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Love that librul media! On CNN's State of the Union, former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao was busily blasting President Barack Obama's "far-left agenda" and claimed that he had not been as willing to work towards bipartisan solutions as Republican senators.

Oddly enough, CNN host Candy Crowley did not think it worth mentioning to viewers that Chao is married to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Wonder why?

During a panel segment on CNN's State of the Union, Crowley noted that Obama had accused Republicans of obstructionism and standing in the way of improving jobs and the economy.

"I don't know how he can say that when he had control of both the houses in the legislative branch, he had control of the White House from 2009 to 2010," Chao opined. "He was able to get sweeping changes through to our economy, which actually, including for example, Obamacare and also Dodd-Frank [financial reform], which are actually having a hampering effect -- they're having a dampening effect on job creation."

"I'm actually rather surprised that in his inaugural address that there was not a more magnanimous spirit shown, that there was not more of a graciousness to focus on reaching out to the other side to work together," she continued. "He uses the words, but if you look at the agenda, it's very much a far left-agenda item... So, I think the president has to focus on job creation. He cannot do everything at one time."

But former Obama adviser Melody Barnes argued that the the president had been focused on the economy and 6.5 million jobs had been created over the last 35 months.

"No one's pretending it isn't a weak recovery," she explained. "That's why, because of its fragility, that we have to focus on not getting the sequester that Republicans seem to be leaning toward, but in fact, targeted investments and targeted cuts."

"And the most important financial issue with the fiscal cliff, the president lent no leadership to the issue," Chao interrupted. "It was the Republicans who reached out to the vice president."

Uh huh.

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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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I guess it's asking too much of Fox Business Channel to let us know that their guest and former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao also happens to be married to the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as she repeats his talking points for him on the current jobs market. As Think Progress noted, she did at least get some push-back from Stuart Varney but at no time during the interview is she asked if her opinion might be biased because of who she is married to.

Although given her background and after being as Jim Hightower put it, the (anti-) Labor Secretary, she'd likely be in lock-step with him even if they weren't married. As a former Bushie who's administration ran the economy off of the cliff and as the current Minority Leader's wife, she's certainly no impartial observer of what's going on now.

Fox Business’ Stuart Varney Shoots Down Former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao’s Negative Jobs Report Spin:

As ThinkProgress noted earlier today, conservatives have sought to rain on Obama’s parade, falsely claiming that the numbers are a “disappointment” because they were “mostly” due to hiring Census workers. On Fox Business today, former Bush labor secretary Elaine Chao attempted to spin the numbers negatively. But host Stuart Varney, who has been cynical about the administration’s economic policies, wouldn’t buy her spin, telling her that “this is not a blip up on a one month basis, there is a trend”. Read on...

As Steve Benen noted it seems his first-Friday-of-every-month jobs chart got the attention of Rachel Maddow. As Think Progress pointed out in their post, it appears to have gotten the attention of Speaker Pelosi as well.

Contrary to Chao's talking points, this does look like a step in the right direction to me as well and more than just a one month "uptick" even though as all of us know, things are still not great on the jobs front. I wonder what this trend would have looked like if the stimulus plan wasn't watered down with Republican tax cuts that Paul Krugman warned against back in January of '09?

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

Let’s hope I’ve got this wrong.

Sadly it looks like he got it right although given the Republicans capacity to lie no matter what the facts are even if the administration had listened to Krugman and the numbers were better, they'd still be saying the stimulus didn't work. Transcript below the fold.

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