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Saturday, November 6, 2004
Evan Thomas' great Newsweek story about the two campaigns.--
I have been reading the very long online Newsweek story about the election, which is apparently the heart of their special election issue. Although navigating through it is a bit of a hassle and the final chapters are not online (unless I've missed them), there is some great reporting by a host of Newsweek stalwarts and some first-rate writing by Evan Thomas, who wrote it up. This is the MSM at its best, which (we need to remember) is awfully good.
Surprisingly, the only weak section is the clunky introduction, which is more speculative and not as strongly written as the rest. Once Evans gets into the details of the campaigns, it is a rolling good read with lots of amusing moments.
NEWSWEEK reports that it got special access on condition of not revealing information until after the election.
To read most of the sections, click on each of these, then continue to the other pages in each chapter:
INTROCh. 1
Ch. 2
Ch. 3
Ch. 4
Ch. 6
As a teaser, here is just one of many stories about Bush or Kerry that I haven't heard about before:
On Dec. 9 Al Gore showed the political fingertips that lost him the 2000 election. He endorsed Howard Dean, probably at the precise moment when Dean had peaked and was about to head down. Gore's endorsement came as a blow to Kerry, who had thought Gore was his friend, or at least his political ally. When the Kerry camp heard the rumors that Gore was endorsing Kerry's opponent, Kerry tried to call the former veep to find out if it could be true. Kerry had Gore's cell-phone number and called him. "This is John Kerry," he said when Gore answered. The phone went dead. Kerry tried to call several more times and never got through. He was hurt. "I endorsed him early. I was up for consideration as his running mate," he complained to an aide.
UPDATE: On balance, Kerry comes off as a very decent (if indecisive) man. There was one passage that dealt with his willingness to see the Iraq War through to conclusion that bears reading:
Former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg had been pressing Kerry to tie the war to domestic needs—to declare that $200 billion spent on Iraq meant that much less funding for education and health care at home. Kerry used the line in a few speeches, but reluctantly. He didn't really believe it. In truth, he was willing to spend whatever it took to win in Iraq, or at least to extricate the United States with some semblance of honor.
Still, he was appalled by the carnage in Iraq and the waste of the war. On Sunday night, Sept. 19, the campaign staff met to discuss, one more time, the candidate's position on Iraq. The Clintonistas pushed a harder line against the war. But the campaign's old guard wasn't so sure. Couldn't Kerry play it both ways? Shrum cautioned against appearing too dovish. Kerry seemed to let the debate go on, circling around and around.
But then he spoke. "It's gut-check time, folks," he said. "This is not about whether it's politically expedient. This is a f---ing war. Kids are dying out there, and this president continues not to tell the truth. You'd have to be out of your mind to go in there the way he did. There was no WMD, no imminent threat, no ties to Al Qaeda. The answer is no. Anything else is crap."
Kerry had decided to be the antiwar candidate. Not for the first time, to be sure. He had called himself an antiwar candidate when he was trying to peel off the Dean vote in January. But he spoke without any equivocation this time. The next day he gave a blistering speech at NYU, attacking Bush for the folly of invading Iraq.
A Tragic Story of Wrongful Conviction:
Details here. Thanks to Talkleft for the link.
Debka on plans for Arafat's funeral.--
Some of us rarely link Debka.com, an Israeli site run by former Time Magazine reporters, despite its record of important scoops, because it also publishes some farfetched and ridiculous stories. Its strongest reporting is on Israeli politics, followed by Palestinian infighting. Here it seems pretty reliable and extremely insightful. Once it moves out of that realm to Iraq, Africa, and Afghanistan, it becomes increasingly unreliable and sometimes ludicrous.
With that caveat and a grain of salt, here is some of what Debka is saying about plans for Arafat's funeral:
From the moment on Thursday, November 4, when a French official stood outside Percy military hospital and solemnly declared "Mr. Arafat is not dead," preparations rushed forward for his funeral. The immediate outcome was a split that rent the Palestinian leadership and Arafat's associates into two camps.
Jihad Islami, Hamas, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the other Palestinian organizations with a vested interest in continuing their campaign of terror against Israel were quick to plant a concocted rumor in the Palestinian street and mosques that Israel had slowly poisoned Arafat. This stratagem was intended to fan the flames of anti-Israeli violence and discredit moderate Palestinian leaders with thoughts of dialogue or peace - or even the ceasefire which Mahmoud Abbas is trying to broker. It was meant to make the Palestinians angry enough to refuse any accommodation with the Jewish state and insist on stepping up its war. This would tilt the succession struggle against the moderates and for the champions of continuing confrontation.
The failure of the Percy hospital's physicians to publicly diagnose the ailment that brought Arafat to their institution - contrary to custom for public figures - gave wings to all kinds of vicious rumors about his illness. It enabled the Palestinian extremist factions to blacken Israel to gain an edge in round one of their fight for the succession.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Ramallah and Paris describe the first camp as consisting of his wife, Suha Arafat, and personal aide Ramzi Khouri, who share a longstanding bond as members of the Christian faith, joined by Arafat's nephew Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian UN observer, and Dr. Amar Daka, his personal physician.
Only this foursome was allowed near his bed. They will decide when to disconnect the life support system and declare Yasser Arafat dead. By French law, the final word rests with his wife, Suha Arafat. She is buffeted by contrasting pressures from Palestinian leaders as well as considerations of her own financial future. The funeral will be arranged by Palestinian officials in consultation with the Israeli government.
After Arafat was hospitalized in Paris, members of the second camp, the confidential aides who accompanied him to Paris, were thrust aside and not permitted to visit him - among them, Mohammed Rashid, probably the only person privy to his personal financial secrets, his bureau chief, spokesman constant shadow Nabil Abu Rodeina, and Mohammed Dahlan, the protégé- turned-rival and former head of Palestinian "security" services in the Gaza Strip.
Once the funeral is out of the way, this second group will step into the leadership contest.
In Ramallah, Palestinian leaders sat in around-the clock conclave in a desperate attempt to make the transition orderly and agree on the funeral arrangements. To bridge the period of uncertainty, they assigned prime minister Ahmed Qureia with provisional responsibility for security and finances in the Palestinian Authority, and former prime minister Mahmoud Abbas the chair of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Executive Committee.
