It was just the other day that I was writing about how boring politics is. And the fault is entirely the Republicans’. There’s really nothing to discuss. There are no proposals for fixing problems. I mean really: the Republicans are not interested in any problems. It is all faith based politics. Their approach to guns is the perfect example. We can’t do anything about them because doing even the smallest thing would destroy some kind of vague ideological purity. But when it comes to guns, I don’t so much care because even the changes that liberals propose are unlikely to improve matters.

But on the economic front, it’s downright funny. Marco Rubio is running around the country talking about all his new ideas and how we must vote for him because he’s young and “the future.” And his ideas are that we ought to do exactly what Ronald Reagan did. There’s a big problem with this. Even if you think that Reagan’s policies worked great, they haven’t worked great since then. There are diminishing returns. It might well be true that cutting the top tax rate from 90% to 70% had a big effect. But will cutting it from 39.6% to 30.8% have as big an effect? I think the case is much stronger that it will have the opposite effect: we are now at the point that giving rich people even more money hurts the economy.

Noah Smith talked about this last year with regard to deregulation:

But this is what Rubio and the rest of the Republicans have on offer. And the point is not that cutting taxes would improve the economy. It is just that they are ideologically committed to cutting taxes because helping the rich is just the right thing to do. It’s like the “small government” obsession that Republicans have. They can’t give you a reason why small government is good. It is just an article of faith that it is good. Of course, they don’t actually believe in small government. They just say they are as a justification for cutting programs that help the poor and middle classes and spending more on programs that help the rich.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote, TINA and the ACA. It’s about how yet again, the Republicans have failed to come up with an alternative to Obamacare. It all comes down to what I’ve been talking about for year, Obamacare is the conservative policy solution for our broken healthcare system. So it is no surprise that they find it impossible to come up with a conservative alternative to it. They are against doing anything at all — on principle.

Every idea they’ve ever come up with in the past was only proposed defensively. They wanted something they could hold up to stop a more liberal plan from being enacted. This is the basis of Jonathan Chait’s Heritage Uncertainty Principle. If a policy doesn’t involve helping the rich or hurting the poor, the Republicans really aren’t interested in it. That’s a depressing fact about modern American politics.

So we liberals can get together and talk about different approaches to solving problems. But conservatives are not interested in solving problems. In as much as they engage with them, it is simply to stop anything from ever being done about them. What a sad world they live in. And what an awful world they are trying to create for all the rest of us.

I just read a remarkable article over at Rolling Stone, The Endless Trial of Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi Committee. It is written by Andy Kroll, who clearly looks at Gowdy was a jaundiced eye, but wants to be super fair to this man who heads the latest and biggest investigation on just what happened in Benghazi three and a half years ago. No, wait. That’s not what they are looking into. They are looking into what happened afterwards, because exactly what Susan Rice said on Sunday talk shows is really important! In the end, the entire Benghazi investigation has come down to whether the Obama administration was spinning the attack for political advantage. So even if everything Gowdy and company says is true, it is a witch hunt.

But reading the article, you get the impression that Trey Gowdy is the true victim here. He used to be a prosecutor, and by all accounts a great prosecutor. And now he is so upset because it is all so partisan and unfair. He has to wait forever to get documents. And then Hillary Clinton would only testify in public, as if a closed door testimony would have disclosed something important. (Let’s face it: the public testimony just showed that the worst things we thought about the hearings and Trey Gowdy were exactly right.) Oh, how the Benghazi chairman wishes he had stayed a prosecutor!

I don’t doubt that he does. Nowhere in the article is the most important fact here: prosecutors are by far the most powerful members of the legal system. Everything is set up to their advantage. After OJ Simpson was found not guilty, a lot of people claimed that it was unfair that he was able to spend millions on his defense. So what?! The state spent millions prosecuting him. The state can spend as much money as it likes on any given case. So I’m sure that Trey Gowdy is indeed very unhappy that he now finds himself a fair fight where he doesn’t battle against people who have no real weapons.

