Murdoch’s comments are consistent with how the Right Wing has attempted to reframe debate over the past four decades. I believe he’s being honest here. From his perspective, Fox News’ blend of biased coverage and more blatant propaganda is indeed “center right”. Because he’s going from the Right Wing position that a “liberal” is a 1970s Republican in the Mitt Romney mode, and a “conservative” is an Extreme Far Right Wing idealogue like Stephen Miller or Sydney Powell. From that thinking, Far Right Wing idealogues like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are just “center right”. And from that thinking, an actual centrist politician like Joe Biden suddenly becomes a “Far Left Socialist”.

The Right Wing has desperately tried to convince everyone that the centerline of political discussion has somehow shifted six football fields to the Right over the past decades, when in fact that never happened. The centerline does not shift just because one side decides they’re going to move it. And just because there are piles of angry Right Wing shock jocks on AM radio trying to imitate the unrepentant bigotry of despicable men like Rush Limbaugh does not mean that the centerline suddenly moved. It just means that angry Right Wingers would like to get away with saying as much outrageous material as they can, and they’re hoping nobody will call them out on their behavior.

The entire point of the existence of Fox News has always been to promote a Far Right propaganda tilt of “journalism”, as Roger Ailes designed it. The point was always to normalize angry Right Wing talking points and to put everyone else on the back foot. Fox News has never been in the mainstream, and the Right Wing attempts to redefine CNN as somehow “Far Left” have always been laughable. One has to wonder if these guys have ever heard of Pacifica Radio.

But it is true that there are now even more extreme outlets flanking Fox News on the Right – namely the wingnuts at Newsmax and OAN and Breitbart and the like. In the aftermath of Donald Trump losing the 2020 election, it does seem that a chunk of the angry Right Wing base of Fox News is now turning to these alt propaganda sources that go even farther down the rabbit hole. So it makes sense that Fox News is frantically trying to reclaim its viewers by throwing them more red meat. I’d note that Fox News only covered the election results as they did as a way of trying to pretend to be “fair and balanced”. It’s a similar game to that played by Rasmussen Reports in their polling – keep a heavy Right Wing thumb on the scale until the last possible minute and then report something accurately at the very end and then claim to have always been accurate.

One would think that Hannity would learn his lesson at some point here and stop it with the double downs and the frantic attempts to bully anyone who disagrees with him. But he’s apparently a slow learner.

It really does seem that angry Right Wingers like Carlson have not been getting the message that doubling down will not help them. They’ve been repeatedly preserved on video saying the most vicious and negative things they could. They aren’t going to be able to walk all this stuff back.

This has been the refrain from angry Right Wingers over the past year. That people who were left unemployed by the pandemic were just lazy and shiftless and needed to be told to shut up and go back to work. Mitch McConnell completely fed into this with his refusal to extend stimulus as of last May, when he played the game about how everyone should just go back to work because America would be back to normal by summer 2020. His viciousness resulted in millions of Americans struggling through last fall until the new Congress and White House could start to address the problems the GOP ignored.

I’ll also note that the canard about overpaying the unemployed is offensive on a variety of levels. It’s not accurate, since people really do prefer to be able to work and earn a living if possible. And it’s a second barrel from the Right Wing that regularly exhort against raising the minimum wage.

In late 2001, a full recount of the Florida results from that election was conducted by a group of media agencies, just so that we’d know what the result would have been. The recount was conducted under multiple premises, including just the 4 counties that Gore’s people had specified, including hanging chads, not including hanging chads, etc. As it turned out, Gore would still have lost in the limited recount he’d requested of the 4 counties. He just couldn’t pick up enough votes to get past 520. On the other hand, the premise of recounting the ENTIRE STATE showed that Gore had won by 72 votes overall. Meaning that Gore won the 2000 election.

By the time these results were made public, we were already deep into Fall 2001, after the point where the 9/11 attacks had happened. Gore once again chose not to make a big deal out of this, and most Americans are unaware this recount even occurred.

I note also that when the GOP was concerned that they were going to lose the Florida recount, they were making noises about recounting New Mexico because they felt they should have won that state. There was a bunch of angry Right Wing talk about how the voters of New Mexico had the right to have their voices heard. And then when Gore caved on everything, those same GOP voices became strangely silent about New Mexico… Guess they didn’t care that much about those voices after all.

Vittert is by no means a champion of free speech or tough journalism. He’s an angry Right Wing media face who made his bones by harassing Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake 6 years ago, following her group with his microphone and screaming at her to the point that Al Sharpton tried to back him off, at which point Vittert tried to pretend he’d been “assaulted”. (Shades of Stephen Crowder’s attempt to play the same game in Wisconsin a couple of years prior to that.)

His falling out of favor with the Trump crowd just indicates how much farther over the threshold of lunacy the Right Wing has gone in the past 4 years. It doesn’t suddenly mean that Vittert isn’t who he is. Any more than the disastrous Pence White House suddenly transforming W into anything other than the dangerous and incompetent warmonger he was and is.

Fox News is in panic mode as their viewership has dropped off, with many of them transferring over to even more rabid sites like OANN and Newsmax, who are doing their worst to drive discourse completely into the gutter. So Fox News is doing its best to try to throw more red meat to that audience, to try to stop the bleeding. I have a feeling Vittert has also ruffled feathers within the Murdoch organization, given his odd behavior on camera in trying to provoke conflicts and then being shocked, shocked when his antics backfire.

I doubt that Vittert will come out like Carl Cameron did, or like some others have done at different times. It’s more likely that he’ll find another Right Wing outlet, or just slink into obscurity.

Two things are evident from Fox News and Carlson’s coverage here:

1. They are clearly panicking over the popularity of the Biden/Harris White House. So they’re trying any tack they can to keep repeating the lie that Biden is somehow senile, or that a major jobs proposal is somehow “socialism”. It’s clear that they’re hoping to repeat their vicious success against Hillary Clinton, where years of smears eventually allowed them to pretend that somehow the smears were “facts” rather than endlessly repeated lies. Not sure that this will work in the current context, but it will be crucial for everyone to show up to vote in 2022 and 2024 and not assume that angry Right Wingers are staying home.

2. Carlson and the rest of the angry Right Wing have clearly forgotten about how Pence’s childish spokesman never gave a single address that was not extremely partisan, and extremely negative toward anyone not on the Extreme Right Wing. They’ve forgotten how Pence’s childish spokesman regularly used State of the Union addresses to embolden bigotry and viciousness – including the horrifying spectacle in 2020 when the Presidential Medal of Freedom was thrown away on an unrepentant bigot. The idea that they would then label a simple, heartfelt address as “unbelievably partisan propaganda” is enough to raise the eyebrows, but it’s par for the course for the Right Wing these days.

It’s also clear that Carlson is panicking that he and Fox News are losing their audience to the more hardcore wingnut outlets like OANN and Newsmax. He’s obviously trying to show his audience “See, I’m just as angry as those guys on The First!”

I’ll add that Tim Scott’s rebuttal has already been appropriately criticized for multiple blatant misstatements. The bit about the Georgia law is just one area where he flat-out lied. I’ve read the law. It’s not a “pro-voting” law at all, unless you only want Right Wingers to vote in Georgia. It’s a revenge law, designed to punish the voters who picked Joe Biden and the election officials who didn’t do enough to toss the Biden votes out. I lost count of the number of poison pills in that law, but the intention is to make it so difficult for Black voters to participate in Georgia that they’ll presumably surrender and allow the Right Wing to have their way. Not sure that it will play out in that fashion – but we should keep in mind that we now have a Far Right judiciary and a Far Far Right 6-3 Supreme Court. Meaning that the litigation challenging the Georgia law is likely to be met with 5-6 unfriendly faces when it gets to the high court. (My expectation is that they will assert states’ rights over elections and tell those Georgia voters that if they want to change the election laws they should vote for different legislators.)

It will be both interesting and ironic to see the people who have most vehemently yelled “Lock Her Up!” finding themselves behind bars for their criminal actions.

Angry Right Wingers’ obsession with smearing the Biden family has led them down some extremely strange pathways over the past few years. It’s obvious that trolls like DiGenova and Toensing thought they could eliminate the threat of a Biden presidential run by throwing a bunch of already debunked dirt from Ukraine. This got the attention of Giuliani, who fell for every bit of the lure and pulled the Pence White House into the scheme. And then Pence’s childish spokesman stupidly tried to muscle the Ukrainian president into continuing the smear or risk losing US aid, and the rest of that is impeachment history.

At the tail end of the 2020 campaign, the same trolls attempted an “October surprise” with the nonsense about the engineered “Hunter Biden laptop” that just happened to pop up in a Trump supporter’s shop with all kinds of salacious material on it shortly before Election Day. Thankfully, nobody outside the angry Right Wing media bubble fell for that one, and it died as quickly as the nonsense from Tara Reade.

It seems that the same angry Right Wingers are refusing to acknowledge their 2020 loss and are now just trying to double down on their hatred. Which says a lot more about their immaturity than it does about the non-existent “scandal” they’ve been pushing for years.

It’s obvious that Fox News is trying to parlay its viewers hatred for gay and Trans people, as yet another distraction from reality. It’s similar to their harping against Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights, where the idea is to assume a faux “moral high ground” while actually justifying bigotry against a community that the Right Wing absolutely hates.

The danger in the current scenario is that angry Right Wingers have packed our judiciary with partisan idealogues who are likely to take actions that could have dire consequences for most Americans. In the past, these kinds of feints were just the usual sops to the angry Right Wing base of voters, and everyone knew that it was unlikely that anything would actually be done. The Right Wing campaigned against reproductive rights for decades, since they could endlessly use the issue to fundraise but knew it was unadvisable to take us back to the days of coat hangers in alleys. Today, unfortunately, angry Right Wingers now accurately believe they have sufficient control over the judiciary that they can toss out the precedents of the Earl Warren Supreme Court and take their revenge against the rest of the country.

With the current Far Far Right Supreme Court, we’re very much looking at a situation that should have the gay and Trans communities extremely worried. Fox News can claim some responsibility for the damage, as they’ve specialized in running propaganda pieces like the one referenced in this article. I’d like to think that something can be done about it, but that will take years, if not decades, and not until the Supreme Court is no longer loaded with a 6-3 majority of extreme partisans.

Moody, like many angry Right Wingers, is hoping that viewers will not remember history, or even RECENT history for that matter.

Republicans have been trying to pack the judiciary and particularly the Supreme Court ever since Nixon took office in 1969. They had long been accustomed to the courts upholding their wishes and had been bitterly disappointed in the Earl Warren SC and rulings like Brown v Board of Education. (Angry Right Wingers have long wanted to overturn that ruling, among many others, as they were fine with a discriminatory public school system. When that was blocked by Warren, the Right Wing began pulling their kids out of public school, with the wealthier ones going to expensive private schools and the working class ones just home schooling.)

In the days of Reagan, the GOP instituted a “litmus test” to make sure their appointees were not just Republican but dependably Right Wing. But even that test was not strict enough for the Far Right, so Republican justices like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy were deemed to not be conservative enough, particularly after they failed to outlaw reproductive choice in the Casey decision in 1992. In the current era, the selection of judges and justices for the GOP has been farmed out to extreme Right Wing groups like Heritage Action and the Federalist Society. This way, conservatives know that only their true brethren will be getting these seats.

Angry Right Wingers would also like you to forget that in 2016, they deliberately refused to even hold a hearing for Merrick Garland after he was named by President Obama to fill the seat of the deceased Antonin Scalia. Not only that, but senators like Ted Cruz smugly declared on cable news that they would refuse to hold any hearings for ANY judge named by Hillary Clinton regardless of who they were. Cruz went so far as to remind everyone that there was no rule saying that the Supreme Court necessarily had to have 9 justices and could get along just fine with 8 or 7.

These same angry Right Wingers would like everyone to forget how they rammed Neil Gorsuch into Garland’s SC seat and then did an endzone dance on the Senate floor to celebrate. They’d like everyone to forget how prominent Right Wingers pushed Anthony Kennedy into retirement (partly by providing his son with a lucrative position) and then rammed unrepentant rapist and partisan idealogue Brett Kavanaugh into that seat moments before the midterm election day. And they definitely hope everyone forgets how they seized on the death of Justice Ginsburg to ram Amy Coney Barrett into that seat, again within moments of a major election, even though they had previously decried such an action.

Let’s also not forget how angry Right Wingers rammed through literally hundreds of unqualified partisan idealogues into our judiciary between 2017 and 2020, with Mitch McConnell prioritizing the ram-throughs over providing aid to tens of millions of Americans in the COVID pandemic. And let’s not forget that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett should never have been confirmed to hold any seat in the judiciary, let alone Supreme Court seats. All were extreme partisan picks who were intended to do exactly what they will now do over the next decade – namely, rip up the precedents of the Earl Warren Court and return us to a time when the American Judiciary comforted the powerful and afflicted the afflicted.

Angry Right Wingers have literally spent over five decades trying to game our political system to give themselves the hardline judiciary they wanted. And now that they may have to deal with everyone else pushing back on their behavior, they’re crying foul? This would be laughable if it wasn’t so brazen, and if the consequences weren’t so serious. The Right Wing has no moral or ethical or legal high ground here. If they had the slightest iota of self-awareness, they’d hang their heads in shame.

Part of the reason that Carlson now feels free to just throw bile at Hollywood is that Murdoch sold the movie/TV assets to Disney and just retained Fox Sports and the propaganda division. The former Fox Studios and Fox Television arms are now redubbed Touchstone Television and Searchlight. Disney puts their family-oriented stuff on Disney+ and the Fox stuff on Hulu these days.

But Carlson’s smear of Hollywood is nonsense, like much of the rants he inflicts these days. He appears to be desperate to win back the viewers who abandoned Fox for their temerity in acknowledging reality last November. Not sure that his tactic will work – the ones who left are getting much redder meat from OANN and Newsmax these days. And Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly are frantically hoping to peal off a few people to their web shingles. And everyone on the Right is hoping to be the next Rush Limbaugh, as if the world needed another dirigible of drivel.

John is correct to note that both Carlson and Gutfeld are frustrated in falling short of their aspirations. I’ll add that they’re only the latest angry Right Wing pundits to go through this syndrome.

Rush Limbaugh wanted to be a funny rock & roll DJ in a major market. But he failed in that career because he wasn’t funny and his bullying nature offended FM radio listeners. One of the radio station managers who fired him pointedly commented that “I’m not as impressed with you as you are”. So he found a home on AM Radio in the lower end field of talk/phone-in shows. And he was able to parlay his style into financial success for himself (and increasingly serious cultural problems for the nation as a whole).

Bill O’Reilly wanted, and still desperately wants, to be an “elder statesman” of politics and culture. He was hoping to outshine Brit Hume at Fox News (not that Hume is any actual statesman) and become a voice of authority for Right Wing viewers. Instead, he was forced to retreat from Fox News in disgrace over his repeated sexual misconduct and his vicious behavior, particularly after the revelation that he’d paid 32 million dollars to Lis Wiehl for truly despicable conduct. Today, he rants from the sidelines at his website, openly rooting for the failure of cable news media (including Fox News) and pretending that his webcast is somehow anything more than what it is. It’s interesting to listen to him kowtowing to both Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity to get radio time on their shows – when he’d previously been in a position to treat Beck like a pet, and when he’d been known to despise Hannity while they were both on Fox News.

If I had to guess, I’d say that both Carlson and Gutfeld are making the most of their situation. Carlson knows he’ll never have a legitimate media gig anywhere, so he’s milking the Fox News purse for whatever he can get out of it. For a guy whose prior career was hooting from the sidelines at Daily Caller, this is actually a big step up for him, and he’s clearly making some coin for himself in the short term. But no, he’ll never be an “elder statesman” either. My expectation is that in a few years, Fox News will replace him with whoever the newer, angrier fad is at that time. Gutfeld similarly knows he’ll never be the huge live comic act he wanted to be, so he’s taking the crumbs that Fox News gives him. When the music stops in a few years, he’ll be the guy doing the opening remarks at CPAC and events like that. But he’s cashing in while he can.

Just to be accurate, Ellen is correct about the point of the book “Nomadland” as written by Jessica Bruder. It’s not just about Amazon. It’s about middle class people who fell off the grid (and more and more are continuing to join them) and are then left in the gutter. It makes the point that the corporations did just fine – and it also makes the point that the corporations like Amazon then were happy to have these new nomads work for them on an “at will” basis for a month or two a year, with no obligation at all to think about what it means to hire a workforce who parks their vans and mini-RVs in your parking lot for a month and then are booted out. It’s not like the companies don’t know that they’re hiring people on the ragged edge and treating them in an abominable fashion. They absolutely know – and they don’t care. And we let it happen.

I do need to point out that the movie by Chloe Zhao is not a romantic one, and it does not present this life as anything but bleak and depressing. And it presents many of the real nomads interviewed by Jessica Bruder in the film and allows them to tell their own stories. And all of that is a good thing. The problem is that the central narrative of the film is about the depressing life led by Frances McDormand’s character (and it’s bleak beyond bleak) – but that life is shown to be her choice and not a situation she cannot escape. She’s repeatedly shown to have the option to live with family who want to give her a home and a new start. She turns all that down to live in her van. One can argue that she’s fiercely independent or unable to engage with others – and that may be true. But the reality for the very real nomads interviewed by Jessica Bruder is that they don’t have a sister or a son or a daughter who wants to take them in. They don’t have any family. They don’t have anyone from their former lives who would do more than shrug at their situation. So they’re stuck in this existence and there is no escape for them.

I think there’s a larger point that Jessica Bruder was trying to examine – about the fact that we tried to establish a safety net for Americans in programs like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, etc. We tried to make sure that nobody wound up completely destitute if we as a society could do something about it. Starting with the rise of Ronald Reagan, that safety net was shredded by angry Right Wingers who felt it should never have existed in the first place. So we’ve arrived at a place, about 30 years post Reagan, where multiple Right Wing objectives have been accomplished. The existence of tens of thousands of nomads living in this situation is a sign of the success of the Right Wing.

I’ve followed Raffensperger’s instructions and read the entire Georgia law as passed. He’s blatantly lying about it.

Let’s remember that Raffensperger and Kemp were caught red-handed purging tens of thousands of Georgians from the voter rolls in the run-up to the 2020 election. It was only because of the hard work of Stacey Abrams and countless local activists in Georgia that the word got out and most of those voters were able to restore their enfranchisement in time. (And many thousands more were able to register for the first time) Had the activists not exposed what Raffensperger had been doing, the election would likely have gone to Trump and the 2 Senate seats would never have gone to run-offs. And this was considered to be fully legal and ethical by Republicans in Georgia. These guys are not heroes just because they defied the Pence White House. They’re despicable men who chose not to do something even more odious while everyone was looking directly at them.

The new Georgia law is designed to make it extremely difficult for black voters in Georgia to repeat what they did in 2020. It has specific provisions targeting them. The most obvious one is Section 33, which makes it a misdemeanor for anyone to give voters waiting on long lines food or drink. I note that this Section already had language barring anyone soliciting voters waiting on line, so the new language about “money or gifts including but not limited to food and drink” is superfluous in barring that activity. In other words, the existing law ALREADY BARRED GIFTS. So when Angry Right Wingers try the game about “we’re just blocking people from handing out Biden/Harris water bottles!”, the answer is “That was already illegal!” The new language is just meant to try to make it unpleasant for voters waiting for hours on line.

Raffsenperger says that the law bars lines that go on for more than an hour. That’s not what it says. The law says that AFTER THE ELECTION, the election officials can evaluate the precincts and see if any were too crowded, and then set up new ones FOR THE NEXT ELECTION. And that language is frankly an afterthought.

The more crucial language is what allows the new fully Right Wing State Election Board to get rid of up to 4 local superintendents (such as in Fulton County) if they wish, and allows the counties to reset their precincts and change the polling locations – with many voters only finding out when they get to their usual polling place and just see a sign that the polling place has been moved. Those voters then drive around Atlanta to find a new polling place, wait on line for 2 hours and when they finally get inside, the new law includes language where they will be told they may not vote here because they are not in the correct precinct. Those voters then rinse and repeat this maneuver throughout the day until after 5pm, at which point if they get to the front of the line, they are grudgingly allowed to submit a provisional ballot but ONLY if they sign an affidavit and other documentation. The point of all of this is to make the process so unpleasant and so onerous that many of them will throw up their hands and walk away or choose not to vote.

For the ones who do get through all the rigamarole, the new language allows any Georgian elector to challenge the status of an unlimited number of other Georgians, so those votes may get tossed – if the registrations weren’t already tossed in the manner that Kemp and Raffsenperger practiced in 2019 and 2020.

For the absentee voters, the time window for requesting and processing those ballots has been greatly shrunk, and far more onerous conditions have been put on, including telling those voters to write their ID information on the inside AND OUTSIDE of their ballot envelopes, thus exposing those voters to identity theft if they even have the materials. The earlier practice was signature comparison, which would not expose those voters’ drivers’ license numbers or anything else. And of course the rural voters who don’t have that ID will be writing in part of their SSN and hoping that the ballots aren’t challenged.

For early voters, the time window has been shrunk. Raffsenperger is being disingenuous when he says that Sunday voting is now “allowed”. He knows full well that Republican county officials will never allow this. It’s at the discretion of those officials, not at the request of the voters.

And yes, the number of drop boxes is down to one per 100,000 voters, which will make life interesting in heavily populated areas…

The point of all of this is that there are plenty of reasons to condemn the obvious attempt at voter restriction here. Angry Right Wingers like Eric Bolling should stop lying about this law and admit that yes, they are trying to restrict voter access. It’s frankly rich that the legislation starts with the false premise that it’s intended to “restore confidence” in the electoral process after what the legislation asserts were equally motivated allegations of voter suppression and “rampant voter fraud”. In fact, there was ACTUAL voter suppression by Kemp and Raffsenperger, and there were a multitude of lies about “fraud” by angry Right Wingers. If the Georgia General Assembly was truly interested in restoring confidence in their voting procedures, they would stop trying to toss voters off the roles, and they would tell the Right Wing to stop lying about “fraud”. It would save everyone a heck of a lot of time and aggravation in dealing with vicious partisan voting interference like this.

There are multiple aspects of the GA voter restriction law that are quite noxious.

The law presents a false premise and a false equivalency at its very start, where it says that they’re concerned about allegations of voter suppression and of voter fraud. Supposedly, this noxious restriction law is the solution. In reality, the voter suppression was quite real, including Brian Kemp deliberately dumping tens of thousands of Georgians off the voter roles to keep them from voting in 2020. (Stacey Abrams countered this by her efforts to make sure all GA voters checked their statuses and re-registered, plus registering a lot of new voters) The “fraud” allegations were flat-out lies, promoted by the Pence White House and angry Right Wingers who wanted to sow discord.

As Bemused notes, the law hands over control of the process to the Republicans in the state legislature, allowing them to appoint a crony as the Chair of the State Election Board, and allowing their now totally-owned SEB to arbitrarily remove up to 4 county voting superintendents (such as in Fulton County) and replace them with loyal cronies as well. Further, the law makes it more complicated and more difficult for absentee voters and leaves them with significantly less time to apply and to complete their ballots, if they even get them. The law also makes it open season for angry Right Wingers to challenge pretty much every voter they want, so that they could throw out tens of thousands of votes from Atlanta and swing any election to the Republican.

Added grace notes: The law also requires the polling station counters to continue counting without any break to go home and sleep. (This is revenge for the counters having retreated due to the water leak and then to sleep a couple of times) The law blocks the ability of the SEB to impose emergency rules (such as for a pandemic) unless there is an “imminent threat” that goes undefined – idea being that a pandemic would not be considered “imminent” but more of an overall issue. And there’s a really fun section about arbitrarily switching voting precincts and polling locations with the only notice being a small sign at the now dis-used location. So that voters who don’t have this information show up and find out they can’t vote at their normal location and then hunt for a new one, only to be repeatedly told they’re in the wrong place, and then after a few rounds of this, finally being told they can only vote IF they sign more documentation and take even more time. Again – the point being to stop them from wanting to vote in the first place.

Both Cavuto and Hodge were playing an insidious game here. They were pretending that somehow we are already overtaxing the wealthy and that somehow corporations are actually paying the book rate they were trying to inflate as much as possible. We should disabuse them of those notions.

