I didn’t read enough of the associated article to see if this pic’s real or not - it couldn’t be - but it’s worth a look-see. Gore’s got a new youth-oriented TV channel. Unless it’s broadcast, and picked up by my aluminum foil-equipped mega-tenna - it couldn’t be - then I won’t be seeing it anytime soon.
This is too funny to be real, but it is. [See the video here.] According to FOX News, we can “blame liberals for high oil and gas prices!”
This tease was for FOX News’ “Cost of Freedom” business block, a group of four Saturday morning business shows, with names like “Cashin’ In,” focusing on how you can make money in stocks and other investments. The name is an illogical misnomer; a more accurate name would be “Profit from Capitalism.” I don’t know why it’s called “Cost of Freedom” (other than its obviously jingoistic connotation).
Listen to these short NPR clips (and these). They’re actual answering machine messages to Amy from her mom. I like this one the best: “I’m just thinking, if God forbid you needed to get out of your apartment real fast, and the elevators weren’t running, maybe you ought to get yourself a parachute. I saw a parachute for $12.99, but I don’t think it was a good one because it came with a set of matching pajamas.”
AMSTERDAMÂAmerican students traveling abroad confirm
the findings of astudy indicating that Washington’s
unilateral approach to foreign policyhas seriously
undermined Americans’ chances of getting laid.
“I’ve been in Amsterdam for two months and have yet to
begin aconversation with a cute girl that hasn’t ended
in a lecture about howbig, evil America is taking
everyone’s oil,” said college sophomoreBrad Higgs, a
participant in Johns Hopkins University’s
study-abroadprogram. “I offer to buy them a drink, and
they tell me I shouldn’tjust stand by and watch Bush
destroy the world. Look, if I had that typeof pull
with the president, I obviously wouldn’t be out
trolling foranonymous Dutch pussy.”
Over the last two weeks, my writings have been twice published, and no, they’re not letters to the editor.
First, my student note, “The New Class Action Rule,” was published in The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. But Mohsen, you ask, how did you manage to get published in a scholarly journal as a lowly second-year law student. The answer is that in the legal academy, scholarship is published in student-reviewed, student-editted journals. (I work for the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics; ZLindsey works for the Michigan Journal of International Law.) This may seem like a terrible system, and indeed it probably is.
In any case however, most journals also publish shorter works by their student-editors called notes. “Note” connotes a short, casual peice, but it’s really a horrible misnomer. My “note” is 25 type-written pages and over 200 footnotes, mainly supporing citations. It appears in the Summer issue of the Journal, to which you probably don’t suscribe, and will soon be available on the databases Westlaw and Lexis, which requires a password. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t reproduce it here, because per the Journal’s policy, I signed away my copyright rights to the note. This wasn’t a big deal for me, but it was for some others. One person actually refused, and the controversy even spilled into the blogosphere as some professors took up his cause (here too).
Second, my roommate, the editor of The Bright Line, our school’s creative writing and art magazine, impressed me into writing an essay for the latest issue. The result, “On Blogs and Conformity,” was published in the Spring issue of that magazine last week. I basically compare blogs to IPods and say that though both once represented a certain seriousness or individuality, today they are so common that having one appears to be more an act of conformity. The magazine, unsurpisingly, is not widely distributed (only 500 copies are printed), but I didn’t sign away my copyright to this guy, and I’ll probably post an abridged version of it here one day, when the blog is hurting for some new material.
I had almost finished the longest post in JTTM history, but then I accidentally closed my browser and POOF… gone forever. Since I know more about the NBA this season than perhaps anyone, seriously, I was going to post in-depth analysis of all the first-round series. I’m kind of glad I did screw up, because I doubt any of you would have read it. This time, I’m just focusing on stuff you might actually read.
Playoff overview: This is the first time in many, many years that there’s not a favorite. Detroit and Miami should be in the Eastern conference final, but the West is a mess. Earlier in the season, San Antonio was the overall favorite, but Tim Duncan is having trouble recovering from an ankle injury. He played horribly last night, and the 8th seed (Denver) stole a game at San Antonio. The young Suns have the best record, but most people are skeptical of their full-throttle offense, since usually defensive teams, like Detroit, win as the pressure rises and the refs blow the whistle less. At mid-season, Seattle was looking like the only team in the league that could take down San Antonio, but then half of their team went onto the injured list and in the past six weeks they lost most of their games. Can the Sonics get back into the groove? I think so, because they have the easiest first-round opponent (Sacramento). Houston, Dallas, and Denver are peaking at the right time and no one will take them down easily, if at all.
Here’s a list of things to watch for in the first round:
The assertion that the filibuster has never been used against judicial nominations is factually incorrect. (see picture) The assertion that the filibuster has never been used to block judicial nominations is at best debatable and at worst wrong.
In 1968, the Republicans filibustered Justice Abe Fortas’s (left) nomination to become the Cheif Justice on the Supreme Court. What’s debatable is whether the filibuster actually blocked, that is prevented, Fortas’s appointment. There’s some question whether, absent the filibuster, Fortas would have had the necessary votes to survive the Senate confirmation. The evidence is inconclusive.
Regardless of whether Fortas indeed had the votes, the Republican Senators’ intent was to use the filibuster to block Fortas. Why else would they have filibustered, if it was not to prevent Fortas’s ascension?