The amount of whining that he does in this article is amazing. In fact, it is whining from beginning to end. Listening to him, you would think that he was a babe in the woods — totally unaware of just how nasty politics was. And there he is, like a real life Superman standing up for Truth, Justice, and the American Way! It’s just the media and the Democrats who politicized this. He just wanted “to run a serious, document-centric, fact-centric investigation.” And that’s why again and again he leaked information to damage Democrats in general, and Clinton in particular. In fact, this is doubtless why he wanted a private testimony with Clinton — so he could leak selective bits that made her look bad.

But according to Trey Gowdy, the Benghazi hearings were a success. He said, “We have interviewed this number of witnesses nobody else interviewed, including eyewitnesses, [accessed] these documents from these agencies that nobody else accessed, and, oh, by the way, we have the correspondence from the two people who, one knew the most about Libya being the ambassador, and the other arguably knew more about our policy in Libya than anyone else.” So this hearing — the eighth that Congress had — was all about fact finding. So he found some new facts. And they told us squat. Because there is no there there.

But we are supposed to feel sorry for poor old Trey Gowdy because he was just doing the prosecutor’s job of getting to the facts. Of course, we know that Gowdy was just acting as a hit man and that he was willing to lie to do so. This is the problem that prosecutors face when they have to get a real job: they show themselves to be incompetent and immoral. Rolling Stone shouldn’t have given him space to make his case. It was far more fair than Gowdy has ever been to Hillary Clinton or anyone in the Obama administration.

Shakezula is a very smart guy, but I think he was wrong yesterday, Yesterday Was All We Had. He noted that there will be a lot of very sad people when Obama leaves the White House, but the saddest of all will be “the people who profit from Barack Obama Hate Machine, Inc.” He is right to some extent. Just in the most general sense, Fox New and other conservative hate organizations do best when the Democrats are in charge. When the Republicans are in charge, the Hate Machine is asleep. Everything is just fine because “our guy” is in charge and they only start to complain at the end when even the truest of the true believers can’t deny how bad things have gotten.

But Shakezula said this, “Assuming the next president isn’t named Trump or Cruz, neither a President H Clinton or B Sanders would generate a tenth of the visceral reaction and hence the money and the power that’s come from using President Barack Hussein Obama to frighten to terminally resentful white people into falling in line and forking over the cash and/or votes.” I don’t think that’s true. I accept that there is something special about Obama because he is a black man and these kinds of people are terrified of black men.

But Obama has done an amazingly good job of not being a black man. This is part of how he became president. The main thing that the conservative base hates about Obama is that he’s a Democrat. Someone I have to work very closely with is a hate radio addict and, as a result, a bigot. She is certain that Obama is intent on starting a race war. Now that may sound like it goes along with Shakezula’s contention, but I heard the exact same thing about Bill Clinton when he was in office. The big conservative complaint against the Democrats is not that they are black but that they are on the side of the black man against the white man.

Really: in the 1990s, I was a libertarian. And I was amazed at the things that people would say about Clinton. I said about him more or less what I say about Obama today: he’s the best president we can reasonably expect. Yet the conservative vitriol against both men was almost identical. They were both socialists who were determined to use racial tensions to start the revolution. It was the Obama Hate Machine before anyone knew who Obama was. It was nuts then and it is nuts now. I mean, why would the leader of the most powerful nation on earth want to start a revolution? Also stated was that even though nothing big happened during the first term, just you wait until the second! And then nothing happened and they just dropped it.

But you know who did wait until his second term to show his true colors? George W Bush. This was the man who originally ran on “compassionate conservatism” and then got all the evangelicals to vote for him because the gays were coming. And then once he won re-election, he told the nation that he was going to privatize Social Security. This is entirely typical. The Republican Party is all about projection: they see voter fraud everywhere because they commit voter fraud. They see conspiracies everywhere, because they commit conspiracies. And they think the Democrats are always lying because their entire economic and foreign policy positions are based on lies.

