Brendan Nyhan

Ruth Marcus nails a point I neglected in my post yesterday:

What’s perhaps most astonishing is that this anger is being directed at a federal judiciary in general, and a Supreme Court in particular, that is far more conservative than the liberal bench that once provoked similar complaints. Consider the distance traveled: What started as “Impeach Earl Warren” — the archetypal judicial activist — has now become “Impeach Tony Kennedy” — the archetypal middle-of-the-Republican-roader.

Soon they’ll be coming for Scalia. He’s no Clarence Thomas!

Here’s a question Mike Munger offered in class recently: why do movie tickets cost the same for every movie when some are vastly more popular than others? The prices of plane tickets, hotels and other services are adjusted based on demand, so why not movies?

We came up with a couple of possible answers. First, people don’t want to worry about how much a movie will cost when they show up at the theater — call it mental transaction costs. And more importantly, movie theater owners make most of their money at the concession stand so they want to keep theaters full.

I was reminded of this discussion reading James Surowiecki’s excellent The Wisdom of Crowds, which has a nice passage on movie theater pricing (Amazon Inside The Book link so you can read it yourself).

In short, he agrees — it makes no sense. As Surowiecki writes, theater owners might not want to charge more for popular movies if higher prices prevent sellouts, and thereby lessen concession revenue. But there’s absolutely no reason theaters can’t charge less for less popular movies, which would make theater owners and consumers better off. Let the market rule!

PS If you liked The Tipping Point, you will like Blink (also by Malcom Gladwell) and The Wisdom of Crowds – pick them up and support smart nonfiction.

It doesn’t seem like anyone in the blogosphere noticed

If current law remains unchanged, the alternative minimum tax is expected to wring an extra $33.9 billion from 18 million households in 2006. In 2010, it will rake in an additional $100 billion, and by 2015 an extra $200 billion.

Like its author, Ari Fleischer’s Taking Heat has been condemned for being simultaneously dishonest and stupefyingly boring. So I’m heartened to see that it’s getting the rejection it so richly deserves. Let us rejoice this once in the good taste of the American people:

GETTING ICE-COLD? Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer received a reported $500,000 advance for his memoir, “Taking Heat,” which was launched last month by William Morrow with an eye-popping press run of 200,000. That’s a lot of dead trees to spin a happy (and, by most accounts, news-free) yarn about the all-around fabulosity of President Bush. Alas, Fleischer’s publisher has just placed a tiny little ad in Publishers Weekly Online announcing “a special price promotion for retailers and wholesalers” – often a buzz phrase in the publishing biz for throwing in the towel, admitting a big overestimation of demand and trying desperately to avoid an avalanche of returns by slashing the price. A William Morrow spokeswoman insisted: “It’s a Mother’s Day and Father’s Day promotion.” But according to Nielsen Bookscan, Fleischer’s volume had sold less than a tenth of the copies in print as of March 3.

Attacks on the judiciary are turning ugly. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a number of prominent conservatives advocate lawless disregard for judicial rulings, attack the rule of law as “judicial tyranny,” and call for the mass impeachment of judges Senator John Cornyn of Texas went so far as to excuse violent attacks against judges by attributing them to conservative complaints about the judiciary:

I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country — certainly nothing new; we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that has been on the news. I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence, certainly without any justification, but that is a concern I have that I wanted to share.

Now, Dana Milbank has a report on some even uglier rhetoric at a conservative conference attacking the judiciary (via Josh Marshall):

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

…Vieira, a constitutional lawyer who wrote “How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary,” escalated the charges, saying a Politburo of “five people on the Supreme Court” has a “revolutionary agenda” rooted in foreign law and situational ethics. Vieira, his eyeglasses strapped to his head with black elastic, decried the “primordial illogic” of the courts.

Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the “no man, no problem” line twice for emphasis. “This is not a structural problem we have; this is a problem of personnel,” he said. “We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as judges.”

