Bill O’Reilly was on his way to the airport in Rome on Wednesday when he found out Fox News had decided to let him go. The details of his departure have yet to be worked out, and he was not yet thinking about his life after Fox. Golly. The way I read this, it sounds like Fox didn't talk to Bill about what was best for their common future as much as they announced that they had.
But when he turns his attention to his future, he will have no shortage of options. Though his sexual harassment settlements may pose an obstacle, O’Reilly’s loyal fanbase presents a major opportunity to conservative networks looking to grow their audiences. Or to shrink their audience due to the lack of it . . . .
"Our management here is obviously discussing it," said Charles Herring, president of One America News Network, a conservative cable channel that reaches 35 million households. "Clearly he’s built one heck of a brand. Clearly there’s been accusations that need to be looked at also." Some very suspicious accusations. Starting with the gal who seemed more like a nun than someone you could expect him to go after, and ending with this last piece of work who made no sense at all. Except perhaps as a planted opportunity to push him out the door.
Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, said he would be "very open to talking" with O’Reilly about joining the network, which reaches 10 million homes via cable and broadcast.
"I think some of the allegations made against him were serious, but he’s never been convicted in my mind of anything," Ruddy says. "I think he still remains a very hot property in the media word." If you're a conservative, yes.
Either option would be a step down from Fox, which reaches 100 million households and paid O’Reilly $20 million a year. But Ruddy argues that the "fraying" of Fox News has created an opportunity for other conservative outlets. Funny how Murdock's kids haven't figured that what that translates to for Fox yet.
"I think there’s a lot of players willing to invest," he says.
O’Reilly, 67, also has enough of a profile that he could strike out on his own. After parting ways with Fox in 2011, Glenn Beck launched a TV and radio show on the Blaze, his multi-media platform. The Blaze has reportedly reached as many as 300,000 paying subscribers and is available in 13 million cable households. I doubt it.
"I think it’s harder than it looks," cautions Scott Baker, the site’s former editor-in-chief. "Obviously O’Reilly is in a position to do better at that than nearly anyone. But we’re talking about people at different life stages. The question will be how much does he want it." If he gets away from NY's tax brackets, probably plenty.
"My guess is he loves that idea of being America’s anchorman," Baker says. "Revenge is a powerful motivator. But having to build something from the ground up, it puts you in your place a little bit." And if he gets on a network he can place himself opposite Fox's big money maker and hit them even harder. And Murdock's kids can eat their alleged "values" for sustenance whenever they get hungry.
A less strenuous option would be to launch a podcast, which he could do from his own house for minimal cost. Nancy Grace, who left HLN last year, now does a daily Crime Stories podcast. I never did like this angry . . . thing.
O’Reilly already has a "premium membership" plan on his website. Subscribers pay $4.95 per month for access to a newsletter, a message board, and the "O’Reilly Factor" archives. The site is rumored to have at least 20,000 paying subscribers, bringing in more than $1 million a year.
O’Reilly could launch a daily podcast or streaming show and substantially grow the premium subscriber base.
With relatively little effort, he could replace much of his lost earnings from Fox.
[Dhaka Tribune] Before we get into a debate over the difference between an idol and a sculpture, the fundamentalists among us should be asked whether they acknowledge and recognise the Supreme Court in the first place.
Indeed several Islamist attacks have been directed against courts and judges precisely because the holy mans said judges and courts uphold and represent an un-Islamic dispensation, if not a godless one.
The Supreme Court, where Lady Justice stands with her scales, is dedicated to upholding the constitution of Bangladesh. This constitution, in true democratic spirit, upholds and embraces the illusory sovereignty of the citizen.
It is the citizen who is the source of all power.
This philosophy directly contradicts with that of the Islamist parties, and hence the conflict between a democratic system and one prescribed by Islamists.
However, facts are stubborn; statistics are more pliable... when holy mans talk about Lady Justice and not the iconic Aparajeyo Bangla or any of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s busts, it can only be presumed that they attach more significance to this statue than the others.
