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I don't know about anyone else, but I think one of the last people I want to hear from when it comes to Don Young's remark about his dad's "50-60 wetbacks" and how this is going to harm the Republicans and their joke of a "minority outreach program" is former Santorum communications director, Hogan Gidley.

Rather than being run out of town on a rail for inflicting the likes of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum on the rest of the country, MSNBC has chosen to make this guy a regular on many of their daytime shows, and Thomas Roberts' in particular. So here we are with a man who helped bring us Mr. Man-on-dog, I don't want to make "blah people's lives better," Obama's going to bow to more Muslims, being asked for his sage advice now on how Republicans can now connect with minority voters.

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Yesterday during a discussion with Thomas Roberts and Jimmy LaSalvia of GOProud about why CPAC excludes gays and other groups from their conference the topic of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie came up, and his own lack of invitation to speak. Steve Schmidt, John McCain's campaign manager, had nothing good to say about CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, the distilled fringiest of the right wing fringe:

ROBERTS: “Why does the CPAC organization want to risk alienating burgeoning stars like a Chris Christie, not invite him?”

SCHMIDT: “Look, this CPAC convention is increasingly the Star Wars bar scene of the conservative movement. All that’s missing from that convention is a couple of Wookies.”

Schmidt would later go on to call Mitt Romney's appearance last year, where he declared he was "deeply conservative as a Governor", simply "kowtowing" to the extreme right.

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I guess no matter how badly these so-called "tea party" leaders behave, we won't see them kicked off the air any time soon. Case in point: Wingnut Judson Phillips, CEO of Tea Party Nation, who as we've noted here is prone to misogynistic attacks on female Democrats, has had some trouble paying his group's hotel bills and who wants President Obama to prove that he doesn’t smoke crack and have gay sex. What a guy. But here he was on MSNBC this Thursday, being allowed to pretend he doesn't know Republicans won the House due to gerrymandering, and throwing both Boehner and Romney under the bus.

Thomas Roberts might be good when it comes to LGBT issues (which he actually cares about), but he's fairly useless when it comes to holding most of his guests' feet to the fire on anything else. This interview was just another example of that.

Naturally, Phillips was demanding that John Boehner not give an inch on these "fiscal cliff" negotiations and that we cut spending to take care of our deficit. I agree with him on getting rid of government waste, but I suspect he and I might have very different ideas about what amounts to "wasteful spending." Republicans always think "waste" equals gutting our social safety nets - he was short on specifics and wasn't asked to clarify.

Phillips was also happy to make excuses for why Republicans lost the presidential election and threw Romney right under the bus --and even backed over him a couple of times: Tea Party Leader: Romney Was ‘The Worst Candidate In History’:

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips on Thursday disputed that President Obama claimed a mandate in November's election, arguing that his re-election victory came over "the worst candidate in history in Mitt Romney."

"You know, Obama ran on the fact he was going to raise taxes, the Republicans put up the worst candidate in history in Mitt Romney, yet Obama allegedly has this mandate," Phillips said during an appearance on MSNBC. "Well, why did Republicans keep the House if Obama has this great mandate? People don't want their taxes going up. What people do want is spending cuts."

If Romney was the "worst candidate" ever, what does that say about the rest of the wingnuts he was running against in their primary? He would have been a bad candidate already, but Phillips and his ilk along with the rest of the GOP base pushing him to the right helped to assure his fate. He alienated every group out there other than crusty old white men and the millionaires paying his tab, and he paid dearly for it later.

It's always amusing to watch these guys come on the air and complain about a problem they helped create. It's too bad they're not called out for it and asked about who is funding these AstroTurf groups that they represent when they're allowed on the air.

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Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) has an A rating from the National Rifle Association but he says that Democrats are at fault for not passing more gun control legislation.

During a Tuesday interview on MSNBC, host Thomas Roberts asked Kingston if he looked at the recent massacre of 20 school children in Connecticut and felt "a sense of guilt" over his tough stance against gun control.

"Where I think we have the guilt is we see a huge problem like this -- and it's a problem that's happening in other countries as well -- and we look for something that, okay, what can prevent it?" Kingston explained. "And I think that's where we need to go with this discussion is, yes, put gun control -- more gun control -- on the table. But, also, don't forget the mental health element. Don't forget, is there a home situation that we need to learn more about? Was this young man addicted to violent video games? Was there a Hollywood influence? I think that we can't just stop at guns."

