The Volokh Conspiracy

Who rules us with an iron rod?
Who moves at Satan's beck and nod?
Who heeds not man,
Who heeds not God?
Van Buren, Van Buren!

Here's today's Bushism of the Day from Slate (note that "they" refers to the voters):

"They've seen me make decisions, they've seen me under trying times, they've seen me weep, they've seen me laugh, they've seen me hug. And they know who I am, and I believe they're comfortable with the fact that they know I'm not going to shift principles or shift positions based upon polls and focus groups." — Interview with USA Today, Aug. 27, 2004

The subhead of the column is, as always, "The president's accidental wit and wisdom," but this has nothing to do with the misspeaking — whether real or imagined, unusual or commonplace in the normal speech of normal people — that is supposedly Bush's hallmark, and that is thus supposedly accidentally funny. Nothing here is ungrammatical or a malapropism (unless, I suppose, the author is somehow picking on Bush for saying "under trying times" as opposed to "in trying times" or "under trying conditions").

The only thing that I can imagine the Slate author finding amusing is the "they've seen me hug" line, and more broadly the touchy-feeliness of the first sentence. But that's not a Bushism — that's an "I feel your pain" sensitive-guy Clintonism. I confess it puts me off a bit; I hope you'll never hear me say "they've seen me hug" in public. It says more, however, about the Clintonization (or 70s-ification, if you want to go that far back) of American politics than about Bush's accidental wit and wisdom.

UPDATE: Just to make it clear, occasional hugging is fine -- it's just talking a lot about hugging that I disapprove of.

The Theodorakis remarks that David Bernstein points to below aren't the first of his remarks about Jews to make the news. Last November, Theodorakis was reported as saying:

We are two nations without brothers in the world, us [Greeks] and the Jews, but they have fanaticism and are forceful. . . Today we can say that this small nation is the root of evil, not of good, which means that too much self-importance and too much stubbornness is evil.

He then tried explaining himself, but not quite persuasively, in my view. I posted about this here.

I got many responses to my query; thanks very much to everyone who submitted items. I ultimately ended up choosing the ones for which I could find someone else saying (preferably in a reputable publication) that many readers were indeed likely to use the books to fantasize about doing, rather than to do. Nothing like having Authorities to Rely On, even if they're just someone who's making an educated guess about what's likely.

The items I'm using — and no need to submit more, thanks — are:

1. Lonely Planet: Antarctica. See Juliet Coombe, Planet Goes to China, HERALD SUN (MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA), Jan. 30, 2004, at T11 (interview with Tony Wheeler, co-founder of the company that produces the Lonely Planet guidebooks) ("Q The Lonely Planet guide to Antarctica sells about 45,000 copies a year. Why is it so popular, despite relatively few people going there? [A] Science and wildlife expeditions are getting more exposure and lots of people are armchair travellers. The guidebook includes long sections on wildlife and the environment. For most of us, a trip to Antarctica is a dream."). Naturally, some of the readers are "armchair travellers" in the sense of people who are curious and want to satisfy their curiosity by reading rather than by traveling; but I suspect that some of the armchair travelers really do read the books to fantasize about actually being there. Thanks to Michelle Dulak Thomson.

2. WoodenBoat magazine. See, e.g., MICHAEL RUHLMAN, WOODEN BOATS 23 (2002) ("[A]n obscure magazine idea, a magazine devoted to wooden boats, became a resounding success precisely because readers didn't have to own wood to love it, admire it, or even dream about it. . . . [I]ndustry experts guess that fewer than 10,000 wooden boats exist in America, not including dinghies, canoes, kayaks, homemade plywood skiffs, and the like . . . . Yet this minuscule industry . . . generates a subscription base for Wooden-Boat of more than 100,000 . . . ."). Thanks to David Riceman.

3. Worst-Case Scenario books. See, e.g., Jayne Clark, `Worst-Case' Writers' Newest Scenario: Runaway Train to Fame, USA TODAY, Apr. 27, 2001, at 7D ("In this sequel to their best-selling The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht have once again produced a very funny guide with a deadpan tone aimed at armchair Walter Mittys, as well as wannabe Indiana Joneses."). Thanks to many people.