Israel has demanded that a burial with the trappings of a state funeral must take place in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians, with some support from their European friends, are insisting on his burial in Abu Dis, the Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem that has a view of Temple Mount. Arafat had a building constructed there to house a future Palestinian parliament. It stands empty and could serve as a tomb. In Gaza, the funeral procession would follow the route taken by Arafat a decade ago on his arrival there from Tunis in the wake of the Oslo peace accords. Qureia will be in Gaza Saturday to discuss funeral arrangements with the local heads of organizations.
Both venues pose colossal security problems. Who will control the hordes of Palestinians on the move between the West Bank and Gaza Strip to attend the funeral? Who will guarantee the safety of the VIPs coming to the funeral - Western and Arab?
It has been suggested in some capitals, including Washington, that the funeral and the presence of international figures will provide an opportunity for discreet diplomacy. Americans officials may come to show their respect for the Palestinian people and mark the end of the Arafat era. ...
If true, this involves some interesting choices for the US to make:
Do we go to honor the death of a terrorist such as Arafat if it might help with peace in the Middle East?
Who would be willing to attend, given the awful security problems?
AP Picture of Arafat on way to hospital:
UPDATE:
AP is not sure what Arafat's condition is, but Palestinian spokesmen for Arafat are saying that he is in a coma, but not brain-dead. As I discussed in my earlier post on brain-death, even if Arafat was worse than simply in a coma, but instead in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), he would not be dead. Some doctors or family would pull the plug in such a case and let the patient die, while without such a decision some patients (such as in the Cruzan case) can stay alive in a PVS for years. Years ago it was estimated that there were 10,000 people in the US being kept alive in a PVS. So, even if Arafat is in worse shape than his Palestinian spokesmen are saying, that does not mean that he can't be kept alive for years--unless he is indeed "brain-dead," in which case he is already dead.
2D UPDATE:
The Belmont Club has further thoughts on what might be going on behind the scenes (tip Instapundit).
A New Scopes Trial Atmosphere?--
In David Brooks' latest editorial in the New York Times, he rightly dismisses the conventional wisdom about the election, noting that evangelical turnout this time was about the same percentage of the vote as last time (tip Instapundit). He also notes:
It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction.
This jumped out at me, both because of my recent posts on William Jennings Bryan and because most people understand very little about what was really going on at the Scopes trial. The book that Scopes was teaching was a popular biology book of the day--George Hunter's Civic Biology (1914). Bryan was not just disturbed by the teaching of evolution but more broadly by the whole social Darwinist agenda, including both capitalism and genetic superiority.
Civic Biology was a vicious social Darwinist tract. Here are some excerpts from the book, courtesy of Eugenics Watch:
Hunter's Civic Biology, p. 195-196
The Races of Man. — At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
Hunter's Civic Biology, p. 261-265
Improvement of Man. — If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which we as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.
Eugenics. — When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.
The Jukes. — Studies have been made on a number of different families in this country, in which mental and moral defects were present in one or both of the original parents. The "Jukes" family is a notorious example. The first mother is known as "Margaret, the mother of criminals." In seventy-five years the progeny of the original generation has cost the state of New York over a million and a quarter dollars, besides giving over to the care of prisons and asylums considerably over a hundred feeble-minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons. Another case recently studied is the "Kallikak" family. (Footnote: The name Kallikak is fictitious.) This family has been traced back to the War of the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin Kallikak seduced a feeble-minded girl. She had a feeble-minded son from whom there have been to the present time 480 descendants. Of these 33 were sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feeble-minded. The man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble-mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple a line of 496 descendants have come, with no cases of feeble-mindedness. The evidence and the moral speak for themselves!
Parasitism and its Cost to Society. — Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
The Remedy. — If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.
Blood Tells. — Eugenics shows us, on the other hand, in a study of the families in which are brilliant men and women, the fact that the descendants have received the good inheritance from their ancestors. The following, taken from Davenport's Heredity in Relationship to Eugenics, illustrates how one family has been famous in American History. ...
For me, this irony cuts many different ways. The ACLU and Darrow were right in principle that the legislature shouldn't be determining what is or is not good science, but the version of evolution (white genetic superiority) that was being taught in Scopes would be viewed as very bad science today. This also illustrates that the spirit of free inquiry works, not because it is always right, but because people are free to put ideas out and have them refined and corrected. [UPDATE: Here 1920s science was right about the basics of evolution, but was wrong about social Darwinism and white genetic supremacy and was immoral to advocate eugenics.] It also reminds us that eugenics was a "progressive" idea in the 1920s. Last, of course, it suggests that the enlightened are often much less enlightened than they think they are. Sometimes neither the enlightened nor the supposed unenlightened are right.
UPDATE:
Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan (from Jeff Epstein):
John Scopes (from Jeff Epstein):
Is Bush a cross between Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan?--
I posted the maps that Ralph Luker and David Beito had suggested looked like mirror images--1896 and 2004. Two correspondents, Ash Valentine and William Quale, have pointed me to the 1916 map, with Bush playing the role of Woodrow Wilson. Here is the 1916 map from PresidentElect.org:
It is kind of sobering to see George W. Bush as a cross between Woodrow Wilson (a big-government wartime President) and William Jennings Bryan (a religious populist). The interesting question is not the men, but the complete shift in the sources of party strength.
Another noteworthy thing is that most of the historical political map makers still use the long traditional colors for party maps--red for Democrats and blue for Republicans, blue perhaps suggesting bluebloods and red perhaps suggesting socialism. If you called someone a "red," you would think him on the left (consider the movie "Reds"). When I was young, all the TV networks did the same (red for Democrats, blue for Republicans), but I am guessing that this consensus broke down sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s, and was completely switched over on all networks at least by the 2000 election. It was probably a conscious decision to reverse the implications of the standard red=left, blue=right imagery, but I have found it awfully confusing. It's nice, however, for making the comparisons to 1916 and 1896.
UPDATE:
It is even more sobering to see this map showing the free states and territories compared to the slave states, posted by Kevin Drum, following a comment by Ken Layne.
Friday, November 5, 2004
The Distribution of States in 2004 closely matches 1896.--
Ralph Luker suggested that the 2004 election looked much like the 1896 election, with the Republican and Democratic states switched. What makes George Bush like William Jennings Bryan? David Beito has these maps:
1896 (from David Beito):
2004 (from David Beito):
A comment to Beito's post:
[A]lthough the geographic divide remains the same, the parties themselves have traded places and survived the process. Understanding this switch is to me, at least, one of the most important stories in the past 100+ years of American politics.
Another comment says that Kentucky should have been assigned to McKinley.
Chutzpah:
ChillingEffects.org reproduces a complaint letter from the owner of PenisEnlargement.com to google, apparently asking google to remove links to a competing site that allegedly illegally copied some of the sender's copyrighted content. My heart bleeds for this poor victim of copyright infringement.
Moral values vs. terrorism as important issues for voters:
Politics professor Paul Freedman argues that gay marriage and similar issues didn't sway voters much (contrary to my claims here), and that terrorism did (which is consistent to my claims here). Not sure whether he's right, but it seemed worth passing along.
Hispanic Senators:
As best I can tell from a cursory online search, Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) are tied for being the four Hispanic Senator in U.S. history. Octaviano Larrazolo (1928-29), Dennis Chavez (1935-62), and Joseph Montoya (1964-77), all from New Mexico (the first a Republican and the other two Democrats), are numbers one, two, and three.
On the other hand, my search has been far from thorough, and "Hispanic" is a notoriously slippery term (see here for a slightly facetious example), so I might be mistaken.
Judge Michael McConnell:
My friend and fellow lawprof Mike Rappaport (The Right Coast) suggests that Judge Michael McConnell, a leading constitutional scholar who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit since January 2003, would make a great Supreme Court Justice (in particular, Chief Justice, when the spot opens up). I agree entirely, and have for a while.
Affirmative Action in Law Schools:
My long-time colleague Eugene has invited me to guest-blog for a few days about my soon-to-be-published but already-leaked-to-the-media-by-my-critics article about affirmative action (you can download a copy here). I'm delighted to particpate, especially if it leads to some lively discussion and feedback. The article is long, even by the bloated standards of legal academia, so my plan is to write four short pieces, next Monday through Thursday, on four different aspects of racial preferences by law schools:
--How does affirmative action in law schools work? (Monday)
--How do racial preferences affect the performance of blacks in law school and on the bar? (Tuesday)
--How do racial preferences affect how blacks do in the job market for lawyers? (Wednesday)
--What would the black bar look like if we abolished or limited racial preferences? (Thursday)
Each day, I'll end by responding to comments on earlier posts. As Eugene suggested, there are a few things that make my work on this topic unusual. First, I'm somewhere in the liberal-left spectrum on most issues, and I've worked actively in civil rights (especially on the issue of housing segregation) through most of my career. So my generally negative conclusions about affirmative action put me at odds with many close friends (not to mention former funders). Second, the study is heavily data-driven. Good longitudinal datasets on law students and lawyers have only recently become available, making it possible to ask questions that we could only speculate about before. Third, my interest in affirmative action policies of law schools is not whether they betray general normative goals, whether they are unfair to whites, or whether they have subtle negative effects on blacks — instead, I'm focused on whether the policies meet their simplest goals of producing more and better black lawyers. I was surprised and dismayed to find that, in most cases, the policies fail at this basic level.
FEDERALISM UNDER THE INFLUENCE--DOPE, BOOZE, AND THE COMMERCE CLAUSE:
I will be participating in a program next Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute speaking on the wine cases in the Supreme Court. Brannon Denning from Cumberland Law School will also be on the panel; Hew Pate of DOJ will moderate. Information and registration material is here. My panel will be followe by one on Randy's marijuana case and closing remarks by Richard Epstein.
Rick Sander:
I'm delighted to report that my colleague Rick Sander will be guest-blogging over the next several days about his recent article on the effect of race-based affirmative action on black law students and lawyers. He will begin either this afternoon or Monday.
Rick has a Ph.D. in Economics as well as a J.D., and has been teaching at UCLA since 1989. He is also:
Member, Oversight and Steering Committees of "After the JD," a longitudinal study of the careers of young lawyers, funded by the American Bar Foundation, the National Science Foundation, NALP, LSAC, and the Soros Foundation, 1999-present; Co-Chair, 2001-present Member of Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation's Program in Law and Social Science, 2001-2003 Former board Director and, for two years, President of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California, Board Director (1990-96). Director, Los Angeles City and County Fair Housing Assessment Study, 1994-1996. President, Fair Housing Institute, Los Angeles, California, 1996-2001. Adviser to City of Los Angeles on design and implementation of Living Wage Ordinance, 1996-. Adviser to County of Santa Clara and City of Oxnard on fair housing programs, 2000-02. Author of many empirical articles on legal education, housing segregation, and other fields.
His article A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools is coming out shortly in the Stanford Law Review.
He can be reached at sander at law.ucla.edu, but — as with the other bloggers on this site — he may be unable to respond to messages sent to him.
Varieties of Conservatism in America:
The Hoover Institution just published a slim engaging paperback Varieties of Conservatism in America. In it you will find essays on "Classical Conservatism" by Mark Henrie and Joseph Bottum, "Neoconservatism" by Jacob Heilbrunn and Tod Lindgren, and "Libertarianism" by Richard Epstein and me. Although I do not consider libertarianism to be a species of modern conservatism, I think it was good that it was included as a perspective in this volume. And having read all the papers in draft I can attest to the fact that all of them are very interesting.
For professors who want to incorporate this volume into their classes, Hoover also published a companion volume entitled, Varieties of Progressivism in America.
Dissing Your Partners:
Ordinarily I would rise to the bait provided by Professor Bainbridge in his post Those Annoying Libertarians. But I have learned that blogging requires not only the time it takes to compose a post. It also involves the time it takes to read email responses, responses by other bloggers, and then to reply. Because I am spending the weekend preparing for my first moot court on Ashcroft v. Raich next week at Georgetown (which is closed to the public), I cannot take the time to start something here that I cannot finish. I look forward to returning to blogging in December.
But let me offer a brief word of advice to social conservatives AND libertarians. In a 2-party, winner-take-all, first-past-the-post electoral system, a winning "major" party represents a coalition of voters needed to get past 50%. The marginal voters needed for that goal are important, as are the inframarginal voters. (In proportionate representation, parliamentary systems, winning coalitions are formed among factionalized parties rather than among voters in the electorate.)
Social conservatives are most certainly a part of the winning Republican majority and their interests and concerns must be respected and operationalized consistently with preserving the coalition. So are libertarians. The very fact that the Libertarian Party drew so few votes is evidence that libertarians who vote largely voted for the major party candidates.
I believe that libertarians were in both camps this time around. Of those who did not vote Libertarian, anti-war libertarians who believed that divided government was better to control federal power and spending supported Kerry. They also may have preferred Kerry as better for protecting civil liberties. Those libertarians who support the administration's strategy for fighting the war against radical islamicists, including the battle for Iraq, and perhaps also its proposals for private social security accounts, Medical savings accounts voted Bush. They may also prefer Bush's prospective judicial nominations to Kerry's (or not). Be this as it may, many thousands, if not millions of libertarian-leaning voters supported the President as part of his winning coalition.
It ill-behooves one constituent of a winning coalition to gratuitously insult another member. Disagree with, even passionately, yes. Belittle and ridicule, no. Doing so is a recipe from reducing a winning coalition into a losing one. All coalitions are subjected to this internal tension. Successful ones find ways to resist it by stressing what all coalition members have in common, as compared with their political opponents.
My advice goes to libertarians (a misquotation of one of whom provoked Professor Bainbridge) who want to be a part of this coalition, as well as conservatives, social or otherwise. The Federalist Society, which is itself a coalition of conservatives and libertarians understands this strategy well.
My own view on how to maintain the winning coalition is Grover Norquist's: the "leave-us-alone" strategy, which happens to fit our original Constitution (as amended). This entails leaving gay marriage (which I support) to the states, and the substance of public school curriculum (including moments of silence and pledges of allegiance) to locally-elected school boards. (My only exception would be for when the liberty of adults is at stake as in Lawrence v. Texas, but we have debated this before and I won't be drawn into another debate over this issue right now. I am just identifying this area of disagreement I have with some conservatives.)
With that, I have already spent more time composing this post than I intended and said more than I can back up in the next few days. I leave further comments on this issue in the capable hands of my fellow bloggers here and elsewhere.
PS: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: As a seventh grader, I debated on behalf of Barry Goldwater in front of my entire junior high school student body in the heavily Democratic town of Calumet City. And, like David, I came to libertarianism first through Rothbard, not Rand.
Update: I am happy to post this email from the reporter who wrote the story in which David was quoted:
You seem to be accusing me of misquoting David Bernstein.
That would be news to him. In his recent e-mail to me he affirmed the quote about the separation of everything and state and in fact seemed justifiably proud of it.
As for the paraphrase that follows, that was an accurate summation of his phone discussion with me about the abandonment by the Bush administraion of the limited-government reforms embodied in the Contract with America.
The paraphrase preceding the quote was not attibuted and was my own view.
Paul Mulshine Correction noted. Another reader writes:
Yes, leave gay marriage to the states. But what about the notion that getting married in one state transfers the full rights, benefits, etc. to another state when the newlyweds decide to move? Isn't that the legal reason for a federal marriage amendment? I agree which is why I would support a constitutional amendment that upholds the Defense of Marriage Act that leaves the decisions to the states, while opposing a constitutional amendment that adopts a national constitutional definition of marriage.
PS: The time-consuming nature of this sort of healthy and constructive exchange is exactly why I have not been blogging lately and probably should not have blogged today. Update: Excellent post by Infidel Cowboy on This Whole Reaching Out Business.
Hatred:
I realize that the Slate title "Why Americans Hate Democrats — A Dialogue" was chosen to be provocative, to perhaps be an ironic commentary on the post-9/11 "Why Do They Hate Us?" that some on the Left asked, and likely to be in some measure deliberate hyperbole. But I wonder if it might at least partly be earnest — whether it might reflect an unsound worldview according to which Americans focus their political lives around hatred more than they in fact do. And in any event I suspect that it might be counterproductive hyperbole: Titles, even ironic titles, do frame the way readers (and perhaps even the writers) perceive the issue.
When the Republicans lost the Senate in 1986, or the Presidency in 1992, I didn't ask why Americans hate Republicans, and I suspect most Republicans didn't, either. We asked why Americans voted against Republicans; the answers were complex (and controversial), but I take it that they had a lot to do with policies, the way the policies were articulated, and the personalities and actions of our standard-bearers. Republicans changed their policies, arguments, and standard-bearers; some circumstances changed to favor us; and the Democrats kindly obliged by erring politically in various ways. Now we've won — but I'm not sure that we would have won if we'd focused our thinking around "Why [Do] Americans Hate Republicans?," even hyperbolically.
I'd say the same about most other claims of hatred. They often have a kernel of truth to them, as to the highest-profile cases. Some on the Left do hate America. Some people who oppose same-sex marriage actually hate gays. Some people hate fundamentalist Christians, gun owners, immigrants, the federal government, and so on. But I doubt that such claims would be accurate about Democrats or Republicans generally, or even Americans generally. Asking "Why Do Americans Hate [Group X]?" is likely, I think, to be an unhelpful distraction.
Feeling Like a 1L:
Orin says listening to Charles Fried makes him feel like a 2L. As I had him for Torts, it makes me feel like a 1L.
Indian-American Congressmen:
Bobby Jindal, whose parents came from India shortly before he was born, has just been elected to Congress, as a Republican. The first Asian-American Congressman was also Indian — a Sikh, born in India, named Dalip Singh Saund, a Democrat who was elected from California's Imperial Valley (that's the Southeast corner of the state) in 1956.
Saund came to the U.S. in 1920, but only became a citizen in 1949, since before 1946 he was legally forbidden to be a citizen because of his Asian birth. (The 1946 immigration reforms, I am told, only eased restrictions on Indian and Filipino immigrants, not East Asians.) His white American wife (a daughter of Czech immigrants) had to surrender her citizenship when she married him (in the 1920s). Nonetheless, by the mid-1950s, he was able to win elected office, and served for three terms; he had to retire because of a crippling stroke.
For a more thorough story, see here.
Charles Fried on the Role of the Supreme Court:
A recent lecture on the Court and its Justices delivered by Harvard Law School professor and former Solicitor General Charles Fried is available here via streaming video. Fried was one of my favorite professors in law school; watching his lecture makes me feel a bit like a 2L again. Related Posts (on one page): - Feeling Like a 1L:
- Charles Fried on the Role of the Supreme Court:
Thursday, November 4, 2004
Reporting all the information about exit polls:
A Slate article argues that it was right to report the exit polls, on the theory that this way voters get to know what the journalists know. Maybe so; I have no fixed opinion on the matter.
