I’m honestly confused by FutureDanger’s post.

Is he saying that the Right Wing’s tantrum about this play is not free speech? Is he saying that they don’t have the right to embarrass themselves as they’ve been doing? I believe they do have that right, but that everyone else has the right to call them out for their childish behavior. And if they try to physically disrupt the performances or attack the performers, as they have done, then they should be arrested for assault, among other crimes.

I’m also confused as to what he thinks he’s saying about the quality of Shakespeare’s text for The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The play has been considered a classic for centuries and is part of a rotating group of Shakespearean classics that regularly are presented at schools, festivals and repertory theaters all over the world. I don’t remember anyone referring to it as a “rotten play before”. Or does he mean that he believes the frantic Trump supporters now think this text is rotten?

It’s not a surprise that Trump and his acolytes would spend this week viciously trying to blame Warmbier’s death on President Obama. Remember that as far as they’re concerned, everything negative needs to be blamed on the Obama years, and anything positive needs to be attributed to the Pence White House. It’s nonsensical grade school taunting (“I know you are, but what am I?”), and it’s what we can continue to expect during the Year of the Bully and the time of Trump.

I think we also need to keep in mind what really happened with Otto Warmbier. His death was a horrible tragedy that could have been avoided, but there wasn’t a whole lot that the Obama Administration could do at the time he was convicted and sentenced. Particularly with the GOP repeatedly trying to undercut them on every single move they made – including sending contradictory letters to Iran to try to stop that (soon to be cancelled) treaty from happening.

And this conviction happened under fairly embarrassing circumstances for Warmbier. I don’t believe most of his public statement, as he was clearly under pressure to say whatever they wanted him to – but there was never a thought that he was inaccurately charged. The issue was that he was wildly overprosecuted and oversentenced. The North Koreans clearly wanted to make an example of him – telling Americans if you come to their country and disrespect the place, there will be a terrible penalty. It is tragic that he suffered the brain injury, and the indications are that once this injury occurred, it was pretty much over for him. I wish they would have returned his body earlier, but it’s not hard to understand why they didn’t.

Either way, this didn’t happen because Barack Obama was President when Warmbier was arrested.

Laura Ingraham has no business even thinking about being a Press Secretary.

This is a woman who thought it a fun idea to taunt Ben Jacobs after he was assaulted by Carl Gianforte in Montana with the Tweet: “Did someone get his lunch money stolen and need to go tell the recess monitor?”

If she is put in a room full of reporters, she must be told to apologize for her prior behavior and to specifically apologize in public to Jacobs. If she can’t figure out how to do that, then she shouldn’t be going anywhere near the White House Press Room.

Ellen, I truly wish we could conceive of the notion of a Democratic House by January 2019, but it’s simply not going to happen. Silver is correct that due to the Right Wing gerrymandering, there really won’t be many seats that flip. It will move toward the Dems, but I honestly doubt that it will even be a dozen, particularly if the Dems only look at seats in easy states like California or New Jersey.

Frankly, the best strategy for the Dems is to continue to present a principled, resolved opposition, and to bring their case directly to the American people, particularly to the millions of Obama voters who refused to vote in 2016 and thus handed the outcome to the minority of voters who rabidly supported something like Trump.

The 2018 midterms will likely be the most expensive midterm election in history, and the Dems should not be scared of this. They should aggressively go after every single Republican seat, especially in the swing states, no matter how Red they appear. This means that there will be at least 50 hotly contested seats, if not more – and the Dems should be prepared to spend heavily in these districts. Because as we saw in Georgia, the Right Wing will heavily spend as well. The Right Wing is happily gloating that Dem funders put in 30 million dollars but they’re leaving out that the GOP threw in at least 24 million and likely more, given that high-end Right Wingers were heavily supporting Karen Handel to desperately try to hold the Dems off. So in 2018, the Dems will likely need to spend up to a billion dollars and they need to be prepared to do so. Because this means that the GOP will need to spend up to a billion dollars to keep those seats, and they won’t be able to keep all of them.

