This was a fairly simple case, in that Rittenhouse would never have found himself in a situation where he was compelled to “defend himself” had he not crossed state lines with an illegal assault weapon and engaged a group of protestors.

Unfortunately, the trial was likely to result in either this odd verdict or a mistrial after all the misconduct by the judge. It would be helpful to see that judge brought to account by the Wisconsin Bar Association, but that sadly will prove unlikely.

And we will now see a continuing spike in violence, particularly with the assault weapons enjoyed by people like Rittenhouse, who will now feel emboldened to open fire when they feel like it.

Multiple agendas are involved here.

First, there is no way any angry Right Wing outlet is going to acknowledge any success from the Dems and the Biden White House. Their narrative is one of total failure, so airing anything of that bill signing would be anathema to them.

Second, angry Right Wingers are quite vested in the Rittenhouse situation, just as they were in the Ramos & Compean situation back in 2006-2009. They are more than eager to see Rittenhouse exonerated for his murders.

Third, regarding COVID, angry Right Wingers have now quintuple-downed on the notion that the pandemic was an annoying distraction to their frantic wish to re-elect the Pence White House. They have never admitted the truth – that Pence and his childish former assistant were so incompetent in their handling of basic governmental functions in the face of a pandemic that they allowed millions of people, including over 700,000 Americans to die.

The hope by this group is that they can either reinstall a version of the Pence White House in 2024 or so confuse everyone that the actual history never gets written. In reality, more people than they think actually do remember what happened over the past decades. And there is now literally thousands of hours of Fox News personalities shamelessly repeating falsehoods about all of it.

Paxton is fully aware that the SB8 court fight will mostly be obviated after the current Supreme Court guts Roe and Casey with the Dobbs decision. The one place where SB8 will lose is in its three most outrageous conditions – the bounty hunter clause, the no legal fee reimbursement clause for their targets, and the holdover clause stating that even if it were to be stayed, SB8 could still be retroactively enforced for actions during that period.

The current Far Right SC allowed SB8 to go into effect specifically to make sure that the latter of those clauses could be inflicted. Had they stayed it before it went online, clinics in Texas could have operated. Since they allowed it to go on, Texas clinics really can’t risk operating unless and until SB8 is totally thrown out. So they’re done.

When the Dobbs decision allows the states to set their own deadlines, be it 14 weeks, 6 weeks or 2 days, the rest of SB8 will be able to stand. Texas will then be able to issue a new bill that just removes the obnoxious enforcement methods and goes back to the traditional methods. But by using those methods, Texas will have gotten away with having a ban in effect around 9 months before anyone else.

Paxton is also fully aware of his own hypocrisy. In reality, he doesn’t care at all about “choice” or “life”. Those have never been priorities for angry Right Wingers. He cares about putting women back in their place, and punishing Americans for not living in a Pollyanna world rather than reality. He cares about continuing to support the completely debunked Right Wing disinformation campaign about COVID – where a pandemic was considered an annoying hoax distraction to their frantic wish to re-elect the Pence White House. He cares about continuing to support the nonsensical lie that Pence’s childish former spokesman “won” an Election that he actually lost by a fair amount.

And of course Paxton cares about getting away with his corruption and being able to crow about how he can do what he wants and not face any consequences. Just as Matt Gaetz is hoping the same for himself. Because they learned the same lesson the rest of the angry Right Wing learned from the abomination of the Pence White House: If you’re Right Wing and enough of a bully, you can get away with whatever you want.

Marge is correct to note how viciously the Right Wing regularly refers to non-Caucasians. It wasn’t that long ago that Pence’s childish former spokesman was demanding to know why we had to accept immigrants from #$@$hole countries rather than Norway.

I’ll also note that Fox News pulled a Breitbart/O’Keefe in that they deceptively edited the clip just to make it look worse.

