The Politics Thread - please direct all related posts here..

[mugzi]

Why do you want to go back to policies of the Bush administration which got us into this mess to begin with?

Is that you Jay Carney?

I think people on your side think if you can repeat a lie long enough that'll make it true.

What are these failed economic policies that got us the 5% unemployment and burgeoning economy b4 the great won took over?

Because anyone with half a brain knows why the economy tanked- mortgages and CDO's.

Subprime mortgages were greenlit by CLINTON vis a vis HUD, not Bush. And once banks were forced to lend money to those who didnt deserve it, the floodgates opened, greed went unchecked and markets collapsed.

If people expose themselves to reality and not socialist talking points fed to them ad nauseum by the MSM its easy to see the facts.

Can anyone say to quote Reagan that you are better off then you were 4 years ago????

This economy is Obamas not Bushes, he inherited a difficult situation and made it an impossible one. Thats not leadership, thats ineptitude or deliberate sabotage.

Since its obvious your going down with your parties ship Wingo why dont you cry racism about something the GOP is doing? Maybe that left wing tactic will save you guys again.

[duetta]

I wonder what the crazies are gonna do once Murdock is behind bars?

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2 ... ay_in.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/world ... olice.html

The French saved American democracy in 1781. The Brits get their turn in 2011-12.

[Pharmcat]

I wonder what the crazies are gonna do once Murdock is behind bars?

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2 ... ay_in.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/world ... olice.html

The French saved American democracy in 1781. The Brits get their turn in 2011-12.

its ridicolous if the cops were indeed taking bribes (which imo had to be happening)

[Pharmcat]

cain doing what he can do best

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011 ... osques.php

[ewingxmanstarks]

So nobody thinks that the New York times has informants that are cops on pay role?
C'mon please


The hacked 911 victims thing is simply made up.

Ruppert obviously has a huge target on him, but there has been no proof of any wrong doing, by himself.

[HarthorneWingo]

So nobody thinks that the New York times has informants that are cops on pay role?
C'mon please


The hacked 911 victims thing is simply made up.

Ruppert obviously has a huge target on him, but there has been no proof of any wrong doing, by himself.

Of course, Murdoch knew nothing. He's not very hands on anyhow.

As for the NY Times, no I don't. You see, the NY Times has journalism standards which is why guys like you and mugzi hate it so much.

[HarthorneWingo]

Why do you want to go back to policies of the Bush administration which got us into this mess to begin with?

Is that you Jay Carney?

I think people on your side think if you can repeat a lie long enough that'll make it true.

What are these failed economic policies that got us the 5% unemployment and burgeoning economy b4 the great won took over?

Because anyone with half a brain knows why the economy tanked- mortgages and CDO's.

Subprime mortgages were greenlit by CLINTON vis a vis HUD, not Bush. And once banks were forced to lend money to those who didnt deserve it, the floodgates opened, greed went unchecked and markets collapsed.

If people expose themselves to reality and not socialist talking points fed to them ad nauseum by the MSM its easy to see the facts.

Can anyone say to quote Reagan that you are better off then you were 4 years ago????

This economy is Obamas not Bushes, he inherited a difficult situation and made it an impossible one. Thats not leadership, thats ineptitude or deliberate sabotage.

Since its obvious your going down with your parties ship Wingo why dont you cry racism about something the GOP is doing? Maybe that left wing tactic will save you guys again.

Look, you can't have two wars, huge tax cuts and all this deregulation at the same time. Those are the problems (keep your eye on the ball, mugzi).

Continued tax cuts are not the solution. We've had 10 years of tax cuts .... where are the jobs?

[ewingxmanstarks]

Lol, if you don't think all news papers don't pay informants (including cops) for news...I don't know what to tell you.

Had this been a news paper the size of the sun times, and it wasn't news corp, than it would not be a story.

[Battery]

Look, you can't have two wars, huge tax cuts and all this deregulation at the same time. Those are the problems (keep your eye on the ball, mugzi).

Continued tax cuts are not the solution. We've had 10 years of tax cuts .... where are the jobs?

What you can't have is 1 in 7 people working for the US government if you plan on growing the economy. Right now nanny state Greece is at 1 in 5 which is where we're headed under Obama.

Regulation is taxes. Its just another fancy word so the government (Democrats) can tax you more and in the process hire more government workers (future Democrat voters) who do nothing but drain the economy and kill private business.

[mugzi]

Why do you want to go back to policies of the Bush administration which got us into this mess to begin with?

