I agree that non-Right Wingers do need to appear when they can on Fox News, to try and puncture the propaganda bubble. I just see that Fox News has become increasingly emboldened since last November, and some of the hosts are getting to unpleasant lows in their desperate allegiance to the Pence White House.

I could see trying to go on O’Reilly’s show, although he has actually stated on the air that he no longer wants to interview people he considers “extremists”. For the rest of us, that means anyone who is not in his bubble – and to O’Reilly, a “left winger” looks like Juan Williams. One has to wonder how O’Reilly would handle an interview with Amy Goodman…

With Carlson and Hannity, I don’t really see a point these days. Every guest I’ve seen go on Carlson’s show who’s even remotely to the Left of him is disrespected in a manner that’s viscerally unpleasant to see. It’s hard to watch someone trying to make a point to Carlson, only to be interrupted and insulted multiple times before they can finish one sentence. If I thought Carlson was even listening to what they were saying, it might make a difference. But he’s not. His intention in having these people on is not to engage in any real way – it’s to bully the guest and have fun doing so. I’d rather see a guest in that position simply remove their earpiece and microphone and leave. If Carlson is going to behave like a five year old, clearly modeling himself on Trump, there really isn’t much of a mature conversation you can have with him.

With Hannity, his level of anger and hatred is actually spiking toward Jeanine Pirro levels. Given the fact that we now know about his issues with handguns, I really would not recommend people to appear there. The last thing I would want to see is Hannity losing his temper after having his talking points refuted and then pulling a weapon, as he did with Williams.

After the inevitable collapse of this corrupt group in the White House, it may be possible once again to try to engage with more of these hosts, but I don’t know that much gets accomplished while they’re in full-on bullying mode.

Nunes is clearly on the side of Nunes. He’s also thinking that he can earn brownie points from the Pence White House by making nonsensical displays like his panic attack yesterday. (And which he’s now already walked back the details, if you’ve been paying attention.) He’s another Darrell Issa in the making, with an equal lack of ethics or credibility.

David, they’re absolutely going to take that step. There really isn’t any other option for them left at this point. The Dems aren’t going to fall for the Lucy football pull of thinking that the GOP won’t just do the same thing later on. Better for them to stand on principle and force the Right to their word. Best case scenario – the only other SC vacancy Pence fills is Clarence Thomas in another few months. If the GOP continues dancing on their own grave, the midterms will return the Dems to the majority and this nonsense will be finished.

Debi, there absolutely is a threat by Clarke here. He’s trying to act like a schoolyard bully, and he’s going to stop it. Or he can be removed from his office for cause. But he doesn’t get to have it both ways.

Without bias, this was a childish display by Clarke, and he’s becoming known for his childish displays. If he wants to be an effective Sheriff for Milwaukee, it might serve him better to act like an adult. It also might serve the people of Milwaukee better. I would also recommend that he publicly answer for the four people who died at the Milwaukee County Jail in 2016, including Terril Thomas, whose family has filed a major civil lawsuit for wrongful death against Clarke.

Scratch that. It’s just become clear why these guys are running so scared right now.

If you take a look at the headlines at actual news outlets like CNN rather than Fox News, you’ll see that there are real links starting to emerge about multiple Trump campaign members and Russian Intelligence. Not just rumor – actual intelligence that fills in the blanks of what James Comey was discussing this week. Someone inside the Pence White House is justifiably concerned that this will all blow up in Trump’s face, so they decided to float this story using Nunes as a front.

Should be interesting to see how badly this will backfire over the next couple of days…

The Pence White House’s attempts to bully and intimidate people in my state, California, are not having the effect I think Fox News was hoping to see. Rather than cowing to bullies, the people and officials have made clear that they will not try to throw immigrants under the bus just because Trump keeps scapegoating them. If Trump wants to threaten to withhold funding here or there, he should have Pence go ahead and do it. We’re frankly bored with the empty threats and puffery. Of course, if he actually tries to cut off funding for law enforcement in Los Angeles, we have the option to cut off funds going from the state of California back to the federal government – and we provide more money to the USA than they provide to us. So he can try this game, but I don’t think the Pence White House will enjoy the result so much. We’ll still be funded for what we need here, and Trump will be forced to do without – at least until we can get past the 2020 election and put someone with credibility back in national office.

I’m frankly also wondering how Mexico will respond once Trump makes a show of starting to build the racist wall he’s been insisting he would make Mexico pay to build. In my opinion, it would make the most sense for Mexico to cut off diplomatic relations with this country the moment Trump makes a big event of “breaking ground”. Yes, they’ll lose some financial aid – but they’re going to lose that anyway under Mike Pence. Better for them to take the bull by the horns and give an appropriate response. Building what Trump has threatened is nothing more or less than a giant middle finger to the people of Mexico. They really need to respond in kind – if only to demonstrate that bullies like this never win and never should.

Ellen, they don’t care and he doesn’t care. In their opinion, they neither need nor want the votes of anyone who doesn’t look like them. They’re hoping (I believe in vain) that everyone but the angry white voters will be too disillusioned to show up for the midterms or 2020. I tend to doubt their hopes on that front.

I honestly believe that Smith is having real issues with the Pence White House and its spokespeople. He really needs to watch what he’s saying and watch what he’s doing or he may find himself getting phased out of Fox News in short order. What he’s saying is in direct conflict with the stated intentions of his bosses and pretty much everyone else in that building.

O’Reilly attempted to spin the CBO report last night as showing that people would “choose” not to have coverage. That’s not what the report shows. The report clearly shows that the lower income people who were able to find coverage under the ACA will be losing that coverage. In a bizarre turn, even O’Reilly admitted that the likely result of the passing of HAHA will be that lower income patients will once again resort to the Emergency Rooms, provided they can get there.

And the harder line Right Wingers are now openly stating that health coverage is not something anyone should count on if they don’t have their own money saved up to cover it. I appreciate that people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are at least being honest about what the Pence White House is doing.

In a way, they’re getting a double plus out of this. On the one hand, they get to rip away the primary accomplishment of President Obama and retroactively declare his tenure as a failure. And at the same time, they get to punish anyone and everyone who believed Obama or the Dems could accomplish anything good for the country. And they get to smack the paws of what few GOP members even partly tried to work with Obama or the Dems. If these guys get their way, it’s truly a victory for the Scut Farkuses of the world and a shining example for bullies everywhere.

Eyes, I’ll say it again. They DON’T CARE. This is not about health coverage. It’s about punishing Barack Obama and all those who had the temerity to support him. It’s a bullying move – they are punching people in the nose and telling them to like it.

Hewitt’s position, while spit-take funny, is also consistent with what we’re hearing from Right Wingers across the country – that Medicaid is a waste of money and that somehow states and charities will make up the difference after the funds are slashed. Experience shows us that in fact what happens is that the funds get slashed and nobody fills in that gap. Just ask all the people who wound up homeless after Reagan’s people slashed the funding that would have helped them in the early 80s. And then blamed those same people for being homeless with lines like “They made their bed” when they passed them on the street.

The “Russia Story is Going Away” idea is obviously a Fox News Line of the Day – it’s been embraced by multiple Fox News pundits and personalities throughout this week. The repeated mantra is that the Russia story somehow has no proof or evidence (which is a flat out lie), and that the REAL story is about all the leaking going on from the Pence White House.

The clear intent is to convince the Fox News viewers that a whole bunch of former Obama staffers are somehow undermining the Pence White House in a coordinated effort. The reality that the leaks are likely coming from non-partisan career White House staffers and alarmed GOP staffers is one that the Right Wing does not dare acknowledge.

That being said, O’Reilly is correct that investigations will likely go nowhere, given that Mike Pence has control over what happens at the White House and great influence over what the majorities in each house of Congress do. So we’re not going to be seeing a full court press on anything about all the Russian stuff. But the leaks will continue and the information will continue to drip out over the next couple of years.

Ironic that Fox News is suddenly concerned about leaks when they openly embraced them during the Obama Administration and the Clinton campaign.

David, I hear you, and I’m sure there is a way to address the issue of health insurance being tied to employment. In fact, I know there is a simple solution. They have it in Canada and multiple countries around the world. It’s called Single Payer and it stops the whole notion of having private insurance companies mark up all the costs. We’ll eventually get there, but it won’t be until we go through more years of the quagmires like this one.

In the meantime, I think it important to call these guys out on their fairly direct attack on both working people in this country and on lower income people in this country. The current bill is designed and intended to slap both of those groups as hard as the Right can get away with today – all while telling everyone how wonderful and fairly this bill treats them. In reality, the attack on Medicaid and the viciousness about the employer-covered plans is nothing more than revenge against the rest of the country for voting for things that the Right did not want to discuss.

Neither O’Reilly nor Pirro has even an inch of moral ground on which to stand here. Both have engaged in non-stop bullying and viciousness toward liberals since November 8th – and outright open hate speech toward the left. Pirro in particular is known for angrily screaming taunts at the camera during her weekend show.

The reality of Trump’s usage of the SEAL’s widow is that he was doing exactly what Moore described – he put her there as a giant middle finger to anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him. Just as he paraded the parents of people whose kids had been killed by undocumented immigrants.

Frankly, I’m surprised to hear anyone referring to Trump’s recital on Tuesday as a “presidential” moment for him. I’m not sure what the others are referring to there – what I saw was a man reciting rote talking points from a teleprompter and singling out various examples he insists are motivations for his hateful policies and rhetoric.

Sadly, the reality is that there will be no real investigation of this matter. The Right has full control over both houses of Congress as well as the White House. There will be a little window dressing and an occasional stern look from some GOP congressmen, but that’s it. They’re taking their cue from Fox News, as they have made abundantly clear.

While I can understand people’s sympathy for Colmes and his family, I’ve never thought of him as particularly left wing. Colmes was a moderate liberal Democrat, nothing more and nothing less. He was hand-picked to be on Hannity’s show as a harmless voice who could be counted on to regularly back down to Hannity’s more forceful personality. Colmes did very well for himself at Fox News by essentially doing what he was told. I agree he was under pressure when he appeared on their airwaves. They were paying him a lot more money than he had received to do his radio show or anything else he’d done – although nothing anywhere near what Hannity was getting. He knew his role and he accepted it. As a result, he and his family made a good living for over a decade. And then Hannity dumped him, figuring he no longer needed the pretense of having a sidekick. He continued to make appearances, usually just on O’Reilly’s show, where O’Reilly would regularly shout at him and castigate him, but also where he did occasionally make a more interesting point than he had been permitted to voice on Hannity. (I note that in the years since Hannity kicked him off the show, Colmes was almost never mentioned – it was as if he’d never been there. Hannity’s sudden show of mourning Colmes’ death today is in direct contrast to his deliberate ignoring of Colmes when he was alive for the past 8 years.)

Many left wingers I know were extremely disappointed in Colmes’ appearances with Hannity while he was on the show. They were incensed that Colmes never called Hannity out for his constant cheap shots, his simmering racism and his inability to see past partisan viciousness. I myself recall being confused when I first heard his name back in 1996. Fox News billed him as a “top liberal voice”, but that was news to any of us who regularly listened to Pacifica Radio or even to NPR. If Fox News had been interested in actually putting an openly left wing voice on the air with Hannity, they would have given that seat to Jeff Cohen of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Instead, they put Cohen on in a much more minor position as part of the panel on their Fox News Watch weekend show. They also could have talked to Amy Goodman or to Larry Bensky or to Alexander Cockburn or to any of a number of truly left wing scholars who would have wiped the floor with Hannity on a regular basis. But that’s not what Fox News wanted. They wanted a nice, easy-going guy who frankly had a more bookish appearance next to the red meat of Hannity. And that’s what they got.

Again, it is sad for Colmes’ family that he has passed away, and I wish them well in this difficult time for them. But I have no sympathy for the purveyors on Fox News who presented him in the manner that they did over the years. Colmes’ own willing participation in the ruse makes this situation even more unfortunate. I realize this gave his family a more lucrative lifestyle, but real left wing journalists like Bensky never prioritized that.

The key to any left winger agreeing to appear on a Fox News show is to be aware of how the hosts will attempt to spin their presentation in a wildly slanted manner, and to be ready to challenge the false premises being offered as “facts”. Tucker Carlson has become a master of the typical Fox News approach – present a “question” to a guest that is in fact a wildly propagandistic right wing opinion and then try to trap the guest in their answer. If the guest accepts the premise, Carlson has already won the debate. If the guest does not accept it, Carlson will then attempt to throw false moral equivalencies or absurd comparisons that may initially sound reasonable but are intended to buttress Carlson’s initial preset hypothesis. If the guest points out what Carlson is sneakily doing, Carlson will then attempt to talk over the guest or make funny faces and pretend to laugh. There’s really only one way to deal with this kind of bullying as practiced by Fox News – and this to directly challenge them on their bias and to point out their behavior. I wish that Colmes had taken much more initiative in this area over the past 20 years.

This is a series of blatant, vicious lies from Limbaugh, and we should understand them for what they are.

President Obama absolutely did not get everything he wanted or even close to it during 2009 or any other time during his presidency. And he certainly was not awarded any deference from the Right due to his race. If anything, he was repeatedly attacked even more strenuously on that basis. I can cite Right Wing talk radio from 2008 condescendingly portraying his candidacy as doomed due to his race, where one KFI host predicted he would lose due to dishonest liberal voters who wouldn’t pull the lever for him when in the privacy of the voting booth.

