As David Taintor reports, those following the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal closely don’t think today’s report from Parliament gets us even to the halfway point of the still-unfolding saga.
The full News Corp. statement on today’s report from Parliament.
The Fox News morning show Fox and Friends is a bottomless well of cable news ridiculousness. But on the morning a committee of the British Parliament released a report finding that Rupert Murdoch is not fit to lead a major international corporation, the disconnect from reality was particularly amusing. Watch.
Mitt Romney just did a brief press availability with Rudy Giuliani in downtown New York to commemorate the death of Osama bin Laden and by reference the 9/11 attacks. It gave Romney an opportunity to answer questions on the topic of the day — would he have whacked bin Laden just like Obama did.
Watch the video.
Obama campaign celebrates first anniversary of President’s commando raid on Swiss Bank Accounts.
FBI rounds up anarchists on the fringe of the Occupy movement who an informant organized into core of potential bridge bombers. After the crew couldn’t find anyone at the local Occupy protests.
“The men were wearing black or dark colored shirts, had black backpacks, carried anarchist flags and acted differently than the other people in attendance,” according to the FBI affidavit. They were soon joined by three other men and “appeared to be together and was constantly moving throughout the crowd expressing displeasure at the crowd’s unwillingness to act violently.”
When an organizer of the protest said they wanted to act peacefully, one of the men said “fuck that” and the whole group walked away, according to the FBI.
That’s when the Feds and their informant went into action.
A good quick read on where the campaign stands. The TPM PollTracker Average shows President Obama leading Mitt Romney by a mere 1.1 percentage points. The President has a net approval rating of .1 percentage points.
David has already hit on this point. But of course the Bush administration foreign policy team doesn’t like President Obama focusing on the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden. It was Bush administration policy for seven years to de-prioritize the search for Osama bin Laden. That happened at Tora Bora to refocus the fight to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. And it continued that way through early 2009. The Bush foreign policy team never saw non-state actors like bin Laden as the core threat. It was states like Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea where they identified the true threat. Read More
Initial reactions from both sides of the pond to Parliament’s scathing report on Rupert Murdoch.
A spokesperson for Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who has called for the FBI investigation into whether News Corp. engaged in similar tactics in the U.S., tells TPM: “Senator Rockefeller is just as concerned today as he was last year as to whether Americans were targets of this type of hacking and whether any US laws were broken.”