Sunday must read by Josh Marshall

This is Joseph.

I found this piece by Josh Marshall to be a really good reply to the waves of doom and gloom that I have been seeing lately. It's really thoughtful.

I especially liked: 

Even the history isn’t as simple as you may think. It’s actually very hard to convert a democracy into an autocracy. And the great majority of states where it’s happened are ones that only had a functioning civic democracy for a couple decades at most. Consider some of those other countries I noted above: Russia? Perhaps a decade of extremely tenuous democratic rule. Hungary? Maybe two decades, depending on how you choose to count. Weimar? At most a decade and really no more than half a dozen years of nominal stability before the onset of the Great Depression and the slide into electoral autocracy which preceded the Nazi seizure of power by about three years. The case of Turkey is more complicated but it’s features of electoral democracy were always highly, highly circumscribed. Every example is one where democracy had thin and recent roots, very different from the quarter millennium in which an evolving form of civic democracy has existed in the United States.

Really, this is the real point. It is one thing to acknowledge that some very poor policy decisions are about to be made and that there will be some real costs to American society. That is both real and true. But it is also the case that you can't assume that one side is forever in disarray while the opposing side is filled with high discipline people willing to act against their own self interest in the pursuit of one person's crusade for power. Life is always more complicated than that. 

When I am doing better, I will have some comments about my views in terms of micro and macro, but this is less the time for self reflection and more a time for moving forward. 

More intellectual property silliness

From TPM:

The New York Stock Exchange now claims that you have to get their permission (express or implicit) before you use images connected to the New York Stock Exchange. So if you find a wire photo of the trading floor and use it to illustrate a story on Wall Street, you're violating the NYSE's trademark because they've trademarked the trading floor itself.

We found this out yesterday when we got a cease and desist letter from the NYSE based on an article published at TPM back in November. You can see the letter here.

TPM is represented on Media and IP matters by extremely capable specialist outside counsel. And we've been advised that the NYSE's claims are baseless and ridiculous on their face. But this is yet another example of how many large corporations have given way to IP-mania, trying to bully smaller companies into submission with inane and legally specious claims of intellectual property rights.

Well, TPM's small but we have big teeth. And we don't like being pushed around. So we're again posting the same picture as an illustration for this post. But really, what's next? Mayor Bloomberg trademarks his face and the city newspapers have to get his permission to publish photos of him so not to infringe the Bloomberg face trademark? Or more likely, the Empire State building trademark's the image of the Empire State building and demands a fee or bars photographs of the New York skyline.

...

So in the spirit of the moment I propose a contest. We know that NYSE now says you need their permission to show photographs of the Exchange in the context of news coverage. And if I understand their logic you'd actually need their permission to show a sketch you drew of the Exchange floor.

So here's the contest, what do you think NYSE's next preposterous claim of intellectual property rights will be? Can you say the words 'New York Stock Exchange' without their permission? Can you do a line drawing of the facade of the exchange without running it by the NYSE's lawyers?

As many have observed (including Thomas Jefferson who refused to patent any of his inventions), intellectual property laws are a necessary evil. They restrict the creation of new work in often onerous ways but they provide an increased incentive to create work that qualifies for protection. Even more importantly, they encourage dissemination of that work.

Over the past few decades, however, we've seen less interest in the necessity and more emphasis on the evil. The result is unfair, economically suboptimal, and undeniably silly.

[We've been down this rabbit before as you can see here.]

Does Talking Points Memo know what it's talking about?

When it comes to California, apparently not. TPM (along with TNR) is one of my two favorite political sites but like many news organizations they tend to be NY/DC-centric and their quality tends to drop as they get further from home.

Here's the opening sentence from today's story:

Last week, California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman released an ad that called Republican opponent Steve Poizner that dreaded "L" word -- liberal.

My first thought was that TPM was under the impression that Whitman just started calling Poizner a liberal; my second thought was that my first thought couldn't be right so I checked previous TPM stories on the race. Here's how they described the ad on May 11th:

Whitman Ad: My Conservative Opponent Is A Liberal!

California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has a word she'd like you to associate with her GOP primary opponent: liberal.

In a new Whitman ad aimed at state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a narrator ominously asks, "How liberal is Steve Poizner?" before rattling off a long list -- He supported Al Gore! He supported higher sales taxes! -- before the narrator declares:

"Liberal on taxes. Liberal on spending. Just another liberal Sacramento politician."

As we reported earlier, a new poll shows Whitman's lead over Poizner in California's June 8 Republican gubernatorial primary at a very thin 39% to 37%.

How badly out of the loop was TPM here? For over a month, Meg Whitman has been running, in mind-numbingly heavy rotation, an attack ad with the tag line "Way more liberal than he says he is." As for that "long list," it wasn't very long, particularly considering that it is the exact same list that Whitman has been running (and running and running) in every single attack since February.

The TPM story suggests that these charges were a reaction to the race getting close despite the fact that they started when (according to TPM's own poll tracker) Whitman had a lead of over forty points and she pulling out further ahead.

It would have taken less than fifteen minutes of research to catch these problems. This is not the kind of reporting we expect from Talking Points Memo.