On this day in 1511, the Italian sculptor and architect Bartolomeo Ammannati was born. I think his sculptures are beautiful but they aren’t held in high regard because he so much copied Michelangelo. But if you are going to copy someone, copy the best. Anyway, I really like Michelangelo, so it makes sense that I would like Ammannati. It doesn’t much matter that he wasn’t innovative. He was considered a far better architect during his life.

The Baroque opera composer Antonio de Literes was born in 1673. One doesn’t much hear Baroque opera these days, but I don’t much understand it. It is wonderfully varied. The following video is a good example of his work. It is from a lyric-drama, Acis y Galatea. The song is “Confiado Jilguerillo”:

French neoclassical painter Joseph-Marie Vien was born 1716. I’m very fond of his work. Illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, famous for the Uncle Sam recruiting poster, was born in 1877. The great lyricist Sammy Cahn was born in 1913. Actor E.G. Marshall was born in 1914. And our president’s father, Barack Obama, Sr was born in 1936.

Perhaps the greatest songwriter of the 20th century, Paul McCartney is 71. I don’t much like him as a performer and I am quite tired of his work. But he is a towering figure in songwriting. I rather like John Lennon, but he wasn’t half the songwriter McCartney was. Let me just mention a couple of truly great tunes: “Yesterday” (very likely the greatest pop song ever written), “Penny Lane,” and “Lady Madonna.” But I really could go on and on and on. He also wrote by far the best John Lennon tribute song:

Two childhood crushes Carol Kane and Isabella Rossellini are both 61. And singer Misia is 57.

The day, however, belongs to movie critic Roger Ebert who was born on this day in 1942 (the same day as McCartney). As everyone knows, I am not keen on movie critics. And there is much to complain about with Ebert. But he did know film and he loved it. And when you get right down to it, the biggest problem with critics is that they don’t love the art form. In a better time, Ebert might have been really great. If he had had time to spend with the films and not do all those horrible “one off” reviews. Still, his reviews were always interesting to read. His knowledge of film history helped. But even more important: he was a really good writer. He is missed.

Happy birthday Roger Ebert!

As you have probably heard, Michael Hastings died this morning in a car crash. Rolling Stone has a good obituary for him that you ought to read. I noticed that last November I wrote what could have stood as it’s own obituary in an article, Michael Hastings Ruining Journalism… Again. “I really like Michael Hastings. Like most people, I learned about him when he published his explosive The Runaway General in Rolling Stone. I didn’t give the article itself that much thought. A reporter had a good scoop. It was the reaction to the article that made me take notice of him. It seemed you couldn’t turn the page of a magazine without being confronted with another journalist explaining why Hastings’ article was a bad thing. Never again would the disgraced Stanley McChrystal trust him.”

Of course, that wasn’t what I most liked about him. I continued, “My opinion of Hastings went even higher when he appeared on Up with Chris Hayes in August and dismantled Josh Barro’s fascist argument against Julian Assange. Even more than Jeremy Scahill, Hastings seems determined to get at the truth regardless (or perhaps because) of powerful interests.”

Here he is in that exchange saying what ought to be understood by all journalists, “My job is not to help the US government fulfill their diplomatic objectives.”

And here he is on CNN with the evil idiot Piers Morgan:

Hastings’ death is a great loss to journalism. It shouldn’t be. He should have been typical. He was anything but. And now he’s not even around as an example of how the job should be done.

Rush Limbaugh asked a very good question: if immigration reform is so great for Republicans, why are Democrats in favor of it. And Jonathan Chait provided an answer: because Democrats will still get more credit for it than Republicans. And if it fails, Democrats have to be in the position to say that it wasn’t their fault. Chait is correct, but I think there is a more important point: Democrats agree with the policy.

This is the fundamental problem with the Republican Party. It has become nothing but an opposition party. Its ideology basically comes down to: whatever the Democrats are against. The Democratic Party still maintains a traditional approach to policy: they would be thrilled if the Republicans agreed with them on anything. In fact, just look at Obamacare. That was a big push by the Democrats to create a bill that would appeal to the Republicans. The Democrats want to find common ground because there are actual things they want to do. The whole Republican position is that there will be no common ground. The few things they seem to believe in are placed so far outside normal debate as to be safe. Somehow, I feel that if the Democrats decided that the Estate Tax should be repealed, the Republicans would say that we needed to provide a tax credit to rich people when they die.

