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Archive for 2012
May 11, 2012
THE WASHINGTON POST SALIVATES SQUISHILY OVER DINNER AT GEORGE’S: “Clooney listened intently to the president throughout, his hands folded as if in prayer and his chin resting on them.” Me, I’m praying for unbiased journalism, but I don’t have a famous chin to rest upon my folded hands.
HAMAS: Fine, bomb Iran.
FROM PJTV, VODKAPUNDIT’S WEEK IN BLOGS: Sure, it was a slow news week, not that much happened on the campaign trail or in old media, but somehow Steve Green has rounded up the top ten news items from the week:
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Links to the items that Steve references:
PHONING IT IN: “A tired Obama goes through the motions in George Clooney’$ tent,” from Andrew Malcolm at Investor’s Business Daily.
Dr. Thomas Sowell was once the reason I loved the opinion page of my local newspaper.
Read more at the Daily Caller.
MICHELE BACHMANN WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW SHE’S 100% COMMITTED to the United States of America. She’s a natural born citizen — as they say — and nothing about her opposite-sex marriage is ever going to change that, but just in case you might think that being a Swiss citizen impairs her thoroughly American Americanness, she’s renouncing it.
“THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF THE CLAIM THAT ELIZABETH WARREN IS 1/32 CHEROKEE. The documentary sources have been debunked, and the genealogist and genealogical society which originated the story and upon whom the Warren campaign relies are not talking.” This, on top of news that “[t]he University of Pennsylvania, where Warren worked from 1987 to 1994, listed her as a minority in a ‘Minority Equity Report.'” But on the bright side for Warren, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are doing a fundraiser for her. And as for her feelings: she says: “I feel like Scott Brown is raising ugly insinuations and I think he is doing it because he doesn’t want to talk about what is happening to Americas families.”
VIDEO: MSNBC CUTS CONSERVATIVE’S MIC WHEN HE CALLS OUT MEDIA COVERAGE OF ROMNEY ‘BULLY’ STORY: “The question I was sent for the Romney bullying segment was ‘Does the story matter?’ So I was answering it, not dodging.”
Andrew Klavan’s 2009 video remains prescient:
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AUTO LEGEND CARROLL SHELBY, FATHER OF COBRA, DIES: “Carroll Hall Shelby, the Texan who created the famous Shelby Cobra and uncounted other high-performance machines that turned the auto world on its ear, and made it a whole lot more fun for 50 years, died in Dallas Thursday night at age 89. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia,” USA Today reports.
UPDATE: Via the vacationing, yet still-omnipresent Glenn Reynolds, Autoweek’s obit for Shelby:
Shelby is believed to be the only person to win Le Mans as a driver (with Aston Martin), a manufacturer (class victory with the Cobra Daytona coupe) and team owner (Ford’s GTs).
Not everything this Texan touched turned to trophies, but his solid record of achievement, plus his talents as a promoter, made his name an icon of high-performance worldwide.
In the 1980s, he parlayed all of this into a venture with Chrysler that produced a number of specialty cars and trucks, including the Shelby Can-Am one-design racer, all dedicated to a biggest-bang-for-the-buck philosophy.
Beyond that, Shelby grew his business into a multifaceted “skunkworks,” doing advanced research and development for other clients. From 2005, these included Ford, with whom Shelby patched up an old grievance so that they could partner on a fresh range of super-hot Shelby Mustangs. He also resumed production of old-style Cobras and, less successfully, launched a newer sports model dubbed the Shelby Series 1.
Yet, impressive as his accomplishments were on the automotive scene, that was only one of a bewildering set of arenas through which he moved with equal facility: ranching, real estate development, hotels, food production, aircraft dealing. In every field that caught his interest, he was able to exercise a powerful combination of intelligence, curiosity, vision, timing, guile, cunning and charm, plus what he described as “the work ethic.”
Not the least of Shelby’s secrets was an easy, natural manner, a flashing grin and an almost old-fashioned sense of courtesy, which quickly made firm friendships and networks of important contacts.
Read the whole thing.™
CJR: THE WASHINGTON POST CO.’S SELF-DESTRUCTIVE COURSE: This isn’t actually all that new; two years ago, I wrote a long hyperlink and bullet point-laden post titled “Studying the Washington Post, Kremlinologist-Style,” running down just some of the insanity I was seeing coming out of the WaPo. But when the Columbia Journalism Review notices, the house organ of the media’s ancien régime, as Hugh Hewitt once described it, then you know things are getting serious there:
The Washington Post Company‘s dismal quarterly earnings release last week was received with something of a shrug—more of the same. But the report is worse than the reaction suggests and raises fundamental questions about the Post’s strategy, not just for the newspaper, but for the whole company.
If you hadn’t heard, the Washington Post Company is basically a for-profit college/SAT-prep firm that sidelines as a cable-TV provider and newspaper publisher. The august Washington Post (I’ll italicize Post here when referring to the newspaper and won’t when referring to its parent) contributed just 15 percent to its namesake company’s revenue in the first quarter but was a $23 million drag on the bottom line.
Kaplan, the Post’s education division, is the company’s cash cow, and a few years ago looked like the newspaper’s savior. But its revenue has fallen sharply over the last year and a half since for-profit schools, very much including Kaplan’s, came under pressure for predatory practices. Its sales tumbled 14 percent from 2010 to 2011 and dropped another 11 percent in the first quarter.
Its deteriorating prospects spells more trouble for the Post’s newspaper division, whose very bad first quarter included not only that $23 million loss but also a 7 percent decline in revenue. Crucially, its digital ad revenue—the paper’s main hope for the future—went into reverse and hit negative 8 percent. It’s just the latest in a long line of bad results.
