Martha MacCallum's Mid-Morning Plans, and Ideas for the Deficit

Martha MacCallum has been holding down the fort on Fox News from 1-3pm ET during Megyn Kelly’s maternity leave, and showed up to appear in studio with Imus today even though she’ll have lots of time to kill between his show and her own.
 
“Who knows?” she said. “Maybe I’ll watch Regis and Kathie Lee for a while?”
 
It’s obviously been a few years since MacCallum’s tuned in to that program, but no matter; she’ll be plenty busy all morning following the latest developments in the Casey Anthony trial, and also President Obama speaking to the press about debt negotiations.
 
“They’re getting together at the White House, putting their heads together,” MacCallum said. “He’s decided it’s time to get serious about taking on the national debt. He wants to see some spending cuts, which is a novel idea that apparently has just occurred to them.”
 
No meaningful cuts will occur, in her view, until Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and tax reform are all on the table. “You could, essentially, raise revenues, which would mean raising taxes, which of course the Republicans don’t want to see happen,” MacCallum said. “But they could do that by equalizing corporate taxes.”
 
At present, many corporations, like Exxon Mobil and General Electric, do not pay taxes, as ludicrous as that seems. Rather than point fingers at particular industries, MacCallum believes that doing away with tax loopholes across-the-board is a reasonable solution, and one gaining traction in Washington.
 
MacCallum, like many observers, was surprised that the jury found Casey Anthony not guilty of murdering her two-year old daughter Caylee. More than anything, she was surprised that the defense’s seemingly out-of-thin-air theory resonated with jurors.
 
“They seemed convinced it was an accident and not murder, and yet they had no more evidence to suggest it was an accident than they did to suggest it was a murder,” she said, noting that Anthony’s attorney Jose Baez “never substantiated in any way” that Caylee had accidentally drowned in the family pool, as he claimed in his opening argument.
 
Anthony was convicted of four counts of lying to law enforcement agents, for which she will be sentenced later today. McCallum thinks she could walk immediately, but hopes the judge orders her to stay put for now; if for no other reason than to afford Anthony and her family, many of whom she implicated during the trial, a “cooling off period.”
 
But as is customary in cases like this, Anthony will likely be bombarded with scores of book deals, movie deals, and interview opportunities as soon as she is released from jail.
 
“Everybody—from her own attorneys, to the prosecutors, to her own parents—if there’s one thing they can agree on, it’s that Casey Anthony knows what happened,” MacCallum said. “She can tell that whole story right now, and she cannot be retried in this case.”
 
Fine. When can we stop talking about it?
 
-Julie Kanfer