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Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) on Sunday called out Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) for complaining about drastic cuts in the so-called "sequester" after Republicans forced it by refusing to raise the debt ceiling and risking default for the first time in the nation's history.

"This was a presidential suggestion back in 2011 -- an idea -- and, yet, the president himself hasn't put out any alternative," Cole said during a panel segment on ABC. "Republicans twice in the House have passed legislation to deal with it, once as early as last May, again after the election in December. The Senate has never picked up either of those bills, never offered their own thing."

"Now, we're three weeks out [from the sequester deadline] and folks are worried," he continued. "They ought to be worried. On the other hand, these cuts are going to occur. The real choice here is do you want cuts to be redistributed in other ways, which is the sensible thing to do, or do you want to let this happen?"

Ellison, however, pointed out that Republicans couldn't place all the blame on President Barack Obama after they voted for the sequester created by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

"Well, Tom, the problem with saying that this is the president's idea is you voted for the Budget Control Act, I voted against it," Ellison noted. "We wouldn't ever have been talking about the Budget Control Act but for your party refused to negotiate on the debt ceiling, something that has been routinely increased as the country needed it."

"You used that occasion in 2011 -- August -- to basically say, we're going to default the country's obligations or you're going to give us dramatic spending cuts. That's how we got to the Budget Control Act."

The Minnesota Democrat added that the sequester was projected to increase both unemployment and the deficit.

"It's going to do everything opposite to what your party says they want," he told Cole. "It's going to create uncertainty, it's going to increase the deficit, it's going to increase unemployment, it's going to be a problem."

"We don't have a presidential proposal," Cole opined. "I don't think you speak for the president."

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After watching Ali Velshi fill in on some of CNN's coverage over the holidays on this "fiscal cliff" debacle, I would definitely be happy to see him take Erin Burnett's place on CNN in the evening. He corrected wingnut Rep. Tim Huelskamp on the air this Tuesday and the following evening after the House finally voted to pass the Senate's bill, he didn't let Rep. Tom Cole get away with trying to blame S&P's downgrade of our credit rating on the budget deficit.

After Cole again explained that he was happy with the Republicans passing this deal because they got a lot of what they liked and that they planned on leveraging the debt ceiling to get some of the spending cuts they want, Cole said this:

COLE: We didn't have a downgrade because of the debt ceiling debate. We had it because we weren't dealing with our deficit. This is...

VELSHI: That's not entirely true. (CROSSTALK) No, no, It's not entirely true.

COLE: It actually is. (CROSSTALK)

VELSHI: Congressman, I really enjoy talking to you. I think you're one of the best around. It's just not entirely true.

COLE: Look, you can't have trillion dollar deficits for four consecutive years and have it going forward...

VELSHI: Give me five minutes and I'll pull out S&P's report. I mean, I'm not the guy to have this fight with. I don't know as much about Congress as you do, but I do know about this.

Velshi went on to give him a hard time about the Republicans not being able to get their act together in the House and he's exactly right, that report did not blame the deficit. It blamed the politicians not being able to work together.

When Cole attempted to put most of the blame for the Simpson-Bowles commission going nowhere onto President Obama, Velshi reminded him that their vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan voted against the plan as well. Velshi didn't give Democrats a pass for their part in any of this brinksmanship we've seen going on, but he made sure to let the viewers know we're dealing with a really dysfunctional House right now.

It was nice to at least see the Representative not be allowed to get away with just completely revising history. I'd have been happier after watching this if he wasn't allowed to pretend that it's going to be acceptable behavior for them to continue their hostage taking during this upcoming debt ceiling debate. I've still got my issues with Velshi, mainly due to the fact that's he's on board for austerity measures and cuts to our social safety nets and like so many of them, seems obsessed with the deficit instead of getting Americans back to work. But compared to Burnett, who he's been filling in for, he's a breath of fresh air. It would really be nice to see more of these anchors do what he did here again, which is call out a politician on the spot when they lie on the air.

For a little reminder, here's what that S&P report said about the downgrade:

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Looks like Rep. Tom Cole is still out there taking the hit for Speaker John Boehner and giving him some cover from the "tea party" wingnuts in the House that think compromise of any sort is akin to treason: Key Republican Says Middle Class Tax Cuts Would Pass The House:

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said Sunday that middle income tax cuts would pass the House if brought up.

Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” if he sees growing Republican support for the bill that GOP leaders oppose, he said, “Yeah, honestly I think if it got to the floor, it would carry.”

“I think it would,” said Cole, a deputy majority whip. “Look, that’s my judgment, but I spend a lot of time counting votes and looking around. But this doesn’t say we’re going to raise taxes on anybody, it says OK this group for sure, your taxes aren’t going up. Get that done with, get it over with.”

The remarks seem to undermine Speaker John Boehner’s hand in fiscal cliff negotiations with President Obama. The Speaker’s call for Obama to make concessions in the talks is built on the premise that the president’s plan for avoiding the cliff cannot pass both chambers of Congress.

I don't think he's doing any of this without Boehner's full approval. They want those social safety nets slashed and are backed into a corner on the tax increases and in a bad negotiating position right now. And as Think Progress noted:

Despite their rhetorical support, however, Republican members have yet to sign the discharge petition filed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) that would force the House to vote on the middle-income tax cut extension.

So talk is cheap. They're going to give an inch when they're forced to or when they start hearing from enough of their donors and/or constituents that have finally had a belly full of them.

Transcript below the fold.

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Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Sunday insisted that Republicans opposed raising taxes on the wealthy and supported cutting earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare because they were "the party of big ideas."

"Inside the [Republican] caucus, what people are looking at is how do we solve the system-wide problem," she explained to CNN's Candy Crowley. "And if you're going to talk revenues, you've got to talk cuts, you have to talk reform of your trust funds -- Medicare and Social Security -- and you've got to deal with entitlements."

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), however, advised Republicans to accept President Barack Obama's deal on raising rates on top earners "and just get that off the table" so that taxes would not go up on the other 98 percent of Americans.

"I have a different approach," Blackburn insisted. "The good thing is we are the party of big ideas. We are putting ideas out on the table and saying, 'This is how we solve this, let's talk about it.' Now, what I want to do is make certain no one's taxes go up. Let's look at cleaning up the tax code."

Crowley observed that it would be impossible to reform the tax code before the so-called fiscal cliff kicked in at the end of the year.

"You all lost the election," the CNN host told Blackburn. "Doesn't that put some limitations on what you can ask for here? You lost members of the House, you lost members of the Senate and you lost the White House."

"The president thinks he has momentum, I think he's running on adrenaline from the campaign," the Tennessee Republican replied. "Second thing, we won the House."

"The American people clearly said, 'We don't want our taxes to go up,'" she added. "You can not be practicing escapism and not putting these issues on the table. And it is an imperative to deal with the spending."

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Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma, says that if lawmakers are going to go after U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice over her initial public assessment of the September attack in Benghazi then maybe Congress should also look at how President George W. Bush pushed bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Dan Senor, who worked to spin the Iraq war for the Bush administration as the chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), told a Sunday panel on ABC that Rice deserved to be scrutinized because she was "front and center" as the voice of the Obama administration after the Benghazi attack.

"I spoke with one senator who met with her this week," Senor explained. "The consensus is -- this individual conveyed -- is the meetings did not go well. Benghazi was a serious issue. We can debate whether or not Susan Rice should be blamed for it."

"There is a legitimate concern that she was used five days after the fact to propagate a story that we should have known at the time was not the case," Cole agreed, adding that there were also "serious questions about our own intelligence people."

"We saw President Bush out front defending something wasn't true too," the Oklahoma Republican recalled. "Maybe we should ask those guys some questions too."

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) pointed out that 241 Marines were killed in Lebanon in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan and "we came together and said that this is a national tragedy and blame was not parceled out the way that it is now."

Senor, however, insisted that there was "accountability" after the Marines were killed because Reagan appointed a fact-finding committee to investigate.

"Part of the problem here is in the lead up to the election when Benghazi got a lot of attention, the president said, 'Don't talk about Benghazi. If you do, you're politicizing the issue,'" Senor opined. "So you weren't allowed to -- [former GOP nominee Mitt] Romney and others weren't allowed to talk about it in the political context. Here we are after the election and there's no full airing. We still don't know exactly what happened."

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Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) cast doubt Sunday on the future of the head of the Republican Party following controversial comments about the war in Afghanistan.

At a Thursday fundraiser, RNC Chairman Michael Steele was caught on video saying that the Afghanistan war was a "war of Obama's choosing" and probably a "lost cause."

ABC's Jake Tapper spoke to McCain Sunday about Steele's remarks. "Republicans such as Congressman Tom Cole, William Kristol, Liz Cheney, have said that Michael Steele needs to resign because of those comments. Do you think a chairman of the Republican National Committee can be effective if he thinks that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable as Steele seems to think?" asked Tapper.

"I think those statements are wildly inaccurate, and there's no excuse for them," said McCain.

"The fact is I believe Mr. Steele is going to have to assess if he can still lead the Republican Party as chairman of the Republican National Committee and make an appropriate decision," he said.

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The chairman of the Republican Party suggested last week that the Afghanistan war was a "war of Obama's choosing" but Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) doesn't think that's necessarily a bad thing for Republicans.

At a Republican Party fundraiser Thursday, Chairman Michael Steele told supporters that the war was probably a "lost cause." This caused many hawkish Republicans to question Steele's future as chairman. Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol and Rep. Tom Cole all called for Steele to resign.

Fox News' Major Garrett asked Lieberman Sunday if Steele's remarks "undermined the ability of the Republican Party to effectively join and continue to participate in this debate on Afghanistan."

"No, I think we had a kind of positive boomerang effect here," answered Lieberman.

"There was such a stern reaction from Republican leaders to Michael Steele's comments, which has I say he retracted that I think you now -- I think the Republican Party gives me encouragement to believe they'll take the high road and not make a partisan political fight out of a war in Afghanistan or try to take advantage politically of a war that will get tough," said Lieberman.

"The reaction from some of the leading Republican spokespeople to me is heartening, which is no. We have to win in Afghanistan. It's important to America's security and freedom. If we lose here, if we pull out, it will energize the radical Islamist, extremist groups, the terrorist groups around the world," he said.

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This man is in some serious need of some civics lessons among other things I suspect. From C-SPAN's Washington Journal, a Rand Paul fan from Oklahoma actually calls Arlen Specter, John McCain and Tom Cole "Socialists". How much Glenn Beck does someone have to watch to have your brain fried this badly? It's scary.