It looks like Apple is going to get into the internet radio business. You’ll never believe what their going to call it. Yeah, I know: iRadio. Pretty fucking obvious. But it isn’t just the name that’s obvious. The idea is obvious. Apple will only be about the hundredth company to enter the field. And here’s the thing. They could conceivably blow away the competition. And then years from now everyone would think that Apple invented internet radio. Just like they think about everything else that Apple is famous for but didn’t do any core work creating.

Matt Yglesias suggests that Apple will indeed blow away the competition. Why? Because they don’t have to make money at it. This is an idea that, for reasons that escape me, thrills him. He makes the same argument about Amazon delivering fresh groceries. I think the problem is that he is not seeing that capitalism only works for us all if there is competition. In the long run, if Amazon or Apple create a monopoly, they will strengthen their position through political influence and raise prices. Because, as I say again and again and again, prices are not based upon manufacturing costs.

The problem with iRadio is more than just the possibility that it will destroy the smaller companies. For one thing, I’m not at all clear that will happen. And that highlights the bigger problem. Apple makes fine hardware. In general, it doesn’t offer good value. The Apple brand costs far more than it’s worth. But in general, you won’t be disappointed in their hardware. The problem is with their software. It is of surprisingly low quality. And nowhere is that seen more than in iTunes. So I assume that iRadio will be a bloated pig that is more focused on licensing issues than usefulness.

There’s no doubt that iRadio will be successful. As far as I can tell, there is no product so bad that a large fraction of Apple users won’t love it. But I have great doubts about it knocking all the competition out of the way. Rocco Pendola over at The Street wrote a great defense of Pandora, that looks at the problem from a whole different perspective. Primarily, he argues that Pandora has been in this business for 13 years—from the beginning. But more important:

The truth is, if Apple could do that, they wouldn’t. It isn’t the kind of company they are. Again: I’m not slamming Apple in a general way. They are an excellent hardware company. And I think they would be a better company overall if consumers would get past their brand obsessions. But my guess is that just like with most Apple products, I will be able to get along just fine without iRadio.

Arbiter of men’s fashion in the early 19th century (one of the reasons they dressed so silly) Beau Brummell was born on this day in 1778. He is usually “credited” with introducing the modern suit and tie. People have speculated that was gay. Who would have thought such a thing?! Some have even speculated that Brummell and Lord Byron were lovers. You may remember Byron’s poem, “He walks in beauty because he spends 5 hours every day getting dressed.”

In 1917 on this day, Dean Martin was born. I never liked him much when I was a kid. He was just the guy who screwed up Jerry Lewis’ movies. But as with most people, I got over my love of Jerry Lewis and, perhaps less commonly, came to appreciate Martin. He is actually a funny guy. But more importantly, he’s quite a good singer. I don’t like him as much as Sinatra, but I prefer him to Tony Bennett. I’m sure he put on a hell of a show. Here’s a clip that shows this, I think; he’s performing “Volare” and “An Evening in Roma” with lots of laughs beside:

James Ivory, the great director of just about every costume drama you’ve ever seen is 85 today. Two of my favorites: A Room with a View and The Remains of the Day.

Then we get to the music stars. First, Tom Jones is 74. He annoys me personally. But I rather like his voice and I love the arrangements of his bands. Here is a good example of a kick ass band with Jones doing his thang with “It’s Not Unsual”:

And our second music star, Prince is 55 today. You may know him by another name, however: The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Or: The Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Or as I like to think of him: The Artist Formerly Known as the Human Formerly Known as Prince Rogers Nelson. Take your pick. Anyway, he is one of these scary talented guys. But I’ve never really liked him. Here he is doing a song I’ve never heard that sounds very much like every other song of his I’ve heard. And I assure you it is not because I don’t “get” it. It’s fine pop music, but I know he is capable of far better:

We have three actor birthdays today. Liam Neeson is 61. One of the best things ever to come out of Saturday Night Live, Bill Hader is 35. And Michael Cera of Arrested Development is 25.

The day, however, belongs to the great French Impressionist Paul Gauguin who was born on this day in 1848. When I was at the Getty Center last year, I have a revelation while in its impressionism room. Those artists I liked least when I was younger, I now like the most. This is especially true of Paul Cezanne, who I think is by far the most interesting of the impressionists. But it is also true of Gauguin, whose primitivism speaks to be greatly. For example, The Yellow Christ is great religious art from a time that just couldn’t manage it. I think it is better even than any of Dali’s religious paintings.

