James Murdoch knew of wider phone hacking, ex-colleagues say

Original article: latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britain-murdoch-20110907,0,1114251.story

James Murdoch was aware that another News of the World reporter was seemingly implicated in illegal tapping, despite his statements to the contrary, say two top executives of the now-defunct newspaper.

By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times, 10:54 AM PDT, September 6, 2011, Reporting from London

Media executive James Murdoch knew of a damaging piece of evidence three years ago that phone hacking was practiced by more than one reporter at the News of the World tabloid, despite his statements to the contrary, two of his former colleagues said Tuesday.


The assertion by Colin Myler, the paper's last editor, and Tom Crone, its head in-house lawyer, boosted the likelihood that Murdoch will be called to appear again before Parliament to explain the discrepancy. Both he and his father, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, gave evidence to lawmakers in July after the phone-hacking scandal broke wide open and threw their massive News Corp. empire into turmoil.


Myler and Crone, who were summoned to reappear before Parliament on Tuesday, said they talked to James Murdoch briefly in 2008 about an email that seemed to implicate the News of the World's chief reporter in the tapping of cellphones, an illegal tactic for which a colleague, Clive Goodman, had already been convicted and jailed.


Photos: British phone hacking scandal


The email surfaced in a lawsuit brought by a former soccer star against the News of the World, which he accused of intercepting his voice mail messages. Crone told lawmakers the email convinced him it would be better to settle the case rather than fight it.


"It was evidence clearly … that it went beyond Clive Goodman," Crone said of the phone hacking, which had been characterized as the work of a lone "rogue reporter."


Crone said he sought permission to settle from Murdoch, who was in charge of News International, the News of the World's parent company. The meeting lasted "about 15 minutes," during which "I am certain that I explained to him … this document meant it was clear that News of the World had a wider involvement" in hacking than was previously revealed.


Added Myler: "I think everybody perfectly understood the significance and the seriousness of what we were discussing."


Their statements are awkward for Murdoch, who insists he only became aware in the last year or so that the illegal accessing of cellphones was possibly rife at the News of the World in its pursuit of sensational stories.


On Tuesday, he said he stood by his words before Parliament in July. Neither Crone nor Myler told him during their 15-minute meeting that wrongdoing extended beyond Goodman and the private detective he hired to hack into phones, Murdoch said in a statement released by News International.


His former colleagues also did not show him the damning email or mention the chief reporter to whom it appeared to refer, Murdoch said, adding: "There was nothing discussed in the meeting that led me to believe that a further investigation was necessary."


Whether lawmakers will be satisfied by Murdoch's explanation is doubtful. Once cowed by the power of News International, which owns the Sun and the Times of London, politicians have been emboldened by the scandal to speak out against both James and Rupert Murdoch, saying they must be held to account for the actions of their media properties.


Lawmakers also sharply questioned Crone and Myler about the size of the financial settlement with the former soccer player, Gordon Taylor, which exceeded $1 million.


Crone acknowledged that the big payout and a confidentiality agreement were designed to make the case go away as quickly as possible, to avoid possible lawsuits from four other people in a position similar to Taylor's. But he denied there was any attempt by the News of the World to cover up widespread criminality.


The tabloid was shut down in early July, days after allegations surfaced that the paper not only listened to the voicemails of movie stars and famous athletes but also murder victims and their relatives, including a 13-year-old girl who was killed by a nightclub bouncer in 2002.


More than a dozen people have been arrested so far in connection with the scandal, which has cast a harsh light on the dodgy tactics employed by Britain's tabloid press and on the chummy relationships between media executives, high-ranking politicians and Scotland Yard, whose chief resigned as a result.


The police probe into the case is one of the biggest operations underway at Scotland Yard. News International says it is cooperating fully with the investigation.

Original article: http://www.npr.org/2011/09/02/140132005/democrats-urge-obama-to-go-big-with-jobs-package

Democrats Urge Obama To 'Go Big' With Jobs Package

by MARA LIASSON

When a president asks for a prime-time slot to address a joint session of Congress, he is signaling to the country that he has something very important to say. Next Thursday, President Obama will once again try to make a hard political pivot to the issue of jobs.

