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Who needs Fox when you've got CNN treating their audience to god-awful programming like Fareed Zakaria's Memo to the President: Road Map for Second Term? It's been airing on their network over the weekend, and it's nothing more than one more long infomercial for group No Labels, advocating for every item on the right's wishlist, from economics to foreign policy.

What was missing? Even token representation from anyone in the progressive or labor movements. Instead, there was interview after interview with Republicans, neo-liberals, DLC Third Way "centrists" and advice from some of the last people we should be listening to -- because their very bad policies are what got us into the economic mess we're in now.

In a portion of the program which focused on economic policy, the audience was treated to former Reagan and Bush adviser James Baker -- which makes sense, because who better to talk about what President Obama needs to do to fix the economy than a leading member of the same administration that blew a mile-wide hole in the deficit with tax cuts and a couple of wars they left off the books?

For "balance," he follows up with Robert Rubin. The same Robert Rubin who helped Bill Clinton deregulate the derivatives market and then went on to work for Citigroup while the rest of the country was left with the economic time bomb of deregulation and "too big to fail" he helped to put in place.

Zakaria also decided we needed some sage advice from Mitch McConnell's wife Elaine Chao, who served, as Jim Hightower put it, as George Bush's anti-Labor Secretary, and who helped our most "anti-labor president of modern times" to degrade our protections and rights in the workplace and that wages were kept as low as possible. How could we possibly have a discussion on what to do to improve our economy for the American working class without her input?

And for more "balance" yet, we were treated to Peter Orszag, who left the Obama administration to go work for Citigroup just as Rubin did, and who has been out there pushing for "reforms" -- in other words, cuts to our social safety nets and reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

And there's more where that came from with the entire guest list and their conflicts of interest. You can read the entire transcript here and the full transcript for the segment above below the fold.

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James Baker surely didn't make Bill Kristol, John Bolton and any of the other neocon hawks happy who have been beating the drums for either the United States or Israel to launch a military strike against Iran to prevent them from acquiring a nuclear weapon. During his interview with Fareed Zakaria on GPS he explains why he believes it would not work and just play into the hands of the hard-liners there. I'm curious to see if he ends up being ignored or attacked for this. My guess is he gets ignored.

He said something else I had not heard before that I found very surprising -- that Israel had asked the Bush administration for help in attacking Iran and was told no. That sure didn't keep them beating the war drums with their rhetoric while they were in power.

ZAKARIA: But that was -- that was a part of a policy of containment, keeping the Soviet Union kind of in a box and pressing it.

BAKER: Right.

ZAKARIA: We didn't attack them militarily.

Would you -- would you say that you're uncomfortable with the idea of a military attack on Iran?

BAKER: Look, let me say this. Iran is a huge force for instability, not just in the region, but in the world generally, and if they acquire a nuclear weapon, it could set off a major nuclear arms race in that very difficult part of the world.

So don't under -- we don't underestimate the problem when I say what I'm about to say. I don't know that there is a military solution. Most of the people, knowledgeable people, I talk to say there is no satisfactory military solution, that a strike will delay but not prevent their acquiring a nuclear weapon.

That's not to say that you say, OK then, they should get it. But it's -- it's very questionable whether or a military solution exists.

As a matter of fact, in the last administration, it's my understanding that the Israelis wanted to strike and they came to us and they asked for bunker-busting bombs and refueling -- in-flight refueling capabilities and over-flight rides and deconfliction codes and we said, no, we're not going to do that. That's not in our interest.

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