The fun didn’t stop there. The spokesman for the Pence White House then made a point of going to the Press Room and trying to get reporters to run there so he could pull a stunt that would hopefully steal attention away from Pelosi’s moment.

I’m going to decline to give Regan credit. She was playing fairly sneaky games throughout this segment, not to mention the rancid discussion she referenced with racist Jessica Vaughan of the Far Right anti-immigration FAIR outfit.

Regan is trying the tactic of playing the Democratic Party as being somehow equally unreasonable to the angry Right Wingers who pushed this nonsensical confrontation to where it is today.

To be very clear – there is no mandate for American citizens wanting a bigoted, nonsensical wall structure built. There is a small minority of loud and angry Right Wingers who want it as a giant middle finger to Mexico and to the rest of the world. The point is not to actually stop anyone from getting to this country – it’s just to tell everyone from south of the border to go jump in a lake. And the cherry on top of the vicious sundae was supposed to be the Pence White House forcing Mexico to pay for it. (This is the old schoolyard bully routine, where the tougher kids beat up the other kids and then take their lunch money to boot.)

Regan’s discussion with Vaughan was specifically intended to run the Right Wing narrative of mock concern over families fleeing toward the US from the south – the notion that it’s the families’ fault that they are fleeing and thus not the US’ problem that these kids are dying. I particularly noted Regan’s constant trolling of those families with the line that “there’s no point in your coming here since we won’t let you in. You might as well turn back or just stay in your countries.” The narrative lying just underneath that mock concern actually reads “We don’t want you here! Go away and stay away!” I’ll note that Vaughan’s racist group openly advocates for greatly restricting the numbers of immigrants allowed to come in through the Mexican border.

I’ll also note that the angry Right Wingers are currently celebrating a major coup for them – they were able to bully Mexico into processing asylum seekers on the Mexican side of the border. This has long been a bucket list item for the Right – to force Mexico into setting up these unlivable camps on their side. Because it does three big things. The biggest idea is that by keeping the asylum seekers in Mexico, this denies them the ability to actually get to the US, thus essentially closing the border and sending a message that there is no sanctuary here. Beyond that, this sets up a miserable tent city situation in Mexico that would be just as unlivable as the conditions these refugees will face elsewhere in Central America, which is another deliberate negative message for them. And finally, by keeping the human tragedy in Mexico, this will allow US media to completely ignore what is happening – since we won’t be seeing footage of kids held in US detention facilities and the problem will be in Mexico’s hands. Out of sight, out of mind. (And let’s not forget that the recent deaths of the kids are seen as big positives by angry Right Wingers – their hope is that Central American families will think twice about even trying to come to the US now – since it’s clear that this country will do nothing when immigrant children die in custody.)

Given the cheerleading from Fox News throughout this week (and the nonsensical idea that this stalemate is because the Democratic Party wants to “deny Trump a victory”), it’s no surprise that the Pence White House’s spokesman had another massive tantrum on Twitter this morning. His latest is that he’s threatening to close the border and block all aid, etc etc blah blah blah. I’d say just have him go ahead and try it. It’s frankly tiring to listen to these childish outbursts. I don’t believe any adult in the world is particularly impressed by them.

The proper response by the Democratic members of Congress should be to completely ignore the nonsense of Pence’s spokesman and just have the House pass a budget bill akin to what unanimously passed the Senate before this child walked away from his commitments. Not one penny for this racist boondoggle should be permitted – it has nothing to do with security and everything to do with the child in the White House needing to be taught his lesson. If he wishes to stomp his foot and not approve the budget, then it’s on him – as he already announced it would be. Or he can go get the money from Mexico right now. Or angry Right Wingers can try their crowd-funding idea – at their current rate, it will take them nearly 25 years to pay for a good start on it. (And I seriously wonder if angry Right Wingers around this country are sitting on 25 billion dollars in the first place…)

Tarlov stupidly blew the discussion the second she allowed Cavuto to generate the false equivalence. She should have stood her ground and called out the others for their viciousness. She could have asked them why they thought it was exciting to watch people lose their healthcare.

