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Rupert Murdoch claims that he’s opposing Google because it’s getting rich on his dime, despite the fact that his own websites go out of their way to point Google to the juiciest, most advertiser-friendly content.

Murdoch went so far as to claim that he intends to use this fact to attack Fair Use doctrine:

He also challenged the idea that Google and others could take just the headlines and opening lines from his papers’ stories, indicating that he would not tolerate even that.

“[They use] a doctrine called fair use, which we believe can be challenged in the courts and will bar it altogether,” he said.

And thus, that’s where the real strategy starts to emerge. Continue reading…

I simply can’t do better than this, so I won’t even try. Discussing Goldman Sachs’ inexplicable decision to send PR flacks into churches suggesting that Jesus Christ was actually promoting a Gospel of Greed, Gonzo Superstar Matt Taibbi uncorks the single best political rant I have ever seen on the intertubes.

Among the rhetorical molotov cocktails was this soon-to-be-classic riff:

Nothing else explains people like Alan Greenspan and Megan McArdle and all those other idiotic Ayn Rand devotees, big and small, who continually go out there in public and flog pseudo-religious beliefs about the self-correcting free-market as a cure-all for anything and everything, even as evidence to the contrary rains down from the sky like volcanic ash. These people actually believe this shit and they believe it with the imbecilic ferocity of teenagers, even the ones who are 190 years old like Greenspan (who incidentally finally conceded a “flaw” in his thinking, but only after the entire world exploded and even all the reality-proof friendly data sources he had relied upon for his whole life told him his ideas were fucked), and it’s nearly impossible to get them to let so much as a sliver of their belief systems go.

God bless you, Taibbi. My hat is OFF.

On Drudge yesterday, and still there as of this writing, there’s a blurb making big hay of the fact that FoxNews had a significantly larger share of the total audience for election coverage than any other station. In fact, it claims that Fox, with 4,043,000 viewers had a larger share than MSNBC (974K), Headline News (842K), and CNN (826K) combined.

We’ll overlook for a moment that Drudge’s link actually goes to a story he’d previously linked on a proposed law to make employers give employees up to five paid sick days.

Let’s look, instead, at the breakdowns for the “25-54″ demographic that Drudge also breathlessly trumpets as evidence of Fox’s news supremacy. Continue reading…

I’m not even going to bother thinking about this. This may well end up being the shortest post I ever write for this site. But Neil Boortz needs to be removed from the airwaves, because comparing the President of the United States to a pedophile is so far outside the realm of where political discourse should be –to say nothing of common decency– that it deserves absolutely no response, save for absolute and total censure.

So let me be the first to call for a boycott of Neil Boortz. Anyone who could go so far just to score a political point does NOT deserve to be carried on the public airwaves.

The term “Czar”, as applied to American politics, lost its meaning a long time ago, but has nonetheless generally represented a common shorthand term for “official appointed to oversee and advise Presidents on particular issues”. Until now, apparently.

Yglesias hits the nail on the head here:

If Kay Bailey Hutchison wants to claim that “A few of them have formal titles, but most are simply known as ‘czars’” then fine. Maybe she’s ignorant, or maybe she’s a huge liar. Either way, Amanda Terkel points out that this is completely false. There are zero officials in the Obama administration who lack formal titles and are simply known as czars. She’s totally wrong. Completely and utterly. Is she careless? Is she dishonest? Honestly, I don’t care.

On the other hand, I do care. But only insomuch as I’m disturbed that the use of the term “czar” has actually, some-damned-how, become an issue unto itself.

That said, this preposterous “czar” debate serves to illustrate, very effectively, some of the inherent problems with the mainstream media and the politics of the present era, and while I started writing this post as just a quickie, me-too affirmation of Yglesias’ post, I wound up reaching a much different, and much more satisfying conclusion as to what this silly “czar” dust-up actually represents: one more death cry of old media and old politics.

Continue reading…