NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is Blogging Unscholarly?

The political science blogosphere has erupted in protest after the International Studies Association unveiled a proposal to bar members affiliated with its scholarly journal from doing just that — blogging.

“No editor of any ISA journal or member of any editorial team of an ISA journal can create or actively manage a blog unless it is an official blog of the editor’s journal or the editorial team’s journal,” the proposal reads. “This policy requires that all editors and members of editorial teams to apply this aspect of the Code of Conduct to their ISA journal commitments. All editorial members, both the Editor in Chief(s) and the board of editors/editorial teams, should maintain a complete separation of their journal responsibilities and their blog associations.”

The Governing Council of the ISA, which consists of about 50 voting members, will debate the proposal the day before the association’s annual meeting in Toronto on March 25. Should the council adopt the proposal, it would impact the five journals: International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, International Studies Perspectives, Foreign Policy Analysis and International Political Sociology, as well as International Interactions, which the association co-sponsors.

So, the International Studies Association: not as dumb as the American Studies Association, but pretty dumb.

BLOWBACK: More States Looking To Neutralize The NSA Through Local Legislation. “A widening split between the federal government and its constituents.”

SPACE: Why It Matters That There’s So Much Water in the Asteroid Belt. For the last decade or two, most of our space discoveries have tended to make colonization look easier.

ISRAEL BOYCOTTERS TAKE ANOTHER HIT: Scarlett Johansson Steps Down As Oxfam Ambassador.

SCIENCE: Deep Inside: A Study Of 10,000 Porn Stars And Their Careers. “We now have our average porn stars: Nikki and David. They’re of normal height, but both weigh less than the national average. Nikki has smaller breasts than you might expect and she’s a brunette.”

RON FOURNIER: Why I Was Wrong About Chris Christie.

THE FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE: An Obama Policy The Tea Party Should Love. “By voluntarily paying higher prices for some goods and services the federal government procures, without clamoring for new appropriations, Obama is effectively reducing the size of government.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 266.

IT’S HOW THE SELF-DETERMINED COOL KIDS PAT EACH OTHER ON THE BACK: Matt Welch: It’s Not Just MSNBC Making Flip Assumptions About Non-Liberal Racism. “There is nothing tolerant about assuming that those who have different ideas than you about the size and scope of government are motivated largely by base ethnic tribalism. MSNBC, on whose shows I have happily participated, engages daily in the othering business, of making conservatism itself (and sometimes libertarianism, and other non-Progressive ideological strains) a disreputable condition, explicable in terms of pathology. That this is done in the name of tolerance and sensitivity to punitive stereotypes is one of the ironies of our age.”

WAR ON WOMEN: Democrat Rep. Behind Bars For Domestic Violence, Won’t Resign.

Inmate lawmaker Rep. Carlos Henriquez is 
doing his Beacon Hill business from his Billerica jail cell, thumbing through bills and budget proposals, and speaking to staff by phone “at least once a day,” 
according to the disgraced Dorchester Democrat’s legislative aide.

“We’ve been in regular contact with him, and at this point he’s concerned with the issues of the district,” aide Jessica DaSilva told the Herald.

DaSilva said Henriquez’s office is fielding four or five constituent calls a day, mostly from people concerned about cuts to unemployment benefits. She said Henriquez also has been reviewing budget amendments, though she would not say which.

“There’s a few. Obviously
I can’t speak for him on 
it,” DaSilva said.

Asked whether the 37-year-old lawmaker is sponsoring any new bills, DaSilva said, “At this moment, I’m not sure.”

She declined to characterize the telephone calls further, and said she had not visited Henriquez in person at the Middlesex House of Correction.

Henriquez is serving a six-month sentence there after a jury convicted him Jan. 15 for the July 2012 
assault and battery of a woman he was dating.

Well, he is from Ted Kennedy’s home state.

WHAT LIES BENEATH: China Leads First Oil & Gas Exploration in South China Sea in Years.

Just how much oil and gas lies under the seafloor in the South China Sea is the subject of much debate. China’s National Offshore Oil Company guessed that the area has 125 billion barrels of oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The U.S. Geological Survey says the figure is much lower: between five and 22 billion barrels of oil and between 70 and 290 trillion cubic feet of gas. How much of that can be feasibly extracted is up for debate as well. Like most offshore oil projects, the South China Sea would make for difficult operations even without the territorial disputes.

