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[…] Continue Reading: Balloon Juice » Open Thread: A Song for Doug Mataconis […]
by $8 blue check mistermix| 91 Comments
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[…] Continue Reading: Balloon Juice » Open Thread: A Song for Doug Mataconis […]
abo gato
I’m shocked if anyone is shocked.
beltane
That’s not fair. I’m sure Erick Erickson is perfectly loyal to his country, the Confederate States of America.
Royston Vasey
More News Corp news, Les Hinton, CEO of Dow Jones, has resigned. He’s been with Murdock for 52 years!
Menzies
This post = win.
Doug Mataconis often makes good points, but he tends to lose all the points he racks up when he posts things like United Liberty asking people to vote for the “pro-Wisconsin” (read: fake) Democrats.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by that.
mistermix
@Menzies. At that blog, Stephen L Taylor is 100X Doug Mataconis, and Joyner is 10X. Mataconis is about the weakest of the regular posters.
If Taylor is ‘center-right’ then I am, too, because I pretty much agree with most of what he writes, and he’s also smart and incisive.
Menzies
@mistermix:
1. Seriously, are we not getting a reply button until the debt ceiling gets raised or something?
2. Agreed otherwise. I wish Alex Knapp would start liveblogging Mark Levin again, though. That was actually a pretty smart blow-by-blow.
3. Oh, and wouldn’t that just prove the meme about America being “a center-right nation” correct?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
I do love the tone of in the clip from his letter to Boehner, however. He really thinks anyone gives a flaming fuck.
blackfrancis
This post made my Friday. A great way to start off the weekend.
jacy
Since this is an open thread… Apparently the Republican candidate in the recall election against Wisconsin Democrat Dave Hansen is campaigning on “I don’t smoke rocks, and that’s the truth.” The whole thing is overstuffed clown-car funny.
Ash Can
Mataconis was an ass here about Anita Hill, but I for one genuinely appreciate him calling Erickson on his shit in public. Everyone needs to do that, to the point where CNN admits publicly that it made a mistake hiring him, and stops paying him for his fascist propaganda.
Linda Featheringill
Erik is talking like he thinks The Revolution is just around the corner.
Amir_Khalid
@Menzies:
Links to Monkeyboy’s excellent Reply button fix can be found at his comment #21 on this thread. A few clicks, a browser restart, and you too can have a reply button again!
Roger Moore
@Linda Featheringill:
Let’s just hope he’s among the first against the wall when the revolution finally comes.
scav
@ 6 efgoldman:
Yeah, nice solid domino this one. This side of the Atlantic, 52 years, WSJ Dow Jones, this one isn’t contained yet. and wasn’t it shareholder Prince Alwaleed bin Talid that sort of gave a solid finger in the back helping Rebekeh along?
My song of the day. From The Now Show / Mitch Benn during the 2009 Financial crash but works stunningly well at the moment: Toddling Along.
sukabi
is Erik Ericson still ’employed’ by CNN? if so, why? He’s clearly advocating for the US to go under, and he’s openly promoting / ‘advising’ partisan objectives.
Violet
@Royston Vasey:
I find this kind of amazing. What did he know and when did he know it? Can’t wait to watch this unravel.
@Ash Can:
I wonder when they’re going to dump Piers Morgan. He’s the former editor of the News of the World. No way his hands are clean.
me
@jacy: “…give you that rock you’ve always had your eye on.”
Menzies
@Amir_Khalid:
You have won my undying love and respect. I’d hand you my firstborn, too, but if all goes according to plan that poor bastard will be nonexistent.
Menzies
@Violet:
Far be it from me to ever defend Piers Morgan on anything, ever . . . but you’d think if he was in on that he wouldn’t have run that paper into the ground.
(Or was it another one that he made “almost as good as the Sun?”)
scav
@jacy: ‘f course they don’t smoke rocks, they need them to crawl out from under.
