[Updated] Apologies to Rick Tyler of Winning Our Future, who has expressed his displeasure with this post to me on twitter, pointing out as well that some of his ad buys have been here at RedState. Online advertising hasn’t been my concern below as I’m sure it is geotargetted, etc. As to the television and radio advertising, a friend familiar with the ad buying of the super PAC tells me that in some cases the ads were purchased late and most air time had been filled up. Consequently, the ads were bought as a package that spread them out, though unfortunately those bundles necessitated some ads continuing to play after the primaries in the particular states had ended. Additionally, as I originally mentioned, some of the ads are national ad buys which appear on the national network, be they television or radio. The original post is now below the fold. Is ‘Winning Our Future’, the Super PAC affiliated with Newt Gingrich and mostly funded by Sheldon Adelson using Mr. Adelson’s money wisely? I only ask because yesterday — the day after Super Tuesday — I was still hearing their not very good advertisements on radio in Georgia. I noted that on twitter and subsequently had individuals tell me that the PAC is still running ads in Florida, Michigan, and even in Iowa. A radio host in South Florida confirmed for me he has heard the ads there recently. Most troubling, several Virginia residents tell me the PAC ran ads there despite Gingrich not being on the ballot. All of this, I should be clear, comes in from reports on twitter except for the recent report from Florida and my own experience in Georgia after the election. One might presume that the advertisements in Georgia and Florida were actually targeting Alabama, except Atlanta radio does not penetrate Alabama, nor does radio from Southern Florida where the ads have been heard on the radio. Additionally, some of them could be national ad buys running on national shows, but not all of them are. Finally, I’m sure a few could be ads bought in a block and the days spilled past the election. That is sometimes cheaper than specific date purchases. But still, it makes little sense that Iowa, Virginia, and South Florida are still hearing ads. If they are national ads, I would question if the shotgun approach is the right approach. As I noted just a day before the Florida primary, the super PAC was attacking Mitt Romney in South Florida about abortion — not a relevant topic to voters in that area in that primary. The PAC otherwise has had a minimal presence, though is now airing commercials on Rush Limbaugh’s program (which would account for some, but not all, of the reports of ads in odd places). But I am beginning to wonder if there is an actual strategy or do they just need a new ad buyer. If they need a new ad buyer, what sort of commissions are being paid with the PAC money?
Continued here:
What is ‘Winning Our Future’ PAC Doing With Sheldon Adelson’s Money? [Updated]
BOSTON — The band at the Westin Copley played the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” as Mitt Romney supporters watched the results pour in: “I gotta feeling that tonight’s going to be a good night/That tonight’s gonna be a good, good night.” But at first it didn’t look like it was going to be a good night for Romney. Fox News initially reported that exit polls showed a Ron Paul surge in Virginia and Vermont, making two states the former Massachusetts governor was supposed to carry handily suddenly too close to call. The news quickly got better. The networks called Vermont for Romney, with Paul finishing a distant second. Virginia turned out to be much closer than anyone expected, but Romney still won 59 percent to 41 percent, taking all but three of the delegates. Enthusiastic, as opposed to reluctant and resigned, Romney supporters are often hard to find. But they were everywhere in the hotel’s packed ballroom, on fire for Mitt. This shouldn’t be surprising: Romney won Massachusetts with 72 percent of the vote and swept all the delegates. In 2008, Romney only beat John McCain by 51 percent to 41 percent in the Bay State. That year, Romney only got four more Massachusetts delegates than McCain. Newt Gingrich won Georgia, but the Romneyites were unperturbed. As the television screens showed Gingrich, now deep into his speech, saying he was “amazed” Saturday Night Live hadn’t done a skit about President Obama’s recent energy speech, a man shouted, “I’m amazed you’re still talking!” Munching on miniature cheeseburgers and hot dogs, Romney’s backers were much more concerned about Rick Santorum’s showing in Ohio. The lead kept seesawing back and forth between the two candidates. At one point, Romney was still trailing with 59 percent of the vote reported. Everybody knew a Santorum win, regardless of the delegate math, would make the road ahead much tougher for their candidate. Even though he was still in the lead, Santorum spoke before Romney, appearing in Steubenville, Ohio. Reporters mumbled to each other that Santorum might have waited if he really didn’t believe the exit polls, which suggested