Apparently the bloom is off the rose for conservative book imprints.
McKay Coppins writes that the political conservative book genre is in even worse shape than the publishing industry as a whole. However, I’m not buying the excuse. The excuse is that by setting up exclusive imprints for conservative books, publishers have isolated those books from the mainstream marketplace of ideas. They are now a niche market, which limits their distribution and sales.

I say this always was a niche market, marketed almost exclusively through right-wing media to a niche audience, and if these books aren’t selling like they used to there has to be another reason.

McKay doesn’t say anything about the bulk sales that used to push right-wing books up the best-seller list. McKay says that the web “has decimated the subscription-based “book clubs” that launched a slew of conservative best-sellers in the ’90s and early 2000s,” but those book clubs still exist, and they were still considered a viable marketing tool as recently as 2010. Alex Pareene wrote an article in 2010 musing why George W. Bush’s post-presidency book sold more copies than Bill Clinton’s post-presidency book (really?) and the most plausible reason was …

Conservative book clubs

The sales of books by awful right-wing authors like Jonah Goldberg are boosted by an entire industry dedicated to … boosting the sales of books by awful right-wing authors. Conservative book clubs purchase tens of thousands of copies and right-wing think tanks order right-wing books in bulk. There’s probably a bit more genuine demand for George W. Bush’s wisdom than, say, Laura Ingraham’s wit, but every little bit helps. And there was no progressive equivalent of the right-wing book-buying machine to boost Clinton’s book when it was released.

Steve Benen wrote in 2010,

This is a long-running phenomenon — conservative books nearly always outsell liberal books in large part because of bulk orders. A couple of months ago, for example, Mitt Romney boosted sales of his book by requiring various schools, think tanks, and institutions to buy thousands of copies in exchange for his speeches. Various conferences and Republican outlets do this all the time.

Paul Waldman wrote recently,

As a liberal who has written a few books whose sales were, well let’s just say “modest” and leave it at that, I’ve always looked with envy at the system that helps conservatives sell lots and lots of books. The way worked was that you wrote a book, and then you got immediately plugged into a promotion machine that all but guaranteed healthy sales. You’d go on a zillion conservative talk shows, be put in heavy rotation on Fox News, get featured by conservative book clubs, and even have conservative organizations buy thousands of copies of your books in bulk. If you were really lucky, that last item would push the book onto the bestseller lists, getting you even more attention.

It worked great, for the last 15 years or so. But McKay Coppins reports that the success of conservative publishing led to its own decline. As mainstream publishers saw the money being made by conservative houses like Regnery and the occasional breakthrough of books by people like Allan Bloom and Charles Murray, they decided to get into the act with right-leaning imprints of their own. But now, “Many of the same conservatives who cheered this strategy at the start now complain that it has isolated their movement’s writers from the mainstream marketplace of ideas, wreaked havoc on the economics of the industry, and diminished the overall quality of the work.”

Um, Regnery was not, in effect, a niche imprint? Do most book buyers give a hoo-haw about the imprint?

I think it’s usually true that if you are a niche author, you may be better off going with a small publisher that specializes in marketing your sort of book to your sort of audience rather than with one of the big publishers. But conservative books were unusual among niche books in that they had the huge national media infrastructure Waldman talks about to use for promotion. And that infrastructure is still in place.

It used to be that Ann Coulter could crank out the same book every year, titled Liberals Hate God and America and Want to Eat Your Babies, and be all over television promoting it for awhile, being taken seriously by interviewers. Did people finally catch on that if you’ve read one Coulter book, you’ve read ’em all, and there’s really no point buying another one?

My guess is that the demise of suburban mall bookstores might really be a factor, but that would not have impacted book club sales. Whoever was buying copies in bulk may have stopped doing that. There may be a glut of too many books titled Liberals Hate God and America and Want to Eat Your Babies authored by various cable bobbleheads.

Marco Rubio is very serious.

Put simply, Russia should no longer be considered a responsible partner on any major international issue. The Russian people should see that Putin’s actions will bring about a decline of Russia’s status as a global power, not a return to supposed Soviet glory.

