A direct quote from Peter Jennings, not more than one minute ago:

We’ve kept half an eye on the [hockey] game, but we’re very, very deeply involved in President Reagan’s death.

Sheesh, I knew the media was liberal, but I think that’s just going too far…

The inevitable has happened: Ronald Reagan has passed away. Dan Drezner invites comment on Reagan’s legacy—personally, I think his greatest contribution was rehabilitating the Republican Party after the twin disasters of Watergate and Ford’s pardon of Nixon, to the extent that the GOP was able to survive the scandals of the 1980s with far less damage.

Amanda Butler laments the misclassification of The Federalist Papers as “fiction” at her local Books-A-Million store.

[Insert your own joke about companies headquartered in Alabama here.]

Vance of Begging to Differ summarizes Paul Krugman’s latest column with the following two-line statement:

Bush really doesn’t care about the explosion of federal spending or the possible consequences. He does care, though, about getting reelected.

In other words, first-term presidents, like members of Congress, are “single-minded seekers of reelection,” to borrow David Mayhew’s classic phrase.

Meanwhile, Alex Knapp links to an Onion piece that pretty much summarizes how I suspect about 75% of the voting public feels about November.

I signed a one-year lease today and paid a deposit on a nice apartment in an older building in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson. I’m pumped.

Both Dan Drezner and Amanda Butler (Dan’s research assistant) respond to some grade-A dipshittery from commenters with ideological axes to grind who are pissed off that the empirical results of Dan’s survey don’t comport with their normative views of how the universe ought to be.

Russell Arben Fox gives some advance pub for the blogging roundtable organized by Dan Drezner at APSA in early September and ponders how the discussion will play out.

Of course, I’ll make a point of being there—assuming I end up going to APSA (I’m not presenting or anything, just going to play my designated role as meat for the job mill). I’m about 95% sure I will be there, but I should discuss it with the chair before upping that to 100%.

Anyway, it should be fun. Personally I’m curious how the panelists will reconcile blogs with the two-step flow of political information—is blogging expanding the access to be part of the elite or not, is it another avenue for transmission and diffusion of elite discourse, stuff like that. And it’d be nice to meet some more “scholar-bloggers” in person; as far as I know (for all I know, “John Lemon” could be in my department), Dan is the only one I’ve met in meatspace.

Pieter Dorsman has decided to start blogging again at Peaktalk. He returns with a sage philosophy of blogging:

So is Peaktalk back? Yes, I think so, tentatively. But with a slightly different approach. Content when I feel like it and when I have something to say, or when there’s really good stuff to link to. No more compulsion or posting for posting’s sake.

When blogging starts to feel like a chore, that means it’s time to take a break. Just remember to follow Pieter’s example and come back to us after a while ☺.

Oh, and Pieter—no pressure, but I’d love to hear your take on that minor skirmish going on north of the 49th parallel.

It’s just been confirmed that I’ll be teaching Constitutional Law in the fall—specifically, the first half of the typical political science “Institutional Relations / Rights and Liberties” sequence. Since I’m not a lawyer or an institutionalist, this leaves me a tad out of my depth; I’ve been on the receiving end of Rights and Liberties, but the rest of my background in law and the courts is in judicial behavior.

Assuming I use the case method (given that these are primarily law-school-bound students, I think I should stick with orthodoxy), I’ve got a couple of possible textbooks in mind: Mason and Stephenson (used by John Winkle at Ole Miss) or Rossum and Tarr. Since I’m not sure we plan to offer Rights and Liberties in the spring, and since I’m not sure that I’ll be teaching it even if we do, I’m leaning toward a single-volume text (which indicates Rossum and Tarr over Mason and Stephenson). I also thought of dragging out the first volume companion to the overweight West book I used as an wee grad student for Rights and Liberties, but it may be too expansive—and expensive—for a junior-level undergraduate seminar consisting primarily of political science majors and pre-law types.

Any suggestions, endorsements, or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Update: I received a vote via email for Epstein and Walker, which has the advantage (IMHO) of having been written by political scientists.

