the wrong answer.
This has the remarkable consquence that just in case we expect each voter’s competence slighly to exceed the tossing of a fair coin (say we expect each voter to be right 50.1 per cent of the time), and just in case we can interpret “each voter” to mean “the average voter”, then with an electorate of, say, 100 million, the probability of a majority getting the result right approaches one. Of course, there’s a flip side to this: if the each voter has a < .5 probability of getting the right result, the majority will almost certainly be wrong!
So what should we think, _ex ante_ , about the competence of the average American voter? The votemaster at the excellent "electoral-vote.com":http://www.electoral-vote.com/ opines:
bq. Are the voters stupid? It is not considered politically correct to point out that an awful lot of voters don't have a clue what they are talking about. A recent "poll":http://www.mtsusurveygroup.org/mtpoll/f2004/MTSUPoll_Election_Report.htm from Middle Tennessee State University sheds some light on the subject. For example, when asked which candidate wants to roll back the tax cuts for people making over $200,000 a year, a quarter thought it was Bush and a quarter didn't know. And it goes down hill from there. When asked which candidate supports specific positions on various issues, the results were no better than chance. While this poll was in Tennessee, I strongly suspect a similar poll in other states would get similar results. I find it dismaying that many people will vote for Bush because they want to tax the rich (which he opposes) or vote for Kerry because they want school vouchers for religious schools (which he opposes).
(Lest Carol Gould or her apologists think that this post reflects the anti-Americanism of a sneering Brit, let me say (a) I'm quoting an American and (b) that I'm far from convinced that citizens of the UK would fare much better than the people of Tennessee were _their_ competence to be evaluated in a similar poll.) [2]
fn1. Trachtenberg, _Making Citizens_ p. 281 n. 6
fn2. A commenter to a recent post of mine asked, sarcastically, whether the I thought flipping a coin would have been superior to having the Supreme Court decide on the outcome in 2000. Actually, I do think flipping a coin would have been a better method then. Whether it would be a better method than having the US electorate decide is questionable, although _if_ voter-competence is such that individuals are more likely to get the wrong answer than the right one, it would yield a better chance of choosing the best President. Observant and thoughtful readers will also notice that, since Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, I ought to believe that either Bush was the right answer then or that average voter competence has declined below the .5 level in the past four years....or perhaps I should believe that voter competence then as now exceeds .5 and that Kerry will inevitably triumph, or .....you do the permutations.
by Henry Farrell on October 18, 2004
Anyone who gets the Sundance Channel should check out the Documentary “With God on Our Side,” showing at 7pm ET this evening. I haven’t seen it yet (nor do I get Sundance) – but I feel confident in recommending it, as it’s produced by David Van Taylor, who was responsible for “A Perfect Candidate”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/review96/perfectcandidatehowe.htm, the best documentary on American politics that I’ve ever seen.