For reasons that remain a mystery to me, I had no internet this morning. Awesome.
Archives for December 2009
The thrill is gone
This was fun while it lasted:
The Republican party took down its innovative link shortening tool Tuesday after pranksters had a field day using the tool to associate the GOP with bondage sites.
[…..]Users of the Balloon-Juice website entertained each other last night by exchanging scores of such links, which have since been blocked.
Update. Some of the URLs still work.
Speaking of sociopaths
A friend sent me this about Ken Auletta’s new book about Google:
Many books have been written about Google, even though we’re all pretty familiar with the company to begin with, but what makes Ken Auletta’s Googled interesting is that it’s a history of the company as told by the incumbent sociopaths. These are the people Auletta has spent his life covering: the media moguls who tried to acquire and conquer their own empires of content and delivery. And to them what’s most shocking and galling about Google’s incredibly rapid rise is that instead of being engineered by a fellow sociopath, it was largely done by normal, decent people plainly applying the forces of new technology.
“What has Google ever done for the world?” ask the sociopaths at various points throughout the book. “All they do is steal other people’s content!” To a normal human the question is ridiculous — it’s almost impossible to imagine life without Googling for something, checking your Gmail, or watching videos on YouTube — but sociopaths aren’t used to doing things that create value for people. They’re just interested in conquering more and taking control. When Disney bought ABC for $19 billion, it didn’t improve most people’s lives in any real way, but it did let Michael Eisner regain control of the company he once ran.
So naturally the sociopaths are outraged that their control is being taken away. Newspapers, book publishers, television companies, ad agencies — their businesses are all failing, while Google’s is on the rise. The sociopaths may be outraged, but this is exactly what’s supposed to happen. Most people don’t have a vested interest in whether ABC does well or even continues to exist. What they want are good television shows at a reasonable price, and if they can get those from Apple and Google instead of their local cable company, then bully for Apple and Google.
I’m sure it’s possible to lay it on too thick about how great google is and what great guys the founders are and so on, and perhaps this piece does this. But having just read an article about Rupert Murdoch, I was struck by the differences:
Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud—married to Elisabeth Murdoch, and one of the most well-known P.R. men in the U.K.—explained to me what he believes is the essence of Murdoch’s approach to business: Murdoch is not a modern marketer. He runs his business not on the basis of giving the consumer what he wants but through more old-fashioned methods of structural market domination. His world, and training ground, is the world of the newspaper war—a zero-sum game, where you wrestle market share from the other guy. Curiously, his newspaper battles have most often involved cutting prices rather than, as he now proposes to do on the Internet, raising them. (Murdoch has contributed as much as anyone, with his low-priced papers, to the expectation that news is a de-valued commodity.)
I don’t know who or when this happens, but it seems the lesson “greed is good” was so thoroughly internalized by much of the media that monopolists like Murdoch (and even outright crooks) are now lionized. Whether they create a product that people like and want or just find some way of ripping people off doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re worth a lot of money.
Sunsetting the filibuster
I’m not sure what I think of this, but this proposal to end the filibuster as interesting (and I actually like his use of the word “Rawlsian” here because he uses it to illustrate his point, not to obscure it):
The passage of time, however, creates an opportunity to drape a veil over politicians’ eyes. There is no way Republican senators would agree to the immediate abolition of the filibuster. But what if the proposal on the table was to get rid of the filibuster in 2017? By then, even a potential second Obama term would have ended. Every sitting senator would have faced re-election at least once. And, most importantly, there is no way to know which party would be in the majority and which would be in the minority.
The things I wonder are:
- Would “mend it don’t end it” be better? The 60 vote requirement seems too high, but maybe something like 55 would be good. I also think that the ability to filibuster some nominees (with some number of votes less than 50, if not as few as 40) may be valuable, in any case.
- Since the filibuster can be abolished on a non-filibusterable vote, how much does it matter what Republicans think here? They were ready to abolish it when they had only 55 Senators in 2005. And they extracted concessions from Democrats in return for not abolishing it. Couldn’t the Democrats do the same by threatening to abolish the filibuster starting now?
Deep Thought
Ezra Klein points out that reconciliation will only allow the Senate to pass all the things that Lieberman hates, like the Public Option, but we cannot use it to pass insurance and other regulatory reforms that are still in the bill.
I say pass the Liebermanized bill and let the President sign it. Then use reconciliation to get the rest.
Marty’s minions
The New Republic — especially Jon Cohn and Jon Chait — has actually done a very good job of covering the health care debate. Chait has an interesting take on Joe Lieberman that might be pretty explanatory (his earlier post on Lieberman was quite prescient):
I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn’t actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there’s little evidence that he’s a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform. At one point during the 2000 recount, the Gore campaign explained to Lieberman why lowering standards for military ballots would be totally unfair and illegal, and Lieberman proceeded to go on television and subvert the campaign’s position. Gore loyalists interpreted this as a sellout, but perhaps the more plausible explanation was that Lieberman — who, after all, badly wanted to be vice-President — just didn’t understand the details of the Gore position well enough to defend it. The guy was taken apart by Dick Cheney in the 2000 veep debate.
I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it’s not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it’s part of a plan. I think he just has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t care to learn. Lieberman thinks about politics in terms of broad ideological labels. He’s the heroic centrist voice pushing legislation to the center. No, Lieberman doesn’t have any particular sense of what the Medicare buy-in option would do to the national debt. If the liberals like it, then he figures it’s big government and he should oppose it. I think it’s basically that simple.
What’s almost surreal about The New Republic is how, amidst the sane, and often excellent, contributions of many of the reporters, is all the crazy stuff from Marty Peretz. Today, he’s mad that Ezra Klein said something mean about Joe Lieberman:
I’ve known him for years and he is a conscientious man and a man of conscience, besides. They are different, and he scores high on both counts.
I do not know Ezra Klein, and I do not recall reading any of his writing, except the one today in the Washington Post online. It is his screed against Senator Lieberman to which my attention was called by the former editor of TNR, Chuck Lane, also in the Post.
That’s it for Peretz: Lieberman and Lane are his friends, Klein is a nobody he’s never heard of. End of argument.
It’s a shame Peretz used to pay the bills (EDIT: still pays some of the bills) at TNR.
What Is Not To Love?
Was going to bed and got greeted with this:
Someone was already in bed and I got the “but you stayed up too late” look. And for the Tunch fans, he is in the window making sure the possums and raccoons are kept at bay.
God, I love those two.