I would actually agree with cutting the salaries of everyone in the three branches. I would also agree with the idea of reducing the staff sizes. Neither approach would net that much, but it would be a good step toward this notion being put forward that “everybody needs to step up”…

The funniest part of this confrontation came when O’Reilly tried to get up on his moral high horse and lecture the Congresswoman about “NEVER” castigating him again without knowing the context of what he was saying. And she immediately corrected him again and noted that she had seen his full comments and was sorry that he didn’t feel she had. Which left O’Reilly fuming with a last word that sounded like he was growling at her.

The strong impression from this discussion was that O’Reilly was embarassed about being called out for the Watters segments, and he went into a purely defensive mode. One would hope that O’Reilly would listen to himself and NEVER send Jesse Watters to Hawaii to do a hit piece like this again.

A86, you may find that dealing with certain posters will only result in an endless stream of provoking statements that you’ll have to choose whether to answer. Sometimes the best approach is to save yourself time and simply to allow their issues to speak for themselves…

John, you may want to actually go back and look at Ben Shapiro’s appearances and think about your statement a little more. Shapiro hasn’t chronicled anything other than his own distaste for people with whom he disagrees. Just because he does so with a smirk does not mean that he’s actually proven anything. And the disarray that Breitbart’s company is plunging into should give anyone pause.

Your comment about public money being “forcibly taken” makes no sense. If you mean that tax money gets allocated to a variety of programs, almost all of which one part or another of the population would prefer not to fund, then you’re just stating the obvious. We all have things that our taxes fund which we don’t agree with – but we all agree to be part of this country and to pay our taxes. Are you saying that you only want your taxes to go for those programs you like? If so, join the club.

The answer to this was provided on O’Reilly’s show last night, when he tried to get his guest to go along with the right wing talking point of having Planned Parenthood agree to a public audit, to confirm that no public money was improperly being used. She of course refused his entire premise and noted this would just turn into a GOP media circus and would be an unfortunate thing for the women who use PP’s healthcare services.

The Fox & Friends appearance is only the latest salvo by Laura Ingraham at Planned Parenthood. She tried twice last year while guest-hosting on O’Reilly’s show, and each time she was unable to make much of a case before her guest had to correct her poor understanding of the situation.

The funny thing about this is that the left has been quite unhappy with President Obama over this deal, in that the loss of the 2 percent SS holiday on payroll means that working and middle class people will actually feel this more than the people earning over 400K per year. The left had wanted the Bush rates ended for people at 250K, so this was already a compromise. They were particularly unhappy about the estate tax exemption still going to 5 million dollars rather than being reduced to 1 million.

If you think Varney and the others are done complaining about taxes, just wait until the next shoe drops for Social Security. The GOP will argue to reduce benefits and to raise the retirement age, both of which approaches they’ve already been discussing. And raising the age isn’t completely unreasonable, in that we are living longer than people did 50 years ago. I fully expect that by the time I hit retirement age, it will be closer to 70 before SS can be collected. The GOP will also argue for means-testing, which on its face is reasonable, until you realize that this means that people are paying into the system but then are told that they don’t qualify. That would be one thing if the retiree is a multimillionaire with three homes – in that case, the retiree is unlikely to apply. It’s another if the retiree has a modest pension and the SS payment allows them to live without making dire choices.

But the big SS shoe that’s coming is the step that would silence the SS naysayers. Which is to lift the cap on the SS payroll tax. As it is now, once you earn 114K, no more SS deductions are made from your paycheck. When the cap is lifted, a considerable amount more revenue should come into SS, which would stop the discussions of its imminent demise.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves about this – the GOP’s intention is to try to reduce and limit programs like SS and Medicare. If people like Grover Norquist had their way, programs like SS would have been privatized in 2004 (which would have left millions of seniors destitute in the wake of the recession).

