Fox News has now repeatedly lied about the Georgia voter restriction law, including some truly unfortunate moments where hosts like Steve Hilton tried to explain away the part about how visitors cannot give food or water to people waiting on long lines for hours. (The law has a nonsense provision that the poll workers could come out and provide water from any potential vending machines from inside – except that those poll workers would never have the time to do anything like that in those conditions)

The point of the Georgia law and various other restrictions being inflicted by angry Right Wing state legislatures is to make sure that they can restrict non-white and non-Republican voters from prevailing. The intention is to limit the ability of people to vote, and to force non-white voters into unbelievably long lines and then likely deny them access (as has happened in various states where the polling places slam their doors in the faces of voters because it’s after 6pm even though they’d been standing there for hours)/ In the event of a close election, the Republicans would now be able to completely fog the situation and toss out whatever votes they needed in order to ensure their continued domination.

The truly unhappy postscript to the Georgia law, among the others, is that it is almost certain to be appealed up to the current Extreme Right Wing Supreme Court, where there is a 6-3 majority waiting to make sure that laws like these prevail. (This will be done under the notion that States’ Rights override everything else, given that each state has jurisdiction about how elections are conducted within its borders) Unless something truly odd happens at the Supreme Court, this law will be in full effect by November 2024. Which means that voters will need to be on their guard for every one of these dirty tricks, and they’ll need to be prepared to wait on line all day on Election Day that year, and to have someone recording their situation to make sure it isn’t swept under the rug.

It’s frankly been nauseating to watch angry Right Wingers try to hide behind their supposed support of female athletes when in fact their approach is completely about their hatred of everyone outside their tribe. The hatred in this case is directed at trans people, but it’s also applicable to the gay community and the bi community. The point for angry Right Wingers is that their bigoted attacks on these groups help make them feel better about their own inadequacies, and they are a useful distraction from real issues, such as maybe a worldwide pandemic that we are only now beginning to get a handle on.

Thank you John. Your kind words are much appreciated.

The angry Right Wing approach at the moment is to try to scream their own headlines to replace what is actually happening in the United States since the Pence White House was driven from power.

In reality, the Biden/Harris White House has already surpassed its goal of actually getting vaccinations to 100 million people in 100 days – and they did it in less than 60 days. At this rate, they’ll have herd immunity in less time than we’d feared, and that’s a very good thing. They’ve also gotten a serious relief bill passed, one that included help for multiple states that the Right Wing wanted to bankrupt and a reimbursement to FEMA for the 50 billion dollars that the Pence White House shamefully stole last fall to prop up unemployment insurance for a few weeks. And they’ve done a lot to ease the pain that the Pence White House and its sycophants deliberately caused to millions of people.

But Fox News and the Right Wing don’t want you to think about that. They want you to think that there’s suddenly a border “crisis” and that somehow Joe Biden is instantly “senile” and that somehow the country has fallen apart. So they keep yelling their own version of the headlines and they hope you won’t notice reality happening around you. They’re thinking this will carry them to a good result in 2022 and 2024. I truly hope that most Americans will notice when we’ve actually gotten past this pandemic and when the economy is actually recovering in a real way. But if recent history teaches us anything, it’s that we will have to work extremely hard to get everyone to the voting booth every time, or we’ll get another 4 years of something even worse than the Pence White House. And the last 4 years left us with a judiciary and a Supreme Court that may do far more damage over the next 20 years than anyone thought possible.

Rand Paul is attempting to play a game about repeating obvious falsehoods and hoping that his repetition will eventually convince enough people that the falsehoods have somehow become “proven”. He’s basing this on the success that angry Right Wingers have had over the past three decades in constantly repeating their opinions about various things and then coming back years later to say that those opinions had magically become “proven facts”. Case in point: Hillary Clinton’s supposed “record of corruption”. What we actually had was 25 years of Rush Limbaugh and his copycats trying to smear her with anything they could throw at her. But after 25 years, enough voters were confused by this approach that they assumed there must be something to all the accusations rather than just a repetition of the same nonsense.

When it came to COVID last year, the standard angry Right Wing approach to it was to deny that there was any problem. Confronted with the obvious inability of the Pence White House to deal with it, the Right Wing decided to declare that there was no actual pandemic and that the whole thing was just a “hoax” to turn the country against Pence’s childish spokesman. When it became obvious that this approach wasn’t working, they then repeatedly declared the pandemic “over”, trying multiple tacks in an increasingly desperate cry of “All is Well!” to hopefully re-elect Pence despite the mess. Rand Paul himself spent 2020 denying that there was any issue with COVID, despite the fact that he himself contracted it.

Rand Paul’s current behavior is sadly predictable. The appropriate course of action for him would be to admit that he made a mistake and do what he can to try to atone. Instead, he’s doubled down and is now just repeating canards in the hope that nobody will call him on it. His latest exchange with Dr. Fauci was in reality another complete humiliation for him. He was once again schooled by Fauci in even the most basic vocabulary. Fox News of course chose to edit out nearly all of Dr. Fauci’s responses and just included Paul’s statements.

When the long-term eye of history looks upon Rand Paul’s conduct here, it will not be kind. As with his other refusals to work with anyone and his insistence on smugly dismissing all but the most Extreme Far Right perspective, he will be remembered for his singular lack of contribution while in office. Libertarians will see his behavior as proving their point – that government doesn’t get anything done. Everyone with a sane mind will see that having saboteurs like Rand Paul in government is what gums up the works.

Ted Cruz also went to Harvard. Both Cruz and McEnany are quite intelligent – and they’re also unscrupulous. They use their intelligence for ends the rest of us would shudder about.

As the Rolling Stone article summarizes (and there are piles of data points the article could not include without being 20 pages longer), Limbaugh was a deeply despicable man who enriched himself by engaging in bigotry and encouraging his listeners to do the same.

Throwing away the Medal of Freedom on an unrepentant bigot like Limbaugh (as well as Nunez and Jordan) was a slap in the face to the nation and a permanent soiling of something that had been a significant honor before the Pence White House chose to trash it. Multiple nominees since then have refused the honor, as they do not wish to share it with a hatemonger like Limbaugh. My thinking for the past year is that the Biden/Harris White House needs to redesignate the Medal of Freedom to a new name – such as the Medal of Freedom and American Spirit, and then grandfather in all prior recipients except Limbaugh, Paul Harvey, Devin Nunez and Jim Jordan. So that future inventors and poets will not need to have their records soiled by being counted with those angry men and can appreciate an honor being bestowed upon them without a bitter taste.

I’ll also note that Pence’s childish former spokesman makes a point of noting that Sean Hannity wasn’t the only angry Right Winger urging him to throw that honor away on Limbaugh. The Pence White House had been flooded with requests by Limbaugh fans, other radio hosts and various angry Right Wingers to do this for Limbaugh as a stunt during the 2020 SOTU. Hannity was just one in a chorus that the Pence White House decided to satisfy by giving a fairly open middle finger to the rest of the country. As partly noted by the article, Limbaugh celebrated by gay-bashing Pete Buttigieg for having the nerve to come out ahead in the first couple of 2020 primaries. The article left out how Limbaugh gloated about getting the Medal and used it to once again promote himself. It’s possible that Hannity was the deciding factor in this hateful act. But it’s also possible that Hannity simply wants his viewers to think he was.

No surprise that Fox News is trying to thread this needle. They’re figuring, probably correctly, that they can get back the angry Right Wing viewers who’ve jumped over to Newsmax and OAN for a minute, by continuing their usual pattern of hate-mongering and propagandizing. The move to call Arizona was a tactical one – useful in terms of being able to insist that they’re “impartial journalists”. (It’s similar to how many extreme Right Wing partisan judges rammed onto benches by the Pence White House and Repubs over the past 4 years now have a sliver of cover for themselves by denying the nonsense filings of Giuliani and Powell and the others over the election. When anyone points out the extremism of their upcoming rulings effectively banning reproductive choice and voting rights, those judges will of course point to the election cases and say “See? I ruled against Trump.”

Frankly, we cannot “move on” in a civilized society if the people who attacked the rest of us are allowed to get away with the attempt. We’ve had too much of the “let’s just let bygones be bygones”. Too much of the turning of the other cheek and just hoping that angry Right Wingers will somehow learn their lesson by not being called out for their behavior.

What is needed now is a really stern approach. Fox News abetted the Pence White House and in fact helped direct many of its most vicious acts. Fox News pundits sang the praises of Pence’s childish spokesman throughout, after spending 8 years viciously attacking the Obama White House, and after spending 8 years before that abetting the Cheney/W White House and cheering them on. When W was clearly on the downswing after the 2006 midterms, Dems took the “high road” and said that we would avoid impeachment and we’d let all that illegal behavior go. When President Obama took office, Dems took the “high road” and assumed that Repubs would come along and try to help get the country out of the Recession. We saw what the results were. Angry Right Wingers sneered at everyone else and fumed until they were able to squeak Trump through the swing states in 2016. And when Dems complained about the viciousness, how did these reasonable angry Right Wingers respond? They tried to bully everyone else with the screams of “WE WON! YOU LOST LIBTARD!”

The way to move on from the miserable epoch of the Pence White House is twofold. The first is to clean up the mess they made – in terms of the pandemic, in terms of the judiciary, in terms of the Tax Transfer. And the lasting one is to never allow angry Right Wingers to ever try to lecture anyone again. The response when someone pulls this nonsense in the future shouldn’t be any more complicated than “NO. YOU VOTED FOR BIGOTRY. YOU SUPPORTED BIGOTRY AND HATRED. YOU DON’T GET TO LECTURE ANYONE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.”

Kilmeade is simply copying Bill O’Reilly’s approach on his webpage. O’Reilly made several public comments yesterday, including the obligatory swipe at Joe Biden, but then noting that he thought Biden had spoken well yesterday and saying that he agreed with Biden’s comments. As for Pence’s childish spokesman, O’Reilly suddenly and uncharacteristically became not only stern but angry – repeatedly saying “ENOUGH. WE GOT IT.” O’Reilly notably didn’t go for the “it was antifa” blame game either. He instead railed that by rushing the Capitol and trashing the place, the rioters had essentially robbed him of the moral high ground to complain about the election. Glenn Beck took roughly the same stance – likely having copied it from O’Reilly also.

This is not to say that O’Reilly is that influential – but guys like Kilmeade and Beck look to O’Reilly when they’re searching for some way to behave as if they have a moral position on these matters.

As an added note, Rush Limbaugh went on an extensive rant today, celebrating the rioters and declaring them to be wonderful people and patriots. As far as he was concerned they were non-violent and good people, as opposed to the protesters from last summer. I’m sure this will be the tack used by his copycats in AM radio everywhere and by several Fox News hosts tonight.

If anything, Doocy is taking a very, very mild step towards the inevitable attempt to walk back his open support for the Pence White House (much like Fox News in general and Lindsey Graham) to try to claim that he has some credibility.

In reality, no, he doesn’t have credibility. He bought into the behavior of the Pence White House and its sycophants just like pretty much everyone else at Fox News except perhaps Shepard Smith.

It’s clear that Fox News is trying to pretend that they’re really independent of the Pence White House so they can pretend to be an impartial voice for Right Wingers. (Newsmax and OAN and the various AM radio shouters have not gotten that memo, so they’re still riding the Titanic down to the bottom of the ocean) Fox News did this from time to time during the 2016 campaign and once in a while when Pence’s childish spokesman would say something really outrageous. But as documented here, they spent the last several years essentially directing policy for the Pence White House under the “Broadcast News” model – they’d suggest a new target for Pence’s childish spokesman and he’d echo whatever they said within an hour or two.

