My seatmate at the bar… He prefers draft over bottles
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The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.
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The Dems can try to spin this however they want….
…but they just got shellacked In the closest thing we’ve had to a national referendum of the government thus far.
“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The Dems have had absolute power for a full year. They control the White House and both houses in Congress, even with a filibuster proof majority (until today). With all that power, support (even some from me *gasp*), and a lot of political capital following Obama’s historic win, they moved their agenda so far to the left that they’ve completely lost touch with reality… and apparently the voters in Massachusetts!
It really is tragic because a lot of the ideas Obama talked about in the campaign—including more transparency in Government— were good ones. But good ideas are not enough. Good ideas need to be backed up with determined action and sound implementation. I hate to say it but Obama has failed to live up to a lot of the promises he made on the campaign. The most glaring example is that he has begun to defer on key issues to his party’s leadership on Capitol Hill (you know who I mean) to define agenda, and the definition they’ve come up with has alienated a lot of people. For a President with such political power as he has, this is entirely ridiculous. Obama better get his house in order… fast.
Perhaps this Republican win will shake things up on Capitol Hill and finally convince the Democrats that the American people are unhappy with them. Very unhappy with them! This is not what we voted for, and if they want to avoid getting hosed in the next round of elections they had better get their act together real quick.
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It’s not that the Democrats are playing checkers and the Republicans are playing chess; it’s that the Republicans are playing chess and the Democrats are in the nurse’s office because once again they glued their balls to their thighs.
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I’ll be frank… I really don’t think media companies charging for content is the way to go. Let’s look at why:
One of the things that made iTunes and other music download services great is that they allowed people to purchase an individual song as opposed to an entire record. People don’t mind paying for something they value, but they don’t like paying for other stuff they don’t value. Up until that point, consumers had to “take the good with the bad” and so many either begrudgingly bought the album just for a single song, while others passed on the album even though they wanted a song on it.
Another thing that made iTunes a success was that Steve Jobs (correctly) estimated that the hassle factor of illegally downloading a song was more expensive then a song priced at $0.99. And he was right. The iTunes model has proven definitively that most people are willing to pay a small amount of money for something of value, even when free versions exist, if the paid version is more convenient/fun to own. With news content, the free version is the norm not the exception, and the convenience/fun factor is missing from the ownership experience. As such, it’s unlikely that people would be willing to pay for content since it’s likely available for free elsewhere without much hassle.
In order to change this reality, the news companies are going to have to develop differentiated content. CBS’ 60 Minutes is a good example of this idea as their content and investigative journalism style is unique among news sources. The more that news companies can differentiate themselves in similar fashion, the more they’ll have the ability to charge for content. Barring that, I predict that most paid models will not ultimately succeed.
