Matt Yglesias

The Critique of Pure Vlogging

My family was celebrating an early passover (so much more convenient to just do it on the weekend) today and somehow my little brother got to talking smack about video-blogging. “Tell it to the camera,” I said. And so we did — Web 2.0 rules:

Apologies for the lack of hoodie. Congratulations to Ohio State.

To Clear Things Up

Ankush, I’m afraid, is a bit confued. The reason James Kirchik’s inane posts wind up on The Plank is that he isn’t “the assistant to TNR’s editor, Franklin Foer.” He’s Martin Peretz‘s assistant, so (low) quality of work is not a bar to publication.

David Henson McNab

Assuming Jonathan Rauch doesn’t have his facts all wrong, this man — convicted of a series of charges stemming from an arrest for alleged violations of Honduran lobster-catching law that weren’t actually illegal — certainly seems to deserve a little of the old presidential clemency. The presidential pardon power doesn’t, in my opinion, make a ton of institutional sense. It does, however, give the president some opportunity to do some good. Instead, in practice, it mostly seems to get used to help facilitate either petty graft (Marc Rich) or else Republican efforts to cover up serious abuses of power.

Negotiating Postures

Steve Erlanger in Tel Aviv: “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in interviews published Friday that Israel would not allow a single Palestinian refugee to return to what is now Israel, and that the country bore no responsibility for the refugees because their plight resulted from an attack by Arab nations on Israel when it was a fledgling state.” Not a single refugee? Really? This is such an absurd position that I think I have to take it as a good sign. Given an otherwise favorable peace deal, Olmert would really reject it over the inclusion of, say, seven Palestinians? Really? Of course not. That’s dumb. Just as the Palestinian counterproposal to have millions of Arabs who’ve never even lived there “return” to Israel’s side of the Green Line is dumb.

The refugee issue, however, is eminently resolvable by negotiations, and when you see people staking out negotiating positions (as opposed to simple posturing “we’re ready for peace; we just need a partner for peace”) that means negotiations may be next. Unless I’m mistaken, Ehud Barak solemnly promised never to agree to a division of Jerusalem just before agreeing to a division of Jerusalem.

Rootless Cosmopolitan

I was turned on the other day to the fact that Time Magazine‘s Tony Karon has a blog about foreign affairs, Rootless Cosmopolitan. It’s really good. Good enough that a ten day old post on the subject “What’s Iraq Actually About Now?” is very much worth your time. It’s an excellent question to ponder when you hear debate about whether or not the surge is “working” — working to do what? And why?

At any rate, if Time were smart they’d incorporate this content into their Middle East blog, though I think you could safely classify a lot of Karon’s posts as “Too Hot for Time.”

Bad NBA Fan

Well, so, I had tickets to this here Wizards-Raptors fiasco but I wound up swapping the tickets with someone else so as to be free to have dinner with some extended family types (can someone explain why Michael Ruffin was even in the game? He should be the 11th man on the team after Arenas, Butler, Jamison, Stevenson, Haywood, Thomas, Daniels, Songaila, Blatche, and Hayes) but then I got home with my brother and we settled in to watch some Lakers-Rockets action. By the end of the third quarter, though, I was too damn tired and went to bed thinking to myself “this’ll probably turn into an overtime thriller or something” and, hey, waddaya know.

The recaps of the game out West should remind us that while certain stat-heads seem to overrate pure shooting efficiency, conventional approaches to basketball continue to significantly underrate it. It seems to me that 53 points on 44 field goal attempts (Kobe’s line), while certainly a lot of points, is distinctly less useful performance to your team than something like Yao Ming’s 39 points on 18 shots.

How It’s Done

As you’ll recall, back in December, the government of Ethiopia made conservatives across the land happy by proving that if you put aside liberal qualms, it’s easy for foreign invaders to crush a domestic Islamist movement. Or something: “Artillery fire rocked Mogadishu on Saturday as Ethiopian and Somali troops launched a third day of a major offensive against Islamist insurgents and clan militiamen that has killed scores of civilians.” Alternatively, nobody likes a foreign invader.