When Spoon releases Gimme Fiction on May 10th, it will be only their fourth major label album in seven years. If you do the math (as I’ve), you’d realize that they’re averaging 3.4 seconds of new studio recorded material each day. That’s not so good, until you consider what they’ve done in that time. Since 1998, Spoon has been consistently making some of the best indie-pop music out there. And Gimme Fiction does not depart from this tradition.
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The worst case scenario assumes that Senators would adopt policy preferences as a mere function of the population of their states. This is not how things really work. Senators adopt policy preferences on the basis of their party affiliation.
What will it look like if the Senators vote on party lines, as they’re prone to do? First a few assumptions. First, in states with one Republican and one Democratic Senator, I assume each Senator represents half that state’s population. Second, I assume the Independent Senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, votes with the Democrats as he normally does.
According to my numbers, the 55 Republican Senators represent 143 million Americans; the 45 Democratic Senators, who of course tend to come from the more populous states, represent 147 million Americans. If the Republicans are allowed to ram through whatever they want with their 55 votes, this means that in the antimajoriatarian Senate, the preferences of 143 million will override the preferences of 147 million.
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The Senate is particulary prone to adopt countermajoritarian preferences because there is antidemocratic, disproportionate representation.
What’s the worst case scenario?
What if the 51 Senators who represented the fewest people all adopted the same position– say a tax on the residents of any state with a population of greater than 5.5 million (the population of Louisiana, the 27th most populous state). (By the way, I know this law would be unconstitutional, but I’m using it as an illustration). Assuming that these 51 Senators from the 26 least populous states adopted the same position, Senators representing 49 million could outvote the Senators representing 241 million.
Majority rule in the worst case scenario is this: the preferences of 49 million people would override the preferences of 241 million.
Senators Joe Lieberman, Dick Durbin, and Chuck Schumer spoke today at my school, decrying the Republicans’ threat of the nuclear option, now-called constitutional option, to ram through ten of President Bush’s judicial nominations. First, I’d like to predict that when this issue comes to a head, FOX News will adopt the more neutral “constitutional option,” even though nuclear option is a name given it by a Republican, Trent Lott. Second, and the subject of this and the next two posts, their speeches finally motivated me to do a post I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
The Republican’s argue that the present fillibuster rule is patently undemocratic, as it allows a minority of Senators to prevent a vote on these nominations. Thus, they suggest, the nuclear option will “restore” democractic majority rule to the Senate.
But to suggest that 51 votes in the Senate restores democratic majority rule ignores the fundamentally antidemocractic nature of the Senate. Originally, Senators were not representatives of the people, but of the states as sovereigns. Only after the 17th Amendment, were they true representatives of the people. Even today, however, they do not proportionally represent the people. Wyoming has as many Senators as California, which means that the preferences of 0.5 million Wyomians are a whole lot more representated in the Senate (and therefore judicial nominations) than those of the 35 million Californians.
You can see where I’m going with this: The Senate is particulary prone to adopt countermajoritarian preferences, because there is antidemocratic disproportionate representation. Consider these two scenarios:
This is why we have Alaska.
And, this post may be more interesting to people who 1) like climbing things and/or 2) people who like ice.
What Zach calls agnosticism, I call nihilism.
I think this is the inevitable product of higher education. The more you know about a subject, the more nuances you learn to appreciate and those nuances tend to cut in different directions. Simple moral issue may be easy to take a stance on (although, even here I think things invariably get too complicated unless you’re willing to ultimately say God’s on my side).
But back to the point. Is it really agnosticism when you can’t be sure of any of your positions?
If you can’t be sure of any of your positions, you don’t really have any positions. Actually you do, but you realize that the opposite position is equally valid. If so, why would you hold your position knowing that it is no more vaild than invalid?
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It happened a lot last year that (w/ the upcoming election) people would ask me (being the political science graduate student) what I thought about certain issues of public policy. Unfortunately, I think, my answers more often than not betrayed the fact that my 5.5 years studying politics have only made me more confused about where I stand on most issues today. I tend to qualify my answers way too much, mentioning the fact that both sides have some pretty good arguments and data to back them up. Rather than believing that it is up to the “common man” to determine our country’s political future and to “take the power back”, I now believe that most questions require an unbelievable amount of expertise to sufficiently answer.
Don’t get me wrong. There are a few issues on which my mind is fairly well made up: gay marriage, abortion, the Schiavo case, legalization of soft drugs, George W. Bush is retarded, etc. What strikes me as odd, though, is that it is issues such as these (moral ones that appeal to values rather than calculation) that Democrats were explicitly appealing to Americans to disregard in favor of economic self-interest-related ones.
This post is mainly for Evin. Have you seen Jones’ jump up the NFL draft boards? Three months ago the consensus was that he would drafted somewhere between 120 and 210. Since then he tore up the Senior Bowl as a wide receiver, scorched the clocks at the combine, and had unbelievable workouts for scouts. Now he’s projected to go in the first round, possibly as high as #9. ESPN.com’s Mortensen is calling him the best player in the draft. Teams are considering him as a wide receiver, tight-end, H-back, cornerback, safety, and quarterback. He is widely considered the best available athlete. On top of his insane workout results - 40 times (all sub 4.4), vertical leap (40 inches), broad jump (10′9″) - he’s head and shoulders (6′6″, 242) above his competition.
Where would you draft him?
Contrary to common preception, a new study found that public school kids out-perform private school kids in mathematics, when scores are corrected for socio-economic status. Of course, homeschooled kids probably beat both, irrespective of their socio-economic status. But then again, they’re socially awkward weirdos.
Seriously. What was Duncan thinking by going to NYU?
He (and Murder) could just do this.
