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Conan O'Brien very helpfully produced this ad for conservatives who feel terrorized by Obama's IRS. As the dude in the tricorner hat says:

TEA PARTY GUY: "Filing your taxes can be a little scary, especially if you’re a God-fearing, gun-owning, freedom-loving Republican like myself. The fact is, Obama’s IRS is after us. Luckily, there’s ConservoTax, the only tax software made for conservative taxpayers.”

The segment would have been funnier if the intended targets of this would not be trying to find the 1-800 number for this product.

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Cue the right-wing outrage over this Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher in 10...9...8... for the way he ended his New Rules segment while talking about the dangers of record income disparity in the United States:

MAHER: If you're rich, you should be begging the government to redistribute your wealth, because you know what happens in countries where there's a huge disparity between the rich and the poor? The rich get kidnapped. It happens seventy two times a day in Mexico.

He went onto talk about people resorting to using flame throwers on their cars in South Africa to stop it. He made a lot of really good points about what's happening to our society in the wake of the latest remake of The Great Gatsby being released, and our new Gilded Age which is worse than the last one. I'm sure all those on the right will hear is that he wants to raise your taxes and the clamor will be "Why doesn't he just volunteer to pay more himself?" -- because we all know how well just asking the wealthy to voluntarily pay more taxes, and only a tiny portion of them actually doing it, would work to solve our economic problems and the huge wealth gap we have now.

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Retired professional boxer Mike Tyson on Monday briefly shocked Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade by saying that he was "looking forward" to paying taxes to the federal government, but hoped to save money with "Obamacare."

The former heavyweight champion told Kilmeade that he was hoping to pay off millions in back taxes with a one-man show about his life.

"I'm so proud to be in this," Tyson explained. "I look forward to paying off my taxes and paying off my country, because that's my duty. I know they say that's legal extortion, but listen, I'm living in this country and if I got to pay taxes, that's the money that I paid for my life on Earth."

As Tyson was speaking, Kilmeade appeared momentarily dumbstruck, eyes wide and mouth open.

"I've got the biggest liberal family in the world," Tyson continued. "But I had the more money when Bush and Reagan was president! Oh I shouldn't -- my wife's going to kill me for that."

"Bush and Reagan had this idea that you should keep your money," Kilmeade said.

"Yeah, I'd like that to work for me," Tyson replied. "I'm going to work on that one to with this Obama administration, see can this Obamacare help us keep some money."

(h/t: Twitter/@igorvolsky)

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After first attacking former Rep. Barney Frank and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer's remarks about the Boston Marathon bombings as being "irresponsible" -- because lord knows no one on Fox would ever try to make a political issue out of a tragedy -- and they really hate it if someone makes a valid point about the need for civil servants like policemen and firefighters and the taxes required to pay their salaries -- Sean Hannity asked his guest, Rudy Giuliani about who he thought was responsible for the attack.

I'm sure Mr-a-Noun-a-Verb-and-Nine-Eleven made him very sad with this response.

GIULIANI: My hunch, is that it's homegrown...

HANNITY: Explain what that means, when you say homegrown...

GIULIANI: I don’t think this is orchestrated by al Qaeda or any of their offshoots in Africa or other places from there. I think frankly if it was, we would’ve picked it up because it would’ve had to been communicated internationally.

Waiting for the attacks on Giuliani from the right to start in 10... 9...

From this Monday's Democracy Now, economist Richard Wolff is asked about Bill O'Reilly's remarks last week where he told his audience on Fox that Cyprus and other European countries are facing economic hardships because they’re so-called "nanny states." Wolff responded with a lesson in economics 101 for Bill-O:

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Wolff, before we end, I want to turn back to the crisis in Cyprus and relate it to what’s happening here. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News warned his audience last week that Cyprus and other European countries are facing economic hardships because they’re so-called "nanny states."