Let’s think about immigration. Most of the people who are living in America illegally sacrificed a great deal to come here. Many of them risked their lives. In fact, a great many people have died trying to get to this country. Who in their right mind thinks they do this so they can get on welfare? If conservatives were honest, they would admit that the kind of people who come here illegally are exactly the kind of people we want in this country. These are people who really value what this country stands for and what it has to offer. I understand that we don’t want to incentivize people coming here illegally. But that isn’t the argument that conservatives make against providing a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million people who are here illegally. Instead, the argument is: they broke the law! Yeah, they broke the law because they love this country. Isn’t that worth something?

So why are Republicans against immigration reform? Part of it is just bigotry. The base and to a lesser extent the elite of the party don’t like immigrants—and that includes legal immigrants. This is all part of the narrative that America was founded by white Christians. Somehow, the less white and less Christian we become, the less authentic we are. This is the basis of the hatred of diversity. You’ll note that there is no complaint about Canadian immigration, even though at many times in the past there were much greater economic opportunities in America. But they are all white and they all speak English. Well, almost all.

But there is another important aspect to resistance to immigration reform—although admittedly, not nearly as important as bigotry. Republicans have often been more than willing to ignore their base if the business community wanted something enough. And they surely do want immigration reform—especially this bill that has all kinds of goodies for them. None of that can really trump the imperative that they are against anything the Democrats are for.

Rush Limbaugh is right to ask what immigration reform gets the Republicans. As I’ve argued a lot, Latinos hate the Republican Party for far more than their stand on immigration. In fact, that isn’t even the primary issue. Immigration is the least that Republicans can do for the Latino community and at best they will do it only grudgingly. People aren’t stupid; they know when you hate them; and they don’t like that. So what does immigration reform get Republicans given they are unwilling to do anything else? Damned little.

Hope is not a good environmental plan. For years I hoped that James Lovelock was right and that the earth is its own kind of super-organism that wouldn’t allow itself to be perturbed by a little radiative forcing this way or that. But that hope came to nothing as the earth most clearly got hotter and hotter. The conservative approach to environmental problems is always the same: technology will save us. That isn’t completely loony. Technology usually does help. But just letting the free market take care of the environment is a recipe for disaster. Conservatives seem blind to the fact that the biggest part of past solutions to environmental problems has been governmental regulations. The truth is that the conservative plan for the future is hope: the hope that it will all work itself out.

Other than a few apiologist, the plan for the great drop in bee populations has been hope. And we really need a better plan. Whole Foods has put out the following image comparing our produce offerings today with what they would look like if bees went extinct. But even it underestimates the problem. It only shows first order effects. And that’s frightening enough:

The only thing that could make this worse is if we learned that colony collapse disorder is caused by something that the rich make a lot of money from. Because if that’s the case, we are doomed.

Everybody’s been writing about Alan Krueger‘s talk at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Who is Krueger? The original drummer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience? The guy who wrote “Wild Thing”? A rock historian? No, no, and no. He is the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers—the kind of person who often gives talks at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The talk was titled “The Land of Hope and Dreams: Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class.” Neil Irwin was the first person I saw report on this and he focused on the most shocking bits of data about income inequality in the music industry. In 1982, the top 1% of musicians earned 26% of all concert revenue. In 2003, it had increased to 56%—more than double! So as bad as our economic inequality is generally, it is even worse in the music business. That probably doesn’t come as a big surprise, but why it is so is hardly obvious.

Based upon work by a couple of sociologists, it turns out that our tribal instincts make music much more of a winner-take-all market than would be indicated by artists’ actual appeal. Put bluntly: people are much more interested in music that they know is popular. I know this from my own experiences. Whenever I spend time with people who listen to what is more or less “Top 40” radio, I am struck by how generic and uninteresting the music is. It seems that it is popular because it is popular. I don’t say this as a snob. There is plenty of music I don’t personally enjoy that I still think is great. I think I am in a position to distinguish between music I don’t like and music that has all the creativity of a GM assembly line.

