Do you remember the end of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, when Tony dies having reverted to human form again? It may be bad for science, but isn’t it great that his parents don’t have to bury a monster?

That’s how I feel about the death of Arlen Specter: at least he died a reasonable man—a Democrat!

Let me be clear: I am not making fun of Arlen Specter nor am I making light of his death. It is obviously a personal tragedy for him and his family. But I’m more concerned about his political life. And I think it is pretty great that Specter was mostly on the right side of history with his votes. His political career is certainly not perfect by my standards, but on the whole, it is something to be proud of. Arlen Specter lived a life worth living.

Specter will be remembered as the man who stood still. Earlier today, Robert Reich tweeted pretty much the same thing. (You can always tell when someone is brilliant: they agree with you publicly.)

I didn’t hate Specter when he was a Republican. In fact, he was always someone I could point to and note that not all Republicans on the national stage were crazy and evil. Just the same, had he not so publicly repudiated the Republican Party, I doubt I would now be writing this little obituary. But I am glad to do so.

Rest in peace fellow Democrat.

Afterword

Note that Specter really was a political maverick. Unlike John McCain.

On Up with Chris Hayes today, they discussed employer coercion. This is in reference to people like David Siegel who sent his employees a letter telling them that if Obama is reelected, he will have to fire many of them because his taxes will go up.[1] As the panel discussed why we don’t do something about this, Josh Barro came to the rescue. Now, as regular readers know, I don’t much like Barro, but at times he is very insightful. Today, he again showed his repellent side.

“What would you want to do about it?” Josh Barro asked.

This seemed to flummox the generally quick witted Chris Hayes.

No one on the panel could really counter Barro. This is sad, because Barro is offering one of the standard and most vile of conservative arguments: nothing can easily be done therefore nothing can be done. I associate this most strongly with South African apartheid. You might note that despite calls not to boycott the country—”The western companies are the only non-racist ones there!”—boycott we did, and apartheid was indeed destroyed.

I think we can deal with political coercion in the workplace the same way we dealt with sexual coercion. There is a very big difference between a coworker asking you out on a date and your boss doing so. Ditto for your coworker handing you a political pamphlet and your boss doing so. Let’s just call it political harassment, apply the sexual harassment laws to politics, and move on.

But this isn’t even what’s going on in cases like the David Siegel letter. There is no grey line here. This kind of thing should be illegal. But more than that, we really ought to live in a culture where all of David Siegel’s rich friends would ostracize him for such behavior. But given that this isn’t going to happen any time soon, we need laws. And the sexual harassment model is appropriate and easy.

[1] Note that this is nonsense. His claim is that Obama will raise his taxes, so he will have to fire people. This is the usual “job creator” myth. He would not employ these people if they were not making him money. The idea that he would fire some of them is ridiculous. If he did, his income would be reduced before taxes and after any extra taxes Obama might levy. There are two possible things going on here. Either Siegel is lying to his employees to get them to vote for Romney. Or he is so stupid that he actually thinks that his employees cost him money. I tend to think it is the latter. Conservatives have a shocking history of believing their own bullshit.

Update (26 October 2012 8:58 pm)

Gordon Lafer has a really good article on this subject over at The Hill. Again, however, no discussion of solutions.

Have you seen MSNBC’s The Cycle? It is amazing, because the show tries so hard to be “young” and “hip” it is painful to watch. It is like they’re going after the demographic that likes The Young Turks without having ever watched it. “Put some young people on the TV; it will be like a political American Bandstand.” Except it isn’t.

Touré, who hosts the show projects so much anemic middle-of-the-roadness that he seems more like a Young Republican in black face than the edgy Gen-Xer his other work would indicate. Steve Kornacki, one of the liberals on the show, tries hard to imitate a hip Ezra Klein. Unfortunately, he lands the hip but fails miserably on the Klein. Unlike his “both sides now” newspaper writing, when Klein is on MSNBC, he’s at his best: unapologetically liberal. As the other liberal on the show, Krystal Ball tries her best. Unfortunately, she isn’t that liberal, so she comes off as more whiny than progressive.

