Bill O’Reilly is taking some heat for the rhetoric he has used over the years about George Tiller. O’Reilly talked about Tiller on at least 29 episodes of “The O’Reilly Factor” from 2005 to 2009, according to Salon magazine. O’Reilly referred to him as “Tiller the baby killer” and said he had “blood on his hands.” O’Reilly also said that there should be “a special place in hell for this guy” and likened Tiller’s abortion clinic to Nazi Germany. O’Reilly defended his remarks Monday and said that “every single thing we said about Tiller was true, and my analysis was based on those facts.”
Though we still don’t know much about Scott P. Roeder, who allegedly murdered Wichita abortion provider George Tiller, Kansas City Star columnist Mike Hendricks thinks some blame for the killing may rest with the “vitriolic rhetoric aimed at Tiller these past couple of decades by anti-abortion activists.” He said that certain groups “fomented hate toward a man who, rightly or wrongly, believed he was serving a noble purpose by being one of the few doctors in the country who performed late-term abortions.” And that blind hatred, Hendricks said, may have prompted “some maniac to take a gun into a church and shoot a man to death.”
Former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox “adopted practices that undermined the enforcement division’s efforts to investigate cases of corporate wrongdoing and punish those involved, according to interviews with 19 current and former SEC officials,” the Washington Post reported. For example, Cox required investigators to get the commission’s approval before subpoenaing documents, compelling interviews or approaching a company about a civil settlement. The cumbersome process resulted in long delays and had a chilling effect on investigations, according to current and former agency officials.
