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Wow.

The University of Illinois has sparked outrage by telling faculty, staff and graduate students that a 5-year-old state law designed to prevent state workers from campaigning for candidates on state time or with state resources meant they could not express support for candidates or parties through pins, T-shirts or bumper stickers while on campus. Nor could they attend any political rally or event on campus, the administration said.

The governor's Office of Executive Inspector General, which investigates ethical violations, has gone one step further, saying state law meant that university students, not just employees, were prohibited from participating in political rallies on campus--an assertion at odds with the university's interpretation.

On Friday, the state attorney general's office said the ethics law did not apply to students. The office did not answer whether the law prohibited university employees from wearing political buttons while at work, attending political rallies on campus on non-work time or some of the other specific interpretations made by the university.

To challenge the university's interpretation of the law, students, teaching assistants and professors rallied for Barack Obama on the Urbana-Champaign campus Thursday and then reported themselves Friday to the university's ethics office and the governor's Office of Executive Inspector General.

"We don't want to be disciplined," said Dan Colson, an English graduate student and teaching assistant, who along with other faculty, staff and students argue the University of Illinois was unfairly expanding state law and that academic freedom meant campus communities should not be held to the same standards as other state employees. "We want them to refine their stance and assert that students, faculty, graduate students do have the right to express themselves politically on campus when not functioning as employees."

Tom Hardy, a University of Illinois spokesman, said Thursday that the university only wanted to inform its employees of the law and had no intention of enforcing it. The university, he said, would take no action against participants in the pro-Obama rally.

Things I meant to post yesterday but never got around to....

+ A Georgia congressman called Obama "uppity," but then claimed he didn't realize it had racial connotations. Uh huh.

+ New Rule: If conservatives considered a line of questioning or form of attack acceptable during the Clinton years, they must also consider it acceptable during the McCain-Palin campaign.

+ There are not nearly enough people reading Dean Baker's economic analyses. Go fix that now.

+ When even FoxNews' Chris Wallace pushes back on the "Palin is a crusader against earmarks" lie, maybe there is hope yet for the media. Video here for those so inclined.

+ After saying that Palin would only give interviews when she "felt comfortable," team McCain announced she would do an end-of-week sit down with Charlie Gibson. After his atrocious performance during the debates, my guess is that he is the new go-to guy for conservatives. Expect all fluff, no substance, followed by triumphant cries from conservatives about how she has "proven" that she can stand up to the "liberal elite media." God help us.

+ Viva Rachel Maddow!

+ Political Science quote of the day from non-political scientist Sandy Levinson:

If one assumes the validity of his slanderous comments about his colleagues (and friends?) in Congress, then perhaps one might look to the Constitution for an explanation: The fact that every single member of Congress is elected from a defined geographical area and subject, in the case of members of the House, to election every two years, guarantees that "rational" members of Congress will put the interests of their constituents, who will enable their re-election, ahead of evanescent interests of "the country." Democratic senators and represenatives from Michigan can be offered as examples, to prove my non-partisanship on this point. If McCain (or anybody else) wants to increase the number of "country first" members of Congress, then we have to talk about restructuring our institutions in such a way that there will be greater incentive for leaders to take the broader view. Larry Sabato has an interesting discussion of this point in his book on the Constitution (which also calls for a new constitutional convention). And this would include getting rid of the electoral college, which generates incentives to pander to "battleground" states and to ignore the rest.

One of the worst features of our present politics, and I've said before (and will undoubtedly say again) is that it leads people of all politial persuasions to focus on" character," "leadership," and "vision" and away from even the beginnings of a conversation about how structures generate these attributes. Barack Obama is, of course, no better in this regard than John McCain. He may have taught constitutional law for ten years, but I would be pleasantly surprised if he ever thought seriously about structural issues, since, except for that tiny subset of such issues that are litigated, they are simply untaught and ignored in our leading law schools. The last presidential candidate seriously to address constitutional structures was probably Teddy Roosevelt. It's time for a change....

I've long argued that the achilles heel of McCain's campaign will be their failure to understand how Google, YouTube, blogs, and social networking technologies have totally transformed our electoral process. By picking an absolute unknown, McCain has decided to put my theory to the ultimate test. Josh Marshall must be in heaven today.

More to the point, I am in heaven today. If ever there was a candidate designed to test how ideas spread from the blogosphere to the elite media, this is it. I was hoping I'd get a few good case studies out of this election for my dissertation. Never in my wildest dreams did I think McCain would hand me a gift like this.

Until a few hours ago, Palin was an unknown unknown. Over the next dew weeks, a new narrative about her will be constructed almost entirely from scratch. No doubt the McCain camp thinks they will be able to shape and control it. But they won't.

Good god - how ever did I get this lucky?

Time for a quick update or two...

