Another pro-choicer rejected for Vatican ambassadorship.

I am curious about how many times this administration plans to insult the Roman Catholic Church:

Vatican blocks Caroline Kennedy appointment as US ambassador

The Vatican has blocked the appointment of Caroline Kennedy as US ambassador, according to reports.

Vatican sources told Il Giornale that their support for abortion disqualified Ms Kennedy and other Roman Catholics President Barack Obama had been seeking to appoint.

You would think that after the Vatican made it so clear that Kmiec was unacceptable that he never even made it on the list the White House would take the hint and find a pro-life Democratic Catholic for the job; apparently not. You would also think that this language was clear: Continue reading Another pro-choicer rejected for Vatican ambassadorship.

The New York Times: Doomed, and deservedly so?

shrinkageI was looking for quotes from this highly enjoyable Vanity Fair article (via AoSHQ & And Still I Persist) that would illustrate the haplessness of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (“He is a lifelong New Yorker, but there is no trace whatsoever of region or ethnicity in his speech” was a good example*) – or at least complement the vicious, yet accurate analysis that the picture above represents – but these two paragraphs blew me away completely.  Particularly the second one:

Some at the Times anticipated this tectonic shift years ago, but Arthur wasn’t listening. Despite lip service about change, he presides over a slow-moving beast. Diane Baker, who was regarded as an energetic and forceful outsider, ran up against this in her years as C.F.O. When she took the job, in 1995, she was shocked to discover that the company was still doing all its accounting by hand. “They literally did not have the ability to produce spreadsheets,” she says. “They had not invested in the software you need to analyze data. It is a company run by journalists. The Sulzbergers are journalists at their core, not businessmen.”

Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com**, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the deal have produced revenue from book sales, it would also have cemented a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific stories. “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”

If you felt any sorrow for the New York Times‘ travails, stop right now.  Never mind that it’s a liberal-leaning paper that doesn’t want to admit it (the first part of that is no big deal, the second part of it is); never mind that it’s being run as essentially a vanity press (on an epic scale not seen elsewhere, to be sure); never even mind that the publisher’s so self-evidently a schlub that not even Vanity Fair could hide it.  All of these things are survivable. Continue reading The New York Times: Doomed, and deservedly so?

AARP declines to be shaken down by netroots.

AARP will easily get away with it, too.

In fact, I do believe that there’s a threat here:

As publishers of the world’s largest magazine and the preeminent online destination for individuals 50+, we understand the desire to pursue advertising revenue. Additionally, no one is immune from our current economic crisis and we can appreciate your plea for increased ad revenue. That said, we also strongly honor the integrity of our journalists and writers/editors/content developers. AARP would never allow advertisers to dictate our editorial content based on the amount of ad space purchased, and we would be hesitant to buy ads with any media that suggested it might act otherwise.

Bolding mine, and via InstapunditContinue reading AARP declines to be shaken down by netroots.

Batman Arkham Asylum Trailer.

I should probably be glad that I don’t have a computer that can handle this:


Batman: Arkham Asylum

Especially since apparently they got the voice actors from Batman: The Animated Series.  It isn’t coming out until June 2009, anyway…

Moe Lane

Guess the Wii is finally getting enough of a production run so as to remove the Amazon restrictions.  But you’ll notice that they aren’t giving a discount…

Global Warming and White House Pizza Parties.

To quote Glenn Reynolds, “I’ll believe that it’s a problem when the people telling me that it’s a problem start acting like it’s a problem.

Moe Lane

PS: Unlike AoSHQ, I don’t care that a guy was flown in to make the White House some pizzas. Perk of the job. But like AoSHQ, I’d appreciate it if the White House shut up about corporate heads and their jets for a while. Until this story fades, at least. I think that’s reasonable.

Crossposted to RedState.