Al Franken on the Comcast Deal

(CNN) -- Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, wants to acquire Time Warner Cable, the nation's second-largest cable provider. Should we be concerned?

I certainly am; that's why I oppose this deal. And I'm not alone.

More than 100,000 people -- including many from my own state of Minnesota -- have written to me expressing frustration that they are already paying significantly higher prices for increasingly poor cable and broadband service. Many note that they are unable to get a better deal because, where they live, there is only one viable option (in Minnesota, it's usually Comcast). And they worry that this deal will only make things worse.

Comcast takes merger case to Washington

Comcast dismisses these concerns by pointing out that it does not directly compete with Time Warner Cable in any zip code -- as if that's supposed to reassure us.

But the fact that the two biggest cable companies have already effectively managed to carve the country up into local monopolies shouldn't make us feel any better about their plan to become one giant company. Indeed, it's a clear sign that the cable market needs more competition, not less.

As for satellite TV and wireless Internet providers -- which Comcast would have you believe are forcing it and Time Warner Cable to band together in an uphill battle for survival -- they simply don't represent real competition.

Comcast grilled in Senate over merger plans

You can get your TV from a satellite provider, but it usually won't come with high-speed broadband Internet. And wireless Internet is not a viable substitute for broadband -- particularly if you want to watch TV online.

Essentially, if you want both TV service and high-speed Internet, you are stuck with a big cable and broadband company like Comcast or Time Warner Cable -- "or" being the appropriate preposition here, because, as Comcast brags, many Americans already have just one of these companies to choose from where they live. And if this deal goes through, Comcast will become the only option for millions more consumers.

The danger in allowing Comcast to accrue even more power is not purely hypothetical. The company is already using its dominant position to dictate terms to content providers seeking to reach its 20 million customers.

Take Netflix, for example. Comcast, which happens to have a rival video streaming service of its own, was able to exploit Netflix's growing popularity by refusing to provide the network infrastructure needed to keep Netflix streaming smoothly.

In the end, Netflix had to pay Comcast an undisclosed amount of money to get direct access to Comcast's broadband network and alleviate the slowdown.

As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote, "Some big ISPs are extracting a toll because they can -- they effectively control access to millions of consumers and are willing to sacrifice the interests of their own customers to press Netflix and others to pay."

"Extracting a toll" is a polite way of putting it; this is nothing short of extortion. And acquiring Time Warner Cable would give Comcast millions more customers to use as leverage.

If Comcast is able to effectively charge popular providers extra for access to broadband customers, those costs will inevitably be passed on to consumers themselves. And if Comcast is able to determine what traffic can make it into consumers' homes, content not owned by Comcast could become harder to find online.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee recently met to review the proposed acquisition, Comcast -- which is represented by 107 lobbyists, including several who have passed through the ever-revolving door between the company and the agencies charged with regulating it -- promised to forgo such behavior.

But the company's own actions have already proven that such promises are not to be believed.

For example, three years ago, when Comcast announced plans to acquire NBC Universal, I and others raised concerns about vertical integration: Comcast already owned the pipes through which cable programming flowed, and now it would own NBC Universal's programming, including NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, Telemundo, and others -- more than 20 networks in all.

Fortune: Blocking Comcast-TWC will not fix America's Internet monopoly

As a nod to these concerns, the Federal Communications Commission required as a condition of the deal that Comcast "neighborhood" -- or group -- cable channels into categories, so that programming not owned by Comcast wouldn't be relegated to the far reaches of the dial where viewers would be unlikely to find it.

But once the acquisition went through, Comcast didn't comply with this condition. It refused to put rival Bloomberg News in the same "neighborhood" as its own news channels, MSNBC and CNBC -- a textbook example of the kind of anti-competitive behavior we warned about, and in which Comcast promised not to engage.

As another condition, Comcast was told by the FCC to create a stand-alone broadband product -- one that wasn't bundled with a cable TV package -- so that people who wanted to ditch their cable plans in favor of online services like Hulu and Netflix would have an option.

Indeed, Comcast did create such a product. One small problem: It failed to tell customers about it. And after receiving complaints, the FCC fined Comcast for failing to live up to this obligation.

Now Comcast plans to expand its empire by gobbling up the second-largest company in the cable market (and third-largest in broadband), a move that, as even Comcast's executive vice president admits, could mean that rates will rise at an even faster pace. Not to mention worse service -- and a threat to the free flow of information in America.

That's why I will continue to make the case against this deal. And I hope that, Comcast's outsized political influence notwithstanding, regulators at the FCC and the Department of Justice will listen.

Oligarchy... Your Vote Against It Is Probably Too Little, Too Late

The Supreme Court’s Ideology: More Money, Less Voting

Ari Berman on April 2, 2014 - 11:02 AM ET  The Nation

The Supreme Court.  (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

In the past four years, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has made it far easier to buy an election and far harder to vote in one.

First came the Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which brought us the Super PAC era.

Then came the Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act.

Now we have McCutcheon v. FEC, where the Court, in yet another controversial 5-4 opinionwritten by Roberts, struck down the limits on how much an individual can contribute to candidates, parties and political action committees. So instead of an individual donor being allowed to give $117,000 to campaigns, parties and PACs in an election cycle (the aggregate limit in 2012), they can now give up to $3.5 million, Andy Kroll of Mother Jones reports. 

The Court’s conservative majority believes that the First Amendment gives wealthy donors and powerful corporations the carte blanche right to buy an election but that the Fifteenth Amendment does not give Americans the right to vote free of racial discrimination.

These are not unrelated issues—the same people, like the Koch brothers, who favor unlimited secret money in US elections are the ones funding the effort to make it harder for people to vote. The net effect is an attempt to concentrate the power of the top 1 percent in the political process and to drown out the voices and votes of everyone else.

Consider these stats from Demos on the impact of Citizens United in the 2012 election:

·  The top thirty-two Super PAC donors, giving an average of $9.9 million each, matched the $313.0 million that President Obama and Mitt Romney raised from all of their small donors combined—that’s at least 3.7 million people giving less than $200 each.

·  Nearly 60 percent of Super PAC funding came from just 159 donors contributing at least $1 million. More than 93 percent of the money Super PACs raised came in contributions of at least $10,000—from just 3,318 donors, or the equivalent of 0.0011 percent of the US population.

·  It would take 322,000 average-earning American families giving an equivalent share of their net worth to match the Adelsons’ $91.8 million in Super PAC contributions.

That trend is only going to get worse in the wake of the McCutcheon decision.

Now consider what’s happened since Shelby County: eight states previously covered under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act have passed or implemented new voting restrictions(Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina). That has had a ripple effect elsewhere. According to the New York Times, “nine states [under GOP control] have passed measures making it harder to vote since the beginning of 2013.”

A country that expands the rights of the powerful to dominate the political process but does not protect fundament rights for all citizens doesn’t sound much like a functioning democracy to me.

Atkins: It's Elizabeth Warren's world ... but Dem stardom comes with big risks

Atkins: It's Elizabeth Warren's world

... but Dem stardom comes with big risks 

Boston Herald columnist Kimberly Atkins

WASHINGTON — She’s held elected office for only a little more than a year. She’s not on any ballot — and she swears she won’t be until 2018. Still, Elizabeth Warren is 2014’s most powerful star for the Democrats. But that star can flame out if she can’t help her party fend off a series of dire challenges.

Warren has taken on two jobs in addition to being the senior senator from Massachusetts. She’s a key campaigner for a host of Democratic candidates across the country. She’s also a political icon, a superhero to progressive Democrats — now known as the Warren wing of the party. With control of the Senate 
at stake in this year’s midterm 
election, Warren has emerged as a powerful weapon for Democrats. And as a result she’s everywhere. But that status comes with risks.

