Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans in disarray!

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Everybody saw this coming.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

We will not go back.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

“But what about the lurkers?”

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: A Song for Doug Mataconis

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91Comments

  2. 2.

    beltane

    That’s not fair. I’m sure Erick Erickson is perfectly loyal to his country, the Confederate States of America.

  4. 4.

    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.

  5. 5.

    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.

  6. 6.

    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?

  10. 10.

    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.

  12. 12.

    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!

  14. 14.

    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.

  15. 15.

    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.

  16. 16.

    Violet

    @Royston Vasey:

    More News Corp news, Les Hinton, CEO of Dow Jones, has resigned. He’s been with Murdock for 52 years!

    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:

    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.

    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.

  19. 19.

    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?”)

  23. 23.

    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””

  25. 25.

    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.

  26. 26.

    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.

  27. 27.

    Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen

    that could be the beginning of the end for the old git and his corrosive influence on American news media and public affairs ^the many fReichtards attached to Ruppie’s teats screaming about The Government Trampling 1st Am. Freedumbs.

    Fixellated.

  28. 28.

    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?

  29. 29.

    Tom Q

    Amir_Khalid@14: What about us poor slobs with Internet Explorer? Are we cast off into the dark forever?

  32. 32.

    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.

  34. 34.

    Martin

    What about us poor slobs with Internet Explorer? Are we cast off into the dark forever?

    Oh, if wishing made it so…

    /web developer

  35. 35.

    Chris G

    @Jacy: Isn’t using the words “smoke rock” in and of itself confirmation that one does, in fact, smoke rock?

  36. 36.

    MattR

    @General Stuck: From the CNN article on Hinton’s resignation

    Before heading up Dow Jones, Hinton preceded Brooks as the executive chairman of News International during the years News of the World was allegedly hacking into voicemails of British celebrities and politicians as well as a murdered teen girl and the father of a bombing victim.

  37. 37.

    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.

  38. 38.

    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.

  39. 39.

    Violet

    @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.

    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.

  40. 40.

    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.

  41. 41.

    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.

  42. 42.

    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.

  46. 46.

    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.

  48. 48.

    General Stuck

    Les Hinton was executive chairman of News Corp in the UK from 1995-2007.

    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.

  49. 49.

    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.

  50. 50.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Violet:

    I don’t think even the hardest core wingnuts would be able to explain it away.

    I find your lack of faith disturbing.

  51. 51.

    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.

  52. 52.

    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.

  53. 53.

    Roger Moore

    @Tom Q:

    What about us poor slobs with Internet Explorer? Are we cast off into the dark forever?

    You were cast of into the dark a long time ago. May God FSM have mercy on your soul.

  55. 55.

    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?).

  57. 57.

    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.

  58. 58.

    Roger Moore

    @Violet:

    I don’t think even the hardest core wingnuts would be able to explain it away.

    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.

  59. 59.

    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?

  60. 60.

    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.

  61. 61.

    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.

  62. 62.

    General Stuck

    Fox News will survive. By this I mean that Fox has proven the demand for its product

    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.

  63. 63.

    Dennis SGMM

    The explanation will be that in 1947 a Democrat overheard two Republicans talking on a party line so both sides do it.

  64. 64.

    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…

  65. 65.

    Dennis SGMM

    @General Stuck:

    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.

    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.

  66. 66.

    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.

  67. 67.

    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.

  68. 68.

    Roger Moore

    @Violet:

    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.

    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.

  69. 69.

    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!”

  70. 70.

    scav

    I think I saw a ChiTrib commenter going on about how the NOtW was a liberal rag that deserved it.

  71. 71.

    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?

  72. 72.

    burnspbesq

    @Tom Q:

    What about us poor slobs with Internet Explorer? Are we cast off into the dark forever?

    Yes. Justice is sometimes cruel, but always fair.

  75. 75.

    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.

  76. 76.

    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.

  78. 78.

    quannlace

    ‘look, this happened a long time ago, at a tabloid, in London, somebody did something really bad,’

    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!”

  79. 79.

    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.

  81. 81.

    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. :-)

  85. 85.

    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)

    Has Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls? A disgrunted former Fox News producer claims he has the capability thanks to a secret “brain room” that the network uses for “counterintelligence and black ops.”

    It might garner some more investigation now.

  86. 86.

    WaterGirl

    @ Royston Vasey

    It might garner some more investigation now.

    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. :-)

  87. 87.

    Liberty60

    I don’t think even the hardest core wingnuts would be able to explain it away.

    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.

  88. 88.

    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….

  89. 89.

    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.

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