Plouffe is correct to note that Right Wing media has been presenting a unified front across multiple platforms including Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Breitbart as well as Glenn Beck’s cottage industry and on AM Radio. Their narrative has been to consistently repeat that the Dems are terrible, evil people trying to destroy the “real America”, to consistently repeat vicious attacks on the Biden/Harris White House where the only disagreement is whether Biden is deliberately so terrible or just so senile he doesn’t know how terrible he is. They consistently repeat that the economy is in terrible shape even though it isn’t. And they try to make hay out of every single statement made by Biden or Jen Psaki, twisting the comments into a complete pretzel.

What’s truly unsettling about this insular angry Right Wing media world is not just that it’s divorced from objective reality. The scary part is that there are millions of Americans who truly believe what the angry Right Wing pundits are telling them.

In fairness, this has been the Right Wing approach to media for the past 30+ years, going back to the rise of unrepentant bigot Rush Limbaugh and the original formation of Fox News 25 years ago. And they’ve actually succeeded to a large extent – millions of Right Wingers are convinced that these propaganda jags are truth. And millions more non-Right Wingers wind up thinking that there must be something to the Right Wing complaints – which is how so many people fell for the canards about Hillary Clinton in 2016 and how so many people inexplicably believe that everyone not on the Far Right Wing are somehow “Far Left”.

Let me see if I understand this correctly. The accusations against Portnoy, which detail physical attacks and non-consensual filming are to be disregarded. But the accusations against Don Lemon, which are disputed and appear to arise from the accuser’s political issues with Lemon, are to be taken as absolute truth?

Do angry Right Wing pundits not realize that they are now contradicting themselves with every other breath?

Bemused, it’s actually not out of line to consider that criminal charges should have been filed against Wendy Rittenhouse in this matter. If Rittenhouse walks away from this trial without facing any consequences for his actions, it will mark yet another black eye for the American judicial system in the modern era.

John, you’re forgetting that angry Right Wingers didn’t want ANYTHING to get through. The whole point was to throw enough mud into the gears that they could stop all such bills from passing. Then they could campaign on the Dems’ failure to get anything done. These 13 GOP congresspeople voting for this means that they can no longer play that card.

I note that after the GOP regains their majorities, it is likely that they will attack the continued funding for the infrastructure bill and essentially collapse it after the fact. It’s interesting that Ingraham wants anyone to think that the GOP wanted to pass their own infrastructure bill or anything like one. In fact, they would prefer to just do things like the 2017 Tax Transfer, which directly put money into the hands of the wealthy and skyrocketed the taxes of the Middle Class. Perhaps their infrastructure plan is filed next to their alternative plan to the ACA, their alternative stimulus plan from summer 2020, and the incredible evidence that Trump insisted he was finding in Hawaii about President Obama.

This is yet another nonsensical rant at Margaret Sanger and thus at Planned Parenthood. It’s a repeat of one of the two common misrepresentations angry Right Wingers regularly fling about when they’re called on their viciousness.

Misrepresentation #1 – that anti-choice laws have long been common in the USA and that therefore, the USA has always been an anti-choice nation. Reality: Before the Civil War, there were common practices regarding the management of early pregnancies, usually bounded by the moment of “quickening”. After the Civil War, however, with the rise of the suffragette movement and the moves of affluent White women toward independence from their husbands and fathers, it became clear that those women were managing their pregnancies a little too well. Birth rates for wealthier white women were dropping off, while the birth rates for Irish, Jewish, and Asian immigrants, along with former slaves, were skyrocketing. White men responded by passing multiple anti-choice ordinances, meant to force women back into obedience. So yes, we’ve had a good 150 years of angry Right Wingers trying to inflict anti-choice laws – and for the same reasons that they continue to do so today: they resent their inability to control the women choosing for themselves.

Misrepresentation #2 – that Margaret Sanger was a racist Eugenist who just wanted to sterilize African Americans. Reality: Sanger was a long proponent of birth control, particularly in poorer communities where there were regularly very large families that could not afford to feed their many children. Sanger’s intention was to help poorer families manage their family size, and to help younger people to keep from constantly getting pregnant. Angry Right Wingers saw that work as allowing younger people to engage in intercourse without punishment, so they naturally hated both Sanger and the group that would eventually become Planned Parenthood. Sanger reached out for any group that would support her goal. One such group was the Eugenist Movement, which in the 1920s was a popular “scientific” idea, even if a close look shows it to be both snide and frankly sinister. Sanger appears to have signed on with them because of their popularity, in the hope that it would raise support for her birth control programs. In later years, Sanger spoke out against Nazism and bigotry, and she remained consistent in her beliefs that responsible birth control would help families rise above poverty. But for the Right Wing, the fact that she foolishly associated herself with that movement means her entire life’s work should be tossed out. Interesting that Right Wingers are okay with cancelling Sanger. Also interesting that Right Wingers want to throw stones at Sanger for aligning with what had been a popular movement in the 1920s when it’s the Right Wingers who knowingly allied with Nazism and Fascism even after they knew who what Hitler was.

It’s also interesting that angry Right Wingers so desperately reach to Kanye West now that he sings their song. In the same way that they want to embrace Aaron Rodgers since he’s saying what they want to hear about vaccines and masks. Perhaps they’re still being consistent. Angry Right Wingers don’t want all musicians and athletes to shut up – they just want the ones who aren’t Right Wingers to shut up.

We’re already seeing the over-reach in the drama playing out in the Supreme Court. And I would like to believe that Dems will show up again at the polls to counter it. But there is a depressing lack of energy and urgency on the Dems’ part, and too much assumption about what the public will or will not abide.

2 1/2 years ago, I asked the chief legal counsel for Planned Parenthood Northern California about what PP’s strategy would be for when the Supreme Court drastically limited or overruled Roe and Casey. This was at the time that Kavanaugh was just finishing his first term and Ginsburg was still alive. Her response was that PP was opening some more clinics in California and was looking into setting up some funds to help women in Red States travel to CA for services should it come to that. That was an insufficient answer then and it is even more of one now.

This past weekend, I repeated the question to her, noting that we now have a 6-3 Hard Right majority on the SC, with 5 of the 6 being Far Far Right partisan idealogues. I noted that the Dobbs case is almost certain to either be a 6-3 gutting of Roe, or a 5-3-1 total toss of Roe and Casey, with Roberts offering a separate dissent in the name of stare decisis. I noted her earlier response and asked what her update was. I suggested that perhaps Dems needed to show up to vote for their state legislatures and for Congress in much greater numbers. She agreed with that as a principle. The rest of her strategy was to say that women under 48 years old have never lived in a situation where Roe did not exist and thus may be in for an unpleasant surprise very shortly when 26 states enforce extreme bans on their reproductive rights. She also said that she figured that angry Right Wingers would somehow suddenly lose their motivating issue after they get Roe tossed. (She was ignoring the fact that angry Right Wingers will just keep going – they’ll move the goalposts to criminal penalties, to “personhood”, to banning contraception, and on and on.)

My point is that her approach, which is sadly typical, was to hope for the best. Hope that a few more clinics in California and a bake sale would counter the real problems facing millions of women across the Midwest and South. Hope that maybe Right Wingers will suddenly decide to pack up rather than continue to press their advantages. (As we saw with the Pence White House, they weren’t satisfied with their squeaker win – they spent the next four years trying to push everyone’s nose into the dirt as hard as they could.). Hope that maybe the general public will suddenly “get it” after the bans really kick in – not thinking that most people will likely turn to bootleg pill services. I’d like to believe in those hopes for the best. But we have to live in the real world at some point.

Working for the election of candidates to lower offices and state houses and Congressional seats is a long, slow process. And even after we eventually see progress in who winds up in these seats, changing state laws and getting national legislation passed to correct all these extreme Right Wing moves in voting rights, reproductive rights, marriage equality, etc, will take decades. I’m honestly concerned that most Dems are not that invested in the long haul. As we’ve seen, angry Right Wingers are very much invested in the long haul – and it’s paying off for them.