First Grover Norquist’s obsession with Lenin, now Vieira’s scary invocation of Stalin’s totalitarianism. Who knew the Communists would have this kind of influence on Republican elites?

Update 4/10: Added Tom DeLay’s call for the mass impeachment of judges to the list above.

From the Nyhan mailbag: a fundraising letter for Bill Frist’s leadership PAC. I guess he’s running for president. I don’t know who thinks this guy can overcome the strikes against him:
1) He killed stray cats
2) He looks like a guy who would kill stray cats (or a mortician)
3) He’s a terribly stiff and awkward speaker who gets downright scary when he’s trying to be emphatic (his convention speech last year was painful to watch)
4) He’s a leader in the Senate who has to cut awkward deals and cast awkward votes

All in all, not exactly presidential material.

Interestingly, Frist talks about overcoming Democratic filibusters in the letter, but does not mention the “nuclear option.” Instead, he says “The best way to overcome a Democrat filibuster is to show widespread grassroots support for the issue or nominee.” Is it a sign of things to come? I guess we’ll see…

From his story in the Washington Times on President Bush supposedly soliciting advice from Bill Clinton:

The president also praised one of Mr. Clinton’s domestic policies — trying to reform Social Security. Both men have proposed personal savings accounts as part of the solution, an idea that is vociferously opposed by congressional Democrats.

As Ron Brownstein pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, however, Clinton and Bush’s approaches to Social Security are utterly different:

Clinton’s response to that challenge was close to Bush’s only in the sense that two trucks are close when they collide head-on.

Clinton had a two-step answer. First, he wanted to reduce government interest costs by paying down the national debt with the federal surplus of the late 1990s. Then he would have used the annual savings on interest to help fund Social Security. Bush instead applied the surplus to massive tax cuts that had contributed to mounting federal debts and rising interest costs.

Clinton also wanted to create tax-subsidized personal investment accounts on top of Social Security; Bush wants to carve out personal accounts from Social Security by diverting part of the payroll tax that funds benefits for retirees. One would have added onto Social Security; the other would take from it.

And that’s not all. Sammon’s wording also falsely suggests that Democrats and Clinton are at odds on private accounts, but the reality is the opposite — many Democrats support the add-on accounts that Clinton first proposed, including Al Gore, who pushed them in 2000.

It’s just one more entry in the long and illustrious history of faux journalism at the Times.

In a comment on my post about the Duke student government elections, Ken Waight of Lying in Ponds points us to a hilarious story about the leading candidate for NC State student body president — the Pirate Captain. I have to quote this one at length — it reads like a story from the Onion:

Amidst raucous cheers and hearty applause from the audience, Elections Commission Chair Bonnie Pierson announced results for the 2005 Spring General Elections Wednesday night on Harris Field.

Although none of the four candidates vying for the position of student body president received the majority vote required, candidates Will Quick and The Pirate Captain rose above the fray and will go head to head in a runoff election next week.

…This semester’s election marked a record high in voter turnout, which totaled almost 27 percent of the student population, according to Pierson.

The fact was punctuated by the close to 150 students present at the announcement, several of whom where decked in anything from full pirate regalia to cardboard pirate hats obtained from the seafood chain Long John Silvers.

“I hear we got record turnout,” the Captain said. “I be nothing but impressed.”

The Captain also said he was thrilled with the prospect of participating in the runoffs and inspired by the support.

“I couldn’t be happier,” the Captain said. “The wind be in our sails. It warms our souls and carries our boats.”

Quick, who lost the popular vote to the Captain 44 to 21 percent, said that he felt good about the election results and was confident in his ability to come out on top next week.

“I felt from the beginning that I would be in the runoff, it was just a matter of who,” Quick said. “Of course I’m disappointed that I didn’t win, but the past is behind me and I’m focusing on the runoff.”

Although he said he was “surprised that The Pirate Captain had received that much support,” Quick said he never overlooked the possibilities of the candidate during his campaign.

