And here’s your final Texas Senate Race update for 2012! I’ve been covering this race since Kay Bailey Hutchison decided not to run again on January 13, 2011.
I expect Ted Cruz to beat Paul Sadler handily (and here’s my endorsement of Cruz). Later today I hope to have a prediction up on just how well I expect him to do.
Gloria Allred is getting ready to release her October surprise, and you won’t believe the magnitude!
Are you ready?
Brace yourself!
It seems that during the divorce proceeding of Staples founder founder Tom Stemberg 20 years ago, Mitt Romney may have misvalued the profit potential for shares of Staples, with the result that the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo. While the congress of the Republic endlessly debates this alarming chain of events—
Oh wait, sorry, I accidentally spaced out for a moment and started channeling the opening crawl from The Phantom Menace, probably because it was the only thing I could think of less interesting than a stock valuation issue from a 20-year old divorce proceeding. Indeed, if the general public is given a choice between ancient divorce/stock value questions, or Jar Jar Binks reciting The Federalist Papers, then meesa thinksa yousa gonna be called ona to deliberate ona thisa newa Constitution!
This is a game-changer only if the game is “see if you can bore yourself to sleep.” A real game-changer would be something like “In Baghdad in 1990, Tom Stemberg, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and I all snorted blow off Fawn Hall’s ass.” That’s about as likely as Mila Kunis showing up on my doorstep asking to be my love slave. The whole reason Mitt is poised to win this thing (beside Obama’s mind-numbing incompetence and the senses-dulling numbness of the Liberal Reality Bubble) is because he’s no fun at parties. If he had any real baggage New Gingrich’s opposition people would have unpacked it a long time ago. He’s so clean he squeaks, which must infuriate Obama’s dirty tricks team to no end. “Damn your clean nose and upright moral values, you vile Mormon!”
Sure, illegally unsealing an opponent’s divorce records is Obama’s finishing move, but given the distinct lack of any prurient interest angle, even the most devoted Journolista will struggle to breath life into this pathetic non-scandal.
Messa thinksa yousa wasted a lota tima!
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.)
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.
Doing a bunch of stuff, so here’s a more-or-less random linkSwarm:
Lots of commentators said that Joe Biden did better debating against Paul Ryan than Obama did against Mitt Romney. I found Biden the far more irritating of the two, his his constant grinning and interrupting. He was like some weird, glad-handing political coelecanth that had somehow survived into the 21st century, and didn’t realize how fake his antics look on high def television. (And that’s to say nothing of Biden’s outright lies. No evidence of green pork cronyism? Right. Pull the other one.)
Other reactions:
So remember right after assault on our Libyan embassy in Benghazi, Mitt Romney issued a statement, then clarified those statements the next day?
Let’s roll the video, shall we?
Remember how the press jumped all over him, said it was a potentially campaign-ending gaffe?
Since then we’ve learned that:
This video timeline might help:
Watching and listening to Romney now, who do you agree with more: Mitt Romney, or reporters sounding outraged at his criticisms of the Obama Administration?
Both the Obama Administration and their lapdog media surrogates seem far more interested in defeating Obama’s political opponent than America’s Jihadest enemies, or telling the American people the truth.
Take a gander at the latest ad from American’s for Prosperity:
Not only does it work for me, it has a subtle, minimalist brilliance that not only makes it stick in the mind, but makes it hard to fight. What are liberals going to say? “No, unemployment isn’t high?” “No, middle class families aren’t suffering?” “No, it’s all Bush’s fault?” “No, let’s keep doing the same thing?” The very lack of dialog all but eliminates attack vectors against it, and any attacks against it will only make more people watch it.
I got this via Ace of Spades who, strangely enough, doesn’t like it. A commentator suggests that it’s because it stresses feelings over facts. But if facts and figure by themselves swayed the majority of voters, Obama would never have been elected President, and would stand no chance now.
If you have liberal friends on Facebook, chances are that they’re not forwarding links that show how objectively great a job Obama is doing. No, what they’re doing is forwarding links designed inflame fellow liberals with what horrible people Republicans are by focusing on the stupid things said by a few Republican office-holders. (Todd Aiken before, Paul Broun this week.) It’s meant to distract from Obama’s manifest failures by making the opposition evil incarnate. Political ads play on emotions because playing on emotions works.
Which isn’t to say it’s the only advertising you should be doing. But as part of a larger advertising strategy I think this particular ad is very effective.
You know what they could do to make liberals really crawl of their skin? Do the exact same ad with a black family.
More Romney-Obama Denver debate fallout:
(Hat tips: Ace of Spades, Moe Lane, Instapundit, others.)
More Romney-Obama debate reactions: