Keep America Safe: 'More Risk'

Via Theo Spark:

End of Blogging?

The question's only slightly rhetorical.

John Hawkins tweeted last night, and he got me thinking:

The right side of the political blogosphere is dying. I don't think anything smaller than say 50k views a day will be relevant in 5 years.

I was, well, "Hmm ... I don't know ..."

I'd just seen Glenn Reynolds post on this the other day, and he linked to Technology Review, "Google+ Marks the End of Blogging as a Means of Personal Expression." I'd read that earlier, so I Googled, and came up with Felix Salmon's, "Is blogging dead?" There's an interview with The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, and both Salmon and Madrigal stress the same point: Independent, single-author blogs are a dying breed:

... old-fashioned single-person blogs are largely a thing of the past, with the exception of enthusiastic practitioners in the fields they write about, be it banking or science or anything else. And those people normally blog independently, rather than as part of an old- or new-media company.

I've been blogging for 5 and a half years. I'm averaging probably 2,500 visitors a day, the majority of those through search. I don't have a large commentariat, for various reasons, not the least of which is that progressives trolls ruined the threads. But I keep plugging away because I enjoy it for me. I get my news and entertainment from blogging, and I have enough of a core readership to get feedback and encouragement to keep it up. Besides, I don't trust the MSM most of the time, so I feel an obligation to keep going, for the public good, however marginal my contribution might be.

In any case, I checked my blog ranking at Technorati. I'm still in the top 100 of political blogs, which surprised me. At one point American Power was ranked #40 at Technorati, and for a while I was in the top 50 at Wikio (I'm #94 now). Doug Ross recently ranked my blog #100 in the conservative blogosphere.

Blog rankings generally reflect the volume of incoming links, i.e., how many other blogs are linking to you. But it seems as though it's gotten more difficult to stay ranked, although the traffic has improved over the years, through search and through greater opportunities for networking and marketing. That said, change is in the air. I'm thinking about a Wordpress switch-over soon, transforming American Power into a more sleek, professional blog. I'm also thinking of soliciting a team of bloggers, people who share my ideological goals and a desire to expand the blog into a multi-media portal and neoconservative repository.

Anyway, I tweeted John Hawkins back and he said he was going to work up a post based on that earlier tweet. And he did: "The Slow, Painful Coming Death Of The Independent, Conservative Blogosphere." There's a lot of wisdom there, for example:

The market has ... become much more professionalized. When I got started, back in 2001, a lone blogger who did 3-4 posts a day could build an audience. Unless your name is Ann Coulter, you probably couldn’t make that strategy work today.

Instead, most successful blogs today have large staffs, budgets, and usually, the capacity to shoot traffic back and forth with other gigantic websites. Look at Redstate, which is tied into Human Events, Hot Air which connected with Townhall, Instapundit, which [is] a part of Pajamas Media, Newsbusters which is a subsidiary of the Media Research Center and other monster entities like National Review and all of its blogs, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the Breitbart media empire. An independent blogger competing with them is like a mom & pop store going toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart. Some do better than others, but over the long haul, the only question is whether you can survive on the slivers of audience they leave behind. This plays into #5.

Go read the rest.

John's got a couple of suggestions, and I'm going to be working on integrating those into my blogging soon.

Stay tuned.

Israel Leading the Way in In Vitro Fertilization

At New York Times, "Where Families Are Prized, Help Is Free":

TEL AVIV, Israel — Jewish and Arab, straight and gay, secular and religious, the patients who come to Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv every day are united by a single hope: that medical science will bring them a baby.

Israel is the world capital of in vitro fertilization and the hospital, which performs about 7,000 of the procedures each year, is one of the busiest fertilization clinics in the world.

Unlike countries where couples can go broke trying to conceive with the assistance of costly medical technology, Israel provides free, unlimited IVF procedures for up to two “take-home babies” until a woman is 45. The policy has made Israelis the highest per capita users of the procedure in the world.

“It’s amazing when you think about it,” marveled Keren, 35, who asked to be identified only by her first name. She was seated in a waiting room at Assuta’s in vitro fertilization clinic, a beige canister of her husband’s frozen sperm at her feet. The sperm had been delivered from another hospital where she had her first IVF attempt three years ago, resulting in the birth of her daughter.

“I want at least three kids, and if we had to pay so much money I’m not sure we would be able to do this,” she said.

RTWT.

I love how non-discriminatory the program is. Definitely goes against the "evil" Israel meme. Shoot, progressives ought to be loving a policy like this. Sheesh.

Hugo Chavez Will Go to Cuba For Chemotherapy

At Fausta's, "Chavez going to Cuba, not Brazil, for chemo VIDEO":

South Carolina Couple Sees Face of Jesus in Walmart Receipt

It's a miracle.

At WYFF-TV Greenville, SC, "Couple Sees Jesus In Walmart Receipt."

Also at Daily Mail, "He is coming.... to Walmart: Eerie image of 'Jesus' appears receipt after church service."

More on Google+

I shared my thoughts already.

Here's Holy Taco, "The Minuses of Google+" (via Linkiest):

99% of social media is masturbation (the metaphorical kind). No one really needs it to keep in touch with their good friends, you probably talk to those people other places, like in person and other crazy things. You use social media to make jokes, post links you like, hilarious photos and tell everyone what you’re doing in status updates. It’s not social media so much as “I’m important” media. If anything, with its circles and segregation, Google + makes it harder to be lazy about telling people what you’re up to.

Herman Cain Says U.S. Communities 'Have the Right' to Ban Mosques

At Fox News:

Presidential candidate Herman Cain on Sunday defended his opposition to a new mosque in Tennessee, expressing concern about Shariah law and declaring Americans "have the right" to ban mosques in their communities.

Cain, who stirred controversy this year by saying he would be uncomfortable appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet if elected, first expressed concern Thursday about the controversial mosque in Murfreesboro, Tenn. That mosque has been the subject of demonstrations and legal challenges in the wake of the controversy over the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" in New York City.

Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Cain said he came out against the Tennessee mosque after talking to members of that community. He said the site is "hallowed ground" to Murfreesboro residents and that they're concerned about "the intentions of trying to get Shariah law" -- the code governing conduct in Islamic societies.
"It's not just a mosque for religious purposes. This is what the people are objecting to," he said.

See also Robert Stacy McCain's exclusive report, "VIDEO: Herman Cain Talks Mosques, Sharia and the Muslim Brotherhood."

And at Atlas Shrugs, "Herman Cain gets it. He will be slammed by the leftist/Islamic machine as they continue to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws, bulldoze the American people and bulldoze individual rights."

Taliban Militants Killing Civilians Policemen at Pakistan Border — UPDATED!!

Via Bare Naked Islam, "Barack Hussein Obama’s favorite negotiating partners, the Taliban, dish out Taliban justice to 16 civilians in the Swat area of Pakistan."

Content Warning: Extremely graphic.

I don't see a date on this at Live Leak, but Bare Naked Islam links to Bivouac-ID, "Shock Video: The Afghan Taliban execute 16 civilians with machine guns at the border of Pakistan Shaltalu (July 16)," and from there to Himal Southasian, "From across the border (June 28)."

The insurgents are likely Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant organization allied to Mullah Omar, who was the Supreme Leader in Afghanistan prior to the initial rout of the Taliban during Operation Enduring Freedom. Mullah Omar in turn was closely linked to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Today, speculation is that Pakistan's ISI provides safe haven for Mullah Omar, as it was with Bin Laden. Americans are fighting these insurgents. U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will be a victory for the terrorists. Obviously, this is precisely why I've opposed the administration's drawdown from the region. It's been a long time, ten years since September 11, 2001. And we're all tired of this war. But we'd been doing well with the Petraeus surge in Afghanistan staring in 2009. Some argue that Obama's withdrawal agenda will cancel out all that we've gained. See Robert Kagan, at the Washington Post, "Military leaders know Obama’s decision is a disaster." Also, Max Boot, at Los Angeles Times, "Staying the course in Afghanistan."

*****

UPDATE: Okay, more information coming in on this. See Long War Journal, "Video of brutal Taliban execution of Pakistani policemen emerges." (At Memeorandum.)

The Taliban videotaped the brutal execution of more than a dozen Pakistani policemen who were captured during last month's raid in a remote area of northwestern Pakistan.

The graphic video, which shows 16 Pakistani policemen who are lined up and then gunned down by Taliban fighters wielding AK-47s, was taken in early June in the Shaltalu area of the district of Dir in northwestern Pakistan, a Pakistani official and US intelligence officials who track the region told The Long War Journal. The executions were filmed after the policemen were captured during several days of heavy fighting.

