Vox Popoli

A trial lawyer with experience in settling sexual harassment cases draws his conclusions from the O’Reilly settlement:

We [that is, counsel for Mr. O’Reilly and Fox et al.] now withdraw any assertion that any extortion by Ms. Mackris, Mr. Morelli, or Morelli & Associates occurred.

That, my friends, is eating crow bigtime. That, my friends, is a settlement-mandated mitigation of damages that otherwise might continue to accrue for a defamation claim on Ms. Mackris’ behalf. Accusing someone of commiting a crime like extortion, if untrue, may be defamatory “per se” — meaning that an accusation that someone’s a criminal is conclusively presumed to be injurious to his or her reputation; it may not necessarily be defamatory if, for example, it’s true, but there’s no dispute that it would cause members of the public to think less of the accusee. While there’s a privilege for making such accusations in court filings, that privilege may not extend to accusations that are republished by the accusers outside the courtroom. There’s no way that O’Reilly’s and Fox et al.’s lawyers would have made the admission that the extortion claim was unfounded unless they were simultaneously receiving a release from Ms. Mackris that would cover her potential defamation claims as part of the overall package; and it’s something they’d only give up grudgingly. My hunch is that Ms. Mackris’ counsel painted his demand for such an admission as a “deal-killer point” in the negotiations; their side might have gotten more money if they’d dropped that demand, but they were unwilling to do so.

What’s also missing from the press release that one would normally expect to see is a statement to the effect that by agreeing to settle all claims of all parties, no party was admitting any liability and no party was admitting that any other party’s factual allegations or claims had any validity. That’s probably exactly what the settlement documents themselves say, and it’s usually something that a defendant insists on being able to say publicly. But in the press release, there’s only a weaker statement that “there was no wrongdoing whatsoever by Mr. O’Reilly, Ms. Mackris, or Ms. Mackris’ counsel.” Again, my strong hunch is that Ms. Mackris and her counsel objected to any broader statement than this one, knowing that it would have been spun by Mr. O’Reilly’s and Fox et al.’s lawyers as part of a “these claims were bogus but would’ve been expensive to litigate, blah blah” meme.

Is Kurtz’ source right in speculating that Mr. O’Reilly will write the entire check, however much it is for? I suspect he is.

Speaking as someone who has received a reasonably large settlement from a large corporation as a result of blatant and provable contractual wrongdoings on their part that would have gotten them killed in court, what this means is that O’Reilly did it and Miss Mackris had the proof.

Sexual harassment is a bogus “crime”. It’s totally SUBJECTIVE and completely dependent on feelings. But that’s not what this case was about, as one commenter on Beldar’s site wrote, it was a simple transaction for the tapes in order to protect O’Reilly’s continuing media viability. We can only assume that he’s a freaky phone perv now based on the logic of his actions; we do not have the absolute and undeniable proof.

As I’ve said before, Brave Sir William is both a coward and a fraud. If he truly didn’t do precisely that of which he was accused, he would have fought this to the bitter end as a matter of honor and reputation. Instead, he acted swiftly to sweep the matter under the carpet, buy his accuser’s silence and bury the evidence. No one ever said he was stupid.

Here’s what I’d do:

1. Eliminate the preseason and increase the regular season to 18 games spread out over 20 weeks.

2. Institute an injury study on artificial turf vs. natural grass. If

3. Permit open investment (up to 49 percent) into NFL franchises.

4. Ban domed stadiums. The idea is supposed to be that more people will attend games if they aren’t subject to the elements, but the attendance factors don’t appear to support that. Old domes will be grandfathered in, but no new ones.

5. Order NFL Films to offer full-season DVD summaries for each team that has enough fan support to break even on the sales of such DVD summaries.

6. Ban goal line vulturing. If your running back needs a break, that’s one thing. Substitute away. But dance with the girl that brought you to the Red Zone. Fantasy Football managers across America are demanding this.

7. Offer The Ticket on worldwide satellite. If I’m on vacation in London, I want to be able to see all the games, not just the two that Sky News gets to show.

8. Tell Yahoo Sports to provide a round-up feature to get rid of half-points in final scores.

9. Ban the public financing of stadiums. The Patriots financed their own stadium. The Patriots have won two of the last three Super Bowls. Tell me that preying on the taxpayers is necessary for success and I’ll fine you so hard that people will mistake you for the love child of Jim McMahon and Terell Owens.