BILL O’REILLY: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, now Cyprus, all broke. And other European nations are close. Why? Because they’re nanny states, and there are not enough workers to support all the entitlements these progressive paradises are handing out.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Richard?

RICHARD WOLFF: You know, he gets away with saying things which no undergraduate in the United States with a responsible economic professor could ever get away with. If you want to refer to things as nanny states, then the place you go in Europe is not the southern tier—Portugal, Spain and Italy; the place you go are Germany and Scandinavia, because they provide more social services to their people than anybody else. And guess what: Not only are they not in trouble economically, they are the winners of the current situation. The unemployment rate in Germany is now below 5 percent. Ours is pushing between 7 and 8 percent. So, please, get your facts right, Mr. O’Reilly.

The nanny state, you call it, the program of countries like Germany and Scandinavia, who tax their people heavily, by all means, but who provide them with social services that would be the envy of the United States—a national health program that takes care of you, whether you’re employed or not, and gives you proper healthcare. In France, for example, the law says when you go to work, you get five weeks’ paid vacation. That’s not an option; that’s the law. You get support when you’re a new parent for your child care and so forth. They provide services. And they are successful in Germany and Scandinavia, much more than we are in the United States and much more than those countries in the south.

So they’re not broken, the south, because they’re nanny states, since the nanny states, par excellence, are doing better than everyone. The actual truth of Mr. O’Reilly is the opposite of what he says. The more you do nanny state, the better off you are during a crisis and to minimize the cost of the crisis. That’s what the European economic situation actually teaches. He’s just making it up as he goes along to conform to an ideological position that is harder and harder for folks like him to sustain, so he has to reach further and further into fantasy.

h/t Raw Story

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If it's Sunday, it's another episode of Dancin' David Gregory inviting Republicans to come on his show and rattle off their talking points without fear of contradiction. Karl Rove's dance partner allowed House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy to attribute a very famous statement by Dick Cheney's (that "deficits don't matter") to President Obama! He also said that Democrats are the ones responsible for racking up the majority of the debt we've been dealing with ever since President Obama took the oath of office.

We've been through this here so many times I've lost count, but for anyone who hasn't already seen these charts, President Obama is not the one responsible for the policies that added to most of the deficit during his first term in office.

And pardon me if I'm sick to death of the party that brought us two wars left off the books and the theft of God knows how many of our tax dollars with those debacles, a prescription drug plan that wasn't paid for, the Bush tax cuts, the bailout of the Wall Street gamblers that took down our economy, having the damn nerve to complain about our debt and deficit.

Gregory couldn't be bothered to point out that not only is our deficit shrinking considerably under President Obama, but it's also shrinking at the fastest pace in modern American history.

Transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

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You've just got to love the right wing propagandists over at Fox, like Bill O'Reilly, having the nerve to be screeching about Al Gore and his business partners' decision to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera. Here's more from Mediaite on Bill-O's rant during the opening of his show this Thursday evening: Bill O’Reilly Tears Into ‘Hypocrite’ Al Gore For Trying To Settle Current TV Sale Before Taxes Went Up:

Bill O’Reilly had some harsh words for Al Gore tonight over his sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera. O’Reilly took issue with Gore’s hypocrisy in trying to finalize the sale before the fiscal cliff deadline this past Monday night to avoid paying higher taxes, as well as doing a deal with “anti-Americans” at Al Jazeera. O’Reilly declared that Gore has “shamed himself” with the deal.

O’Reilly highlighted Gore’s hypocrisy on taxes by bringing up video of Gore saying two months ago that he believes rich people such as himself need to “do our fair share.”

O’Reilly then set his sights on Al Jazeera, a network he declared to be run by “anti-Americans” and even sympathetic to Osama bin Laden. By making a deal with Al Jazeera, O’Reilly said, Gore has “shamed himself.” O’Reilly made it clear he would not want Al Jazeera to be censored, but said the whole deal is “sleazy” and “disgraceful.”

I'm not going to defend Gore on the tax hypocrisy, if the anonymous sources O'Reilly quoted here, that it was Gore along with his business partners who were pushing to get this through before taxes went up this year are correct. But as the article noted, Gore owns 20 percent of the company, so it wasn't just him pushing for the time table if the source is accurate. And if the source is not accurate, as O'Reilly admitted is possible, Gore may very well have not been the one pushing for the deal to go through before the end of the year to avoid the higher tax rate.

Of course, O'Reilly's solution for this is for Gore to come on his show and explain himself, which we all know would be a completely "fair and balanced" and cordial interview... or maybe not. The likely outcome would be O'Reilly screaming over Gore and calling him every name in the book and accusing him of sympathizing with terrorists, just as he did here.

Which brings us to O'Reilly's attack of Al Jazeera as some anti-American propaganda outfit. I just have to say, that's pretty rich coming from someone from the right wing propaganda outfit, Fox, which has an ownership stake by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. I guess O'Reilly doesn't have any problems with Uncle Rupert palling around with someone from the country where 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 were from.

And as to the quality of Al Jazeera's programming, from what I've watched of it, they've done a hell of a lot better job than Fox or many of their American counterparts with just delivering straight news from around the world. The reason people like O'Reilly hate them is for the real reporting they were attempting to do when the United States decided to invade Iraq under false pretenses and reporters from that network along with others paid the price for that with their lives.

Fox and O'Reilly were too busy playing cheerleader for the Bush administration at the time instead of telling Americans the truth about what we were doing there.

There are legitimate concerns to be had about foreign ownership of our news media here in the United States, but I think they pale in comparison to the problem we have with media consolidation, which is far more dangerous. The quality and honesty of what's presented to the American public matters and having five or so huge media companies controlling everything we watch, read, listen to and the mixture of entertainment and news has been far more corrosive than any addition of news channels with foreign ownership will ever be.

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Anyone remember Bill-O and his rant back in September of last year, where he threatened to "pack it in" and leave the country if President Obama raised his taxes? MSNBC's Ed Schultz took his viewers on a trip down memory lane and replayed O'Reilly's threat, and asked him when he was going to make good on it now that his taxes have indeed gone up.

Sadly as Ed and The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky noted, it's not likely that we'll get rid of Bill-O or his ilk any time soon, regardless of the Randite temper tantrum he threw on the air last year.

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Surprise, surprise! It's all sour grapes over at Fox now that it seems Republicans are finally going to allow a clean vote on this so-called “fiscal cliff” bill that had passed the Senate. Leave it to their resident curmudgeon Charles Krauthammer to use the opportunity to paint President Obama as some evil Socialist who just wants to extract money from those hard-working rich people so that the lazy, good-for-nothing moochers out there can have their “entitlements.”

Never mind that he's completely wrong about President Obama being willing to negotiate with Republicans (far too often with the hostage taking we've witnessed), or that Republicans were the ones who originally voted to have these tax cuts expire. And never mind that we've got record income disparity and if we want to pay for a democratic society with a middle class, we should have a progressive tax code where the rich pay their share.

And of course no segment on Fox would be complete without some revisionist history in the form of St. Reagan worship.

BAIER: I mean, if you look at his deficit and debt commission, the Simpson-Bowles commission and the recommendations that came out of there (sorry Bret, but there were no recommendations from that commission, it failed) and what has not been followed through on, now two years ago, it's pretty remarkable.

KRAUTHAMMER: But he's not interested in that. And he's not interested in leading on spending. He's not interested in cutting spending. I think if you look at this in a large view, it's now becoming very clear who he is and what he wants to do. He's now in his second term. He's liberated.

He can be open about what he wants to do. He once said on '08 that Reagan was a historical President in a way that Clinton or Nixon was not. He meant Reagan changed the nature of the country. He got it hooked on low taxes, less government and an increase in inequality, is the way Obama sees it.

