Libertarian voters tend to get ignored by political strategists because they're not easy to categorize or organize. They don't congregate in churches or union halls; they don't unite to push political agendas. Many don't even call themselves libertarians, although they qualify because of their social liberalism and economic conservatism: they want the government out of their bedrooms as well as their wallets.

They distrust moral busybodies of both parties, and they may well be the most important bloc of swing voters this election, as David Boaz and David Kirby conclude in a new study for the Cato Institute. Analyzing a variety of voter surveys, they estimate that libertarians make up about 15 percent of voters -- a bloc roughly comparable in size to liberals and to conservative Christians, and far bigger than blocs like Nascar dads or soccer moms.

They're especially prevalent in the West, where half a dozen states have legalized medical marijuana. When Californians approved one of the first medical marijuana laws, in 1996, drug warriors were so convinced it would lead to a catastrophic spike in illegal use by teenagers that they sponsored a study to document the damage. But there was no catastrophe: after the law, marijuana use by teenagers actually declined in California.

In the decade since, as the Marijuana Policy Project documented in a recent study, popular support for legalized medical marijuana has increased in California and in virtually every other state with a similar law. Last year it was favored by 78 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll.

Yet these realities still haven't registered with Republicans in Washington. This year the White House drug czar, John Walters, and his minions have been out campaigning in Nevada, Colorado and South Dakota, which have marijuana initiatives on the ballot. The drug warriors are still sounding the discredited alarms about youths turning into potheads. Their fervor's not surprising -- they may even believe their own hype.

What's surprising is the political stupidity of the meddling. Westerners, no matter what they think of marijuana, don't appreciate sermons from federal officials on how to vote. In 2002, when the White House campaigned against another marijuana ballot initiative in Nevada, the state's attorney general said it was ''disturbing'' to see the federal interference in a state election.

When it comes to global warming, we need to balance uncertain future benefits against certain costs today.

When Title IX was enacted in 1972, women were a minority on college campuses, and it sounded reasonable to fight any discrimination against them. But now men are the underachieving minority on campus, as a series by The Times has been documenting. So why is it so important to cling to the myth behind Title IX: that women need sports as much as men do?

Yes, some women are dedicated athletes, and they should be encouraged with every opportunity. But a lot of others have better things to do, like study or work on other extracurricular activities that will be more useful to their careers. For decades, athletic directors have been creating women's sports teams and dangling scholarships and hoping to match the men's numbers, but they've learned that not even the Department of Education can eradicate gender differences.

At the University of Maryland, the women's lacrosse team won national championships year after year but still had a hard time getting 40 players to turn out for the team. The men's team had no such trouble, because guys were more than willing to warm the bench even if they weren't getting a scholarship, but the coach had to cut the extra ones to maintain the gender balance. The school satisfied Title IX, but to no one's benefit.

On or off campus, men play more team sports and watch more team sports. Besides enjoying the testosterone rushes, they have a better chance of glory -- and of impressing the opposite sex. Thirty-four years after Title IX, most women's games still attract sparse audiences. Both sexes would still rather watch men play games, especially football.

Now that the Supreme Court has gotten itself into the global warming debate, the justices face a choice: Should they rule in favor of environmental groups, or in favor of the environment?

The court agreed last week to hear a case brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups seeking to empower the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide from cars. To David Schoenbrod, the case sounds unfortunately familiar.

In 1972, as a lawyer for the council, he started the litigation that forced the E.P.A. to take lead out of gasoline. Technically, it was a victory for environmentalists, but it took so long that Schoenbrod decided his comrades in the movement had made a big mistake -- the same mistake they're now making with carbon dioxide. They keep expecting the E.P.A. do an impossible job.

They still believe in the Spaceship Earth management style, as Schoenbrod describes it in his book, ''Saving Our Environment from Washington.'' They still imagine the planet as a ship that must be guided by a wise captain, aloof from politicians and voters, who issues orders from the bridge with the help of his trusty crew of technocrats and lawyers.

If Al Gore's new movie weren't titled ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' I wouldn't have quite so many problems with it. He should have gone with something closer to ''Revenge of the Nerd.'' That's the heartwarming angle to global warming. A college student is mesmerized by his professor's bold measurements of ...

To be fair, this sort of thinker exists on other continents, too. But what distinguishes the Perfect Latin American Idiot is his persistence. No matter how far the continent falls behind the rest of the world, its populists cling to the same beliefs in socialism and big government, the same distrust of capitalism and free trade, the same conviction that Latin American poverty is the fault of the United States.

''Maradona embodies the wonderful possibilities of globalization, yet he does everything in his power to deny people poorer than himself to participate in that world,'' said one of the ''Perfect Idiot'' authors, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian journalist (and son of the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa). ''Everything Maradona and Chavez stand for has been tried before. These populists are repeating the mistakes of the Mexican Revolution, of Brazil in the 30's, of Argentina in the 50's, of Peru in the 80's.''

The new wave of populists is led by Chávez, who's been using the recent windfall in oil revenues to expand government and solidify his hold on power. But even while $100 million in oil money pours into Venezuela every day ($60 million of that from those terrible gringos north of the Rio Grande), the poverty rate has risen above 50 percent.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate has declined sharply in Chile, to about 20 percent (compared with about 50 percent in the rest of the continent). Chile has become South America's economic success story by embracing capitalism and making its own free trade agreements with the United States and other countries, most recently China.

Bush went to the Latin America summit meeting hoping to persuade the rest of the continent to follow Chile's example -- the right message but the wrong messenger and the wrong place. Any American president, especially one as unpopular as Bush, makes too easy a target for the populists and rioters who turned the meeting into their own photo opportunity.

