For a shocking change of pace, the Friday LinkSwarm will be on Friday:
LinkSwarm for May 10, 2013
May 10th, 2013
Texas vs. California Update for May 9, 2013
May 9th, 2013Time for another Texas vs. California update!
South Carolina CD1 Election Fallout
May 8th, 2013A roundup of interesting commentary on Mark Sanford’s defeat of Elizabeth Colbert-Busch in the SC1 special election:
“We gave it a heck of a fight,” Colbert Busch said in her concession speech. No, you didn’t. You were obliterated by the most beatable Republican in the House. Between campaign and independent spending, you blew upwards of $2 million, and got trounced by a candidate the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to support. You ran a weak, lazy campaign that never had much to say beyond harping on Sanford’s extramarital affair, and reminding voters that your brother is a TV star, while he threw himself furiously into shoe-leather retail politics. Sanford was still holding public events on Election Day, while you were nowhere to be found. You backed away from a crucial debate opportunity, leaving Sanford to own the stage by debating a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s hard to imagine how you could have fought less for the seat, short of holding all your campaign events by closed-circuit TV from your brother’s house.
More:
The mythical backlash against opponents of gun control didn’t materialize to help Colbert Busch, which should only come as a surprise to those who take liberal media manipulation seriously. She took labor union money, which wasn’t going to endear her to voters in the state where unions tried to kill a Boeing plant. Between the ObamaCare disaster, the failure of their Sequester Terror efforts to cudgel more taxes out of the American people, and the gathering Benghazi storm, the Democrat Party isn’t looking its best at the moment…I would imagine we’ll be hearing a lot about Nancy Pelosi in tight 2014 races.
What we see here is another refutation of what I’ve called a “beautiful little fairy tale that liberals tell themselves,” that the American public is broadly supportive of their worldview, and they only lose because Republicans manage to Jedi-Mind-Trick the electorate into caring about distractions, silliness, and those irrelevant ‘wedge issues.’…The fairy tale is that Americans, deep down, really agree with liberals on all of these issues and would heartily embrace their agenda if only these side issues, scandals, and manufactured distractions would just get out of the way. But the electorate doesn’t always think liberal ideas are better, and we may argue that they rarely do.
More: “Today you’re hearing a lot of talk along the lines of, ‘Oh, everyone knew this was a really conservative district and that Sanford would probably win.’ Well, you don’t spend more than $2 million ($1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford) for a race you know you can’t win.”
Sandford Beats Colbert-Busch
May 7th, 2013In the South Carolina First Congressional District race. In fact, it wasn’t even particularly close.
Stephen Colbert may be America, but his sister can’t be a U.S. Representative on his coattails.
LinkSwarm for May 6, 2013
May 6th, 2013Time for another LinkSwarm!
I’m Not at the NRA Meeting in Houston. But Ted Cruz Is.
May 3rd, 2013I couldn’t go to the NRA annual meeting in Houston this weekend, as much as I would have liked to, because I went to a family even in Houston last week.
But fortunately, Ted Cruz is there.
“The Constitution matters. All of the Constitution matters. You don’t get to pick and choose.”
The Decline and Fall of the Austin American-Statesman
May 2nd, 2013I’m not sure if you noticed (and it’s entirely possible you haven’t), but the Austin American-Statesman has instituted a paywall on their website. Obviously the Statesman feels that their slow, steady decline just isn’t getting the job done, so they’ll move straight to assisted suicide.
The Statesman website was not my first choice for news. Or my second. Or my tenth. In fact, they probably come in slightly ahead of Pravda (though behind Russia Today, which is pretty quick at putting up relevant disaster videos). Despite living in Austin for decades, I’ve never subscribed to the Statesman, and purchases of single issues has been limited to the day after national elections and UT winning a national football championship.
The Statesman was never a great newspaper in the best of times, and these are not the best of times.
It’s no secret that the Statesman has suffered severe declines in circulation (possibly even more severe than the average suffered by the print newspaper industry a whole), despite publishing in one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. But finding a single source for year by year Statesman circulation figures has proved elusive. Here’s what I found from various heterogeneous sources for daily (rather than Sunday) circulation, so they may very well not line up with “official” circulation figures (especially for the three most recent years), but are probably close enough to the ballpark to get a good idea of the decline.
