Most of the synth-driven stuff from the early ’80s hasn’t aged very well. But that’s certainly not true about The Motel’s biggest hit, “Only The Lonely.” And the album, All Four One, remains a pretty solid listen, 30 years later.
Thirty years? Jeebus.
Nate Nelson: The libertarian case against Rick Santorum.
He makes an excellent Tea Party case against the former Senator, too.
Here’s Jim DeMint explaining to Reason why Republicans must become more libertarian.
That’s a long way from 2009, when he claimed that “You can’t be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative.”
Welcome aboard, Senator.
Other than Fandroids, who hates the iPhone? iPhone carriers:
Wireless carriers trip over themselves to offer Apple’s iPhone, especially in the United States. Sprint wanted the handset so badly it was willing to guarantee Apple $15.5 billion over four years for the privilege of selling its sleek smartphone, and it certainly didn’t help matters much in the fourth quarter when Sprint posted a $1.3 billion loss. T-Mobile is still sour over failed negotiations with Apple, and the carrier has resorted to offering up free microSIM cards to iPhone users willing to come aboard and forgo 3G data speeds.
“A logical conclusion is that the iPhone is not good for wireless carriers,” Nomura Securities analyst Mike McCormack told CNNMoney. “When we look at the direct and indirect economics that Apple has managed to extract from the carriers, the carrier-level value destruction is quite evident.” The site notes that Verizon Wireless’s EBITDA service margin has dropped from an average of 46.4% per quarter to 42.2% since the carrier added the iPhone to its lineup one year ago.
But the iPhone is a necessary evil for carriers that some expect to pay off in the long run.
The real reason carriers hate the iPhone, is that the customer relationship goes through Apple and not the carrier. It doesn’t do AT&T or Verizon any good that the nearly-three-year-old iPhone 3GS can run still the latest version of iOS. That’s a big reason why Apple can still sell new 3GS’s by the millions, and why millions more are using old 3GS hand-me-downs instead of buying new phones.
Try getting Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich on an even six-month-old phone. Carriers would rather you just pony up for a new phone — and a new contract.
Occupy Wall Street is getting into bed with… The Weather Underground? See here:
Occupy Albany has announced an event in March called, The Weather Underground Meets Occupy Wall Street. The event will be held March 3rd, and is co-sponsored by The Sanctuary For Independent Media and the Albany Social Justice Center. It is described as, “A book event and multi-generational dialog to celebrate U.S. political prisoner David Gilbert’s new memoir, “Love and Struggle.”
Idiot children are going to get somebody blown up.
iPad 3 coming first week of March. Just in time, as my iPad 1 is a little long in the tooth.
Now if only I could reserve one already…
UPDATE: The “retina” display is all-but official, too. That’s 2,048-by-1,536 pixels on a 9.7-inch display. By comparison, my awesome 24-inch monitor shows slightly fewer pixels — 1,920-by-1,200.
From Michael Memoli at the L.A. Times:
But looking at the state-by-state results, there are some troubling signs for the Romney team in Boston. For starters, Romney won both of last night’s caucus states in his 2008 bid for the GOP nomination, when he was seen as a more conservative alternative to John McCain. And Tuesday’s third-place finish in Minnesota was especially embarrassing, both for Romney and his national co-chairman, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.
The kind of person who votes in a meaningless primary or goes to a party caucus in February is the same person a nominee will need this fall volunteering to make phone calls, go door-to-door and rally others to vote in the general election. In other words, the base.
So even as the narrative was that Romney was getting closer to locking up the party’s nomination, hundreds of thousands of the party’s core supporters turned out and voted for someone else.
Up until yesterday, Romney was doing as well — if not better than — anybody else with self-described conservatives, Tea Party voters, and even SoCons. That’s still true this afternoon, only less so. And a chink has appeared in his armor. But then there’s this:
That being said, the fundamentals of the Romney campaign are still strong. He’s got a decided advantage in fundraising, and a super PAC ready to fuel an air war ahead of Super Tuesday contests. Those resources were notably not deployed this week.
He’s got an organization that can wage a multi-front campaign, while rivals Gingrich and Santorum won’t even be on the ballot in some states, like delegate-rich Virginia on March 6.
