Lisa Montgomery has no credibility whatsoever, and her desperation here is showing. If you want to see her at her finest, look up the clip of her blown interview with Martin Landau on the subject of Mission: Impossible. I realize that she wants to cultivate an image of herself as a brilliant snarker, but her history is that of a deeply ignorant person who spends a lot of time ridiculing other people who have actually spent their lives trying to accomplish something of substance.

As for the question about who Fox News would hate if they didn’t have the Clintons to kick around? That’s easy. President Barack Obama. They never tire of hating on him. And in 2020, I’m sure they’ll find new reservoirs of hatred for the next Dem nominee for President too.

Bill O’Reilly’s comments here are typical of his entire career, and consistent with the way he has always dealt with someone calling him on his personal behavior. He doubles down.

It doesn’t matter that the facts show O’Reilly’s behavior was swinish and unacceptable. It doesn’t matter that he cost his employer millions of dollars in legal costs and settlement payments. It doesn’t matter that it was O’Reilly’s own behavior that put him in this position. To O’Reilly, the only thing that matters is that he thinks he was somehow wronged and he’s trying to get revenge.

It’s understandable that O’Reilly feels wronged. He had a cushy gig on Fox News and was setting himself up to be an Elder Statesman of the Right, someone who could opine as a real authority on Current Affairs and be thought of as a true Man of the World by Fox News viewers and Right Wingers everywhere. Instead, he’s been publicly humiliated and reduced to ranting on his website or on Glenn Beck’s increasingly wacky radio show. I’m sure it rankles him to no longer have his bully pulpit to yell at everyone.

It’s interesting that O’Reilly wants to point fingers at David Brock’s group rather than acknowledge his own behavior. The reality is that Fox News would never have fired him if O’Reilly was this innocent paragon of virtue. They fired him because the damage he had caused them was real, and was increasing. They fired him because they knew the facts about his awful behavior and they could no longer bury them. They fired him because in the wake of Roger Ailes’ humiliation, they knew they couldn’t get away with encouraging this behavior any further.

O’Reilly is delusional if he thinks that his downfall occurred because some left wing conspiracy concocted “a political and financial hit job”. His downfall, like Ailes, like Eric Bolling, happened because of his own conduct. If he wants to know who’s responsible for his situation, he should follow the Right Wing’s trademark advice: Look in the Mirror. (Why is it that the Right Wing never wants to take individual responsibility when it’s for something that actually matters? It’s like Mitch McConnell saying he had “no choice” but to destroy the filibuster rule this year. Of course McConnell had a choice – and he made one to ram his gargoyle through. And then he ran and hid from the consequences of his choice.)

I’d recommend that if O’Reilly actually thinks he has a case for wrongful termination, or for slander or libel here, he should stop making childish threats and file his lawsuit. If he really thinks he has a case, then put his money where his mouth is. Until then, this is just more hot air from the blowhard at the end of the bar.

When the North Korea situation goes over the edge, and it’s only a matter of time now before that happens, I’m sure Dobbs will applaud the carnage. Because these guys really do want that carnage to happen. They’ve been frustrated for a long time that we don’t drop bombs on whole populations and they’ve been looking for a chance to get to do it again.

The reality of yesterday’s sinister behavior by Trump is that we just witnessed him trying to bully the entire world in his usual manner. The reaction of the rest of the world to his threats was pretty easy to see coming – we’re now even more isolated than we were before, something I didn’t think was possible.

The Right Wing loves what Trump did there because he was really speaking to them in any case. I heard AM Radio hosts practically giddy with their joy at hearing Trump act like a five year old at the UN.

Again, this is a stark reminder of what happens when people decide that their vote doesn’t matter and choose to stay home. Had the three million Dem voters who sat on their hands actually taken the time to vote last November, we would not now be facing a situation like this. Elections have consequences and this is a big one.

The only questions I have are about what will happen after the Pence White House attacks North Korea. What are the consequences for us, past whatever weapons get lobbed at us during the immediate event? How does China react to our behavior, when they’ve stated they will have a response? I’m assuming that will mean a major economic impact, but we’ll have to see. And how does the UN react? Do they sanction us? Does the UN move its HQ out of New York, as I’ve been expecting them to? The only thing we can say for certain is that the next presidential administration is going to have a much bigger mess to clean up than President Obama faced in 2009.

And I note that childish threats and tantrums like Trump’s do not project strength in any case. Trump’s behavior is that of an increasingly weak person – one who is prone to make irrational choices as he flails around in his desperation. It appears that the Right Wing is joining him in that behavior.

It is unfortunate for the Bolling family to have this tragedy occur while in the midst of dealing with his inevitable firing from Fox News.

At the same time, Bolling is overdue on the retraction he will need to make on that SLAPP suit against Ali, and he has yet to apologize to his family or to the women he harassed at Fox News. One can only hope he will gain some perspective from these events and do something positive moving forward. I believe he did try to do so with regard to the female UAE pilot, when he made his second on-air apology a couple of years ago. And I believe he is capable of doing so again. If so, perhaps something positive can come out of this.

The brazen viciousness of Kobach’s approach here should not be surprising to anyone in this Year of the Bully. Kobach is clearly delighted (as were nearly all the Fox News hosts today) to see the Pence White House finally take a blatant open shot at the DACA group. KFI hosts John and Ken in Los Angeles gleefully hosted Kobach for another round this afternoon, in which they openly laughed at the fun of deporting the DACA participants – including one amazing moment where they discussed the notion of ICE using the DACA information to help round up and deport the participants (“That was mistake number two!” said John Kobylt with a pretty scary snicker…)

We should also note that Kobach is using an identical talking point set to racist ideologues like Mark Krikorian on Tucker Carlson’s show in the evening. The first thing they do is echo the false narrative voiced by Jeff Sessions in the morning. They start with the fiction that President Obama’s executive action was “illegal amnesty”, which it was not. (And they ignore that the GOP had sworn to block every single thing President Obama did, and repeatedly blocked every attempt by the Dems to get something through Congress on this issue, before and after DACA was enacted.)

We should be very careful about drawing larger conclusions from these studies. They’re really polls of a few thousand voters (in the same way that voter polls are not completely reliable at any time). There are a couple of these studies where the researchers have extrapolated their numbers to say that Sanders voters were the ones who made the difference. There are other studies that say that maybe 6 percent of Sanders voters chose to either vote for Trump or chose to stay home, and that number makes more sense to me.

Keep in mind that there was always a contingent of Sanders voters who were not Dems. Remember that he was an Independent for decades. He only took the banner of the Dems when he wanted to run for President (and there were many Dems I spoke to last year who would not support him for that reason alone). I’m not surprised that a small percentage of Sanders voters were people who just liked his populist message and hated Clinton and the Dems. Like the rest of you, I’ve encountered this group online a few times during and since the election, and their anger at everyone is both palpable and infantile.

But I don’t think it was the Sanders crowd that turned this election, no matter how many extrapolations the researchers try to make. I don’t doubt that this crowd was part of the problem, but the problem numbers were much higher. Put it another way: It’s true that thousands of Bernie voters in the swing states didn’t show up when they could have helped stop Trump. But it’s also true that hundreds of thousands of Clinton and Dem voters in those states didn’t show up either, and they’re the ones who made the bigger difference. And it’s true that Trump was able to con a fair amount of disgruntled Dems in the Rust Belt into voting for him, just by showing up there and telling them the basest version of what they wanted to hear. Clinton lost those votes by taking those voters for granted. Trump used those voters to fill in the blank space left by a fair amount of GOP voters who refused to vote for him in those areas – which is why his overall totals are about the same as Romney’s in 2012. (I’d be interested to see a study showing how many moderate GOP voters in those same areas opted to support Clinton over Trump…)

The uncomfortable truth here is that it wasn’t Bernie Sanders voters by themselves who turned this election, even if they want people to believe that. This was not a Ralph Nader situation by any means. Sanders himself exhorted his voters to support Clinton, and all of the studies indicate that the massively overwhelming majority of them did so. It was the 2-3 million Dem voters around the country that just didn’t show up. For some, it was because they bought the Right Wing smears that have circulated about the Clintons for 25 years. For many, it was because they assumed Clinton would win and it was inconceivable that something like Trump could prevail. We could even factor in how the Right Wing always tries to make it harder for non-Whites to vote in rural states, but even that wasn’t the deciding factor.

