Beth Reinhard has written quite an amazing article. It is a thing to behold—but not in a good way. The basic argument is that it isn’t just Republicans who are getting extreme, it’s Democrats as well. This is Villager Think at its most basic. As I’ve long argued, politicians should do what their constituencies want. The idea that some Representative should care what’s happening in national elections is madness. But for the Villagers, the right non-ideological position is the one in the “middle.” Of course, the “middle” is defined as halfway between the Republicans and Democrats, so it isn’t like either side can ever really win this game.

The article focuses on state governments. It begins by characterizing the Republican moves in the most charitable light: they have passed laws to “restrict abortion, rein in labor unions, and slash state spending.” I would not characterize laws designed to shut down all abortion clinics in a state with “restricting” abortion. Nor would I laws designed to destroy labor unions as “reining” them in. And “slashing spending” has a special meaning when those very Republicans are also cutting taxes on the rich. But the article doesn’t even mention what is the most remarkable move from Republicans: voter suppression laws.

Even given this limited view of what the Republicans are doing, the contrast with Democrats is astounding. Democrats are pushing “stronger gun safety legislation and gay marriage.” By gun safety we are primarily talking about background checks. Regardless, gay rights are popular most places in the country. It isn’t like Mississippi Democrats are pushing for same sex marriage. The gun issue is even stronger. The article notes that while gun purchase background checks are hugely popular, not everyone is please—especially in Colorado. “In northern Colorado, several rural counties are threatening to secede over the new gun restrictions, driving privileges for illegal immigrants, and a renewable-energy mandate.” I see: some people in conservative rural communities are upset and that means that the Colorado governor is moving far to the left. It apparently doesn’t matter that Colorado voted for Obama over Romney by over 5 percentage points.

There is one conservative issue that most Democrats like: capital punishment. And that’s an issue where John Hickenlooper is pushing against public opinion. So Reinhard is arguing that all of the Republican radicalism, which has pushed the party far to the right of anything we’ve seen before in this country, is equivalent to John Hickenlooper standing up against the majority of his state on a death penalty case. After you cut through all of hedging and analysis from moderate observers, that’s what you get: the Democrats are on the verge of being seen to be as radical as the Republicans. Or at least that’s what Reinhard thinks.

What is most troubling about this kind of reporting is its not too subtle advice to Democrats: don’t move to the left, even if that is where your constituencies are moving. Of course, these same people are calling for Democrats to “hold the line” are also calling for them to “lead.” Apparently, the Democratic Party is supposed to lead the people nowhere, because where we are is just perfect. I think that the Democratic Party has not moved nearly far enough left. I found this quote from Bill Galston quite amusing, “Especially on social issues, the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved in the more liberal direction.” Really?! Especially on social issues? How about only on social issues. In fact, one of the radically liberal governors that Reinhard mentions is Andrew Cuomo, an economic conservative. On economic issues, the party has not moved to the left at all. Meanwhile, conservatives have moved into feudal territory on the economy. But I doubt we’ll be seeing any articles about that from Reinhard.

H/T: Ed Kilgore

Elvis Costello’s first album My Aim Is True was released 36 years ago yesterday. And that got me thinking about one of the songs on that album “Watching the Detectives.” So I got my guitar out and fiddled around with it. Soon I checked online for the lyrics, which are fairly complicated; I certainly didn’t have them memorized. And one line really stood out, “He stares at you, and you mash a cigarette.” But that isn’t what anyone but me thinks the line is.

Let me explain. “Watching the Detectives” was the song that made me take notice of Costello. And it was that one line about mashing a cigarette that caught me. I thought that it was a wonderfully simple description that perfectly brought to mind those old Humphrey Bogart detective movies. I’d never heard the term before, but it was right: people mash their cigarettes out when they are done. So was I wrong when I thought that? Who knows! I’ve listened to every version I could find this evening and none of them are any more clear than this one:

Opinions on the whole line are varied. No one I’ve found agrees with me on the line. In fact, no one agrees with me on “mash.” Everyone else has “match.” But note that not one of the following lines makes any sense:

• You snatch a chill, and you match a cigarette
• You snatch a chew, you a match his cigarette
• You snatch a tune, you a match a cigarette
• He snatches at you, and you match his cigarette

My line probably is wrong, but it doesn’t appear to be as wrong as all of these. Also, the next lines follows it thematically, “She pulls his eyes out with a face like a magnet.” The song has two narratives: the guy trying to get the attention of his girl friend and the TV detective show the girl friend is watching. So at this point, more or less the same thing is happening in both narratives. He’s staring at his girl friend as she puts out her cigarette. And on the screen, some detective is salivating over a femme fatale.