More thoughts on libertarianism and the efficacy of the Libertarian Party from Will Baude, who is looking for some sort of cross-party soft-libertarian caucus to take up the mantle of advancing libertarianism. He also writes:

I’d also like to see a group with the microphone and legitimacy of a national party that didn’t run fringe candidates but rather conducted in-depth research into the voting records and announced positions of candidates in every house, senate, and presidential race, and announced how closely they hewed to libertarian orthodoxy (on those things—unlike, say, war—where such an orthodoxy exists).

The Republican Liberty Caucus does this—or at least did this for a while—by compiling two “interest group” ratings for legislators—one each for economic and personal liberty.* Not sure if they still do it… anyway, I used the ratings in at least one iteration of the now-legendary impeachment paper. Unfortunately you can’t find RLC publicity standing on the street outside their headquarters, much less in the halls of power or the public discourse; however, I think that Republicans who want to push their party in a more libertarian direction won’t find a better place to put their money.

I spent Memorial Day afternoon at the funeral of my uncle, Bill Sides. Bill Sides was a World War II veteran, who served with the 236th Engineers in China, Burma, and India.

This was the first funeral I’ve been to with military honor guard. The graveside ceremony was simple but moving. One soldier, out of sight, played “Taps,” while two others folded the flag that was draped over the coffin into a right triangle with only the stars showing. Each of the three soldiers saluted the folded flag before presenting it to a family member.

The complex of meanings that this ceremony invokes surely differ from viewer to viewer, and I find it difficult to sum up in words what I felt on seeing it. Suffice it to say that the ceremony managed to honor at the same time both my uncle as an individual, and all America’s military veterans who have passed on.

Only a few hours left to buy BlogMatrix Jäger at the low introductory price of $10 US, versus the still-low new price of $15 US. I’d probably buy it myself if I lived more than 1% of my life in Windows…

Doug Allen wonders what the best future approach for the Libertarian Party is. In the comments on Allen’s post, Skip Oliva writes:

The LP’s flaw is that they focus exclusively on electoral politics, which is a high-cost, low-yield means of communicating your message when you’re a third-party. I’d like to see more LP activism in things like administrative law (which is where I focus my attention) and areas that aren’t the focus of popular and media attention, areas that could use some principles to shine a light on government abuse.

I think the larger question is whether a political party (e.g. the LP) is the best vehicle to advance those goals in the contemporary U.S. political system. I have previously written why I think not; rather, I think the best front is to support organizations like the Institute for Justice and the Cato Institute that work on the legal and interest articulation side of the spectrum. Groups like Cato and IJ have institutional advantages over political parties for pursuing goals outside the electoral process—most notably, the ability to attract tax-deductable donations.

Sean Hackbarth has some thoughts on Allen’s post as well.

James Joyner finds large gatherings of bikers to be something of an inconvenience but nonetheless, in this instance, in service of a worthy cause. He’s got a link to a WaPo account of the Rolling Thunder biker rally, which I suppose will be nothing new to those of us with Harley aficionados in the family. I was previously unaware that Rolling Thunder made political endorsements, however.

Dan Drezner takes a look at the results of the survey of the blog-reading habits of media professionals he conducted with Henry Farrell, and has some surprising findings.

One minor caveat to his analysis: I don’t think the Daily Kos counts as a “newly emerging blog,” as it’s been around longer than I have, although the current “community” format for it inspired by Kuro5hin (and powered by the same software, Scoop) is relatively new.

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Apologies for the brief downtime earlier today… we’re experiencing what might be called “power difficulties” here in Oxvegas, magnified by the fact that the BIOS on the machine that currently hosts Signifying Nothing has no “power on automatically when AC comes back on” setting. Hopefully things are now back to normal.

Like Brock, I can’t be excited about the Libertarians’ nomination of Michael Badnarik. And his enthusiasm for non-alcoholic beer makes me wonder about some other possible faults he may have—like, perhaps, support for the designated-hitter rule or liking the taste of broccoli.