And while that fight is brewing in the House, the Dems can focus on the real battle – for the Senate, where they will need to hold their seats and add three more. Given the viciousness of the Pence White House and the inability of the Right Wing Congress to get a single thing accomplished, one would think multiple grassroots Dem candidates from multiple states could break through to get the Dems back to a 51 or 52 seat majority – enough to make sure that the Pence White House won’t be throwing any further judicial appointments to Far Right ideologues from Heritage Action’s infamous list.

The result of this election shouldn’t be surprising, but it should be heartening for the Dems. This is a heavily Red district where Tom Price easily won his seat in the double digits just 7 months ago. This week, that seat was heavily contested, even with the Dem candidate not even living in the district! This should not have been a contest – Handel should have easily won by the same double digits as Price. It’s quite telling that it took 24 million dollars and the most rabid Trump fans to barely get her the seat.

I think it’s a good idea for the Dems to do some soul searching at this point. They need to do that before the midterms, and it will lead to a stronger outcome for them – as well as help to indicate who the grassroots candidate will be that they’ll be pushing in 2020. And they’ll need to do the simple work over the next two years to gain seats in the state legislatures and local town councils to make sure that the 2020 Census can correct the mistakes of the one we had 7 years ago.

DeLay’s comments here are a vicious lie, and they really can’t be allowed to stand without being immediately refuted.

If DeLay wants to know about the wave of hatred and anger sweeping this country, he could start by looking at the devastating reports from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the over 1370 documented hate actions that happened since Trump squeaked into office last November. He could also look at the constant stream of viciousness and hostility coming from the Pence White House, and the triumphant gloating that sadly seems to follow each instance. He could look at the behavior of Trump supporters around the country in harassing people in stores and restaurants, as has repeatedly been documented over the past 7 months, not to mention the vast amounts of hatred unleashed by Trump’s notorious rallies last year.

DeLay wants to throw mud at UC Berkeley and say that the riots that happened there are a Dem “strategy”. Try that again. First, nobody tore any buildings down in Berkeley, and nobody in Berkeley ever told a Right Winger that they had no right to speak. There was a riot in Berkeley in February after Milo Yiannopoulos attempted to pull a nasty maneuver at a speaking event, where he made clear he was going to read off a list of “illegal aliens” supposedly living and working in Berkeley and then tell his audience to contact ICE. Angry protestors in the Black Bloc group (now called Antifa) made clear they weren’t having this, and they proceeded to set fires and break windows to disrupt his event before he could do it. I don’t condone their behavior, but I do understand why they were motivated to stop him – he wasn’t trying to exercise free speech, but was instead trying to be outrageous as is his usual approach. The big riot that happened in mid-April was not a Dem “strategy” but was the result of angry Right Wing hate groups coming to Berkeley (including open Nazis) to pull an in-your-face demonstration of their anger at everyone else. Left wing groups like Antifa were drawn in to confront them, and the two wound up having it out in public. Take out the White Nationalists and the Nazis and their publicly announced attempts to sneer at everyone else, and you would not have had any real issue at the pro-Trump rally. It was when Identity Europa and the rest got involved that the situation went south.

It would seem that DeLay and Fox News aren’t satisfied to watch the Right Wing attempt to bully the rest of the country. Apparently, DeLay wants to make sure everyone else submits to being kicked in the face without having any response.

It might help if any of these people would look into why over the past few years, we are seeing more and more of these angry white men acting out in public with automatic weapons? Could it have something to do with a tide of negativity fomented by Right Wing talk radio and outlets like Fox News? Could it have anything to do with this country’s inability to acknowledge or deal with continuing issues of mental illness, racial disparities and extreme division between communities? Could anything be said about the Right Wing’s absolute refusal to understand that something needs to be done about how easy it is for these disturbed individuals to get their hands on automatic weapons? It is no small irony that Scalise himself was a huge opponent of any kind of gun control.