All of this could be forgiven if it weren’t for the choice of S. E. Cupp to play the part of the conservative on The Cycle. I know that in this modern world, it is easy to equate conservative and stupid or conservative and ignorant or conservative and both. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If I were creating a show where I needed a token conservative, I would try to find one. (Josh Barro would be a great choice!) I wouldn’t just pick any public idiot. But that is what the producers of The Cycle did when they hired S. E. Cupp.

On today’s show, Cupp explained that Biden did pretty well on domestic issues, but embarrassed himself on foreign affairs. As I noted last night during the debate, I thought Ryan embarrassed himself in this area—especially on the issue of Afghanistan. But I understand that Biden wasn’t perfect, especially when explaining the Libyan embassy attacks. But this is not why Cupp thinks Biden “embarrassed” himself. Biden embarrassed himself on the issue of Iran. After all, Martha Raddatz had to “ask” Biden, “You are acting a little bit like [the Iranians] don’t want [a nuclear weapon].” The assumption is that the Iranians are just evil and irrational —the same charges we have heard about America’s enemies for as long as I’ve been alive. These are also the same charges that have proved to be wrong each and every time. And this is what S. E. Cupp knows to be the case and this is her damning indictment of Joe Biden.

Of course, it is exactly because of such ignorant statements that shows like the The Cycle have conservatives on. Liberals won’t say such things. Just the same, they won’t counter them either. Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent article this morning that touched on this subject, Martha Raddatz and the faux objectivity of journalists. Supposedly objective journalists like Raddatz are committed to war with Iran and no liberal pundit is going to point out how off the chart crazy these ideas are:

The Cycle is a much more dangerous show than Fox News’ The Five. Whereas The Five is supposed to be crazy conservative and is, The Cycle is supposed to be at least somewhat liberal but isn’t. Instead, it provides a venue for crazy conservative talking points to be spouted without any counter. But I don’t suppose it matters, because in addition to everything else, The Cycle is boring. I don’t think it will be long for the TV machine.

Our intellectual property system has been broken for so long that most people can’t even see the problem. I remember back in the early 1990s, my friends and I often talked about software patents and how they were killing innovation. Things like the GIF image format and the XOR cursor could make me apoplectic. Over the last year or two, I’ve been hearing a lot more people talk about this—only three decades late! (I don’t mean to suggest that I was on the cutting edge.)

Now let me be clear. I’m with Dean Baker: we should rethink our entire patent and copyright systems. There are two arguments in favor of patents. First, patents encourage innovation. I think this a highly questionable statement. But even if one accepts it, there are other ways to encourage innovation. As a society, we are blinded by our approach to intellectual property. In fact, most people think these anti-free market laws are somehow God given.

The second argument in favor of patents is that it protects the “little guy” against the big corporations. I like this image of the individual battling against the system. But it is rarely, if ever, the case. Take the story of Edwin Howard, the inventor of FM radio, driven to kill himself when corporate interests blocked his new (And far better!) system.

Yesterday, Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr wrote an excellent article about the software patent system, The Patent, Used as a Sword. It starts with the story of Vlingo, a company that created voice recognition software included in Siri in the iPhone, which was destroyed by a patent lawsuit that Vlingo won. It is a very familiar story.

They also note in the article that Apple and Google now spend more on patent lawsuits and purchases (which are often coerced in cases like Vlingo) than they do on Research & Development. That makes sense. Why should a company create intellectual property when they can just steal it?

This story points to an important aspect of our entire economic system: large companies use the legal system as a sword against small companies and individuals. Conservatives claim that the government should not “pick winners and losers.” But the truth is that through a broken intellectual property system that allows the powerful to always get their way, the government is picking winners and losers. It is simply doing it in the most unjust way imaginable. Conservatives don’t even see the problem given that they like this kind of “winners always win” market manipulation. And liberals don’t see it either because they are too involved using Siri on their iPhones.