If he wins the nomination, as still seems likely, then Romney’s general-election strategy would seem to be a mirror-image of Obama’s: Just absolutely smear the other guy with everything and everything and hope your base remains slightly less dispirited than his base.
It would make Election 2000 look absolutely wholesome.
I need a drink.
Good news for Android owners: Google’s Chrome browser is coming to your phone.* This is good, because Chrome is an awesome browser.
Better news for Android owners: It won’t support Flash. This is good, because Flash is battery-killing, OS-crashing malware — no matter what certain smartphone makers have been trying to tell you for the last few years.
So what happened last night? Is Rick Santorum suddenly the GOP frontrunner? Well, let’s look at yesterday’s contests and what might happen next.
Missouri’s beauty pageant was a nice, if ultimately meaningless win — although the magnitude of it should give Mitt Romney pause. Still, I grew up in the Show-Me State, and voters there tend to be very Catholic and quite conservative — and that’s just the Democrats. Santorum came in with a strong hand, and played it perfectly.
Colorado held a caucus, which tends to bring out the less-moderate voters. That’s never a plus for Romney. My next of the woods, El Paso County, is the heart of the state GOP. It’s evangelical and very socially conservative, and not at all comfortable with Romney. We also just had our third (fourth?) snow storm in the last six days. Only the most energized voters bothered to caucus, and that ain’t exactly Team Romney. The moderate wing of the state GOP has also been slaughtered in recent years, in a fratricidal mess the likes of which I’ve never seen before firsthand. Calling it “ugly” is calling Ava Gardner “pleasant to look at.”
Minnesota is more difficult to explain. Honestly, I figured the moderates would hold sway there, giving Romney a nice plurality. That so did not happen. It looks instead like Santorum might be cementing himself as either the Midwest Candidate or the Small State Candidate — or perhaps both. He could keep racking up some impressive caucus wins, and be a real force at the convention.
Does that mean I don’t see him as the nominee? That’s exactly right, and I’ll tell you why.
Romney didn’t get caught exactly by surprise in South Carolina. As I’ve written here before, losing there was always part of the gameplan, with Florida as his backstop. So far, so good. What did, I think, catch Team Romney by surprise was the sudden swift rise of Newt Gingrich as the non-Romney flavor du jour. Surely, Santorum’s Tuesday Trifecta must come as an equal shock.
So now Santorum will have to deal with something new. So far, he’s run a scrappy campaign where Romney could afford to mostly ignore him. That’s about to change. I posted on Twitter last night:
Santorum’s next challenge: The Romney machine that is about to come down on him like it came down on Gingrich after South Carolina.
Santorum hasn’t had to face that yet, and he’d best start raising (and spending) some serious money if he’s going to combat it. Gingrich was absolutely pummeled by attack ads in Florida, and they brought his campaign to a screeching halt. The former frontrunner wasn’t even a factor in yesterday’s races.
The next stop is Maine’s weird week-long caucus. It’s a small state, so a scrappy little campaign can fight there. But it could also prove an expensive diversion, with Arizona and Michigan coming up shortly after. Then comes Super Tuesday, where money and organization –perhaps Romney’s only real strengths — will mean much, if not everything.
Does Santorum have a path to victory? If he can win Maine, Arizona, and Michigan — then maybe, yes. But it’s still a longshot.
Looks like the White House is trying to walk back on the decision to require Catholic charities to cover birth control in their health insurance plans:
“There are conversations right now to arrange a meeting to talk with folks about how this policy can be nuanced,” said Pastor Joel C. Hunter, a Florida megachurch pastor who has grown personally close to Obama and advised his White House on religious issues. “This is so fixable, and we just want to get into the conversation.”
Hunter’s comments followed a statement by David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama’s reelection campaign, who indicated on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that the White House might be open to a compromise on the matter.
“We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedoms, so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventive care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions,” he said.
Axelrod — if nobody else on Team Obama — has to know how dangerous it is to mess with 77 million Catholics on an issue on conscience. Besides, there was no “right” to free contraceptives before ObamaCare simply dictated one into existence.
