Oh my

Well, I know he has tons of money and doesn't need a job, but Tucker may wish he still had an income when Abby Grossberg and Dominion get through with him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They've upset baby

The RNC announced their 2024 debates, stating that their first will be held in Milwaukee in August 2023, the site for the 2024 RNC convention. The decision was announced Feb. 23.

[...]

Trump ranted that he wasn't consulted about the presidential debates for the 2024 cycle, and as such, he doesn't plan on attending

  MSN

He'll be there. He wouldn't pass up the chance to make fun of the others on the national stage. That is unless he's losing in all the many lawsuits he'll be fighting at the time. And why did he wait until now to complain?

"I see that everybody is talking about the Republican Debates, but nobody got my approval, or the approval of the Trump Campaign, before announcing them," Trump posted.

Must have the king's approval.

"When you’re leading by seemingly insurmountable numbers, and you have hostile Networks with angry, TRUMP & MAGA hating anchors asking the 'questions,' why subject yourself to being libeled and abused? Also, the Second Debate is being held at the Reagan Library, the Chairman of which is, amazingly, Fred Ryan, Publisher of The Washington Post. NO!"

Oh that WOULD be just too, too much.

Trump had such a poor performance in the 2020 presidential debates that the following weeks were filled with the press about his unhinged behavior. One report even noted that his own supporters were put off by it, and his campaign expressed concern about the fallout.

The second debate in Miami, Florida, in 2020 was canceled because Trump refused to participate. It was supposed to be a townhall style event with audience members asking questions of the candidates.

The Republican Party is a shell of its former self.

It could be bad for the Democrats if he doesn't participate and people get a chance to see what their other options are.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Corruption at SCOTUS doesn't begin and end with Clarence Thomas

(Or Brett Kavanaugh, for that matter.)

Unlike Thomas, however, I'm guessing he wasn't required to.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Brave new world

The week is off to a good start

Tucker Carlson fired on Monday.

Donald Trump on trial for rape on Tuesday.

UPDATE 10:40 am:

He won't be there.

RIP Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and wide-ranging activist, has died aged 96. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.Belafonte spent his life fighting for a variety of causes. He bankrolled numerous 1960s initiatives to bring civil rights to Black Americans; campaigned against poverty, apartheid and Aids in Africa; and supported leftwing political figures such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

[...]

At the meeting with Chavez, in 2006, he described US president George W Bush as “the greatest terrorist in the world”. He also characterised Bush’s Black secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as being like slaves who worked in their master’s house rather than in the fields.

[...]

He was a frequent critic of Democrats, particularly Barack Obama, over issues including Guantanamo Bay detentions and the fight against rightwing extremism. He criticised Jay-Z and Beyoncé in 2012 for having “turned their back on social responsibility.

[...]

Belafonte was born in 1927 in working-class Harlem, New York, and spent eight years of his childhood in his impoverished parents’ native Jamaica. He returned to New York for high school but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out in his early teens. He took odd jobs working in markets and the city’s garment district, and then signed up to the US navy aged 17 in March 1944, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.

After the war ended, he worked as a janitor’s assistant, but aspired to become an actor after watching plays at New York’s American Negro Theatre (along with fellow aspiring actor Sidney Poitier).

[...]

Belafonte maintained an acting career alongside music, winning a Tony award in 1954.

[...]

Bob Dylan’s first recording – playing harmonica – was on Belafonte’s 1962 album, Midnight Special.

  Guardian

UPDATE 10:45 am:

Now that Tucker's gone...

...Who will rage about woke toys?

Would Tucker think she's more or less attractive than M&Ms without the spike heels?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Nice job, Kev

Pretty sure that's part of the GOP plan to destroy the US government.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What a way to start

Donald Trump lost his second attempt to block a People magazine writer from testifying that he groped her, bolstering E. Jean Carroll’s allegations that the former president is a serial sexual abuser.

  Law and Crime

That and his infamous "when you're a star they let you do anything" are going to hang him up.

“Ask E. Jean” columnist will begin making her case to a jury that Trump raped her inside the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s. Carroll’s case will rely in part on testimony from two other women who allege that Trump behaved in sexually inappropriate ways with them, too, roughly 25 years apart.

Like Carroll, one of those women, Natasha Stoynoff, is a professional scribe who claims that Trump unexpectedly cornered and groped her long before his presidency.

In 2005, Stoynoff says, she went to Mar-a-Lago to interview the then-real estate mogul and his wife Melania Trump for People magazine. She says Donald Trump offered to show her a painting hanging in one of the rooms and then shut the door.

“I turn around and he’s right here, and he grabs my shoulders and pushes me against this wall and starts kissing me,” Stoynoff testified.

I have a theory. We know he sees the world through Hollywood casting eyes. I think he grew up watching movies where men manhandled women, and the women gave in to them after a half-assed pretense at putting up a fight. I think that's a male fantasy, and Trump sees himself as the rugged, sexy, rough male lead in his own movie.  Also, Trump is a misogynist.

Stoynoff said that she was in “complete shock” and pushed back at Trump, twice. She says she unpinned herself after a butler walked into the room. She kept silent on the alleged incident until a little more than a decade later when she went public in a People magazine feature: “Physically attacked by Donald Trump.”

[...]

As the trial approaches, Trump has tried — and failed — in multiple attempts to overturn unfavorable pretrial rulings. The former president unsuccessfully tried to delay the trial date multiple times, and he fought repeatedly against the judge’s determination that the jury should be anonymous. Jury selection begins on Tuesday.

Buckle in.

Non-renewal

On Monday morning, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott called Carlson and informed him he was being taken off the air, and his Fox News email account was shut off.

  Vanity Fair

And people thought it was Suzanne Scott who would be thrown under the bus.

Carlson was in the midst of negotiating the renewal of his Fox News contract through 2029. [...] As of last week, Carlson had told people he expected the contract to be renewed.

Carlson has told people he doesn’t know why he was terminated. According to the source, Scott refused to tell him how the decision was made; she only said that it was made “from above.” Carlson has told people he believes his controversial show is being taken off the air because the Murdoch children intend to sell Fox News at some point.

And they couldn't sell it with him still lying?

Details are emerging about Carlson’s exit. The Los Angeles Times reported that “Carlson’s exit is related to the discrimination lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg,” a producer fired last month, and that the decision to fire Carlson came from Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch. And The Washington Post reported that Carlson’s comments about management, revealed in the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems—which Fox settled last week for $787.5 million—“played a role in his departure.”

As we’re already seeing, Carlson’s virtual defenestration has kicked off a massive backlash on the right. That is no surprise. What that tells you is that this isn’t the kind of decision Fox would make in some kind of weighing the pros and cons performance review. There would need to be some big, fat near-existential reason behind it. Perhaps there was something super damning in pre-trial discovery or some sliver bullet revelation to come in Grossberg’s suit. But at least in their current ‘contributing’ form, none of these explanations come close.

Again, this is simply not going to be a decision that has a lot of contributing factors. There is going to be one thing that made it necessary and inevitable. We just haven’t heard it yet.

  Talking Points Memo

Whatever the reason, it must have been serious, because they must have known the stock would drop.

Maybe not that much, though!

UPDATE 07:30 pm:

UPDATE 04/25/2023 11:08 am:  Until they replace him with somebody worse (if such a thing is possible), this is a very big deal...