Within minutes of Scott Brown’s announcement that he was forming a committee to explore a Senate run against New Hampshire incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Warren’s team shot out a fundraising email on Shaheen’s behalf — though conveniently, the email link lets donors split their contributions between Shaheen’s and Warren’s campaign accounts if they wish.

A Brown win would be a major blow to the Warren brand — even before she bought further in by 
tying herself to Shaheen.

Not content to fight just her own grudge matches, she has already inserted herself into tough races across the country, making sought-after endorsements and raising cash through her PAC for a Level Playing Field. Not bad for a first-term senator, but if, as some polls and pundits suggest, the Democrats are on the verge of losing Congress entirely, she’ll be wearing it.

Warren, so far, has managed to deftly fan the flames of her hero status while still expertly maintaining her public reputation as the People’s Senator. The faithful affectionately call her “E-Dubs.” Yes, she has reached the cult status of celebs with shortened monikers such as the Biebs and J.Lo.

Warren manages to stay popular while keeping the press at arm’s length. Well known for eschewing the media except for carefully-chosen appearances, you won’t find her chatting with reporters in the halls of Senate office buildings as her colleagues do. Instead, her office releases YouTube videos, usually of her floor speeches or berating Senate committee hearing witnesses such as corporate executives accused of cheating consumers. She even takes on the administration, like last week when she laid into a Department of Education official for the agency’s decision to keep its contract with troubled student loan servicing company Sallie Mae. And yes, she even pops up in the Bay State for carefully-planned public appearances.

Her new book, “A Fighting Chance,” hits store shelves in April, and she can probably rely on her progressive fan club to ensure it has respectable sales. But there is little even the political phenom known as E-Dubs can do about what any pol will tell you are the only numbers that
matter. And that’s the election
 results in
 November.

Are You There God? It's Me, Hobby Lobby: corporate personhood one step further

Are You There God? It's Me, Hobby Lobby

Everything you need to know about the high-stakes religious-freedom case that could redefine corporate personhood.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Mar. 21, 2014 3:00 AM GMT   - from Mother Jones

CyberXRef/Wikimedia Commons

On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Inc., the most closely watched case of the year. The stakes are high. Thanks to novel legal arguments and bad science, a ruling in favor of the company threatens any number of significant and revolutionary outcomes, from upending a century's worth of settled corporate law to opening the floodgates to religious challenges to every possible federal statute to gutting the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act.

Hobby Lobby is a privately held, for-profit corporation with 13,000 employees. It's owned by a trust managed by the Green family, devout Christians who run the company based on biblical principles. They close their stores on Sundays, start staff meetings with Bible readings, pay above minimum wage, and use a Christian-based mediation practice to resolve employee disputes. The Greens are even attempting to build a Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC.

The Greens contend that health insurance plans cover contraception will force them to choose between violating their religious beliefs or suffer huge financial penalties for violating the law. They don't object to covering all contraception, only the emergency contraceptive pills Plan B and Ella and intrauterine devices (IUDs), which they (erroneously) believe are abortifacients. But the Greens aren't the ones who'd be providing the health insurance with contraceptive coverage. Their corporation, Hobby Lobby, would be.

So in September 2012, Hobby Lobby sued the US Department of Health and Human Services, challenging the contraceptive mandate on the grounds that it unconstitutionally and substantially burdens the company's religious beliefs. The company is asking the court to find that it has the same religious-freedom rights as a church or an individual, a finding no American court has ever made.

"By being required to make a choice between sacrificing our faith or paying millions of dollars in fines, we essentially must choose which poison pill to swallow,” David Green, Hobby Lobby's founder and CEO, said in a press release when the case was filed. "We simply cannot abandon our religious beliefs to comply with this mandate."

On many levels, the Hobby Lobby case is a mess of bad facts, political opportunism, and questionable legal theories that might be laughable had some federal courts not taken them seriously. Take for instance Hobby Lobby's argument that providing coverage for Plan B and Ella substantially limits its religious freedom. The company admits in its complaint that until it considered filing the suit in 2012, its generous health insurance plan actually covered Plan B and Ella (though not IUDs). The burden of this coverage was apparently so insignificant that God, and Hobby Lobby executives, never noticed it until the mandate became a political issue.

