Henry

Josh Marshall is a little uncertain about Jerry Nadler’s proposed measure to reform the pardons process.

in addition to always being leery of fiddling with the constitution, I don’t know if I like the idea of changing the pardon power. I think it’s an important safety valve in our constitutional system. If it’s been a problem, rather than changing the constitution, maybe we need better presidents.

Looking more closely at what Nadler is saying, it seems to me that there are two distinct elements. One is the suggestion that the President not be allowed to pardon members of his/her own administration. This, I suspect, is the bit that Josh is leery of – I imagine that his thinking is that in a country where the prosecution is highly politicized (as in the US), the benefits of having the President able to overturn politically-driven prosecutions may outweigh the benefits. This, I think can be argued either way. But I can’t see any very good argument against the second, admittedly more tentative element of Nadler’s proposal – that the President’s power to pardon be restricted during his/her final months in office. As we saw most notoriously with Clinton, presidents may possibly have a strong incentive to pardon people in the closing months of their administration, because they won’t have to pay a significant political price for it. This creates real problems of democratic accountability, in an area where the arguments for political discretion seem relatively weak (e.g. if the claim is that the power would be used primarily to overturn bogus political prosecutions, then there shouldn’t be much of a legitimacy hit for pardoning people earlier in the President’s term). So is there any good rationale why the President shouldn’t be constitutionally forbidden from issuing pardons say, during the interregnum after November 4 and before the new President takes office?

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I’ve been puzzling over this post by Steve Bainbridge for a few days. Steve vigorously denounces a suggestion by Michael Winters that Douglas Kmiec be appointed ambassador to the Vatican, saying that such an appointment would be an insult to the church.

I take it that, as a general rule, one should not choose ambassadors whose appointment will insult the country to which they are credentialed. One would not expect Obama to appoint a known anti-Zionist as ambassador to Israel, for example. Yet, while Winters and other pro-Obama US Catholics might delight in tweaking the Holy father by appointing Kmiec as ambassador to the Vatican, it would be tantamount to sending Norman Finkelstein to Israel. Doug Kmiec chose to turn his back on a life time of support for conservative and, in particular, pro-life causes to endorse Barack Obama. … Since the election, Kmiec has further angered pro-life Catholics by, among other things, his recent love letter of praise for Edward Kennedy. … His main role in public life now seems to be giving cover to pro-abortion rights Democrats. The Vatican has made clear that a Kmiec appointment would be most unwelcome … Obama may have won the vote of a majority of America’s cafeteria Catholics. Even so, to appoint Doug Kmiec as ambassador to the Holy See would be an insult to both the Vatican and to “serious, loyal” Catholics everywhere.

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I have a Bloggingheads on the Mumbai attacks with Sumit Ganguly, an expert on Indian politics at University of Indiana. Since Sumit, unlike me, knows a whole lot about the background and likely consequences, the format is more like an interview than a dialogue. Click below to see it (or here for the home site).

Can’t imagine how we missed this the first time around …

Over lunch not long after Summers took over the presidency in 2001, Ellison said, Summers suggested that some funds should be moved from a sociology program to the Kennedy School, home to many economists and political scientists. ”President Summers asked me, didn’t I agree that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?” Ellison said. ”To which I laughed nervously and didn’t reply.”

Via Josep Colomer.

Gideon Rachman says what I’ve been thinking.

In fact, I would even argue that the G8 was quite well-placed to see off the upstart G20 – were it not for one thing. Next year it will be presided over by that one-man wrecking crew, Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy. Berlusconi has a “sense of humour” that makes him a uniquely disastrous chair for international organisations. His presidency of the European Union in 2003 was catastrophic. He caused uproar in the European Parliament by comparing a German politician to a Nazi concentration-camp guard. In an official photo, he made the sign of the cuckold’s horns behind the head of a Spanish minister. He opened a summit designed to discuss the future of Europe by suggesting to his fellow leaders that they discuss women and football instead. Then he turned to the chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, and suggested that he should open the discussion since he had been married four times. Amazingly enough, Schroeder did not see the funny side.

Not that any of this is likely to hurt his domestic approval ratings or anything (the public persona he has constructed for himself is quite extraordinary), but it certainly should be interesting to watch from a safe distance.

It appears that The Monkey Cage, a blog that I contribute to together with a bunch of other political scientists, has been domain squatted. Hence, it will no longer be themonkeycage.org, unless we somehow manage to get it back (fat chance). As soon as the domain name propagates (probably 24 hours or so) it will be http://themonkeycage.net. Those of you who read the blog please update accordingly – I’d be grateful if those of you who have blogs that are likely to be read by Monkey Cage readers passed on the information about the new URL.\

UPDATE: It looks as though the problem isn’t as bad as I had thought – one of my co-bloggers (who shall remain nameless) had forgotten to renew the URL GoDaddy screwed up the renewal of the URL and it is simply going to the registrar’s home page. So the old URL should be back soon – but the new one will work too.