Frankly, Fox News should never be regarded as an impartial news source given their record. They should be remembered as a Far Right propaganda outlet – with Newsmax and OAN even farther over to the Right than them. None of them practice legitimate journalism.

This frantic attempt to blame antifa has been making the rounds today on every angry Right Wing website and blog. After they spent the last 3 weeks since the Electoral College constantly tweeting and blogging that they intended to come to DC to commit mayhem, now they want us to believe that actually they were somehow “infiltrated”.

Riiiiiiight.

There’s multiple levels of testimony, including on-camera interviews that aired on network television, of profanity-loaded statements by angry Right Wingers from Qanon, the survivalist fringe, the white supremacists, etc. It wasn’t “antifa” or “BLM” or anyone from the Left Wing that invaded and attacked the Capitol today. This is owned completely by the Right Wing. Just as the 4 deaths that happened in the riots are owned by the Right Wing.

The fact that Brit Hume is trying to gaslight this just points up how nonsensical it is for him to pose as an “elder statesman” when he is the same angry propagandist he’s been for decades, going back to when he tried to snark Bill Clinton at the announcement ceremony for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and got his paw smacked fairly hard in public.

Fox News and AM Radio have fed the fire of this kind of activity for decades. It led millions to believe the lies of the Pence White House, which had a mutual feedback loop with angry Right Wing propaganda outlets for the past 4 years. And now we’re at the point of these thugs deciding they’re going to behave like animals. We did get warnings about what these guys were thinking – from their attacks on the Oregon and Michigan state capitols, as well as their vicious plot to kidnap the Michigan governor.

It’s frankly nauseating to watch Norquist play this game. This is someone who was a cheerleader for the 2017 Tax Transfer – the one that skyrocketed taxes for Middle Class Employees, and particularly the ones who live and work in Blue States. He couldn’t care less about their tax burdens, since he was fine to increase them by thousands of dollars per year.

That “average family” standard he’s touting is a deliberately misleading one. Because it’s not a measure of working class families (who only saw savings of $5 to $10 per week from the meager provisions for them in the Tax Transfer), the way he’s claiming it is. It’s actually a standard that includes the HUGE cuts that were given to extremely wealthy families, corporations and business owners. It includes the big tax cut for everyone earning over $415,000 per year. It includes the HUGE cut in the amount of inheritance taxes the uber-rich pay, in that they each can now gift over $11.5 million per heir and a married wealthy couple could gift over $23 million per heir – all tax free, where the numbers were less than half of that in 2016.

Let’s also not forget that the Tax Transfer also erased nearly all the deductions that Middle Class Employees formerly had available to them, by drastically reducing the State/Local Tax allowance (which thus means that those Employees have been getting double taxed on tens of thousands of dollars every year), and by eliminating pretty much everything else they could deduct short of a restricted mortgage amount and for charity. (The supposedly “doubled” standard deduction actually just added in the Individual Exemption that used to available to everyone and took that away from anyone who itemizes)

When the overall average between a working class family with an income of $30K per year and a super-rich family with income in the tens of millions per year is run, then yes, the “average” between them is a number where it looks like a savings of 2K per year. If you took out the super-rich from that averaging equation, you’d find that actually there wasn’t any real savings and that, again, for Middle Class Employees, this meant a massive skyrocket.

What Norquist is really saying here is that the super-wealthy will be seeing an increase in their taxes, and he believes that the viewers are uninformed enough to believe that this somehow applies to an average American family.

It’s amazing to see angry Right Wingers like Graham doubling down rather than acknowledging reality. This shouldn’t be hard for them. They just lost an election, and by the same margin that they won in 2016. You’d think they’d take it and try to limp away with some dignity. They could just wave the “we had 74 million votes” flag and try to declare something with that. But no, they keep doubling down as though they didn’t lose.

