The most important observation here comes at the bottom of the article. Watters is just repeating the Right Wing libertarian mantra: “I got mine, (BLEEP) you”. Or at its more basic: Straight up Right Wing selfishness. Watters has full health coverage because he’s paid under SAG-AFTRA conditions and because he doesn’t have serious medical problems of which we know, so as far as he’s concerned, there’s no problem here to him.

The Right Wing never wanted anyone to have any kind of service like this – their notion is that if you don’t have health coverage, that’s your problem. If your job doesn’t pay enough or offer any coverage, the Right Wing believes you should quit your job and find another one that does – and if there is no job that does, then you should work five jobs so that you can afford to self-insure. And if you can’t work five jobs, then they believe you should be quiet about your problems so they don’t have to hear it.

When President Obama pushed the ACA to try to get as many people covered as possible, the Right Wing’s response was to gum up the works as much as possible. They tried to talk it down, tried to obstruct it, tried to say that it was only covering a few people, and various other tactics. They got the public option removed, which dropped the effectiveness of the whole plan and then they worked to sabotage and kneecap the pieces that were left. They worked to keep as many states out of as much of the ACA as possible – specifically to keep the net it could extend as small as possible, and therefore as expensive and ineffective as possible for those states that were in it. That’s why so many angry Right Wing state legislatures and governors refused to do anything to participate.

As Watters is unintentionally confirming here, the whole point to the Right Wing is that they don’t care about any of the people who aren’t covered. If that’s 50 million people, so what? If that’s 27 million people, who cares if those people get hurt or die? To the Right Wing, NONE of those people should have been helped here – and their hope is to see those people’s coverage dropped as soon as possible. To them, the idea is to show the rest of the country that “Yes We Can” doesn’t work and that you can never believe in the good a society can do. If they succeed in completely erasing the ACA, they will have taken a large step in one of their major goals – convincing the American public that we cannot accomplish anything collectively. (Which then will lead them to their next major goal – getting rid of the other social services and of course slashing taxes further for the wealthy.)

I strongly doubt that the Murdoch family will ever mess with the formula that has made them hundreds of millions of dollars – namely the exploitation of the deplorables and the other angry Right Wingers across America who think that the “lamestream” news channels aren’t telling it like it is. They had a chance to try and change course when Bill O’Reilly was forced out in disgrace and when both Megyn Kelly and Greta van Susteren quit. They could have tried to hire actual journalists and credible people to do their primetime shows. What did they do instead? They pushed Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, two of the most discredited and extreme deplorables in the Right Wing mediaverse.

My instincts say that Fox News will likely stay as it is until their audience of primarily older viewers starts to dissipate.

It is no accident that Lahren used this approach to viciously attack Kamala Harris, a politician the Right Wing has hated from the moment she had the temerity to speak up.

I have heard this exact same attack talking point used by angry Right Wingers, who are being fed this nonsense by Fox News and AM Radio in anticipation of her potentially rising higher. If she prevails and becomes the Dem nominee, you can guarantee that Mike Pence and his childish spokesman will immediately go to this talking point as their first shot. The implication is that they figure she has no actual ability and only got pushed up to this position because she was Willie Brown’s girlfriend once upon a time. In the event she is ever in a debate with Trump, you know he’ll slip this idea in somewhere to see if he can get a response.

When I responded to the Right Winger who tried this smear and reminded him of the actual facts, he laughed and smugly dismissed the truth, saying that nobody would care and that she was a lousy candidate and the Dems better hope she doesn’t get the nomination. (I note that this same response has been given to pretty much every Dem candidate by the Right Wing – they’re literally sharpening their butter knives for every one of them, hoping they can generate something close to the amount of bad odor they tried to gin up around Hillary Clinton. The difference now is that they don’t have 25 years of Right Wing media history to draw from with most of these candidates.)

The only mistake Lahren made here, if she even really made one, is that she got a little ahead of her skis. Fox News is waiting to see whether she gets any headway after the first few primaries before they start lobbing smear grenades like this one. Their hope is to embarrass her at a much deeper point in the campaign and then hopefully brand her with the smear as close to the election as possible. I strongly doubt anyone in the power structure at Fox News is angry at Lahren for repeating this talking point – they just don’t want her spoiling their strategy of how to use it.

It’s very interesting that the Right Wing just keeps shoving the discussion farther to the right and acting like they aren’t doing it.

