The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Rick James Has What Wisconsin Democrats Need: Unity

Posted on | May 8, 2012 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Insta-Althouse reports big trouble in Troglo-reich, as in what perhaps is a Dick Lugar shout-out, the Dems can’t seem to get their junk together and consolidate their opposition to the common-sense leadership of Scott Walker:

Unity:
Brother, sister,
There’s got to be,
Uuuuuuniiiiiity.
Yeeeeeeahhh.
Unity.
Unity’s what missing in our
Liiiiiiiiiives.
Can’t you see?
Wee need looooooove.
A little word of confidence.
Every now and then.
A little hoooonesty,
And trust among us.
A little love and harmony,
And there’ll surely be,
Some unity,
Unity,
Unity.
(Unity)

The last time I trotted this one out was for the Delaware GOP in 2010. Heh.

Category: Wisconsin

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Time to Quit Whining and Get to Work

Posted on | May 8, 2012 | 144 Comments

This will be brief, but expect additions to follow in updates. Rick Santorum is now urging his supporters to get behind Mitt Romney:

Rick Santorum has officially endorsed Mitt Romney, and notified his supporters in an email sent Monday night.
In the email, the former presidential candidate cited his Friday meeting with Romney in his hometown of Pittsburgh as a reason he finally got behind the presumptive GOP nominee.
“On Friday, Governor Romney came to Pittsburgh for an over-hour long one-on-one meeting,” Santorum said in the email. “The conversation was candid, collegial and focused on the issues that you helped me give voice to during our campaign; because I believe they are essential ingredients to not only winning this fall, but turning our country around.” . . .
In the lengthy email, Santorum encouraged Romney to “add more conservative leaders as an integral part of his team.”
“And you can be sure that I will work with the governor to help him in this task to ensure he has a strong team that will support him in his conservative policy initiatives,” Santorum said. . . .
“Above all else, we both agree that President Obama must be defeated,” the letter read. “The task will not be easy. It will require all hands on deck if our nominee is to be victorious. Governor Romney will be that nominee and he has my endorsement and support to win this the most critical election of our lifetime.”

More at Memeorandum. As I say, this initial memo will be brief. If you supported Santorum, you must now respect his judgment that getting on board with the Romney campaign — “all hands on deck,” as Santorum says — is a vital obligation for all conservatives.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Santorum is scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno this evening, and ABC’s Shushannah Walshe says that Santorum was expected to make a commitment at that time.  Santorum apparently decided to announce the endorsement as soon as he made the decision.  That may take a little of the drama out of tonight’s appearance, but it also may draw more interest as people tune in to hear Santorum’s explanation of the endorsement.

Here’s the thing I want to get across to our readers: Whenever Republicans lose a presidential election, the first thing the GOP Establishment does is to focus blame on conservatives. This is why Sarah Palin was scapegoated for the 2008 defeat, because treacherous swine like Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, who get paid to win elections, don’t want to accept responsibility for their own failures.

It is therefore an urgent necessity — however painfully ironic — that hard-core grassroots conservatives give their maximum effort to help Romney defeat Barack Obama, because if Team Mitt loses this election, you will be blamed. Your honor as a conservative, to say nothing of the future of our Republic, thus requires from you even greater labors than you would have made if Rick Santorum had won the nomination.

Like I said, “painfully ironic.”

UPDATE II: In case you don’t understand how the GOP Establishment’s blame-shifting apparatus works, Tony Lee explains it at Big Journalism. Here’s the thing: When Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace backstabbed Palin and threw her under their RINO careerism bus, they thought their vicious treachery would never be discovered, because they’re so much smarter than everybody in the conservative grassroots.

UPDATE III: As I say, however, this isn’t the time to be nursing old grudges. We’ve got find a way to win, or else expect to be blamed for the defeat. Bridget Johnson at PJM notes that Santorum’s e-mail “stressed his differences with Mitt Romney and therefore gave the need to beat President Obama as the key reason to vote for the former Massachusetts governor.” Well, of course that’s what Santorum did.

