Clipping blog |
- Clearing the Browser Tabs – It’s A Progressive Puppet Show Monday Edition
- My Crazy Idea: The Great Tip Jar Rattling of 2011.
- Tim Geithner, Liar.
| Clearing the Browser Tabs – It’s A Progressive Puppet Show Monday Edition Posted: 25 Jul 2011 03:10 AM PDT The bodies of the nearly 100 victims of Anders Breivik have barely cooled and the left has already tried to dance them around like puppets . Breivik was pointedly anti-Muslim (as well as a nigh-perfect imitation of a white supremacist) and progressives like the dull-witted Eric Boehlert, the propagandists at MS-NBC, and the hacks at Think Progress have decided that he is of a piece with those on the right here in America who oppose head-chopping, woman-oppressing, gay-murdering Islamists. Michelle Malkin (via memeorandum) and Moe Lane both eloquently explained why that’s a load of codswallop. Glenn Reynolds, who very kindly gave me my second Instalanche in ten days, has a very good roundup of the political silliness including one post wherein the left has actually blamed the mass murder on…Sarah Palin. I swear, you can’t make this stuff up. And now, links!
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| My Crazy Idea: The Great Tip Jar Rattling of 2011. Posted: 24 Jul 2011 07:34 PM PDT
If we assume that half of the donations received by the RNC and SarahPAC will get spent, in some form or fashion, on the 2012 Presidential Race, we get a grand total of $45.1 million donated in six months for a campaign where we won’t see a real election until mid-February. Mind you, I didn’t include the fundraising totals for the RNCC and RNSC, because OpenSecrets doesn’t have a tally for the 2012 election cycle yet. It’s safe to say that between them, you could probably double that total. Why do I point this out? Well, I’m afraid I’m back on my new media hobby horse again. See, this week I’ve had a few blog posts hit my RSS reader and little of the news has been good. Let me give you some of the highlights.
Quite the contrast, eh? On one hand, the professional politicians — not just the candidates but their staff members who jump from campaign to campaign each season — are doing pretty well. On the other hand, folks in new media are sucking wind to pay their bills each month. But why should that be? Which group does more to aggressively advance conservative causes; take on pernicious media bias; and dos battle with the well-paid and full-time hacks in Media Matters, Think Progress, and the Democratic Party every day? I’ll tell you, from the looks of my e-mail inbox and my RSS reader, the new media Army of Davids Let me point something else out as well. Every election cycle, the Republicans rattle their voluminous tip-jars for candidates we then have to fight for two, four, or six years to do the things we put them into office to do. They plead poverty and reap millions, then spend those millions on overpriced and arrogant advisers like Mike Murphy and Ed Rollins. They pay tens of thousands of dollars to “geniuses” like Fred Davis who produced such flops as “Demonsheep” and “I’m You”. When I mention this, though, my friends who have been on the inside of political campaigns assure me that we on the right must hire these people, that their expertise is indispensable. I wonder, though. If they’re so darned good, why did their candidates lose so badly? Why don’t they have a few recent successes under their belts? Let me point out one other thing. The Republican National Committee, for all its millions, has virtually no new media presence. They have one, perhaps two people, who work their tails off to cover the whole nation. No one is making videos and pushing them out on YouTube or Vimeo with any great frequency. No one makes regular outreach efforts to bloggers. I can’t recall that Chairman Priebus has had more than perhaps a couple conference calls with bloggers since January. Surely the RNC could have set aside a million or so this year, hired 6 or 8 established bloggers and videographers, and set them to work at the soft underbelly of the Democratic Party, but they haven’t. Now I understand that Michael Steele left the committee in horrible financial shape. I get that the “establishment” sees new media as the junior varsity. What I don’t understand is why anyone with any internet savvy at all would look at the Return On Investment (ROI) potential of new media and not at least give it a try. It’s not as if the RNC hasn’t spent money on media aplenty already. But what does that have to do with you? I’m glad you asked. Let me grab a bit of Stacy McCain’s post today to start:
Here it is. Every month, we’re bombarded with donation requests from politicians and parties who assure us that the $20, $50, or $100 we send them over and over again will be well-spent. They promise us that they will use our money wisely and we believe them only to learn, usually after another losing election, that they spent the cash on overpriced fripperies and could have done just as well with half the money. I think they could do just as well with a little bit less. Their consultants and ad “geniuses” can bring their rates down a touch without falling into the peril of eating Mac and Cheese a couple times a week. So here’s what I”m suggesting. Instead of donating to a candidate or a party, donate to a blogger or a podcaster. Make a regular habit of it. If you’d normally give $100 to a candidate, give a blogger $20 a month for five months. Heck, give $20 to five different bloggers. Let them know, in paying green fashion, that you support and appreciate what they