And she’s also badly misleading herself with her thinking about the current judiciary, particularly after the Pence White House has been packing courts, including the 5th District, with Far Right partisans. And that doesn’t even mention the disaster at the Supreme Court.

Based on their past rulings and partisanship, it’s fairly certain that the 5th Circuit will happily support Judge O’Connor’s destruction of the ACA, specifically under the premise that the withdrawal of the individual mandate not only bankrupted the plan financially but also removed the only legal justification Roberts had allowed for it in 2012. Following that ruling, the appeal will proceed to the Supreme Court, which most likely will refuse to hear the case, as this would allow Roberts to duck the accountability here. Denying cert would mean that the lower rulings stand and the ACA goes away, which will absolutely lead to more celebrating at Fox News and on AM Radio. If the SC hears the case, that just puts off the final ruling until 2020, meaning that you’ll have the Dems campaigning on it, and the Far Right trying to rally their base with the celebration. (This will also set the stage for Fox News to run their post-mortem of the Obama White House during the 2020 campaign, where they will include the erasure of the ACA as part of their story of a complete and utter failure by the Dems.)

No surprise that Fox News would repeatedly try to throw up distractions while the Titanic continues to take on water.

They had a spit-take laugher story up yesterday about former car thief Darrell Issa proclaiming that Michael Flynn’s criminal prosecution would somehow be tossed, because Issa thinks it wasn’t handled correctly. Issa was also doing the same bizarre jumping up and down that Fox News and AM Radio has been doing about how the FBI was engaged in somehow unfair tactics. These are the same pundits who celebrated every investigation they could throw at President Clinton, President Obama and Hillary Clinton. But now they feel that everyone should take a breath, since Mike Pence is the acting president?

There’s been one other moment of hilarity running through Fox News and AM Radio, BTW. Somehow the Right Wing is trying, as a gesture of heartfelt concern of course, to warn Dems that impeachment is a bad idea. The Right Wing is taking the momentary position that they were mistaken to impeach Bill Clinton in the 90s as this only increased his approval rating. Once you stop laughing hysterically at their obvious attempt here, the nonsense becomes overwhelming. Clinton’s popularity increased because it was generally known by everyone that he hadn’t committed any more serious crime than lying to a gotcha question about his infidelities. Was this a stupid and frankly immoral thing for him to do? Sure. Was it something that merited practically shutting down the government to have a show trial? Nope. It was obvious partisanship and vindictiveness. But in the case of the Trump campaign and the Pence White House, we’re seeing very real criminality and conspiracy on multiple fronts. Payoffs, intimidation attempts, collusion with foreign interests, open corruption, etc. Not the same thing as the Clinton impeachment at all.

And sure, the Right Wing is just so remorseful about impeaching President Clinton. They were salivating about doing it then, and they’re delighted they did it. Having run that process means that every time they have to discuss the Clinton White House, they get to add that impeachment asterisk to it. They’re not sorry they did that. Just as they’re waiting for the final destruction of the ACA to run their postmortems on the Obama White House – since they’ll now be able to establish that they’ve pretty much erased every single thing that was accomplished between 2009 and 2016.

Probably the same level of despicable these people have been throughout the existence of the Pence White House.

But there is one good aspect to this viciousness. When the Pence White House is sent packing (hopefully in less than 2 years), these guys will not be able to suddenly play the “lets let bygones be bygones” game. They won’t be able to take the “I wasn’t really supporting all that hate” pose. They’ll have to live with the consequences of their hateful actions. The rest of the country and the world are under no obligation to give them a blanket forgiveness or to forget these actions.

One advertiser walking away from Carlson is a nice gesture but it won’t change anything. Multiple advertisers walked away from Laura Ingraham for her hatefulness and she didn’t learn hear lesson either.