What a surprise. Mike Huckabee is following the lead of his buddies at the Pence White House in using childish nicknames and trying to bully the press.

One has to wonder if these people understand that their behavior is being preserved for the record and that they won’t be able to walk this stuff back in another couple of years when they’re trying to deny they did it.

The actual story that came out from Sessions’ embarrassing collapse yesterday is that he either knows shockingly little for a sitting Attorney General or he was only willing to say shockingly little. Nearly all of his answers were filibusters intended to run the clock out on his questioners without actually saying anything. It was enough to make one wonder why he even wanted to appear at the Senate if he wasn’t going to say anything.

Regarding Laura Ingraham, she lost any moral standing she had purported to have when she gave this response to Carl Gianforte’s vicious assault on Ben Jacobs: “Did anyone get his lunch money stolen today and then run to tell the recess monitor?”

I think what’s happening here is that Carlson is realizing that he has no hope of reaching the ratings numbers of O’Reilly and that there is a real chance he may not have this show in another year if he doesn’t improve. So he is trying more and more desperate swipes for attention – this being one of the nastier attempts.

I actually feel a bit sorry for Carlson. He was never really cut out for this position and he hasn’t known what to do with it. My instincts say that the Murdochs will want to overhaul this primetime lineup next year before the midterms, given that they are now losing to the other networks and the audience they lost over the past year doesn’t show any signs of returning.

Gingrich is just saying the same things most of the Right Wing media are. The fun began with Rush Limbaugh attacking Nancy Pelosi’s comments this morning when she said she was praying for everyone and included both Obama and Trump in her comments. Limbaugh and his listeners decided that would be a great time to pile on the sneering and the viciousness. If anything, Gingrich is actually being more polite than Limbaugh.

The Right Wing response to this event has been to try to duck the whole issue of gun control and respin the whole thing as something about the “deranged Left”. It’s both shameful and depressing at the same time.

It is nonsensical to think that the Public Theater’s production of Julius Caesar had anything to do with this event, particularly since that that play is actually a treatise against violence. Anyone who actually follows Shakespearean theater knows that JC is done multiple times every year around this country and it’s a regular thing for it to be staged in modern dress with a modern figurehead at the center. Ellen correctly notes it was done at the Guthrie in 2012 with an Obama figure at the center, in a production that Delta had no problems sponsoring. I note that Oskar Eustis (the director of this new show with a Trump figurehead) also did a Julius Caesar that I saw at Berkeley Shakespeare Festival in 1988, which was set in the early 1960s with a JFK figure at the center and one line of iambic replaced with “the best and the brightest” as the conspirators go off to kill Caesar. It is interesting that someone like Gingrich, who purports to be a scholar, simply doesn’t understand the play or its history.

If there is a connection to be made in today’s events, it would be to the many, many public shootings we are continuing to endure. Nearly all of them involve a white male who has isolated himself from society and armed himself with military-grade weapons and ammunition. A friend of mine wrote an analysis of this today, noting that we’re seeing a series of horrifying moments where the angry white man who feels disempowered will act out in a violent and murderous fashion. She sees it as a response to the fact that white men don’t have all the privilege in society of late, and their frustration is manifesting in multiple outlets, usually including violence. The various shooters and murderers we have seen are all angry, sociopathic people, who’ve usually had their paranoias reinforced by one area of the media or another. These days, it seems to come from social media and various internet memes. It’s why someone like Alex Jones is popular among a lot of gullible people – he provides an easy narrative to why their lives aren’t what they hoped, and he provides easy scapegoats. The shooter in this case appears to have glommed on to one part of the Sanders message (the system is corrupt) but not have listened to anything else Sanders was trying to say.

The situation we have seen today is truly a sad one – reflecting this country’s inability to deal the mentally ill or to get any kind of handle on how a disturbed person can get his hands on automatic weapons and ammo. That’s the real discussion that needs to happen – not some cheap shots from Right Wingers trying to score points from the misery of others.