The appropriate response is to note that Rives is simply repeating Right Wing propaganda talking points, to note that without a minimum wage, millions more Americans would be unable to eat or would be dependent on food stamps, and to note that the Right Wing is not the friend of the Middle or Working class anyway, given that they skyrocketed taxes on Middle Class employees while giving themselves and the rich a huge tax cut last year.

I do have an explanation. Fox News is not an important broadcasting network. It is a propaganda operation masquerading as a news network. It employs amateurs like Hannity and O’Reilly and Carlson because it makes the base audience happy by slaking their hatred and anger.

Given that Hannity appears to be so excited about having a war with Iran, if he’s really that confident, then he should fly out immediately to Tehran to stand at ground zero to report on the bombs falling. A real man would do this, so of course Hannity should do it in a moment. He should be man enough to go to the front lines and stand there and be counted when the carnage happens. If not, he should not be given even a moment of anyone’s time or thoughts when he desperately waves his arms around like this.

Rand Paul has no moral or ethical high ground here. He voted for the Tax Transfer, which vindictively skyrocketed taxes on millions of Middle Class Americans so he could give a huge break to his donors and himself. He doesn’t get to then whine about how much it costs to provide medical care to emergency responders. He frankly should be ashamed of himself, and should be confronted about this at any point that he appears in public for the rest of his life.

There’s a bit to unpack here.

First, to the Pence White House and its childish spokesman, they don’t care about the views of most of the country – they only want to talk to their small base of maybe 30% of people who actually vote. To them, THAT is the country, so they’re probably correct when they say that 95% of that crowd totally agrees with Pence and his spokesman. (The other 5% of the deplorables are unhappy that Pence isn’t just filling buses with “illegals” and flat-out throwing them into the desert. But they’ll still tolerate another term for Pence, of course.)

Second, the idea of pollsters or aggregators skewing the numbers to depress votes is just Fox News projecting a common RIGHT WING tactic. Namely, the fun with Rasmussen every election cycle, where they tilt the numbers toward the GOP candidate in every race – both to generate false results and to drag down the overall numbers for the aggregators like 538. Which is why 538 regularly equalizes the tainted Rasmussen numbers before including them in their calculations. Rasmussen was caught red-handed messing with the numbers in 2012, when they predicted a Romney victory along with Gallup and were humiliated. Gallup responded by withdrawing from presidential campaign polling. Rasmussen responded by acting like it never happened and hoping nobody would notice. (And people should remember the nonsense about “Unskewed” polls in 2012 – when the Right Wing insisted that the REAL Americans weren’t being polled correctly because how could the numbers show approval and a lead for President Obama?)

The 2020 election frankly won’t be decided by the independents. It will be decided by the 2-3 million active Dem voters across the swing states who stayed home in 2016 and allowed Trump to squeak through with a minimal shelf of tiny majorities. If those Dems show up to vote in 2020, if they’ve learned their lesson about how elections really do have consequences, then Eric Trump will be able to complain about it all he wants on Trump TV while the rest of us clean up the mess that the Pence White House and its deplorable fans have made of our nation.

No surprise that the Pence White House wants a sycophant like Crowley to directly address the press about how well they want everyone to think they’ve done with the economy. And no surprise that they’re pulling their appointees from their public relations arm at Fox News.

I note for the record that for most people, the economy in general has continued to moderately improve as it did under President Obama, given that Pence inherited a growing economy that had modestly recovered from the huge Republican recession of 2008. (And he didn’t inherit a “mess” as falsely claimed by his childish spokesman) But I must also note that the Tax Transfer inflicted by the GOP has grievously injured millions of Middle Class employees and Blue State residents by raising their tax brackets and erasing their deductions. And the Pence people added injury to insult by messing with the withholding rates last year in a vain play to convince everyone they’d received a fantasy “tax cut” before the midterms.

The actual economic policies pursued by the Pence White House, including the Tax Transfer, the abandonment of multiple international agreements, and the constant infantile tantrums about how they want to inflict tariffs, are not helpful for long-term economic growth, despite the sugar high the wealthy and the corps are enjoying at the moment. But you’ll never hear that from a person as truth-challenged as Crowley.

Exhibit #12405 of things that angry Right Wingers will not be able to walk back after this miserable epoch of our history is finished. If the 2-3 million active Dem voters in the swing states can manage to show up next November, it will be shortly after that.