To me, the biggest factor was that the Right Wing succeeded in their double down on their 2012 strategy. As we’ll recall, in 2012, the Right went super-negative throughout Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. The idea was to make the process so unpleasant, so viscerally awful that many Dem voters would choose to stay home rather than deal with it. If the plan worked, it would reduce turnout to closer to midterm levels and they could get whichever GOP candidate they had across the finish line. Because GOP voters always turn out and Dems are known for being flakier. In 2012, this backfired badly – Obama’s voters showed up again in sufficient numbers to clearly reject the hatred and the Right Wing was humiliated. (Particularly those who smugly predicted their ploy would work and Romney would somehow win a “landslide”.) In 2016, rather than reach out to the rest of the country, the Right Wing went even more negative than they had in 2012 – figuring that Clinton did not have the personal popularity of Barack Obama and that the ploy could work this time. They fed this by constantly repeating a narrative of how Clinton was a terrible and corrupt politician on the one hand, and also an incompetent, weak person who couldn’t even get past Sanders without “cheating” on the other. Between the nonstop barrage of negative press about both candidates, and the constant flinging of mud, the atmosphere last year became toxic. I knew people who had bumper stickers that read “Everybody Sucks 2016”. Sure enough, the actual turnout on the day in the key swing states was lower than it had been for either of Barack Obama’s campaigns. President Obama saw this coming and practically begged those voters to show up, saying that it would destroy his legacy if they allowed this to happen. But that group didn’t respond – and Clinton’s ignorance of the problem doomed her there. Result – more Trump voters than Clinton voters turned out in the key areas by a slim margin.

I’ll continue to say that I hope these voters learned from this situation. If they haven’t, it will be repeated.

I’m wracking my brain, and I honestly haven’t been able to come up with any accomplishments that the Pence White House can crow about on “Main Street”.

They can say that they were able to take advantage of Mitch McConnell’s shenanigans in the US Senate to steal a Supreme Court seat for a completely inappropriate ideologue, but I don’t know that I’d call that an accomplishment. They can say that they’ve been systematically dismantling sections of the government with which they disagree, such as the EPA and the Depts of Labor, Energy and Education.

They can say that they’ve endangered the entire world by trying to out-bluff North Korea, and that they are known for having questionable intentions toward Russia.

And they can say that they’ve continued the Obama Recovery with roughly similar numbers of improvement in job growth and consumer spending and stock prices.

So basically, not much at all. And it all gets overshadowed by Pence’s spokesman, who has managed to misstep every way possible and who has made the USA the laughingstock of the world.

There’s a false argument being promulgated by the Right about how these statues and monuments are just historical and how any opposition to them must be an attempt to erase history. And this whole argument is a false dilemma.

Nobody anywhere is saying that the Civil War did not occur. Nobody is saying that we shouldn’t remember what happened. What people are saying is that Confederate military leaders are not something we are asking people to celebrate and idolize as honorable men. We absolutely should remember what they did – and there many appropriate places to do so. We can discuss them in classrooms, in museums, in gatherings. Ken Burns has a wonderful documentary about the Civil War and nobody is saying that we shouldn’t continue to examine it.

The Right Wing is only upset about taking these monuments down because they were hoping to be able to continue celebrating what the South stood for during the Confederacy, and instead they’ve been caught. It would be nice if the Right Wing would be honest for once about their motives.

It should not be a surprise to anyone that the Right Wing has been stoking hatred and violence for quite a long time. Charlottesville was not the product of a “perfect storm” – it was the inevitable result of what’s been building up in the country and it sadly won’t be the last of these violent events.

Maher would be more correct to say that Fox News is a major part of the reason why we have a Pence White House rather than a Hillary Clinton presidency. They spent 20 years attacking the Clintons to the point that many people gullibly assumed that there must have been some fire behind all the smoke – so the smear campaign did finally work enough to make sure they could tank her candidacy and put something like Donald Trump into the Oval Office. That’s something that pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly had stoked for decades, in the hope that they could achieve this result. (Which is why O’Reilly and Hannity were so smug about the election result.)

