Mexican Election Debate Continues

Despite what I wrote in yesterday's piece at NRO, it still seems that you can convince people that an election has been stolen when it is in their interest to claim it.

But Mr Calderón, a 43-year-old former energy minister in President Vicente Fox’s current administration, says opening up the boxes would break electoral law and could invalidate the entire election. In an FT interview this week, Mr Calderón said that a full manual recount was “totally out of the question. Not only that but it is illegal.”

Most legal experts agree, though some argue that the constitution is flexible enough to allow a recount, given the exceptional circumstances. The problem for Mr Calderón is that he faces the prospect of taking office on December 1 with millions of voters believing that he did not win fairly.

In the meantime, many Mexicans believe that Saturday afternoon’s rally in the Zócalo could be just the first – and, perhaps, most peaceful – manifestation of growing social unrest.

Even if you are talking about only 10 percent or so of Obrador's supporters who believe that there is fraud and the election should be challenged (about the number that I saw in a recent poll), that is still millions of people.

UN Gun control report

Details of the UN's gun control report can be found here. I haven't looked through the report yet, but it doesn't look good.

Well, the UN Conference broke down without passing anything.

A U.N. meeting meant to expand a five-year-old crackdown on the illicit global trade in small arms ended in chaos on Friday as delegates ran out of time without reaching agreement on a plan for future action.

"There was a total meltdown at the end. You don't know if it was a conspiracy or just a screw-up," said one delegate, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Other delegates said negotiations had simply proceeded too slowly, leaving too much to accomplish on the last day.

But Rebecca Peters of the London-based International Action Network on Small Arms accused governments of letting a few states "hold them all hostage and to derail any plans which might have brought any improvements in this global crisis.

This might be a temporary victory for those who want to be able to protect themselves and their families, but it is a win nonetheless.

Thanks to Brian O'Connor for this last link.

Indiana starts granting lifetime concealed handgun permits

Indiana is the first state in the nation to offer residents lifetime handgun permits under a new law that went into effect this month -- a move hailed by Second Amendment supporters and blasted by gun-control advocates.

The law, which also increases the cost of obtaining or renewing a four-year license, went on the books Saturday. The change is expected to bring in more money to the state and the Indiana State Police.

State Police Superintendent Paul Whitesell announced details of House Enrolled Act 1176 at a news conference Wednesday, saying the law will streamline the process to get a permit for law-abiding gun owners. His agency oversees the issuance of permits.

Residents do not need a permit to buy handguns or other firearms but must have one to carry or transport a pistol. State Police officials said Indiana has about 288,000 active handgun permits. Permits are good for four years, but now gun owners have the option of obtaining a lifetime permit instead. . . .

"Peter Hamm, communications director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, called the law 'ludicrous.'"

Thanks to Dan Gifford for sending this to me.

Media Bias: Misreporting on the economy

Larry Elder has a nice op-ed on media bias today.

Forty-seven percent of Americans, according to a recent poll, believe the economy is doing "badly." Or, as a woman I encountered at a party recently put it, "Bush put the economy in the toilet." Really?

The feds just revised upward – again – the economic performance of the last quarter. From January through March 2006, the economy grew at a rate of 5.6 percent – higher than any in the last two and a half years. Despite recent inflation scares, inflation remains low, at a 2.1 percent core rate. Unemployment, at 4.6 percent, represents a lower rate than the average during the '60s, '70s, '80s and the '90s. Since August 2003, the economy has created more than 5.3 million jobs. . . .

What we can learn from Mexicon on holding elections

I have a new op-ed on the Mexican presidential election vote recount in today's National Review Online.

Despite this ruckus, Mexicans have something to teach Americans about how to run an election. Many types of vote fraud that have been alleged in American elections simply could not occur in Mexico. . . .

Gunlocks endanger lives

I have a new op-ed on gunlocks in today's Washington Times.

Touting locks as a way to reduce accidental gun deaths among children, Sarah Brady of the Brady Campaign, a gun-control organization, immediately responded to the House vote by saying, "as a mother, this makes me ill." But despite the obvious feel-good appeal of these rules, gun locks and safe-storage laws are more likely to cost lives than to save them. Possibly the worst thing about mandating that handguns be sold with locks is that it exaggerates the risks of guns in the home and scares some people into not owning them. . . .

Update: Clayton Cramer and Ted Nugent have some comments.

Rankings of economists

For whatever it is worth, there are recent rankings of economists. The rankings examines economists from 1969 to 2000. There are four UCLA Ph.D.'s noted on the list: Ross Levine, Guido Tabellini, Bob Topel, and myself. Personally, I am honored to even be roughly on the same list as these three guys. Based on that ranking in terms of total academic journal output adjusted for quality of the journals I am ranked during that period of time as 26th (obviously I didn't get my Ph.D. until 1984 so that works to lower my rating relative to older economists, still I am surprisingly ahead of older well-known economists such as Robert Barro (Harvard), Ed Lazear (Stanford), and Peter Diamond (MIT) (see Table 8)). In terms of raw number of equivalent size pages in academic journals, I am 4th among all economists worldwide. Based upon citations during the 1969 to 2000 period I am 86th (putting me slightly ahead of older people such as John Roberts (Stanford), Ben Bernanke (Princeton, now head of the Federal Reserve), and Oliver Hart (MIT) (see Table 9)).

Thanks to Butch Browning for bringing this to my attention.

Mexican Stock Market Says PAN Candidate Won

Mexican financial markets opened sharply higher Monday as investors apparently decided that fiscally conservative Felipe Calderon will be Mexico's next president. . . .

Mexico's stock market, currency and bonds rallied sharply on news that Calderon was leading over his leftist rival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, though by a razor-thin margin, with 97 percent of polling stations counted.

The Mexico City stock market's IPC index of 35 leading issues rose 3.7 percent, or 709.490 points, to 19,856 in morning trading.

"It seems that they're declaring him the winner," said Carlos Gonzalez, an analyst at IXE brokerage in Mexico City, referring to local markets' reaction to Calderon's lead.

Happy 4th of July Weekend!!

Just wishing everyone a happy 4th of July Weekend! Enjoy the fireworks and be safe.

Justice Anthony Kennedy as a "moderate-conservative"?

According to Georgetown's Supreme Court Institute, six times he made the difference in 5 to 4 votes on the conservative side and 4 times on the liberal side. I am not sure that I quite agree with their count because Kennedy issued a divided opinion in hte Texas redistricting case, where he argued that there was discrimination against Hispanics in one district. Rather than a 6 to 4 division, possibly it should count as 5.5 to 4.5 or 5.75 to 4.25? In any case, Kennedy appears more moderate than conservative.

In the 17 cases during the 2005-2006 term that were decided by five-vote majorities, Kennedy was on the winning side 12 times, more than any other justice, according to figures compiled by Georgetown's Supreme Court Institute.

In six of those cases, Kennedy voted with the conservative bloc, made up of Roberts, Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. As a result, the court upheld most of Texas's Republican-drafted redistricting plan, restored the death penalty in Kansas, and ruled that police do not have to throw out evidence they gather in illegal no-knock searches.

But four times, Kennedy, a 1988 appointee of President Ronald Reagan, defected to the liberal justices, John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

As a result, the court not only struck down Bush's military commissions. It also ruled that the police need permission from both occupants to search a home without a warrant, gave a Tennessee death-row inmate a chance to win a new trial, and said that Texas violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Latino Democrats in one district. (Twice Kennedy was part of mixed left-right coalitions.) . . . .

John McGinnis explains the changing dynamic on Supreme Court

I had been surprised by Breyer voting with the majority in the Vermont campaign finance case and possibly this explains it:

The court's new lineup is likely to change the dynamic in ways that extend well beyond the differences in how Roberts and Alito might vote compared with Rehnquist and O'Connor, says John McGinnis, a Northwestern law professor who worked with Alito in the Reagan Justice Department.

For example, there are some early signs that Justice Stephen Breyer may be inclined to vote more strategically to stay within the majority on certain cases, McGinnis said. And Roberts, for his part, may be assigning Breyer to write certain opinions in an effort to keep him from reflexively siding with the other liberals.

"I think that will be a story we should be following for the next five years," McGinnis said.

Eminent domain mess, Land taken by mistake?

Fox News has a nice video story about land that was siezed under eminent domain to build a WalMart, but now the city want to buy the land back because the WalMart store design is said to be "too boxy." Don't people check these things out before they take other people's property? I assume that people would be more careful taking property if they actually had to pay what it was worth.