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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has a perfectly good explanation for why he awkwardly reached for a water bottle during his Tuesday night response to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address: It was a message from God.

Throughout Rubio's delivery of the Republican response to Obama's speech, Twitter users noted that he seemed parched. And then the social media site erupted when the Florida senator finally paused his speech to sneak a sip of water from a bottle sitting far enough off camera to make the reach seem uncomfortable.

The next morning, ABC News host George Stephanopoulos asked Rubio about the incident.

"I needed water, what am I going to do, you know?" the Tea Party Republican replied after jokingly taking a swig from another bottle. "It happens."

"God has a funny way of reminding us we're human," he added.

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During this week's Republican response to President Obama's Weekly Address, we got more of the same with their solutions on energy and gas prices, which is "drill baby drill", pretending that the Keystone XL pipeline is going to create tons of jobs, and pretending that they're for an "all of the above" energy policy when they've been completely dismissive of President Obama for pushing a move to new sources of energy like solar, wind and geothermal.

Hastings also completely ignored the fact that domestic oil production is up in the United States and it hasn't lowered gas prices, that it's a global market that President Obama doesn't have a lot of control over if they're unfairly going to try to blame him for the costs of gas rising and that oil speculation has a good deal to do with the price of gasoline going up which his party doesn't seem to be too interested in confronting since they don't want any regulation of Wall Street or anyone else for that matter. Let the 'free market" rule.

Hastings was also still pushing the GOP's old "jobs plan" which Jon Perr already took apart for us here at C&L, not to be confused with their "new" jobs plan which he also debunked for us as well.

Transcript of Hasting's remarks and their description of the video from their You Tube posting below the fold.

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Any time you hear a Republican use the word "Greece" to defend not raising taxes on the rich and to push the austerity measures, it's a safe bet--before you even hear anything else they had to say--that they're lying. They may claim that they are willing do anything to make the situation better in the United States in regard to jobs and the economy, but the truth is those measures will kill us.

I've been following the Republicans' response to President Obama's Weekly Address almost since he's been elected and if there's one thing you can say for them, it's that they've got their messaging down pat. No matter who gives the response, they are going to repeat that messaging week after week, usually jam-packed full of lies.

Case in point is this week's latest, with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R - WA) doing the duties and a repeat we saw from her fellow House member Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-NY) last month. I'll just quote a bit of what I already wrote about Hayworth here:

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-NY) delivered this week's Republican address and lo and behold, they're still pretending like they care about job creation and pushing their House Republican Plan for America's Job Creators that Jon Perr wrote about here last October:

So there's one of the lies in Rodger's statement: that they actually have some "plan" for jobs that isn't just more of their standard fare of dismantling all government regulations and lowering taxes for the rich.

As to her statement that we're going to become "Greece", I'd just refer readers back to Paul Krugman who debunked that back in May of 2010 -- We’re Not Greece. Sadly, they've refused to quit using that lie at every single opportunity no matter how many times it's been debunked or for how long.

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We've been down this road before and it only took a week for TPM's Sahil Kapur's prediction to be correct that this trial balloon for Republican governors trying to take credit for the economy improving being one of their talking points we're going to hear more of, this time with Virginia's wingnut Gov. Bob McDonnell repeating it during their weekly Republican response to President Obama's weekly address.

For a reminder of why McDonnell is just as full of it this week as he was last week, I'll refer back to my post from here -- Gov. Bob McDonnell: Economy is Recovering Because of What Republican Governors Are Doing, Not the President.

I didn't see McDonnell on the list of Sunday show hackery this weekend, but I believe he agreed to make an appearance on Rachel Maddow's show this week. I look forward to seeing whether she calls him out for the fact that these Republican governors he's touting here have done nothing but do their best to destroy, weaken and sabotage our economy with the help of their cohorts in the Senate and House in order to make President Obama a one term president, which is their political goal, if he actually shows up for the interview.

Transcript below the fold.

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Chris Matthews was apparently completely enamored with Mitch Daniels and his response to President Obama's State of the Union Address this Tuesday night and all I can say is thank goodness Rachel Maddow was there to at least beat back at part of Matthews' fawning praise.

She didn't really have much time to respond to Matthews since they were coming up on a hard break for a commercial, but it's too bad she also did not point out that one, there was nothing honest about Daniel's speech. It was full of one lie after another. And means testing "entitlements", and I hate that word by the way, but means testing Social Security and Medicare is nothing but a way to turn them into welfare programs and to later have an excuse to eliminate them. It's a terrible idea.

