Yes, I know it's been a little while, but I am packing up and moving to Boston from Washington, DC this week. This necessitates, well, maybe not a whole blog vacation, but at least a blogging pause. Don't expect to hear from me futher until September 1st. Look forward to catching you on the flipside...
Kyle Hampton bemoans the difficulty of creating a marketable web persona.
A new weblog by an organization titled "Kick AAS" seeks to galvanize public support for the movement to end all agricultural subsidies. Definately a free-market must read. Here are a couple of tantalizing exerpts:
"Abolition [of subsidies] would save Western governments over $300 billion a year (equivalent to a cashback of over $200 for everyone) while giving a huge boost to agriculture in developing countries."
"The average European subsidy per cow matches the $2 per day poverty level on which billions of people barely subsist."
From Eve Tushnet.
Educators in Britain, home of the content-driven "A-levels" similar to America's SAT II "Achievement Tests," have decided to add the more talent-oriented SAT next year for thousands of top students. They give two reasons for the change.
The first is ironic in light of America's discomfort with parallels between SAT performance and socioeconomic privilege. Some Brits see A-level performance as too closely tied to teaching quality, and want to level the playing field for those students attending less-than-excellent schools.
The second reason is one to which American university officials can certainly relate. Apparently, A-level grade inflation has made it impossible to draw distinctions between top students. Over 20% of exam takers now receive an A, making admissions to top universities a "lottery" like process. If that is true, what should they think about Prince Harry's D in Geography? No trouble making distinctions there. But he'll be fine. My cousin who was a poor student joined the army too.
The meme that modern classrooms are hostile to boys has gone international. As I've said before, I think all this carping overstates the gender discrepancy problem.
The NYT's Clifford Levy complains: "In New York, where State Supreme Court judges are elected rather than appointed, the dominant political party in a county can virtually dictate who goes on the bench..."
It's not clear why Mr. Levy thinks elections are worse in this respect than an appointment system, under which the dominant political party in a state can actually dictate who goes on the bench.
Whether election or appointment is the mechanism, judicial selection is always a little shady because the general public has so little idea of who is qualified to be a judge. On one hand, local politicos and unions can easily tell their minions who to vote for (because who knows, anyway?), and voter guides usually contain the ABA's notorious qualification rankings, which appear to screen for safely center-left politics as much as for professional experience.
On the other hand, governors in appointed systems shamelessly appoint loyal cronies to the courts. Certainly they did in Hawaii, the state where I grew up, and there's little public outcry about their selection (because who knows, anyway?).
Elections introduce what is either a terrifying randomness or a delightful unpredictability to the process, depending on how you look at it. There is such a thing as an incompetent judge in a purely non-ideological sense, and judicial elections always produce a few judges who make both plaintiff and defense attorneys groan equally.
On the other hand, elections make it possible to bring outsiders into a legal process that is, to a substantial extent, political. Washington State's Justice Richard Sanders is a perfect example. Washington needed an irascible libertarian land use litigation attorney on the court. They got one who thinks lap dancing is a constitutional right. What governor would appoint this guy?
Having the right name can make all the difference. My state constitutional law professor ran for an open seat on the Washington State Supreme Court a while back. In professional terms, he was clearly the best candidate for the job: a very smart, scholarly lawyer with many published articles and over a decade of experience handling appeals in important state constitutional cases with one of Washington's most prestigious firms.
Unfortunately for him, his name was Hugh Spitzer. It just doesn't roll off the tongue, and the fact that every downtown Seattle law firm loved him wasn't going to give him magical ballot appeal to voters who read about their choices for the first time in the voting booth. He lost. To a woman musically named Faith Ireland.
Free-market web guru PJ Doland seems to have my site running properly again. He accused me - probably accurately - of accidentally deleting some of its code when I was tinkering with my template a while back. To dissuade me from trying that again he substituted this swanky grey-purplish look for the blue dotted thing that always drove me a bit nutty. Hope you all approve!
Gene Healy wrote this interesting editorial for the Chicago Tribune evaluating the U.S. presence in Liberia under General Colin Powell's guidelines for intervention, known as the Powell Doctrine since the first Gulf War.
Yes really. My cool chum Chuck warns that my blog freezes up sometimes when he drops by. Do any of the rest of you experience this problem?