Roberts observed that many pro-gun Democrats had recently changed their tune and that the Republicans were in danger of being the party of "the people that defend Glocks" if they continued to oppose meaningful gun restrictions.

"What also is disturbing though is people would say, do the Republicans -- I mean, here we have a town, which was controlled in the House by Democrats, in the Senate by Democrats and the White House by Democrats for two years and nothing took place for stricter gun control laws," Kingston insisted. "So, for the partisans in our country to already start injecting politics in here, that saddens me further."

"Now, we have to remember that Connecticut has the the fifth toughest gun control laws in the country, including an assault weapon ban that bans 35 different weapons," he added. "The weapon that was used was not an assault weapon, therefore it wasn't banned."

The MSNBC host pointed out that Kingston had gotten an A rating from the NRA because he had voted against gun regulations for years -- including opposing the Brady Handgun Bill, supporting a partial repeal of the D.C. firearm ban, opposing restrictions on semi-automatic assault weapons and voting to decrease waiting periods.

"None of the policy issues which you just ticked off would have prevented [Connecticut shooter] Adam Lanza from doing this," the Georgia Republican opined. "And it's very sad that we want to cloud the issue by making NRA the policy as opposed to Adam Lanza and what triggers this off."

"We need to just be complacent in the fact that we can send our children to school to be assassinated?" Roberts wondered.

"I think if we want to have a reasonable discussion, we have to look at what happened in Germany with all the gun control laws, it didn't prevent anything," Kingston asserted. "What happened in Connecticut, the fifth toughest gun control law in the country? It did not prevent anything. So, what I'm saying, you can't just stop at guns. You have to look at mental health. What about having a toll-free number for people who have somebody like an Adam Lanza in the house, where there may be some red flags that they could say, 'I'm concerned that my son may have a tendency towards violence or insane acts. What do I do?'"

"I think at this point we need to come together as a nation instead of start pulling off in separate camps."

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There were a great number of thing wrong with this interview on MSNBC, one being the fact that host Thomas Roberts and his producers thought that the public needed to hear from the corrupt former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert about the need for bipartisanship during these fiscal negotiations. Another is Hastert being allowed to get away with this statement:

ROBERTS: But sir, if you were able to hold the line on spending limits, then why would you go ahead to oversee two unfunded wars?

HASTERT: Look... the wars happened. I don't know if you were around at 9-11 but we lost 3000 people, but we ended up in Afghanistan. We also ended up in Iraq. You know, we can go back. History will tell us whether we should have been in Iraq, but at the time, we thought that was the right decision. We were not going to expose this country to that type of threat and we haven't had it since then.

Roberts just completely let Hastert off the hook here without an ounce of follow up. First off, he didn't answer the question about why they didn't see the need to pay for the two wars that they didn't want to put on the books to show the hole they were blowing in the budget. And second, it's just shameful that a politician is still being allowed to use 9-11 to justify invading Iraq.

And as far as Hastert and anyone wanting his advice on how someone should govern now, here's more from our archives on him, and he received the honor of being listed by Rolling Stone as one of the The Ten Worst Members of the Worst Congress Ever in Tim Dickinson's article which was originally posted in their Nov. 2006 issue. Here's a portion of that report:

The Highway Robber: Dennis Hastert (R-Ill)

Hastert could well be the weakest House speaker in history. Tapped by Tom DeLay to serve as the mild-mannered frontman for the GOP leadership, the former wrestling coach ceded most of his power to the now-disgraced majority leader, allowing Republicans to treat the Capitol as their private piggy bank. Last year, Hastert got in on the action himself, secretly inserting $207 million into the budget for the "Prairie Parkway" – a highway that will speed development of 210 acres he owns in Illinois. Before the year was out, Hastert sold part of his land – soon to be the site of a sprawling subdivision – for a profit of $2 million.

"Here's a guy who saw a chance to profit from his official acts and took it," says Bill Allison, who uncovered the late-night earmark as a senior analyst for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "Most of us aren't speaker of the House, and most of us don't have a $200 million earmark running through our back yard. Hastert does, and he made a fortune from it."

The speaker at least functions as a bipartisan defender of congressional corruption. In February 2005, he purged the chairman of the House Ethics Committee for daring to admonish DeLay. And after Rep. William Jefferson's offices were raided by the FBI last spring, it was Hastert who lodged the strongest protest on the Louisiana Democrat's behalf.

Bipartisanship! Ain't it grand?

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Who could have seen this coming? Here we go with the next step in the ridiculous, drummed up, non-scandal, Benghazi-gate that the right wingers have all been losing their minds over for the last couple of weeks at Fox -- Huckabee Suggests Obama Should Be Impeached Over Libya Incident:

Fox News host and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) compared the administration’s handling of the consulate attack in Libya to Watergate, during an appearance on the network Friday morning, and hinted that the president should be impeached for not immediately attributing the violence to terrorism.

“We have been flat-out lied to,” Huckabee told Fox’s Bill Hemmer. “They know they lied. As if airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center said those were just accidents. Anybody with two eyes and an IQ above plant life knows what happened in Libya was not a spontaneous reaction to a 13 minute video on YouTube”:

HUCKABEE: It was a planned orchestrated attack led by terrorists, terrorists, Bill. And this White House has to explain why it hasn’t owned up to that. Why it can’t say it. I think frankly, if this issue really gets traction that it deserves, and let it say it deserves, go back. Richard Nixon was forced out of office because he lied. And because he covered some stuff up. I will be blunt and tell you this. Nobody died in Watergate. We have people who are dead because of this. There are questions to be answered and Americans ought to demand to get answers. [...]

HEMMER: Just one more thing here. What you’re describing, comparing events of today to Watergate.

HUCKABEE: I sure am….Bill, i’m not saying this just out of some political interest. I’m saying that our trust as a nation is built on our ability to know that when our president, whoever he is, Democrat or Republican, looks us in the eye and tells us something, we ought to know he is telling us the truth.

Fox News, Republican lawmakers, and conservative pundits have for weeks hinted at an administration cover-up, naming it Benghazi-gate, and alleging that Ambassador Susan Rice misled Americans, when she initially claimed that the attacks were a “spontaneous reaction” to a movie trailer disparaging the Prophet Muhammed.

And while some administration officials expressed concern that “the White House began pushing the line that the attack was spontaneous and not the work of terrorists,” officials began labeling the incident the work of terrorism after investigating the incident. Read on...

Media Matters has more on the attack here -- Myths And Facts About The Benghazi Attack And Protests In The Middle East :

Right-wing media have pushed numerous myths about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and protests in the Middle East, from distorting the Obama administration's response to the attacks to misleading about the nature of security at the Benghazi consulate.

Check out the full report at their site.

And here's more from Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog -- No, Obama is Not Going to Lose the Election Because of Benghazi:

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If RNC Chairman Reince Priebus thinks nasty, petulant interviews like this one with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts are going to win his party some support back with women voters, I think he's sadly mistaken. Last week, Priebus appeared on Bloomberg TV's Al Hunt and claimed that the "war on women" was as fictional as the "war on caterpillars."

This Wednesday, Priebus was asked about those remarks and decided to double down:

On Wednesday, MSNBC host Thomas Roberts gave Priebus a chance to revise his remarks.

“I’m not going to walk back,” the RNC chairman insisted. “I’ll double down on it. This war on women is a fiction that the Democrats have created. And the real war on women is the war that this president has put forward on the American people by not following through on his promises, by having women disproportionately effected by the Obama economy.”

“How can you say that it’s a fiction, though, if you stand of the record of what the Republican Party has said and done?” Roberts wondered, noting that all of the remaining GOP presidential candidates had promised to eliminate funds for family planning and Republican-controlled state legislatures had pushed through 90 anti-abortion bills in 2011.

“Because it is a fiction, Thomas,” Priebus replied. “It’s a fiction because, number one, there is no war on women. … The fact of the matter is that the real war on women, the actual thing that I think most women in this country are most concerned about, which is a good job, a good family, being able to live the American dream, provide for your kids and your family, that war on women is being perpetrated by President Barack Obama.”

Thomas actually did a pretty good job of pushing back at Priebus' arguments and pointed out the record number of anti-abortion legislation passed by the Republicans and their attacks on Planned Parenthood.

“You can’t discount the fact that we almost took the government to the brink of closing Planned Parenthood,” Thomas pressed.

