liberty

Thou Shalt Kill

Tom Scocca · 06/16/16 09:20AM

On Monday, a representative of the National Rifle Association officially blamed “political correctness” for the massacre in Orlando this past weekend. This line of argument—that that the killings were a result of our inability to speak frankly about the dangers this country faces—gathered momentum while the dead bodies still lay in the Pulse nightclub.

Rich People Want Customer Service on Defective Congress They Bought

Tom Scocca · 10/10/13 04:00PM

Remember how Congressional Republicans went to the shut-down World War II Memorial to protest the fact that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives had just shut down the government? In a spectacular meta-expansion of that story line, today's New York Times checks in with the right-wing organizations that spent millions on millions of dollars to elect and entrench a Republican majority in the House. They're upset.

Ask.com buys reference site Lexico

Jackson West · 05/15/08 12:00PM

Lexico, the company behind reference sites like Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, has been acquired by also-ran search engine Ask.com, a unit of Barry Diller's IAC, for an undisclosed sum. It will mean an 11 percent boost in traffic for Ask and more revenue for Lexico's sites, as Google had cut a special deal with IAC for a higher revenue share than it would give to the likes of Dictionary.com. Possibly tipping their hand about future moves, Ask CEO Jim Safka told the AP the site was also looking to improve results related to health and entertainment, presumably through more acquisitions. The move comes after IAC's Barry Diller settled a fight with Liberty's John Malone, a major IAC shareholder, over plans to split the company into five different parts.

Killer Diller the victor in IAC breakup case

Owen Thomas · 03/28/08 04:50PM

Score one for the bitter old queen. Barry Diller, battling with major IAC shareholder John Malone in court, has won the right to break up IAC without interference from Malone's Liberty. This solves one problem for Diller, but creates another. Instead of running one hodgepodge of Internet businesses, he'll have five of them to worry about. Sparring with Malone, a business ally turned enemy, will look simple compared to regaining Wall Street's affections.

Kiefer Sutherland Is Free!

Seth Abramovitch · 01/21/08 02:31PM

That deafening cheer you heard last night, so loud it blew the Ye Rustic Inn's front door right off its hinges and into an adjacent stripmall's parking lot, had nothing to do with Brett Favre's crushing defeat, but rather a triumph of the highest order involving one of Silver Lake's favorite sons. For Kiefer Sutherland, you see, had emerged from the Glendale City Jail a free man at precisely 12:05 a.m., having served the entirety of his 48-day sentence, where he passed the long hours "cleaning sheets, pillowcases and blankets on laundry duty." John Balian, a jail spokesman always forthcoming with kindly soundbites and incremental Kiefer updates, offered that the 24 star was wearing "a shirt and jeans," and "looked like he was glad to be out." Why was the beloved Christmas tree assassin forced to serve out his entire sentence, where lesser shock-starlets have been released early for far more serious, traffic-flow-flouting crimes? The AP report explains: