Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Hissy Fits and Jelly Spines Thursday Edition
• Oooh! That Evil Netflix! Why I’ll Just…Wait. They’re Going to Have to Pay How Much? Oh.
• Dear God in Heaven, There is an Actual Thing Called “Manorexia”
• Oh, So Now The DoJ Wants to Get Tough on Guns?
• The Delivery Presents – So, You Want to Podcast, Do You? Good!

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Hissy Fits and Jelly Spines Thursday Edition Posted: 14 Jul 2011 03:10 AM PDT I’m going to have a bunch of links above the bullets today, so the bullets will be few, but really good. See, there’s this debt ceiling “negotiation” going on and the news is moving pretty quickly. You’ll notice I put a certain word there in quotes, because what’s happening now isn’t a negotiation but an exercise in infantilism. Today, the President threw a hissy fit and fled a meeting with GOP leaders because they wouldn’t give him everything he wanted. Exaggeration? Hey, check the numbers. The President wants tax increases at a time when tax increases are not even the least bit warranted, unless of course you have it in your head that the people who are paying about 70 percent of the taxes aren’t paying “their fair share”. The Republicans, on the other hand, are busy filling their feet full of bullets. Senator Mitch McConnell put out an awful “last ditch” plan that he’d suggest if all the other options failed, thus ensuring that all other options will fail. Still, his plan does have his supporters — see Jennifer Rubin (whose snottiness quotient increased dramatically yesterday), Fred Barnes, the Wall Street Journal, and Donald Douglas. Pat Austin has a couple of very good posts on McConnell’s deal and what’s really at stake in these talks. My take? I say the GOP should call the President’s bluff. There is nothing in his history to suggest that he is capable of anything but tough talk. He’s hard up against a hard default line that he daren’t cross. If the Republicans can, just once, play a little PR hardball — maybe call a few press conferences complete with old people threatened by the President’s scurrilous Social Security lie — they can get a deal that will really help this country. Admittedly, the Republicans in the Senate will have to stiffen their jelly spines for a few days and deal with those horrible, amateur new media people. They’re not at all used to the former and apparently allergic to the latter. But they have not only the House of Representatives behind them, but also a sizable portion of the American public. And now, links! Oh, my. Freshman Republican Rep. Renee Elmers wants a full Congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood and has used the magic words “fraud and abuse”. That’s good, Rep. Elmers. Very good! There is no reason at all a group like Planned Parenthood should have gotten a dine of our money much less millions. I’m a little speechless. No one with a working brain denies that easy mortgage loans to risky lenders from banks under pressure from the government was a huge contributor to the current recession. So why is the administration going to do it again? Well, other than the delusional belief in progressive ideology, that is. Uh oh. There’s no evidence that at least one person inside the BATFE wanted to leverage Operation Fast and Furious into a push for more gun control (via memeorandum). You can be that the middling bureaucrat who sent that e-mail didn’t come up with the idea on his own. Attention: The President is feeling a little sensitive today, so please don’t yell at him. Thank goodness the Summer of Obama is over! Or is it? Don’t forget, if you can help Tom LaDuke, he can still use it. Again, we learn that our brains are wackier than we can imagine.

Oooh! That Evil Netflix! Why I’ll Just…Wait. They’re Going to Have to Pay How Much? Oh. Posted: 13 Jul 2011 05:59 PM PDT I’ve seen a lot of sturm und drang on the ‘net over the announcement from Netflix that they’re going to split their DVD and streaming packages and charge a bit more for both. Since I don’t immediately buy into the notion that successful companies do things to anger their customers for no good reason, I did a little bit of research. Guess what? Netflix doesn’t have much of a choice. They’re looking at some very large expenses over the next three years for which they’ll need to pony up far more money than they’ve had to spend so far. These expenses are not the fault of Netflix but the movie studios. You Netflix folks might remember a little episode recently where a whole gob of Sony movies disappeared from Netflix Instant. The company gave a suitably vague reason why it happened along with an assurance that the situation would be fixed soon. That incident was actually the first sign of a very big problem for Netflix that’s only going to get worse unless it takes fairly drastic action, like, say, a rate hike. Several years ago, Netflix made deals with several movie studios to buy the rights to stream those studios’ libraries for relatively little. Since then, the streaming movie market exploded, to the point where Netflix is worth a couple hundred million and other companies like Hulu and Amazon are looking to expand their own presence. You know what happens when you have more than one bidder for a product, right? The price goes up. That’s exactly what’s happening with Netflix. One estimate has Netflix licensing costs rising from about $180 million last year to almost $2 billion in 2012 – an elevenfold increase. What does that mean for Netflix? Well, do the math. So if Netflix wants to continue getting Disney and Sony new movies via Starz, it will have to pay the equivalent as Starz's conventional licensees. In dollar terms, according to industry insiders, this will mean that Netflix will have to pay an additional $300 to $400 million a year to stream new movies. And this is just the beginning. As Netflix's other contracts expire in 2012-3, its other content suppliers, including television networks, will also hike the price. To stay in the game, Netflix's licensing cost will rise, according to the estimates of content providers, by at least a half billion dollars. That is in addition to the $1.2 billion it is presently paying to license digital content (including its deal with EPIX). Netflix would require 5 million or so new subscribers to offset the additional $500 million cost. Finding them will be far more difficult than when it launched its service and had no formidable competition in the streaming arena. But Netflix does have competition, and it’s going to need ready cash to get deals done as soon as it can. So while it’s trying to add new subscribers, it also has to get more money from the subscribers it has right now. And don’t think that you’ll be able to skip over to Amazon or Hulu and find amazingly-low prices. Any company is going to have these costs right now. So long as you want a wide selection of fairly-recent movies delivered right to your television automagically, the companies who provide them to you will have to pay whatever price the movie studios demand. Supply and Demand 101, right? There is a bright side, though. The monthly expected cost of both streaming and DVD service is still less than a night at the movies for two people. It’s lower than the rental plus late fees you’d likely pay to a brick and mortar store if you happened to keep a couple movies past their return dates. For that price, you still get movies and television shows whenever you want them, in high-definition, with great sound. Yes, it stinks that you’ll have to pay more than 8 or 10 dollars, but it’s not Netflix’ fault. Don’t blame them too much.

