Maybe you’ve said to yourself recently, I wonder how Bill O’Reilly thinks about all these “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts that NBA players have been wearing? Well, O’Reilly not only schooled America on racism, but he did it in a conversation with Martin Luther King III. His message? Stop getting pregnant at 14 and abandoning your community, black people.
Bill O’Reilly really is America’s straight-talking treasure.
Team Blackness also discussed a St. Louis judge actually ruling in favor of protestors over police for once, the rise of sexual assaults in the millitary, and a cruel punishment for an eight-year-old blind child.
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Cervantes
No one should.
But what connection to racism did O’Reilly posit?
TooManyJens
In other news, Bob McCulloch admitted that his office knew Witness 40 was lying and they put her on the stand anyway. He has no regrets. How nice for him.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/some-witnesses-told-obvious-lies-to-michael-brown-grand-jury/article_fd6effff-fc82-5df2-a248-cb93587847c7.html
jl
This is the ‘don’t have kids out of wedlock’ T-shirt thing? Go Bill, go!
Bill is unbalanced.
jl
@TooManyJens:
” Bob McCulloch admitted that his office knew Witness 40 was lying ”
Are there no legal consequence for allowing testimony known to be false into the proceedings? Maybe not for the witness since everyone says she has serious mental health issues. But for the prosecutor? There should be.
Lurking Canadian
@jl: seriously. I thought that was one of the few Thou Shalt Nots of trial lawyering: namely Subborn Perjury
Cervantes
@Lurking Canadian:
He has no intention of prosecuting any of those witnesses for perjury, thus they will not be convicted of perjury, thus there will have been no perjury, and thus he will not have suborned it.
Singular
GODDAMIT. I was having a happy day up until clicked on that streak-of-pish face…
Villago Delenda Est
My question for Bill O’Reilly is, “Did you ever get your effin’ Iced Tea, mofo?”
Singular
In Britain it’s more insidious, but nobody gets away with talking like that. Acting like that, yeah, but openly embracing it? They would get fucking slaughtered.
Buddy H
Bill O’Reilly’s debate with Al Franken is a beautiful thing to see.
The sort of person who comes from a privileged background, then pretends to be blue collar, should be exposed as a fraud every time. O’Reilly’s father was a highly-compensated business executive. He did not grow up blue collar. And Bill is so wrong, every time, on race relations. Can he really be so clueless, or is it weird performance art?
And don’t these people have any shame? After the sexual harassment controversy, why didn’t he slink away into the shadows in shame? What are they so proud of? Same thing with Limbaugh and his viagra sex tourism? How do they go on, so full of themselves?
••••••••
On the subject of comedies that poke fun at foreign countries… Charlie Chaplin ended his “Great Dictator” masterpiece with a beautiful speech; a call for universal peace and tolerance. Seth Rogen ends his film with the dictator’s face exploding. He gets into an email argument with the producers, who ask him to tone down the face exploding bit. He agrees to remove some of the melting face footage, but he stands his ground. He wants SOME melting face. He insists.
Here’s a thought experiment: what if Rogen had ended his film with a call for peace? Maybe the dictator listens to Rogen and Franco, and comes to his senses; frees his people and embraces democracy? A silly ending, right? Rogen and Franco return home and become Nobel Peace Prize recipients and heroes.
I don’t know… maybe NK would have been just as offended by that ending….
TooManyJens
Oh wait, I’ve listened to the whole interview now (Youtube link here), and McCulloch does have one regret: he wishes he would have spoken up more in his own defense when people were saying he couldn’t handle this case fairly and impartially.
Un. Fucking. Real.
KG
@Cervantes: wonder if Bill is aware that teen birth rates have dropped drastically across the board in the last 20 years. I’m guessing he isn’t aware of that at all because it won’t fit the narrative. But blowhards gotta blow, hard.
Cervantes
@KG:
True.
Also true that rates are much higher in some “communities” than in others.
I guess if I really wanted to know what O’Reilly did with these facts (or other assertions), I’d look it up.