He sees his historical role, Obama, is to undo Reaganism and that means, not to cut spending. It means to raise taxes and he let the cat out of the bag on Monday. In that little rally he had, he said to Republicans, you're not getting any spending today and you know that, any spending cuts, but he said that if you think that you can get spending cuts after this in the rest of our negotiations, the answer is no. If you want a cut in spending, you're going to have to increase taxes on the rich.

Remember, he got an increase in revenues now by raising the rates on the rich. Well, now he's going to return, as he said on Monday and get increased revenue from the rich by eliminating deductions, the other way to do it. So he has no interest in anything other than raising the level of taxation, to sort of pre-Reagan levels, so he can support the entitlement state, which is what his presidency is all about. It's a very long view and I think he's attacking it in exactly the right way, if you were of his ideology.

Yeah, that's the ticket. The Kenyan usurper Socialist Communist just wants to beat up on the poor, oppressed rich people and steal all of their money for those lazy, undeserving seniors who would like their Social Security benefits so they don't starve. Krauthammer's still stuck in the '60's if he thinks this sort of talk is going to move most people when you still have so many people hurting from the recession and unemployed. That said, he knows he's speaking to the Fox viewers here, who are probably stuck right there with him.

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From this Wednesday's The Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell took apart "tea party" Rep. John Fleming for his remarks about irresponsible Republicans in the House never voting to increase taxes in the last 100 years -- and reminded everyone why they would be better off not quoting President Lincoln on taxes if they're not in the mood to make fools of themselves.

It seems Fleming repeated during a press conference, the same thing he wrote in an op-ed this week: FLEMING: GOP-controlled House has never raised taxes:

If some Republicans have their way, the party soon will make history for all the wrong reasons.

In the past 100 years, since the authority of Congress to tax income was enumerated in the 16th Amendment, marginal income tax rates have never been raised when Republicans have held the majority in the House of Representatives. For nearly a century, Republican-controlled Houses held the line on tax rates, a Republican coup de pointe to Democratic tax-increase parries. Here’s the question for my fellow Republicans: Do we want to be the first-ever GOP House majority to raise federal marginal income tax rates? [...]

If Republicans really believe in the principles of smaller government and economic liberty — as we have over the past 100 years, and as many of us still do — we should be far more concerned about getting principle right instead of worrying about polls and re-election.

Abraham Lincoln reminded us to “adhere to your purpose, and you will soon feel as well as you ever did. On the contrary, if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power of keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life.”

Here's more on O'Donnell's response from his site: O’Donnell on why Republicans shouldn’t quote Lincoln on taxes:

He failed to mention what the Republican-controlled House of Representatives during Lincoln’s presidency did with taxes. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell set the record straight on Wednesday’s show:

“That Republican-controlled House actually passed our first income tax which Lincoln signed into law to pay for the Civil War. It was a progressive income tax–3% on annual incomes over $600 and 5% on annual incomes over $10,000. The Supreme Court ruled those taxes constitutional, but decades later in 1895 the Supreme Court reversed the earlier decision and declared federal income taxes unconstitutional–which is why in 1913 it took a Constitutional amendment to re-establish federal income taxation.

O’Donnell also pointed out that Republicans constantly bring up Lincoln any chance they can get “because 21st century Republicans know that Abraham Lincoln is the only Republican that many Americans admire.”

“Abraham Lincoln is also the only Republican president, indeed the only president, who has ever gotten a Republican House of Representatives to raise income taxes. Republicans didn’t just establish the very first income tax as I just described. Two years later, they raised the rates. They doubled the top tax rate from 5% to 10%. That’s back when Republicans were responsible: 150 years ago.”

O'Donnell also reminded his audience that their stance on taxation may be one of the reasons that Americans have not given them control of the House of Representatives for all that many years over the last century.

Sadly, they wouldn't have it now were it not for cheating and gerrymandering.