Refuting Derek Thompson (or, Newsweek’s Self-Inflicted Wounds)

October 19th, 2012

Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson has a piece up laying the blame for Newsweek’s on the economy. “This is an economic story, plain and simple. The print news business is grim and hardly needs a lengthy explication.” Well, I’m sure the economy didn’t help. But the story of Newsweek‘s demise is not that plain, nor that simple.

I was going to laboriously track down magazine circulation data, enter it into Excel, and create a chart. Then I found that State of the Media had done it for me:

Notice how Time, Newsweek‘s chief competitor, starts sucking wind before the recession hits full force, then stabilizes, while Newsweek goes into freefall, then continues? In fact, Newsweek‘s nosedive gets steeper in 2009, right about the time the recession was bottoming out around the New Obama Normal. What could have happened then?

While conservatives had long complained of Newsweek‘s liberal bias, it was 2009 when Newsweek finally gave up their pretense of being neutral and all but announced they were in the tank for Obama.

They practically came out and said they weren’t interested in conservatives reading their magazine. The chart above tells you how well that decision worked out for them.

As I said yesterday, Newsweek‘s demise is a case of assisted suicide. They had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.

(And here’s an excuse to link to that Iowahawk piece on Newsweek again.)

Romney Slays at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner

October 18th, 2012

Mitt Romney just kept slamming them out of the park at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner. “In the spirit of Sesame Street tonight, the President’s remarks are brought to you by the letter O and the number 16 trillion.”

Background on the Alfred E. Smith dinner.

(Hat tip: Ramparts 360’s twitter feed.)

Newsweek To Start Pining for the Fjords

October 18th, 2012

Today Newsweek announced that they were ceasing print publication and going all digital. For a national general-interest weekly news-magazine, that’s tantamount to saying that you’re dead but you don’t feel like lying down just yet.

Back in 2009, you may remember Newsweek‘s decision to remake itself as a liberal opinion weekly, an odd financial choice in a country where conservatives outnumber liberals nearly 2-to-1. Since then Newsweek has managed the amazing feat of hemorrhaging readers faster than other print publications. Then the Washington Post company decided to sell the venerable newsweekly to Sidney Harman for $1, screwing its shareholders but keeping the magazine’s money-losing liberal slant under Tina Brown’s editorship. Hired to steer the ship around the iceberg, Brown instead decided to teach the iceberg who’s boss by ramming it a few more times.

Vast swathes of legacy print media are in trouble in the Internet-era, but Newsweek‘s demise is more like an assisted suicide than a graceful decline. It’s like a Type II diabetic who had already lost three toes deciding to immediately go on a diet consisting entirely of ice cream.

Newsweek had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.

Quick Texas Senate Race Q3 Fundraising Update

October 17th, 2012

Barring any catastrophic event, Ted Cruz is going to be the next Senator from Texas, but the campaign keeps on chugging along. The official fundraising forms from the FEC aren’t up yet, but the two campaigns have announced the totals raised.

Ted Cruz raised $3.5 million in Q3, $2 million of it after the runoff.

I can’t find any mention of Paul Sadler’s fundraising numbers on his press release page, but according to the Houston Chronicle, Sadler raised “about $358,734” in Q3. In truth, that’s a bit more than I expected him to raise, given that he has about as much hope of being elected Senator than the Cleveland Browns do of winning the 2013 Superbowl.

Oh, and just for the record: Losing Democratic Senate runoff candidate Grady Yarbrough did finally file his FEC report.

Assault Weapons Vital Topic Among America’s 23 Million Unemployed

October 17th, 2012

Hempstead, N.Y.: All across the country, millions of unemployed Americans expressed relief and gratitude that Obama finally addressed their most important issue at last night’s Presidential debate: assault weapons.

“I’m glad Obama is finally tackling assault weapons,” said Barbara Rheems, taking a brief pause from brushing her teeth in the 1998 Honda Civic that has been her home for the last three years. “I think that’s the greatest concern facing our country.”

“Thank God Nina Gonzales had the courage to ask about assault weapons,” said Richard Smith, an unemployed construction worker, speaking from the cot in his mother’s basement. “I can’t think of a single more pressing issue.”

“Assault weapons terrify me,” said mother Gladys Castle, who was busy preparing an “Obama soup” made from pilfered ketchup packets for her three hungry children. “I’m afraid that at any moment they might burst out of closets and gun safes and start shooting people.”

“Well it’s about time someone dealt with America’s biggest challenge, which is reinstating the Clinton-era assault weapons ban,” said Tom Feller, who spoke to us from behind his homemade cardboard WILL WORK ANY JOB/HAVE CHILDREN TO FEED/GOD BLESS sign. “The fact is that Americans just don’t need a weapon that has any two of a folding stock, a pistol grip, a bayonet mount, or a flash suppressor, and it’s high time we moved to disarm ordinary Americans citizens who purchased such weapons in a completely lawful manner.”

A CNN poll of America’s unemployed showed that assault weapons were far and away the most pressing issue this election, with 78% citing them as their biggest concern, while those who said that their top issue was forcing Catholics to pay for contraception were a distant second at 19%.

“You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.”

October 16th, 2012

I didn’t even know Twitter had a daily limit for sending tweets, but evidently I exceeded it livetweeting the Presidential debate. Fortunately that didn’t kick in until the very end.

Anyway, if you follow me on Twitter, you might send out a note to that effect, just in case people wonder where I went…

I Will Be Live-Tweeting Tonight’s Presidential Debate

October 16th, 2012

Attention the Internets: I will be live-tweeting tonight’s debate between Romney and Obama. Tune in or follow me if you are so inclined.

LinkSwarm for October 15, 2012

October 15th, 2012

Doing a bunch of stuff, so here’s a more-or-less random linkSwarm:

  • A funny thing happened on the way to the death of conservatism.
  • Romney might pick up one electoral vote in Maine.
  • Michael Totten and Sohrab Ahmari take down Tariq Ramadan.
  • In the Texas House, it’s a band of conservative brothers vs. Texas Speaker Joe Straus.
  • Journalist shocked that all his fellow journalists are suddenly spewing vitriol at him and calling him a traitor because he’s decided to vote for Romney. Also confirms the overwhelming liberal bias in the newsroom.
  • Police arrest members of the Mexican Mafia prison gang across the state, including one police officer in Houston who was providing them guns.
  • Joe Biden’s Creepy Smile Take Two

    October 13th, 2012

    The Night of 53 Smiles

    Mark Steyn Lays Waste to the Obama Adminstration’s Libyan Lies

    October 13th, 2012

    Mark Steyn’s comprehensive takedown of all the Obama Administration lies and incompetence in the Benghazi terrorist assault and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens is so righteous it deserves a link of its own.

    “The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”

    Thus, Stephanie Cutter, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to “politicize” it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday: “There’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane.”

    She’s right! The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets.

    Snip.

    Obviously, Miss Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican party’s war on puppets rather than attempting to “politicize” the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy, and other obscure peripheral subjects.

    Snip.

    For most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12.

    Snip.

    Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your “friend”’s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.

    Snip.

    Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” — selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who in turn outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory — no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales.

    Read the whole thing.