But the violence? That’s something we’ve been seeing build up over the course of the Trump campaign, where more and more of these wingnuts were empowered and emboldened by the Trump people to let their inner hater loose. Repeatedly, they were told it was okay to hate other people, and even to physically attack them. We saw more and more assaults and acts of bullying as the campaign dragged on, with Trump never acknowledging that his people were the ones instigating the problem. Instead, he offered to provide legal defense to anyone caught doing it. And after Trump squeaked into the White House, there were over 1000 documented hate crimes committed by Trump supporters against everyone else, and those continue to this day. The response by Right Wing outlets like Fox News has been to ignore the real crimes wherever possible and to focus on either the occasional hoax call or the occasional hate crime committed AGAINST a Trump supporter. But never to acknowledge the very real wave of hatred and violence that the Pence White House has stoked across the country. It doesn’t help that this presidential team doesn’t even believe in discussing facts if they are inconvenient. We are told instead to focus on “alternative facts”.

What happened in Charlottesville is a natural progression from what happened in April in Berkeley. The Far Right came to a town with the purpose of attacking it and terrorizing the locals into submission. In both cases, they succeeded in generating a violent confrontation with everyone else, and in both cases there were injuries. The difference in Charlottesville is that the Far Right is now more actively engaged in homicidal behavior. And the Fox News has been addressing this via Tucker Carlson and Hannity and Watters to say that the violence is just a response to their imaginary Left Wing crime wave – the false premise that because there are principled people standing up to them, the Right is entitled to try to attack and kill them. The horrifying posts on the Fox News page about this are testament to the fact that the Right indeed intends to continue its violence, and will likely ratchet it up farther the next time. We should be prepared for this – protestors dealing with Right Wing crowds should expect to be attacked any time they encounter them at this point, and that they face potential injury. Until another presidential team gets to the White House in 2021, we sadly face a continuing wave of this behavior.

This is the unhappy fruit of 2016, a year in which millions of voters chose not to vote because they didn’t think it would make a difference, or because they felt uneasy about the Clintons or because they just didn’t think Trump could ever be elected anyway, or maybe all of the above. But they didn’t show up when it counted, and we have seen the result. The next time people have a chance to vote, they really do need to show up. Because Trump’s voters will, no matter what. And because these people did not show up when they should have, we must continue to endure the Year of the Bully. We must work hard to make sure that it doesn’t turn into the Decade of the Bully.

The massive hypocrisy of the Right Wing over the viciousness yesterday is quite stunning. The rally in Charlottesville is only the latest event of this kind of thing, which has been happening in a consistent pattern since the infliction of the Trump campaign in the first place. Trump’s rallies and rhetoric have been a starting gun for open bigotry across this country. We saw this in the brutality at his rallies, and we saw it in the massive number of hate crimes committed by Trump supporters in the weeks and months after he squeaked through last November. Trump’s pattern of saying hateful things and tweeting juvenile personal attacks has empowered many neighborhood bullies and loudmouths to go big with their racism and sexism. Why should they cover up their viciousness when Trump can get away with it on a massive scale every morning? After all, as Rush Limbaugh’s ads like to trumpet, “well SOMEBODY had to say it!”

I find it interesting that Fox News spent hours carefully trying to parse the facts of Charlottesville, including the notion that “these guys are just a small fringe group and they don’t speak for anyone but themselves.” Where was this concern for parsing when the Right Wing was attacking UC Berkeley for the protests there over the last six months? Where was this concern for detail when the Right was trying to say that UC Berkeley should lose its federal funding after the same alt-right bigots went on the warpath in Provo Park in April? Suddenly, Fox News is parsing that “well, most of these protestors came in from out of town.” That’s not what they were saying about Berkeley – the Right Wing made it sound like all the violence in Berkeley was somehow home-grown and another reason to hate that community.

Trump’s behavior yesterday was both shameful and telling. He was specifically asked to address the fact that White Nationalists generated this situation and clearly had committed vicious acts as part of their activities. Trump’s only statement was to assign some of the blame to the victims and give a false equivalence where “everybody was wrong”. Which is nonsensical. If the White Nationalists had the right to speech, then so did the rest of the people there. If anything, it was necessary to rebut the bigotry the Right was inflicting upon Charlottesville. When Trump was asked specific follow-ups, he made a face and then made a show of ignoring the question and walked out. His primary Tweet afterwards was to sympathize with the police officers who were killed in the helicopter crash – not with the young woman who was murdered.