Now, if they do not even recognise an institution then they cannot comment on it.
If Bangladesh does not recognise a country, then our government cannot urge that government to behave responsibly. But such reasoning can only be expected to work with a reasonable and rational quarter, which the Islamists have shown little evidence of being.
Soon after getting an assurance from the prime minister that Lady Justice would be removed (thankfully, the PM seems to have had second thoughts on this), the holy mans were out with the demand of removing all statues.
One presumes that the prime minister was just trying to placate a room full of holy mans when she assured them of having a word about the sword wielding, scale bearing Banglicised Lady Justice.
But the mullahs then demanded removal of all statues.
That would include all statues and sculptures like Aparajeyo Bangla, Raju Bhashkorjo, and the hundreds of busts of the prime minister’s father, not to mention the millions of idols of deities that are worshipped around the country.
This is a perfect example of why one should not relent to communal pressures, no matter how insignificant they might seem.
And as regards the debate of whether it is an idol or a statue, it is pointless.
Those saying it is not an idol but a sculpture are treading a very dangerous path. Even agreeing to take up such a line of argument would suggest one is worse or better than the other.
There is the suggestion that perhaps it would have been OK for the holy mans to make the demand if this were an idol that people worship.
It is not.
So what if this is the Roman goddess of justice? It is this concept of justice being blindfolded that we have embraced.
Bengali, Buddhist, agnostic, bigot or buffoon, Lady Justice doesn’t see the difference.
She has her scales to test the strength of one’s argument and evidence against another, and she has her sword to deliver swift justice.
Removal of the statue of Lady Justice now, would threaten the idols and statues everywhere forever.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/21/2017 00:00 ||
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#1
I've clicked through - both statues are: how shall I put it?
BLUF: [City Journal] A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the country’s educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals--the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other "symbolic analysts," as Robert Reich once called them--who shape the country’s tastes, form its opinions, and renew its prestige. Cheap labor, tariff-free consumer goods, and new markets of billions of people have made globalization a windfall for such prosperous places. But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the rest of France.
Cities that were lively for hundreds of years--Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Béziers--are now, to use Guilluy’s word, "desertified," haunted by the empty storefronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.
[Newsweek] The well-manicured Washington, D.C., suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, is probably what President Donald Trump’s supporters imagine when they whoop about draining the capital’s "swamp." A high-income enclave of Volvo-driving, wine-sipping, NPR-listening lawyers, lobbyists, journalists and government bureaucrats, Chevy Chase is such a liberal stronghold that local Republicans said last year they were afraid to plant Trump campaign posters on their lawns.
All of which makes the town an unlikely launch pad for Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the suddenly prominent White House National Security Council official at the center of a bizarre backdoor maneuver to provide House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes with top-secret documents on government surveillance. Cohen-Watnick reportedly retrieved the documents from a classified CIA terminal in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House and gave them to Nunes, a California Republican who had been a member of Trump’s transition team. They were intended to prove that former President Barack Obama was "wire tapping" Trump during the 2016 campaign.
The documents did no such thing, other members of the panel concluded after studying them. What they actually showed is that U.S. intelligence agencies did have Trump’s associates on their radar--but only because they were tracking Russian agents.
#1
From the Guardian article:
“They hate him. They absolutely despise him,” a former senior intelligence official said of the CIA’s view of Cohen-Watnick.
Yes, and I'm reasonably confident we now know WHY! Nothing from GCHQ yet on this fellow, but we're still waiting.
#3
Genealogy also tends to be the sanitized version of personal history. Seldom does one read in obits that the person was the worst SOB in his small town.
#5
Nothing really sinister meant by the comment. I've read some of the entries for my relatives and often wondered if they were talking about the same person I knew.
#6
Ezra-Cohen-Watnick rose very quickly for a 30-year old. There is quite a bit of intrigue surrounding him. One has to wonder if the media is driving this, the Democrats or people close to Trump or all of them. Cohen-Watnick seems to be wading in deep swamp water.
