Politics

JUDICIAL NOMINEES….From the Associated Press: Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch says he will make it harder for Democratic senators to block home state nominees for federal judgeships. At issue is the so-called “blue slip” tradition, referring to blue-colored approval papers that senators are asked to submit on nominees to fill vacant federal judgeships in their […]

EUROPE AND IRAQ….Is NATO dead? Is Europe fatally cutting itself off from America? Did Jacques Chirac personally deliver diplomatic pouches full of plutonium to Saddam Hussein? Take a deep breath, everyone. The future of NATO is indeed uncertain, but this is a meme that’s been making the rounds since the fall of the Berlin wall. […]

STILL MORE ON LOTT….IT JUST NEVER ENDS….Lott says he did his survey during the first few months of 1997. His hard disk crashed in June 1997 and he lost all the data. OK, fine. But it’s not believable that he had already thrown away the paper records within ten weeks of finishing the survey. And […]

EVEN MORE ON LOTT….Here are the demographic questions that Lott used for a survey he conducted recently to reproduce the results of his mysterious 1997 survey. He claims that it is very similar to the one he did in 1997: (We obviously have the area code, write down sex from the voice if possible.) I […]

JOHN LOTT….THE SAGA CONTINUES….One of the interesting notes at the bottom of Kieran Healy’s post about John Lott yesterday was this: One point came up which I haven’t seen mentioned before: if Lott did the survey while at the University of Chicago, why didn’t he go through their Institutional Review Board? Federal Law says you […]

AMAZON PROFITS….Yesterday Amazon reported fourth quarter results: revenues of $1.4 billion ? up from last year ? and a tiny profit of $3 million ? down from last year. And of course there was also the usual “pro forma” malarky: we would have earned $75 million if we didn’t have to, you know, follow normal […]

NEWS FLASH….Tom Spencer defends George Bush. Tomorrow: Satan rings up Saddam to order a few barrels of heating oil “just to take the chill off.”

JOHN LOTT FOLLOWUP….Kieran Healy takes a crack at the John Lott survey question I posted yesterday, and concludes that Lott’s weighting is highly unlikely, but not impossible. But his colleagues apparently found the whole story so hilarious that they could hardly hold still for him to ask his questions.

TIME SCREWS UP….A few days ago I linked to a Time magazine article saying that President Bush had revived the practice of sending a Memorial Day wreath to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. Today Jay Caruso links to a Washington Times article saying that Time was wrong: nobody ever stopped sending the wreath, […]

TIA ISN’T DEAD….BUT IT TOOK A BODY BLOW TODAY….Good news: LeanLeft reports that the Senate has voted to remove funding for TIA, the big government snoop program. It’s not dead yet, since the spending package it’s embedded in still has to be reconciled with the House, but it’s a start.