Political Irony

A recent article in Salon starts with a headline that says it all: “Sean Hannity is killing the GOP: Fox News & conservative media have the party in a stranglehold“. At one point the Republicans might have thought Fox News was on their side, but one has to wonder what the GOP is thinking now that Hannity is cheerleading for Donald Trump. He even says that the other Republican candidates should learn from Trump.

But the problem goes deeper than that. The Salon article points out that despite taking over both chambers of Congress, Republicans really haven’t gotten anything done. The GOP is still fighting lost battles, like trying to defund Obamacare and fighting against same sex marriage. I’m not sure I can even say what the Republican agenda is, let alone point to any things they have accomplished on it.

And what would they do if they did get their way? Even Republicans acknowledge that if they somehow managed to repeal Obamacare, it would be a disaster for their party. Heck, they were even secretly hoping the Supreme Court wouldn’t rule against it.

Instead we see the following scenario repeated way too often:

The dysfunction typically follows a familiar pattern: the GOP leadership in one or both Houses tries to follow through on some basic task – funding government agencies, for example – but runs into opposition from conservatives. The leadership tries to accommodate the right, but finds that the right’s demands are unreasonable and inflexible. The whole legislative process derails, and then the Democratic minority steps in to save the Republicans from themselves.

Is that any way to run a party, let alone a country?

But there may not be much the GOP can do. A paper out of Harvard points out that the Republicans, who promised in the 2014 midterm elections that they would show the nation how well they could govern, if only voters would put them completely in charge of Congress. Well, the voters did, and the result was humiliation after humiliation. Republican Congressman summed up the first three weeks, before the honeymoon was even over:

Week one, we had a speaker election that did not go as well as a lot of us would have liked. Week two, we got into a big fight over deporting children, something that a lot of us didn’t want to have a discussion about. Week three, we are now talking about rape and incest and reportable rapes and incest for minors. I just can’t wait for week four.

The following weeks only got worse. The GOP staged a showdown against Obama over immigration policy, insanely vowing to withhold money for homeland security (as terrorist acts filled the news) unless Obama reversed his executive decision and deported millions of people who were brought to the US illegally as children.

The fight completely backfired. (But that hasn’t stopped Trump from still fighting it, with his “rapists” remark against immigrants.)

It is clear that the GOP is out of control. So who is in control?

As many of them concede, it is conservative media – not just talk-show celebrities Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham, but also lesser-known talkers like Steve Deace, and an expanding web of “news” sites and social media outlets with financial and ideological alliances with far-right anti-government, anti-establishment groups like Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. Once allied with but now increasingly hostile to the Republican hierarchy, conservative media is shaping the party’s agenda in ways that are impeding Republicans’ ability to govern and to win presidential elections.

According to another Republican staffer:

It’s so easy these days to go out there and become an Internet celebrity by saying some things, and who cares if it’s true or makes any sense. It’s a new frontier: How far to the right can you get? And there’s no incentive to ever really bother with reality.

It is too easy to play on people’s fears and make money off it. And according to former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott “If you stray the slightest from the far right, you get hit by the conservative media.”

Is there any way the Republicans can break out of this vicious cycle?

Techdirt has a stunning article showing how corrupt we have become.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) was trying to force Google’s search engine to stop linking to content that MPAA didn’t like. Search engines are supposed to search for websites, but the MPAA wanted the power to make sites they don’t like simply disappear from search engines, as if they didn’t exist. Of course, the websites still would exist (if you know their domain name or IP address), but you couldn’t search for them to find them.

Unfortunately for the MPAA (and fortunately for us), US law (specifically, Section 230 of the CDA) is very clear that you can’t hold a service provider responsible for the actions of its users. For example, if two criminals discuss over the telephone robbing a bank, the telephone company is not criminally at fault for not stopping the conversation. The same thing is true of the internet; in particular, if a search engine returns a website that contains some content that is infringing someone’s copyright, the search engine is not at fault and cannot be forced to disappear that website from its results.

Imagine if this were not the case. Any website that contains, returns, or even just links to user-generated content would have to censor everything on their site that may be violating a copyright. Not just search engines (like Google or Bing) but also social media sites (like Facebook or Twitter), sites that contain user reviews (like Amazon or Yelp) and even Internet Service Providers (like Comcast). To see how insane this would be, if any user on Facebook (or Twitter, etc.) ever linked to copyrighted content, Facebook would be responsible for censoring that content, and if they fail, Google (or Bing, etc.) would be responsible for not returning a link to Facebook in their search results.

And it isn’t just copyrights. If a newspaper (like the Guardian, New York Times, etc.) posts an article containing content from Wikileaks, and then you tweet a link to that article, not only would the newspaper be liable for breaking the law, but you could go to prison for posting a link to that article.

Free speech, along with the Internet, would die. But the MPAA doesn’t care about the internet.

If the MPAA finds illegal copyrighted material on the internet, they are responsible for notifying the person who posted that content to remove it. That’s the law, but it is too difficult for copyright owners to police the internet to remove copyrighted material, so they wanted to get companies (like Google) to do it for them. And that’s where things get really bad.

Because the MPAA couldn’t force Google to do this legally, they decided to strong arm them. They enlisted the aid of Mississippi state attorney general Jim Hood to run a smear campaign against Google.

How do we know they did this? Here’s the smoking gun:

It’s an email between the MPAA and two of Jim Hood’s top lawyers in the Mississippi AG’s office, discussing the big plan to “hurt” Google. Beyond influencing other Attorneys General (using misleading fake “setups” of searches for “bad” material) and paying for fake anti-Google research, the lawyers from Hood’s office flat out admit that they’re expecting the MPAA and the major studios to have its media arms run a coordinated propaganda campaign of bogus anti-Google stories.

Here’s an excerpt from the email, discussing a proposed media campaign:

We want to make sure that the media is at the NAAG meeting. We propose working with MPAA (Vans), Comcast, and NewsCorp (Bill Guidera) to see about working with a PR firm to create an attack on Google (and others who are resisting AG efforts to address online piracy). This PR firm can be funded through a nonprofit dedicated to IP issues. The “live buys” should be available for the media to see, followed by a segment the next day on the Today Show (David green can help with this). After the Today Show segment, you want to have a large investor of Google (George can help us determine that) come forward and say that Google needs to change its behavior/demand reform. Next, you want NewsCorp to develop and place an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google’s stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs and noting some of the possible causes of action we have developed.

That’s right, the MPAA is conspiring with supposedly independent media (including the Today Show and the Wall Street Journal) to run stories attacking companies who are (legally) resisting efforts to “address online piracy”, along with a sustained attack by supposedly impartial Attorney Generals with the aim of forcing Google stock to lose value so they will have to capitulate.

This is definitely corruption. It also looks like blackmail. I’m sure if I were as powerful as the MPAA, I could easily find a law that classifies this as economic terrorism.

Republican politicians figured out a long time ago that running for president was a good way to get lots of publicity (often for free). This resulted in the 2012 Republican primary having a mind numbing total of 20 television debates and a slew of additional debate-like events, including a Twitter debate sponsored by TheTeaParty.net.

The Republican party responded by changing their rules in an attempt to limit the number of politicians who could participate in an official debate to ten, based on their national polling results. But as we approach the first debate, the candidates who are in danger of not making the cut are jockeying for positions.

How are they doing this?

© Jack Ohman

© Jim Morin

© Pat Bagley

That’s right, Rick Perry thinks that the proper response to the theatre shooting spree that left three people dead (including the shooter) and 11 injured is to have more guns in theatres.

What would Lincoln think about that?