One has to wonder if Gutfeld knows about the little matter of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire…

Paul, it sounds like you’re trying to take the position of defending the Confederacy. Good luck with that one. That battle was settled 150 years ago. If you’d like to reopen the matter, it’s a fairly strange position to take. And if you’re trying to reopen the discussion of whether the US should have declared independence from England in the 18th century, that’s just getting further out into the weeds.

As we’ve discussed, the current situation has to do with a small number of people in Texas, certainly nowhere near a number that could speak for a signifcant part of the state, who are unhappy with the GOP losses in the 2012 election and are acting out. The fit will only last for a little while, and then they’ll go back to their regular activities, as do most tantrum throwers after they’ve exhausted themselves. This is certainly not a case of a group really fighting for independence or defending anything other than their own misunderstanding of the current political situation and their own anger at their inability to unseat the current President.

Aria and Visitor 55, I wouldn’t worry about needing to clarify your points. Your posts have been cogent and accurate.

Griff Jenkins stepped over the line both at the Journal office and at the editor’s home when he refused to leave the area after being denied entrance. At that point, his action moved from a simple query to trespassing and even harassment. It is likely that he doesn’t understand the difference, and more likely that if confronted, he would pretend not to know. This would be consistent with the way he has conducted himself during his career at Fox News.

One thing to keep in mind is that this kind of ambush is not just the play of the right wing. They copied it from the work of Michael Moore, after Moore embarrased several people in his documentaries. I found the ending of Bowling for Columbine, with his confrontation of Charlton Heston, to be exactly the kind of trespassing and harassment Jenkins did here.

Things got even toastier on Hannity’s show, where Hannity thought it would be fun to show video of Gore at his private jet and limo. And his right wing guest made a point of repeating that he thought Gore was a hypocrite, un-American and of course one of the biggest gas guzzlers and oil consumers ever.

Lanny Davis did actually challenge Limbaugh on many of his points and stood his ground when both of the other guys tried to shout him down and talk over him. Unfortunately, Hannity ended the double segment abruptly and on a completely false note.

Things got worse with the following segment with good old Jay Sekulow and, for reasons I’ll never understand, Leo Terrell. In that segment, the mutual shouting got to the level where it was pointless to listen much more. Terrell ended the segment with his hands over his ears…

And in typical fashion, friends of mine who are big Fox News fans actually think she’s somehow faking the blood clot. When I said to one of them last night that this sounded more than unlikely and that she clearly has a medical issue, he responded, “I don’t trust those people about anything.” Here we go with another birth certificate issue. Do we need to bring out her doctor, her medical exam results and photos of her in the hospital now?

In the short term, this is a good thing, in that the tax rates were extended for middle class families, and the unemployment benefits were extended. But that’s the extent of it.

This past Congress distinguished themselves by refusing to compromise on anything, even when this would potentially harm everyone. Fox News did much to exacerbate the situation by encouraging these people to stay as far out on the limb as possible. So that they caused a downgrade of our credit rating and couldn’t even agree to do this work until after it was already too late.

A few points of this mess are pretty clear. The GOP group was clearly waiting to make sure they wouldn’t have to vote on this until after the deadline passed, so they could say they were lowering taxes rather than raising them. (Which belies the point that technically they did raise them…) The GOP group was fractured, in that some wanted to follow John Boehner when he made a deal with President Obama, and others are still refusing to do anything with the Democrats.

It looks very likely that Eric Cantor will try to challenge Boehner’s position, and one has to wonder how that will go down. If Cantor does this, it will mark a clear divide between two generations of the GOP – one of which trying to actually govern, and the other one trying to campaign full time. How this develops will be very interesting.

The sad part about this is that it’s obvious that we’re headed for a repeat of the debt ceiling debacle within a month, and this was clearly the intent of the GOP and of Fox News. President Obama clearly wanted to end the speculation about this early and move on to other areas. But the GOP wants to play chicken with that deadline again, hoping they can get more leverage out of there somewhere. The likely result will be another downgrade – directly tied to GOP obstinance.

