Some fascinating new evidence on US Supreme Court decision making and (perhaps) on _Bush v. Gore_ from my colleagues Forrest Maltzman, Lee Sigelman and Paul Wahlbeck in the latest issue of “PS”:http://www.apsanet.org/ps/oct04/toc.cfm (the complete paper is “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/images/scj.pdf). They’ve uncovered smoking-gun quality evidence that Justice Rehnquist has been running a betting pool on US presidential elections – there’s a copy of the bets (and results) for the 1992 election among Harry Blackmun’s papers (you can see an extract below). In 1992, six members of the Court anted up $1 each for each of the 50 states and for the District of Columbia. Thus, there was a pool of $6 for each state, which was divvied up evenly among those Justices who correctly predicted the winner for that state. As the Chief Justice described the results of the pool in his cover note:

bq. The net result is that Sandra has won $18.30, Harry has won $1.70, John and I have lost $6.30, Tony has lost $2.30, and Clarence has lost $5.10.

Maltzman, Sigelman and Wahlbeck run a series of statistical tests on the Justice’s performance, finding that the justices’ exposure (or lack of same) to mainstream media and first-hand knowledge of the state in question have statistically significant effects. They demonstrate that the level of Supreme Court productivity sags during election years, suggesting that the Justices are “preoccupied with cramming for the office pool.” More pertinently, for recent political events, they suggest that this may have affected the Judges’ incentives in _Bush v. Gore_ – to the extent that the judges had money at stake, they had, to put it mildly, an interest in swinging the result. As the authors remind us:

bq. During an election night party in 2000, Justice O’Connor apparently became upset when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Vice President Gore, She exclaimed “This is terrible!” and then proceeded, “with an air of obvious disgust,” to walk off to get a plate of food (Thomas and Isikoff 2000). Speculation abounded at the time about why O’Connor was so distraught, but our revelation of the operation of a Supreme Court gambling ring opens up a new possibility: If, as she had done in 1992, O’Connor predicted that Florida would go Republican in 2000 (an outcome she subsequently helped to assure), then her outburst probably stemmed from dismay at the prospect of falling behind in the election pool.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it.
!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/scj2.jpg!

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.

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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Let me intoduce myself. I am Bill Gardner and I live in Columbus, Ohio. I asked the Crooked Timber folks if I could guest blog on the election. I am a new Ohio voter, having just moved to the Ohio State University faculty last year. It’s possible that Ohio could prove to be the Gettysburg of the 2004 vote. If so, Columbus would be Cemetery Ridge. I’ll try to tell you what it looks like from here.

I don’t have any qualifications for this, other than being fascinated by this place and time. I’m a quantitative psychologist doing medical research in the OSU Pediatrics Department. I don’t know anything about philosophy, economics, or political theory (or cold temperature physics, or…). I’m such a dork that when I had the chance as a college freshman to take a class on The theory of justice from Rawls his own self, I passed because I thought his voice would put me to sleep. If only that was the worst educational choice I ever made.

“The Guardian has a story today”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html about some research led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore which claims 100,000 excess Iraqi deaths, many of which it attributes to bombing by coalition forces. “Juan Cole has some comment on this”:http://www.juancole.com/2004_10_01_juancole_archive.html#109902941049326214 (and more links).

I should state plainly that I have no way of judging the accuracy of this figure. It may be way off. Nevertheless I can predict with certainty that there will be numerous posts on weblogs supporting the war attacking the study. However much they criticize such exercises, though, there is some fact of the matter about how many excess Iraqi deaths there have been as a result of the war. My faith in human reason and evidence is such that I must believe that there is some figure which, if verified, would lead the enthusiasts for _this_ war to conclude that it was a mistake. But perhaps I’m wrong about that: perhaps they think that the case for _some_ war to displace Saddam Hussein was just so strong that no facts about the actual war have any bearing on the correctness of the decision to fight?

As “John Quiggin”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002753.html says, the European Commission President has blinked, and backed down in the face of a credible threat from the Parliament to defeat the Commission. The short term result is an (informal) enhancement in the power of the Parliament to control the Commission – what’s likely to happen in the longer term? My predictions:

* An informal deal between the Parliament and Commission in which the Parliament will get a permanent role in deciding which Commissioner gets which portfolio. If Barroso had struck a deal with Parliament last week, he would have been able to get away with sacking Buttiglione, and nobody else. Now, the Parliament is going to demand a higher price – in part because it can get it (the Commission has blinked), and in part because this will be much easier to sell to Christian Democrat MEPs who didn’t want Buttiglione to go. It’s clear that there is going to be a real reshuffle (Buttiglione will be booted; a couple of other dodgy Commissioners will either withdraw or be allocated less sensitive portfolios). The Parliament will demand a proper and ongoing voice in this, and will almost certainly get away with it – neither the Commission nor the member states are going to want a repeat of this week.

* If there’s ever another round of Treaty revisions, I suspect that the Parliament will be formally given the power to reject individual Commissioners. It has effectively shown that it is willing to summon up an absolute majority to reject the entire Commission if there’s one Commissioner whom it dislikes sufficiently. It makes sense for the Council to recognize this _fait accompli_ – and ensure that the Parliament can express its dissatisfaction with individual Commissioners without provoking an institutional crisis by sacking the lot of them. Something like this has happened before, in the Council-Parliament confrontation over the “last bite at the cherry” stage in the codecision procedure (if anyone’s interested, the story is detailed “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/governance.pdf in a piece co-written with Adrienne Heritier).

