I've been meaning to link to Unlearned Hand, an interesting blogger, law student, and fellow member of the Matthew Yglesias fan club. Good stuff.

Mac Diva has some thoughts on the latest John Lott's latest controversy. (Quick summary- John Lott may have anonymously told Glenn Reynolds and Dave Kopel that respected academic Steven Levitt is "rabidly anti-gun." Kopel and Reynolds wrote it up in the National Review, and Lott included the quote in his new book. In other words, he may be anonymously quoting himself smearing another academic at one remove. Most fair observers agree that Levitt is brilliant, fair, and not rabidly anti-gun.)

Here's what I didn't know:

John Lott's extreme, even reactionary views extend beyond gun rights. He believes giving women the right to vote was detrimental to society. That there is a relationship between race and criminality, with blacks being 'naturally' violent. That hiring of women and nonwhites by police forces endangers the lives of the citizenry because of their alleged incompetence. And so on, and on, and on, until one wishes Mary Rosh would whack him with her purse.

Here's my caveat- I haven't read all of the links. In fact, I read part of one of the papers, the one about giving the right to vote to women, and I don't think that I'm ready to condemn it. Lott is a conservative and a fan of small government, as his choice of quotations at the top of the paper make clear. He's making the argument that female sufferage was followed by a significant expansion in the role of government. The difference in party affiliation between men and women is well documented, and it's obvious that conservatives would have an easier time getting elected if they didn't have to worry about women voters. Therefore, he probably has entertained the argument, on some level, that the country would be better off if women had never been given the vote.

But as far as I can tell, that's an argument that he quite explicitly doesn't make. Lott probably feels that we would have been better off if conservative politicians had been in place to prevent the creation of big programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He also (hopefully) feels that universal sufferage is a moral good that supercedes his wish to move politics to the right. I don't know, and he appropriately doesn't seem to make an argument in his paper as to whether female sufferage was a good or bad idea. (Again, I'm at work and haven't finished it.)

Tracking the influence of women voters on political history is entirely legitimate, even if the results can be used in noxious arguments. I can imagine a parallel study, in which a left-wing academic attempts to measure the deleterious effects of right-wing talk radio in the 90s. Right-wing critic accuses LWA of promoting censorship based on politics. LWA says that he never said anything about censorship, and he never offered an opinion about whether the expansion of right-wing talk radio was good or bad. He was just attempting to measure a historical phenomenon, albeit one with effects that he doesn't like. The LWA is right and the RWC is wrong.

******

On a related note, Tim Lambert, the Tenacious D of John Lott coverage, has an update today:

On Monday Glenn Reynolds wrote:

Kopel sent an update to the NRO piece some time ago stressing Levitt's denial of the charge. Although Lambert doesn't mention this, I imagine that he's aware of it. I don't know if it has appeared on their site yet or not.

It turns out that "some time ago" was Reynolds' special way of saying "yesterday". Nor, of course, would he have any reason to believe that I would be aware of this update. Kopel says he thinks Reynolds may have "misremembered".

Tim Lambert: Don't make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.

If you can see this image, I've finally figured out how to post pictures. I promise not to overdo it.

UPDATE: It ain't working for me, either. Anyone who knows of a good free image hosting service who mentions it in my comments will recieve treasure in heaven.

UPDATE II: It seems to be working now.

Marc Racicot, chairman of the Republican National Committee, is in trouble with some conservatives just for meeting with the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group.

Here in Texas, we don't have that problem. In fact, as Rob Humenik points out, State Representative Robert Talton actually had state troopers posted at his office door to keep a gay group from getting inside. The gay group was interested in talking about this:

Talton introduced House Bill 194, a bill similar to the one filed in 1999, which stipulated that homosexuals or bisexuals are prohibited from applying as foster parents. He also filed House Bill 1911, which "prevents the placement of a child in a foster home with any unmarried individuals."

"It's a waste of both of our times," Talton said. "They have their position and I have mine, so I made a decision not to talk to them."

Once you make up your mind, you don't want them getting inside and getting gay all over your furniture.