If Clinton or Sanders is the next president, the Obama Hate Machine will just change to the Clinton or Sanders Hate Machine. Nothing substantial will change. There will just be new bits of their personal biographies that will prove that they truly want to destroy the country. It will continue on. Sure, Obama being black helped in a certain way. But there is lots of good material coming from a woman or a socialist. In fact, if the next Democratic president happened to be a black man, it might make their work harder. You can only claim that the president wants to destroy America because he’s black for so long. You have to come up with new narrative — new hokum to sell.

It’s not the Obama Hate Machine; it’s the Democratic Hate Machine. And the conservative base will continue to shell out money to fight it for as long as there are angry old white people.

I have to admit to being at a loss about the Republican presidential nomination. It does seem hard to believe that Donald Trump would be the nominee. But why do I think that? In a lot of ways, he is the Ross Perot of his day. I don’t mean that they are the same. Perot was an actual issue candidate. That issue — the budget deficit — was wrong; but it was something that intelligent people could disagree about. But they both appealed to people in much the same way: they were self financing and seemed like the kind of people who were willing to tell the people “the truth.” It’s a kind of affinity fraud, or as it is know, “identity politics.”

There are a lot of conservatives who are in love with this idea. Part of it is the delusion that people deserve their wealth. As we all know, Ross Perot’s fortune was highly tied to government largess. And the same thing is true of Donald Trump. See question number 17 of David Cay Johnston’s 21 Questions For Donald Trump. But to the conservative mind, these are self-made men. And without any experience in government, they are expected to walk into the White House and fix all our problems. So I see no reason why Trump can’t manage to take a third of the Republican delegates.

Matt Bruenig wrote an interesting article related to this, The Trump Confidence Game Analysis Has No Basis in Fact. Really, it just comes down to the fact that everyone has predicted that Trump will die out but he’s only grown in support. And I understand this. There is just this gut feeling in me that Trump can’t win, but there is no actual evidence behind it.

I noticed this in a recent Jonathan Bernstein article, Trump Will Still Lose. Here’s How. From the beginning, Bernstein has said that Trump will lose because he is of “the party decides” belief. But I found this most recent article to be hedging more than usual. Maybe there really is something different this time. Maybe it is all just about Trump being a billionaire.

Cruz seems like such an obvious choice, because he is even more vile than Trump, but is savvy enough to know what he can and can’t say regarding the media. But who really cares? Imagine that it is Marco Rubio? We are still talking about a horrible person. And let’s not forget that of these three, Trump is most likely to be the best. He’s not committed to conservative ideology. The other two are. So I imagine that a Trump administration would at least have some pragmatic aspects to it and very likely some absolutely positive policy.

But as Brian Beutler noted, the GOP’s indentity politics may doom Marco Rubio. But he is wrong when it comes to the Democrats. He thinks that the reason that Martin O’Malley hasn’t caught on is because he is too much of a banal white guy. But that isn’t it. I think O’Malley hasn’t caught fire because he doesn’t offer anything especially exciting. Dismissing the Democratic base’s embrace of Sanders (a while male from the Northeast) being because he is a “left-wing insurgent” is self-refuting. The Democratic base is interested in issues, not “types.”

This is something I’ve talked about a lot, but people have a hard time accepting it. The Democrats are not the party of identity politics. African Americans don’t vote for the Democratic Party because it is the African American party. They vote for it because it has done a great deal for the African American community. If there is an identity for the Democratic Party, it is economic uncertainty: poor and working class people vote for the Democratic Party because they think that it looks out for their economic interests.

It is the Republican Party that is all about identity politics. They are, after all, the people who claim to be the “real” Americans. And they very much want to vote for a rich white guy, because we just haven’t had enough of those. So currently, Trump and Cruz look like the clear favorites to win the nomination. Politically, the three are very similar. But Rubio has the problem that he looks just a little bit like he might be ethnic.