Multiple angry Right Wingers have pushed this canard, hoping in vain that the Catholic Church would publicly deny President Biden and Speaker Pelosi communion, if not simply throw them out of the church entirely. It’s another faux outrage that can be stacked up next to the CRT nonsense.

Interesting that the same people were shocked, shocked when anyone said anything mildly disparaging about Pence’s childish spokesman, or noted all the times he would regularly lie about everything. I guess they found their inner strength somehow…

Carlson must really be panicking to get back some of the viewers who’ve gone to Newsmax and OAN. I honestly can’t say that I’ve even spent five minutes watching his show in nearly a year as it is. But he does seem to think that if he shouts loud and offensive things, maybe he’ll get some eyeballs. In this respect, his conduct is similar to an idol of his: the unrepentant bigot Rush Limbaugh.

A few things to keep in mind here.

First, the Pence White House never had any intention of paying any DOJ settlements to any families. Their idea was to say NO and to refuse to do anything. They had never intended to reunify the families, which is why the process became so belabored. The whole point was to make life miserable for immigrant families, and to make it clear that you really wouldn’t want to bring your kids to the US, would you?

As far as the Pence White House was concerned, brutalizing the families and making people stay in the Mexican desert was “solving” the “crisis”. That, and constantly harping on the idea of building their “big beautiful wall” that Mexico was supposedly going to be forced to pay for. In reality, this was just bullying people who could not defend themselves. The “wall” work was actually just a lot of maintenance of existing fenceline, along with a tiny amount of new extension.

Next, regarding the economy, Pence is openly lying. Pence inherited a growing economy from President Obama, and proceeded to squander its momentum while spending his time ripping up needed environmental protections just for the nastiness of it. The manufacturing jobs did not in fact return to the US – multiple factories like the Carrier plant in Indiana were shuttered anyway even after Pence and his childish spokesman said they were saved. The “tax cut” was actually a massive tax increase for Middle Class employees and particularly for those who live in Blue States. People in the Lower Middle and Working Class wound up seeing a negligible “cut” of 5 to 7 bucks per week that they’d never notice. The farther up the Middle Class you went, the more the taxes would jump, as the brackets were increased and the deductions were erased. But once you passed $418K, you saw another deduction, so that anyone earning over $750K was actually looking at a real cut (making up for the increases along the way), and anyone earning millions was looking at significant cuts. And how did the wealthy celebrate? By continuing to offshore their money. Anyone actually paying attention to tax policy knows the 2017 maneuver as the GOP Tax Transfer.

We should remember that the intention was to generate a massive deficit, which would then have triggered new legislation in 2019 to “reduce entitlements” – ie, cut Social Security and Medicare. Had the GOP maintained their majorities in the midterms, those programs would have been hit with significant reductions for anyone under the age of 60. When the GOP lost instead, they reverted to just refusing to address the funding issues for the programs – which is a slower way of accomplishing the same task. We should also remember that the Pence White House’s utter failure with COVID mostly ended the stronger economy they’d inherited from the Obama White House.
Regarding CRT, it’s a non-issue that angry Right Wingers are frantically trumpeting in the hopes they can gin up their base to vote in 2022. And they’re frantically trying to gaslight the very real problem of Right Wingers threatening their teachers and school boards with violence as some kind of “free speech” issue as opposed to one of attempted bullying and coercion. The VA governor’s race is one that angry Right Wingers are latching onto, as they hope to humiliate Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday.

Regarding both COVID and its effect on the economy, the Pence White House deliberately refused to do their job and allowed over 700,000 Americans to die. This was due to Pence and his childish spokesman having defunded agencies like the CDC and having dismissed key personnel who could have headed off the pandemic. It was exacerbated by the Pence White House ignoring the extent of the problem until it had spread to a catastrophic level, and then exacerbated worse by angry Right Wingers attempting to play politics with the situation to promote themselves for the 2020 campaigns. Had Pence’s childish spokesman not spent the first quarter of 2020 insisting that COVID was a “hoax”, and had the Pence White House actually worked aggressively to curtail the pandemic, the economy would not have receded as it did.

