(Mike Thompsom via GoComics.com)
Since it’s never a wise idea to go off-topic during the Ten Minutes’ Hate Du Jour… What’s going on in your neighborhood tonight?
This post is in: Open Threads
by DougJ| 90 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Remind me who the actual Speaker of the House is again:
Congressional Democrats took aim Thursday at conservative Republicans who oppose raising the federal debt ceiling, with Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) charging that a top GOP negotiator, Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), “shouldn’t even be at the table” in crucial White House talks on the issue.
Can you imagine Steny Hoyer even thinking about pulling this shit on Nancy Smash? If he did it in a dream, he’d wake up and apologize.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 47 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
It was a long, hard slog against the heathens, but this true believer finally earned the right to wear his religious headgear in his drivers’ license picture.
Open thread by request.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Assholes, hoocoodanode, Our Failed Media Experiment
If it’s true that what’s bad for Fox News must be good for America, then at least we have some tasty schadenfreude to distract us from the Republican FailParade in DC. Yesterday, the Guardian (may its shadow never grow less!) shared the plaints of the upper-crust former-WSJ-owners who are shocked, shocked to discover that Mr. Rupert Murdoch is a silky-tongued liar (they already knew he wasn’t a gentleman), and painted an untender portrait of the would-be-patrician clan “descend[ing] from deal to disaster: political and public backlash raises doubts over the family’s hold on its empire”.
This morning, they have good news for sane people on this side of the Atlantic:
Members of Congress from both major parties have waded in to the affair with warnings of “severe” consequences if a report in the Daily Mirror that the News of the World attempted to access the voicemails of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks or other Americans is true.
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Two New York members of the US House of Representatives, Pete King and Louise Slaughter, demanded an immediate justice department investigation of whether US laws were broken, particularly in relation to any attempt to hack in to the phones of terrorist victims.
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King, who is the Republican chairman of the House homeland security committee, said in a letter to the FBI director, Robert Mueller, that journalists should face felony charges if evidence is found. […] __
The calls for an investigation come as Murdoch faces pressure from a group of American shareholders, including pension funds and banks, who have taken legal action saying it is “inconceivable” that the News Corp’s board was unaware of the phone hacking and other illicit practices, and accusing him of using the company for “personal and political objectives”.
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Senator Frank Lautenberg has asked the securities and exchange commission and the justice department to investigate whether US laws against the payment of bribes abroad were broken by Murdoch’s parent company.
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In a letter to the attorney general, Eric Holder, Lautenberg said allegations that NoW journalists bribed UK police officers are potentially a breach of the US’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which bars American companies from paying bribes abroad…
Our old friend Rep. Peter ‘The Mucker’ King, scourge of all anti-American foreign terrorists (with whom he doesn’t share a close ethnic affinity)!
It’s one thing to have wimpy Democrats like toothless old Jay Rockefeller whining about “offensive” invasions of privacy, but GOPers like King have no truck with pious phrases about looking forward, not back.
The sharks have scented blood in the water now. Surely when Tina Brown’s sensitive celebrity antennae permit her to unleash Howie Kurtz, foremost of all proud media courtiers, upon the legendary indiscretions of Murdoch’s American outlets, it portends trouble even for the previously impregnable Roger Ailes…
This post is in: Open Threads
I think I have depressed myself enough to open a bottle of wine.
On the other hand, the fact that Patton Oswalt linked us is very cool. Because he’s FUCKING AWESOME. In fact, every time I listen to liner music on NPR I think of Oswalt.
*** Update ***
I know what we all need right about now:
I feel better already.
by Randinho| 114 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
For which Cinderella will the clock strike twelve? Have at it.
This post is in: Open Threads
Apropos of even less than usual, I was just walking down the street one day, when I came across this message:
So, with a h/t to M. Magritte, and a deep felt need for just a touch of the inconsequential absurd — to wash away all the absurdity with teeth our politics offers us these days — let’s enjoy a surreal open thread.
Oh — and a PS: I find it oddly perfect that the Kabbalah center on whose side this notice appeared vanished very shortly after I took this pic.