Sunday, November 7, 2004Guest-blogging at WSJ.com:
This week I will be guest-blogging over at the on-line Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com. The Journal page is usually gated, but for this week it is open to all visitors. I am debating economist John Irons of Argmax.com. The exchanges are on the Economy page; here is a direct link, which includes a comments board. The first discussion concerns social security privatization; on Tuesday comes outsourcing and trade, followed by the future of Europe and China. Who is next for the Supreme Court?--
Alberto Gonzales (CNN photo). Senator Charles Schumer has released a letter to President Bush suggesting the candidates that he would favor for the Supreme Court (tip to the Corner). Personally, my uninformed guess is that Bush will nominate Alberto Gonzales for the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, though this is far from certain. White House Counsel Gonzales has Bush's trust, has prior judicial experience, and is reputed to be competent. Gonzales would be as moderate an appointment as the Democrats are likely to see. Not only is Gonzales probably in favor of affirmative action, but he decided against parental notification for abortion in Texas. If there are two slots to fill at the same time, I would expect an attempt at a deal--Gonzales plus another much more conservative justice. Depending on whom they replace, that would leave the abortion split close to the same. This would also seem to be consistent with Bush's practice of appointing minorities to more of the truly important positions of power than any prior President. Minorities are part of Bush's inner circle in a way that they never were for Clinton, Kerry, or Dean. Here are Schumer's suggestions and his descriptions:
Related Posts (on one page):
My colleague Ilya Somin notes that unlike the Jewish community as a whole, Jews from the former Soviet Union overwhelmingly supported President Bush. Ilya writes: "I'm still waiting for the political payoff for our loyal support. For example, instead of naming a Hispanic supreme court justice, why not name Eugene Volokh?" Sounds great to me. Is Arafat nearly dead or still dead?--
Debka is reporting that Arafat died several days ago, which is contrary to what some Palestinian spokesmen are saying in other press stories. Who knows? I don't. But the fact that the doctors are not saying anything is highly suspicious. UPDATE:Reuters reports that Arafat's wife is accusing Palestinian officials of trying to bury Arafat alive. That tends to lend some credence to the speculation that he is already brain-dead and she is refusing to allow pulling the plug. If this is true, in the US this would not be her decision beyond perhaps the brief time needed to harvest organs if that were contemplated. But who knows? Here is Reuters (tip LGF): Israeli media had reported the 75-year-old president would be taken off life-support equipment after Palestine Liberation Organization (news - web sites) Secretary General Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie and Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath arrived in Paris. Related Posts (on one page):
Best State Poll Predictions were from Rasmussen and Survey USA.--
Polipundit has a nice review of which polls did better in predicting state results. Rasmussen comes in 2d of the 11 polling agencies that Polipundit reviews. Survey USA comes in first.
Here are some of the results: #11 - The LA Times Poll. ... .At least nationally, Rasmussen was weighting by an assumption of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats (which turned out to be true), while most advocates of weighting by party ID were urging weighting as a way to reduce the polling results for Republicans supposedly to correct for the higher percentages of Democrats (as determined by 2000 exit polling). Rasmussen's final national prediction was 50.2% for Bush and 48.5% for Kerry (which was off by less than 2% and got Kerry's share almost exactly). So from this one election alone, the answer to weighting national polls would seem to be one of the following: (1) do not weight by party, which allows you to catch a switch in party ID (as actually happened in 2004); (2) weight by party according to exit polling in 2004 (equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats); (3) to smooth out extreme swings in party ID in particular polls, weight by average party ID as revealed in polling done that current polling season; (4) guess right about the weight to be used (as Rasmussen did this year nationally, perhaps with a good reason, perhaps not). Related Posts (on one page):
Mark Steyn
has a very funny and apt column in the Telegraph (UK) on European attitudes towards America. It naturally overgeneralizes to some extent, but I found it to be an incisive and amusing read. (Thanks to the newly-blogrolled Betsy Newmark for the pointer.) Massad Defends Himself:
I've been reporting on the Professor Joseph Massad controversy at Columbia, which you can follow via the links below. I've reproduced, via Juan Cole, Massad's statement in his own defense, which I will mostly let speak for itself. My quick comments: The difficulty with Massad seems less that he is anti-Israel, as such, and I've seen no evidence that he is anti-Semitic, but that he is an extreme left-wing ideologue who allows that ideology to interfere with scholarly judgment and to make broad statements about matters on which he is ignorant. Note that in statement reproduced below, while strongly objecting to being accused of anti-Semitism, he smears tens of millions of American Christians as anti-Semites, asserting that all evangelical Christians (whom he mischaracterizes as all being fundamentalists) (a) want to convert Jews, and (b) are therefore anti-Semitic. In fact, not all evangelical factions want to convert Jews; even fewer have active programs to do so (as opposed to seeking converts equally from all groups, including other Christians); and, as for the remaining groups who specifically target Jews for conversion, it's pretty hard to see as "anti-Semites" those who are eager to peacefully persuade Jews to join their religious community because they think that God has special love for the Jewish people. Moreover--and this is truly absurd--Massad claims that evangelical Christians (and not, say, Islamic Jihadists) are the "most powerful anti-Semitic group