Update (8 October 2012 12:41 pm)

Dean Baker chimes in on the Times article:

Question: How many US newspapers does it take to predict the Venezuelan presidential election?

Answer: Predict it wrong? All of them!

Maybe it’s just because I’m some godless socialist, but I think Hugo Chavez has been pretty good for Venezuela. There is no subject on which the mainstream media are more clearly biased. I get the impression we’re supposed to think that Chavez is some evil despot like Saddam Hussein or Charles Taylor. But to me, he seems like a democratic socialist.

Hogo Chavez’s Constitutional Referendum

I was most struck by this when Chavez tried to get a constitutional amendment to eliminate the presidential term limit. The US media reported that the amendment was to make him “president for life.” Amazing. But then, when the amendment failed by a really small number of votes, Chavez was asked if he would contest the results. He replied that he wouldn’t because he didn’t want the constitution amended unless the country was really behind it. How did the media respond? He must have some evil socialist plot!

Contrast this to President Bush, who at that time had the 50 percent plus one vote strategy—the idea being that the narrowest of margins gave him a mandate to screw roughly half the nation. In this case, who seems like the statesman: Bush or Chavez? I realize that Bush doesn’t set the bar very high. But Bush is always treated with respect by the mainstream media. The same cannot be said about Chavez.

Afterword: Keep Your Ignorant Comments to Yourself

Before anyone starts yelling at me that Chavez did this or that: stop! I don’t doubt that Chavez is imperfect. I remember his infamous “Bush is Satan” speech at the UN. But that is not what the US media coverage of him is about. Chavez is a socialist. But that isn’t it either. He’s an advocate of the working class. But that isn’t it either. He’s nationalized industries and that has hurt profits for various corporations. Bingo!

Further, I really don’t want to hear from people who know Chavez only through US media coverage. It is clearly biased. No pretense is made at objectivity. If anyone can send me even to typical he said/she said coverage of Chavez, I will be grateful. And surprised.

Update (7 October 2012 9:05 pm)

Via Corey Robin, Business Week writes:

But coming from Business Week, this is probably meant as an indictment.

Update (7 October 2012 9:13 pm)

Yes! Mark Weisbrot writing in The Guardian, Why the US demonises Venezuela’s democracy. The subtitle is, “Venezuela is about to hold impeccably free and fair elections. Yet the US treats it as a dictatorship.” Go read it. It’s good.

Update (8 October 2012 8:28 pm)

Keane Bhatt has a great article at the North American Congress of Latin America website, A Hall of Shame for Venezuelan Elections Coverage. Here’s a bit of it, but you should read the whole article (it’s pretty short):

Update (9 October 2012 11:26 am)

Mark Weisbrot of one of our favorite places on the net, CEPR, has a really good OpEd in today’s issue of The New York Times, Why Chávez Was Re-elected. Must reading.

Update (10 October 2012 9:37 am)

Peter Hart has a good article over at FAIR, What Are Enemies For?: Iran Sham Helps PBS Smear Chavez. I saw another article (Can’t find link!) where the author claimed that Chavez only getting half the vote should make him humble. That’s amazing — it shows a writer not letting the facts get in the way of the argument he wants to make. Chavez won by 10 percentage points, or as we say here in the United States: a landslide.

Peter Hart over at the excellent Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has an amazing catch. In the most recent Time magazine, Michael Scherer present a cover story that is supposed to get past the campaign lies, Blue Truth, Red Truth. But it is, of course, just another exceptional example of he said/she said reporting.

Hart notes that the article came just to the edge of calling out the lying Romney campaign—if in the most gentle words imaginable:

Not nearly as bad as we’ve come to expect. But (following last week’s CounterSpin), the paragraph continues:

Just to unpack this: Obama is a worse liar because he doesn’t lie as much as Romney. Balance!

