It would appear that Fox News (and many other angry Right Wing propaganda operations) are aware of the problems with this desperation move by supporters of the Pence re-election Campaign. Because they’ve tried to change the narrative away from the actual “surprise” itself and toward the fact that multiple media outlets are recognizing it as a falsehood.

So now we have frantic headlines galore about how awful it is that Twitter and Facebook are not allowing blatant falsehoods to be cited right before an election. We have frantic “whataboutism” regarding this hoax versus the Trump tax papers – except that the tax papers have been confirmed as real and this story is an obvious fabrication.

I’m honestly uncertain which is the stranger approach for angry Right Wingers at this time – pushing desperate fantasies like this one, or pushing desperate fantasies about how Trump is supposedly going to win in a massive landslide in 2 1/2 weeks.

By the way, don’t look now, but I’m ready to wager that Fox News and angry Right Wingers everywhere are going to jump up and down about Tara Reade one week before Election Day, which is when her frantically published tell-all book is going to be inflicted on the public.

Angry Right Wingers have never been able to contain their glee over getting away with stealing these 3 Supreme Court seats and ramming in extremist partisan idealogues.

When Mitch McConnell completed his maneuver of holding the Garland seat open for a full year and then changing the Senate rules to allow the GOP to slam Gorsuch into the seat instead, McConnell celebrated by running around on the Senate floor, exchanging high fives with his aides and with other gleeful Republican senators. He then went to the press and intoned about what a “sober responsibility” it was to have done this.

Any sane legal professional would have serious reservations about the notion of putting Amy Coney Barrett into this seat, let alone onto the Supreme Court at all. Those reservations have nothing to do with whether she drives a minivan or not, or whether she chose to adopt children. Or even whether she goes to church. The reservations are about Barrett’s openly stated Extreme Far Right bias, which the GOP is counting on to provide a 6-3 hammerlock to specifically erase much of the last 65 years of jurisprudence in the United States.

Angry Right Wingers have dreamed for years about reversing Brown v Board of Education, Roe v Wade, and many other major decisions. Now they are guaranteed to be able to get away with it.

On the other hand, if the Dems prevail in 3 weeks, perhaps we can reset the Supreme Court and rebalance to address all the court packing the GOP has been inflicting.

Barrett will be a reliable Extreme Far Right partisan vote for everything the Republicans have wanted from the Supreme Court for decades. She is clear in her writings – even to the point that decisions like Brown v Board of Education are likely to be tossed.

It’s really unfortunate that an infected and potentially contagious person like Mike Lee has made a point of sitting in the room with the rest of them WITH NO MASK ON. The point of the mask isn’t just to protect yourself – it’s to protect EVERYONE ELSE! And Lee is clearly doing this to see if he can scare the Dems out of the room – which is why Harris is participating from remote. Whereas Diane Feinstein is trying to show that she’s not intimidated, and yet she’s potentially exposing herself to a serious danger.

The one hope that remains will be for the four additional seats to be added as of next February, so we can then have four more of these hearings, only for sane people.

What the heck does that even mean?

How about telling Pence’s childish little spokesman to take a PCR COVID test right now, and then take a Rapid test as well so we can see how much virus is showing up?

Is Siegal going to perform a physical on Donald Trump on the air? How the heck does that idea work?

This reeks of both Fox News and the Pence White House growing extremely desperate.

Trump is clearly panicking about his current standing, and thinks that he can turn it around by making these calls to Fox News and to Rush Limbaugh.

His intention about suddenly inflicting new rallies is that they’ll soothe his ego and they’ll provide some fun visuals of people willfully refusing to follow any pandemic protocol while attending a super spreader event with him. And if the timing works out for him, the lethal consequences won’t be fully known until after the election.

Of course, the fact that he keeps refusing to say whether he’s been tested at all is a dead giveaway that anyone getting into a room with him should believe that he is both carrying the virus and extremely contagious.

Fox News will of course run Diane Feinstein’s quote until the videotape breaks in half.

In reality, Barrett’s confirmation is about the fervent wish of angry Right Wingers to pack the Supreme Court with a 3rd stolen seat, specifically to give themselves a 6-3 hammerlock of Far Far Right partisan idealogues at the apex of our judiciary. It’s nothing more or less than that extremist intention by the Right to fully politicize the court.

As for Barrett’s religious beliefs being persecuted, Harris pretty much demolished that canard last night in short order. And Barrett’s Catholicism isn’t a problem. The problem is that she uses it as a cloak for her obvious partisanship. If she was taking her Catholicism seriously, she would not be able to support the death penalty, she would not support the vicious treatment of immigrants by the Pence White House, she would not support the suppression of voters, and she would not support an obviously partisan move to erase the ACA. But she does support all those things, and she’s made that clear. She also supports the criminalization of women’s reproductive choices, and she supports the Hard Right’s demand that pretty much every single consequential decision of the Earl Warren Supreme Court be wiped out, including Brown v Board of Education.

After Barrett is rammed onto the Supreme Court, in a similarly craven manner as the one used to ram Kavanaugh on, we can look forward to a slew of 6-3 and 5-4 Hard Right decisions. Alito and Thomas gloated openly about this just this week, when they demanded that Obergefell be tossed out, which would retract the civil status that same sex marriages have had. That would simply be cancelled. Roe would be gutted of nearly all its effect, in that abortion would simply not be legal in much of the country, and multiple Red states are already making it a criminal act to even leave the state to have a procedure done elsewhere. If Mr. Brown were to bring his case about educational inequality to a 6-3 Supreme Court with Barrett, we can guarantee he would be told to stop whining and that if he doesn’t like his daughter being bused to a segregated school, he should vote in a new school board.

These are only some of the consequences of having 6 Hard Right justices on the high court at one time. We’ll frankly be looking at a court that may actually go farther than Roger Taney’s did in attacking the rights of most people in the country.

It’s always helpful when would-be “elder statesmen” like Brit Hume reveal themselves to be the same uninformed angry Right Wingers they were back when they were foolishly trying to bait Bill Clinton at press events in the 90s.

It’s clear that angry Right Wingers are moving from panic mode to open hysterics. The Fox News propagandists aren’t alone in this – the AM Radio shock jocks like Beck and Limbaugh are now repeatedly screaming at their listeners as if the apocalypse were nigh. It’s truly disturbing to hear the level of venom being spat out on a daily and even hourly basis by this crowd. And it’s what leads to bizarre outbursts like those of an unimportant and discredited petty bigot like Carlson.

We should note that any concern about Pence somehow being “worse” than Trump is a bit misplaced. We’ve noted for the past nearly 4 years that the actual decisions about policy have consistently been made by Mike Pence throughout this presidency. It’s the reason that people refer to this administration as the Pence White House. (And this was always the intention – given that the offer to any VP that took the offer from Trump Jr was to be able to set all the domestic and foreign policy while Trump himself would be free to be “out there making America great again”). Trump himself has done very little while in the White House other than act as a public face for the Far Right policies being pushed by the group around Pence. In that way, Trump has actually performed the role of Vice President while Pence has done the work of the presidency. Which is why Trump is more properly referred to as Pence’s childish spokesman.

The saddest part of the situation is that even as a spokesman, Trump has been unable to do more than make vicious statements that cater to the angriest partisans in the mob of bigots who support him. And by emboldening that crowd, Trump has fomented a wave of hatred across the country that has caused real damage. Further, by refusing to behave in any kind of a responsible way in the midst of a pandemic, Trump has contributed in a real way to the massive infection and death count in the United States from COVID.

This miserable epoch of our history will hopefully be brought to an end by the voters in less than one month.

It should not be a surprise that angry Right Wingers in the Senate are fully committed to ramming Barrett’s confirmation through the mill as fast as they can. If they need to change the rules to get it done online, they’ll do that. If they need to just skip the hearing and go right to the floor vote, they’ll do that. The priority is ramming her on and getting that 6-3 hammerlock on the Supreme Court for the next 25 years.

As for coronavirus stimulus, that’s never been a priority for Republicans. Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly tried to get something done here, but the House has already recessed until after the election – unless something truly bizarre happens in the next week. They already voted on their own reduced version of the stimulus at 2.2 trillion, and the GOP laughed at it. My expectation is that this will once again result in a standoff, with Pelosi reluctantly telling Dem voters that it’s up to them to fix this on November 3rd. I’ll add that in the event that the Pence White House loses and the Senate is flipped, angry Right Wingers won’t be in any mood to cooperate with anything, so any kind of relief would not likely happen until next February at the earliest. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong on this, but the GOP has been extremely consistent in their contempt for any kind of stimulus.

It is my fervent hope that people have enough savings to hold them over until next year, or until they can be employed again.

I have to give Gutfeld points for really trying on that one. So we’re supposed to believe that Pence’s childish spokesman somehow contracted COVID out of his selfless bravery in trying to set an example for us?

How about that the Pence White House refused to acknowledge the reality of a raging pandemic for months, and that Mike Pence’s gutting of key departments like the CDC led directly to tens of thousands of avoidable illnesses and deaths? How about the part where Pence’s childish spokesman knowingly and deliberately endangered thousands of people every time he inflicted one of his super spreader gatherings? How about the reality that this situation, where a growing number of COVID victims can thank their infection to the Pence White House’s malfeasance, is less a heroic gesture than one of dangerous incompetence?

This entire offensive and vicious false narrative was completely obviated by what actually happened in the debate.

Pence’s spokesman was just rushed to Walter Reed by Marine One. They’re publicly saying that this is for “an abundance of caution”. They’re also admitting that he now has a fever, but reports are differing about the severity.

Regardless of the spin they’re going to attempt here, the fever and the hospital are not signs to be taken lightly.

I suppose I should tell some people I know that their husbands aren’t dead because they were under 70 when they died of COVID. The most recent one was 51 years old. The fact that Fox News thinks it’s okay to put something this offensive on the air tells you everything you need to know about them.

They’re playing this game because Diane Feinstein brought it up in her hearings in 2017, noting in an unfortunately clumsy manner that Barrett has indicated that she would prioritize her faith over her judicial responsibilities. Feinstein wasn’t attacking Barrett for being Catholic, but angry Right Wingers immediately seized on the soundbite to play it that way. (Feinstein’s point was that Barrett has extremist views and appears to be trying to justify them through her faith, which is a fairly dangerous combination to put on any court. It’s one thing to hold Right Wing partisan views. It’s another to try to hide them behind a church vestment while wearing a judge’s robe. The point is that Barrett is coming at important issues from a preset and partisan point of view that is unlikely to change and is devoted to the unraveling of key court precedents.)

The most important information about Barrett is found in her own writings, wherein she has discussed her disregard for precedent in the same kind of language as that used by Clarence Thomas. To both Thomas and Barrett, stare decisis does not apply if they personally disagree with the prior decision under discussion. This tells us exactly how she will rule on multiple decisions.

Democratic politicians and most citizens are correct to be extremely concerned about the new iteration of the Supreme Court that McConnell will now ensure – a 6-3 Hard Right tilt on nearly every consequential case and an occasional 5-4 Hard Right tilt on the few cases where Roberts wants to look after his eventual legacy. But the result will still be the same – Hard Right tilts on every major case from now until we have a change on the High Court. And this could take at least another 2 decades if everyone holds their seats – unless the Dems prevail this year and have the courage to deal with this problem before it deals with us.

This is a story that should be mentioned every time Hannity or O’Reilly tout how well they want everyone to think their books are doing. In reality, the books are mass-purchased by angry Right Wing organizations trying to pump up the sales numbers.

Mike Pence just achieved his lifelong ambition with the infliction of Barrett onto the Supreme Court. There’s a reason he happily led a “prayer march” today. As far as he’s concerned, this is the big win – even if he loses his job after November 3rd, he figures nobody can take that away.

True. This would appear to be an even deeper concession, as they’re now directly admitting that Carlson’s comments cannot be believed or taken seriously. It was the only way out of the defamation suit, but it means that anyone speaking to Carlson is now free to remind him that even his current employer doesn’t believe the nonsense he regularly inflicts.

Graham is lying his head off. He’s still ahead in the polls and Harrison isn’t outraising by that much. Graham just wants to present himself as a victim so that he can get people to fork money over and make his election margin larger.

We can only hope that Harrison picks up enough momentum to send Graham to the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society as of January.

I need to point out two simple things here:

1. Carlson snuck in a bit about the rioters being “mobs of Biden voters”. I wonder how he knows that. Did he go there and interview them? The looters and rioters here in Santa Monica weren’t the protestors, who demonstrated peacefully many blocks away from where the looters were attacking our stores. (And the looters and rioters actually behaved a lot more like angry Right Wing supporters of the Pence White House in that they were brazen and aggressive in their attacks)

2. How was Rittenhouse engaging in “self defense” when he illegally crossed state lines with a large firearm he had no license to carry? The fact that Pirro is trying to avoid stating this completely knocks her out of any sane legal discussion. Rittenhouse committed a felony before he ever got to Kenosha – and that initial felony points to his criminal intent, which he had made clear – to confront and shoot protestors. Now he can deal with the consequences of his homicidal behavior.

I’m no longer watching Carlson’s show. I just don’t have the time to deal with his viciousness until after the election is concluded. We could all write the monologues he’ll be delivering up to that day, including the gloating he’s getting ready to inflict about ramming Barrett into Ginsburg’s seat before November 3.