worldwide." Besides the nonsensical notion of grouping all the disparate evangelical factions into one "group", the obvious questions arise: How many Jewish children in France have been beaten by evangelical Christians? How many evangelical ministers or newspapers have referred to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? Beyond the tiny and definitely non-mainstream Christian Identity movement, which fundamentalist or evangelical terrorist groups have targeted Jews for violence? Which evangelical nations expropriated Jewish property and expelled their Jewish populations? Does a Jew wearing a yarmulke feel threatened walking through small-town Oklahoma, or am I confusing that with Cairo, Baghdad, Riyadh, etc.? Massad also states that in his class, "One of the assigned readings by Israeli scholar and feminist Simona Sharoni spoke of how in Hebrew the word 'zayin' means both penis and weapon in a discussion of Israeli militarised masculinity." Again, this is an ideological construct with tenuous roots in reality. My Israeli wife--who served in the Israeli army and therefore heard plenty of discussions of weaponry--tells me that the modern Hebrew word for "weapon" is "neshek," and that she has absolutely never heard the word "zayin" used to mean weapon in modern Hebrew. She does recall that there is a biblical Hebrew word that has the same root as "zayin"--mizuyan--which means something like to be armed or wear armor (she can't recall which, which is a sign that she only encountered this in her Bible studies class, not in spoken modern Hebrew). If the word "zayin" or any derivatives is not used in modern Hebrew to mean weapon, how can this be an example of "Israeli militarised masculinity?" This makes me very suspicious of whether Prof. Massad, who styles himself an expert on Zionism and Israel, actually speaks Hebrew. Anyway, here is Prof. Massad's statement (Note that the most troubling alleged incident involving Prof. Massad, is the one in which he refused to speak to an Israeli student at Columbia until the student revealed "how many Palestinians he had killed" while in the army; Prof. Massad denies that this incident ever took place, or that he ever met this student.):
UPDATE: A reader writes:
For what it's worth, my wife reiterates her point that "neshek," not zayin, is the Hebrew word for "weapon," and adds that it's very, very rare to hear any of the other terms the reader mentions in modern Hebrew. Another reader writes:
UPDATE: Several reliable sources inform me that Massad does not know Hebrew. Isn't Columbia embarassed to have a non-Hebrew speaker teaching a course called "Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies"? How much can Massad know about Israeli society if he can't speak to Israelis in their native tongue, nor read Israeli books or periodicals in the original? Related Posts (on one page): Bill Stuntz writes on the 1896, 1916, & 2004 election pattern.--
Bill Stuntz, who started as an assistant professor at UVA when I was a visiting professor there in the mid-1980s, is now a professor at the Harvard Law School. He wrote me an email on the voting patterns that I and many others have been noting:
There have been six elections with this basic pattern, South and West versus Northeast (more recently, the Pacific Coast joins the Northeast), with the Midwest divided. The first is 1896, and that's the only one the candidate of the Northeast wins. The others -- 1916, 1948, 1968, 2000, and now 2004 -- are all won by the candidate of the South and West, who always wins at least a couple of Midwestern states, always including Ohio and Missouri. The key is that the Midwest has never identified culturally with the Northeast. In a close election, it just isn't possible for a candidate like Kerry to sweep the region -- and he had to nearly sweep the region in order to win.I had read his prescient article when it came out, but it had slipped my mind. It was enttitled: "Why Dewey Defeats Truman -- And Bush Beats Kerry?"  Related Posts (on one page):
Saturday, November 6, 2004Evan 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: INTRO Ch. 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. 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.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). Related Posts (on one page):
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:
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:
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. 
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Friday, November 5, 2004The 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. Related Posts (on one page):
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. All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts: 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:
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. All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts: 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.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.
Related Posts (on one page):
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):
Thursday, November 4, 2004Reporting 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?
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 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:
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):
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):
More on Ohio and same-sex marriage:
Two conflicting reports. Patrick Lewis, a former student of mine who now practices in Ohio, writes:
On the other hand, Prof. Bill Nancarrow at Curry College in Massachusetts — not an Ohioan, but then again neither am I — writes:
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):
"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:
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:
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. Related Posts (on one page):
Patriot Act Article:
Professor Richard Seamon and his coauthor William Gardner have just put an interesting draft article on the Patriot Act on SSRN: Does (Should) The Patriot Act Raze (or Raise) the Wall Between Foreign Intelligence and Criminal Law Enforcement?, forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. 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. Related Posts (on one page):
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