10. Forbid any team that sells out more than half of its games from even talking about moving the franchise.

11. Work with the players union to reduce rookie salaries and increase veteran’s salaries. Funding big busts while cutting fourth-year journeymen does no one on either side any good. The goal would be to increase the ability of teams to keep veteran players and retain a more stable long term team identity.

12. Tell teams to quit changing their colors all the time. The Broncos change was kind of cool, but the Rams, the Bills and the Falcons are all too much.

13. Move the Arizona franchise to Los Angeles. That’s the only move that makes much sense to me. Retirees don’t want to go to the game, they want to watch it in their air-conditioned media room.

14. Forbid the “star and storyline” approach to coverage of the games. Tell the networks to hire real sportscasters who will talk to the fans, not to the half-interested folks who are never going to get sucked in to full fandom just by hearing Olympics-style blather about the players’ personal lives. Unless you’re going to show fifty pictures of Jessica Simpson walking her dog and completely turn into US magazine, you’re not going to get their allegiance.

15. Create a Dick Bavetta of the NFL, who would be in charge of refereeing all Vikings playoff games in order to make sure they get the breaks when needed. The Lakers and Knicks have Bavetta, Manchester United has Mike Riley, doesn’t Minnesota deserve a referee to call its own? (Totally kidding, I’m as desperate for a Vikings Super Bowl victory as any Boston fan was for a Red Sox championship was until this week, but I want a real one. I want to beat the Giants and the Redskins in the playoffs, then stomp all over the Steelers for the ultimate victory.)

Double-M worries about the lawyers:

God’s perfect government is a kingship and that king is perfectly righteous. That will be Jesus, of course. For now, we must attempt to limit the government that will be used to oppress us. Not only the Christians in this land but all men will become victims. I do agree with you on this completely. I suppose that my issue is what place does law play in the Libertarian philosophy?

I think you may agree that those who say you cannot legislate morality are being foolish or just singling out one or two issues. If you pass a law that says it is illegal to steal my hubcaps, then you are legislating morality.

What does the Libertarian Party say about tort reform? what does it say that it will do with the hundreds of thousands of tax suckers that are government employees that should be fired and put back into the private sector? Of course, lawyers must be brought under control to some extent. This will clearly involve a major removal of corrupt judges from the Supreme Court and in the lower courts, as well. How will this be done? Our present legal and political systems are so corrupt that I do not see much hope for even gradual change in the right direction. I do believe that it is heinous that the other party nominees were not allowed into the debate structure. This is the problem, corrupt people, corrupt system. Christians make the mistake of believing that a political party will somehow continue to make their lives comfortable.

What does the libertarian philosophy say? For starters, it says can about 95 percent of the federal employees, including those working in the courts. Fire the judicial employees at the state level too. The court system is so utterly corrupt that even the lawyers have no idea how ubelievably bad it is. Forget the lawyers, it’s the judges that are the real problem. An acquaintance of mine went into court for a hearing recently and began by demanding to know whether constitutional law trumped statutory law in the judge’s court or not… the judge, of course, evaded like mad and finally declared that it wasn’t his job to answer the question.

Oh, really? How very… educational.

The best way to sum it up is that what you hear from the seeming whackos bears far more resemblance to the truth than what you’ll hear from the lawyers, with one exception. When a lawyer tells you that what the judge says in his court is the law, he is correct – but only in that court provided you have voluntarily submitted to the court’s jurisdiction. What no lawyer will ever tell you is that most of the time, you don’t have to do so. Of course, this is similar to how a common law libertarian system should work, except that the two parties would simply agree upon a judge instead of having the state assign one to them.

This is why it is usually a mistake to be represented by a lawyer. Most of them have no idea what is really going on, they are fighting the wrong battles and they will not wage the proper ones because they’ll be disciplined by the bar if they open Pandora’s Box and inadvertantly let the truth out. My best friend is a lawyer and he was shocked to learn how completely his legal training had failed him. I haven’t read Judge Andrew Napolitano’s book yet – full disclosure: we will likely share a publisher soon – but based on the description, I suspect he’s discussing some of the more obvious and less egregious aspects of this cancerous court corruption.

With regards to tort reform, in my opinion the Republicans are doing little more than talking about spraying perfume on a rotted corpse. It’s not a bad thing and it will help the room smell a little better, but it’s still beside the point.

CNN will shut down its struggling CNNfn financial news network in mid-December, giving up its attempt to compete with CNBC after nine years. A handful of programs will be shifted to the main network. CNN also said it is planning changes for its Headline News offshoot, offering prime-time programming instead of a constantly repeating 30-minute newscast.