Amir_Khalid
@Menzies:
T’was Monkeyboy wrote the fix and made it available for us. All credit belongs to him.
me
@Violet: Apparently it’s a bigger question about whether similar shit was done while he was editor of The Daily Mirror.
Royston Vasey
@efgoldman.
This story has legs – it will run and run. It’s only the start, not the end.
However, over at Fox News, they have a different stance. This exchange shows how different Fox/conservative thinking is.
(btw, blockquote fail. Apologies)
“In the Fox and Friends show, Fox journalist Steve Doocy wondered just what the fuss was all about: “The company has come forward and said: ‘look, this happened a long time ago, at a tabloid, in London, somebody did something really bad,’ and the company reacted. They closed that newspaper, all the people got fired, even though 99 percent of them had nothing to do with it.”
Doocy’s guest, public relations consultant Robert Dilenschneider, was in agreement:
“If I am not mistaken, Murdoch, who owns it, has apologised but for some reason, the public, the media keeps on going over this, again and again. It’s a little bit too much.”
“The bigger issue is hacking and how we as a public are going to protect outselves,” said Dilenschneider, who earlier listed a number of US companies which had recently become the targets of hacking.
Doocy added later: “One of the things about the media, you look at some sites and you would think that martians had landed in New Jersey – again””
FlipYrWhig
Linda:
Irk Irksome was talking like The Revolution was just around the corner when he found out about phosphate free dishwasher soap.
Calouste
@Royston Vasey:
I think you might find more criticism on North Korean TV about Kim Jong-Il than on Fox TV about Rupert Murdoch.
Amir_Khalid
Re Les Hinton resigning: There’s much reason for us to freuen uns over this latest Schade that News Corp has suffered. But I really want to see what the FBI turns up. If a US Attorney has enough to begin filing charges against one or more of Uncle Rupert’s rags, that could be the beginning of the end for the old git and his corrosive influence on American news media and public affairs.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Fixellated.
Amir_Khalid
@Royston Vasey:
One wouldn’t seriously expect objectivity and frankness about Rupert Murdoch and News Corps’ journalistic practices from people whose paychecks are cut at News Corps, would one?
Tom Q
[email protected]: What about us poor slobs with Internet Explorer? Are we cast off into the dark forever?
piratedan
@Royston Vasey: brought to you by the friendly folks that source the New Black Panther Party, Voter Fraud and Andrew Breitbart. Those champions of fair and balanced reporting ;-)
Menzies
@Amir_Khalid:
freuening uns sounds like a sin. I’m up for it.
General Stuck
I am getting sniffs of a low running river of Fox shit flowing beneath out feets. A sniff not unlike we had in the Watergate infancy. Why would a Wall Street CEO of the Dow resign relative to a hacking phone and general privacy scandal? BEFORE an investigation has even begun in this country. stay tuned Gracie.
piratedan
@Tom Q: yes Tom, yes you are….convert to Firefox, its easy and with 85% less crashing and rebooting.
Martin
Oh, if wishing made it so…
/web developer
Chris G
@Jacy: Isn’t using the words “smoke rock” in and of itself confirmation that one does, in fact, smoke rock?
MattR
@General Stuck: From the CNN article on Hinton’s resignation
Violet
@me: Ah, well, I probably got my British tabloids confused. Piers Morgan is slimy and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ordered his minions to hack people’s phones while at either tabloid.
Amir_Khalid
@Menzies:
sich freuen is German for “rejoice” — wir freuen uns means “we rejoice”. No, it’s not a sin when one is rejoicing at a scoundrel’s deserved misfortune.
Violet
@General Stuck:
I agree. I think this News Corpse scandal (although “scandal” seems too mild a word) is the first great collapse of the beholden-to-no-country global corporation. All Rupert’s execs were loyal and beholden to him, not to the any country or its laws. It’s going to be fascinating to see how it unfolds.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Bless his heart.
Amir_Khalid
@Tom Q:
If the machine you use is yours to install a new browser on, do yourself a big favor and get Firefox. I only ever used IE once on my laptop, and that was to find and install Firefox.