Obama will confront two big problems when he stands in the well of the House next week. The first is political: the loss of voters' confidence in his handling of the economy. The second is the economy itself. A new estimate released by the White House on Thursday shows the economy growing at an anemic 1.7 percent and unemployment staying at 9 percent in 2012.

it's all politics

What Should Be In Obama's Jobs Plan? Six Ideas That Could Make The List

"He has to push forward a plausible, credible jobs package that will target that rate and start to finally bring it down," says Jared Bernstein, the former top economist for Vice President Joe Biden.

Obama previewed the speech Monday, saying he would be "laying out a series of steps that Congress can take immediately to put more money in the pockets of working families and middle-class families, to make it easier for small businesses to hire people, to put construction crews to work rebuilding our nation's roads and railways and airports, and all the other measures that can help to grow this economy."

Possible 'Opening Gun' In 2012 Race

The president's jobs package will almost certainly include measures for payroll tax relief, business tax credits for hiring and infrastructure projects. Bill Galston, a former aide to former President Clinton, says he thinks the president needs to go even bigger and lay out a growth agenda that includes a solution to the mortgage debt crisis and a long-term vision for fundamental tax reform.

"By going big, he will do what he really hasn't done so far in 2011, and that is plant a flag and invite the people to rally around it," he says. "If you look at the speech that way, it really is the opening gun in the 2012 presidential campaign."

The president would, in effect, be telling Americans what he would do if he had a second term.

What his Democratic supporters desperately hope he does not do is lay out an agenda designed to win Republican support. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, is one of Obama's liberal supporters who thinks the president has been too fixated on bipartisanship and finding the magic set of policies that will appeal to Republicans in Congress.

If you only propose what you think [Republicans] will accept, they control the agenda.

- AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka

"I said to him, 'Do not look at what is possible. Look at what is necessary, and just because you think it's the only thing that's politically possible, that doesn't mean you should propose that,' " Trumka says. "If you only propose what you think they will accept, they control the agenda."

At this point, Republicans don't even seem open to proposals they once supported, like an extension of the payroll tax cut. Galston says it's time for the president to give up on his quest for economic solutions that are agreeable to both parties.

"Given where the energy is within today's Republican Party, the prospects of an agreement that is significant are almost zero," Galston says, "which means that the president not only has no choice but to state his own position clearly and in unvarnished terms, but also that he can only gain from that."

Obama can only "gain," Galston says, because he's in such a deep hole. The number of people who view him as a strong leader has plummeted over the past two months.

What He's Fighting For

Galston and other Democrats think the only way out of that hole is to propose a bold plan and fight for it — even if it has no chance of passing Congress.

"If he has to choose between rebuilding his reputation as a strong leader and ticking off a menu of relatively modest legislative successes, I think that he would be well-advised to pursue the former even at the expense of the latter," Galston says, "because right now, even his friends are wondering what he stands for and what he's prepared to fight for, and if even your friends aren't sure, then you can bet that the people who are in the middle — the independents and moderates who will decide the election — aren't sure, either."

Ensuring that the American people know what he's fighting for is really the biggest task for the president next week and in the weeks after the speech, Bernstein says, as the president campaigns for his plan against Republican opposition.

"He will regain his footing precisely by doing just that, and I think that's where he's pivoting. This president can be extremely effective when he fights for what it is that people care most about in their economic lives: their living standards, their paychecks, the quality of their schools," Bernstein says. "He lost his footing, he got distracted. He got sucked into a very destructive, self-inflicted, wounding debt-ceiling debate, and that's behind him now."

The debt ceiling debate — where the president emerged looking weak and Washington utterly dysfunctional — is over, but the political damage it did hasn't gone away. Thursday's speech may be one of Obama's last big opportunities to reverse it.

How Smart Should A President Be?

Reposted from: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/08/29/140039074/rick-perrys-brainpower-questioned-how-smart-should-a-president-be


Rick Perry's Brainpower Questioned; How Smart Should a President Be?
by FRANK JAMES

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, with wife Anita, gestures as he answers a question at a news conference in Tulsa, Okla., Monday, Aug. 29, 2011.

The Politico headline was definitely eye-catching: "Is Rick Perry Dumb?"

Twelve years ago if Politico had been around then, it might have asked the same question about another Texas governor who went on to become president, George W. Bush.

And that, of course, is one of the uncanny things about Perry's ascendancy to frontrunner among Republicans vying to become their party's presidential nominee.

Not only do we have another Texas Republican governor who works the I'm-one-tough-hombre persona pretty hard but who strikes many observers as not being all that curious about the world outside his own small little part of it and doesn't seem to care how much he shows that.