To start with, US corporations rarely pay the book rate on their actual income. They use every deduction they can, and every subsidy they can, and every maneuver they can to avoid a substantial amount of their tax burden. My understanding is that many of the larger corps are paying less than 10 percent once all their deductions are added in. (And pundits like Hannity were begging the GOP to lower the corp rate to 15% when they inflicted the Tax Transfer, which would have meant that most corps would actually pay ZERO.) The other countries being mentioned do not have the same deductions the US allows, which means the EFFECTIVE tax rate the corps pay in the US is much, much lower than anywhere else in the world. This is the reason that corps aren’t rushing to flee the continent – not the supposed blindness that Hodge essentially accused them of having.

Next, the tax credits Hodge was scorning are actually lifelines for families with children. And under the prior code that angry Right Wingers destroyed with their Tax Transfer, every family used to receive an Individual Exemption for each person, adult or child, in their household. It was about 4K per person, so if you had a married couple with 2 kids, they’d be looking at a 16K deduction on top of either their Standard Deduction or their itemizations. The Tax Transfer put a single Individual Exemption into the Standard Deduction itself and then added a little cream on the top so they could say they’d doubled the SD. This meant that a married couple that itemized would now lose 16K of deductions in that single area. The tax credit for each child is not the same thing, and it does not make up for that loss.

But let’s get to the actual meat of the discussion. For the 743rd time, the GOP gleefully RAISED taxes on Middle Class employees with their Tax Transfer while they were lowering them for the corps and the wealthy. I’ll say that again – tax rates went UP for Middle Class employees, while the people earning over 415K per year saw a tax cut of nearly 3%. And on top of that, angry Right Wing Republicans also erased nearly all the deductions that Middle Class Employees could have claimed, while retaining them for the corps and for the “independent contractors”. (In simpler language, the GOP was going after the union members and the middle managers while sparing the contractors, since the feeling was that contractors tend to be Republican while employees tend to be Democrats.)

The actual result of the Republican Tax Transfer was that Middle Class employees, particularly those in Blue States, saw their federal tax burden SKYROCKETED. My own tax burden shot up by several thousand dollars per year, as did the burden of nearly every co-worker and acquaintance of mine. So it’s frankly a bit rich to hear Cavuto and Hodge bemoaning the idea that the wealthy might have to pay a little more. I don’t recall hearing Cavuto expressing concern about tens of millions of Middle Class employees. So this concern about the wealthy and the big corps who actually pay under 10 percent per year is not something that rings as genuine.

Angry Right Wingers have no ground upon which to stand here. They need to own the fact that they deliberately raised taxes on the Middle Class while trying to protect their donors. And they need to stop trying to lie about the significantly increased tax bills they inflicted upon so many Americans.

Ellen, I agree with you that it’s Greenberg who’s rolling over on Gaetz. It is more than likely that Gaetz distanced himself from Greenberg after the bust, and that Greenberg is responding by dragging Gaetz down with him. The usual way that these guys behave is that if one of them gets busted, the other one will play the “I don’t know you now” game – which predictably results in a backfire that the police enjoy.

It’s clear that the guys were doing various drugs, and encouraging the women they were procuring to do them as well. This is consistent with the fraternity party mentality that both men have never dropped from their lives. Gaetz’ wild outbursts on the House floor may well have been fueled by drug use as well, now that we understand the context. (Based on the full picture, it appears that Gaetz has been enjoying this lifestyle for at least a decade, going back even before his jump into Congress)

Truman is correct that angry Right Wingers are working very hard to set themselves up to retake the House and Senate in 2022, and they’re going with any narrative they can to support that attempt. They’ll wave Hunter Biden around, they’ll assert that the Dems are all “socialists”, and they’ll assert there’s a Border “crisis” or “invasion”, among other things. And yes, they’re frantically trying to pass voter suppression laws wherever they can. Those suppression attempts are being met by civil rights litigation – the key will be whether or not the appeals are heard before the midterms next year, and whether or not any of those laws actually go into effect in time to block the Dems. I’ll add that this will require Dem voters to work even harder to make sure that their votes are counted. And it will be necessary to document on video every time angry Right Wing poll workers attempt to disenfranchise people – such as when they close the doors on voters, or when they refuse to help. The Georgian attempt to keep anyone from providing food or water is supposedly based on the idea that the poll workers will do so. So voters will need to show videos of how nobody from the polling stations actually does this and how they’re too busy dealing with the voters inside to run water out to 1000 people standing on line outside.

I’ll also note that the Biden/Harris White House is a lot farther along in combatting the COVID pandemic than anyone thought they would be. We’ve already vaccinated tens of millions more people than we’d thought possible, which should lead us to herd immunity by this fall, if not earlier – which means that we should see an economic recovery in a major way. The GOP will try to talk this down (like they did during the Obama White House years) but voters will know if they have a job, have spending money and are able to go out and do things they couldn’t during the pandemic. This is why angry disgraced former pundits like O’Reilly are desperately trying to predict an economic meltdown before next year – they’re actually hoping for an economic collapse so they can usher more angry Right Wingers into Congress to block and then impeach both Biden and Harris. But an economic recovery would destroy that false narrative and result in something similar to the 1996 election instead. At that point, I’d count on a different meltdown – one happening on the air at Fox News.

None of this is looking very good for Gaetz. It’s pretty clear that the actual investigation being discussed here was started last year, and that he must have been aware of it. His attempt to go into attack mode is similar to that of Bill O’Reilly and Eric Bolling when each of them was confronted with disclosure of their despicable and career-ending sexual behavior. His aggressiveness is exactly what we saw from Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 – a snarling refusal to be held accountable for his actions and an attempt to deflect attention on something, anything that would get the heat off of him.

Gaetz has regularly behaved like an angry bully in Congress, and in his appearances on Right Wing propaganda outlets like Fox News. His attitude has been consistent with that of the angry fraternity member who gets rebuffed by a sorority girl at a party and then screams at her “I never liked you anyway!” It’s not a surprise to learn that he has regularly engaged in relationships with young women below the age of 20, even when he was nearly twice their age – and that’s without getting into the details of the current investigation. It sounds like the situation in question was part of a behavioral pattern for him, and a fairly creepy one at that. And he sounds desperate to keep it from getting out. Downright panicked, if we’re really examining it carefully.

Fox News will have a choice to make here. They really like Gaetz, because he says all the things they like and he does it with all the aggression they like. But will they be willing to support him throughout a potential career implosion like this one? Or do they just move along to the next angry Right Wing congressman who isn’t preying on minors?

The Psaki interview by Chris Wallace frankly didn’t go anywhere. He asked her essentially a series of gotcha questions to please his viewers and she avoided falling into the pitfalls. Then he said goodbye to her and had Lindsey Graham go off on a bizarre rant about how he needed an AR15 to defend his house.

None of this would be particularly interesting – except that disgraced former Fox News host Eric Bolling decided to attack Wallace from the Right on Newsmax, repeatedly saying that he thinks Wallace is a liberal and wasn’t throwing hard enough fastballs at Psaki’s head. It’s frankly interesting to see Bolling take this approach (and instructional to see how much a toll the last few years have taken on him – in fairness, his son died right after Bolling was fired in 2017, but his career was spiraling down before that happened. It didn’t help him to have a reputation as a serious sexual harasser in the workplace).

I’ll note that Bolling is now supposedly 4 years into his threatened 50 million dollar lawsuit against Yashar Ali for having the temerity to write a carefully researched and sourced article about Bolling’s bad behavior. It’s odd that we haven’t heard anything about Bolling’s lawsuit since he got a stern letter from Ali’s attorney that pointed out his extreme vulnerability and that they were looking forward to deposing him and getting access to his phone and computer records which they expected him to produce shortly. It’s not odd that Bolling’s show on a Sinclair-owned outlet was cancelled, even after he repeatedly prostrated himself before Pence’s childish spokesman in fawning “interviews” that were unwatchable to anyone other than hardened members of the Pence White House voter base. And it’s not odd that he’s been reduced to co-hosting a podcast.

It’s telling that multiple disgraced former Fox News personalities, including both Bolling and Bill O’Reilly, have taken this tack – of trying to present themselves as expert “elder statesmen” who can expose the “truth” about the Biden/Harris White House or about their feelings about Jen Psaki. In reality, they continue to be what they’ve been for years – disgraced former television personalities who have yet to own up to the despicable behavior that ended their careers.