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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.

From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, Chris takes a look at the message we saw coming out of this year's Republican National Convention and as he concluded "It's an ugly message, but in a time of anxiety and diminished expectations, not a stupid one." It may not be stupid but it's extremely cynical.

The RNC’s backward-looking tour of nostalgia:

This week the Republican party gathered in Tampa to tell a terrible and tragic tale of American decline. They couldn't quite say that, explicitly, of course. This is the party of Reagan and sunny optimism, or so they'd like to present themselves, but you couldn't help notice that the three days of speeches on the convention floor were an orgy of imagined persecution, grievance and doleful recollections of halcyon days gone by.

But the packaging for this message was insistent invocation of American greatness. As Rachel Maddow's team documented in a montage for MSNBC's convention coverage, almost every single speaker told a story of upward mobility, usually taken from their own family's past: tracing the arc of the American dream that had brought them to the podium.

Part of this is just standard political treacle, a way for, say, an extremely wealthy prep school graduate like Ann Romney, to seem relatable. But the larger reason this was such a dominant theme at the RNC is that the Republican Party's platform and tribal identity are zealously committed to the notion of American exceptionalism, and when people talk about American exceptionalism, this is usually what they mean. [...]

Somewhat oddly almost every single one of the stories of "we-built-it," plucky American success didn't revolve around the speakers own experience of social mobility but rather that of their hardworking relatives and ancestors. It struck me, listening to these invocations of the labors of previous generations as a slightly odd note, a backward looking tour of nostalgia for an America that we are losing. But of course, that's precisely the message of the Republican party this year and its a potent one because it's based on a core reality.

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From this year's Netroots Nation, here's Elizabeth Warren from this Friday evening: Elizabeth Warren On Why Corporations Are Not People: ‘People Have Hearts’:

But she sounded a confident — though raspy — note during her address to thousands of Netroots Nation progressives here Friday. “It was not the convention that did it to me, it was the parties,” Warren said of her hoarse voice. Warren on June 2 avoided a Democratic primary at the state party convention, winning a historic 96 percent of the delegates.

Progressives who have any doubt where Mitt Romney, Brown and their supporters stand, Warren said at Netroots, should consider: Romney wants to repeal financial reform, says that people who are concerned about income inequality are envious and claims that corporations are people.

“No, Mitt, corporations are not people,” Warren said, to applause. “People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they love, they cry, they dance, they live and they die. Learn the difference.”

Warren, who helped conceive and establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said financial markets need one set of rules to ensure a level playing field. “Progressives understand that markets are like football,” she said. “Every game needs rules, a referee with a whistle to enforce those rules. Without rules and a ref, it isn’t football, it’s a mugging.”

Warren later rejected the notion that the climate in Washington can prevent any actual reform — and jabbed her Republican opponent for reportedly shielding banks after voting for a Wall Street overhaul in 2010.

“That has now come to light, and it’s time for the American people to re-engage on this and say, ‘No more,’” Warren told TPM. “I don’t see this as a climate in Washington. I see this as a climate in the whole country.”

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Give him his due for saying it out loud what we all knew anyway. Questions about Romney's skills as a politician though will continue to be asked after this unforced error. And of course few people will also believe his tongue wasn't firmly in his cheek when he said he's not concerned about the very rich. Why else would he try to become President?

The thing that caught my attention though is that Mitt Romney seems to believe the middle class are the 90-95% of Americans. It'd probably come as news to him that 16%, or 49 million Americans, are now living in poverty, according to the latest census.

via Rachel Werner at the Washington Post:

In an interview with CNN Wednesday morning that should have been a Florida victory lap, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney made a fumble that could give rivals an attack ad sound bite.

Asked about his economic plan, Romney said repeatedly that he was not concerned with very poor Americans, but was focused instead on helping the middle class.

Romney explained that he was confident that food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid and other assistance would keep the poor afloat — he pledged to fix holes in that safety net “if it needs repair.” He repeated past statements that his main focus is the middle class because those people, in his opinion, have been hardest hit by the recession (President Obama also has focused many of his efforts on the middle class).

But Romney’s awkward phrasing could give fuel to critics who argue that he does not empathize with the poorest Americans.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there,” Romney told CNN. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Doubtless we'll hear the similar empty platitudes from the other side, albeit more deftly. The poor really are of marginal interest to both parties. One side takes them for granted while the other side doesn't even acknowledge their existence.

