MISCmedia by Clark Humphrey » Blog Archive RANDOM LINKS FOR 3/6/12

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RANDOM LINKS FOR 3/6/12

March 5th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

crosscut.com

Ex Seattle First Brother Bob Royer looks back at one ofÂ the city’s first prominent newspaperwomen. Fun fact: In the late 1930s, theÂ Seattle Times had six people working in the “society” section; an expense more than made up by the amount of “women’s” oriented advertising in the section. Speaking of whichâ€¦.
TheÂ P-I globe will remain standing, somewhere. That’s nice. But it’s not just the globe that I’d wanted preserved. Speaking of whichâ€¦.
Newspapers areÂ losing $7 in print ad revenue for every $1 they gain in online ad revenue. This is from a Pew Research study. The study’s authors claim papers “need to prioritize digital ad revenues” in order to survive. But what if that’s still not nearly enough? The study cites a “success story” of a small paper (20,000 print circ.) that’s now making $670,000 a year online, compared to $8 million from print ads. That doesn’t look like a bright future to me.
The new Miss Seattle used to be a Miss Phoenix. Last December she TweetedÂ® how she “Ugh can’t stand cold rainy Seattle and the annoying people.” She has since apologized.
Could liquor privatization in Wash. state really get derailed by a court challenge on techinical issues in the original initiative?
Repercussions continue from Friday night’s Republican coup in the state Senate. The all-cuts budget they rushed through, with the help of three turncoat conserva-Dems but withÂ no public hearings, turns out to hurt K-12 education and devastate services for the neediest.
Also, the GOP’s parliamentary trickery doomed about 20 non-budget bills from the state House, which died because the Senate didn’t take action on them by midnight Friday.
Meanwhile, the national Republicans, becoming shriller and stupider every week, have firmly (and probably fatally) tied their fate to the aging, non-college-educated, white male demographic. And they’re “appealing” to this last remaining constituency by treating them like idiots.
Oh, and the even more batshit-n’-bigoted than ever Limbaugh? He’s lost a third of his ratings in the last few years. (However, some of that loss can be attributed to more accurate means of measuring radio listenership.) But in any event, the right wing “outrage machine,” which includes Limbaugh and his many imitators, may have finally become too petty and brutal for its own good.
Besides, there’s a problem with trying to bring sexuality and women’s lives back to what they were in the 1950s. It wasn’t working then either. As local author Stephanie Coontz points out, “Teenage childbearing peaked in the fabulous family-oriented 1950s.”
The GOP-controlled U.S. House is pushing through a bill that would crack down on protests anywhere a federal official might be present. At least, that’s what a worst-case interpretation of its “imprecise language” might infer.
We know the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia. But did the Saudi regime itself collude in the attack? Two former U.S. Senators say maybe.
A megarich hedge fund manager write lucidly about the failures of capitalism in regard to preserving a sustainable society.
What if crossword puzzle editors wrote poetry?
Finally, here is a handy pie chart of “excuses conservatives make when facts prove them wrong“: