Bill O'Reilly has blood on his hands (video)

No question [Bill O'Reilly] has blood on his hands.

LINKS:
- Bill O'Reilly killed George Tiller
- Tiller the baby Killer

----------------------------------

Liberal bloggers point finger at Bill O'Reilly in George Tiller's death

It's no secret that Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly was instrumental in publicizing the activities of George Tiller, the 67-year-old Kansas doctor who was one of the few physicians in the country to perform late-term abortions in the face of protests, bombings at Tiller's clinic and death threats.

Tiller was slain over the weekend, as he stood in his church in Wichita, Kan., serving as an usher. President Obama decried the killing, saying, "However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence." Scott Roeder, an anti-abortion activist and former member of a right-wing militia group, has been arrested.

Now, liberal bloggers are speculating that what one called O'Reilly's "jihad against Tiller" may have contributed to the doctor's death.

"There's no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose," said Salon.com's Gabriel Winant. Tiller has been vilified in 29 episodes of O'Reilly's "The Factor," Winant reports, usually described as "Tiller the Baby Killer" and often as a doctor who "destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000."

On March 15, 2006, O'Reilly said Tiller was the moral equivalent of Al Qaeda. On Nov. 9, 2006, he likened the physician who gave women legal abortions to China's Mao, Germany's Hitler or the Soviet Union's Stalin. And on Dec. 12, 2006, he unleashed all his hatred in this episode. See what you think.

The right-wing blogosphere is defending O'Reilly by blaming ... the Obama administration.

John Aravosis, who blogs for AmericaBlog.com, wrote that this was all the president's fault, because the administration withdrew a report warning about abortion protest violence.

Thank God that the Obama administration caved last month to religious right and GOP demands that it withdraw a new domestic terrorism report that indicated, among other things, that radicals might use abortion as a justification for committing acts of domestic terrorism. Now a man is dead, and an American church has been shot up during services. Which leads to the question as to whether the Obama administration plans to do anything about the terrorist threat posed by religious right extremists, or whether typical Democratic spinelessness will lead us to now ignore this brutal murder, since that is the message that was sent last month, just weeks before this act of terror.

For the most part, both pro-choice and anti-abortion groups of the mainstream variety were careful to condemn Tiller's slaying.

But Operation Rescue, which ran a Tiller Watch on its website, called Tiller "a mass murderer." In a statement, the group's founder, Randall Terry, said, “We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.”

Maybe, as MSNBC's political team suggested this morning, the culture wars are about to return big time.

-- Johanna Neuman

Jonathan Kay on STV: liar

How much disinformation can one spread without lying? Well, it seems to be getting harder for Jonathan Kay, the asswhole writing for the junk paper "The Corporate Ghost".

Lie number one:

The STV system was developed by B.C.'s Citizens' Assembly, "an independent, non-partisan assembly of 160 randomly selected British Columbians [...]

STV has been in use long before BC considered it. Wikipedia knows:

The Single transferable vote (STV) [...] was pioneered in Tasmania, Australia, where it has been in constant use in the Tasmanian House of Assembly since [1906].

Lie number two:

Under STV, the tabulation process requires a computer.

If that was the case, then Tasmanians invented the computer in secret, long before anyone else did: while Tasmania's STV is from 1906, the invention of the first computers that most people know of took place in the 1940s. Way to go Tasmania!

Jonathan Kay's convenient lies
Let's face it, Jonathan Kay is nothing more than mouthpiece for the corporate elite in this country. Corporate Canada doesn't like STV because it would be a lot harder to rig the results under STV to the same extend as it can be done under FPTP.

National Post sucks, sucks, sucks!
The fact that the National Post prints Jonathan Kay's "inaccurate" junk should give you enough reason to avoid this paper like the pest. Not to mention that the NP was one once started by one of Canada's most corrupted business magnate (yes, Conrad Black, and he's is in jail too), and currently owned by one of Canada's biggest bigots on Israel's Apartheid issue.

Links
- I'm Jonathan Kay, and I lie for a living
- We are the National Post: Why WOULD we produce sound journalism when selling our personal biases as media is a) far more profitable and b) a lot more fun?

Why Milton Friedman (and free-market orthodoxy) is OUT and Paul Krugman (and counter-counter reformation) is IN

Let's remember why big business hates unions, government regulations and restrictions:Yes, it's because big fish like to eat small fish, and is rather scared of any counter movement.

Well, the time has come: Milton Friedman is OUT and Paul Krugman is IN.

In Paul Krugman's own words, from before the credit crunch (2007):

Friedman's laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence.

Developing countries rushed to open up their capital markets, despite warnings that this might expose them to financial crises; then, when the crises duly arrived, many observers blamed the countries' governments, not the instability of international capital flows.

Electricity deregulation proceeded despite clear warnings that monopoly power might be a problem; in fact, even as the California electricity crisis was happening, most commentators dismissed concerns about price-rigging as wild conspiracy theories. Conservatives continue to insist that the free market is the answer to the health care crisis, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

What's odd about Friedman's absolutism on the virtues of markets and the vices of government is that in his work as an economist's economist he was actually a model of restraint. [...] Why didn't he exhibit the same restraint in his role as a public intellectual?

The answer, I suspect, is that he got caught up in an essentially political role. Milton Friedman the great economist could and did acknowledge ambiguity. But Milton Friedman the great champion of free markets was expected to preach the true faith, not give voice to doubts. And he ended up playing the role his followers expected. As a result, over time the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy.

[There's] a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I'd argue, is a counter-counterreformation.

LINKS
- Sound economics, but bigoted opinions: "Free to choose", as long as you stay away from choosing for government regualtions and unions (and other outdated biogotry - video)
- Democracy Now! An interview with Paul Krugman (october 2007 - video) - On Bailout talks (september 2008 - video)
- Wikipedia: Paul Krugman
- Wikipedia: bigotry