4. Some cookbooks. See, e.g., Maurice Sullivan, Last Best Books of 1997, WINETRADER, vol. R, no. 6, http://www.wines.com/winetrader/r6/r6bk.html ("I have finally figured out that all these beautiful and expensive color cookbooks aren't for people who really want to cook, but rather are for folks on diets that want to fantasize about food!"). This is probably something of an overstatement, but I suspect that some of the cookbooks' readers do indeed use the books this way, even if others do actually use them to cook. Thanks to many people, especially Ashley Doherty.

Apropos the story I mentioned yesterday, here's Daniel Pipes' argument for why revoking Tariq Ramadan's visa was a good idea. (My post dealt simply with why it's constitutional.) I don't know enough about the facts to speak to this myself, but I thought I'd pass the item along; I'll be happy to link to counterarguments, too. Here's an excerpt:

What's up? The DHS knows much more than I do, but it is not talking. A review of the press, however, gives an idea of what the problem is. Here are some reasons why Mr. Ramadan might have been kept out:

• He has praised the brutal Islamist policies of the Sudanese politician Hassan Al-Turabi. Mr. Turabi in turn called Mr. Ramadan the "future of Islam."

• Mr. Ramadan was banned from entering France in 1996 on suspicion of having links with an Algerian Islamist who had recently initiated a terrorist campaign in Paris.

• Ahmed Brahim, an Algerian indicted for Al-Qaeda activities, had "routine contacts" with Mr. Ramadan, according to a Spanish judge (Baltasar Garzón) in 1999.

• Djamel Beghal, leader of a group accused of planning to attack the American embassy in Paris, stated in his 2001 trial that he had studied with Mr. Ramadan.

• Along with nearly all Islamists, Mr. Ramadan has denied that there is "any certain proof" that Bin Laden was behind 9/11.

• He publicly refers to the Islamist atrocities of 9/11, Bali, and Madrid as "interventions," minimizing them to the point of near-endorsement.

And here are other reasons, dug up by Jean-Charles Brisard, a former French intelligence officer doing work for some of the 9/11 families, as reported in Le Parisien:

• Intelligence agencies suspect that Mr. Ramadan (along with his brother Hani) coordinated a meeting at the Hôtel Penta in Geneva for Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy head of Al-Qaeda, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, now in a Minnesota prison.

• Mr. Ramadan's address appears in a register of Al Taqwa Bank, an organization the State Department accuses of supporting Islamist terrorism.

To return to the legal question (and I stress again that I don't know enough about the factual issues to comment on them), if one thinks that aliens should have a right to enter the U.S., and should be barred based only on proof in court of criminal conduct rather than based simply on suspicion of connections with terrorists, then these allegations might not be enough. But U.S. law has not generally taken such a view, and I think it has been right not to take such a view.

The claim: A paper on climate change reaches bad results because the authors entered one piece of data in degrees rather than radians. (See Crooked Timber (John Quiggin) and Deltoid (Tim Lambert).) Whoops! Not quite as bad as filling up an airplane in pounds rather than kilograms or using the wrong units in the Mars Climate Orbiter, but -- if this indeed happened -- still pretty bad.

Of course, that's the claim; if there's a rebuttal somewhere, please point me to it, and I'll happily link to it.

A tangentially related phone call from a reporter reminded me of this story that a law professor I know and trust told a while back.

It seems that a visiting colleague's students were going to a public school in Texas, and declined to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher insisted that they say it, which of course violates Barnette v. West Va. Bd. of Ed., the 1943 case that held students had a First Amendment right not to recite the Pledge. Fortunately, the school backed down after getting a letter from the father.

The letter gave an explanation for the children's behavior, though it didn't have to (and though as a legal matter, there should have been no need for the letter). The explanation was that the visiting colleague, and his children, were visiting from a foreign country, and they were citizens of that country, not the United States. They thus don't owe allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, or the Republic for which it stands, wonderful as it may be. (Technical footnote: In a purely legal sense, noncitizen residents of the U.S. owe the nation a duty not to aid its enemies in time of war -- noncitizens can thus be convicted of treason -- which is sometimes called a sort of "allegiance," but this is not, I think, the solemn allegiance to the flag that the Pledge contemplates.)

Apparently the teacher not only didn't know or think about the students' First Amendment rights. The teacher also didn't think about what exactly the Pledge means, and why some students have an entirely simple and prosaic reason -- entirely unrelated to high constitutional debates about dissent and conscientious objection -- not to express that meaning.

seems to be marked on ears, not foreheads. Thanks to GeekPress for the pointer.

seems to be saving the day — or ruining it, depending on whether you're human or a bee.