“The world will continue,” the RNC chairman quipped. “I don’t buy your argument. I happen to believe that you can be pro-women and pro-life. You don’t. That’s the problem, Thomas.”

Sadly, Thomas did not point out to Priebus that their forced birth agenda is not necessarily "pro-life" when it means forcing a woman to choose between her life and the life of a fetus that's not viable when there's a problem pregnancy with some of these extreme laws they've been passing -- or the fact that abortions are only a small fraction of the services provided by Planned Parenthood and that life-saving cancer screenings are "pro-life."

Planned Parenthood has done more to prevent abortions than the current Republican Party. All the Republicans want to do is to restrict access to birth control and dumb down our kids by refusing to teach them sex education at the appropriate age and pretending they're never going to have sex until they're all adults and married.

It's been pointed out repeatedly by those on the left that if you actually want to limit the number of abortions in the United States, then make sure everyone has access to affordable contraception and educate people on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The right would rather demagogue the issue and pander to the religious right.

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A Republican strategist who has spoken out against same sex marriage asked one of the few openly gay news anchors Wednesday if he had ever "disappointed a woman."

During a segment about female support for presidential candidates, Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus told MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts that President Barack Obama shouldn't try to bolster his poll numbers by condescending to women.

"Women need jobs," Jacobus stated. "We don't have to be off to a separate group and condescended to and talked to by the first lady. That's nice, but we don't need that. And we're disappointed in this president, and that's what's happened. We've been lied to."

She continued: "Thomas, if you ever disappointed a woman, you know how hard it can be to get back into good graces and regain her trust."

"The most important woman I'm disappointing right now is my executive producer, who's telling me that I need to be quicker," Thomas said with a grin.

Whether she knew it or not, Jacobus may have been on to something with her tone-deaf assertion. In a 2008 interview with The Advocate, Thomas admitted had felt the need to date a few women early in his career.

"I didn’t know how best to deal with that professionally, or personally for that matter," he explained. "I thought it would be a roadblock -- or a brick wall -- to advancement."

He said that after taking a job in a new television market, "I would automatically date a girl and have everyone at the station see it. We'd date for a little while and then I'd break up with them or do something to make them break up with me."

Jacobus is president Capitol Strategies PR and appears regularly on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. In an op-ed for The Hill in 2009, she argued that "bullies" were trying to legalize same sex marriage.

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Luke Russert explains to MSNBC's Thomas Roberts what his marching orders are from their network. He will hound the Democrats and Anthony Weiner at every opportunity until Weiner finally resigns. Of course no word yet on when he's planning on doing the same thing to David Vitter or Tom Coburn.

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MSNBC's Thomas Roberts, filling for Ed Schultz after his suspension, talked to former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich about the stalled talks on raising our debt ceiling and how the paralysis in Washington, D.C., is allowing the bigger problem to be ignored -- namely, the fact that our politicians have done little to nothing to address the situation with unemployment in the U.S.

I for one am sick of the hostage-taking by the GOP on this issue and their complete irresponsibility on taking Medicare and Medicaid hostage and demanding that either the poor and the elderly get hit as part of their deal, or they crash the world's economy. As Reich noted, there are very large problems our politicians are refusing to deal with in regards to our economy that they're completely ignoring due to ideological issues and making this ridiculous argument a centerpiece when they should be focusing on getting Americans back to work instead.

Reich has much more in his columns at his blog in a couple of his latest posts, some of which he discussed with Roberts here.

How to Get Washington’s Attention:

Finally, it seems, the economic burdens of America’s vast middle class may be catching up with the Street. The Dow lost 2.22 percent today; the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 2.28 percent. Both marked their worst declines since August 11, 2010. The Nasdaq composite index fell 2.33 percent.

We’re coming full circle: The stock market is dropping because corporate earnings are slowing. Corporate earnings are slowing because consumers are pulling back. Consumers are pulling back because they don’t have enough jobs or adequate wages.

The immediate cause of the sell-off was an announcement by ADP Employer Services, a payroll processing firm that estimates employment, that private employers added only 38,000 jobs in May. The economy needs 125,000 new jobs a month just to tread water, given that at least 125,000 people join the potential labor force every month. Simply put, if new hires are in the range of five digits, American consumers will not have enough purchasing power to buy what the private sector can produce. Read on...

The Truth About the American Economy (II):

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