Balderson has pretty much won it. The proportion of remaining votes would need to be overwhelmingly for the Dem for this to turn out different.

I see this race as a cautionary one for the Dems. The turnout showed that the race swung up to 13 points toward the Dems from where things were just 2 years ago. Which should be a positive thought, as 538 notes. But that leaves out a major factor which is why the 13 point swing wasn’t enough – the gerrymandering that the GOP has inflicted around the country. In most congressional districts, it would take a much larger swing than 13 points to allow the Dem to win – they’ve been stacked that high. Which is why Dems should not be counting on a massive change in the House this fall. I’m thinking they’ll pick up about 15, maybe 20 seats, which will be a major achievement. But gerrymandering is done for a reason – and this makes the Dems’ work this year much, much harder. It’s why I believe it’s far more crucial for the Dems to get a 1 or 2 vote majority in the Senate, which cannot be gerrymandered. If they put their resources to bear in that direction, they can both protect the country from future malfeasances like the Tax Transfer and can keep a semblance of sanity about the upcoming judicial appointments after Kavanaugh is rammed onto the Supreme Court in October.

It’s possible that the Dems will pull off a historic win and suddenly overwhelm all expectations. Still, I’m thinking it will be more likely that we’ll see them do well, but not at the stratospheric level they’d need to actually change the math in DC these days. I truly hope I’m wrong on that. If I’m right, we’re looking at another 2 years of the Right Wing unravelling this nation one piece at a time.

I would advise major caution in reading the Luntz predictions today. They were made in April, nearly 4 months ago. If he makes the same prognostications today, then that would be different. But we can’t rely on his attempts to scare Right Wingers into action from the Spring.

The most important thing that the Dems can do is show up and vote whenever and wherever they can. The wind is against them thanks to the massive gerrymandering and the current Senate election schedule, but if they all make the effort and fight for it, they can at least make the point that the Dems did show up this time.

I give Fox News no credibility for occasionally sticking up for real journalists. Fox News itself has rarely had any journalism going on – aside from some coverage by Smith. But where was Shep when Sam Husseini was physically thrown out of the press room in Helsinki two weeks ago? For that matter, where was the rest of the press when this happened? Where were the expressions of outrage?

I also note that it’s a false premise to equate the current behavior of the Pence White House with the approach of an actual presidency like the Obama White House. When President Obama was in office, Fox News made it plain that they intended to attack him at every turn, including manufacturing nonsense conspiracy theories and throwing loaded “grenade gotchas” in the place of serious questions, just as they did with the Clinton White House and with the campaign of Hillary Clinton. The Obama White House responded in 2009 to the childishness of Fox News by trying to limit them to just the opinion propaganda area they clearly wanted to occupy. Fox News then threw a tantrum and got several actual journalists to stick up for them. Over the 8 years of the Obama White House, Fox News regularly attended the White House briefings to ask puerile gotcha questions, and President Obama made himself available for laughable “interviews” with blowhards like Bill O’Reilly, as did Hillary Clinton.

With the current embarrassment of the Pence White House, we have a situation where actual news and actual journalists are openly shunned and ignored, so that Right Wing propagandists can help promote the carnage Pence is inflicting. The questions being asked of Pence and his unpleasant spokesman are real ones – about very real investigations of wrongdoing and about very real consequences of Pence’s vicious policies, such as the pain of families who have been brutally separated at the border so that Pence could bully those who wish to emigrate to this country. It’s been a regular feature of the Pence White House to not only refuse to actually answer questions, but to sneer, bully and openly lie about the issues. Only in the craziest of funhouse mirrors could anyone equate the two situations, regardless of what Right Wing blowhards want to scream every day.

It could be a much simpler idea. Guilfoyle has long acted in an unpleasant manner both in front of camera and behind the scenes. It’s entirely possible that enough became enough. Just as Fox eventually tired of the behavior of Andrea Tantaros, it’s possible that Guilfoyle outlasted their tolerance. I would add that given her choice of dating partners, it’s also likely that she was putting on a lot more airs and acting with a much greater sense of her own ego in the last few months.

