Americans Elect, the group dedicated to finding a third-party candidate to run in 2012, revealed on Tuesday that although they spent $35,00,000 on finding a third party candidate, they had failed. Poof.
Write it down: Americans Elect. What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life — remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in. Watch out.
Just remember this as Friedman talks about high-speed rail, Chinese infrastructure, etc.
Also known as: courting the Kim Kardashian vote on The View. For real. They asked the president about 50 Shades of Grey and Kim Kardashian’s marriage. Video here.
Just to update this post from May 12 where MSDNC’s Tamron Hall went a little nutso and cut of fTim Carney’s microphone, Howard Kurtz has reached a verdict. From his CNN program Sunday: “It was Tamron Hall who was being insulting by silencing him.”
George Lucas’s 1 percent neighbors have successfully thwarted his attempt to bring a movie studio to his little corner of Marin County, California. And in revenge, Lucas is making the land available to the 99 percent who might want to live near his snotty neighbors. Movies.com:
So what is George Lucas going to do with his property now that he’s tired of his rich neighbors putting up a not-in-my-backyard stink? He wants to transform the property into low-income housing, naturally, ending their official statement with this zinger, “If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.”
He’s working with the Marin Community Foundation to instead construct affordable housing for either low-income families or seniors living on small, fixed incomes. In order to smooth along the development, he’s already given them all of the pricey technical studies and land surveys Lucasfilm spent years conducting. And we think that’s just great. Because if there’s one thing rich people will hate more than having movie magic made in their backyard, it’s poor people moving in.
Dear regular people: George Lucas considers you a weapon to use against other rich people so he can get what he wants. What an ass.
The ombudsman is being bombarded by input from readers, via e-mail and phone calls, about the story that Post reporter Jason Horowitz wrote on Mitt Romney’s teenage years at the prestigious Cranbrook School in Michigan. . . .
The first is that The Post changed the text of one paragraph from the online version published on Thursday to the print version published on Friday without telling readers. . . .
This is the original online paragraph:
“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident [emphasis added]. “But I was not the brunt on any of his pranks.”
This is the new paragraph as it appeared in print and now appears online:
“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago, before being contacted by The Washington Post. “But I was not the brunt of any of his pranks” [emphasis added].
The Post changed the story after talking to White again and discovering that White only learned of the prank in recent weeks after being told of it by a Cranbrook classmate.
Kevin Merida, national editor of The Post, said on Friday that “We should have updated it with a note.” I agree with Merida. I would have used strike-through text online to make it clear to readers that that part of the online story was changed. I think that’s just the better part of candor. There is now an editor’s note at the very bottom of the story. The Post is not calling it a correction. I think it is a correction, but not germane to the central theme of the story.
This part of Horowitz’s story is tangential at best. It is only about how one person, who was not an eyewitness, felt about the incident.
Four of the five witnesses to the forcible haircut cited by the Post are on the record, by name, and remember it well. Their accounts remain unchallenged. I also think it’s important to point out that Romney quickly apologized after the story was published, and although not a detailed apology, I think his demeanor in the apology seemed genuine.
The other criticisms are that this story was published knowing that President Obama was going to announce his shift in favor of gay marriage. The allegation is that somehow The Post is working with the White House to time the story.
Do I think The Post took advantage of the timing? Yes. Vice President Biden had telegraphed the president’s position on gay marriage just days earlier. This story on Romney was in preparation for three weeks. . . .
Matthew Schmitz at First Things has a few more examples from Christian art.
Now compare them with the Time cover. How is that any different? It’s the kid’s advanced age, Matt suggests — to which one commenter replies, You know, in some cultures it would be considered age-appropriate enough.
But is cultural relativism really the last word? The pictures of Mary nursing Jesus are touching. The photo of a different mother nursing a different child is not. My reaction to the magazine cover is not the same as my reaction to the religious paintings. And if you told me yours is, you’d be lying, unless you’re blind to body language.
In the photo, the woman, dressed in black, has her hand on her hip and strikes a regal pose, conveying a look and a feeling-tone that, however else you might describe them, are highly un-Marian, so that comparisons to Madonna and Child don’t ring true. And what is that expression on the boy’s face? A cry for help?
The religious paintings are a visual analog of “Silent Night,” whereas the outré cover photo looks like an outtake from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We could argue over whether the difference between them represents cultural decline or development, but first we’d have to admit the obvious, which is that the difference exists.
Get the popcorn! Watch MSDNC’s Tamron Hall go “Hulk” on the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney and turn off his microphone (Tim defends on his Twitter feed here):
In light of the Washington Post’s Pulitzer-worthy piece today on Mitt Romney’s time in high school, conservatives decided to reciprocate and dig a little into the president’s past.
But the president’s bad behavior doesn’t end there. I went out and ordered Dreams from My Father on Kindle and discovered young Barack’s horrific treatment of his fellow college student Tim.
The future president wrote that Tim wasn’t a “conscious brother.” He “talked like Beaver Cleaver” and had a white girlfriend who, Obama guessed, listened to “country music.” What’s worse, Obama thought Tim’s real name should be “Tom.” As in Uncle. Shameful!
The good news is that young Barack learned from his bullying of blacks and stereotyping of women. You see, at the heart of his behavior was his “fear” — “the constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong somehow.”
Too bad Romney didn’t think to say his behavior was motivated by his being an out-of-place Mormon. Surely then his treatment from the Washington Post in its big story would have been much kinder.
