If Biden is thinking ahead, he’ll be able to salt those other topics into his answers, in spite of Wallace’s attempt to Fox News it up.

Possibly the most nauseating aspect of the past weekend has been the barely restrained glee we’ve been seeing from angry Right Wingers everywhere as they celebrate this moment. That, and the faint praise damnations from plenty of other angry Right Wingers who hated Ginsburg throughout her life and are happy to see that she’s gone.

This is truly a depressing moment in our history, as we watch the Right Wing literally bury the Supreme Court for easily the next 25 years. I truly hope that the people who told us the Supreme Court doesn’t matter and that the GOP would never try to throw out all those precedents have learned their lesson by now.

This is a truly depressing moment. The Pence White House and angry Right Wingers in the Senate have made very clear that they intend to ram Barrett through into this seat as fast as they can, and definitely before the November 3rd election if they can get away with it.

The Dems do not have a single way to block this from happening. If they attempt to delay, McConnell or Graham will maneuver around them. If they attempt to boycott the hearing, McConnell and Graham will conduct them without the Dems. Simply put, the Dems have no say in what happens here and McConnell doesn’t need a single vote from them. That said, Joe Manchin voted for Barrett when she was appointed to her current inappropriate position. He may well do so again.

The only possible hope here is for 4 Republican Senators to show some backbone and hold to the same principle they voiced in 2016, so that the process could be held back until after November 3rd, so that we’ll know if the American people really support this approach.

And even in that scenario, we’ll still have another 6 weeks of potential for Barrett to be rammed through, even in the event of a crushing Pence loss and a switch in the Senate Majority for 2021. I note that even if Mark Kelly wins in Arizona (as appears likely), the notion that he gets seated early is based on everyone forgetting that the GOP governor, AG and county recorders will not simply gum up the works so that he doesn’t get seated until 2021.

I don’t like saying this, but barring a sudden and unexpected explosion of integrity from multiple Republican Senators, we’re very likely looking at Barrett successfully being rammed onto the high court within the next 4 weeks.

Buck Sexton is a Glenn Beck acolyte. He started out filling in for Beck’s various programs on paranoia, and now he has his own platform to foment the nonsense. His entire approach is to pretend to be an expert (he’s not) while advocating the most extreme propaganda he can. In that way, he’s a low-level copycat of Glenn Beck, who is himself a low-level copycat of the more successful angry Right Wing AM radio guys he loves.

The point for angry Right Wingers is for there to be no health coverage other than what people can afford on their own. They never wanted to have a Medicare or Medicaid system to exist in the first place, and they certainly never wanted a public health service like the ACA to ever be enacted.

The attitude of the Right has been amply demonstrated on multiple occasions. Rush Limbaugh has openly stated that he figures that people with pre-existing conditions are akin to someone trying to get fire insurance for an already burning house. He’s also openly stated that people with less money should make do with lower quality healthcare, just as they make do with lower quality housing, food, etc. Angry pundits like Jason Chaffetz have opined that if people are having issues paying for healthcare, maybe they shouldn’t buy that new iPhone – as though that was the reason someone’s medical bills were overwhelming them.

And the best recent example we have of the Right Wing attitude came from a staffer in Thom Tillis’ office who was called by three-time cancer survivor Bev Weals. She was worried that given her husband’s layoff and the continuing COVID disaster, they might lose their coverage while she continues to need treatment. The Tillis staffer told her that she should think of the health coverage financial side as being akin to not being able to buy an expensive dress shirt if she couldn’t afford it. When she asked what she was supposed to, he told her that she’d have to find a way to pay for it. When she asked how that would happen during a pandemic, he told her that this sounded like something she’d have to figure out. I’ll at least grant him that he was being honest about the Right Wing approach here. They’re taking the technical position – it’s a YP.