UPDATE: My colleague Steve Bainbridge has a different view.

I'm looking for examples of factual books — preferably how-to books — that some readers read for the fun of imagining themselves using this knowledge. One example, though I don't know if such a book actually exists, would be a work that explains how someone could reconstruct civilization if stranded on a desert island. It may not be consciously aimed at the fantasizing market, but I imagine that a lot of people who read it would do it in part to imagine themselves as some super-savvy Robinson Crusoe.

Likewise, my sense is that the Hit Man contract murder manual — obviously a much darker and more dangerous work — has also been used mostly as entertainment for people who want to imagine themselves as soldiers of fortune. It apparently sold 13,000 copies, and I doubt that there are 13,000 would-be real contract killers in the country. The same may be true for the Anarchist Cookbook and similar works.

I'm looking for more examples, preferably of real how-to books, that people do use, or are likely to use, as means to imagine themselves as something else — a successful castaway, a contract killer, or something else. If you can give examples of people actually remarking (preferably in the press) that this book is good for that sort of thing, that would be best. But examples where it's simply plausible that many readers would read the book for that purpose would be fine, too.

This is for a tangent to my Crime-Facilitating Speech, which I'm just finishing up and getting ready to send to the journals, so responses that I get will come in very useful. Many thanks in advance.

[Note: Yes, I know that my first hypothetical is reminiscent of the "what technology could a smart 12-year-old reproduce if hurtled back in time to ancient Rome?" question. I have the 250 messages that I got in response on my desk, and I've gone through about 175, looking for what strike me as the best answers — I'll then try to do a bit more research on them, and post the answers, probably in a month or two. Thanks again to everyone who responded, and sorry for the delay.]

UPDATE: A bunch of people have recommended the Worst Case Scenario guides, and some others have recommended some other items (I'll blog more about this soon). In the meantime, more, more — I'm still not satisfied!

An intriguing and very readable piece.

Venkat Balasubramani (Begging to Differ) points to what appears to be a revocation of a visa based on an alien's speech:

The US administration came under fire for barring prominent European Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from entering the country to take a post at the renowned Notre Dame University.

Ramadan, rated by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, was granted a visa in May only to have it revoked on August 2 by the US State Department on the recommendation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). . . .

Russ Knocke, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman, told Reuters on Tuesday, that the work visa was taken back because of a section in federal law applying to aliens who have used a "position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity." . . .

(I say "appears" because the article is clearly an opinion piece, not an objective news account -- note the reference to "the Board of Deputies of British Jews [launching] a vile campaign against prominent moderate Muslim scholar Youssef Qaradawi's visit" -- but I'll assume that the account is complete and accurate for purposes of this post.) Balasubramani calls this "a good example of Patriot Act abuse" (because "The Patriot Act added the following clause which provides an additional ground of inadmissibility with respect to an alien who . . .'has used the alien's position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity, or to persuade others to support terrorist activity or a terrorist organization, in a way that the Secretary of State has determined undermines United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activities'"); he also says that "[i]t's definitely not a no-brainer as to whether this passes First Amendment scrutiny," though in an update he suggests that "the case may be a bit less strong, and maybe because of the standing issue," and may present only an as-applied challenge.

But as a doctrinal matter, this is a "no brainer" in favor of the government; there's a 1972 Supreme Court case, Kleindienst v. Mandel that's quite squarely on point:

It is clear that Mandel [a self-described "revolutionary Marxist" foreign academic] personally, as an unadmitted and nonresident alien, had no constitutional right of entry to this country as a nonimmigrant or otherwise. . . . The case, therefore, comes down to the narrow issue whether the First Amendment confers upon the appellee professors, because they wish to hear, speak, and debate with Mandel in person, the ability to determine that Mandel should be permitted to enter the country or, in other words, to compel the Attorney General to allow Mandel's admission. . . .

Recognition that First Amendment rights are implicated, however, is not dispositive of our inquiry here. In accord with ancient principles of the international law of nation-states, the Court . . . [has] held broadly . . . that the power to exclude aliens is "inherent in sovereignty, necessary for maintaining normal international relations and defending the country against foreign encroachments and dangers - a power to be exercised exclusively by the political branches of government . . . ." . . . The Court without exception has sustained Congress' "plenary power to make rules for the admission of aliens and to exclude those who possess those characteristics which Congress has forbidden." . . .

