It’s pretty clear that Hannity is terrified about the implications of Trump’s lawyer having tried to pay off Daniels in the middle of the campaign. He knows this is a potentially serious problem for Trump, and that Trump’s silence on the matter is telling. Since he cannot refute the truth of what happened, he’s once again resorted to childish nicknames, just as our Tweeter-in-Chief regularly does. Which only goes to show the real panic lying just underneath his false bravado.

Levin’s statements, as usual, are a string of blatant falsehoods. He tries to once again sling all the old accusations at Bill Clinton, as though they have anything to do with Trump’s shenanigans. He lies about everyone covering up for Clinton and Kennedy, when in fact those stories were covered. He leaves out the part where Clinton’s accusers were completely heard out and vetted – and then found to be inconsistent and unreliable. Juanita Broaddrick’s story changed multiple times – to the point that nobody will ever know what happened, apparently including her. But the notion that Bill Clinton raped her is one that only came up after she had gone through various iterations and was trying to keep her story relevant many years after the fact. Kathleen Willey’s accusations were similarly found to be spurious, after she’d been heard out. Donald Trump’s behavior, on the other hand, has openly been admitted by him at various times, even with pride from the man. So yes, Trump isn’t even close to Clinton’s affairs – Trump is far beyond anything Clinton did, in terms of sheer numbers and outrageous behavior.

Levin goes on to repeat multiple lies about JFK – including the Ellen Rometsch story, which was never corroborated in terms of her being anything more than a woman with whom Kennedy had a fling. The Right Wing regularly tries to paint her as a “spy” but always leaves out the part where that was never actually established. In fact, the FBI stated at the time that she wasn’t one. Levin also goes into the mud about the Judith Exner story, which was challenged during even her first iteration of it in the 1970s and then demolished in the 1980s and 1990s, when she got more and more outrageous in her embellishments in a desperate attempt to continue getting media attention. And of course Levin throws a heap of mud at LBJ in the same breath. The one thing he says that we can agree about – he can definitely go on and on and on.

Next, Levin says a bunch of lies about President Obama and the FBI. There is no evidence of “rogue activity at the highest levels of the FBI” in the manner that Levin is hysterically opining. And the issue of “Russian influence” in the election is exactly what Robert Mueller is investigating – not in terms of physically rigging votes but in terms of trying to poison the dialogue, apparently with the eager assistance of Trump and his staff. What we know about President Obama’s handling of that situation is that he had the FBI looking into it, as is proper, but did not want to turn that into a major election issue. In other words, President Obama was trying to actually preserve the sanctity of the election. Levin’s nonsensical take is that he should have shouted fire in the middle of the final weeks of the campaign – something that the Right Wing would have screamed about had it happened. And no, nobody was told to “stand down” – either in this situation or in Benghazi.

Ellen is partly correct in her assessment that Hannity will constantly blame any downturns or setbacks on President Obama, while giving all the credit for any positive events to Trump. For example, President Obama took office in the midst of a dire recession that erupted during the terrible mismanagement of W and the GOP. Hannity spent 2008 denying that anything was wrong – until the second that President Obama was inaugurated. At which point, Hannity suddenly discovered that the economy had crashed and began blaming everything on the Democrats. President Obama worked to have the government help end the recession, with almost no help from the GOP, which was bent on obstructing everything he did – even while people were watching their unemployment benefits dry up and no new jobs were available – in the hope that continued economic troubles would help get them back into power. So in 2017, when Mike Pence assumes the role of acting President, the economy is actually better, thanks to the work of the Democrats in the face of the GOP, and just as suddenly, we’re supposed to celebrate what a great job the GOP has done to generate the better numbers.

