As is often the case, it takes just one person to publicly come forward with their story about being abused by powerful people to open the floodgates because other people, realizing that they are not alone, feel emboldened to tell their own stories. It seems like a day doesn’t pass without someone new coming forward to say that former president George H. W. Bush is a disgusting lecher who groped her. And another woman Beverly Young Nelson has now come forward to accuse Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore of assaulting her, both sexually and otherwise, when she was just 16, after he had offered her a ride home from her job as a waitress.
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On his last show for the year, John Oliver looks at the obfuscatory rhetorical techniques that Donald Trump uses and the danger of them spreading more widely. He also looks at the slight glimmers of hope that have emerged.

There was so much, what with the Democratic party wins, the revelations about the attack on Rand Paul by his neighbor, the Roy Moore pedophile allegations, and one famous and powerful person after another accused of the most gross sexual aggressions towards young men and women, that even a horrendous tragedy like the mass murder in a Texas church on Monday quickly got pushed out of the headlines.
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That is what Tom Tomorrow thinks.

There is a long and boring profile of former speaker John Boehner that will likely be of interest only to diehard political geeks who are interested in the minutiae of political maneuvering. But there is one interesting nugget about what happened when, as speaker, Boehner promised to get rid of ‘earmarks’, the practice by which money is allocated to fund the pet projects of congresspeople in their districts and are popularly seen as a means of bribing them for their votes and loyalty. This led to something that looks like it would be seen as too extreme even for the series House of Cards.
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David Dayen explains the complicated money-laundering schemes indulged in by Paul Manafort, former campaign chair for Donald Trump and one of the three people indicted today by special counsel Robert Mueller. What we are going to see in the days to come is increasing attention to the connections between corrupt US politicians, banks and businesspeople, foreign governments, and shady international organized crime figures.
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