It’s interesting that Pence’s childish spokesman is so desperate to get a Nobel Peace Prize that he’s humiliating himself like this. It wasn’t that long ago that the angry Right Wing attitude about the Nobel Prize was that neither the nominations nor the actual awards were legitimate.

It wasn’t just that the Right Wing scoffed at President Obama winning the Peace Prize. They had previously made sport of Stanley “Tookie” Williams being repeatedly nominated for the Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature in the early 2000s. Williams was a long-imprisoned convicted killer who had spent his years on Death Row trying to do meaningful things to help kids stay out of gangs and avoid the things he had done. The angry Right Wing response in Los Angeles was to ridicule the idea that he could say he was a Nobel Prize nominee. KFI AM Radio host Bill Handel made a point of having a local Republican congressman nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, just so he could announce himself as a “Nobel Prize nominee” and thus point out that Williams’ nominations were meaningless. Williams was of course put to death that year, to the immense satisfaction of angry Right Wingers all across Los Angeles, including Handel.

But now that Pence’s childish spokesman wants one, it’s suddenly a meaningful idea. At least it is until it becomes clear to the Pence White House that no actual award will ever be forthcoming for Pence or anyone else in this vicious group.

Fox News is clearly trying to thread the needle here. They want credit for having Griffin confirm the story, but they don’t want to make too big a thing out of it for fear of upsetting the Pence White House. If Pence squeaks through again in November, they don’t want to be in a position where his gang abandons them in favor of OANN or Breitbart. And if Pence loses, they want to be able to tell everyone they covered this story because they’re “fair and balanced.”

I really don’t think they’re fooling anyone, but you never know.

The saddest part of this has been Glenn Greenwald jumping up and down to condemn the reporting on the story. Greenwald has his own axe to grind regarding Russian hijinks in the 2016 election, as his version of the story is a mirror of the Right Wing “hoax” variety. So when he heard that CNN, AP and even Griffin have “confirmed” this story, he immediately penned a vicious broadside at The Intercept, saying that nothing’s been confirmed but showing that he hasn’t read any of the coverage. In other words, Greenwald is commenting on a story of which he doesn’t know the contents. Had he taken 90 seconds to listen to Griffin’s comments here, he would have heard specifics that blow apart his entire premise.

This is looking worse and worse for the Pence White House. I have a feeling the rest of the Fox News gang is going to try to continue to ignore Griffin’s reporting, but we’ll have to see how it plays out. I’m already hearing stories about angry vets tossing their Trump 2020 signs.

Cavuto’s smirk throughout this discussion is particularly scary. Fox News itself appears to be panicking over how 2020 has gone for the Pence White House, but various of its personalities are manifesting different reactions on camera.

In the case of Hannity and Carlson, you see an increasing level of anger, vitriol and open desperation that the election may not go their way. In the case of Laura Ingraham, you have the desperate laughter that catches at the wrong times. In the case of Cavuto, there’s just this odd smug demeanor. Maybe he knows something we don’t – or maybe he just enjoys throwing mud.

To be clear, for all the mudballs he was heaving at Biden, Biden was not the US President in January, February or March of this year. The actual president was Mike Pence, who completely bungled this situation, and Pence’s spokesman is continuing to claim that COVID will just “go away”. In the meantime, tens of millions of Americans are unemployed, tens of millions more are under-employed, and angry Right Wingers in the Senate and in the Pence White House have made sure that they will receive no help as we head through the fall.

One angry Right Wing congressman just proposed a bill where anyone protesting would be denied the $600 federal unemployment boost. Which would be funny if it wasn’t so vicious and if tens of millions weren’t hurting badly right now. Not to mention that nobody is receiving the $600 anymore, and thanks to angry Right Wingers like that congressman, nobody will be likely to do so at any point before 2021.

It’s no surprise that Lin Wood is chasing more ambulances here with the McCloskys and with unrepentant murderer Kyle Rittenhouse. Wood specializes in trying to go for the high profile publicity bait cases, demanding massive settlements for his nuisance suits and getting pittances instead.

