Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1055

At Least 19 Tornadoes Hit 3 States

A pack of severe storms barreled through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa on Sunday, bringing tornado touchdowns in all three states. The emerging photos are terrifying and devastating.

Here's the National Weather Service's blunt warning about the storms in Kansas:

"You could be killed if not underground or in a tornado shelter. Complete destruction of neighborhoods, businesses and vehicles will occur. Flying debris will be deadly to people and animals." 

While the language reads as unusually direct, the agency has actually been stepping up the drama of their alerts lately, in order to make sure people pay attention to approaching weather that could be deadly. It might have worked. While it's still too early to tell the extent of the casualties from the storms, there's been just one report of a fatality.

Some of the worst damage seems to be the result of two tornados that hit just northwest of Shawnee, OK:

WX UPDATE:Large tornado on the NW side of Shawnee.Take your precautions now.Viewer submitted this photo. twitter.com/NEWS9/status/3…

— News 9 (@NEWS9) May 19, 2013

NEW PHOTO: Intense rotation described with tornado on the ground near Shawnee, OK; people told to take cover - @kfor twitter.com/NewsBreaker/st…

— NewsBreaker (@NewsBreaker) May 19, 2013

It looks like it pretty much completely destroyed a trailer park:

PHOTO: Trailer park near Shawnee, Oklahoma completely obliterated - @kfor: kfor.com/on-air/live-st… - twitter.com/MicahGrimes/st…

— Micah Grimes (@MicahGrimes) May 20, 2013

More damage, in Wellston: 

RT @bbcnewsus: Tornado sweeping across US state of Oklahoma flattens houses in Wellston twitter.com/BBCNewsUS/stat…

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) May 20, 2013

Here's footage from a tornado in Carney, OK. It gets kind of stunningly huge at about 3:20: 

And another large touch down in Wichita, Kansas: 

And in Iowa, at least one confirmed touch down broke the state's record 359-day streak without a tornado. At least 19 (and counting) tornados have touched down in the three states so far on Sunday, according to Reuters. 

       

Obama's Approval Rating Survives Scandal Week

Here's one place where the president didn't have a dramatic week: in his approval ratings. According to two polls — the Gallup daily tracking poll, and a CNN/ORC International poll released Sunday — Obama's approval rating has more or less remained steady as potential scandal upon potential scandal blew up the news cycle. 

First, here's CNN's poll, conducted over May 17-18. According to their survey, Obama's approval rating is at 53 percent. While that's a two percent rise since early April, the difference is within the margin of error of the survey, so we'll say that the president's approval rating here remained steady. Forty-five percent of Americans, meanwhile, disapprove of the job the president's doing. 

Gallup's results are similar. Right now, the president is registering a 50 percent approval rating, with a slight increase over the course of Scandal Week that's within the survey's margin of error. Here's Gallup's tracking polls, graphed, since the end of April 2013: 

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But that doesn't mean Americans aren't paying attention to the administration's troubles this week. While a separate Gallup poll this week found that American attention to the Benghazi and IRS stories this week was actually below average for other news stories they've tracked, most Americans (54 percent for IRS and 53 percent for Benghazi) were following the stories either "very" or "somewhat" closely, and most (74 percent and 69 percent, respectively) believe both stories warrant further investigation. In the CNN poll, majorities of respondents believing the IRS and Benghazi stories (55 percent) are important to the nation, while 53 percent would say the same about the AP phone records story.

One further note: according to CNN's results, it looks like Americans are are at least a little less likely to buy that the Benghazi and IRS stories represent the exposure of a conspiracy on the part of the White House: While a majority (53 percent) of Americans are dissatisfied with the president's handling of the Benghazi attacks and the ensuing political aftermath, 50 percent believe that the administration's inaccurate statements after the attack represented what they believed had happened at the time. Forty-four percent believe the administration intentionally misled the American public. Similarly, 55 percent of Americans believed the IRS acted on its own to target "Tea Party" and "Patriot" groups for extra scrutiny, while 37 percent thought the agency was acting under the White House's orders. 

       

Teens Are This Excited About Yahoo! Buying Tumblr

Now that Tumblr is a Yahoo! property, just like the beleaguered Flickr, some are predicting the service's death already and the deal hasn't even been officially announced yet. Those people are dramatic teens who use Tumblr but that's still a pretty big deal. 