BLUF: [PJ] The real target in the defenestration of Bill was not O'Reilly himself but very obviously Donald Trump. He's the Big Kahuna the obscenely named "Resistance" (hey, you idiots, that was about Auschwitz, not tax reform) is after and Bill was only a stop along the way.
Indeed, several of Bill's accusers, represented by the daughter of Gloria Allred, appear to be people who find Trump particularly loathsome.
And the original story was broken by the New York Times, the literary capital of the "Resistance."
[American Thinker] Senator Elizabeth Warren denounced President Trump's election as the product of an 'ugly stew of racism' that propelled him to the top.
So given that she considers herself a Native American minority and has sought affirmative action privileges with that so-claimed designation, what she's saying is that a vote against her or her party could only have been due to racism, never a popular rejection of her socialist ideas.
Logic of that sort is why Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds can often say: 'Want More Trump? That's how you get More Trump.'
Warren;s contempt for America's votes couldn't be more obvious. If it was an ugly stew of racism that got Trump elected, is it not a little patronizing that Warrren also could say, in an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow:
"People are right to be angry, but Donald Trump said it’s their fault--those other people. Those people who don’t worship like you, those people who don’t look like you, those people who aren’t the same color as you."
So all those Trump-voting racists are right to be angry, is that it? Since when does one justify a racist's right to be angry? Only when one is a Democrat who still hasn't gotten over Hillary Clinton's loss, and needs a few insults to hurl at the people who kept her party out of power.
#1
Warren denounced President Trump's election as the product of an 'ugly stew of racism' that propelled him to the top.
The old bag of tricks in the leftie playbook are ceasing to work. Trump went a long way in neutering this formerly tried and true method of the Donks. He drove a stake in the heart of PC.
#3
That one wore out so long ago. Remember the dem primary with Gore vs. Dukakis? Gore was using the Willie Horton case to paint Dukakis as a liberal loon. Nobody called Gore a racist.
It was only when repubs pointed to Horton that it was racist.
The hypocrisy was obvious.
The technique has been dead since, at least, then.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
04/21/2017 8:37 Comments ||
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#4
Those people who don’t worship like you, those people who don’t look like you, those people who aren’t the same color as you.
I must have missed that part.
I do recall the part about how we don't murder and commit violence like certain groups do. Especially the groups that ought to be on their best behavior since they have no right to be here in the first place.
But maybe "right to be here" is the unspoken issue.
[DAWN] IT had all the makings of a landmark judicial case: a serving prime minister and his family accused of corruption; the petitioners representing an array of political opposition; the hearings initiated by a chief justice of Pakistain, who intervened to prevent a potentially catastrophic political confrontation in Islamabad; and an evidentiary trail rooted in the explosive Panama Papers, which caused ripples across the globe. In the end, and in a split decision, the court has found that it does not have enough evidence to give the opposition what it wants, but it does have enough doubts to demand a joint investigation team probe Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... and his family. The verdict was immediately hailed by the government as a victory; and, perhaps half-heartedly, used by the PTI to demand yet again that the prime minister temporarily step aside. Both reactions were predictable.
In the hours after a lengthy judgement is delivered, a full examination of its contents is unlikely; the days ahead will yield more details and informed opinion, supportive and critical of the judgement. Yet, there is an anomaly that can be immediately identified and that perhaps the court has not thought through the implications of. The JIT itself is effectively a dead end. The record of JITs in other politically charged matters make it clear that no great surprises ought to be expected. But the inclusion of military-run intelligence agencies in a probe against a serving prime minister in matters of finance and the law is remarkable -- and a precedent that should not be established. It is not a question of who the prime minister is or civilians being above the law. There is absolutely no doubt that as prime minister, Mr Sharif must be held to a greater level of scrutiny than the average citizen. What is concerning about the composition of the JIT, especially with the inclusion of a Military Intelligence representative, is the signal it sends about the lack of institutional trust. Civilian matters should be probed, adjudicated and resolved in the civilian domain. And if the court has little faith in civilian institutions, as it indicated in its verdict, it could have put its trust in a judicial commission.