CNNfn is only available in about 30 million of the nation’s 110 million television homes. With the coming expiration of its deal with the DirecTV satellite system, it faced the prospect of losing more distribution. It launched in December 1995 when business, and business news, was hot. CNBC’s ratings plunged when the Internet bubble burst on Wall Street, and CNNfn failed to gain footing, too.

We’ll know to start looking for an end to Wave 3 when CNBC goes off the air too.

From WND:

Here are the facts the NTSB failed to address and resolve before resorting to a theory without credible factual support:

Many credible witnesses described a modest initial explosion that created a fire toward the rear of AA587. At least one rear passenger door and a cargo door appeared to have separated from the plane in the opening seconds of the tragedy.

The NTSB made no attempt to interview and obtain comprehensive statements from the witnesses and attempt to use those statements to develop an initial investigative hypothesis. An honest investigation would have expeditiously taken this step. Then, evidence would be built around those statements, or the statements would be shown by objective analysis to be in error. And the reasons for judging witness statements in error would be fully explained in writing. This did not happen.

The NTSB did not release photos and a debris field map showing where the first parts of the aircraft rested on the Bay floor under only a few feet of salt water.

Potentially critical video tape of AA587 has been withheld from the public.

Within minutes of AA587 going down, Colin Powell and other high-ranking federal officials raced for the media microphones and began chanting a propaganda mantra: It was not a terrorist act.

This would seem to suggest that combining strong offensive operations in the Middle East along with lying to the public would make for an effective means of eliminating terrorism in America. I wonder how they’ll spin it if a nuke goes off in New York Harbor? Maybe the NTSB can draw up a cartoon of how an atom moved the wrong way at just the wrong moment and chalk it all up to proton error.

As people, in general. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of friends who are on the left side of the spectrum and are voting for Kerry next week, (although not very enthusiastically, it’s been interesting to note), and in my experience it’s mostly the younger sort, the 12-25 year olds, who are unable to control their reaction to someone who dares to disagree with them.

In my Kerry-Edwards shirt, I enter Red America certain that I am on the verge of inciting to rage a gang of angry yachtsmen who would soon be strapping me and my lefty leisurewear to their mizzenmast. Instead, I encounter only shades of indifference—head shaking, “crazy idiot” expressions from older, very wealthy, very white folks in Newport Beach; terse nods from the middle- to working-class citizens of Bakersfield, which seem to indicate that people here have much bigger things to worry about than whatever is on my stupid T-shirt….

Dressed to impress in my Bush-Cheney T-shirt, tote bag, and “W.” button, I first stop at Silverlake’s Über-cafe, the Coffee Table…. A fashionably dressed woman seated at a sidewalk table makes a disgusted face at the sight of me. On line at Psychobabble coffee house, another woman in a blue velour tracksuit rolls her eyes and grimaces at me with undisguised hatred. Realizing there are no seats but the one next to me, she stares intently into her cup, avoiding my polluting glance, until another table opens and she quickly relocates. Out on the avenue once again, I am gifted with my second “Asshole” of the day, this time muttered by a young man with bright dyed raspberry hair.

That sort of name-calling is pretty tame compared to what I get from both outraged Three Monkeys who see me as some sort of traitor and clueless lefties who simply don’t have any ammunition to use against me, but it pretty much corresponds to my daily experience. I do find it amusing, though, to see the look of shock on someone’s face when after they finish a diatribe against Bush, I agree with them because he’s far too statist, far too leftist and is leading the country into global socialist ruin….

“Vox, even a libertarian pitbull like Vin Suprynowicz (Vin’s the sort who believes that the 2nd Am means *personal nukes* are legitimately allowed for) can figure out that Bush needs to win this election over Kerry…”

He doesn’t need to win it, he doesn’t deserve to win it and it makes very little difference to the country who does win it. The fact that Suprynowicz understands proper political theory does not mean that he knows his history or understands how the theory has played out in the real world.

For the Nth time, you media-mesmerized folk dwelling in the political matrix need to understand that both men belong to the same elite and share the same long-term goals. It’s all a charade and Bush=Clinton=Bush=Kerry. Do you realize that the same fake dichotomy is set up in almost every European democracy as well? Chirac and Jospin were the bifactional ruling party’s two candidates in France during the last election, but when huge voter disgust and low turnout allowed the populist Le Pen to sneak past Jospin, the supposedly virulently opposed Conservatives and Socialists immediately united behind Chirac in the run-off to ensure his victory.

