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Joan Walsh and Peter Beinart do a pretty good job here of tag teaming Nancy Pfotenhauer on her punishing the rich talking point. It was nice to watch a panel where they didn't let her talk over everyone the entire time as she likes to do if they let her.

HUGHLEY: Nancy, what do you think? Is he a communist?

PFOTENHAUER: I heard communist and socialist thrown around, and they are two different things. If you want to talk about communism, that's more "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." So it would be more the redistribution of wealth aspect.

I do think his tax the rich thing is punishing prosperity, which is an antithetical to the American dream, and completely ignores the fact that the top five percent of the earners in this country, they do earn about 36 percent of the income. They pay about 60 percent of the income tax, and the bottom 40 percent pay zero. So I'm not sure that's the way he should be going. So that would speak to the redistribution act.

WALSH: But why is it --

PFOTENHAUER: Excuse me?

BEINART: Sorry, go ahead.

HUGHLEY: We just turned into Jerry Springer. Who is going to say -- Joan, what were you saying? You were about to say something.

WALSH: I think that we have had a situation. We are not punishing the rich. Let's be honest. In this country, we have a game that is rigged. If you're born wealthy, you stay wealthy. It's very hard to climb out of the middle class into wealth.

It's still possible. It's a great country. We provide a lot of opportunity. But the rich are finally about to pay their fair share, and Obama, finally a president did what he promised to do. He gave a tax cut to 95 percent of the country. And if you're lucky enough to be in the top five percent who will pay a little bit more, well, you're a lucky person to start with and you should be paying more.

(CROSSTALK)

BEINART: What happens is Republicans always play this game, Republicans always play this game when they start talking about taxes. They start talking about taxes, and then they add the word "income taxes."

PFOTENHAUER: I will talk about payroll.

BEINART: Payroll taxes are much more regressive. They fall much more aggressively on poor people. So do sales tax. So Republicans always talk about income taxes are so weighted against the rich. That is actually the most progressive part of our taxes.

PFOTENHAUER: Let me talk then, particularly, to payroll taxes. When you include payroll taxes with income taxes, the numbers do drop, but not demonstrably.

So you can look at it. You still see the top earners paying the lion's share of both the income and the payroll taxes, and you see the prime earners -- I'm not arguing for anybody to pay more taxes. In a recession, no one's taxes should be raised.

Since President Obama is not talking about raising anyone's taxes other than the upper earners I don't think Nancy is really too worried about everyone's taxes. Just the types she used to lobby for. Just a hunch.

Full transcript to follow.

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D.L. Hughley talks to Ron Reagan Jr. about his and his family's reaction to the lifting of the ban on federal funds for stem cell research. Of course the one person in his family who's not happy about it is his wingnut brother Michael. I know, everyone's shocked right? That guy is right up there with Glenn Beck and Michael Weiner Savage for his hackery and outright hatred from the little I've been able to stomach of him.

Reagan reminds us that there is still more work to be done in the Congress to truly lift the restrictions that have been put in place. He also calls out Bush and Rove for playing politics before caring about people's lives by using this as a religious wedge issue.

Off topic from the post in general but one last note here. MSNBC is looking for someone to follow Rachel Maddow. I think Ron Reagan Jr. would make a good choice. They gave him a show and let Monica Crowley ruin it as his co-host. How about giving him a show of his own without some wingnut for "balance" MSNBC? There are some others I think would be good as well but Reagan is definitely on my list for one I'd stick around for after Maddow's show is over.

Ed Schultz gets the spot and I'll likely be changing the channel. I don't care for him much because the man obviously talks a lot more than he bothers to read. I've listened to him spout off about a number of topics he painfully knows nothing about one time too many on his radio show to want him representing liberals on a cable news network with a show of his own.

Reagan on the other hand I'd love to see get a second chance without his blonde news model wingnut co-host and forced three minute debate boxes where no serious discussion takes place as we had on their day time show.

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D.L. Hughley talks to Crazy for God author Frank Schaeffer, whose father was one of the founders of the religious right. Schaeffer discusses his articles at the Huffington Post Why Obama Must Not Work With Republicans and Why Are the Republicans Such Anti-Obama Liars?. From the latter:

Today the Republican Party is rooting for doom. And since the Republicans are now anti-American members of an Obama-must-fail insurgency, lies become a self-fulfilling prophecy: talk doom, and keep the economy in a panic and we may get what we wish for.

Don't conservative Republicans object to the lies? No, because the Republicans don't have any actual and traditional conservative followers left. The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward -- there-is-no-global-warming -- rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

The Republican religious nuts are rooting for Jesus to "rapture" them, not for America, and the neoconservatives are rooting for war and the Israeli hard liners, not for America. Truth (and sanity) are out the window.

So, what is the problem with lying to our faces, say, claiming that all American's taxes are going up when 95% of American's taxes are going to go down? Why not claim Obama is a socialist, even if he's not? Why not say anything at all to drive our country into a pit when losing is seen as winning? That, is all the Republicans have to offer America: more lies on a path to destruction from which the Republican "leadership" plans to resurrect themselves and "save" America from Obama.

Updated: Full Transcript to follow.