Some consumer venting. In 2006, I used E-Fax for several months, and then cancelled the service. At that point, it was necessary to use a chat client to cancel – I presume in order to increase the chance of retention by raising hurdles for customers who wish to depart. After going through a lengthy and tedious process of telling the E-Fax representative that no, I did not want to get two months service free to encourage me to stay, I quit, and was told by the representative that my account was cancelled. Story over – or so I thought. Then today, I check the credit card account that the E-fax account billed to (it’s automatically balanced and one that I rarely use) and discover that E-fax have never cancelled, and have been billing me $16.95 a month for the last two years. I call customer service, and eventually get transferred to a supervisor called ‘Martha’ who is polite, but insists (a) that their customer records show that I accepted the offer of two months free service to stay (which is flatly untrue), (b) that the transcript of the chat conversation can’t be found (and because it can’t, she suggests that I must have called to cancel, which was an impossibility at the time), and (c ) that their inflexible policy is only to refund for a maximum of four months of service. She conceded that the online chat agents were encouraged to retain customers – when I asked whether or not their pay reflected their retention success, she told me that she didn’t know, because they were based in India (but suggested, without ever quite explicitly saying so, that they weren’t – I strongly suspect from my knowledge of how these subcontracting relations work that this isn’t true).

Yes – this is partly my own fault for not checking all my accounts regularly to be sure that weird things aren’t happening – but it has left a pretty bad taste in my mouth regarding E-Fax and its business model (a couple of cursory Google searches suggest that I am not the only unhappy customer). So I strongly recommend that before people think about signing up for E-fax, they consider the difficulties of cancelling, the adoption by the company of a cancellation system that provides you with no record to prove that you have cancelled, when in fact you have, and the fact that the sales agent in my case at least seems to have falsely recorded the outcome of our interaction. I told the representative that I understood that this was the policy of the company, but that I would be blogging it to express my strong dissatisfaction – so here it is (and may it put a pox and a plague their Google searches).

Dani Rodrik had a provocative blogpost a little while back:

Here is the dilemma we cannot evade. If we want a truly global financial system, we need to acquiesce in a global regulator and a global lender of last resort. If we do not want the latter, we cannot have an integrated global financial system, so we must acquiesce in–gasp!–capital controls.

The counterargument that I’ve been hearing from people (well, one significant person anyway) involved in the Obama transition process is twofold. First – that it would take far too long to create any global regulatory structure, given differences in national level regulatory schemes. Second, that we don’t need any binding global regulations anyway, and that everything we need to do can be done through dialogue between the national regulators that already exist. Maybe the best way to think this through is to look at the best example that we have of a transnational regulatory system with teeth – the European Union.

The EU’s experience reinforces the claim that it is really difficult to get national regulatory systems to play nicely with each other, and it is _especially_ difficult to get them to play nicely in the realm of banking and financial system regulation, because these regulations are (a) really important, (b) reflect genuinely different national priorities and banking systems, and (c ) also reflect the desires of strongly embedded interest groups in the national systems that like things the way they are (the Italian central bank, for example, is effectively beholden to a number of national banks inside and outside the _salotto buono_ and unsurprisingly these national banks want to keep the current system unchanged).

However, it also provides strong evidence of the problems of weak regulation. One of the major reasons why the European financial system is finding it hard to cope is exactly the lack of a Europe level regulatory backstop and lender of last resort, that could deal with banks that are effectively playing in a Europe-wide (if not worldwide) market. National governments are trying to do what they can, but their efforts are sometimes pretty wobbly. And the EU experience completely belies the claim that regulatory dialogues are a good substitute for comprehensive supranational regulation. If there is one thing that Europe does to a fault, it’s regulatory dialogues. But they do diddly-squat to stop countries defecting when they are in hard situations (e.g. the Irish offer to guarantee bank deposits when its credibility came under attack, Germany’s follow-up behaviour etc). This isn’t to say that one can easily create a global regulator with teeth and genuinely binding regulatory power – building one would be somewhere between very difficult and effectively impossible. It is to say that Rodrik’s conundrum is a real one – and the claim that governments can muddle through with a little more coordination and talk among themselves is almost certainly wishful thinking.

My first book is coming out with Cambridge next year, _The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation_, and the publisher is asking me whether I want to suggest a cover image. My first thought – to do a Wordle of the text – apparently isn’t going to work – and my visual imagination and knowledge of the visual arts leaves a fair amount to be desired. So I thought that I would throw it open to CT readers, who might have some ideas of where to go for good images (or even some proposed images of their own). The themes of the book include trust and distrust, the mechanical engineering industries in Germany and Italy and the Sicilian Mafia. Possibilities might include classical art, cartoons, political images related to the above. Ideally, nothing with expensive rights of reproduction, since I think that I have to cough up the fees myself, but any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated (and reciprocated with the admittedly modest reward of acknowledgment in the book’s introduction).

Aaron Swartz tells us about another effort to fence off the information commons.

OCLC was founded in 1967 by Fred Kilgour, a pioneering Ohio librarian, with a simple idea: Instead of having every library in the country separately catalog a book — laboriously entering its title, author, and subjects in just the right format — why not have one person enter the cataloging information, upload it to a central computer, and then let everyone else download a copy from there? It was called WorldCat, for World Catalog, and it’s been a resounding success. … OCLC’s control passed from librarians and academics to business people (its senior executive comes from consulting firm Deloitte & Touche). They realized they had a monopoly on their hands … used the resulting flow of cash to fund a spree of acquisitions of commercial companies and expand into other fields … dragged its feet in getting library records on the Web …

All this was bad, but it was tolerable. At least folks could build an alternative to OCLC. So that’s what I and others have been doing — Open Library provides a free collection of over 20 million book records that anyone can browse, download, contribute to, and reuse for absolutely free. Naturally, OCLC hasn’t been a fan. They’ve been trying to kill it from the beginning — threatening its funders with lawsuits, insulting it in the press, and putting pressure on member libraries not to cooperate. … But recently, it’s gone one step way too far. Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library. It’s not just Open Library that’s at risk here — LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened.

This seems to me to be a terrible idea, for all the obvious reasons. I suggest that CT readers who have a mind to should sign this petition, and email their librarians to request that they investigate this and seriously consider protesting this proposal. I’ve drafted a short email (which I’ve sent to my own university librarian) which people can use as a model if they want; it’s below the fold.

Update: Inside Higher Ed has a story this morning suggesting that the offending policy has been partly amended.

By the time news of the policy, to take effect in February, spread across the blogosphere, OCLC posted a new draft softening some of its requirements — for example, by making it optional to use or keep the text referring to WorldCat’s policies and clarifying that non-commercial use of the records was generally protected, except in cases where it could interfere with OCLC’s mission. And while the shift signals some openness to members’ concerns, some still aren’t satisfied, especially with the way the initial decision was made. … Terry Reese, the Gray Chair for Innovative Library Services at Oregon State University Libraries, said in an e-mail that it is partially a philosophical issue: “At its core, libraries have always been about providing access to our information and our metadata. We don’t make value judgments as to why people may want/need to use our materials — but that’s essentially what OCLC is doing now (whether intentional or not).” He continued, “As OCLC is oft to bring up, WorldCat is a member created resource — yet, OCLC seems to be the only organization that is allowed to have unfettered access to that data. There are many ways to protect the membership’s investment in the data that has been created.” But for OCLC, the issue is one of adapting to a Google-oriented world without sacrificing the value of WorldCat.
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Via TechPresident, this story about fundraising and t-shirts.

So I got another e-mail from Barack Obama. I get ‘em all the time. This one asked me for $30 to help replenish the funds of the Democratic National Committee, which apparently blew all its money exterminating the GOP. … I know the campaign is over, but I’m missing the fray. Besides, the e-mail says, if I donate the $30 I’ll get this cool Limited Edition T-shirt. … Okay, it’s a hideous T-shirt, but still. Funny thing, though: It turns out that a friend of mine got a similar e-mail today. But she was told that to get the same hideous Limited Edition T-shirt, _she’d have to cough up $100._ … It doesn’t take a political scientist to figure out what’s going on here. My friend made her donations in increments of $100. I made mine by letting BO tap my credit card for $25 a month.

This kind of generosity-to-a-cause discrimination has a certain economic rationale. But it seems to me nonetheless to be a very stupid way of raising money if (as here) there is a decent chance that people at the different price points will be able to compare notes with each other. My (perhaps flawed) back-of-the-envelope sense of the sociology of giving is that people are likely to be very highly sensitive to perceived unfairness in the allotment of tokens of recognition (even truly foul t-shirts like this one). If people get the same recognition for very different donations, then the perceived value of that recognition is going to plummet, and potential donors, rather than being motivated to give, are likely to be annoyed. That said, my knowledge of the literature on this topic basically amounts to vague memories of having read Titmuss 15 years ago, so I may be wrong … Kieran? Anyone else? ?

I’m a bit worried that in all of the pouring of cold water on assorted spanking fantasies in: re unemployment during the Depression, people are losing track of the main point that needs to be hammered home: that Amity Shlaes is an unscrupulous hack. Readers may need to be reminded of her final two op-ed columns before her inglorious and swift departure from the pages of the _Financial Times._ [click to continue…]

Whatever disappointments and unhappiness lie in the future, my two sons are going to grow up in an America where it is a _done deal_ that an African-American with a foreign-sounding name can run for President and win. That’s pretty nice to wake up to.

What Robert Farley just said.

Update: Gregory King, associate director of public relations for AFSCME has spoken to me on the phone at length, and sent me the statement below. I remain highly skeptical about the claim that this wasn’t gaybaiting, but am happy to give both sides of the argument.

AFSCME’s radio advertisement in Kentucky says absolutely nothing about Senator McConnell’s sexual orientation. We are as interested in McConnell’s undisclosed service records as we were in those of George W. Bush. Urging Senator McConnell to be “straight” with the voters of Kentucky is not gay-baiting. That is as ridiculous as suggesting that Senator John McCain named his bus the Straight Talk Express in order to appeal to anti-gay voters. AFSCME is being unfairly smeared with an unfounded charge of gay-baiting. We have done no such thing.