Margin of Error

A joke from Joe Klein: “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is testing the limits of the possible: in a recent poll by a local television station, he had a favorable rating of 3%. Given the poll’s margin of error, it was possible Olmert had no support beyond his extended family.” I’ve had that thought before when I see polls with extreme results. I assume that it’s not literally true. But I don’t understand the right way to interpret a result like that is. If your sample size gives you an MOE of four percent and Olmert has a 3 percent approval rating, how do you interpret the possibility of negative popularity?

There’s also some substantive point here about the prospects for an Israel-Syria peace deal and the Bush administration’s absolutely bizarre desire to prevent that from happening.

My Plan: Ponies for All!

Ramesh Ponnuru reports that Sam Brownback “unveiled his Social Security plan here at the Club for Growth meeting. The plan is heavy on personal accounts and light on benefit cuts.” Can I do a plan that’s heavy on benefit increases but light on tax hikes? Maybe everyone gets a free personal account they can invest in my perpetual motion machine firm. It’s seriously pathetic what passes for conservative “thinking” about domestic policy these days; the ideas aren’t so much bad ideas as they are obviously nonsensical ones. And yet, nobody seems to notice.

Dying to Cheer

Bill Pennington of The New York Times brings us the word that cheerleaders suffer far more injuries than do female athletes in any other sport. “They make you sign a medical release when you join a cheerleading team,” one Jessica Smith told Pennington, “They ought to tell the girls that they are signing a death waiver.” This seems like a somewhat perverse consequence of the effort to turn cheerleading into a “real” sport, incorporating less simple chanting and more athleticism. It turns out that what was created was a really dangerous sport that still has the fluffy image of the cheering of yore.

Preemptive Surrender

“Second, McCain and Giuliani’s broader appeal is due in large part because stand out as different kind of Republicans — they are not known first as conservatives or party guys but as independent-minded reformers.” This is, I think, basically true. It’s also written by Dan Gerstein, erstwhile Democratic strategist. Thus, the next sentence isn’t something like, “thus, the task of Democratic operatives like me is to find ways of persuading voters that this bullshit is bullshit.” Rather, he meekly notes that “it stands to reason they would be more immune to the taint of Bush’s incompetence and hard-partisanship or for the corruption scandals in the Republican Congress.” Gerstein also asserts that Giuliani has “commander-in-chief credentials.” He doesn’t observe that Giuliani is seen as having such credentials. Rather, he just concedes that Giuliani, who lacks commander-in-chief credentials, has commander-in-chief credentials.

Thus, Gerstein concludes, it will be hard for Democrats to win in 2008. And, indeed, it may be hard. But I think it would be easier for Democrats to win elections if the party’s elite consultants were more interested in finding ways to win than in finding excuses for losing and searching for explanations of why any hint of progressivism is doomed.

Show Me The Money

Abusive gerrymandering is bad, and all else being equal I’m all for efforts to reduce it. It is, however, a bit hard to know exactly what the non-gerrymandered district ideal is supposed to be. Should districts be as compact as possible? Should you maximize the number of evenly split districts? Should districts generally approximate statewide opinion? It’s not clear to me that there’s a “right answer” though there certainly are some wrong answers.

As you can probably guess, however, I think indignation about this is overblown. The real issue is simply that incumbency provides such enormous advantages given the current campaign climate. If every congressional district faced one well-funded Democrat and one well-funded Republican every cycle, that would do a lot more for political competitiveness. You could recruit a higher caliber of challenges if the funds were guaranteed to be forthcoming for a challenge, you could be sure that any incumbent who made a major misstep would be fighting for his political life, and you’d probably have more ideological diversity within the parties since you’d have more incentive for Republicans to find candidates well-suited to very liberal districts and vice versa. This world would require, of course, some form of public financing which is even harder to get than serious districting reform. Still, at the end of the day it’s a much more worthwhile goal.

