The Incredible Shrinking Papers

The death spiral of newspapers continues:

The decline in newspaper ad revenues to a 60-year low is amazing by itself, but the sharp decline in recent years is pretty stunning. Last year's ad revenues of about $21 billion were less than half of the $46 billion spent just four years ago in 2007, and less than one-third of the $64 billion spent in 2000.

Given this many papers have grasped at online readership as way to save themselves but have managed to screw that up as well.

One of the few papers that's succeeding online is the UK's Daily Mail who seem to have found  a winning formula: Giving readers the kinds of stories they actually want to read - celebrity and crime news, stories about health and bikinis, and some sports and politics - along with lots of pictures and punchy titles. Basically everything that makes J-school graduates weep.

And not only are papers' revenues and readerships shrinking - but the papers themselves are getting physically smaller too. Here you can see a 2011 issue of the Los Angeles Times compared with the same paper in 1966.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:42 PM | Comments (746)
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Rebutting all the climate alarmists' theories and computer models, a skeptic presents his own theories and computer models.

Wait, did I say he presents theories and computer models. My mistake, I thought he was practicing the "New Science." Actually he presents the "Old Science" to make his case -- namely, actual observed data.

One of the better posts on this subject I've read, and very brief. Read the whole thing, and don't be put off by the graphs -- they're pretty simple.

And read the point about the conjectured hotspot in the troposphere, something that must exist if global warming alarmism is correct.

It doesn't exist. At all.

But so what, they say, rubbishing steps four and five of the scientific process (check theory against observed evidence, refine theory to better fit observed evidence).

So What?

Nyah nyah, we still control the major journals.

thanks to @comradearthur.

Posted by: Ace at 05:09 PM | Comments (174)
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Something to cleanse the palate. more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:13 PM | Comments (227)
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I thought he was asking about some state law which "bans providing contraception," he says in paraphrase.

Which was, actually, what the question said. Not a mention of ObamaCare, or health care, or insurance. Just about "ban providing female contraception," which, if you think that's a crazy question so he never should have imagined he was being asked about such a crazy thing, remember, he was asked pretty much that a month ago, by George Stephanolopolous.

He goes on to discuss, as he always does, his support of the religious exemption generally, and how even Ted Kennedy supported such mandates.

He has talked and talked about this. If he were doing a major reversal, he would have had a big explanation ready explaining why, while he supports the generals of the exemption, he finds this particular one overbroad or whatever. He wouldn't have just blown it off with some anodyne comments about not interfering with a husband's and wife's birth control decisions.

Anyway, I'm sure some will disagree, but I'm now personally designating this as Officially Silly.

Posted by: Ace at 02:22 PM | Comments (179)
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Watch the video, see how this bill is "defined" for Romeny.

It's confusing, but the definition this genius settles on, in posing the question, is that it "allows employers to ban providing female contraception" based on religious scruples.

That sounds like a bill that would permit employers to, um, "ban providing female contraception," whatever that means, but it sounds like an employer gets to include "We will fire you if we find out you're using birth control."

So, 24 hour rule, huh? The definition did not mention this was about insurance, or about the HHS Mandate that Romney has specifically opposed.

I'll wait to see what Romney says. Sounds to me he didn't know what he was being asked about, and the questioner asked him he'd be in favor of employers "banning providing female contraception."

Update: Romney supports Blunt.

Yeah, if you've listened to the debates, one of the areas in which Romney has sounded particularly conservative and on Team Red was in discussing this very thing, and talking up his resistance to such attempts to bigfoot religious conscience by the state.

It really made no sense that he was reversing himself on a very defensible, popular, and clearly-expressed position.

Posted by: Ace at 01:20 PM | Comments (237)
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That's the one that would block the HHS birth control mandate.

And that's bad.

But it sounds like he doesn't know what the bill is:

IÂ’m not for the bill. But, look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, IÂ’m not going there.

It sounds like (and I hope) that it's a case of him not knowing what the amendment is.

If he actually knows what it is and is taking a position against it anyway, then I think I might actually just write him off, and write off the whole election as well.

The reason I have doubts that he understands what he's being asked about is that he has been conservative on this whole question of mandates and religious exceptions for conscience -- again and again in debates has has attacked Obama for this very thing.

It seems strange that he'd reverse all that.

If this is his next flip-flop... that's the last flip-flop for me.

Meanwhile... ABC News now projects that Michigan is a tie on delegates. Split down the middle.

Posted by: Ace at 12:47 PM | Comments (202)
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Alan Dershowitz pledged to oppose anyone who cooperated with Media Matters.

