greetings from the heartland where we got wiped out by George Soros and friends.
At least after Thanksgiving, we get the "National Review view" of the election. And life does go on.
#1) I wish your LETTERS page could carry a few more newsworthy letters. I remember in Bill Buckley’s waning days, the correspondence with him about usage. Maybe your truncated LETTERS page is a natural reaction against numerous LTEs. How to choose, etc. But it is cheap and often newsworthy and scintillating editorial copy that is FREE. Think about it before your next letter asking for money.
#2) Your fabulous THE WEEK section is worth the price of the magazine alone. In contrast, I am a little peeved that your cover lists TEN conservative journalists to write on the election and their pieces seem to run to several page-length essays–too much, too long.
#3) THE WEEK this issue seems to have some omissions and some wrong emphases. You could have sub headings: GOOD NEWS and BAD NEWS. The GOOD NEWS could have bragged up that Michigan voters rejected the AFL-CIO takeover of the state constitution to lock in union benefits (some $42M poured out and 58% of MICHIGAN said no). Worth comment, gentlemen.
Massachusetts did NOT join Oregon in support of euthanasia. Since I am age 68, I do give more attention to euthanasia than abortion or death penalties for murderers. Given the aging of the electorate, I think "euthanasia" is a topic worth NR coverage in the future. Hell, we are ALL aging. How it ends is indeed important, at least to those not of the Jihad suicide bomber persuasion.
On the BAD NEWS side, I can tell you from a Minnesota perspective, the Citizens United case threw our election for the first time in 35 years to solid one party (Democrat) governance.
You have a small item in THE WEEK about Citizens United and Obama chastising the Supremes in person and the outrage in the conservative press (NR), sequeing into media outrage at the Big $$$ conservative PACs. We are one of about 7 states allocated to MoveOn.org and we all know Soros is not just a billionaire but some years he has made a billion. Soros at least tithes (an old idea), say $100M/year and about $5-10M goes to the DFL party in MN. They ganged up not on our incumbents with real records. They hit our fresh new candidates with around 50 negative ads each (one day in one state senate district the DFL state party had THREE $8,700 direct mail pieces attacking our candidate, a 26-year FBI agent whose late uncle was the much beloved local Catholic bishop). He lost by 60 votes. Our local DFL candidates got on average about 90% of their money (direct campaign and independent expenditure money) from 1)state DFL party (George Soros), 2) out of district unions and 3) individuals in Hollywood, SF and NYC. Category three were all in the amount of $185. Apparently 50 MN legislative candidates were on a list (2,000?) emailed to all those bazillionaires in Hollywood, Manhattan, San Francisco who had maxed out to Obama and wanted to "do more".
I did not see it in the reporting by your ten headline writers. SEIU, I believe, spent $10M in MN in last month or two. So now we have a billionaire governor (Mark Dayton of the Target family fortune) with a former wife (nee Rockefeller, daughter of Sen. Jay Rockefeller of WV) who spends like Soros in MN. And we have the Wilf brothers who own the Vikings, who give 99% of their money to Democrats, and whose appraised value for the Vikings that they own went up by a quarter billion after the Governor got the legislature to agree to a half billion stadium. AND we still have Republican billionaire T. Boone Pickens trying to foist his 300 windmills on Goodhue County, MN, to get between a quarter and a half billion of taxpayers/ratepayers money.
Can you connect the dots? Billionaires, democrat or republican, use cronyism to get more billions.
Here is another piece of reporting for Kevin Williamson to follow on (remember his great piece on the Bakken?). Cuomo just decided not to make his November-end deadline for environmental review of fracking (the southern tier of NY counties did in fact go for Romney–they understand). Here is the news analysis. The companies are HAPPY for the moratorium which sets up force majeure so they keep the leases and do not have to spend money on dry gas drilling. They are still all (Chesapeake, Range Resources, EOG, Cabot Oil and Gas, Talisman, Exxon, Statoil, etc)
spending ALL their cash flow on dividends and drilling, but now 100 rigs have moved from central and eastern PA to Ohio Utica wet gas/oil and Permian and Mississippian TX and OK drilling.
Talisman even put out a press relief to tell the mafiosic politicians of Quebec that they have NO PLANS to drill the Utica shale in Quebec–happy to have the moratorium go on and on.
You see, oil companies with a 100-year resource in the ground can out wait people like Muamar Quaddafi and Barack Obama and George Soros. When they are dead, the oil companies keep on ticking.
Life is good.
If Jack Fowler, the guy at the BOTTOM of page 4 asks for money, I probably am disposed to write you a check. I hope the guy at the top of the page, R. Lowry, will SHORTEN up the pieces, some of which are getting turgid, print more LTEs, consider some more cartoons (maybe we can beat Obama’s party in 2 or 4 years with humor).
Of course yo do not need advice from me. Bill Buckley is looking down at you from heaven and insinuating good thoughts into your nightly dreams.
68 and now retired from politics, in Rice County, MN (this my last year I got up 2,300 GOP signs in 4 counties, swamping the DFL which has moved on to voter ID and direct mail and paid students door to door).
Via email …