It could be about the room temperature, tobacco product types, a song request, or snatching at you, whatever that might mean. And it could be that the two people are comparing or exchanging cigarettes. God knows that Elvis Costello doesn’t make the issue any easier. But really: “snatch” and “match”? Really?! What ever it was, I’m at least sure that Costello is a good enough writer to have avoided that.

Charlie Cook wrote a really interesting article over at National Journal yesterday, Both Parties Need to Keep an Eye on Older Voters for 2014 Elections. Most of the article is stuff that we all know. As I’ve been arguing for a long time, the Democrats need to stop focusing on the mythical “moderate” voter and focus on turn out. It is very simple: when turn out is high, liberals win. That’s because America is a liberal country. Unfortunately, it is not a country that believes much in democracy, and so it has gone out of its way to make voting difficult. And that empowers the rich and disenfranchises the poor.

Cook’s article is based upon a briefing that he got regarding a new poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. Unfortunately, the poll is not online, so I’m left with some questions. But there are clearly two interesting results. First, Republicans have a 3 percentage point advantage going into the 2014 election. That’s better than they had in 2012, but nowhere near as good as they had in 2010. So generally speaking, the upcoming election will probably not be a blowout like 2010 was.

The second result is that older voters seem to be turning off to the Republican Party. In 2010, Republicans had a 21 (38-59) percentage point advantage with them. But in 2012, they had only a 12 (44-56) point advantage. In January, the poll found an 11 point advantage. By March it had dropped to 6 points and is now down to only 5. It’s early, of course. But here’s the thing: Republicans managed to get the huge advantage in 2010 by saying that the Democrats were taking away their Medicare in order to give it to the poor. They haven’t been able to say that recently.

Now, Ed Kilgore (who directed me to the Cook article) is perhaps even more cynical than I am. He noted, “It’s time for another big Mediscare effort linked to attacks on Obamacare that encourage white retirees to view the Affordable Care Act as a raid on their hard-earned benefits and hard-earned tax dollars to show welfare on those people.” That’s good advice. But I’m not sure that’s on the table. The issue isn’t so much what Republicans say but what the media will report as credible. Another round of “Obama is stealing your Medicare” just doesn’t sound like news.

There are many reasons why the elderly could be cooling off on the Republican Party. For one thing, the most conservative among them are quickly dying. Also, the Republicans aren’t making it easy to love them. How long can you scream about the coming apocalypse before people just yawn. Add to that a big conservative talking point over the two years before the last election. It went like this, “Sure, Obama hasn’t acted as a radical, but just wait until he’s re-elected!” Well, he’s been re-elected and he is the same old middle of the road Milktoast that he always was.

The main thing is that I suspect that the trend in elderly voters is real. Time will tell, but one thing is certain: the Republicans are not going to have the blowout election they had in 2010. For one thing, they already have about as many seats as they can given gerrymandering and the advantages they naturally get when only the more wealthy show up to vote. I think what we are seeing is that slowly (for now) the whole electorate is pulling away from a party that long ago became too extreme and beholden to their very limited base.

Glenn Greenwald mentioned an interesting bit of American hypocrisy over the weekend that relates directly to what is going on with Edward Snowden. In 2001, Muslim cleric Abu Omar was granted asylum by Italy because he was being persecuted by the Mubarak government in Egypt. Then, two years later, a group of CIA agents kidnapped him off the street in broad daylight. They took him back to Egypt, where he spent four years in prison being tortured. He was originally charged with belonging to an illegal group, but the charges were ultimately dropped.

In February of this year, four members of the Italian secret service were convicted of complicity in this kidnapping and were given six to ten years in prison. What about the American CIA operatives? In 2009, the Italian government indicted 23 of them, including Milan station chief Robert Lady. The United States would not cooperate (justice is for the little people and foreigners) so the Italian government had to convict them in absentia. Greenwald made three points about this at the time. First, such convictions would never happen in our country; government officials have done far worse and we just ignore it. Second, our government did everything it could to interfere with the Italian judicial process. And third, our lack of accountability is an indication that we don’t have a truly independent court system. The article is very good and well worth reading in full.

Since retiring, Robert Lady has lived in Latin America. Last week, while crossing the boarder into Panama, Lady was arrested at the request of Italy who wanted to extradite him to serve his sentence for the kidnapping. But on Friday, he was released following some negotiations with the US State Department. And that is probably as it should be. I think that countries ought to look out for their citizens, although as in this case, the United States has far too much power in this regard.