In summary, plenary congressional power to make policies and rules for exclusion of aliens has long been firmly established. In the case of an alien excludable under [sec.] 212(a)(28), Congress has delegated conditional exercise of this power to the Executive. We hold that when the Executive exercises this power negatively on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason, the courts will neither look behind the exercise of that discretion, nor test it by balancing its justification against the First Amendment interests of those who seek personal communication with the applicant. . . .

One can debate whether the Court got it right in Kleindienst; I think it did, but that is a story for another day. One can also debate whether it's a good idea for Congress and the Executive Branch to exclude such aliens -- though note that the Patriot Act is not an innovation in this respect. But as a matter of existing First Amendment doctrine, the government has a clear winner of a case here (again, even if the press account that Balasubramani quotes is entirely accurate).

Here's an excerpt:

Digital radio promised lower costs, higher quality and more variety. To portray this as a bad thing, the NAB turned the free-market logic of 18th-century economist Adam Smith on its head, stressing the harm satellite radio could do to the listening public.

Satellite's "purported benefits are, in the main, nonexistent, unrealistic or of minimal value," the group assured the FCC in 1995. Left free to compete, the NAB added, satellite radio would offer inferior programming and shove better-quality AM and FM service off the air. Thus competition would leave consumers worse off, the NAB said in an Orwellian conclusion: "Adding a new service would likely decrease the overall service to the public."

"Economists just don't take a lot of those arguments seriously," says Stuart Benjamin, a Duke University professor who studies broadcast regulation. "To be blunt, the NAB has power that is not commensurate with the persuasiveness of its arguments." . . .

The Harper's Magazine site contains the following (thanks to Christopher Rohrbacher):

[Letter to the Editor:] I was most impressed to read of Lewis Lapham's ability to travel in time in "Tentacles of Rage" [Essay, September]. As far as I can tell, on the day I received my copy of Harper's Magazine, the Republican convention had yet to take place, and living in New York, I think I would have noticed. Admittedly, the pablum will be predictable (barring some unforeseen event), but it seems awfully sloppy of Lapham to discuss feelings he had while watching something he has yet to watch, simply in order to put some additional feathers on one of his rhetorical barbs. What is most appalling is that he chose an actual piece of journalism, rather than his accustomed punditry, for this rather silly fillip. This doesn't exactly give me faith in his understanding of what it is reporters actually do.

On the other hand, if he has in fact traveled in time, I would appreciate it if he could let all of us subscribers know the outcome of the forthcoming election.

Matthew Ostrowski Brooklyn

Lewis Lapham responds:

As Mr. Ostrowski properly notes, the rhetorical invention was silly. The mistake, however, is a serious one, and if I'd had my wits about me as an editor, I wouldn't have let the author mix up his tenses in manuscript or allowed him in page proof to lapse into poetic license. Both of us regret the injury done to the magazine and apologize, wholeheartedly, to its readers.

It's to Lapham's and Harper's credit that Lapham apologized, and did so promptly, via the Web. I'd like to know a bit more about how this error came about -- but in any event, I'm glad that it was promptly acknowledged.

A reader asks: "[C]an you explain this geometry puzzle?," pointing to the 8 x 8 = 5 x 13 puzzle that's been making the rounds. He adds:

Ever since I saw it, I've had a hard time concentrating on work. It seems to call into question an orderly universe, which is quite disturbing.

Well, I surely don't want American productivity — or for that matter American faith in an orderly universe — to decline. So the answer is

available by clicking here.

UPDATE: Reader Jason Wolfkill articulates the general point well:

Your answer to the 64=65 puzzle showcases what I like to call the "do the math" principle. Our eyes and intuition may lead us astray, but the numbers don't lie (at least not to a degree that those of us living in the Newtonian/Cartesian world can detect).

The JibJab "This Land Is Your Land" controversy (see here and here and several posts in between) is over: It turns out, thanks to an investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that the song may well be in the public domain -- and thus free for all to use -- because the original copyright had not been properly renewed. (Under the pre-1978 copyright law, a copyright had to be renewed after the first 28 years; that's not the case any more for new works.)

