In today's Altercation, as a throwaway quote, Eric asks:

An aside: The New York Post loses anywhere from $10 million to $30 million a year. Arthur Carter's New York Observer's losses are in the tens of millions as well. Why do newspaper moguls who want to throw this kind of away money publish crappy newspapers? Why don't they at least want to lose money on something they can be proud of?

This seems like an odd question coming from the man who wrote "What Liberal Media". These are relatively intelligent business people running these operations. If they're not making money on the newspaper, they're doing it because they're getting something else out of it. We leave speculation as to what that "something" might be as an exercise for the reader.

So I'm finally catching up on reading for my "Competitive Strategy in the Marketplace" class. The book we're using is by our Professor and is called (not surprisingly) "Competitive Marketing Strategy". An interesting statistic from a section on oligopolistic markets dealing with game theory in advertising:

Congress banned television and radio advertising by tobacco companies as of January 1, 1971. ... Advertising dropped by $63 million in that first year and profits rose by $90 million.

even more interestingly, in the footnote about that numerical discrepancy:

The higher profit figure is credited to an increase in cigarette consumption, which accelerated because the advertising ban also eliminated counteradvertising that stressed the health hazards of smoking.

That's an interesting statistic, I'm sure it has relevance to something today, I just can't think of what...

Back on the 15th, John Robb addressed the question of Syria being next in line for attack:

One thing most people don't understand, is that given our focus on the Loose Nuke Problem Syria rises to the top target.

John Robb is a smart guy, and often has interesting analyses of foreign policy type issues. But he seems to attribute a lot more faith in this administration actually being honest than is merited. You would think that if "loose nukes" were a problem they really cared about, they would address it where it was potentially cheaper to address than by attacking YA-country, and yet as Eric Alterman points out in his most recent column for the nation:

With everyone losing sleep over "loose nukes" falling into terrorist hands, Bush even tried to cut overseas nuclear security funding by 5 percent.

Hmm....sounds like that might not be the reason for threatening Syria...

CalPundit has a post up that deals, partly with Republicans and tax policy:

Far from "doing nothing," Republican economic policy for - well, forever, really, but certainly for the past 20 years, has been explicitly aimed at what Selzer unwisely acknowledges: "encouraging" rapid increases at the top end of the income scale. One of the enduring mysteries of American politics has been the ability of the Republican party to get away with this while still retaining the loyalty - and votes - of the middle class that they rather obviously don't care a whit about. Middle class enthusiasm (or, at least, tolerance) for the dividend tax cut is merely the most recent example of this.

This touches on one of my enduring questions about the Republicans and the way they tend to act. I've assumed that the middle class puts up with this because of the pro-religion-in-public-life and pro-gun stands of the Republican party. The questions is, is it the so-called-moral-majority supporting the more important business (anti middle class) objectives, or is it the other way around? If it came down to it, which constituency (rich, reasonably well educated, white guys (and businesses) or religious fanatics) would the Republicans' choose? There's a huge area where those two objectives don't cross, and without the media free pass the Republicans tend to get, that would probably be more apparent.

It looks like the latest version of Safari actually fixed the bug with Basic Auth credentials not being remembered on every second click. Hopefully, since my admin for this is on a different machine, with that enabled, it will make posting here less irritating.