 

Through his reporting for his Politico story, Jonathan Martin appears to conclude that that Perry has an obvious aptitude for getting and keeping power even though his lack of curiosity may place some serious constraints on what informs his use of that same power.

An excerpt:

Doubts about Perry's intellect have hounded him since he was first elected as a state legislator nearly three decades ago. In Austin, he's been derided as a right-place, right-time pol who looks the part but isn't so deep — "Gov. Goodhair." Now, with the chatter picking back upamong his enemies and taking flight in elite Republican circles, the rap threatens to follow him to the national stage.

"He's like Bush only without the brains," cracked one former Republican governor who knows Perry, repeating a joke that has made the rounds...

The story goes on to say that Perry doesn't learn for knowledge's sake. His approach to learning is apparently more like the just-in-time delivery approach in manufacturing. If he needs to know something, he learns it. Otherwise, why bother?

A quote in the story that seems to neatly describe Perry is this one:

Dave McNeely, a Texas political columnist who has covered Austin since 1963, differentiated between Perry's skill set.

"In terms of sheer brains and understanding policy at a deep level, he'd rank pretty low," said McNeely, looking back at the chief executives he's covered from John Connally on. "But as far as power politics and control, he's the most powerful Texas governor in history."

If Perry is able to fend off the attacks sure to come his way as the GOP frontrunner from Mitt Romney and other Republican nominees and wins the nomination, it would obviously set up one of the greatest contrasts bewteen presidential candidates in American history.

On one side, there'd be President Obama, the cerebral and cool intellect who once held one of the most prestigious positions accorded to any American law student, Harvard Law editor, who actually wrote two best-selling books himself and who wears his Christian faith lightly.

On the other would be Perry, the indifferent Texas A&M grad who questions science and apparently had plenty of help writing his book "Fed Up", who evidently even sees Bush, his immediate predecessor as Texas governor, as something of an Ivy League elitist, and who recently held an Christian evangelical rally.

And that's before you even get to the two mens' different racial histories.

Obama is clearly the anti-Perry; Perry unquestionably the anti-Obama.

Getting back to the whole issue of Perry's brainpower, it seems self-evident why a president of the U.S. would need to be smart, especially at this historic juncture.

As presidents are fond of saying, only the toughest issues reach their desk. The ones with easy solutions get solved lower down in the bureaucracy and never reach the Oval Office.

So it seems a president needs the ability to understand the complexity of the problem he, or one day she, is facing and be able to ask the right questions to reach the best possible answer.

Along those lines, a president needs to be smart enough to know what he doesn't know and to figure out who can get him the best answer.

And there's a lot that's difficult to know at a time when the global economy is more complex than ever, nuclear weapons are in the hands of unstable nations and the Earth is warming.

Indeed, America seems to be at an inflection point where if it doesn't get its policies right, it may remain a superpower but a rapidly declining one.

A president also needs to be able to synthesize a lot of disparate and confusing information into a coherent picture that he can then communicate to the American people. It takes intelligence to do that.

Because a president deals with many different domestic constituencies often unlike those from a president's own background, it seems obvious a president would need to have the sort of curiosity that leads to some understanding of people of widely divergent cultures. That's even more true on the foreign policy.

If part of intelligence as defined broadly is the ability to project yourself into the shoes of other people with completely different life stories, to empathize with such people, then presidents need that, too.

Obviously, there's the necessary aptitude for leadership, for rallying people to a cause and for inspiring confidence. A president must have that kind of intelligence, too.

These are arguments for a president being intelligent. There are certainly others.

Surely, people have become president who lacked a reputation for intelligence. After Abraham Lincoln, one of the smartest presidents, came Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, who strikes many historians as one of the most intellectually challenged.

Johnson, who numerous historians believe was drunk at his inauguration, is probably not the best argument for why intelligence shouldn't matter so much in a president. Ironically, it was Lincoln, a smart president, who chose Johnson as his running mate which demonstrates the limits of presidential intelligence.

On the other hand, Ronald Reagan proved to be a something of political genius, despite having once been called an "amiable dunce" by an old Washington graybeard, Clark Clifford.

So you clearly don't have to be a great intellect to be a transformational American president. But if intelligence is a good thing in airline pilots, Army generals or heart surgeons, it makes sense that it would be desirable in a president, too.