So wait, was the British Parliament effectively at Murdoch’s beck and call? Imagine the uproar if a US Congressional committee traveled “privately” to take a foreign news magnate’s testimony. Or would that just be called a junket with justification?
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So sad. Another “national Tea Party convention” cancelled due to lack of interest… and funding, since it was billed as a true grassroots-organized event not supported by one of the AstroTurf groups that pay for the buses and the wall-to-wall FOX News coverage.
Organizers of the Freedom Jamboree announced Wednesday that they have canceled the tea party convention planned for this fall, citing low registration.
They had hoped the event would serve as a stage for Republican presidential candidates to court the conservative movement, and two — Rep. Michele Bachmann Minn. and former Sen. Rick Santorum Pa. — had already confirmed they would attend.
The weekend of reflection and strategizing was scheduled for Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 in Kansas City, Kan., and included a straw poll. Twenty-one local tea party groups started it with the intent to reclaim the movement from national umbrella groups and offer an alternative to the annual fall tea party rally on the National Mall.“We were doing it because we were fed up with the infighting that these umbrella groups have done in 2010,†William Temple, a lead organizer who lives in Georgia, told Roll Call.
The national “groups,” having dropped their tools when they were no longer useful, may get around to using them again, but some of the finders are a little busy distancing themselves from the taint of the impending FOX/News Corp/News International meltdown. A big part of the funding and coverage of Tea Party events (not to mention laying on wrapped buses to haul them around) comes through FOX.
But the people heading up FOX and News Corp are a little busy, what with all the resignations. The legal department is in a little disarray because the top News Corp legal counsel resigned… back in June before the worst of the scandals even broke.
Now Hugh Grant is saying he regrets “Nine Months” because it was distributed by 20th Century Fox, and Jude Law is suing another Murdoch rag, the Sun, for hacking his phone. Now waiting to see if celebrities will start refusing roles in Fox pictures, but not holding my breath. Also kind of wondering how The Simpsons might refer to the scandal in future episodes, as that show has always been rather deft about witty subversion from within.
Who has time for a bunch of rubes who can’t afford to fly themselves and their extended families to Tea Party events? Who wants to spend money paying for a fleet of charter buses to collect them from Podunkburg? They’ll vote the way they’re supposed to when the time comes. The powers that run the Right-Wing Noise Machine are too busy with damage control to bother with the little, low-to-no information people who so reliably make up their base.
via Low Registration Sinks Tea Party Convention : Roll Call.
Something I missed before; the phone hack of murder victim Milly Dowler was back in 2002 according to this. I conflated it with the royal voicemail scandal, which is a different but likely related story.
I’ll guess that journos and PIs have been figuring out how easy it is to navigate voicemails since the technology was invented. Maybe they found it more convenient and less risky than breaking in to homes and offices to listen to taped messages on the old first generation machines? Since many people never changed the default passwords on their analog and digital voicemails, it just was too temptingly easy.
The scandal exploded this week after it was reported that the News of the World had hacked the mobile phone of 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler in 2002 while her family and police were desperately searching for her. News of the World operatives reportedly deleted some messages from the phone’s voicemail, giving the girl’s parents false hope that she was still alive.
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As a progressive who abhors the unprecedented and frighting hold Murdoch holds over Fox News, and by extension the radical Religious Right in the US, his fall from power as Britain’s “uncrowned king” can’t come soon enough. And with the latest news breaking that millions of emails pertinent to the scandal might have been deleted by a News International executive, it’s possible the scandal may jump the pond and take a few of Murdoch’s US institutions down AND even a family member or two. Oh, I hope so. I do hope so.
And now, Andy Coulson has been arrested: he’s the former spokesman to British Prime Minister David Cameron who was formerly a News of the World editor connected to the “phone hacking” story. It seems that he had a brush with trouble back in 2007; that time it was the “royal family voicemails” story, but it seems that it’s really all one big, long, sordid tale of unscrupulous people easvesdropping on private conversations electronically.
In Britain this weekend, the knives are out for the billionaire “faux news” master manipulator; previously no one was willing to take him on because they feared having their personal scandals rooted out and splashed on the front pages of Murdoch’s papers. He made his way to the UK for the closing of the News of the World; as an Australian, he can’t vote in British elections, but lots of people resent him for the huge amount of “pull” he has there in politics. They’re speaking out against him and his media empire, and are calling for more investigations. These inquiries will likely result in prison for the small fry and the middling managers, but probably not for the top executives and family members that run News International and the other media properties it owns in the UK.
Only a few days ago, the “phone hacking” scandal reached a new peak when it was revealed that the voicemail of a murder-kidnap victim was accessed, and families of servicemembers killed in Afghanistan had good reason to suspect that their anguish had become fodder for a sleazy “private investigator” who generated tips and stories for the News of the World weekly newspaper, based on the information he got from listening to their messages. This one person’s actions caused the closure of the “NoW”, a168-year-old newspaper when it became just too toxic a brand… and everyone working there is out of a job. The last Sunday issue has been published, the last desk has been hammered on (“banging out” a departing colleague is a Fleet Street tradition), the last round has been paid for at the Cape pub by editor Colin Myler.
Britain has had enough of Rupert Murdoch, and of News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, who comes off as the Red Queen to Murdoch’s Humpty Dumpty. It’s unlikely they’ll be going on any cozy pub crawls to Cotswold gastropubs again.
…But it’s an upside-down world that will greet media kingpin Rupert Murdoch when he arrives in London for an expected visit Sunday as he personally takes on the battle to keep an explosive phone-hacking scandal at one of his tabloids from sinking the rest of his business interests.
Almost overnight, open season has been declared on Murdoch, with politicians once too afraid to criticize him now lining up to rail against the Australian-born billionaire and his vast media holdings. The effect has been of a dam bursting in a country whose people are famed for their reticence.
"We have let one man have far too great a sway over our national life," Chris Bryant, a member of the Labor Party, declared in Parliament.
"No other country would allow one man to garner four national newspapers, the second-largest broadcaster, a monopoly on sports rights and first-view movies," Bryant told his fellow lawmakers last week. "America, the home of the aggressive entrepreneur, doesn’t allow it. We shouldn’t."
The stunning reversal of fortune for Murdoch, 80, comes amid a criminal probe into the News of the World, a weekly tabloid that has been accused of hacking into the cellphones of possibly thousands of people in its single-minded pursuit of sensational stories.
Britons who shrugged when the targets were identified as movie stars and athletes arose in mass indignation last week over allegations that the tabloid also accessed voicemails left for a kidnapped 13-year-old girl who was later found slain. The relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq may also have had their phones hacked.
To limit the damage, News International, the British arm of Murdoch’s giant News Corp., abruptly decided to shut down the News of the World, a 168-year-old publication that was to put out its last issue Sunday. (Its final front-page message: "THANK YOU & GOODBYE.")
via Rupert Murdoch: British politicians turn on tabloid king after hacking scandal – latimes.com.
Fantastic. The Guardian has an entire archive of stories on this, as it’s been working the story for months, if not years.
Now then… who’s looking at Murdoch‘s media in the US? A girl’s gotta hope.
I bought this mug 20 years ago, photographed it for the Flickr London Bomb Blasts group on 7/7/05
We’ve done a little finding, but prefer to do it when on vacation.
We saw Kung Fu Panda 2 yesterday, and it was a joy to see a sequel that extended the original story so seamlessly and with such generous emotional satisfaction. Ebert liked it too, but thought the 3-D version detracted. Based on that assessment, we saw the “normal” 2-D version, and liked it very much indeed:
“Kung Fu Panda 2” is exactly as you’d expect, and more. The animation is elegant, the story is much more involving than in the original, and there’s boundless energy. I enjoyed it as fully as I possibly could, given the horror of its 3-D. The original film, in 2-D wide-screen, was just fine. But never mind. Hollywood has brainwashed us or itself that 3-D is an improvement and not an annoyance.What’s best about this sequel is that it’s not a dutiful retread of the original, but an ambitious extension. Of the many new elements, not least is the solution of the mystery of how Mr. Ping, a goose, could be the biological father of Po, a panda. In the original film, as nearly as I can recall, every character represented a different species, so I thought perhaps inscrutable reproductive processes were being employed. But no, Po’s parenthood is explained here, and it has a great deal to do with new developments in the kingdom.
via Kung Fu Panda 2 :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews.
I spotted at least 2 Easter eggs or visual jokes – there’s a Pixar reference (this is a Dreamworks film) in a fight scene along a city street (watch out for the signs, Po!) and there’s an old-school gaming reference immediately afterwards that made me gigglesnort uncontrollably. I was already laughing hysterically when at the beginning of the “stealth mode” sequence, Po truly takes on the role of the Dragon (you will, too), but the sequence built on the laughs to a level that was just pure, childlike delight.
Yet the fight scenes were also intense, although true cartoon-animal violence is handled senstitively. The exploration of Po’s backstory brought me to tears late in the movie, where only the reel before I was laughing or chuckling most of the time.
The antagonist this time out, played by a sinister-sounding Gary Oldman, is a royal peacock with parental issues who seems to have mastered the “war fan” style of fighting using his magnificent Chinese-style tail plumage. His encounters with Po are amazing to watch.
In fact, all the animation is just jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and there are flashback sections that are told in a simplified visual style that evokes Chinese water colors. The opening and closing credits are beautifully rendered “Chinese cut-paper puppet” scenes.
Jack Black owns the panda, who’s really come into his own as a skilled warrior (who’s still a plushy looking panda after all). And there’s just a touch of “skadoosh” too.
Highly recommended – we saw it at a matinee and there were a ton of kids, so think about going later when there might be more adults willing to be seen at a “kids’ movie.”
From today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, a video of the southern sky.
Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.