Calouste
An interesting bit of news, and something that Labour will play for all it is worth, it that David Cameron hosted former News of the World editor Andy Coulson at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s offical weekend residence, last March, two months after Coulson resigned as Cameron’s communications director following an earlier wave of phone hacking allegations. That was seriously bad judgement by Cameron.
Royston Vasey
@34 General Stuck
Les Hinton was executive chairman of News Corp in the UK from 1995-2007.
He had responsibility for all UK operations during the time of the phone hacking scandal, which has been running for many years now. Now that Rebekah Brooks has resigned, he thought he had to do ‘the decent thing’?
Still, this resignation does imply that more and more details will be forthcoming, especially from the US side of the operation.
Cat Lady
@Stuck:
You are so right. Something stinky this way comes. I’ve got my plastic unicorn ready.
Violet
@Calouste:
Yeah, that will keep the British press busy over the weekend.
Linda Featheringill
@Amir_Khalid:
Oooh! I finally installed the reply button!
I guess the umpteenth time is a charm.
[I’m trying to get into the 21st Century before I die. It might be a tight race. :-)]
me
@Violet: You didn’t get them mixed up. He was the editor of NotW before the Mirror but there’s evidence that there was bad stuff going on while he was at the Mirror and none (yet) while he was at NotW.
Menzies
@Amir_Khalid:
Ah, and here I thought you were just going for a pun off schadenfreude. Just goes to show how long it’s been since I’ve known my German.
General Stuck
Resigning Pre emptive to a US investigation has a bad smell to it, even if he claims a Ken Lay defense of being deaf dumb and blind, could be true, and so could the existence of the Santa Clause. We shall see. But if any employee of Murdoch had anything to to with hacking the communications in this country, like in GB, then this could be the biggest scandal since Watergate, and could be bigger than that.
And if 9-11 families were messed with, as has been alleged, Rupert and Co are finished in this country, or at least gravely wounded as the pol force for the GOP. They say Roger Ailes used to call George Bush regular for whatever reason, during the time the Bush administration thought they ruled the universe for life, and packed all the hubris that mindset implies.
Violet
@General Stuck:
If they hacked into 9-11 victims’ phones or families’ phones, there will be hell to pay. The American public won’t stand for it. I don’t think even the hardest core wingnuts would be able to explain it away.
Davis X. Machina
@Violet:
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Violet
@Davis X. Machina:
LOL. They’ll try, but I don’t think it will work. The average person will see it for the horror that it is. There will always be the 27%, but outside of those idiots, not many people would support that kind of activity.
JPL
Stuck and Violet, It doesn’t matter if they hacked the phones of 9-11 families because us Southerners will blame the brits not the good folks at fox news. This is just a witch hunt…
btw.sorry about the little girl whose parents thought she might be alive cuz her voice mails were deleted. That really is sad and I’m sure she is with god now but that has nothing to do with fox news.
EDIT… Personally if I were Milly Dowler’s dad, when Murdoch showed his face today, I would have smacked it.
Roger Moore
@Tom Q:
You were cast of into the dark a long time ago. May
GodFSM have mercy on your soul.danimal
@Linda Featheringill: I haz REPLY now, also too!!!!
Watch out, I’m a repressed replyer with a weekend pass.
Royston Vasey
@50 General Stuck.
Yes, you are quite right. This doesn’t pass the smell test.
As I said upthread, this story has legs. Could as big/bigger than Watergate.
However, even if this brings the eventual folding of News Corp, Fox News will survive. By this I mean that Fox has proven the demand for its product, so Ailies will take the whole operation away from Murdoch (it will be sold on as a going concern), and start over as Fox II – The Empire Strikes Back (or should that be Fox II – Electric Bugaloo?).