It's no secret that teens are the lifeblood of newer social networks like Tumblr and Instagram. They prefer Tumblr to social networks for olds like Facebook and Twitter. They sit around after school and make an endless amount of One Direction GIFs. Despite some late rumblings to the contrary, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher confirmed Yahoo!'s board of directors approved the deal to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion on Sunday. An official announcement is expected on Monday at a previously announced press conference. (Not so coincidentally, Swisher and her colleague Peter Kafka were denied press passes to the Yahoo! press conference.) Anyway, those teens that make up most of Tumblr's userbase are not taking news of the deal well. Yahoo! is just another relic belonging to olds on the Internet to these teens. Some chimed in on Twitter: 

bye never signing into tumblr again theatlanticwire.com/technology/201…

— dom (@nopelarry) May 19, 2013

theatlanticwire.com/technology/201… I CAN ACTUALLY FEEL THE TEARS IN MY EYES.

— Helen (@melonbraders) May 19, 2013

NO APPARENTLY YAHOO IS SUPPOSED TO BOOST TUMBLR'S REVENUE BY ADDING ADS TO THE SITE HOLY HELL LORD HELP US ALL OMG theatlanticwire.com/technology/201…

— damn straight. ∞(@making_it_shine) May 19, 2013

*imagine dragons voice* this is it the apocalypse whoooaaa theatlanticwire.com/technology/201…

— Trina Saavedra ϟ (@Trina_Rowe) May 19, 2013

There were even some choice reactions in our comments section. We don't normally jump down there for reaction posts, but these ones seemed special enough to include:

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This one is a personal favorite: 

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But everyone knows the real action has been happening on the "Yahoo" Tumblr tag all afternoon. If you've jumped in there at any point this afternoon, teens of all stripes and colors have been non stop reaction-GIFing and photoshopping their overdramatic feelings about the deal. They don't seem all that excited: 

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And last but certainly not least:

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Can we confirm that all of these people are teens? No, not exactly. But the use of multiple o's and the GIFs and usernames like "Nineties Kid." are all pretty good signs.

The best GIF representation of the deal might be this one, though. It'll be interesting to watch for Tumblr's current users protesting the Yahoo! purchase in any meaningful way, like finding a new blogging service to fill with GIFs, or if this is just a bunch of millenials overreacting to news that won't affect them for months. Tumblr isn't going to be a soft purple tomorrow when they wake up tomorrow. Any effects from this sale won't be seen for a while. 

Oh well. There are other ways Yahoo! could raise their cool factor in the mean time: 

LONG overdue. RT @jamiemottram: If Yahoo! wants to be cool again it could just drop the exclamation point.

— Matt Ufford (@mattufford) May 19, 2013

Until then, we'll just have to wait for the banner ads to roll in and see how the community reacts. 

       

Uh Oh, Another Big Burglary Happened at Cannes

Does Cannes have a serial thief in their midst? A powerful Chinese film executive had all of his luggage stolen out of his rented apartment this week just days after $1 million worth of Chopard jewelry went missing from a hotel on the city's main strip. 

The Hollywood Reporter has most of the details about the latest heist. The luggage belonging to China Film Group vice president Zhang Qiang went missing from the apartment he rented from the Pierre & Vacances Cannes Beach Residence on May 16. He reported on Weibo (China's Twitter equivalent) that he returned home from dinner to his door ajar and his possessions gone. Ahang was forced to cancel a Monday press conference with Keanu Reeves after he received miserable service and became frustrated. This Chinese website has Zhang's Weibo rant in full. At one point he says the hotel was "indifferent" to his claims. They told him to call the police himself and wouldn't check out his room for damage. Eventually he became so fed up with the terrible service he was getting, he lashed out: "This film festival is not worth mentioning!" That's not good for Cannes. 

China is the second largest film market in the world after the U.S. And many studios are realizing this and trying to make inroads with Chinese viewers. Previously, many American movies wouldn't receive an official release in China but citizens would still get to see them through a well connected bootleg market. But more and more American studios are altering parts of their movies so they can tap into that sweet honey pot of Chinese cash to boost their global grosses. It's being received with only some success, but give it time. It'll get there. 

So why is that bad for Cannes? Zhang is the second ranked official for the country's film board. He's the highest ranked Chinese official at the festival. If he leaves France with a poor taste for the festival then plenty of studios could miss out on big opportunities in the market. Cannes is a time for deal-making, back-scratching and networking. And, on top of all that, this looks really bad when coupled with the $1 million jewel heist that happened earlier this week. 

Zhang said on Weibo that he had to leave for Marseilles to fill out travel paperwork, but otherwise the festival, hotel and local authorities all reached out to apologize to him for the poor service he received earlier in the week. 

       

'Star Trek' Prospers

 

Welcome to the Box Office Report, where we know The Next Generation is clearly the superior television show. 

1. Star Trek: Into Darkness (Paramount): $70.5 million in 3,868 theaters 

So apparently the studio was expecting something closer to an $84 million weekend haul, so this being looked at by crazy people as a disappointment. As if $70 million isn't a pile of money. The movie business is full of looks. And the latest Trek did pull in $84 million since it opened with midnight showings Wednesday evening so things aren't all bad. But we suspect the studio wanted to brag about making $100 million in four days. Alas, the tragedy of it all. 

2. Iron Man 3 (Buena Vista): $35.2 million in 4,237 theaters [Week 3]

It took 23 days for Iron Man 3 to surpass $1 billion globally. And yet Marvel thinks they're not going to pay Robert Downey Jr. for a fourth or fifth or sixth movie (plus assorted Avengers team-ups and cameos). Ha! Right. A billion dollars. Really. 

3. The Great Gatsby (Warner): $23.4 million in 3,550 theaters [Week 2]

This is a solid second week for Mr. Gatsby and his fabulous shirts. When The Report finally checked out Gatsby this week, we knew the general details of the ending except who was holding the gun. (We somehow escaped high school without reading it.) So the whole thing was like an episode of Dallas: "Who shoots Jay Gatsby?" Anyway, we've checked the book out of the library to finally get familiar with Mr. Fitzgerald's famous flamboyant character. 

4. Pain & Gain (Paramount): $3.1 million in 2,459 theaters [Week 4]

There's some ridiculous rumor about the Rock playing Luke Cage in the Marvel universe and we've never been more conflicted about anything in life. 

5. The Croods (Fox): $2.8 million in 2,373 theaters [Week 9]

This movie is like a zombie in that it won't die. It's just hanging around, like the guest at the party who doesn't know when it's polite to leave. 

       

Dan Pfeiffer Explains the IRS Scandal

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer did a tour of the sunday shows to try and calm everyone down about this whole IRS targeting Tea Party groups scandal. He was the one tasked with assuring the masses that the White House knew nothing, that things will change in the future, and that heads will roll. On Fox News Sunday, Pfeiffer promised the administration would make sure "everyone who did anything wrong here is held accountable" before the dust settles. The IRS's next goal is to "fix the problem, make sure it never happens again and restore the public trust," Pfeiffer said. On CBS's Face the Nation, Pfeiffer defended the President's relative naiveté about the scandal. "What would be an actual real scandal in Washington would be if the president had been involved or had interfered in an IRS investigation," Pfeiffer said. "You do nothing to interfere with an independent investigation and you do nothing to offer the appearance of interfering with investigations," he added. Only the administration did learn the facts, only then did they decide to respond. On ABC's This Week, Pfeiffer said the law was "irrelevant" to the fact that the activity was "outrageous and inexcusable." He explained: "What I mean is, whether it’s legal or illegal is not important to the fact that the conduct doesn’t matter. The Department of Justice has said they’re looking into the legality of this. The president is not going to wait for that. We have to make sure it doesn’t happen again, regardless of how that turns out." On NBC's Meet the Press, Pfeiffer finally went on the offensive and attacked Republicans for trying to make the IRS scandal into the biggest deal possible. He acknowledged the scandal as a "very real problem at the IRS," before launching into a scathing bit about Republican strategy. "We’ve seen this playbook from the Republicans before," Pfeiffer said. "What they want to do when they’re lacking a positive agenda is try to drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped-up hearings and false allegations. We’re not going to let that happen. The president’s got business to do for the American people."