My normal approach with these guys is to simply ignore them now. Carlson doesn’t really have anything constructive to say, and much of what he does spew out on his show are demonstrable falsehoods. His standard routine is to show mock outrage at something, generate a false premise to ridicule it and then demand that his guests accept his false premise before discussing the matter. Which leads everyone down into the mud and doesn’t accomplish anything.

There is one part of this that is correct, to be fair. There were plenty of women in the 2-3 million Democratic voters in the swing states who chose to stay home in 2016. Because they didn’t show up, the election was decided by the people who did. So Trump is correct when he gloats that his voters did show up. What will solve this is if those Dems have learned their lesson and will actually show up in 2020 to demonstrate that we do not in fact live in a nation where only the bigots choose to vote.

Let’s not sugar coat this situation. The Right Wing is delighted that this little girl has died.

The whole point is to make border crossings so unpleasant, so onerous and frankly so dangerous, that the word will get back to anyone else wanting to come north. It’s the same thinking that led to the current and vicious family separation policy. It’s the same thinking that led AM Radio to champion the cause of Ramos & Compean ten years ago for shooting a man in the back.

And the best part for people like the Pence White House and their angry Right Wing supporters is that they will then blame the victims for their suffering. It’s the same logic that works when they laugh at the people who are losing their ACA coverage and tell them “why don’t you get a job, libtard?” without knowing what is actually happening with them. It’s just fun for them to have extra bullying opportunities.

As I see it, the one plus here is that these angry Right Wingers will not be able to walk all their bigotry back when they lose the White House and Senate and suddenly want to let bygones be bygones. They’ve taken their masks off and let their inner hater flags fly. Now they can live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. There’s been a lot of hateful viciousness over the past three years that doesn’t get forgiven or forgotten, unfortunately. And nobody forced these people to act in a hateful manner. So they’ll reap what they’ve sown.

Pompeo’s smugness is interesting. And yes, he is part of the wing of the Pence White House (along with John Bolton) who’s been annoyed that their march to open warfare against Iran has been interrupted by this irrelevant Khashoggi guy. The Right Wing has never cared for a second that this man was killed. In fact, multiple Right Wing pundits have come out attacking Khashoggi and effectively saying that he deserved to be murdered. The initial reaction of the Pence White House was to downplay this whole situation, even to the point of doubting that it even happened. Given their inability to act like adults and own anything, they’ve chosen to double down on their downplaying.

We should absolutely remember the smugness of despicable people like Pompeo and Bolton. We should remember that this was their behavior when it mattered. And we should remember that they would never have been in their positions to do this damage had 2-3 million Americans actually showed up to vote in the swing states in 2016. Elections Have Consequences.

Has everyone forgotten that the Pence White House’s spokesman made a point last year that he didn’t pay anyone off and didn’t know anything about any of this? He’s on video, repeatedly saying this never happened. And then he’s on video at a later time, admitting that he did do this. Meaning that he got caught in a boldfaced lie. Period.

Michael Cohen’s recordings show that Trump was fully aware of what Cohen was doing for him, and that he was directing it in the same way he always does – by assuming he knew all the ins and outs of these things better than everyone else. Cohen happily did this work for Trump because he thought he was going to achieve incredible wealth and power for himself.

We shouldn’t forget how Cohen repeatedly threw what he thought his weight was around at every legal opponent he had – including open threats to ruin people’s lives and livelihoods. A bit of a remove from the defeated man who cried in court in the hope that his tears would get him out of the prison term he deserves for his conduct.

Where this gets interesting is how the prosecutors and the courts will deal with the Trumps, now that they are homing in on them. And how the Pence White House will react. I have long held that this will go to the mattresses the moment that Don Jr or any of the others are indicted. Some of the fallout will likely include the firing of the Special Prosecutor and some of the fallout will likely include charges being filed against the Clintons. I’m frankly surprised that these actions have not been taken yet.

