Dear Commons Community,

George Will, conservative voice, Pulitzer Prize Winning Washington Post columnist, and ABC commentator  has a less than high opinion of Donald Trump.  On ABC’s “This Week” Will criticized Donald Trump’s role in Mitt Romney’s campaign calling the real estate mogul a ”bloviating ignoramus.”

Trump endorsed Romney in the Republican presidential race in February. He is scheduled to appear with Romney at a May 29 fundraiser in Las Vegas, even as the Romney campaign refutes his claims that President Obama was not born in the U.S. Trump recently raised his birther views again in a new interview.

On Sunday, “This Week” moderator Jake Tapper wondered if Trump hurt Romney’s efforts to convince voters to “take him seriously.”

“I do not understand the cost benefit here,” Will lamented. “The costs are clear. The benefit — what voter is gonna vote for Romney because he is seen with Donald Trump. The cost of appearing with this bloviating ignoramus is obvious it seems to me.”  Will continued, “Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics. Again, I don’t understand the benefit. What is Romney seeking?”

Ouch!!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There has been so much commentary on the Facebook I.P.O.  during the last two weeks that it was difficult to follow all of the comings and goings.  What started as the Wall Street deal of the century ended in a fiasco and many people losing a good deal of money.  Ross Douhat provides a sober view of all of this in his New York Times column this morning.  Here is a sample:

“I will confess to taking a certain amount of dyspeptic pleasure from Facebook’s hard landing, which had Bloomberg Businessweek declaring the I.P.O. “the biggest flop of the decade” after five days of trading. Of all the major hubs of Internet-era excitement, Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site has always struck me as one of the most noxious, dependent for its success on the darker aspects of online life: the zeal for constant self-fashioning and self-promotion, the pursuit of virtual forms of “community” and “friendship” that bear only a passing resemblance to the genuine article, and the relentless diminution of the private sphere in the quest for advertising dollars.

But even readers who love Facebook, or at least cannot imagine life without it, should see its stock market failure as a sign of the commercial limits of the Internet. As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy pointed out in one of the more perceptive prelaunch pieces, the problem is not that Facebook doesn’t make money. It’s that it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have an obvious way to make that much more of it, because (like so many online concerns) it hasn’t figured out how to effectively monetize its million upon millions of users. The result is a company that’s successful, certainly, but whose balance sheet is much less impressive than its ubiquitous online presence would suggest.”

Tough commentary for a lot of Facebook investors!

Tony