Ludlow Music still claims that they do own the copyright, but they have decided to withdraw their objections "to avoid the expense and difficulties of litigation." JibJab had earlier filed a lawsuit for declaratory judgment to establish their right to use the song, and that lawsuit has now been settled in JibJab's favor. See this Electronic Frontier Foundation press release and this Wired News story.

Thanks to readers Robert Schwartz and Matthew Sheffield for the pointers.

I'm amazed how often people think there's some puzzle about whether zero is odd or even. (Do a google search on "is zero even" and you'll see.) The question has even made its way into news stories, usually when some government institutes "odd-even" gasoline rationing in which the days you can buy gas depend on whether the last digit of your license plate is a 0.

The answer couldn't be simpler: Zero is even because it is exactly divisible by 2 (i.e., when divided by 2 it yields no remainder) or, if you prefer, because it is a multiple of 2 (just as 2, 4, and the like are). That's the dictionary definition, and it's also the standard mathematical definition.

Nor would there be any reason to define evenness the same way. Mathematical definitions are sometimes chosen with an eye towards convenience, for instance when prime numbers are defined to exclude 1, so as to guarantee that every positive integer above 1 has a unique prime factorization. One could define prime numbers so that 1 is included (any positive integer that's divisible only by 1 and itself) rather than so 1 is excluded (any positive integer that has exactly two different positive integer divisors); but mathematicians have chosen the latter definition for their convenience. Still, I know of no reason why evenness would be defined so 0 wouldn't be even, and I've never seen any such odd definition. (Of course, zero isn't an even positive integer, but that's because it's not positive, not because it's not even. I've also heard it said that in some versions of roulette, if you bet on the evens, you'll lose if the ball lands on 0, but naturally doesn't really tell us much about the mathematical definition.)

Incidentally, I once ran across an article whose author was saying some political question was unanswerable, much like the question whether zero is even. I e-mailed him to say that the is-zero-even question is very much answerable. He responded with an apology, and a suggestion that he should have used some other example, such as "Is there an infinite number of primes?"

I felt compelled to respond that actually there is an infinite number of primes, and there's an elegantly simple proof developed of this over 2000 years ago (by Euclid). Ah, the perils of drawing analogies to a subject that one doesn't really know well.

I should be on Bill O'Reilly's radio show today at 10 am Pacific, talking about the First Amendment rules that would apply to protests at the Republican National Convention.

I called Harper's, and was told that Lewis Lapham would have an explanation of the error (they acknowledged it was an error) in the October issue, which should be out about a month from now. To their credit, by the way, someone called me back from Harper's within an hour.

I should have asked -- and I encourage others to call them to ask -- whether they'd be distributing the explanation earlier. They do have a Web site, after all. Bloggers who make a mistake can and generally do correct it, apologize for it, or explain it (or some combination of these) within hours or days. Seems to me Harper's ought to as well, no?

My colleague Rick Sander is one of the researchers on the "After the JD" project; they're interviewing a huge (about 3800) and fairly representative sample of people who graduated from law school in 2000, and they're just beginning to come up with data. (They intend to interview them again on several occasions in the years to come.) Rick gave a great presentation at UCLA yesterday about it, and much of the data will be posted on the NALP Foundation and American Bar Foundation sites.

Here's one tidbit, far from the most important one, but one that I thought might be interesting, from p. 19 of the study:

2.5% of the [After the JD] respondents reported that they are gay or lesbian. This figure is not very different from the 2.1% of the general population, and 3.5% of the college educated population, that self-identified as homosexual in the 1991 Laumann et al survey . . . .

A footnote notes that "Given that younger people may be more likely to report homosexuality, and that more people are openly gay now than a decade ago, it is likely that the AJD sample reflects some underreporting by the respondents. Those who reported being gay or lesbian were distributed very much like the rest of the respondents by gender, race, practice settings, and income, with a slight geographic overrepresentation in New York and San Francisco."

The data can't be entirely precise, partly because of the limitations of self-reporting, and partly because homosexuals are such a small part of the population that random variations might throw off the numbers considerably. (Also, I'm not sure how the study treated bisexuals; I hope to get more data soon on that. [UPDATE: I just looked at the questionnaire, and it turns out that students were asked the yes or no question "Are you gay, lesbian, transgendered or bisexual?" -- this suggests that the 2.5% number covers all these categories, thus including bisexuals.]) But it does seem that homosexuals are roughly as represented in law as they are in the population at large.