But if you report 50-49 exit polls, and then report 51-49 numbers with subheads such as "Mucho flattering to Kerry," wouldn't it be more helpful to also report the following, from the National Election Pool page?
The margin of error for a 95% confidence interval is about . . . +/-4% for a typical state exit poll. . . . Other nonsampling factors may increase the total error.
You might also thrown in this from the Mystery Pollster (thanks to Douglas Johnson for the pointer), if you think he's right — or come up with a better analysis yourself, if you think he isn't quite right:
Even if comparable to the final numbers — which they are decidedly not — the mid-day leaked numbers would have much greater error, perhaps +/- 7% or more.
Even if you think 95% is a more demanding confidence interval, and you think 68% confidence is fine, you'd still have a margin of error half of those mentioned above. And this is the purely mathematical margin of error, i.e., accounting only for random variation, and not for the other problems that bedevil polls; you might also warn people of other possible causes of error, such as differences between early voters and late voters, or between those who talk to pollsters and those who don't, or between the true vote and the vote reported to the pollster.
So if you're really trying to inform your readers, it seems to me the story ought not be:
Updated Late Afternoon Numbers
Mucho flattering to Kerry; plus Nader makes an appearance.
. . .
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004, at 4:28 PM PT
Florida
Kerry 51
Bush 49
Ohio
Kerry 51
Bush 49
. . .
Rather, they should be (using the Mystery Pollster's 7% level, though if you prefer to use 6% the picture doesn't look much different):
Updated Late Afternoon Numbers
Mucho flattering to Kerry; plus Nader makes an appearance.
. . .
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004, at 4:28 PM PT
[Margin of error: +/-7% if you want to be 95% confident in the results, +/-3.5% if you want to be 68% confident; and note that the margin of error may be even greater if early voters differ from late voters, or if voters for one candidate are more likely to talk to exit pollsters than voters for the other.]
Florida
Kerry 51
Bush 49
Ohio
Kerry 51
Bush 49
. . .
And if you realize that, even at the 68% confidence level, the results are Kerry 47.5-54.5 vs. Bush 45.5-52.5 — a statistical tie even at this very low level of confidence — should the headline really be "Mucho flattering to Kerry"?
(Note that some of the other pro-Kerry predictions in the Slate-reported exit polls, such as those for Pennsylvania and New York, proved to be right as to the bottom line — not coincidentally, these were mostly those in which the gap was indeed pretty large, and not just a couple of percent.)
UPDATE: Martin Plissner, also in Slate, likewise has a criticism of paying much attention to exit polls that are within the margin of error. Related Posts (on one page): - Exit polls:
- Reporting all the information about exit polls:
- Exit polls:
More on Ohio and same-sex marriage:
Two conflicting reports. Patrick Lewis, a former student of mine who now practices in Ohio, writes:
I disagree that Issue 1 [the anti-same-sex marriage measure] was decisive for Bush. Indeed, locally, one of the big stories was how the black vote was split — they voted for Kerry and against Issue 1. Indeed, many Catholic voters here apparently did the same thing (around here, Catholic voters tend to be unionized workers).
Issue 1 was promoted in Ohio by Republican elected officials (most notably Ken Blackwell, who is the Sec[retary] of State . . .), but it's not altogether clear that Issue 1 actually had the effect of bringing Bush supporters to the polls. The gay marriage issue in general may have fired them up; but I'm sure it fired up religious conservatives all over the country, and was unrelated to Issue 1 in Ohio specifically. We're going to have to wait for more polls and exit surveys to come out and be analyzed to say for sure, but I would have to say that the war on terror, Iraq, and the economy were the 3 driving issues.
On the other hand, Prof. Bill Nancarrow at Curry College in Massachusetts — not an Ohioan, but then again neither am I — writes:
I told my classes . . . that as far as the electoral college goes, at least (probably less so the popular vote), you have four people to thank/blame for Ohio-the four majority justices of the Mass SJC in Goodridge. While my research on the politicization of legal issues is from the early 20th century (in Ohio, even), as soon as I saw the Goodridge case I thought "backlash." Yes, these things are difficult to gauge, but when I saw the overwhelming support for the amendment banning same-sex marriage in Ohio yesterday, I could have called the state for Bush. I told all my gay friends who were cheering over Goodridge to be careful what they wished for. The justices were way out in front of "the people" on this, and now they have 11 states with constitutional amendments prohibiting the very measure they (and I) supported. The SJC, at least for the foreseeable future, set their cause back, rather than advancing it. Moreover, I believe the "Goodridge effect" likely influenced the outcome of the election.
So there you have it. The votes from Ohio still seem to be running in favor of the "yes, Goodridge likely did influence the Ohio vote and help Bush" position (see the related post noted below), but I can't say I've got a statistically valid sample here . . . . Related Posts (on one page): - More on Ohio and same-sex marriage:
- Liberals from Massachusetts:
"Even Berkeley Votes for 'Morality'!"
So Vice Squad declares in reporting on Berkeley's rejection of a ballot initiative that would have effectively ended prosecutions for prostitution.
Arafat: If he is "brain-dead," he is dead.--
The Agence France-Press (AFP) is reporting:
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was "brain dead" and breathing only thanks to artificial life support systems, a French medical official said after conflicting reports as to whether he was alive or dead.
In strictly technical terms, Arafat was "not dead," the source told AFP on condition of confidentiality, adding that the 75-year-old leader had slipped into an irreversible coma and could only be maintained in his vegetative state through ventilation machines.
This is inconsistent nonsense, though my knowledge of medicine (depite being married to a med school professor) is not sufficient to be certain that I don't make an error myself. However, a decade ago I read hundreds of medical and legal articles and polls on end-of-life decisions and wrote a scholarly article arguing for pulling the plug when you don't know what the person wanted. Also, I can't tell from the description whether Arafat is brain-dead or in persistent vegetative state, which is quite different.
First, brain-dead is dead. Before we had ways of testing brain activity, the test was whether the heart was beating. Now (in the US at least) if your brain is dead, you are dead. End-of-story. Although some hospitals have screwed up by mistakenly asking family members if ventilation (keeping the blood flowing) may be withdrawn in this situation, the family has no legal say (since all that is left is a dead body). Sometimes ventilation is continued to facilitate harvesting organs.
Second, a person in a coma is alive, but unconscious. A person who is brain-dead would not be considered to be in a coma. A persistent vegetative state, on the other hand, is a condition where lower brain functions are still present, but higher brain functions are gone:
Individuals in such a state have lost their thinking abilities and awareness of their surroundings, but retain non-cognitive function and normal sleep patterns. Even though those in a persistent vegetative state lose their higher brain functions, other key functions such as breathing and circulation remain relatively intact. Spontaneous movements may occur, and the eyes may open in response to external stimuli. They may even occasionally grimace, cry, or laugh. Although individuals in a persistent vegetative state may appear somewhat normal, they do not speak and they are unable to respond to commands.
So if Arafat is brain-dead, he is simply dead, no matter whether he is on a ventilator. If he is in a coma, then he is not brain-dead. If the higher cerebral functioning shows up, the person would usually be said to be in a coma. If he has little or no higher brain functioning, then he would be in PVS, but still legally alive. At least that is how I (as a lawyer) understand things.
Autobiographical Note:
Steve Bainbridge's post, discussed below, cites Russell Kirk's famous insult of libertarians as "chirping sectaries." This reminded me of my college days, when I was testing out various political philosophies. I decided to spend Spring Break (yes, it was a wild college life for me!) reading the three books National Review consistently referred as the foundational works of modern conservatism: Kirk's almost unreadable and unedifying The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot; James Burnham's racist and imperialist Suicide of the West; and Whittaker Chambers' meandering and hallucinatory Witness. I was, not surprisingly, sorely disappointed. Around the same time, I received my first Laissez-faire Books catalogue, and started reading Hayek, Nozick, Rothbard, and, especially, Milton Friedman (unlike many libertarians who get their first inspiration from Ayn Rand, I didn't read her until much later). I started calling myself a "libertarian-conservative," and the rest is history.
Barry Goldwater, Annoying Libertarian?:
Steve Bainbridge manages to write Barry Goldwater out of the conservative movement. Only "annoying libertarians," you see, think the federal government has no business dictating morality to the public, or thinks it's beyond the government's constitutional power to do so. I still remember back around 1981, when Goldwater was told that Jerry Falwell said that "all good Christians" should oppose some vote or other of Goldwater's. Goldwater responded along the lines of "I think all good Christians ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass." We could use more of such sentiment these days.
Unfortunately, many Christian "conservatives" only support limited government when they are out of power, as is amply indicated by this William Bennett column calling for federal legislation to "promote a more decent society." I actually do see plausible a reason to sympathize more with right-wing Christian statists than with left-wing secular statists--the moral issues Christian activists want to regulate tend to have more externalities attached to them than the economic activities left-wingers tend to get agitated over (though gay marriage is a huge exception). But statism, especially when it manifests itself in a lust for federal power, is against the American conservative tradition, and you don't have to be an annoying libertarian to see that.
If You Enjoy Cat Blogging,
you probably don't want to take a look at this.
Oberlin President Reacts:
An Oberlin College student passes on the following e-mail sent to the Oberlin student body from college president Nancy Dye in reponse to the re-election of President Bush: November 3, 2004
To the Oberlin College Community:
Mark Twain once said that "If we would learn what the human race really is
at bottom we need only observe it in election times." Needless to say, we
could interpret this statement in many ways. But when it comes to the
behavior of Oberlin students in this election, we learn that human behavior
in one of the most passionately and closely contested presidential
elections in American history can be admirable indeed.
Never have I seen college students organize themselves so effectively to
register and to vote. Throughout the long hours of waiting at First Church
and Oberlin Public Library (as a resident of Precinct 3B I will certainly
never forget yesterday!) your good spirits, your patience, your
persistence, and your contagious enthusiasm for playing an active role in
American politics were inspiring.
Many of you, I know, are deeply unhappy with the results of the 2004
presidential election. I sure know that I am. But political and social
change often takes a much longer time to bring about than we think it
should.
Any group of people who can accomplish what you managed to bring off yesterday will certainly be able to make a real difference in this nation. Keep up the fight.
Sincerely,
Nancy Dye
I think it's great that college students are playing an active role in politics, and it's commendable for a college president to congratulate students for their efforts. Plus, Oberlin has an established reputation as a liberal institution, so it's a fair bet that most of the e-mail's recipients appreciate the kind words after a tough loss. Still, might you not feel just a bit uncomfortable receiving this message if you are an Oberlin student who voted for Bush?
Hillary's Vice-President:
Assuming that Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, who will she pick as her running-mate? Some people would say Illinois Senator Barack Obama--an excellent speaker who could help bring out the black vote.
But I'm putting my money on Colorado's new Democratic Senator Ken Salazar. Salazar is a very dull public speaker, but he's much closer to the political center than Obama. And Hillary doesn't need a staunch leftist to shore up her base.
Moreover, Salazar is a proven Democratic winner under tough circumstances. His victory on Tuesday was the only Democratic victory in a seriously contested open seat, and he won in a state which George Bush carried.
A fifth-generation Coloradan, Salazar is of Mexican ancestry, and would likely increase turn-out and Democratic voting among Americans of Mexican ancestry. He might help Mrs. Clinton carry Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona, all of which have large populations of immigrants from Mexico.
Hispanics are not nearly as monolithic as some political pundits claim; I doubt that Salazar's Mexican roots would mean a great deal to Floridians who immigrated from Cuba, or to New Yorkers from Puerto Rico.
But for the Democrats to win the electoral contest while being shut out in the South, they're going to need to add some more states, and Salazar could be part of a winning strategy to pick up the southern Rocky Mountain states.
P.S. A couple points in response to reader comments. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson would also be a good VP choice, for many of the same reasons as Salazar. But he does have the burden of serving as Secretary of Energy under the Clinton administration. Another reader suggests that North Carolina Governor Mike Easley, who was re-elected this week, might make a stronger candidate in the general election than Senator Clinton; he is more moderate, and both parties do well nationally when they nominate Southern Governors.
The Mystery is (Apparently) Solved:
From The Hill, via Wonkette: That mysterious bulge on President Bush's back during the first presidential debate was not an electronic device feeding him answers, but a strap holding his bulletproof vest in place.