As I said, it’s telling that Trump could not condemn these people – they’re a big part of his base. But we should note that Fox News tried to make hay out of David Duke not liking even the comment that Trump did make. Which is nearly irrelevant, since many, many commenters on the Fox News website yesterday were gleefully using every bigoted epithet they could to celebrate the carnage – including calling the counter-protestors “mud people”.

In simple terms, the Right Wing just confirmed that they have no moral ground on which to stand when it comes to protests and political discourse. If they’re going to throw false equivalences around prevaricate about a vicious murder, they don’t get to take a pious tone when Ann Coulter throws a tantrum over her speaking schedule.

It’s fairly clear that Fox News and the rest of the Right are eager for a massive military confrontation with North Korea. It will get the continuing investigation of the Trump campaign off the front page and it will allow the Pence White House to show how tough it is. And they think a war will force the country to somehow unify behind their figurehead.

Of course, this confrontation will result in a horrifying amount of death and destruction, but it does not appear that the Right Wing cares much about that – Hannity’s smug faux-concern from last night notwithstanding. The reality is that the Right thinks Trump can somehow get a “win” here if he can devastate North Korea quickly, and even if North Korea bombs the heck out of the region, that’s far away from us anyway, right?

So how does this play out, given that the Pence White House has no idea how to handle an international conflict and Donald Trump only knows how to beat his chest? Most likely, as Dana Perino has stated, the North Koreans will carry out their promise to attack Guam, and we’ll hear about launches on Tuesday morning. Trump will then demand an overwhelming response so that he won’t appear to be wimpy. The North Koreans, seeing our launches, will then retaliate with everything they have, since they’ll have nothing to lose. Which spells disaster for multiple countries in the area, and may even include launches to distant targets. All of this will happen on a single day, and while the bodies are being counted, Trump will undoubtedly Tweet about his big victory.

I would be happy to learn of another alternative, but we simply don’t have anything else in the offing. This group does not understand diplomacy or channels – they only understand how to look butch for their base.

Elections have consequences, and this is a very serious one. I again hope that the millions of Dems who refused to vote last November are paying attention. Had they actually shown up, this scenario would not now be unfolding.

As expected, Yashar Ali has prepared an anti-SLAPP countersuit and his attorneys have issued a stern letter to Bolling’s lawyer to demand they immediately withdraw. If Bolling doesn’t come to his senses very quickly, he’s looking at a situation that will ruin him – both in the courtroom and in the pocketbook. If he’s as smart as he wants people to think he is, he’ll get out of this mess now and publicly apologize to Ali. If he insists on pushing his line, Bolling is looking at losing millions of dollars in a fruitless effort to deny truth and facts.

I realize that Eric Bolling is panicking and lashing out now, but this may have been the most foolhardy action he could have taken. Filing a SLAPP suit against a reporter for saying true things is going to cost him dearly, and he will wind up losing more than his job at Fox News.

For those who are unfamiliar, a SLAPP suit is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. This is how big companies and rich individuals used to handle lower income people who would inconvenience them with protests and sit-ins. (Such as protestors standing outside the Rand Corporation) The big-money company would file a massive and frivolous lawsuit against the individual leading the protest, knowing that this person would almost certainly run away in order to avoid the massive legal costs of defending themselves in court. This is clearly Bolling’s intention here – to intimidate Ali from speaking the truth about Bolling’s shameful conduct.

But Bolling is apparently unaware that we have anti-SLAPP laws on the books in many states, I believe including New York. These laws are designed to protect the 1st Amendment rights of writers like Ali. Anti-SLAPP laws state that a SLAPP suit can be countered directly, and that if the initial litigator can be shown to have attempted to infringe on the defendant’s 1st Amendment rights, the initial litigator can be held accountable for massive damages, not including being compelled to pay all the legal fees (including attorney’s fees) incurred by the defendant.

In simple English, this means that Ali should immediately countersue Bolling, using anti-SLAPP laws as his basis and noting that his reportage is factual and that we already have actual witnesses corroborating the story he wrote. Ali could easily countersue Bolling for the same nonsensical 50 million dollars Bolling is trying to throw at him, and he can also demand to see Bolling’s correspondence regarding this matter, to show the intent behind the frivolous lawsuit. If Bolling tries to cry attorney-client privilege, he’s as much as admitted his guilt. And if Bolling turns over the correspondence, he admits it directly. Either way, Bolling’s just placed himself in an unwinnable situation that will only get uglier for him as it goes on.