Radley Balko takes on new federal regulations designed to limit unwanted faxing.
An entertaining federal law called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) - passed back when fax paper was special and pricey - also provides a civil cause of action replete with punitive statutory damages for recipients of unwanted attention from serial faxers with whom they have no existing business relationship. I looked it up one day after plucking a filing out of a pile of ads for cheap printer cartridges. The sender was apparently trying to boost demand for his product as well as name recognition.
The entertaining part? Congress decided that state courts - not federal courts - should have exclusive jurisdiction over these lawsuits. Moreover, existing court decisions require the state courts to hear these federal law cases that federal courts are apparently to busy to hear.
The incentive problem should be obvious: Congress can get political credit for passing laws that address annoying problems with hundreds of ticky-tack suits, while shifting all the costs of actually adjudicating those suits onto the state courts rather than the federal courts. The TCPA is an unfunded mandate.
I actually think there may be a 10th amendment problem with this related to state judicial independence, but haven't really looked into it.
The California recall is the highest profile campaign Iâm aware of in which a leading candidateâs wife is a registered member of an opposition political party. Arnold Schwarzeneggerâs spouse Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, didnât doff her political affiliation when she married him.
In an era in which the financial and intellectual independence of women is a given, why should she? Still, political spouses are among the last to come out of the closet as - gasp! - Separate Human Beings. Itâs hard to imagine Laura Bush admitting to any political disagreements with the President. Even Hillary swallowed hard, knowing her feminist past left her without the political capital to do much but smile quietly in that Easter hat.
I hope Maria will do ladies luncheons in those awful, mandatory pastel suits and say, âWell, I think Arnoldâs full of it on a wide range of issues, but heâs a good man and I love him to pieces.â
Halley Suitt points to a PBS documentary titled "The Merchants of Cool," which explores the link between style innovators and mass marketers. But I have to wonder: how cool can something possibly be if PBS knows about it?
Always on the cutting edge of art and fashion, the Parisians deserve recognition for an innovative effort to reverse engineer talent. If van Gogh and Mozart were crazy, so the reasoning goes, why not fill museums with the drawings of mental patients?
It doesnât take a logician to suspect that this strategy puts the cart before the horse. Van Gogh and Mozart were so talented they were a bit crazy. Einstein was âcrazy smart,â and not a little eccentric. But being crazy doesnât make you talented.
Mark Morris is a brilliant choreographer. So brilliant, in fact, that he can get away with being beastly to his dancers. But being an a**hole wonât make an ordinary choreographer great (a point that should be better publicized in the dance world), any more than developing a strange physical tic will make one a more brilliant academic, or wearing a pocket protector will improve oneâs grasp of economics.
Unsurprisingly, most of the mental patients who submitted the best artwork to the French "La Clé des Champs" were professional artists before they lost the old grip on reality.
UPDATE: I'm similarly out of patience with a common tendency to blame the sins of politicians on lawyers as a group. While it is true that many politicians are lawyers, only a tiny percentage of lawyers are politicians. The power hungry may attend law school, but going to law school doesn't make one power hungry.
California Democrats have decided to harness the power of organized labor in defense of Governor Davis. Perversely, it's my guess that a strong labor turnout could put Ward Connerly's "Racial Privacy Initiative" - scheduled to appear on the same ballot as the recall - over the top in a tight campaign. I suppose the left can't win 'em all.
Of course, neither can civil libertarians. This reminds me of the time we generated massive conservative turnout to oppose a gun control initiative in Washington State, accidentally sinking a medical marijuana measure on the same ballot.
The Associated Press reports that a former employee has sued California gubernatorial candidate and Hustler magnate Larry Flint for sexual harrassment.
Via Hit & Run.
A local bureaucrat is never so innovative as when she is figuring out how to meet the letter of a federal mandate while completely defeating its purpose. Such is the folly of this New York high school's recent effort to meet the accountability standards of the No Child Left Behind Act by "encouraging" its poor performing students to drop out.
It's unfortunate that the absence of real competition in schooling encourages educator behavior reminiscent of a John Hughes film. New York spends $10,000 or more per student. I'll bet a private school somewhere would be happy to take on Ms. Garcia for that amount.