I’d like to draw a little more attention to one of those squares.

(Executive Direcector of Reclaiming America Gary) Cass also presents another small-town activist, Kevin McCoy, with a Salt and Light Award for leading a successful campaign to shut down an anti-bullying program in West Virginia schools. McCoy, a soft-spoken, prematurely gray postal worker, fought to end the program because it taught tolerance for gay people — and thus, in his view, constituted a “thinly disguised effort to promote the homosexual agenda.” “What America needs,” Cass tells the faithful, “is more Kevin McCoys.”

Compare that to evangelical writer Tony Campolo:

Roger was gay; we all knew it, and we all made his life miserable. When we passed him in the hall, we called out his name in an effeminate manner. We made crude gestures, and we made Roger the brunt of cheap jokes. He never took showers with us after gym class, because je knew we’d whip him with our wet towels.

I wasn’t there the day some of the guys dragged Roger into the shower room and shoved him into the corner. Curled up on the floor, he cried and begged for mercy as five guys urinated all over him.

The reports said that Roger went to bed that night as usual, and that sometime around two in the morning, he got up, went down to the basement of his house, and hanged himself.

When I heard about Roger, I realized that I wasn’t a Christian. I was a theologically sound evangelical, believed in all of the points of the Apostles Creed, and had declared Jesus to be my Savior. But I know now that if the Holy Spirit had actually been in me, I would have stood up for Roger. When the guys came to make fun of him, I would have put one arm around Roger’s shoulder, waved the guys off with the other, and told him to leave him alone and not to mess with him because he was my friend.

But I was afraid to be Roger’s friend. I knew that if I stood up for a homosexual, people would say cruel things about me too. So I kept my distance. I had done better, who knows if Roger might be alive today.

I desperately hope that we have more Tony Campolos than Kevin McCoys. Specifically, I desperately hope that there’s more Campolo than McCoy in me.

Alabama legislator proposes bill to ban libraries from buying books by gay authors or about gay people.	Middle-aged anti-Bush protestors arrested and strip-searched.	Christian lobbying group prepares to fight vaccine against cervical cancer because it might encourage women to have premarital sex.	Florida Republican legislator proposes bill to give students the right to sue if they think their beliefs are being questioned or treated with disrespect.	Republicans in Congress write one-time-only law purporting to cancel decisions of Florida courts for Terry Schiavo’s parents.
Senate Majority Leader Frist joins questionable characters on “Justice Sunday” to proclaim that the Democrats are prejudiced against people of faith.	Christian lobbying group gives “Salt and Light” award for successful campaign to reverse anti-bullying program that includes gays.	Focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly from hard drugs to marijuana (trend started under Clinton, to be fair)	James Dobson compares the Supreme Court to the KKK.	Virginia bans private contracts between gay couples; no wills, medical directives, powers of attorney, child custody and property arrangements, even perhaps joint bank accounts can be recognized.
East Waynesville Baptist Church kicks out all its Democratic members.	Bush administration bumps Kerry supporters from international telecommunication standards conference.		Pat Robertson says that federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists.	GOP rewrites descriptions of Democratic amendments to accuse Dems of protecting sexual predators.
Texas legislature bans suggestive cheerleading.	Former pro-McCarthy ghostwriter given new job as ombudsmen for the Public Broadcasting System.	Senate Majority Leader (and physician) Bill Frist refuses to contradict federally funded abstinence-only materials that claims that tears and sweat can transmit HIV.	Conservative media saves Christmas.	Texas House of Representatives votes to ban lesbians, gays, and bisexuals from being foster parents.
Top Republican lawmakers propose applying decency standards to cable television and satellite television and radio to protect children from explicit content.	Chief of staff for Tom Coburn (R-OK) says, “I’m a radical! I’m a real extremist. I don’t want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!”	Bush’s federal court nominee Janice Rogers Brown claims that America is in the midst of a religious war.	Kansas Board of Education (not legislature, sorry) holds debate on validity of evolution vs. intelligent design.	Texas legislature votes to make gay marriage extra double super illegal by changing the Texas Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

HOW TO PLAY: Well, that’s just the point. Why would you want to play?

(P.S. If anyone can help me get rid of all the blank space up top, I’d be grateful. -FIXED! Thanks, William)

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/homer.jpg!

