Eideard

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, has tweeted about how his company “screwed up MySpace in every way possible”…

It is the first time Murdoch has tweeted about the social network and his experience of owning MySpace for six difficult years, since joining the microblogging platform. It was in the context of several technology-related tweets he has written about the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which has been going on all week.

Murdoch tweeted: “CES again. Big three, Apple,Google and Amazon, and maybe Facebook dominant now and growing. Plenty of others good, but not in same league.”

He then wrote: “CES coming to a close. Seems like more innovation than ever, some great, all disruptive. Traditional coys [companies] feeling digital tornado.”

Murdoch has spoken out before about how difficult owning MySpace was, after finally selling it off to advertising company Specific Media and Justin Timberlake last year, for approximately $35m – just six per cent of what News Corporation paid for the business. Murdoch’s business is understood to have retained a small undisclosed stake in the social network, but is not involved in the day to day running of it…

MySpace, which started as a site on which users could share their interest in pop and rock bands, has in the last four years been totally eclipsed by the explosive growth of competitor Facebook.

“This was a good example of how to turn $580 million into a lot less virtually overnight,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm, at the time of the sale to Specific Media last year. “In many ways, it was a failed merger.”

Murdoch proved, once again, that corporate executives with their brain stuck in last century solutions and methods – will run modern Web exterprises as badly as the worst of their existing/declining ventures.

Murdoch proved incapable of innovation, unable to keep up with the crowded field of peers in the world of geek dynamism. And he wasn’t bright enough to hire someone who could.

Why is this man laughing all the way to the bank?
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The tentative deal to avoid a crushing debt default is at best a mild relief for the U.S. economy that nearly stalled in the first half of the year and has yet to show signs of any realistic pickup…

Market reactions today to lousy job and manufacturing numbers indicate even less.

The prospect of spending cuts is the last thing the U.S. economy needs right now, many commentators say.

Economists were stunned on Friday when data showed the U.S. economy grew just 0.4 percent in the first three months of this year — perilously close to contraction — and picked up unimpressively to 1.3 percent in the second quarter.

Against the backdrop of the weak economic recovery, the divided political parties in Congress appear to have agreed on one thing early on in their dispute over how to raise the U.S. debt ceiling: that spending cuts to narrow the deficit should be phased in slowly. They will be phased in from 2013…

About $1.5 trillion of the planned savings will be decided by a bipartisan congressional commission, leaving unanswered the question as to whether the United States has the political will to tame the country’s growing debt pile once and for all.

Obviously done to eliminate possibility of responsibility for cuts to Medicare which kick in automatically if no consensus is reached.

Any relief, however, is likely to be short-lived. U.S. jobs data on Friday will probably prove another reminder of the weak U.S. economy. Unemployment is expected to remain at 9.2 percent, according to a Reuters poll.

The budget deal “does nothing to restore household and corporate confidence,” said Mohammed El-Erian, chief executive of bond fund investment giant PIMCO.

“So unemployment will be higher than it would have been otherwise, growth will be lower than it would be otherwise, and inequality will be worse than it would be otherwise,” El-Erian told ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour.

All this lying crap has been about is introducing austerity to the nation’s economy without using the word. Some European nations aren’t as cowardly as Congress would have us be and actually name silly policies for what they really are. Austerity as resolution to recession has been a Republican mantra since the days of Herbert Hoover – with recurrent levels of failure. About as hackneyed a piece of bad advice as trickle-down economics/Reaganomics. You simply extend the pain.

Addendum: Here’s Paul Krugman’s take on the whole disaster.

And the only Good News UPDATE about the vote in the House, today. The return of Gabrielle Giffords. Unannounced, she showed up on the floor to vote:

For nearly four years they lay piled in a Scotland Yard evidence room, six overstuffed plastic bags gathering dust and little else.

Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper.

Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former and current senior police officials.

During that same time, senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident.

After the past week, that assertion has been reduced to tatters, torn apart by a spectacular avalanche of contradictory evidence, admissions by News International executives that hacking was more widespread, and a reversal by police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.

Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police Service publicly acknowledged that he had not actually gone through the evidence. “I’m not going to go down and look at bin bags,” Mr. Yates said, using the British term for trash bags.

At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects. At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.

NSS. Supervising coppers covering up for their mates in the tabloid press should not shock anyone. It’s the kind of corruption that has always lived on a 2-way street.

RTFA for pages of detail – of exactly the sort of corruption you already expect.

Council bosses have admitted scoring an “own goal” after a fence was built through the middle of football goalposts in a park in York.

The new fencing was installed at a cost of £6,000 on playing fields in Heworth…

Dave Meigh, City of York Council’s head of parks and open spaces, said: “We recognise that the failure to relocate the goalposts is a real own goal.”

It has left local people who use the park to play football confused. Local residents said it was “unreal” and a “waste of money”.

Jane Hannon wrote on the BBC Look North Facebook page: “Typical example of too many chiefs and not enough Indians, one doesn’t know what the other is doing. What a waste of time and money.”

OTOH, this demonstrates there is plenty of local talent in the UK ready and qualified to take over leadership of the FA and FIFA at a moment’s notice.

Thanks, honorarynewfie

The confusion is understandable, right?

The imposter who posed as a Taliban leader to open peace negotiations with Kabul was put forward by British agents who failed to note he was several inches shorter than the man he was impersonating.

The man masquerading as Akhtar Mohammad Mansour was paid a six figure sum and was flown three times to secret meetings with Nato and Afghan representatives before he was rumbled.

Afghan intelligence agents later determined he was a shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.

A senior aide to Hamid Karzai said the man had been recommended by the British.

Mohammad Umer Daudzai, Mr Karzai’s chief of staff, said British officials brought the impostor to meet the president in July or August, where he was spotted as a fraud. Senior American officials confirmed the impostor was “the Brits’ guy”.

The British embassy in Kabul declined to comment.

Har! What could they say?

We noted this tale earlier this week; but, accepting a ringer, paying him big bucks to “negotiate” – and failing to notice he was a shrimp compared to the real deal. Laughable.

“America’s only native criminal class is Congress”

This is from a consistently conservative polling outfit, Scott Rasmussen makes better than beer money from his appearances on Fox Snooze and diddling rightwing think tanks.

Heading into the final weeks of the congressional election season, 62% of Likely U.S. Voters believe that no matter how bad things are, Congress can always make them worse. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 19% disagree, with 19% more not sure.

This level of skepticism is shared by a majority of just about every partisan and demographic group, including 53% of Democrats whose party currently controls both houses of Congress.

75% of voters in the political Mainstream say if something is not going well, Congress can always make it worse.

Rasmussen differentiates between folks who are actively political – and ordinary voters who say they’re going to vote.

Other recent results have found that 60% believe most members of Congress don’t care what their constituents think. Also, voters are evenly divided as to whether a group randomly selected from the phone book could do as good a job as the current Congress. Overall, just 16% say that Congress is doing a good or an excellent job.

It will go down as one of the most painful openings to a political debate in recent memory…

With her hands clasped in front of her, she looked at the camera, then down, possibly at notes, and back up at the camera. She smiled, let out a loud exhale, then resumed her statement with a pronouncement of her record as governor.

“We have, uh, did what was right for Arizona,” Brewer said, using a grammatical misconstruction she uttered twice during the debate.

Then, she bolted from a post-debate question-and-answer session with reporters after refusing to respond to queries about a past statement about bodies supposedly found beheaded in the Arizona desert.

BTW – folks outside the US who wondered in the past how our electorate voted in dimwits like George W. Bush – reflect upon the fact that this dolt is leading among Arizona voters by 19%.

Thanks, Sergio

Why is this man not smiling?
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Days after MySpace, the struggling social network site, replaced its chief executive, a leading media pundit has said that interference from its owner, Rupert Murdoch, has left the business in a state of “total desperation”.