Perhaps when George Bush introduces a variant of Hillarycare and we see pro-choice justices seated on the Supreme Court in his second term then some of you will begin to believe me. Obviously the UN support, the Wilsonian nation-building and the new Medicare entitlement wasn’t enough.

From the Washington Times:

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein’s weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned. John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, “almost certainly” removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

“The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units,” Mr. Shaw said. “Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units.”

Debka reported that the weapons had been moved to Syria right around the time the invasion began, if I recall correctly. The notion that it was the Russians who did the moving is certainly new to me and is a pretty big deal that raises some serious questions about our “ally”, but I don’t quite understand how the idea that the weapons are in Syria – along with many families from the Iraqi Ba’ath elite, by the way – can possibly be considered breaking news.

Don’t get me wrong, confirmation is always a good thing, but it was pretty obvious that Hussein wasn’t ever going to send his toys to Iran and Syria is not just the only other Ba’athist regime in the world, it’s also right next door.

… that the IRS is in league with the devil. From WND.

In a letter of clarification requested by a traveling minister, the Internal Revenue Service has declared people gathered in tax-exempt churches can’t pray for President Bush to win the election on Tuesday.

The ruling comes in response to a request by the Christian Defense Coalition, which is in the midst of a 15-day prayer tour through Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the organization, had planned to lead in prayer for a Bush victory during evening services in each town. Though he had hoped to hold the services in churches, Mahoney says he has used American Legion halls, hotels and other venues pending a clarification from the IRS.

Yes, those government-funded faith based initiatives are looking better and better all the time, aren’t they? When a quasi-government agency is telling churches what they can and cannot pray for, it seems hard to assert that one is living in a free country.

I hope that one day conservatives will finally realize that government money is pure poison; the fact that George Delano is now being credited in a new book as the first “conservative” president to openly reject small government philosophy in favor of transforming and streamlining big government’s agenda, (THE RIGHT NATION), is not a healthy sign for conservatism, freedom or the future prosperity of the nation.

bls has a question:

“What is it about my support of Bush’s crusade against Islamic terror that renders me unable to be a conservative by any meaningful definition of the word?”

Utopian nation-building by force is inherently a progressive, totalitarian action. There is nothing conservative about it. It violates the Washingtonian principle of not getting involved in entangling alliances, the isolationist principle and the national sovereignty principle. One will not find any support for it in conservative philosophers such as Burke, Kirk or Tocqueville.

In other words, you’re casting aside conservatism for progressive liberalism, albeit in the name of national security. There’s nothing conservative about that, some variant of the “national security” argument has been used to justify otherwise unpopular political actions since the days of the Roman Republic.

Another problem with the self-defense justification is that the global jihad is not truly targeting America, like China, it primarily wants America out of the way in order to pursue its real goals. In the case of the jihad, that goal is reclaiming the lost lands of Islam in a reverse reconquest of Europe. Their communications are quite clear about this, as even Israel is secondary to that goal, which is very different than older terrorist organizations like the more provincial PLO and Hamas. 9/11 was nothing more than a shot across the bow and a flexing of muscle, much like Pearl Harbor was intended to be on the part of the Japanese. The global jihadists would surely like to see the black flag of Islam raised over the entire Earth, but they are practical enough to be focused on lands where they have a sizeable minority, such as Nigeria.

I believe that’s why they haven’t bothered making any attacks in the USA for over three years now, because the US itself is a tertiary concern and the warning shot turned out to be at least somewhat counterproductive. If/when the jihad perceives that the Bush administration is making a serious dent in their ability to strike where they want, that is the point at which they would likely turn their attention to the United States again. Occam’s Razor strongly suggests this is the most logical explanation, as the almost complete absence of real arrests resulting in prosecutions inside the United States combined with de facto open borders means that concluding American counterterrorism agents are far more successful than their much more experienced Israeli counterparts is unlikely to be anything but wishful thinking.

To be honest, I think the entire American public debate on the subject is almost entirely worthless. I mean, giving “they hate our freedom” as an explanation is so transparently stupid, and is almost completely contrary to the history of Islamic conquest. Basically, it’s safe to assume that any explanation relying on the notion of human beings being completely insane is incorrect.

A minor tangent, sorry, but I think I answered your question somewhere in there….

UPDATE: for a good article touching on what conservatism was perceived by one who is strangely considered a hero by many of today’s conservatives, Hayek’s “Why I am not a Conservative” is well worth reading. I have no doubt that he’d be voting for Badnarik, were he alive today, as the Libertarians are the clear intellectual heirs to the Old Whigs of whom Hayek speaks so favorably.