Last Call For Anything You Want

The Internet Service Economy(tm) reaches its nadir. TechCrunch's Sarah Burh introduces us to Magic.

Get sushi on a boat, a tiger at your door, or make your parking ticket vanish into thin air. An ambitious new startup says it will let you text for anything you want (and they do mean anything) as long as it’s legal, and it will magically come to you. 

Just text 408-596-5017 and Magic, a texting service that seems to have blown up over the weekend, promises to deliver. 

Magic is only 48 hours old, but we’re told it has already had over 17,000 text messages as of this morning. Someone added Magic to Product Hunt over the weekend and it was No. 1 on Hacker News within 20 minutes. 

Requests have ranged from help getting out of court to a tiger delivered to a customer’s door, according to co-founder Mike Chen. 

Magic seems to have blown up because of what I call “Product Hunt Effect” (similar to the “TechCrunch Effect“). A small startup with a simple idea gets posted on Product Hunt and it’s flooded with more traffic than it knows what to do with. 

Chen seemed overwhelmed when I spoke to him. “I had zero idea it would get like this. You know people say things happen overnight and I didn’t believe them before and now it’s happening to me,” he told me over the phone. 

The original idea was to create a service using text messaging instead of going through several steps on an app to order food, a driver or other things people might want. “Something like DoorDash or Postmates you have to manage it a bit,” Chen said. 

So this last Saturday his team put together a simple site with a number to text that would try to give you anything you want, as long as it’s legal and you are willing to pay the price.

And off to the races Magic goes.

Magic charges a fee on top of the cost of the products or services you're requesting, essentially acting as a middleman for services like Instacart or Seamless that are already acting as a middleman. That means you're paying two premiums: one for the convenience of simplifying the process to just a text message and one premium if Magic ends up using an existing delivery service. To be clear, you can definitely save some money if you go directly through those delivery apps or just order those plane tickets online yourself.

The ultimate concierge service for people with too much money and not enough common sense? These guys are going to make billions.

Shutdown Countdown: DHS Edition

With days left before 85% of Department of Homeland Security employees will have to start reporting to work without pay (because that will make them really want to protect America) Republicans finally have a plan for moving forward by caving on immigration, but a GOP partial shutdown is looking all but assured as there's no way the House will play ball.

Congress approved a full year’s funding for the rest of the federal government in December, but Republicans held back funding for DHS in reaction to Obama’s immigration actions, giving the agency budget authority only through midnight Feb. 27. 

Now, with four days before the security agency’s budget lapses, senior Republicans are pushing for a new strategy that does not directly link Obama’s actions on immigration to funding for DHS. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had previously acknowledged that the chamber was in stalemate over the issue, set up votes later this week on separate legislation that would repeal one of Obama’s immigration actions.

Those actions, announced in December, would grant temporary relief from deportation to more than 4 million illegal immigrants. McConnell’s hope is that moving the immigration issue onto a separate bill may create a path for the DHS funding bill to go through. 

“It’s another way to get the Senate unstuck,” McConnell said.

But getting a clean bill past the House once again comes down to Boehner selling it to a base that wants to obliterate Democrats from the country.

Outside conservative groups, including Heritage Action, have been pushing Republicans not to not approve a “clean” funding plan, demanding that any DHS budget include the immigration provisions that would reverse Obama’s actions. 

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has sided with Heritage Action and other conservatives, even after the judge’s ruling last week that could tie up the issue for many months in the courts. 

“The House has passed a bill to fund the Homeland Security Department, but Senate Democrats are blocking debate on it — and, with just days left before the deadline, President Obama is doing nothing to help,” Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, said Monday in a statement.

So even if a clean bill passes the Senate, it's not passing the House.  And time is running out.

A Question Of Faith

When Byron York of the DC Examiner asks why Americans seems to be so confused and mentions the fact that less than half of Americans believe President Obama is a Christian, you'd better start looking for the catch.  (Hint: it's at the end.)

In the more than four years since that column was published, it's likely at least some confusion about Obama's religion has persisted. For one thing, few people see Obama openly practicing any religious faith. After the president did not attend church on Christmas 2013, the New York Times, citing unofficial White House historian Mark Knoller, noted that Obama had attended church 18 times in nearly five years in the White House, while George W. Bush attended 120 times in eight years. Yes, there are a variety of reasons some presidents don't go to church very often, but in Obama's case, absence does nothing to change existing public perceptions of him. 

And there are other factors. For example, it would not be a stretch to guess that those Americans who told Gallup and Pew that they did not know the president's faith would remain unsure after hearing reports that at the recent National Prayer Breakfast, Obama explained Islamic State violence by urging listeners to "remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ." Again, many people don't pay close attention to the news, and snippets of reports on Obama's faith, like his remarks at the Prayer Breakfast, could yield a confused picture. 

Some would argue that, while yes, many in the public don't know the president's religion, certainly Scott Walker, the governor of a state, should know. But Walker's answer to the reporters' question just reflects a broader public puzzlement over Barack Obama's faith — a phenomenon that he helped perpetuate and, at this late date in his presidency, seems unlikely to go away.

"Gosh, of course less than half of America thinks Obama is Christian.  He's terrible at it."  And so the racist, bigoted assholes like York keep concern trolling the President that he's not Christian enough, and absolve the "He's a seekrit Mooslem" nonsense all in the same breath.

And of course, York's bigotry is all Obama's fault.  It always is.

StupidiNews!

• Russian President Vladimir Putin says a war with Ukraine would be "apocalyptic" but that there is no chance the Crimea region will ever be returned to Ukraine.
• A jury in a civil terrorism trial has awarded $218 million to the families US victims of Palestinian attacks in Israel between 2002-2004.
• ISIS has abducted at least 90 men, women and children from Christian Assyrian villages in northeastern Syria according to human rights observers on the ground.
• The world's largest banks are facing a new Justice Department probe into the global manipulation of commodities like gold and silver.
• The two Republicans on the 5-member FCC want to delay Thursday's vote on net neutrality until the end of March in order to give Congressional Republicans time to find a way to kill the vote.