Amusing first comment here, including a bigoted comment about Shepard Smith. But past that, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Pence White House would have Trump take this action. It’s intended as a distraction from everything else that’s going on, particularly the Senate’s continuing moves toward eliminating the ACA and giving Pence a big win before they break in mid-August.

It’s of course a hateful action, but again, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Pence White House would engage in hateful and vicious behavior. It’s what their base expects and loves, and it lines up with what Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity want to encourage throughout the country.

And at this point, Fox News is doing its part to retroactively justify the hateful act.

I strongly recommend people not start celebrating while this matter is on the Senate floor. Just because one proposal was shot down does not mean the repeal isn’t going through. There will be multiple proposals brought up for votes, and there will be multiple opportunities for McConnell to sneak in an amendment that does what the Right Wing really wants here – namely to just repeal the ACA and get rid of it. If they can get that through with 50 votes, it’s over. And if McConnell needs to change the basic voting rules via amendment to make everything a 51 vote situation (meaning 50 plus President Pence), he’ll do it. These guys want a win very badly, and Pence will twist arms to make sure they get one.

And even if this somehow doesn’t go their way, keep your eyes open for Pence to simply pull the funding for the exchanges. That’s been their lurking threat since January. The only reason they haven’t used that option is that they want the Congress to take the blame and the hit. And it plays to their narrative that they’re somehow following the Constitution better than President Obama.

This is Coulter’s second major tantrum this year, and both show the same level of childishness and viciousness from her.

The first was her cranky behavior in Berkeley, when she was fraudulently booked for an appearance and refused to acknowledge that the campus was trying to fix the problem by offering her a legitimate venue on a more appropriate date and time. Her response was to demand that the campus and students cancel another event to make room for her – something that was never going to happen, as she well knew.

This time, she decided that her comfort mattered more than anything else, including the needs of other passengers or the airline.

Same basic perspective and same basic problem. Unfortunate for everyone else.

Ellen is correct to note the completely tortured logic being used by Hume in this segment. And he didn’t figure that out on his own – it’s an old chestnut Right Wing talking point that Rush Limbaugh has been using for years. Only Limbaugh uses the home insurance analogy. As though a person who has a recurring medical condition is the same situation as a homeowner who wants to get a handout after they burn their house down. Again, we should remember that the Right Wing position in this matter is a consistent one – as far as the Right is concerned, it’s your problem to pay for your doctor bill. They don’t want to hear about it. If you have higher bills because you have bigger problems, then that’s your cross to bear. Maybe you should work a second or third job and deliver pizzas. (Of course, Hume says this while enjoying the rich health benefits of being a lifetime member of SAG-AFTRA and as a multi-millionaire) The Right Wing position is that there should never have been an ACA, because that’s just the government taking money away from the healthy to allow everyone else to steal an “entitlement” they don’t really need or deserve. Getting rid of the ACA is essentially just desserts for everyone from the Right Wing point of view, and if that action causes many to lose their belief that society can collectively act to help each other, that’s actually a major win for the Right, which would prefer the notion of every man for himself. Also known as Libertarianism.

But there were far nastier moments in Chris Wallace’s panel conclave today than Hume’s petty viciousness toward sick people. The saddest part of this is that the only truly non-Right voice I could see there was Dr. Emanuel (I wouldn’t count Julie Pace, who’s been repeatedly called out for accepting Right Wing canards as legitimate facts).

The panel included Michael Needham from the Far, Far Right Wing group Heritage Action – the very same group that inflicted the list of horrors Mike Pence is using in isolation for consideration for any Supreme Court vacancy that should arise. The very same group that concocted the current GOP ACA “replacement” plan. (It’s due to the Heritage Action fingerprints all over it that I’ve dubbed it the “Heritage Action Health Act” or HAHA for short…) Needham wasted no time in any subject trying to slip vicious lies into the discussion, hoping that he could get away with as many as possible, given that Dr. Emanuel would not likely know about them. (My favorite moment of this was when Needham threw in the debunked lie about Ted Kennedy supposedly trying to curry favor with Russians before the 1984 election – Emanuel looked completely confused at that reference and wasn’t able to immediately call Needham on the lie, so it just lay there unrefuted. For the record, Ted Kennedy did NOT do this, and the document the Right Wing wants to rely on for it has been completely discredited – Rush Limbaugh still tries to bring this one up from time to time, but it’s easily batted away by anyone who knows anything about it – and Emanuel was sadly not ready for that non-sequitor.)

