LIVE AT FIVE – 05.08.12

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

Tom Barrett’s War on Wisconsin Women

Posted on | May 7, 2012 | 7 Comments

Mayor Tom Barrett is a misogynistic patriarchal oppressor
who thinks you look fat in those pants.

Progressive women in Wisconsin are about to learn a lesson they should have learned four years ago when Hillary Clinton got thrown under the wheels of Obama’s bus: All that talk you hear from Democrats about “women’s rights” goes right out the window the minute any woman gets in the way of a Democratic man’s ambitions.

Tuesday is Wisconsin’s Democratic primary, as Anne Sorock at Legal Insurrection reminds us. Progressives are backing Kathleen Falk as their candidate to take on Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Unfortunately for Ms. Falk and the aspirations of Wisconsin women, the old boys in the state’s Democratic Party machine (with the blessing of Team Obama) have lined up behind the corrupt mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett:

Given the fierce political division that has prevailed in Wisconsin for more than a year since the passage of Act 10, one could be forgiven for thinking that Falk — early and unstinting in her assault on Walker’s measures — ought to be wiping up the floor with Barrett among angry Democrats.
In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Barrett was statistically even with or ahead of Falk in most polls even before he declared his candidacy. As soon as he did declare, he began to gain steam. In the latest poll, released Wednesday by the Marquette University Law School, Falk had dropped precipitously to lag Barrett by a 17 percentage point margin.

See, ladies? If you’re willing to sit around begging for scraps at the Democratic Party table, don’t complain when they treat you like dogs.

You know who really appreciates women’s support? Republicans, that’s who. And at least when Republicans screw you over, they do it for profit. Democrats just screw you over for fun.

RE-ELECT GOV. SCOTT WALKER
He’s Kind of Cute (And Doesn’t Think Those Pants Make You Look Fat)

Category: Democrats, Election, National Offend a Feminist Week, Wisconsin

Rule 5 Monday

Posted on | May 7, 2012 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Honestly, I didn’t postpone this for the benefit of National Offend A Feminist Week, it just worked out that way.

Eye of Polyphemus hits leadoff this week with Sarah Shahi, followed by a selection of lovelies from Zion’s Trumpet. Reaganite Republican brings us Miss Cyprus 2011, while Laughing Conservative has the controversial Kate Upton video for your enjoyment. Copious Gasser has a fistful of five-woman shots, while Jake Finnegan’s Burkalesque Babe this week is the Human Barbie Doll, Valeria Lukyanova. The Rio Norte Line returns with Denise Richards, Fishersville Mike introduces Ainsley of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Storm Chasers, and the POH Diaries thinks Scarlett Johansson is Avengers hot.

A View From The Beach has a retrospective on the companions of Dr. Who, some videos relating to Indian Princess Liz Brown, more video weirdness, skier Lindsey Vonn, Shanna Moakler, and some obligatory Japanese weirdness.

El Opinador Compulsivo offers the choice between yellow and white, Hailee Rain, more from the Nighty Night vault, Sofia Vergara, Carmen Electra at 40, a taste of Asia, and a reminder that jeans go everywhere.

Soylent Green introduces a new linky love logo. The Monday Motivationer is Carrie, Tuesday Titillation is supplied by Betcee May; Jillian brings the Humpday Hawtness, followed by Goddess of Dawn Aurora, and the Corset Friday Fantabulasm. There’s a Go(Ogler) shoutout to Malaysia, and a new Miss Spassfabrik.

Proof Positive checks in with Tulisa Contostavlos, vintage babe Marie McDonald, Kate Upton’s “Cat Daddy” dance video, and Victoria’s Secret for the Sex In Advertising segment. Dustbury goes with Beyonce and Lisa Rinna, and at The Camp Of The Saints, it’s Sophie Reade, the Rule 5 News, and Cikita.

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week include Jennifer Lee, Maki Miyamoto, this week’s Mystery Babe, Francesca Frigo, Yuuki Fukusawa, a tribute to the power of Rule 5, Lina Posada, and Natalia Velez with some linkagery.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline for next week’s Rule 5 Sunday is Saturday, May 12.

Category: Rule 5

Team Mitt: Let Them Do Their Jobs

Posted on | May 7, 2012 | 21 Comments

Romney campaign senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom talks to reporters
after CNN Republican debate, Jacksonville, Fla., Jan. 26, 2012

One of the dangerous temptations of political journalism is to begin thinking that it’s your job to tell politicians what to do. Like any other citizen, you have the right to express your opinion, but your job is to report and explain what’s happening, not to decide what happens.