I’m also continually amused at how the Pence White House keeps desperately claiming that the Mueller Probe is just “wrapping up now”. They’ve called that play at least three or four times already. I wonder how many more times we’ll hear it…

Baier did get in a cheap shot about O’Rourke and he was pointedly noting that he doesn’t think the Democratic Party is in very good shape. Sanders had to correct Baier to note that the Dems just won 40 seats. If we followed the Fox News approach, we’d just think that they lost the midterms. Granted, they were nearly overwhelmed by the gerrymandering, but they managed to win some seats and get a small majority in one house. Hopefully the Dems have learned more lessons and will show up in much, much larger numbers in 2020.

I have no idea what goes on with Melania Trump, but it’s fairly clear that she’s miserable in her current circumstance. I don’t think she ever thought she was going to be in this position, nor that she ever wanted to be in this position. This was a marriage for each side to get something they wanted – Melania got access to the “billions” Trump claimed he had and Trump got another attractive young wife.

I would not be surprised to see Melania leave this marriage as soon as she can when the White House disaster is concluded. For her sake, I hope she had an attorney check that pre-nup before she signed it, or this adventure will end quite poorly for Melania in the end.

One more example of the old but true lesson: Elections Have Consequences.

Thanks for noting this, Ellen.

I first want to note that Limbaugh ends with a vicious, vicious cheap shot at President Obama, even after Bream has said “May President Bush bring out the best in all of us” and tried to end the segment. With a truly unpleasant smirk, Limbaugh then adds: “You know, if I was Barack Obama, I’d be really upset, Shannon. All this talk about George Bush being the last days of civility. If I were Obama, I’d say ‘What about me? Y’know, I was civil, I was a nice guy, I was sophisticated, I was the smartest guy in the room. Why are they going back and honoring this guy?’ (ANGRILY POINTING FOR EMPHASIS) If I was Obama, I’d be worried maybe the media is forgetting him!” Bream responds with a sympathetic laugh, “Not so fast, Rush”, to which he happily snickers like a fifth grader and says “I had to get that in!” The hatred dripping from Limbaugh at that moment speaks for itself.

Before that, Limbaugh’s comments are mostly a stew of outright lies and angry statements intended to rewrite history. He’s correct to be puzzled by the sudden outpouring of love for the Bush family, but he plays that situation under a completely false premise. To Limbaugh, only GOP pols get tough coverage from journalists and somehow it’s “the media” that is driving down the approval numbers on the Pence White House. That’s flat-out backwards. Journalists regularly criticized Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama and will certainly criticize the next Democratic President. And the Pence White House has low approval numbers because it’s done nothing to reach out to anyone but its increasingly narrow base and has actually been hostile to the rest of the country, including by massively raising taxes on Blue States while giving huge breaks to their donors.

Limbaugh also offers a false premise that “the media” think that the “good Republican” is someone who loses and that Bush is being presented as good because he raised taxes, was bipartisan and went against the interests of the GOP. But that’s outright nonsense. And for the record, neither Bush acted with class and dignity very much of the time, and they certainly didn’t act with any kind of sophistication. HW Bush was always obsessed with trying to sound like a tough Texan (something Dana Carvey easily showed to be ridiculous) and W had no inkling of anything approaching sophistication.
Limbaugh brings up that he got to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom in 1992, but leaves out crucial information. In June 1992, Limbaugh was supporting Pat Buchanan’s insurgent campaign and was openly critical of Bush. But then Roger Ailes arranged for Bush to bring him to the White House, where Bush himself carried Limbaugh’s bags to the Lincoln Bedroom and fawned over him for an evening. Limbaugh returned to his show and suddenly, coincidentally, began wholeheartedly supporting Bush’s re-election bid. Limbaugh also conveniently rewrites the history of the evening to say that they spent 90 minutes discussing the campaign and had no concerns about Bill Clinton – when in fact at that time Perot was easily leading Bush and Clinton, and when at the time Limbaugh said that Bush really just asked him personal questions about his life and history. (At that time, Limbaugh was also regularly bashing Clinton as “Slick Willie” and dismissing his candidacy.) If we are to believe Limbaugh, Bush was dishing nastily about George Mitchell to a radio show host – not something that would indicate a deep commitment to civility.