. . . [S]ources in the Secret Service told The Hill that Bush was wearing a bulletproof vest, as he does most of the time when appearing in public. The president's handlers did not want to admit as much during the campaign, for fear of disclosing information related to his personal security while he was on the campaign trail.
New CrimProf Blog:
Professors Jack Chin (Arizona) and Mark Godsey (Cincinnati) have started a new blog on criminal law, available here.
Gun Case in the Supreme Court; Sporting Clays Case in Virginia:
Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in U.S. v. Small. The case involves interpretation of 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(1), which prohibits firearms possession by any person "who has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year." The question for the Court is whether the statute applies to foreign convictions, or only to American convictions.
Before buying a gun in Pennsylvania in 1998, Small had been convicted in a Japanese court of a non-violent firearms offense punishable by more than one year in prison. The procedures of the Japanese trial were grossly divergent from American legal standards of due process.
Small is represented by Paul Boas (who gave the oral argument) and Stephen Halbrook (a firearms law expert with a 3-0 record in Supreme Court cases).
The Halbrook and Boas
opening brief
argues that when Congress said "any court," Congress meant "any state or federal court." Halbrook and Boas muster a host of federal statutory and legislative history arguments to support their point.
They also point out that Congress has explicitly found the Second Amendment to be an individual right, and that Congress therefore would not want a person to be deprived of one constitutional right based on a foreign court conviction obtained contrary to other standards in the Bill of Rights.
Another interesting
brief
on Halbrook's
website
is the Virginia state case of Orion Sporting Group v. Nelson County. The case is currently before the Virginia intermediate court of appeals. Nelson County denied Orion a permit to use land for simulated hunting. Halbrook argues that the denial violates the Virginia Constitution, which guarantees the right to hunt.
Orion wants to operate a sporting clays facility. Sporting clays, which first became popular in the 1980s, involves firing a shotgun at clay disks. Sporting clays is usually considered much more difficult than trap or skeet shooting, because the clays fly in a wide variety of different paths--such as very steep arcs in the air, or gliding a few feet off the ground. Sporting clay fields are natural land, comparable to typical bird hunting terrain.
Bolstering Halbrook's argument are Virginia state laws which specify how local governments may regulate firearms discharge. The Orion sporting clays field would comply with all such laws.
The Nelson County government argues that since Orion is a corporation, it is not a person, and therefore has no right to hunt. Halbrook answers that "the constitutional right to hunt implies a right to make and provide the goods and services that make hunting possible, just as the right to a free press includes a right of corporations to print newspapers or communicate on signs. Corporations manufacture firearms, ammunition, clay pigeons, blaze orange clothing, and other items necessary for hunting, and corporations sponsor hunting safety classes, opportunities for simulated and actual hunting, and other services. "
These days, even anti-gun groups claim that they support "gun safety." An isolated 450 acre rural tract is certainly a safe place to shoot sporting clays, and to improve the shooting skills that are important to safe hunting.
"Affirmative Action Hurts Black Law Students, Study Finds":
The Chronicle of Higher Education (article available to nonsubscribers free for the next five days; for subscribers, its permanent home is here) writes:
Affirmative action hurts black law students more than it helps them, by bumping applicants up into law schools where they are more likely to earn poor grades, drop out, and fail their states' bar exams, according to a forthcoming study by a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The author, Richard H. Sander, argues that ending racial preferences in law-school admissions would increase the number of black lawyers because it would help ensure that students attend law schools where they are more likely to succeed.
A report of the study, scheduled to appear in the November issue of the Stanford Law Review, has sparked a contentious debate among supporters and critics of affirmative action. . . .
His report, "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," says that: - After the first year of law school, 51 percent of black students have grade-point averages that place them in the bottom tenth of their classes, compared with 5 percent of white students. "Evidence suggests that when you're doing that badly, you're learning less than if you were in the middle of a class" at a less-prestigious law school, Mr. Sander says.
- Among students who entered law school in 1991, about 80 percent of white students graduated and passed the bar on their first attempt, compared with just 45 percent of black students. In a race-blind admissions system, the number of black graduates passing the bar the first time would jump to 74 percent, he says, based on his statistical analysis of how higher grades in less competitive schools would result in higher bar scores. Black students are nearly six times as likely as whites not to pass state bar exams after multiple attempts.
- Ending affirmative action would increase the number of new black lawyers by 8.8 percent because students would attend law schools where they would struggle less and learn more, and earn higher grades.
- With the exception of the most-elite law schools, good grades matter more to employers than the law school's prestige.
. . .
I had read Rick's article, and found it extremely interesting and highly persuasive. (I have not checked his raw data, but he has an excellent reputation as a quantiative scholar.)
In case you're interested, Rick is, among other things, a specialist on housing segregation, and former board member and President of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California, serving the last two years as President, as well as a noted quantitative analyst of legal education. I'm pretty sure that he's being driven by the evidence here, not by political preconceptions.
Moral values as most important issue for voters?
According to the exit polls — and take them with a grain of salt — moral values was given as the most important issue by 22% of voters. But 20% and 19% said economy/jobs and terrorism, respectively; and though theoretically these numbers are likely outside the mathematical margin of error for the entire survey (there were 13,000+ respondents nationwide, which means the purely mathematical margin of error would be roughly 1%), given all the nonmathematical imprecision inherent in this sort of survey, I'd say that it's a tie.
What's more, even if the 22% constitutes a plurality, that doesn't tell us much about just how important the issue to a majority of voters. Among other things, look how sensitive the plurality question is to the way the options are given or classified: If you combine terrorism and Iraq under the rubric of "national security," and combine their 19% and 15%, moral values gets displaced as the plurality winner. Likewise if you combine health care (which presumably means making health care more affordable) and economy/jobs, which put together count for 28%, into a single economic well-being category.
Now I'm quite sure that moral values are very important to many voters — to some, they are the most important issue, and to others they may be a close second. (My post about the possible importance of the same-sex marriage question in Ohio reflects that.) But their garnering a 22% plurality as the most important issue tells us relatively little about how they actually stack up to other matters, such as national security, economic well-being, and so on. It seems to me that people pay more attention to these "most important issue" surveys, where the "winner" has less than a quarter of the vote, than the surveys deserve.