I can be persuaded on a number of conservative arguments. Really, I can. But as long as Republicans are "the party that hates gay people," I'm not coming inside.

Look up "smug" in the dictionary...:

1,000 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN MURDERED IN THE CONGO. But the United Nations is on the job:

The United Nations has sent a team to the area to investigate the reported massacre.

Well, we don't have to worry, then.

Ha ha. Yeah, why can't those UN losers be more like us and...

what are we doing to help stop the violence in the Congo, again? According to the article linked, we've condemned it. Boy, the UN sure looks useless now!

Quiddity Quack and Digby are on fire, dude.

Jay and Jane's pet blogging day is in full effect, and my little dog Ramona is featured near the top, wearing her American flag sweater. If she was any cuter, she would lose her physical corporeality and assume the form of the Platonic ideal of "Cuteness."

This was at the top of Andrew Sullivan's blog Friday:

THE COMING SPIN: You can see it now. Chaos. Looting. Disorder. Losing the peace. It's not that there won't be some truth to these stories; and real cause for concern. The pent-up fury, frustration and sheer anger of three decades is a powerful thing, probably impossible to stop immediately without too much force. And the last thing we want is fire-power directed toward the celebrating masses. The trouble is that they could become the narrative of the story, especially among the usual media suspects, and erode the impact and power of April 9. By Sunday, or sooner, you-know-who will probably have a front-page "news analysis" that will describe the joy of liberation being transformed into the nightmare of a Hobbesian quicksand of ever-looming cliches.

What to make of this? I can understand his point of view; who wouldn't want to savor the images of toppling statues and Iraqi kids greeting our soldiers, especially after many dire warnings failed to come true? I, for one, was wrong about how difficult it would be. I was sure that once the war began, Saddam would throw missile after missile loaded with chemical and biological weapons* at Israel. I was pretty sure that the fight for Baghdad would be a lot bloodier than it turned out to be. A lot of the worst-case scenarios for the war didn't happened, and Sully's entitled to gloat a little about them.

But I'm sensing a potentially toxic defense mechanism building up among war advocates (here, for example, or in the astonishment in the Corner that anti-war partisans haven't apologized, or about half of Instapundit’s postings). I've got a bad feeling that the conventional wisdom on the right has already gelled that the real story of the Iraqi war ended on April 9. We came in, deposed a terrible dictator, and the Iraqi people were glad to see us. Roll credits.

Combine this with an unflappable faith that the media is biased against them, against the Bush administration, and against the war on Iraq. What you get is a large number of influential commentators who will be worse than useless when it comes to promoting a stable and just reconstruction of Iraq. I'm afraid that war supporters might come to see any bad news from Iraq as nothing more than a continuation of a campaign of the liberal media to make Bush and the war look bad. As such, bad news can be safely ignored, or dismissed by cherry-picking good news.

This constellation of beliefs will allow pro-war partisans to dismiss stories about looting of hosptials, or ethnic cleansing in the Kurdish-controlled north, or humanitarian catastrophes in controlled cities, as just a part of the continuing "domestic battle" to discredit the war. And since we all know that that opponents of the war are secretly thirsty for blood, they can't possibly be right about problems in post-war Iraq. In fact, just admitting that things aren't going great in Iraq could be seen as giving comfort to the opponents of the war. And pushing the administration to do better will be out of the question.

Liberal and anti-war commentators will, of course, push stories about the problems in post-war Iraq. The thing is, they'll be right much of the time; it's already proving to be an extremely difficult problem with a lot of moving parts. I get a bad feeling when both Sullivan and Reynolds downplay any bad news about Afghanistan by pointing to the relative success of the city of Kabul. And I think that I'm starting to see it again.


* The corollary to this is obvious... he did have some chemical and biological weapons, right? Andrew Northrup has a good post on this, which contains the phrase, "Will the locations of the WMD caches be revealed through a sequence of rhyming riddles, each one more fiendishly cunning than the last?"


** Imaginary reader G.D. asks, “Ted, wouldn’t this have been more timely last week? What did you do, half-write this on Friday and then sit on it all weekend while you went biking?”

G.D., it's people like you wot cause unrest.