Royston Vasey
@56 danimal
I haz no reply on my Safari/iMac
=(
Violet
@JPL:
True enough, but there’s no way Ailes’ hands are clean. We’ll just have to see how it plays out. If Ailes falls, all bets are off.
Roger Moore
@Violet:
Then you haven’t spent much time observing your garden variety wingnut. I’m guessing that Fox already has several explanations of why it was OK ready to go, and the wingnuts who watch Faux News will swallow them whole. My prediction for one of them: News Corpse was doing a public service by making sure they hadn’t just pretended to be there that day so they could collect death benefits.
Violet
@Royston Vasey:
Does Fox News make any money? Or is it subsidized by other News Corpse concerns? If it’s spun off, how will they keep themselves going? Will another corporation want to take on such an organization, tainted by association?
JPL
Did Fox news spend more time this week talking about Mrs. Obama’s hamburger than they did about their boss?
Enquiring minds want to know…
Edit..Violet, I do not have the numbers but TV and TV news is very profitable that’s why Murdoch want total control of Sky.
Violet
@Roger Moore:
If it comes out that the conservative 9-11 victims’ families had their phones hacked too, I don’t think they’ll be very happy about it.
I know Fox will try to spin it, but somehow I think hacking into victims’ phones is beyond the pale and won’t stand up to the scrutiny. It’s not just saying the victims are cheating, it’s actively hacking into someone’s phone (if it happened). It’s just not supportable.
General Stuck
Yes, I agree. The twenty seven percenter loyalists will keep them in business, but their political power, such as it is now, will be damaged considerably, depending how far this goes into the GOP proper. We shall see.
Dennis SGMM
The explanation will be that in 1947 a Democrat overheard two Republicans talking on a party line so both sides do it.
JPL
Violet, I don’t agree about the 9-11 victim investigation causing the downfall of Fox. It will become a big story in the north but I don’t see the south caring because Murdoch is not a scary Muslim. I hate to sound so negative but I fear folks will say they all do it and the communists are just trying to get rid of Fox News.
EDIT.. I still would like to see a comparison about the time spent talking about hamburgers compared to hacking…
Dennis SGMM
@General Stuck:
I wish that I could be that optimistic. Fox is the best thing that’s happened to the GOP since the Southern Strategy. My money says that the Gopers will give up being fat before they give up Fox.
scav
Anybody else getting the feeling of large dangerous objects threatening to hurtle down upon the Met. Police very soon? I was hearing ominous creaking from that series of dams as well today.
Amir_Khalid
A fortnight ago Rupert Murdoch was in his pomp, Les Hinton and Rebekah Brooks were the big wheels at Dow Jones and News International respectively, and NoTW was the biggest Sunday paper on the planet in English. Quite a bit has happened since.
Now, this scandal in the UK was years in the making; only in these few weeks did it start gathering so much momentum. So I don’t expect the FBI to turn up anything especially heinous right away. But I’d keep an eye on the big guns at News Corp. The more you see them sweating at the collar, the greater the chance that they’ve got big snd seriously damaging shit to hide.
Roger Moore
@Violet:
I’m not saying they’ll have just one excuse. In addition to blaming the victim, they’ll claim it was a few rogue employees, the responsible people have been fired, all the news companies do it, and it’s a frame job by the liberals to run us out of business. The true believers will accept some or all of those arguments- even the ones that contradict each other, given their capability for cognitive dissonance- and keep watching. Given that Fox viewers are already selected for being true believers, they’ll lose a lot less viewership than you expect.
FlipYrWhig
I agree with Roger. It would simply become, “Yes, it was bad. And they dealt with it. But now everyone’s piling on to silence Fox’s brave opposing views, and we’re not gonna let that happen!”
scav
I think I saw a ChiTrib commenter going on about how the NOtW was a liberal rag that deserved it.
Joel
Newscorp’s shares haven’t dropped that much in light of their historical volatility, but that might be because of the $5 billion buyback from Murdoch himself (or ~10% of the market cap). Is that final yet?
burnspbesq
@Tom Q:
Yes. Justice is sometimes cruel, but always fair.
danimal
@Royston Vasey: Royston: Follow the links from comment #14.