I frankly wonder why anyone gives even a moment of their time to this unimportant child Tweeter. He’s an embarrassment to the nation and to the world. It’s more important that we keep our eye on the acting president, Mike Pence, who is still involved in fairly unfortunate business while people are distracted by the infant with the cell phone.

Wow.

Okay, let’s straighten this one out, as Fox News and AM Radio are having fun trying to gaslight the whole thing.

First, as Ellen notes, the whole point of putting this question on the general census is to make sure that a bunch of Chicano residents do NOT fill it out, regardless of whether they are citizens. This is to help the Right Wing limit any representation those people get, and to cut as much funding as possible from those areas.

Second, the Right Wing is LYING when they say they’re just adding back on a question that was already there until 2010. In fact, the citizenship question has not been on the GENERAL census since around 1950. It was only put on after the Civil War as a way of intimidating former slaves and immigrants from participating. It went on and off, depending on the mood of the country, including the whole anti-immigrant mess we went through at the end of WWII. By the time we got to the modern age, the citizenship question was only given to a less-than-3% sample of the population, who were filling out a much longer and more complicated form. The Pence White House’s aim here is to put the citizenship tripwire into the general census so EVERYONE would have it – something that has not been the case for generations, and for good reason.

Third, Jessica Tarlov may be a wonderful person, but she knew what she was getting into when she took a paycheck from Fox News. I realize that even Jeff Cohen has done this at one point, but it’s still tarnished money. And it frankly hasn’t ended well for a single Dem who took that money, whether that be Dennis Kucinich, James Carville or Tamara Holder. I frankly wouldn’t recommend ANYONE take Fox’s offer, and I’d point them to actual news outlets instead.

Fox News is just pushing the usual Right Wing line on this stuff – which is to blame the individual if anything goes wrong in their life, and to sneer at people who are still working driving Uber at the age of 80 because they don’t have enough money to survive.

There is something to be said about saving your money and being frugal. There’s also something to be said about a culture that encourages everyone to BUY as much as they can, regardless of whether they can afford it. I do agree that individuals need to act with responsibility, but it’s mean to the point of viciousness to make the comments seen above about senior citizens who have been bankrupted by conditions way beyond their control. 50 years ago, it was possible to earn a decent pension and to have a solid retirement after working 20 years. These days, pensions are much rarer, something the Right Wing has made a point of causing. So people are more stuck on their own, and thus finding themselves working literally until they cannot stand up.

The Right Wing take on this is what is peddled by Dave Ramsey to millions every day:
1. Avoid All Debt.
2. Live on Cash.
3. Assume Wider Economic Trends Will Not Affect You. (Ramsey tells his listeners they can choose not to participate in a recession, as though that were an option)
4. When those Trends do Affect You, BLAME YOURSELF.

Ingraham is undoubtedly in conversation with Pence, talking with the Pence White House throughout this miserable term. But she’s tooting her own horn a bit much here. The list she’s discussing was formulated by Heritage Action and the Federalist Society, two extreme Far Right judicial activist groups. What Ingraham did was cluck her approval of the gargoyles they were suggesting. She may have even suggested a couple of gargoyles herself. I’m sure Ingraham has been able to help convince Pence to really lean into this list, but it’s not like Pence wasn’t already committed to doing so.

Neither Gorsuch nor Kavanaugh were on the initial list. Gorsuch was added after he showboated on the infamous “Frozen Trucker” case and demonstrated that he was completely hostile to Labor. That, plus his family pedigree as the son of the notorious Anne Gorsuch, helped catapult him into the seat that the Right Wing stole from Merrick Garland and President Obama. As for Kavanaugh, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ingraham helped suggest him as a candidate and then pushed his name with Pence. Kavanaugh was long known to be an extremely craven partisan, who had distinguished himself as a rabid Clinton hater during the Lewinsky matter.

The question now is whether Clarence Thomas will cave to pressure. He’s been a lot more outspoken than ever before – particularly in stating that he doesn’t intend to retire. Kennedy said some of the same things before he suddenly caved, took the cash offer and announced his retirement last year. I have a suspicion that the Right Wing intends to have Thomas retire next spring, in the middle of the 2020 campaign. If that happens, they’d ram another Kavanaugh-type gargoyle through the Senate by September and smugly show off their now future-proofed Far Right Supreme Court a month before the election. The calculation is that this would completely demoralize the Dems and presumably dash their hopes enough for those swing state Dems to stay home again. I truly hope this does NOT happen – on either front, but knowing the cravenness of the Pence White House, I would recommend being prepared for it.