* Curiously perhaps, given the slant of the current news coverage, an increase in the powers of the Commission President vis-a-vis the Council. Up to now, the Commission President has had limited choice over who gets what portfolio, and none whatsoever over who gets nominated. As a result, the European Commission is an odd mix of ambitious and competent politicians, bureaucratic operators, placeholders, superannuated hacks and complete chancers. Now, the Commission President is going to be able to tell member state governments that certain candidate Commissioners are unacceptable, and have more discretion in making sure that the right person gets the right portfolio – he’ll be able to say quite credibly that the Parliament won’t stand for this or that fox being put in charge of the hencoop. In political science jargon, he’s now the equivalent of a “COG” in a “two level game”

* As a result of all the above, a quite real increase in democratic legitimacy for the EU. The European Commission only vaguely approximates to a real government, and the European Parliament is not a fully-fledged parliamentary body. But by holding hearings for Commissioners- and firing them if they don’t measure up – the Parliament is injecting some real accountability into an area of EU politics that has traditionally been dominated by self-serving backroom deals among governments.

“Gallimaufry tells you how”:http://marykay.typepad.com/gallimaufry/2004/10/protect_the_vot.html.

Several images and videos have come across my inbox regarding the types of ballots one may encounter at the elections. Sure, these are parodies for the most part, but certainly have a serious side in light of the 2000 elections. Here is one. Here is another. I thought this thread could serve as a collection for pointers to other images and videos people have seen.

More on the troubled relationship between the Republican Party and technology. One of my colleagues complained to me this morning that her AOL Instant Messenger software had been hijacked by political spam. As I’ve seen for myself, every time she moves her cursor over the program, a loud, obnoxious movie-ad pops up, telling her in stentorian tones about the horrible things that John Edwards and the Evil Trial Lawyers are doing to doctors. On further investigation, it turns out that this particular box of delights has been brought to your desktop by the “November Fund,” a pro-Republican 527 created by “the US Chamber of Commerce”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/politics/campaign/22donate.html?ex=1256184000&en=e43aec0c1f5c694b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. Apparently, the fund has spent $2 million; according to the American Bar Association’s “ABA Journal”:http://www.abanet.org/journal/ereport/s3campaign.html, they’re legally prohibited from buying attack ads on TV or radio, which probably explains why they’re spending money on pop-ups.[1] For my part, I sincerely hope that they raise and spend as much money as possible on Internet advertising. If I were a swing voter, I can’t imagine anything more likely to make me vote Democratic than having my desktop invaded by talking, dancing Republican adware.

fn1. The Internet is “exempt from the ban”:http://channels.netscape.com/ns/tech/story.jsp?floc=FF-CNN-Tech&idq=/ff/story/5001/20041013/1547000005.htm&sc=Tech on corporate funded advertising that specifically targets candidates.

The BBC “is reporting”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3948165.stm that scientists have discovered evidence of a new human species that outlasted the Neanderthals:

bq. Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world. The new species – dubbed “the Hobbit” due to its small size – lived on Flores island until at least 12,000 years ago.

“BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/27/president_bushs_webs.html is telling us that George W. Bush’s election site is blocking requests from non-US IP addresses. This seems pretty weird – there could be some reasonable explanation (preventing some kind of DoS attack???), but according to BoingBoing the Bush campaign’s media people aren’t telling. Does anyone have any idea what is going on?

Update: “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/10/georgebushcom_not_viewable_from_uk.html links to a “story”:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19301 suggesting that georgewbush.com suffered a DoS attack on Tuesday.

Update2: “Joi Ito”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/10/27/wwwgeorgewbushcom.html suggests that the site has been timing out if you tried to reach it from Japan or elsewhere since August. Curioser and curioser …

James Wolcott thinks that Bush supporters are preparing to deny the legitimacy of a Kerry victory, and shift the blame for disaster in Iraq, by blaming media bias.

Matt Welch has a reasonable response to this idea:

My main objection is this (note: he’s quoting Mark Steyn, although he could have found the same thought from James Lileks or a dozen others):

If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War.

Firstly, as Steyn surely knows, the press was much more explicitly partisan and venal back before and during WWII, and because of a lack of things like television, barons like William Randolph Hearst (who bitterly opposed the entrance to the war, and even employed Hitler as a columnist) had far more comparative power than anyone you could name today.

As I pointed out in this column back in May, it’s amazing that the same people who constantly prophesize and compile evidence about Big Media’s demise will in the next breath blame the MSM for losing wars, tipping elections, and otherwise delivering massive outcomes contrary to the Republican agenda. They’re either all-powerful or not; I’m putting my money on “not.”

“Richard Heck”:http://emerson.fas.harvard.edu/heck/ has put together what should become one of the coolest philosophy sites on the internet – a searchable database of online papers.

bq. “PhOnline”:http://phonline.org/index.php

There isn’t much up there yet because individuals with papers have to “register”:http://phonline.org/register.php and deposit their own papers. (Which if you’re a philosopher with online papers you should do right now.) But this will in time be a phenomenal resource for philosophers and people wanting an introduction to philosophy, and we’ll all be very grateful to Richard for putting together such a wonderful site.

In the dispute over Rocco Buttiglionie the head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso has blinked, deferring a vote which would have seen his entire panel of 25 commissioners rejected by the European Parliament. Barring extraordinary dexterity, it looks as if he will have to either secure Buttiglionie’s withdrawal or shunt him to a less controversial job.

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