Harry Reid says he's gonna get out there and promote their book.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (39)
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Really!

I'm beginning to suspect that sometimes The Left resorts to saying things that aren't quite true to win a cheap Culture War point.

Installing a free app -- "NYC Condom" -- on to his smartphone, he located 309 free or taxpayer-supporter contraception centers within 5 miles of his office.

Kenneth Cole, the designer-clothes store, was the most bizarre of my visits. I had expected at least to have to sidle up to an assistant and ask sotto voce if they had “something for the weekend” behind the store counter; but evidently one need not even go to the trouble of speaking to a staff member, for, on each of the tables — which sit out in the open, next to the racks of clothes, in case, perhaps, one be put in the mood by buying a couple of shirts — are large glass bowls full of the branded “NYC Condoms.” The branch I went to was at Grand Central Terminal; let it never be said again that visitors coming into the city by train have restricted access to contraception during their inaugural moments in New York.

...

Such facts, however, do not really matter. As H. L. Mencken acerbically noted, “the whole purpose of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed . . . by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” To listen to the president and the various women’s groups who have so enjoyed throwing around the absurd “anti-women” hyperbole over the last month, one would think that Americans were still required to ape the cloak-and-dagger subterfuge of a drug deal in order to get their hands on contraception, and that they were paying a hefty premium into the bargain. This could not be further from the truth. In my foray, remember, I looked solely for “free” contraceptives. But — quelle horreur! — it is still possible, even normal, to buy contraceptives in every drugstore in the country. Indeed, so ample and various is the supply that it comes in a startling array of flavors, methods, and combinations. No questions are asked. Nobody is excluded.

Meanwhile, in pricey DC (the only city flourishing in this Great Recession), Target will sell you birth control pills for nine bucks per month.

But Fluke's testimony was very misleading. Birth control pills can be purchased for as low as $9 per month at a pharmacy near Georgetown's campus. According to an employee at the pharmacy in Washington, D.C.'s Target store, the pharmacy sells birth control pills--the generic versions of Ortho Tri-Cyclen and Ortho-Cyclen--for $9 per month. "That's the price without insurance," the Target employee said. Nine dollars is less than the price of two beers at a Georgetown bar.

You know that chick who claimed that, while she was well-off, she had lots of friends who (not under oath) swore to her they were unable to front the high costs of birth control?

There's a Target less than three miles from her campus:

Does she want me to pay for her new Vespa too? Because I'm guessing her next testimony will be that she has lots of poor friends who have Strange Diseases which will cause their feet to fucking explode!!!11!!11 if they are required to walk such an impossible distance.

Oh they have a Metro in DC? Well, I'm sure her friends also suffer from debilitating subway claustrophobia.

I have my own policy: If you're too fucking stupid, cheap, lazy, entitled or infantilized to buy a pack of rubbers at CVS, I will in fact pay for free contraception for you.

That contraception is permanent sterilization. I will pay for this, and I will not call it charity or welfare; I will file it under National Defense.

Posted by: Ace at 12:03 PM | Comments (253)
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He's previously stated that the ideal price of gas would be $8-$9.

He doesn't back down when queried by Congressmen.

“But is the overall goal to get our price” of gasoline down, asked Nunnelee.

“No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy,” Chu replied. “We think that if you consider all these energy policies, including energy efficiency, we think that we can go a long way to becoming less dependent on oil and [diversifying] our supply and we’ll help the American economy and the American consumers.”

Democrats' response is, as ever, to put a quick political band-aid on the problem: As usual, they want to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (248)
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Shuster claimed, for the sixty bazillionth time, that James O'Keefe was a "convicted felon."

No. Misdemeanor. It was a prank, dude. And the judge threw the book at him, because, conservative.

But that book was still only a misdemeanor. That was the most this out-for-blood judge could get him for.

O'Keefe slapped him with a libel suit.

Resulting in Shuster claiming he "misspoke."

Correction; when reporting on James Okeefe's arrest, I misspoke and said OKeefe is a convicted felon. He's not. I apologize for the error.

That's on Twitter. We'll see if he corrects on Olbermann's show, where he's guest hosting, and where he made his libelous remark.

Shuster, of course, has been claiming this for years. No matter how many times people informed him he was factually inaccurate, he kept on claiming it.

Because he's not a journalist, and realizes his reputation is too stinky to ever work in that field again. He's now just a rabble-rouser in a suit.

The Leftist Media

We'll report the truth. If under court order.

Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (107)
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