do. Tell your friends, too and point them to the same bloggers to whom you donate. Get a little contest going among your friends and family to see who can get the first blogger to post about how their tip jar exploded because of all the cash that you all stuffed into it. Make it last at least through the end of this year and see how it works. If you can keep it up into 2012, when the new media will be even more important, do it. I know times are tough, but I think we can all come up with $10 or $20 a month somewhere. And there’s another benefit. If you put that money into new media you can see what you get every day — blog entries, podcasts, videos, or any combination thereof. As Stacy said, it’s not a donation but a payment. You’ll get something out of it — real solid news or commentary you can send to people you know or use to bolster your own political chops. You also get regular, direct contact with the person to whom you’ve donated either through e-mail, other places like Twitter or Google+, or the comment section of the site. You can’t buy that from a candidate unless you pony up tens of thousands of dollars and even then, you won’t get that contact every day. So your money buys not only global reach and regular output but also real access to real people who are hitting their licks for conservatism every day. If that’s not a deal in a day when parties are not exactly the model of transparency, I don’t know what is. And there’s no better time to start than now. If you have an extra ten spot kicking around in your wallet, hit one of the links toward the beginning of my post and drop it in a deserving blogger’s tip jar. If even half of you do that, you can make a huge difference and give a real lift to the spirits of some good conservative foot soldiers. And don’t worry. The politicians will still get theirs. There’s plenty of money to go around and they’ll still fill up their coffers very nicely. Except if we do what I’m suggesting, we’ll have an army of hungry hounds on their trail who won’t have to stop every month to rattle their bowls. Wouldn’t that be a thing to see?  |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2011 02:30 PM PDT
Now why would our young tax cheat of a Treasury Secretary do in front of the world and accuse “some” Republicans, who he didn’t even have the courage to name, of praying for a fiscal disaster? Obviously, he knows as well as we that all but five Republicans voted for a “Cut, Cap, and Balance” plan to immediately forestall any threat of default with a rise in the debt ceiling and a significant series of budget cuts. He also knows, as do we, that the five Republicans who opposed “Cut, Cap, and Balance” did so because they prefer to forestall default with a greater amount of spending cuts that would remove the need to raise the debt ceiling. In other words, they don’t want to extend our credit limit, they want to cut back our spending so we can pay down the balance. Admittedly, that plan doesn’t actually exist in writing, which makes it equal to anything proposed by the President of Democrats in Congress. Can we then say with Geithnerian logic that the President is also praying for default? Of course not. No one wants the United States to default on its debt. So why would Geithner tell such a whopper? I’m afraid it comes down to that Ol Debbil Politics. He wants to pressure the Republicans into a short-term deal that would settle the debt ceiling issue through the end of 2012, so that it’s not an issue during the Presidential election (via memeorandum). We already know the financial markets do not want a short-term deal. They fear the uncertainty that has been the hallmark of all of Barack Obama’s tire-patch solutions to our economic woes. Let’s also consider that the White House already walked away from one short-term deal when it thought it could get a better offer from the Gang of 6. Gabriel Malor put together a reasonable reconstruction of those events in a blog post here. It’s clear that the White House isn’t opposed to all short-term deals, just the ones that don’t raise taxes enough to please the howling left-wing mobs nor give away enough taxpayer money to their well-heeled campaign contributors. And of course, my definition of short-term (18 months) and the President’s definition (8 months) are different. Then again, I’m not interested in the politics of the situation nor am I willing to apply the Cruciatus Curse to the English language until it submits to my hyper-partisan world view. So, back to Geithner. I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on the lying cheat. He’s only doing the bidding of his boss. Any flailing around in the puddle of progressive logic we see from him reflects the utter panic that drove the President to the microphones at the end of last week to throw a temper tantrum of the likes we’ve not seen from a Chief Executive in my lifetime. Still, I’d expect a man with even a sliver of self-respect to resign rather than utter such an egregious falsehood as Geithner did today. But this is politics. I don’t imagine that self-respect enters into it very much.  |
Let me toss a few number at you. These are fundraising totals, for the first half of 2011 (candidates’ figures 
is beating the socks off the professional political class on a daily basis.
I’m sorry if the title of this post offended you, but it’s true. Tim Geithner went on national television today and | You are subscribed to email updates from The Sundries Shack To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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