When I was a sports writer, I didn’t tell football coaches which play to call on third-and-nine. Whether the quarterback scored a touchdown or threw an interception, the outcome was not my responsibility. Of course, the analogy between covering sports and covering politics isn’t perfect: Football coaches can’t raise your taxes or start wars, and the fans in the bleachers don’t get to vote on the score of the game.

Yet I still try to resist the arrogant delusion that what I write about politics has any decisive influence. If I were running the show, things would be different, but nobody’s offered to pay me to run the show, so I try not to get wrapped up in that “make a difference” mentality for which Rush Limbaugh so often excoriates crusading liberal journalists.

All of this is a necessary preamble to linking my American Spectator column today about the Mitt Romney campaign:

Ruthless efficiency is the hallmark of a professional campaign operation. Watching Team Mitt in action during the primary season left no reason to doubt that, if sharp work by an experienced staff can make a difference, Romney’s operation will deliver a solid performance for Republicans. The question now, as the general election campaign gets fully under way, is whether Team Mitt will be good enough to beat the equally professional Obama operation. Among the skeptics is Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner, who last week criticized the Romney campaign for having “taken the bait, reacting to whatever Team Obama has decided to make an issue.” Klein cited three examples: Democratic operative Hilary Rosen’s attack on Ann Romney, a report that Obama had once admitted eating dog meat, and the administration’s “spike the football” celebration of the anniversary of the Navy SEAL raid that took out Osama bin Laden.
Republican reactions, Klein said, enabled those stories to “dominate the political headlines,” distracting from a steady drumbeat of negative economic news: “If the campaign is about bin Laden, identity politics and silly controversies about dogs, an Obama victory is a lot more likely. To seize control of the campaign, instead of merely being reactive, Romney has to put Obama on the defensive about his own record.”
Certainly this is good advice, although the pessimistic appraisal by Klein — an excellent journalist who spent many years as an American Spectator reporter — may overstate the extent to which the Romney campaign departed from its accustomed discipline. . . .

Please read the whole thing, and everybody try to calm down. We’ve still got six months to go before Election Day. There will be plenty enough time for Fear and Loathing between now and Nov. 6. The big headline on Memeorandum today is this:

Battleground Poll: Obama, Romney in dead heat

Whatever Team Mitt may have done wrong so far, it hasn’t been enough to damage their chances to beat Obama. Everybody knows Romney wasn’t my choice for the GOP nomination. Therefore, I can neither be blamed nor claim credit for whatever happens in this election. Most of our readers are in the same position: You resisted Romney as hard as you could, and now he’s the nominee anyway. So what do you do now?

Look: I’ve known the guys on Team Mitt pretty well for a couple of years now. When I went up to Massachusetts to cover the Scott Brown campaign in January 2010, one of the first campaign staffers I met was Eric Fehrnstrom, one of Romney’s top advisers. If Fehrnstrom and the rest of the Romney guys were good enough to beat a Democrat for Ted Kennedy’s seat, they deserve a certain amount of confidence now that it’s their job to beat Obama. Let ’em do their job.

If Team Mitt screws it up, that’s not our fault, but whatever they need from us, it’s probably not a lot of bitching and complaining. And my sense of the strategic situation is that Team Obama could be a lot weaker than they look. While it’s not my habit to invoke inspirational quotes from damned Yankees, I think this battle might pretty swiftly reach the crucial point where Da Tech Guy likes to quote Phil Sheridan: “Ride right through ’em, they’re demoralized as hell!”

Category: Election 2012, Mitt Romney

Occupy the Environment!

Posted on | May 7, 2012 | 11 Comments

Tired of being oppressed by endangered species? Do you curse the caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge every time you pay $4 a gallon to fill up your SUV? Have you ever felt the urge to go hunting for spotted owl? Do you consider the Delta smelt an existential menace?

It’s us or them.

You don’t see anyone trying to protect mastodon habitat, do you? Nobody’s marching to save the dodo bird.

Here’s the point: Once a species is extinct, it’s no longer “endangered,” and then we can do whatever we want with their precious “habitat.”

Pave the f–king wetlands, I say!

Put a bounty on the spotted owl.

Delta smelt? Clearance sale: $2 a bucket at the bait shop.

And if any smelly caribou try to get between us and that oil in Alaska, buddy, I’ve got two words of advice: Open fire.

These sentiments may seem “extreme” to some people, but are inspired by the news that terrorist Bill Ayers is speaking at the GreenFestival.

Category: Environmentalism

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The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.08.12

You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing

Number One, He’s French

Grim News in WaPoVille

Tom Barrett’s War on Wisconsin Women

Rule 5 Monday

Team Mitt: Let Them Do Their Jobs

Occupy the Environment!

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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