Is that you Jay Carney?

I think people on your side think if you can repeat a lie long enough that'll make it true.

What are these failed economic policies that got us the 5% unemployment and burgeoning economy b4 the great won took over?

Because anyone with half a brain knows why the economy tanked- mortgages and CDO's.

Subprime mortgages were greenlit by CLINTON vis a vis HUD, not Bush. And once banks were forced to lend money to those who didnt deserve it, the floodgates opened, greed went unchecked and markets collapsed.

If people expose themselves to reality and not socialist talking points fed to them ad nauseum by the MSM its easy to see the facts.

Can anyone say to quote Reagan that you are better off then you were 4 years ago????

This economy is Obamas not Bushes, he inherited a difficult situation and made it an impossible one. Thats not leadership, thats ineptitude or deliberate sabotage.

Since its obvious your going down with your parties ship Wingo why dont you cry racism about something the GOP is doing? Maybe that left wing tactic will save you guys again.

Look, you can't have two wars, huge tax cuts and all this deregulation at the same time. Those are the problems (keep your eye on the ball, mugzi).

Continued tax cuts are not the solution. We've had 10 years of tax cuts .... where are the jobs?

Two wars your man campaigned against then continued and actually upped the ante vis a vis troop surges and an unnecessary campaign which is going nowhere in Libya at a billion dollars in bombs a month.

There havent been tax cuts under this president, there was an extension of the Bush cuts through next year, which is creating uncertainty and keeping money the economy could use on the sidelines.

And yeah Mr.President where are the jobs? Unemployment was almost 2.5% less when you took office from its peak during your term and is still at an abysmal 9.2%.

Where is the democratic plan for economic growth? And growth of government is not growth. Taxing the evil wealthy is going to solve our spending problems right and eradicate our debt or even a quarter of such debt? Here's a hint- it wont. Look at the numbers liberals math is your friend.

Where is the ditch that Obama is supposed to be driving us out of? Or are we digging ourselves further into the ditch? Yep. We all know the answer to that one.

Care to guess how many presidents have won re-election in history with U/E/ above 8%???

None.





Nov 6th 2012 Im poppin bottles like the Mavericks.

[HarthorneWingo]

You can laugh all you want now. Trust me, I'll be laughing last.

Don't believe me when I'm telling you that your team is playing a losing hand. Hear from one of your own. Even this guy, Douthat, says republicans are f-ing up big time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/opini ... ef=opinion

Op-Ed Columnist
The Republican Retreat
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: July 17, 2011

In the negotiations over the debt ceiling, the Republican Party had everything mapped out except the endgame.

For months, Republican leaders used all the tools at their disposal — the anti-spending intensity of their base, the White House’s desire for a deal, the specter of dire consequences if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised — to leverage their way into a favorable position. Despite controlling just one house of Congress, they spent the spring and summer setting the agenda for the country: not whether to cut spending, but how deeply and how fast.

But last week, the Republican offensive suddenly collapsed in disarray. In the space of a few days, a party that once looked capable of pressing the White House into a deal that would have left liberals fuming found itself falling back on two less-palatable options instead: either a procedural gimmick that would try to pin the responsibility for raising the ceiling on President Obama, or a stand on principle that would risk plunging the American economy back into recession.

What went wrong? It turns out that Republicans didn’t have a plan for transitioning from the early phase of a high-stakes political negotiation, when the goal is to draw stark lines and force the other side to move your way, to the late phase, in which the public relations battle becomes crucial and the goal is to make the other side seem unreasonable, intransigent and even a little bit insane.

Winning the later phase doesn’t require making enormous compromises, or giving up the ground you’ve gained. But it requires at least the appearance of conciliation, and a few examples of concessions that you’re willing to (oh-so-magnanimously) make to those unreasonable ideologues in the other party.

For Republicans, this would have required one of two maneuvers: either modestly scaling back the size of the spending cuts they were seeking, or finding a few places in the tax code (the ethanol tax credit? the carried-interest loophole? those corporate jets the president keeps talking about?) where they could live with raising revenue by eliminating a tax break or capping a deduction.

For months, I had assumed that the Republican leadership would be able to find support within its caucus for option No. 2. Based on John Boehner’s brief flirtation with a “grand bargain” that would have included tax reform, the speaker of the House thought so as well.

