Basically, Pence’s childish spokesman lied yet again. We should just add it to the tally and move on. He’s not worth a single minute of anyone’s attention at this point.

One quick correction. The person currently running the country is Mike Pence. Pence decides all the domestic and foreign policies and makes all the appointments, as per the arrangement that was made to get him to be the VP in the first place. John Kasich discussed this publicly back in 2016 – this was the offer they made to anyone who they were trying to cajole into taking the job. (When Kasich asked Donald Jr what Trump would be doing while someone else did all the work, Jr responded, “he’ll be out there making America great again”.)

Donald Trump is functioning only as a spokesman – a dangerously childish one at that. The Right Wing dislikes him personally, but they love that the media jumps on his every comment, as it’s a huge distraction from the actual work going on. And while they don’t approve of Trump as a person, they love the bigoted dog whistles and open slurs he regularly emits.

And while most people are distracted by the nonsense from the spokesman, Pence has quietly and viciously moved ahead every week with steps to systematically erase every single thing done by the Obama White House and to make the nation and the world a nastier, dirtier, angrier place. That’s not to mention the systematic understaffing and paralyzing of most of the Cabinet Departments. And not to even get into the extremist partisan court appointments, including two absolute gargoyles onto the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump is an unimportant child, and it’s a waste of time to humor his desperate need for attention. I agree that his emboldening of the deplorables across this country has been despicable, but that doesn’t mean we need to glorify the Tweets themselves with any attention. We can deal with the deplorables by standing up to them and by shunning them completely. The much larger concern is the damage that Mike Pence is doing to the very fabric of government. If he is allowed another four years, we could wind up with something unrecognizable to any sane person.

If President Obama had ever pulled a nonsense move like this, hypocrites like Chaffetz would have screamed bloody murder at the top of their lungs. It’s a blatantly unconstitutional move, and it’s only being done because the Pence White House is panicked that they will go into 2020 without having done anything about this idiotic “Big Beautiful Wall”.

The Fox News sycophants are of course forgetting that there are major lawsuits being brought against this obvious misuse of public funds, which will mean that any expenditures will be tied up potentially until after the 2020 election. (They’re also ignoring that one of the huge problems with this nonsense project is that it would require the Pence White House to declare eminent domain on many Texas ranchers in order to use their land to build this pointless bigoted middle finger at Mexico.)

Fox News loves the idea of doing this – partly because they blindly go with whatever the Pence White House does and partly because the in-your-face nature of it. They love the fact that Pence is just doing what he feels like and daring everyone else to call him on it. And they love that Pence’s childish spokesman will undoubtedly gloat about it in his daily tweeting.

The sheer tonnage of hypocrisy and viciousness from Right Wing media is only getting larger. When this miserable epoch of our history is concluded, hopefully after next November, the Right will have no place to go when they try to either walk back their hatred or try to turn on a dime to attack the next actual President we elect.

No surprise here, from the bigot Macdonald or from Fox News in general. This is the typical response whenever we have a mass shooting – they wave their arms about Chicago. And if they couldn’t do that, they’d yell about South Central Los Angeles, or New York City. You know, places where the deplorables figure the non-whites have authority.

McCallum’s entire tone here was vicious, not to mention deceptive. She’s comparing an entire weekend of separate crime incidents in a large city that houses nearly 3 million people, versus Odessa, which houses just under 100,000. Percentage-wise alone, she’s misrepresenting by a factor of 30×. And she’s deliberately fogging the discussion by trying to tally up ALL the crime incidents in a major city with a single mass shooting that had far greater impact.

We could try this the other way, of course. What MacCallum is inadvertently admitting is that the mass killer in Odessa managed to slaughter the same number of people in a single incident what we could only see in an entire weekend across a major city. And the Odessa shooting was a small one, compared to the now-regular stream of these mass killings that we see every week.

Perkins is a vicious bigot. SHAME ON HIM. If he wants to discuss moral bankruptcy, he can take it up with Mike Pence and Pence’s childish spokesman, both of whom having encouraged hatred, violence and a complete abandonment of decency toward others.

It’s no surprise that Graham is going all-in on the Far Right lunacy at this point. It’s all he has left now. And it’s a shame. There was a time when he used to speak common sense. He had two of the greatest quotes I’ve ever heard about Ted Cruz and Pence’s childish spokesman.