Here's ABC: 

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And NBC:

Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Ryan was promising to continue the crusade against the IRS on Fox News Sunday. "Look, people have no trust that their government is being impartial," the Wisconsinite told Chris Matthews. "This is arrogance of power, abuse of power, to the nth degree, and we're going to get to the bottom of this." Ryan argued there was "credible evidence that donors were targeted, that the IRS leaked private information to the public, which served political purposes." There's something nefarious afoot at the IRS, Ryan thinks, and it all roads lead to Obamacare. Becasue, wait, what? "So there's so much more that we have just uncovered that we do not know the root causes of. And so to suggest that this is some bureaucratic snafu, that's been disproven, Chris," Ryan said. "The other point I'd say, as bad as this is, the person in charge of this bureaucratic snafu has now been put in charge of Obamacare." The former head of the tax exempt division, Sarah Hall Ingram, is now moving to head the IRS's implementation of Obamacare. This is "rotten to the core," according to Ryan. "This is big government cronyism," he argues. "And this is not what hard-working taxpayers deserve. People deserve a government they can trust, that's honest, that's impartial, equality before the law, and that is not what we're getting here. And so to try to suggest that this is just bureaucratic snafus, we already know that's not true.”

Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn accused the Obama White House of practicing a "culture of cover-ups," on CBS's Face the Nation. He inquired in 2010 and 2011 for his constituents about whether or not they were being unfairly targeted. If the President somehow didn't know about the IRS overreach, it was "willful ignorance," Cornyn said. He said he wants to hold more hearings about the IRS scandal in the future. "We need to have a fair and respectful process and not put the cart before the horse," he said.

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Meet the Press's David Gregory there is "a culture of intimidation throughout the administration." He called the IRS "the most recent example." It's all part of an overall "nanny state" being run by the White House, he said. There's "an attitude that the government knows best: The nanny state is here to tell us all what to do. And if we start criticizing, you get targeted." McConnell signaled there could be more hearings on the way, too, when he claimed the investigation was just beginning. "I don't think we know what the facts are," he said. "... I'm not going to reach a conclusion about what we may find. But what we do know happened is they were targeting tea party groups. We know that."

On the other scandal front, Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz wants even more documents about Benghazi from the White House. This guy makes Lindsey Graham look modest. "People deserve the truth and the families deserve the truth," Chaffetz said on Face the Nation. "I can't imagine that this administration would say those same things about what happened in Boston where we had four people killed by a terrorist." (Yes, that comment is as head scratching as it looks. Chaffetz blamed a cover up for keeping the answers from the American people. "We weren't able to investigate," he said. "We still have terrorists that committed these attacks that are out there. They are on the loose. We don't know where they are."

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Hillary Clinton should have resigned as Secretary of State over what happened in Benghazi on CNN's State of the Union. "[Clinton] should have resigned and accepted blame for it," Paul said. He explained that he's not so worried about the Benghazi talking points anymore, but that the outpost wasn't given more security. That was a "tragic mistake," he said. "We need to treat it more like Baghdad, that's an error of judgment the president and secretary of state made," Paul said.

       

What We've Learned About the Cincinnati Team at the Heart of the IRS Scandal

The IRS' office of Exempt Organizations sounds like a terrible place to work. Piling on to the critical report from a Treasury Inspector General, at least four sweeping media assessments this weekend show a department that is overwhelmed, underfunded, and poorly managed.

The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and ProPublica all researched the evolution of the small group of Cincinnati-based employees that unethically (and perhaps illegally) isolated the tax-exempt applications of Tea Party groups for additional scrutiny. What they found doesn't appear to be the image of big government run amuck, as charged by Senator Mike Lee earlier this week; instead, it's an organization trying to do politically tricky work while it struggled to cut costs — and failing.

The scandal unfolded in four parts.

Part 1: Tax-exempt work is moved to Cincinnati to save money.

The ProPublica story provides the best explanation for why the group was located in Cincinnati at all.