Blogger Ethics Panel

Matt Stoller is quite right on the issue of James Carville. What’s astound here, however, is less Carville than CNN. CNN is a prestigious television network. They have a lot of money. If they wanted to find a Democratic analyst to comment on the primary race who wasn’t invested in any particular outcome, they surely could do so without much trouble. I know a lot of people in this town with genuinely agnostic views on the subject. Carville, who’s doing fundraising letters for Hillary Clinton and more broadly is all tied in with their camp, is clearly an inappropriate choice. So why’s CNN doing it? Probably for no reason. Or, rather, just because they’re CNN “the most trusted name in news” and don’t think it matters what they do. They’re the professionals and everyone knows it, so thy’re under no particular obligation to act like professionals.

Clinton’s Perpetual War

I’ve gone back and forth on this a bit, but John Judis has me convinced that Hillary Clinton’s forward-looking position on the Iraq War is worse than the alternatives. First, her position:

As she recounts in her interview, her solution to Iraq rests partly on a “very vigorous diplomatic effort on the political front and on the regional and international front.” This would include “a track with Syria and a track with Iran.” But the main part of the strategy would be its military dimension. While Clinton does not favor having U.S troops intervene in an Iraqi civil war, she would retain a significant force in Iraq. This force would try to “contain the extremists,” “help the Kurds manage their various problems in the north,” “provide logistical support, air support, training support” to the Iraqi government, and try “to prevent Iran from crossing the border and having too much influence inside of Iraq.”

Clinton’s idea of a residual occupying force goes well beyond that of the recent Senate resolution. The resolution provides for a “limited number” of troops after the pullout date, which would be devoted to training and to “targeted counterterrorism operations.” By contrast, Clinton’s force would have larger geopolitical responsibilities, including the restraint of Iranian power. Clinton says she doesn’t know how many U.S. troops her plan would require, or how many military bases would be required to house them. But Michael Gordon and Patrick Healy, who conducted the interview, noted that former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim, who has developed a strikingly similar plan, estimates that 75,000 American troops would be needed to carry his plan out. That’s about half of the current force stationed in Iraq.

Initially, Clinton’s plan differs from what Bush is doing. While Bush is still seeking victory over Iraqi insurgents, Clinton would withdraw from urban centers and from the civil war that is raging. But in its broader objectives, Clinton’s plan is not dramatically different from that of the Bush administration. The White House certainly isn’t expecting to maintain 160,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, but it is planning a long-term occupation anchored in what the Pentagon has described as “enduring bases.” As Spencer Ackerman has shown, it continues to construct these huge, imposing bases. Clinton’s residual army, like Bush’s, would not merely provide training to the Iraqis in the manner, say, that some European countries have done. The remaining force would have a larger geopolitical mission of keeping Iraq in the American orbit and away from either Al Qaeda or Iran. Their presence in bases would be reminiscent to that of the forces that the United States stationed in Cuba after 1901 or the British stationed in Iraq after 1921– after they had abandoned colonialism for an informal imperial approach.

I think the right thing to say is that the consensus Democratic plan, and variants on it like Barack Obama’s proposal, are consistent with Clinton’s more-spelled-out vision, but not the same as it. The literal text of Obama’s proposal, in short, doesn’t rule out something as grandiose as what Clinton’s proposed, but it also doesn’t commit him to it and there’s no particular reason to think that he or Edwards or anyone else means the same thing that Clinton means. The alternative:

Similarly, if the United States wants to bring stability to Iraq and to the region, it will have to forego any hint of an imperial ambition inside Iraq . This means dismantling its military bases and allowing the Iraqis to develop their own oil industry. It will have to subordinate its military to its diplomatic policy and focus on getting Iraq’s neighbors to take responsibility for stability in the region and for marginalizing Al Qaeda–an objective on which Jordan, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia should be able to agree. It’s not clear if the U.S. will be able to assemble a multinational force that could carry out training and combat terrorism. But as American experience has already shown, a necessary condition of assembling such a force will be a commitment by the United States to cease playing the role of a dominant occupying power.