As with Tantaros, I take no enjoyment from seeing her get run out of there. (And I’d note that anyone who’s spent their career saying vicious things in public on Fox News is unlikely to get a media job anywhere else other than Newsmax or Glenn Beck’s dying outlet.) I just note that Guilfoyle acted in an extremely unpleasant manner and eventually that stuff catches up.

Eric, I believe Richard is referring to Pirro’s derangement syndrome, which has sadly been demonstrated on the air for years now. She’s a fairly unpleasant person, at least from what we’ve seen of her shouting at the cameras and angrily declaiming about whichever issue is upsetting her at the moment.

As for this incident on The View, it’s extremely clear what happened. This isn’t a “feud”. It’s a simple matter of Pirro acting very badly as a guest on someone else’s program. Pirro attempted to get away with bullying – not just the hosts of The View but also their crew and their audience. She threw a tantrum in front of the audience and cursed up a storm while throwing (and destroying) expensive equipment that did not belong to her at crew members. When Pirro did this, Goldberg correctly responded by standing up to her and making clear that Pirro would not be playing those games in that studio. Faced with someone who would not back down before her, Pirro did what all bullies do – she slunk away in her cowardice.

Pirro’s attitude since the 2016 election has been terrible, and it’s frankly time that someone called her on it. If anything, Goldberg’s correction of her was long overdue.

There’s a sinister moment in the middle of the interview, where Putin throws out a blatant lie about the hacking and Wallace slyly lets it go by.

Putin claims that the DNC materials were “all true”, and that the DNC somehow admitted that the materials were true, that the DNC admitted “rigging” their primaries and that “they all resigned” over the issue. Wallace of course did not correct these lies, given that the Right Wing is enjoying their opportunity to continue fomenting them and hopefully divide the Dems so they fall apart before the midterm vote in 3 ½ months.

In truth, the leaked DNC emails did NOT show the Dems rigging the primaries against Bernie Sanders. What they showed was the reality of the process – that everyone involved knew that Sanders was not likely to be the nominee when the primaries were finished, and that they needed to keep the later campaign in view, for when Hillary Clinton would need the whole party behind her. If anything, the emails showed that the DNC heads didn’t give much thought to Sanders as a serious candidate – something that was echoed by many longtime Dems who had a dim view of Sanders suddenly joining the party so he could run for President. And the general thought was always that Sanders was running to publicize his issues, including college tuition and healthcare, more than anything along the lines of a serious run for the presidency. When Wikileaks maliciously published the emails, it was an attempt to air hopefully dirty laundry in public and embarrass the Dems on the eve of their convention – a goal shared by Julian Assange and clearly by others. The resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz was not because she was admitting to Right Wing lies. She resigned to make sure that the Right Wing and Assange’s attempts to disrupt the convention would not succeed. (It’s true that Donna Brazile voiced her own opinions about the situation in her book – but her account of supposed rigging is contradicted by the other Dems who were involved. The Right Wing does love to quote Brazile now as a way of continuing their meme, but they always leave out what everyone else said.)

This is important because it’s yet another attempt by Fox News to rewrite the 2016 election, now with the help of Vladimir Putin. And of course, it’s an attempt to depress Democratic turnout this fall. The silence of Chris Wallace about this during the interview speaks volumes about the real goals of Fox News and the Right Wing these days. It isn’t just that there will be no impeachment and no consequences for the Trump group for their shady behavior here – it’s that Fox News wants to get a double advantage by once again trying to divide their opposition.

Truman is correct. Yes, a Republican here or there will make a show of protesting Trump’s latest nonsensical statements. But they’re married to him and to what the Pence White House is doing to the country. So long as Pence continues to lower their taxes and skyrocket them for middle class Democratic Party members, the Republicans will be fine to continue with this group.

Truman is also correct that the only way to stop the mess from getting any worse is going to be for Democratic voters to actually show up and vote in a midterm this year, and then show up and vote for the presidential election in 2020. If the Dems stay home again, particularly in the swing states, the real problems will get much worse.

Looking at the accounts of what happened, it’s clear that one of the producers’ assistants was told to harass and then attack Will Sommer. When Sommer refused to be bullied and instead challenged the assistant after the idiot stole his property, the producers pulled a “Trump” and tried to gaslight the situation back onto Sommer. I love how Allyn tries to say that Sommer was disrupting a take by yelling profanity at the thief. Sure. He was yelling while chasing a thief across the area, after the thief did what the producers told him to do, and they foolishly tried to roll their cameras at that exact second.

By the way, what happened to the notion of conservatives as “happy warriors”? Most of them continue to sound like embittered, angry children with the way they behave toward everyone else.

Hemmer’s approach here was sinister – particularly his cheap shot off the bat about how Richardson should be checking in with Alan Dershowitz. (That’s a thinly-veiled slap about how Dershowitz has not been getting his usual party invitations to events in the Hamptons this year. Which is something that resulted from Dershowitz’s shameful promotion of the Pence White House’s bigotry for money on Fox News.)

This is yet another example of how Fox News will be unable to walk back their behavior and their comments, as they will undoubtedly attempt after the Pence White House ends its term. They will not be able to assert anything about morality, about “family values”, or about integrity. They will get to own their bigotry and viciousness and accept that most of the country and the world is disgusted by them.

Fox News is blatantly lying about this troubled production, which itself was based on lies.

To be clear, the filmmakers could have just made their offensive movie by openly stating what they were doing and providing their script to the people working on it. They could have made it in Kentucky or Arkansas or any other Red State that agrees with their anger and their biased perspective. But they would have done it openly and told the truth about what they were doing. Dinesh D’Souza regularly does this with his vicious “documentaries” and does not have trouble putting them together.

These guys tried to lie about what they were doing in order to sneak their production into Blue areas of a Red State in Louisiana. They regularly lied to their crew, their potential cast and to the various locations where they needed to have permission to do their work. They apparently believed that they would be able to get away with a bait-and-switch where the cast and crew would think they were making an even-handed examination of this issue when in fact the point was a completely vicious slam on women making an extremely difficult choice. They exacerbated their viciousness by bringing in extremely Far Right personalities to play various roles, including Roger Stone and Milo Yiannopolous and Tomi Lahren.

The result for them has been that their director quit, a bunch of their cast quit, including the young woman who was going to play their lead. Their ADs have quit. Much of the crew has quit, in several cases in open disgust of the underhanded nature of the directors. And they’ve been thrown out of multiple locations in Louisiana because they lied to the property owners about what they would be filming. The atmosphere around this movie is one of chaos because the people producing it clearly don’t know what they are doing.

And it isn’t “Hollywood pressure” causing this. These producers should own their problems and stop trying to point fingers elsewhere. I note that the Louisiana crew and actors are locals who are able to find work on other productions quite easily, and have chosen not to work with producers like these. I’m currently working in Louisiana and I see that myself – my cast and crew isn’t worried what people think in Los Angeles.

The beauty of this stuff is that the Right Wing and the minions at Fox News will not be able to deny their behavior when the Pence White House is sent packing. They will need to own their bigotry and their viciousness.

The reality is that Pence’s ignorant spokesman normally has these public tantrums and most sane people have learned to simply ignore him. There’s no point in discussing how wrong he is or how much he lies – that’s just enabling him further.

And this last tantrum is just another version of his shameful display in the last G7 meeting where he pouted like a three year old. And it’s just another extension of his Montenegro Shove from last year.

The smartest thing the NATO group could do at this point would be to censure the US until such time as we have competent leadership that understands international issues.

As for Fox News, they’ll be digging out of this mess for decades. They already had no credibility – now they will be stuck with this albatross around their necks.