Dean Baker added to this discussion by noting how the ever increasing copyright length adds to inequality. Marketing new artists is an expensive endeavor. It is much cheaper to just re-release yet another version of an old band. As a result, the money just keeps flowing to Paul McCartney and Peter Frampton—both of whom are already wealthy. Baker also noted the extra profits that certain artists made as people switched from vinyl to CDs to MP3s and then, of course, back to vinyl. No one need buy “The Man from San Sebastian” more than once.

E.J. Dionne focused his attention on Krueger’s point about the luck that is involved in being successful in the music business. And of course, it is as about as true of the economy generally. Dionne wrote:

And that gets to Krueger’s main point that we need to grow the economy from the middle out. We’ve spent the last 35 years growing the economy from the top down. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the economy has grown and those at the top are the only ones who have benefited. The real problem is that the rich can take care of themselves. Even if the government enacts laws designed to take money away from the rich, they have the ability to protect themselves. But when the government enacts laws designed to give money to the rich, there is no counter balance. The middle class are in no position to protect themselves. And that leaves us where we are today.

It is good to know that Obama has people like Alan Krueger around him. I still don’t expect much. Recent history indicates that under Republican administrations, income inequality gets much worse. Then, under Democrats, it gets slightly better or at least only marginally worse. Countering the last 35 years of dysfunction is going to take a lot more than incremental improvements. I suspect Krueger knows that. But whether he has the strength of conviction is hard to say. Regardless, I know that Obama doesn’t.

On this day in 1691, the Italian painter Giovanni Paolo Panini was born. He is known for his view painting: very large scale painting of cities. In his case, it was Rome. It’s interesting stuff, but I would prefer more people. He clearly had a gift for historical or mythical material, but he did very little of it.

Igor Stravinsky was born on this day in 1882. He is arguably the most important composer of the 20th century. Most of the last century was a muddle with the majority of the best composers really coming from the 19th century. But Stravinsky seemed to understand the opportunities that the liberalizing environment provided in the context of where music was going. It is hard to listen to his music without thinking that in a strange way it was defining the course of music. As interesting and important as Arnold Schoenberg was, almost no one writes like him anymore and few want to hear his work. He was probably as brilliant as Stravinsky but he used his gifts in a far less edifying way. And I say that as a fan of Schoenberg. It is just that Stravinsky was the 20th century.

Here is Stravinsky at age 82 conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra in the “Lullaby and Final Hymm” from The Firebird:

On this day in 1898, M. C. Escher was born. Everyone knows Escher and his prints of impossible reality. He worked mostly with lithographs and woodcuts, which alone makes him pretty interesting. But it is his ideas that made him world famous. I think it is a mistake to think of him in that way, however. He was much more. For example, Gravitation on the right has all of those elements but is also extremely compelling with the turtles using the polyhedron as a shared cell. If Escher hadn’t been so against politics, I would claim it was a socialist statement.

Actor Ralph Bellamy was born in 1904. And two-time World Chess Champion Tigran Petrosian was born in 1929. He was known for his amazing defensive play. He was kind of the yin to Bobby Fischer’s hyper-aggressive offensive yang.

Japan’s “eternal virgin” Setsuko Hara is 92 today. Social realist director Ken Loach is 77. Newt Gingrich and Barry Manilow are both 70 today. Jello Biafra is 55. Here he is with Dead Kennedys doing one of my favorite songs, “California Uber Alles.” You’ve got to love a guy who (rightly) thinks that Jerry Brown is too conservative. Calling him a fascist is a bit hyperbolic, but that’s why it’s so fun:

The younger Farrelly Brother, Bobby is 55. And Greg Kinnear is 50.