That’s what it seems to be about. The Republicans have long ago given up on policy. It is all about personality and identity. And as a result, it is most likely that they will nominate Trump or Cruz. In the end, all they want is some blowhard to talk tough — but one they trust. And that means a white man. It’s funny that the Democratic Party with all its diversity is the one that is seen as the party of identity politics. Is the Democratic Party the African American party? No. Is it the Latino party? No. Is it the woman party? No. But the Republican Party is the white male party. It is the party of identity politics.

Last night, I watched a little bit of the MSNBC coverage of the then upcoming State of the Union address. And what I saw so upset me that I didn’t even watch the event. It was big news yesterday that Iran had captured ten US Navy crew members. So it was time to start demagoguing! And there was Steve Schmidt on “liberal” MSNBC going on (and on and on) about how the president needed to change his speech and talk tough about Iran and under no circumstance should the president tout the Iranian nuclear deal because Iran is bad, bad, bad.

Chris Matthews fired back. He’s not an artful guy, but what he said was basically correct: the Republicans just look for anything to complain about the president, that it was a bad faith criticism, and that Schmidt himself was doing that. Schmidt defended himself by noting that his wife was in the Navy and through a kind of “some of my best friends are military,” claimed that he didn’t just want war.

As I recall, both Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes made the argument that the whole thing was a diplomatic issue and maybe the president would be wrong to politicize it and might put these very service members in jeopardy. All I could think at the time was that this was going to be how it was. It didn’t matter that the president wanted to use the SotU address to call for collaboration, it was all going to be about conservative jerks like Steve Schmidt going around claiming that Obama is weak because he doesn’t rip off his shirt and pound his chest.

At the actual SotU address, Obama went on with his speech as planned. He told the assembled conservative whiners that we had a solid economy, and, “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth.” And then after the speech, the press was filled with headlines like this one in The Washington Post, Iran Releases Captured US Navy Crew Members. And there was this in The New York Times, Iran’s Swift Release of US Sailors Hailed as a Sign of Warmer Relations. Oh! So contrary to Steven Schmidt, it’s actually things like the Iran nuclear deal and the fact that Obama believes in diplomacy that made this whole thing a non-issue, except for the conservative ranters who are only interested in finding fault with the president because he happens to be a Democrat.

Now you might say that this is much ado about nothing. And that’s true in an absolute sense. It’s just that it is always true. What Steve Schmidt was really saying was that he doesn’t like the Iran nuclear deal, and he doesn’t like it because he doesn’t like the president, and he doesn’t like the president because he’s a conservative hack. Of course, what seems to have been lost in all of this is that it was actually America that was at fault. What Iran did is what we would have done in that circumstance. But any excuse for more whining from conservatives.

What exactly Steve Schmidt is doing on television is unclear to me. If he had been more successful, we would have President McCain, be at war with Iran right now, and have Sarah Palin embarrassing us all over the world. Someone on Twitter last night said that he should be on Fox News, but I countered that. Say what you will about Fox News, at least the people on it are interesting. Steve Schmidt is on MSNBC because the network is desperate to have some kind of conservative who can breath through his nose to sort of counter Rachel Maddow. I hope Schmidt realizes just how much he benefits from affirmative action.

As I was getting ready to leave town Monday morning, I saw that Chris Hughes had decided to sell New Republic. It’s interesting to me because I was harsh in my criticism of the late 2014 resignation debacle. I first wrote, New Republic: 1914 – 2014. And then later, Attack of the Crybaby: Why Chris Hughes Turned Against New Republic. It is this latter one that I find myself thinking about now. What exactly was Chris Hughes thinking all this time.

I don’t think that what happened is opened to debate. Hughes started by thinking it would be fun to own a magazine. He had a great time hanging out with really accomplished, sophisticated people who had earned their reputations at the top of the liberal publishing pyramid. It must have been heady for Hughes, because let’s not forget: all Hughes did was happen to be Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate. That’s it. There’s no doubt that he’s smart enough, but he isn’t even at Zuckerberg’s level, and that level is low itself.