“I wouldn’t say that I over- or underestimated The Pirate Captain,” Quick said. “[He] was a hard factor to predict.”

Will Langley, visibly disappointed after his defeat, said that he felt the elections sparked student interest and motivated students to get out and vote.

“The Pirate Captain definitely got the student body involved,” Langley said. “I hate that he had to make a mockery of the system to make it happen.”

Langley said the students need the right person for the job, and that he hopes the Pirate Captain will realize that, if elected, the position of student body president is a “serious job.”

Here’s another story from local TV channel WRAL:

One candidate for student body president at North Carolina State University is rocking the boat.

North Carolina State is the home of the Wolfpack, but right now, a pirate is the talk on campus.

A student is on the ballot, not under a real name, but as The Pirate Captain. He even has a platform or “plank.” It includes “expanding the bus lines to haul thar peopled cargo to and fro from ACC bouts at the yonder RBC Center.” Also, “holding meetin’s open to all ye landlubbers.”

The Pirate Captain said his candidacy is serious. At least one of his competitors believes it.

“It’s cool how he’s doing things, how he wants to get out and have his message heard,” presidential candidate Will Langley said.

Candidate Lock Whiteside is not sure what to make of it.

“We were hanging up our signs one night and we ran into him and his craw. They were all dressed up in pirate gear and he came to the debate the other night dressed up as a pirate as well, so it’s ridiculous. It really is,” presidential candidate Lock Whiteside said.

“Voting for someone who wants to rid the campus of scurvy dogs is not really an effective way of having student government,” sophomore Christopher Sanchez said.

The Pirate Captain was able to get on the ballot because all students need to run for office is a valid student ID number to verify they are in good standing. The Pirate Captain promises to dress more “dapper” if he’s elected.

Here he is in full regalia:

Update 4/11: Here’s his website, complete with lots of pictures of the Captain and his Scurvy Crew plus some sort of commercial I can’t open on my machine.

Amen! Educators are realizing that middle school is a bad idea (link requires WSJ subscription):

One of the longstanding rites of passage in American childhood is on the wane: middle school.

That traditional precursor to high school that usually encompasses grades six through eight can be an exciting and challenging transition for preteen kids. But as every parent knows, it also can be fraught with anxiety over the tougher academics and more-sophisticated social scene.

Now, a growing body of evidence is showing that preteen students do better when they can remain in their familiar elementary schools for longer — with better grades and fewer disciplinary problems than their middle-school peers. As a result, many school systems are starting to do away with middle schools and are increasing the number of elementary schools that continue through the eighth grade.

The number of public K-8 schools still is relatively small — around 5,000, according to the U.S. Department of Education. But that number represents a 17% increase since 1993-94. That compares with a 9% increase in the total number of public elementary schools, which now number about 65,000, most of which go up to grades five or six.

Where I grew up, the elementary schools were very good, the high school was very good, and the middle school was awful. No one learned anything, and there were so many fights and drug problems that it seemed like the Wild West to us at the time. It was never clear to what extent the problem was school-specific, and to what extent it was middle school in general. But exploring K-8 schools as an alternative sounds very promising to me.

In the Nyhan mailbag: a RNC fundraising letter for the 2005 Durham Area Republican Party Annual Fund Drive. Partisan hackery ensues:

Many Democrats and their liberal allies refuse to recognize that the President’s decisive reelection and our Party’s important gains in the U.S. Senate and House are a powerful sign of the American people’s strong support for President Bush’s policies.

Uh, “decisive reelection”? “Strong support”? How about a mid-40s approval rating after the narrowest reelection since Woodrow Wilson?

Then there’s this:

Your support today is our best defense against the liberal special interest groups who hope to obstruct many of the President’s most important initiatives and press on with their vision of a socialist/welfare state where taxes would be significantly higher, the government would takeover your health care, and the United Nations would decide what is in our national interest.

Watch out for the “socialist/welfare state”! Government takeover of health care! Boo!

I know direct mail is always ridiculous, but come the f— on.