The problem is how hypocritical the United States is. When it comes to Edward Snowden the government and the supposedly independent media have been screaming about China and Russian not turning him over to the United States. Not only has Snowden not been convicted of anything, the charges against him are so trumped up as to make the government’s case against him look like nothing other than political crimes (which is what they are). What’s more, there are countries who want to give Snowden asylum. But they can’t because the United States government has effectively made him into a man without a country. Much the same thing has happened to Julian Assange.

It is one thing for all the different countries to position themselves and try to enact policies that they want. I don’t blame any of them for trying to do that. But the United States acts in a lawless fashion in its attempts, but then screams loudly when any other countries don’t follow the letter of their treaties (as the US sees it) in its interactions. What makes it far worse (and far easier for the government to get away with it) is our complicit media. That allows the public to not only think that we are the most powerful nation on earth, but also the most true and good. The reality is quite different. We use our power to make our misdeeds go unpunished and to punish anyone we don’t like. We should not be proud.

Update (22 July 2013 10:40 am)

Dean Baker wrote an excellent article discussing this very issue. He noted that the US government could make France refuse its air space to Bolivia President Evo Morales because he might have been carrying Edward Snowden (he wasn’t). Yet somehow the US government is impotent to do anything about the Cayman Islands’ use as a tax haven. It is laughable, of course. But it makes sense. Snowden is a little person who embarrassed the government. Those using tax havens are the big people who run the government.

William sent me the commercial below called “Emma.” It deals with the idea of the “exciting” paperless future. I’m agnostic on this issue. I’ll read anything in any form. Just the same, being agnostic tends to put me off the chart in terms of our new technological frontier. For a very long time, I have stayed out of the Windows-Mac wars. While it is true that I have major problems with the company Apple, I like their products just fine. It doesn’t matter to me what computer I use: they are all just tools.

The biggest problem with the new technology is that it has been commoditized from the beginning. I go to one or more libraries several times per week. Libraries are one of the greatest things ever. Yet if the idea were being developed today, it would never happen. The publishing companies would scream about how the libraries were stealing money by systematizing the use of a single book for perhaps hundreds of readers. Indeed, you may have noticed that for most books you get on your Kindle, you can loan them to a friend precisely once for two weeks. And that’s if you are dealing with a liberal publisher; some don’t even allow that! So the new technological frontier is really only for the wealthier classes. And regardless, it is designed (Designed!) to maximize profits and minimize community.

A hard copy book is the essence of freedom—or at least the closest we ever come to freedom. You can do whatever you want with that book. You can sell it or loan it to a friend. When you read it in public, you share it with others. You can store it in the attic and know that people a hundred years from now will have the technology to read it. Increasingly, our electronic content not only locks us into specific technologies, it locks us into our own worlds. And it limits us in more ways than it frees us.

Bear in mind that the main problem here is not really the technology. If content were easily transferable, it wouldn’t matter so much. This website, for example, is not only available here; you can look at through time at the Internet Archive. And when Dean Baker released The End of Loser Liberalism, he did so in various formats that will be available indefinitely. So it isn’t technology that is holding us back.

The problem is that the companies who distribute content have more power than they ever have. And that power is used to hinder communication. It is very much like insurance companies whose primary function is to limit healthcare. Look, I’m not a fool. I understand that the book is a technology. I understand that profits have only ever been the purpose of business. But we do not in live a free market “paradise.” There are rules as to how business is done. And when those rules are set by the people who have a vested interest in destroying our culture, we have a problem. And we have a problem.

But this commercial is really great:

Michael Tomasky wrote a good summary of the recent news about the IRS non-scandal at The Daily Beast, The Nature of the Beast: the Breathless Press and the Phony IRS “Scandal.” (What is wrong with editors? It wasn’t necessary to put scare quotes around “scandal” when “phony” precedes it.) Like most liberal commentators, he still focuses too much on how this “scandal” (see what I did?) had nothing to do with the White House. To me, that question was settled a long time ago: at the beginning since there was never any evidence that what the IRS was doing was led by the White House. Actually, there was lots of evidence that is wasn’t. I’m more interested in the fact that this isn’t even a scandal in terms of the IRS targeting conservative groups. And Tomasky provides lots of details about that.

But there does seem to be a scandal here. It looks as though the Treasury Department inspector general Russell George politicized his report. What he delivered to Darrell Issa was exactly what the conservative propagandists were looking for: something that said that the IRS (conservatives’ most hated institution) were targeting conservative groups. There were no liberal groups targeted. And all those Obama sycophants at the IRS may not have been taking orders from the White House, but they knew what needed to be done. That’s how Obama won re-election, because as all conservatives know, Obama is hated by the “real” America. The only way he won was by the IRS efforts to stopping Tea Party groups and ACORN (which of course was long out of business) efforts to commit voter fraud.

I don’t even think that George and Issa are being disingenuous. True believing conservatives just know that the Democratic Party must be even more corrupt than the Republican Party. And if that were true, it would indeed make the Democrats very corrupt. This is what comes of creating a whole insular conservative media where no mainstream facts can penetrate. The whole question of truth becomes an exercise in mythology. “Liberals have horns, or so I’ve heard from other conservatives who claim to have talked to people who have seen them.” But one would expect better from an inspector general and a sitting Representative.

There are three specific issues about George’s report. First, he did not report an analysis of 5,500 IRS email messages that showed that there was no indication that the behavior was politically motivated. Second, George claimed that “progressive” and “occupy” were never used to flag groups the way that “tea party” was. That is simply untrue. And third, none of the witnesses have done anything but push back against George’s report.

Russell George is set to talk to Issa’s committee today. But this time, it is the Democrats who are on the offensive. It will be interesting to see what he has to say. I expect him to give some variation on, “The preponderance of the evidence was blah, blah, blah.” Not that it will matter. The Republicans have gotten everything out of this scandal they can. The media has been really helpful in pushing the idea that the Democratic Party, the White House, and the IRS are corrupt institutions. At best, there may be a short story on the nightly news about how it turns out that the IRS did nothing wrong and there was nothing political going on. But even that is unlikely. “There was nothing to the story we hyped for a couple of months” is not a compelling headline. And here is a Ted Cruz ad that is running right now on television:

It makes me wonder: will the mainstream press ever see through the continual parade of false scandals by the Republican Party? I know one thing: they will not stop until the Democratic Party stops falling for this right wing propaganda. When the story first broke, I wrote, Obama Wimps Out on IRS Scandal. I was (And still am!) mad about the firing of acting IRS chief Steven T. Miller for nothing other than the fact that Republicans were claiming something had happened. It was Shirley Sherrod all over again. The administration can’t take even a tiny bit of political heat; they just fire people before any of the facts come in. And that is what is truly messed up in American politics. A two party system doesn’t work when one of those parties is all backbone (that is: no higher brain function) and the other is none.

Afterword

Note that Ted Cruz in his “abolish the IRS” commercial is pushing the flat tax. I’ve had countless conversations with conservatives about this. They really like the idea of a flat tax. But they begin to dislike it when I explain to them how their taxes will go way up. Of course, the information never sticks; conservatives are very much like EPROMs: you can program them with correct information, but Fox News comes on, erases the programming and puts incorrect information back on. But really, this isn’t difficult. How do people think that there can be a major overhaul of the tax code that is going to lower everyone’s taxes? And why do they think that the rich are so keen on the flat tax? It isn’t because they mind paying accountants to do their taxes. It is that they would pay less—generally far less. The most honest flat tax proposal was by half billionaire Steve Forbes who offered a 17% tax. Do you now pay 17% in federal income taxes off your gross income? If not, your taxes are going up. But the wealthy? Their taxes would go down. His tax would be 0% on all capital gains and other unearned income. So if you earn your money, you are taxed, but if you just live off daddy’s trust fund, you are not. Fairness!

Something has been bothering me since Tuesday. Richard Cordray was allowed to go to a vote because a number of Republicans voted in favor of cloture. So it wasn’t that Cordray wasn’t filibustered, it was just that the Senate voted to end the filibuster. But that had been going on since before the recent deal to avert the nuclear option, so that doesn’t too much matter. Then yesterday, the Senate held another cloture vote on Fred Hochberg, which also got the necessary votes to move on. But it’s still a filibuster, right?

Finally, I got confirmation from the grand wizard of everything filibuster, Jonathan Bernstein, Why the Senate Deal Is Worse Than They Should Do. This is more than just a technicality. The Republicans are still using the filibuster—just not to stop nominations. Instead, they are using it to slow nominations down and eat up the time that the Senate has to deal with other issues. So Tuesday’s deal is not at all that the Republicans will stop their de rigueur filibustering of every executive branch nominee. It is just that they promise not to do it for too long.