This is a fascinating look into a completely alternate reality. It must be nice to live in the world Lewandowski inhabits. I do hope that when the reality comes crashing down next November and in 2020, it won’t completely leave him dispirited.

The Pence White House as a great success? By ‘every measure’? Was he planning on including any of the metrics that anyone else uses? How about how Trump’s popularity (and that of Congress) is historically low? How about how most of the country does not trust what this White House says and does not think their racist and bullying behaviors are making anyone anything but less safe?

Lewandowski wants to cite the Supreme Court situation? That’s not a success for the Pence White House – it’s a black eye on the Senate, as inflicted by Mitch McConnell and the Right Wing, who made a point of shirking their responsibilities for a solid year and then celebrated when they were able to steal a Supreme Court seat. It’s true that Pence had Trump name one of the viciously Far Right names from the second variation of the Heritage Action list of approved partisan judges, but the real legwork on this was done by McConnell – whose own legacy will be the way he diminished the Senate and soiled the reputation and credibility of that institution. When people look back on the decline of US politics in the early 21st century, they’ll be able to cite McConnell as one of the truly nasty pieces of work responsible for much of the acrimony. But even if you want to cite the theft of the seat as a “success”, the person responsible for the heist wasn’t in the Pence White House, and they don’t get to take that credit.

It is true that Trump was able to see Aya Hijazi and her husband released by Egypt, after years of attempts by the Obama administration did not get her out. Of course, we don’t know what other back channel discussions got this done, nor do we know what promises were made to Egypt. We do know that when the Obama administration got several prisoners released by other nations, the Right Wing would immediately accuse him of bribery and of any criminal action or intent they could conceive. I am assuming based on Lewandowski’s statements here that he is now prepared to acknowledge Obama’s leadership in repeatedly getting multiple prisoners released across the Middle East and that the Pence White House is preparing an apology to President Obama for their unfortunate statements about those releases during last year’s campaign.

As for the notion of the economy booming, I’m certain that Lewandowski is prepared to thank President Obama for that, although he and Trump were castigating the economy at similar levels last year. And at the same time, when Obama would get numbers close to 200K new jobs, Trump and the Right would regularly say that those numbers should be quadrupled. So if anything, the Pence White House is actually coming in at maybe half the number that would actually signify major job growth.

So what actually has the Pence White House accomplished since January 21? Well, Pence has had Trump sign a bunch of Executive Orders – something that Trump had castigated President Obama for doing, primarily to erase those earlier EO’s from the record. The Pence White House has announced various forms of bullying and meanness both toward their political opponents and toward the world. The Pence White House has repeatedly stated obvious falsehoods, about everything from the intentions of their budget cuts to the way Trump lost the popular vote last year to the reasons for Trump’s impulsive firing of the head of the FBI to the size of the crowd at his inauguration. The Pence White House has embarrassed the nation and itself to the world, both with Trump’s disastrous and bullying voyage across Europe (including his horrifying shoving aside of another head of state) and with Trump’s gloating demeanor about the whole thing.

Of course, the Pence White House hasn’t actually done all that has planned to do yet. Pence did have Trump make the long-awaited announcement that the US would retreat from the world stage and abandon even the pretense of working to address global warming. And Pence did supervise the first stage of Congress’ attempt to get rid of the ACA, although that’s still mired in a Senate committee. And Pence did get an announcement out about how the US will be abandoning the Cuban rapprochement that had literally just happened between Obama and the Cubans. But all of that could have been done on January 21, and it’s bizarre that the Pence White House has failed to move very quickly on this stuff. Pence could have completely shut down the ACA on January 21 by stopping the subsidies for the insurers – that would have collapsed all the exchanges and we’d be where the GOP has wanted for nearly a decade: back before the ACA’s passing with an additional 25 million people uninsured and unable to get coverage. Pence could have had Trump announce on January 21 that the US was walking away from every single treaty made by President Obama, including the Paris Accord, the Iran Treaty and the Cuban talks, and it all would have been over by now.

