DeMint Stakes His Political Future On Murdoch Being Too Big To Jail... Or Even Fail

I'm starting to lose track of the mayhem inside the fascistic Murdoch media empire as the criminal regime starts unraveling. Over the weekend the head of his operations in the U.K., Rebekah Brooks, resigned and was subsequently arrested "in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking." Les Hinton, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and head of Dow Jones, who is thought to be neck-deep in the U.K. scandal, was shoved overboard last week. The noose beginning to close, next to go was the head of Scotland Yard.

Britain's top police officer resigned Sunday and Rupert Murdoch's former aide Rebekah Brooks was arrested as the phone hacking scandal finally tore into the heart of the British establishment.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson said he was quitting due to speculation about his links to Murdoch's empire and the force's botched investigation into hacking at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

His shock announcement came just hours after police arrested Brooks-- who resigned on Friday as head of News International, Murdoch's British newspaper arm-- on suspicion of phone-hacking and bribing police.

...Stephenson was linked to former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis [who was arrested last week] in reports Sunday which said the police chief accepted a five-week stay earlier this year at a luxury health spa where Wallis was a PR consultant.

...Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband piled on the pressure by calling for Murdoch's British media interests to be dismantled, telling the Observer newspaper: "I think he has too much power over British public life."

Abandoning his earlier defiance, Murdoch placed ads in most of Britain's Sunday newspapers for a second day, this time entitled "Putting right what's gone wrong" and promising to fully cooperate with police.

Prime Minister David Cameron has meanwhile faced questions about his decision to invite his former media chief Andy Coulson [arrested earlier this month], another ex-News of the World editor, to his country residence in March, two months after Coulson quit Downing Street.

Australia has also kicked off an investigation of Murdoch's criminal activities in his homeland and the FBI is either investigating or covering up... whatever they do these days. Several members of Congress, including heavyweight Democrats like Jay Rockefeller and Dick Durbin (usually a good reflection of Obama's thinking), as well as Republican Homeland Security Committee Peter King are clamoring for congressional investigations into what Murdoch has been up to in this country. It is widely suspected that his organization was illegally tapping phone lines here-- including of the families of the 9/11 victims-- just as he was doing in the U.K. Actor Jude Law has accused the Murdoch organization of hacking his phone on U.S. soil.

Murdoch's American empire is also said to be 'exploding and unravelling' as he faces the threat of losing control of his Fox and other cable networks if found guilty of breaching anti-corruption laws.

As panic started to set in in right-wing circles that their primary media ally could be neutered just as election season gets rolling, reactionaries wondered who would stop the hemorrhaging. As if on cue, along came Mary Jim DeMint, the fascist senator from South Carolina. DeMint told David Gregory on Meet The Press yesterday that the Senate should leave the Murdoch scandal alone and concentrate on the GOP's latest repackaging of the widely discredited Ryan budget, now being called "cut, cap and balance."

DeMint won't be able to prevent a Senate investigation. Darrell Issa, who heads up the House committee that should be investigating Murdoch's activities, is strictly about partisan witch hunts and, as expected, he is refusing to do anything at all. But investors in News Corp are getting antsy and are starting to focus on James Murdoch, the person in the organization who was authorizing the bribes and other expenses for the criminal activities.

John Whittingdale MP, the chairman of the [culture, media and sport select] committee, said they would be particularly keen to hear Mr Murdoch clarify remarks he made last week that executives at News International, the publisher of the News of the World, had misled MPs in earlier appearances in 2007 and 2009 by making statements about the scandal “without being in full possession of the facts."

Tom Watson, a Labour member of the committee, said he also expected Mr Murdoch to be questioned about what he meant when he said, hours after closing down the Sunday tabloid, that he had approved out-of-court settlements over phone hacking when he “did not have a complete picture.”

Mr Watson has written to Richard Alderman, director of the Serious Fraud Office, drawing his attention to these payments, and others, and asking if he will consider investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty by directors of the relevant News Corp subsidiaries, including Mr Murdoch.

One investor, whose holding is about one per cent of BSkyB shares, said at the weekend: “At the moment, we are trying to strike a balance. James doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong and he has been a good chairman of the company.

“On the other hand, we all know that mud sticks and we wouldn’t want people saying they were going to cancel subscriptions in Sky because of the Murdoch association.”

Another investor, with a larger holding, added: “This committee meeting is going to be box-office television. It’s a pity Sky can’t put it on pay-per-view.

“But to be serious, if on television he came across as someone with something to hide, or he got angry with MPs or, who know, anything might happen, you might take a view that Sky could be affected and it would be better not to have the Murdoch name on the chairmanship.”

A third investor added: “We think we should have a non-Murdoch chairman, but we’ll wait to see what Tuesday brings. Having said that, I would be more worried if I was a News Corp shareholder. In the States, there is more than a sense that things aren’t real till they’ve happened on television.”