As IF Times

link AOL INSIDER: Here Are 12 Reasons Why The AOL-Huffington Post Merger Is Going Down In Flames AOL.

Future business and culture students will be dissecting this for years.  In the annals of business combinations, this isn’t exactly merging chocolate with peanut butter.  As we have commented earlier,  http://asiftimes.com/2011/04/12/i-thought-we-were-friends/  the idea that AOL had to hitch their  name brand wagon, albeit a fading one,  to that of a cult graffiti blog was ill conceived at best and epic in stupidity at worst.   As this article seems to show, the only ones who couldn’t see this disaster coming was the guy running AOL, CEO Tim Armstrong.

Absent a bailout from government, this exercise will be a clinical demonstration of the mechanics of capitalism.  Someone comes up with a ‘brilliant’ idea, spends money to forward it and then, when it turns out to have no basis in business sense at all, collapses, or will collapse and everyone loses money.  That’s the way it is.  Of course, someone’s going to make some money out of this; someone always does.  There will be two conspicuous losers.  Obviously, the investors in the failed enterprise lose and secondly, the architect of the fiasco, Armstrong, who will likely have trouble convincing people that he can run a lemonade stand in the future.  Even now, his old business school is scrambling to take down any pictures and evidence of his attendance there and working on a public denial.  

Assuming there was a business model to be acquired beyond the siren call of Arianna Huffington’s annoying personality, the spending of over $300 million dollars of other people’s money must have accomplished something.  Turns out the simple answer is NOT.  Upon closer inspection,  the juvenile and crass scratchings of the Post scribers were not just part of the package, they WERE the package. Having a byline on the Post was the equivalent of flashing your breasts during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  Discovering that the contributors to the Post had as much contempt and hatred for their fellow staffers as for sane people must have been a jolt however.   OH NO!!  Maybe Armstrong made the deal after the 4th martini during a 5 martini lunch when anything would have sounded reasonable.  I’m sure he now feels like the guy in the Vegas commercials who wakes up in the morning with tattoos and nipple rings on his body. 

Ironically, Arianna, despite her anti-capitalist and anti-American sensibilities has realized the quintessential American dream.  You can’t make this up.

link Howard Dean warns Dems Sarah Palin could beat Obama in 2012 – TheHill.com.

The on-going wisdom that is being peddled every day by the sage beltway crowd is amusing in their consensus.  The narrative is that Sarah Palin would be crushed by Obama if she won the Republican nomination.  Hmm.  Politics is the ultimate poker game of course.  Except that in politics, the game is played with other people’s  money and the rules, well there aren’t really any rules.  Posturing, positioning and misinformation are the standard techniques to bluff the opponents.  While the number of beltway pundits is small, their influence can be large since their opinions are transmitted via a sympathetic media to the mostly uncaring public.  The money aspect relates to the ability for any particular vested interest to sell their side of the story.  The more money, the more you can sell your story.  With the generally short attention span of most people, repeating a message often enough will make it true.  As an example, for decades, the media pushed the illusion of Camelot and the Kennedys.  We know this now to be fictional delusion, but most believed it for generations.  But, we digress.

Whether or not you have any stake in the U.S. elections and of course, in Canada, we don’t except by resulting consequences, the portrayal of the players is fascinating.  At the moment, the news surrounding the incumbent president is amazingly quiet.  This is in stark contrast to the pre-election hysteria, which carried through the first 2 years.  We all know how it was sold; hope,change, statesmanship, etc etc.  That was easy to do since he was essentially an unknown entity.  Now, 3 years into the program, to all but the hard wired partisans, it’s obvious the marketing was a lot better than the product.  A person who had never held a responsible position outside of a government funded bureaucracy has been an abject failure as the presumptive leader of the free world.  The much vaunted character and oratory genius has been revealed to emanate from a teleprompter.    If the next U.S. elections were based solely on policies and implementation, there is no logical way that he can possibly win.  In every measurable category, but especially the one of national finance, Obama’s vision has gone rapidly from expectations of hope to realities of despair. 

But that’s not how it’s been  sold.  We’ve seen the marketing and compared it to the product.  It’s been a masterful and coordinated sales job.  It’s as if you believed the hype about how wonderful a solar clothes dryer is until you receive a clothesline for your money.   Whatever solutions Obama has served up to ‘fix America’ are rooted in some form of government intervention or engineering. That is his prism of life.   Of course, the massive errors of this vision are now apparent and horribly so to the naive consuming public.  What has happened to the U.S. is analogous to someone taking some antacid for heartburn and then reading the label which states that “may cause ulcers, vomiting, rectal bleeding or death”.   This was buried  in the fine print. 

So if the partisan left can’t use Obama’s record to battle an agenda that someone such as a Sarah Palin brings to the discussion, then it becomes purely a popularity contest.   We take for granted that Obama would be popular among his core group even if it were revealed he liked to kick dogs and small children as a hobby.  People like Palin or Michelle Bachmann who have actually either run a state,  a business and  raised a barnful of kids (in the case of Bachmann, 23 foster kids) are portrayed as dumb, wild eyed loons and racist rubes.  At least that’s the beltway’s spin on it.  While not a fan of Howard Dean, speaking of loons, at least he has the clarity to see that there is a vast pool of disenfranchised but heretofore quiet majority of Americans who identify with the likes of Palin or Bachmann.  The media’s  haughty dismissal of these two as being non-serious contenders is a slap to this vast quiet majority.  

The press and the pundits can spend money and posture all they want and try to convince the public that their guy holds the better hand.  But with most of the cards dealt, their bluff will soon be called.   The geniuses  may recall the last time they practically anointed the presumptive winner of an election, albeit only within their ranks.  Hilary Clinton.