If he hadn’t been honest about the differences, his endorsement wouldn’t have persuaded anyone. Here’s the crucial word from Lisa Graas:

Since May [2011], I have been 100% behind Rick Santorum because I trust him to do what is right for America. If Rick Santorum believes that Mitt Romney will defend life and marriage, then that is good enough for me. I also now endorse Mitt Romney for President and look forward to being a part of Rick Santorum’s grassroots volunteer team to continue the fight for conservatism in America.

One of the key topics at the Mitt/Rick meeting? Vanuatu.

UPDATE IV: Readers will recall that yesterday I said it is important to let Team Mitt do their job. That is to say, we shouldn’t be disgruntled, sitting around second-guessing them and bitch, bitch, bitching for the next six months. That ain’t gonna beat Obama, OK?

Our confidence in Team Mitt should prevent us from being distracted by certain people (not on the campaign) whining because they didn’t think Santorum’s endorsement was sufficiently sycophantic.

Hey, whiners: Kissing ass is your job, not Rick’s.

UPDATE V: Robert Costa at National Review talks about Team Mitt’s new hires, including former Santorum campaign director, Mike Biundo.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been biting my tongue about this, which got linked here, and to which I obliquely replied Sunday night. Because we are now in what Ace likes to call “game faces” mode, some insults must be ignored and some injuries suffered in silence.

Our personal interests or narrow ambitions should never be confused with “the conservative movement,” which is larger than any one person. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and owe an obligation to those who suffered and sacrificed to build this movement, and who are no longer here to aid us in our struggle. Humble service is our duty, and the scrupulous fulfillment of that duty is a matter of honor.

Note, please, that this mild acknowledgement has been included in the fifth update, three hours after the original post went online. That is to say, I’ve put it where it will attract little public notice, merely so that it may be known to friends that I am fully aware.

 


Category: Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption, Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Vanuatu

Question To Bush: How Does It Feel To Be Anti-Christ And Savior?

Posted on | May 8, 2012 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

See if I’ve got this sorted correctly:

  1. Obama blames Bush for the crappy economy.
  2. Bush = Anti-Christ.
  3. ManBearPig says a crappy economy is needed to trim atmospheric CO2 levels.
  4. Bush = Savior?

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but two or more wrongs often seem to comprise a day’s work for the Democrats.

Category: Democrats, Global Warming, ManBearPig

So Funny, When Feminism Thinks The Unborn Should Die

Posted on | May 8, 2012 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Funny or Die dives deep into the grave here:

What a creepy, sick, Orwellian world these feminists live in. Remind me again why any mature, masculine male would want to be in the same room as these abattoir-vaginas, much less offering them any essence to destroy? I guess I should say “choose to destroy”.

The sickness of the government-worship implied in this clip is only exceeded by the crypto-incest of talking about their dads and their vaginas at the end, if you can make it that far.

“Ye are the sodium chloride of the Earth,” to paraphrase the Sage. He did not follow up: “And if the chlorine hath lost its mind, and formeth not the good salt of a family with the sodium, then it shall have lost its savor to feminism, and be fit for going under the wheeled conveyance* of history, with the rest of a godless culture.” And why was such an addendum unnecessary? Because a couple thousand years ago, people weren’t post-Modern crack-addled Feminist nitwits, that’s why.

The good news is that these twisted females are unlikely to achieve any reproduction under the sun. Thus, there isn’t much danger of the World’s Youngest Blogger encountering this sort of dementia when he’s old enough to date. I hope these women find sense and these perverted ideas die, die, die.

via Breitbart

Update: linked at WyBlog, who offers more background.

*bus

Category: Abortion, National Offend a Feminist Week

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.08.12

Posted on | May 8, 2012 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
CIA Busts Undetectable Underwear Bomb Plot
Unclear on whether bomb would have been picked up by new scanners



Future Of Austerity In Europe Doubtful
They don’t have a plan, but they sure don’t like yours

Putin Assumes Power In Russia
Blames US for supporting protesters; chided by Communists for not taking opposition seriously



POLITICS
Soros Hands $2 Million To Liberal Groups

George Soros

American Bridge, America Votes the beneficiaries as Soros funds “grass roots” organizing

