Wickersham's Conscience

Joe Miller’s incessant whining is really starting to grate on WC. And WC is talking about the post-election sniveling, not all the nonsense that came before.

For example, whining that he wasn’t give time to ramp up staff to keep an eye on the evil Division of Election’s officials. If, in his arrogance, he was so certain he was going to defeat Murkowski that he didn’t do any contingency planning, then he needs to get used to the smell of chicken manure, because the birds have come home. If it wasn’t arrogance, then it was a complete failure of contingency planning. And, again, it carries its own punishment.

For example, whining that the Division of Elections didn’t give him notice of events. It’s clear now that it was his failure to investigate his obligations as a candidate, including his obligation to provide contact information for a single person to serve as his liaison to the Division. If he would step away from the mirror for just a moment, Candidate Miller would possibly appreciate that it is impossible for the Division to know who to contact, and unreasonable for them to be forced to guess. And any questions about the reasonableness of that requirement are washed away by the flood of his Dan Fagan-inspired allies who named themselves as write-in candidates.

For example, he’s whined about “electioneering” by supposed federal contractors and Native corporations. But he hasn’t disavowed Dan Fagan’s stunt,

Finally, Candidate “Write-in” leads him by more than 13,000 votes. Sure, he is counting on absentee voters and his dubious connection to the military, but absentee voters have rarely deviated by more than 25% from the regular voting ratios. Miller’s drawing to an inside straight with three of the cards he needs face up on the table.

Worst, his post-election studio assumes the voters are massively incompetent. That’s pretty cynical, isn’t it? Granted, this is politics we are talking about, but in the best case he needs, what, at least 10,000 people to be unable to spell “Murkowski”? That’s his strategy, right? WC would wish Miller good luck, but he wouldn’t mean it.

But at least stop whining. It’s unbecoming a senator wannabee, at best, and borderline paranoiac, at worst.

You can cut down a tree – a small tree, anyway – with a semi-automatic weapon. It’s a matter of patience, lots and lots of bullets, and little regard for the environment. For certain of WC’s politically conservative buddies, it must have some kind of internal gratification that offsets the waste of money and the consequences of pumping pounds of poisonous lead into the environment. But it’s not a very effective way of cutting down a tree.

But that’s what the Recording Industry Association of America – the RIAA – has been doing the last 4-5 years. They’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers, filing 35,000 plus lawsuits against folks who they accuse of swapping songs on-line. The RIAA has sued teenagers, dead folks, housewives, college students and small businesses. All because the RIAA was afraid that someone, somewhere might not be paying for a song.

As WC has said before, he’s all in favor of hiring lawyers, especially paying the lawyers you hire. But a little arithmetic might suggest that RIAA’s war on its customers doesn’t pencil out.

First, there’s the premise that someone who downloads a song illegally would have bought the song at full price. Since Bill Gates whined about folks pirating Microsoft BASIC back at the dawn of time (1976 in Computer Years), that premise has been doubtful. WC has never seen a statistically sound study that supports the premise. There’s some pretty good work that suggests there is no statistical correlation between folks who download songs and lost sales.

But if you get by that unproven assumption, there’s the second problem of cost effectiveness. WC would bet a designer coffee at River City Deli that the RIAA has spent far more on lawyers than its members have lost in sales to piracy.

Not to mention the collateral damage. There are 35,000 plus people who have likely sworn they will never, ever buy music from the recording industry again. And likely they have a significant number of friends who are similarly annoyed.

None of which will stop the RIAA from taking its arsenal of lawyers to the next tree, of course. A sensible industry might ask itself its distribution model was flawed. But anyone with common sense doesn’t try to cut down trees with a semi-automatic weapon.