Ink Lake

More March Crazy Than March Madness

From Conservapedia’s headline page today.

And here’s a story that Rick Santorum would appreciate.

At least they didn’t blame that damn liberal dark energy.

No. I Do Not.

Props to Igor Vamos. Tom Paine would be proud.

Home Run

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Metastasis

One long week ago, Carl Bernstein compared the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal to Watergate. He would know, and he is right.

What immediately flashed through my mind was John Dean’s comment to Richard Nixon, as recorded by the Oval Office taping system.

“I think that there's no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within - close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself.”

I didn’t write about it at the time because the day-job was keeping me busy, and also, it was so obviously true. It wasn’t ever the News Of The World scandal, or the Andy Coulson, Lee Hinton scandal, nor even the Rebeka Brooks scandal. It’s always been the Rupert Murdoch scandal. 

It was under Brooks that the News hacked the voice-mail of murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler. That fact was apparently unknown to the police at the time, but Brooks had been called to a meeting with Scotland Yard, where according to the Guardian, she was informed,

Brooks was summoned to a meeting at Scotland Yard where she was told that one of her most senior journalists, Alex Marunchak, had apparently agreed to use photographers and vans leased to the paper to run surveillance on behalf of Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery, two private investigators who were suspected of murdering another investigator, Daniel Morgan, when the latter was a partner of Rees’s in the firm Southern Investigations. The Yard saw this as a possible attempt to pervert the course of justice.

Brooks was also told of evidence that Marunchak had a corrupt relationship with Rees, who had been earning up to £150,000 a year selling confidential data to the News of the World. Police told her that a former employee of Rees had given them a statement alleging that some of these payments were diverted to Marunchak, who had been able to pay off his credit card and pay his child’s private school fees.

After her stint as editor of the News, she became the Sun’s first female-editor, and two years ago was  promoted to running Murdoch’s entire UK news business.

Reuters reports,

She became a favourite of Rupert, who put his arm around her and told reporters she was his top priority when he flew into London a week ago to take charge of the crisis shaking his global media empire News Corp .

The notion that he would be unaware of that, and later the hacking and the surveillance of the police themselves, is, as the president of Geritol (played by Martin Scorcese) in the perfect movie Quiz Show, says, “insulting.”

“That’s the kind of business-man I am.”

Criminals..Victims.. Such A Fine Line!

Fox News Commentator, Bob Dilenschneider..

“Citigroup, great bank. Bank of America, great bank. Are they getting the same kind of attention for hacking that took place less than a year ago that News Corp is getting today?”

First, Dilenschneider is confusing data hacking with breaking into people’s voice-mail boxes, but more importantly,as Wonkette notes,

“Yes, why ARE victims and criminals subjected to a different level of media scrutiny sometimes? That is very unfair!”

And Didlenschneider pouts,

“Murdoch, who owns it, has apologized, but some reason the public, the media keeps going over this again and again.”

What, like ACORN, or the Black Panthers, or Bill Ayers?

And of course, Fox host, Steve “Mouth-Full-of-Murdoch-Cock” Doocy, wholeheartedly agrees!

Perhaps My Favorite Cartoon

From an old New York Observer. I cut it out years ago and saved it; amazingly, I managed not to lose it. I mentioned it to someone the other day, and it occurred to me to scan it.

Goddamn It

The Times today with a great exposé of the rampant abuse that goes on at state-run facilities for the mentally disabled. Danny Hakim tells of humiliation, beatings, and death, at the hands of state employees.

Yet on a February afternoon in 2007, Jonathan, a skinny, autistic 13-year-old, was asphyxiated, slowly crushed to death in the back seat of a van by a state employee who had worked nearly 200 hours without a day off over 15 days. The employee, a ninth-grade dropout with a criminal conviction for selling marijuana, had been on duty during at least one previous episode of alleged abuse involving Jonathan.

“I could be a good king or a bad king,” he told the dying boy beneath him, according to court documents.

In the front seat of the van, the driver, another state worker at O. D. Heck, watched through the rear-view mirror but said little. He had been fired from four different private providers of services to the developmentally disabled before the state hired him to care for the same vulnerable population.

Kudos to Hakim and the Times. Yes, I have my frustrations with the paper (more in an upcoming post), and yes, I like blogs and blogging, but there’s no substitute for reporting like this. I hope everyone sees the value in news you actually pay for. Five bucks a week is a bargain.

Fron another section of the piece…

The Times asked the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities why Ms. Bishop and Mr. Morgese could not say what an assault was and why Ms. Maioriello’s supervisors had not forwarded her allegations to law enforcement.

The state disputed the framing of the question.

“Your characterization of these exchanges is not consistent with our understanding of the facts regarding those conversations,” an agency spokeswoman said, adding, “Without question, it is the agency policy that if a staff person hit an individual with a stick, law enforcement should be notified.”

The state was subsequently informed by The Times that a tape existed of the encounter, and shortly thereafter both Ms. Bishop and Mr. Morgese were removed from their positions. Ms. Bishop was reassigned to the central office, and Mr. Morgese was demoted and sent to a regional office.

Grow A Pair!

I wanted to touch briefly on the decision by a Brooklyn-based Yiddish newspaper, Di Tzeitung ,to ‘photoshop’ out, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and NSC Counterterrorism Director, Audrey Tomason, from a photograph released by the White House. The photo was taken in the Situation Room as President Obama and his senior staff monitored the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden.

The paper, after criticism, gave the excuse that “laws of modesty” prohibits them from publishing pictures of women.

 

Bullshit. First, although neither woman was dressed immodestly by any sane (or even Orthodox) standards, they could have chosen to blur the faces.

Instead, the editors totally removed the women from the photo. This is what the classical Romans called damnatio memoriae, seeking to obliterate a person from history. Why? Precisely because Clinton and Tomason were part of this history. These medieval jackasses sought to make these women, invisible, irrelevant.

Stalin liked to do that to too.

 

 

And what will happen when there is a female president? Di Tzeitung will show what... an empty Oval Office, an empty podium?

Also, in altering the photo, the paper violated the terms of its use — that it not be altered in any way. The putzes did apologize for that.

How do you like that Yiddish?

Rapture Doesn't Happen...Illiterate Journalists Still With Us

NY1’s website.

Fit For Print

Clyde Haberman, mild-mannered metropolitan reporter, who wrote the Times’s  “NYC Column” for sixteen years, is now blogging four days a week for the paper (and now website) of record. 

His e-column is called “The Day”. Check it out. (I don’t know if “e-column” is a word, but I like it.)