Regarding Wood’s supposedly “incredible” track record, that actually doesn’t hold up if you look more closely. Wood says he did great for Richard Jewell back in the 90s/2000s over the coverage of that situation. And he did get a couple of settlements – including a larger one from NBC due to Tom Brokaw being stupid enough to say something totally unsupported on a network newscast. But most of the settlements were for peanuts, to make him and Jewell go away. And the key lawsuit was against the Atlanta Journal Consititution, which refused to settle and went to court to defend their principles. And the AJC WON THE CASE, humiliating Wood. The court’s verdict clearly stated that the AJC was not attacking Jewell or stating falsehoods but instead doing their job of reporting the news. Wood slunk out of that courtroom and hoped everyone would forget that moment.

More recently, Wood has gotten publicity for inflicting several nuisance suits on behalf of Nicholas Sandmann against various media companies. Wood has received very small pittance settlements from two organizations at this point, and the others look like they’ll take Wood to court if he doesn’t drop the nonsense. (The fact that the pittances were quite small became a major story about a month ago, when Wood threw a tantrum about being called out for it.)

As for Kyle Rittenhouse, he’s in extremely serious trouble, as is his mother. Rittenhouse was caught in the act of committing a serious felony just for carrying an AR-15 and for crossing state lines to bring it to Kenosha to kill the people he hates. But it gets worse – he’s a minor, and his mother drove him there. So they’re both looking at extremely serious criminal consequences. Wood can try to argue his way out of that, but the reality is that he will likely be filing nuisance suits for clients sitting behind bars for years.

Mulvaney is hoping that we can’t remember years of Darrel Issa and Trey Gowdy frantically screaming in Congress at every single facet of the Obama White House, hoping they could find that magic bullet scandal to bring it down. He’s hoping that we can’t remember all the screaming by Jay Sekulow every other day on Fox News about how President Obama was about to be “IMPEACHED!” He’s hoping we can’t remember all the false outrage over Solyndra, over Joe Sestak, over the IRS and Lois Lerner, over Benghazi, over…

Meadows was extremely busy lying and obfuscating to Chris Wallace, who was willing to allow Meadows to pretty much get away with all of it. Granted, Wallace gave it a veneer of “I’m making him answer a tough question” but in reality it was a softball approach.

Meadows is fully aware of who and what Qanon is, and he’s fine with the fact that an increasing number of angry Right Wingers think that Qanon is a great idea. He’s fine with the fact that more and more GOP candidates are openly joining Qanon. And he’s fine with having hate groups like Qanon, Proud Boys, the Europa group and the Boogaloo group raining terror around the United States. He’s also happy to blame the hate crimes on antifa, when in fact antifa has been DEFENDING communities from the vicious bigots Meadows supports.

And Meadows really couldn’t resist getting in that quick shot at the Mueller Probe, presumably to try to dismiss the devastating materials that came out last week, showing conclusively that Manafort was significantly and knowingly in contact with foreign agents. (In that respect, Meadows is in competition with Oliver Stone, who embarassed himself on Bill Maher’s show last week doing the same thing…)

We must not forget that Meadows also inflicted a particularly brutal series of lies in regards to the House passing an emergency funding measure for the Postal Service in light of the exposure of the Pence White House’s attempts to kneecap it. Meadows openly gloated about making sure the funding measure went nowhere and then began fabricating about the stimulus negotiations that he ruined. Meadows had previously made sure that no stimulus bill could be passed, thus allowing Pence’s childish spokesman to fraudulently claim HE was going to fix everything. Meadows had refused to negotiate in anything approaching good faith, choosing instead to yell at Nancy Pelosi and pound his hand on the table before stomping out of the room. Having succeeded in destroying the negotiations, he then gave himself a 2 week luxury vacation while insisting he was somehow “available” to talk. Then when he saw the House was trying to do something to save the USPS, he frantically ran back to the Capitol to interrupt the House vote and demand that Pelosi talk to him about an insulting proposal where the GOP would offer only half of the inadequate proposal he’d previously tried to force her to take. When that predictably failed, he scurried over to Fox News to make appearances like this one.