But after hanging out with the cool kids for a couple of years, Hughes got bored with it. After all, people like Jeet Heer were little more than celebrities to Hughes. And the truth is to them, Hughes was probably just a rich kid who owed his position to luck. They appreciated the money, but that was as far as it went. So given that New Republic was no longer fun, Hughes had to come up with a reason to have bought it — something to save face. So he came up with the idea he would revolutionize publishing.

The problem was that Hughes couldn’t revolutionize anything — the best he could hope for is to be the roommate of someone who might revolutionize publishing. And that wasn’t going to happen. But even if he had been a genius, he didn’t understand the publishing industry. So he was destined to fail regardless. And so that led to his letter Monday where he announced that he was selling New Republic because of the question he can’t answer, “Can it find a sustainable business model that will power its journalism in the decades to come?”

Well, it’s going to be pretty hard to sell New Republic as anything but a brand name that someone might want to take on. Thirteen months ago, it employed a great staff of writers and editors. Now they are mostly distributed throughout the publishing industry. Now I pretty much only follow Brian Beutler and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Stoker. I don’t see who is going to be all that interested in buying Chris Hughes’ plaything now that he’s broken it.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo made a great point about the constraints of running a news organization within a budget. That was something that Hughes had no interest in. The idea of managing New Republic better doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to him. Instead, he blew $20 million in four years. His idea seems to have been that he could use the power of the internet to turn the magazine into something really special. But of course, there are already millions of people on the internet trying to do that.

A lot of people are talking about the old New Republic business model: modest financial losses made up for with donations from rich donors. Certainly that is what I thought Chris Hughes was going to do when he first bought the magazine. But he’s turned out to be far more immature than that. He never had a plan. He never tried to make the magazine efficient. He just tried to have fun. And when he was done, he tried to say face.

His legacy will be that he destroyed the magazine. There really is no point in it continuing on. But of course, it will continue on — just like Netscape continues on. But what it shows is that it is dangerous to have really rich people around. Hughes is like Bill and Melinda Gates. They are all people who think that because they are wealthy, they must be smart and able to fix difficult problems. And because they can throw around a lot of money, there are always lots of people around to tell them they are right. But now that Hughes isn’t having fun and everyone is laughing at him for being incompetent, he’s giving up and going out looking for something else to have fun with. After the Gates Foundation manages to finish all its education “reforms” only to find that they’ve made things worse, the Gates will find something else that they don’t understand to help “fix.”

No one should care that New Republic is dying. But we should care very much that our excessive income inequality allows rich fools to destroy venerable institutions because they think their money makes them smart.

A lot of my day job involves work about copyright. That is why you will notice that I am now so careful about using only free and fair use images and giving credit. It’s made me paranoid. But also, I really didn’t know much in the past. I thought, for example, I could take anything from Wikipedia and it was okay. It turns out, that’s not true. All images on the site are free, but most of them require attribution. I’ve just taken to providing attribution regardless, because I like giving people credit. I’m grateful that I can use their work to provide a better experience for my readers.

But last night, I was thinking about the Barack Obama “Hope” poster, which was created by Shepard Fairey. It’s a beautiful design. And after thousands of parodies, beyond the visual idea, it is clearly hard to render well. But back in 2009, I was listening to Fresh Air, and Mannie Garcia was being interviewed. He was a photographer for the Associated Press, and it turned out that Fairey had used one of Garcia’s photos as the basis of the “Hope” poster. It was because there was a legal battle going on: how dare Fairey “steal” Garcia’s work!

As a legal matter, I think what Fairey did was entirely in keeping with the letter and spirit of fair use. Garcia had taken thousands of photos. He didn’t recognize that Fairey had used his image because Fairey hadn’t. Fairey used a small part of one of his images and made something totally new. But Fairey knew the slippery legal foundation of all this because he tried to hide the source of his poster. That was stupid, but probably standard operating procedure, because the way the law works, if everyone had a good enough lawyer, nothing would ever be created.