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From this Wednesday night's The O'Reilly Factor, Monica Crowley is pretty desperate here with this ridiculous bit of hackery, claiming that it's actually President Obama that started the Occupy Wall Street movement in a coy move to help him beat Mr. One Percent Mitt Romney during the upcoming presidential election, because they were aware he was going to be the candidate all along and now they can use the issue of income inequality to run on.

I hate to break it to Monica Crowley, but with Romney's background at Bain Capital as a vulture capitalist, they weren't going to need any help to frame the debate that way should he become the Republican nominee. And if she's silly enough to think that the Occupy movement is supportive of President Obama as a whole and isn't as upset about a lot of his policies as a lot of conservatives are, or that a lot of liberals and Libertarians that are members of the movement are as well, then she obviously hasn't been following them. Or what's more likely is she knows they're not fully supportive of the President, much less some AstroTurf movement like those teabaggers they like to pretend are grass roots, and she's just lying and doesn't care because she knows the Fox-bots who watch O'Reilly's show won't know the difference.

Here's more from our friends at News Hounds -- Today In Monica Crowley Conspiracy Theories: Occupy Wall Street An Obama Re-Election Technique To Attack Romney:

Leave it to Monica Crowley to find a way to find some hidden evil in the scrutiny of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital. The same Monica Crowley who thought CBS’ Bob Schieffer gave secretly coded campaign suggestions to David Axelrod, who saw attacks on Rush Limbaugh as a stealth way to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and – my personal favorite – blamed the Obama administration for her decision not to eat a cheeseburger – that Monica Crowley has a new conspiracy theory, that the Occupy Wall Street movement was set up in advance to help President Obama attack Mitt Romney, his likely opponent.

Seems to be a habit with Ms. Crowley, doesn't it?

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House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Sunday defended the richest 1 percent of Americans and suggested that the Occupy movement was engaging in class warfare.

"You look at Occupy Wall Street, I think you said you understand their frustrations," ABC's Christian Amanpour told Boehner. "People such as, let's say Eric Cantor, called them a mob not so long ago. Do you agree with that? Are they a mob?"

"Listen, I understand people's frustrations," Boehner replied. "I understand their concerns. And I, frankly, understand that we have differences in America. We are not going to engage in class warfare. The president is out there doing it every day."

"It's not so much that redistribution of income the president is talking about," Amanpour noted. "It's a shared and much fairer sense of sacrifice. And there doesn't seem to be the sense among people here that the sacrifice is being shared. Because they point to taxes and tax cuts and who it benefits and who it doesn't."

"Come on," Boehner protested. "The top 1 percent pay 38 percent of the income taxes in America. You know, how much more do you want them to pay? Let's take all the money the rich have, it won't even put a dent in our current budget deficit, much less our debt."

In 2010, the richest 1 percent of Americans owned 70 percent of all financial assets. Between 2002 and 2006, they captured three-quarters of the nation's economic growth.

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry on Tuesday advised protesters in the Occupy movement to worry less about income inequality.

"You know, we have young people who are today occupying Wall Street, that there are some people out there that are making too much money," the Texas governor said at an education forum in Des Moines, Iowa. "And if somebody were to ask me what the best advice that I could give them? It would be that money is probably the most highly overrated thing in the world."

"It's good to have some," he admitted. "Because I've been without and I've had some, and it's better to have some."

Perry is said to have an overall net worth of about $2.8 million.

In 2007 alone, he made over $1 million, putting him well withing the top 1 percent of earners in the country.

CNBC's John Harwood pointed out to Perry last week that his recently unveiled flat tax plan could actually worsen income inequality.

"I don't care about that," the candidate said. "If that's what comes, I'll take that criticism."

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From CNN's Your Money, apparently we're all supposed to think that there's nothing that can be done to get rid of the income inequality in the United States that we're seeing now because... hey, the rich just always figure out how to game the system. That's just the way it goes. Our political dialog in this country has moved so far to the right that it's taboo to even suggest that the fat cats on Wall Street and the have-mores should do more than throw the rest of us some crumbs to fight over or that heaven forbid these markets should be regulated. The rich win! Get over it suckers!

If what's going on in Wisconsin and around the country is any indication, the peons look like they're not ready to settle for serfdom quite yet.