The city had a history of being able to hire people at low federal grades, which in 1995 paid between $19,704 and $38,814 a year — almost the same as those federal grades paid in New York City or Chicago. (Adjusted for inflation, that's between $30,064 and $59,222 now.) …

So in 1995, the Exempt Organizations division started to centralize. Instead of field offices evaluating applications for nonprofits in each region, those applications would all be sent to one mailing address, a post-office box in Covington, Ky. Then a central office in Cincinnati would review all the applications.

Nor did the IRS splurge on a fancy office for the team. The Post describes a fourth-floor office with an "open, L-shaped layout of small, plain cubicles. (Office norms discourage the decoration of cubicle walls.)" The Times also reports that the group was the least popular assignment in an unpleasant place.

Inside the agency, the unit was considered particularly unglamorous. “Nobody wants to be a determination agent,” said Jack Reilly, a former lawyer in the Washington office that oversaw exempt organizations. “It’s a job that just about everybody would be anxious to get out of it.”

Part 2: Tax-exempt applications increase, while resources to deal with applications keep shrinking.

By 2010, when the group began flagging applications that included the words "Tea Party," the group was only a tiny part of the massive IRS tasked with a big job. The Post:

Nationwide, about 900 of the IRS’s nearly 100,000 employees deal with tax-exempt organizations. Cincinnati’s determinations unit handled about 61,000 applications last year. In recent years, office culture in Cincinnati has been defined by constant reorganization to offset a voluminous workload: Regulations in the Pension Protection Act of 2006 triggered a wave of reapplications, and between 2009 and 2012, the annual number of 501(c)(4) aspirants nearly doubled, to 3,357. Many had a political tinge that complicated the determinations process.

The Times points out that the change in tax code that threatened the existence of hundred of thousands of groups, spurred "tens of thousands" to reapply. This is a key point: these employees handled every applicant for tax exempt status, and applicants for 501(c)(3) status, which results in the ability to accept tax-exempt donations, comprised a larger, more sensitive pool.

At the same time that the office was being flooded, both a key training tool — a series of explanatory articles called Continuing Professional Education — and a spot-check of performance had already ended, in an effort to be more "efficient." ProPublica:

In 2003, the saturation reviews and post reviews ended, and the public list of criteria that would get an application referred to headquarters disappeared, Owens said. Instead, agents in Cincinnati could ask to have cases reviewed, if they wanted. But they didn't very often. … By the end of 2004, the Continuing Professional Education articles stopped.

The Treasury Inspector General's reported detailed one consequence of the lack of training for staff. For a period of about a year, all processing of questionable applications stopped while the group waited for a determination of what levels of political advocacy were permitted for (c)(4) applicants. That's the sort of training that the CPE articles were meant to provide.

In the end, the easiest thing to do was approve them all. ProPublica notes that, of 24,196 501(c)(4) applications between 1998 and 2009, 77 were denied. Until someone decided to start paying closer attention.

Part 3: An employee starts streamlining applications.

The Times notes that the process began in 2010 with a single person.

For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used “political sounding” criteria — words like “patriots,” “we the people” — as a way to search efficiently through the flood of applications for groups that might not qualify for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. “Triage,” the agency’s acting chief described it.

The Los Angeles Times agrees, blaming "one specialist."

The crux of the investigation by Congress and the administration will be why that employee started to flag those applications — and why, as the inspector general notes, it soon became an office-wide practice. Was it an attempt to streamline the workflow? Or was it politically motivated behavior meant to target Tea Party groups? So far, it appears to be the former; the Los Angeles Times points out that "[n]o evidence yet suggests that the IRS agents in Cincinnati had a political agenda." The Times spoke with a former IRS supervisor, who said that "[t]he specialists, hunched over laptops on the office’s fourth floor, rarely discussed politics."

Part 4: Management in Washington is slow to catch and correct the mistake.

It wan't until July 2011 that Lois Lerner, the group's Washington-based director, learned of the problem. As The Times and the inspector general's report indicate, management revised the criteria triggering closer inspection of applications. But:

… a midlevel official in Washington temporarily overseeing the Cincinnati office told a supervisor there that the guidance was “too lawyerly.” The guidelines were revised several times, as new specialists and lawyers joined the effort.

By January 2012, employees in Cincinnati, apparently without consulting senior officials, chose new keywords, including “educating on the Constitution” and “social economic reform/movement.” That month, the specialists in Cincinnati and elsewhere began sending out increasingly exhaustive, sometimes intrusive questionnaires.