The most well-publicized and controversial element of the case is Hobby Lobby's assertion that a for-profit corporation can have the constitutionally protected right to the free exercise of religion. It's a strange notion, but the court opened the door to this argument when it ruled in Citizens United that a corporation has First Amendment rights. So now the justices will have to consider whether corporations can pray, believe in an afterlife, and thus, be absolved of ACA's contraception mandate. But that's hardly the only thorny issue the court has to grapple with.

For Hobby Lobby to prevail, the company has to, among other things, meet what's known as the Sherbert test. It requires plaintiffs in religious-freedom cases to first show that their religious beliefs are sincere, and then prove that a government regulation or law poses a substantial burden on those beliefs. Given those criteria, a skeptic might wonder how burdensome the mandate really is for Hobby Lobby when, until just recently, it was mostly in compliance with the law.

The fact that Hobby Lobby once covered the drugs it now objects to is "evidence that these cases are part of a broader effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act, and push new legal theories that could result in businesses being allowed to break the law and harm others under the guise of religious freedom," says Gretchen Borchelt, senior counsel and director of state reproductive health policy at the National Women's Law Center.

Motives aside, theoretically the court in Hobby Lobby is being asked to make an entirely subjective judgment as to the sincerity of a plaintiff's religious beliefs and whether a government regulation poses a "substantial burden" on them. Such things aren't easily measured, and doing so puts the courts at risk of passing judgment on the religious beliefs themselves, a big constitutional no-no. That's why back in 1990 the court abandoned the Sherbert test for something more straightforward: Is the law generally applicable or does it single out a specific religious belief for punishment?

In Employment Division v. Smith, the court said it was okay for the state of Oregon to deny unemployment benefits to a couple of counselors at a drug rehab program who'd been fired for using peyote, which was illegal at the time. As members of a Native American church, they argued that denying them benefits violated their right to practice their religion by using peyote. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, wasn't buying it. He wrote that the Oregon law was constitutional because it didn't single out any particular religious practice. It applied to everyone. He wrote:

The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind—ranging from compulsory military service to the payment of taxes to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws; to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races.

If Scalia had had the last word on this subject, the court might not even be considering Hobby Lobby. For this case and many of its potentially wide-ranging ramifications we have Congress and Bill Clinton to thank.

The Supreme Court ruling in Smith outraged members of Congress, who in 1993 passed the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA), which Clinton signed into law. That act forced the court to once again look at things like religious sincerity and to try to measure how much a government mandate burdens any one religious belief—something courts generally don't like to do. "Courts are wary of scrutinizing sincerity of claims," says Caroline Mala Corbin, a professor at the University of Miami law school. "They're worried that it will bleed into judgment of the religious belief itself. And if there's one thing courts don't want to do and aren't allowed to do under the Establishment Clause is to pass judgment about people's religious beliefs."

That's why Corbin thinks the court will steer clear of the sincerity question. Even the government hasn't touched it. As Lori Windham, a senior counsel for the Becket Fund, which is representing Hobby Lobby, says, "Neither the government nor the courts have disputed the sincerity of the Green's objections to these drugs and devices."

But in the Hobby Lobby case, there might be a good reason for the court to take a closer look at whether this legal challenge is politically, rather than religiously, motivated. Not only had the company never objected to covering the kinds of birth control that are now central to its lawsuit, but the reason Hobby Lobby now balks at covering these forms of contraception is based on a false premise—one the court will have to accept as true in order to find in Hobby Lobby's favor.