And this best kind of "honest" "fiscally conservative" Republican was George W. Bush's OMB Director that helped get our economy into this mess, who has no right to be criticizing that Obama didn't fix Bush's mess quickly enough and is in the middle union busting and pushing right to work in his state and is not looking out for the working class. He's just another Republican governor doing their best to make the economy as terrible as humanly possible at the bidding of the Koch brothers and the richest among us in order to keep President Obama from being reelected. Sadly if this was Matthews' immediate response, we'll surely be hearing more of this sort of ridiculous praise of Daniels' speech from the rest of the Villagers in the beltway media.

MATTHEWS: You know, I really liked that speech by Mitch Daniels. I thought it was really a Midwestern conservatism of the best kind, honest, fiscally conservative or course, but recognizing that we have to protect our safety net and we have to recognize that the rich cannot get all the pension money and all the entitlement money. There's not enough to go around. We're going to have to have means testing. We're going to have to close the loopholes.

A very responsible kind of look at fiscal conservatism that recognizes that the rich can't plunder the poor any more, that if you're going to have a true conservatism, in other words a society that will sustain itself, a society that will be at peace with itself, you need to help the people to get a break and that means it's not Libertarianism at all. There's nothing of Ron Paul in what that man said.

It was a responsible social policy of the right, which was really I think cast in old time Midwest, Bob Taft conservatism, except for some of the bromides, the idiomatic crap that he threw in there to make everybody happy. There was a seriousness to this speech. And now I understand why people like Mitch Daniels.

MADDOW: Chris I am very glad that we area all talking about this together because I could not disagree with you more about the speech. This was just my impression of it but I don't have time to go into that...

MATTHEWS: Why?

MADDOW: We're going to go into that in a moment.

MATTHEWS: What's wrong?

MADDOW: I think that Mitch Daniels there to say the world is on fire. Be afraid. Run to Republicans. I mean, he's talking about America as a country that... America adrift, quarreling and paralyzed going over Niagra. I mean this was a “Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid” this guy's trying to murder the country speech.

MATTHEWS: But he also had solutions. He had gutsy solutions. He wasn't afraid to take on the rich and that's so rare today in the Republican side.

MADDOW: I will take you on that Chris, absolutely.

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Once again, the Republicans prove they're living in upside down land with the remarks in their Weekly Address. This week it was Sen. John Ensign's replacement in Nevada, Sen. Dean Heller giving their talking points for the week.

After rattling off a list of their supposed remedies for "job creation" in the United States - deregulation, a balanced budget amendment, lowering taxes on corporations, attacking unions and card check -- Heller asks that the Congressional Democrats quit using "scare tactics" on senior citizens by daring to point out that Republicans would like to get rid of Medicare and Social Security. A charge Heller denies naturally, who claims instead they really want to "save" them for future generations.

By saving them he means of course privatizing them and dismantling our social safety nets by putting senior citizens at the mercy of Wall Street and the private insurance industry. You know an attack ad like the ones the Democrats used after the Republicans all voted for Paul Ryan's budget, showing him throwing grandma off of a cliff, are working when we've got Republicans like Heller basically begging them to stop running them as he just did here.

The best thing they can do is to ignore his advice and let the public know they plan on defending those programs and strengthening them such as Sen. Bernie Sanders just proposed.

Transcript via the LA Times below the fold.

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Ohio's Gov. John Kasich isn't quite the most unpopular governor in the United States. He's number two right behind Florida's Gov. Rick Scott. So who better to sound off this week about how to get our country back on track in the Republicans's Weekly Address?

This is the same governor who, according to polling back in May, would lose a do-over election with his former opponent Ted Strickland by 26 points. And as TPM reported as well, he's another one of these Republican governors who for all of their bluster attacking federal spending, were also quietly accepting those dollars at the same time.

Now that Kasich's union busting law is going to be put up to a referendum this November, Kasich suddenly decided that he now wants to make a deal with the state's public employee unions. To their credit, it appears the unions have said, no thanks -- Kasich Opponents: Repeal Your Anti-Union Law — Then We’ll Talk.

And what are his "solutions" for getting our economy back on track? The same as we've seen from all of these Republicans. More tax cuts, deregulation, privatizing everything, and apparently what he didn't bother to mention during this weekly response, union busting.

Kasich also said Republicans should be willing to compromise with Democrats, but not compromise on their "principles." Which is generally Republican double-speak for we'll compromise after you give us everything we want, maybe. Or maybe you give us everything we want and we still obstruct for the sake of obstructing. Which is something they seem to be particularly good at now that we've got the scary Kenyan usurper in the White House that they'll never acknowledge had a right to be there in the first place.

