politics – Page 12

Tag: politics (page 12 of 23)

Modernizing White House technology

One of the small but persistent questions that’s hounded Barack Obama since he announced he was running for President was whether or not he’d be allowed to keep his Blackberry. The arguments against are based on security (which I don’t really understand) and the archiving requirements of the Presidential Records Act, which came into law in 1978.

Today I read that White House employees will be barred from using instant messaging due to the Presidential Rights Act.

Matthew Yglesias suggests that Obama could probably succeed in getting a modernized law passed that would end the controversy over White House employees using modern tools to get their work done. There are no barries to archiving every type of communication that would be subject to archiving laws. This is not a technology problem, it’s a law problem. It seems to me that Obama is the right President to fix it.

Maybe solving this problem is a good job for the yet-to-be-named government chief technology officer.

Discussion: is Obama too close to Google?

January 16, 2009 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Over at Talking Points Memo, they’re holding a panel discussion on Barack Obama’s relationship with Google. Are they too close?

Here’s a specific question that was asked today:

Today over at the Mothership (that’s the TPM Front Page) we see one of the “wire” stories that the General Services Administration is negotiating with YouTube (a Google service) to post federal hearings, etc.

Given the uncomfortably close relationship between Google execs and Obama, should we be worried about this? I think so. YouTube is already the default video platform on the Web. But it does not have to be. And there is no clear reason for the government to solidify YouTube’s market dominance. In fact, there is no reason why the GSO could not mandate that all federal agencies post their videos in open forms — accessible, repostable, and mashable — on their own sites.

Then We the People could repost them on YouTube with commentary and maybe some cartoon graphics mixed in. Better yet, because .gov can’t deal with the bandwidth demands of too many folks pulling down popular videos, the federal government should post open format video as bittorrent files.

I can see both sides of this argument. Contracting with YouTube to host the videos clearly further cements Google’s position as the dominant player in hosting videos on the Web. At the same time, there’s no reason not to put them on YouTube. Many people expect YouTube to have what they’re looking for when it comes to online video. If you leave the videos off, people won’t find them, or they’ll find the remixed mashups people make and have no idea where to get the originals. That’s a problem.

I think BitTorrent is a terrible response to bandwidth issues. I love BitTorrent, but it’s not very user friendly.

At the same time, YouTube’s Flash videos are hosted in a closed format. If the US government is going to post videos online, they should be posted in a format that’s easy for end users to repurpose, for broadcasters to use, and so forth. So if YouTube is going to be the only place these videos are hosted, that’s a problem. If the US government is going to host videos there to stay in the mix, I think that makes sense.

As to the larger question, presented in the opening post in the series, as to whether the government should start looking at Google from an antitrust perspective, I think the answer right now is negative. There’s nothing to suggest that if some other company came out with a better index tomorrow that Google wouldn’t find itself losing traffic like it’s going out of style. Google is hardly the first search engine to dominate. Doubt it’ll be the last.

Update: Looks like we have our answer on downloadable videos. They’ll be made available through YouTube.

Dan Froomkin on Bush’s last press conference

January 12, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

If there’s anything I’ll miss about the Bush administration, it’s Dan Froomkin’s coverage of the White House. Today, he analyzes President George W Bush’s final press conference.

I understand Froomkin will remain on the job, covering the Obama White House as well. Hopefully he’ll not be forced to spend as much space as he does now correcting the White House’s misrepresentations.

Today’s post on economic stimulus, episode II

January 10, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Since my post yesterday questioning what the realistic expectations for stimulating the economy should be, the Obama transition team has released some hard numbers about what they expect to gain through their stimulus package.

Paul Krugman reacts here. It addresses my question from yesterday — the stimulus plan is aimed at closing one third of the output gap over the next two years. So the plan as designed will soften the blow somewhat, but will not compensate entirely for what has been lost. That seems realistic to me.

Nate Silver also has a great post looking at the anticipated effects of government spending versus tax cuts as a form of stimulus. The Obama economists helpfully list the multipliers associated with each, and Nate does a great job of explaining why the multipliers for government spending versus tax cuts are different. Nate also speculated about Obama’s negotiating strategy on the stimulus bill. Given that Obama has shown himself to be a strategic thinker over the course of his political career, I think it’s wise to try to analyze what he does from that perspective.

You can just read one sentence from Tim Fernholz to get the gist of what all of the posts I just linked to are getting at:

But one thing I do expect is for Democratic members of congress to look at that graph above, consider their reelection prospects, and wonder if maybe they ought to make the bill just a bit bigger so that unemployment line will drop just a bit lower as voters head to the polls; nothing like seeing self-interest and good public policy go hand-in-hand.