The Post’s newspaper division (which includes Slate) has posted losses in thirteen of the last fifteen quarters, a trail of red ink that has led to cumulative losses of $412 million over the period. Its revenue has declined in twenty of the last twenty-two quarters and last year it brought in fully one-third less—$314 million—than it did at its peak in 2006. Layoffs have reduced the Post’s newsroom to a little more than half its peak size.
The CJR might not want to admit it, but the core product that the WaPo delivers to its consumers isn’t doing it any favors these days, either.
UPDATE: Stacy McCain adds:
Remember that last month the Washington Post fired a young blogger, Elizabeth Flock, for errors in her account of a controversy involving the Romney campaign. WaPo ombudsman Patrick Pexton headlined his account of that incident, “The Post fails a young blogger.”
OK, so who failed on the “BullyGate” story? And if Elizabeth Flock got fired for an inaccurate blog post, how can Jason Horowitz survive multiple inaccuracies in a 5,000-word front-page story? How does the WaPo plan to verify a secondhand quote from a dead man?
Stacy has contact info for the Post’s ombudsman, though as Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler, after attempting to contact him and receiving radio silence in return, “The Washington Post Could Not Be Reached for Comment, On Its Own Blockbuster Story.”
Bill Clinton called Obama an amateur. (And now I agree with Bill? It’s the end of the world.)
IN THE MAIL: Chasing Demons – My Hunt for War Criminals in Bosnia
DR. SANITY: Countering the Postmodern Political Narrative.
WHEN THE U.S. REALLY DID TRY AUSTERITY, IT WORKED! From James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise blog.
UPDATE: When Austerity Worked, Part 2 — from Steve Bartin at Newsalert.
ED CONSIDERS CANADIAN CITIZENSHIP: Not me, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz on his radio show; Brian Maloney has audio at his Radio Equalizer blog.
But hey, it’s tough to fault him for wanting to move north to an economy that’s performing better than our own, with less unemployment. Earlier this week at the Fiscal Times, Liz Peek suggested that the real star of MSNBC should spend some time there as well: “Obama Should Go to Canada for Leadership Lessons.”
RELATED: Of course, Canada’s lack of a first amendment is also appealing to any MSNBC journalist.
ALSO RELATED: “Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Gives Up U.S. Citizenship Before IPO.”
PBS FILMMAKER SERVES UP A LOPPED-OFF SCOTT WALKER VIDEO CLIP, just in time for the Tom Barrett campaign to use in the recall election. And yet Brad Lichtenstein — who has contributed to Barrett — says “I have no political agenda with the film and I’m not releasing the trailer to have a political impact in Wisconsin.” I would have thought that after the firings over the George Zimmerman 911 audio that journalists would be a little more circumspect about this sort of thing.
BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS ACHIEVED: Conservative American Power Blog, left-leaning Raw Story agree: WaPo hit piece on Romney coordinated with White House.
NOT YOUR FATHER’S NEWSPAPER: Actually, I’m pretty sure Mencken and even Lou Grant would be pretty cool with this: Houston Chronicle Reporter Fired for Moonlighting as Stripper. Yes, the post is illustrated.
YOU MEAN IT DOESN’T COME NATURALLY TO THEM? House Democrats trained on how to play the race card.
Besides, I thought the left’s race card was maxed out — Jon Stewart told me so in 2010.
UPDATE: Dems Choose Sixties Radical’s Daughter for Race Bait Training.
NANOTECH UPDATE: U.S. Workers Unprepared for the Nanotech Revolution, nanotech-expert Howard Lovy writes.
LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE WHITE HOUSE: Steve Green writes:
Everything we’ve seen this week is of a piece with Bill Clinton calling Obama “an amateur.” But even if he never said “amateur” out loud like Edward Klein claims in his new book, you knowClinton thought it. And since Clinton is almost pathologically incapable of not sharing his every thought, I’m certainly inclined to think the story is true.
And now Drudge is red-headlining — redlining? — a new poll showing Mitt Romney with a seven-point lead, 50%-43%. Gallup? Rasmussen? Drudge isn’t saying yet, but Rasmussen usually releases his daily numbers at around 11AM Eastern, so it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody there leaked Drudge a preview. [UPDATE: Yes, it was Rasmussen.]
Which leads us to the stupidest thing I read all week — Mark Halperin’s report about how “confident” the Obama campaign is about their chances this fall. Has he not seen David Axelrod doing the Flop Sweat Tango on national television? Has he not noticed that the DNC chair is witlessly out of touch with voters? Is he unaware of the unprecedented nastiness of the president’s campaign? Obama 2012 makes Bush 2004 look like Reagan 1984. “Mourning in America” would be a step toward the positive for this crew.
Anyway, Halperin is just another cog in the progressive media machine that will stop at nothing to reelect the President. Our job is a much simpler one: Point and laugh at all of it. The contortions, the spins, the lies — they’re all so pathetically and rib-achingly funny. In three-plus decades of watching politics, I’ve never witnessed anything so desperately, hysterically funny.
Obama could still well drag his SCOAMF campaign over the finish line in November, and he could then govern in a scorched earth style in the following years, with plenty of punitive executive orders and the like. But no matter what happens in November, his last four years of governing, his leaden oratory, and his scorched earth Alinskyesque tactics have all combined to leave his brand permanently damaged beyond repair. The messianic praise that he inspired amongst his acolytes at the start of his campaign now looks like snake oil and tulip mania of the worst order.