The answer is that scooter is correct. Carlson is clearly feeling very threatened by Omar (as well as by Ocasio Cortez and the others). With Omar, he feels entitled and emboldened to launch a screed like this – kind of like Bill O’Reilly did against George Tiller. It makes Carlson feel good to say racist things about Omar, knowing that a large part of his audience are the deplorables who lap that stuff up and feed from it.

And in the event that one of the deplorables takes action against Omar, as one did against George Tiller, Carlson would be fine with it. Like O’Reilly, he’ll never apologize for instigating violence against someone he hates this much. As far as Carlson is concerned, Omar deserves it.

This is yet another moment that Carlson will not be able to walk back, and which Fox News should be held responsible for airing for the rest of its existence. So after the Pence White House is hopefully shown the door, provided the swing state Dems show up next November, when partisans like Carlson try to play the card of “Well, I guess everyone just went a little crazy there. Let’s let bygones be bygones and just move forward.”, the rest of us can say “NO. You endorsed and emboldened hatred. You don’t get a pass. Live with your shame.”

The Pence White House has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it is dangerously incompetent. Its only agenda has been a complete erasure of every single policy set by President Obama’s administration. Destroying the Iran nuclear agreement was part and parcel with that. Pence’s childish spokesman can say whatever he likes about it and sycophants like Tucker Carlson will lap it up. But the reality is fairly obvious, and has been since the beginning of Trump’s campaign all the way back in 2011.

This humiliating display by Pence’s childish spokesman was truly uncomfortable to watch. Carlson can gaslight it all he wants, but the reality is that Pence’s spokesman is apparently desperate to get Kim to agree to anything so he can say he has succeeded somewhere, ANYWHERE before the 2020 campaign kicks off in earnest. It’s fairly obvious that Kim agreed to say hello to him, only on the condition that Trump prostrate himself and on the condition that Trump agree to meet Kim on KIM’s terms. And Kim didn’t have to agree to do anything for the Pence White House – so it’s a huge win-win for Kim and another embarrassment for Pence and his spokesman.

I realize there are many people who would like to see warmer relations with North Korea, and I’m one of them. The bizarre threats we were hearing two years ago from Pence’s spokesman about North Korea were petty and alarming. Now he’s gone 180 degrees and is slavishly elevating Kim. There is another way to have handled this – which would involve actual diplomats and people with some brains actually thinking for a minute before taking the odd actions we’ve seen from Trump here. Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone like that involved in our current diplomacy. Such an advance will need to wait until we have an actual President elected – hopefully next November. Until then, we’re stuck with the continuing mess of the incompetent, bumbling Pence White House.

Regarding Otto Warmbier, he was neither a martyr for freedom nor a tragic victim of the North Korean state. The linked article makes Warmbier’s situation pretty clear. Warmbier was a college student who made a truly unfortunate mistake when he tried to steal a propaganda poster from a restricted area in the hotel where he was briefly staying when he was a tourist in North Korea around NYE at the end of 2015. He was of course caught, and the North Koreans assumed he had been put up to this behavior to attack them. When he tried to explain his membership in a fraternity (the real reason he’d tried to steal a trophy – he would have been the king of the frat if he’d succeeded), they assumed this meant he was involved in a conspiracy with a “secret organization”.

It’s clear that Warmbier was terrified for his life by the ordeal of questioning and intimidation he endured after being caught breaking North Korean laws. When the show trial ended with him being sentenced to hard labor for longer than he’d been alive, he clearly was a broken man. The article notes that he never made it to the labor camp. Instead, he suffered a massive loss of oxygen to his brain on the night before he was to be transferred. Coincidentally, he apparently had been given an extra supply of sleeping pills as he was unable to rest without them due to all the stress. It doesn’t take an expert to figure out what Warmbier did when faced with what he thought was a life sentence of brutal punishment and no hope. This doesn’t excuse the North Koreans, but it makes the situation a lot more understandable.

When all the GOP candidates raised their hands to attack health care and try to defund the government, I seem to recall Fox News celebrating those pledges. But when a Democratic candidate raises their hand to stick up for someone else being able to get health care, that’s a foolish idea, if you take your cues from Fox News.