Continued on Page 49
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[DAWN] WHEN I insist before my students that they are part of the ’Zia generation’, some of them cringe. But it is true. Ours is a country in which the vast majority of the population -- there are approximately 120 million Paks under the age of 30 -- was born into a society that had been transformed by 11 years of brutal dictatorship.
Religion has been instrumentalised by all of Pakistain’s rulers -- even before the inception of the country. But the Zia years marked a politicisation of religion without precedent. The ’Zia generation’ grew up in a heavily ’Islamised’ world in which most progressive traditions were pushed completely to the margins of society.
When the events of 9/11 forced Pak officialdom to publicly renege on its long-term policy of patronising religiously inspired militancy, the societal contradictions to which this policy had given rise were laid bare. Hatred and (structural) violence is today commonplace. Mashal Khan’s brutal lynching at the hands of his fellow students was only the latest example of how pervasive Zia’s legacy is.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
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BLUF: [Breitbart] [Sons of Fox News owner Rupert Murdock] One of their wives works for the Clinton Global Initiative. One of the wives when this New York Times story, ’You can’t keep the man on the air you just can’t this is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to us, it’s embarrassing to dad company. You can’t do this.’ And the fact that the story ran on The New York Times was such a profound shock, sadness, and embarrassment that they felt that had to do something. That is why the fact that is started on The New York Times is crucial. There is two reason it is important. The Times is not just appearing out of nothing out of the ether.
Here’s the timeline, story New York Times. How long did it take before you started hearing about massive advertiser defections, just a day, right? You think that was natural? No, this was a campaign, folks. That’s why this is so frustrating to me, even after all this time, these campaigns are not immediately spotted for what they are. Therefore, people are not able to deal with them. And this one should have been expected given what’s been going on the last two years there. Tey should have been ready for this. But see the bottom line is they were.
Fox is not going to be the way it is for long. There is a massive ‐shakeup coming, and it is generational. It is generational and political. It is like anything else, nothing ever is constantly the same, there is change everywhere. But it has been amazingly easy to sit from a distance and watch this, it’s amazing how easy it appears, at least to me, that this massive and rapid transformation is occurring. Emphasis added.
#4
George Soros and his organizations Media Matters and MoveOn.org going full bore against another conservative messenger. They will go after Tucker Carlson also. If they can't dig up dirt, they will manufacture it.
I believe he was attempting to communicate with her in her native tongue.
Posted by: Sleretle Lover of the Slytherins8031 ||
04/21/2017 9:24 Comments ||
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#6
Destroying Fox News or at a minimum forcing it to move to the left sharply (which will eventually do the same thing) is about gutting the political messaging that is the sole source of conservative analysis in the US. That done, and the apparent emergence of generational transference of conservative ideals is curbed . Couple that with renewed importation of massive immigrants primed to socialist entitlements and the doom of the Republic as we descend into another Workers Paradise continues. This is strategic and planned and deadly dangerous to core America.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Bill O’Reilly was on his way to the airport in Rome on Wednesday when he found out Fox News had decided to let him go. The details of his departure have yet to be worked out, and he was not yet thinking about his life after Fox.
[Newsweek] The well-manicured Washington, D.C., suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, is probably what President Donald Trump’s supporters imagine when they whoop about draining the capital’s "swamp." A high-income enclave of Volvo-driving, wine-sipping, NPR-listening lawyers, lobbyists, journalists and government bureaucrats, Chevy Chase is such a liberal stronghold that local Republicans said last year they were afraid to plant Trump campaign posters on their lawns.
[DAWN] WHEN I insist before my students that they are part of the ’Zia generation’, some of them cringe. But it is true. Ours is a country in which the vast majority of the population -- there are approximately 120 million Paks under the age of 30 -- was born into a society that had been transformed by 11 years of brutal dictatorship.