Stimulus is on the way

December 29, 2008 / Rafe / 3 Comments

I’m finding it interesting to read the debate on economics blogs about how effective the stimulus package that the government will pass early next year is likely to be in addressing the economic collapse that we all hope won’t linger for ten years.

For what it’s worth, I think Tyler Cowen is close to the truth when he writes this:

Note that under standard theory neither monetary nor fiscal policy will set right the basic problems from negative real shocks and indeed the U.S. economy is undergoing a series of massive sectoral shifts. That includes a move out of construction, a move out of finance, a move out of debt-financed consumption, a move out of luxury goods, the collapse of GM, and a move out of industries which cannot compete with the internet (newspapers, Borders, etc.)

That’s why we’re in for pain for what may be a very long time. I think we should all hope that the more optimistic economists are right on this issue, because some stimulus package is inevitable.

For the pro-stimulus argument, Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman are the essential stops.

For what it’s worth, non-economist Jim Henley wrote the best summary of the economics of the past 20 or 30 years that I’ve read:

During the period of Republican dominance, government policy contributed to stagnant real wages for most Americans, but to keep consumption up, fostered ever-more-creative ways for them to take on debt. The recent real-estate bubble (still deflating) was the final(?), decadent stage of the con. Now the jig is up: what falling asset prices reveal is that the country was a lot less wealthy, in real terms, than we imagined. In the absence of broadly shared prosperity, society can’t maintain a robust growth in genuine wealth.

You can leave out the stuff about Republicans if you like, increased ability to take on debt did replace wage growth as the means by which people improved their standard of living over the past 10 or 20 years. The difference between borrowing and having is that now the economy is going to suffer as people try to pay down the debt they’ve accumulated as rapidly as possible.

Intuitively, if the economy’s size was based in large part on borrowed money, government borrowing could make up some of the difference since businesses and consumers are borrowing less, but clearly that can only work for a short time as we try to find some more reliable means to rebuild the economy.

Bringing a legacy into the Senate

December 18, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Marc Ambinder reminds us that Caroline Kennedy is a legacy pick, not a beneficiary of nepotism.

As a practical matter, I’ll throw in my hat with Ross Douthat. If Caroline Kennedy wants to enter a Democratic primary, raise money, and campaign for a Senate seat, I wish her well. To request appointment to the Senate on the basis of no practical political experience whatsoever is just silly. And the soap opera-esque aspects of the whole thing make me want to throw up.

The thing that sucks about the South

December 16, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Matthew Yglesias explains what sucks about the South:

This is, of course, but a small slice of the larger southern politics tradition which has always insisted since the end of the Civil War that cheap labor and a low-tax, low-service, high-inequality social and economic system are the key to prosperity. This approach left the South perennially poorer than the rest of the country, but over the past couple of decades this made-in-dixie failed approach to economic development has come to dominate national policy. Not coincidentally, during this period the United States has begun to fall behind high-wage, high-service, low-inequality northern European countries in terms of average living standards.

I’ve lived in the South for essentially my entire life.

No backtracking on torture

December 4, 2008 / Rafe / 2 Comments

One of the reasons people hate politics is the hypocrisy of it all. Politicians excuse behavior from their allies that they are eager to rebuke from their opponents.

Perhaps the most shocking recent example of this was the Republican effort to eliminate the filibuster when they had the majority in the Senate and House until 2006. After decrying the filibuster as an unconstitutional travesty for years, the Republican minority in the current Senate has used the filibuster more than any other Congress in history.

Now we see Democrats who were unequivocally against torture equivocating. The only way to prevent this sort of thing is to make people aware that it’s going on, and for voters to let politicians know that principles shouldn’t change regardless of who’s in the White House. So that’s what I’m doing.

You can only fall so far

December 4, 2008 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Andrew Leonard on Eliot Spitzer’s new column at Slate:

But fundamentally, I’m just flat-out impressed. What do you have to do in this country to absolutely, completely, ruin your long-term income-generating potential? Americans are a forgiving bunch.

I’ve always been fascinated by the floor on how far people tend to be able to fall in our society, although I find the phenomenon more remarkable in business than in politics. A Slate column is not the same as being the governor of New York. But in business, once you’re in the CEO club, you’re in for life. The same goes for vice presidents, directors, managers, and so forth. In my experience, no failure is too spectacular to disqualify you from getting a job with the same title as you’ve had in the past.

What happens to campaign supplies?

November 18, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

I live near one of the Barack Obama campaign offices, and I couldn’t help but notice that it was completely vacant the next morning after election day. It was like the circus leaving town. I wondered what happened to everything in the office, and in the hundreds of other campaign offices around the country. In the case of the Obama campaign, the answer is that they made arrangements to donate all of the computers, furniture, and office supplies to schools.

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