Limbaugh would have people believe that Bush should have been attacking the Democratic Party on a more consistent basis than he was already doing. Limbaugh presents both Bushes as refusing to “defend themselves” against what Limbaugh saw as “outrageous” charges rather than actual behaviors that were correctly being challenged. Limbaugh is also playing another interesting card – he’s insisting that Right Wing voters want to see their politicians “fighting back”, which means constantly being on the attack. Except that Limbaugh has spent decades pretending that angry Right Wingers are really just positive, nice people beset by awful liberals. But if those Right Wingers are so positive, then why would they need to constantly be in attack mode??? Limbaugh also loves that Trump is constantly attacking and in a petulant mode, saying that this is what Republican voters want – not noticing the massive contradiction in his earlier career statements about the positivity of the Right Wing. And Limbaugh thinks this is why Trump squeaked by in 2016 – which leaves out the fact that Trump’s base has always been a weak minority of the voting population and that he only got through because 2-3 million Dems in the swing states didn’t bother to show up.

Bream then plays a canard about how Bush was so modest that he wouldn’t play up his military or political record when dealing with “this young upstart Southern Governor”, which is frankly nonsense to anyone who followed that campaign. Bream also tees up the idea that Bush was too decent to brag about his record. Bream quotes a Bill McGurn piece in the WSJ about how selfless Bush was in signing up for the military for WWII on his 18th birthday. She leaves out that Bush was pushed to do this by his wealthy family, as this would groom him for his future political life.
Limbaugh uses that tee-off to go on a rant about how he was raised with wonderful moral values like the Bushes where “you do not brag”. “It’s not becoming, it’s unseemly to do so.” And he paints the hapless W as someone who was just too principled to brag because it would “drag the office down into the gutter”. Except that Limbaugh has made his entire career and persona off the notion of bragging and gloating and rubbing whatever he can in his enemies’ faces. And both Bushes did plenty of this too. HW Bush constantly would do this to show that he was somehow manly, including when he gloated after his debate with Geraldine Ferraro, “we tried to kick a little ass” and then defiantly refused to apologize for it. W was known for constant gloating and smirking. So one has to wonder what fantasy world it is that Limbaugh is imagining…

Limbaugh invents a scenario where the Bushes just didn’t defend themselves out of high principle and thus the “media onslaught” was able to snow the public. Rather than a situation where the Bushes regularly acted badly, were called on it and had no answer, which is the actual truth of the matter.
It’s also interesting that Limbaugh holds Bob Dole up as a paragon of integrity and virtue when Dole was known throughout his career for petty partisanship and long-held grudges and vendettas. Yes, it’s nice that he made an effort to salute Bush’s casket. That does not undo the prior 70 years of his record. And Limbaugh seems to be saying that Dole’s action is a wonderful moment of virtue – does that mean that Limbaugh will celebrate a Republican who salutes or pays respect to Bill Clinton when he passes? I’m betting that Limbaugh will have a very different reaction then.

Thank you Ellen.

I do think it’s appropriate to mark the passing of George HW Bush as a career politician and an apparently loyal family man. Of course, he was the son and heir to an extremely wealthy New England family, so he wasn’t brought up in a hardscrabble life. Of course, he went to serve in WWII, signing up on his 18th birthday as required by his family to establish his credentials for a future life in politics and society. Looking at his record, one can see a clear path and pattern of being set up for career and political success, and Bush dutifully followed each of the steps he was instructed to take.