It’s a sad truth that panic and desperation rarely lead to happy outcomes. Bolling’s misstep here is a classic example of that truth.

At this point, the Right is desperately trying to push any angle they can to show the Pence White House as having been a “big success”. They’re painfully aware of how unpopular Trump is, and how very little has been accomplished since Pence took over the executive branch.

This is part of the reason why Hannity, Carlson and others are so frantically trying to scream “Nothing over here! Nothing over here!” when more details of the Russia probe come out. All this story does is drum up more ominous clouds for a presidency that is lining up to be one of the most unfortunate ones of our history – if not the single worst one ever.

Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised when very little comes from the full investigation. My instincts say that the Pence DOJ will simply smack Trump and his kids on the paws, in the same way that James Comey handled Hillary Clinton – they’ll say that these guys acted irresponsibly but not in a criminal manner, and they’ll let it go at that. Same thing will go with the Congressional inquiries. If anyone complains about it, they’ll be screamed at about how the Clintons got off easy. And we shouldn’t be surprised when the Pence DOJ actually does proceed against the Clintons – I’ve been waiting for them to actively play that card for six months now. Trump is only recently starting to foment the “Lock Her Up!” ideas again, and hard line Right Wingers in Congress are just now trying to gin up new investigations of Hillary Clinton. I’m anticipating that in the event of anything more serious happening with Mueller, the Pence DOJ will announce either a grand jury or indictments on the Clintons, as a way to draw the focus away from themselves.

There’s another area that is also becoming clear as a Right Wing talking point feast. Which is that the Right has always stated that if the economy were to really improve, Donald Trump would be assured of re-election, regardless of scandals. So it should be no surprise that the Right is trying to push the new meme of “record high stock market!” and “record low unemployment!” and any new jobs projects it can pretend were the result of the Pence White House’s machinations. Of course, the improved numbers that happened under President Obama were regularly dismissed by the same cheerleaders, as they always wanted to act like the economy was tanked throughout the Obama presidency, without taking any ownership for the behavior of W and the GOP congresspeople who triggered the last recession. But what’s interesting is that Trump’s approval rating continues to plunge, most recently hitting 33%, even while the Right keeps trying to cheerlead the same economic numbers they dismissed one year ago.

The only other step these guys could take to try to bolster the Pence White House would be to get involved somewhere in a military fashion – and let’s hope they’re not foolish enough to make that mistake.

Wallace’s questions were intended to portray Pelosi as out of touch and unreasonable, so that when Trump announces this week that the subsidies (and thus the exchanges) will no longer be funded, he can be defended on the basis that he had no choice due to these awful Dems. Pelosi should have understood this was the foundation of the questioning and challenged the very premise of what Wallace was doing, but she apparently was just happy to be offered an opportunity to speak on a program that usually would ignore Dems completely. In simple terms, she got conned.

People keep acting as though the Right Wing is suddenly going to have a V8 moment and decide to start acting reasonably toward the Dems in Congress. Recent history shows us this is not likely. And the messaging from the Pence White House this weekend has been consistent on the matter. Pence has no intention of working with Democrats on this or any other issue. Trump has no intention of conceding a centimeter of ground here. They’ve declared the ACA dead, and it is dead. They will make sure of this. This is not a negotiation over how the law can be fixed or modified. It’s not even a discussion. This is Trump punching President Obama in the face and making sure Dem voters know to keep their heads down. If the Senate won’t give him what he wants (a modifiable bill that can be adjusted to something closer to a full repeal before it gets to Pence’s desk for Trump’s public signature), then Pence will just turn off the subsidies. And doing this allows him to take a nice cheap swipe at the congresspeople from both sides who didn’t hop to when they were told to do so. It’s not an accident that Fox News is repeating the names of any GOP senators not toeing the line.

