And now obvious questions are being asked:

… critics muse that Mr. Murdoch’s free-wheeling and politically conservative hand in British reporting may have influenced American journalism as well – particularly in the well-regarded Wall Street Journal, whose parent company Dow Jones was acquired by Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2007.

For its part, the Journal’s editorial page fired back about these charges in an editorial for Monday’s paper:

When News Corp. and CEO Rupert Murdoch secured enough shares to buy Dow Jones & Co. four years ago, these columns welcomed our new owner and promised to stand by the same standards and principles we always had…

… [regarding] Friday’s resignation of our publisher and CEO, Les Hinton, who ran News Corp.’s British newspaper unit during the time of the alleged hacking . . . on ethical questions, his judgment was as sound as that of any editor we’ve had.

To help readers understand what makes this such a galling non-denial denial, we pause here for a concurring opinion from the hereafter:

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

The above is from the suicide note of Vincent Foster, an aide to the Clinton administration who killed himself in 1993 after being savaged in a series of Wall Street Journal editorials during the preceding two months.

In other words, it wasn’t the Journal‘s editorial-page standards that anyone was concerned about when Murdoch took over.  The issue is whether Murdoch pushed the news operation into the op-ed section’s moral cesspool.

We’ve only got Soros (where is my monthly check btw, George?).  They’ve got the Koch Brothers, Satan’s little helper Rupert Murdoch, and another 184 billionaire-donors.  Not to mention all those corporations…

My previous post about alternative energy technology being manufactured in China attracted a fair bit of discussion.  Beyond the snark, the U.S. does indeed have legitimate concerns about how China conducts its business.

The yuan needs to float freely against the dollar and the euro – like a real currency.  Right now they have a built in mechanism to ‘not be undersold’ by U.S. goods.

Why is the U.N. still giving them development aid?  If they can afford to loan us trillions of dollars, then can afford to lift themselves out of poverty.

We need to enforce environmental concerns with excise taxes.  Chinese pollution doesn’t just stay in China – their crap comes wafting in the air and affects everyone.  They don’t want to commit to emissions caps?  Well estimate their emissions, put a price on them, and attach the price to their cheap goods.  They won’t come to the table unless we force them to come to the table.

I could go on in the same vein about labor concerns, sustainable sourcing of resources, etc.  Right now China is acting like the ‘bad boy’ of the planet, and will continue to do so if there are no consequences.