Transcript via the LA Times below the fold.

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In the Republican Weekly Address, Sen. Jon Kyl continued with more of the GOP's latest excuse for why no one can ever dare to take tax rates back to where they were when Bill Clinton was in office. Heaven forbid we can't raise taxes on the "job creators." Republicans care about job creation, alright ... just not in the United States.

Maybe once they've destroyed our economy entirely where people here will work for a few dollars an hour, those "job creators" will decide to start blessing us again and creating more jobs here at home. Kyl also seems to have a bad case of amnesia if he's not going to acknowledge just who did that "runaway spending" he's talking about here.

Kyl's part of the problem with his votes for the Bush tax cuts, the illegal invasions of countries that were not a threat to us and the giveaways to the pharmaceutical industry -- not to mention he and his fellow Republicans' aversion to any type of regulation that might have prevented the financial meltdown and subsequent bailouts that have done terrible harm to our economy.

Kyl claims that raising the debt ceiling without significant spending cuts would be irresponsible. Sorry Jon, but your reckless spending that you refused to pay for or even put on the books that caused us to go from a surplus to a deficit in the first place is what's irresponsible. Now your party just continues to prove that you're completely incapable of governing as well. Slash, pillage, burn and destroy is all these people understand.

Weekly remarks by Sen. Jon Kyl, as provided by Republican Party leadership

Good morning. I am Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona.

By now, most Americans know that lawmakers in Washington are engaged in a difficult debate about the nation’s ‘debt ceiling,’ the legal limit to the amount of money the federal government can borrow.

The debt ceiling is currently set at a little more than 14 trillion dollars, and if Congress and the president don’t reach an agreement to raise it by this coming Tuesday, the Treasury secretary tells us America will no longer be able to pay all its bills.

The consequences of missing this deadline could be severe, precisely because Washington....
...borrows so much money -- more than 40 cents out of every dollar it spends. So, spending would have to shrink by 40% very quickly.

What’s more, markets would likely respond, dropping in value and hurting the retirement savings of millions of Americans.

Republicans have tried to work with Democrats to avoid this result and put our country on a better path, but we need them to work with us.

We start from the understanding that the reason the debt ceiling is a problem is because of runaway Washington spending. So, Republicans have been united in the belief that raising the debt ceiling without making significant spending reductions would be irresponsible.

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After allowing a trade assistance program to expire back in February, Republicans are still demanding that President Obama agree to ratify pending trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia and Panama in their GOP Weekly Address, given by North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven.

Here's more from Think Progress on the assistance program -- McConnell On Trade Pacts: ‘Leave Trade Assistance Out Of It’:

Back in February, congressional Republicans allowed a key trade assistance program to expire, blocking tens of thousands of workers who have lost their jobs due to international trade from accessing benefits. President Obama, in turn has said that he will not submit new trade agreements to Congress until it revives the trade assistance program.

But Republicans are digging their heels in against reauthorizing a program to help the workers who inevitably end up on the short end of the stick when it comes to free trade deals. Today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) went so far as to claim that trade assistance has no place in negotiations over free trade agreements:

This morning I’m calling on the administration once again to send us the three pending trade agreements that the president himself has said would create tens of thousands of American jobs and to leave Trade Adjustment Assistance out of it.

McConnell is not the only one utterly indifferent to the plight of workers who lose their jobs due to trade pacts. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said that trade assistance shouldn’t be reauthorized because “we’re broke.” [...]

Indeed, international trade pacts produce winners and losers, and the government has a responsibility to help those who lose their livelihood through no fault of their own. But the GOP wants only to talk about the positive aspects of trade, while pretending that the negative aspects simply don’t exist.

Transcript below the fold.

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Looks like the incoming freshmen class of Republicans has all of their talking points down pat -- we care about small businesses, tax cuts control runaway spending, we're listening to the American people, freedom, and god bless America! Or in other words, another two years of platitudes and trickle-down economics.

Hi, I’m Austin Scott. Earlier this month, I had the privilege of being elected to represent the people of Georgia’s Eighth Congressional District.

This week, Americans will gather to give thanks for what matters most: for me, that’s family, faith and freedom. We are fortunate to live in a country where we, the people, are free to speak out and alter the course of our government.

The American people have sent 85 new Republicans to Washington with a clear message: listen up, stop the job-killing policies, stop the runaway spending, and focus on getting our country back on track.

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