This expedition should go a ways toward answering questions about what kinds of natural resources and business opportunities are really at stake in the South China Sea dispute. At the moment everyone is fighting over a few rocks that jut a few feet about sea level, the abundant schools of fish that swim in the waters around them, and the strategic nature of the Sea itself. Soon we will also know if there is oil and gas worth fighting over as well.

Related: India’s Struggling Military Gets Major Boost From Japan.

India intends to buy 15 ShinMaywa Industries amphibious aircraft at a cost of about $110 million each, Reuters reports. “The plane has a range of over 4,500 km (2,800 miles), which will give it reach far into Southeast Asia from the base where the aircraft are likely to be located, in the Andaman and Nicobar island chain that is near the western tip of Indonesia.” India established itself as the world’s biggest arms importer last year.

Building deeper military ties between India and Japan suits both countries. For Japan it helps the economy emerge from years of sluggish growth, and for Abe this deal is a landmark in his quest to revive Japan’s sense of regional strength. India and Japan are the two largest and most powerful of China’s rivals, and cooperating to balance the tiger in the room is a no-brainer.

I think it was safer for everybody when the Pacific was under a Pax Americana. Those days appear to have ended.

BIOTECH/PHARMA LEADERS: ObamaCare Killing Innovation.

This was my biggest worry.

JOHN FUND: Pete Seeger, Totalitarian Troubadour. “We shouldn’t forget that Pete Seeger was Communism’s pied piper.”

Related: Spengler: Pete Seeger: A Mean-Spirited and Vengeful Recollection. “I was not just a Pete Seeger fan, but a to-the-hammer-born, born-and-bred cradle fan of Pete Seeger. With those credentials, permit me to take note of his passing with the observation that he was a fraud, a phony, a poseur, an imposter. The notion of folk music he espoused was a put-on from beginning to end. There is no such thing as an American ‘folk.'”

Related: We Are The Folksong Army. “It sounds more ethnic if it ain’t good English, and it don’t even have to rhyme.”

AT AMAZON, Top Valentine’s Day Deals.

Plus, Get Ready For The Big Game.

Also: Deal of the Day: Stuhrling Original Men’s Concorso Watches.

UNEXPECTEDLY: 2013 GDP Grew only 1.9%, down from 2.8% in 2012. Well, 2013 wasn’t an election year.

UPDATE: First-Time Jobless Claims Rise Unexpectedly.

UNRAVELLING: Reid Deals Body Blow to Obama on Trade: His Opposition to Fast-Track Authority for Trade Deals Puts Him at Odds With President’s Economic Agenda.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Social Liberalism As Class Warfare.

Now do I actually think there’s some kind of elite-liberal cultural conspiracy to keep the masses in their social place? No, of course not – there’s nothing so conscious and cynical at work. But then again, neither do I think there’s a meritocratic conspiracy to withdraw into walkable-urban enclaves and leave the rest of society to fragment and decay. Yet that withdrawal and its consequences are still important facts for understanding the decline of marriage, just as Waldman says. An approach to life doesn’t have to be calculated to be effectively self-interested, and in the context of a stratified country that self-interest is well worth pointing out.

And the same is true of an approach to politics and culture. Again, I’m not alleging cynicism: Social liberals are entirely sincere in their belief that even self-censorship is unnecessary censorship (or, perhaps, that the internet has rendered cultural standards obsolete); in their conviction that laws banning abortion or restricting divorce are too punitive, illiberal and inherent sexist to be just; in their abiding sense that economic paternalism is morally acceptable but social-moral-sexual paternalism is not. But it is still the case that when we legalized abortion and instituted unilateral divorce, we helped usher in a sexual-marital-parental culture that seems to work roughly as well for people with lots of social capital as it did sixty years ago, while working pretty badly for the poor and lower middle class. It is still a reality of contemporary life that when anyone can get a divorce for any reason, the lower classes seem to get far more of the divorces, and that when anyone can get an abortion for any reason, the poor end up having more abortions and more children out of wedlock both. And it is still a fact that if you tallied up winners and losers from the sexual revolution, the obvious winners would tend to cluster at one end of 1975’s income distribution, the obvious losers at the other.