The company argues that emergency contraception pills, such as Ella and Plan B, destroy fertilized eggs by interfering with implantation in the uterus. Hobby Lobby's owners consider this abortion. But the pills don't work that way. When Plan B first came on the market in 1999, its mechanism for preventing unplanned pregnancies wasn't entirely clear. That's why the FDA-approved labeling reflected some uncertainty and said that the pills "theoretically" prevent pregnancy by interfering with implantation. Since then, though, there has been a lot of research on how these pills work, and the findings are definitive: They prevent pregnancy by blocking ovulation. In fact, they don't work once ovulation has occurred. As Corbin recently wrote in a law review article, "Every reputable scientific study to examine Plan B's mechanism has concluded that these pills prevent fertilization from occurring in the first place…In short, Plan B is contraception."

Labels on these products have been updated in Europe to reflect the science, and the Catholic Church in Germany dropped its opposition to local Catholic hospitals providing emergency contraception to rape victims after reviewing the evidence. The science is so clear, in fact, that even Dennis Miller, an abortion foe and director of the bioethics center at the Christian Cedarville University, concluded that emergency contraception drugs don't cause abortions. Last year, he told Christianity Today. "[O]ur claims of conscience should be based on scientific fact, and we should be willing to change our claims if the facts change." (IUDs generally work like spermicide, preventing conception.)

Yet the Becket Fund's Windham insists that the question of the science is not before the court. So basically, the Hobby Lobby case requires the court to decide whether a corporation has sincere religious beliefs that would be compromised by having its health plan cover the contraception that it once covered because it believes that contraception causes abortions, even when it doesn't. Got that?

Of course, the case isn't just about Hobby Lobby. The Supreme Court is using it to address dozens of similar lawsuits by other companies that, unlike Hobby Lobby, object to all forms of contraception. But the inconvenient set of facts here are just one reason why the case hasn't garnered a lot of support outside the evangelical community. Many religious people are uneasy with the idea of corporations being equated with a spiritual institution. At a recent forum on the case sponsored by the American Constitution Society, the Mormon legal scholar Frederick Gedicks, from Brigham Young University, said he was offended by the notion that selling glue and crepe paper was equivalent to his religious practice. "I'm a religious person, and I think my tradition is a little different from an arts and craft store," he said.

Women's groups fear a ruling that would gut the ACA's contraceptive mandate. The business community, meanwhile, doesn't want to see the court rule that a corporation is no different from its owners because it would open up CEOs and board members to lawsuits that corporate law now protects them from, upending a century's worth of established legal precedent.

No one seems to really have a sense of how the court might rule. On one side, court watchers have speculated that with five six Catholics on the bench, Hobby Lobby has a decent shot of prevailing. But then again, one of those Catholics, Chief Justice John Roberts, is also sensitive to the interests of corporate America. He seems unlikely to do anything that might disrupt the orderly conduct of business in this country and make the US Chamber of Commerce unhappy, as a victory for Hobby Lobby could. Scalia is an ardent abortion foe, but his view of Native American peyote users might incline him to find for the government.

Finding a reasonable way out of this case won't be easy. The litany of bad outcomes has some legal scholars rooting for what might be called "the Lederman solution"—a punt. Georgetown law professor Martin Lederman has suggested that the lower courts have misread the contraceptive-mandate cases by assuming firms such as Hobby Lobby have only two choices: provide birth control coverage or pay huge fines to avoid violating their religious beliefs. He argues that while the ACA requires individuals to purchase health insurance, it doesn't require employers to provide it. If companies choose to do so then the insurance companies must cover contraception without co-pays. Hobby Lobby and the other companies currently suing the Obama administration can resolve their problems by simply jettisoning their health insurance plans and letting their employees purchase coverage through the exchanges.

An employer that drops its health plan would have to pay a tax to help subsidize its employees' coverage obtained through the exchange or Medicaid, but this option is actually far cheaper than providing health insurance. And if a company doesn't even have to provide insurance, much less a plan that covers contraception, Hobby Lobby doesn't have much of a case that the ACA burdens its free exercise of religion.

Lederman's analysis gives the court an easy out in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, allowing it to avoid the dicey questions of whether corporations have religious-freedom rights, whether scientific ignorance is a religious belief—or even whether the plaintiff is sincerely religious or simply part of a larger Republican-led political effort to kill off Obamacare.

