O'Reilly and Trump

Keith Olbermann says the O'Reilly firing could be used as a model for getting Trump out of the White House:

An Eventful Week,

and not in a good way, as Dan Rather notes, but things have been overshadowed by the Bill O'Reilly firing--long overdue--and the election in Georgia last night:





O'Reilly got shitcanned because of several sexual harassment claims against him, and these and similar allegations have dogged him for many years.

O'Reilly didn't start out so bad. He had once been a high school teacher, albeit at a private school, before turning to journalism. Unlike many commentators, he actually was a journalist who started out with local CBS stations, I believe. However, he went on to work as the original host of the television tabloid/news program Inside Edition. This was when I was first familiar with O'Reilly. I watched him nightly on this program. He generally played it straight and didn't interject his opinion on reports. By the mid-1990s, he decided to go back to school and attended Harvard, ultimately getting his master's degree in public administration. Also around this time, Fox, Murdoch, or Ailes approached O'Reilly and offered him a plum job as a host of a talking head program. O'Reilly knew which side his bread was buttered on, so he took it, and the rest is history, or infamy, as it ultimately turned out.

Details on the O'Reilly firing:

Mr. O’Reilly is departing two and a half weeks after an investigation by The New York Times revealed how Fox News and 21st Century Fox had repeatedly stood by him even as sexual harassment allegations against him mounted. The Times found that the company and Mr. O’Reilly had reached settlements with five women who had complained about sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by him. The agreements totaled about $13 million.

Since then, more than 50 advertisers had abandoned his show, and women’s rights groups had called for his ouster. Inside the company, women expressed outrage and questioned whether top executives were serious about maintaining a culture based on “trust and respect,” as they had promised last summer when another sexual harassment scandal led to the ouster of Roger E. Ailes as chairman of Fox News.

It didn't make sense to ditch Ailes yet keep O'Reilly around.

I don't think he will starve to death. Somebody in another network might actually pick him up.

Possibly he will turn to writing full-time. He already has a bunch of (probably bulk-bought) bestselling books.

Entertainment of the Day

Two pit bulls go at it:

Gene Lyons

Lyons is right when a tragedy like the Tiller murder is twisted into some kind of perverse "infotainment" by the media, especially by the likes of Bill O'Reilly.

The Abortion Wars

A Nebraska doctor is prepared to temporarily take over slain physician George Tiller's Wichita, Kansas, clinic.

The 67-year-old Tiller, who was controversial for performing late-term abortions, had been targeted for decades and at one point had the protection of federal marshals. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by a woman who remains in prison. His clinic was recently vandalized.

After Sunday's fatal shooting, Tiller's chief nurse called Carhart. Carhart made arrangements to keep his Bellevue clinic open while he is gone. When contacted Sunday, he said he was en route to Wichita to run Tiller's clinic for at least the next week.

Nationally, Tiller's slaying pushes abortion to the front burner of American politics. The killing follows President Barack Obama's controversial speech at Notre Dame University and the president's selection of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court.

But for Carhart, the response is deeply personal and filled with rage at the level of violence directed toward abortion providers.

He sees his friend's death as "a declaration of war" on the part of radical anti-abortion activists whom he calls "fundamentalist terrorists . . . no different from al-Qaida, the Taliban or any of them."

Tiller had been a frequent target of harassment, both at his clinic and in the judicial system. Attempts to prosecute him ultimately failed.

You bet his killing is an act of terrorism, and the anti-abortion groups cannot just distance themselves from the murder. They need to bear responsibility for increasingly poisoning the debate.

Meanwhile, the investigation into the killing intensified.

Accused killer Scott P. Roeder's behavior had changed as of late.

The Tiller clinic will reopen next week.

And yes, O'Reilly and Fox News deserve some criticism regarding Tiller:



Frank Schaeffer, son of the late religious rightist Francis Schaeffer, accepts some of the blame for creating the climate in which this murder happened.

Video of Schaeffer is here.

Randall Terry

really and truly needs to shut up about Tiller and "reaping what he sowed."

Seriously. Terry sounds like he is condoning murder--real murder--of people as long as it is for the "right" cause.

And Bill O'Reilly is smart enough to know there are limits to "freedom of speech" such as yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. As far as I am concerned, his demagoguery regarding Tiller created just the atmosphere for the doctor to have been murdered by a crazy person.

Even apologies to Tiller's family would ring hollow at this point.

Now That Dr. Tiller is Dead,

how much responsibility does Bill O'Reilly bear for having incited such hatred towards the late abortion provider?

But there's no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly thanks to the collusion of would-be sophisticated cultural elites, a bought-and-paid-for governor and scofflaw secular journalists. Tiller's name first appeared on "The Factor" on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O'Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as "Tiller the Baby Killer."

This kind of demagoguery would never happen if we had a Fairness Doctrine.

Jesse Jackson Spoke His Mind

Unfortunately, he had to apologize for being truthful:

Add O'Reilly Jackson to your page

Miscellaneous News.

Last week's gun nut ruling shouldn't have been a surprise: Anthony Kennedy has been the deciding factor in these decisions, even those decisions arrived at by pulling their arguments out of their asses.
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Thanks mostly to economic factors, fewer Europeans are having children, which could have some long-term negative consequences.
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Maybe the two of them will knock each other off and put us all out of our misery.
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Larry Sinclair needs to explain this or he can just forget it:

Sinclair, who has been making charges about Obama involving sex and drugs, allegedly was taken away at the conclusion of his remarks by U.S. marshals on an outstanding warrant from Delaware.

Some -- perhaps only those on Sinclair's Web site -- suggested this was concocted to embarrass Sinclair because there had been no record of a Delaware warrant after a detailed background check in January.

Well, yes, but no.

There was no warrant in January because it was issued in February after an October incident at a New Castle hotel involving Sinclair.

According to the Delaware State Police and Delaware Superior Court records, Sinclair allegedly paid for a three-week stay at the Rodeway Inn with $2,400 in money orders. The hotel manager later found they were counterfeit and called police.

In February -- long before Obama became the presumptive nominee -- a New Castle County grand jury indicted Sinclair for felony theft and a warrant was issued.

According to state prosecutors, Sinclair was released on $8,000 unsecured bond this week and is due back in court in July for an arraignment.

He does respond to the piece citing what he calls blatant inaccuracies.
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A bear decided it didn't like a bike racer on its property and mauled her:

Police officers with shotguns escorted medics into dark woods to retrieve the girl, who underwent surgery at Providence Alaska Medical Center.

“One of the EMS supervisors on the scene said that in his 24 years of doing this, these were the most extensively traumatic injuries he’d seen,” Anchorage Fire Department spokeswoman Cleo Hill said this afternoon.

She is expected to live.
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The Fergusons were at a loss when they heard the news their son had been hideously killed at the Six Flags park yesterday.
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Dogs can be used to find rare species.
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How More Twisted

can Obamamann get? Hillary "embraces" the right-wing conspiracy? Oh, shit.



And he attacks Sidney Blumenthal, lumping him in with the wingnuts, just because he is critical of Saint Obama.

The Rest of the Clinton Interview

with Bill O'Reilly can be found below, thanks to Taylor Marsh:

If You Don't Have

cable or satellite, such as myself, you may have missed Clinton's interview with Bill O'Reilly tonight:





H/T to Taylor Marsh for having gone to the trouble of recording and uploading the interview.


Clinton did extremely well. O'Reilly couldn't help but admire her. She's sharp as a tack.

O'Reilly

ended up making people sympathetic for Barack Obama, and I am sure that wasn't his aim.