While I would have preferred to see Fox being forced to go through the complete trial and then be hit with a massive damages assessment, it’s clear that the Murdochs and their attorneys panicked today. I would not consider any situation where a company is required to pay nearly 800 million dollars and issue a public statement (and they did issue the statement, as mealy mouthed as it was) admitting that they were lying on the air, to be a “win” for them. This was a large, humiliating loss for Fox.

Granted, I’d have preferred an on-air mea culpa from various Fox personalities, but Dominion was clearly satisfied with what Fox begged to give them. And Fox had a lot more to lose here – they were looking at losing the 1.6 billion plus what could have been another 3-5 billion in damages. And as we’ve discussed here, while that would not have significantly damaged their overall worth, it would have been noticed. The Murdochs were faced with a choice here: Lose in court and lose a MASSIVE damages assessment and then spend the next 20 years appealing before finally having to pay the amount, all the while continuing the story of their constant recitation of falsehoods on the air. Or they could do what Dominion told them to do, pay nearly a billion dollars right now and make a public apology. After over a year of talking tough about this before they got to the courtroom, the Fox attorneys openly lost their nerve and began pleading with the Dominion attorneys to allow them to settle.

We should take a minute to remember that this is the second largest defamation payout result in US history. The largest one of course is the 1.5 billion dollars that angry Right Winger Alex Jones has been commanded to pay to the Sandy Hook families. And now, Fox comes in with a forced payment of 787.5 million. The difference between the two is that Jones will never be able to pay the 1.5 billion as he’s completely bankrupt now and will spend the rest of his life destitute. Fox on the other hand, will actually be paying the nearly 800 million post-haste. That’s not nothing. (And we shouldn’t forget how Fox was compelled to repeatedly pay settlements to the victims of disgraced predator Bill O’Reilly, who himself then had to pay 32 million dollars to settle the suit from Lis Wiehl for a “nonconsensual sexual relationship”…)

On top of that, we should remember how many times angry Right Wingers have tried to play the massive lawsuit game when they’ve been exposed for their malfeasances. For example, Mike Pence’s childish former spokesman has repeatedly launched 500 million dollar nuisance suits against whatever media companies have hurt his feelings. Most recently, he announced yet another 500 million dollar waste of time against Michael Cohen that will be tossed out court just like the others. Or there was the multiple 250 million dollar nuisance suits from Nicholas Sandmann when he didn’t like being called out for his vicious behavior at the National Mall, which resulted in a couple of pittance settlements of under 50K and the rest of the suits being tossed out of court. Or there was the 50 million dollar nuisance suit that Eric Bolling petulantly threatened to file against Yashar Ali in 2017 that curiously disappeared after Bolling was challenged Ali’s attorney and dared to go ahead and try it. None of these tantrums have worked for angry Right Wingers – simply because they weren’t based on anything other than Right Wingers feeling aggrieved and wanting someone to pay. But when actual defamation suits have been brought – such as this one and the ones against Alex Jones, they’ve resulted in fairly appropriate punishments for bad actors.

And we should remember that the Dominion suit is not the last word here. The Smartmatic suit is for 2.7 billion – nearly twice that of Dominion, and that hasn’t been scheduled for trial yet. Not to mention various sundry discrimination suits that Fox will almost certainly settle as quietly as they can.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this situation is that Fox has been publicly spotlit for its pattern of lies and propaganda, and for its obvious attempts to manipulate its viewers. And while Fox will try to play this off as nothing special, the reality is that no other media outlet has EVER been required to pay out nearly a billion dollars for the blatant lying that Fox did here. History will record this infamy, regardless of how angry Right Wingers try to spin it.

It is always possible for Fox to settle this matter – by not only paying a big check to Dominion but issuing that humiliating apology where they have to admit they were knowingly telling lies and defaming another company in their desperation to keep viewers who are abandoning them for even more brazen propagandists like OAN and Glenn Beck and Newsmax

The trick is, will Fox be willing to make that public and humiliating apology? Possibly. But the usual resort of angry Right Wingers is to double down and refuse to admit it’s raining even when they are sitting in the middle of a deluge. (Back when Trump was embarrassed by President Obama proving that Trump lied about the birth certificate nonsense, unrepentant bigot Rush Limbaugh tantrumed with “Donald Trump doesn’t eat crow! He eats OTHER PEOPLE’S LUNCH!!!”)

There’s also the factor that Dominion is winning the PR element of this discussion in the media. Fox repeatedly comes out with egg on its face and Dominion repeatedly is shown to be a solid company understandably fighting back after being defamed by Fox. I would not be surprised to learn that Dominion has actually been gaining business contracts and making more money due to their steadfastness here.

That said, it is still possible for this matter to end at any time. I just don’t think Dominion lets Fox off without that apology and most angry Right Wingers I’ve encountered are incapable of apologizing.

Just so everyone is clear, Clay Travis is not an authority on anything. He is an angry Right Wing pundit who models his comments from those of unrepentant bigot Rush Limbaugh. He is not simply a “sports radio” host. He once was, just as he once was a lawyer over 20 years ago. But at some point, Travis decided it would be more lucrative for him to stake out a position as a Right Wing mud-thrower, which led to “Outkick the Coverage” becoming a haven for angry Right Wing conspiracy theories and rumors. (Travis spent much of the COVID pandemic pretending that it wasn’t happening and smugly predicting that only “a few hundred” Americans would die of COVID-19. Spoiler Alert: He was off by over a million deaths.)