STEPHANIE MENCIMER

Reporter

Stephanie Mencimer is a staff reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. 

New York Times: POLITICS

Koch Group, Spending Freely, Hones Attack on Government

By CARL HULSE and ASHLEY PARKERMARCH 20, 2014

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WASHINGTON — Americans for Prosperity — the group backed by David H. and Charles G. Koch that has been pouring millions of dollars into competitive Senate races to the rising alarm of Democrats — was also among the politically active groups on the ground in this month’s special House election on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

But its agenda had little to do with the fate of David Jolly, the Republican candidate who won that race. The group’s ground troops — including those who knocked on doors, ran phone banks and reached out through social media to gauge ways to motivate voters — were part of a much greater project, with a prize much larger than a congressional seat.

Americans for Prosperity turned the Florida contest into its personal electoral laboratory to fine-tune get-out-the-vote tools and messaging for future elections as it pursues its overarching goal of convincing Americans that big government is bad government.

As the group emerges as a dominant force in the 2014 midterm elections, spending up to 10 times as much as any major outside Democratic group so far, officials of the organization say their effort is not confined to hammering away at President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They are also trying to present the law as a case study in government ineptitude to change the way voters think about the role of government for years to come.

Photo

A screen shot from a campaign advertisement paid for by Americans for Prosperity.CreditAmericans for Prosperity

“We have a broader cautionary tale,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. “The president’s out there touting billions of dollars on climate change. We want Americans to think about what they promised with the last social welfare boondoggle and look at what the actual result is.”

Leaders of the effort say it has great appeal to the businessmen and businesswomen who finance the operation and who believe that excess regulation and taxation are harming their enterprises and threatening the future of the country. The Kochs, with billions in holdings in energy, transportation and manufacturing, have a significant interest in seeing that future government regulation is limited.

Democrats say their own research has shown that voters are skeptical about candidates who benefit from political spending by superrich businessmen with an antigovernment ideology.

“The notion that two billionaires are bankrolling Republican candidates because they support an agenda that is good for the Koch brothers and bad for middle-class families is very persuasive to voters,” said Matt Canter, the deputy executive director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The little-noticed Florida field operation and a similar one in Virginia during the governor’s race last year were part of the group’s effort to apply the well-honed, data-centric business practices of the Koch brothers, as well as undisclosed donors, to devise an approach that is not only smarter, sleeker and sprier, but also one that provides more bang for the big bucks.

In Florida, the group tested the effectiveness of messages, including sentiment toward the president’s health care law. The organization’s Facebook page features photos of its grass-roots activists knocking on doors in Florida, clad in white T-shirts emblazoned with a green visage of Ronald Reagan.

“We’re focused on optimizing our efforts,” said James Davis of Freedom Partners, a Koch-influenced trade association that distributes hundreds of millions of dollars to Americans for Prosperity and other conservative groups. “Being in the field and testing during the slower periods, and in smaller areas, allows you to refine strategy and tactics so that you can make the larger investments with confidence.”

Two years ago, Americans for Prosperity spent more than $100 million, but Mr. Obama was re-elected and Democrats held the Senate, despite the group’s investment in Indiana, Wisconsin, Florida and other key states. Afterward, the organization underwent a rigorous self-analysis, as it usually does in election cycles: Did it have the right personnel in the right positions? How effective was its work in the field? Was it using data well? Was its messaging right?

“There was an awful lot of introspection there,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist. “A.F.P. is dedicated to research. They are dedicated to doing this in a quantifiable way.”

The group, for instance, analyzed the available data, determining which of their ads performed best, and held focus group sessions. Among the most recognizable changes from 2012 is that Americans for Prosperity is now producing testimonial-style ads and carrying out an elaborate field effort, spending more than $30 million already in at least eight states with crucial Senate races and in some House districts as well.