VELSHI: Over the last decade, the income of 90 percent of the American public has remained stagnant. Take a look at this. The story changes dramatically for the other 10 percent. That bottom red line is 90 percent. That yellow line is the wealthiest 10 percent. The folks, the super wealthy, they've gotten richer; a whole lot richer while everybody else has stayed the same. Those superrich, by the way, account for one-half of America's wealth. Top 10 percent, half of the American wealth. This does not sound like the America we knew. Christine, how do the rich become the superrich?

ROMANS: The rich always come out on top when there's an economic debacle. We've had the biggest economic debacle since the great depression. I never count out the rich for being able to figure out how to become richer. I think you can talk about how business has done, technology has allowed out sourcing --

VELSHI: And mostly, working stiffs, Richard depend on their paycheck. Other people, the rich make money in other ways. They can invest in the stock market, they can invest in property like we're talking about, and they buy the services of other people.

QUEST: Look, look, it's fundamental. If you are one of those people who was making money when you are asleep because some business is making it on your behalf, or you are one of those people who makes money because their money makes money, you're going to be all right. But if you're like most of us, which literally, and I challenge you, Christina, and myself, how many paychecks would it take before you are in trouble if you suddenly started losing them? Then, inevitably, it's going to be that way. The rich have always sailed majestically on the good ship dollar big bucks.

ROMANS: And you know, the rich take risks. And not all of us are big risk takers. And this has been a good world to take risks in, big risks, because you get bailed out if you fail, and if you win you win big, right?

VELSHI: That's exactly right. All right, guys, we'll leave it at that. Great to talk to you all. Richard a pleasure to see you as always, Christine Romans.

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Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs sat down with Lawrence O'Donnell to discuss the coordinated efforts by Republican governors to help billionaires like the Koch brothers deal a final blow to unions and the working class in America. I guess if we can thank Scott Walker for anything, it's reigniting the labor movement in America and for being the reason we're seeing conversations like this one take place on television. They're long past due.

O’DONNELL: You hear in that phone call the governor saying, I’m talking to John Kasich every day. This is what we’ve been suggesting here, that it feels to us like this is a national Republican governors movement. This is not just one state trying to get control of its budget. It seems that phone call shows us that this is, the hope is that this governor will be able to spread something nationwide.

SACHS: Well this is absolutely coordinated. There’s no doubt about it and it’s not an accident that one Republican governor after another is trying to crush the unions and crush workers in general. And what’s astounding is we have the greatest inequality in income and wealth in the history of this country and you have the billionaires going out to absolutely do the final deed of crushing workers to the maximum extent. It’s amazing what’s going on.

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As William Cohen noted, David Stockman continues to make the rounds after bucking with the Republicans on tax cuts for the rich last summer.

A Republican for Higher Taxes:

David Stockman has never been one to shy away from a roaring economic-policy debate. The former boy-wonder budget director in the first Reagan administration and the architect of Reagan’s supply-side economic policies, Stockman has been very busy lately rejecting the tax-cutting recommendations of Republicans in Washington and arguing that we must get our fiscal house in order or watch our way of life continue its decline. As an “imperialist power,” he says, America is in danger of being at “sundown.” Stockman, who turned 64 on Wednesday, has always been ahead of the curve on tax and fiscal issues, and it appears that he is ahead of it again this time, too. Read on...

Stockman continued his media appearances with CNN's Fareed Zakaria and went after the GOP for their single minded devotion to tax cuts.

Reagan Budget Director: GOP Has Abandoned Fiscal Responsibility By Adopting ‘Theology’ Of Tax Cuts:

As Congress prepares to take up extension of the Bush tax cuts during its lame duck session, Republican lawmakers have been unanimous in demanding that the cuts for the richest two percent of Americans be extended, claiming they are necessary for economic growth and that tax cuts (miraculously) pay for themselves.

While independent economists have shown these arguments to be false, today on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, President Reagan’s former budget director took on his own party for pushing this faulty logic. David Stockman, who led the all-important Office of Management and Budget under Reagan and was a chief architect of his fiscal policy, criticized today’s GOP for misreading Reagan’s legacy by adopting a “theology” of tax cuts. Stockman has spoken out before, but took perhaps his strongest stance yet against his own party today, saying “I’ll never forgive the Bush administration” for “destroying the last vestige of fiscal responsibility that we had in the Republican Party.”

Transcript below the fold.

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