And that’s not even to mention the Muslim ban, which Pence hasn’t been able to get past the courts, and which even this Supreme Court is unlikely to uphold given all of Trump and company’s statements about its purpose.

On the other hand, I do need to acknowledge that the Pence White House has been successful in a few things – namely in alienating and angering the majority of the electorate who did not choose to have these people in executive office. And the Pence White House has been unintentionally successful in mobilizing those voters, which is likely to have much more positive impacts for the nation and the world in another 18 months. And it’s frankly quite possible that the Pence White House’s viciousness towards our health care system is likely to make Single Payer a reality a lot earlier than many people thought possible. So I would term that a success – but I’m not sure that the Pence White House would agree…

I strongly doubt this story. It would be extremely unusual to see Hannity suddenly quit Fox News and walk away from his meal ticket. Without his nightly show, his radio show would not have nearly the pull among the Right Wingers who keep tuning in. He’d essentially be retiring, and there’s no indication that he really wants to do that.

On the other hand, if there is a move within Fox News to drop him, he could try to pre-empt it. But that assumes Fox News wants to completely kill their prime time lineup.

If there is one surprising irony in this Year of the Bully, it’s that Fox News has foundered so badly. Who would have thought 12 months ago that Fox News would go into this kind of a slide, with Mike Pence running the White House and Donald Trump acting as the national spokesman for the Right? Who would have thought that Fox News would lose three out of four of their prime time anchors in quick succession, and would find themselves losing to MSNBC?

If anything, it’s reassuring to see that most viewers are not buying what Tucker Carlson is desperately trying to sell them, and that The Five really isn’t ready for Prime Time.

Brace yourself for the sneering and gloating today.

Limbaugh will kick it off in a couple of hours, saying that Jacobs got told what for and that Gianforte showed he’s a real Montana man. Fox News will carry it from there. The lightest version will be the mock concern about the throw down, paired both with a caution to the left and the press to be more respectful of the bullies lest they get a good slap too, and with the usual slam on liberals as somehow provoking or inflicting more violence themselves.

The more open version will be on AM radio or the Gutfelds on Fox News who will openly celebrate the beating inflicted on Jacobs. The Year of the Bully will include many more such assaults. If you’re planning to discuss this in a public place like a bar or at an event, be ready for angry Right Wingers to pick fights or just start throwing punches. They’ve been given license and now they know there are no consequences.

Truman is correct to note the thuggish behavior by our Tweeter in Chief in Europe. That’s how the Right rolls these days. If you’re in their way, they’ll just shove you out of the way or throw you to the ground. Until someone stands up to bullies like this, they will continue to act out.

Cavuto is just following the usual 2017 Right Wing approach to discussion here – this is par for the course for anyone who has tried to discuss any current event with a Right Winger this year.

That approach starts with making a ridiculous, untenable statement. Such as “The new Trump Budget really doesn’t have ANY cuts and it’s great for taxpayers and everyone else, isn’t it?” Which is of course a complete whopper, just like the rest of the statements regularly made on Fox News about the Pence White House. It’s along the same nonsensical lines of “Trump is a VERY successful President!” and “Berkeley has no right to ever talk about free speech again!” All lies, and all designed to put anyone left of the Far Right completely on the defensive in trying to discuss even the simplest of issues. So Cavuto starts with that nonsense right away, hoping that Goolsbee will fall for that bait and meet him on his own turf.

Goolsbee, to his credit, doesn’t fall for the bait and doesn’t accept the false premise Cavuto is using. He brings the conversation back to reality. Had he simply accepted the premise, Cavuto could have followed the flowchart to the usual Right Wing conclusion of gloating about how much better everything is under Trump and about how stupid Democrats have been to supposedly mismanage the economy so much under President Obama. (Don’t worry about the actual history of what happened under W, or that Obama spent 8 years fixing with no help from the Right, which was hoping to keep the economy mired to get themselves back into power or at least to completely obstruct Obama from accomplishing anything.)

So Cavuto takes the flowchart to the usual 2017 Right Wing place if the other party says “No” to the false premise – he begins screaming and shouting incoherently, as though he had any kind of moral standing to be doing so. The line “You should be ashamed of yourself!!!!” is a standard retort in this approach, as it’s meant to shame the other party into suddenly recanting their views or at least doubting their own beliefs. I’ve encountered this too many times in the last 6 months, all from the same Right Wingers who are incapable of having a reasonable discussion without suddenly losing their temper and screaming and shouting. This was the case under President Obama, but since Trump squeaked into office, it’s become almost sinister at times.

And these guys are taking their cues from the childish behavior of the Pence White House’s chief spokesman and Tweeter, who seems to think that “I know you are, but what am I?” constitutes intelligent discourse. Never forget – this is the Year of the Bully. The Right has no interest in having a real conversation with you. They just want to kick their opponents in the face and then tell them to get over it.

The Right is quite happy with Gianforte having assaulted Jacobs – I’m seeing repeated posts from angry conservatives who wish that more politicians would physically attack the press in this manner. They’re not sorry at all, and they’re hoping that Gianforte wins his seat easily to boot, so they can continue their gloating in the spirit of the Year of the Bully. Rush Limbaugh went on at length about this today, describing Gianforte as a man and Jacobs as a wimp, and stating that Montana voters would of course side with Gianforte, and that it wouldn’t matter anyway since 70 percent of the state has already turned in absentee ballots.

Laura Ingraham is trying to make points for herself by getting into the tiniest of definitions with Alicia Acuna and then trying to make it sound like Acuna retracted her story. In reality, Acuna has stated to Ingraham that she isn’t sure if Gianforte’s assault happened with his hands completely around Jacobs’ neck. Maybe his hands were just on either side of his neck as he was throwing him to the deck and then repeatedly punching him. Ingraham thinks this is a major coup – Acuna is admitting that she doesn’t think he grabbed him by the neck! And it’s an irrelevancy. Gianforte lost his temper and grabbed Jacobs and assaulted him. Period. Full Stop. Ingraham is also (as is Limbaugh) trying to make it sound like Jacobs should have hit Gianforte back if he was a real man. Sure. And then both men would have been arrested. Instead, Jacobs acted like an adult, and reported Gianforte to the police, who took statements from multiple people and then charged Gianforte with misdemeanor assault. Somewhere in this, Gianforte’s staff decided it would be best to pull a Trump and try to redirect the discussion to a lie about whether Jacobs actually initiated the contact.

Likely result will be that Gianforte still wins his seat but serves under a cloud, including pleading guilty to a reduced charge. And that Fox News plays up the situation as yet another case of wimpy Dems losing.

What’s happening with Fox News is pretty simple to understand. Their ratings are down due to two basic problems.

The first is that they’re going all-in, at least during prime time throughout the week, to cheerlead for the most unpopular White House since the darkest days of the W and Nixon administrations. That’s great for the people who already agree with them but doesn’t work for even the Republicans who have issues with Trump, and there are plenty of those. In the years of W, Fox News could count on Republicans closing ranks around him. In the current situation, people are a lot warier about the Pence White House, and with good reason.

Also, the complete marriage of Fox News to the people now generating real scandals in the White House is something that will come back to bite them hard as the investigations multiple and bear fruit. As much as the Right Wing tries to stick their fingers in their ears and yell “La-La-La, I can’t hear you!”, these are real problems that aren’t going away. And unlike the phony smears they attempted to throw at President Obama’s presidency, these have real teeth and real consequences. I really don’t know what Fox News will do to cover themselves when people start to go to jail. How will Hannity deal with that one? Trot out another bogus story about Seth Rich?

And the second problem is that Fox News has been effectively forced into updating its lineup in a much faster and more drastic way than it would have preferred. When they added Megyn Kelly to prime time, that was an addition that supplemented and buttressed what they already had going. It meant that they juggled Greta and Hannity to new slots and gave Kelly the plum position of having O’Reilly as her lead-in. Unsurprisingly, this led to her getting better ratings, and it probably strengthened their lineup. And then Greta left the network, which didn’t hurt them a lot due to having Brit Hume take over for a while before handing that timeslot to Carlson. Flash forward to the top of 2017 and suddenly Megyn Kelly herself leaves the lineup, forcing the network to push Martha MacCallum into the Greta slot and juggle Carlson. Flash forward again to April and suddenly O’Reilly himself is gone, and he was the lynchpin of the lineup. So within a short time, Fox News has replaced ¾ of its primetime, and viewers who were partial to O’Reilly, Kelly and even Greta no longer have a reason to tune in. Greta’s viewers can now see her at 6pm on MSNBC, which means she’s pulling some of them from Bret Baer’s news/opinion show. Kelly’s viewers are standing by to watch her on NBC when she finally debuts there. The biggest blow has been with O’Reilly’s viewers, who really don’t have anyone like him left on the air at Fox News, so they’ve had to go cold turkey with Tucker. It’s not a surprise that many of them don’t really like Tucker and aren’t willing to spend an hour with him every night – so they’re choosing to just go to O’Reilly’s website and perhaps they’ll listen to Beck’s radio show once a week, provided they can tolerate Beck’s continuing bizarre behavior.

In a way, Fox News is facing a Perfect Storm. They’ve backed an unpopular and scandal-plagued administration that is quickly capsizing, and they’ve replaced their most popular prime time hosts with shows that don’t attract as many people (and won’t, based on the trends). That’s on top of the already serious problems Fox News and the GOP are facing with an increasingly elderly constituency. I’ve said this repeatedly, but it’s important to remember – the Pence White House is acting as quickly as it can, not just because the people are smug and vicious, but because they know they don’t have much time to do these things before they will lose their opportunity. The same reasoning applies to Fox News. They went for the quick fix but will wind up in a serious hole within the next year or two. As the coverage and ratings are showing us, the major decline has already begun.

O’Reilly is clearly desperate to have some kind of public platform where he can opine as the “elder statesman” he wanted to be. (And I’m not convinced that Fox News won’t bring him back in a few years from now as their next Brit Hume – not to host his own show but to be a phone-in or in-studio pundit once a week for one of the prime time hosts, whoever those will be at that time.

Beck is clearly happy to have O’Reilly, since his radio company has been floundering – but I don’t think this will do much other than add another anchor to the water.

Interesting that Earhardt went back to a version of the old Fox trope of “Some people say” for her tribute to this man.

It is not a matter of speaking ill of the dead to note the destruction this man gleefully and willfully visited upon this nation and the world. It would speak ill of the dead to not be mindful of the many people in nations around the world who suffered in horrifying and cruel ways as a result of his behavior. The body count is truly staggering, if you include the vicious legacies of the Nixon, Reagan and W Bush foreign and domestic policies – and all of that was celebrated, promoted and very much made possible by the work of one Roger Ailes.

It is not a matter of speaking ill of the dead to note that this man happily promoted divisiveness and viciousness as a way of life, cheapened the public discourse in the United States, and championed the most hateful elements of society in spreading vile racist and misogynist sentiments – and simultaneously emboldened the worst among us to not only behave as childish bullies but also somehow take pride in that behavior.

It is true that this man ended his life in disgrace, but one doubts he would ever have acknowledged it. In the same way that Bill O’Reilly now petulantly insists that some grand conspiracy caused him to act so horribly as to become a liability to even an organization like Fox News, Ailes similarly never took any responsibility for his behavior. (I note that O’Reilly is now so desperate for public acclamation that he is frantically taking a regular slot on Glenn Beck’s failing radio show. One presumes he is doing so to warm the seat for Ted Cruz, who should wind up there in the next few years, as soon as he is either voted out of office or chooses on his own to go to punditry as a profession – like Jason Chaffetz just did.)