In the coming years, these guys are not going to be able to walk all this behavior back. Neither will their supporters. Moving forward, I don’t ever want to hear another angry Right Winger try the moral high ground game again. They openly backed a vicious bigot, they caused significant damage to the country, and they took what would have already been a deadly pandemic situation and they exploded it into a catastrophe. They don’t ever get to lecture anyone again – and if they try it, the appropriate response is “NO. YOU SUPPORTED BIGOTRY. YOU ALLOWED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS TO DIE. YOU DON’T GET TO LECTURE ANYONE.”

This is a very serious and very real defamation situation. Unlike the Nick Sandmann nonsense (where Lin Wood was suing everyone and their mother for 500 million bucks over coverage of Sandmann and the Covington kids’ obvious bad behavior on video), this is a matter of open defamation meant to destroy two companies that have the means to fight back.

My instincts say that this may well close down OANN and Newsmax, and that’s not a bad thing. But don’t think that this would change the Right Wing media landscape. If those two cockroaches get stamped out, there will be another 10 that will pop up tomorrow. Breitbart will expand, or Daily Caller will expand, or Sinclair will fill in the gap. The propagandists will just move over to whatever the existing outlet is at the moment. “The First” is another upstart operation, airing home-built “news” shows from Buck Sexton and Dana Loesch (video of their radio shows) and giving a one hour primetime spotlight to disgraced Bill O’Reilly.

I don’t expect this will really affect Fox News all that much, as they have deeper pockets. But these will be significant payouts for sure. John McKee is correct. And this will not be the pittances of a few thousand bucks that were tossed off to Nick Sandmann and Lin Wood by the Post and CNN to make them go away. These will be major settlements.

The pardons over the last couple of days have been despicable. (And they’re likely only the beginning) We should keep in mind that it’s entirely possible that Pence’s childish spokesman may pardon himself and his entire family but never actually say so in public. He’s not obligated to say when he does these things.

There are multiple bad choices in these pardons – the Blackwater murderers being some of the worst. There’s also his choice to spare three completely corrupt Republican congressmen who were caught flat-out committing graft. There’s his choice to let Jared Kushner’s dad off the hook for some truly vicious behavior, including blackmail. There are the expected pardons for Trump’s lackeys in the campaign chicanery, like Manafort, Papadopoulos, Flynn and now a full pardon for Stone. With all of these cases, it’s probably not clear to the Pence White House that they just admitted the guilt of these felons – because you can’t pardon someone for a crime if they didn’t commit the crime.

The two pardons that jumped to my attention in these piles, however, are the ones thrown to Ramos & Compean. Those are the two thugs who used to work for the US Border Patrol in Texas. In 2006, they got into a pursuit situation where they were chasing a drug smuggler near the border in El Paso. They didn’t know for certain he was a smuggler or if he was a citizen or not. They just knew he was acting fishy. At some point, the smuggler jumped out of his van and ran on foot toward the border. Compean ran after him and moved in to arrest him. The smuggler tried to surrender at this point, but Compean decided this would be a good time to hit the smuggler with his shotgun. The smuggler then ran away again. Compean emptied his pistol shooting at the suspect and missed every time. Ramos then ran up and shot the suspect in the back. The suspect fell down, and then limped over the border into Mexico, where he was picked up by a passing car. Ramos & Compean never radioed for help or said that they were dealing with an armed suspect. Instead, they gathered their shell casings and threw them down a storm drain. A couple of months later, they were arrested for attempted murder and at that time, they began selling a lie that the smuggler was armed and about to fire a weapon at them. This went to trial and they both went to prison. At which point Right Wing media went nuts on the subject and Sara Carter was able to take cherry-picked bits of the story and peddle it around to establish herself as a “serious Right Wing journalist”. Fox News personalities and AM radio hosts went on and on about how these brave men were being railroaded and how the smuggler deserved to be shot. (Because angry Right Wingers really wanted to send the message that anyone coming over the border better be prepared to die) When W was leaving office in disgrace in early 2009, the propagandists demanded that he pardon these thugs. W commuted their sentences instead. This allowed them to come home from prison but with their felony records. What Pence’s childish spokesman just did was expunge their records and send a message that it’s okay to just shoot people on sight at the border.

Given that Graham has abandoned whatever principles he once had to make sure they can ram through Amy Coney Barrett to get that 6-3 hammerlock for the Far Right Wing for the next 35 years, it’s beyond strange to see a partisan like Dobbs turning on him.

Kennedy is blatantly lying here, and it’s shameful that Cavuto sat there and allowed him to get away with it.

Here’s the actual timeline:

May – Pelosi and the House pass the HEROES Act, looking ahead to make sure that there is stimulus for testing, tracing, small businesses and the unemployed for the rest of the year, as well as assistance for all the states, since they’ve been strapped as a result of the pandemic. McConnell, Kennedy and the Senate Republicans openly sneer at this and refuse to take any action, noting “we’ll pause” rather than do anything further. Angry Right Wingers are at that time frantically hoping the pandemic will disappear by July, when the existing stimulus will expire.

June – the GOP ignores the HEROES Act and McConnell sends the Senate on summer vacation for most of July, only returning at the exact moment that the stimulus has effectively expired.

July – As soon as we pass July 4 and Senate GOP have refused to do anything, the stimulus is set to expire. When the Senate reconvenes in late July, GOP members refuse to back anything other than a tiny amount of business assistance and a blanket liability waiver for businesses. McConnell retreats to his office and hides in terror rather than engage in negotiations with Pelosi to work any stimulus out. Instead, the Pence White House sends Mnuchin and Mark Meadows to stonewall. Meadows repeatedly threatens to walk out and have Pence issue some Executive Orders. The stimulus expires.

August – Meadows responds to Pelosi’s offer to lower the size of her stimulus proposal by stomping out and telling Pence to issue Executive Orders. Pence’s childish spokesman immediately has a press conference announcing them – except that they do almost nothing. One memo actually jeopardizes Social Security funding while setting up current employees for a massive tax hit in 2021, and another sets up a raid on FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund to throw a few dollars to the unemployed. Both parties spend the rest of the month working on their conventions.

September – Congress doesn’t return until after Labor Day – much of the month is taken up with discussion of funding the government. McConnell makes a public display of presenting an insulting “skinny” proposal that would not do anything other than some small business assistance and that blanket liability waiver. McConnell attempts to play this as somehow a genuine effort – it goes nowhere. All sides note that we are now too close to Election Day to reasonably expect anything to be accomplished.

October – Pelosi and the House pass a reduced stimulus bill. McConnell again retreats from it in terror. Pelosi attempts once again to negotiate with Mnuchin to get something done before Election Day. Pence’s childish spokesman, in the midst of a steroid rage while being treated for his COVID infection, angrily calls off the negotiations. And then suddenly begs for them to be restarted. McConnell responds by refusing to talk about it and instead putting the insulting “skinny” proposal back up to be rejected again. All sides agree that nothing will be accomplished until after the election (and frankly that nothing will be accomplished until 2021).

If you look at this timeline, you’ll see that any real possibility of further stimulus was killed back in June when McConnell, Kennedy and the GOP refused to engage. Their entire point was to not get anything done. And McConnell has been noted as wanting to now play himself as anti-spending, so that if Biden prevails, he can be consistent about opposing it in 2021.

Glenn Greenwald has his own agenda running here. He always hated the Russian narrative – because his version of the 2016 election is one where the Dems should have nominated Bernie Sanders, and THAT’s the reason Trump squeaked through, and somehow everything else is just sour grapes and typical Cold War paranoia.

Further, Greenwald hates mainstream Dems and particularly hates anyone involved with the Obama White House, including Biden. As far as he’s concerned, the Dems have once again ignored Bernie Sanders and he’d be perfectly happy to see the Pence White House squeak through again.