On the other hand, one can't make the same claim about Jews; Jews are 2% of the full-time working population, but 7% of the survey respondents said they were Jewish (p. 20). Some stereotypes are indeed accurate.

The survey also reported that 30% self-reported as Protestant, 27% as Catholic, and 23% as having no religious identity, which suggests that the irreligious are also overrepresented, though of course "no religious identity" can be defined very differently in different contexts, and it's thus hard to compare these numbers across surveys. (Note also that some of the 23% might be secular Jews, so the Jewish numbers might be higher than 7%.)

I at first didn't want to get too outraged about Lewis Lapham's writing -- before he actually had a chance to see the Republican convention -- about "the platform on which [George W. Bush] was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants," and adding

The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?

The falsehood was so obvious (Harper's subscribers would read this before the convention), and its obviousness must have been so obvious to Lapham, that it's hard to see this as a deliberate lie. If a 5'6" man tells you he's 5'8", that might be a lie. If he tells you he's 6'6", then it seems like something else -- a joke, maybe, or a delusion, or irony that's way too deep for me.

But I wonder what that "something else" here. One explanation is that Lapham wrote the column to be published after the Convention -- but that's really not an innocent explanation: He's writing that he listened to something, and giving his characterization of what he heard (or at least heard about), even though at the time of writing he hadn't actually listened to it, and thus had no opportunity to characterize things accurately.

A more innocent explanation might be that he wrote this as a draft, meant to go back to update this if necessary, but somehow the article slipped out early. That's an odd way to write a column, and bespeaks a certain closed-mindedness: I'd think most writers would have left the paragraph blank, and filled it in afterwards, perhaps with some telling details and with an eye towards reflecting the actual proceedings -- yes, conventions are predictable, but they're not completely predictable, so why mentally box oneself in with a first draft? Nonetheless, different writers write differently, and in principle if a writer wants to write a draft of what he expects the article to be like, with the expectation that he'd revise it later, that's fine.

But is this really what Lapham did? Or did he just say "Hey, I'll just write it now as if I'd seen the whole thing, and send it now to be printed as is later"? If it's the latter, then shouldn't someone announce, well, a scandal or something?

Also, if this really was a screw-up, how many people had to have screwed up for something like this to happen?

here. I linked to Cathy's column, and provided an excerpt here.

Good thing that people still read the reliable, credible Real Media instead of those nasty inaccurate, un-fact-checked blogs. That way, they get the benefit of what Jacob Sullum (whose work I have generally found quite trustworthy) says is Lewis Lapham's clairvoyance:

In the latest issue of Harper's, Lewis Lapham has a long, tiresome essay on the "Republican propaganda mill" . . . . [Important substantive criticisms by Sullum omitted, in the interests of getting to the shallower but juicy stuff. -EV]

Perhaps the most revealing part of the article is the paragraph where Lapham pretends to have heard the speeches at the Republican National Convention that does not open until a week from today. Referring to "the platform on which [George W. Bush] was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants," Lapham writes:

The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?

True, the issue is dated September, but I got my copy in early August, and Lapham must have written those words in July. . . .

Ramesh Ponnuru (of the National Review) noted the same thing.

Is there some context here that Sullum or Ponnuru are omitting, which might make this make sense (for instance, if Lapham makes clear that this is his prediction, or that he's joking, or some such)?

Seriously, if Sullum's account (and Ponnuru's terser account) is correct and in context, this is the editor of a leading magazine knowingly making factual assertions — that he was at some place and heard some things — that aren't true. Not very good behavior, it seems to me.

The odd thing is that of course Harper's readers will realize they aren't true. What happened here? Did he prewrite the article, and then accidentally release it too early? (That would actually be pretty bad as well, unless he had been planning to go back to revise it in light of what he actually heard at the convention.)

UPDATE: Readers Michelle Dulak and Dick Riley (who regularly read Harper's) confirm that there's nothing in the context that would change Lapham's meaning.

A couple of readers pointed me to this file, which they say contains the Air America gun control debate I was involved in last Friday. I haven't yet been able to check it myself, or to figure out where in the file the debate starts, but I thought I'd pass it along in any event.

UPDATE: A helpful reader reports that the debate starts at around 44:00 in the program.