Bernstein thinks the current situation is unstable. It requires a constant stream of Republicans to “cross over to the dark side” and vote for cloture. A better idea would be to get Republicans to vote once to change the rules of the Senate to forbid executive branch nominations. The real reason that everyone is so hysterical about the so called nuclear option is not the fact of changing the Senate rules; it is changing them with a simple majority vote. Now I don’t mind that for a couple of reasons. First, I think the filibuster is a bad thing. It adds a highly undemocratic element to an already undemocratic institution. Second, I am certain that the Republicans will use the nuclear option the moment it is to their advantage.

Rather than take all these “difficult” votes on a string of nominees, a few Republicans (6 now and most likely 5 in a couple of months) could just vote for the rule change and that would be that. Or at least that is Bernstein’s notion. But I think that the current Republican behavior shows why this isn’t going to happen. If they can’t stop the nominating process, at least they can slow it down. It is hard to just say, “No more parties!” It is a lot easier for a few Republicans to come in after the obstruction party has been going on for a while and say, “Time to wrap it up!” Bernstein notes that the Republicans would still be able to do their limited filibustering as they are now, it is just that it could be stopped by a simple majority vote. But who’s he kidding? All the Republicans would know why the Democrats had the power to stop their fun.

The current system is unstable. For one thing, it is not clear who the agreement is with. The Senators who vote for cloture seems to be ever changing. But even more so, the Republicans are already showing their tendency to push the extent of the agreement. Soon they will start balking at the slightest controversy in a nominee and they will eventually move to blocking all nominees again. In fact, Marco Rubio as of yesterday—One day after the deal!—called for a full filibuster of the Labor Secretary nominee Thomas Perez:

I’m not hopeful moving forward. Fool me once, twice, three times… After a while, I’m just an asshole.

This is how Democrats work. First they compromise. Then they back off. Then they come back with more compromises. Then they back off again. Again they come back with yet more compromises. And finally they compromise some more.

And that’s what we’re getting with filibuster reform. We couldn’t have complete filibuster reform. So we talked about just judicial and executive branch nominees. And then just executive branch nominees. That was pretty weak tea from my perspective, but at least it was something—and it was completely justified. And as of last night, it looked like that compromise of a compromise might hold. Mitch McConnell offered to permit all seven of the “test” nominations to go forward if Reid would back off on his use of the so called nuclear option. Reid said no.

This morning, the Boston Globe is reporting that Reid has caved again:

What’s more, the article says that people worry that the nuclear option would poison relations between the parties. What a joke! Are relations not already poisoned? Then to top off this bit of hand wringing, “But critics say Reid’s plan would be likely to prompt Republicans to retaliate by doing even more to reduce the minority party’s rights if the GOP regains control of the Senate.” As I’ve argued again and again and again: that’s going to happen anyway.

As of this writing, the deal is still not done. But once again it looks like there is nothing the Democrats will do to fix the Senate. We will have to wait for the Republicans to take over the Senate and live through some very unpleasant legislative years before we can see any real reform. Harry Reid and his Democratic caucus are again showing they have no backbone and won’t do even the smallest things for their constituencies.

Update (16 July 2013 9:13 am)

Greg Sargent has posted some details of the deal along with a bunch of hogwash:

Wrong! The time to draw a line in the sad was 2009. Now it just looks weak.

Part of the deal is that the Democrats are backing off on two nominees for the National Labor Relations Board. But the Republicans promise to allow two new nominees picked by labor groups to get a vote by the end of July. I don’t even understand this. What is so wrong with the current people that will be fixed by new nominees? It sounds like a way for the Republicans to save face, but this is a deal that the Democrats need to save face on. Regardless, the deal is not terrible. But you have to ask: why are filibusters allowed on executive branch nominees? In the past they were never used. Everyone agrees that presidents ought to be able to pick their own people. What’s the big deal?

Meanwhile, judges will go unconfirmed until there is a Republican president. Good job, Harry!

Update (16 July 2013 9:50 am)

NBC News is reporting that the deal has been struck. And Steven Benen makes a good point about the deal. It is different from the one that McConnell offered in that the new deal does not taken the nuclear option off the table. Of course, this is all about expectations and that is a game that the Republicans play very well. I can’t help thinking that Mitch McConnell and John McCain are running good cop / bad cop on the Democrats. McConnell does everything to obstruct and even lies about deals. McCain comes riding in to save the day with a deal that in any reasonable world sucks. But it could be worse, because it has. Just the same, the fact that you aren’t being tortured on your birthday doesn’t make up for the fact that no one called.