There’s an important debate on the politics of Bush’s tax cuts in _Perspectives on Politics_. Larry Bartels’ paper, “Homer Gets a Tax-Cut,” argues that Bush was able to get his tax cuts through because of disconnections in public opinion – while voters’ don’t like inequality and the rich getting richer, they have trouble in “connecting inequality and public policy.” According to NES data, better informed voters were much more likely to express negative views about the tax cuts than less informed voters (interestingly, the data suggests that the relationship between voter information and support is a lot more complicated for the estate tax). Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue in contrast that voters knew what they liked, and that “large majorities of voters expressed clear hostility to the tax cut’s size.” In their argument, the tax cuts got through less because the public don’t draw certain connections, than because the Republicans were highly successful in framing the public debate and in framing the _policies themselves_ so as to slash tax rates on the rich without arousing widespread unrest (there’s an excellent discussion of the strategic deployment of ‘phase ins,’ ‘time bombs’ and ‘sunsets’ in the tax-cuts).

In my view, Hacker and Pierson have the better of the argument. Even if Bartels is correct in suggesting that they overestimate the degree of latent public opposition to tax cuts, Hacker and Pierson are surely right in pointing to the key role of agenda manipulation and policy shaping by Bush and the Republican leadership in getting the tax cuts through. They also draw out some very important connections between the changing role of leadership in Congress, the activities of anti-tax lobbies like the Club for Growth and the new tax-cutting agenda. But it’s also interesting that both articles agree that you can’t explain the political success of the tax-cuts by saying that Americans are happy with increases in inequality, and the rich getting richer. Bartels shows that the survey data points unequivocally in the opposite direction. Also interesting is Bartels’ aside that “the public as a whole likes ‘big business’ even less than it likes people on welfare, liberals, feminists, the news media and the Catholic Church.” What this says to me is that there is space for a much greater degree of left-populism in American politics than we’ve seen recently. The problem is not that the arguments of anti-tax Jihadists like Stephen Moore and Grover Norquist accord well with American public opinion; it’s that these extremists have been very successful in using the Republican machine to manipulate the political agenda.

I was writing this at the same time as Chris, and don’t have much more to add, but I’ll post it anyway, having had the dubious benefit of a bit more daytime to digest the results.

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I went to bed at 12.30 with things looking increasingly grim for Labour, and I’m surprised that when I got up just before 6 they’d improved considerably. The short version: Labour will win an unprecedented third term, but with a reduced majority of 60-something; the Liberal Democrats have made big gains in votes, but less so in seats (and have hurt Labour); and the Tories’ negative campaign has won them some seats but no increased popularity. Oh, and George Galloway ousted Oona King. But you could get all this just by “reading the BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/default.stm .

There’s been a minor “controversy”:http://www.chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1774 recently over Naomi Oreskes’ literature study in _Science_. Oreske found that of 928 paper abstracts on climate change, taken from the ISI database, precisely none disagreed with the consensus view that anthropogenic climate change is real. Now Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University says that after searching the same database, he’s found 34 article abstracts that “reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years.”” Peiser wrote a letter to _Science_, putting forward his alternate findings, which Science declined to publish; in Peiser’s view using “a contrived technicality as an excuse.” This has gotten some “attention”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ixworld.html from the Telegraph, which hints at skulduggery and low standards in high scientific places.

Now, however, Tim Lambert has gotten Peiser to cough up the goods – the 34 (now, for some mysterious reason, 33) scientific abstracts that cast doubt on anthropogenic global warming. Tim is “inviting readers”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/science/peiser.html?seemore=y#more to go through the abstracts, and record their own conclusions. My take after reading them: the claim that Peiser’s 33 abstracts “reject or doubt the view …” is completely unsustainable. There’s one undoubted rejection of the anthropogenic case (no. 27) – but it comes from that well-known arbiter of peer-reviewed scientific neutrality, the ‘Ad Hoc Committee on Global Climate Issues’ of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. There are a few others that could be construed as scepticism (the explicit ones appear to be either outdated or else personal views), but the vast majority of the papers that Peiser cites don’t even begin to make any general arguments about global warming, let alone claims that the anthropogenic argument is bogus. Abstracts no. 12, 13 and 25 aren’t even _scientific research_; they appear to be postmodern inquiries into the construction of scientific authority. If I’d been asked (while wearing my hat as a member of GWU’s Center for International Science and Technology Policy) to review Peiser’s letter and evidence for possible publication in a peer-reviewed journal, I’d have rejected them summarily, and made some fairly warm comments in my rejection letter. I’d have done exactly the same if it had been making the opposite argument (that is if Peiser had used similar evidence to argue that there was support for global warming). Simply put, I don’t think Peiser’s evidence even begins to provide proper support for his claims. But, in fairness to Peiser, he’s made the evidence that he’s using publicly available, so you can go over to Tim’s place and take the taste-test for yourself.

Nearly a week has passed since I endured the finale of Phyllida Lloyd’s Ring for the “English National Opera”:http://www.eno.org/home/index.php . I wrote up earlier episodes on CT, so I ought to complete the job. Kathleen Broderick was just amazingly good as Brunnhilde and the orchestra — under the direction of Paul Daniels — played very well. But producer Phyllida Lloyd should be shot, or worse.

Wagnerphobes are going to be mystified at the complaint that a production of the Ring was silly. “Isn’t it always?” Kieran might say. Well, up to a point. This production of Twilight of the Gods was really very silly indeed, but also trite, one-dimensional, incoherent and offensive. I have no objection to modern dress productions of opera or Shakespeare, to radical changes of location or period. That’s fine. If a producer can give us a new insight into a work of art, or make it come alive for a modern audience, that is ok by me. But this wasn’t anything like that.

It was gratuitous and exploitative. (This was signalled before the performance even started by the programme, which contained photographs of the Twin Towers burning, a severed hand amidst post-Tsunami debris, and cows being burnt in Britain’s last episode of foot-and-mouth disease.) The culmination of this urge to grab hold of any random news image or bit of popular culture for shock value was the portrayal of Brunnhilde as a suicide bomber in Act 3. In between we were treated to Siegfried as rhinestone cowboy and Brunnhilde as Judy Garland (opening of Act 1) and Hagen as game-show host (wedding in Act 2). Why does Judy Garland metamorphose into a Palestinian suicide bomber?! I have absolutely no idea.

Utter crap.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of the – um – mis-communication over his debate with David Horowitz, Michael Bérubé speculated:

I think we’re finally getting to the real reason David hates professors so much. It has nothing to do with our salaries or our working hours: he hates our freedom. Horowitz knows perfectly well that I can criticize the Cockburns and Churchills to my left and the Beinarts and Elshtains to my right any old time I choose, and that at the end of the day I’ll still have a job – whereas he has to answer to all his many masters, fetching and rolling over whenever they blow that special wingnut whistle that only far-right lackeys can hear. It’s not a very dignified way to live, and surely it takes its toll on a person’s sense of self-respect.

With respect to the issue of self-respect, here’s the giveaway: think about how often Horowitz complains that the intellectual left doesn’t take him seriously, doesn’t read his books, and so on. What’s weird about this, you’ll probably have noticed by now, is that American left intellectuals are just about the only thinkers who pay any attention to Horowitz at all.

I’ve tried to do my part by not paying attention to him as much as possible. But I did read the Chronicle’s article about him (previously subscription only, now free – I think). [Update: The Chronicle circulated a special link to make this article available free.] There were several chuckles, some of which others have noted –

“For 20 years, when I have written books on the left, the left has ignored me,” he says. “It’s just what Stalin did to Trotsky.”

He claims he would make more money as a liberal, too, “at least three times,” what he earns now. According to the center’s most recent available tax form, Mr. Horowitz received an annual salary of $310,167 in 2003. He declines to give his current income, but in addition to his salary, Mr. Horowitz receives about $5,000 for each of the 30 to 40 campus speeches he gives each year.

“Someone would have made a film out of it [his autobiographical Radical Son] if I was a leftist,” he says bitterly.

Bérubé’s speculation receives some support: “If he were liberal, he contends, he could be an editor at the Times or a department chairman at Harvard University.” And the author summarizes Horowitz’s outlook this way: “While he wants desperately to be included in the academy — for professors to assign his books and invite him to speak in classes — he seems eager to punish it, in part, for turning a cold shoulder to his work.”

But the real news to me was this tidbit:

The academic bill of rights may have its genesis back in Mr. Horowitz’s grade school, but it really started to take shape after a December 2002 meeting with some fellow Republicans in New York. He met with Thomas F. Egan, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York System; Peter D. Salins, the system’s provost; and Candace de Russy, a member of the board, to discuss the problem of leftist indoctrination in college classrooms and how to solve it.

“I was among sort of friends,” Mr. Horowitz says. “It allowed me to think aloud.”

No surprise that Candace de Russy recently urged the SUNY Board to adopt a version of Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights.” I can’t wait until our own aggrieved creationists come out of the woodwork.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown is back in the news, with “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/05/the_fortas_fili_2.html and various members of the “Volokhs”:http://www.volokh.com discussing her promotion prospects. Henry has already “noted her fondness”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/04/happy-days/ for self-help guru Sam Beckett. Below the fold I reproduce a post of mine from 2003 about “Brown’s rant”:http://www.constitution.org/col/jrb/00420_jrb_fedsoc.htm — there’s really no other word for it — to the Federalist Society, delivered at the University of Chicago Law School in 2000. Mark Schmitt links to a “similar outing”:http://www.communityrights.org/PDFs/8-12-00IFJ.pdf from around the same time. She should have taken it on the comedy club circuit.

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Quickly quickly, here’s my prediction. I’m using vote shares from the IG betting market, because I think that “The Wisdom of Crowds” probably works quite well for mass estimation problems like this, but maybe not so good at projecting the results of its mass estimation onto a difficult electoral college problem. So I’m working on the assumption of 32.5% Conservative, 37% Labour and 24% LibDem and using my own Allocated Regional Swing model, documented here last week.

That gives me the following seat predictions:

Labour: 388
Conservative: 190
LibDem: 53.

Labour majority 130, and presumably Blair decides that it was a referendum on the war (and the lying about the war) after all.

Note that the LibDems get royally screwed by first-past-the-post; they get a swing of 5% and pick up three seats. I have a really ace triangle plot showing this but I don’t know how to upload images on the new WordPress site (Update: thanks Henry!)

I’ll do a proper post after the election explaining how I got it so wrong. Meanwhile, below the fold is my list of possible seat changes; it’s longer than Martin Baxter’s, but this is mainly because the list is drawn from a slightly different model; I wanted one as long as would be possible consistent with my overall predictions to be a bit more interesting.

Now I’m off to vote (LibDem, if anyone cares. Sorry Dobbo, you’re a really nice guy but you’re not standing for the Frank Dobson party. You’re standing for the Labour Party and that means Blair).
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Readers of BoingBoing will have heard about this a while ago, but mashup artist extraordinaire ccc has done an amazing Beatles mashup album called Revolved (scroll down for a bittorrent link). I was just listening to it and I had to share it with all of you, because it is so very fab and gear. The Taxman track is great; it combines Beck’s New Pollution with The Jam’s Start (which, of course, just rips off the bass line from Taxman, but hearing them together is funny). You should check out his other tracks, too.

In more depressing news, I met an actual real-live defender of torture last night. I mean, I know they’re out there because I have to read all the incredibly stupid and irritating comments threads, but it was still weird. His metric of sucess involved 99 innocent people being tortured for every one guilty jihadi who then gives up the goods on some plot which would have killed many people (not clear if this was he fabled nuke scenario or your more run of the mill bombing). And he seemed so normal otherwise! For an English guy who reads LGF all the time. I was really polite too; clearly I wasn’t drinking enough, though when I woke up this morning that wasn’t my first thought.

N.B. Please talk about mashups in this comments thread. Please. You too, jet. C’mon, McSleazy vs. dsico, who’s your man?

UPDATE: You know, there are all these famous mashups out there that don’t seem to be available anymore, like Conway’s “Lisa’s Got The Hives”, or some of that Frenchbloke stuff, or Soundhog? I can’t believe that the basic illegality of the whole thing could possibly be compounded by some enterprising CT reader emailing me some mp3’s. Just thinking out loud, here.

If I’m not confused by timezone differences, today is election day in Britain and the outcome seems pretty much a foregone conclusion (I haven’t checked the omniscient betting markets, I must admit). So, I’ll look at a more trivial question. If the British government wants to increase voter turnout, why don’t they hold elections on Saturdays instead of Thursdays?

I looked into this question in the case of the US, and there’s a complicated historical explanation, but the central point that, at the time Tuesday was chosen as a polling day, the standard working week was six days, and Sunday was excluded for religious reasons. So it didn’t really matter which day was chosen.

But in an economy where, even with a 24-7 service sector, Saturday is a day off for most people, it seems like a much more convenient choice. For a bunch of reasons, I can’t see the US ever making a change like this[1]. But in Britain it would be easy, and presumably modestly beneficial to Labour, which could therefore push such a change through Parliament any time it wanted.

fn1. First, the US is very conservative in relation to traditions of this kind. Second, although it had an excellent record on this issue up to the 1960s, the Republican party now routinely opposes measures to increase voter turnout.

I’m off to “UCLA”:http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/ tomorrow to give a talk to their “Comparative Social Analysis”:http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclasoc/trcsa/ group. Provided, that is, I don’t get “shot”:http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/11541089.htm “on”:http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20050503-1615-ca-freewayshootings.html “the”:http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-me-freeway4may04,1,1550122.story?coll=la-news-state&ctrack=1&cset=true “way”:http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=716475 to campus.

Need some good news?

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Authorities arrested the nation’s most-wanted militant, the head of al-Qaida operations in Pakistan who had a $10 million bounty on his head, and said Wednesday they now were ”on the right track” to catch Osama bin Laden.

Abu Farraj al-Libbi, who allegedly orchestrated two assassination attempts against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was arrested after a firefight on the outskirts of Mardan, 30 miles north of Peshawar, capital of the deeply conservative North West Frontier Province, the government and security officials said.

Via praktike, who has more.