Newt as a Republican Symptom

Tom Edsall, in his opinion piece Newt Gingrich and the Future of the Right in the New York Times, echos my Newt take:

But the country is going through a profound restructuring in moral and economic thinking and the danger for Republicans is that their current coalition might become obsolete. If the party doesn’t adapt, the alternative is that its power centers — the Christian right, anti-immigration forces, and proponents of policies that benefit the affluent at the expense of the less well-off — will refuse to adjust, in which case the party risks going the way of the Studebaker.

It's not just the growth in hispanic voters that threatens the viability of the Republican coalition, the entire country is shifting away from them.

Suicide is part of their culture

The perfect intersection of blogger boiz, o-bot and reality distortion

Exactly what Anglachel was writing about.

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/164196027333750785

The Best Defense

There have been a flurry of wild claims that Google is Evil lately, mostly around social search and Google's new privacy policy. A bunch of TechCrunch alums at their new site Pandodaily are particularly incensed, posting dozens of sensational posts in the past week with titles like I Guess We Have Google’s Answer: Search Results Are No Longer Sacred (a classic in the "when did you stop beating your wife" genre), Evil, Greed, And Antitrust Aren’t Google’s Real Problems, Relevancy Is (good old anecdata), and that old yellow journalist's trick SPYW Update: Is Google Back-Pedaling Ahead of Company All-Hands?. Most of these pieces take decent reporting by people like Danny Sullivan and twist it beyond recognition.

Meanwhile Apple released it's fiscal 1Q2012 numbers (covering 4Q2011), showing obscene profits, and the New York Times front-paged a huge story on the abusive conditions in the factories that generate Apple's profits, showing how Apple has been complicit in the abuse. Somehow the Apple news only merited a few mentions in Pandodaily's ticker.

Muddying the waters is a classic technique of crisis PR, usually accomplished by pitching sympathetic reporters. Setting up a whole news site for the purpose is audacious. We'll see how this works out for Apple.