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Ari Fleischer on D.L. Hughley Breaks the News talking about the White House press corps and how "tough" David Gregory was on him but a straight shooter when it came to his reporting.

Fleischer: David Gregory D.L., he started out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I knew him a long, long time ago and he worked his way up and became a White House reporter and then became the host. But what you have to understand is that room is a TV show. It's not the reality. This is where they posture. They show I'm tougher. They know their editors are watching and they know their colleagues are watching. So they're going to show I'm the toughest guy. I can take down the Press Secretary.

Hughley: Who irritated the hell out of you? Somebody had to.

Fleischer: David Gregory. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. But, having said that, that's because that was a TV show in that room. David was the toughest interrogator I had but when it came time to go on the air the man was always fair. What he put on the air was straight down the middle. So that's the bigger story about life at the White House. They can be one thing in that room. The reality is when they come into your office ten times a day and are talking to you privately. They're gathering facts and background information, that's the real work that goes on and most of them are actually pretty polite at that point in their lives, but they're not so polite in that briefing room.

Greg Mitchell has a slightly different take on that in his article at the HuffPo:
Ari Fleischer Defends Press Coverage of Iraq -- Wrong Again!.

That was written back in June of 2008. I see some things never change. Fleischer is still using the same tired talking points and claiming Gregory did his job as a reporter. I think if that were true, he might have spent a little bit of time covering this-- Pictures of Anti-War Protests from Around the World-- and a little less time doing this.

As noted by Think Progress Fleischer was also still claiming that Saddam Hussein was at fault for our invading Iraq: Fleischer: On Iraq, ‘Saddam was the big liar.’.

Fleischer: We were wrong about weapons of mass destruction being in Iraq. […]

Hughley: When you found out that you were wrong, how did that make you feel?

Fleischer: You just scratch your head and say, “How could we be wrong?” It wasn’t just us that thought he had weapons of mass destruction. The Egyptians thought it, the French thought it, the Germans thought it the United Nations thought it, Bill Clinton’s CIA though it. We all thought it. Saddam was the big liar here.

Nothing like a little revisionist history on those weapons in Iraq Mr. Fleischer. And could D.L. Hughley have given this man any more of a softball interview? Hell he was harder on Bay Buchanan than he was Fleischer.

I had to tune out the Blago stuff after a while, but check out D.L. Hughley's take.

Hughley: Now I listened to those tapes and I'm not going to hide my affinity for this guy. I never met him before then but to me we have become such a trivial place that we will impeach a man for having sex, or lying about having sex with a woman. In California we will impeach a guy because he raises taxes on license plates because energy gets out of control. We'll impeach a guy for saying some things on tape. But a man can take us to war and lie and we won't do a damn thing about that. That makes me so mad.

Here's the video....

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From D.L. Hughley Breaks the News, Hughley and Cliff Kelley discussing the Blago impeachment. Whether anyone agrees with Hughley's defense of Blago here or not, he's spot on with this statement:

Hughley: Now I listened to those tapes and I'm not going to hide my affinity for this guy. I never met him before then but to me we have become such a trivial place that we will impeach a man for having sex, or lying about having sex with a woman. In California we will impeach a guy because he raises taxes on license plates because energy gets out of control. We'll impeach a guy for saying some things on tape. But a man can take us to war and lie and we won't do a damn thing about that. That makes me so mad.

D.L. Hughley talks to Peter Beinart and Bay Buchanan about Bush's exit speech, the future of the Republican party and the spinelessness of Harry Reid. Bay Buchanan as usual has about as little introspection as George Bush. I commend Hughley for managing to get through a segment with her and not allowing her to talk over everyone the entire time. Hughley is spot on with what's wrong with Harry Reid and the Democratic establishment. I think Hughley is also right about Obama in the sense that he's already showing himself to be more of a leader than Bush ever was, but that's a pretty low bar to hurdle. It goes without saying that the higher bar will be whether he can clean up the mess he's inherited.

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Howard Dean stops by D.L. Hughley's set and they discuss the success of Dean's fifty state strategy, his leaving as head of the DNC and they joke a bit about Rahm Emanuel getting the Chief of Staff job instead of Dean after all the great work Dean's done to help the party pick up seats.

Bay Buchanan tried spouting the right-wing meme that "this is still a center-right country" when she was on D.L. Hughley's CNN show this weekend, and he had a simple question:

Hughley: Bay, do you think all the evidence -- even the election? That's the biggest evidence we would have. It's kind of shifted, don't you think?

Buchanan tried to filibuster the point (sure, it was a good campaign, blah blah blah) and then emits this howler:

Buchanan: This was a rejection of Bush, it was not a rejection of that which is conservative. George Bush did not govern as a conservative.

Sure. Because all that deregulation of the financial sector, all that gutting of government services like FEMA, all that warhawking in Iraq, all the tax cuts for the wealthy ... all of the things that Bush oversaw and which got us into this mess -- why, those things aren't conservative at all! And they had zero support from conservatives while Bush was carrying these policies out!

Right.

The rest is equally amusing. Hughley shoots down her arguments expertly, and all Buchanan can do is grasp at straws.

[H/t to Heather for the video.]