When Senator Ted Cruz went pheasant hunting with Representative Steve King in Iowa on Saturday, he took a break to discuss the infamous 2006 incident in which former Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot his friend during a quail hunt in Texas, NBC News reports.

“Look, it happens,” Cruz said.

King added, “Doesn’t bother me a bit. The way I understood it, he was standing in the wrong place.” Later he joked of Cruz’s unpopularity post-government shutdown: “There are a lot of people who would like to shoot me and you, I’ve noticed. That would be a fundraiser to end them all, wouldn’t it?”

ANOTHER SECRETLY RECORDED STAFF MEETING at News UK has revealed that Rupert Murdoch’s British operations are close to bankruptcy and their future is dependent on the outcome of the current London trials. 

A former head of the British publishing arm, New Zealand-born Tom Mockridge, told the staff  late last year that the costs associated with the trials will be at least double the half-million pounds cost that the corporation told its shareholders at its recent general meeting in the United States.

The new figure would leave its British arm insolvent. Its British newspapers would have to be sold. In the past, they had been highly profitable,  most of all The News of the World, which had been the company’s richest asset until Murdoch closed it down. 

Mockridge had replaced Rebekah Brooks (now on trial) as chief executive of News UK. He bluntly told his London staff:

Mockridge had called the staff of News UK to a one-hour meeting in the boardroom on the 13th floor of its London headquarters, where he laid the company’s cards on the table, admitting that the company had co-operated too closely with the police investigation.

“It wasn’t my decision,” he said. “If I had hindsight I would have told the police to bring a search warrant, but I was too bloody late.”

He blamed the company’s army of lawyers: “There were too many and they were all bastards.”  

After the meeting, Mockridge tendered his resignation.

What he said throws a new light on the desperation with which Murdoch brutally assaulted the Australian Labor Party in the lead-up to this year’s September 7 election. Murdoch is clearly using his power in Australia to resurrect the prestige he has lost in England.

The astounding headlines that marked the whole election campaign – 'KICK THIS MOB OUT', 'KEVIN’S DEADLY SINS', 'SEND IN THE CLOWNS', ;DOES THIS GUY EVER SHUT UP' –  inevitably handed a shallow victory to Tony Abbott and his motley team of money and power grabbers.

Australians are already regretting the result of the election that put Abbott and Co. into Murdoch’s pocket. The U.S. based Fox News-Tea Party  magnate will call the shots as long as the Abbott era is allowed to last.

With his newspapers covering every Australian state and prepared to lie on every current issue,  Murdoch is in a position to demonise any opposition and any individual. He has even been able to influence the ABC national TV and radio services as well as the shock jock commercial broadcasters. 

The November issue of the national The Monthly magazine is one of the few outlets that describes Murdoch’s blitzkrieg in an article headlined 'Why Rupert Murdoch cannot be stopped'. 

The power that one man can exercise over the country of his birth, while facing criminal charges in England and serious investigations into his corporate activities in America, leaves Australians under a virtual dictatorship.

But Murdoch is small fry in America compared to his iron control of what Australians are allowed to read and hear today.

Earlier this year, Murdoch, under pressure from his New York based senior executives, his legal advisers and his shareholders, broke his company into separate divisions — one for newspapers and the other for entertainment and TV.

read more: http://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/news-corp-teeters-on-the-edge,5850

Read also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/24007

Note: the toon at top is supposed to show Senator Cruz "walking on water"... I forgot to tell you this...

In a sense, it’s just another example of the hard right tendency to assume that you’re not a real American if you don’t belong to the 30-ish percent that holds,as Rick Perlstein puts it, the belief that liberalism is “the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks” and that they’re here to save America from the supposed dangers of, to be blunt, democracy. But with Ted Cruz, I think he’s reaching a new stage in his exponential ego growth. This is the part where he starts to see himself as a god of sorts, a prophet put on earth to bethe body of “America”. It’s really no surprise. Cruz’s father has been running around hinting that he believes his son is some kind of emissary of God’s, here to end the supposed “great transfer of wealth”. See above from Rick Perlstein about what that means.

Not that you need to bother, since Rafael Cruz is pretty blunt about his racism:

Evangelical pastor Rafael Cruz, father of tea party star Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), called black and Hispanic voters “uninformed” and “deceived” during a speech to conservative activists in February.

After attending a panel on minority outreach at the FreedomWorks grassroots summit, Cruz, a Cuban-American, born-again Christian, spoke at the conference. He noted that a previous speaker “mentioned something about Hispanics being uninformed or deceived.”

“Well, the same thing is true of the black population,” Cruz said.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/14/ted-cruz-crowns-himself-the-stand-in-for-the-american-people/

The Republican Party has finally admitted what has been fairly obvious for much of the past six years: It produces fake news.

This is not an earth-shattering revelation to anybody who has been paying attention, but, still, it’s an important step for the party to embrace the phoniness.

“NRCC Launches Fake News Sites to Attack Democratic Candidates” was a headline in the National Journal on Tuesday.

As Shane Goldmacher reported, “The National Republican Congressional Committee, which came under fire earlier this year for a deceptive series of fake Democratic candidate websites that it later changed after public outcry, has launched a new set of deceptive websites, this time designed to look like local news sources.

read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-republicans-embrace-their-phoniness/2014/08/13/f01ee0ca-2319-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html

I wonder if Uncle Rupe is involved in disseminating the fake news once they are concocted...

Once again I offer you Tony Abbott to lead you, dear CONservatives, into where you belong, the 1950s promised land... See story at top.