A couple of things to note:

Hannity went out of his way to challenge Boebert on the air, making his own rather nonsensical “point” that over 200 Right Wingers support McCarthy. (He forgot to mention that 212 Dems support Jeffries. Did Hannity mean to say that Jeffries should be declared Speaker, since he has the most votes?)

The trashing of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Pence’s childish former spokesman is one of the malfeasances of the Pence White House that could most easily be corrected. Pence’s childish former spokesman actually tossed that Medal away on three separate people who should never have been allowed to get anywhere near such an award: Jordan, Devin Nunes and unrepentant bigot Rush Limbaugh.

Decent people have been urging the Biden/Harris White House for two years to address the Medal problem by redesignating the award. The simple and appropriate way to go would be to create a new Medal of Freedom and Distinction. And then grandfather in all prior recipients of the Medal of Freedom other than Jordan, Nunes, Limbaugh and Paul Harvey. That way, the next Maya Angelou will not be forced to share the stage with the likes of Limbaugh.

Comer certainly wants to do the racist dog whistle here, but he has also made clear that his biggest priority is to continue the false Hunter Biden “laptop” narrative in a series of pointless hearings.

BTW – the entire Hunter Biden “investigation” is nonsensical on its face. In reality, Hunter Biden is no criminal. He certainly has tried to cash on his family name, and various companies have legally offered to pay him to be involved with them. Regardless of any other issue, there is nothing illegal about them offering him a salary or him agreeing to accept one.

We should also keep in mind that the entire narrative about the “laptop” is an invented one. In reality, Time Magazine and WaPo covered the fact that in mid 2019, there were people trying to sell Hunter Biden emails and embarrassing photos in Ukrainian cities for up to 5 million dollars for any American propagandist who wanted to take them. Given how fishy that looks on its face, even “Newsmax” wouldn’t take them. But apparently Rudy Giuliani did, and it’s after that point that we started to hear about this laptop repair shop. The problem is that during the time the “laptop” was supposedly in the repairman’s possession, the offers were already happening.

It’s more than obvious that Giuliani and company cooked up the “laptop” ruse as a way of having a legitimate vehicle to carry the hacked goodies. And Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda rag, the NY Post, agreed to go ahead and carry that story, even though the writers involved took their names off of it.

Let’s remember that the Bidens have never made any statement about the “laptop” being real in any way. All they have done is consistently say that Hunter Biden has never given his consent for anyone to access any data or device of his. And this makes sense – the family isn’t going to dignify this nonsense by pointing out the ruse, and even if they did, angry Right Wingers would just use the additional airtime to play a “But His Emails” game.

CBS just aired a report by former Fox News personality Catherine Herridge where she tried to once again make hay out of the “laptop” but all she actually did was repeat what outlets have been consistently saying for three years now. Which is that the emails appear to be genuine (which means that they were stolen and someone should investigate that…).

The actual emails, when examined, do not show anything of significance or major illegality. Frankly, they show Hunter Biden trying to parlay the family name and usually failing. The supposed “bombshell” email that notes the “10 percent held by HB for the big buy” is actually followed up by another one where Hunter Biden sheepishly admits “the Chairman of the Board” said no. The only actual misbehavior (other than his long-known drug addiction issues) that the DOJ has found even remotely interesting are two misdemeanors: One is a possible underpayment of taxes, which would be handled by a fine and a demand for payment. The other is a possible illegal possession of a handgun while he was in rehab, which would be handled by a fine and a relinquishing of the handgun – something that likely already happened years ago.

The only reason that angry Right Wingers keep playing these games with Hunter Biden’s private data is that they want to embarrass President Biden and get him to emotionally lash out in defense of his son. And that strategy hasn’t really borne any fruit yet, but these guys keep trying, don’t they?

Sanders is in no position to make vicious comments like this. She frankly is showing that she will be just as divisive and unhelpful as DeSantis should she prevail this evening.

Ellen is absolutely correct in her assessment. I’d add a little more.

The efforts of angry Right Wing propagandists in infiltrating the polling community is not just about a single objective. They have multiple ideas in mind here.

When we were all a little younger, pollsters were groups like Gallup or Quinnipiac or various universities that would just run scientific surveys of voters, usually by calling them on their landlines and asking them a few questions. The pollsters were non-partisan and just wanted to find out what citizen awareness was of various issues and at the proper times, how the citizens were thinking of voting. The Right Wing community clearly got the message that the polls would help build a narrative of what the country was thinking as a community at any given time. So Right Wingers began creating their own partisan polling services to get results that would line up with what they wanted to hear.

There are now a pile of openly partisan Right Wing services like Trafalgar, Rasmussen, Remington, Insider Advantage and more, which make a point of putting their thumb or more on the scale to tip their results to what Right Wingers would prefer to hear. In the case of Rasmussen, they used to play this game up to the last week before an election and then switch up to razor sharp polling in the final few days, and use those numbers to claim to be “the most accurate pollster out there” on Fox. In the case of Trafalgar, the propagandist running that outfit has publicly stated that he takes his results and adds points to the Republican candidate to make up for what he says are the Right Wing citizens who don’t answer his questions. He assumes that anyone not responding or sounding neutral must be Republican. So his results always look wildly out of sync with everyone. In 2020, Trafalgar had a “D” rating and was properly considered unreliable. In 2022, Trafalgar now has an “A-” rating. It’s interesting how they pulled that off.

Propagandists like Rasmussen and Trafalgar are running both a short term game and a long term game.

In the short-term, their intention is to tilt the results of the poll aggregators like Real Clear Politics and 538, so that an average of polls will wind up looking like the Right Wing candidate is always going to win and the Democratic candidate is always going to lose. This allows the propagandist to create a narrative that “The Right Wing is winning!” throughout any election campaign. This in turn leads to mainstream news outlets thinking there must be something to all these polls showing Right Wingers ahead, and they begin running stories saying “Well, it certainly looks like a lot of people are planning to vote Right Wing now…” And this leads to a general consensus that the Right Wing is ahead and the Democratic voters have no chance. Which of course is intended to depress Democratic voter turnout while getting Right Wingers excited about showing up to vote for a winner. Now, this is short-term and really only plays up to the time of the Election. I’ll note that propagandists like Robert Cahaly at Trafalgar are not interested in polling what people actually think – their intention is Advocacy. They’re hoping to influence how people vote – by getting their target audience to show up while depressing their opponents into staying home.

In the medium term, this flooding the zone with partisan push-poll numbers serves a more sinister purpose, as Ellen noted. If the propagandist succeeds in their advocacy and their voters do drown out the rest of the populace, then the pollster can bring a pretense of integrity – and this is how Trafalgar now has an inexplicable “A-” at 538. Trafalgar got more GOP voters to show up in various races in 2020, so their tilted polling results resembled the result that Trafalgar generated. We’ll see if Trafalgar succeeds again, or if their results are belied by the facts we’re already seeing in early voting across the country for 2022. In the event that the propagandists succeed, then we’ll hear the same gloating we heard in 2016, and the propagandists will use this situation as another badge of accuracy and aggregators like 538 will shrug and give them a higher rating. On the other hand, if Democratic voters re-elect Raphael Warnock in Georgia and elect John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and otherwise do not do what Trafalgar keeps predicting, then the Right Wing will use the false narrative we’ve heard in the short-term as a way of spreading a story about “voter fraud” and “illegitimacy” just as they did in 2020. In other words, if the propaganda advocacy fails, the fall-back position of the Right Wing is to then challenge the results as somehow wrong. Which is why we’ve seen angry Right Wingers spending the last 2 years insisting that President Biden did not win when he in fact did.

In the longer term, Right Wingers have a more insidious notion in mind with the polling games. Win or lose, their constant flooding the zone with partisan push-polls winds up resulting in a scenario where the actual pollsters have one result (as we see from Marist and Quinnipiac) and the Right Wing propagandists have a diametrically opposed result. So general citizens take a position that “Well, everybody is biased, so you can’t trust ANY of the polls”. Because the propagandists have effectively poured sewage into the public aquifer. And at the same time that citizens are feeling they can’t trust any pollster, they also lose confidence in the ability of our governmental system to conduct free and fair elections. Because they keep being told that something is wrong with the elections if the Right Winger loses. Repeat this cycle enough times and most citizens throw up their hands and say they’d rather not get involved, as happened in 2016. Which allows Right Wingers to run the table whenever they like.

The only way to counter this is for people to show up and vote and not fall for the nonsense that propagandists like Cahaly and Kent and Rasmussen inflict. Do that enough times, and the propagandists will be repeatedly exposed for what they are, and they’ll eventually either retreat or be forced to live with the public not taking them seriously for a moment. We just need to see if enough Democratic voters have gone to the ballot box this year. It’s crucial that they do.

I’ll add that in the event of extremists like Kari Lake winning in Arizona, we would see a scenario in 2024 where a Democratic presidential candidate wins the state of Arizona, but Lake throws out those votes and install her own “alternate electors” anyway. The second we see that happen, there will be extraordinarily serious questions about whether a democratic republic can survive that kind of abuse. Personally, I’d rather avoid that situation entirely. But it does seem that angry Right Wingers and their pundits want that to happen.

I should also note that there is no need to make these draconian cuts in these programs. Social Security and Medicare can easily be funded for the next century by making several small adjustments:

-Raising the retirement age by one year for people currently aged 25 or younger
-Lifting the cap on applicable income for FICA
-Including the governmental employees in the FICA pool
-Raising the employer side of FICA by 0.3%

And these steps could have been taken 20 years ago, when the FICA increase could have been 0.1%. But angry Right Wing pundits and politicians insisted that they would never ever ever raise taxes ever. Of course, those same people cheered on the GOP Tax Transfer of 2017, so one should really wonder what they meant by those Grover Norquist pledges.

Just so everyone is clear on what the GOP plan is for Social Security and Medicare:

They are following the Heritage Foundation plan from 2010, which is easily found online and has only been made stricter since the time that original paper was published.

The plan is to reduce Social Security to a flat rate of about $1200 per month, and to strictly means-test it so that seniors who receive decent pensions or have decent savings will be cut off. The original Heritage Foundation plan said this would only apply to people born in 1985 or later (meaning it was only for people who were 25 or younger at the time they presented it). The new plan goes into effect for anyone born in 1968 or later – meaning that people who are 54 years old today would be told they only qualify for a greatly reduced benefit, if they are not cut off entirely. This would mean that Middle Class Employees who paid FICA for the past 35 years would be told that they’re out of luck, and that would be within about 10 years of when most of them will want to retire. This is not accidental – the GOP Tax Transfer of 2017 was similarly a frontal attack on Middle Class Employees, particularly those living and working in Blue States. The GOP is well aware of what they’re doing here.

The Heritage Foundation today estimates that the revised GOP version of their drastic cutting plan would result in savings of over 640 billion dollars over the next several years. Which is understandable, since that’s the amount that would no longer be paid to retirees who paid into the system for decades.

As for Medicare, the GOP intention is to replace it with a tiny voucher program that would do little for anyone not living in poverty. Frankly, the entire GOP approach here would be to reduce Social Security and Medicare to welfare programs for the indigent elderly. Which would make the programs much easier to eliminate altogether, since they would no longer be any benefit to anyone else. And that’s the ultimate intention here. The GOP is following the same patient playbook they did in tossing Roe v Wade in the trash can. They’ve never wanted these programs to exist in the first place, and they were willing to take the long approach to getting them tossed. So with this move, they’ll reduce the programs to something that doesn’t help most people and thus is vulnerable to being scrapped. And then, ten years later, they can deliver the final blow and toss them entirely.

We should remember that there are much simpler ways to deal with Social Security funding – a lift on the cap on income that applies, an inclusion of governmental employees who qualify as part of the funding, a mild increase in retirement age for taxpayers under 30 years old, and a tiny increase in the employer side of payroll taxes. These steps could and should have been taken 20 years ago, but angry Right Wingers refused to allow it. Now those same angry Right Wingers make noises that the programs they starved of funds are going to have financial issues soon. In scientific terms, we call this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If anyone truly thinks that the GOP will not work to eliminate these programs that Right Wingers have long hated, I advise that person to look no further than the Supreme Court. Angry Right Wingers are telling us exactly what they intend to do here. I strongly suggest that people pay attention and take them at their word.

It’s frankly unbelievable that a person who poses as such a devout spiritual person and upright man in his community would so blatantly engage in utter falsehoods.

In reality, Lee believes in a form of White Supremacism and is willing to compromise any principle to forward that agenda. He figures his followers (and Trump’s) will never notice if he dissembles, and that he has free reign to behave with impunity. His actual agenda is clearly about attacking what small gains happened in civil rights between 1954 and 2016, and returning the country to a time when females and non-whites knew their place and didn’t lift their heads.

John is correct. The entire narrative of “Evil Trans People Are Attacking Your Children” is just the latest anti-gay screed from angry Right Wingers looking for a new “outrage” to get them excited about voting.

By the strangled “logic” that the angry Right Wingers are pushing here, the frantic attempts by Republicans to block anyone from receiving this minor student loan relief are a GOP ploy to anger and disappoint voters and presumably depress the turnout.

It’s truly unfortunate how driven angry Right Wingers are to play these games. Particularly when one realizes that 50 years ago, a public college was not an expensive proposition. All the student needed were good grades and a disposition to work hard in class. Nowadays, even the public colleges can be prohibitively expensive and millions of college students wind up buried in massive debt. Which of course means that anyone who had intended to be a lawyer for a non-profit or a volunteer or anything not in a lucrative profession is out of options. Which is of course the intention of the angry Right Wingers who support the college education situation being in this unfortunate place.

Note that Vera’s comments contain a veiled threat – telling students they better not even think of applying for this benefit because angry Right Wingers are going to take it away.

It is truly shameful that angry Right Wing propaganda platforms like Fox are so bent on trying to push Walker that they’ve lost track of the “good Christian family values” they previously professed to support. The true victims in Walker’s story are the women he abused and the children he abandoned.

A few things to point out here:

The Republican Study Group plan embraces the approach of the Heritage Foundation and their paper from a decade ago. It goes far beyond just raising the eligibility age and means testing, although both of those actions are included. The HF plan has not been widely circulated itself in several years, but it can still be found online – and it’s something everyone should read. The HF plan calls for Social Security to be reduced to a flat benefit of the equivalent of $1200 per month (theoretically in 2010 dollars). This drastically reduced benefit would only be available to people seeing less than 55K per year in retirement outside of SS payments.

I’ll note that while this flat amount would be about what the average monthly SS payment is (if they actually did adjust for inflation, which I find doubtful), it also would mean that literally tens of millions of people who were eligible for higher benefits of at least twice that amount would suddenly get a massive cut. And that’s if they were even considered eligible for anything under the new rules. The HF plan had the idea of slowly phasing in and really only applying to people born after 1985. The Republican Study Group says they would make the drastic cuts applicable to anyone age 54 or younger. For those keeping track, that would mean anyone born in 1968 or later.

Heritage has noted in more recent articles that its plan would save over 640 billion dollars over the next several years. Which makes sense, since they’d drastically be cutting and/or eliminating benefits from so many of the potential recipients that would have received them before this change. I’ll also note that Medicare would essentially become a means-tested voucher system.

And the reason that angry Right Wingers want this approach is that it would turn SS and Medicare into welfare for the indigent elderly and make a point to most Americans that “you can’t count on the government for anything”. Which has been the approach of angry Right Wingers going back several decades. If they get away with these changes, it’s only a matter of time before they move to completely abolish the programs. Which would become a lot more possible given that most of the country would no longer see any benefit from those programs even after paying into them for decades.

This is the exact approach that the GOP had intended to take in 2019, but was unable to push as they’d lost their majority in the House and could no longer present it. The fact that they’re seriously trying to push it again and threatening to capsize the economy to do it should be chilling to anyone paying attention.

Social Security and Medicare can easily be stabilized by several common sense measures – including lifting the cap on applicable earnings and making a minute increase in the employer side of FICA payroll taxes. But angry Right Wingers have refused to do these simple things for decades, in the hopes they could starve the programs and force everyone else to agree to slashing them.

It is beyond despicable that Scalise thinks he can get away with accusing Dems of trying to bankrupt these programs when it is people like Scalise who have actually been working to make that happen.

As Ellen noted, this kind of blatantly deceptive game-playing is common at Fox, and it gets even worse at other Right Wing propaganda platforms. And it goes farther than just creating an echo chamber of angry Right Wing voices as a “focus group”.

Multiple Right Wing pollsters, such as Rasmussen and “The Trafalgar Group”, regularly present blatantly tilted polling results as a way of trying to make the GOP candidates appear to be doing better than they are, as a way of depressing Dem voter turnout while goosing GOP voter turnout. This approach does work when the voters are not aware of who is presenting the numbers to them, or where the propagandists’ advocacy pays off in their people showing up in greater numbers.

What makes this scenario so dangerous is that angry Right Wingers are trying to literally create “facts” out of thin air and use those “facts” to bamboozle their way into real election victories that can have terrible consequences.

Martin’s hefty lunch order indicates two things:

1. The effect of inflation raised his costs for lunch by between two and three dollars. So two years ago, his cost for the same thing would have been a total of around $25 including tax. Meaning that he’s raising a complete red herring.

2. He needs to seriously consider going on a diet.

Angry Right Wingers keep trying to push the inflation numbers as much as they can, and it isn’t distracting the tens of millions of American women who are fully aware of how the Right Wing has treated them. As loud as the Right Wing propagandists yell “Inflation! Inflation! Inflation!” and “Hunter! Hunter! Hunter”, people in the real world are aware that most Red States are attempting to make it impossible for women to have any control over their own bodies, and that the Republicans are sneering while they take these actions.

We’ll just have to see how the turnout goes next month. Given the utter panic being shown by angry Right Wing pundits across the board now (as they scream at their listeners “VOTE!!!! VOTE!!! VOTE!!!!!”), the results may not be the ones that the Right Wing is desperately hoping to see.

Angry Right Wingers are frantically trying to repeat a mantra that “most voters don’t care about women’s rights”, because they’re terrified that the Kansas vote will be magnified in the Midterm results next month.

It’s of course possible that the angry Right Wingers are correct – that most women simply won’t remember that the GOP worked to erase their rights and then gloated about doing so. It’s possible that most women won’t realize that Red State after Red State is moving quickly to establish the most vicious and pernicious anti-female laws they can, with the thought that they can simply get away with this conduct and not face any consequences.

But it’s a lot more possible that angry Right Wingers will be getting an unhappy result next month, and based on the frantic tone of their comments, it won’t be a surprise.

Regarding Georgia, it’s looking fairly clear at this point that Walker has completely imploded and that Warnock will easily carry the day. But past that, it’s also very possible that Warnock may help carry Stacey Abrams to victory as well, given that Warnock’s voters are unlikely to vote for Kemp.

It’s becoming clear that the GOP and their supporters on the propaganda platforms are beginning to openly panic about what’s coming next month. On-air personalities and pundits across the various platforms and AM Radio shifts are now openly screaming at their listeners and viewers to vote as though the world is about to end. One can only think that they’ve seen internal polling that’s far worse for them than the games they’ve been playing in public with poll spinners like “Trafalgar”.

That said, it continues to be absolutely necessary that everyone show up to vote across the country. Unless Dem voters show up like they did in 2020, this frantic push by angry Right Wingers could very well succeed. It would be disastrous if the Right Wing were allowed to get away with their behavior over the past several years, now including the assault on women’s rights and the utter viciousness toward asylum seekers, without consequences. The Right Wing needs to learn the lesson that they cannot treat the rest of the country in this fashion. If they are not solidly rebuked next month, they will interpret the situation to mean that they actually can do whatever they want and never face any pushback.

Of course Walker did this. His inept response is just Example #6731 of why it was nonsensical for angry Right Wingers to think he could be a serious candidate for County Trash Collector, let alone the US Senate. But the Right Wing obviously figured if they presented someone, anyone, who was African American, that would automatically allow them to push Senator Raphael Warnock out of his current seat. This is similar to the move made by the GOP to push Sarah Palin into John McCain’s 2008 ticket – they were thinking that women would just vote for the ticket because Palin was a female, as if American women couldn’t distinguish between an actual candidate who could discuss issues and someone who could not.

It’s fairly evident that the Right Wing is panicking over not winning this seat, and more than that, they’re panicking that Walker’s implosion may take down Brian Kemp as well, since Warnock’s voters are likely to vote for Abrams.

Angry Right Wingers have regularly played the homophobic card when discussing Buttigieg, ever since unrepentant bigot Rush Limbaugh emboldened them to let that hatred fly. We should remember that Limbaugh spewed this invective where he chortled at Buttigieg’s love for his husband and family while extolling Pence’s childish spokesman as “Mr. Man”, on the morning after the Presidential Medal of Freedom was thrown away on him at one of the most unfortunate moments of the entire miserable term of the Pence White House.

A few quick thoughts here:

This was on the Dr. Phil show (not necessarily any better than Dr. Oz’s show, but still a different one…) and Carlson has studiously edited out most of the exchange so that all we can hear is part of Rose’s inept response. The woman who was challenging her was asking real questions about how rights have been taken away from American women and Rose was blithely repeating her talking points rather than answering the questions. So the problem starts with the same deceptive editing that Rose has happily participated in while playing with the unfortunate “Project Veritas” and its scams.

We should also remember that the entire debate is being falsely presented by angry Right Wingers. Nobody is advocating for the killing of children in this discussion. The discussion is about what happens during a woman’s pregnancy and how it is that an angry Right Wing packed Supreme Court decided to take reproductive choice away from American women. Rose still doesn’t understand that.

We should remember that for decades, it’s been an accepted concept that if the Right Wing ever did this to women, they would face unhappy consequences at the ballot box. That indeed appears to be what is about to happen, provided that Dem voters actually show up this year. If Dems stay home, then the Right Wing will get away once again with unbelievably vicious behavior and women across this country will continue to suffer without any recourse.

It’s telling that Carlson, Rose and other angry Right Wingers think that they have so much of a “win” here that they can gleefully spike the football and pretend that they have a moral high ground rather than the unfortunate position they now hold. It will be up to American voters to explain that error to them in less than 8 weeks now.

Interesting to see Fox turn on Cheney, who was not only a paid contributor but sometimes a substitute host on their prime time shows. One supposes that Fox is so desperate to appeal to the Far Far Right wingnuts abandoning them for Newsmax that they feel they must burn their bridges here. When the history of this epoch is written, it will note these odd moments when the Far Far Right Wing began devouring everyone even one smidge less Far Far Right Wing than they.