Mark Meadows has absolutely zero credibility in any of these matters. In that respect, he’s probably a good representative of the Pence White House and it’s childish spokesman.

There’s an easy way to rectify this.

Any time that Sean Hannity makes a public appearance to plug his show or his latest written screed, someone should ask him if he’s apologized to the Rich family yet and remind everyone of his continuing shame.

Similarly, anytime a Fox News representative tries to pretend to be fronting a legitimate organization, they should be asked about their conduct regarding the Rich family.

If the Right Wing is going to bring up debunked, 25 year old smears about any candidate who has the temerity to run for office, then the rest of us should be free to point out the truth about the terrible behavior of angry Right Wing pundits and propagandists.

Always fun to watch the old Cavuto Mark being put into what an unsuspecting person would think was an honest question. In reality, Cavuto is following the most common angry Right Wing talking point for attacking Joe Biden – calling him senile.

The Right Wing has struggled to find a single easy playground nickname for Biden, so that they can label him and dismiss him as they did “Crooked Hillary” in 2016. So they’ve tried “Crooked Joe” in relation to whatever scandals they’ve tried to invent about him. They’ve tried “Creepy Joe” in relation to an invented sexual assault smear. They’ve tried “Sleepy Joe” and “Senile Joe” to say that he’s just too old to be a president. And they’ve tried “Bernie Joe” to see if they could use their anti-Sanders talking points on him.

The one they keep going back to as their standby is the senility idea. And they keep repeating it, on every outlet they can, from Fox News to OANN to Newsmax to Breitbart to The First to every angry Right Wing AM Radio shock jock in the country. And they’re figuring that they can build the same wall of noise around it that they did against Hillary Clinton. It doesn’t matter that their various “explosive” revelations about this or that gaffe by Biden don’t ring true, given Biden’s long history of gaffes. It only matters that they keep repeating it every day – hoping that even mainstream voters will be tricked into saying “Yeah, he’s too old, but hey, it’s better than Pence”. Because that’s a trap, and any sane person knows better than to walk into a Right Wing meme trap.

Angry Right Wingers are now putting all their eggs into the basket of the debates to try to somehow give Pence’s childish spokesman an edge. Except that Biden is a good debater and Pence’s spokesman has lost every debate he’s ever been in. Let’s see what happens in another month, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Right Wing media spin every debate as a massive win for the Pence White House, regardless of reality.

Bemused, just to set the record fully straight:

The Fusion GPS opposition research on Donald Trump was initiated by the American Free Beacon, a Far Far Right propaganda outfit. Their thinking was that Trump was a secret liberal and a “Hollywood” or “New York” guy they couldn’t trust. Their hope was for Ted Cruz to prevail. When Trump’s schoolyard bullying succeeded in intimidating the other candidates out of the 2016 race and even cowed Cruz, the Beacon quietly retreated. Fusion GPS was left with a LOT of material they’d compiled but nobody to give it to. Fusion then reached out to some Clinton donors and offered what they had, saying they needed more funding to complete their work.. The donors agreed to give some money to Fusion to finish up and get whatever they had. This final bit of work included the Steele dossier, which apparently included a lot of the same stuff Michael Cohen is readily admitting to here.

I note that Hillary Clinton herself never paid for Fusion GPS, and you’re correct to note that none of their work was ever actually used by the Clinton campaign.

If a Supreme Court vacancy happens at ANY point before Christmas, Mitch McConnell will ram through a Far Right gargoyle no matter what. And if the GOP keeps the majority in the Senate after November, this will apply all the way up to January 20th, 2021. And if Mike Pence is re-elected and the GOP keeps the Senate majority, this is all a moot point.