Lastly, as to why Pence was selected to be our acting president, the reasoning is pretty clear. First, Pence is a hardline Right Winger in the mold of Ted Cruz. His policies and his smug piousness were exactly the thing that angry Right Wingers around the US have long wanted to see on display from a sitting president. The policies themselves went down the line of the wish lists of shock jock bigots like Rush Limbaugh: Ripping up every single policy of the Obama White House, deliberately sabotaging the ability of governmental agencies to function (and thus then say that those agencies don’t function), sneering in the face of non-Right Wingers and most importantly, packing the courts with rammed-through Far Far Right Wing idealogues. Pence was totally on board with all of that, and was happy to make sure it would come to pass.

And the other part of the reasoning is that Pence was willing to do all this work without getting the glory for doing it. He was willing to take the offer that Donald Trump Jr was frantically giving to anyone he could find – the offer that Jr made to John Kasich, to run all the domestic and foreign policy for the White House while Trump spent his time “making America great again”. From Pence’s perspective, this was a golden opportunity, and he wouldn’t have to worry about anyone spending time looking too closely at what he was doing. Not every politician would have agreed to working this way, which is why Jr couldn’t find anyone else to do it. Ted Cruz, for his part, wanted to be able to get all the credit for the viciousness and not have to do it while Trump got the attention for his latest Tweets. Which is why Cruz spent the last 4 years as one of the angriest men in America – he was able to see his wish list satisfied, but he didn’t get any credit for it and had to stand on the sidelines and half-heartedly cheer for Pence’s childish spokesman.

I’ll note that Pence was finally unwilling to give Trump what he wanted in stealing the 2020 Election, but I don’t believe this was out of principle. Pence clearly wanted to finagle another term for himself, but this would have been in full view of the entire country, without the usual distractions allowing him to work in the shadows. And while provocateurs like John Eastman would have been delighted to do something blatant and in everybody’s faces, Pence wasn’t comfortable with that level of exposure. So he shrunk away from it.

Angry Right Wingers are salivating over the prospect of seeing Alec Baldwin arrested and humiliated over this tragedy, much less prosecuted.

The reality is far different.

First, he’s unlikely to be arrested or prosecuted – he was relying on the AD who handed him the prop gun, who told him it was a “cold weapon”. That immediately provides enough of a “shadow of a doubt” that there wouldn’t be much point in a prosecution, and would frankly only appeal to a Pence appointee.

Next, while he was a producer on the film, it is even more unlikely that he would be prosecuted simply for being a producer of a show where this kind of accident happened. Again, that’s a huge reach.

In civil litigation, he and his company are certain to be sued for the wrongful death of Halyna Hutchins. And Baldwin is certain to settle out of that litigation faster than anyone else, on reasonable terms with the family.

And in personal life, he is likely to bear the burden of having been the one with the prop gun in his hands, and having not checked it before holstering it. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

But all the while, we can guarantee that angry Right Wingers will be gloating themselves silly. Because for them, this is sweet revenge against a liberal nuisance who enjoyed doing his Trump impression throughout the single term of Mike Pence as our acting president.

It’s a foregone conclusion that Fox News would push the anti-vaccination approach. Even if they didn’t, all the even more extreme propagandists like Breitbart, OAN and Newsmax would be pushing that approach. And AM Radio is full of the approach as well. If anything, Fox News is just working to catch up to the pack, given that much of their former viewership now sees them as being “too liberal”.

And yes, the point of pushing the anti-vaccination approach is to make sure that the pandemic continues as an unsolveable problem all the way past the midterms and up to the 2024 election. Idea being to say that Joe Biden wasn’t good enough to solve it, and that a re-instated Pence White House (likely with Ron DeSantis or someone close to him running the policy) would save everyone.