Many of Americans for Prosperity’s current ads feature women talking directly to the camera, explaining how Mr. Obama’s health care law has hurt them and their families. The group just repurposed one of its original ads for Colorado, where Republicans see a new opportunity, with a woman saying: “Obamacare doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.” The tag line now urges voters to call Senator Mark Udall, the Colorado Democrat facing re-election, about the law.

Democrats and others have challenged the specifics of the ads and the use of actors in some of the spots, but Americans for Prosperity has not retreated.

The organization also switched to a more business-minded approach in the production of its ads, moving from largely relying on a single company to soliciting bids from a larger number of firms, according to people outside the Koch network with knowledge of its efforts.

The change in advertising strategy is a response to an analysis that found that the group’s 2010 and 2012 ads often failed to tell moving personal stories about how a particular policy, such as health care or renewable energy, was affecting the lives of real people, said Mr. Phillips, Americans for Prosperity’s president.

“Too often we were looking at broader, kind of macrolevel statistics, instead of looking at the impact of a policy,” he said. “Too often we did kind of broader statistical ads or messages, and we decided that we needed to start telling the story of how the liberals’ policies, whether it’s the administration or Congress, are practically impacting the lives of Americans each day.”

The personal nature of health care gave the group an opportunity to move away from the “collections of clips and canned imagery and text” that it had relied on in previous cycles, said Elizabeth Wilner, a senior vice president at Kantar Media/CMAG, a company that monitors political advertising.

“I think ads that tell stories are more compelling than ads that don’t,” Ms. Wilner said, “and ads that use sympathetic figures are more compelling, generally, than those that don’t.”

Americans for Prosperity is also stepping up its ground game. The organization now has more than 200 full-time paid staff members in field offices in at least 32 states. The idea is to embed staff members in a community, giving conservative advocacy a permanent local voice through field workers who live in the neighborhood year-round and appreciate the nuances of the local issues. They can also serve as a ready-to-go field organization in future election years and on future issues — not dissimilar from the grass-roots, community-based approach Mr. Obama used successfully in 2008 and 2012.

“Too often our side will gear up for an individual issue battle or in some cases an election, but we don’t have a permanent infrastructure,” Mr. Phillips said. “What we took from studying it was that we have to have a bigger, more permanent infrastructure on the ground in these states, and this takes time.”

High Fallutin' Nazis by Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman New York Times MARCH 18, 2014, 1:39 PM
High Fallutin’ Nazis

Here comes another billionaire who thinks that anyone who talks about income inequality is a Nazi; this time it’s Ken Langone, co-founder of Home Depot. I don’t have anything useful to say about this, other than the observation that there must be a lot of these guys. I mean, there aren’t that many billionaires, so that coming up with multiple examples of the genus who not only believe that progressives are just like Hitler but are willing to say so in public must indicate that a substantial proportion of our billionaires share this belief, but more privately. Luckily, great wealth doesn’t bring great political influence in modern America — does it?

But Jonathan Cohn’s report on Langone brought to mind an earlier rant by the same guy, in which he denounced yours truly and my “high-fallutin’ thoughts and ideas.” And I think, now that I remember that, that this rant (and others like it) gives a partial clue to the mystery of the continuing popularity of the Wall Street macro canon, despite its total failure in practice.

For what, after all, was Langone raging against? Well, me, of course. But not, presumably, against “high-fallutin” ideas in general: Langone can’t really be a stupid man, and I’m sure that when it comes to, say, information systems for inventory management hes’ quite willing to accept the idea that some things are technical and require some knowledge.

No, what I think he’s really raging against are two things. First is the idea that understanding economics, as opposed to other issues, might involve some kind of special expertise. This is an all too common problem with the wealthy, and maybe especially among self-made men: they think that their personal financial success means that they understand the economic system, and bristle at the notion that macroeconomics may be more than the sum of individual business strategies.

