They’ll never be able to find his like again.
Just a flesh wound, declares Jack Shafer, who titles his piece Rupert Wins Again.
Getting out from under all of that hurt for $787.5 million is a kind of bargain for a company with a market cap of $17.3 billion. Fox has $4.1 billion in cash and warrants on hand, says the New York Times... [Murdoch always pays] his way out of jams. The Dominion case and the similar Smartmatic case that awaits its place in the defamation docket, are not aberrations for Fox. It’s all a part of Murdoch’s way of doing business.
UD‘s got no doubt Murdoch, like his fellow slashed and amputated knights Berlusconi and Trump, remains a fully intact legend in his own mind. Smartmatic, just to take one of many lawsuits Rupert faces, demands 2.7 billion and will, you figure, get one billion. Doing the big math on Fox/Murdoch is always going to be tricky (he apparently spent 1.7 billion to get rid of his second wife), but even with a ton of assets the enterprise absurdly endlessly drains – and publicly humiliates – itself in what only a nut would call a winning strategy. Just for starters:
[T]he condemning depositions of Fox anchors and executives, admitting that they knew their stories were false and sources were ludicrous, opens Fox’s board to serious claims of negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty—violations of a board’s duty of care and duty of loyalty under Delaware corporate law.
But there’s so much more.
Fox just settled. Will we ever know how much money it had to fork over? UD‘s gonna guess it was something like half of what Dominion asked for. $800,000,000.
****************
WHOA NELLIE. Swear I didn’t peek!!
‘[Kim Jong-Un is] top of the line. Really smart. As a young man at 24, even though he sort of inherits it, most people when they inherit it they lose it… He has total dominant control. That’s not easy.‘
… but everyone else has. UD assumes the paper of record wants to make ENTIRELY sure that Trump intends to sue Michael Cohen for five hundred million dollars onaccounta he shouldn’t have talked about Stormy Daniels.
*****************
Everyone’s been looking for Larry for two years, and all this time he’s been hiding in plain sight among his fellow undergraduate fellows in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.
Woke locales at Princeton might produce some obnoxious disrupters of campus speeches given by conservatives; the Madison Program houses a violent seditionist, someone the FBI has been tracking down for two years!
Now that he’s been captured and is preparing for trial, it will be interesting to know whether the dude is more broadly violent. Like was his ecstasy at being part of a mob injuring police officers confined to just that one event, or has he found other outlets?
We might never know. But the lad is articulate, and has a lot to say. Let’s look forward to his Patrick Henry moments in front of the judge.
Duh. One glance at Lady Lara de Bourgh (about whom we have had WHAT to say on this blog) instantly brings to mind Mr Collins’ praise of her precursor in Pride and Prejudice: “What affability! What condescension!”
But if you’re a little slow on the uptake, Tom Nichols at The Atlantic will help focus your attention on this notorious aspect of High Trumpworld, composed of vulgarians like Catherine de Bourgh who look down on vulgarians like Mr Collins.
That Foxworld and Trumpworld have a special horror of the yahoos who gather ’round them/vote for them is hardly surprising: Anxious about their own social standing, they can’t help but watch in dismay/cynicism as an embarrassing rabble tries to touch their hems. A dude like Jared Kushner, who affects aristocracy but in fact hails from the basest money mafias, can’t help but lose his latte when hopeless schlumps sidle up. He’s counting on his new fifty million dollar house on a heavily policed island to keep them out.
Anyhoo we’re focused on this matter again because of new revelations around UD‘s favorite ongoing billion dollar lawsuit, in which Dominion, a voting machine company, seeks damages for having been slandered by Fox broadcasters, who as one denounced Dominion as a malicious part of the Soros-engineered conspiracy to keep DJT from his second presidency. Dominion says all the Fox broadcasters knew they were lying when they assured the rabble the election, with important help from Dominion, had really scout’s honor been stolen. But now that Fox emails from the time have been released, it turns out… Dominion’s right!
Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back…
The network knew, of course, that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell, a chief promoter of Dominion conspiracy theories, was a delusional fantasist. The legal brief reveals that some of her claims about Dominion were based on an email Powell had received from someone who claimed to be capable of “time travel in a semiconscious state.” On Nov. 18, 2020, Carlson told Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham wrote back that Powell was a “complete nut.”
… “Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.
… costing him quite a lot of money.
Helluva distinction for Chapman: How many DEANS are disbarred?
But then – how many deans are credibly accused of treason?
Bowing to pressure from the student and faculty community, NYU has decided to replace the controversial conspiracy theorist with the high-profile lawyer whose radical ideas about the American electoral process have shaken up the world of legal theory.
Insiders have suggested that the real reason Bartiromo has been removed involves enormous financial penalties she is expected to incur when she loses various multibillion dollar defamation lawsuits filed against her by voting machine companies. NYU trustees are appointed largely on the basis of their ability to give hundreds of millions of dollars to the school.
As pundits have noted, it’s chaotic.
The MAGA conspiracy theorist has fingered vaccinations as the cause of the football player’s on-field collapse; but Marjorie Taylor Greene has countered with a theory based on the player’s given name.
“DAMAR” backwards is RAMAD which is one letter short of RAMADA, the international hotel chain owned lock stock and barrel by George Soros in cahoots with Dominion Voting Systems. I leave the rest to you.
JUST WALK AWAY D.J.
And when I made the ask about your special day
The day you tried to kill Mike Pence to make him pay
You walked away, D.J.
The sixth of what? Nothing much to say.
The ballroom’s empty and your face has gone all pale:
Guest list’s in jail.
Yes deep inside their cells
The Proud Boys sit
They’ve been condemned to hell
You don’t give a shit
So walk away, D.J.
The shit still follows close behind
As bitter rains burn down upon your weary eyes
You lose your mind.
Trump’s [current] struggle is simple because he is simple: All he is is appetite – for fame, power, sex, admiration – shorn of any interior life and unencumbered by exterior attachments.
More here. And here. And here.
I mean. You know. Sing it.
She’s come undone
She didn’t know what she was headed for
And when I found what she was headed for
It was too late