Ohio Supreme Court justice boasts about his sex life

Bill O’Neill was elected to serve on the Ohio Supreme court, the only Democrat on the seven judge panel, all the others being Republicans. Yes, the fact that in Ohio, even judges to the Supreme Court are not only elected but are nominated by political parties should tell you that I live in a pretty weird state. The rules require judges to retire at the age of 70 but they can stay on until they complete their terms of office which for O’Neill meant January of 2019, and he decided to run for governor of the state in the election to be held in November 2018.
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16 Trump accusers tell their stories

With the avalanche of stories of sexual abuse and harassment, let us not forget the Abuser-in-Chief Donald Trump. Brave New Films has done us a service by putting together a compilation of the 16 women who have come forward to describe what Trump did to them.

Americans needs to face up to the fact that the person they elected as their president is a disgusting human being, even worse than the Roy Moore that the national Republican party has abandoned.

Some men simply have no clue

One of the astonishing features of the current spate of revelations about the way that men have been sexually harassing women is how many of them seem to have expected the women to welcome their advances, even if they had absolutely no reason to think so. A most glaring example comes from Minnesota where state representatives Tony Cornish and state senator Dan Schoen are accused of harassing two women, one a lobbyist and the other a fellow legislator.
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We cannot be selective about exposing abusers and holding them to account

I recently discussed this issue of sexual harassment and abuse with some female friends who were roughly of my age and they shared stories of utterly inappropriate behavior that they experienced at the hands of their male bosses decades earlier when they were younger. They had not reported it to the authorities for the usual reasons, many of which should by now be well known to everyone.
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US aiding and abetting Saudi war crimes in Yemen

The newly installed crown prince of Saudi Arabia and heir apparent to the throne Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS) has shown himself to be a shrewd manipulator of American media. He has arrested about 50 people within the ruling class, including some potential rivals, ostensibly for corruption. I have no doubt that there is massive corruption in that country, as there is by the wealthy in most countries. But he likely knows that anti-corruption plays well in western media and could mask what may well be purely a power grab. He also allowed women to drive, a welcome move no doubt, but just a very slight relaxing of the oppressive status of women in that country. But for doing so, he was hailed as some kind of great emancipator in the west.
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Two more women come forward about Roy Moore

[UPDATE: And yet another woman has come forward.

Gene Richardson, 58, alleges Mr Moore called her at her high school to ask her out. She rebuffed his offer, but said she felt pressured to go out with him after he allegedly asked again at the Gadsden Mall, where she worked. She claims the date ended with a “forceful” kiss.

Becky Gray, who was 22 at the time, also worked at the mall and said she complained to her manager about Mr Moore’s behaviour. She alleges the manager told her it was “not the first time he had a complaint about him hanging at the mall”.

]

As is often the case with sexual abuse, once the floodgates open, more and more people come forward with stories about the perpetrators that they had long suppressed thinking that they were alone or that no one would believe them. That is what is happening with Roy Moore as two more women come forward with stories that Moore is a creepy guy.
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How to prevent gerrymandering when drawing districts

One of the biggest scandals in the US is how districts are drawn to benefit the party in power, to give them legislative representation that is much greater than their share of the vote merits. This is because the party that controls the legislature at the time of the drawing every ten years pretty much gets to draw the lines as it wishes as long as the area is contiguous and contains roughly equal numbers of voters. They thus can draw the most outlandishly shaped districts in order to concentrate most of their opponents’ votes into a few districts. Only the grossest abuses, the ones that use race as the main factor, get rejected by the courts, because race gets the highest standard of scrutiny. But if race is not an obvious factor, you can with impunity shepherd the supporters of the opposing party into a few districts.
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Why are politicians are so cheap to buy?

That politicians can be bought by rich people, businesses, and lobbyists is no secret. What is surprising is how cheap they are. Sometimes it seems like all you need to do is give them a vacation or even just an expensive meal with plenty of alcohol to get them to do your bidding. The latest example of this are the charges brought against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara who seem to be not only cheap to buy but extremely brazen about the fact that they are for sale.
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Edward S. Herman (1925-2017)

He died on November 11, 2017 at the age of 92. He was emeritus professor of finance at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the co-author with Noam Chomsky of that excellent book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) that I think should be essential reading for anyone interested in politics and the media and which I have referred to many times on this blog. His Wikipedia page provides his biography.
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