In an otherwise interesting article, Jonathan Chait wrote, “In the aftermath of the 2012 election, it was obvious to nearly every analyst outside the Republican Party, and to quite a few of those within it, that the GOP needed to get immigration reform off the table to give it a chance with Latino voters. All House leaders had to do in order to accomplish this was to bring up an immigration-reform bill that had passed in the Senate, and it could have passed with just a few dozen Republican votes.” No, no, no! Jesus, how long are people going to believe this hogwash?! Sure, there were and still are analysts who think this. But they couldn’t be more wrong.

Chait continued, “Anger by the base paralyzed them from acting, and they muddled through instead.” I really wonder what people like Chait think political parties are. Do they think that the parties just make up their platforms and then hope that there will be enough voters for them to win elections? Parties are coalitions. For almost 50 years, the Republican Party has managed to wed the “libertarian” part of the party with the racist part. Is that racist part just going to shut up because immigration reform was passed?

This brings us back to Chait, “Not long ago, the prospect of Trump heading the ticket in 2016 was utterly unthinkable. Now it is thinkable…” How is it that the House passing immigration reform would have stopped Trump from gaining so much traction? Indeed, if immigration reform had passed, wouldn’t that have made the base even more angry? Wouldn’t that have made a Trump or Cruz candidacy all that much more appealing? I really don’t get the way that mainstream (usually liberal) pundits see this. It’s like they think that an immigration reform bill — one that was ridiculously harsh, requiring almost two decades to get citizenship — was some kind of magic bullet that would make the Republican Party’s racism problem vanish.

And look at what Chait acknowledges: the Republicans just had to allow the bill to get a vote where only a tiny percentage of Republicans would have voted for it. And it only passed the Senate with a handful of Republican votes. So what would this have said to the Latino community specifically? That the Republican Party doesn’t hate them, just everyone in it?! It’s madness. And it gets worse.

At least by doing nothing, things stay the way they are. But the whole time immigration reform was being debated, it was very clear that even its Republican supporters had the attitude that this was the one thing that they were willing to do for the immigrant community. So the Republicans were offering an incredibly harsh, punitive approach to immigration reform and acting like that was the end of it. It’s like a friend giving a junkie twenty bucks after years of charity, “Okay, but this is the last time I’m doing this!” That’s what the Republicans were offering.

Given the Republicans will not embrace immigrants (legal or otherwise), I do not see how immigration reform helps them. Are we to assume that immigrants are just ignorant? That they wouldn’t know that it was the Democratic Party that somehow got immigration reform passed despite Republicans and not because of them? But regardless of that, how does immigration reform make Trump’s candidacy less plausible?

Every time I hear someone saying it is okay for all of us to limit freedom of speech because it isn’t the government doing it, I have a problem. Sure, I don’t especially care if people boycott Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers. But a much more likely scenario is that some company is going to fire some woman for what she says on her personal blog. It happens all the time. And people usually don’t care because it doesn’t contradict the Constitution — as though every right that people ought to have is found that the two century old document.

I’ve made arguments along these lines many times before, but I always get the impression that people don’t really get it. It’s really simple. People have a right to life. We no longer have free land where people can just go out and make their own living by hunting and gathering — or by farming. Just try it some time. Go out to an unused field and start developing it. You’ll find very soon that even though the property is not being used for anything, you don’t have the right to farm it. You don’t own the land; someone else does. So if you can’t get a job, you don’t have a right to life. You have a right to beg and maybe a right to starve, but that’s about it.

This is a fact of the world that libertarians in particular do not understand. But it is a fact that is poorly understood by even quite liberal people. Most liberals I know just have a gut feeling about what is right and wrong. They don’t think too deeply about it. And that’s fine! One should have a gut feeling about justice. And I think that conservatives mostly have the same gut feeling. It’s just that they’ve managed to slice and dice the world up into those people who deserve this kind of justice.

But it isn’t just on an individual level that we find this. On Monday, I read a very interesting article by Glenn Greenwald, Court Ruling Against Chicago Sheriff Proves Thuggish Anti-WikiLeaks Blockade Was Unconstitutional. The ruling doesn’t have to do directly with WikiLeaks. It has to do with a classified ads site, Backpage. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart decided that he didn’t like the barely cloaked prostitution ads in Backpage, so he decided to shut it down.

Now before going forward, I should point out that Tom Dart is not a bad guy. He suspended foreclosures in Cook County, because he said (rightly) that renters were being evicted, based upon their landlords’ being behind in their payments. His legal reasoning was sound. He’s not some yahoo. He has a JD from Loyola University. But that doesn’t stop him from being wrong about other things. He first tried to shut down Craigslist. He did it by filing a lawsuit against the company for its offering of “erotic services.” He lost; the court found that Craigslist was an ISP and therefore not responsible for any illegal things that people using the service did.

So far, so good. But then Dart went over to the dark side. He knew he couldn’t take Backpage to court. So instead, he pressured Visa and MasterCard to not allow credit card transactions through the site. Brilliant, right?! And of course the credit card companies wouldn’t admit that they were doing this because of political pressure. It is, whether done by public or private entities, the perfect way to destroy just about anyone: don’t allow them to make money. The Constitution says nothing directly about that.

Well, the court didn’t buy it. It said that it was clear that Sheriff Dart had violated Backpage’s first amendment rights. But as Greenwald pointed out, back in 2010, this is exactly what Joe Lieberman did to WikiLeaks. And there it wasn’t just some overzealous sheriff with some sexual hangups; this was a sitting US Senator trying to destroy an explicitly political group using underhanded economic tactics because he knew that the First Amendment would never allow the important and legal work of WikiLeaks to be stopped directly. It’s not the government! It’s just a private sector!

Of course, even if the extension of this case to WikiLeaks is clear to Glenn Greenwald, it isn’t mentioned in the case. And you always have to wonder where the Supreme Court would come down on this. This is one of those cases where I actually think that Scalia would come out right. But Thomas and Alito, I feel certain would see things differently on this one. The truth is that we need a new Constitution. The Supreme Court has found far too many loopholes that have empowered the powerful and weakened the weak. This kind of financial extortion should be clearly illegal, and not left up to a bunch of people who owe their jobs to the power elite.

I think we are all in agreement that if Anne Frank had not believed that her diary would be protected for 95 years, well, she never would have written it. Right! I mean, that’s what writing is all about: making as much money as you possibly can for as many years after your death as possible. Because it isn’t even really about you or your family. It’s about the corporation that owns your work. The last thing you would want is for your work to be widely and freely available. Let’s not forget: the world changes a lot faster than it used to, so copyright needs to be a lot longer.

Wait. That doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, the song “Yesterday” is really old. In any reasonable sense of the term, it is in the public domain. It doesn’t really belong to anyone. Certainly if it had been written in 1865 instead of 1965, it would have been well out of copyright fifty years later. And that was when times were slower. It made more sense. It might take decades to get the whole world humming “Yesterday.” In 1965, it took a couple of months. Today, it takes a couple of hours. Yet copyright length is more than twice as long as it was in 1865.

I started with Frank’s work, because two weeks ago, Michael Hiltzik wrote, The Squabble Over Anne Frank’s Diary Shows the Absurdity of Copyright Law. The Anne Frank Fonds owns the copyright to the diary. It is now 70 years after the murder of Anne Frank. According to the law in Europe, the diary should be in the public domain this January. But Fonds is having none of that! This is because they claim that her father, Otto Frank, is the co-author. He died 1980. Thus, we must wait until 2050 at the earliest for the book to belong to the people.

It turns out that the Anne Frank Fonds does a lot of good work with the money that it makes. But what it is doing with its copyrights is exactly the same as what any other soulless corporation is doing. The most recent US copyright law — the Sonny Bono Act — increased copyright to 95 years. As Hiltzik put it:

It’s just a corporate game. When I last wrote to Dean Baker about Fantasia not being in the public domain, he said, “It’s all about Mickey Mouse (literally).” Indeed it is. Oh, the money that would be lost to a bunch of people who have never had a creative idea outside the realm of finance in their lives! The truth is that I’m sure that the Anne Frank Fonds would get along just fine without the copyright to the diary. And I’m sure that the MLK family would get along just fine with the copyright to his “I Have a Dream” speech.

But these are the “good causes” that are trotted out to justify a totally out of control copyright system — one that does nothing to encourage writing and a great deal to harm it.

I am painfully aware of stereotypes. That doesn’t mean that I am immune to them. But I have no doubt that I am far more immune to them than the vast majority of people I interact with. So whenever I hear of a horrible crime, I always hope that the perpetrator is a white man (or woman, but that’s generally too much to ask for). When a murder suspect’s face is shown on the local news and it is black, I’m saddened. And I spent much of yesterday hoping that the San Bernardino shootings were a bunch of white guys who wanted to play at war.

It doesn’t matter to the victims. But it does matter to the society. And watching the reactions yesterday, I see we are a society cleaved in half. The liberal world was focused on guns and the easy access to them. It is an important issue. But we liberals have a real problem here. Events like this would not be stopped by any of the “common sense” gun control laws that the Democratic Party would propose. The difference on gun control between Bernie Sanders at his most conservative and Hillary Clinton at her most liberal is basically nothing. And it certainly isn’t anything that would have stopped yesterday.

But there are roughly 30 gun murders every day in the US — and twice as many gun suicides. But sadly, that is “dog bites man.” The news doesn’t care. Good God! The news doesn’t even care when shooting sprees don’t end in large numbers of dead. Every day is a good day to talk about gun violence. But if you do, there won’t be anyone listening to you. This is bad news for liberals. There is no time when anyone will listen to a discussion of the real problem. And even if they did, very few in America are open to what would need to be done to address it.

On the conservative side of things, everyone was talking terrorism. God, how I’ve come to hate that word! It’s just the newest racist word that anyone can use without being called on it. We pasty white Americans can’t use the n-word, but we sure can use the t-word. And do we ever! I heard someone talking about nuking ISIS. I guess that’s the new, “Fight ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here.” Except that it is exactly the opposite.

Let’s suppose that these three mass murderers were aligned with ISIS. Let’s further suppose we could wipe out ISIS central command with nukes. Would this really cause resentful Muslims all over the world to just calm down? I don’t think so! I think doing something like that would greatly increase the number of attacks here at home. Nuking them would seem kind of like a trick — an unfair way of winning. Far better to show that ISIS is impotent in the normal ways of war. (It’s also true that the use of nukes wouldn’t be any better at defeating ISIS; it would just be better at killing more civilians.)

Martin Longman noted something really depressing:

This has been the working theory of terrorist attacks in Europe: make the wider population hate the Muslim community. In so doing, give Muslims who just want to live their lives a very good excuse to lash out. In other words, manipulate the non-Muslim community into starting a war. It’s a brilliant strategy. It depends upon stereotypes and they are very dependable.

All Indians walk in single file; at least the only one I ever saw did; so let’s nuke ’em.