Trump’s Crappy Campaign Might Do as Well as Romney’s Decent Campaign

Here’s a sober­ing sign of the state of our polit­ics: It’s be­com­ing very plaus­ible that Don­ald Trump, des­pite run­ning one of the worst pres­id­en­tial cam­paigns in mod­ern his­tory, could lose the pres­id­en­tial race by the same Elect­or­al Col­lege vote mar­gin as Mitt Rom­ney. A cam­paign that doesn’t be­lieve in tele­vi­sion ads, of­fers in­sults in­stead of policies, and lacks a full-fledged cam­paign staff, could end up per­form­ing nearly as well as a high-char­ac­ter can­did­ate who ran a re­spect­able los­ing cam­paign against Pres­id­ent Obama.

— Josh Kraushaar, National Journal

It’s Amazon’s World and We Just Live in It

I wanted to buy a book a few months ago for a relative who was hospitalized in a city about 40 miles north and who wasn’t a TV watcher. I figured I’d stop off at the mall or a shopping center as I drove up and pick up some books and magazines.

Except there were no bookstores. While I had been floating along, ordering books from Amazon because they were cheap or putting them on my Amazon wish list and waiting for the prices to come down, book shops all around me were going out of business. Instead of finding some cool books and artsy, interesting magazines, I had to stop at a grocery store to buy a lame edition of O Magazine by Oprah. I believe it went unread.

Your reading choices will someday be either 50 Shades of Gray or The Hunger Games…or a copy of O Magazine

If you watch the Colbert Report, you know that the responsible thing to do right now is to boycott Amazon. The massive “Don’t Be Evil” online seller is engaged in a very evil battle with traditional publishers to control pricing and set off a dumbing down process that will likely promote self-publishing as an Amazon work-around.

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FBI Enters Investigation into Corruption Probe of Tea Party Leader Michele Bachmann

Late last week, the Minneapolis Post and other outlets reported that the FBI has now joined the investigation into alleged corrupt activities by Tea Party Caucus Chairperson Michele Bachmann during her failed presidential campaign last year:

The FBI joins the Office of Congressional Ethics, the Federal Elections Commission and an Iowa state Senate ethics committee in probing whether Bachmann’s presidential campaign paid an Iowa state senator from her MichelePAC, a fund that should not have been used for campaign expenses, and whether the state senator stole the email list of an Iowa home-school group from another Bachmann staffer, Barbara Hekki, prior to the Iowa caucuses in January, 2012.

Andy Parrish, former Bachmann chief of staff and one of the directors of Bachmann’s Iowa GOP presidential campaign, will be interviewed by the FBI, according to his attorney, John Gilmore.

“I can confirm that Andy Parrish has been contacted by the FBI for a scheduled interview next week,” Gilmore said. “He will cooperate fully.”

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