Ralph Benko’s got The Huffington Post Deathwatch… since the HuffPo’s bleeding money.
I’m not totally convinced; it seems to me that there’s so much symbolic investment in the HuffPo as a liberal outlet that there will be sizable monetary injections for a very long time.
False Hope: Obama “HOPE” Artist Admits To Scam
$16 billion for 30,083 jobs
That’s $531,861.85 per job.
But then Air America was touted to have the bestest and deepest pockets ever. Well, hardly ever. And it had the demographics that The Nation and AARP could only wish they had.
Aaah, the thought of the HuffPo pulling an Air America flopperoo into the Dustbin of History. Realistic? Who knows? But tantalizing nevertheless.
Realistically they only way they can survive is twofold. A massive bloodletting of “talent,” to blance the books or an infusion of cash ala Youtube where the investors simply can’t add but think its cool to be invested in somethng more exciting tha Boeing or Johnson and Johnson.
A fool and his money are soon parted!
> That’s $531,861.85 per job.
Nothing new — from 1990’s Parliament of Whores:
“So what are our Department of Agriculture tax dollars buying for us? A Department of Agriculture. The USDA has 106,000 employees, one for every three full-time farms in the country.
These 106,000 people would be more useful to farm economy if we sent them out to hoe weeds. But they can’t go; they’re too busy doing things like administering the Federal Wool and Mohair Program. According to the U.S. GAO report to Congress on the 1990 farm bill, ‘The government established a wool and mohair price-support program in 1954…to encourage domestic wool producction in the interest of national security.’ Really, it says that. I guess back in the fifties there was this military school of thought that held in the event of a Soviet attack we could confuse and disorient the enemy by throwing blankets over their heads… From 1955 to 1980, $1.1 BILLION was spent on wool and mohair price supports, with 80 percent of that money going to a mere six thousand shepherds and (I guess) moherds. This is $146,400 per Bo Peep. And, let me tell you, she didn’t lose those sheep. They’re off at boarding school in Switzerland.”
– P. J. O’Rourke, ‘Parliament of Whores’ –
A few years back they finally axed this program, despite more than a decade of complaints about its absurdity.
What happened? Subsequent Congresses (yep, the Republican ones, dammit) slipped most of the old financial supports right back into law.
People who think government is the solution should read two of O’Rourke’s books — Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich (by all means, read some of his others, such as “Give War A Chance”, but those two, in particular, should be required reading in High School, with an advanced “General Studies” course based on them required to graduate from College)