Weep not for Roger Ailes, or even for his family, which enjoys untold millions reaped from the horrors he willfully inflicted upon this world. It is said that the true measure of a person’s life is whether they made the world a better place by their having lived in it. The notion of leaving the campground a little cleaner than when you arrived there. If we apply that measure to Ailes and his life, it is a sad truth that he left the world an angrier, nastier and more divided place – as a direct result of his willful actions. He personally profited from these actions and was proud of them. He is no more worthy of anyone’s sympathy, even at this time, than any other public malefactor.

We should absolutely remember Roger Ailes, and we should remember what he did in life. And we should remember that the continuing viciousness of Fox News and the Right Wing of this country owe much to Ailes. We can mark his passing, but there is no cause to mourn him.

In the spirit of bipartisanship, I would offer the following response to Mike Lee and Mitch McConnell:

It’s wonderful that they are now recognizing the value of Merrick Garand, a man they disgraced themselves to ignore last year so they could steal his Supreme Court seat. Unfortunately, Judge Garland is not interested in leaving the judiciary and his important work there for a temporary post, one that would be in a subservient position to an unqualified and inappropriate person like Jeff Sessions. So he’ll be staying at the District Court. But the GOP’s newfound respect for Garland could absolutely be demonstrated in a more meaningful fashion: When Clarence Thomas or Anthony Kennedy steps down in the next couple of years, it’s great to know that Mitch McConnell and Mike Lee will be supporting Garland’s re-appointment to the Supreme Court at that time. I’m sure Democrats will be able to get behind that and make this a fully bipartisan action.

It’s becoming obvious that Fox News is hoping to get Trump to push for the Clinton perp walk we discussed several months ago. It was clear all along that the Pence White House would mount this attack when they ran into trouble in Congress or otherwise. It’s cheap political theater, it satisfies their base’s hatred of the Clintons, and it’s a fun way for the Right to bully everyone else.

Since Trump takes his cues from Fox News and Limbaugh, I’m expecting to hear about Sessions and the new FBI Director re-opening and expanding the investigation, with an emphasis on getting criminal indictments before the end of summer. Idea would be to get that perp walk around the time that the fall budget goes in, so that they’ll have an alternate cover story for the media. And then the trial would be smack in the middle of the midterm elections.

Keep in mind that these guys will always try to change the narrative whenever they can. So the story isn’t that Trump badly lost the popular vote – it’s that there must be millions of fraudulent votes. The story isn’t that Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russian agents to mess around with the election – it’s that someone is leaking that information to the press.

And of course these guys have already managed to distract everyone with Trump’s antics from the actual work being done by Mike Pence every day at the White House.

We should keep in mind that the Fox News perspective (and the Right’s in general) is that there should never have been an ACA in the first place. As far as they’re concerned, it’s your problem to pay for your hospital bills and if you can’t afford them, then obviously there’s something wrong with you, isn’t there?

It’s not a surprise that these guys finally got something through the House – they were going to get there at some point. I’m frankly surprised that it took these guys all the way to May 4 to do it. I figured they would have gotten this all done by January 21st. And the Pence White House could have just stopped the subsidies at that time, which would have destroyed the ACA immediately, but they chose to wait for Congress to do it instead. Which tells you how scared the Right actually is of the consequences of their actions here.

The reality of this situation is that, again, it has nothing whatsoever to do with health care. They don’t care whether you can get to a doctor or not – that’s your problem. The issue has always been for the Right to be able to kill the ACA so they could retroactively declare Barack Obama the failure they’ve always thought him to be. If that means that millions of people will lose their coverage, that’s the problem of those people. And as Mo Brooks has made clear, the Right believes that if you lived properly, you wouldn’t have any pre-existing conditions anyway.