''Nothing has ever emerged from a Latin summit,'' said José Piñera, the Chilean reformer who started the first private-account social-security system, and then helped introduce similar systems in two dozen other countries. ''Real change blossoms from good internal public policies. President Bush should not attend and dignify these weapons of mass distraction.''

I am in debt to liberal scholars across America. After I wrote about the leftward tilt on campus, they sent me treatises explaining that the shortage of conservatives on faculties is not a result of bias. Professors helpfully offered other theories why conservatives do not grace the halls of academe:

1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.

2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.

3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.

4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.

I'm studied these theories as best I could (for a conservative), but somehow I can't shake the notion that there just might be some bias on campus.

I can imagine reasons why liberals would be intrinsically more inclined than conservatives to pursue academic careers. But even if that's true, it doesn't explain why there are so many more liberal professors now than there used to be.

Surveys last year showed that Democratic professors outnumber Republican professors by at least seven to one, more than twice the ratio of three decades earlier. The trend seems likely to continue, because younger professors are far more likely than older professors to be Democrats.

You could argue that fewer conservatives today want to become professors, but that seems odd given the country's move to the right in recent decades. Conservative student groups and publications are flourishing. Plenty of smart conservatives have passed up Wall Street to work for right-wing think tanks that often don't pay more than universities do, and don't offer lifetime tenure and summers off.

At think tanks and other research institutions outside academia, there's a much higher percentage of Republicans than there is on university faculties. Apparently, despite their greed and other failings, many conservatives do want to become scholars, but they can't find work on campus.

One reason is the structure of academia, where decisions about hiring are made by small independent groups of scholars. They're subject to the law of group polarization, derived from studies of juries and other groups.

''If people are engaged in deliberation with like-minded others, they end up more confident, more homogenous and more extreme in their beliefs,'' said Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. ''If you have an English or history department that leans left, their interactions will push them further left.''

Once liberals dominate a department, they can increase their majority by voting to award tenure to like-minded scholars. As liberals dominate a field, conservatives' work comes to be seen as fringe scholarship.

''The filtering out of conservatives in the job pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing,'' said Mark Bauerlein, a conservative who is an English professor at Emory. ''It doesn't have to. The intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by itself.''

Suppose, he said, you were a conservative who wanted to do a sociology dissertation on the debilitating effects of the European welfare state, or an English dissertation arguing that anticommunist literature from the mid-20th century was as valuable as the procommunist literature.

''You'd have a hard time finding a dissertation adviser, an interested publisher and a receptive hiring committee,'' Bauerlein said. ''Your work just wouldn't look like relevant scholarship, and would be quietly set aside.''

Social scientists call it the false consensus effect: a group's conviction that its opinions are the norm. Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views, either on campus or in politics. Last year professors at Harvard and the University of California system gave $19 to Democrats for every $1 they gave to Republicans.

Conservatives complain about this imbalance in academia, but in some ways they've benefited from being outcasts. They've been toughened by confronting skeptics on campus and working at think tanks in Washington involved in the political fray. They've come up with ideas -- welfare reform, school vouchers, all kinds of privatization schemes -- that have been adopted around the country and the world.

But how many big ideas from liberal academics are on anyone's agenda? Democratic politicians are desperately trying to find something newer than the New Deal to run on next year. They're glad to take campaign contributions from professors, but they're leery of ideas from intellectuals who've have been talking to themselves for so long.

Hurricane Katrina set off a 1930's nostalgia craze in Washington, with liberals pining for F.D.R. and conservatives promising their own New Deal. But after looking at polls and talking to people now coping with Hurricane Rita, I don't see this craze spreading beyond the Beltway.

Along the Gulf Coast I heard politicians clamoring for new federal programs, but also citizens doubting they would do any good. The cynicism toward government reminded me of another decade, the 1970's, partly because that was the decade of Watergate, but mainly because that was when I did my one stint of public service.

. . . That was the moment I lost faith in government, and I kept remembering it as I listened to people along the Gulf Coast. Some of them sounded like people who'd stopped believing, too -- and for much better reasons than mine. They had seen hurricane-force ineptitude.

'I've learned my lesson from Katrina,'' said Dartanian Sanders, a laborer from Abita Springs, La., who'd spent three days driving through two states seeking help for his family. ''The lesson is to save money and be self-reliant. Counting on the government in an emergency is like sending your kids to a candy store where the guy is selling drugs.''

The scenes from New Orleans prompted calls in Washington for a new war on poverty and racism. But in a national poll after the hurricane, conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans' attitudes on poverty and racism were largely unchanged compared with previous polls; if anything, they were slightly more likely than before to criticize the government for giving too much money to the poor.

The poll did find one notable change, when it asked whether the government is almost always wasteful and inefficient. The number of skeptics saying yes had been declining fairly steadily over the previous decade, falling to 47 percent last December. But after Katrina, the trend reversed and the skeptics became a majority, with 56 percent viewing government as mostly wasteful.

For those dreaming of another New Deal, the most hopeful finding in the poll was that about 3 in 10 people trust the government to do the right thing most or nearly all of the time -- about the same percentage as before Katrina. But that's still a distinct minority. And as the Pew Center notes, it's in ''striking contrast'' to people's feelings after the Sept. 11 attacks, when 6 in 10 trusted the government.

He prominently used the phrase "cut and run."

You are not correct on this Radley.

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If you see Tierney as the champion of Liberraeian Democrats, well, then I think you ignore most of his work.

That said, I wrote a column right here at TalkLEft on the limits of the idea of the libertarian Democrat.