Kay
The news on teen pregnancy is actually really positive, not negative. There’s been a huge decline:
I don’t think people should be able to just repeat their favorite lectures for decades no matter what happens in real life :)
Kay
@KG:
It;s such a drag because if he was actually concerned about it he’d be saying “what did we do right to get these dramatic declines?”
But he doesn’t actually give a shit. He just wants to use the most convenient, laziest, easy-to-reach punching bag that he’s been socking for 20 years.
High school graduation rates are up too, across the board.
Roger Moore
@TooManyJens:
Isn’t calling a witness you know will give false testimony a breach of legal ethics? I would think that would be enough to get the bastard disbarred, which he ought to care about. I would expect anyone prosecuted by his office to bring that up at trial.
TooManyJens
@Kay:
What are you, some kind of pinko egghead?
Betty Cracker
So true it should be committed to needlepoint.
WereBear
I wouldn’t have gone with “treasure.” Unless it was in quotes.
jl
@KG:
@Kay:
Thanks for those links, which give the numbers along with the graphs.
What is interesting is that, if we use non-Hispanic Whites as the Gold Standard of Goodness (which I think is safe to say is the implicit Fox News assumption always), the non-Hispanic Black rates have not-only been declining absolutely along with non-Hispanic Whites and other groups, the rate among non-Hispanic Blacks has been declining relative to non-Hispanic Whites (unlike other disadvantaged groups of color, Hispanics and Native Americans). The relative risk for Blacks to Whites has steadily been dropping from over 2.7 to slightly over 2.1.
I think it is certainly healthy to remind people to behave responsibly, to foster community and family standards that promote responsible behavior. But certainly NOT OK to never ever consider the fact that there are reasons why there is what appears (note well, APPEARS, may not really be so if circumstances are considered) to be irresponsible and irrational self-destructive behavior among oppressed and disenfranchised groups (which include poor Whites BTW).
Even a bigoted nutcase like O’Reilly had to make a small gesture in that direction with the Garner case. But he returns to type, of course, since that is his role.
But, cannot even give a community of color credit for progress (edit: by Fox News’ own bigoted standards) even over a recent time period when Blacks have been slammed by economic hardship and the social and institutional discrimination becomes ever more obvious and glaring. (Edit: but of course that would require dividing two numbers, not sure Fox News does advanced analysis like that.)
Keep if fair and balanced, Fox News. Hey, maybe Shep will be the sane one on this someday, or perhaps that would be a bridge to far for him to cross in his role as the rinky dinky balance act over there.
Tree With Water
Shit rolls downhill, and the KKK rally that masquerades as FOX “news” serves as a window into the ugly heart of Rupert Murdoch (et.al). It’s the grotesque and breezy ease of his on-air flunkies in conveying expression of his vile worldview that is shocking, for it perversely increases the poison of his spiritual bankruptcy as many times over as there are viewers. I never think in these terms, but if did think of myself as caucasian in my dealings with the world, my reaction to all things FOX would be, “You caucasian shit-birds are making me look bad”.
jl
@jl: I remember a couple of years ago some commenter hyped an article that supposedly showed all sorts of measures of African-American family dysfunction ‘exploding’. But when you looked at the numbers, the ratio of these measures to those for Whites was very steady at around 2 to 3 times rates for Whites for over a 140 years. So, I think the whole idea of Death Star level explosions of dysfunction wrecking African-American families, such as births out of wedlock or family break-ups or one-parent families is racist bunk. Any effect of the evil nanny state welfare on African-Americans was a barely noticeable blip.
There are coping mechanisms poor and oppressed people use (including poor Whites) that do not find favor with the more pampered classes. As a commenter said in reply, (paraphrasing): it is very important for Whites to explain such long standing and stable patterns without using the ‘R’ word.
As Alexander Hamilton said (paraphrasing): it is mistake to think that the rich are more virtuous than the poor, the rich merely have vices which are more conducive the acquisition and maintenance of wealth and power.
Would be fun to get Alexander Hamilton in Bill’s show and talk like that, so Bill could denounce him as a commie and cut him off in mid-sentence.
Mike in NC
The Colbert Report is now history but The O’Reilly Factor will probably continue to spew wingnut vomit for another 20 years. Proof that there is no God.