By the time Lerner curtails the practice, it's too late. The questionnaires are for many groups the first time they've heard about their applications in months. It triggers blowback from conservative organizations which ultimately and indirectly prompts the inspector general's report. For months, upper-level managers obscure the problem — including in testimony before Congress — until Lerner spoke at a conference two weeks ago, shortly before the inspector general's report was released.

Photo: Acting head of the IRS, Steven Miller, testifies before Congress on Friday. (AP)

       

Yahoo! Just Bought Tumblr for $1.1 Billion

Update, Sunday 12:44 p.m.: AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reports Yahoo!'s board approved the deal on Sunday. This thing is happening. Yahoo! has purchased Tumblr despite any last minute rumblings of distress. This is a developing story and we'll update this post as we learn more. 

Update, 1:59 p.m.: These kids are going to get married. Roughly thirty minutes after this post went up, Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reported Tumblr's board of directors approved Yahoo!'s offer and the Yahoo! board is expected to go along with Mayer's wish to buy Tumblr. There's still a little room for things to fall apart, but it's unlikely that's going to happen. So no, the Yahoo! deal will likely not be falling apart. 

Original: That rumored $1 billion offer from Yahoo! to buy Tumblr? It's looking like a forgone conclusion at this point. But things are messy and speculative and there are already doomsayers predicting this is a bad idea for everyone involved. But mostly they're predicting it's bad for Yahoo!

[image error]AllThingsD's Peter Kafka and Kara Swisher reported late Friday evening that the deal was all but done. Marissa Mayer was going to put forth a $1.1 billion all-cash deal for Tumblr at a board of governor's meeting Sunday. Tumblr CEO David Karp would be kept on with a four year deal that gives him bonus opportunities for business performance. With the board's approval, Yahoo! would purchase Tumblr for that whopping amount of money and Mayer would own her cool blog thing. The only thing missing was the bow on top.

The timing of AllThingD's report is perfect. Yahoo! has a press event scheduled for Monday afternoon. Seems like convenient timing, no? As if Yahoo! is so confident this deal is already done that they're announcing the press conference a whole weekend in advance. 

But that's not how business acquisitions work. They're rarely clean. Acquisitions are cut throat and underhanded and nothing is official until the papers are signed. And these negotiations are playing out a little bit too much in the press. So, on that note, TechCrunch reports Tumblr sees Yahoo!'s billion dollar offer as "too low" and "only a first offer." And Tumblr's booming business success and financial reports showing off the charts revenues and profits certainly give it that right. Oh, wait, no. Tumblr only made $13 million in 2012 and that hype about hitting $100 million by the end of this year isn't lining up with reality. TechCrunch says they're going to run out of money soon if they can't find a sugar daddy soon: 

Tumblr employees have been told that the company only has enough funds to operate for a few more months, as its costs far exceed the limited revenue it earns. Tumblr pulled in $13 million in 2012, but has accelerated its advertising offering in hopes of hitting $100 million in revenue this year. The money’s not coming in fast enough to support its expenses though. Employees were recently told not to be concerned, though, because the company is expecting to be bought.

Tumblr sources saying, anonymously, that Yahoo!'s offer it too low when they're running out of money and their only hope is for a benevolent benefactor to swoop in and purchase them is something to behold. So things are already messy and being negotiated in public. That usually leads into a great working relationship, right? 

To say there are cynics out there who think this is going to blow up and be a disaster for both sides is an understatement. But it's mostly going to be a disaster for Yahoo! and Marissa Mayer because they're the ones dumb enough to pay $1 billion for a company that only generated one percent of that in revenue last year. CNET's Dan Farber thinks this could be go down as poorly in the history books as Fox's deal to buy Myspace: 

Of course, there is a big risk in spending a billion on a blogging platform that essentially competes with Facebook and Twitter. Yahoo's board has a good reference point for considering the Tumblr downside. In 2005 Fox bought the fast-growing social network MySpace for $580 million. Then Facebook came along, and six years later Fox unloaded MySpace for $35 million. Yahoo isn't Fox, where MySpace was an island in a sea of mostly unrelated news properties.