That’s fine until we need Russia to put pressure on Iran, as I thought we did. We’re not worried about Iran any more?

To this end, Obama should urge U.S. allies to impose an arms embargo on Russia. It is unconscionable that NATO allies would send arms to Moscow even as it violates Ukrainian sovereignty.

I didn’t know Russia was dependent on NATO nations for arms. Uh, it isn’t. Russia doesn’t appear to be importing arms from anybody, although it exports quite a lot

Third, I welcome the fact that Vice President Biden is in the region this week to bring a message of reassurance to our allies and partners. I hope those assurances include a specific and clear response to requests by Georgia and Ukraine for lethal military support from the United States. It is shameful that even as Russia attempts to carve up Ukrainian territory, Ukraine’s request for weapons, intelligence sharing and other assistance has been turned down by the Obama administration. We also need to deploy additional military assets and even U.S. personnel to our allies, including Poland and the Baltic states.

Lethal military support? We’re supposed to go to war over freakin’ Crimea?

WaPo’s editorial board is raving that the Russian annexation of Crimea poses a threat to “European and global security,” because it’s clear (to them) that Putin intends to keep going and annex “former Soviet republics with substantial populations of ethnic Russians.” They want Estonia and Latvia to be accepted into NATO last week.

In Georgia and now Crimea, Putin took advantage of massive political instability and, in the case of Georgia, the presence of an ongoing separatist movement. I’m not aware of any such instability in Estonia and Latvia. So it’s not obvious to me what Putin’s long-term plans are. A military move on those two countries would be a very different act from what just happened in Crimea, it seems to me. And given their location, if Putin made such a move, I’d expect NATO to respond whether Estonia and Latvia are members or not.

And I can’t bring myself to read Condi Rice’s opinion. If anyone ever relinquished any right to express an opinion on foreign policy, it’s her. Well, her boss, too, but he doesn’t seem to care.

The news yesterday was that the world’s stock markets are not worried about the Crimea: “Global financial markets on Monday shrugged off an anticipated Russian annexation of Crimea, as stocks rose strongly on Wall Street and in Europe.”

Some are still wringing their hands, but the only tangible reason for concern given in this Telegraph article is that sanctions might make Russia an unsound investment.

So the wise and all-knowing Market, Blessed Be It, hath spoken on the Crimea crisis. And It says, meh.

This is not to say there is no reason to be concerned, but nobody seems to know what that reason is. Especially after Crimeans themselves voted to join Russia, unless someone can document they had a gun to their heads as they voted, I’m not sure why we should try to reverse that. The “cure” might cause more problems than the disease.

John Cole wrote,

There is a very serious disconnect between the public and our news media, and the most immediate example of which is the frothing headlines about Crimea and the opinion leaders need for action as compared to the responses I have gotten around here.

And mind you, I am in West Virginia, where almost half of us it seems are veterans, and the resounding response to the Crimea issue around here is “Who the fuck cares? Are they shooting at us?”

I’m hard pressed to disagree.

Again, I’m not saying there’s no reason to be concerned; I’m saying nobody’s telling us what that reason is. The Right primarily is in a twitch because Barack Obama is President; if a Republican were in the White House doing exactly the same things, they’d be praising him up and down for his prudence and restraint. Now, they seem to be hysterical because Hitler annexed Austria, and nobody did anything, and domino theory, and Florida will be next. Or something.

Bobby Jindal has an editorial in the New York Post titled “Bill De Blasio’s War for Poverty.” So the governor of one of the most poverty-ridden states in the Union, with 20 percent of residents living below the poverty line, thinks he is in a position to lecture anybody about poverty? That’s rich.

Jinda mostly criticizes De Blasio’s alleged war against charter schools, which are basically schemes to let a private educate industry gets its hands on tax dollars. However, De Blasio’s actual charter schools policy isn’t much of a war.

