In the Name of the Motherfu…I mean, Father

From Business Spectator:

The abrupt change in News Corp’s tactics as [it] tries to bring some semblance of control to the maelstrom it is experiencing in the UK hints at a longer-term problem for Rupert Murdoch and his succession plans.

On Wednesday News withdrew its undertaking to spin off Sky News from BSkyB enabling the UK government to refer its proposed bid for the pay television operator to its Competition Commission and ensuring that any final decision on the bid would be deferred for at least six months and probably closer to a year.

That appeared designed to avoid any immediate decision on the bid within an atmosphere of extreme hostility towards News and therefore to preserve the potential for another tilt at BSkYB once the heat eventually dies down.

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Tunnelvision

From The Trentonian:

TRENTON — Hamilton native and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey bigwig Bill Baroni, whose bistate agency pledged to pump $3 billion into an ambitious train tunnel project, refused to comment Thursday after Gov. Chris Christie killed the plan.

Baroni deferred to his Port Authority press flack, Ron Marsico, who also refused to comment on Christie’s sweeping action to pull the plug on a decades-in-the-making train tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan.

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The Wizards of Oil

From The Washington Post:

Three major oil industry executives agreed on one thing in a pair of Senate hearings Tuesday: Someone else was to blame for the drilling rig accident that triggered the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The senior executives from the oil behemoth BP, the offshore oil drilling company Transocean and the oilfield services contractor Halliburton pointed fingers at each other in seeking to explain what caused the accident that set afire and sank the Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 people.

…snip…

BP blamed the failure of Transocean’s blowout preventer and raised a new question about whether Transocean disregarded “anomalous pressure test readings” just hours before the explosion. Transocean blamed decisions made by BP and cited possible flaws in the cementing job done by Halliburton. And Halliburton said that it had faithfully followed BP’s instructions and that Transocean had started replacing a heavy drilling mud with seawater before the well was sealed with a cement plug.

To the tune of If I Only Had a Brain, written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, as performed by the fabulous Ray Bolger:

Lamar McKay:

I sit here, oh so coyly, don’t know why the gulf’s so oily,
But I’m here to proclaim,
That I couldn’t say for certain,
But I think that Halliburton,
Is the company to blame.

Gunnin’ for Trouble

From The Washington Post:

Senate Democrats are scrambling to produce 40 votes — or a mere two-thirds of their caucus — to defeat a GOP-led push to override state gun laws.

Republicans have twice this year scored significant pro-gun victories with substantial moderate Democratic support. The minority party lured away a whopping 27 swing-state Democrats to support looser rules on guns in national parks. And a similar coalition has stalled the District of Columbia’s quest for House voting representation, by adding language to the Senate version to ease D.C. firearm restrictions.

The latest measure, offered by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), has far greater reach. Offered today as an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, it would allow individuals to carry concealed firearms across state lines if they “have a valid permit or if, under their state of residence, they are entitled to do so,” Thune explained in a statement.

The Rethugs are all about states’ rights, aren’t they?

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