I note that the reality of the Biden White House has been an obvious and marked improvement over the disaster of the prior 4 years. In short order, we had far greater access to vaccination, and far more constructive work being done by governmental agencies, leading to a significant economic improvement over where things were left by Pence and his childish spokesman. We’ve also had much greater international stability. We could point to the mess in the Afghanistan exit as a low point, but this would have been the case no matter who the President was – and the fact is that we should never have been there for ten minutes in the first place, let alone 20 years. But you won’t hear about that reality on Fox News or AM Radio – they don’t dare admit it.

John, I hear you, but I use the proper reference for the prior administration as a way of showing respect for the institution, as well as for the person who actually spent 2017-2020 setting policy in the White House. Had Trump spent even a day actually trying to do the work of that office, we might be able to have a different discussion. I can’t reward him or his fans for his attempt to get away with a no-show job while trying to snow the American public.

Similarly, the 2017 Tax Transfer really does need to be discussed as such – the moment we fall for the canard that it was a “tax cut” for anyone but the uber wealthy is the moment we allow the Hannitys and Limbaughs to spin utter falsehoods about our pocketbooks.

As for Putin’s influence on Trump, it’s pretty clear that Trump was intimidated by him. I honestly don’t know why – but I have a feeling those AWOL tax returns may well show how far in hock Trump still is to Russian funders…

Barrasso has made a career out of obstructionism at this point. It is unfortunate that he refuses to admit some basic facts here – that he’s absolutely trying to tank the economy just so the GOP can try to blame the mess on the Dems. (This is similar to how the Pence White House and the GOP deliberately left tens of millions of Americans without COVID related assistance as of August 2020 in the hopes that the public would blame the Dems for the mess.)

I note that Barrasso continues to say things that support the false narrative about “fraud” somehow happening during the 2020 Election that Pence’s childish spokesman lost. And he has continued to say that he wants to make President Biden a “half-term president” by getting the GOP majorities in Congress and then completely blocking anything from getting done as of 2023. He has made it clear that he does not care about actually doing the work of his office. He just wants to make it impossible for anyone else to get anything done.

I must also note that if the GOP manages to regain their majorities, and if another angry Right Winger manages to get into the White House with those majorities, we would see an even larger disaster than what was inflicted under Pence and the 2017 majorities.

What we’ve learned about means testing is that it actually costs MORE and creates more problems. We’re frankly not likely to see extremely wealthy families frantically trying to get access to public school lunches, but if they’re sending their kids to public school, they have just as much right as anyone else to the resources.

It’s the same issue about higher education. An extremely wealthy family sending their kids to an elite college is not worried about going to the local community college.

The actual means testing tends to weed itself out in actual practice. Trying to penalize everyday people with it is less effective and only serves to reinforce an angry and false Right Wing narrative about who “deserves” assistance.

Typical of both Hannity and Fox News. If Bill Clinton was in office, then Patriotism demanded that everyone oppose him. If W was in office, then everyone better do what they’re told. If President Obama was in office, then Patriotism demanded everyone oppose him. If Mike Pence and his childish spokesman were in power, then everyone better obey.

And now that President Biden is trying to clean up Pence’s gigantic mess, Hannity wants everyone to forget the past 25 years and just go with his narrative.

Hannity forgets that there is evidence going back through the entire past 25 years of his despicable behavior, which is how subsequent generations will see him.

Frankly, Hannity loved every minute of the Pence White House, where he was able to parade around in DC and gloat that he had the ear of Pence’s childish spokesman any time he wished. He’s as angry and in denial as the rest of the Right Wing that continues to refuse to admit they lost the 2020 Election.

Frankly, I could not understand why any sane person would try to present the lunacy of the Pence White House as “American leadership”. It’s easy to see why angry Right Wing partisans like Hannity and Bill O’Reilly would do so.

But it is important that every sane American continue to show up to vote for every election. The second anyone takes an election for granted is the moment that another Donald Trump will squeak through, and also the moment that idealogues like Hannity and O’Reilly will succeed in bullying the country and the world.