But based on how quickly he abandoned that flirtation, it appears we were both mistaken. The result was a hanging curveball for President Obama, who spent last week posing as the Last Reasonable Man in Washington, contrasting his willingness to compromise on entitlements with the House Republicans’ intransigence on taxes.

To conservatives, this has been a galling spectacle. A president who spent his first two years in office taking spending to a historic high is accusing them of fiscal irresponsibility? A president who spent the spring demagoguing House Republicans for their willingness to restructure Medicare is citing a much more modest set of cuts as evidence of his fiscal seriousness?

But this fury misses the point. Obama has been playing the reasonability card so successfully because his opponents won’t (or can’t) play one of their own.

It’s not that Republicans needed to tug their forelock and go along with whatever grand bargain the White House whipped up. But to win the endgame, they needed something they were willing to concede, something they could tout in public as an example of meeting the Democrats partway.

Their inability to make even symbolic concessions has turned a winning hand into a losing one. A majority of Americans want to close the deficit primarily with spending cuts — which is to say, they’re primed to side with conservatives in the debt-ceiling debate. But in trying to turn that “primarily” into a “completely,” the right has squandered this advantage. By 48 percent to 34 percent, a Quinnipiac poll found last week, Americans will blame Republicans if debt-ceiling gridlock precipitates an economic crisis.

In the end, the threat of such a backlash will probably impel Republicans to make some kind of concession anyway, if they don’t admit that’s what they’re doing. (The maneuver that Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid are working on, for instance, would reportedly cut spending by $1.5 trillion and then let the president extend the debt ceiling on his own, effectively shaving about $500 billion off the spending cuts that Republicans were originally seeking.)

By backing into a compromise and shrouding it in procedural gimmickry, Republican legislators may hope to throw the Tea Party’s watchdogs off the scent. But both the politics and the substance of such a deal would probably be worse for conservatives than the kind of bargain that might have been available otherwise — if more Republicans had only recognized that sometimes a well-chosen concession can be the better part of valor.

[duetta]

Turns out Murdock is running a defacto-crime organization, with "Guido" (and as an Italian-American, I can use that phase) Al-Capone wanna-bees at its head!

Who will become the Elliot Ness figure that puts these criminals element behind bars, by whatever means necessary?

Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel
By DAVID CARR

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

(snip)

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits that chipped away at the bottom line.

And while Mr. Murdoch might reasonably maintain that he did not have knowledge of the culture of permission created by Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks, by now he has 655 million reasons to know that Mr. Carlucci colored outside the lines.

So what became of him? Mr. Carlucci, as it happens, became the publisher of The New York Post in 2005 and continues to serve as head of News America, which doesn’t exactly square with Mr. Murdoch’s recently stated desire to “absolutely establish our integrity in the eyes of the public.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/busin ... ispel.html

[mugzi]

You can laugh all you want now. Trust me, I'll be laughing last.

Don't believe me when I'm telling you that your team is playing a losing hand. Hear from one of your own. Even this guy, Douthat, says republicans are f-ing up big time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/opini ... ef=opinion

Op-Ed Columnist
The Republican Retreat
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: July 17, 2011

In the negotiations over the debt ceiling, the Republican Party had everything mapped out except the endgame.

For months, Republican leaders used all the tools at their disposal — the anti-spending intensity of their base, the White House’s desire for a deal, the specter of dire consequences if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised — to leverage their way into a favorable position. Despite controlling just one house of Congress, they spent the spring and summer setting the agenda for the country: not whether to cut spending, but how deeply and how fast.

But last week, the Republican offensive suddenly collapsed in disarray. In the space of a few days, a party that once looked capable of pressing the White House into a deal that would have left liberals fuming found itself falling back on two less-palatable options instead: either a procedural gimmick that would try to pin the responsibility for raising the ceiling on President Obama, or a stand on principle that would risk plunging the American economy back into recession.

What went wrong? It turns out that Republicans didn’t have a plan for transitioning from the early phase of a high-stakes political negotiation, when the goal is to draw stark lines and force the other side to move your way, to the late phase, in which the public relations battle becomes crucial and the goal is to make the other side seem unreasonable, intransigent and even a little bit insane.

Winning the later phase doesn’t require making enormous compromises, or giving up the ground you’ve gained. But it requires at least the appearance of conciliation, and a few examples of concessions that you’re willing to (oh-so-magnanimously) make to those unreasonable ideologues in the other party.