Overall, the Time article blames the public for not “demanding” politicians be honest. But it does allow that it would be better if journalists were more aggressive in calling out politicians. Then it notes that the partisan news sources are more aggressive. Thus, all the public need do is go to Fox for information about Obama and MSNBC for information about Romney:

This is bad in so many ways. It is wrong to say that MSNBC is the liberal version of Fox. It’s true that MSNBC does go a little softer on Democrats than Republicans. But it is not at all the same. Fox News is rightly referred to as “GOP TV.” Fox isn’t so much conservative as Republican. It is explicitly partisan and can in no way be considered a traditional news source. MSNBC can.

Another problem I have with this is equating the New York Times editorial page with the Wall Street Journal’s. The New York Times is very slightly left of center. The Wall Street Journal is just loony.

Finally, the Drudge Report is shown to be wrong a few times each day. It would make more sense to tell people to go to the National Enquirer. Actually, the National Enquirer is a far more dependable news source. Really.

This Time article is an embarrassment. It is one thing if they want to publish articles filled with false equivalence. It is quite another to write a story that claims to get to the bottom of partisan claims but then weasels its way out of any real reporting. Time should be ashamed. But then, they should have been ashamed these last 90 years.

In a lot of discussions of income inequality, people note that the huge rise in inequality over the last 35 years happened in both before and after tax income. Thus, like Estragon in Waiting for Godot, they claim, “Nothing to be done!” Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson in Winner-Take-All Politics discus income inequality entirely from a political standpoint. And this is the right way to look at it.

We already know that money makes money. If you have a bank, it does not take great skill to borrow money from the Fed for nothing and loan it out for more. Similarly, having lots of money is often a prerequisite for investing in the best opportunities. The Facebook IPO was for suckers with their hundreds and thousands of dollars. If you had tens of millions, like Bono, then you could have invested in Facebook a couple years earlier and made a billion.

So the question is how the government makes the rich even richer, so that they will have an even bigger advantage to collect even more. Winner-Take-All Politics describes it like this:

The authors talk in great depth about the two powers that balance a democracy: the wealthy trying to enrich themselves and the poor passing laws to redistribute wealth. In general, through its history, the United States oscillated with the waxing and waning of these forces. But over the last 35 years, we have seen our political system tip far toward the wealthy. They note that the decline in union power is most disturbing because unions provide the only real organized counterbalance to the power of rich corporate interests.

They also note that this idea is nothing new:

There is too much in this book to discuss. Whenever I read any book, I book dart interesting parts. My copy has over 100 book darts in it. I’m sure I’ll come back to it. In fact, this is not the first time I’ve written about the book. But if nothing else, we should all listen to the broad argument of Winner-Take-All Politics.

The rich have gotten very organized and the poorer classes simply cannot compete. That is, unless we organize. And it is in this way that Hacker and Pierson take a sobering book and pull off an inspiring ending. I’m not much a joiner, but I’ve decided that I need to join Common Cause. At least. And I think all of you should too.

Paul Krugman has a good article on Mitt Romney’s biggest lie of Wednesday night’s debate, Romney’s Sick Joke. He points out the usual stuff: Romney’s “plan” is to simply go back to what we had before—unemployed people who can afford the outrageous COBRA fees can keep their coverage.

He also added a few points that have not been so well reported. One is that the number of jobs that provide healthcare has been declining over the last decade. He also noted that the Romney campaign’s assertion that states could come to the rescue by guaranteeing coverage was nonsense. He write, “Mr. Romney wants to eliminate restrictions on interstate insurance sales, depriving states of regulatory power.” And, “If all you do is require that insurance companies cover everyone, healthy people will wait until they’re sick to sign up, leading to sky-high premiums.”

However, I think that Krugman makes a mistake that pretty much everyone is making: Obama did punch back on this point. Krugman writes:

As I wrote in Romney Campaign Walks Back “Moderation,” Obama countered Romney on this exact point. And he did it quite forcefully. This makes Romney’s lie all that much worse because he doubled down on it during the debate only to have his campaign walk it back afterward.