Rush Limbaugh kicked off 2009 with the infuriated scream of “I HOPE HE FAILS!” as a direct attack on President Obama for having the temerity to be elected by a solid majority of the country. Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, and the Right held a strategy meeting to coincide with Obama’s inauguration wherein they plotted to block every single thing the Dems did and to then campaign on that intransigence in 2010 and 2012. The GOP worked hard to stop anything Obama proposed under the idea that most things wouldn’t go anywhere so they could call him a failure, and that if anything did get through, they could campaign that they didn’t vote for it anyway. The only reason that Obama and the Dems got anything accomplished in 2009 was because the Dems held solid majorities in Congress, as a continuing direct repudiation of the corruption and incompetence of the GOP and the W Bush White House. Had the GOP controlled larger numbers of congresspeople, we likely would not have seen the ACA passed and the government would have been completely mired in gridlock.

I also note that Barack Obama assumed office at a time when the country was in an economic free-fall, due again to the corruption and incompetence of the W Bush White House. The hope from folks like Limbaugh had been to hold off the recession until a Democrat got into office and then blame it on him. Unfortunately for the Right, the recession erupted before the election, so it was clear to all where the blame resided. And we must note that throughout the Dems’ work to get us out of the recession, the Right did everything they could to pour sand in the tank and talk down the economy – to tighten the screws on everyday voters and convince them the Dems weren’t really doing anything to help them.

Despite all this, Barack Obama was consistently a popular president who was perceived as intelligent and caring, and who was clearly trying to do what he could to clean up the mess left to him and us by 8 years of Dick Cheney running the White House. What Obama accomplished, he did in spite of the constant and mean-spirited attacks from outlets like Fox News and AM Right Wing radio. And in spite of Limbaugh’s vicious lies here, there in fact were jobs created during the presidency of Barack Obama. The stimulus wasn’t enough, but it did stem the free-fall we were experiencing and we did pull out of the recession. Had the Right been willing to help in this process, we could have recovered more fully and more quickly, but Limbaugh didn’t care about that in 2009.

Limbaugh seems to want to blame the unpopularity of the Pence White House on some kind of favoritism toward Obama, rather than on the behavior of Pence and his Tweeter-in-Chief. He might do better to look at the belligerence of Trump’s behavior, and the mystifying assumption that Trump has some kind of overwhelming popular mandate to inflict the damage he is attempting. If Donald Trump wants to be more popular with the majority of people in this country, he needs to actually try to work with someone outside his small group of supporters and yes men. If he’s going to continue dictating from the Far Right and telling everyone to just get over it, he will continue to watch his approval rating plummet into oblivion. I realize that Trump is upset and frightened about this situation, but he needs to start demonstrating the maturity he promised he would when he campaigned to take this office. If he cannot do so, we will face certain problems in the near future, and he will face a landslide defeat in 2020.

David, Pence is already running the policies at the White House. Trump is acting the part he said he would during their negotiations in the campaign – he’s the public face and spokesperson for the real work that Pence is doing behind the scenes.

This particular clip just reinforces that Trump is regularly watching Fox News at all hours – likely because it’s the only media outlet consistently giving him high fives. The scary part here is something akin to the movie Broadcast News, where the anchor blindly repeats what he’s told over his headset. In this case, Trump regularly parrots whatever propaganda line is spewed from the Fox News’ broadcasts, and does so within minutes of the line being aired.

We actually did hear the Watergate line last night from Bill O’Reilly, while Bob Woodward was trying to school him on the real problems being exposed by the Flynn debacle. Woodward was concerned that the firing of Flynn was setting off warning bells for journalists who didn’t see why his dissembling was so serious – meaning that there must be something more to this story than what we’ve been told. They clearly think there is a greater malfeasance. (And Fox News wants to twist the story so it’s about the act of leaking rather than about the information that came out – which is stunning in its hypocrisy for an outfit that openly rooted for leaks into the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House…) I would argue that the real reason Flynn was fired was because he messed with Mike Pence, the acting President and this was a message to the entire cabinet and the Executive Branch – don’t make the same mistake Flynn did. I’m sure the rest of the White House will be a LOT more careful in how they deal with Pence going forward. Or they’ll be fired too. We can always hope that journalists will start picking up on this and showing how Pence is controlling a lot more than anyone thought. His influence today is apparently much greater than even Dick Cheney’s was a decade ago – and that’s saying something.

I’m more than skeptical about thinking this will go much farther. Jeff Sessions is now the head of the Justice Department, and he has no incentive to follow a series of leads that would be embarrassing or criminally fraught for Fox News and Roger Ailes. Based on the Pence White House’s fondness for Fox News, and on Trump’s personal friendship with Ailes, it’s more likely this investigation will be slow-rolled until nobody knows much about it anymore.