No surprise that Hannity would take this approach. I’m actually surprised that we haven’t already heard Fox News seize on the shooter’s name of Ramos to play on their audience’s hatred of anyone with a Spanish-sounding name, and to play up the whole narrative about dangerous Other people.

From what I can see, the man was a deranged lunatic who, surprise surprise, was able to arm himself with guns and enough ammo to not only attack the newspaper office, but to calmly reload while he was in the middle of the office shooting people. This has nothing to do with Maxine Waters, and everything to do with how the Right Wing has emboldened angry people to act on their vilest impulses, particularly against the “Fake News”. And of course it’s example 256,156 of how the NRA has choked off all discussion of limiting people’s access to dangerous weapons.

This is meaningless legalese. What it translates to is that Scott received complaints about the unhappiness of various celebrities on the Fox Studios side of the company and she wants them to think she’s taking action – when in fact this is simply a CYA memo approach. And it’s only intended to cover them until the acquisition by Disney or Comcast is completed. Once Fox News and Fox Sports are left on their own, talk like this will be forgotten.

The entire point of Fox News is to allow angry Right Wingers to spout whatever hatred and talking points they can to slag their political enemies. That has always been the point. Scott’s words fly in the face of the entire mission of the network. I’m sure that when Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson heard them, they openly laughed in the messenger’s face.

Huckabee has always been a vicious bigot and a hypocrite. Nothing new about this. I’d recommend ignoring him. The proper response to a bigot like this is to shun him. At the least, he’s confirmed that he has no moral ground from which to say anything to anyone.

But I do need to caution people that the institutionalized gerrymandering will make it extremely difficult for the Dems to do more than pick up a few seats in the House this fall. It’s a better and more effective route for them to go all in for the Senate, where seats cannot be gerrymandered. The Senate is crucial, particularly for the judiciary. Failure to take the Senate means that Mike Pence gets to put one or two more gargoyles onto the Supreme Court before he’s hopefully shown the door in 2020. Of course, all of this depends on Dem voters actually showing up and voting – something they’ve not been very good about in the past couple of election cycles.

It’s frankly getting tiring to listen to angry Right Wingers play this game of “Ding Dong Ditch”. I’ve also heard it called “Ring and Run”. They drop a bomb with a completely offensive comment and then run away.

This person was not being attacked – she was appropriately being criticized for saying something completely offensive. If she did not want to hear criticism for saying offensive things, it might have helped for her to have not been saying offensive things.

Sadly, Lewandowski’s viciousness is not shocking at all. It’s not even unusual given the competition among angry Right Wingers to say the most offensive things they can in the hope of “triggering snowflakes”.

The best thing people can do is encourage everyone to vote in November. Hopefully, if enough people show up to participate, the Senate can switch to Democratic hands. And cowards like Lewandowski can go back to carping from the sidelines rather than gloating about how badly they’re treating everyone.

It should not be a surprise to anyone that cowards and blatant liars like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are happily supporting this vicious approach to immigration policy. To them, this is an enjoyable diversion – they get to support the brutalization of the immigrants and they get to sneer about it to anyone they feel smug about dismissing.

The reality is that Carlson and Ingraham are well aware that there was no reason to adopt a vicious approach like this one. No prior president or Congress has ever pushed something like this, and no reasonable person ever would. The only reason to do it is out of the simple cruelty and cowardice of the Pence White House and its hope to score cheap political points off the misery of others.

Ingraham repeatedly and knowingly lied about the reality of this situation. She’s aware that there was no law forcing Jeff Sessions to adopt this approach. She’s aware that most of the people interdicted at sites between the “ports of entry” are not hardened criminals but simply desperate immigrants who don’t know where those ports are. The fact that ideologues like Nielsen and Sessions are pushing the “ports of entry” nonsense is an indication that they know they have no moral or legal ground on which to stand. Sessions at least admitted on the air that he is intentionally using this approach as a way to deter potential immigrants from coming to the US.