Romney would win narrowly. But before he finished, word came that Romney was preparing to address the gathering. The band played hits spanning from the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” before warming the crowd up for Romney with “You Make Me Wanna Shout.” A man walked up to the podium and appeared to shuffle papers. The crowd chanted, “We want Mitt! We want Mitt!” But no Mitt appeared. Instead, they switched to canned music: first a local favorite, Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” followed by some Hall and Oates, and then a brief video touting all the contests Romney had won. When the patriotic music started playing, it became obvious Romney would soon speak. Former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, who ran unsuccessfully to succeed Romney in 2006, appeared first. Healey reminded the throngs that Romney had inherited a deficit (from the only one of his Republican predecessors who hasn’t endorsed him for president) and left Massachusetts with a surplus. Then the Romneys took the stage, with Ann pretty in pink and the candidate wearing his standard conservative suit and blue tie. The crowd shouted “Go Mitt go, go Mitt go!,” a variation of the chant made familiar at Pat Buchanan rallies in the 1990s. Ann Romney thanked an improbably long list of people in all ten Super Tuesday states — including, oddly, Donald Trump for supporting Mitt on the radio in Ohio — before turning her attention to Massachusetts. Mrs. Romney thanked the small but influential crew of successful Bay State Republicans who endorsed her husband (and whose moderation, especially on social issues, probably makes them imperfect surrogates outside the commonwealth): Sen. Scott Brown, who is suddenly leading Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren in the polls, former Govs. Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci, and state House Minority Leader Brad Jones. “We want Mitt! We want Mitt!” The crowd then got their wish. Romney took to the podium and thanked his supporters for welcoming him, vowing to “take this win to the White House” He said it would be the first night that he would get to go home in two months. He congratulated Gingrich for winning Georgia, Santorum for the states he won, and Paul for getting people excited about the Constitution.
Great news! Tech at Night’s favorite Representative Marsha Blackburn, along with TaN’s own home representative Mary Bono Mack are bringing a version of Secure IT to the House . The bill has been introduced in the Senate as an alternative to the power grab known as Lieberman-Collins. The great thing about the bill? It toughens criminal penalties for online lawbreaking even as it makes it easier for the private sector to share information about attacks. The bad guys share information, and they think they won’t go to jail. If we let the good guys share information without getting sued for it, and if we throw the bad guys in jail, we win. And you can tell that the bad guys really hate it when we send them to jail; just witness how Anonymous has been hitting law enforcement more and more in the last year or so, most recently targeting Interpol’s website, and previously publishing names and addresses of police officers in the US. These online terrorists don’t like that they can be held accountable for their actions. It’s their weakness, the fact that they are named individuals who are finite in numbers, and we need to exploit it. I know we had to push hard against some good members of Congress in order to send a message on SOPA, but it had to be done. The RIAA is not giving up on SOPA , so it was important that we let good members of Congress know what the problem was. And we did, so now it’s time to move on to passing good bills like SECURE IT. Yes, the FCC does need reform. Republicans want a transparent and accountable FCC , so naturally Obama Democrats are opposed. The Obama FCC and allies is out of control: shifting opinions of market forces as is convenient to justify power grabs , taking power in new issues needlessly , buddying up with George Soros-funded radicals at Free Press , and of course blocking spectrum transactions needed to service the growing market for wireless Internet. The FCC is out of control. Obama regulators know no bounds. Someone came up with a clever idea recently: lease television antennas to people so they can watch free broadcast television over those channels. The clever part? Aereo would let you watch over the Internet what your antenna picks up . Naturally, this threatens some cable television revenues, if people actually have free stuff, so the broadcasters are suing . I hope they lose. These are purely free, over the air broadcasts. PATENT WARS: Apple and Samsung lose some claims against each other in Germany , essentially drawing without injury. Google/Motorola Mobility however is at risk of some pretty bad worst-case scenarios over its loss to Apple in Germany. Phone app development is creating jobs and wealth! Quick, to the Schumer-mobile ! That job creation must be stopped, post haste!