Many policy experts in Washington, including Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, favor this kind of approach. It enjoys adherents at most of the left-center think tanks. But it has not been embraced by Capitol Hill and the White House. Only two presidential hopefuls, retired General Wesley Clark and Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, clearly support it, and neither of them are declared candidates. The leading Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, favors an even more extreme version of Bush’s policy. (If Clinton is Bush lite, McCain is Bush heavy.)

Right. Edwards and Obama right now are pretty light on where they stand as to these questions, but I’d sure like to know.

Bad Argument of the Day

Tyler Cowen explains that because some labor unions have, in the past, been deeply implicated in organized crime activities that we should embrace a labor law regime that clearly has the country headed toward the total extinction of private sector unions. Presumably, the same logic applies to the publicly traded business corporation, right? If it can be shown that entities organized in this model have ever in the past engaged in criminal behavior that we should simply eliminate the model? Nor do I think Cowen is about to become an immigration restrictionist even though organized crime is heavily associated with immigrant “ethnic” neighborhoods.

And, of course, plenty of countries have had union-friendly legal climates and high levels of unionization without ever developing the union-mob links that were, in fact, a fairly idiosyncratic Americanism.

Outsourcing Distribution

Noam Scheiber worries that Freakonomics is ruining economics — people are finding cute methodological tricks to answer cute questions instead of doing slow, difficult work on the the big issues. Certainly, I wish I didn’t need to read things like Brad DeLong saying “Global outsourcing seems to me at least as likely to improve as to worsen the distribution of income.” We’re talking here about the fabled offshore outsources of IT and other kinds of professional work. I, not an economist, can see two takes here. One says that unlike with earlier phases of trade, this new phase involves jobs with higher-than-average salaries. Thus, while trade has in the past tended to expand the pie at the expense of mostly working class Americans the future of trade will tend to expand the pie at the expense of mostly professional class Americans. The older scenario was a mixed bag, while the second scenario is much more positive.

On the other hand, I can also imagine it being the case that the opening of very large global labor markets plus a techology-driven massive increase in the scope of things that can be traded will simply lead to a structural increase in the income share that goes to capital. Thus, the distributional consequences would be bad. Not being an economist, I have no real idea which of these stories is right. But I sure would like to know! I’d like to think economists are working on understanding this issue better instead of working on funny results about baby names.

An Old Complaint

Sam notes some bad framing by John Boehner. It also involved a lie that’s become so common I didn’t even think to remark on it. But, no, failing to extend Bush’s tax cuts is not “the largest tax increase in history” in any reasonable sense. Thanks, national media, for letting the GOP get away with it! That’s why you earn the big bucks.

Rudy and Kerik

At last, some reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s ties to mobbed-up incompetent Bernard Kerik. Kerik’s ties to Giuliani, and Giuliani’s post-9/11 semi-mythical status almost got this joker a cabinet job.

Nonzero

Andrew Sullivan attempts a rebuttal of David Brooks’ column. I agree with Ross Douthat that Sullivan’s engaging in some wishful thinking about politics here. Lots of people, for example, would like a candidate to take on farm subsidies but the only people who are going to make it a voting issue are the farmers, and no such proposal would ever get out of committee no matter what the president said, since the Agriculture Committees are dominated by . . . the beneficiaries of the subsidies.

On the merits, though, I think the argument founders on the view that “it is simply true that every dollar taken by the government is one dollar less for you and me to spend on what we decide is best.” The overall size of the economic pie is not irrelevant here. It’s possible for taxes as a percent of GDP to go up, while after-tax income also goes up. It all depends on how your policies impact growth. These are, of course, controversial issues. But if liberals are right that a move to a national health care system would be a boon to the economy, then implementing such a system — even if it meant a tax increase — would be fine for freedom. Conversely, insofar as conservatives are right that their agenda will boost growth, more growth will mean more resources available to be taxed and spent on services. It all does depend, on some level, on the actual content and merits of the policies in question.

American Progress for Kids!

Looking to get a start in the high-stakes world of professional political punditry? Consider applying to be Associate Editor of Campus Progress. PDF job description here. Previous occupants of the job have gone on to fame and/or glory, but have not yet achieved fortune.