+ First off, this blog. For most of the next two weeks, I'll expect to be entirely off the grid. I'm leaving Steamboat Springs early in the AM and heading southwest, all the way to Mesa Verde in the Four Corners. I'll be there for three days, and then head east to pick up G in Colorado Springs before heading back into the Great Sand Dunes for a few days. Then its back to Colorado Springs for a single night before heading into Rocky Mountain National Park for an entire week, the longest stretch I've ever spent in a single National Park.

My original plan for the trip was to do my usual longform Journeys By DJ thing, but after all the time I've spent doing data entry these past two weeks (more on that below), I just don't have it in me. So... instead I'll be tracking my journey through Twitter. From what I hear the iPhone Twitter apps are pretty phenomenal, and what better time to test them out than now? So.... Want to follow along? Now you can.

+ Second, the datamines. I've mentioned them quite a bit the past few weeks, but I don't think I've ever specifically mentioned what I've been doing there.

My original dissertation project was on campaign advertising and the electorate, but as I started working through the details this past winter and spring, I began to have some serious doubts. I still think my original project has merit, maybe even lots of it, but... it would require years worth of effort, and to be honest I'm just not sure I care enough about the topic right now to commit to that kind of effort.

So a few months back I made a switch. Forget TV and focus on blogs. I know... I know... that's where I should have always put my focus, right? Believe me, I've heard it a thousand different times in a hundred different ways. Trust me. It should have been obvious, right? It was obvious, I suppose, only I couldn't see it.

But now that I'm in, I'm all in. My project is going to track the interactions between the political blogosphere and the elite media during the fall election campaign. Using a tool called reBlog, I'll be collecting everything written on over 350 blogs from the first day of the convention until the week after the election. At the same time, I'll also be collecting everything written by 20 elite media sources - NYT, WaPo, CNN, Fox, AP, etc. Then, using a variety of social science network analysis tools, I'll start digging into the data to look for patterns.

But between now and then I'll need your help. I'm looking for two things, primarily. First and foremost, I'm looking for moments in the campaign when information, ideas, and memes cross over from the blogosphere into the elite media. Subtle is good, but I'm hoping for at least a small handful of examples that are somewhat obvious. If I can identify them, I should be able to use my database to track how they emerge and cross over into our elite media system, and if there are enough of them (hope! hope!) I may be able to outline some theories about how, when, and why these breakouts occur.

For those theories to be believable, however, I'll also need to identify how, when, and why these sorts of breakouts do not occur. And that, I suspect, is going to be much more difficult. Every day it seems the blogosphere has a new obsession, and in most cases those obsessions have little to no impact on the outside world. And usually that's as it should be. But every once in awhile the sphere gets its collective hands around something that seems certain to attract major attention, and then..... noting. If I can find identify those moments... if you guys can help me identify those moments.... I just might be able to start putting together a comprehensive description of the way the blogosphere and elite media world interact.

So that's where I am. I've spent the past month doing the hard work of building the feed collector, setting up the databases, normalizing the feeds, and entering all of the data. With the exception of the feeds for the bloggers credentialed for the Republican Convention (what are the folks at the RNC waiting for anyway in making the announcements about who these bloggers are, anyways?) its all ready to go. In a few months I'll have more data than I know what to do with. Needles and haystacks... So if you catch a glint of steel in the sunlight, let me know, OK?

And in the meantime.... Tweet!

Before I get to today's news, a few more general thoughts on the election...

In addition to the hand-wringing over how Obama should respond to attacks from the McCain campaign (see yesterday's post for my thoughts on that), there's also been quite a bit of grumbling about Obama's supposed inability to pull away from McCain in all of the national polling. A few things here:

First of all, it's August. Who cares what the polls say today?

Second, looking at the RCP poll average , McCain hasn't been ahead of Obama head-to-head matchup since early March, and even that was inside the margin of error. This is a problem for Obama exactly why?

Third, just how much do people think Obama is actually supposed to win the general election by? The last time we had an election where one candidate beat another by double digits was way back in 1984. That was Reagan vs Mondale, an election where a popular incumbent completed a realignment that he had begun 4 years prior. And in 1980, Reagan won by a bit less than 10%, thanks in no small part to an assist by John Anderson.

Fourth: Remember 2000? National polling data is meaningless. What you want to look at is the state-by-state counts. And on those, even in the most conservative scenarios possible, things are still looking great. No no, really.... they are.

Finally, fifth. Why can't he "pull away" from McCain? Because he hasn't even started to try! This is what Obama does. He starts quitely, putting his ground game in place fully before he makes his move. It's what he did when he won his first race in the Senate, and its what he did when he took out Clinton. This is his M.O. because it works for him.

And besides, it's August, people. Relax. The campaign doesn't start for a fef more weeks, OK?

Now on to today's news....

+ You remember those Al Qaeda in Iraq guys? You know, the ones who weren't there when we invaded, but who are there now, making Iraq the "central front?" Thye've left Iraq and headed for Afghanistan. That's right: AQI is now AQIA. Al Qaeda in Iraq in Afghanistan

+ Ron Suskind makes one hell of an allegation in his latest book.