When it comes to the debate, Obama can’t catch a break. Even when he did fight back, he gets no credit. And this is true even of good liberal commentators like Paul Krugman.

Frankly Curious’ favorite economist, Dean Baker, takes a bite out of conservative affirmative action case George Will. Following the presidential debate, Will is screaming, “Healthcare rationing!” This isn’t even a canard; it’s a lie. There is no way that George Will is this stupid or ignorant.

As we know from economics, or even arithmetic, all things are rationed. A private insurance company rations healthcare. And even more to the point, healthcare is really rationed for the 50 million people without insurance. But Will doesn’t care about those people. No. He’s out there making sure that we provide healthcare to babies born without brains, because those are the people who are the real victims of our broken healthcare system. This is typical of conservatives, of course: they are always more worried about unborn children than born children. I think it’s because they don’t much like actual people.

I should be clear: George Will does not use the “brainless baby” as an example. No one does. But when Oregon decided that they were going to prioritize healthcare, last on the list of procedures to spend money on was keeping babies born without brains alive. The point is that there are limited resources and I am proud to admit that I think those resources are better used on, say, heart surgeries and insulin prescriptions. (Note: only three children with anencephaly have ever lived any length of time even with medical care. By far the longest is three and a half years.)

After Wednesday’s debate, I had a conversation with a conservative who was surprised when I explained that the ACA was just like the laws that say you have to have auto insurance to drive. This conservative thought this was a good idea. (He should! It’s a conservative idea!) He explained that he thought the ACA was a government takeover of healthcare. Now why would he think that? Perhaps because people like George Will are constantly implying this?

No one is stopping the rich from getting any healthcare they can afford—just like now. So what are conservative upset about? Chick Deney will continue to get spare body parts so the rest of us will have to put up with him until his cells won’t regenerate at 124 years old (and who knows, they may come up with something for that too). But no, George Will screams, “Rationing!”

Dean Baker explains:

George Will: freedom fighter.

Warning: The following commentary, and blatant example of internet bullying, may be offensive to some readers (specifically, Kenneth W. Krause).

In a recent e-mail to news anchor Jennifer Livingston, Kenneth W. Krause stalwartly addressed Jennifer’s outrageous obesity and calling on her to be a better example for impressionable young girls who watch the early morning news – girls, I assume, like Krause’s own pudgeball daughter. What father wouldn’t try to spare his little girl from the nightmare of body fat? Like Olive’s dad in Little Miss Sunshine, Krause just wants girls to keep in mind the ancient adage: a moment on the lips, forever on the hips.

To stand up to the elephant on the TV takes a man of some kind of character. His thoughtful attempt to expose the grotesque error of Jennifer’s lifestyle was the sort of humanitarian gesture that would make Don Imus or Rush Limbaugh harden up with pride. Mister Krause, with his huge, socially-stunted balls, went so far as to call her out for choosing to maintain the disgusting habit of chewing tobacco – I mean the disgusting habit of being an affront to the universal idea of female beauty. And in the public eye too!

Behind her brave facade, Jennifer must certainly have been cut to the quick by Mister Krause’s words: seeking his approval is the only reason she gets out of bed every morning. Why else does any woman go on living if not to forage in the brutal wilderness of our society for even a meager compliment? If just one person you pass on the street finds you unattractive, you might as well stay inside and become a snarky blogger. I shudder to think that the guy behind the counter at Arby’s might look at me and think, “If she lost a few of pounds and combed her hair, I might hit that.”

Fortunately, “there’s no accounting for taste” is also true. Even I might be considered alluring, depending on the lighting and whether the beholder is wearing his glasses. Personally, I don’t see myself as beautiful or sexy. My husband tells me I’m beautiful and I believe him because there are no other women in the room.

I can only imagine the sort of Adonis Mister Krause must certainly be. I mean, people in glass houses… am I right? He was probably born an average-looking kind of guy before he was transformed into the god of all things beautiful. I’ve found an artist’s rendition of what Mister Krause may have looked like before becoming the guiding light of pulchritude: