The issue here is that Boebert clearly felt she could get away with doing whatever she wanted without any consequences. This is unfortunately the same pattern we have seen from Angry Right Wingers over the past 7 years, particularly after they were emboldened by Mike Pence’s childish former spokesman.

It’s not just that Boebert was vaping in the theater, or that she was being loud and obnoxious, or that she was engaging in unacceptable public behavior that’s right on the edge of indecent exposure. It’s not just that she was taking phone photos and selfies in the theater when she had been told not to. It’s that when she was told to stop it, she lashed out at the other patrons and the theater staff who then appropriately removed her. It’s that she then played the “do you know who I am” card and made further obscene gestures, while continuing to take selfies.

Boebert would have been fine to try to just get away with all this, had she not been confronted with the actual video from the security cameras. So now we get a “limited, hang-out mode” sort-of apology. But she’s not sorry for what she did. She’s sorry she got caught on camera doing what she did.

And again, she clearly thinks she can behave like this and get away with it. Just like Pence’s childish former spokesman always did. But just as little Trump is now facing years in prison for his felonies, she’s being held accountable for her misdeeds. Hopefully both of them (and their fans) can learn their lesson.

The killer buoys are proof that for Angry Right Wingers, the meanness is the point. Putting blockers with serrated blades in the Rio Grande is not meant to save lives at all. It’s meant to make examples of anyone who dares try to cross.

This is the same thing as when Sessions announced the vicious policy of separating families from their children – he openly stated this was intended to make sure migrants knew it would be viscerally unpleasant for them to come to the US, so hopefully they wouldn’t anymore. And the Pence White House added to this with the equally vicious “Remain in Mexico” idea, which was designed to push migrants into the Mexican desert for months rather than allow them to enter the US. It’s no surprise that border entries plummeted of all kinds on the US/Mexico line after that – the Pence White House had made clear that coming to the US meant death or what could be worse than that. The reason the entries have jumped since then isn’t because the Biden White House is lax, but because we stopped the viciousness from the Pence guys. It’s not rocket science.

I’ll note that this viciousness from Angry Right Wingers goes back over a century. In more recent years, we can identify key moments of bigotry like the “Minutemen” volunteering to “watch” the border from their lawnchairs. And the Angry Right Wing AM radio support for Ramos & Compean for shooting a fleeing suspect in the back and then covering up the bad shoot. The proper response here is to confront this kind of bigotry when it pops up.

Give Gutfeld and Pirro an acknowledgement for at least being open about their hatred.

Eight months of constant touting of “bombshells” about President Biden and his son have gotten them nowhere, and they continue to have no evidence of actual wrongdoing, so what can they do? Pretend they do and proceed anyway.

Pirro’s comments are a litany of debunked falsehoods. Bobulinski is a jilted ex-partner of Hunter Biden who frankly is understandably upset that he never got those big money deals Hunter Biden said he would get. I’m sure Bobulinski thought that Joe Biden would be involved, and was pretty angry when he found out that all he was getting was the chance to listen once in a blue moon when Joe would call his son and say “How ya doing? How’s the weather over there, son?” Devon Archer’s actual testimony clearly states that Joe Biden was never involved in business discussions. All that would happen is that while Hunter was with his partners, occasionally he’d call his dad on speakerphone. And sometimes Hunter and his father would go out on social outings, like a golf game or a dinner, and his partners might attend, since they were friends with Hunter. None of that was actual business, but Angry Right Wingers hope everyone gets confused enough to think it was. Then VP-Biden using pseudonyms is not unusual. I would not be surprised for every major personage in DC to be using them, for a variety of legal reasons. And people visit the White House for a lot of reasons – 19 visits over 8 years by someone who was a friend of the VP’s son translates to about twice a year and there is no indication that anything untoward happened.

The only reason to push for this inquiry is exactly what Gutfeld admits – it’s revenge for the impeachments that Pence’s childish former spokesman brought upon himself. And it’s revenge for the felony prosecutions now coming down on little Trump. Most Angry Right Wingers know they have nothing to charge President Biden with, but they are so consumed with their hatred for him that they can’t stop themselves. And they have to know that they have a serious problem for 2024. GOP voters have made very clear that they will not support a convicted felon for President. And the only reason little Trump is campaigning is that he’s trying to stave off the consequences of his crimes. He’s trying to stay out of prison. Given how those prosecutions are going, that’s not working out very well for him.

There are two extremely telling indicators of how Angry Right Wingers are thinking the felony trials of little Donald Trump are going.

The first is that even the loudest and angriest GOP pundits on AM radio and on the various propaganda channels like Newsmax or Fox are starting to discuss the inevitable – that little Trump and his cronies are going to be convicted of multiple felonies, and that little Trump himself is looking at serious prison time. (He’s actually going to get his stated wish of winding up back in federal housing, but it may be somewhat different than he was thinking…)

The second is that angry Right Wingers are now throwing nonsense mud at President Biden and his family as furiously as they can, hoping they can fool voters into confusing the situations and winding up with a “plague on both their houses” response. It is sadly true that the endless repetitions of falsehoods like “Biden Crime Family” and “Hunter Biden Laptop” have confused enough poll respondents to foul various polls about voters’ feelings.

I’ll further note that Trump’s attempted public poses about this disintegrate when given any scrutiny. His pose of “You can’t prosecute me! I’m a presidential candidate! This is political persecution!!!” would mean that everyone could go rob a bank and then file to run for Mayor or Congressman or whatever, and tell prosecutors and the police that they’re now untouchable. His other pose of “I didn’t understand that I lost!” as well as “I didn’t understand that I couldn’t steal confidential documents” also translates to “I’m so unable to process basic information that I don’t know how elections work or how confidentiality works, but please vote for me anyway!”

Frankly, little Trump should be less concerned about whether authorities will establish a special wing of Leavenworth for him, and more worried that one or more of the judges is going to apply an appropriate sentencing punishment. Given Trump and his cronies’ utter disdain for the Constitution, for laws, and even for our democracy, it is important not only that he receive the applicable prison time, to be served consecutively and not concurrently, but also that he be stripped of all of the perquisites normally accorded to former presidents – including his Secret Service protection and his pension. This would make his imprisonment a much simpler matter, and given Trump’s sloughing off of the actual work to Mike Pence from 2017-2020, he frankly has never deserved those perquisites in the first place.

The entire current situation of lawlessness in the GOP sadly arises from Gerry Ford’s mistaken pardoning of Richard Nixon in 1974. Had Nixon been appropriately prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for his behavior then, the nation could have avoided multiple significant criminal scandals afterward – including the disasters of the Reagan, W and Pence White Houses. Instead, the criminals involved with the Nixon felonies learned they could get away with it. And many of those same people gleefully broke laws with Reagan and W and so on. With the current situation, the justice system at least has a chance to finally make a statement that nobody is above the law. This is actually positive moment for little Trump and his fans. They’re about to learn some very important lessons – about proper behavior and the consequences of misbehavior. And it’s long overdue that they do so.

This is a subject I’ve been following quite closely, having read the 2010 Heritage Foundation plan to “reform” Social Security and multiple current “Republican Study Committee” plans from the last couple of Congresses.

What Christie is proposing is essentially what the RSC wants to do. It’s a plan in three parts:

1. Reduce the SS payment to a flat $1200/month. They don’t say this openly now, but they do mention the same language around it – that the amount of the benefit needs to be “adjusted”, that those who currently get the lowest amount would see an increase and those who get the highest would see a decrease, etc. The Heritage plan spelled it out – make the benefit just the flat $1200/month or a whopping total of $14,400 per year. This would reduce the benefit to being what angry Right Wingers believe it should be – a small supplement that would help the elderly pay for groceries or other bills if they need a little help.

2. Means Test the payment so that it no longer goes to anyone with a decent pension, 401K or savings or any combination. The fun here is that none of the Right Wing plans agree on where they draw the line. Given the louder tone of the doomsaying for SS, I’d bet that they’ll go for the low end – say, if the retiree was seeing 50-60K per year, or less than 5K per month. For this group, instead of receiving the maximum SS payment (currently close to 4K per month), they might still be eligible and receive 1.2K per month or a little more than 1/4 the former benefit, or they might be declared ineligible and thus receive nothing at all. Either way, they definitely fit the description from #1 – they’ll be seeing a decrease…

3. Apply the new rules to the widest cohort possible. In the 2010 Heritage Foundation plan, the new rules would only apply to people 25 and under. In the 2022 RSC plan, the new rules would apply to people 54 and under. In the most current RSC plan released this year, the new rules would apply to people 59 and under. I want to make sure people understand that they read that correctly. The GOP intention is to tell people who have worked for nearly 40 years that they will see no benefit from having paid into FICA for those 40 years. Yes, the cruelty is the point.

In the event of a GOP president and a GOP majority in Congress in 2025, I would absolutely expect this to be at the top of their priority list, and I’d expect the new rules to be applied as widely as possible. The GOP has worked patiently for the past 6 decades to make this happen, so this would be another win for them, to go right alongside tossing out Roe and affirmative action.

Ellen is correct that there are extremely simple fixes that could be applied to SS funding – lifting the applicability cap, applying a small tax on the highest earners, and making a tiny increase in the employer side of FICA. All of this could have been done (in fact, should have been done) in the early 2000s, but the GOP wouldn’t hear of it. Nowadays, they trumpet the doomsaying as Christie is doing, saying that SS is about to go insolvent. It isn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the GOP who repeatedly refuses to take even a single common sense step to help SS.

Should the Right Wing succeed in gutting SS and Medicare, there is no question that they would move toward completely eliminating the programs as soon as practicable. Because at that point, all they would be is welfare for the indigent elderly and we can all hear what Right Wingers will say about that group – ie “they should have thought of this 20 years ago” or “they should ask their kids for help” or “they made their bed, now they can lie in it.”

It would be a surprise to find out that this baggie was planted by anyone other than an angry Right Winger trying to stir up trouble. We’re already seeing GOP pundits and politicians make as much hay out of this as they can.

In reality, the actual criminal matters at hand are the upcoming prosecutions of Mike Pence’s childish former spokesman. He’s been indicted twice on extremely serious felony charges, and there are at least two further major cases about him due to state their indictments later this summer.

Angry Right Wingers are clearly panicked at the potential prison sentences now faced by Trump, so they keep coming up with these whataboutism attempts to distract the public. We can expect their panic to increase as the cases proceed, which means the nonsense in this baggie story is likely to be exponentially multiplied…

Let’s all be very clear about how the 303 Creative ruling came about, as well as the killing of Affirmative Action, the killing of the student loan help and last year’s abomination of the Dobbs ruling killing Roe v Wade. And let’s be clear why they are doing this.

The rulings we’re seeing are absolutely predictable. They are what happens when angry Right Wing groups like The Federalist Society and Heritage Action dictate who the SC picks are. This is about the numbers game on the courts and particularly the SC. The hatred and the bigotry are the point. This goes back over 70 years.

For the entire term of the Earl Warren Supreme Court, angry Right Wingers were fuming that the SC had lost its way. Starting with Brown v Board, angry Right Wingers were vowing to disobey those rulings and to work to erase them. When Nixon got elected in 1968 as Warren was retiring, he appointed 4 Republican justices to try to reset the Court. And he mostly succeeded (one of them was noted bigot Bill Rehnquist). But the Burger Court also delivered Roe v Wade, which sent the Right Wing spiralling. After their humiliation in Watergate, they waited for the next GOP president, which turned out to be Reagan. With Reagan, they instituted the litmus test where they’d pre-screen any judges or justices to make sure they’d vote the Right way on whatever was required. When Reagan’s handlers told him to appoint Sandra Day O’Connor, he personally interviewed her to confirm that she found reproductive choice to be an awful thing. What he didn’t realize was that she wouldn’t outlaw it for everyone else.

When the Right realized that even the litmus test wasn’t foolproof, they outsourced their screening to Far Right extremist idealogues like Leonard Leo at the Federalist Society and hacks at the Heritage Foundation. Which is why nearly all GOP judge picks from the Cheney/W White House forward have been extremist gargoyles. It’s not all of them, and a tiny handful have had changes of heart – Michael Luttig being a notable exception to the rule.

So the 303 Creative Ruling is one we could see a mile out. The entire point of the ruling is that it doesn’t matter if there was a real cause of action. It doesn’t matter that this is a discussion that was settled many decisions ago in terms of fairness to everyone and free speech rights. All that matters is that angry Right Wingers now hold a 6 vote supermajority on the SC. In reality, there have been multiple bigoted cases brought on nearly every major civil rights and political matter over the past 50 years. And the Supreme Court with different membership regularly would bat these cases away as having been asked and answered. Roe v Wade was itself upheld no less than FOUR times, with even the Pence appointees like Kavanaugh admitting it was now not only a precedent but a “super-precedent”. But angry Right Wingers were extremely patient. They just kept bringing those doomed cases up, hoping that at some point they’d get the right number of idealogues on the SC bench at the same time. (One has to give the Right Wing points for patience – they’ve been playing the same long game to destroy Social Security for everyone currently under 65 for over 20 years, and their gambit may pay off soon…)

The actual people responsible for the 303 Creative debacle are the same people responsible for Dobbs – and that’s the 2-3 million active mainstream Dem voters across the swing states who stayed home in 2016 because they figured their votes didn’t make a difference. And hey, angry Left Wing commentators like Alexander Cockburn had told them for years that it didn’t matter who was on the Supreme Court because the GOP would never overturn Roe anyway… Because those 2-3 million active mainstream Dem voters stayed home that year, Trump was able to run the table on those swing states and install Pence as the acting president in the White House. And with that, over 200 bench appointments in the judiciary could now be handed over to Mitch McConnell and Leonard Leo and Heritage Action. Which is how we got Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett on the SC, when none of them should have ever been anywhere near the SC, let alone on any bench anywhere.

The point of the current SC rulings is that they are systematically rewriting SC precedents to a new hateful normal. You believe that women should have reproductive choice? NO. You believe that discrimination should not be normalized? NO. You believe that the COVID relief for people with loans should apply to students? NO. Notice how these rulings line up precisely with how angry Right Wingers have been fuming for years. Particularly the language in Alito’s rancid Dobbs decision, where he opines that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” This has nothing to do with any precedents, since the current SC doesn’t believe in them. It’s all about the game of “we have the majority and now WE’LL tell YOU what.”

The 303 Creative ruling, which is clearly based on a completely false premise, is a direct statement that Obergefell is soon to fall. And it won’t be the last one to go. Angry Right Wing local legislators in Wisconsin are already railing against contraception as immoral – it’s only a matter of time before Griswold is tossed. And angry Right Wingers have hated Brown v Board from the beginning, regardless of what they currently say to sound less bigoted in public. It’s only a matter of time before a case is brought up that allows Alito to opine that Brown was “egregiously wrong from the start” and say what angry Right Wingers wanted in the original ruling – that Mr. Brown should stop whining if he doesn’t like how the Board of Education functions and just vote them out. (Except for the part where Mr. Brown is gerrymandered to make sure his vote is routed to the only non-white district in the area and thus inconsequential.) We can also look forward to SC decisions that allow states to criminalize reproductive choice if they wish under “states’ rights”. And we can look forward to this SC absolutely upholding a nationwide reproductive choice ban, should that come their way.

One could and should ask what the solution is. I’d argue that the options are limited. It’s unlikely that any White House or Congress will agree to expand the seats on the SC. It’s also sadly unlikely that Alito or Thomas will be impeached or resign in disgrace. Even though we’ve seen enough to have a good idea which of the two of them leaked the Dobbs decision and then blamed it on the clerks. (Alito’s comment of having “a pretty good idea” of who leaked Dobbs is particularly brazen.) So we simply have to wait until another justice steps down. And from what we’ve seen, that’s unlikely to happen for another 20 years, or until another GOP president is in the White House and the GOP controls the Senate. That’s not going to sound optimistic, and it isn’t. But it’s what happens when people don’t show up to vote. And this lesson really needs to be learned, or we’ll get another version of the Pence White House. And this time instead of Trump as the childish spokesman, we’d get a troll like DeSantis, who would go much farther.

There is a concerted strategy being played by angry Right Wingers, as this example shows. The idea is to counter the actual criminal jeopardy faced by little Donald Trump with smears about President Biden and his son Hunter. The intent is to muddy up the discourse so that uninformed viewers and voters will automatically assume that it’s not just Trump who’s corrupt but really EVERYBODY. So any time we hear a new revelation about Trump being caught on tape brazenly admitting to his malfeasances, angry Right Wingers immediately stammer out, “But what about Hunter Biden’s laptop????”

The GOP used this approach during the first impeachment of Mike Pence’s childish former spokesman. (And it’s really odd to think that we have to refer to that as just his first impeachment…) Whenever a GOP congressman got the microphone during the impeachment proceedings, they would immediately launch on a fact-free monologue about the “Biden Crime Family” or about “Hunter Biden’s crimes”. With the intent of confusing viewers into throwing up their hands and yelling “Ah, to heck with all of them!”

In the current situation, the desperation of angry Right Wingers is clear and understandable. They have a standard-bearer who is likely to either land in federal prison or be compelled to plead guilty to felonies within the next several months. (Which will render him unable to seek office, by the way) The only play they can think to make is to throw as much mud at President Biden and his family as they can.

So we hear nonsense about “Hunter Biden’s laptop”, which is a canard. In reality, there is no indication that any such laptop ever existed or that Hunter Biden ever went to the shop of the Trump fan in Delaware. What we do know exists is a “hard drive copy” that appears to contain the results of a data hack into Hunter Biden’s iCloud storage in 2019. This data hack was available in the Ukraine, coincidentally, when Rudy Giuliani was trolling for that kind of thing in later 2019. Time Magazine and Politico covered this fairly thoughouly. Or we hear about IRS “whistleblowers” in hushed tones. Except that it’s really just Gary Shapley again, and now he’s trying to get people to doubt the word of David Weiss, who already sent a terse letter to the angry Right Wingers in Congress, politely telling them to back off. But why should anyone listen to the prosecutor on this matter?

The reality here is that angry Right Wingers are panicked that little Donald Trump is facing at least four criminal prosecutions, with two of those due to have their indictments announced shortly. They have no idea what to do after he’s sentenced, so they’re frantically doubling down on the smears.

One would think these guys could figure out that their game-playing is quite obvious to all seeing it. On the other hand, angry Right Wingers might just be falling into the usual and predictable pattern of a gambler going into a downward spiral of going all-in on bad hands and then losing greater and greater sums until his entire life savings is exhausted.

In all honesty, I never watched much of Carlson’s embarrassing displays, and I don’t pay any attention to Watters or to Gutfeld. They just don’t merit my time.
Carlson’s frantic attempts to out-crazy the crowd at Newsmax sometimes could be unintentionally amusing – particularly his attempt to lionize Richard Nixon, but mostly he was a boring drone of risible insults. Watters seems to still be the creepy stalker he was for O’Reilly’s ambush spots. Given how quickly Fox dumped O’Reilly and Bolling and Bongino and Carlson, one would think it’s only a matter of time before Watters gets the axe too. Gutfeld, on the other hand, seems to understand his position as a resident troll. He’s likely to last another decade at Fox, akin to one of those cockroaches that just cannot be stamped out.

I’d argue that Perino knows she really has no other place to go if she wants to continue to earn the large paychecks she gets from Fox. She wouldn’t be welcome in a White House run by any of the current unhinged GOP flock, and she would likely not command much attention or salary at a legitimate news network. So does she go do a podcast like Megyn Kelly or Bill O’Reilly? Or does she just sit there and continue to collect a large salary? Sounds like she picked the last option.

As for RFK Jr, listening to even one minute of an interview with him reveals a dangerously unhinged mind. President Biden actually sounds and acts younger than Jr. Angry Right Wingers are only pushing Jr as a way of insulting President Biden.

Rivera has always been a self-promoter. Nobody should mourn for his career, as he voluntarily did all this to himself. He chose to take Fox’s money and he chose to dignify programs that should never have been treated as anything more than gutter propaganda.

One could well ask the question why he would want to spend time in a room with trolls like Watters, Bongino, Pirro and Gutfeld in the first place.

Kennedy’s greatest career achievement will be the moment she completely embarrassed herself on the premiere red carpet of the 1996 “Mission: Impossible” movie. She was trying to interview Martin Landau, who had famously played master disguise artist Rollin Hand on the 1960s series, and she inadvertently revealed she’d never watched the series by asking why he was at the premiere. Landau immediately and brutally schooled her, pointing out she had no idea what she was talking about or what the series had been. After several minutes of being castigated, and Landau returning to castigate her again on camera, Kennedy ruefully turned to her camera and announced “Well, THAT sucked!”

Angry Right Wingers are in the middle of a pivot now. They were counting on the default happening and then blaming everything on President Biden on the Dems. Now that McCarthy has agreed to make a deal to push the situation off again, they’re in a bind. They can’t continue to push for default following the deal without owning the default themselves. So their fallback will a retaliation against McCarthy.

The next question will be the over/under on how quickly McCarthy is tossed from the Speakership…

My understanding is that Carlson was fired because there were further texts and comments from him that Dominion got access to, which were disclosed to the Murdochs, and that these included even more embarrassing misogynist comments than the ones we already know about. Some of these comments were about Fox executives. (NY Times ran a story on this yesterday.) Apparently, Dominion was warming up to center their courtroom presentation on confronting Carlson with his own comments, including calling women various derogatory terms. (And since this material is out there, that means that Smartmatic could pick up right where Dominion left off…)

This frankly sounds like a repeat of the previous firings of Bill O’Reilly, Eric Bolling and Ed Henry, not to mention Roger Ailes himself. It was the Murdochs distancing themselves from a person who was now costing them a LOT of money, and I include the massive settlement Fox is almost guaranteed to be forced to pay Smartmatic in the next year.

I have to be honest and note that I did not watch Carlson’s show. I’ve barely seen any programming on Fox in some time, as their propaganda has only grown more toxic since the 2020 Election. I anticipate that Carlson will start up his own little podcast like Megyn Kelly – I doubt that Newsmax or anyone else will take him, despite their noises right now. Particularly since both Newsmax and OAN are being sued by Dominion and may be decimated by the settlement payments they will be forced to hand over to avoid losing in court and paying even higher amounts in damages.

I expect that Fox will replace Carlson with someone like Jesse Watters, or perhaps one of their female personalities, given that one of the issues cited with Carlson’s show was the rampant misogyny. And in a few months, nobody will remember the current crocodile tears about Carlson – just as nobody remembers the gnashing of teeth about O’Reilly.

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.