Update (16 July 2013 10:01 am)

I continue to see loads of happy horseshit coming from the Villagers. Ezra Klein says something I’m not convinced about but which may be true, “This will be the new normal.” But then he notes that the Republicans will also have the same new normal if they are in charge under President Christie. No, no, no! What’s wrong with these people? They are so used to pretending that we are all just a big group committed to working together that they completely miss what’s going on. Every time the Republicans have been in the minority, they have greatly expanded the use of the filibuster. The last time they were in power, they effectively destroyed the filibuster. Once the Republicans hold the White House and the Senate, the Majority Leader will do whatever he likes. If there were no “new normal,” he would just create one. And he will do a hell of a lot more than that. I am so tired of listening to Villagers talk as though the Republicans have just been a bit overzealous recently. This has been going on a long time and nothing is going to stop it.

Update (16 July 2013 11:59 am)

Matt Yglesias is in fine form this morning. He lays it out exactly right. This may be a win for the Democrats:

There’s a great scene toward the end of The Matrix where Agent Smith is talking to Morpheus. He says that humans are like a virus. This is actually a shockingly stupid argument. The truth is that all creatures bread to the point where they exhaust all resources and then either die out or move onto green pastures. It is only other species that causes there to be any balance in the environment. But I think the virus analogy is pretty good when it is applied to American journalism.

The Australians are currently suffering from America creep. The country has three new “fact checking” services. Bronwen Clune reports all in, Are Fact-Checking Sites a Symptom of the Media Not Doing Its Job? One of them will be very familiar to most Americans: Politifact Australia! They haven’t only exported their ridiculous Truth-O-Meter with its infantile “pant on fire” rating. They’ve also exported their peculiar definition of of the word “fact.” Clune writes something that should be familiar to readers of this blog:

Hooray! America’s greasy sense of fact wins another victory!

The other two fact checking services are home-grown. One is a kind of academic affair where a statement is graded by one person. Then that person’s analysis is graded by someone else. And what do you know? Sometimes the two disagree. There is a third service that has not yet started but already conservatives are complaining that its editor has a leftist bias. I think that tells you all you need to know about the whole “fact checking” endeavor: it will never work as long as people can’t differentiate between fact and truth. In the Politifact example above, it was found that the statement was correct, but that Ludlam had used it to imply something that wasn’t true.

Clune’s point is that this really ought to be what journalists are always doing. Of course, they aren’t. But the fact checking services are not going to fix this problem. This is because they claim to objective, when they aren’t. Their effort is a worthy one—but it is worthy for journalists, not specialists who claim they are providing “just the fact.” And that gets a “pants on fire” from me.

Afterword

You know you want it:

Since there were none of the riots that Fox News was predicting, they had to go elsewhere with their fear mongering and racist coverage Monday’s broadcast. I just caught a little bit of Shepard Smith’s show and it was quite the thing to watch. As I try to explain to fans of Fox News, the problem is not so much that the station actively lies—although they do enough of that. The big problem is what they choose to cover. In a general sense, there is nothing wrong with this. Last week on Counterspin, FAIR had a segment of Sequestration, which is great, even though most of the mainstream national press couldn’t care less about the issue. Similarly, on right wing hate radio, they are still talking about Solyndra. But no one mistakes FAIR or the right wing talkers for the mainstream media. Fox News is very much mainstream media. And thus people get the impression that if Fox News is reporting it, it must be a big story.

So the big story on Fox News is that Eric Holder said that Trayvon Martin was a “tragic, unnecessary shooting death.” Furthermore, Benjamin Jealous of the NAACP is calling for a federal civil rights trial of George Zimmerman. Oh my God! That’s so shocking! Also, Trayvon Martin’s parents are thinking about a civil case against Zimmerman. Let’s think about those for a minute. First, Holder is right. I would like to think that even Zimmerman’s staunchest defenders would admit that it was a tragic, unnecessary death. We all could assume that the NAACP would call for a federal case. Regardless, we knew before the verdict that this was a possibility. As for the civil case, there’s been a lot of talk about that the whole time.

Smith was also reporting on the need for George Zimmerman to get his gun back. One “reporter” went on at some length about this and the subtext was not good. You see, with all those angry negroes in the NAACP, you know they’re coming after poor George. After all, they are calling for a civil rights charge to be filed against him. That’s just respectable negrospeak for “bust a cap in your ass.” Really, that’s the level of the nonsense that we are getting from Fox News. I fully expect to see George Zimmerman on Hannity’s show talking about how scared he now feels.

On their website, Fox News has the headline, More Than a Dozen Arrested in Protests Against Zimmerman Verdict. The article itself, however, tells a different story, “Thousands of people staged demonstrations in cities across America Sunday and into Monday—resulting in more than a dozen arrests in New York City and Los Angeles—as they voiced their disappointment and anger at the decision by a Sanford, Fla. jury’s [decision] to acquit George Zimmerman in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.” In other words, they couldn’t report riots, so they reported negligible arrests to invalidate the protests. And what were those arrests for? “Police in Los Angeles said they arrested six people on Monday, mostly for failure to disperse.”

I understand all the people who are upset that Zimmerman was found not guilty. I share their disappointment. And if they had rioted, I would have been at least understanding. But I don’t understand why the political right is so vindictive even—Or especially!—when it wins. If George Zimmerman had been convicted, I could understand the blanket coverage about the miscarriage of justice. But this isn’t about that at all. This is about how the black folk are coming for all the good white folk. This is, “We got the ruling we wanted; be afraid, be very afraid!”

Update (15 July 2013 5:15 pm)

I decided to watch the beginning of All In to see what was said there. They were clearly upset, but there was no fear mongering. The one point they were most upset about was the after trial press conference when the defense said that if it had been the other way around, Trayvon Martin wouldn’t have been prosecuted. That is, admittedly, an outrageous statement. Remember: when the police investigated the crime, they tested Martin for drugs, but not Zimmerman. They did a criminal background check on Martin, not Zimmerman. The idea that the justice system was especially hard on Zimmerman because he wasn’t black is ridiculous. But the main thing is that on MSNBC, which clearly has a Democratic bias, I saw nothing especially out of line. But then, I tend to agree with them.

Update (15 July 2013 5:53 pm)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Cenk Uygur this upset. It is really good and I agree with him right down the line:

Update (15 July 2013 10:32 pm)

The Washington Post just reported, Juror: 6-Woman Jury Was Initially Split on Convicting Zimmerman, but Law Led Them to Acquit. That is not what actually happened. The truth is that juries are a very unstable thing. Three jurors wanted to convict on at least manslaughter. What it means is that the three on the other side were dominant. And that is all that it means.

Also: All In had this great segment of a case where a black woman got 20 years for simply firing a gun that harmed no one; she was not allowed the use of the stand-your-ground law.

Speaking of libertarians, Timothy P. Carney is over at the Washington Examiner today. He wants to explain to us, Libertarian Populism: The Economic Prescription for the Right. It is a list of policies that he claims constitute libertarian populism. He even complains about Paul Krugman calling the whole idea of libertarian populism “bunk.” But his whole article demonstrates that Krugman was right.

I’m not saying that there is no overlap between populism and libertarianism. But as I know from years of disappointment, if you vote for someone who talks libertarian, what you will get is straight up conservative policy. You may vote for the guy who is calling for an end to all welfare, but the policy you will get is an end to individual welfare. So if the people are dumb enough to vote for a politician who says he is a libertarian populist, they will be getting a conservative who will put anti-choice, pro-big-business people on the federal courts.

So what does Carney offer as policy positions? He wants to break up the big banks. That is anti-libertarian but very populist. That will absolutely not happen. In fact, a candidate probably wouldn’t even campaign on that because it would offend too many donors. It’s his second position that made me write this article: he wants to eliminate (or at least cut) Social Security. You know what they call Social Security? The most popular government program ever. Very populist! Next up: corporate welfare. Two of the three examples he produces are from the farm bill. That’s the farm bill that the conservatives just cut in half; the farm subsidies part was increased relative to the Senate bill. Apart from that, liberals have long been for cutting farm subsidies. What’s more, in general, conservatives are way more in favor of corporate welfare than liberals are.

Carney also wants a “cleaner tax code.” That is just another name for raising taxes on the poor and middle classes, and lowering them on the rich. Of course, Carney says, “I don’t think the tax rate has to be flat.” But it is clear that he thinks it ought to be flatter and that totally flat would be a good thing. That is what people mean when they talk about simplifying the tax code. That’s what Simpson-Bowles is pushing. That’s what Paul Ryan is pushing. And that was what Mitt Romney was pushing. You remember Mitt Romney: he was the guy that libertarian populism is supposed to save the Republican Party from.

His approach to healthcare is pretty much to kick people off their employer provided plans. He says that this limits competition between insurers. There are a couple of things wrong with this. First, insurer profits are not a big problem; the problem with insurance companies is all the money they spend denying care. The big problems are drug patents and great limits on who can practice medicine in this country. Rather than offering a true libertarian approach to these problems, he just ignores them and focuses on minor issues. It’s also interesting that conservatives scream about how disruptive Obamacare will be, but have no problem greatly upsetting the current system by removing support from the employer-based system. He also wants to cut Medicare. Of course.

There are couple of other things that don’t exactly fit. He wants to cut down on regulation to allow more raw-milk dairy farms and such. And he wants to stop the revolving door of people in government going into lobbying. This second one is shockingly anti-libertarian, but at least populist. Regardless, almost all of Carney’s libertarian and populist ideas are marginal. In addition to not dealing with patents and medical trade, he doesn’t mention our out of control copyright system and says nothing about the very populist idea of a financial speculation tax.

He ends his article by saying, “These are acute libertarian populist policies. In the long run, a freer market means more competition, means higher wages.” Really?! Almost without exception, his ideas are not libertarian or not populist. Freer markets do not necessarily mean more competition; that’s why we have antitrust laws. It is also not clear that a freer market means higher wages. But regardless, in the long run we are all dead. One of the good uses of the government is to soften the disruptions of a free market. (And what’s with that highly unusual use of “acute”? It’s like Romney’s “severe conservative” comment.)

What all of Carney’s article shows is that libertarian populism is simply rebranding of tired old conservative policies. There is basically nothing in his list of policies that Romney and Ryan weren’t talking about during the last election. Conservatives have never tried to sell tax cuts for the rich as a good thing because rich people are so great. It was always that tax cuts for the rich would be good for the rest of us. Remember “trickle down economics”? Now it is about giving the “job creators” more money so they can hire us. But the article is good in the way that Sean Trende’s articles were: it shows what conservatives will do. The problem is that Carney really thinks he’s onto something new.

Nancy Folbre is an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And last night, she wrote an article over at the Economix Blog, Let Your Rich Uncle Pay for College. It is about a pilot program that will allow students go to their state university system in exchange of a 3% tax on their incomes for the first 20 years after graduation. As she notes, this is a good deal for poor and middle class students. What’s more, similar programs in Australia and Britain have increased college participation.

This is an exciting idea and I hope that it works out well. But I’m more interested in what she compared it to: a market-based program called My Rich Uncle. It is based on an idea by Milton Friedman and the Cato’s Miguel Palacios. And like most libertarian solutions to these kinds of problems, it goes a long way out of its way to ultimately do a far worse job than a direct government approach.

The idea is similar to the Oregon program. Students who want to go to college find a rich person to pay for it in exchange for a piece of the action. My Rich Uncle would work as an intermediary between the two parties, just like those companies that administer loans between family members. I see various problems with this. The main one is that this will set up a situation where those who are already well connected will do the best. Those who know wealthy people are more likely to benefit from their largess. What’s more, those whose parents are in the upper middle class are a much better bet than those those parents are poor—because that’s how our “meritocracy” works.

Almost as big a problem is turning education into job training. My Rich Uncle will clearly incentivize even more young people to major in business and finance. It would probably also encourage more people to go into engineering, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I doubt it would do much either way regarding the sciences. But it would decimate most of the liberal arts. I think that our society is greatly enriched by having a diversity of intellectual experiences. I want more people studying literature and Latin. They make us all better. But there is another aspect to this: most people don’t work in the field they got degrees in. The point of college, as Professor Kingsfield might have said, is to train your mind.

Here we come to a conundrum. If programs like My Rich Uncle were the only ones available to support higher education, people would notice the first problem: too many business majors. And so a private bureaucracy would form to deal with it. Students would be told things like, “You know, we’ve got too many business majors this year. Have you thought about engineering?” I run into this a lot when I discuss things in depth with libertarians. After a while, they end up with systems that are even more bureaucratic and constraining than government programs. But to them, it is all good because the government isn’t doing it. In other words, they don’t care about freedom so much as they just mistrust the government.

So where does this leave us? I believe that these kinds of free-market approaches to social ills are not provided so much to solve problems. Instead, they are provided to show that there are potentially solutions to these problems. The assumptions is that if the government just gets out of the way, the free market will cure all of our problems. It reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon where a scientist is written out a proof. It starts with the problem and ends with the solution, but in the middle is, “A miracle happens.” Indeed, if you listen to conservatives generally on these issues, you will over hear the word “magic.” The government should get out of the way and let the magic of the free market work. But the free market doesn’t work by magic. We understand in broad terms how it works and how it fails. And it does fail. That is especially the case when providing social goods like public education. And remember: almost all libertarians and a growing number of conservatives don’t even want to have publicly funded primary education. So you have to wonder about them when they start hocking ideas like My Rich Uncle.

But I’ve left the best for last. My Rich Uncle went bankrupt in 2009, screwing a whole lot of people. Vive la free market!