Finally, note that a Cox News Service service story, reprinted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and perhaps elsewhere, reported that "Of 12,649 voters who participated in exit polls nationwide, 76 percent of Bush voters said 'moral values' was the one issue that mattered most in their selection"; but I couldn't find any such report, and it's directly contrary to the CNN account of the exit polls. I think this might have been an error; please correct me if I'm wrong.
Bush & the "Gay Vote"
An interesting report from the Washington Blade's Blade Blog:
Perhaps the most surprising news for gay observers of the presidential election is that exit polls show President Bush received the exact same percentage of gay votes — 23 percent — as he did four years ago. This despite the president's vocal support for a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
You Can't Say That! Review:
A nice review of my You Can't Say That! in Choice, which publishes reviews for academic libraries. Excerpt:
How does US political culture in the 21st century accommodate the conflicts between freedom of speech, association and religion, and the
various state and federal antidiscrimination laws? Bernstein (law George
Mason Univ.) superbly navigates the rough waters of the statutory and
case law that attempt to curb discriminatory practices by both public
and private organizations.... Bernstein carefully leads readers
through specific problem areas such as the threat to free expression in
the workplace and to artistic freedom, the censoring of campus speech,
interference with freedom of association, and diluting the autonomy of
religious organizations.... One cannot gainsay his contention that a
society that undercuts civil liberties in order to attain equality will
end up with the loss of both. A solid effort that deserves a wide
readership. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
Learners vs. complainers:
Michael Totten (guest-blogging at InstaPundit) posts a rundown of "left-wing blogosphere reactions" (oddly enough including the not generally left-wing Andrew Sullivan, so I suspect this is really "Kerry-supporter blogosphere reactions").
Some, it seems, ask "What can people on our side learn from this?" Others just keep complaining about how bad Bush and Bush supporters are. As a purely practical matter, Republicans have much to fear from the first group, and very little to fear from the second.
Post-election news:
From The Onion:
Nader Supporters Blame Electoral Defeat On Bush, Kerry
WASHINGTON, DC — Supporters of presidential candidate Ralph Nader blamed his defeat Tuesday on George W. Bush and John Kerry, claiming that the two candidates "ate up" his share of the electoral votes. "This election was stolen out from under Mr. Nader by Bush and Kerry, who diverted his votes to the right and the left," Nader campaign manager Theresa Amato said. "It's an outrage. If Nader were the only candidate, he would be president right now." In his concession speech, Nader characterized Bush and Kerry as spoilers.
Gay Marriage and the Cheneys:
If, as Eugene and others have suggested, it was voters who turned out to vote against gay marriage who gave Bush his margin of victory in Ohio, it lends credence to the theory that the reason Kerry and Edwards both noted that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter was to discourage turnout among precisely these voters.
A Public Service Announcement:
For the benefit of our law professor readers:
From: Carl Monk
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 5:16 PM
Subject: 2005 AALS Annual Meeting
To: Deans of Member and Fee-Paid Schools and Members of the House of Representatives
Greetings to all:
Many of you are aware of the fact that the headquarters hotel for the Annual Meeting, the San Francisco Hilton, is currently involved in a strike/lockout with one of its unions. Although negotiations are in progress it is unclear whether the strike/lockout will continue at the time of our Annual Meeting on January 5-8. The Hilton has indicated that it is continuing to provide full service during the strike/lockout.
A few Section leaders have already advised us that they would lose speakers and attendees for any program scheduled in the Hilton. To assure that the Annual Meeting content is not affected by cancellation of speakers, and that faculty who would not cross picket lines are able to attend the Annual Meeting and programs in which they are interested, the AALS has developed a "Plan B" that will be implemented if the strike/lockout is still in progress at the time of the Annual Meeting. This afternoon our office consulted with the AALS Executive Committee and all committee members support this option.
Under Plan B virtually all of the events scheduled in the Hilton would be moved to Hotels Nikko and Parc 55, neither of which are affected by the current strike/lockout, and are located directly across the street from the Hilton. Thus, Annual Meeting registration and all regular Section programs would be moved. In addition to all regular Section programs, all but three Section meal events (breakfasts and luncheons) would be moved. We will attempt to make alternative locations available for these three Section meal events as well. Due to space constraints, exhibit booths and perhaps childcare facilities would be required to remain in the Hilton.
Lodging arrangements can be made at Nikko, Parc 55, or Hilton. Once Nikko and Parc 55 are full AALS will attempt to add additional hotels for those of you who prefer not to stay at the Hilton. You are of course also free to arrange for your own lodging at one of the many hotels in San Francisco not affected by the strike/lockout.
Although the ideal solution would be that the strike/lockout no longer be in progress at the time of our meeting, "Plan B" provides an option for presenting virtually the entire Annual Meeting in hotels that are not subject to the strike/lockout and thus have no picket lines. AALS is pleased to have been able to arrange this backup plan and we look forward to seeing you at the Annual Meeting January 5-8.
PLEASE SHARE THIS WITH YOUR FACULTY AND STAFF. I look forward to seeing you in San Francisco.
Carl C. Monk
Executive Director
Association of American Law Schools
1201 Connecticut, Avenue, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
LIBERTARIAN V. NADER:
According to the final tally, I see that the Libertarian Party candidate Michael Bednarik got almost as many votes nationwide as Nader. Curious that the media nonetheless covered Nader throughout the race, while ignoring Bednarik (for instance, on the Washington Post web site with the tally, you can link to background stories on Nader, but not Bednarik). Of course, the number was quite trivial for both, but the difference in attention garnered by each also-ran is striking.
Another perennial libertarian favorite, "None of These Candidates", finished a strong 11th nationwide with 3,646 votes.
Update:
A reader alerts me to an additional layer of irony, which is that I managed to misspell Badnarik's name in my initial post. Hey, I didn't say I voted for the guy, and not because I couldn't recognize his properly-spelled name on the ballot.
Update:
Even better, I'll adopt the observation of another reader: "You can blame the media: 'Had they covered this guy as much as they did Nader, I'd know how to spell his name!'" I wish I could have been that clever on the last update.
It's a Question of the Separation of Everything and State:
The Volokh Conspiracy and I are featured prominently in this post-election column in the Newark Star-Ledger. Money quote:
That idea [that the Federal Government should embrace "traditional values"] is anathema to those who take the Constitution seriously. It's not simply a question of separation of church and state, said Bernstein, but "a separation of everything and state." The conservative idea of limited government has been all but abandoned by Bush, Bernstein said.
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