The sheer number of vicious statements and wild bald-faced lies coming out of the Pence White House has been truly staggering. It’s finally gotten to the point that most people are simply deadened to it. Which may be the point for the Far Right Wing – to have most people just shrug at all the bad behavior, throw up their hands and say “government doesn’t get anything done anyway.”

The amount of damage that angry Right Wingers have done to this country is staggering, particularly in how quickly they’ve done it. It will take years to start to clean up the mess they’ve made.

The display by Pence’s childish spokesman yesterday at his golf club in New Jersey was frankly despicable. Tens of millions of Americans have been waiting for Republicans to take the COVID situation seriously, only to watch them continue to dissemble and lie. The House passed an actual comprehensive stimulus bill TWELVE WEEKS AGO, and the response from Pence and McConnell was to refuse to even acknowledge it. McConnell then refused to negotiate at the eleventh hour and allowed two of Pence’s minions to do all the talking – namely Steve Mnuchin (aka The Foreclosure King) and Mark Meadows, who was known in the House to be an extreme obstructionist and an incompetent negotiator. When they didn’t get their way on everything, the Pence minions stomped out and now we have the spokesman threatening what appear to be illegal actions and lying about what happened in the discussions.

It appears that Pence’s childish spokesman is hoping to campaign on having “done something”. Except that his actual comments don’t add up. He says that COVID “will disappear”, which I suppose he could try to tell the nearly 160,000 US citizens who have already died and the hundred thousand more who are likely to die from it while he dithers. He says that his big solution is a “payroll tax deferral”. Except that this will not help the unemployed at all, and it only means that anyone currently paying this will still need to pay the bill in a few months, just like someone getting a rent deferral. Further, it’s an obvious attack on Social Security and Medicare funding, intended to help set up massive cuts to those programs if Pence prevails this November. And Pence’s childish spokesman promises to extend a UI boost – but he doesn’t say for how much, which was a crucial part of the negotiations that the GOP failed. If I had to guess, he’s thinking he’ll just illegally repurpose funds from the CARES Act to fund a $200 boost rather than the $600 level that was needed.

I’ll give the Pence White House that they can probably do something for an extension of the eviction moratoriums. But that does nothing to help the landlords who cannot afford to keep running their units if they have no income. And it means that the tenant who no longer has income just racks up a larger and larger unpayable debt to their landlord. If I had to guess, I’d say that many tenants will still choose to move out anyway rather than be stuck with upwards of 10K in rent debt. If the GOP has its way, I expect that a large number of millenials will find themselves moving back in with their parents or other family members to ride out this crisis. I’m aware of multiple people who have already done so.

And here we have one of the sons of Pence’s childish spokesman lying his own head off in support of the whole rancid mess. November cannot come soon enough, and assuming that voters actually make their voice heard, the same applies to next January. At the very least, we would be able to see the various state criminal cases against this gang unsealed and perhaps justice could finally be done.

This is the usual and expected result of nuisance suits from angry Right Wingers who don’t like it when journalists cover their actions. Of course Bongino sued the Daily Beast for 15 million, and of course he lost. And yes, he will need to pay the costs for the people whose time and money he wasted in needing to spend even five minutes on his tantrum.

The same thing applies to Eric Bolling’s 50 million dollar lawsuit against Yashar Ali from 3 years ago. You know, the one where Bolling didn’t like the fact that Ali had covered the story about Bolling sending unwanted sexting photos to his female co-workers until he got himself fired. Bolling announced his gigantic 50 million dollar lawsuit with a lot of sound and fury. And then Ali’s lawyer answered that they were ready to deal with Bolling in discovery and in court, and that they were going to countersue Bolling for far more. And then Bolling stopped talking about the suit. I wonder what might have happened to it. Hmm. Maybe it’s been tied up in procedures for 3 years or maybe Bolling forgot it was happening. Or maybe he did what he was told and backed down.

This is the same nonsensical approach we’ve regularly seen from Lin Wood, who has now been granted two pittance settlements for his 500 million dollar nuisance suits for Nick Sandmann. (And it would appear that Sean Hannity is hoping to get in on the action of the nuisance suits over coverage of his current legal woes, as he announced he’s retained Wood for that purpose…) One really has to consider whether these guys will ever learn their lesson. And to think – they’ve been the ones saying that liberals are somehow litigation-happy. I certainly haven’t seen President Obama or Joe Biden suing Fox News for 500 million.

The Hannity cupcake interview by O’Reilly was intended to promote Hannity’s screed “book” that essentially begs his listeners to vote for Trump or risk America’s immediate death. O’Reilly promoted this interview as a “non-cupcake” hard news interview. So what did he ask Hannity? A few cupcake questions about how great a job has been done by Pence’s childish little spokesman, a cupcake softball to Hannity about how proud his parents must be of him (O’Reilly waxed about how he thinks Hannity is more powerful than Rush Limbaugh, which clearly delighted Hannity), and a creampuff with icing for Hannity about how Fox News “has changed”, leading to Hannity musing about how he has so little time to watch the network other than Fox & Friends because he’s so busy in quiet contemplation for his daily radio screeds. (Of course, Hannity also talked about all the TVs and computers constantly on to feed him the latest news when he does his screeds…)

Hannity followed up by having O’Reilly on in his usual slot on Wednesday, with a few further cupcake questions about how they hope Trump will be re-elected. As a sidenote, O’Reilly has commented that with 2020, he’s had it with the Dems and can’t even THINK of voting for any Dem. When Hannity asked O’Reilly a week ago about if he’d ever voted for a Dem, O’Reilly said of 1996, “Well, I didn’t vote for Dole.” He didn’t say that he voted for Clinton, which is wise, given that Roger Ailes would have thrown him off the top of the NewsCorp building. Just that he didn’t vote for Dole – which I suppose for O’Reilly is just the same.

It’s clear that the Right Wing approach here is to continue denying the severity of the pandemic – other than to demand blanket liability shielding for big companies to make sure they can’t be held accountable if they endanger anyone.

It’s also clear that Mitch McConnell has no intention of trying to pass any relief legislation, other than a demand that schools reopen right away and a setup for a new round of Trump checks for individuals who regularly make under 75K per year, likely timed to be delivered in October, just before the election.

When it comes to the Unemployment Insurance boost, the approach is to get rid of it, demand that everyone just go find a job somewhere, and to present a false option for restructured state benefits that isn’t physically possible so the Right Wing can try to blame the Dems for not doing it. That 70% idea has a cap on it that really means a major reduction across the board, and would only happen if a state suddenly put all their resources into trying to rebuild their UI system. The simpler and more appropriate way to deal with the current pandemic is to just continue the benefit they’ve already established – which is why the Right Wing opposes that. Because they don’t want to continue any benefit.

I note that McConnell does not even have enough GOP support in the Senate to pass ANYTHING unless it’s just a liability shield. So for him to pass a bill will mean he needs Schumer and the Dems to support it – and they’ll never support this idea. He appears to be trying to blackmail the Dems and it’s not working. The Dems in the House had a full bill passed 2 1/2 months ago and McConnell publicly stated there was no need to deal with it. Now he’s trying to play the card that somehow it’s the Dems who are allowing the current relief to expire.

I also note that the House is scheduled to recess this Friday and the Senate is scheduled to recess next Friday for their August break until after Labor Day. Pelosi has stated that the House will stay in session but McConnell has made no such pledge. He has instead stated that it will take “some weeks” to get anything done. Meaning that he’s thinking he’ll let this drag out into September.

And the UI boost actually already expired, so as of now, those millions of unemployed people are now facing rent and other payments without the assistance boost. McConnell is clearly hoping he can make them desperate enough to accept the non-offer he made and just give him the liability shield.