So these were apparently police units and not civlians. Be sure to RTWT at Long War Journal.

See also New York Times, "Taliban Video Shows Execution of 16 Pakistanis":

Los Angeles 405 Freeway Reopens Earlier Than Expected

At KABC-TV Los Angeles, "Carmageddon ends, 405 Freeway back open early."

Also at LAT, "Carmageddon ends: 405 Freeway reopens to traffic."

Syria Crackdown Widens

At San Francisco Chronicle, "Syrian Troops Expand Crackdown on Protest While 30 Die in Fight." Also at Jerusalem Post, "Syrians clamp down on restive eastern area."

And see Los Angeles Times, "Syria security forces attack protesters across the country" (on Friday's developments).

The top video was just posted at a Syrian YouTube page, while the bottom two, which show skirmishes, were posted earlier:

Check Haaretz as well, "Syrian troops arrest dozens in town near Lebanon border."

And at Christian Science Monitor, "Syria opposition unity bid thwarted by Assad regime's brutal crackdown."

Sir Paul Stephenson, London Police Chief, Resigns in Phone Hacking Scandal

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has resigned.

See Wall Street Journal, "Scotland Yard Chief Resigns":

LONDON—Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson resigned on Sunday amid a phone-hacking and police-bribery scandal that has tarnished the police in Britain's capital.

His resignation comes amid a growing uproar in the U.K. over the reporting tactics of News Corp.'s now-closed Sunday tabloid News of the World, which is being investigated by British authorities for allegedly intercepting voice mails and paying bribes to police in pursuit of scoops.

Sir Paul's resignation follows Sunday's arrest of Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International—News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper unit—who stepped down from her post on Friday. She is the most senior executive at News International to be arrested in connection with the scandal.

As of late Sunday, Ms. Brooks remained in police custody and hadn't been charged.

Also at New York Times, "Scotland Yard Chief’s Resignation Statement." (At Memeorandum.)

Plus, at Telegraph UK, "Sir Paul Stephenson: rise and fall of a no nonsense copper."

Outside Groups Spend Big on 2012 Ads

I've been seeing the Karl Rove Crossroads GPS ads on television, and they're covered at today's Los Angeles Times, "Independent groups getting a head start on 2012 campaign":

Reporting from Washington

An early television war fueled by independent groups is poised to shape the focus and landscape of the 2012 presidential race much as "tea-party"-backed organizations helped set the stage for Republican victories in 2010.

This summer — a full 16 months before the general election — television viewers across the country are already confronting hard-hitting commercials jousting over President Obama's record on the economy. Such political ads are usually confined to places such as Iowa and New Hampshire at this point in the race.

The ads aren't the work of the president's reelection campaign or the Republicans jockeying to run against him — they are the product of a new breed of well-funded outside groups seeking to define the contours of the 2012 campaign.

One of the biggest, Crossroads GPS, has pledged to spend $20 million in television advertising in July and August alone.

"I supported President Obama because he spoke so beautifully, but since then, things have gone from bad to much worse," says the character of a worried mom in the group's latest spot, running nationally on cable as well as on broadcast stations in six states.

Keep reading.

I'll look around for some of the other groups highlighted at the piece. The trend is not new, although the scale of outside spending for 2012 may break records.

People Magazine: 'William and Kate's Excellent North American Adventure'

Pirate's Cove has the Sunday blog roundup: "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup."

And speaking of lovely women, I'm reading my wife's People Magazine, which features the beautiful Catherine Middleton on the cover:

No one's exploited Kate Middleton like R.S. McCain: "Ye Merry Olde Upskirt Traffic." And check the FMJRA roundup over there as well.

RELATED: At London's Daily Mail, "A waist that made Nicole Kidman look dumpy and why Kate deserves to be more than just a clothes horse."

It's the Consumer Bust, Stupid

From David Leonhardt, at New York Times, "How the Bursting of the Consumer Bubble Continues to Hold the Economy Back." (At Memeorandum.)

THERE is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs: The deficit is too big. The stimulus was flawed. China is overtaking us. Businesses are overregulated. Wall Street is underregulated.

But the real culprit — or at least the main one — has been hiding in plain sight. We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.

The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began. And big-ticket items are hardly the only problem.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending, a category that excludes housing, food and health care and includes restaurant meals, entertainment, education and even insurance. Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.