Of course, what Cavuto and Friends don’t tell you here is the unspoken wish (or maybe the sometimes spoken wish) of the deplorables. They really do want the immigrants to hopefully catch these diseases and for the word to get around about it. This allows them to rid the country of a population they don’t want, and to discourage more of them from wanting to come here in the first place. Bigotry of the most despicable nature.

And the people supporting that position are currently in positions of supposed authority in the Pence White House.

Elections Have Consequences.

I’m wondering where this change in heart is really coming from. Regardless of whether he’s putting some money into this project, why did he suddenly shift up after 20 years of consistently reading Right Wing propaganda as “news” on the Fox News network?

In the case of David Brock, it was a matter of his personal issues ultimately overwhelming his partisan instincts – but Brock did this within 10 years or so. Cameron made a whole career of selling the Right Wing talking points – enough that he literally retired from Fox News having done so.

My instincts say that he’s trying to set up a way that respectable Republicans can save face once the Pence White House is hopefully shown the door by voters (assuming the Dems in the swing states can find their voting booths next November). Like Ralph Peters and George Will and others, he’s not a friend to the Left, but he is concerned that the GOP has put itself in an untenable position by catering so broadly to the deplorables.

The age of the Pence White House and his childish spokesman has generated some truly odd reactions on both the Right and the Left. On the Right, there are those who’ve backed away from the dumpster fire, like Cameron appears to be doing. And there are those who’ve jumped headfirst INTO the dumpster fire – like Hannity, Limbaugh, Ingraham, Carlson and Lindsey Graham. (And I say this knowing that Carlson has misgivings about the Pence White House’s intentions to viciously attack Iran – Carlson’s misgivings aren’t about the Pence White House, but rather about what the consequences could be for Pence’s 2020 re-election campaign.) On the Left, there are some who have decided to spend the past 2 1/2 years tut-tutting about how the Dems should have nominated Bernie Sanders or about how Julian Assange is supposedly a “hero” and then making odd alliances with outfits like Fox News (like Glenn Greenwald) and there are others who’ve been consistent in their approach that
Right Wing politicians in both parties have generated the situation we currently endure.

Greenwald is doing this from the perspective of Left Wingers who are angry at everyone in the mainstream media for their conduct during the W/Cheney White House’s vicious attack on Iraq in 2003. And he’s continuing his retaliation at the mainstream media for not supporting his friend Julian Assange – something that Carlson is only too happy to help him do. This is not the first time Greenwald has done this at Fox News and we’ve discussed it when he played this game recently.

It is extremely important that Ellen notes here how Greenwald is deliberately ignoring the openly partisan and craven conduct of Fox News while he is on their airwaves. It sadly defeats Greenwald’s very basis for speaking – and shows him compromising any claim to integrity just so he can get a few cheap shots in.

The reality is that Fox News is a major part of the propaganda wing of the Pence White House, and anyone who appears as a guest there should be pointing that out in a vigorous manner. Fox News is not legitimate journalism and should not be dignified as such. Fox News is the equivalent of a combination of Breitbart’s screeds and some of the sillier ideas heard on Alex Jones’ radio show. The people who work there may make a few bucks, but they sacrifice any credibility by doing so. And when the Pence White House is hopefully voted out, they’ll have no place to turn – which is sadly the price one pays for having played these games and lost.

I am not convinced that the Pence White House will walk away from this opportunity to attack Iran. I believe they are evaluating WHICH strategy of attack they wish to employ, and when would be the optimum time to do so.

What Hannity is really concerned about is making sure this attack is timed best to help Mike Pence get re-elected. He wants to make sure that a massive attack and bombing happens, to slake the Right’s hatred of Iran, to be sure – but he wants that massive attack to happen at the worst possible time for any Dems trying to run against a wartime consigliere, er, Right Wing white house.

My instincts say that they’ll do a smaller scale attack this year, within the next couple of months, keep fuming at Iran for the rest of the year, and then launch a much bigger attack next summer just before the Dems hold their convention.

It’s a no-brainer that Gaetz wants a cushy, well-paid Fox News gig as soon as he’s out of office. I fully expect him and Jim Jordan to be at the Fox doorstep, hat in hand, as soon as they announce their “return to civilian citizen life” – something I have a feeling they may accelerate if Dems actually show up for the 2020 election.