Advertisers are fleeing Bill O’Reilly’s show following reports of massive settlements with women who claim he harassed them. Over 50 sponsors have fled and a recent show had just seven advertisers and ended abruptly 15 minutes early, maybe because there were not enough ads to fill the time, though one would have thought that he would have been able to bloviate to fill that time since talking is what he does best.
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When reports emerged on April 4 of what seems like a ghastly tragedy in Idlib, Syria, the key questions should have been: What exactly happened? Who were the victims? Who were the perpetrators? What was their motive? Was it a deliberate and targeted attack on the victims or had something gone badly awry? What should be the appropriate response? As with any investigation of deliberate killings, identifying means, opportunity, and motive become paramount. Means and opportunity exist for a wide variety of agents in the region, including the Syrian government and the ISIS-affiliated the rebels fighting against them. That leaves motive as a key discriminant.
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Much of the time, synchronized swimmers are under water and upside down. So what happens if you film them underwater and then invert the film? You get a strangely weird result.
The Intercept website was started by Glenn Greenwald and others following the whistleblowing by Edward Snowden. It has a page where they encourage other whistleblowers to come forward but also provides them with suggestions as to how to do it while minimizing the risks of exposure.
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As the Trump administration lurches from one awful policy to another, some are hoping that his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner will serve as some kind of moderating force. It is incredible that we have arrived at this stage of politics, a reversion to a form of medieval fiefdom where people who have no claims to any expertise whatsoever are now in positions of great influence merely because they are family members of the ‘ruler’ and thus have his ear.
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I have written before about the problematic nature of romantic relationships between college faculty and students. The college campus is a place of great ambiguity when it comes to these kinds of relationships. Since college students are adults who also have more freedom than secondary school students, it lacks the clear boundaries that one finds in secondary schools. Since the college classroom is not a workplace, it lacks some of the rules that have become the norm there.
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The 19th season of the British TV series Midsomer Murders has started streaming on Netflix. This is quite an achievement in longevity. I wrote about this long-running show two years ago and it sparked a lot of interesting comments and suggestions for other similar series. Thanks to those, I have watched episodes of Death in Paradise, Inspector Morse, and the first two seasons of the much more superior show (in terms of writing, acting, and plotting) of Broadchurch and am looking forward to the third.
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As if Fox News couldn’t sink any lower, now comes information that the network paid as much as $13 million to settle lawsuits brought by women against Bill O’Reilly. The fact that they kept him on shows the kind of culture that is tolerated there. And now even more women are coming forward.
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Democratic congressperson Elijah Cummings has been one of the most vocal critics of Donald Trump. So when, in an interview after meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Trump said to a reporter, “Elijah Cummings was in my office and he said, “You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country” pretty much nobody believed him and put that down to yet another falsehood by this pathological liar.
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After the humiliating debacle in which Paul Ryan and Donald Trump had to pull their health care bill from the floor or see it go down in flames, the talk was that the reform effort was dead, at least for some time, and that Trump and Ryan would reluctantly defer health care actions that hurt the poor and middle class and instead move on to other things dear to their hearts that hurt the poor and middle class, like cutting taxes on the wealthy.
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