For Republicans, this would have required one of two maneuvers: either modestly scaling back the size of the spending cuts they were seeking, or finding a few places in the tax code (the ethanol tax credit? the carried-interest loophole? those corporate jets the president keeps talking about?) where they could live with raising revenue by eliminating a tax break or capping a deduction.

For months, I had assumed that the Republican leadership would be able to find support within its caucus for option No. 2. Based on John Boehner’s brief flirtation with a “grand bargain” that would have included tax reform, the speaker of the House thought so as well.

But based on how quickly he abandoned that flirtation, it appears we were both mistaken. The result was a hanging curveball for President Obama, who spent last week posing as the Last Reasonable Man in Washington, contrasting his willingness to compromise on entitlements with the House Republicans’ intransigence on taxes.

To conservatives, this has been a galling spectacle. A president who spent his first two years in office taking spending to a historic high is accusing them of fiscal irresponsibility? A president who spent the spring demagoguing House Republicans for their willingness to restructure Medicare is citing a much more modest set of cuts as evidence of his fiscal seriousness?

But this fury misses the point. Obama has been playing the reasonability card so successfully because his opponents won’t (or can’t) play one of their own.

It’s not that Republicans needed to tug their forelock and go along with whatever grand bargain the White House whipped up. But to win the endgame, they needed something they were willing to concede, something they could tout in public as an example of meeting the Democrats partway.

Their inability to make even symbolic concessions has turned a winning hand into a losing one. A majority of Americans want to close the deficit primarily with spending cuts — which is to say, they’re primed to side with conservatives in the debt-ceiling debate. But in trying to turn that “primarily” into a “completely,” the right has squandered this advantage. By 48 percent to 34 percent, a Quinnipiac poll found last week, Americans will blame Republicans if debt-ceiling gridlock precipitates an economic crisis.

In the end, the threat of such a backlash will probably impel Republicans to make some kind of concession anyway, if they don’t admit that’s what they’re doing. (The maneuver that Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid are working on, for instance, would reportedly cut spending by $1.5 trillion and then let the president extend the debt ceiling on his own, effectively shaving about $500 billion off the spending cuts that Republicans were originally seeking.)

By backing into a compromise and shrouding it in procedural gimmickry, Republican legislators may hope to throw the Tea Party’s watchdogs off the scent. But both the politics and the substance of such a deal would probably be worse for conservatives than the kind of bargain that might have been available otherwise — if more Republicans had only recognized that sometimes a well-chosen concession can be the better part of valor.

Another faux conservative azzhat you trot out from the NY Slimes. As if that means anything.

I dont expect your boy to quit acting like a petulant child who isnt getting his way. But I also dont expect the country club RINO pink ties like Boehner to stand up and show real backbone either.

And if you're so confident Wingo ONCE AGAIN ill challenge you to a bet, loser leaves the board for good- that there will be no re-election for the Kenyan, NWO, marxist, manchurian candidate.

Put your money where your misinformed mouth is Wingo.

[mugzi]

Turns out Murdock is running a defacto-crime organization, with "Guido" (and as an Italian-American, I can use that phase) Al-Capone wanna-bees at its head!

Who will become the Elliot Ness figure that puts these criminals element behind bars, by whatever means necessary?

Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel
By DAVID CARR

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

(snip)

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits that chipped away at the bottom line.

And while Mr. Murdoch might reasonably maintain that he did not have knowledge of the culture of permission created by Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks, by now he has 655 million reasons to know that Mr. Carlucci colored outside the lines.

So what became of him? Mr. Carlucci, as it happens, became the publisher of The New York Post in 2005 and continues to serve as head of News America, which doesn’t exactly square with Mr. Murdoch’s recently stated desire to “absolutely establish our integrity in the eyes of the public.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/busin ... hat-money-
cant-dispel.html

Care to take off your partisan shades for a moment and answer this question?

Why is this such a big story to liberals as opposed to OPERATION FAST AND FURIOUS, an ILLEGAL WAR IN LIBYA and a LETHARGIC ECONOMY?

Here's a hint because the first two could mean impeachment?





And I could care less about Fox news they're a faux conservative company controlled almost 20% by a Saudi prince, hence their softball approach on terror related stories.

[mugzi]

Here's another reason why we need to split the country in two and let the liberals rot in their own self designed Babylon.

Crime Rates in Liberal and Conservative Cities Compared
Home Facts ^ | 21 June 2011 | Home Facts

Not long ago, we had an interesting discussion on the 25 most liberal and conservative cities in America based on voting behavior. That thread is on the source URL.

