DISPATCHES FROM APSA. I'm at the American Political Science Association Conference in Chicago this weekend, and amongst all the noise there actually are some interesting things going on. I attended two panels this morning, the first on blogging and the second on the ISG report. Dan Drezner chaired the blogging panel, which also included Laura McKenna of 11D. While some of the papers were of the "Saying the Obvious in a Methodologically Rigorous Way" vein that political scientists are so fond of, McKenna's paper involved a survey of journalists at elite newspapers regarding their attitudes on blogging. Long story short, a lot of big journalists read blogs, and while most hate the bloggers that comment on their stories, they tend to think that blogging is good for the journalism profession as a whole. The panel on the Iraq Study Group included Jay Parker, Meena Bose, and Stephen Biddle. Most panels are decided upon many months in advance, so it wasn't as clear then that the ISG would be fundamentally a dead letter on arrival. In any case, Parker gave a good account of the process of putting the group together, a process which was, for the lack of a better word, serious about both finding multiple viewpoints and ensuring that space existed for debate. Bose compared the ISG process unfavorably with the Eisenhower administration's Operation Solarium. Biddle made a couple of very good critiques of some of the ISG policy recommendations, mainly regarding the faulty assumptions of training and negotiation strategies. Tonight more drinking, tomorrow more panels. --Robert Farley
