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From Bill O’Reilly, responding on the air to Canadian viewer Peter Gillies, who noted that Canadians have higher life expectancies under their healthcare system than we do under ours:

Well that’s to be expected, Peter, because we have ten times as many people as you do. That translates to ten times as many accidents, crimes, down the line.

Note that this wasn’t just an off-the-cuff howler.  O’Reilly chose to air Gillies’ letter and had his response all teed up on the prompter.  Here are the alternatives for how this happened: (a) Not a single person on his staff noticed that this was nonsensical.  (b) Someone noticed but didn’t have guts to tell O’Reilly he was wrong.  (c) Someone noticed, told O’Reilly, but was unable to convince him that he’d flubbed his fourth grade arithmetic.  (d) O’Reilly does this stuff all by himself and doesn’t show it to anyone before airtime.  I’m going with (b).

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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