As Robert Stacy McCain puts it: "'Counterintuitive' Is the New Stupid." The idea is to discourage resubscriptions until total circulation drops. The magazine is also raising prices. What kind of crazy shit is this? R.S. McCain explains:

Meacham [Newsweek's editor], an admirer of the Economist, is fashioning a serious magazine for what he calls his base, with a heavy emphasis on politics and public policy.

Right. You're going to turn a mass-circulation news magazine into some sort of highbrow policy journal . . . weekly! And then watch the money roll in! If this isn't the stupidest business strategy in the history of journalism -- that's a pretty tough competition -- it's certainly in the Top Five.

Notice that Meacham's idea is to publish a magazine resembling a magazine that he likes to read. Call it the Narcissus Reflecting Pool Theory of journalism: If the top editor admires a certain publication, then trying to imitate that publication must be a good business strategy. What you are doing, therefore, is producing a publication for your own editors, rather than for the readers.

This isn't as crazy as it sounds at first. It's rather expensive to print magazines and deliver them. Meacham's making a couple trade-offs. He believes the cost reduction for printing and delivery will be greater than the reduction in ad revenue. He's also hoping that by re-casting Newsweek as a high-brow weekly he can grab some high-brow readers who will pay $6 at the newsstand.

Will it work? Doubt it. The Great Recession is teaching advertisers all kinds of great and terrible things about print media.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:31 AM | Comments (55)
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If the Obamas were capable of self-deprecation.

Boy oh boy, I'm in for it now. Should I look? I'm gonna look. [looks over at Michelle] Oof. Yeah, I know. I know. You gotta believe I love you, baby, but next time could you maybe wear the four-hundred-dollar shoes to the homeless shelter? You're killin' me out there. [to audience] Oh, man, that was not a good look. I am not looking forward to the ride home.

Well, it beats making her laugh. Every time she slaps the table, they have to bring out a new table. Know what I mean? [flexes biceps, snarls] But I tell ya, I've loved her from the first moment Skynet sent her back in time to kill Sarah Connor.

That's just a taste. Read the rest over at Tweetcher.

Posted by: LauraW at 06:27 AM | Comments (28)
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Big surprise. The NY Times' "public editor" laughs it off as an unverified story about merely "technical violations of campaign finance law." It was unverified, though, because as soon as it looked like there was some truth to the story and after they had scheduled an on-the-record interview about it, the editors killed the story.

The insanely laughable excuse, according to the source: "it was their policy not to print a game-changer for either side that close to the election."

Bullshit. It was and is their policy to get Democrats elected. Nobody believes for a second that the Times wouldn't have tried to verify the story if it had been about John McCain breaking campaign finance laws. And it's probably better than 50-50 that the failing newspaper would have run a story like that about McCain--carefully couched in the "questions have been raised" mold--even if it couldn't get anyone on the record.

There's more on this over at PowerlineBlog.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:17 AM | Comments (117)
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There's a must-read op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal; the gist is that states that tax the rich to make up for their budget mismanagement tend to drive the rich away. The result being the states don't actually get the taxes they want AND they end up economically weaker. A taste:

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, "Rich States, Poor States," published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

There are a lot of little jewels buried in there so go read the whole thing.

Update: Dave in Texas sends a link that illustrates the problem:

Ending any speculation about another possible run for governor, Rochester businessman and Sabres owner B. Thomas Golisano said Thursday he will be moving his legal residence to Florida to escape New York state taxes.

Golisano told a gathering of Rochester business executives that he will remain as owner of the Buffalo hockey team, but he is fleeing the Empire State to avoid paying $13,000 a day in state income taxes. [...]

The billionaire earlier this year told The Buffalo News that the only thing keeping him in New York was his family. “The only reason I’m staying in this state is I have family here. Economically, it just doesn’t make sense,” he said in February.

Someone mentioned earlier the idea of "exit taxes" like Europe uses. Fortunately, exit taxes within the United States (that is, state-to-state) are unconstitutional.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:53 AM | Comments (87)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:44 AM | Comments (36)
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Update: I've removed the e-mail text from the post due to wordiness. Not sure they added much anyway since everything's pretty well summarized in the first (long) paragraph. So ignore the e-mail references.

I hope you (and Ace) will indulge me if I do one post thatÂ’s sortaÂ’ personally related, which is a no-no around the HQ. ItÂ’s a one-time thing I hope. (also, donÂ’t let it ruin the thread and feel free as always to comment about whateverÂ’s on your minds). IÂ’ll put the story below the fold in case youÂ’re interested. If not, scroll past it and ignoreÂ…itÂ’s very long. Also really boring at times. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:03 PM | Comments (472)
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All the News That Fit To Lift From A Left Wing Blog! (safe link to The Corner which you can follow to TPM should you be so inclined)

What Dowd wrote:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Here's Marshall's post:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

The bold parts are all that were changed.