SRW1
Max Planck is supposed to have said that science advances one funeral at a time.
Bill O’Reilly is but one example that this holds true beyond science.
Kay
@jl:
I just think it’s important to look at actual progress because it pushes back against what always sounds like (to me) as ” these are intractable poor people problems that never ever get solved or even improve so let’s yell at them some more about solving them”.
A lot of people worked on reducing teenage pregnancy. They had some success.
My daughter jokes about it now. She happened to be in high school when this county (which is white) had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state. She said they were all but begging them in high school: “please don’t get pregnant”. Assemble in the gym for the adults to parade in front of them, pleading with them :)
CONGRATULATIONS!
@jl: Yes, they are called “sanctions” and they come into play when the case goes to trial.
You see the problem.
jl
@Kay: From the data in your link the reduction in the ratio of Black to White of teen births has been amazingly steady over 1991 to 2012, and by 2012 amounts to a 22% to 25% reduction.
Seems like that is huge progress. Wonder why respectable corprorate media wiseasses have not noticed. What do their interns do with their time? (uh oh, maybe better not to ask).
Anyway, the more you look, the more you find White ignorance and bigotry, not less. I am ashamed of my people.
jl
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Will be state bar association notice? Can someone make a complaint? Can they do anything? Will they want to do anything?
MomSense
@TooManyJens:
Outrageous. I don’t know what to say. It is just so disturbing.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Kay:
So African-Americans don’t have the highest teen birthrate, but they’re the ones who should be wearing the t-shirts?
And yet you can’t logically argue that with someone like O’Reilly, because facts don’t matter. Only his feelings matter, and he FEELS like Black teens are having babies right and left.
japa21
@jl: Don’t know. But I have read that that particular witnesses testimony was pretty much discredited by the FBI and the FBIs conclusions were presented to the grand jury and that even the prosecutors basically told the grand jury not to give any credence to it. Of course, the question then becomes, why even allow it?
Kind of like the judge at a trial where an objection is raised and granted telling the jury to disregard the previous testimony. It is already in their heads and really can’t be totally disregarded.
jl
Life a black 12 year old in Bill O’Reilly’s US of A.
Plainclothes cop runs up and starts punching a 12 year old being restrained over a car hood by some uniformed cops. Because… apparently.. why not? At least the kid didn’t get shot.
But…. he ‘must of done sumpin’ so he is lucky. Maybe he did not have a sufficiently respectful expression on his face? Or maybe he was complying with police orders too quickly, therefore a threat?
Video Shows White NYC Cop Repeatedly Punching Young Black Male
‘ The footage, shot from the sidewalk, shows several officers surrounding a young male on the hood of a car, the New York Daily News reported on Friday.
Suddenly, what appeared to be a plainclothes officer ran into frame and began punching the young male as the other cops continued to press him against the car. ‘
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/video-nypd-officer-punching-black-male
Kay
@jl:
Because then they’d have to admit that they are addressing that problem.
jl
@japa21: I am not a lawyer (there, I spelled out the words!), but isn’t one of the rationales for keeping false testimony out of the courtroom or hearing room whenever possible, is that a lawyer debunking it does not undo all the damage? There are subtle psychological effects of hearing the made up stories. Which, probably reinforce the very friendly treatment the officer’s testimony received.
And we do not know exactly how much of it was debunked.
It seems like you are saying that if I shoplift, it is OK as long as I decide to put some (how much?) of the stolen goods back on the shelf later.
There is a case here of a high ranking cop illegally taking high price gift game tickets from the 49ers. He, and his cronies in the San Jose city government, including its crummy mayor Chuck Reed, don’t think he should be investigated any further since after he was told he broke the law, he paid for the tickets. The nasty and hard ass city ethics counsel (or is it a judge, forget) said that the law doesn’t work that way, you cannot undo a violation of law. I agree with that..
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
This thread depresses me. The lying asshole prosecutor, racist assholes lying about Black Americans, it just makes me sad. Even when teenage pregnancy rates drop, it won’t mean anything, since the racist assholes don’t give a shit. As somebody said above, they don’t care what’s true, they only care what feels true. Sometimes I wonder if there’s any hope for this country.
japa21
@jl: Wasn’t justifying what was done. As a matter of fact, I basically said the same thing.
jl
@japa21: OK, I misunderstood your comment.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@jl: There’s nothing to be done. It never went to trial. No charges were filed.
Don’t forget that in this case that legally, Darren Wilson was not the accused. He was the victim.
Mike J
@jl:
More accurate, “Cops beat up a little boy.”
Kay
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I think Hispanics have the highest RATE with AA next, but the rate of decline is what’s extraordinary. It’s also important to look at the age. 18 and 19 year olds are included in “teen”. 75% of teen births (not pregnancies) are 18 and 19. That’s not good, obviously, too young because people need more than a high school diploma, but it’s not 14.
It’s not in that stat but the biggest issue is the really small group that have more than one birth. One child at 17 or 18 they can surmount, with a lot of effort and help. Multiple children they’re basically doomed. It’s just too hard to come back from more than one baby while you’re that young. They probably won;t make it. They’ll be poor for life.
Cacti
Has someone explained to Bill how the tides work, yet?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Mike J: True. The horror is that it’s an improvement from the last instance. When it was “cops fatally shoot a little boy.”
CONGRATULATIONS!
Lest it be said that I had the chance to say this and didn’t take it: Bill O’Reilly is a vile piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to be a citizen of this nation.
gene108
@Kay:
More than addressing the problem of teen pregnancy, it is the fact their preferred method of
slut shamingabstinence only education is being discarded in favor of other methods that show a higher success rate.Plus teen pregnancy rates have not just come down.
THEY ARE AT AN ALL TIME HISTORIC LOW
Lower than they were in the 1950’s, when stats on this subject were being tracked.
Title says it all:
https://guttmacher.org/media/nr/2014/05/05/index.html
EDIT: Also, too high school graduation rates are at historic highs…the kids these days…
PurpleGirl
@Cacti: The astronomy would be beyond his comprehension. I don’t think even Neil deGrasse Tyson could find a way to explain it in terms O’Reilly could comprehend. Then too Dr. Tyson is a blah person and O’Reilly would never believe he knew anything about astronomy.
Shorter: O’Reilly is an ignorant and racist POS.
SatanicPanic
For me when news of how Cosby is a rapist started coming out I thought- I knew it, moral scolds are always the ones with terrible crimes they’re trying to hide. I wonder what O’Reilly gets up to? Is it irresponsible to speculate? I mean, we already know about the loofah thing
SatanicPanic
@gene108: I love these stats. I keep them ready for whenever someone starts complaining about the youth
Kay
@gene108:
I think there’s a large group of people around my age who are very invested in the idea that young people are worse than we were- dumber, more irresponsible, lazier and more coddled.
It isn’t true but it doesn’t matter. I love Kevin Drum on it because he consistently pushes back against this. His commenters look (in vain!) for ways to disprove graduation rates or college entrance scores or juvenile crime or whatever it is.
I think it’s weirdly ungenerous and a little delusional.
RaflW
If by straight-talking you mean that he does not deviate … from vileness and venality, anyway.
Singular
@Kay: It’s entirely logical though. Everyone and everything is golden in your golden years, and when the feeling that something is wrong with the world creeps through, it’s easy to blame it on the young.
My dad had a hard time before, during and just after WW2, but then he tapped into the well of great opportunity that came to his generation. But he still talks about his heroes of yore being 7 ft tall when, really, they were 5′ 10″.
The state of the world has to be somebody’s fault ;)
jl
@gene108: Dude, don’t harsh the meme of exploding and outrageous and ever increasing African-American dysfunction. If it’s not all their fault, then…might look bad in some way for the rest of us. Can’t have that.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I wanted to reach through the radio today and punch NPR’s Larry Mantle (can’t remember if he’s local or national). They were talking about the president’s speech about the police and Mantle’s problem was that Obama didn’t talk about what the public was doing wrong to make the police treat them badly. Talk about your clueless, sheltered upper-class white dude reaction …
jl
@Cacti: ‘The tides come in, the tides go out. No one can explain it’ SATSQ.
jl
@Kay:
@gene108: Thanks for link to Guttmacher report.
Kay is right (I shoulda trusted her, but was curious).Pregnancy rates among 15-17 and 14 or under have been plummeting compared to 18 to 19 olds. Ratio very steadily reduced by 25% between 1994 and 2010 among 15 to 17 year olds, reduced by 53% among 14 or unders And the rates among 18 to 19 year olds dropping fast after 1994. Nothing much happened, trendwise in rates or ratios of rates between age groups before 1994.
Couldn’t be that a bunch of racially bigoted and age-ist old (and sadly not so old… Hi there Fox News blondes!) white farts are dishing out BS that their bigoted and age-ist audience wants to hear, could it?
Villago Delenda Est
@SatanicPanic:
Two words.
Bill Bennett
Tree With Water
@Kay: People concerned with birth statistics in this country (outside of statistics intelligently useful) have way, way too much time on their hands. Although born into a melting pot of a country, something snaps and they suddenly freaking out. About what exactly, who knows? I live in a county with a large hispanic population. It stands to reason the birth rate among that population is representative of that percentage. And you know what? I don’t care, at all. Outside of wishing the new arrivals all the best, why on earth would I? People who do fret about it piss their precious time away so stupidly. I’ll never understand them, never.
J R in WV
Racial bigotry seems to almost be hard-wired for many people. I have never understood it.
I was allowed to run around a manufacturing plant as a kid. There was one employee who was assigned to shovel metal scraps into a melt furnace, and recycle them into ingots, which he stacked in piles waiting for the next production run.
The guy was huge in the arms and chest, from pulling 2 50 pound ingots in each hand and hurling them into place neatly stacked on the pile of ingots. For hours every day.
He was black, and eventually resigned to become a cop. He would have no problem with subduing a suspect, 200 pounds was just a tiny piece of a hard day’s work to him. My point here is that I had a black role model, in a way. I was never going to be as strong as he was, but I admired him for his strength, and for his ambition.
How could anyone not admire him for developing his strength, and for having ambition past just working on the floor of the plant?
Because he was a big strong black guy? How crazy, how stupid the idea is. He was also smart. But bigots couldn’t see past that!!
Tree With Water
“St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch told a St. Louis radio station on Friday that he knew some of the witnesses who testified before the Ferguson grand jury were lying.
In an interview flagged by BuzzFeed, McCulloch told radio station KTRS that he allowed the witnesses to testify because he wanted to present as much testimony as possible”.
Memo to Bob: Lies by definition are not testimony. They’re just lies.
Turd Burglar
My goodness, he sounds just like Bill Cosby!
And for good reason. Mr. Falafel has a lot in common with Mr. Roofie.
Villago Delenda Est
@Buddy H:
NK is offended by people crossing the street with the light in their favor in downtown Seoul.
Fuck them.
jl
@SatanicPanic:
” I wonder what O’Reilly gets up to? ”
That’s been out for awhile. People in the know hint it is gross and disgusting sexual harassment of employees, featuring faloofahs, or loofahs, or hummus, or something.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@jl:
My other suspicion, though it may be giving O’Reilly too much credit — he thinks the people he sees walking down the street are younger than they actually are, because he is an Old and isn’t able to correctly estimate ages anymore. Now that I’m in my mid-40s, college undergrads look like middle schoolers to me.
Xenos
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Actually, that is a good point. I am nearing 50, and many of my co-workers are in their 20s. We had some 19-year olds come in as short-term hires to help with filing, and I thought they were no younger than everybody else.
BubbaDave
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
Yeah, I’m mid 40s as well, and I’ll see a car pull up at the Quik-Trip and the driver gets out and I’m thinking “Wow, is she old enough to drive?” And then she’s in line in front of me buying beer, and I realize I’m ooooold. But on the bright side, if I’m going to be getting ages wrong, mistaking 21-year-olds for 15-year-olds has a lot less downside than the other way around….
Sour Kraut
@Tree With Water:
Lies are a type of testimony. See? You just have to know how to frame it…