Needham and Hume also openly lied about what is actually happening in the Senate with the efforts to get rid of the ACA. Hume tried to ply the line that actually the latest version of the bill (with Ted Cruz’ transparent attempt to skyrocket the premiums for patients with pre-existing conditions) is somehow getting “very close” to passing, which is the line that the Pence White House’s spokesman is frantically trying to push in his weekly address. Hume is ignoring the fact that with 2 GOP senators having already announced their opposition, there’s pressure about which of the other GOP holdouts will be the third one to say no, and thus be held responsible for the bill dying on the vine. It’s not about passing the bill – it’s about passing the buck. My money is on Dean Heller saying no first and then the dam breaking and another 5 or 6 GOP senators jumping ship. And that’s where Needham’s other lie kicks in. Needham tried to say that only 15 or 16 GOP senators would agree to sign on for a total repeal of the ACA. But he’s parsing it – he means for a bill that would have to get 60 votes, not something that could be rammed through reconciliation. (And the 60 vote threshold will be junked by McConnell as soon as he tires of needing to play these games – the only question is whether McConnell holds out for fear of falling victim to it himself after the 2018 midterms…)

After the Senate realizes it cannot pass the current bill and really cannot come up with a “replacement” that anyone can agree upon, we’ll be given the Repeal Only option, which is what most Hard Right congresspeople were pushing from the beginning. I particularly enjoyed the Rand Paul segment, where he announced his concept of a “replacement” actually consisting of just repealing the ACA and telling the consumers to exercise free choice in finding insurance. Paul’s idea continues to be to separate the “repeal” and “replace” sections so that the former can immediately pass and the latter can be bogged down in committee debates and tabled to infinity, just like Hillary Clinton’s health care idea from the mid-90s. As we’ve discussed, Paul has already built in the notion of saying that the “replace” section would just be a bunch of spending that would never fly with real conservatives, so that it should be left to RINOs and Dems “who always want to vote for big spending items anyway”. Meaning that Rand Paul would want to get rid of the ACA and then blame the Dems for not voting for an inadequate replacement that furthers the punishment.

I note that Dr. Emanuel tried to point out the fallacy in Brit Hume’s arguments, but in the absence of him having any time to point out the rest of the argument, it came across as whining rather than as a factual rebuttal. Which was, of course, Wallace’s real point.

Yet another temper tantrum from Bolling, who’s clearly still smarting from not being given Bill O’Reilly’s show and from being left in the afternoon hour while the rest of The Five were able to transition to prime time.

News flash for Bolling: President Obama did not cause this meeting to occur. The evidence shows that the Trump campaign enthusiastically attended it to hear any dirt they could get on Clinton.

Bolling is trying to push the discredited notion that somehow reporting the truth about the corruption of the Trump group is a sign of “collusion” between “The Left” and “The Media”. He apparently doesn’t know what actual Left Wing media is, since we’ve never seen him actually talk to anyone from the Left, such as Amy Goodman, Dean Baker, Larry Bensky or Sonali Kolhatkar. He’s also neatly reversing the facts. It’s not that there’s some conspiracy in the mainstream media to invent the fumbling we’ve seen from the Pence White House – it’s that the Right Wing is desperately trying to distract everyone from the coverage of what has actually been happening. And in the forefront of this panic at the media are Right Wing outlets like Fox News and AM Radio.

Interesting to hear a lecture about “sore losers” from a man who bristled at both Obama victories in 2008 and 2012, and who repeatedly did anything he could to undermine that presidency for the entire 8 years.

Also interesting to hear how Hillary Clinton “overwhelmingly lost” the election, when she in fact won the popular vote by 3 million votes. It’s true that Trump squeaked by in the swing states, and it’s true that several million Obama voters in those states chose to stay home rather than vote, but there has been no real mandate for the Pence White House, which continues to be historically unpopular and which refuses to do anything to reach out to the rest of the country.

When the history is written about this particular epoch, it will be quite harsh about the behavior of the Pence White House and even harsher about the behavior of its lackies in the Right Wing media, even the lower-level ones like Bolling.

This kind of viciousness is to be expected from Watters, as is the ineffectual reaction from Juan Williams, who has sadly become the new Alan Colmes for the network. His presence on the Five has become almost unwatchable, because he’s shouted down at every turn, sneered at for nearly every statement he makes, and is treated like the idiot nephew everyone has to tolerate.

The actual idea that Watters and the Right are discussing is a serious threat – and they mean it. If the Right can maintain or increase their standings in both Houses next year, I guarantee something like this will be passed through for signature by the Pence White House. They’re not kidding. If they can both express this level of hatred for Mexico (and the Dems) and simultaneously attack everyone outside of their sandbox by taking away funding from Food Stamps, etc, that’s a big win for them. Keep in mind that this has nothing to do with women’s health or whether low-income people can afford to eat. These guys don’t care about that. This is about punching the Dems in the nose and having a good time while doing it. Future historians will view this period quite harshly (similar to how we can see the despicable nature of those who tried to maintain and defend slavery up to the Civil War), but people like Jesse Watters figure that they’ll have Fox News around at that time to try to cover it up.

Let’s be open about what Hannity is actually advocating here. His goal isn’t to replace the ACA – it’s to get rid of it. He’s coming from the same place as Rush Limbaugh and the Pence White House – just repeal the ACA and worry about how to replace it later, if ever. And that’s almost certainly what will be happening this summer.

Hannity and his associates on the Far Right are not interested in whether someone in Tacoma or Toledo can get to see a doctor. As far as the Right is concerned, that’s your problem, not theirs. They don’t want to hear about it.

What the Right is actually going for here is the cherry on top of their sundae – the scrapping of the only remaining vestige of the presidency of Barack Obama outside of his two appointments to the Supreme Court. After they get the straight repeal to Pence’s desk and Trump dutifully signs it, the Right will throw a party that will make the Rose Garden affair over the House bill look like a quiet nod. Repealing the ACA means that they can retroactively declare the Obama Presidency the complete failure they’ve been labelling it for years – and I guarantee that Hannity will be ready with his show-length special attacking President Obama as a failure the moment this thing gets signed.

The current Senate bill looks almost certain to fail, since they can’t get to 50 votes with what they have. Which is why McConnell will go with the Rand Paul idea of just repealing and putting off the effective date – which will still kill the ACA just as dead within a couple of months. McConnell cancelled the first half of the August recess specifically to give himself time to generate the straight repeal once the current bill fails next week. There will be a momentary breath of relief from the Dems, but that will be short-lived once they see what’s coming next.

We shouldn’t be surprised at this happening – the only surprise here is that they didn’t just do this in January. But one supposes they wanted to play a line about how they were trying to work with the Dems. Even while the Right has repeatedly bragged that they don’t need a single Dem vote to do anything in either House – it’s only when the Right can’t get their people together that their failures are suddenly the fault of the Dems.

BTW – I also note that the Right’s whining about the appointments and nominees completely ignores how the Right obstructed FAR more nominees from both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, specifically so they could try to pull maneuvers like this. For the last couple of years of the Obama presidency, almost nobody got through – because the Right was hoping to completely stymie the Dems and then get all those appointments for themselves. Obviously, the most infamous example of this behavior was the Right’s refusal to even acknowledge that Merrick Garland had been properly nominated to the Supreme Court for over a year. The Right does not get to rewrite this history.

Reince Priebus looked a lot like Nathan Thurm when he was interviewed today on this. He was visibly sweating and nervous, and his answers didn’t make sense. He tried the tactic of saying “I really don’t know anything about this meeting” and then went into a bunch of what he hoped would be harmless details, like how long it was, when it took place, who was there and what they talked about.

Unfazed by all the contradictions in his account, he then went on to try to say this idea would somehow backfire on the Dems because Circa News says so. Which would be spit-take funny if viewers knew anything about Circa News and its primary reporter Sara Carter.

Sara Carter is infamous for her false and misleading reporting on the matter of former Border Patrol agents Ramos & Compean, who were properly convicted and sentenced for their attempted murder of a fleeing suspect, who Ramos shot in the rear end. (And there was the matter of the guys trying to cover up the shooting…) Carter made a name for herself in Right Wing media with that canard, even after it was thoroughly debunked, because the Hard Right loved the narrative she was telling, and its true purpose. (She was painting the felons as heroes of the Border, and was trying to defend a practice that would essentially turn the Border into a far more dangerous badland than it already is.) These days, Carter peddles whatever conspiracy theories the Hard Right wants to hear for Circa, which is why Sean Hannity keeps putting her on his show. While the rest of the world is watching the mess of the Pence White House and its various entanglements with Russia, Carter keeps pushing any thread she can find that might be about Hillary Clinton or Loretta Lynch.

So to be clear, Circa News is not a legitimate news source. It is a partisan attack group that is trying to establish an alternative narrative, something they’re really going to need after the Pence White House is sent packing.

Interesting to hear all this hatred toward the Dems for voicing appropriate criticism of the behavior of the Pence White House and its chief spokesman on Twitter. As I recall, during President Obama’s terms, Fox News regularly featured psychological and personal judgments about everyone in the Obama administration. This included Keith Ablow, but also multiple panelists on O’Reilly’s shows, and multiple panelists on other shows, all referring to President Obama as being “weak”. (The purpose of that was to tie him to the Right Wing perception of Jimmy Carter as a weak and ineffectual man)

Throughout President Obama’s terms, Fox News repeatedly attacked him for every single thing he said and did, with the only exception being the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. (Of course, Rush Limbaugh made a point of continuing his attacks on Obama even then, with a sarcastically overblown description about how President Obama must have done the whole operation by himself…)

The Far Right viciously resented that President Obama was more respected around the world than George W Bush or his enforcer, Dick Cheney. (I note that there are outstanding warrants for their arrest should they appear in various European cities, which is why we don’t hear about them travelling overseas anymore.) Obama did not go on an “apology tour”, much as the Right would like to paint it that way. He went on a series of visits to foreign countries who were appropriately concerned about the warmongering and torture that the W White House had engaged in over the prior few years. Obama’s discussions with those countries led to a breath of relief from the world, restored a lot of our credibility and obviously led directly to the Nobel commission giving that prize to him.

I find it interesting that Hegseth and McCain think they can make their viciousness and hatred somehow look reasoned if they holdsa pen in his hand while stating outright lies. (Hannity does this as well, and I have to believe it’s based on some kind of polling that showed their viewers think the speaker has more intelligence if they hold a pen and might be taking notes…) Hegseth and the Right’s resentment of President Obama being given the Nobel Peace Prize is pretty obvious here. They simply cannot stand that a President they hated was actually popular around the world and actually did work to restore our credibility and integrity after the disaster of the W years. I note that the “millions dead” were not a result of President Obama restoring our credibility and working with the rest of the world, but were instead a result of the massive regional destabilization caused by W’s foolhardy invasion of Iraq and his bumbling behavior in Afghanistan – both of which stemmed from decades of wrong-headed foreign policy going back to Ronald Reagan’s unfortunate adventures in the area. Hegseth clearly doesn’t understand this, but the situation is not that most people have turned on the Pence White House “because he takes a different perspective that the American people elected him to take.” The situation is that most people in America and around the world have been taken aback by the immaturity of Donald Trump, by his inability to do a job he said he wanted to do, and by the Pence White House’s clear and vicious isolationism. And Hegseth doesn’t get to rewrite the history on the election – the majority of the American people did not vote for this – it was a sliver of voters in the swing states that Pence was able to win by gaming the election and depressing millions of Dem votes.

Ellen is correct to note that it’s bizarre to hear these people trying to play the “I don’t care what you say anyway” game, when they’re spending this whole segment trying to attack Dick Durbin. If they didn’t care, they’d just ignore it.

McCain’s screed of course ignores that President Obama took multiple steps and made multiple statements regarding Russian behavior throughout his presidency. He worked at all levels to deal with Putin’s actions, and also to engage with the Russians (something that McCain clearly doesn’t understand, as it would require a much greater level of complexity than she appears capable of handling.) But McCain shows her hand when she openly supports Trump’s isolationism and xenophobia, and then says that “we are going to completely undo the legacy of the last eight years”. Because that’s the actual intent here – to erase the presidency of Barack Obama. Funny to hear McCain try to talk with a moral tone about the Left and Russia – one has to wonder if she’s ever actually heard anything from the actual Left in this country, such as Pacifica Radio and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.

McCain also lies about President Obama “arming the Middle East” as her way of getting around the fact that Trump’s vicious statements about American media were made while he was in Europe. (And that’s yet another embarrassment on top of the multitude of others we have endured from the Pence White House…) Hegseth gets into a weird lie about how Donald Trump was just criticizing the press for their coverage and how Trump wasn’t saying anything about other politicians. Which forgets how Trump was attacking President Obama, and how Trump and his people regularly continue to attack Hillary Clinton even today.

Interesting that McCain is full of righteous indignation about President Obama correctly noting how out of line the W administration had been in encouraging torture and warmaking and in demanding fealty from the rest of the world while it did so. She seems to have some kind of fixation on the word “arrogance.” Here’s a news flash for her – President Obama was addressing very real behavior problems and very real arrogance that we saw from the W White House and now from the Pence White House. If she doesn’t want to hear anyone call the Right on their “arrogance”, it would help to not show arrogance. Same thing applies about racism. If they don’t want to be called out for racism, then don’t say racist things.