Dear God in Heaven, There is an Actual Thing Called “Manorexia” Posted: 13 Jul 2011 05:28 PM PDT Wait…what? he pressure to look like a male model is driving more men to develop dangerous eating disorders, experts warned today. GPs have been warned to be on the lookout for the potentially fatal conditions, which include anorexia and bulimia, after a rise in the number of those affected. Men may be reluctant to admit they have a problem as the issue has until now been seen as something affecting mainly teenage girls. Medical experts blame the surge on an obsession with looking good by having bulging biceps and a six-pack stomach. Holy crapweasel, people. This is what happened to manhood? Back in the day, if a guy wanted “bulging biceps and a six-pack” he hit the weight room every day for a couple hours. Of course, he also ate like a pig because Basic Weight Training 101 says that if you want to grow muscles, you need to give them fuel. And by the way, when I say “back in the day” I mean exactly one minute before I read this article. It is utterly amazing to me that a society can emasculate its men and leave them so blazingly ignorant that they think they can build a Charles Atlas body by puking into a sink like Lindsay Lohan after a three-day bender. I’m pretty sure I can’t live in a world where the entire male population of a civilized western nation its turning itself into a legion of Gollums. (via the Drudge Report Twitter feed)

Oh, So Now The DoJ Wants to Get Tough on Guns? Posted: 13 Jul 2011 01:52 PM PDT I’m pretty sure this press release from Deputy Attorney General James Cole is evidence that he either needs to be tested for drugs ASAP or that his conscience was surgically removed in the recent past. Deputy Attorney General James Cole issued the following statement today regarding information requests for multiple sales of semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines in select states along the Southwest Border: "The international expansion and increased violence of transnational criminal networks pose a significant threat to the United States. Federal, state and foreign law enforcement agencies have determined that certain types of semi-automatic rifles – greater than .22 caliber and with the ability to accept a detachable magazine – are highly sought after by dangerous drug trafficking organizations and frequently recovered at violent crime scenes near the Southwest Border. This new reporting measure — tailored to focus only on multiple sales of these types of rifles to the same person within a five-day period — will improve the ability of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to detect and disrupt the illegal weapons trafficking networks responsible for diverting firearms from lawful commerce to criminals and criminal organizations. These targeted information requests will occur in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas to help confront the problem of illegal gun trafficking into Mexico and along the Southwest Border." Let us not forget that Cole Justice Department, and perhaps even Cole himself, allowed well over 2,000 guns of just the type he mentioned, plus several .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles, to get into the hands of narco-terrorist cartels in Mexico. That the Obama administration would paint gun store owners (who practically begged BATFE agents to stop selling firearms to straw purchasers as part of last year’s Operation Fast and Furious) in any way responsible for the recent paroxysm of violence in Mexico is unconscionable. You know something? Strike that first sentence up there. Cole doesn’t need a drug test. He needs to be under oath before Congress, then he needs to be unemployed or in prison. And so do his bosses.

The Delivery Presents – So, You Want to Podcast, Do You? Good! Posted: 13 Jul 2011 01:12 PM PDT I don’t know how I managed to get through the first half of Episode 102 and not use the phrase “A pox on both their houses”. I think the entire budget/debt ceiling debate has gone so far past silly that it’s looped around back into silly again. The Democrats have no interest in putting a real set of numbers on paper. The Republican PR can not bring public pressure to bear on them because their PR is handled by a room full of arthritic, narcoleptic sloths who haven’t talked to an American who lives more than 40 miles from Washington, DC in perhaps ever. But that’s okay. I’m sure everything will work out just fine. It’s not like anything important is at stake — like the value of our currency, our ability to get loans, the security of our retirement investments, the “full faith and credit” of our government, or our continued employment in the job of our choice. Meh. Who needs to worry about all that when you could be in the halls of Congress playing “whose gonna gain an approval rating point today”? Fortunately we still retain the right of free expression and the ability to connect to the internet. If you’ve had a thought toward expressing yourself in podcast form, I have a few things you’ll want to consider before you start. The level of talent that exists on the conservative side of new media (which is mostly what I know) is considerable. You only real edge might well be in the level of commitment you have for your show. Highly-placed contacts don’t hurt either, but I’m trying to stay on the high road here. So stick with what you can control. The Delivery - Episode 102 This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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