The past week brought more bad news. Retail sales in June were weaker than expected, and consumer confidence fell, causing economists to downgrade their estimates for economic growth yet again. It’s a familiar routine by now. Forecasters in Washington and on Wall Street keep saying the recovery’s problems are temporary — and then they redefine temporary.

If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust.

Well, I'd suggest that the housing crash underlies the consumer bust, and folks increasingly see this as caused by Democrat Party policies. See Glenn Reynolds, "REX MURPHY: 'If America falls, it will not be from external enemies...'."

And ICYMI: At Wall Street Journal, "A Home Is a Lousy Investment," and "The Housing Headache Felt All Over."

Anne V Sunday Rule 5

She's lovely.

British Police Arrest Rebekah Brooks in Phone Hacking

At New York Times and Memorandum.

And see Janet Daily, at Telegraph UK, "The 'BBC Left' is using hacking to get revenge."

Paul McCartney at Yankee Stadium

A music review, at New York Times, "A Gentle Reminder of Paul McCartney’s Survival and Vitality."

Santa Ana Enclave Tops Orange County In Proportion of Single-Parent Households

I visited Census Tract 750.03 in Santa Ana last week. The Los Angeles Times reported that the area's Willard neighborhood has the highest proportion of single-parent households in Orange County. See: "A community of single parents."

I grew up in Orange, the city next door, and spent a lot of time in this part of Santa Ana as a kid. There's a street graphic at the Times' article. Here's the intersection at Main and 17th Street. My buddies and I used to skateboard at that building across the street, where that blue "for lease" sign is located. The flowerbeds are banked (or they were banked, until the property owners installed a brick perimeter around the flowers to thwart the skaters):

Here's a shot looking back at the corner where I was standing in the picture above. That's an illegal immigration law office. The fruit vendor, with the ice cooler, was selling cantalopes and mango slices to customers in their cars:

More pictures. At the top of the stairs a sign is printed in both English and Spanish:

Climbing back in the van to cruise around the neighborhood, I see a man walking north on Main Street with a sleeping back and personal belongings:

Turning right, I head South on Main Street. A couple of blocks up a see throngs of people congregating, near a bus stop and in front of an insurance office. Traffic slowed and I rolled down the window to snap a photo. A Latino man was working as a sign-spinner. He ducked down when I raised my camera. Probably an illegal alien making some money under the table:

Driving West now, across Broadway, an accountant's office:

The neighborhood is a migrant enclave, which helps explain the large number of single-parent households:

Although Orange County has the lowest proportion of single-parent households in Southern California, Santa Ana stands as the highest in that category, with 12,023, or 16%. Laguna Woods, a small city in South County, has the fewest, 21, or 0.2%.

The roots of this anomaly can be found in Santa Ana's decades-long history as a magnet for immigrants.

This part of the county was converted from orange groves to single-family housing to apartments, said G.U. Krueger, a housing expert in the area. Now, Santa Ana is one of the most densely populated cities in the country.

Michael Ruane, director of the OC Community Indicators Project, which studies trends in the county, said Santa Ana has always stood out statistically because of residential overcrowding, high school dropout rates and the educational level of adults.

But it's also one of the least expensive areas in the county.

"That's why you would live there, or have to, or be unable to move from there," he said.

There's a lot of poverty here as well. At the corner of Durant and Washington, a local Head Start center:

Heading East, Willard Intermediate School (discussed at the Times) and across the street a Mexican civil rights history mural:

Back over at the Los Angeles Times:

Laura Arreola, 43, may be one of those people. She's lived in various apartments off Parton Street for 14 years. All of her four children have attended schools in the area, where empty strollers sit on overgrown lawns and dusty toys spill onto the sidewalk.

Merchants hawk fried pork bellies and produce from white trucks that serve as gathering points for children. In this tract, more than three-quarters of the households include children.

But the only open space in the neighborhood is the local school, Willard Intermediate, which serves as the de facto park. Children also play in alleyways and the church's patio [nearby St. Peter Evangelical Lutheran Church].

Another mural, on Washington across from the school. This one records the promise of education to lift kids out of what looks like is some kind of desolation:

A couple of kids and either their grandmother or another older caregiver. It was about 4:00pm. School's out for summer and a lot of parents were still out working. The woman was speaking Spanish:

Food trucks on just about every corner. The second one was covered with graffiti, which was unusual. The food vendors were clean and organized, a part of the neighborhood. Reminds me of Mexico:

Despite the glum statistics at the Times, I didn't see a lot of social disorganization. There was very little graffiti on the walls. This batch below was few and far between:

Frankly, I found people to be enterprising. The food trucks are totally cool. And the food's tasty:

It's a Spanish-speaking enclave, however. People spoke Spanish in their interactions with each other and the woman spoke Spanish when she served me.

Santa Ana is the county seat and prides itself as an all-American city. It's a mostly Latino/Mexican-American city, and for whatever reasons --- language, low educational attainment, poverty and family breakup --- many in the community remain economically and socially distant from the larger economic mainstream of the society. That's not to say it's not a nice place. Just a lot different from what more demographically stable communities would exhibit.

Long-Form Journalism Reborn

I never bought the notion that long-form was dead, but everything's hip for the moment on the Internet. Now, long-form essays are hip again. Demand is driven, paradoxically, by a backlash against instant gratification short-form technology (tweets, social networking, etc.) At the Independent UK, "The long-form resurrection: Will snappy websites kill off lengthy magazine reads?":

Last summer, the editor-in-chief of technology magazine Wired wrote and ran a cover story declaring, "The Web is Dead". A year earlier, the then managing editor of Time.com had rung the death knell on long-form reportage journalism. Wired's Chris Anderson claimed that newer, better ways to use the internet – apps, say – were pushing the conventional web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox et al) into terminal decline. Time's Josh Tyrangiel argued that the culture of rapid-fire news on the internet meant that Time magazine's distinctive essays were just "too long" to work on its website. In his view, the web had rendered the entire form obsolete.

Now, judging by an emerging online trend, both theories seem to have awkwardly mutated to produce a wobbly, exciting new truth: narrative journalism, the kind of expertly crafted piece that sprawls over thousands of words and swallows up a whole lunchtime to read, is far from dead. Thanks to nifty advances in technology (smartphones, tablets, ebook readers) it is undergoing a major revival on the internet. Classic writers of the genre – such as Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson – are now filtering through to a new, fast-growing audience.

In his 1972 New York magazine essay, "The Birth of the New Journalism" (available now at Instapaper), Tom Wolfe described the form as a "discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would... read like a novel". He, and Gay Talese (whose 15,000 word, 1966 Esquire piece, "Frank Sinatra has a cold", is considered one of the best long-form profile pieces ever written) "never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature's main event". Which, at its peak – particularly in the US, where the tradition really took hold – it almost certainly did. But this form of novelistic investigation has been in serious decline for the past decade. Long-form always takes considerable time and money – investments the print industry now finds it increasingly tricky to sustain. So, why the resurgent interest? Can it really all be down to more efficient ways of using the internet? Well, yes and no.

Keep reading.

Community College Worries and Challenges

At the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. See Chronicle of Higher Education, "Community-College Officials Swap Notes on Common Worries and Challenges."

And at New York Times, "At Two-Year Colleges, Less Scrutiny Equals Less Athletic Equality."

Los Angeles Southwest College has a new athletic field house and football stadium, but almost no female athletes.

Women make up more than two-thirds of students at this community college in the city’s South Central neighborhood, but less than a quarter of its athletes. The college’s decision to suspend the track team this year left women who wanted to play a sport with a single option: basketball.

Henry Washington, the college’s athletic director and head football coach, acknowledges that his program is most likely violating federal law by failing to offer enough roster spots to women. But he said many of the female students are also juggling jobs and child care, and do not have time to play sports. Then there is the question of money. “I just keep my fingers crossed that we can keep what we have,” he said...

The situation at Los Angeles Southwest, without question, more closely represents the norm among community colleges around the country. Even as they play an increasingly vital role in American higher education — enrolling more than eight million students nationwide last fall, a 20 percent jump since the fall of 2007, just before the start of the recession — community colleges are routinely failing to provide enough athletic opportunities to women, as required under Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education. Many community colleges offer an array of options for men but just a single team for women. And dozens of colleges over the years had no women on their athletic rosters, according to federal education statistics.

No one disputes that community colleges face distinct challenges, with a lack of money paramount. But Pensacola, one of the rare exceptions among community colleges, offers evidence that the demands of the law can be met.

Continue reading. And note the comparison to Pensacola State College in Florida. This is all about state money. Those states, like California, deeply in the hole aren't going to be able to provide the opportunities required by law. The question becomes one of enforcement. Seems like California colleges would welcome the scrutiny if it forced state officials to better fund the institutions.