US Campaign Ads Carry Familiar Echo For Brits

Tea Party Flexes Its Muscles Against Lugar

White House Gives Charlie Rangel The Cold Shoulder

Governor Malloy, CT Legislature Reach Deal On Education Reform

Senate Confirms Obama Nominees To FCC



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Oil Prices Close Slightly Higher; NYMEX $97.74, Brent $112.98
Markets Watch Europe Amid Flurry Of Earnings Reports
Spain To Spend Billions On Bank Bailout
Obamanomics: Americans Too Broke To Go Bankrupt
BPI Closes Three Processing Plants, Blames “Pink Slime” Uproar
GAO Claims Taxpayers Could Turn $15.1 Billion Profit On AIG Bailout
Buffett Reassures Berkshire Stockholders On Cancer, Succession
Electronic Arts Shares Fall On Weak Outlook
Mastercard Unveils PayPass Wallet Services
Greece Could Drop Euro, But Tragedy Won’t Follow
Jury Rules Google Infringed Java Copyrights With Android
What Will It Take For Apple TV To Succeed?
Nevada OKs Google Autopilot Car Tests
Disney Technology Turns Everything Into A Touch Device



SPORTS
Rangers Strike Twice On Late Power Play, Stun Caps 3-2

Brad Richards ties it up for the Rangers

New York takes 3-2 series lead back to Washington

Player Formerly Know As Ron Artest Not Sure He Deserved Lengthy Suspension For Harden Hit


Spurs Sweep Jazz Out Of Playoffs, 87-81

Unlikely Heroes Lead Mets To Victory Over Phillies

Hamels Fined, Suspended Five Games For Deliberately Throwing At Harper

NHL Reaches Tentative Deal To Sell Coyotes To Jamison

Can Jeremy Lin Save The Knicks?



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Matthew Fox Busted For DUI

Pulled over at 3 AM in Oregon

John Travolta Sued For Groping Masseur

Supermodel & Billionaire Settle Child Support Tiff

Jack Osbourne, Fiancee Lisa Welcome Baby Daughter Pearl

Lifetime Renews “The Client List”

Beastie Boys Thank Fans For Outpouring Of Love

Sony Signs Shakira: $60 Million For Six Albums



FOREIGNERS
New Democracy Fails To Form Coalition; No Government Yet For Greece
Kadima Joins Netanyahu; Early Elections Canceled
Hillary Clinton Talks Tough On India And Pakistan
PRC Gives al-Jazeera Correspondent The Boot; First Reporter Expelled In Thirteen Years
US, PRC To Cooperate More On Cyberdefense



BLOGS & STUFF
Viking Pundit: Mark Halperin Beclowns Himself
Bryan Preston: President Who Hired Communists And Hung Out With Terrorists Says Romney Must Rebuke “Extreme Voices”
Jm Geraghty: You Can’t Fight In Here, Gentlemen! This Is A Unity Rally!
Ricochet: Tolerance And Diversity At The Academy
Ace Of Spades: Perfect Gaul – Obama Advises French Not To End Austerity Measures
Weasel Zippers: The Charade Continues – Obama Won’t Say If He Supports Gay Marriage
NewsBusters: Jon Stewart Loses Delta As Sponsor After “Vagina Manger” Sketch
Clayton Cramer: Even Newsweek Is Now Covering The Apparent Corruption Of The Obama Administration
Washington Free Beacon: Administration Drafted CYA Memo For Obama In Case OBL Raid Failed
Hot Air: Shocker! FLOTUS’ Plan To Weed Out “Food Deserts” Failing To Bear Much Fruit
Ramesh Ponnuru: Dead Wrong

Category: Live at Five

You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing

Posted on | May 7, 2012 | 28 Comments

“François Hollande will strike fear into the hearts of the rich,” is the headline on a column by Nabila Ramdani in the British Independent.

Permit me to suggest two likely results (a) some genuinely rich people will leave France, taking their wealth with them, and (b) a lot of the “rich” people in France won’t be so rich any more.

The point is that “rich” is often used to designate people who, at any given time, have a high annual income. This is not the same as “rich,” as in having a massive net worth, and it is certainly not the same as the cartoonish Thurston Howell III stereotype: People born to ultra-wealthy parents, who grow up in extraordinarily affluent circumstances, with nannies and butlers and chauffeurs, top-flight private schools, winter ski vacations at the family chalet, summers in the Hamptons, etc.