So, here’s a chart for Daily Average Circulation Figures for the Austin American Statesman for 2004-2012:
(Click to embiggen. Crappy chart courtesy of a 12 year old version of Excel. I’m sure Will Franklin could do much better.)
And some of that most recent number may be even more dubious, given that sometimes the Statesman won’t actually cancel people’s subscription when asked. And try to charge people more than they agreed to for the discount subscriptions they do sell. And don’t always deliver the issues people have actually paid for.
The Statesman has been in a long, steady decline in staff as well. They bought out 71 employees in 2009, another accepted by 33 people in June of 2011, and laid off an additional 53 employees in October 2011. And even after that, more copy editing jobs were to be consolidated in Florida by Cox Media.
Cox tried to sell the paper in 2009, but backed out of the deal.
One big reason for declining newspaper circulation is the obvious and pronounced liberal bias in so much of the MSM. With so many choices for news on the Internet, local news is no longer a reason to continue funding a carrier medium for liberal opinion.
The paywall seems to be the last thing newspapers institute before they go under entirely (a few of the bigger ones excepted). Initial reactions to the move are hardly ecstatic. I don’t expect the Statesman to go straight out of business next year, but I do expect their decline in circulation to accelerate.
May 1st: Victims of Communism Day
May 1st, 2013Today is an important day.
I’m speaking, of course, of Victims of Communism Day.
People may say that anti-communism is a cause that’s passe, but keep in mind that:
Plus, the crimes of an ideology that killed 100 million people should never be forgotten. Especially one that still has friends in high places.
This is EXACTLY Why We Sent Ted Cruz to Washington
April 30th, 2013Republican Senators have been yelling at Ted Cruz. At the top of their lungs, no less. “How dare you make me stand on principle???”
We won the gun control fight because Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul stood up for principle and shamed other Republican Senators into standing up as well.
We sent Cruz to Washington to shame Republicans into acting like Republicans. No, you don’t get to to betray conservative principles and expect us to keep donating and working for you merely because you have an (R) after your name. No, you don’t get to cave into Washington’s permanent liberal establishment without cost. No, you don’t get to enjoying fawning “strange new respect” profiles from the media without getting primaried. “You could just not be a bunch of squishes.”
Does anyone doubt that we’d now be seeing fawning profiles of Senator Dewhurst for his help in forging a “compromise” on gun control?
Spain IS Beyond Doomed, But It’s Not Practicing Real Austerity
April 30th, 2013Take a look at these charts. Unemployment in Spain is up over 25%, and most have been unemployed more than 2 years. Matthew O’Brien is correct when he says that Spain’s inflexible labor laws contribute greatly to the unemployment, but errs when he says that “austerity hasn’t been the path to prosperity. It’s been the path to perma-slump.”
Austerity hasn’t failed in Spain. It hasn’t been tried.
Spain last ran a budget surplus in 2008, and since then it has engaged in deficit spending. In 2012, Spain’s budget deficit was 9.4% of GDP, and this year it will be 10.6% of GDP.
Remember, real austerity isn’t trying to tax-and-spend your way to prosperity. Real austerity is cutting budgets until outlays match receipts. Estonia bit the bullet and balanced its budget, and its economy is now growing at a steady clip. Meanwhile, governments all across Europe continue to try the same deficit spending Keynesian pump-priming, and keep having the same recession. In most of Europe, “austerity” has meant digging their own graves more slowly rather that stopping digging.
And European elites refuse to stop digging because their power and perks all stem from swaddling voters in an unsustainable cradle-to-grave welfare system.
If all this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Europe makes the same mistakes, gets the same results, and keeps doubling down on stupid, content to keep the farce running as long as they possibly can. Instead actually of solving the interrelated problems of debt, unsustainable entitlements, and the Euro, the Euroelite seem content to preside over the world’s slowest, most boring train wreck. Yes, it’s a pity the train is sliding inexorably toward the chasm, but there’s such fine vintages to be had in the saloon car, and it offers such a magnificent view of the coming crash…