Indeed.

JEFFREY SINGER: The Affordable Care Act: A Train Wreck And A Lie.

JAMES TARANTO: Party Like It’s 1959: Fanciful proposals for a sexual counterrevolution.

Let us pause to note the contrast in tone between these two paragraphs. Whereas Saletan’s lecture to women is merely condescending, in addressing men he is gross and dehumanizing.

In substance, he is essentially calling for a turning back of the clock–for men and women to approach sex with the same sort of caution that was typical in 1959, adapted to today’s technologies and laws. It would be simpler just to advise both sexes to save sex for marriage, but of course we know from debates over sex education that “abstinence doesn’t work.” Even before the pill and Roe v. Wade, people were having premarital sex, or there wouldn’t have been shotgun weddings.

Yet actually abstinence does work; the problem is that moral suasion is of limited effectiveness. Even assuming Saletan’s advice is sound, there is no reason to expect it to be widely followed.

The shotgun wedding was not a prescriptive formula devised by some writer or policy analyst. It was a spontaneous adaptation to the constraints and incentives that existed at the time. When those constraints gave way, the incentives changed, and individual men and women changed their behavior in response.

What about Saletan’s reductio ad absurdum of Douthat’s argument? Could the shotgun wedding be restored if society were “to go back to restricting reproductive freedom,” as Saletan puts it?

The question is unanswerable, because the premise is flawed. Changes in the law surely accelerated the sexual revolution, but they did not cause it. Advances in technology did–specifically, the development of the pill, which the FDA approved for contraceptive use in 1960. The current extremely permissive abortion regime may or may not be here to stay, but a ban on modern contraception is no more feasible a proposal than a ban on automobiles or guns, both of which have deleterious social consequences as well as “awesome” ones, and bot of which enhance individual freedom.

After propounding his “ethic of sexual responsibility,” Saletan issues a challenge: “Some of you might view this advice as too austere or prudish. If so, let’s hear your alternative.” We don’t have one. But the absence of a better idea doesn’t make a bad idea good, and when analyzing social trends it is well to remember that not every problem has a solution.

Yeah, I noticed that Saletan was a lot harder on men than women, too, but that’s to be expected. Under Saletan’s proposal, of course, we’d expect to see more men turning to Internet porn, or prostitution, rather than dating. Also because of incentives.

MICHAEL BARONE: Gallup Obama approval numbers suggest shifting Electoral College map.

UPDATE: Rich Baehr: How Good Could 2014 Be for GOP? Odds are even that Republicans can take over the Senate.

OUCH: Mike Lee Gives Eric Holder the Grilling of a Lifetime Over Obama’s Use of Executive Orders: ‘I Respectfully, but Forcefully, Disagree.’

Attorney General Eric Holder was unable to explain to Congress why President Barack Obama was within his constitutional limits when he issued an executive order to delay Obamacare’s employer mandate. The nation’s top law enforcement officer said he hasn’t looked at the analysis in “some time” and thus was unsure of where along the constitutional spectrum the order is permitted.

The surprising admission came after Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) grilled Holder for several minutes on the constitutional limits of executive orders and the executive branch during a Senate hearing on Wednesday.

He doesn’t know, because he doesn’t really care. Laws are for the little people.

UPDATE: Speaking of Executive Orders, here’s a post from a while back that demonstrates just how far a President can go.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Sen. Ted Cruz Calls For Select Committee To Investigate IRS Scandal.

Related: Ted Cruz Spars With Eric Holder at IRS Targeting Hearing.

Plus: Former Acting IRS Administrator Daniel Werfel Leaves Government.

A SIGN OF HIS STRENGTH? OR OF HER WEAKNESS? Scott Brown Tied With Jeanne Shaheen In NH Senate Race He Hasn’t Even Entered.

THOUGHTS FROM ACE: The Left Talks a Great Deal About the Evils of Income Inequality, But Is Very Happy to Perpetuate a Regime of Social Inequality. That’s because they know they’re better than you. “Our current class distinctions are similar to those in Victorian England.”