Sadly, it’s more likely than not that he’ll keep his seat. But I’d be happy to see him go into retirement along with the rest of his hypocritical flock.

The value of this website is that it has preserved for more than a decade the actual record of Fox News’ vicious conduct. It’s an extremely important part of the historical record. Because when we get the inevitable Right Wing attempts to play the “let’s brazenly rewrite history” game, more intelligent people will be able to instantly rebut the nonsense and show that Fox News was propaganda from the start. It will also be clear from the record that this was an attempt by the Right Wing to establish an alternative history, in the face of the actual facts.

I look forward to the parade of college courses, particularly in anthropology and sociology, that will wind up examining this trend from the Right Wing in the coming years. There’s something pathological about the issues that the Right Wing has long had with the truth, and something truly pitiable about their attempts to somehow declare the funhouse mirror of Fox News and Breitbart to be “journalism”.

Shocked, shocked that Fox News is desperate to create a non-existent criminal case against someone who the Pence White House sees as an enemy. I note that during prime time, Fox News trotted out the usual other suspects (Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, etc) to try to keep fanning the air over non-burning logs.

Fox News has spent over two years frantically trying to make noises about how Comey “should be very worried” or about how he was “about to go to jail” or about how they were really about to turn all of this on the Dems. Sean Hannity had repeated meltdowns as he shouted “Tick Tock!” in the middle of the Mueller Probe.

In reality, Comey’s actions weren’t illegal. Personally, I find his conduct a bit specious, but not anything you could suddenly make a criminal case around. His behavior around Hillary Clinton reeked of someone trying to play both sides when there wasn’t any criminal matter at hand. His behavior around Donald Trump just shows the same reaction most people have had when dealing with Mike Pence’s childish spokesman.

So now, since the IG report shows pretty much nothing, we’ll have Fox News making more and more phony claims about how the NEXT internal report will be the really damaging one. Sure. And they can probably sell us the Brooklyn Bridge again too.

Fox News and its pundits would do better for themselves if they can figure out how they will try to spin their way out of having cravenly propagandized for the bigoted, incompetent and deeply unpopular Pence White House for years.

The international community has already started moving on without the Pence White House, since it’s become clear that nobody can rely on Pence or his childish spokesman for anything other than bizarre infantile tantrums. This week was an interesting example. Rather than shoving a prime minister as has been his prior habit, Pence’s childish spokesman spent his time lying about why he failed to appear for a discussion about climate change, saying that he was spending the time with Angela Merkel and another head of state. Except that Merkel and the other person were at the meeting that Pence’s childish spokesman failed to attend. Whoops.

I would not be surprised to see the international G7 community opt out of showing up at the 2020 conference and choose instead to wait until the results of the 2020 Election to find out if they will have an actual partner or just another four years of this nonsense.

Of course Scott Walker wants to resurrect his political career as soon as the Pence White House is hopefully out on its ear. And of course Fox News wants to promote Walker for this run, for a seat that he LOST JUST LAST YEAR! Tony Evers has only been in office for 8 months, during which time the angry Right Wingers there tried to take away all of his authority, and Fox News is already campaigning to see if they can unseat him in three years. Nice.

Let’s remember that Walker was a DISASTER as governor of Wisconsin. He campaigned on attacking unions, and particularly attacking public employees’ unions. He did everything he could to alienate everyone but the Far Right conservatives in his area. He figured that would be the springboard for his mega-campaign for President in 2016, but it backfired when Trump sucked all the air out of the room. Walker wound up retreating in humiliation, while begging the other candidates to retreat too so he wouldn’t look as defeated as he did.

I’m thinking he could probably do better running for something a little closer to his abilities. Maybe Animal Control for the city of Wauwatosa.

I’ve pointed out to Ellen that I also called this one right out of the gate. So both Ellen and I are owed 100 bucks from Sanders, particularly after that silly fakeout about her suddenly running for a governorship.

Like the other politicos who take the money from Fox News, Sanders will get a nice check to show up a couple of times a week and cheerlead for the Pence White House.

This thread seems chock full of trolls, for some reason.

Carlson is an unimportant former blogger who lucked out when Fox News needed a new blowhard to come in as they went through their changeover a couple of years ago. He appears to want to just say as many outrageous things as he can in the hope that he’ll get more attention for himself. In the same way that Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin regularly misbehave in public, to their own detriment.

The fact that Fox News keeps him and Ingraham on is a testament to the network’s total lack of credibility as a journalistic endeavor.

I’d love for these hypocrites to watch their own programming from 8 years ago, when they were frantically doing anything they could to talk down the economy while President Obama was trying to clean up their mess.

For those who were asleep for the past decade, the history isn’t that complicated.

In the 2000s, under the failed stewardship of Dick Cheney in the W White House, the US economy expanded a massive amount of consumer debt in multiple forms while the major companies gouged the consumers as much as they could. In the short term, this had appeared to be a growing economy, but the signs all pointed to a bubble that would burst – particularly in terms of real estate, where too many people were buying property they couldn’t afford. Cheney and his cronies had hoped the economy would float at least until mid 2009, so they could escape office and claim that they’d left a wonderful situation for the next White House. Instead, the whole thing imploded starting at the end of 2007 and accelerating through 2008.

During the 2008 campaign, Fox News desperately tried to paint the situation as totally fine, with Sean Hannity frantically shouting down any guest who dared admit the truth.

As soon as President Obama was elected and took office, Fox News and the Right Wing immediately turned on a dime and declared that the economy was practically in a depression, and that it was all the fault of the Democratic Party and President Obama somehow. Throughout Obama’s first term, the GOP and their friends in Right Wing media repeatedly talked down the economy. When President Obama announced his plans to stimulate the economy, Rush Limbaugh countered at CPAC with a hysterical scream of “I HOPE HE FAILS!!!!” All the way up to Election Day 2012, Right Wingers kept banging the drum that the economy was in ruins thanks to that terrible Obama and that they hoped he would be a one term president. When President Obama defied them and was re-elected instead, the Right Wing media simply continued talking down everything that happened in the economy. Among their tactics, by the way, was a refusal to extend unemployment benefits and a refusal to allow the ACA expansions to go into effect in multiple states. This was partly to kneecap the programs, but it was also intended to put the clamps on Middle Class and working class families across the country – payback for their temerity and potentially planting a seed for them to feel anger at the Dems and vote another way come 2016.

As soon as Trump squeaked through in 2016 and Mike Pence became the acting president, Fox News and the Right Wing turned on a dime once again and suddenly the economy was all roses. Even when farmers were getting pounded by ill-advised tariffs. Even when Middle Class employees were suddenly targeted for massive tax increases in the GOP Tax Transfer of 2017.

And now that we hear today about the economy showing extremely ominous signs (enough that Right Wing radio shows regularly have commercials warning their elderly listeners to buy gold to be ready for the oncoming problem…), the Right Wing media wants you to believe that any discussion of the problems Pence has created is just sour grapes and an attempt to talk down this White House.

What an incredibly brazen example of projection and what a daring attempt to rewrite history. It’s too bad that some of us actually have memories of the recent past, or maybe this trick could have worked.

It surprises me that there is any story here.

First, Juan Williams actually was articulating a REPUBLICAN talking point, if anyone was watching it carefully. He was taking the same basic position as various non-Trump Right Wingers, like Max Boot and George Will. Meaning: A light criticism of Pence’s childish spokesman as “inarticulate” and potentially unhelpful to the US economy.

Second, Williams was, as usual, fairly meek about his conservative criticism of Pence’s childish spokesman, which really just invited the usual tantrum from that person.

Third, Williams has already meekly retreated, making an appearance where he tried to explain away how he asked for a photo with Pence’s childish spokesman, as though that mattered in the slightest.

We need to keep our eye on what is actually important – not what Pence’s childish spokesman rants about on Twitter. Pence is the one making the policy decisions that are causing problems for everyone. The spokesman is nothing more than a distraction, and an irrelevant one at that.

I find it interesting that the Right Wing is trying to play a silly game about how “the Left wants a Recession”, which is an utterly false premise. The Dems are NOT “the Left” and other than Bill Maher making snarky comments to get attention, we are not seeing any sane person advocating for a massive recession. What we are seeing is that the incompetence and idiocy of the Pence White House has destabilized the US economy, between the lack of any focus to the policy and the open meanness of the Tax Transfer that skyrocketed the tax burdens of Middle Class employees and Blue State residents across the country. (The only focus Pence has had over the past 2 1/2 years has been toward erasing ALL of the policies of the Obama White House and ramming the most cravenly partisan gargoyles into our judiciary. Past that, Pence has been happy to understaff much of the government and to leave the rest of the world where the US stands on anything other than blustering tantrums. The result hasn’t been hard to understand – instability and an obvious slide into recession from the stronger economy that President Obama had worked to shepherd after the huge GOP recession of 2007-2009.)

If the Right Wing wanted to look at the economic situation with ANY honesty, they would acknowledge that Pence has squandered the economic conditions he inherited from an actual functioning White House, and that we need to be prepared for the inevitable dip into negative numbers. “The Left” isn’t cheering for the numbers to go down – actual Left economists are simply noting that the numbers ARE GOING DOWN without cheering or booing. They’re acknowledging reality – something Fox News is incapable of doing. We went through something similar, noted on this website, when Sean Hannity was throwing tantrums in 2008 rather than acknowledging the major recession that was hitting the US during an election year.

And speaking of Hannity, has he spoken up for his “good friend” Williams yet? I noted that Brit Hume and one other commentator gave Williams condescending little pats on the head, but nothing from Hannity yet, to my knowledge.

One has to really wonder if there will actually be any debates at all after the party conventions next year. The Pence White House is clearly terrified at the prospect of their spokesman being trapped on a stage for two hours with any of the Dem candidates, and the spokesman himself is clearly rattled.

Pence’s gang had already stated that they were intending to only debate on Fox News after the Dems sidestepped the GOP attempt to “gotcha” them into providing soundbites and ad clips for the 2020 Pence campaign. (The Dems wisely chose to avoid Fox News for any debate appearances)

Now we hear Pence’s childish spokesman saying that he doesn’t even want to go on Fox News to debate. Which means that he is too scared to debate, period. Not surprising.

I’d keep an eye on what actually comes from Pence and the people around him to be sure. The tweets from Pence’s childish spokesman are not worth anyone spending any further time examining.

There isn’t even news in this story. It’s a nonsensical distraction from the actual damage being done by the Pence White House.

Honestly, who cares what Pence’s childish spokesman says these days? He has fantasies about everything. Why should anyone waste even a moment of their time trying to think about them?

The one telling note here is that, as usual, Fox News is standing firmly with Pence’s spokesman no matter what he does – because they enjoy furthering the distraction and because they love what Pence is doing in the background while nobody is watching.

To answer Bemused, the Pence White House is hoping to make sure its bigoted base will turn out in enough numbers to allow them to squeak through again next year. They are also hoping that they can depress turnout by everyone else. This strategy worked for them in 2016. And they have the entire Right Wing media machine working in fascistic lockstep behind them – whether that be Breitbart, OANN, Limbaugh and his copycats or Fox News.

Less extreme Republicans are also falling into this, as they frankly love Pence’s policies – particularly the complete mess he’s made of our judiciary and the concentrated work his men have done to erase every single bit of work accomplished by President Obama’s people. I’ve even heard “mainstream” Republicans trying to excuse the tariffs and the skyrocketed taxes faced by Middle Class employees across the country because of Pence and his ilk. So we have an issue in that the Republicans have all tied themselves to this concrete block as it sinks into the quagmire.

The key to 2020 is whether enough of the swing state Dems have learned their lesson from the results of 2016, when they stayed home and allowed the deplorables to prevail by a hair. It is my fervent hope that these 2-3 million active voters across Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, etc will show up in force this time to assert that the US does not stand for bigotry and viciousness. I’d be even happier to see Texas actually stand up against this bunch. What this country needs right now is a firm stand that says “NO” to bigotry and enthusiastically tosses these criminals out of our White House.

Bemused is correct that Pence will try various little tricks over the next 15 months to see if they will increase his chances and depress turnout. I’m anticipating any or all of the following:

1. Watch out for Clarence Thomas announcing retirement next June and being replaced by a young gargoyle by October, just before the election. This is a maneuver intended to depress all the voters trying to correct the mess these people just made of the Supreme Court.

2. Watch out for further bellicose action towards Iran – these guys are hoping to provoke a confrontation that goes as big as possible, which would then lead to the old trope of “Hey, we’re in a war and you don’t change horses in the middle of the race!” like they tried with W back in 2004.

3. Watch out for another “invasion” meme being thrown around next fall, likely fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout the GOP convention. The GOP believes this ploy worked well enough in 2018 to depress Dem turnout that they will use it again in a general election. (Keep in mind that the GOP had secretly thought the results could have been worse for them – they were concerned about potentially losing the Senate but were able to actually gain seats by depressing turnout in Florida and other states and by pushing extremist governors in Florida and Georgia.)

And we should remember that the Pence White House isn’t trying to mobilize the whole country. They hate most of the people of the US. They’re just trying to mobilize their base of deplorables. If the active Dem voters across the swing states stay home again, that’s really all Pence needs to do in order to win. Let’s work to make sure that those people show up this time.

A few quick notes:

1. The ICE employee tried a little trick we’ve seen previously in multiple places, including the Standing Rock protests where the Right Wingers in that state attempted to pass local laws to make it the protestors’ fault if they were run over by Right Wingers committing vehicular homicide. We’ve seen this previously in Charlottesville. So under Dobbs’ thinking, it is the fault of the homicide victim not the killer in these cases. Good to know that this is his perspective, next time he opines about how the death penalty should be enforced.

2. Dobbs and Homan engaged in mutually reinforcing nonsensical and childish rage baiting. They clearly enjoy the presidency of Mike Pence and think wonderful things about Pence’s childish spokesman. And in the case of Dobbs, there’s clearly a rage basis for all of this – which has been the historic problem with Right Wingers in the first place. Dobbs isn’t happy for all the “great stuff” he’s trying to credit Pence for – he’s FURIOUS that everyone else doesn’t see the world through the Right Wing tinted glasses he uses.

3. We have not seen the last of these kinds of vicious attacks – and the situation isn’t helped by the lies being spread by childish buffoons like Dobbs. Particularly when Pence and his spokesman are trying to blame the protestors and ANTIFA for having the temerity to stand up to Right Wing hate groups. Eyes asks if the 2020 election can fix this issue. The answer is no, but at least the haters have made their faces known to everyone. So hopefully after Pence and his gang are shown the door, when these guys try to walk back their bigotry, we can stand back from them and tell them to live with their shame. I have no intention of forgiving or forgetting the infants who attempted to bully the rest of this country and the world. I’m glad they made the situation simpler for us. The moment they went full bigot, they lost any consideration. I don’t ever want to hear another Right Winger opine about anything beyond whether they think they can get to work on time. They’ve lost their privileges.

4. As for the ICE employees being in a tough spot, I point to the members of even Nixon’s corrupt Justice Dept, who resigned rather than enforce Nixon’s evil will. The ICE employees all have had a choice before them. Nobody is forcing them to attack families and children or to run over protestors. They are actively choosing to do this. I have no sympathy for them. If they want to act in a morally and ethically upright manner, they should work somewhere else. (I also note that the one guy who did what Nixon demanded in trying to shut down Watergate was the infamous Robert Bork…)

I can’t imagine who in the world actually finds Kennedy or Katie Pavlich to be remotely intelligent or reliable sources for anything. Pavlich has long been known for repeating Right Wing hateful smears and propaganda. Kennedy’s claim to fame is when she humiliated herself at the premiere of the first Mission: Impossible movie in 1996 by interviewing Martin Landau and not even knowing he was a star of the original series. Landau proceeded to give her a severe talking-to in front of the cameras while she could only gulp. When Landau finally stomped off, Kennedy sheepishly looked at her cameraman and muttered, “Well, that sucked!”

This is just another example of the thousands we have of Fox News and Right Wingers making comments they will not be able to walk back when this miserable epoch is concluded, hopefully next year – provided that active Dem voters can be persuaded that it really does matter if they vote.

As Ellen correctly notes, Mike Pence’s childish spokesman had no interest in “helping” Baltimore or in doing ANYTHING to raise awareness about social issues. He just wanted to have a tantrum about a congressman he hates, and one who happens to also be black, something that we have seen is revolting to the Far Right. (Witness Ronald Reagan’s recorded viciousness – something that Fox News has studiously avoided discussing)

Watching Right Wing pundits trying to explain away the bigotry of the childish Tweeter’s nonsense would be laughable if they weren’t talking about actual politics today.

As for the childish Tweeter himself, his comments are as irrelevant and unimportant as he is. What matters is the behavior of the deplorables he emboldens and the non-response of the general GOP members who will not be able to walk this back.