One would hope that the GOP would learn from what happened in 2012, where they lost on almost every front in the end. But it seems they’re just digging in their heels.

Huckabee topped himself in his year-end rant. He started that with a bunch of false premises and then got in deeper as he began wildly misrepresenting what actually happened in the election. (The best part of this was his sinister implication that President Obama only won because the “47 percent” voted for him along with a few more people who didn’t know what they were doing.)

To top it off, since he couldn’t end the year with a triumphant note of “Ding Dong The Witch is Dead”, he instead tried to jump to the moral high ground to say that he wanted to cherish the memories of his family from this year rather than dwell on anything else. Except that he’s just spent a year dwelling on exactly that, with only a few quick segues into photos of his grandkids. It’s nice that he’s a happy grandfather, but that doesn’t change his behavior or his statements this year – and it doesn’t get him off the hook. Hiding behind his family now seems a bit less than courageous. Give Rush Limbaugh credit – he may be wildly offensive and over the top with his anger, but at least he doesn’t hide.

I agree with Ellen. Fox’s obsession with this “story” is less about bringing down the Obama presidency or blocking his re-election now that they’ve failed in those endeavors. It looks as if they are trying just to smear Hillary Clinton as part of the record they’ll want to have on hand for the 2016 campaign.

The other purpose for this and the continuing nonsense about Fast & Furious is that they hope to besmirch Obama’s legacy with as many of these things as they can. When you add them together with the attempted scandals about the Black Panthers, Joe Sestak, the Winston Churchill bust, etc, you get a tawdry list indeed. I would count on Fox News citing all of this nonsense at the end of Obama’s presidency in 4 years and then whenever his name is mentioned in the coming years.

VK, your response ignored almost all of the rebuttal I provided to you. If it works for you, I’ll presume that you’ve conceded those points.

Regarding Chicago’s status, that’s another distraction. It’s one of the biggest cities in the United States, and like all big cities, there are issues with crime and violence there. Nobody is disputing that. Nobody is saying that any big city is a magically safe place to live. Nor is anybody saying that having gun regulation is a panacea, and you know that. The point is that having gun regulation, particularly of heavy weapons, provides something for the police to enforce when they do catch criminals with those weapons, and it makes it a lot harder for people to obtain those weapons if they aren’t hardened criminals. Short version – the statistics that you don’t specify would be a lot more severe if everybody could get their hands on an AK-47. And the fact that you can’t or won’t specify your statistics is quite telling.

Either way, you’re unable to answer the fact that having Joe Arpaio’s volunteer “posse” march into Maricopa County schools with their pistols in hand would be a disaster for everyone involved. That’s the real point of this thread, no matter how much you try to distract people from it.

Antoinette, I’m curious to know – is your list indicating a story that’s about to break?

Huckabee is vamping. He got caught saying something truly offensive but he doesn’t want to just apologize and move on. Thus, we will continue to hear these defensive explanations rather than humble remorse.

Ailes keeps putting Trump on because he’s flashy and he gets people’s attention. Ailes doesn’t mind that Trump’s statements are usually baloney.

Trump should be asked whenever he is interviewed what “unbelievable” evidence his guys found in Hawaii that he said was going influence the 2012 election. He should be asked what evidence his guys found that causes him to think that Obama wasn’t a good student in college. He should be asked why he attempted to set up his own GOP presidential debate and then cancelled it. He should be asked why he repeatedly discussed running for President and then cancelled.

The reality is he just likes getting attention for himself, and he’ll say whatever outrageous thing comes to mind at the moment without any filter. Fox News’ use of him as a “go-to” interview is yet another indication that they are less interested in providing actual reporting than they are in stoking partisan conflicts.

McFarland is yet another exhibit in the case of why Fox is not a legitimate news organization. She’s purported to be a reporter for them, but she insists on doing things like this, as well as the shameful display with Petraeus.