Ingraham also tried to play a card of presenting the immigrants as criminals, and even to insidiously suggest that the children themselves are conniving perpetrators who can’t be trusted. She hosted one Right Wing guest who laughably tried to present the plight of immigrants through the prism of a couple of anecdotes about desperate people turning their kids over to coyotes in the hopes of getting them to America. (This was of course in the perspective of trying to say these parents don’t care for their children anyway – which would make sense, as the Right Wing doesn’t see these people as human in the first place.)

One hopes that voters will pay attention to this viciousness and respond in appropriate manner in November. Except that the Supreme Court just ducked the matter of the gerrymandered states, which means that the Democrats now have a nearly impossible hill to climb in most states. Dems still must show up in the highest numbers possible – that could still make a difference, at least in terms of letting everyone know that there’s a majority of citizens who do not support the current Right Wing regime. But it’s almost a certainty now that the GOP will retain its control of Congress, which means we will need to brace ourselves for what will come next year.

Not surprising to see a coward like Jesse Watters trying to sneer his way out of this situation, in the same way that it’s not surprising to see another coward like Greg Gutfeld try to score cheap points on the backs of immigrant children.

We should understand right away that the entire discussion is built on a false premise, one that the Right Wing is frantically waving in the hopes that most people will go along with it. Sadly, they’ve been correct for much of the time on this. The false premise here is that somehow the Pence White House is just following a broken law that the Democrats in Congress won’t help them fix, and that the source of this problem is “our broken immigration system”. And perhaps that if the Democrats would just be reasonable, they could get a solution for the DACA group and stop unfortunate situations like this one. Of course, this premise is a complete lie – and the people inflicting it, like Sanders and Watters, are fully aware of the blatant nature of the lie.

In reality, there is no law that states that children should be ripped from their parents and put in cages if ICE is investigating an asylum claim or an undocumented entry into the country. There are unrelated codes that have to do with how we deal with criminals – such as burglars, murderers, and others who present an actual danger to other people – and those do recommend that violent criminals be separated from everyone else as a matter of safety. But that’s not the same situation as what’s going on at the border, and everyone in the Pence White House knows it. Further, we NEVER had a situation like this one before the Pence White House decided to generate it. Not under a GOP president, not under a Democratic president, not under any version of the Congress under either party.

The current situation is the direct result of choices made by the Pence White House to treat immigrants as violent criminals and to brutalize them when they arrive, including by ripping their children away and putting them in detention facilities. Nobody forced Mike Pence to push this policy, and nobody forced Jeff Sessions to implement it, and nobody is forcing ICE agents to grab infants out of the arms of their mothers. This is entirely the choice of the Pence White House and they should own it. The fact that they’re ducking about it in public indicates to me that they’re aware that this approach is backfiring on them at the moment.

There are three reasons why the Pence White House has taken this approach, and they’re all fairly obvious – even to the point that various people in this miserable administration have openly copped to them. First, the intention is to make the immigration/asylum process so horrible, so risible and so vicious that the wave of people fleeing to the US from the south will turn toward other countries. It’s the same racist idea that goes with having the Border Patrol shoot undocumented immigrants. The point is to make an example of the people in the system, so that others coming this way will hear about it and maybe they’ll say “I don’t want that to happen to me or my kids”. And the Pence White House has admitted that they do intend this to be the reaction from potential immigrants. (At least the immigrants who aren’t Caucasians from Europe and Scandinavia)

The second reason is that the Pence White House is hoping to bully the Democratic party into begging for mercy for the kids and signing onto the racist proposed legislation that the Right Wing tried to inflict several months ago. Under that scenario, the Democrats would presumably be crying and wilting under the sight of what’s happening to the children, and would go along with the GOP’s notions of gutting the current immigration system and again turning it to favor Caucasians from Europe and Scandinavia. Sure, they’d allow some kind of limbo status for the DACA group that’s here, but they’d tell them they’re on their own and can’t have any of their family here, and they’d make things as difficult as possible for them – in the hopes that many of them would self-deport anyway. Currently, the Dems aren’t falling for this nonsense, and are instead making principled statements about the moral bankruptcy of the Pence White House and the GOP. This could change quickly after November if the GOP retains control of the Congress. In the event that the Dems fail to take either house, we will most likely see the Dems cave on some terrible Right Wing bill that’s even harsher than what I just described, since there will be no other options until 2021 and they won’t want to have the kids continue to suffer for another two years.

