That Sneaky Yglesias Fellow!

Matthew Yglesias has been posting to his own blog sparsely during the week in recent months, since he started his job at The American Prospect. He's been saving stuff for his own blog for the weekends, since TAP doesn't operate on weekends, which is actually kind of nice because it keeps something new in Blogistan when everyone else (myself included) is taking a breather. But yesterday and today, he's on a posting tear. What a devil.

Anyway, he links to an interesting article about Howard Dean and gun control, which is frankly an issue that I really don't care too much about. I don't like guns, and I wouldn't shed a tear if they all went away, but I am about as likely to put my own energy into advocating such a policy as I am to open a diner along I-90 in South Dakota. It just doesn't seem that big a deal to me, so I didn't know that Howard Dean was significantly to the right of many Democrats on guns. And it just goes to show what a dysfunctional house we Democrats can be: we'll cheerfully attack our own people from the left and from the right. Yeesh.

He also discusses the idea of splitting California into two states, a suggestion that comes up because of problems that pretty much exist everywhere. Sometimes I think that New York City, Yonkers and Long Island should be spun off into their own state, but that's mainly when I'm feeling snarky. There's no real, compelling reason to do so, even if as a Buffalonian living in an old steel town on the shores of one of the Great Lakes I feel more kinship with cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland than I do with New York City. (I remember working in my telesales job on 9-11-01, having to place my daily allotment of calls, and a few customers expressed sympathy because the victims were my fellow New Yorkers, and in truth, I hadn't thought of it that way. My personal feelings of allegiance are more local than that, and also wider than that -- I consider myself an American and a Buffalonian more than I consider myself a New Yorker.)

Moving on, Matthew also debunks the idea that disapproval of Schwarzenegger's treatment of women is hypocritical if you opposed the Clinton impeachment. Matthew's take -- that opposing the removal of an already elected and serving officeholder is not the same as opposing the election of a mere candidate for office, when both have done similar things -- is right on. I remember once commenting to a friend of mine, during the impeachment affair, that this was why I didn't like term limits: I no longer had the option of not voting for the guy. (Personally, I don't much care about the accusations about Schwarzenegger. First, he's not going to be my governor, so any interest I'd have would merely be a sporting one; second, he's already demonstrated to me that he's not worthy by virtue of his refusal to discuss in any way what he plans to do with the office once he has it. My suspicion is that he will push for some token cuts in programs, they'll get blocked by the overwhelmingly Democratic California legislature; he'll blame them for the gridlock, and wait for the business cycle to swing around into "boom" mode so the resultant increase of government revenues will erase the current deficits.)

Finally, Matthew points to an article about the fraying allegiance between libertarians and conservative Republicans. I'm reminded of a quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden's sidebar: "Just because you are on their side doesn't mean that they are on your side."