The previous week, Mr. de Blasio had approved 14 of 17 charter schools for co-location in traditional school buildings, which does not easily suggest that he is conducting a war on charter schools. And yet this has become the conventional wisdom. Five of the approved schools belong to the high-performing Success Academy network, run by Eva S. Moskowitz, who having led the protesters upstate chose to focus not on her win, but rather on the fact that three of her schools were rejected.

In two of those instances, elementary schools would have been set up on high school campuses, a practice the city has come to regard as problematic, and the third, a co-location at Public School 149 in Harlem, would have put the school at almost 135 percent of its capacity over the next few years and would also have displaced a vast number of children with special needs. Writing to the Department of Education, the principal of P.S. 149, Barry Daub, explained that keeping the space as it is would mean that his students would be able to maintain rooms for mandated occupational and physical therapy and speech services and that the school could continue with a theater arts initiative that was a key part of its program for children with severe disabilities.

You would have learned none of this from Ms. Moskowitz, who marketed her tale of victimhood by proclaiming that the mayor was disenfranchising “poor minority kids who want a shot at the American dream,” as if the autistic and behaviorally challenged children at P.S. 149 were coming from Sutton Place.

The facts of the matter don’t stop Bobby Jindal, in whose state charter schools have been founding teaching children that dinosaurs co-inhabited the earth with humans, from criticizing Mayor DeBlasio for being insensitive to the educational needs of the poor.

Like I said, talk is cheap.

Also, our old pal Mittens is crowing about how he wouldn’t have let Vlad the Mad take Crimea. Daniel Larison responds at The American Coservative with “Thak Goodness Romney Isn’t President.” After providing specifics on why Mitt ha no clue what he is talking about, Larison writes,

It has become fashionable in the last few months to give Romney credit for “prescience” on Russia in the 2012 campaign, as if he did anything more than echo ignorant hard-line talking points that didn’t show the slightest understanding of the relevant issues. He uttered a nonsensical claim about Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe,” which is still very wrong, and most of his defenders still don’t understand how laughable this was. All that Romney demonstrated as a candidate was a knee-jerk hostility to Obama’s policies and equally reflexive hostility to improving relations with Russia. To the extent that he had a coherent idea for how to approach Russia differently, he thought that Russia should be provoked at every turn and that cooperation should be avoided. This approach was rightly mocked during the campaign, and one can only imagine how much more poisonous relations with Russia would be now if it had been official policy for almost five years before the crisis in Ukraine. Had Romney been carrying out his preferred policy towards Russia over the last year, relations would be considerably worse, and we would be saddled with an administration that would go out of its way to clash with Russia on every issue. It was bad enough listening to Romney try to make foreign policy arguments as a presidential candidate, but it is simply ridiculous to be treated to the same nonsense now that the election campaign is long over.

Talk that is never tested is very, very cheap.

Something a little more traditional.

The terminally clueless Paul Ryan’s crusade against free school lunches and other benefit programs is one of the issues that marks the difference between “movement conservatives” and normal people. It’s likely the rabid crew at CPAC ate it up, so to speak, but do the wingnuts really think the average suburban soccer mom voter is angry that children from impoverished families qualify for a bigger lunch subsidy than other children? It’s not like all school lunches aren’t partly subsidized, you know. Does Ryan not know that? Is he calling for an end to all school lunch subsidy? If not, how much subsidy does it take to eat one’s “soul”?

And his recent comments about the work ethic of inner city men were not only racist; they were ignorant. The fact is that entrenched poverty in the U.S. tends to be rural as much as urban. There are exceptions to everything, of course, but if you look at both patterns of poverty and where people who receive food stamps and other benefits are actually living, the highest rates of such benefits tend to be in low population density areas, especially in the South.

I’ve spent enough time in Ryan’s state of Wisconsin to know that parts of Wisconsin are poor, especially in northern Wisconsin where there is less dairy farming and a lot of the jobs are seasonal. If people didn’t get benefits they’d never make it through the winter. And off the Sioux reservations, that area is also almost all white.