I would love to be able to say that the ACA is somehow going to survive what Pence is doing to it, but that would be spreading a false narrative. A big part of Pence’s agenda is tied up in getting rid of the ACA and declaring the Obama Administration a total failure. This will also lead in to cuts in Medicaid and potentially Medicare. Keep in mind these guys will never give up on the notion of getting rid of anything they consider an “entitlement” – or to use the vernacular that Right Wing radio loves, a “handout”. One has to be impressed at the commitment of the Right in their work to obstruct and kill this law. Had they been this steadfast about Social Security and Medicare back in the 1930s and the 1960s, those programs would never have survived this long. My instincts say this is not just about the program, which they would never have allowed through if they could have killed it like they did Hillarycare in the 90s – it’s also about Barack Obama and their visceral hatred for him.

The smarter use of resources will be toward the 2018 midterms and the 2020 campaign. There will be millions of people losing their coverage who the Pence White House will try to convince that this was all caused by the Dems. It is extremely important to make sure these people understand who threw them off the rolls, and why. If the Dems blow another election, there will be far greater consequences than this one.

It seems to me that every Right Wing pundit and personality has their “I got it!” explanation for Trump’s bullying of Jeff Sessions. Everyone wants this to make some kind of fiendish sense, as though Trump is “playing three dimensional chess”. Somehow this will all tie in to some incredible plan and everyone will say “AHA!” when the final pieces fall into place.

How about that Trump is just a bully with the intellect of a fifth-grader, and he doesn’t care how he comes across when he bullies someone? And how about that Jeff Sessions is happy enough bullying other people as AG that he’s willing to put up with it?

I have no tears to shed for Jeff Sessions. He was and is an extremely bigoted man. He continues to use his position in government to attack people of other ethnicities, simply because he thinks he can get away with it. Just because Donald Trump bullies him in public doesn’t make him any less despicable.

I have a feeling Fox News will in fact move to hire Priebus at some point – he’s not that damaged and he’s a reliable cheerleader for the Right Wing and the GOP. This segment was indeed a “loyalty test” to see if he’d dish on what happened. He was a good soldier, which should warm the hearts of the guys at Fox News, and I have a feeling he’ll wind up as one of the easy go-to’s for the various talking heads shows they run – always ready with a supportive comment about Trump and the “good fight” the GOP is waging against the rest of us.

I have no tears for Priebus or for Sessions or for anyone else who signed up to be part of the abomination of the Pence White House. They knew what they were getting into, and they have conducted themselves like angry, spoiled children. Because of their behavior, we’ll be digging out from their vicious actions for the next decade or more.

Trump just made clear in his latest tweeting that he intends to pull the federal funding. Could be finished as quickly as next week, since the current funding was only set to go through the end of July.

I honestly don’t think Barack Obama is laughing about this. The petty action about to be undertaken by the Pence White House will cause major problems for millions of people and destroy the ACA in one shot. President Obama wanted the GOP to work with the Dems in creating and then fixing and maintaining the ACA. This action will simply end it – and he knows they are doing this as a direct attack on him. I again urge people to not think that this situation is somehow a settled matter.

In a civilized situation, we’d have the Dems and GOP congresspeople sitting down and working out their differences and coming up with a compromise that could work for everyone. We’re not in that situation. The GOP does not negotiate with anyone but their Far Right Wing. Trump will apparently be announcing his action this week. It will be one of two options, from what I can see. The less likely option will be for him to announce he’s only approving the funding of the exchanges for a single further month and then that’s it, presumably to motivate the Senate to come back and pass a repeal bill of some form so it can go to conference with the House and then morph into as close to a full repeal as possible. The more likely option, given that Congress is leaving for their latest recess, is that he’ll simply defund the exchanges immediately and declare his victory. The ACA will continue to exist, but as an unfunded program that is ignored from this point forward.

Okay, one more time: this debate among the Right has nothing to do with health care or health insurance. It never did. These guys don’t care about whether you can see a doctor or whether you can get treatment for any illness.

This has always been about getting rid of President Obama’s one major achievement in Congress before the Right Wing successfully obstructed everything else. And punching his supporters in the nose at the same time.

I submit that if the current crop of Right Wingers had been active in the 1930s or the 1960s, we would not have seen Social Security or Medicare survive. Because Right Wing governors would have refused to let those programs take hold in their states and Right Wing legislators would have obstructed them at every turn and starved them of funds until the programs could be portrayed as teetering. And then they would have advocated pulling those programs completely as unaffordable boondoggles. Hang on a second – that’s actually the notion they’re trying to pull on Social Security and Medicare right now…