I showed this list to a liberal acquaintence and suggested we compare crime rates. Of course, he tried to dismiss it stating factors other than liberal voting accounted for the high crime rates. We agreed to compare just the top five cities in each category just to sample his theory. So I am listing the top 5 cities in each category followed by the (total crime rate, violent crime rate, property crime rate). A score of 100.00 is exactly the national average. Thus, a score of 50 would be half the national average, a score of 200 would be twice the national average.

These can be verified on the Home Facts website.

Most Liberal

Detroit, Michigan (445.47, 503.51, 310.04)
Gary, Indiana (404.09, 490.36, 202.79
Berkeley, California (159.6, 135.67, 215.43)
Washington, DC (283.93, 325.02, 188.06)
Oakland, California (382.01, 420.48, 292.24)

Most Conservative

Provo, Utah (49.9, 43.92, 63.86)
Lubbock, Texas (159.19, 153.1, 173.41)
Abiline, Texas (163.21, 178.73, 127.01)
Hileah, Florida (99.13, 81.3, 140.73)
Plano, Texas (53.46, 40.56, 83.54)

[ewingxmanstarks]

^interesting

[Capn'O]

Here's another reason why we need to split the country in two and let the liberals rot in their own self designed Babylon.

Crime Rates in Liberal and Conservative Cities Compared
Home Facts ^ | 21 June 2011 | Home Facts

Not long ago, we had an interesting discussion on the 25 most liberal and conservative cities in America based on voting behavior. That thread is on the source URL.

I showed this list to a liberal acquaintence and suggested we compare crime rates. Of course, he tried to dismiss it stating factors other than liberal voting accounted for the high crime rates. We agreed to compare just the top five cities in each category just to sample his theory. So I am listing the top 5 cities in each category followed by the (total crime rate, violent crime rate, property crime rate). A score of 100.00 is exactly the national average. Thus, a score of 50 would be half the national average, a score of 200 would be twice the national average.

These can be verified on the Home Facts website.

Most Liberal

Detroit, Michigan (445.47, 503.51, 310.04)
Gary, Indiana (404.09, 490.36, 202.79
Berkeley, California (159.6, 135.67, 215.43)
Washington, DC (283.93, 325.02, 188.06)
Oakland, California (382.01, 420.48, 292.24)

Most Conservative

Provo, Utah (49.9, 43.92, 63.86)
Lubbock, Texas (159.19, 153.1, 173.41)
Abiline, Texas (163.21, 178.73, 127.01)
Hileah, Florida (99.13, 81.3, 140.73)
Plano, Texas (53.46, 40.56, 83.54)

...



...



Oh wait, you're seriouly syggesting a simple cause and effect chain here.Wow.

[mugzi]

Oh and the laughing shows you're seriously trying to assert logic when you're devoid of any.

Why don't you in all of your regressive I mean progressive omnipotence dispel these statistics? And try to do it without the standard talking points such as economic disparity, allocation of govt resources and any other smoke and mirrors your ilk resort to.

Why wouldn't a criminal set up shop in a liberal city or state? After all the criminal to the liberal isn't the problem, the system is.

It wouldn't be so boring if I wasn't always right, but I feel like Mike Tyson boxing against a featherweight, none of you intellectuals ever argue with intellect. You obfuscate and hide behind cliches and your own elitist commie groupthink.

[HarthorneWingo]

Turns out Murdock is running a defacto-crime organization, with "Guido" (and as an Italian-American, I can use that phase) Al-Capone wanna-bees at its head!

Who will become the Elliot Ness figure that puts these criminals element behind bars, by whatever means necessary?

Troubles That Money Can’t Dispel
By DAVID CARR

“Bury your mistakes,” Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don’t stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

(snip)

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits that chipped away at the bottom line.

And while Mr. Murdoch might reasonably maintain that he did not have knowledge of the culture of permission created by Mr. Hinton and Ms. Brooks, by now he has 655 million reasons to know that Mr. Carlucci colored outside the lines.

So what became of him? Mr. Carlucci, as it happens, became the publisher of The New York Post in 2005 and continues to serve as head of News America, which doesn’t exactly square with Mr. Murdoch’s recently stated desire to “absolutely establish our integrity in the eyes of the public.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/busin ... ispel.html

plus




I can't wait to hear Bernie singing like a bird and then seeing Rudy in an orange jumpsuit.

[ewingxmanstarks]

Talk about jumping to conclusions.