It worked!
Royston Vasey
@61 Violet
Fox news was on course to make $700m profit in 2010
See this Business Insider article.
I would say for that amount of profit any tainted associations would be quickly forgotten about in a sold off Nu-Fox.
Violet
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, you could be right. But if it wasn’t just 9-11 victims, but, say, the phone of a blonde, southern girl who went missing and later turned up dead (just like the poor girl in the UK), that might be different. Maybe they hacked into the phones of the Bush administration. Maybe they hacked into the phones of a southern Republican governor. Who knows what an investigation might turn up.
Maude
@FlipYrWhig:
IF there was News Corpse hacking of the 9/11 kind, then Fox News as part of the Corpse will be the Richard M. Nixon of 2011.
Royston Vasey
@75 danimal – Trust me to be using Safari!
I’ll have to switch to Chrome.
quannlace
Lordie, just when you don’t think these Fox&Friends can’t get any more juvenile, now they sound like they’re reading from a kid’s picture book.
“Yes, somebody did something bad. Something vewwy, vewwy bad!”
WaterGirl
General Stuck
I read an article on-line and it was so poorly written that I couldn’t tell if he only resigned rom the washington post or if he had also resigned from his top position at Dow Jones.
The reason he gave for his resignation is that he had NOT known all this was happening.
MazeDancer
@Royston Vasey:
Download FireFox. Patch it with monkeyboy’s amazing fix. Either keep two browsers open, with Firefox just on Balloon-Juice. Or go all FireFox for a while.
Every now and then I use Safari for something at some sites. It’s good to have a couple of browser options.
FireFox for Mac:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/new/
WaterGirl
@ Royston Vasey
Yeah, I use Safari, too, but it’s really easy to reply without the button.
Go to the box to create a reply. Type the @ symbol, then a space, then the screen name of the person you want to reply to. (you can copy the name & paste it in if you prefer)
Then go to the comment you want to reply to and Ctrl-click on the word “Link” that’s next to the time stamp. Select “Copy LInk” (7th item on the list).
Then go back to the reply you have started, highlight the name of the person you are replying to, click “link” and paste the link you just copied into the box that comes up.
Then type your reply.
It’s very simple – it takes much longer to type the instructions that it does to create the reply. :-)
Royston Vasey
@ WaterGirl ok That worked! thanks
WaterGirl
@ Royston Vasey
Yay!
scav
BJ is now boot camp for learning HTML. cunning plan that.
Royston Vasey
@ WaterGirl I wonder how much truth there is to this Portfolio story from 3.5 years ago about Fox’s Brain Room? (h/t Crooks & Liars)
It might garner some more investigation now.
WaterGirl
@ Royston Vasey
I have high hopes that the DOJ will be all over this. Some days I read about allt he ways that this country has gone off the rails and just shake my head as I look at the computer screen. Today is definitely one of those days.
I will now attempt to distract myself by walking away from the internet and watching some shows on Tivo. :-)
Liberty60
People please-
These are people who think Jesus rode a dinosaur, who think white people are the oppressed victims, who think that Obama is plotting to herd them all into FEMA camps and confiscate their Ameros- (if only!).
There just isn’t any cognitive dissonence strong enough to overcome thair faith.
piratedan
@WaterGirl: I wish WG I wish, but since they let the Bushies walk without any repercussions for torturing terrorists, and the alacrity with which they’ve gone after Massey Mining and BP for their worker killing gaffes doesn’t give me much hope, but hey, the press, they do love them some scandal now….
RossInDetroit
The only thing that can hurt Rupert, really, is the markets. If investors get wind of major prosecutions they’ll drop him like a tainted egg salad sandwich. If it goes low enough someone will break it up and sell off the parts. The bits will still be evil, but with fewer people and resources.
CaliCat
Love that Weezer album.