Kennedy’s last statement is a marvel of hypocrisy. She claims the media and Dem politicians never criticized President Obama’s foreign policies – but that’s blatantly untrue. President Obama was regularly and roundly criticized, and not just from Fox News and AM Radio where there was an obvious agenda to obstruct and dismiss him. But while Kennedy is making this statement, she’s forgetting that the Right Wing press demanded allegiance and obedience from everyone else to W and now to Trump, because they wanted to support their home team. The only real criticism I saw from the Right of the W presidency was that they wanted him to pardon Ramos & Compean so they could encourage more Border Patrol agents to shoot border crossers. But when it came to bread and butter issues, we were repeatedly told by these people – “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists!” Kennedy shows a lot of gall in trying to ignore and rewrite this history. (On the other hand, Kennedy’s own documented prior demonstrations of her ignorance may explain this…)

Finally, it’s interesting to hear these guys trying to talk up Trump’s vicious partisan rally in Poland as though it were an example of historical scholarship. McCain’s final comment about how the Left is somehow “hysterical” is bizarre in and of itself. Would she prefer that we simply note that Donald Trump regularly acts like a small child (as she herself noted during the campaign) and note that this is a dangerous notion when that person is ostensibly in charge of our military?

We should keep in mind the reality of what happened in Poland, not the cheerleading that Fox News and AM Radio would like to do.

The reality is that the Pence White House’s public spokesman once again embarrassed himself, this time with a rambling, pedantic set of remarks that served just to aggrandize himself and further his obsession with trying to bully his critics and insult President Obama. The audience at this speech was a group of Far Right supporters of the Polish regime and of US Far Right notions, so it’s no surprise that they were eagerly applauding and chanting his name. Essentially, the Polish regime just gave Trump a rally like he’d get in Texas. Probably made him feel right at home.

The reality of the Pence White House’s approach to foreign affairs is that we’ve managed to alienate the rest of the world – in a manner that may take decades to undo the damage. Where before the US was looked to as a nation the world could depend on for leadership in multiple areas, now the world is retreating from America and charting their own course, since Trump has made clear that Pence has little interest in working with them. This isn’t completely a bad thing – it’s healthier for other nations to find their own path and not worry about our behavior, and in the long run it means that the balance of global relations will be more even. But in the short term, one really wonders how the next president in 2021 will be able to convince Angela Merkel or any other foreign leader that the commitments we make will be honored in the future. This is precisely the mess that Tom Cotton was trying to make with his treasonous letter to Iran a couple of years ago, when the GOP was frantically trying to scuttle Kerry’s work there. The behavior of the Pence White House is essentially a continuation of the Cotton letter – it tells the rest of the world that they can’t depend on the US to live up to its obligations, and that other nations should expect that the American Right will petulantly walk away from any commitments we make that they don’t feel like honoring.

I note that this situation is also reflected in the Pence White House’s domestic policy, which is entirely driven by their obsession with erasing everything accomplished by President Obama’s administration over 8 years. We can see it in Pence’s shameful approach to foreign refugees, who are once again being threatened by the Muslim ban, thus reinforcing the notion that America is no longer receptive to “your poor, your tired, your huddled masses”, but instead would like slam the door on their fingers. We can see it in Pence’s continuing attempts to create a racist, hateful wall on the Mexican border, and in Trump’s continuing attempts to bully the Mexican people about it – including the fantasy that he can force the Mexicans to fund it. We can see it in Pence’s steady increase in pressure on undocumented immigrants, particularly those who enrolled in the DACA program. After another president takes off and tries to undo this damage, it’s hard to see how the DACA enrollees will ever trust a US president again – since any program can simply be erased by the next president on a whim, and the enrollees’ information can be used as a weapon to deport them. (And this is really a big point of the Pence approach here – where President Obama tried to bring these people out of the shadows and into some kind of normalcy, the Pence group is intent on chasing them out of the light. Because in addition to feeding the Right’s hatred of Mexican immigrants, it really helps the various businesses who employ them – if the immigrants are constantly scared of being deported and are living with one eye over their shoulder, they’ll work for much lower wages and much worse conditions. So it’s a win-win.)

And there’s the whole healthcare debacle – where insurers properly do not believe that Pence will honor the various subsidies and supports that President Obama instituted for the ACA. Since Pence’s spokesman keeps yelling that the ACA is “dead”, the insurers are doing what they must to protect their own bottom line – they’re backing away from it. The situation was already tenuous enough with so many GOP governors and state legislators refusing to participate and thus making their own residents’ lives more difficult. With the Pence White House refusing to subsidize the insurers (as we predicted Pence would do), what little coverage was available in many red states has now been reduced to a tiny amount, if anything. It’s been a self-fulfilling prophecy, intended to help buttress Trump’s constant whining about “victims of Obamacare” and about how it’s “failed”. After the Senate proceeds to a simple repeal of the ACA (which I understand can be quickly confirmed by the House and sent to Pence’s desk for signature), we’ll re-enter the scenario where tens of millions cannot afford healthcare and wind up in the emergency rooms when their situations become dire. Just like the immigrants and the refugees and the rest of the world, the insurers and medical providers will be extremely wary of any further government programs in the future. And that’s the point for the Far Right.

Loesch has made a career out of encouraging hatred and viciousness, and Fox News has promoted her campaigns without any problems. Loesch has also made a habit out of trying to bully other speakers on Fox News, sometimes to embarrassing effect. I honestly don’t know what set her off, but she seems to delight in indulging in a mean streak whenever confronted with someone who disagrees with her.

And she could do everyone a favor by being honest about this ad. She was not doing an ad for a Peace Corps-like organization. She was shilling for the NRA, and yes, she was advocating violence. Just as Hannity has been trying to get Right Wingers to do a full Tantaros and just punch Obama supporters in the face. If we want to really look at her statement, she wasn’t trying to fight violence with truth. She was encouraging her listeners to fight truth with violence.

If she had any sense of human decency, she would apologize to the nation for her offensive behavior. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Like Ann Coulter, she profits from that behavior.

Kennedy’s vicious comments here are best understood in the context of how the Right Wing (and thus Fox News and AM Radio) see this issue.

In short, the Right Wing has never believed that healthcare is anyone’s problem but the person who seeks treatment. You need to see a doctor? Fine, go to the doctor. You can’t afford the doctor’s price? Fine, save your own money up til you can afford it. You still can’t afford it? Try the Emergency Room if they’ll take you. Still not getting help? Well, then, that’s your problem, isn’t it?

The last thing the Right Wing ever wanted to see was a situation where anyone in the country would have to pay a single dime for someone else to get medical treatment. At the same time, the Right Wing has never wanted a situation where we had anything like Medicare or Social Security either – which is why they regularly attack those programs as “entitlements” – a term meant to denigrate anyone who uses them as freeloaders who don’t deserve them.

Once the GOP settles on just repealing the ACA and putting off the discussion of how to replace it, you’ll see a LOT more of this argument on Fox News as a way to explain how the ACA was a bad idea in the first place and we’re better off without it.

Interesting that both of these people, who should happily be celebrating how good their lives are today, are instead frantically screaming at everyone else and now at each other.

I again must ask the question – what is making them so angry and so desperate?

Doors is correct to note that this situation was almost certainly kicked off by Hannity’s attack on the MSNBC show last night. Trump regularly watches Hannity’s show and clearly picked up on the cue.

It’s frankly bizarre to watch Trump try to get away with saying that everyone else is bullying him when in fact his childish behavior for decades has been the very model of bullying. And it’s offensive for the Right Wing to try this kind of tactic. It’s bad enough that Trump’s behavior has emboldened hateful people across America (and the world), that we’ve had over 1000 hate actions inflicted by mean-spirited people who think they can get away with it while Pence runs the White House. But it really gets offensive to then hear the Right try to project their own viciousness onto the people who are trying to counter that hatred with reasoned thought.

And by the way, Hannity very much has been making it personal in his frantic attacks on Joe Scarborough. He spent his froth segment on Scarborough repeatedly calling him “Liberal Joe” – presumably this is Hannity’s way of jumping on the Trump/Limbaugh bullying insult train.

First, I’m glad to hear Ellen is okay. Wildfires are extremely dangerous and I’ve seen entire areas of Southern California ravaged by them.

Regarding the latest fun with the impending GOP repeal of the ACA, Rand Paul is now repeatedly throwing his delightful solution into the ring. He presented it as a brand new “breakthrough” idea yesterday on Fox News and tried that again today, but it’s the same thing he’s been saying for months. Namely, he wants the GOP to split up the “repeal” and “replace” notions into separate bills. To hear it from him, it will be much more reasonable this way, right? Because the GOP can have the repeal bill, which is what they all agree on and which the Dems won’t support, and the Dems and the weaker GOP members can have the spending bill, and that way both bills have a better chance, right?

Except that Paul is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. He knows very well that only the first bill will go through – the repeal, which he and the Right have desperately wanted from the moment that the ACA became law. The replacement bill would unquestionably bog down in endless debates, even if some Dems tried to jump in to offer ideas – but the GOP could not pass it on their own and the Dems would not likely go along with the more draconian ideas the GOP would include. So what Paul is actually trying to do is have his repeal and make it look like he’s “the reasonable person”.

And if he gets away with this move (something I actually find quite likely given Pence’s desperation to get something, anything through the Congress this year), Rand Paul will give the Hard Right a series of big wins:

1. They get rid of the ACA – and all the Right Wing congresspeople get to say they’ve finally lived up to that promise.
2. The Pence White House gets to claim a “win” for signing this bill into law and appearing to get something done.
3. The Pence White House and the entire Right Wing get to retroactively declare President Obama a total failure. (Expect the sneering Obama retrospectives to begin moments after a repeal bill is signed into law)
4. The Right Wing gets to punish the Dems and GOP members who supported the ACA or signed up for it – basically the bullying mode of “You shouldn’t have signed up for this in the first place because you don’t deserve it.”
5. Wealthier Right Wingers get a major tax break and no longer need to pay the ACA premiums that had been imposed.
6. Right Wingers get to make major cuts to Medicaid, as a precursor toward attacks on Medicare and Social Security. (The entire notion of turning Medicaid over to the states means that the program would inevitably need to be slashed to a tiny fraction of its current budget – because individual states could never support Medicaid, and that’s the point.)
7. When the “Replacement” bill fails to go anywhere, the Right Wing gets to blame the morass on the Dems, under the notion that “they’re not doing anything to help us provide health care”, which will hide the reality that the Right does not want any such bill to succeed.

So a Rand Paul splitting of the repeal and replace notions will absolutely do what Rand Paul and the Right Wing actually want here – namely, just get rid of the ACA in one swell foop. And that is where they’re heading, given their inability to get anything else done. But we shouldn’t fall for the flattering unctions Rand Paul would like us to believe about his actual thinking here.

Hannity’s desperation is showing now. He’s visibly sweating and frantic on camera, constantly screaming about anything he thinks that could threaten his friends in the Pence White House.

Part of this I would chalk up to his usual attempts at bullying, but there’s more going on here.

I would have thought that Hannity would be absolutely delighted with the current state of affairs, what with GOP Right Wingers in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, and with a potential for the Right to completely tilt the judiciary off the deep end on the Far Right. But Hannity isn’t happy at all – he’s fighting mad.

So this begs the question: What is making Hannity so angry? Why is he so frantic now? He’s been given everything he wanted, hasn’t he? Shouldn’t he be singing “Happy Days Are Here Again?”

This was a notably smarmy edition of the show. Note the hosts’ obvious condescension toward Mason. And note that these guys don’t see Mason as representing their colleagues. Keep in mind that Fox News hosts and personnel are getting plenty of access to the Pence White House, including exclusive interviews with Trump and Pence, and regular access to pretty much anyone they want to talk to in the administration. It’s the other news organizations that are being shut out, and that’s the way the Right Wing wants it.

Now, during the time when Ed Henry was the head of the WHCA, he was given plenty of deferential interviews from Fox News where they cheered him on for repeatedly haranguing the Obama White House press secretaries with Right Wing talking points. If the Obama White House had inflicted this kind of press restriction, Fox News would have had a conniption fit like we’ve never seen, and Ed Henry would have been on every single Fox News show to decry this total assault on our democracy. But since it’s the Pence White House playing these games, Fox News is now on the side of the restrictors.

And let’s be clear as to why the Pence White House is trying to stop anyone from recording the press briefings. It has nothing to do with communicating any more clearly than before. It’s frankly about Sean Spicer’s complete failure to handle this job. From the beginning, Spicer has presented himself as an enraged kid brother to Trump, regularly screaming and jumping up and down to make himself look bigger and tougher to the other kids on the playground. It’s the equivalent of a cartoon where the strongman is reduced to miniature size and continues running around screaming in a high pitched voice to everyone’s amusement. Unfortunately for Spicer, his own inadequacy was exponentially magnified by Melissa McCarthy’s spot-on portrayal of him on SNL. So the country’s impression of Spicer (and these press briefings) has become a bit of a joke, and it’s clear that Trump is unhappy to see that happen. Where another White House would likely have just replaced Spicer with a competent person, the Pence White House is unable to admit mistakes, so they’ve doubled down. And they’ve had encouragement from Newt Gingrich, who advised them that they don’t even need to have these briefings anyway.

The concern of the Pence White House is really about not wanting the country to see too much of how this group is behaving, particularly with Trump constantly embarrassing himself on Twitter. A daily spectacle of Spicer yelling at the press and stumbling when called on his false statements was simply proving to be too much of a drag on their numbers, so the hope is that by getting Spicer off TV, they can somehow arrest their fall. Sadly for the Pence White House, this approach is being seen for what it is, no matter how hard they try to spin it.

A couple of quick notes:

1. Hannity doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to legal matters. He likes citing whatever obscure statutes or sections of code because they sound very important and he thinks it makes him sound well-informed. But he doesn’t understand what those code sections actually mean, since they all work in concert with each other. Just citing a single bit of code never gives the full picture in governmental regulation. Comey made clear in his July presentation last year that the code section Hannity keeps desperately hyping doesn’t apply in context.

Hannity can hammer all he wants on his uninformed opinions, but prosecutors don’t pursue unprovable and unconvictable cases. In order for Hannity to get his way that the intent of Hillary Clinton doesn’t matter for a prosecution, you’d have to prove that she was so outrageously, ridiculously negligent that intent would be irrelevant. If it’s just a matter of whether she should have had a more secure server (and we don’t even know that anyone hacked it – while we do know that the Pentagon servers absolutely were hacked, and they had the same emails she did…), then it’s really not something that any Justice Dept lawyer would jump on if they have any common sense. It’s frankly too small-time and too petty.

2. On the other hand, given the pettiness and viciousness of the Pence White House, it is becoming much more likely that Jeff Sessions will go ahead with a prosecution of Bill and Hillary Clinton, most likely around both the server and the Clinton Foundation. There isn’t any real conviction to be obtained here, but it will at least give the Right Wing the perp walk they’ve long been hoping to see, and it would set them up for a drawn-out court battle during the midterms. As we discussed last year, this is political theater that the Pence White House desperately needs, if only to distract from Trump’s increasing unpopularity.

Rand Paul would be happy to just use a Health Savings Account. He’s a very wealthy man and the idea would essentially be a tax break for him.

We need to remember that the purpose of these bills in the House and Senate has never been to help anyone receive healthcare or health insurance. The Right Wing very much agrees with Rand Paul on this – it’s your problem to take care of your hospital bills, not theirs. As far as they’re concerned, Cavuto’s little question is exactly their position – that there never should have been any program like this in the first place. And by the way, keep in mind that Rand Paul was already arguing to go for just the repeal first and then maybe see about what a replacement might look like, someday. When he discussed this three months ago, he wanted it to sound like he really was interested in a replacement while many of us knew he was lying through his teeth. What he just said in this interview confirms that he was lying in the earlier interviews. He has no intention of allowing ANY replacement through.

The purpose of these bills was always to simply erase the one legislative achievement of the Barack Obama presidency so that he could retroactively be declared a total failure, and so that they could punish the voters who’d had the temerity to support him. Apparently, the Right Wing got a little greedy here – they figured they could not only destroy the ACA but could get themselves a quick windfall at the same time. They just didn’t count on their own members’ conflicting agendas cancelling their work out. Some of the members are more bent on the revenge/punishment idea (like Paul) and others are more bent on getting a financial bonus as well.

It sounds from what we’re seeing today that the GOP will very likely not be able to get this bill through the Senate, as they’ll lose enough votes either way to stymie it.

Based on their conduct over the past seven months, I expect them to then simply go for repeal, as they all agree on that, which will allow them to at least try to declare some kind of a legislative achievement and victory. If it’s just repeal they’re after, they should be able to ram that directly through both Houses in record time and get it to Pence’s desk as we thought they would have done six months ago. If they have to fall back to this, as looks likely, I expect Trump to then blame the Dems for somehow not going along with this behavior, and if his poll numbers continue plummeting, we’ll likely start to hear more rumblings about indicting the Clintons as quickly as possible.

The last two posts are truly puzzling. I have to assume the posters are trying to be funny.

One poster is actually trying to justify the discredited notion of birtherism and to relitigate a completely bigoted idea. The “birther” scam was a Right Wing invention, specifically intended to throw mud at a candidate that Right Wingers hate. The fact that someone would continue trying to foist this one in 2017 is a signal of how deep that hate goes. I suppose this poster’s hate is pure, since he is going to such lengths to lie about the situation.

The more recent poster is completely ignoring what Hannity is actually saying, and what is actually happening. Hannity’s comments are almost completely the opposite of the truth – occasionally he will find a couple of factual nuggets to twist into his spread of conspiracy theories, but the rest of it is completely discredited bunk. But I do agree with the more recent poster that the American people will not stand for the nonsense that Hannity and his friends are trying to play with these endless rants against the rest of the country. And if Hannity and his supporters continue to advocate for violence, they will find that tends to result in arrests and prosecutions.