The quicker the White House can figure out a way to back down, the better for it.
The most effective ad on Super Bowl Sunday might have been the one nobody paid to broadcast.
I still haven’t read Austin Bay’s new book on Ataturk, but it’s going to the top of my (virtual) reading pile after seeing this WSJ review.
Got caught up in the whole region years ago, after getting sent Noriwich’s A Short History of Byzantium, because I’d forgotten to fill out the Do Not Send card from the History Book Club. Followed that up with a couple of books — since forgotten — on the Ottomans, who replaced the Greeks as the imperialists of the Eastern Med. But I’ve been short on post-WWI reading on Turkey, so Austin’s book will be a welcome addition to the library.
I have no pity for this woman:
Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, cast a crucial vote in favor of Obamacare in 2010. She lost her seat that November in part because of her controversial support of Obamacare. But Dahlkemper said recently that she would have never voted for the health care bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the “week-after” pill “ella” that can induce early abortions.
Next time, read the [REDACTED] bill so you can know what’s in it.
Frank-Dodd, in a box. Click to embiggen.
Think you’re confused? Most of the rules & regulations aren’t even written yet, so fiancesclurosis is the rule of the day.
Hair of the Dog: Bob Schieffer brought out the inevitable long knives for the inevitable Mitt Romney, David Gregory squawked for the White House, and George Will is the Fat Lady of ABC News. All in all, a pretty fabulous weekend for me, and a pretty terrible one for everybody else.
BONUS: See Callista Gingrich’s shopping spree!
From the Ministry of Truth:
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that the number of people dropping out of the work force, which artificially depresses the unemployment rate, can be regarded as an “economic positive.”
“A large percentage of that is due to younger people getting more education, which in the end is an economic positive,” Carney said. “This increase in the number of people leaving the work force has been a trend and a fact since 2000, because of an aging population, which is not to say this is wholly — that’s not to say that I would wholly disregard as an issue.”
Well, no. The labor participation rate continued to rise, even an unemployment levels fell, from Reagan to Clinton to Bush 43. A shrinking labor pool in a growing economy is strictly an Obama-era phenomenon, and it can be explained by all the change taking away people’s hope.
In other news, drones are peace, unemployment is freedom, and ignorance is what they’re counting on.
Golly, but you’d think a visiting lecturer of Constitutional wisdom-type stuff at a big Chicago school would have had some inkling of this before becoming President — but I’m sure glad to see Obama grow:
“What’s frustrated people is that I’ve not been able to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008. Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes. But what we have been able to do is move in the right direction,” Obama said.
But it gets better:
“And you know what? One of the things about being president is you get better as time goes on,” he added.
Let’s just give him a “Most Improved President” trophy and send him on his way.
We have our lucky (and very smart) iPad 2 winners in the PJ Media Nostradamus contest.
You know what we don’t have enough of? Taxes on make-believe. Fortunately, we do have overweening politicians:
An Oklahoma lawmaker has proposed levying a new tax on violent video games. Oklahoma Democrat Will Fourkiller has suggested the tax be applied to all games that receive an ESRB rating, which is intended for adults only. In addition, Fourkiller thinks T-Rated games should also have a tax added to the cost of the games, since some include “simulated gambling.”
His name sounds violent. We should make him change it.
OWS’s race problem, your blood is interstate commerce, the President’s giant screw, and the triumphant return of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz — all on another exciting episode of… The Week in Blogs!
BONUS: Joe Biden, a bunch of condoms, and a congressional candidate, but not all at once.
Weird band, Depeche Mode. They have a ton of singles I love, but not a single album I can sit down and listen to all the way through. I can almost listen to Violator without a break, but that’s probably because it came out and a time and a place still special to me.
Anyway, “Personal Jesus” was the monster hit off that album, and for good reason. And here is Depeche Mode performing it live in Barcelona in 2009.
RIM is now giving away free PlayBooks to developers willing to write an app for the beleaguered tablet. The deal is good, even if all a developer does is repackage an Android app to run on the PlayBook.
Heck, some sharp coder might even figure out a way to use BlackBerry email or calendars on the useless crapslab.
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