I think of Mike Konczal as an economics writer, but he is usually just as illuminating when writing about other things. Yesterday at Wonk Blog, he wrote, Is a Democratic Surveillance State Possible? In it, he described work by Yale law professor Jack Balkin where he argues that there are two kinds of surveillance states: authoritarian and democratic. Of course, in the United States, we have the authoritarian kind. And that is perhaps understandable. It matches our pretend democracy.

Authoritarian surveillance states act as gluttons and misers of information. They are gluttons in the sense that they collect all the information they can without regard to content or source. As Konczal puts it, “More is always better, indiscriminate access is better than targeted responses, and there’s a general presumption that they’ll have access to whatever they want, at any time.” But they are misers in that they want as little information as possible to get out about who they are and what they do. In other words, authoritarian surveillance wants ultimate power and no accountability or transparency.

Democratic surveillance states, on the other hand, are, “information gourmets and information philanthropists.” They are highly selective about the information they collect and generous about what they are doing and for what purpose. Konczal points out that a big part of this would be information destruction. That’s one thing you can count on: the government might, for example, take your finger prints to identify you. But they will use those fingerprints even after you die to accuse you of crime. The information just goes on and on. In the case of fingerprints, it probably makes sense. But does it make sense for the NSA to maintain all of my phone records until the end of time? I assure you that they think so.

The worst part of all this is that we know that we can’t trust the courts. As I reported earlier this year, FISA just acts as a pass-through filter for the surveillance state. Over 32 years, the FISA courts got 38,093 requests for secret monitoring and they denied just 11 of those requests. That means they approved more 99.97% of those requests. Great oversight guys! Konczal notes:

Clearly, we need to move toward a democratic surveillance state. Actually, I’m even more liberal (Libertarian!) than that. I think most of our secret services are unnecessary. Just like with our imperial guard all over the world, they aren’t there to make us safer. They are there to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful. But I understand that few people think like I do. So the least we can do (the least) is to limit the scope of the surveillance state and make it transparent so that we know in a general sense what it is doing.

Afterword

Today at Wonk Blog, Timothy B. Lee asks, Has the US Become the Type of Nation from Which You Have to Seek Asylum? This is in reference to Edward Snowden, the NSA surveillance leaker who is in Hong Kong trying to get political asylum from the United States. He sums up:

That’s an understatement. All indications are that someone like Snowden would be treated quite unfairly by the American “justice” system. Can you say John Kiriakou?

On this day back in 1812, the discoverer of Neptune, Johann Gottfried Galle was born. By “discoverer” I mean that he was the first person to see it and know what it was. The planet was already theorized and Urbain Le Verrier had predicted roughly where it would be. Still, Galle’s achievement is notable.

The founder of the Repository for Germinal Choice, Robert Klark Graham was born in 1906. Very creepy eugenics stuff. Iron artisan Philip Simmons was born in 1912. Guitar legend Les Paul was born in 1915. The longest serving Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara was born in 1916. Although he came to regret the Vietnam War, he was one of its principle architects. Still, there were larger social forces working. McNamara was not an evil man like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.

The late great rhythm and blues singer Johnny Ace was born in 1929. He wasn’t bad at all. His biggest song was Pledging My Love. But he is best know for his death. He was playing around with a .22 caliber revolver while drunk. And he accidentally shot and killed himself. He was 25.

Contemporary of Jacques Brel, the French chanson singer-songwriter Barbara (Monique Andree Serf) was born in 1930. Here she is doing “Le Bel Age” about her affair with a beautiful young man:

And Jackie Wilson was born in 1934. Here he is doing “Higher and Higher”:

Writer of the novel The Graduate, Charles Webb is 74 today. Film composer James Newton Howard is 62. Crummy but popular crime novelist Patricia Cornwell is 57. Michael J. Fox and Johnny Depp is the big five-oh. Natalie Portman is 32. And “Egg” from Arrested Development, Mae Whitman is 25.