Timothy Egan has written before about how Ryan’s “eat the poor” rhetoric repeats the same arguments against helping the Irish that the English made during the famine, but it bears repeating and he’s repeating it —

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

The Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012 presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears during the famine — and hurt them badly.”

Preach it, brother Timothy.

Ryan boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry, on his father’s side. “I come from Irish peasants who came over during the potato famine,” he said last year during a forum on immigration.

BUT with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod. Centuries of British rule that attempted to strip the Irish of their language, their religion and their land had produced a wretched peasant class, subsisting on potatoes. When blight wiped out the potatoes, at least a million Irish died — one in eight people. …

… the Irish were starving to death at the very time that rich stores of grain and fat livestock owned by absentee landlords were being shipped out of the country. The food was produced by Irish hands on Irish lands but would not go into Irish mouths, for fear that such “charity” would upset the free market, and make people lazy.

It’s not just Ryan. I don’t know what it is about Irish-Americans and wingnuttia, but it seems a disproportionate number of spokesmouths for the Right have Irish names. Off the top of my head — Hannity, O’Reilly, Noonan, Buchanan. Rep. Peter King used to be an IRA supporter, I understand. The Irish “made it” in America thrugh public emplyment (Irish cops and firefighters, anyone?) and labor unions, after all. Are the descendents still trying to prove they are white?

I’ve passed the 50,000 word mark in The Book and am working on the last chapter, so there will be an end sometime this spring. I’ve got four days left in my Indiegogo Crowd Source campaign, for any of you feeling generous or desiring of an autographed copy of the eventual print-on-demand paperback.

There’s an outbreak of measles in NYC, thanks to anti-vaccine hysteria. I got immunized the old-fashioned way, by coming down with measles when I was 10 or 11 or so, because they didn’t have the vaccine yet. I mostly remember this because I broke out with poison ivy at the same time.

I don’t know if anti-vaccine absurdity is exclusively leftist, but it does strike me that while righties are puritanical about sex, lefties tend to be puritanical about food and health remedies. I don’t know why that is, or which is more annoying.

It’s starting to look like the missing Malaysia jetliner is not missing because of an accident.

“Why Nothing Is Truly Alive” — food for thought.

“When the Crazy Drifts Toward the Evil” — there’s a lot of The Stupid mixed in there as well.

And speaking of stupid — Bobby Jindal is arguing that Obamacare, particularly expanding Medicaid, hurts the disabled.

Sen. Diane Feinstein has been a knee-jerk apologist for secret government surveillance until this week, when she realized that the government may have been spying on her. Oops!

How do you spy on a spy? In the case of Senate investigators, you do it by adopting some of their methods. During the five year investigation into the CIA interrogation and detention program, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in a windowless room at the spy agency’s headquarters, suspected that key documents had been removed from their computer network. Luckily, they had a hard copy. To keep it from being destroyed, Senate sleuths spirited the document from the CIA and put it in a safe in the Hart Senate Office Building. The move set off a chain of events that broke open on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the intelligence committee, accused the CIA of spying on her investigators. CIA Director John Brennan insists the CIA isn’t trying to thwart her investigations. The Justice Department is now conducting two inquiries: one looking into whether the CIA illegally snooped on congressional investigators and another looking into whether those investigators broke the law. The accusations include lying to Congress and to the Justice Department, and spying on congressional investigators to hide what the CIA was doing. Frank Underwood will no doubt be weighing in soon.

It's called "protecting America," Sen. Feinstein. http://t.co/qBqVV4d9us Surely you don't want to mess that up.

— billmon (@billmon1) March 12, 2014

I don’t know that anyone’s actually in charge of anything in Washington. It would almost be comforting to think that the Obama Administration is actually directing this, which would mean someone is actually directing it, which means someone might actually be held accountable. But my guess is that the surveillance/security apparatus is becoming its own branch of government, and that’s much worse.

See also Annie Laurie.

My God, CIA bugged the Senate Intelligence Committee. I am sure nothing like that has ever happened before.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 11, 2014