It’s interesting to see the Right Wing constantly railing on the rest of the world for supposedly being Trump haters who don’t want the Tweeter to succeed. This is the same gang who spent 8 years throwing vicious hatred at President Obama and everyone in the Democratic Party. This is the same gang who spent 8 years obstructing and opposing every single thing that President Obama did, and who continue to show total hatred toward both the Obama and Clinton families. But they seem to be really sensitive about anyone showing the slightest skepticism about the proven venality and viciousness of the Pence White House. So if CNN reports on what’s actually happening when staffer after staffer is fired or forced out of the building, that’s somehow “Trump hating”. If the New York Times reports on actual indictments of people who are plea-bargaining with Robert Mueller to get lesser sentences, that’s somehow “Trump hating.” If anyone points out that Trump’s behavior has been spectacularly embarrassing for this country, that’s somehow “Trump hating.”

And it’s interesting to hear Hannity and Levin pretending they don’t know Daniels’ porn name, presumably out of their moral purity. Given how much they tend to tell falsehoods, it’s difficult to take that pose seriously.

Laura Ingraham’s apology is disingenuous and Hogg will not be spending any time appearing on any program with her, particularly after that cheap shot. (Note how she tries to trumpet her own show in the middle of the apology, as though that would have any bearing on her viciousness.)

I agree that she only made a move to apologize after several of her advertisers jumped ship – just as Rush Limbaugh was forced to partially walk back his vicious attack on Sandra Fluke a few years ago. Ingraham is a typical bully – all bluster until called on her behavior, at which point she folds.

James Comey will never appear on Sean Hannity’s embarrassing program. It doesn’t matter how many times Hannity begs him to do so. Comey has neither the time nor the inclination to waste even ten minutes dealing with Hannity’s childishness.

Bolling was openly, blatantly lying in the interview. On a host of levels. He figured he could just play this game and not be challenged on his falsehoods. It looks like Stelter let him get way with it, which is unfortunate.

Stelter should have pinned him down on this notion that “only a handful” of people at Fox News were pro-Trump, particularly if we’re discussing last summer. The reality is that Fox News is almost entirely pro-Trump. The programming is geared to support him, and the prime time shows are geared to defend him at all costs. The only people I’ve seen express any reluctance to complete fealty have been Shepard Smith, Chris Wallace and Neil Cavuto. The latter two of those appear to only have an issue with the childish way in which Trump behaves. Not with his policies, which are completely acceptable to them. And yes, it’s demonstrable that Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham regularly play fast and loose with the truth. Ingraham regularly inflicts so many blatant falsehoods on her program that it’s difficult to keep track of all of them. Hannity simply repeats his lies on a daily basis, to the point that trying to correct the record would take much longer than anyone would find worth the effort.

But the major area where Stelter allowed Bolling to escape proper accountability was in reference to his firing from Fox News. Stelter backed off when Bolling told him that he’d “never” behaved in the way that caused him to be fired. Except that Bolling is now calling 14 women who attested to his creepy and offensive behavior liars. Stelter never pressed him on that. Stelter also never pressed Bolling on his nonsensical 50 million dollar SLAPP suit against Yashar Ali for having the temerity to report the truth about him. And Stelter never asked Bolling about the massive countersuit filed against Bolling by Ali.

The reality is that Bolling is a pretty vicious creature, and one who continues to assume he can get away with outrageous behavior if he can hide behind either his political allegiances or the personal tragedies his own actions have helped to trigger. It’s his own fault that he was fired by Fox News, and it’s his own hubris that prevents him from understanding that. The smartest thing Bolling could do would be to acknowledge his vicious behavior and publicly apologize, and then retreat from public life. It’s frankly unfortunate that Stelter chose to give a man like this yet another platform to spew hatred and falsehoods.

I have no sympathy for the likes of Ralph Peters. He’s been happy to say the most vicious things he could over the past decade, if it would slake the hatred he knew Fox News fans had for President Obama and for the Democratic Party.

His actions in quitting Fox News are not about standing up for honor and decency. They are about his attempt to distance himself and Republicans from the growing dumpster fire of the Pence White House. Many, many saner Republicans have already been moving away from Pence and Trump. Peters’ angry letter will probably help move a few more away too.