George HW Bush had an unfortunate political record, including his opposition to the Civil Rights Act and various other Hard Right behaviors. For all of the discussion of his civility, he had plenty of unfortunate moments in public, some of which were downright hateful. His tenure at the CIA is especially troubling. (And even that was part of an obvious grooming for the top slot)

His tenure as Vice President and then as President was truly regrettable, and marked by a series of attempts by him to show that he was manlier than the New England millionaire he really was. As VP, he was part of one of the most corrupt White Houses we have ever seen in our history. As President, his policies resulted in thousands upon thousands of needless deaths, both here at home and abroad. His administration completely bungled the Iraq/Kuwait situation and then lied about it to push a totally unnecessary and vicious war action. His invasion of Panama was a particularly feckless action, resulting in massive death and destruction in that country. He worked to pack our courts with Right Wing idealogues, including both of his Supreme Court appointments. We need to remember that David Souter was put forth as a “stealth candidate” by John Sununu in an attempt to sneak a Far Right jurist onto the highest court. It was only because Sununu was mistaken that we wound up with an independent centrist for two decades. But that wasn’t the intention – they were thinking they could get another Robert Bork onto the court without the fireworks of 1987. When this gambit failed, they went back to the old playbook of just appointing an openly Far Right jurist, even an unqualified one like Thomas. In short, George HW Bush was not the fine man that Right Wingers today are attempting to lionize. He was a career partisan and occasionally a quite vindictive man. His behavior, along with Reagan’s, paved the way for the declension we’ve seen in the now-open hatred and viciousness practiced by the Right Wing in this country. It’s true that his son George W was an even worse President, and that the current Pence White House is ten steps farther down in the sewage. But that doesn’t suddenly make George HW Bush a great President. It just means that the Right Wing has simply become more craven and vicious with time.

Granted, the elder Bush family behaved themselves well in retirement and did the occasional good deed. But this was not the selfless work of a Jimmy Carter, who dedicated himself to good works over the past nearly 40 years. This was simply the correct behavior of an extremely wealthy New England family.

Truman is correct to note that when it comes to the eventual passings of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, we will not be seeing anything like this hagiography, particularly not from Fox News and AM Radio. Given how Rush Limbaugh frantically injected as much bile as he thought he could get away with (such as insults against the Clintons and a vicious statement about President Obama), it’s not hard to foresee how that display will occur. But that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – people like Limbaugh are, for whatever reason, extremely insecure and angry about themselves. They can’t resist an opportunity to act out.

I would laugh, to be honest. Look at the “talent” they’re trumpeting:

“Proud Boys”? “Duck Dynasty”? Eric Bolling? And at this point, other haters like Malkin are already jumping ship? What do they plan to fill the empty slots with? “The Ted Nugent Show”?

It’s partly correct to see this as the sad end of Glenn Beck’s ego trip. But it’s also an attempt by Mark Levin to create his own online footprint to compete with the expansion of Fox News and with other trolls like Newsmax. If I’m understanding the situation correctly, Beck will now essentially be reporting to Levin and the guys at CRTV.

My next question is how long it will be before Beck’s ego pushes him to back out of this idea and make another one of his doom-laden announcements?

Interesting to hear smug remarks from one of the more vicious Right Wing cranks now inhabiting the Senate. Keep in mind that as more of the less openly craven Republicans like Flake and Heller have departed the Senate, what is left are the serious gargoyles like McConnell, Cotton and Ernst.

Of course Ernst wanted Nelson to run home and hide. And of course Fox News was delighted with Rick Scott taking a pre-victory lap by flying to DC to make sure he was photographed gleefully smiling alongside McConnell for the welcoming events. (By the way, shouldn’t Scott have refrained from running for Senate, since the Right Wing believes in extreme term limits? Why did he run for the Senate at all, if his priority was to just return to civilian life and support another citizen legislator? Of course, we could ask that question of most of the “Tea Party” astroturfers who all promised to not run for re-election and have barnacled their way along for the past several years…)