Andrea has indicated that Gauguin was not a good man who treated his family badly. I don’t find any evidence of that. He strikes me more as a man with marginal mental health who was finally banished by his family when he was of no economic value to them. Regardless, there is no doubt that he lived a scandalous life. He probably had more illegitimate children than the five legitimate ones he had with his wife. And then there are the sexual relationships that he had with prepubescent Tahitian girls. (I would like to think this did not include coitus, but really I don’t want to know.) Regardless, it doesn’t much matter. I don’t have a problem overlooking terrible personal lives in artists I admire. (Rape is another matter, though.) It is more the vile beliefs that put me off.

Happy birthday Paul Gauguin!

This afternoon, Greg Sargent wrote, Dems Vow Hard Line in Immigration Reform’s Next Phase. It is about John Cornyn’s amendment to make the bill “stronger” by increasing border security. People in Washington are claiming that by appealing to conservatives with the amendment like Cornyn’s, they might be able to get 70 Senators to vote for the new bill. What’s more, that might push the House to vote on it. There are so many things wrong here!

To begin with, we are back to the conventional wisdom from after last year’s election that Obama’s win would somehow make Republicans in Congress more compliant. I said it then and I’ll say it now: what the “country” thinks doesn’t mean a thing to a particular member of congress; they don’t get elected by a national vote; all they care about is how things look in their districts and states. So what do House Republicans care if 100 Senators vote for a bill? What’s more, Boehner needs to please House members. It might be a little uncomfortable for him to refuse to vote on a popular Senate bill, but I don’t see how it actually matters to his seat or his speakership.

But what I find most offensive is the idea that if the Democrats just make the bill conservative enough, then the Republicans will vote for it. Haven’t we already gone through this time and again? Didn’t we start with a conservative healthcare bill for the purpose of getting overwhelming support for it? And that turned out like this: not a single Republican voted for it. Not one. This is the modern Republican approach to legislation: push bills as far to the right as possible and then don’t vote for them anyway. Anyone thinking that 16 Senate Republicans are going to vote for the immigration bill is delusional.

There is another side to this: are the Democrats supposed to stand for nothing? I know in CentristLand, passing any law at all is good. Because: bipartisanship! So this bill could just fly through Congress if Democrats were willing to vote for a law that had nothing in it they liked. Why not take out the path to citizenship? After all, that’s the real stumbling block here. All this extra border security is just a way for conservatives to signal to their base that they hate those dirty Mexicans as much as ever. But the point of legislation is to improve policy, or at least to try to do so. I understand that to House Republicans, who have now voted to repeal Obamacare 37 times, it is really about “sending a message.” But that’s just a pathology of the modern Republican Party—not something the rest of us should take seriously.

So I’m pleased that the Democrats are pushing back against this nonsense. As I’ve long argued: the Republicans are so unreasonable because the Democrats have been a damned sight too reasonable. What’s more, Republicans seem to respond well when Democrats play tough. In fact, there is a lot of bully in the modern Republican Party: fight back and see them fold. But the way it is, the only thing the Republicans have to worry about is their crazy base. They need to fear that the Democratic Party will push every advantage and make them look like the unpatriotic idiots they are. Trying to pacify them hasn’t work because it can’t.

I didn’t see Enemy of the State until 2003. I was over at my sister’s and it came on TV. The film grabbed me instantly. It’s directed by Tony Scott, with all of his wonderful excesses. And then there was Gene Hackman taking another turn at the reasonable paranoia of Harry Caul in one of my very favorite films, The Conversation. What was a real surprise to me was that the film was not new—it was released in 1998. It seemed so obviously an attack on the recent huge increase in the surveillance state after 9/11. It wasn’t that I was naive and thinking that this stuff suddenly appeared as a result of the Bush administration. But the film seemed almost exactly what happened: government leaders using fear as political cover to greatly curtail civil liberties.