Mo Do says she got the quote (almost word for word) from a friend and not from reading Marshall's post. Even if you accept that, then why didn't she credit the 'friend'?

Frankly, I almost believe her. I mean, it's such an egregious theft that there's no way she could have thought she'd get away with it. Either way, she was by her own admission passing off someone else's thought as her own.

Clearly this calls for another column mocking Bush and/or another Pulitzer.

Posted by: DrewM at 04:33 PM | Comments (116)
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Since there's nothing else going on this evening, I thought you might like to marvel at this totally awesome groom's cake:

Pricetag? About $5,000 (although this one was a gift made by friends). Details and more photos are here.

Anything else going on out there in the world? You may consider this an open thread.

Totally Unrelated: I humbly submit this photo for Jenjhiss's "sponsored by strange creature" series of overnight threads.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:50 PM | Comments (71)
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I'm glad to see the Republican leadership stay after her, after that ridiculous press conference this week.

"Lying to the Congress of the United States is a crime," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said on CNN's "State of the Union."

"If the speaker is accusing the CIA and other intelligence officials of lying or misleading the Congress, then she should come forward with evidence and turn that over to the Justice Department so they be prosecuted. And if that's not the case, I think she ought to apologize to our intelligence professionals around the world."

Goddam right. It isn't just some "game", as the Speaker asserted in her incredibly inept performance (apparently her staffers get this, even if she doesn't, trying to pull her out of the stupid thing as they were).

Seriously, what planet are you on when you can toss this kind of nonsense around like it's just a meaningless political disagreement or a "he said/she said" misunderstanding? They are legally accountable, to Congressional oversight.

Jim Geraghty asked the President of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers to offer some important perspective.

Did I say "important perspective"? Sorry, I meant basic mundane common friggin sense.

Those CIA officers chosen to brief the Congress, and especially the intelligence committees, are very senior, experienced officers, who well know the reputation and future of the CIA, as well as their own jobs, are on the line should they be perceived as not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Such restrictions, however, do not apply to members of the Congress when they then appear before the public.

Heh. Gotta love that.

Square that with the arm flailing nonsense offered by the Speaker of the House of Representatives: "They misled us! They mislead us all the time. No, Bush did it! There were no weapons of mass destruction!"

Nancy please.

That is an assertion of a crime Ms. Pelosi. I wonder if you will survive this one. I don't think so.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 02:45 PM | Comments (92)
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For this to make any sense at all you have to take it as given that Global Warming is going to KILL US ALL and that as a result the EPA is tasked with making decisions to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, that's bullshit we can thank Congressional Nincompoops like Republicans Michael Rogers [AL-3], Thomas Latham [IA-4], Steve King [IA-5], Jerry Moran [KS-1], Samuel Graves [MO-6], Adrian Smith [NE-3], Robert Latta [OH-5], Frank Lucas [OK-3], Glenn Thompson [PA-5], and Robert Goodlatte [VA-6] for.

Thanks to idiots like these, who are really in it for the subsidies that biofuels production brings to their districts, the Democrats get to claim that they've launched a "bipartisan" effort to correct "unreasonable restrictions placed on the biofuels industry."

In a nutshell, the EPA in 2007, after enabling legislation by Congress, issued rules about how to count the greenhouse gas emissions produced during the production of biofuels. One of those rules required that the agency consider indirect land use when calculating the emissions associated with biofuels. But it turns out that if you calculate emissions in this manner, biofuels actually produce more emissions than plain old gasoline.

The Democrats (and greedy, faithless, pathetic worms like Republican Frank Lucas from my former district in Oklahoma) have an easy solution: we just won't count indirect land use! Science be damned, they want biofuels and they're not going to take "no" for an answer.

So we've got confidence games piled on confidence games. These guys have federal agencies busy counting greenhouse gases when indications point to global cooling for at least the past ten years with an ever-dawning realization that the giant heatlamp hovering in the sky might just have something to do with temperatures on Earth. And now the geniuses have decided to game the situation they created: apparently greenhouse gases produced directly have a different supposed effect on global warming than those produced indirectly.

As Insty likes to say (paraphrasing), "I might be inclined to believe this global warming stuff, if only its loudest supporters actually acted like there might be a problem."

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:34 AM | Comments (86)
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