The day, however, belongs to the great songwriter Cole Porter who was born on this day in 1891. He wrote so many great pop songs, they are hard to list. So I’m not even going to try. Here is Frank Sinatra doing one of them, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”:

Happy birthday Cole Porter!

On Real Time last Friday, Bill Maher claimed that Ronald Reagan was the original Teabagger. It’s a funny bit that’s worth watching. It highlights some problematic liberal mythology. But it doesn’t actually attack what many people mean when they say that Reagan wouldn’t fit into the modern Republican Party.

Politics is relative, and Maher is right to point this out with regards to tax policy. Reagan may have raised taxes from time to time, but the main thing he did was cut the taxes of the rich in half. Modern Republicans would likely tinker with new taxes too if the Democrats would allow them to cut the top tax rate to 20%. But the more fundamental issue is how Reagan would act if he were on the radio or in the White House right now. And there is no doubt: he would be the conservative populist he always was. So he would be a Tea Party leader. There is no question of that.

A more interesting question is where Nixon would stand in the modern environment. He was not ideological in the sense that Reagan was. But there is no doubt that he was a cultural conservative. However, his neuroses were so extreme, that they could have taken him in any direction. And I have a hard time imagining him in the context of the ideological extremism of the Tea Party. I don’t think he would have felt comfortable there.

Another part of this—certainly for Obama when he quotes and otherwise refers to Reagan—is the tendency for one party to look back fondly at past leaders of the opposition. The Republicans do this with Clinton—a man they seriously accused of murder when he was in office. This is the part of Maher’s rant that is most important. Obama should be saying that Reagan is the man who first got this country way off the tracks. He should not treat Reagan as a hero because the people of the United States and the greater cause of liberalism have been terribly hurt by Reagan. The problem is that Obama pretty much agrees with Reagan’s positions. Like most New Democrats, he just wants to take conservative ideas and implement them better. See, for example, the last four and a half years.

When I, and I think others, compare the modern Republican Party to Reagan (which I rarely do) or Nixon, it isn’t to say that they would be different from modern Republicans if they were in politics today. Rather, it is a claim about the changes in the party itself. Primarily, it is a claim that at one time the Republican Party was actually interested in government. It is a claim that the Republicans have moved from a normal political party to a revolutionary party. But it is because I know just how radical Reagan was that I normally hearken back to Nixon. Because Maher is right: Reagan really was the start of this Tea Party nonsense.

On this day back in 1625, Giovanni Domenico Cassini was born. The name probably sounds familiar because of NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft that they sent to Saturn. That’s because Cassini did some important early observations of the planet. He discovered four of its moons and also the division of Saturn’s rings. Christiaan Huygens did a lot of the same kinds of things at the same time. But it isn’t Huygens’ birthday. Cassini also made important discoveries about Jupiter. And most impressive from my standpoint, he calculated the distance to Mars. He did this by sending a colleague to French Guiana while he stayed in Paris. Then they each took simultaneous measurements and were able to get a rough approximation of the distance. Since scientists already knew the relative distances of most things in the solar system, this calculation established the distances for everything. Very cool!

Baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni was born in 1671. He is best known for his Adagio in G minor. I assure you that you’ve heard it, but if you really want to know, you can listen to a fine guitar arrangement for it by Peo Kindgren. At this point, I really don’t want to hear it again. But here is a much more fun performance of his Concerto for 2 Oboes in C Major:

Romantic composer Robert Schumann was born on this day in 1810. I fully admit that he was a great composer. I just don’t like him. British illustrator George Charles Haite of The Strand fame was born in 1855. The mind-blowing four-dimensional geometry mathematician Alicia Boole Stott was born in 1860.

The great and under-appreciated Flemish Symbolist painter Jan Frans De Boever was born in 1872. His work is, well, morbid. If Edgar Allan Poe had lived a hundred years later, and was a painter, he would have been De Boever. It is just the perfect combination of eroticism and death. Some might have a problem with that, but the connection to me is very strong. I will stay away from the obvious and just say that both highlight the decay of the flesh—the essential impurity of the material world.

Not completely irrelevant Abstract Expressionist Harry Holtzman was born in 1912. Biologist Francis Crick was born in 1916. Actor Robert Preston was born in 1918. I was very surprised to learn that he wasn’t gay. I clearly have a bias, because I had the same reaction to Joel Grey. Just because a man can sing and dance does not mean he’s gay. Anyway, here is Preston at his best:

And pop artist LeRoy Neiman was born in 1921. You know his work.

Barbara Bush is 88 today. Jerry Stiller is 86. I’ve always though his wife was funnier. They will celebrate their 60th anniversary next year. Joan Rivers is 80. Nancy Sinatra is 73. Boz Scaggs is 69. Bonnie Tyler is 62. The great guitarist and founder of Black Flag, Greg Ginn is 59. Unfortunately, I can’t find any good video of him. Cartoonist Scott Adams is 56. And comedian Keenen Ivory Wayans is 55.

What a day! With so many great people, who would rise to the top? Well, it isn’t that I think he is necessarily greater than Francis Crick or Robert Preston or even Scott Adams, but the day belongs to Frank Lloyd Wright who was born in 1867. Consider Fallingwater on the left. Or pretty much anything he did. It is all beautiful and smart work. I think sometimes people exaggerate his greatness in comparison to other architects. There was a lot of great architecture going on in the United States. And also Europe, even if Tom Wolfe doesn’t like it.

Here is the Guggenheim Museum, a perfect combination of form and function:

Happy birthday Frank Lloyd Wright!

I just saw Jonathan Alter explain something really interesting about this whole fight involving Obama’s three simultaneous nominations to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. A couple of weeks ago, I mocked Chuck Grassley from claiming this was “court packing.” As I explained, that’s not what the phrase means. It dates back to Roosevelt’s threat that if conservatives on the Supreme Court wouldn’t let his legislation stand, he would just increase the number of people on the court and pack the vacant seats with liberals. This is not what Obama is doing. He is just filling already vacant seats.

After writing that, I was surprised to see that Mitch McConnell was saying the same thing that Grassley was. It was apparently a new conservative meme—false though it was. But McConnell took it further. He claimed that what we really needed to do rather than fill the three vacancies on the DC Circuit Court, was to just reduce its size to the eight members it now has. He claimed that it was an underused court anyway and the extra judges could be better used in other courts. That turns out not to be true. Shocking! In fact, the DC Court deals with more complicated cases, so the fact that they hear fewer cases is irrelevant. But clearly, McConnell is just attempting a political maneuver, and that is clear enough to everyone.

This is where we get to Alter. He noted that although Obama is doing nothing like “court packing,” McConnell is proposing exactly that—just in the opposite direction. The court is now fairly conservative with its eight judges. He doesn’t want it to get more liberal by allowing it to be filled with three more judges from a Democratic president. Alter calls this McConnell’s “court shrinking” scheme. And he is quite right to! Here is the sequence on Up with Steve Kornacki:

This is entirely in keeping with the modern Republican approach to minority politics. Despite what Josh Barro my think, he and other conservative pundits function primarily to give conservative politicians plausible justifications for their positions. In Barro’s case, he claimed that I was against talking about infrastructure cost-effectiveness. But that wasn’t the case at all. What I was arguing was that Barro was giving political cover to Chris Christie’s ideological position. And there is no doubt that this is true.

In McConnell’s case, he must know that he isn’t making any sense. But no one in the mainstream is attacking him for it, because his argument sounds plausible. But even if the situation were like with Barro (having the benefit of being correct), it would still be the case that the justification was ex post facto. Since McConnell is more than simply wrong because he throws in hypocrisy, he ought to be laughed out of politics. But of course, he won’t be. There is nothing short of cheating on his wife with a man that can cause a conservative to lose credibility with the mainstream news.

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.