politics – Page 11

Tag: politics (page 11 of 23)

Political hyperinflation

Tyler Cowen on politics:

One of Obama’s problems is that other peoples’ attempts to copy his memes and strategies make it harder for those same strategies to succeed. There is a common pool of “good publicity for being bipartisan” and now many players are rushing to exhaust it, even if that means pushing policy changes of low quality.

I’d describe it as bipartisanship being a currency everyone’s rushing to print. Eventually it’s valueless. When I’m feeling optimistic, I think that Obama is trying to transcend this problem by elevating the dialogue with voters past the cliches.

People don’t like Rush Limbaugh

February 4, 2009 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Hedrik Hertzberg writes about Rush Limbaugh’s approval rating — it’s 21% among likely voters. Rush’s fans love him, in fact they love him enough to forgive him for being a hardcore drug addict. If I were a Democratic strategist (and we can all be glad that I’m not), I’d be shoving Rush Limbaugh down the GOP’s throat. This guy is an embarrassment, happy to cheer for America to go down the tubes because the right wing is waning in influence. Now that Democrats don’t have George Bush to inveigh against, they need to start making Rush Limbaugh the new right wing bogey man. I think some concerted effort could drive that 21% number even lower, and he’d take a lot of Republican elected officials with him.

Settin’ the blogs on fire

February 2, 2009 / Rafe / 4 Comments

TPM DC’s Matt Cooper says that Tom Daschle will be confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services:

First, he apologized which is a necessary but not sufficent precondition to surviving these things. Second, Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee which has jurisdiction over Daschle’s nomination, came out for him despite a history of tension between the two. Third, Obama stood by Daschle–a sentiment echoed by Robert Gibbs at his press conference although Gibbs used the slightly miffed phrase, “a report we heard this weekend,” about the Daschle contretemps. Fourth: Silence. The blogs are not on fire–yes, there’s Greenwald, I know–but there’s not pitchfork mob calling for his head of the size and scope usually needed to kill a nomination. The optics of the thing are terrible but it’s not deadly.

So, he’s my contribution to setting the blogs on fire. Daschle should go. He failed to report as income the value of having a freely provided car (and driver) that he used. First of all, this is a perk that nobody can reasonably expect. It was provided by corporate interests who retain his Washington DC influence peddling services. That’s disgusting. If that’s not enough, be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s blog post on Tom Daschle.

This is the guy economists had in mind when they came up with public choice theory.

(The title of this blog post is a reference to this song.)

Quote of the day

January 29, 2009 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Matthew Yglesias’ father told him this:

To this day I remember when I was in eighth grade and my father first explained to me that there was a man named Alan Greenspan who ran a government agency that watched with an eagle eye for the day when there might be an insufficient number of unemployed people. If too many people had jobs, he was supposed to swoop in, tighten the money supply, and make sure some people lost their jobs. Otherwise, wages might get too high!

It’s important to remember this whenever people start talking about how people on welfare need to go out and find jobs, that we don’t need universal health care, and we need to get rid of “entitlements”. We have an economy managed by a central bank that tries very hard not to let unemployment get too high — or too low. Combining that with a federal government that refuses to extend aid to the people who we, as a matter of policy, keep out of work seems cruel.

Links from January 26th

January 27, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Boston Globe: An American take on al-Jazeera. Really interesting recounting of how al-Jazeera has covered the war in Gaza. I feel strongly that if American war coverage was less sanitized, support for military action would go down.
Rick DeNatale: Database Representation for Recurring Events. I’d love to see more micro-case studies of data modeling problems.
Marginal Revolution: Worry less about releasing terrorists. An economist’s view of releasing terrorists.
Errol Morris: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. Long interview with wire service photo editors on iconic photos of President Bush.
clicktoflash. WebKit plug-in to prevent automatic loading of Adobe Flash content.
Riding Rails: Nested Model Forms. Improvements in this area have been desperately needed.

Industrial policy

January 21, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Robert Reich once said that defense procurement is what passes for industrial policy in America. Here’s that idea made plain.

I think I’m going to stick with Eisenhower on this one.

Don’t be evil

January 21, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

A lot of people have made fun of Google’s informal corporate motto — “Don’t be evil — since it was originally disclosed in 2001. And clearly it’s a motto that they’ve failed to live up to at times, but what I really like about it is that it sets the standard to which Google expects to be held.

If Google is evil, every critic can say that the company doesn’t live up to its word. That’s a powerful thing.

Indeed, it’s something that I’ve come to appreciate about the Obama transition. They’ve made a lot of promises, now it’s up to us to measure their performance against those promises, and hold them accountable when they’ve failed to live up to the standards they set.

Yesterday Dan Froomkin, the Washington Post writer who tirelessly chronicled the misdeeds and mistruths of the Bush administration, talked about how he plans to cover the Obama administration. His starting point is that he plans to hold them to the standards that they have promised.

Self-imposed standards are a shortcut to establishing trust. By creating these standards and then living up to them, you demonstrate that other promises you make can be trusted as well.

On a personal level, I’d rather deal with a person or entity that sets high standards and sometimes fails to meet then than one that refuses to claim any standard at all.

Today, Obama set a high mark for himself and his administration: “Let me say it as simply as I can, transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” Let’s hope they live up to it.

Obama’s pedestrian speech

January 21, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Paul Krugman illustrates why many knowledgeable speech-watchers found Obama’s speech yesterday somewhat pedestrian. That said, I found the speech to be quite good. My guess is that Obama felt like soaring rhetoric would put the nation in the wrong mood for what’s immediately ahead. What I get from Obama is that for him, being elected President was not mission accomplished but rather mission accepted, and he’s not going to take any victory laps or speak from an aircraft carrier anytime soon.

My favorite passage from the inauguration speech

January 20, 2009 / Rafe / 3 Comments

I thought the speech was great, and this was my favorite bit:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

There were many great passages, though. I very much appreciated his full throated renunciation of torture and his offer of friendship to everyone in the world. I really liked that he made it clear that economic policy is a tool to increased shared prosperity rather than a moral end unto itself.

Here’s a link to the full text.

Torturers must be prosecuted

January 18, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Glenn Greenwald runs through the applicable laws and statements and comes to the inescapable conclusion that the Obama administration is required by the Constitution to investigate and prosecute people who tortured and ordered people to be tortured under the Bush administration. I still wouldn’t be surprised if no charges were ever brought.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held