And there's also the huge financial blow Yahoo! absorbs for paying such a high price as explained by Business Insider's Henry Blodget:

The $1.1 billion purchase price, meanwhile, will vaporize more than a third of Yahoo's cash balance, which will presumably leave some at the company wondering whether Yahoo should have spent so much money buying back its stock over the last couple of quarters.

The Tumblr deal would put Yahoo! in a stick situation. They would have to reign in the purchasing for a while. It would also limit them from doing investor friendly things like buying back shares or producing dividends. If their stock price takes a dive after the Tumblr deal that could pose major problems. But they would also still have around $2 billion to play with. That's still a lot of money. 

So if things do blow up between Yahoo! and Tumblr, though at this point it seems a forgone conclusion no matter what TechCrunch says, who else could possibly step in at the last minute to save Tumblr's keister? Forbes' Jeff Bercovici reports Microsoft and Facebook have also expressed interest, but they can't outright make an offer because Yahoo! and Tumblr have an exclusive negotiation agreement. But if Facebook or Microsoft wanted Karp to know they're interested, well, those messages often get delivered somehow, exclusive agreements be damned. But Bercovici's story could be more work on Tumblr's part to drum up a higher price tag out of Yahoo! As Blodget points out, if Facebook wanted to buy Tumblr, wouldn't it have happened already? Nothing is holding them back. If they were going to do it, the deal would have happened by now.

For now we're left to wait until Sunday's Yahoo! board meeting concludes and both sides can leak whether the deal got done or not. There is a chance that Monday press event is about a Flickr announcement after all. 

       

Oxbow Upsets Orb's Bid for a Triple Crown at the Preakness

After completing a thrilling come from behind win at the Kentucky Derby, Orb was supposed to walk away with Preakness and charge onto the Belmont Stakes in pursuit of the elusive Triple Crown. Unfortunately a horse named Oxbow had other ideas. 

Orb was coming into the race as a heavy favorite. Oxbow was a 15-1 underdog. Or, to put it another way, someone just got paid. Orb struggled to find his footing on the inside and Oxbow had the race pretty much locked down after a half mile. 

In some ways Orb's collapse should have been seen coming. Maybe some people were blind with hope that a horse could finally win the Triple Crown. Orb started in the worst pole position possible -- number 1. Slotted against the rail, Orb tried to become only the second horse since 1961 to win the Preakness when coming out of the gate from the number 1 spot. Orb was just as successful as the other 51 horses who started in the same position. 

Last year's potential Triple Crown winner I'll Have Another took the Preakness and the Kentucky  Derby, too. I'll Have Another was to compete for the greatest prize in horse racing until the horse withdrew and retired the day before the Belmont Stakes, the final race in the Crown. Affirmed was the last horse to complete the Triple Crown back in 1978. Maybe, just maybe, a horse will actually replace him in the record books next year.

       

Sore Losers Can't Accept That France Legalized Gay Marriage

France finally became the 14th country to legalize gay marriage on Saturday when President Francois Hollande signed the bill that legalizes same sex marriage into law. But ugly protests that have marked the legal process will continue even now that the bill is passed. 

The country's Constitutional Council approved the law on Friday, clearing the last hurdle before Hollande's signature was required to make it a reality. The bill was passed by the French parliament in April. The French opposition party had tried to argue the bill violated the constitution, but the Council disagreed. They ruled same sex marriage "did not run contrary to any constitutional principles", and that it doesn't violate "basic rights or liberties or national sovereignty." So there you have it: France finally joined the elite club of countries where gay marriage is legal. Hollande campaigned on bringing gay marriage to France and, at the end of the day, he achieved it. He'll always have that to fall back on (it's not going that well otherwise) no matter what else happens during his presidency.

[image error]Despite polls showing the majority of France supports gay marriage, ugly and sometimes violent protests have come hand-in-hand with the legal fight over gay marriage. Opposers have shown up in massive numbers to protest the gay marriage bill. And despite their legal loss, they plan to continue protesting. French humorist and one of the country's mout outspoken gay marriage critics Frigide Barjot is already planning a May 26 protest. She promises millions of people will join her in protest even though the legal fight is over.

Seems like a productive use of time.