OBAMA WON’T BE SPONSORING A NASCAR CAR AFTER ALL: Money problems, or did it just not play as well as they’d hoped? (Via The Next Right).

JAMES LILEKS: “It’s the anniversary of the plunge of Skylab. . . . Skylab was the butt of jokes when it was operational as well; they didn’t do anything fun up there. They just floated around and took notes. Big deal. My theory: science fiction in movies had gotten so good that people became bored with the real version. Why pay attention to an ungainly can rolling around the earth, when you can watch Luke swoop into the trench to blow up the Death Star for the 294th time? This perspective persists.”

IN THE MAIL: Naomi Novik’s Victory of Eagles, the latest in her Temeraire series. I very much liked the earlier installments.

VIDEO: The untold story of gun confiscation after Katrina.

LIFE AT SEA: A cool blog by an offshore ROV pilot.

RASMUSSEN: “The race for the White House is tied.”

UPDATE: What does it mean? “I had always assumed that the race would tighten up in October, but we’re a long way from then. Why so early? What does this mean? Well, I might go on about this at more length, but it’s obvious Barack’s deep in the old Catch-22, not able to look like the candidate of change or ‘new’ politics as he slips-slides to the center. And to make matters worse, he can’t even go that far to the middle without sounding like a total hypocrite and alienating his base.” Which, in fact, is already happening.

Some related thoughts here.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “Do you really think Justices Stevens and Ginsburg are about to create Supreme Court vacancies?”

ESCAPED IRANIAN DISSIDENT AHMAD BATEBI tells his tale.

His escape has prompted a paroxysm of denunciation in Iran’s controlled news media, which have accused him of defrauding creditors and suggested that he has long been in league with the United States and Israel, claims that human rights groups dismiss as crude propaganda.

From his Yahoo blog, Mr. Batebi has replied, posting the taunt, “Your hands will never reach me” and the instruction “Click here.” The photograph that pops up shows the dissident, an Iranian Johnny Depp with a ponytail and a satisfied expression, posing in front of the United States Capitol.

Heh.

VICTORY INSTEAD OF GENOCIDE: Well, I’m happy to see things go that way.

OBAMA EVENT FEATURES JOKES “offensive to women.”

BARACK OBAMA is sounding more and more like John McCain. Bolstering his chances for the much-coveted InstaPundit endorsement!

THE MANDARINATE STRIKES OUT: T.M. Lutas on the bureaucracy’s resistance to the electorate.

MCCAIN AND OBAMA CAMPAIGNS RESTRICTING PEACEFUL PROTESTERS. Guess which Is played up, and which is “overlooked” by the media?

CHARLIE RANGEL IS no Ralph Nader.

THE NEW YORK TIMES interviews John McCain.

Plus: Obama Supporters on the Far Left Cry Foul. (Via TalkLeft: “I see no transformational quality to either Obama or his candidacy.”)

SO I’VE HAD THE MAZDA RX-8 for nearly five years now, and people occasionally email to ask if I still like it. Yes. The story is pretty much what it was back when it was new. Still handles well, fun to drive, seats very comfy. Still looks like new, too. On the second set of tires. It still doesn’t burn much oil — despite the reputation of rotary engines — but the gas mileage is so-so, though of course it is a sports car. Still, it’s funny that it gets worse mileage than the Highlander Hybrid.

NEWSPAPERS — an interesting email from reader Ed Brenegar.

My son recently interviewed for a job with a newspaper that is a part of one of the large chains. What he learned from the interview, which lasted 80 minutes with both the Executive and Managing Editors, points to a divide that I think is worth noting.

This paper produces a wide variety of niche products. The figure that they reach about 80% of their region with one of their products. The products are focused on parenting, retirees, entertainment, etc, as well as online and print versions of the daily paper. They are making money.

One of the explanations for the demise of the print edition of the traditional newspaper that they gave him was the change in the demographics of the community. They told him that increasingly people move there, spend a few years, and move elsewhere. They don’t move into town and take up an intimate concern for the community. They find that the percentage of the local population that is engaged in local issues is shrinking, and therefore the numbers of people who are interested in a newspaper is shrinking. As a result, the problems of local newspapers are the connected to the problems of local communities. May explain why the quality of people who run for local public office is so poor.