The priorities of the Jeff Sessions Justice Dept will be the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, the dropping of all attempts to protect anyone’s civil rights, the dropping of all attempts to defend the ACA, and a frantic attempt to locate the multiple government employees now regularly leaking the details of the incompetence of Pence’s staff. There’s not a lot of room there for a high line investigation of the Pence White House’s largest and most visible ally in the Right Wing media.

And we should not forget that they still have open investigations running against the Clintons and their charity. Sessions himself may recuse himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t instruct the people below him to aggressively find whatever they can. Just yesterday, the Tweeter-in-Chief threw out another attack on the Clinton campaign as part of his desperate attempt to deflect questions about his compromised and now former National Security Advisor. If Flynn is to be dropped from the Pence White House, and if there is a push to discipline Conway, it’s a no-brainer that these guys will respond with an even nastier push to get that grand jury empaneled on the Clintons as soon as possible.

Even if Sessions had been confirmed earlier (and there was never any doubt that he would get in), he could not have changed the outcome here. The reality is that the Pence White House’s position has been a bullying tone of saying they can rely on shaky statutory support and that this vicious ban is “unreviewable” – meaning in simpler language “SHUT UP AND GO AWAY”. That approach has never worked well with the judiciary – hence the unanimous result from the 9th Circuit. If this was purely a partisan scenario, the court would have been split. It wasn’t – this was a clear cut case of overreach by the bullies in the Pence White House, who are now getting their first taste of the asphalt.

We must also be clear that these decisions are not really being made by Donald Trump. He doesn’t know half of what he’s signing. The EO’s are being drafted by Pence and his team and then being presented to Trump to present as a triumphant success, regardless of what damage each EO does. Remember that the domestic and foreign policy of this White House is the responsibility of Mike Pence, meaning that we should expect more and more of these EO’s, and more and more proclamations of imaginary success and popularity. Even if Trump somehow resigned or disappeared today, these policies and EO’s would continue at the same pace in the same direction. We would just have Pence doing his work in the open rather than hidden behind Trump.

I think it’s healthier to think of this as the presidency Mike Pence was hoping to see from Ted Cruz. Hard Right choices, Far Right appointments and a smash-mouth, in-your-face approach to governance. If anyone in this country is really upset by all this, it’s Ted Cruz, who is now forced to cheerlead Trump from the sidelines while watching Pence steal all of Cruz’ pet ideas and present them as Trump’s.

Keep in mind that the fast pace of this White House is understandable as their reaction to how little time they have to ram all these ideas through before the 2018 midterms where they expect to face serious trouble in the Senate. And they’re rushing to try to erase the Obama presidency as fast as they can – but that’s more a matter of their personal hatred for Barack Obama and his voters than any real political need.

Regarding Neil Gorsuch, that’s unfortunately a done deal as well. My hope is that the Dems go ahead and filibuster him, and that they vote, as they’ve announced, to appropriately oppose him. Once it’s clear that McConnell can’t get 60 votes (he’ll likely only have 53 with Joe Manchin joining in), the Right will immediately “go nuclear” and dismantle the remaining 60 vote thresholds. The next day, we’ll see a new vote on Gorsuch, which will safely sit at 53 and Fox News will announce it as “bipartisan support” for the new Scalia on the high court.

BTW – I note that Jason Chaffetz has proudly announced that he’s pushing a bill to abolish the Department of Education that should move through the House this year. So they’re moving faster than I thought on some of these ideas. I have a feeling that Energy and the EPA won’t be far behind…

This is fairly simple to understand.

They don’t care, and they’re not going to change their behavior. They’re happy that you don’t like them – they enjoy rubbing this kind of stuff in people’s faces. It’s called bullying. They’ve been doing it for the past 18 months. Not a surprise that they’re going to their usual safe space.

I do find it interesting that O’Reilly, Carlson and Hannity very carefully avoided mentioning this situation AT ALL. It was as though this never happened, while they were fuming over the Pence White House being appropriately slapped down by the 9th Circuit. Now, if Robert Gibbs early in 2009 had endorsed a product hawked by Michelle Obama while being interviewed by CNN, I have a feeling the entire Fox News network would have been in an uproar. Jay Sekulow would be screaming from the rafters that Gibbs needed to be thrown in the hoosgow immediately to restore democracy. O’Reilly would be intoning heavily on the loss of dignity for the White House and the damage this could do to our standing with “the folks” everywhere. But if the Pence White House does it? All good! Nothing to see here. Move along. (Or at the more extreme edge of bullying, you can check out Rush Limbaugh’s response – which was to viciously laugh at anyone thinking there was anything wrong here, and to say that it was just so much fun to watch liberals get upset about it.)