The Murdochs: The Buck Stops Near
BY SAM FIELDS
Like all well-healed witnesses, James and Rupert Murdoch had pat answers for most of the questions thrown at them by members of Parliament.
All their answers boiled down to: The acts were wrong, but we did not know about them and therefore you can’t blame us.
“Mistakes were made.”
Rupert Murdoch
It remains to be seen whether they are telling the truth.
Their argument that News of the World was less than 1% of Newscorp makes about as much sense as Richard Nixon proclaiming that Watergate payoffs were less than 1% of the money spent by The Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP).
Or Bill Clinton defending himself by pointing out that Paula Jones was less than 1% of the women he was schtupping.
For decades, Rupert Murdoch has made a living by invading the privacy of the famous and not so famous.
As bad as any was the repeated attempts by Murdoch’s News International papers to obtain anything damaging on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
This was not a News of the World effort. It included reporters from the Sunday Times posing as others to obtain the bank records of Brown by subterfuge. It also includes somebody from the same paper hacking into the files of Brown’s attorney. And Murdoch’s Sun obtained the medical records of Brown’s son only to plaster the fact the child has cystic fibrosis all over the front page.
The British public, lawmakers and legitimate journalists are understandably angry.
Am I experiencing a major schadenfreude moment? You better believe it.
Satan’s Spawn
Orlando’s Casey Anthony killed her kid because it was interfering in her dating.
Port St. Lucie’s Tyler Hadley bludgeoned his parents to death so he could throw a party.
It’s frightening to imagine the offspring of that union.
Gay Muslins
Three cheers for U.S. Deputy Ambassador Richard Hoagland who held a gay rights meeting at our embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Local homophobes, which is most Pakis, denounced him.
First of all the U.S. embassy is not legally Pakistan. Like all embassies it is the lawful territory of the embassy’s home country.
Secondly, a country that gives life prison sentences for gay love deserves to be called on to the carpet.
It would have been a nice gesture if the American Embassy in 1930’s Germany had held public Seders and Purim festivals.
The Real ‘Final Frontier’
Whether you are talking about Star Trek, Star Wars, Galactica or a host of other space sci fi shows, one thing is always missing.
Hint: Without it nothing happens in or out of space.
Answer: Taxes.
Put another way…Where does all the $$$$ coming from to pay for Star Fleet? From our pockets!
I bring this up because as I am writing this the final Shuttle flight is landing…Thank god.
Far from advancing space travel, the Shuttle program and its first cousin the Space Station have wastefully sucked up practically all the space exploration money for the last thirty years.
It was expected to cost $43 billion and produce 50 launches a year. It proved to cost $196 billion and had a total of 143 launches. That’s about $1.3 billion per flight!
With relatively small amounts of seed money NASA has been encouraging a number of private flight programs who are using there own matching money. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_spaceflight.
Quicker and cheaper, these are the folks who will “go boldly where no man [or woman] has gone before.” .
July 25th, 2011 at 8:21 am
NASA tried ‘Better, Faster, Cheaper’ in the mid-90s which led to a whole slew of crashes and miscalculations.
July 25th, 2011 at 10:23 am
You forget, Fields, that every dollar spent on the space program is recycled into society in the form of jobs and research. Maybe you rather it go to food stamps and welfare?
July 25th, 2011 at 4:20 pm
Dear Tiny.
Sounds like a blanket defense for government inefficiency, waste and fraud—all of which profit someone or some group.
We lost tens of billions and thirty years of space exploration by putting all our eggs in this dead end basket.
We figured how to land on the moon in one decade. Can you really maintain a straight face and suggest that the thirty years of shuttles has produced anything worthwhile other than the Hubble telescope… which could have been launched and serviced with upgraded 60’s technology.
Privatizing of the space program will help us get back on track. The NASA bureaucracy long ago outlived its usefulness.