Travis and Buck Sexton now co-host the replacement angry Right Wing AM radio show for the original flagship of bigotry from Limbaugh, and they regularly make outrageous statements in the same vein as their idol. They can be counted on to fervently support the most angry Right Wing talking points possible and to speak dismissively and viciously about anything not on the Far Right.

Travis has one major media achievement to speak of: In September 2017, he was invited to speak on CNN on Brooke Baldwin’s show on the matter of Jemele Smith’s accurate social media comments about Mike Pence’s childish spokesman. Rather than actually discuss the topic, Travis smugly announced “the only two things I 100% believe in are the First Amendment and boobs” and then smirked in the mode of Limbaugh. Baldwin quickly chastised Travis, who continued repeating the lewd comment and smirking. And then Baldwin tossed Travis off the air and apologized to her viewers. Travis was informed he would not be allowed on CNN’s airwaves again. It is telling that Travis continues to think that this was a good thing for him to do rather than a puerile bit of misogyny.

As for Travis’ fantasies about the 2020 Election, they are unimportant and irrelevant.

Whitlock has no credibility and no moral ground whatsoever. He’s a lackey of Glenn Beck and a current employee of Mark Levin. He has had a long history of being unable to maintain employment, as he regularly makes new alliances with the new boss, and then turns on them shortly afterward. He has repeatedly been disciplined for making bigoted and vicious remarks on the air.

As for the current nonsense about a “national divorce”, that’s nothing short of angry Right Wingers pretending they have some moral high ground from which to condemn the entire rest of the country. In reality, angry Right Wingers have sowed divisiveness in this country for over 50 years. When they get their way, they demand everyone kneel to them. When they don’t, they throw tantrums like this one.

As for Carlson, his desperation is increasingly showing. It’s only a matter of time before he brings Alex Jones on the air for a cozy chat.

It’s fascinating to hear angry Right Wingers like Comer play these games. The old “You better not indict Trump or we’ll make you really SORRY!” They play that card at the same time that they pull the “Trump is so happy that you’re indicting him! This is the best thing that could happen for him!” And they figure that nobody will be able to see through them.

In reality, Dems who have misbehaved over the years have been appropriately prosecuted or dealt with in other manners. Rod Blagojevich went to jail, Eliot Spitzer was humiliated and forced to resign, John Edwards was prosecuted and wound up out of public life. And there are plenty of others.

But somehow angry Right Wingers think their own criminality should be held above the law “for the good of the country.” In reality, this misguided thinking led to one of the greatest mistakes in US political history, when Gerry Ford pardoned Nixon rather than allowing him to be prosecuted and imprisoned as should have occurred. That pardon sadly taught angry Right Wingers the wrong lesson – that they could get away with criminal behavior and never be held accountable. Which led us directly to the criminality of the Reagan and W White Houses, which in turn led to the blatant and open criminality of the Pence White House. Because Pence’s childish former spokesman somehow believes there will never be any consequences for him when he breaks the law.

In reality, it would be extremely helpful and educational for Trump to spend some time in prison – both to teach him his lesson and to teach his followers that there are indeed lines they shouldn’t be crossing.

As for Comer’s infantile threats to prosecute the Biden and Clinton families, they’re just noise. If Comer has something he can actually prove, as opposed to the hollow nonsense he’s been slinging around in his committee these days, then maybe a prosecution could happen. But for all that hot air about “lock her up”, nothing was ever shown of criminality by Hillary Clinton. For all the hot air around the Bidens, the best angry Right Wingers have been able to come up with are a question about whether Hunter Biden paid his full tax bill one year and whether Hunter Biden improperly owned a firearm while in rehab a few years ago.

Frankly, it’s more than appropriate that the first indictment of Donald Trump is for his hamhanded attempt to cover up his payoff of Stormy Daniels. And if Trump is “delighted” to have been indicted for this, then he’s likely to be “overjoyed” after he gets indicted for racketeering in Georgia and for far worse by Jack Smith. We can only hope that Trump’s attorney gives him the same kind of representation that Arthur Kirkland gave the Honorary Henry T. Fleming.

Cassidy is blatantly lying, and he’s getting away with it on Fox because he knows they support him on it.

To be clear for the 3759th time, there is absolutely no need to cut either Social Security or Medicare. Both programs are fine to continue paying benefits, but have been threatened by angry Right Wingers like Cassidy, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and others who oppose the very existence of those programs.

In reality, these programs have regularly seen adjustments to their funding (ie tiny tax increases and tiny changes to their structuring), most recently in the 1980s by a bipartisan majority of Congress at that time. Since then, the Republicans have refused to make common sense adjustments, preferring to avoid action and instead make the nonsensical threats that Cassidy does hear about how “these programs are about to be insolvent”. If Cassidy would simply do his job and stop obstructing the process, there would be no need to discuss his imagined “insolvency”.

As Ellen notes, the GOP has regularly been extremely sneaky about their methodology here. They discuss maintaining SS for the current recipients (ie a large part of the GOP voting base) but taking it away from as much of the rest of FICA contributors as they can. Their threat to allow SS to hit a shortfall is nothing less than the GOP saying that they’d rather threaten current retirees with a 20% reduction in payments than make the same adjustments to the programs that Republicans and Dems previously made without the current obstructionism.

The simple adjustments that Dems have proposed for over 20 years include the lifting of the cap that Ellen mentions. They also include expanding the number of government employees who pay into FICA and receive SS (currently 25% do not). There’s also a slight increase in the employer side of FICA contributions, which would have been 0.2 or 0.3% if the GOP wouldn’t have blocked it in 2004 and probably will be closer to 1% now. And yes, there’s almost certainly going to be a slight raise in the eligibility age from 67 to either 68 or 69 over a 10-20 year period, something Dems would have apply to workers under the age of 25 once the GOP stops blocking progress here.

I remind everyone that SS and Medicare are programs that workers regularly pay into from their weekly paychecks. SS is not available to people who have not paid into it. It’s not a handout – it’s a public insurance program where workers pay in for decades and then receive the funds back during their retirements. One of the dirtiest tricks the GOP has pulled in this discussion is the attempted labeling of SS and Medicare as “entitlements” rather than “repayments”.

So to be very clear, the intent of angry Right Wingers like Cassidy is NOT to “save” Social Security but to get rid of it. Because angry Right Wingers never wanted it to exist in the first place. Their approach since 2000 has been to refuse to make any common sense adjustments and threaten to let the programs hit shortfalls if they can’t make massive cuts. The only actual “plans” we’ve seen from angry Right Wingers have been from the Heritage Foundation and the “Republican Study Committee” in the House late in 2022, as well as these occasional feints about diverting FICA withholding into “private accounts”. (And those diversions would intentionally starve SS of funding even faster). The Heritage and RSC programs explicitly discuss changing SS into a flat payment of $1200 per month and means-testing that amount so that anyone with a pension or solid 401K would be deemed ineligible. That’s on top of an aggressively fast increase of retirement age to 70, and applying these massive cuts to everyone up to 54 and 55 years old today.

If angry Right Wingers were to get their way and make these massive cuts to people up to their 50s, the GOP’s hope is that the long-held public support for these programs would quickly fall away, which would make it much easier for the GOP to propose completely eliminating them as close as they can to the 100 year anniversary of the creation of SS.

Finally, the GOP nonsense about “we’ll never ever ever raise taxes” is a proven canard. Where was Cassidy or any other angry Right Winger’s concern when Middle Class Employees were socked with a massive tax increase in the 2017 GOP Tax Transfer? Do they think we won’t remember the many, many times that Right Wingers gloated about skyrocketing taxes on the Middle Class and Blue State residents, sneering that maybe they should tell California legislatures to adjust their state finances? Do they think nobody will remember Tucker Carlson gloating happily about pumping up taxes on “urbanites who voted for Hillary”?

The GOP “concern” here is so disingenuous as to frankly be insulting.

Kennedy is being completely disingenuous and Fox is simply encouraging him in that misbehavior.

Kennedy plays the talking point card about “solvency” of Social Security and Medicare and upcoming dates where they may not be able to pay 100% of projected benefits. He leaves out the key information that this “solvency” issue is a creation of the GOP. For the past 20 years, Dems have repeatedly proposed common sense funding adjustments for SS and Medicare – including lifting the cap on applicable income for FICA, expanding the pool of applicable employees, a tiny increase in the employer side of FICA and a tiny increase in the eligibility age. The standard angry Right Wing response has been to stonewall all of that other than increasing the eligibility age and to do so in a much more aggressive manner. The GOP could still take this time to behave like adults for a change and support the common sense adjustments. But they clearly have no intention of doing so.

The angry Right Wing plan for Social Security has been published twice – in 2010 by the Heritage Foundation (and echoed by Cato around the same time), and in late 2022 by the “Republican Study Committee” in the House. This plan involves drastically reducing SS to a $1200/month flat payment, and means-testing to sift out anyone with a decent pension or 401K – which would morph SS into a form of welfare for the indigent elderly, albeit only the indigent elderly who happened to have jobs that paid into FICA. And while Heritage was content to have these new draconian conditions only apply to people who were 25 years old and younger, the “Republican Study Committee” has expressly stated that they want their version of that plan to apply to everyone under the age of 55. Meaning that if the GOP gets its way here, tens of millions of Americans who have paid into FICA for upwards of 30 years will be told they’re only going to see 1/3 of what they paid in, if they see anything at all.

The reason that angry Right Wingers are taking this unfriendly approach is that they’re hoping to really shrink the high popularity that SS and Medicare currently have. The Right Wing has already convinced many Americans that “I’ll never see anything from Social Security” by its constant fear-mongering about it – taking this step would confirm that feeling and make it possible for the GOP to move to completely phase out SS and Medicare, something that has long been a goal of the Right.

Despite Kennedy’s desperate attempt to present himself as “the adult in the room”, the reality is that Kennedy and his fellow GOPers have generated a false dilemma for the direct purpose of motivating unnecessary slashes to these programs.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. Angry Right Wingers can tantrum all they want about January 6. They’re not getting away with retroactively painting it as a tourist visit or a small disturbance by a few bad apples. It was an angry Right Wing mob attacking the US Capitol with implements in their hands, smashing windows, bringing nooses with which they announced their intention to hang the acting president of the US at the time, Mike Pence. And all because Pence’s childish former spokesman couldn’t stand the fact that he, Donald Trump, is a loser.

2. The January 6 committee did a commendable job of collating the information and materials we have from what will go down in history as one of the lowest points for the Right Wing in American history. Republicans did participate in the committee, including Liz Cheney who is herself fairly Far Right. The other Republicans that were suggested were never serious candidates for such a committee and had made clear that they would have spent their time disrupting the committee and challenging its existence rather than contributing in any constructive manner. Brian is correct to note that McCarthy’s temper tantrum is the reason that more Republicans didn’t participate, not anyone else’s behavior. McCarthy apparently throws these tantrums as a regular behavior for him, and it seems he does so out of his own insecurities.

3. Brit Hume should be remembered as a fairly poor excuse for an “elder statesman”, which is clearly the position he sees himself as holding at Fox. In reality, he is an extreme angry Right Wing partisan who regularly spouts talking points rather than actual analysis. His career before Fox gave him a platform consisted of multiple embarrassments, including when his attempted “gotcha” during President Clinton’s intro of RBG backfired into utter humiliation for him in front of the entire White House press corps. It’s interesting to note that predator and disgraced former pundit Bill O’Reilly openly campaigned to get Hume’s position before Fox was compelled to fire him.

In fairness, from Murdoch’s perspective, the Dominion lawsuit is just “noise” to him. Yes, it will cost his company billions, but his company makes tens of billions every year. And he’ll undoubtedly appeal the verdict once it hits, and keep appealing for a decade, until the value of the settlement has been effectively reduced.

As for the reference to “middle America”, Murdoch is playing the usual angry Right Wing card about how the “coastal elites” in Los Angeles and New York somehow are “Far Left” and don’t care about the values of the average American.

It’s frankly odd to hear anyone trying to refer to Fox as “News” when in fact it was never intended to be a journalism outlet. Its entire purpose has been to be a counter to actual journalists and a propaganda platform to boost angry Right Wing politicians and to slag everyone else. It was established in the shadow of unrepentant bigot Rush Limbaugh’s AM show, with the thought of spreading that approach across a 24 hour news cycle.

We have noted over the past 27 years that Fox viewers are notably under-informed and in fact misinformed about both current issues and historical ones. We have noted that Fox regularly pushes extremely divisive rhetoric and bigotry and has paved the way for the candidacies and political careers of despicables like DeSantis, Gaetz, Greene, Boebert, Hawley, Cruz, etc. Not to mention the Pence White House and its childish former spokesman. And today, Fox is being outflanked on its own Right by even more extreme propagandists. Whereas Fox has been forced to recognize reality at various points (such as conceding the 2012 and 2020 Elections), propagandists like “Newsmax” and Glenn Beck feel they can get away with utter denial of reality. Which has in turn pushed Fox even farther to the Right and gotten them into this mess with all their post-Election denials of 2020 and their false coverage of the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021.

One unfortunate fact that’s been raised by media analysts is that Fox regularly brings in about 14 billion in revenue, so a judgment of 1.5 billion would not really hurt them that much. And it’s been pointed out that Fox would likely see this as a price worth paying to keep their ratings and their income flowing.

The one undeniable positive that comes out of this case is that Dominion has caught so many Fox pundits and personalities knowingly and blatantly lying to their viewers. The problem is that the memory of this behavior tends to be ephemeral. Which is why this site and Ellen’s work is so important. It is necessary to continue to document what these ideologues have been doing for when they attempt to rewrite the history in the days to come.

Without this knowledge, Bill O’Reilly would get away with telling everyone he’s a “victim” of the “Far Left” rather than a serial predator who ended his propaganda career in disgrace. And the current talking heads on Fox would get away with telling everyone what a “beloved” president Richard Nixon was rather than the disgraced crook he actually is known to have been.

To be very clear, the GOP playbook for SS and Medicare at this time is to try to scare everyone into agreeing to massive cuts in the programs for everyone up to the age of their mid-50s. The game being played is that they keep saying they won’t slash the programs for the already-retired population (ie much of their voting base). So current retirees and everyone above 65 years old would continue to receive their payments. It’s nearly everyone currently working who would get the cuts, even if they’d been paying into FICA for upwards of 30-35 years.

Since 2004, Dems have repeatedly presented common sense adjustments to the funding of the programs, which include lifting the cap on applicable income for FICA deductions, expanding the applicable employee base and making a tiny increase in the employer side of FICA of perhaps 1% (it could have been 0.2% if the GOP hadn’t stonewalled the discussion 20 years ago). The Dems have also acknowledged a need to increase the retirement age by one year, phased in over a decade or so. The GOP refused to discuss anything other than a sharp increase in the retirement eligibility age, and said that their intransigence was based on their Grover Norquist pledges to never ever ever raise taxes. (Of course, they leave out the part where they skyrocketed Middle Class taxes with the 2017 Tax Transfer).

The GOP approach has been to slag Medicare and SS since those programs were established, and to constantly fear-monger that the programs are “bankrupt” or a “Ponzi scheme” and to try to scare 30-40 year olds into thinking the programs will disappear before they can collect on their FICA investments. Since 2004, the long game by angry Right Wingers has been to deliberately refuse to provide any funding adjustments and to then cry public crocodile tears of their “concern” that the programs may be unable to pay more than 80% of their scheduled payments as of the mid 2030s. The GOP regularly tries to convince everyone that the 20% shortfall they’re ensuring is somehow a “total bankruptcy” or “insolvency” rather than a shortfall they’ve caused. We should remember that these programs are not “entitlements” by any means – they are public insurance programs we all pay into together, and the payments are actually a repayment that is owed to the employees who pay in. Mislabeling them “entitlements” is intended to make people think that they are handouts, when the facts are the reverse.

The GOP and angry Right Wing “solutions” for this “crisis” consist of slashing the programs by making SS a $1200/month flat payment, means-tested to only go to the indigent elderly, and by making Medicare a tiny means-tested voucher. And these new conditions would apply to everyone born after 1967 per the GOP “Republican Study Committee” plan of three months ago. Which would mean the majority of Middle Class employees would be told that even after paying into FICA for over 30-35 years, their payments would now be 1/3 of what they’d been promised, if they are to receive anything at all whatsoever. There’s also the debunked and discredited move now being pushed again by former acting president Pence to divert FICA deductions into some kind of alternate investment plan – something that Right Wingers know would actually result in a massive funding shortfall that would almost certainly result in real insolvency for SS and Medicare.

One obstacle for the GOP over the decades in their work to toss out these programs is that the programs are extremely popular and successful, despite all the sabotage by the Right Wing. So the press to slash the programs for most Middle Class Employees is clearly aimed to quash that popularity and turn public opinion firmly against even having these programs in existence.

The long game by angry Right Wingers is to be able to get a complete scrapping of SS through Congress by 2035, literally on the 100th year anniversary of the Social Security Act passing. It’s an insidious plot, and one that angry Right Wingers are really hoping you won’t notice.

For anyone falling for Right Wing spin in this matter and thinking “they’ll never cut Social Security”, I would point you to those who said “they’ll never throw out Roe v Wade”. This is a long-held long-term objective for angry Right Wingers. They will not hesitate, not even for a second, to get rid of Medicare and SS as soon as they have the opportunity.

Biden was correct to avoid stepping into the bear trap of a “Fox Interview” on Super Bowl Sunday. Frankly, President Obama should have avoided those as well. There was no need to dignify Fox in that fashion, or to dignify a predator like Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s nonsensical attempts to “gotcha” President Obama were embarrassing at the time and have not aged any better. For his part, O’Reilly continues to tout that he was able to have those moments to lob angry Right Wing talking points at President Obama, even from the perch of his video podcast.

It sounds like angry Right Wingers and GOP members of Congress are trying to play games with semantics here.

To begin with, they’re dodging the fact that they’ve always been opposed to SS and Medicare and have spent decades trying to denigrate those programs and turn the public against them, despite the solid popularity both programs continue to have. They’re also dodging the fact that they’ve spent 20 years expressly ignoring simple common sense steps the Dems have proposed, such as lifting the cap on applicable income for FICA, expanding the pool of employees paying into FICA and making a small increase in the employer side of FICA. The standard GOP response is to say “Taxes are off the table” – except that they had no problem skyrocketing taxes for the Middle Class with the 2017 Tax Transfer.

So the “concern” about Social Security’s future is a lot of crocodile tears. And the repeated falsehoods about how Medicare and Social Security are “insolvent” or “bankrupt” are just a continuation of the decades of calling SS a “Ponzi Scheme” or “Social Insecurity” and an attempt to justify the massive cuts they now believe they can get away with. In reality, both SS and Medicare will continue to function but may not be able to pay more than 80% of the proper amount within about a decade if the GOP continues to stonewall.

The most obvious bit of semantics angry Right Wingers are playing here is for them to loudly protest that they’re not trying to cut Social Security. What they’re leaving out is the phrase “for those people already retired and receiving payments.” All of the GOP plans to destroy the programs include a proviso that people who are already retired will continue to get their Social Security. But that’s not what we’re talking about and the Right Wing knows this. What the GOP is trying to do is slash Social Security for Middle Class Employees who are still in the workforce and not imminently retiring. The most current Republican Study Committee “blueprint” says their new “improved” Social Security would go into effect for everyone aged 54 and younger who could potentially take early retirement in FY2030. So one could say that the GOP’s fingers-crossed promise not to touch SS is true “from a certain point of view”. Smith’s statement that he wants to protect SS for people just like his mother is partially about exempting the current retirees from his new plans.

The second bit of semantics comes with the phrase “protect and preserve” from Smith. So we’re clear, he doesn’t mean to actually protect and preserve the programs as they’ve functioned over the past nearly 90 years. The GOP’s thinking is that their massive cuts to the programs will be the way to “protect and preserve” them without any pesky “tax increases”. And that’s where the other aspect of Smith’s statement about protecting SS for people just like his mother comes into play. It’s the same approach as former acting president Pence saying that SS should be protected for people “at the point of the need”. What they’re saying is that SS should just be a small stipend for the indigent elderly. That’s the recommended approach from the Heritage Foundation that the GOP is following – to reduce SS to a flat $1200/month and to means test it so that it really only goes to people “at the point of the need”.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the actual intent here is to both sour the public on SS, and to get in another shot at the Middle Class Employees who already took a body blow with the Tax Transfer. Where the Tax Transfer was an obvious counterpunch to President Obama’s exhortation to the wealthy to “pay your fair share”, the continued attempts to slash Social Security sound like an obvious move by the Right Wing to generate a “crisis” by refusing to act for over 20 years and then use their “crisis” to justify massive cuts, which can then lead to actually sunsetting these programs as soon as the retiree population has all passed.

I’ll note a couple of things here.

First, the GOP’s intent to slash SS and Medicare is well-known and long-documented. They have slagged the programs at every turn for the past 50 years and stonewalled common sense funding adjustments so they could feign “concern” at the “crisis” with the programs today. Make no mistake – if angry Right Wingers pull it off, SS would be reduced to a flat $1200/month, means-tested to disqualify Middle Class employees with decent pensions or 401K plans and these conditions would apply to all Americans 54 years old and younger. That’s the short version of both the 2023 Republican Study Committee plan and the 2010 Heritage Foundation plan upon which it’s based. (And Medicare would be slashed to a tiny means-tested voucher idea.) To be fair, HF only wanted their plan to apply to Americans under 25 years old, but today’s angry Right Wingers want to make sure that middle-aged Middle Class employees really feel a pinch here. In the same way, they were happy to smack Middle Class employees with a massive tax increase in 2017 and then gloat about it on Fox and elsewhere.

Second, if the Right Wingers were to get their way on this, the long-held popularity of SS would quickly wane, since tens of millions of Middle Class employees would be told that their forecasted SS payments would be cut in half or down to a third or a quarter of what they’d previously been promised, regardless of the fact that they’d paid into FICA for over three decades. And that’s assuming the means-testing allowed them to collect anything at all. The gamble the Right Wing is making here is that they’re thinking the public would blame Social Security itself or “government that can’t do anything” for the situation, rather than the angry Right Wingers who sabotaged the programs to make them fail. It is for this reason that angry Right Wingers have been doing all that slagging of SS over the past five decades. Sadly, too many American employees have bought the line that “Social Security won’t be there for me”. But up to now, those employees have been pleasantly surprised by actually receiving regular SS payments as promised upon their retirements. If the GOP is able to default on those promises, it’s a sure bet that the program’s popularity would fall away in a hurry. Since it would have been changed into a form of welfare for the indigent elderly. Which would pave the way for the GOP to have no real opposition to sunsetting SS around the time of its centenary in 2035. Given the patience the Right Wing showed about throwing Roe v Wade in the trash, one should not underestimate the intentions here. The Right Wing has been playing a long game here, and they’re hoping most people won’t notice.

We should underline a point made earlier – FICA and Social Security and Medicare are absolutely not “entitlements” or handouts. They are a public insurance program that all employees fund through their weekly paychecks. The GOP only uses the derogation of “entitlements” to help sell the idea that retirees are somehow getting something for nothing. Again, should the Right Wing succeed in taking SS away from Americans 54 years old and younger, that push would ensure that a majority of Americans would no longer see SS as a worthy idea, since they would see no real benefit from its existence.

All of that said, there is a small case for cautious optimism after the 2023 SOTU address. President Biden somehow managed to rope-a-dope the GOP caucus into publicly proclaiming that they will not slash Social Security. Since they will theoretically not be able to inject this into the debt ceiling discussion, they’re essentially frozen out of doing much more with their plans for the rest of 2023. And they’re not going to push a slash plan in the Election Year of 2024. Which means they’ll have to wait until 2025 for their next attempt to gut SS and Medicare. That is, unless the Dems can somehow get a few GOP members to go along with finally making those small adjustments they’ve been trying to activate for 20 years.

I have a feeling that Fox will continue to play games until the defamation suit is filed, and even then they’ll keep trying to throw mud.

We should keep in mind that the Biden family has been consistent in refusing to dignify the lies about the “laptop” and the various emails over the past 2 1/2 years. It’s clear that the continuing viciousness of angry Right Wingers such as Carlson (not to mention the propagandists on the various minor web copycats like OAN, “Real America”, Newsmax and Glenn Beck) has angered Hunter Biden to the point that he’s had enough of the constant libels and slanders.

Reporting from actual journalists at Time and Politico has shown that hacked Hunter Biden data was being offered for sale in the Ukraine in July 2019 and September 2019 (at which point the price had risen to 5 million dollars). This data was being sold as truly salacious stuff including emails and nasty pictures and videos, etc. It’s probably just a coincidence that Rudy Giuliani was known to be in Ukraine around those times frantically looking for “dirt” on Hunter Biden and his father. And it’s probably just another coincidence that Mike Pence’s childish former spokesman chose that time to blackmail the Ukrainian President to make him announce a non-existent “investigation” into the Bidens. And wow, it’s probably an even bigger coincidence that we’re meant to believe that someone went into a legally blind Trump fan’s computer repair shop around that exact time with “laptops” supposedly belonging to Hunter Biden containing the same data.

We should also note that the data in the hacked cache has long been acknowledged to contain genuine Hunter Biden emails and data. If anything, the fact that there is real personal and private data here should be a major worry for the angry Right Wingers who have peddled this “story”. Because it’s actually proof of the theft of Hunter Biden’s data, which he’s consistently stated he has never given permission to anyone to access. While we’re there, let’s also note that the supposedly “incriminating” emails show nothing more than Hunter Biden trying to do business, mentioning his father but then being repeatedly told no by his father. In other words, there’s no there there. The only missteps the hacked data have revealed are a possible underpayment of taxes (even though Hunter Biden made a large late payment quite a while ago) and a possible improper owning of a handgun while he was in rehab. That’s it, after all the angry Right Wing posturing.

And let’s look at the supposed “laptop” “story”. We’re meant to believe that this legally blind repairman runs a shop that has no security cameras and that his habit is to snoop through the data of the laptops he repairs and then make his own copies of that data and distribute it to political cronies. There’s a reason why no legitimate reporter wanted to touch this story in 2020 – it wouldn’t pass a smell test or even a laugh test. When it finally ran as a failed “October Surprise” in October 2020 in the NY Post, the writers took their name off the story. They did as Rupert Murdoch demanded, by running the propaganda and thus giving it legitimacy for other outlets to discuss it, but they didn’t want their names associated with this. When only the typical angry Right Wing propagandists tried to push it later, the Right Wing changed their propaganda line to saying that somehow their failed smear was being “censored”.

There’s a reason that the Bidens did not dignify this story over the past 2 1/2 years – they didn’t want to provide more air to this balloon. The fact that at least some of the emails are genuine would open them to exactly the nonsensical screams we’re now hearing from angry Right Wing pundits today. If the “laptop” were to be discounted by the Bidens, we’d be into a discussion about how the data is real and somehow a “bombshell”, as well as a discussion about how Hunter Biden is somehow just like Hillary Clinton with her server. Angry Right Wingers have demonstrated a strong resilience to the truth, even when confronted with facts that contradict their wishes. At some points, they pivot to whataboutism. At others, such as with Kari Lake or Pence’s childish former spokesman, they literally just continue to lie and hope that nobody will notice.

I’m frankly most curious to see what happens when Rudy Giuliani and the computer repair shop guy are required to answer questions under oath about where the data came from and how it got onto the “laptop” in the first place. If I were them, I’d be in the process of finding a good criminal defense attorney.

Regarding angry Right Wingers’ hatred of Alec Baldwin, that goes back over 25 years, frankly.

Baldwin made some frankly offensive comments about GOP congressmen just before they impeached President Clinton and had to walk them back. He made a comment in 2000 that he would leave the United States if George W Bush won the election. And he was a strong supporter of President Obama. And all of that was well before he began regularly lampooning Mike Pence’s childish personal spokesman on SNL.

Back in the early 1990s, angry Right Wingers loved Baldwin for his alpha male performances in movies like “Glengarry Glen Ross” and for being in “Hunt for Red October”. When his political preferences became publicly known, they turned on him and began inflating any misbehavior as a way to attack and diminish him. His unfortunate and mean-spirited message to his daughter about a decade ago is just one item they’ve repeatedly dredged up.

The current situation just shows that angry Right Wingers have not forgotten their hatred for him, and their fervent wish to see him sent to prison.

I note that Fox is not the only entity playing this game. Angry Right Wing AM radio shock jocks across the country have been expressing their glee at these charges. Disgraced former Fox personality Eric Bolling made a point of making several nasty statements about Baldwin, to the point of indicating his own utter ignorance about the entire matter. Inevitably, we will see a heck of a lot more of that before the matter is concluded. And if Baldwin is acquitted, as I believe he will be, those same angry Right Wing pundits will scream that the fix is in. Because the facts here don’t matter to the Right Wing – just their hatred for Baldwin.

The Special Counsel for the Biden documents is appropriate, and he will almost certainly find that there is very little here. A tiny handful of documents that staffers didn’t return when they should have, and another two or three that accidentally got left in files that nobody has looked at in years. Nothing where anyone would be going into Biden’s garage looking for materials. More along the lines of a single paper here or there that absolutely should have been kept in the classified archive, but nothing anyone was trying to find or there would have been a concerted effort about these papers years ago.

It is notable that the Biden team immediately reported finding the materials and turned them over – as opposed to the staffers for Pence’s childish former spokesman, who lied about having them and then lied about having unilaterally “declassified” hundreds and hundreds of stolen materials.

The nonsensical “investigations” that angry Right Wingers wish to inflict in the House for the next two years have nothing to do with justice or fairness. They are about a childish need to take revenge. Dems are appropriately reluctant to dignify the false premises that the GOP are trying to get them to fall for here.

We should also note for the 8613th time that the 2017 GOP Tax Transfer was NOT AT ALL a “tax cut” for millions of Middle Class Employees and Blue State residents, who saw their federal tax burdens gleefully skyrocketed by thousands of dollars every year. Smith’s devotion to that attack on Middle Class America is telling.

And we should remember that the ominous threats GOP congressmen are making about the debt ceiling and “fiscal responsibility” are specifically about blackmailing the country into accepting disastrous massive slashes in Social Security and Medicare – ie another massive attack on Middle Class America. There are actual common sense adjustments that needed to be made with the funding mechanisms for SS and Medicare for the past 20 years, but angry Right Wingers in Congress refused to take any of them so they could establish a false “imminent disaster” to set up their latest attempt to gut the programs. Make no mistake – angry Right Wingers have no intention to make Social Security function. Their intention is to sabotage the program and retroactively prove their constant mischaracterizations of SS as a “Ponzi Scheme” and a “failure”. If they are allowed to get away with this, neither SS or Medicare will be available in any meaningful way to Americans born after 1967.

The intent of angry Right Wingers in their current hair’s breadth majority in the House is to completely stop any business from happening other than their show trial “investigations”. And those hearings will only be conducted as a revenge action for the Dems having had the temerity to actually look into the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021 as well as the rampant criminality of the Pence White House and its childish former spokesman.

The operating premise of angry Right Wingers today is that “government can’t get anything done”. So it’s natural that they will spend their time deliberately setting up situations that prove that hypothesis. The Pence White House made a point of not properly staffing its cabinet departments – in many departments, veteran staffers were effectively chased out of their jobs and harassed into retiring or leaving without being replaced. Literally dozens of ambassadorships were never filled around the world, not because those rascally Dems wouldn’t approve a nominee but because Pence and his cronies didn’t nominate anyone for many positions. In the worst example of this approach, Pence allowed the CDC to be wildly understaffed, including a complete absence of personnel in regions like where COVID popped up in Asia. Pence’s stated position was that we were spending too much money on all these career staffers in the various departments like State and the EPA and that if we had an emergency, we could just “hire the best people” at that time. Which was utter foolishness when it came to a deadly pandemic, where the CDC needed to have a team in place in advance of the problem. (Had Trump not squeaked through in 2016, we would never have had the significant pandemic of COVID of 2020. There would have been a much smaller outbreak that would have been quickly contained, and Trump would of course have tweeted that it was much worse. Because we had Pence in the White House and an utterly incompetent group that couldn’t manage such a problem, COVID spread like wildfire and killed more than a million Americans.)

We should note that all the various wild conditions angry Right Wingers were demanding of Kevin McCarthy had already been agreed to before they blocked his temporary ascension to the Speaker position. The only part of it that McCarthy had balked at was allowing any single member to challenge his status as Speaker and call for a new vote. McCarthy offered instead to allow that if only 5 members called for it. But the extremists were all set to get everything they’re taking credit for “achieving” before they wasted a week on 15 votes. It’s clear that their point wasn’t to “achieve” the nonsensical conditions they were demanding but instead to make this as humiliating as possible for everyone involved.

Lastly, we should note that McCarthy’s speakership may not be for that long. When the angry Right Wingers make their move this year to shut down the government rather than deal with the debt ceiling, it is likely that McCarthy will be forced to compromise. And the second he does so, he will likely be voted out.

This is but the latest feint in the angry Right Wing narrative about how schools are not educating but “indoctrinating” and about how learning different points of view is somehow “being forced to be woke”.

There is nothing new in the Right Wing’s attack on education. They’ve been at this since 1954, when they were infuriated by the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board. Right Wingers today like to make noises that they are totally on board with that ruling, but the reality has been that they’ve been fighting it since the day it was announced. It literally took decades to get Right Wingers in Red states to stop overtly refusing to honor Brown.

When angry Right Wingers they could no longer use school districts and Boards of Education to discriminate against non-whites, they turned to the idea of pulling their kids out of the public schools and putting them in private schools. And then demanding “vouchers” to help support the tuitions. This had a twofold purpose – it was mostly to keep their kids from being put in schools that were being integrated, and it also caused many public schools to lose funding, thus setting up a downward spiral since the 1970s.

By the 1990s, angry Right Wingers had taken over many local school boards and were able to facilitate the creation of “charter schools” to further the goal of making sure that their preferred places to have their kids educated did not fall under any requirement of integration or diversity.

And in the last two decades, we’ve seen a significant movement by angry Right Wingers toward home schooling, where the parents literally remove their children from any schooling environment whatsoever and claim they are providing education themselves. We are only now seeing how devastating the effects of this have been on young people now going into their 20s after having never been exposed to anything other than the extremist views of angry and controlling parents. Frankly, the behavior of the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world would stand as an unfortunate example. (Rittenhouse dropped out of high school, saying he was an “online” student somehow…)

It should be no surprise that angry Right Wingers view any attempt to educate their kids as “indoctrination”. The only surprise now is that too many people are allowing Right Wingers to get away with this nonsense rather than calling them out for their bigotry.

Lake’s behavior following her decisive loss has been risible. In reality, the technical issues at voting booths in Maricopa County did not stop a single person from voting. As even the supposed “bombshell” videos from those locations show, the ballots that the machines couldn’t feed were able to be placed in separate bins to be manually counted. It is true that a tiny number of angry Right Wingers chose to throw tantrums and huff out of their voting locations, but they were irrelevant to the process.

Lake has repeatedly tried to take different approaches to avoid admitting the fact that she is the loser of the 2022 Arizona midterm. She’s tried to declare fraud that doesn’t exist. She’s tried to declare vote suppression when nothing of the sort happened. She’s tried to falsely declare victory and announce a “transition team” to nowhere. And now she’s in the middle of fruitless litigation that is wasting the time of multiple courts and getting her attorneys sanctioned.

Lake would do better to start looking for an actual job, given that there are many employers in Arizona where her skills could be used. Those Burger King and KFC applications won’t fill themselves out.