My guess is that many of these old traditional newspaper companies don’t have the resources nor the capacity to shift to a multi-product format. Hence, they are tied to the past, and the past is passing away. Of course, nature abhors a vacuum, and it will be filled by some form of information retrieval system.

Thought you’d find this interesting.

I do.

UPDATE: A newspaper-biz reader who requests anonymity emails:

In our division every one of the print magazine businesses have lost huge amounts of money in the last two years. As in 40%-50% drops in revenue. However, everyone of our internet businesses has grown and continue to grow at 15%-50% depending on the specific market, but they all grow. Having worked on both the print side and internet side I can tell the biggest reason for the decline of the print side is advertising. Specifically, print magazines are finding it hard to attract advertisers. While it is tempting to blame the decline on the increasing political editorials that sometime masquerade as “news” that is usually a side effect rather than a cause–the editorials get more pages because there are fewer ads to fill those pages.

And here is why–distribution. Internet venues exposes a person’s ad to a far greater scale than any newspaper can hope to achieve. We have one business that has a print magazine and an internet version. Almost to a customer when we discuss a marketing campaign or advertisement the prospective businesses are only interested in the internet version–we often have to throw in a free quarter page in the mag to sweeten the pot. Why? Because the mag is distributed to a few hundred thousand people if we are lucky–the internet portal exposes the ad to a few hundred thousand people the first day–and a few million people across the country by the end of the day.

From the internet side we’ve developed several standards for various websites to distribute advertisement information to several distribution nodes. Want to sell a pleasure boat or a motorcycle? Place your ad on one of portals and it will get distributed to not only our websites but to Google, Yahoo, and up to 50+ other websites that sell boats or motorcycles. We’ll even place it on eBay or Craigslist for you. Hell, craigslist has been almost the single cause of the demise of newspaper classified ads.

Has the newspaper industry EVER thought to develop a way to exchange ad information with another newspaper across the country? No. They believe in keeping it close–why give the other guy a chance to show your ad and get credit? That’s why they are dying–they don’t understand that if they had developed such standards and developed their agreements properly they could reap a 2% jump in advertisement revenue for every 1% they lost. It’s all about exposure. If they want to blame “the local demographics changing” I suppose that might be true–but it has nothing to do with why they are losing revenue.

Interesting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Posner asks: Are newspapers doomed? Gary Becker says yes, they are.

JENNIFER RUBIN: “Another Barack Obama earmark turns up in the news. For a candidate who has made earmark reform an obsession, John McCain hasn’t done much to point out some of Obama’s more embarrassing and egregious earmarks. They do seem to be a powerful example of Old Politics.”

BILL ALLISON: Holes in Disclosure.

ONE DAY, THIS BOOK WILL PUZZLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS. (Via Omnivoracious).

RICK MORAN remembers Tony Snow.

PROGRESS: “THE World Health Organisation and the European Union have allowed Uganda to spray the DDT chemical, the water and environment minister has said. Ali Mambule reports that Maria Mutagamba said the Government would use the chemical, to kill mosquitoes that spread malaria.” I hope this is a harbinger of a more liberal attitude generally. If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.

JACK KELLY:

Much of the dissatisfaction with Congress is due to its unwillingness to do anything about the soaring price of gasoline. “Right now, our strategy on gas prices is ‘Drive small cars and wait for the wind,’•” a Democratic congressional aide told The Hill newspaper.

“So why are the Republicans running scared, and why aren’t they going after the ‘new Democratic Congress’ hammer and tongs?” wondered Web logger Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. “Beats me. Because they’re idiots, I guess.”

I disagree. Some Republicans in Congress are crooks, and many are cowards. But few are idiots. For idiocy, you have to look to the campaign of Sen. John McCain.

Ouch. But, yeah.

IF YOU SUPPORT GUNS IN NATIONAL PARKS, just go here and edit the message slightly. A suggested version, from Marc Danziger, is below. Click “read more” to see it.