It’s been more than clear that the Right Wing has wanted to get their gloat on for this midterm as soon as it could. When the House gerrymandering didn’t allow them to keep total control as planned, they turned to dismissing any gains the Democratic candidates made. And they turned to gloating about how they would continue to rule the Senate (including more judicial gargoyles and the upcoming retirement of Clarence Thomas). The fact that Nelson, Gillum and Abrams hung on and exposed the multiple attempts at voter suppression and viciousness was inconvenient for the Right. Granted, the Right Wing succeeded in their efforts in both of those states – which should be a lesson to Democratic voters – that they can’t just take these races for granted and they have to show up in real numbers – there are over a million Democratic voters in each of those states who did not bother to show up for the midterms and who regularly do not bother to show up for elections. Those voters could have ended this nonsense before it started. But even given that situation, the Right Wing’s open glee about demanding the Democratic candidates bow down was fairly rancid to see. Particularly when they made no such demand of Republican candidates who have been filing lawsuits and refusing to concede. (It’s a long-time Republican tradition to refuse to concede out of spite – I still remember Carly Fiorina in California making a point of refusing to concede in 2010.)

To quote Sean Connery as James Bond: “Well of course you are!”

No surprise here. After spending the entire year predicting a “red wave” and getting ready to gloat about doing a lot more damage to the middle class voters who rejected them, Fox News and the Right Wing media have lurched into Plan B – Gloat about the Senate, Gloat about Florida and Georgia and then blame every single problem that happens on the Dems barely breaching the gerrymandering firewall in the House.

The GOP played a pattern like this in 2007, when they lost the House at that time – they blamed the entire Bush Recession on the Dems having just landed into the majority in the House when all of the Right Wing mismanagement chickens came home to roost. (Their hope had been to escape the White House and have the crash happen after President Obama took office, but the crash happened nearly a year earlier and the blame was placed on the appropriate parties.)

It’s a guarantee that Fox News will try to blame the House Democrats when two bits of fun happen in 2019 – the first is the moment when taxpayers realize how much of a beating they took from the Tax Transfer, including millions of people actually getting tax INCREASES and now owing large, unexpected federal tax payments. We can already anticipate how Fox News and AM Radio will try to game this as “Democrats always raise your taxes”… And the second is the inevitable downturn in the domestic economy – fueled by the Pence White House’s complete incompetence in handling trade issues around the world, and by the backfiring of the Tax Transfer, which did not raise incomes for most people but instead just gave a sugar rush to the wealthy at everyone else’s expense. As the economy turns in the other direction from the recovery we were seeing during the Obama presidency, Fox News will of course blame the Democrats everywhere they can.

Greg Palast has occasionally found useful tidbits but usually dolls them up into ridiculous conspiracy theories. He’s very similar to Michael Moore in that he constantly beats the same drum and then acts as if he was prescient when some part of his rant turns out to be true. I do appreciate that he confronted Kemp this year, but he accomplished nothing by doing so other than catching his stunt on camera.

As for this evening’s returns, we should take a few lessons from them. The turnout throughout the country was closer to a presidential election than a midterm, because more Dems chose to come out. But at the same time, plenty of GOP voters also came out, as they always do. Watch how most of the house races wound up going – particularly the toss-ups. They were mostly within a point or two – that’s the power of gerrymandering and even incumbency in many cases. Were many of those seats not gerrymandered, the Dem candidates would have easily been several points ahead. At the same time, I take heart from the fact that so many seats around the country flipped in different states, including surprising turnarounds in Florida and Iowa. This was not a coastal turnout by the Dems, so the Pence White House won’t be able to play that card tomorrow. I also take heart that the Dems were able to win several governorships and turn various state legislatures – which will be crucial for the 2020 census and the 2021 redistricting corrections.

The Dems’ performance in the Senate was unfortunate – McCaskill and Donnelly were mostly undone by their own failures to reach out to their own base, and by their voters’ failure to recognize that those seats really needed their support. In the case of Heitkamp, a strong case can be made that the disenfranchised Native Americans were the key that she was denied this year – which was precisely why the Right Wing changed the voting rules in that state. In the case of Beto O’Roarke and Bill Nelson, we are looking at situations of states that have not completely moved toward sanity yet. But the strong showing of O’Roarke in Texas tells me that in another cycle or two, Texas will be a lot more purple than red. Cruz will gloat his head off about surviving this challenge, but he’s going to miss the bigger lesson – Texas is rapidly becoming a different state than the one people think it is.

I was saddened to see what happened in Florida, both to Nelson and to Gillum. Hatred won on both counts there. One can only hope that DeSantis’ open corruption will catch up to him before long. On the other hand, I was heartened to finally see Wisconsin Dem voters finally show up in just enough numbers to say goodbye to Scott Walker. We’ll just have to see how the Nevada, Montana and Arizona races turn out – with any luck those will hold and the Right Wing increase in the Senate will be minimized.

On the positive end, I strongly doubt the GOP will be able to raise our taxes any further, and I doubt they’ll be able to do anything further to the ACA or to Medicare and Social Security. And no, there won’t be any wall funding. On the other hand, the DACA group’s case will be going to the current Supreme Court, which is guaranteed to tell them that the Pence White House was completely correct to terminate that program. Just as this SC will also be getting to work overturning lots of cases the Right Wing has bristled over for the past 60 years, including immigrant rights, union workers and of course Roe v Wade.

The biggest consequence of Dem voters not showing up in enough numbers for the Senate contests in multiple states is that we are now almost certain to see Clarence Thomas step down next year – to be replaced by a much younger gargoyle, and there is not a thing the Dems can do about it because they were once again not putting their emphasis where it needed to be.

We can only hope the Dems learn from the comparison between 2016 and 2018 and actually show up in greater numbers in 2020 if we are to have any sanity in our government.

It’s truly spectacular how far the Right Wing is willing to go with the lying and the projection.

To be specific, there is NO “Donald Trump Healthcare Plan” nor is there ever going to be one. The Pence White House has absolutely no intention of offering ANY program whatsoever. The actual intention of the Right Wing, as voiced by Rand Paul last year, is to simply get rid of the ACA and bury it. And then if anyone wants to propose a new program, they’re free to do so – except that the Hard Right members of Congress will never support it, so it won’t go anywhere. The Right Wing never had a problem with the idea that lower income people have very few healthcare options. As they see it, that’s your problem, not mine. And this is consistent with Libertarian thinking – that everyone is on their own in a vicious cruel world.

This is similar to the lies these guys are spreading about how the Dems want to “get rid of Medicare”. That’s beyond nonsensical. In reality, the Dems are trying to help fund and expand Medicare while the Right Wing are sharpening their knives to drastically reduce Medicare and essentially eliminate it for everyone under 57. It’s a similar story for Social Security. The Heritage Foundation published a detailed proposal a few years ago for how to do “entitlement reform”, which is almost certainly the blueprint the Pence White House will follow. This proposal includes reducing Medicare to a small voucher supplement and reducing SS to a flat handout of $1200 per month – and both programs would be severely means-tested, so the only people receiving any benefit would be those with low incomes and no retirement savings. (I would have thought people would have taken a hint from the vicious budget proposals put forth by Pence’s staff over the past 2 years, including the cancellation of Meals on Wheels.)

And it’s rich to hear this bunch chuckling about President Obama having accomplished “nothing” over his two terms. Because they’ve spent their first 2 years doing nothing but eliminating and erasing every single program, treaty and proposal made by the Obama White House. I’ve long expected that Fox News would do a “retrospective” on the “failed” Obama presidency, but only after they complete the repeal of the ACA next year.

Finally, I’m going to wait to see if the Dems really are able to overcome all the gerrymandering tomorrow. The numbers I’m seeing indicate the races are mostly very close – which gives the GOP candidates an 8-10 point buffer each time. Which is the whole point of gerrymanders.