+ John McCain has long had problems with social conservatives. But recently he's been trying to make amends, right? Riiiiiight....

+ Jay Newton-Small writes today about a subject very near and dear to my heart: the Mountain West is ripe for realignment because sportsmen finally understand that conservation benefits their way of life, too. When the mountains turn blue this year, this shift will be a big but nevertheless unde-rreproted part of the story.

+ How did I miss this before? Ana Marie Cox is married to Tom "what's the matter with Kansas" Frank? Really?

+ The debate moderators have been announced. Thank god there's no Charllie Gibson! And Jim Lehrer gets the first event, too. It could have been much worse.

+ Not that the GOP candidate for Senate in Colorado stood much of a chance anyway, but still.... his son had a Facebook page with a banner that said "slavery gets shit done." Really? And please, I don't want to hear your "these aren't the values my parents raised me with" nonsense. Actions, not words, are what we judge people by here. It's what you do in life that matters, not what you say. If your parents didn't teach you that, they didn't teach you anything, kid.

+ Very smart play by Nancy Pelosi here.

+ What's the Power of O? 1 million plus, it would seem.

+ Definitely, Maybe... Life on Mars

A few small bits from these past few days...

+ Mark your calendars: August 16 will be the first day Sens. Obama and McCain will appear on stage together. But its not a debate, its an appearance. They'll be giving back to back speeches at Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. That's right - Sen. McCain has agreed to give a speech either directly before or after Sen. Obama at a fairly progressive evangelical church. I don't know what he is thinking.

+ A few days ago, right wing bloggers were apoplectic over the flyer Obama was using for today's appearance in Berlin. Some were offended (I'm not making this up, I swear!) that a flyer that was created for distribution in Germany was written in German. Others thought that the side profile shot of Obama was reminiscent of Hitler. But then the McCain campaign released this poster, and suddenly... radio silence!

+ You know that ranch down in Crawford that Bush so loves to spend time clearing brush on? You know, the one he bought a year or two before the 2000 election so that he could appear more like us common folk? Yeah... he's selling it.

+ Want to know what us political scientists are thinking about what voters are thinking? As far as a brief introduction goes, you could do much worse than this. And this. Bottom line? "People aren't rational: we're rationalizers." Which, when I stop and think about it, makes me wonder why I spend so much time writing this blog. Hmm....

+ I don't know why everyone is wondering about this. Of course Bush is going to issue preemptive pardons. His dad did it for Iran-Contra, and the outrage lasted all of 5 minutes. More to the point, he did it for Scooter Libby and the outrage was even more short-lived. We have two sets of rules in this country: one for those with power, and one for the rest of us.

+ From the Department of "you really can't make this stuff up": During a segment on education, Fox News misspelled the word "education."

+ Ford Motor Co. announced huge losses today - nearly $9 billion in one quarter! And in response they are making a number of drastic changes, including this: "Ford will realign factories to manufacture more fuel-efficient engines and produce six of its next European car models for the United States market." One of the most bizarre aspects of our debates over fuel efficiency standards in this country has always been our refusal to acknowledge that most US car manufacturers are already producing much more fuel efficient vehicles for consumers on other continents. For years I've been ranting in my Comparative Public Policy classes about how no one has ever been able to explain to me why we couldn't just achieve higher standards by selling more European models here in the US. It's nice to find out that the reason is because there is no reason!

So I haven't mentioned it on this blog before now, but in a few days I'll be leaving for Colorado. One of my various part-time jobs is taking me to the state, and the way the schedule was originally set up my commitment to them ran out just before the convention. So my thinking was... if I'm going to be in state, why not stay over and do some dissertation research first hand? My project is going to track the influence of blogs on our elite media during the general election campaign, and what with bloggers gathering in The Big Tent, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to gather some information that would otherwise be impossible to get (more on my research design later, I promise).

I can't go into all of the details right now, but at the last minute some things changed, and as a result one of my primary sources of funding for the trip disappeared. It can't be helped, but it still hurts, and so now I'm turning to you, my loyal readers, for help.

Anyone who knows me knows that I hate to ask for help. There are several reasons for this:

1. Pride.
2. I want to keep my powder dry for when I really need it.
3. After asking, I might come to the conclusion to that I didn't really need it and regret having asked.

Or in other words: 1+2=3. But... Given that right now I am convinced that neither #2 nor #3 apply, I'm doing my best to ignore #1 and ask.

This summer will mark the 4th anniversary of this blog. I've written lots of words, and you've no doubt read at least some of them. And all of it has been for free. That time together must be worth something, right? Once every four years isn't too often to ask for some love, is it?

I'm like Obama, here. Or maybe NPR. Even $5 will help. Hell, I'll even take 5 cents. So if you've got some loose change you can spare, really... I would be much obliged. Really.