The day, however, belongs to Ruth Graves Wakefield who was born on this day in 1905. Who could beat out Stravinsky and Escher and Biafra? Who is more important than all of these remarkable men? Why, only the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie! Wakefield worked as a dietitian and a food lecturer when she was young before starting a tourist lodge, Toll House Inn. She invented the cookies when she used chunks from a semi-sweet chocolate bar for her chocolate cookies, because she was out of baker’s chocolate. She sold the recipe to Nestle’s in exchange for a lifetime’s supply of chocolate.

Happy birthday Ruth Graves Wakefield!

Greg Sargent wrote an article this afternoon that really has me scratching my head, Do Senate Dems Have the Votes for the ‘Nuclear Option’? The word on Capital Hill is that the Democrats may not have enough votes to enact the “nuclear option”—the move to abolish the filibuster on judicial nominations. Apparently, there are four Senators who are not keen on this filibuster reform: Carl Levin (MI), Patrick Leahy (VT), Jack Reed (RI), and Mark Pryor (AR). As a result of Frank Lautenberg’s death, this puts the number of Democratic votes for the “nuclear option” down to just 50—not enough to pass.

These four Senators are an odd collection. The first three are somewhat liberal from liberal states. I can understand someone being very much in favor of minority rights and really wanting to keep the filibuster. But when the Republicans last controlled the White House and the Senate, they effectively eliminated the filibuster. This was at a time when the Democrats were using the filibuster half as much as the Republicans are now. Plus, the rate was decreasing. Can these guys really think that they are preserving the filibuster and not just, you know, preserving the filibuster for as long as it advantages the Republicans? Really: I don’t get it.

The fourth Senator, Mark Pryor leans somewhat conservative, and given that he’s from Arkansas, I can hardly blame him. But even he’s an odd one to be against this. During the Bush years, he was part of the Gang of 14, who effectively ended the Democrats’ ability to filibuster. I know, I know: the Gang of 14 compromise was supposedly a way to maintain the filibuster. But in practice it just meant that the filibuster remained as long as the minority didn’t use it. And when the Republicans were once again in the minority—Quelle surprise!—the Gang of 14 broke up. So it would seem that Pryor is very concerned about protecting the minority, but only when his own party is in the majority. Of course, Pryor is known to be kind of an idiot:

What I find perplexing in Sargent’s article is his concern that the Democrats don’t have the votes for the “nuclear option.” First, it is not at all clear that none of these four will vote for it. He wrote that Leahy and Pryor are “question marks” and Reed is “a Maybe.” (I’m not sure why he capitalized it.) And then there is the Joe Biden factor. Sargent showed that Biden is virtually guaranteed to be on board, so there are the 51 votes that the Senate needs.

I would add one more thing: the Democrats could wait until October when Cory Booker (or regardless, some Democrat) wins the special election and puts a Democrat back in the Lautenberg seat. So I think that Sargent is just being overly gloomy. I usually share that gloom, but it looks pretty sunny this time. And I’m especially happy that my two Senators Boxer and Feinstein are on board. Let’s reform that filibuster!

One of the big arguments against libertarianism is the threat of monopolies. If there is no government, what will stop all markets from becoming noncompetitive? What stops a big company from using its resources to sell below cost for long enough to drive the competition out of business? The answer to these questions is hardcore. If one company gains a monopoly and doesn’t keep prices down, another company will see an opportunity and enter the market. This is a perfect libertarian answer because it is (1) perfect in theory and (2) hopeless in practice.

The way this situation would work in the real world is that most businesses would not enter the market because they would know that the current monopoly would simply force them out of the market by selling below cost. The only business that would enter the market would be another behemoth that was only entering the market to destroy the current monopoly and take over the place themselves. Doing anything else would have too high an opportunity cost.

One particularly interesting aspect of this situation is that it would cause prices to be highly variable. Today, the price of sugar might be 50 cents per pound but next week it might be $5.00 per pound. Libertarians are generally very concerned about price stability. As you can see here, government bonds are not the only thing that affects price stability. What’s more, libertarians are fond of pointing out that inflation is a kind of tax. And that’s true—a tax with many advantages. But monopolies are their own kind of a tax—but a tax that does no good.