The other source of his rage — and this, I think, gets to the right-wing canon — is fury at the notion that sometimes scarcity doesn’t rule. For many people on the right, it has to be true — just has to be true — that prosperity is limited by the willingness of productive people (that is, people like them) to produce. The idea that sometimes the problem is instead lack of demand, that the failure is a system malfunction rather than a lack of sufficient effort, is anathema. Among other things, it suggests that sometimes people succeed or fail for reasons that have nothing to do with their personal talents and virtues or lack thereof, a suggestion that they — who believe that their personal success was entirely earned — find deeply offensive.

And so when you say that this is a depressed economy in which deficits don’t crowd out private spending, in which printing money doesn’t mean inflation that expropriates their hard-earned wealth, they don’t listen to the argument, let alone pay attention to evidence. They take it as a personal affront, and start yelling about your high-fallutin nonsense.

The car dealers' racket: "crony capitalism"

Op-Ed

The car dealers' racket

Consumers shouldn't need government consent to buy Tesla vehicles, or any product, but New Jersey is now third state to say otherwise.

By Michael Shermer LA Times
March 17, 2014

The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission last week voted to prohibit Tesla from selling its electric vehicles directly to consumers, a decision endorsed by the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers and Gov. Chris Christie. New Jersey is the third state, after Texas and Arizona, to block Tesla from direct sales, all under the guise of protecting consumers. Some free market.

Of course, auto dealers prefer an arrangement in which they have exclusive rights to sell a certain manufacturer's product. I know because my father owned a Ford dealership for decades in Montrose, Calif., and we were proud to represent such an honorable American product. And there's nothing wrong with a manufacturer offering to sell its products only through designated retailers. This is common practice in many industries so that manufacturers don't compete against themselves and undercut their retailers.

But there's also nothing wrong with a manufacturer offering to sell its products directly to consumers. This too is common practice, as evidenced by the billions of dollars that are exchanged online between manufacturers and consumers. Some bricks-and-mortar businesses have suffered as a result. But as conservatives like to say, that's the free market at work.

Except when it comes to industries that grease the wheels of politicians. Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, tweeted that Christie "has gone back on his word" and that "his administration, under pressure from auto dealers, may shut down Tesla in NJ as soon as today." Note that three members of the motor vehicle commission are from Christie's cabinet and four more were appointed by the governor, including the chairman.

This move against Tesla is nothing more than naked economic protectionism of the type that Adam Smith railed against in 1776 in his book "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations." This work, which conservatives treat with almost biblical reverence, is one long argument against the mercantilist system of protectionism and special privilege. Smith demonstrated that practices similar to what is being done to Tesla may benefit other producers in the short run by protecting them from competition, but in the long run they harm consumers and thereby decrease the wealth of a nation: "In the mercantile system," he wrote, "the interest of the consumer is almost always constantly sacrificed to that of the producer." Whereas in a capitalist system, Smith explained, "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production."

In the old mercantilist system — what we today call "crony capitalism" — instead of consumers telling producers what they want, government agents and politicians tell consumers what and how much they can buy, and at what price. This is done through tax subsidies for corporations (estimates vary, but Fortune 500 companies combined receive about $100 billion annually), regulations (to control prices, distribution and sales), licensing (to control wages, protect jobs, exclude newcomers) and other deals between industries and politicians.

New Jersey is not only stopping Tesla from selling cars to consumers. They are, in essence, saying that we the government will tell you where you will be allowed to buy your cars. This move against Tesla reminds me of a wickedly satirical essay by the 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat titled "The Petition of the Candlemakers," in which he lampoons special-interest groups — in this case, candle makers — who have petitioned their government for protection from a certain producer of light:

"We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light, that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price.... This rival … is none other than the sun.... We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds; in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures."

Elon Musk has been compared favorably to Steve Jobs. Imagine where we'd be if, in the 1980s, typewriter manufacturers lobbied to block Apple from selling its computers directly to consumers. The very idea is absurd. Consumers should be free to buy any product they want from any manufacturer without the consent of the government. And if anyone should understand this simple principle, it should be conservatives.

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American. His next book is "The Moral Arc of Science."