The way it worked out, Fairey and the AP made a settlement where they would share the royalties going forward. I believe Garcia was squeezed out of the deal all together. Think about that. Fairey takes a small part of an endless supply of photographs that the AP publishes, each of which has negligible marginal value. He turns it into something that is not only of great cultural important but also of great financial value. And he has to share the profits from that. This is rent seeking, pure and simple. This isn’t about art. The AP hired Garcia because they wanted photos to go with an event that was being covered. This is just a big business forcing an innovative small business to pay it money. It is a kind of protection racket for big corporations.

But what bugged me in the interview was that Garcia was offended at the idea Fairey would just go online and look for images — that he did not “condone people taking things, just because they can, off the Internet.” The nature of all art is acquisition. But in the visual arts, it’s totally out of hand. No one would ever be sued for using the phrase, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Yet that is exactly what happened in the case of the “Hope” poster. In fact, it was even worse, because that particular element of that particular photo is not nearly as memorable — and creative — as Chomsky’s sentence.

The original purpose of copyright was to encourage the creative arts. It has been a long time since that’s been true. Now copyright discourages the creative arts. All copyright really encourages is the promotion of things that look salable and legal action against creative workers. It’s sad. And it means that creativity has been corporatized. It’s just another sign of an empire in decline.

Afterword: Copyright and Fair Use

It’s amusing that Fairey couldn’t use part of the original image to make his iconic poster. But Wikipedia can now use his poster — a far greater creative achievement — under fair use.

I’ve written before about 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. But last night, I came upon a lecture that Chang gave in support of the book at the London School of Economics. I’ve embedded it below. If you haven’t read the book, you should at least listen to the lecture.

In the lecture, he talked about something I quite remember. He made the point that it was a myth that people were paid what they are worth. You hear this kind of nonsense a lot from the likes of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek and really any free market absolutist. The idea is that the market is never wrong. If you are paid $20 million per year, it is because that’s what the economy — more or less God the way these people see it — has decided what you are worth.

And really, since the late 1970s, I’ve heard this nonsense from a lot of people. It is very much a matter of faith. Because there is absolutely no evidence for it. And there is plenty of evidence that it just isn’t true. But Ha-Joon Chang provided a great thought experiment regarding two bus drivers: one in Sweden and the other in India. Bus drivers in Sweden make 50 times as much as bus drivers in India. Is the Swedish bus driver really worth 50 times as much as the Indian?

Well, I know what the free market absolutists would say: yes! You see, the Swedish bus driver is transporting people who pay more money. Therefore, this bus driver is worth the greater amount. But this is a very abstract view of the world. It is something that the free marketeers don’t much want to discuss: value is meaningless. In this way of thinking, the bus driver is not primarily driving but rather conning people to pay him for transporting them.

As a matter of reality, it is almost certainly the case that Indian bus drivers are better because they have worse and overcrowded equipment and drive on worse roads. If you transported the Indian bus driver to Sweden, they would have no trouble doing the job. Moving the Swedish bus driver to India would not work out nearly as well.

It got me thinking. Ha-Joon Chang doesn’t speak English all that well. He has a very bad accent. But his writing is great — certainly as good as mine. Now he also happens to be one of the best economists in the world. So I don’t have to compete with him for writing jobs. But if he can write English so well, there must be plenty of other people from South Korea who can write English as well as I can and who would be willing to write 2,000 word articles about XML for less than I charge. And that’s one country — one that doesn’t even have a history with the English language; imagine what it must be like in India!

By American standards, I’m still pretty poor. But even still, I get by very nicely. Compared to people in other countries, I’m rich. And that’s an accident of birth — just as surely as it is for Donald Trump. Not that I’m comparing myself to Donald Trump. We are quite different. First, I’m actually good at my job (even if over-paid) and Trump is not. Second, I do understand my privilege (even if I’d likely still be very surprised just how much my standard of living would go down in a truly fair world).

There are other things to think about, of course. Most measures of health and happiness are based upon local inequality, not global or absolute inequality. But I think it does us all good to remember just how talented the human family is, and that we should feel good about being part of that. We are all special in our way. But that’s not something that we Americans need to be reminded about.