But it is interesting to see Fox News properly being sized up by even Right Wingers for what it has become – a state apologist for the likes of Donald Trump. If I were in the higher echelons of Fox News, I’d be worried to see this – they can’t afford to lose Right Wingers. If anything, this is an indication of the major problems the network is likely to face once Pence and Trump are out of office and the consequences of the Right’s behavior come into play. (The Republicans will be saddled with their deference to the Pence White House, and Fox News will forever be tarred by their inability to acknowledge the truth of what was happening.)

Sadly, this is not a surprise. We already knew that the Pence White House was moving toward active conflict with countries like North Korea. This just clarifies that it’s unlikely we’ll see any kind of summit with NK, and that it’s a lot more likely that Pence will launch a military action. If there is any surprise here, it’s that this has not already happened.

We need to stop allowing the Right Wing to define these discussions under their own rules. For example, it’s a complete LIE to refer to this legislation as “tax cuts”. This was a Tax TRANSFER. Most people aren’t seeing any cuts. The number cited above where 40% only see 8.25 or less per week added to their paychecks is interesting, but it doesn’t cite that an even higher number won’t see higher than 30 or 40 bucks per week, and that’s before they have to deal with massive increases in their healthcare costs, and without accounting for double taxation if they live in a Blue State. When you count those numbers in, an overwhelming majority of Americans are either completely in neutral ground under the new law, or they’re actually seeing less income.

For those of us living and working as employees in Blue States, the tax increase is massive. I’m seeing 200 dollars less per week in my paychecks as a result of this law. I expect to lose up to 10K per year in income due to the loss of nearly all of my deductions. Of course, if I were a business owner or a corporation or an independent contractor, I could continue to enjoy my deductions. It’s because I’m a guild member and a union employee that I now may enjoy the fun of handing 40K of my retirement savings over to massive corporations and wealthy donors to the GOP. It’s not an accident that the Republicans deliberately targeted union employees in Blue States for big increases. Tucker Carlson has effectively admitted to this on his own show.

The one basic hope I have to stop some of the damage is found in the lawsuits filed by multiple Blue States over the double taxation issue – when the law capped State & Local deductions at the low end, it also instituted defacto double taxation on Blue State residents. Because we don’t see that income in any case, and yet we’re now taxed on it. Up to December 2017, every federal tax law passed has acknowledged that we didn’t want to get into double taxation. The new law actually encourages double taxation – so long as it’s for the people the GOP dislikes.

But I wouldn’t call this scenario “tax cuts”. Not unless you’re earning at least 500K per year or have a net worth clearing 50 billion dollars.

It’s not surprising to see Carlson continuing to lie and smear Planned Parenthood in this fashion.

There’s actually more than two big lies here. Although the first two are plenty big enough for one broadcast. No, Planned Parenthood does not use federal funds as PAC contributions. That’s called a felony – although one would think Carlson should know something about the area as a look into the illegal use of campaign funds and illegal influence are a major part of the Pence White House’s current panic about Robert Mueller. And no, Planned Parenthood does not use federal funds for abortion procedures. Those funds are raised as a separate matter. Of course, the Right Wing would like you to believe the lie that all the money in any organization is “fungible” and thus every single dollar held by Planned Parenthood must be deemed to be applicable to abortion.

I’d love to see Right Wingers take that “fungible” argument and apply it to their taxable income, since they take advantage of every deduction they can as wealthy individuals. And maybe they’d like to apply “fungible” to all the scenarios where they’ve had supposedly rogue campaign operatives doing and saying vicious things on their behalf. But maybe “fungible” only applies if it’s something the Right Wing doesn’t like.

The other big lie going on here is a not-so-subtle attempt by the Right to reframe family planning as a discussion of murder rather than a discussion of a woman having the right to choose whether or not she’s going to take a fetus to tem. It’s not murder for a woman to stop a pregnancy, and it’s frankly despicable for the Right Wing to keep trying to play this card. It’s a medical procedure, used many times for health reasons, and also used for appropriate economic reasons and other reasons that are the business of the women and not of Tucker Carlson or his guests. Attacking Planned Parenthood is a favorite game of these people, partly because it’s a first step toward accomplishing the larger goal – that of making any abortion procedure illegal and impossible to obtain. One has to wonder where they think all these babies are going to go. Or if they believe instead that millions of people are simply going to abstain because the Right Wing hypocritically tells them to. (This while so many Right Wingers keep getting caught in their own peccadillos…)

The rank hypocrisy on the Right is staggering.

Fox News was started on the premise that Right Wingers just had to have a cable news feed that attacked President Clinton every minute of the day. Because it wasn’t enough to have Rush Limbaugh and his imitators out there throwing mud across the AM dial. So they went to town with a 24 hour “news” channel. And then this “news” channel pushed to make sure that George W. Bush was perceived as the winner of the 2000 election, even though the numbers in Florida were disputed. (And in fact, the only recount of the state of Florida showed that W actually lost the state…) But the second they had W in the office and Dick Cheney and his cronies actually running the country, they turned on a dime and demanded TOTAL LOYALTY AND OBEDIENCE from everyone while they worked to destroy anything they could from President Clinton’s time in office. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, this “news” channel went even farther – calling anyone who disagreed with the Cheney cronies a traitor. And when the W White House lurched the country into a terrible recession, Fox News bravely insisted that things were much better than everyone else was saying. That is, until President Obama had the temerity to get elected. At which point, Fox News suddenly turned on a dime and declared that the country had gone to Hell, the economy was destroyed and we all needed to blame President Obama for it. For the entirety of his eight years in office, Fox News viciously attacked President Obama – for everything from his birth certificate to his appointments to tracking how many times he played golf. Fox News worked hard for eight years to find some scandal, ANY scandal that they could smear on President Obama. Everything from conspiracy theories to Joe Sestak to Solyndra to Fast & Furious to the IRS to Benghazi to Hillary Clinton’s emails. And they repeatedly got frustrated because these were all debunked as they should have been.

So in 2016, Fox News runs a nonstop smear campaign against Hillary Clinton’s campaign (mildly interrupted by their occasional petty squabbles with Donald Trump), hoping to work the Right Wing strategy of depressing voter turnout as far as possible. And after this backfired in 2012, they found a small success in 2016 – in that they got enough Dems to stay home in the swing states that Trump’s campaign squeaked through. So what do you know, Fox News suddenly turns on a dime again and demands TOTAL LOYALTY AND OBEDIENCE from everyone. So any news channel or anyone in general who points out the truth about the Pence White House and Donald Trump is somehow “biased”. Somehow, as of November 9, 2016, it became unseemly to point out that the elected president is a childish, selfish bigot who repeatedly demonstrates his viciousness, on a daily and even an hourly basis. Somehow, we’re all apparently required to shut up while this group attempts to attack the rest of the country and to bully everyone while they do so.

Fox News spent an entire week salivating over the notion of cheating a career FBI official out of his pension. They cheered this on from the moment they got the leak that it was going to happen. The whole point was to get a story into the mainstream media that McCabe was about to lose his pension so they could torment him with it for a week before it happened. A bit like the Pence White House repeatedly threatening the DACA group before finally making the vicious announcement last September. Because it’s not as much fun to just punch the other kid in the nose when you can spend all day at school telling him and everyone else that you’re going to punch him in the nose. So you get this drumroll all day about how that punch in the nose is coming, and that kid gets to live with all that talk and all that gloating until the bell rings for the end of the school day and pow! One really has to wonder how people like this behave with their children – do they think that this is appropriate behavior for anyone? Or do they just want to get away with as much of this as they can before this bunch gets booted out of office?

Harmeet Dhillon has no credibility to discuss these matters. She’s known for filing frivolous lawsuits in California and generally trying to make mischief to help Far Right clients and hurt anyone with whom she disagrees.

One of her latest campaigns has been her ill-advised nuisance suit against UC Berkeley regarding the nonsensical Ann Coulter scenario from a year ago. (Given that we’ve heard nothing about that suit in a full year, it’s fair to conclude she was forced to withdraw it.)

She touts as a major success her work in trying to silence Yvette Felarca last year. Felarca is a teacher and advocate who was stalked and harassed by Berkeley College Republicans president Troy Worden. Felarca had gone for a restraining order against Worden for his actions and when the resultant courtroom actions went another way, Dhillon tried to get the judge to make Felarca pay 180 thousand dollars in legal bills she couldn’t collect from Worden. The judge laughed at that, but allowed that she could bill Felarca for about 10K. Felarca has of course appealed that and will not be paying it. And Worden has been dumped by the BCR for his behavior in any case. Somehow, Dhillon is attempting to play that situation up as a win. One has to wonder if she gets dizzy after that much spin.

It’s abundantly clear that Fox News was given advance notice that the Pence White House was about to fire McCabe. The mistake that was made here was just that somebody jumped the gun by a few hours in posting their coverage.

To be honest, the posting of the story wasn’t the biggest problem seen at the channel over the past few days. It was bad, to be sure, but in the greater context of Fox News’ coverage this week, it was more like the icing on a rancid cake. It was frankly more distasteful to see pundit after pundit at Fox News cheerleading the notion of firing a man as an act of political revenge, with the express purpose of trying to destroy his pension. Some of the Fox News personalities actually took it a bit farther, in advocating for McCabe to somehow be thrown in jail too, for his temerity. It was interesting to see how much gleefulness Fox News showed throughout the week about finding this technicality so they could try to put a personal hurt on the man. The last time I saw that kind of approach was when Dick Cheney and Karl Rove went after Joe Wilson by trying to endanger his wife. You’d think these people would learn at some point.

It’s a guarantee that McCabe will appeal this action, given the way it was handled and given the capricious approach taken by the Pence White House. If I had to guess, I’d say that a federal judge will restore his pension but allow the firing to stand – in other words, the courtroom result will be that the Pence White House will be affirmed in its right to fire who it wishes but not in its blatant attempt to strip someone of their 20-year-earned pension as a cheap political shot.

It’s also a guarantee that Jeff Sessions will be taking other actions fairly soon – particularly when Mueller indicts Trump Jr and Kushner. If Sessions wants to keep his job and knows what’s good for him, he’ll have indictments ready to throw at the Clintons, so that we’ll wind up with competing coverage and headlines – one set about Trump’s blanket pardoning of his kids and another with the juicy footage of the Clintons being arrested and publicly frog-marched.

Nunes is blatantly lying about the entire matter, with an obvious intent toward providing some justification for the upcoming perp walk of the Clintons that will certainly follow any indictment of Trump Jr or Kushner.

The House GOP never had any intention of investigating this situation. Their entire purpose was to steer the narrative in reverse so that the public would become confused as to who the real criminals were. (This is the same trick regularly used by the Right Wing when they want to short circuit a popular statewide initiative – when California had the Big Green proposition, the Right Wing immediately got another prop on the ballot that looked like Big Green but actually was designed to kill it if it passed.)

And Nunes is repeating the same nonsense the Right Wing has been spouting for months about the Fusion GPS opposition research on Trump. The Right Wing is frantically trying to convince everyone that the dossier was entirely funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC as some kind of evil plot with those rascally Russians. When in fact, the dossier was funded by multiple GOP opponents of Trump in the primaries, a situation that only changed late in the game when Trump clinched the nomination. At that point, after most of the work had been done and paid for, Fusion GPS offered their materials to the Dems, who agreed to pay for them to finish it and show them what they had.

The real investigation of the Trump campaign and criminality is being done by Mueller. We’ll just have to see if that investigation is allowed to get past the Kushner and Trump Jr indictments, or if the Pence White House closes it down at that point. The one thing we can be sure of is that Trump is quite serious about “Lock Her Up” when it comes to Hillary Clinton, and Fox News would be delighted to see that happen.

The story with Saucier is yes, he was going to sell the photos. I don’t know who he specifically wanted to sell them to, but the evidence was clear that he was trying to broker a sale. He took a series of photos of classified areas and equipment on the USS Alexandria and left an unlocked phone with some of those photos at a pickup point for the buyer – except that someone else found the phone first. When Saucier was confronted and questioned about it by investigators, he initially denied that he’d taken the photos. He then went home and hid his African Dream phone card. He took his laptop, phone and an SD card to his basement , wrapped them in plastic and smashed them to bits before driving the wreckage to his grandparents’ house and dropping the mess in the area out back. All of this came out in the investigation, as well as an unlicensed pistol in his house.

The authorities had Saucier dead to rights and he knew it. I don’t think he got very far in his plan or they would have been a lot harsher with him – instead, they allowed him to plea to the least of the charges. He already served his time in jail and was dishonorably discharged. All this pardon does, to my knowledge, is wipe the discharge from his record. And essentially spit in everyone’s face, just like these guys did when they pardoned Arpaio.

I note that the Fox News narrative about Saucier has been a lie from the beginning. Hannity and the other pundits would have you believe Saucier was just taking selfies and was overly punished. No, Saucier was specifically taking forensic and panoramic photos of classified areas of the submarine maneuvering and reactor areas. The only reason he wasn’t charged on espionage grounds is because they let him plea to the lesser charges. And they only let him do that because he’d destroyed the laptop, phone and card that had the rest of the evidence. To have reconstructed those devices would have meant a lot of time and money that frankly wasn’t worthwhile here. (Where they did actually spend money was on Hillary Clinton’s server, and that cost millions to recover.) Saucier had a choice – if he really was innocent, he could have fought this in court. He knew they had him, and he was okay to take the least punishment possible.

As a sidenote, the Fox News version of this story, where sailors are overpunished for taking selfies on the sub, is completely debunked by the fact that several of Saucier’s fellow sailors on the Alexandria actually did get in trouble for taking selfies while on board. Their punishments were the usual smack on the wrist – one was temporarily reduced a grade in enlisted rank, and another was fined a few hundred bucks. As usual, Fox News is only telling a small part of the story, and only to make sure that their spin is supported.

The news today is that the Pence White House is now trying to put a bunch of conditions upon any talks happening – essentially to make sure that no talks actually happen. This is partly because they know they’re exposed to criticism for doing exactly what Ellen is pointing out: caving to long-standing North Korean wishes without getting anything in exchange. And so we now see the White House frantically trying to walk back their capitulation so they can play the “we’re being tough” card. And if North Korea doesn’t play into that card, Trump can weasel out of the meeting without doing anything, while still playing “tough guy” to his base.

But there’s a bit more to the Pence White House’s panic over this situation that should be considered. Let’s say that North Korea calls Pence’s bluff and leaves no easy exit route for Trump from the meeting. So Trump is compelled to go to North Korea and have a discussion in another 6 weeks or so. Except that he has almost no State Dept guidance and no idea what to say to the North Koreans. Further, Trump is guaranteed to do or say something extremely childish and nonsensical while talking to the North Koreans – and that’s an event that even the Republicans know would potentially have a catastrophic result for everyone. I would argue that the Pence White House would greatly, greatly prefer to find a way to make sure this meeting does not happen. They’d rather just play on the notion that it could have happened due to the wonderfulness of Pence’s Tweeter-in-Chief, but that the North Koreans blew the opportunity.

Julian Assange has certainly exposed malfeasance by major players (particularly in the leaked helicopter footage), but he has also behaved in a singularly irresponsible manner – and he’s endangered the lives of people caught between him and the higher-ups he enjoys embarrassing. He’s also never answered for the sexual misconduct for which he originally fled into the Ecuadorian embassy.

Assange’s account of how he got ahold of the Clinton emails has been fishy from the beginning. He knows exactly what he’s saying – he just makes sure that he doesn’t say that Putin himself gave him the materials.

Stone is an even bigger coward and a dodge. In this interview, Stone plays all the same games that Assange does – he lists off all the various options of people who didn’t give him information. But he doesn’t say that he didn’t get any information. He just leaves out the categories of those who DID give him that information – without which he could not have published those gloating tweets or whatever when he was aware ahead of time that more WikiLeaks material was coming out.

I honestly don’t know when Stone will be hauled in by Mueller – I think he’s a much smaller figure than he’d like to be thought of, and Mueller hasn’t moved into his area just yet. Based on Mueller’s pattern, he’s building toward the hackers, and then to the document theft, and then to who knew about it, which would lead into the Trump campaign and thus to Stone. It will be interesting to see how Hannity reacts after Stone does get hauled in…

The comments from the Pence White House’s spokesman (or I suppose “spokestweeter”) are loaded with false premises and false conclusions, and all the cheerleading from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Rasmussen’s push-polls will not solve that problem for him.

1. The first year of the Pence White House was an embarrassing disaster, where very little was accomplished amid all the controversies and the inability of Pence to get much of anything done. The only real movement that happened was a pointed erasure of every single thing the prior Administration had accomplished, in terms of getting rid of programs started or supported by President Obama, and in terms of deliberately starving multiple federal departments of resources and personnel. The only notable events that happened in the legislature were the ramming-through of Neil Gorsuch by Mitch McConnell, who celebrated his bullying by engaging in high-fives on the Senate Floor after disgracing himself in his conduct for over 14 months, and the passing of the extremely regressive Tax Transfer at the end of the year, something that will result in tens of millions of middle class Americans seeing much higher taxes while wealthy individuals and corporations get a huge gift. The only visible “accomplishments” we’ve been seeing have been disgraces like the removal and deletion of major environmental research from the EPA website (something that research groups thankfully anticipated by copying and preserving all those documents before Pence could have them deleted) and the deliberate sabotage of the Affordable Care Act.
2. The issue with Senate confirmations isn’t just that the Democratic members of that body are asking for proper evaluation of many thoroughly unqualified appointees. It’s that the Pence White House hasn’t made very many appointments. They’re deliberately understaffing most of their departments and refusing to appoint replacements. They’re also trying to make life miserable for the current employees, in the hope that those people will choose to retire or leave public service. We literally have dozens of embassies around the world that do not have an ambassador or a complete senior staff. And we have major positions in Justice, State, the EPA, Education, etc, that are notably unfilled and have nobody even named for appointment. (The clear intent with Education and the EPA, among others, is to take the first steps towards simply closing the departments if the Pence White House is allowed to inflict a second term.)
3. The Republicans’ constant refrain about “obstruction” is entirely hypocritical, given that they spent the entire 8 years of President Obama’s terms engaged in deliberate and total obstruction themselves. We should remember that the Right Wing engaged in this despicable behavior at a time when the nation was in a major recession, with their stated intent being their wish to foil any attempt by the Democratic Party to get the country back on its feet, in the hope that they could score political points and get their majorities back. The Democrats’ current attempts to rein in the damage being inflicted by Mike Pence and his appointees is both appropriate and necessary, given that no positive positions have been taken by the Pence White House – only attacks on the prior Administration. We should also note that the current state of the Democrats trying to resist the ramming-through of disastrous appointments and policies is taking place during a moment of economic prosperity shepherded in by President Obama and the Democratic Party in spite of the Right Wing’s constant hateful opposition. So the Democrats are resisting moves that will actually hurt a growing economy. The Republicans’ vicious behavior in 2009 and onward was intended to keep a languishing economy down – both in their obstruction and in their constant talking-down of any progress that was made.
4. As for DACA, nothing is going to come from this Congress, and Mike Pence is fully aware of it. Trump’s comments about wanting to “get something done” or getting a bill done “out of love” has been revealed to just be puffery for public consumption. His true feelings about the situation have been revealed both by Rush Limbaugh and by Trump himself, when he mused about not wanting any more immigrants from the “xxxxhole” countries. His true feelings have been revealed by his threat to veto any DACA plan that does not include the hateful and xenophobic dismantling of the current immigration system. Now, we’ve had an interesting twist in the refusal of the Supreme Court to circumvent normal appellate procedure on DACA. Unless the Pence White House wants to violate a court order, DACA will actually continue for the next few months, while Pence appeals to the 9th Circuit and the 2nd Circuit to have the stays lifted on his attempt to destroy the program. It is entirely possible that these matters will drag on into the fall before those circuit courts hear the Pence appeals, meaning that DACA would continue on into next year before the Supreme Court would get the issue back, which in turn means that a new Congress with Democratic majorities could actually pass a fix. Except that we know that Mike Pence will have his spokesman veto that fix…