Most people by now have seen Lindsey Graham telling Fox News, “I’m a Verizon customer; I don’t mind Verizon turning over records to the government, if the government’s gonna make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist with somebody in the United States. I don’t think you’re talking to terrorists; I know you’re not. I know I’m not so we don’t have anything to worry about.” With all due respect to Graham, this entirely misses the point. For one thing, we don’t know what the government is doing with those records. For another thing, data use creep is a well known phenomenon. I can well see the definition of terrorism creeping from “people who bomb us” to “people who sell drugs to us” to “people who cheat on their wives.”

But the biggest issue is the Enemy of the State problem. Under most circumstances, Graham is right: we have nothing to worry about. But we do have something to worry about if we start publicly complaining about government policy. We’ve already seen the “War on Terror” used against peace activists. For the average American Idol fan, there is nothing to fear. But that’s also true under most autocratic governments. The fact that Lindsey Graham and the hosts of Fox and Friends have nothing to fear is irrelevant.

The film Enemy of the State has many problems. For one thing, satellites can’t be moved around like that. But there were three things that Brill says that seem relevant to the recent revelations about the government’s spying programs. First, how long:

Second, how easy:

Third, how bad:

It’s alright to think it’s hopeless, because it probably is. But it is wrong to think it isn’t a problem.

Here is a good segment on the whole issue by Cenk Uygur:

Afterword

A big problem I run into with liberals these days is the idea that this isn’t a problem because we can trust Obama. Of course, it isn’t phrased that way. It’s mostly just an attitude: liberals shrug off these revelations or claim that Bush did the same thing. Well, that’s the point! First, we all elected Obama because we thought he would be better than Bush. Second, even if we can trust him, he will only be president for another three and a half years. Then we will have someone else. Eventually, we will have a Republican. And regardless, eventually we will have a really bad person in the job who will abuse these powers in a way that will shock even the American public. This is important stuff.

Remember yesterday when I reported on Ezra Klein’s most recent false equivalence? He rightly noted that the Republicans are not changing their position on the budget deficit even though the situation has changed substantially. But since he attacked the Republicans, he had to attack the Democrats. So he said that the Democrats have not come to terms with the fact that the Republicans are fine with the Sequester. According to Klein, the Democrats should be negotiating with the Republicans to make the law work better rather than holding out for a deal to replace it.

But then, just this morning, Klein’s own subordinate at Wonk Blog, Dylan Matthews reported, Will a Fight Over Defense Spending Blow Up the Sequester? He started the article almost taunting Klein, “Turns out Republicans aren’t willing to cut defense down to sequestration levels after all.” Of course, the Republicans just want to get rid of the defense Sequester cuts and keep everything else. That’s the usual way: Republicans think compromise is where they get everything they want and the Democrats get nothing. Hence the phrase: fair and balanced.

The point of all of this is that false equivalence is a tricky maneuver. It is really easy to be shown wrong. Yesterday, I called it, “I think he’s stretching here. The Republicans have had years to adjust to falling deficits and the Democrats have had just two months from the very beginning of the Sequester.” This doesn’t mean that the Democrats really can hammer out a deal with the Republicans. But it is simply wrong to state that the Republicans are perfectly happy with the Sequester. In fact, they are anything but; unfortunately, Klein is being naive, taking them at their word about it when we always knew most of them were just positioning themselves.

Whether Klein’s broader point is true, I can’t say. I already argued that if we really look at what the Republicans and Democrats want, they are acting rationally and are in no way ignoring new information. But fundamentally, this doesn’t even matter. Politicians aren’t supposed to respond to facts about the economy. They are supposed to react to us, their constituencies. We are the ones who are supposed to respond to the facts. And in general, I think we do an alright jobs of that. The problem is that the politicians don’t so much respond to us.

There is something that Matt Yglesias wrote that I quote all the time. In it, he talks about how those running around screaming about the federal debt are not really interested in it. He compares them to a hypothetical group of Quakers claiming that we must cut spending on the military in order to reduce the deficit. If the Quakers then rejected raising taxes to reduce the deficit, we would figure that the Quakers didn’t really care about the deficit; they just used it as an excuse to cut military spending. Well, the same thing is going on with the deficit scolds: they claim to want to reduce the deficit, but really they care about other things—cutting entitlements mostly.

Yesterday, Yglesias presented a chart from the Center for American Progress (pdf) that shows that the medium term budget deficit has largely been fixed. Fundamentally, he is making the same argument that Ezra Klein did yesterday: that the changing facts are not changing behavior in Washington. But yesterday, I countered that Klein was being naive. Conservatives are not calling for reducing the deficit because they care about the deficit. If they did, they wouldn’t try to lower taxes and increase military spending.

Yglesias puts it much the same way that I do:

And that takes us back to the Quaker problem. Why is it that the mainstream media still take these budget hawks seriously? Really, why did they ever? A budget hawk like Romney who wanted to reduce taxes and increase spending on an already bloated military should have been laughed out of politics. But he wasn’t. Most people pretended as though he was some honest broker.

Now the situation is far more absurd. We’ve managed to bring the deficit down without touching Social Security and Medicare. So what are the deficit scolds going to do now? They’re going to lie and obfuscate. They are going to create calculators like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that are designed to frighten more than enlighten. But the issue that Klein and Yglesias don’t discuss is that it doesn’t matter what those people do. What matters—what is really important—is that the media take these people seriously. They pretend that they really do care about the deficit. The the real question is when the media will start treating these people as the charlatans they are.

On this day in 1755, Nathan Hale was born. He is know for his death. When he was being hanged by the British as a spy, he said, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” Maybe he didn’t actually say it. But after people die, they become mythical. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And so of course Nathan Hale said that his only regret was blah blah blah. He was 21 when he was put to death.

Speaking of the Revolutionary War, American painter John Trumbull was born in 1756. He really wasn’t very good. The Russian Romantic poet Alexander Pushkin was born in 1799. Radio pioneer Karl Ferdinand Braun was born in 1850. And scandalous Flowers in the Attic author V. C. Andrews was born in 1923.

Bass/stick player Tony Levin is 67 years old today. The great singer Holly Near is 64. Here she is singing “Gentle Angry People”:

And speaking of lesbians, Sandra Bernhard is 58. The great tennis player Bjorn Borg is 47. Borg allows me to spend a moment talking about how much watching tennis on TV sucks. Borg was known for his heavy top-spinned fore and backhands. But watching tennis on TV, you would never know that they put spins on the ball at all. In other words, 90% of the craft of tennis playing is lost on TV. It’s a great game, but you really have to be there.

But as much as I admire Borg and Near, the day belongs to the great Spanish Baroque painter Diego Velazquez who was born in 1599. He is mostly known for his portraiture, but I prefer his historical and “everyday” painting.

Happy birthday Diego Velazquez!

Brad Plumer presented a fun math problem this morning. But instead of using it to discuss why math makes everything better, he insisted upon discussing policy. Environmental policy, in fact. Now I’m all for that. You can decide for yourself if the article is worth reading from its title, Want to Boost Fuel Economy? Stop Thinking About Miles Per Gallon. It is worth reading! But I will give you the important conclusion: small increases in the mpg of gas hogs are far more important than big increases in the mpg of tiny cars that already have decent fuel economy. In other words, if you are shopping for a hybrid, mpg doesn’t matter that much. But if you are shopping for an SUV, you should pay close attention to minor differences in competing model fuel ratings.

How do we know this? Mathematics! All is revealed in the following puzzle:

Let’s assume that x is the number of miles that Dylan and Sarah each drive in a year. (I’ve already lost you, haven’t I? Pay attention! This is not just interesting; it is fun.) That means that the gallons of gas they each use is given by x divided by the mpg they get. So originally, Dylan uses x/29 gallons of gas per year. With his new car, he uses x/50 gallons. Similarly, Sarah uses x/12 gallons and x/15 gallons. The amount of gas they each save is given by the amount of gas they use with the new car subtracted from the amount they used with the old car:

To figure out who saves more gas, we just divide these two equations. This causes the number of miles (x) to cancel out and we get:

So Sarah will always save 15% more gas than Dylan for her small 3 mpg increase (25%) compared to his large 21 mpg increase (72%). You probably already know why this is: Sarah starts by using a huge amount of gas. In Plumer’s example, he uses 1,000 miles for his x value and finds that while Dylan decreases his gas consumption from 34 to 20, Sarah reduces her consumption from 83 to 67. In other words, she has more gas usage to save. Or think of it this way: imagine you have a car that gets a million miles to the gallon. If you drive 1,000 miles, you would only use 0.001 gallons of fuel. Getting a car with better gas mileage can’t same you more than 0.001 gallons.

So remember this if you are buying an SUV. And if you’re buying an SUV, I certainly hope that you have a very good reason!

David Bernstein wrote a good overview of last night’s Massachusetts Senatorial debate.If you’re interested in the race, I recommend clicking over and reading the whole thing. All I’m interested in here is the way that politics really does make a reasonable discussion impossible.

Current House representative Ed Markey is the favorite in this race. Republican Gabriel Gomez has spent the campaign thus far trying to get traction against Markey. And you can sympathize with Gomez. He is, after all, running in a very liberal state. What’s more, Markey is popular and experienced. So one of Gomez’s complaints is that Markey is an ineffective legislator as proved by the fact that Markey has never gotten his own bill signed into law by the president.

This was discussed at the debate last night. And Markey had a good answer. He has written and sponsored a number of bills that were later integrated into larger bills that became law:

Normally, that would be the end of this discussion. But Gomez doesn’t accept it, claiming that this is some kind of lawyer’s trick. As Bernstein notes, even if that were true, it makes no sense. Gomez only brought up the “you ain’t passed no laws” claim to argue that Markey was ineffective. Clearly getting his bills passed inside a larger bill with someone else’s name on the top is effective.

This is unfortunately the nature of politics. Gomez can concede the point and look like an idiot or not concede the point and look like an idiot. There is no room for him to win by manning up and admitting that the new information means that Markey really has been an effective legislator. Of course, the original idea was wrong. Legislators are successful in a lot of different ways; they don’t need to author legislation. But what is a conservative to do in Massachusetts? He can’t argue about ideology. So the debate is necessarily about technocracy. And even in that way, Republicans are at a distinct disadvantage.

I’m not sure there is a solution for this. I would think that blue state Republicans would liberalize more to become competitive. But they can only go so far before they become Democrats themselves. The process works better with Democrats in red states. Blue state Republicans have the advantage that if they can just get a low-turnout election, they might win. But the problem is more fundamental: we don’t want a real debate about issues. And so Gomez is using the only tools he can.

I’ve been trying to figure something out. How does immigration reform help Republicans? I mean, I understand if Republicans actually embraced it. They could changed their tune and say, “Of course we are for immigration reform. Immigration has made America great. People who risk death to come to America for economic opportunity are exactly the kind of people we want!” But they aren’t doing that. Even the big Republican advocates approach immigration reform as something they do reluctantly. “Okay, we’ll let the evil brown skinned people already here stay—but no more!” Then, as Greg Sargent reported this morning, Republicans in the Gang of Eight are trying to make the immigration “compromise” less “you can stay” and more “protect the border.”

The argument for Republicans embracing immigration reform is that it acts as a kind of political poison, keeping Latino voters focused on this one bad aspect of the Republican Party. But as I was arguing last year after the election, Republicans have much bigger problems with Latinos than the immigration issue. As long as Latinos are poorer than other groups, they will continue to vote for the Democrats in large numbers.

This isn’t all about political tactics. I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that Democrats want immigration reform because it will broaden their base of support starting in about 15 years. Similarly, I don’t think that Republicans are against reform because it might hurt them starting in about 15 years. I know some commentators have argued this, but politicians just don’t plan that far ahead. From a tactical standpoint, it is just about constituencies. Latinos are a major Democratic constituency. They are not a major Republican constituency. In fact, a major Republican constituency hates immigration reform.

A better argument in favor of the Republicans supporting reform is not that they want to win the Latino vote; it is just that they want to improve it from the pathetic 27% that Romney received. They remember the halcyon days when Bush won 43%. But I still don’t see how this helps them. If immigration reform passes, those Latinos who really care about the issue will see it as something that the Democrats gave them. Immigration reform could make Latinos even less likely to vote Republican.

In the long run, Latinos will stop being a minority group. They will just be like the Italians or the Irish. And in that case, they will vote as their interests dictate. But even if our immigration laws never get reformed and Latinos still strongly associate with the undocumented community, they will not blame Republicans of that time for the inaction of Republicans now. They will judge the Republicans on the positions that they hold at that later time. So again, I ask: if Republicans are unwilling to appeal to the Latino community in any other way, why should they try to appeal in this one way? Especially when their support is at best grudging and at worse nonexistent.