Elsewhere: MNSlog misidentified Brock as a Republican (thanks for correcting it ☺), Q and O considers this evidence that the LP is a collection of “losertarians,” and Brian J. Noggle reminds us that he and his wife met Badnarik earlier this year in a basement. Oh, and some dude named Glenn Reynolds has some links. Heh.

I learned from Mike Hollihan that the Libertarian party has nominated Michael Badnarik for president.

So despite my threats, I won’t be voting Libertarian in November. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone who doesn’t respect the eighth amendment.

UPDATE: According to the Blogcritics article linked to above, "Badnarik is clearly a genuine connoisseur of N/A beer." Like I said, he's a crackpot.

Well, the conspiracy theorists will have to spin a new yarn about Disney burying Michael Moore’s apolitical magnum opus for political ends, as the Weinstein brothers have snagged themselves a sweetheart deal to get Disney to sell themselves the rights to Fahrenheit: 9/11.

So now we’ll all get to see if it measures up in over-the-top melodramatic impact to The Day After Tomorrow, which Julian Sanchez characterizes as a virtual ad for Bush/Cheney 2004, while a commenter at Dan Drezner’s place calls it “the Left Behind for the environmental left.” More importantly, this news goes to show you that free speech, even when illicitly pursued on someone else’s dime (apparently the Weinstein boys don’t quite understand this whole “owner-employee” relationship thing), is alive and well in America. Hallelujah!

Both Trio and the Superintendent think there’s too much “ass crack” on display in American educational establishments. Great minds…

So as not to disappoint Robert Prather, I’ll provide a very brief review of Measuring America by Andro Linklater (which I finally got around to finishing a few days ago, and which is June’s Signifying Nothing Book of the Month).

Overall, I found it an engaging read. Linklater frames the story, as I suppose is the current trend in popular history narratives, around historical figures of interest, mostly surveyors but a few political figures (Thomas Jefferson chief among them) as well. It is as much a history of the standardization of weights and measures as it is of geography. I think perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from the book was that Jefferson’s francophilia did not extend to adopting the metric system; instead, he favored a decimalized system based on the “traditional” (but as-yet unstandardized) units.

There were a couple of minor disappointments for me. First and foremost, the book didn’t quite explain how surveying actually works, which I suppose might be a bit technical but seems to underlie a lot of the discussion. As a result, I still know more about how GPS works than the simple geometry that underlies traditional surveying. The other disappointment is the sloppily-assembled measures appendix, which contains quite a few typographical errors and appears to be a transcribed copy of a NIST web page.

Of course, the political scientist in me might have more strongly emphasized that one of the enumerated powers of Congress was:

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures[.]

That alone is a powerful statement of how seriously the Constitution’s Framers considered the issue of standardization, even though it took several decades for the American customary system to be adopted (ultimately, under the direction of a staunch advocate of metrification).

Anyway, I found it a quite enjoyable read, and it’s rekindled my interest in digging through the stack of books I’ve been meaning to read to find my copy of Longitude; my vague recollection is that the ability to determine longitude depended on producing an accurate chronometer (time-keeping piece), but I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

Matt Yglesias broadens his perspective with a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, with the following observation:

I’ve been surprised to discover that southerners really do say “y’all” all the time.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum discovers that people in different parts of the country refer to carbonated soft drinks by different names. There may be hope for John Kerry in flyover country yet…

Well, not exactly. While ego-surfing last night, I came across this obituary for “Uncle Brock Sides,” a Confederate veteran who died in Texas in 1914.

On this page, there’s also mention of a Brock Sides, who may or may not be the Confedarate veteran mentioned above. This Brock Sides would be my third cousin twice removed, if I'm counting generations correctly. His great-great uncle, Benjamin Franklin Sides (a popular name for children born in 1786, I suppose), was my great-great-great grandfather.

And another Brock Sides was a Gilchrist Studios National Poetry Month Contest winner in 2000, at the age of 13, for this anti-abortion poem.

Josh Chafetz isn’t entirely thrilled about his appearance being compared by Jonah Goldberg to that of a college sophomore.

You think that’s bad? My mom thinks my dissertation chair (who’s quite a bit older than me) looks younger than I do, at 28-and-change.