It’s resentment of the Thurston Howell III types that fuels this spiteful rage to make the rich “pay their fair share,” and so if François Hollande tries to jack up taxes on those people, they’ll either find ways to evade the taxes or else they’ll get the hell out of France. One way or another, by driving investment capital out of the private sector, such a soak-the-rich policy will have the effect of stifling economic growth, and reduce the incomes of everybody, including some high-income people — entrepreneurs, high-skill technicians, sales executives — who, earning less money in a weakened economy, will therefore not pay as much taxes at the higher rate as they would had the rates stayed the same.

So all this “strike fear in the hearts of the rich” noise is either just noise, or else it’s a plan to spread the misery around.

BTW, yes, I realize this is my second post in a row about François Hollande, and yes, I realize you probably don’t give a damn about the French. But it’s all over Memeorandum, and the rest of the news seems kinda meh today. So let’s have more fun with Euro-weenies, eh? Here’s Independent columnist Peter Popham:

Rise of far right threatens
to pollute politics across Europe
They may not have claimed ultimate victory, but the biggest winners of the elections in France and Greece were the parties of the extreme right. Fringe parties, some of them routinely labelled “neo-Fascist” until recently, have made stunning inroads into mainstream European politics, to the point that in France, Norway, Finland, Hungary and Austria they either hold or threaten to hold the balance of power. Governments are increasingly faced with the choice of either giving ground on hot-button issues such as immigration and Islam, or ceding power.

Hang on here: France elects a socialist who wants to impose tax rates as high as 75 percent, and it’s the “extreme right” we’re worried about? Speaking of irrational fear, Charles Johnson is hearing jackboots on the cobblestones again, as Diary of Daedalus reports:

The Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party has won 7% of the votes in Greece’s recent election. They will get 21 seats in the new parliament. This gave Charles Johnson an orgasm since he is obsessed with Nazis!

Seven percent of voters in Greece, a country with a population (11.3 million) roughly the size of Ohio, vote for this far-right party, and Charles Johnson imagines . . . what? The Greek neo-Hitler building up a mighty war machine? An Aegean Kristallnacht? An invasion of Macedonia? Greek bombers and tanks rampaging across the Mediterranean? Headline from the London Daily Mail:

Rise of the Greek neo-Nazis: Ultra-right
party Golden Dawn wants to force
immigrants into work camps and plant
landmines along Turkish border

Sounds scary, except they only got 7% of the vote! Assuming that the other 93% of Greek parliament members aren’t down for this agenda, the wacko plans of these “ultra-right” guys are as much of a genuine danger as the threat of Ron Paul becoming president. (OK, that scenario had some people jittery in December.) We’re talking about a comparative handful of powerless kooks in a weak, impoverished and demographically collapsing country on the far side of the globe.

The same people who want us all to freak out about Greek Nazis, of course, would be the first to accuse of us of irresponsible fear-mongering if we pointed out the dangers of, inter alia, narco-terrorists in Mexico or Mahmoud Ahmahdinejad in Iran.

Hell, I’m more afraid of Canadians than I am of the Greeks, and we could probably wipe out Canada in a week or two without mobilizing much more than the Minnesota National Guard.

You people need to get a grip, or you’ll end up gibbering nonsense on “progressive” talk-radio like Charles Johnson:

Category: Charles Johnson, Diary of Daedalus, Economics, France, Greece

Number One, He’s French

Posted on | May 7, 2012 | 8 Comments

That could also be numbers two through five, but James Poulos is more imaginative with “Five Reasons François Hollande Is Destined to Fail,” and includes this astonishing fact:

As Gideon Rachman observes, France “is a country where the state already consumes 56 per cent of gross domestic product, which has not balanced a budget since the mid-1970s, and which has some of the highest taxes in the world.”

Read the whole thing. The French excel at three skills: Surrender, collaborating with the enemy, and sodomy. Not exactly a formula for economic success, no matter who’s president.

Category: France

Grim News in WaPoVille

Posted on | May 7, 2012 | 29 Comments

Washington Post, it sucks to be you:

The Washington Post Co. reported its first-quarter earnings on Friday, and the news coming out of the newspaper division was mostly grim. The unit lost $22.6 million in the quarter, with revenue down 8% and revenue from print advertising specifically falling 17%.
Meanwhile, the Post just reported one of the biggest circulation drops of any major newspaper with the lucrative Sunday edition selling 5.2% fewer copies and the daily edition skidding almost 10%. Oh, and newsroom leaders are so distressed about the way the business decline is affecting them, they held a secret meeting with the paper’s president, Steve Hills — without inviting executive editor Marcus Brauchli.

Did somebody say “secret meeting“?

Washington Post staffers are buzzing about a secret meeting between some 10 big-name Post journalists including Dana Priest, David Finkel and Carol Leonnig, and Steve Hills, the president and [general manager] of the newspaper. The April 17 meeting was highly unusual for two reasons — the executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, wasn’t present, and the participants agreed not to talk about it. . . .
Hills was said to have shocked with remarks that awards “don’t matter,” urged more traffic-driving slideshows over original Post photos, and compared the Post to Ohio’s Dayton Daily News, a paper with one-fifth the circulation of the 508,000-circ Post. . . .
[T]he paper has lost top talent lately, including James Grimaldi, who took a buyout and is heading to The Wall Street Journal. With his departure, the Post will have lost all three reporters who won its 2006 Pulitzer for their coverage of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The paper also shut out of the 2012 Pulitzers and weathered a blogger embarrassment that revealed its BlogPost operation to be a mini sweatshop.

We took note of the WaPo blogger sweatshop story last month. You start to wonder: How long before Nick Denton buys out the WaPo for $1 like Tina Brown bought Newsweek?

The “traffic-driving slideshows” idea is brutally dissected by the Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigral. To summarize, all “page-views” are not created equal. A genuine, organic readership cannot be built via technological trickery, clever SEO software, etc. In the long run, quality content matters, and attempts to evade that reality ultimately fail.

The essential problem of Old Media dinosaurs is that they refuse to acknowledge that a lean-and-mean operating model, with a more efficient use of personnel and a flatter pay structure, is their only hope for survival. Publishers simply can’t keep paying six-figure salaries to scores of people whose output averages no more than a few hundred words per day. Excessive specialization, eight-hour days, three weeks of annual vacation — you’re just not going to be able to compete like that in the New Media environment.

Here’s a helpful anecdote: I started out at small newspapers, where most staffers had to do everything, soup-to-nuts, from writing to photography to layout. So I came to D.C. as a desk editor for The Washington Times, but I always had the small-paper attitude and tried to contribute “value-added” wherever I found a chance.

Eventually, my editor was shocked to discover that, while working full-time as an assistant national editor, I’d actually contributed more bylines in a year than did one of our full-time reporters — whose employment was subsequently terminated as a result of that discovery.

As declining revenues and shrinking staffs gradually turn big news organizations into smaller organizations, executives at behemoths like the WaPo will eventually have to shift toward that kind of personnel structure, where every person in the newsroom is cross-trained and capable of doing whatever work has to be done to put out the product.

The Guild shop, with all its ridiculous rules, is doomed to end up on the ash-heap of journalism history, like the Linotype or the flatbed press.

(Hat-tip: MediaGazer.)

UPDATE: Dude talks about the decline of journalism in a way that’s really kind of depressing, but makes a few points I like:

  • People just don’t value journalism as much as journalists do.
  • Amp up storytelling and personality, because those things are irreplaceable.
  • If you don’t go out of business, you’re a hero.
  • Are we trying to get better at something that doesn’t matter anymore?

He’s close to a point that I keep in mind: Write for the reader.

This seems so obvious to non-journalists that it feels stupid saying it so simply, but too many people in the news business completely lose sight of the fact that the reader is their customer, and is under no obligation to consume your product. You must try to write something that people actually want to read, and try to keep the readership in mind. Your boss is ultimately not the editor, but rather the guy who drops 50 cents in the newspaper box.

Update II (Smitty): Thank you, Mr. Driscoll!

Category: Journalism, Media Bias
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