The third reason is that the Pence White House intends to use these images as positive campaign promotion. While the Dems will campaign on these images as examples of typical Right Wing savagery, the GOP will use the images to rally their base of angry White men. The test in November will be to see who actually shows up to vote. If the Dems stay home and say “We’re doomed. There’s nothing I can do. Why try?” as so many people are currently doing on Facebook and social media, the GOP will prevail. I agree with Erich that it is CRUCIAL for people to show up and vote this November.

And we should remember that it isn’t just the immigration issue that will be at stake after November. There’s also the Supreme Court and the judiciary, which the Right Wingers in the Senate are working to poison. And there’s the imminent major cuts coming to Social Security and Medicare – if the GOP keeps control over the Congress in November, you can time your watch to the big moves they’ll be making in 2019 – with over 20 months to make a giant mess before they’re really held accountable in another election. Remember that the Tax Transfer was only the first step in a larger plan. If they keep the Congress, we’ll see the next two or three steps before we get to the 2020 election, which will include the reduction of Medicare to vouchers and the slashing and means testing of Social Security benefits for anyone under 57. Do not underestimate what they will do. They already massively raised taxes on middle class union workers in Blue States – mine went up by thousands of dollars per year.

I would argue that Erich is actually understating the urgency of this fall. It’s not that 2020 may be too late. 2020 WILL be too late. People need to get off their rear ends and vote this fall, or they will have only themselves to blame for the fallout in 2019. Elections have consequences.

A few quick notes:

1. The Clinton Foundation was an actual charity which provided documented relief for people around the world. It can certainly be argued that some people who made donations to the Foundation weren’t doing so because they cared as much about the charity’s work as they did about currying favor with the Clintons. But that doesn’t mean the Foundation didn’t do legitimate and good work that helped a LOT of people.

2. The Trump Foundation has been under investigation for years for actually using the donated funds for the further self-enrichment of the Trump family. They apparently didn’t actually do the charitable work the Foundation purportedly was formed to do. And the people who were supposed to be operating the charity didn’t even know that they were supposed to be doing so. Everything about the Trump Foundation suggests that it’s been exactly what they’re being pursued about – a scheme to get people to give the Trump family money for their own use. Which would make the exercise a complete and utter fraud. Not particularly surprising, given the long history of Donald Trump and his associates in that area.

3. Kennedy is not someone with a track record or a journalistic history that can withstand scrutiny. Her greatest achievement to date was an embarrassing discussion with Martin Landau at the 1996 premiere of the first Tom Cruise “Mission: Impossible” movie wherein she embarrassed herself and MTV. Landau humiliated her for trying to present herself as informed about the movie when in fact she’d never seen the original series or studied anything about it. Ever since then, the only places she seems to have gotten anyone to listen to her comments have been Right Wing AM radio stations and Fox News. I wouldn’t recommend that someone like that spend much time in the public eye.

What happened yesterday was pretty much everything the North Koreans have long hoped to see. They got the Pence White House to concede in every single area, and never made a single commitment to do anything about their human rights situation and their nuclear arsenal. The farthest they were willing to come was to say they would think about it. Which is where we were before yesterday. So the only change is that Trump capitulated to their demands.

Granted, I’m happy to hear that we will stop overtly provoking the region with the wargames exercises and the mock assassination stuff. But the notion that the Pence White House achieved anything here is not even flimsy at this point.

Put it another way: If President Obama had conducted a meeting like this with the leader of North Korea and walked out without anything while giving away everything he had on his side of the table, Fox News and the Right Wing would be screaming wall to wall that he was the next Neville Chamberlain.