Last week the site, which was bought by Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005, made the shock announcement that Owen Van Natta was stepping down as chief executive after less than a year in the job…

Michael Wolff, author of The Man Who Owns the News, a biography of Murdoch, said that the roots of MySpace’s problems were much deeper. “It certainly is not [Van Natta's] fault – he inherited a business in which you could only manage decline,” he said.

Instead, he suggested, the reshuffle is indicative of a wider panic over the way in which News Corp deals with its online businesses.

“The thing that’s going on at News Corp right now is total, total desperation over this digital stuff,” he added. “Rupert is saying, ‘What’s going on with MySpace? What’s happening? Why isn’t this working?’ It’s impossible to explain to him that it’s not working because it’s over, because this is the way the technology business goes. Once it’s past, it’s really past. There is almost no way to get that back…”

While the site has generated plenty of cash for News Corp – at one point, advertising on the home page alone was valued at $1m a day – a series of missteps has left it in turmoil, struggling for success and flailing in the wake of its rivals…

Figures from comScore, the internet traffic analysts, suggest that MySpace has about 57 million users in the US, down from a peak of more than 75 million. Facebook, meanwhile, has experienced incredible expansion in the past 18 months and now boasts more than 400 million users worldwide…

I used to have a modicum of respect for Murdoch’s business acumen. Turns out it hasn’t moved much beyond the end of World War 2.

He’s getting what he deserves.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Nobody was more surprised that the Securities and Exchange Commission did not discover Bernard L. Madoff’s enormous Ponzi scheme years ago than Mr. Madoff himself.

After all, it would have been pretty simple, he said in a transcript of a jailhouse interview that is part of a trove of official exhibits released on Friday by the S.E.C.’s inspector general, H. David Kotz.

In the interview, Mr. Madoff said that the young investigators who pestered him over incidentals like e-mail messages should have just checked basics like his account with Wall Street’s central clearinghouse and his dealings with the firms that were supposedly handling his trades.

“If you’re looking at a Ponzi scheme, it’s the first thing you do,” he said.

Those simple steps, he added, could have revealed years earlier that he was running the largest Ponzi scheme ever, a crime that has now dragged the S.E.C. into the worst scandal in its 75-year history. “It would have been easy for them to see,” he added.

The new exhibits consist of 6,157 pages of interviews, letters, e-mail messages, telephone records and other background material gathered during Mr. Kotz’s 10-month investigation of how the commission handled, and mishandled, numerous tips and warnings it received about Mr. Madoff over the years. His full report, released last month, found the agency had received six substantive complaints since 1992 — and botched the investigation of every one of them. He found no evidence of any bribery, collusion or deliberate sabotage of those investigations.

You needn’t worry much about investigators when you know the highest agency of the electorate – the United States Congress – has abdicated any responsibility for oversight. It started in 1994 with Newt’s Contract on America – accelerated and grew through K Street and C street – culminating in the Halliburton Years with Dickie and George W..

Texas autopsy?

Texas medical examiners are under fire for mistakes that have allowed convicted criminals go free and sent the innocent to prison, critics said.

“The state does not keep track of MEs in any shape, form or fashion,” Bexar County Chief Medical Examiner Randall Frost told the Fort Worth Star Telegram, adding the state doesn’t know how many certified forensic pathologists work in government offices.

A medical examiner only needs a state medical license to perform an autopsy and does not have to be trained in forensics or pass a specialty. Frost said people are shocked when they find out there are not special qualifications.

“The work of the medical examiner’s office is just so slipshod,” said Tommy Turner, a former special prosecutor. Turner’s investigation put a Lubbock medical examiner behind bars for falsifying autopsies.

Critics call the medical examiner’s office “the last bastion of junk science.” They cite lack of performance standards, poor documentation and too few qualified personnel as well as lax oversight.

On the other hand Texas prosecutors find nothing wrong because District Attorneys aren’t complaining of losses in court because of medical reports. WTF?

That describes the ignorant leading the incompetent – if nothing else.