Get rid of newspaper websites

As it becomes clear that an ad-only model CANNOT, repeat CANNOT, “monetize” online newspapers, either today, tomorrow or five years from now, more small- and midsized dailies are doing the smart thing, and either pricing subscription paywalls higher than their dead-trees versions, or else simply junking much or all of their online content and presence.

Among the reasons American Journalism Review touts this idea, this one stands out:

•Eliminating Web offerings would save precious dollars now being spent on a product that does little more than undercut the printed paper. Even smaller papers are devoting a growing share of their limited newsroom budgets to Web-only content. The cost is substantial, and growing, at larger metropolitan papers, which for years have been pouring resources into new Web features (video, search, Twitter feeds, blogs, etc.) without seeing much financial reward for their efforts. Question: How deep does the hole have to get before publishers stop digging? Another question: What would happen if those same resources were focused exclusively on producing a first-class newspaper?

Skeptic Alan Mutter, a former publisher, doubts newspapers can coordinate that much… even though he proposes… irony alert… a “universal subscription” to all participating online papers on his own blog. Moron.

Maybe, if smaller dailies like the Newport Daily News just take the lead as AJR documents, others will follow.

Lieberman a symbol of what’s wrong with Dems

And more.

Letting him caucus with him while slavering after a cloture-proof majority they probably couldn’t get with two more Senate Democrats. Not enough party discipline. The corrosive and corrupting influences of campaign cash on a semi-undemocratic body.

Result? Joementum can kick the party in the teeth again, and now on national healthcare, not even on nutbar neocon foreign policy, and surely get away with it again.

Roubini warns on double-dip and speculators

Nouriel Roubini warns a double-dip recession is possible, and also warns that commodities speculators are getting out of hand.

The second warning certainly applies to the US above all, followed by the UK. Ditto, I believe, on the first count. Germany and France are already out of recession; China appears to be headed that way.

Twould be funny indeed (ignoring the suffering value), if “old ‘socialistic’ Europe” recovered faster than the US or UK, the most hypercapitalist western nations.

Tom Daschle behind health ins co-ops

That is, Obama’s one-time choice to be Health and Human Services Secretary, former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, has been a big pusher for health insurance co-ops instead of a public option for health insurance. Like Byron Dorgan, Mod Max Baucus, etc., Daschle’s long history of small-state senator buyouts from the healthcare industry shines through.

It also, as critics note, shows the lies behind Preznit Kumbaya’s pledges to “change Washington,” etc.

More stupidity from Robert Wright

The author of “The Evolution of God,” a banal and inaccurate attempt to harness the one-trick pony of “Nonzero,” is engaged in more of the same type of blathering on the NYTimes op-ed page.

This time, he’s trying to get atheists and theists to Kumbaya on evolution.

As in the book, in the column he promotes evolutionary “progress,” this time connecting it with convergence.

Here’s the kicker:

And, god-talk aside, these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it.

Bullshit.

Once again, I do not get what nontheists see in Wright.

Another moronic Morning News op-ed

This one courtesy of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Steven Malenga, senior editor there, after a passing reference to the “Gordon Gekkos,” of course says that people on the economic edges as to blame for not having a work ethic.

What an effing maroon. What about the “employer ethic”? He mentions “Gordon Gekkos” in passing but never chides them, especially for all the ways THEY, not the people at the edges, suck off the government teat.

And, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was based on the “wind up the clocklike world” divinity of Enlightenment Deism, an absurdity disproven by two world wars, atomic weapons, the Holocaust and quantum mechanics.