John, I think the intent is to try to head off a Watergate-level disaster for the Pence White House by throwing so much mud at the Democrats that nobody can see straight.

I don’t think this tactic is working in terms of affecting the actual Mueller investigation, however. Yet. We’ll have to see after he indicts Trump Jr and Kushner – my instincts say that Trump will completely lose control when that happens and we’ll have a much more serious problem.

As for an investigation of the Clintons and their Foundation and the emails, etc., that’s been on the Pence White House’s agenda since the campaign. And they haven’t forgotten their pledge to “Lock Her Up”. Once the Trump kids are indicted, I’d expect to see a perp walk of the Clintons within a week or two.

Kurtz frankly hasn’t had any credibility since he joined Fox News full time and began spouting support for whatever the usual line of the day was. It’s disheartening to see this, but there’s no way around it.

As for the Breitbart site, it is and has always been a haven for haters. Angry conservatives loved Andrew Breitbart because he told them what they wanted to hear – that they were somehow virtuous for hating others, and that their opponents were genuinely evil. Breitbart is a man whose vicious behavior over the course of his career truly made the world a much fouler place than when he arrived in it. I can’t say that he has had as much nefarious influence as, say, Roger Ailes, but he certainly emboldened plenty of vicious people to let their inner hater fly. Case in point, sadly, is the current Tweeter-in-Chief.

When people look back on this time in American history in another 50 years, they will note how many of the Fox News pundits really went all-in on the Kool-Aid. Kurtz has unfortunately positioned himself in the neighborhood of the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh. A truly sad way for him to end his career, but he made this choice and must now live with the consequences.

The world ended up with the Pence White House because 2-3 million Dems in the swing states didn’t show up to vote in 2016. Had even a tenth of them bothered to participate, we would not now be having this discussion.

First, let’s not dignify Nunes’ little political spin piece with being anything like an official or reliable governmental “memo”. It’s Nunes’ desperate attempt to smear the Mueller probe before further indictments are named in the coming weeks. And the Dems have a memo of their own that has very different conclusions. Frankly, if anyone is trying to “weaponized” intelligence (or a shutdown, for that matter), it’s, as usual, the Right Wing. For some reason, these guys seem to think we’re still in the Year of the Bully. They don’t realize that the calendar turned and we’re now in the Year of the Troll.

I note that a second dossier is being now being used by the FBI in their investigation of the various Russian issues – and the second dossier apparently corroborates many of the same details heard in the first one, including the same information about how compromised Trump and his family are when it comes to Russian dictates.

It sounds like the Right Wing is trying a Hail Mary to see if they can get someone to fire Mueller before he indicts members of the Trump family or even gets to Trump himself and acting president Pence.