monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The host of Fox News' most popular show has said his position makes him "vulnerable to lawsuits" after it emerged at least five women have accused him of harassment.

Bill O'Reilly released the statement after the New York Times reported he and his employee had paid the women a total of $13m (£10.3m).

In return, they paper says, they did not take their cases to court.

21st Century Fox says Mr O'Reilly, 67, denies wrongdoing.

In a statement published on his website, The O'Reilly Factor host said he was "vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity".

A statement from 21st Century Fox to the New York Times said: "While he denies the merits of these claims, Mr. O'Reilly has resolved those he regarded as his personal responsibility."

Two of the cases had been previously reported. However, the New York Times investigation discovered three more after conducting "more than five dozen interviews with current and former employees".

Two of the new cases were of a sexual nature and one alleged verbally abusive behaviour by O'Reilly.

The cases date back as far as 2002, and all the women were connected in some way to his show, the highest rated on the network, or worked for other programmes.

This is the second scandal to hit the channel in less than a year.

Its long-time boss Roger Ailes resigned in July after a number of female employees accused him of sexual harassment.


Mr O'Reilly added that "no-one has ever filed a complaint about me with the human resources department", and says he "put to rest any controversies to spare my children".

THE series of columns I’ve been writing lately, floating implausible proposals for an ideologically unstable age, has been a useful way of avoiding the depressing subject of the Trump administration’s first 100 days — because really, in the face of such incompetence and chaos, what is there to say?

But precisely because this administration seems so hopeless, any constructive advice for the Trump White House automatically falls into the category of implausible ideas. So I can continue my ongoing series while also talking about Donald Trump — by proposing, as this week’s unlikely-to-happen proposal, that our president should go out and get himself a brain.

(,,,)

A certain Steve Bannon — perhaps you’ve heard of him — was supposed to help Trump figure all this out, perhaps with an assist from Michael Anton, the once-pseudonymous pro-Trump essayist now ensconced in the National Security Council. But there’s little evidence that either man’s policy vision has advanced much beyond, “The conservative movement has failed, let’s try something else.” Bannon seems to have been particularly useless during the health care negotiations, encouraging Trump to work with the Freedom Caucus one day and trying to bully them the next, while throwing out various critiques of the Paul Ryan bill that didn’t point toward anything coherent.

It was probably unreasonable to expect a sixtysomething whose life experience is all in media and Hollywood to suddenly turn into a one-man think tank, no matter how many French far-right agitators he name-drops. But a think tank is basically what Trump needs: a small brain trust committed to figuring out what parts of the mainstream G.O.P. vision he should support and what heterodoxies it makes sense for him to champion, so that he isn’t stuck governing on the Heritage Foundation’s austerity budgets while his friends outside the administration urge him to expand Medicaid. (...)

Ashcroft commissioned the nation’s 93 U.S. Attorneys to make voting fraud a priority of their offices. Over the next four years, those prosecutors launched more than 300 investigations. But in the end, the government had little to show for it. On July 26, 2006, the day before Bush signed a renewal of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department released a fact sheet summarizing the Voting Integrity Initiative’s accomplishments. Federal prosecutors had charged 119 people with election crimes and convicted just 86. The worst examples were vote-buying schemes in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia that helped keep local politicians in power. Cases that had fixated GOP officials—like the “major criminal enterprise” in St. Louis—were not substantiated. Instead, most of the cases involved individuals who had cast a single ballot that they shouldn’t have, or hadn’t even voted at all but simply had registered improperly. Some of them went to prison. At least one person was deported. The targets that ended up getting the most attention weren’t the alleged fraudsters but the handful of U.S. Attorneys who didn’t push hard enough for prosecutions and were forced to resign.

“It’s remarkable that all of the U.S. Attorneys had a mandate and were given adequate resources to raise this to the top of the pile,” says David Becker, who was a trial attorney in the voting section of the Justice Department until 2005 and is now executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “They all agree we found a handful of cases … and that was it.”

But that wasn’t it. Not by a long shot. Eleven years after the books were closed on Ashcroft’s probe another voter fraud investigation is gearing up.

the pressures to exploit irrationalities rather than eliminate them are great and the chaos caused by competition to exploit them is perhaps already too intractable for us to rein in.

DID THE U.S. JUST PULL OUT OF A GLOBAL ANTI-CORRUPTION GROUP?
There is a mystery unfolding in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Officials there seem to have removed the United States from a singularly successful anti-corruption effort. This has happened largely in secret, aside from a few public statements in legalese that are nearly impossible to parse. At times, bureaucrats in the department have behaved in ways that—it’s hard to think of another word—seem un-American, literally silencing dissent in open forums and abruptly cutting off contact with the public.

The controversy centers on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a remarkable global project with a very boring name that has become a model for the fight against some of the worst forms of corruption. Countries where economies are built on oil, gas, diamonds, or other natural resources are frequently subject to what is known as the “resource curse.” Those countries are often run by autocrats who use the wealth in the ground to enrich themselves and crush opposition. This is not merely a local concern. There is a well-established link between global terrorism and the regions of the world—the Middle East, Nigeria—most susceptible to extractive-industry corruption. Money from oil-and-gas wealth has flowed into Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, and other nations. Imagine the past few decades if those nations had been well-governed democracies, instead of places that breed resentment, funnel money to bad actors, attack neighbors, and in other ways destabilize their regions and the world.

The first step to ending this age-old problem is fairly simple: a bit more information. Typically, a private company, such as ExxonMobil or BP, will pay a huge and secret amount of money to a government for access to fossil fuels or minerals. Nobody, aside from insiders, will ever know how much money the government received and how that money was spent. The E.I.T.I. changed that.

by proposing, as this week’s unlikely-to-happen proposal, that our president should go out and get himself a brain.

Judge to Trump: No protection for speech inciting violence

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A federal judge has rejected President Donald Trump’s free speech defense against a lawsuit accusing him of inciting violence against protesters at a campaign rally.

Trump’s lawyers sought to dismiss the lawsuit by three protesters who say they were roughed up by his supporters at a March 1, 2016 rally in Louisville, Kentucky. They argued that Trump didn’t intend for his supporters to use force.

Two women and a man say they were shoved and punched by audience members at Trump’s command. Much of it was captured on video and widely broadcast during the campaign, showing Trump pointing at the protesters and repeating “get them out.”

Judge David J. Hale in Louisville ruled Friday that the suit against Trump, his campaign and three of his supporters can proceed. Hale found ample facts supporting allegations that the protesters’ injuries were a “direct and proximate result” of Trump’s actions, and noted that the Supreme Court has ruled out constitutional protections for speech that incites violence.

“It is plausible that Trump’s direction to ‘get ‘em out of here’ advocated the use of force,” the judge wrote. “It was an order, an instruction, a command.”

[...]

At this point I'm uncertain about how much more I'll write here about politics in the US. ...can get quite depressing.

Did Putin prefer Trump to Clinton?

Some of Trump’s foreign positions happen to dovetail with Putin’s. This includes Trump’s potential unwillingness to defend NATO allies, support for Russia’s takeover of Crimea in Ukraine, and willingness to consider lifting sanctions against Russia. He has also praised Putin as a "strong leader."

But experts said this alone is not evidence that Putin is Trump’s puppeteer, or that he even wanted him as president.

"Trump's comments on Russia have been very unusual, strangely at odds with the dominant view of both parties in the U.S.," Radnitz said. "But that's literally all we know."