Read the rest here:
Tech at Night: SECURE IT comes to the House, Aereo gets sued for innovating, FCC needs reform
Let’s have a chat about sluts, shall we? For surely, this is what is the most IMPORTANT THING EVER in this election year. Before I even get into the science of slutology, let us first and forever dispense with the notion that the glorious fury of the left over Rush Limbaugh’s comments has anything to do with the defense of Sandra Fluke. The outrage is, as ever, simply directed kabuki theater aimed at getting a major conservative talker off the air and into the corner with a pointy hat on his head. It’s about taking away a microphone. That is all that it is about, and it is about it is nothing else whatsoever. I’m just trying to be abundantly clear here: they don’t care about the slut comment outside any other context than taking down a mortal enemy, and would, without that opportunity, alternately revel in being called a slut, even claim it as a title of honor on par with being knighted, or use it freely and as often as possible when referring to conservative women. In fact, terms like slut, and other words I can’t use on the front page of RedState, are used so ubiquitously on the left, so frequently and with such fervor and practiced skill … well suffice it to say, they are “slut” sluts. They sleep around with any opportunity to use words like slut and worse that they can sink their greasy little keyboards into. But enough about them. For now. Let’s talk about us. When I first heard what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke, it was through Twitter. I admit that I spent several days, watching Twitter, being uncomfortable with the fact that my timeline was filled with people discussing the personal sex life of a college student. It seemed very inappropriate to me, and I remain, if I’m to be honest, offended by what some people, even some I like, had to say. I did not want to discuss Sandra Fluke’s sex life. I didn’t want to speculate about how many people she was having sex with. The question at hand was whether or not a religious organization should be forced to become a contraception provider, not whether or not she spent too much on contraception. This is especially true considering, given her career, that it was likely the expense figure was as fake as the Sasquatch, global warming, or the idea that Dane Cook is funny. (And as an aside, that’s what, at least it seemed to me, was the original point [such as it was] of Limbaugh’s ill-advised and tasteless commentary. That her testimony was absurd. The idea that the cost of contraception is prohibitive, given the easy availability, low prices, and indeed, abundant free contraception, is so silly, that the only way it could possibly take up such a large part of one’s budget was if they were so busy getting down with the business that they must suffer several other side effects, such as, perhaps, back problems or bed sores.) Anyway, where was I? Oh right, being uncomfortable. On Twitter, I don’t follow many people on the left side of the fence, so I was reading mainly commentary from the right. Of course, I use the term commentary with artistic license out of personal interest, as 140 characters may not rise to the level of commentary, but I get most of my traffic from Twitter so SHUT UP, IT’S COMMENTARY! So I’m reading the commentary and feeling uncomfortable and eating Count Chocula out of the box while wearing pajamas having just woken up at 3 in the afternoon (I’m a blogger), and I finally start to notice the pushback. At first I thought, well I can see why they’re upset. I mean, I’m an unhinged right-wing keyboard jockey, and even I was offended. But as the pushback grew, the hypocrisy of it all really started to reveal itself. Where were the boycotts and calls for dismissal when Keith Olbermann called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it”? Oh sure, Jon Stewart called him on it, but exactly which advertisers did he lose? Did Malkin get a “let me kiss your boo boo” call from the President? A token pushback at best. I could now, at this point in my post, provide you with links to dozens of other similar such incidents from left-wing talkers, but A) they are already posted on every single other right-leaning blog or website on the internet, B) they’re pretty gross and I don’t know if you’ve eaten and, C) I’m pretty lazy. (I’m a blogger.) And here, we can begin to discover whether or not I have a point. We will discover this together, since I am as unsure as you. This organized, concerted effort by the left to get Rush Limbaugh off the air has all the genuineness, originality, and creativity of a Hamburger Helper Lasagna (which, by the way, I’m currently eating). Advertisers are, (forgive me), pulling out. There is a full-scale war on Twitter. There is a boycott. And the online left’s toadies in the mainstream press have become (or remain) little more than the television version of serial retweeters, parroting the outrage in the hopes of a pat on the head or a Scooby Snack. This, one might wish to add, comes right on the heels of the gleeful denizens of the left spending days speaking horrors in the wake of the death of Andrew Breitbart. Civility, indeed. It is an ever-present argument in politics, on both sides: well YOU did it! But that argument is particularly galling from the one side of the aisle that cannot stop lecturing about civility, among other boring topics. (It is also, we might note, galling to use the left’s yardstick to measure ourselves, as Rush pointed out in his opening monologue today. And goodness knows I’ve been guilty of the same thing.) The same party comfortable with calling tea partiers “terrorists”, the party infinitely comfortable with anything at all you wish to say about Sarah Palin, however grotesque, has the nerve to organize a boycott because Rush Limbaugh said the word “slut”?? Let’s be clear. Rush Limbaugh missed the mark. Saying that if it was true that Sandra Fluke was spending that much money on contraception makes her a slut, or that wanting it paid for not out of pocket makes her a prostitute, was definitely wrong. There was nothing she said that would justify calling her either. The reason these words bother so much is because, from a pulpit the size of his, it seems to amount to a public shaming. Worse, it was so derogatory, even if he meant it as a rhetorical device to deliver a point, one could scarely avoid wincing. Though Rush is an entertainer, he’s not a stand-up comedian. In fact, even from an objective and mechanical standpoint it was wrong, as it was predictably bound to swerve the conversation bus off the highway and into a ravine. But let us also be clear about another thing. In the realm of what is right and what is moral, Limbaugh was right and moral to apologize. But in the realm of the political, that means almost literally nothing. The dudgeon is as high and predictable as it is trumped up and fake. The left wants what it wants, and in this case it wants voters to think that the Republican party is trying to ban contraception, which it isn’t, that conservatives are misogynists, which we aren’t, and that the Occupiers don’t smell really, really bad. Which they definitely do. (Another aside: it would be nice if the left could muster at least as much wounded moral sensibility for the Occupiers raping each other all the time as they have for Rush Limbaugh saying “slut”.) Remember when you and I stepped together into the darkness and tried to discover if I had a point? Good times. Anyway, Rush, I am certain, will survive. And that is a blessing. Sandra Fluke, I speculate, will get a lot of face time on cable news this year. And that is what is. Contraception, obviously, will remain cheap and abundant. And that works for me. And Caleb Howe, I pray, will win the lottery and become a rich, pompous jerk. Hey, I’ve got two out of three already! And to my “outraged” friends and foes on the left I have one parting thought: spare me .
More:
Of Sluts And Men
Why is an industry mired in remakes and sequels aghast that its annual awards show came across as well past its sell-by date? “The whole night looked like an AARP pep rally,” the New York Times remarked of this year’s Academy Awards broadcast. TMZ’s Harvey Levin dubbed the ceremony “stale.” Television critics panned the movie critics for giving an atavistic silent film the big award. They noted that Billy Crystal had already hosted the show eight times, that 62 is the median age for a member of the academy, and that the theater that hosted the shindig is named for Kodak, a bankrupt film company left behind by digital. John Anderson declared at CNN.com that “someone — producer Brian Grazer, perhaps — should answer for why a show celebrating an industry in so much trouble chose to cast itself as something so profoundly passé.” Don’t blame the industry awards show. Blame the industry. The Oscars aren’t living in the past. They’re living in Tinseltown, which lives in its past. It’s Hollywood, but even an awards show can’t act as though throwback movies are cutting edge. Such a performance would simply demand too much. Hollywood is in its Sunset Blvd. years, living off the fumes of its past. Consider the retread rubbish that ruled the box office last year. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 , the first installment of the fourth Twilight book to hit the big screen, earned more at the box office in 2011 than all but two films. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third live-action film based on a toy that had long since spun off a cartoon series, a comic book, and an animated movie, placed second. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 , the latter half of the seventh installment of the film franchise, earned the top spot by grossing $381 million in the United States. Do you sense the pattern here? The top ten domestic receipts of 2011 belong exclusively to remakes, sequels, and films based on ancient comic-book characters. Reruns are supposed to be for television. One has to go all the way down to the 13th spot to The Help , a movie that everybody says they like but nobody really likes, to find something new (and technically, it’s based on a 2009 book, so purists might contend that it’s not totally new). For the first time in the history of motion pictures, the annual cash leaders wholly excluded original movies. There is a dearth of creativity in a town built on creativity. Marketing rules. People lacking imagination decide what films get green lighted and which films get red lighted. It’s easier to sell the known but weak commodity than it is to sell the unknown but strong commodity. There’s safety in numbers — as in part 3, part 4, and part 6. But doing the “safe” thing isn’t always safe. The best commercial arts are a risky business. It’s tempting to judge a bestseller list frontloaded with stagnant superheroes and silver-screen second helpings of mediocre television shows as market validation of rerun cinema. But 2011′s sequel-heavy Hollywood closed 4 percent down from 2010, which was down 5 percent from the previous year. Fewer people went to the movies in 2011 than in any year since 1995. The industry points to a down economy, piracy, and improvements to in-home theaters as handicaps. Those factors certainly haven’t helped. But neither has the recycled content. It’s easier to blame external factors beyond one’s control. It’s more constructive to identify the internal impediments that can be fixed. Hollywood can make dinosaurs walk the earth again and host visits from cute candy-eating extraterrestrials who befriend children. But can they feed people stale and convince them that it’s fresh? That’s a problem with this year’s Academy Awards. More importantly, that’s the problem with the movies that the academy had to sift through. At least the Oscars didn’t honor the films with statuettes that the public had honored with cash. Fast Five , Mission: Impossible, Ghost Protocol , and Captain America cleaned up at the box office but left the Kodak Theater empty handed. But it’s not as though the movie industry has learned its lesson from a dismal few years, especially with rehash reaping cash. March offerings include John Carter , 21 Jump Street , The Lorax , and Wrath of the Titans , a sequel to the remake of Clash of the Titans . We may not have seen these movies before. But we’ve been there, done that. It’s lamer than you think.
More:
Hollywood, the Sequel