I bring this up, because the Supreme Court just found in favor of free markets in FTC v. Actavis. In a 5-3 decision, the Court found that the FTC could sue drug companies for paying other companies to not produce generics. This brings up our entire broken patent system, but this particular case has to do with the time after the patent is over. Suppose Company A just lost its patent on a drug. Company B is going to start producing the drug at a much cheaper price. So Company A pays Company B to not produce it. According to libertarian thinking, there is nothing wrong with that. And three justices agreed: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia. Samuel Alito recused himself, but he certainly would have voted with them.

This is all funny when you look at it the right way. The libertarian argument here is that two companies ought to be able to enter into their own contracts and it has nothing to do with the rest of us. In fact, there are other companies that could start to make the drug, right? As I’ve indicated, this is nonsense. But what’s funny is that the very same libertarians who would argue that the government shouldn’t get involved in the market in this way think that the government should get into the market in a very big way by allowing patent monopolies.[1]

The idea for allowing patent monopolies was always to encourage innovation. But at least when it comes to new drugs, the government spends as much as the drug companies do on research. What the drug companies spend a lot of money on is advertising. They spend almost 20 times as much on marketing as they do on research. Clearly, we would be doing better if we got rid of patent protection and provided more public funding of research. It would also have the advantage of providing better drugs and not just the newest boner pill that’s only advantage is that it is still covered by a patent.

The problem with libertarians or communists or anyone who is dedicated to an ideology is that they limit their options in solving real world problems. To libertarians, patents aren’t about creating a dynamic marketplace; they are about some theoretical notion of freedom. But the truth is that freedom is not an absolute concept. There is the freedom of companies to subvert market forces so they can keep drug price margins high; and there is the freedom of individuals to buy drugs at a free market price. The fact that we have patents at all indicates that we understand this freedom trade off. But libertarians and like minded conservatives seem to think that the only freedom that is in need of expansion is the freedom for businesses to increase their profits. Thankfully, in this case, five members of the Court came down on the side of individual freedom—the kind that is increasingly fragile in this country.

[1] There are some libertarians who don’t believe in patents. They are rare, however.

I’ve got a great way to make a group of people think that the government is complete corrupt and without any accountability. It’s really easy. Have the people on TV tell them every day about some terrible scandal. Of course, there is no actual scandal. The news readers just report things that indicate that there is a scandal and don’t report the vast majority of the evidence that indicates there is nothing going on. And then, when all the possible scandal confirming information has been reported, the TV drops the subject altogether.

This is brilliant because the news source never actually lied. It provided true, if highly misleading information. But the biggest part of this is not information at all; it is the sudden lack of reporting. Why would they do that?! It must be yet another example of the government clamping down on the news media. We really do have a fascist government! It won’t even let them talk about these scandals on TV!

Yesterday, The Hill reported, House Republicans See Long Slog Ahead for Probes of IRS Targeting. It got me thinking about the effects that all of these non-scandals are having on conservative television viewers. For almost a year, they’ve been told that Benghazi is a big scandal: Obama killed those four people! And now? Nothing other than occasional comments to the effect that Benghazi is a bad scandal that shows how terrible the administration is, even if there is no evidence to support that.

What’s interesting about the article in The Hill is that the Republicans themselves seem to be aware that they are doing this. Actually, it’s been pretty clear for a while. Why else would Darrell Issa be selectively and deceptively releasing information from the House hearings? But it goes further than that:

In other words, “We are only going to put out information that furthers our goals of embarrassing the White House.” It also makes it sound as if the Republicans on the committee want to slow the process down so that they can use this non-scandal (You do know it is a non-scandal, right?) throughout next year’s election cycle to impugn the Democratic Party.

As much as any group, conservatives bemoan the fact that the people have no respect or confidence in the major institutions of American life (except shockingly, the military). Yet they are willing to hurt our country on this score in the name of short term political gain. There is no doubt that Charles Boustany and Darrell Issa know there is no scandal behind the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. But they will use their plausible narrative and willing accomplices in the conservative media to imply that it is true. It’s shameful. It’s traitorous.