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As Susie already noted here, Ed Schultz got the scoop and for the first time, interviewed Scott Prouty, the man who filmed Mitt Romney's now infamous "47 percent" video. And for anyone who did not catch it this Wednesday evening, I really recommend watching the entire hour he talked to Schultz.

I wanted to highlight a bit more of the beginning of the interview here: Revealed: The 'blue collar' bartender who secretly filmed Romney making infamous 47 percent remarks to wealthy donors:

The man who secretly filmed the infamous ’47 percent’ video of Mitt Romney has finally come forward and explained why he decided to wade into the presidential dogfight.

Scott Prouty publicly admitted that he was the bartender who released the footage of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaking at a private fundraiser and he said that the motivating reason behind the move was so that all Americans could see the ‘true’ Romney.

‘Frankly, the people that were there that night, they paid $50,000 per person for a dinner. I grew up in a blue collar area of Boston,’ Mr Prouty said in an interview with MSNBC’s Ed Schultz.

‘There's a lot of people who can’t afford to pay $50,000 for one night, for one dinner… I felt an obligation for all of the people who can't afford to be there.

‘I knew where he came from, he was born with all of the advantages- he was the son of a Governor, a CFO, went to prep school and Harvard- and I don’t think he has any clue what a regular American goes through on a daily basis. The day in, day out struggles of regular Americans --that guy has no idea and I don’t think he will ever have any idea,’ he said. [...]

His attention was piqued when Romney walked into the room and quickly began ordering staff members around. Even though his comments that the workers should speed up their service was likely in jest, that still rubbed Mr Prouty the wrong way.

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In yet another day in upside-down land at Fox "news" good old Mike Huckabee, just after going on a rant about the so-called "fiscal cliff" deal and how that irresponsible government spending was going to destroy our country, brought in wingnut Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) to heap praise on him for supporting a bill that freezes Congressional salaries and to pretend that he and his fellow obstructionist Republicans have actually been governing responsibly.

I guess Duffy finally decided that it wasn't too much of a "struggle" to get by on their $174K a year salary, since this is the same guy that was complaining about how much they were paid not that long ago as Nicole wrote about here: Break Out The Tiny Violins: WI Rep Eager To Cut State Employee Salaries Says "It's A Struggle" To Make It on $174K A Year.

Of course, Huckabee and Duffy's ideas about what constitutes wasteful spending is probably a little different than what most of the readers here would feel is wasteful. They were complaining about how we can't afford the unemployment insurance extension, stimulus spending to get us out of the recession and needing to do something about "entitlements," or in other words, all of our New Deal social safety net programs.

So more austerity for you Americans or your grand children are doomed! I'm not sure if it's humanly possible to have a much more substance free debate on the topics these two were talking about here, but I am sure if it's out there to be found, it will either be on Fox or right-wing radio somewhere.

We've got some of the most irresponsible hostage takers running one of the three branches of our government right now and this clown is going to paint them as though they've got one iota of concern about our economy, the welfare of our citizens other than the wealthiest among us or the real work of actually governing this country and negotiating with someone in good faith. They're ready to burn the place down if they don't get their way and the two of them are pretending like the only thing that would happen if they refuse to let the government pay its bills is a government shut down, when everyone knows the consequences would actually be much more dire.

Even John Boehner admitted that the failure to raise debt ceiling would mean "financial disaster" a couple of years ago on Fox during an interview with Chris Wallace, but the two of them conveniently decided to ignore that here.

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Just when I thought anyone over at Fox could not manage to out do Bill O'Reilly with being more ridiculous with their flame throwing towards Sandra Fluke and her testimony before a Democratic forum that Darrell Issa refused to allow during the House's actual hearing on the contraceptives mandate in the Affordable Care Act, Megyn Kelly manages to one up him with the stupidity.

The gist of the argument here from Kelly and guest Lars Larson is that heaven forbid anyone who attends a university that will eventually earn as high of a salary as Sandra Fluke might possibly be making after she graduates and who can afford to pay her tuition, should have a right to bitch if they're discriminated against with their health care coverage for claims of religious reasons that don't even make an ounce of sense economically for that insurance provider.

Par for the course, it's really obvious that the pundits over at Fox are all reading off of the same playbook and repeating the same talking points. Megyn Kelly might not be the bully that Bill O'Reilly is when she does segments like this, but it doesn't make her any less of a tool for Fox that is obviously just looking out for the interests of the Republican Party and repeating their talking points ad nauseum.

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Bill O'Reilly really is as big of a bully as his fellow He-Man-Woman-Hater Rush Limbaugh. On this Monday night's "Talking Points Memo", O'Reilly was terribly upset that Sandra Fluke didn't want to appear on his show so he could grill her over her "sense of entitlement" because poor old underprivileged Bill is going to be forced to buck up for her free birth control. Except of course he's not, since paying for contraception actually saves money, a fact that O'Reilly has shown himself to be oblivious to ever since he decided to start railing on this issue.

Let me break out the violins for O'Reilly if heaven forbid any woman who knows already that O'Reilly is going to be hostile to her, especially given his record, might be running for friendlier territory to give interviews instead of appearing on his show.

If Fluke had decided to appear with O'Reilly, and if she could have gotten a word in to make her points, which I doubt she'd have been given a chance to adequately, she would have laid him to waste with facts. I don't blame her if she didn't trust him with a ten foot pole to have been potentially allowed that sort of interview to happen.

The odds given his record are that if she was on there live, she'd have been interrupted and talked over and bullied with the subject being changed constantly and then cut off if she finally started letting the Fox viewers be aware of the facts of the debate. If she was allowed a long taped interview where she had a chance to actually rebut him, it would have been edited to fit O'Reilly's agenda.

O'Reilly is also convinced that the Democrats having Fluke slated to testify at all was just some evil plot to help President Obama get reelected and all part of some grand plan that Republicans and I guess Darrell Issa got blind sided by and tricked into participating in. Heaven forbid those evil liberals were allowing Republicans to be shown to be the women hating extremists that they are by tricking them into exposing their sexism by asking this "contraception activist" to testify at a hearing and I guess knowing ahead of time that Issa was going to disrespect her in the way he did.

I thought O'Reilly was over the top last week with this issue. He's apparently decided that hole wasn't quite big enough and it was a good idea to keep digging.

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Paul Ryan admits here that the cuts he's going to propose to our social safety nets, or as he calls them "entitlements" will end up giving the Democrats some fodder for political ads against him in the next election, but claims they'll have to lie and demagogue the issue in order to do so.

I think all they're going to have to do is let people read his plan for themselves and run back the recordings of interviews like this one. If he thinks turning Medicaid into a voucher system and privatizing Social Security are somehow going to "save" them, he's been drinking too much of his own Kool-Aid.

WALLACE: Last question, as you look ahead, and a lot of people would say look, the answer is you're not going to get this budget passed. It's really setting up an issue and a sensible debate for 2012. As you look ahead to the next election, aren't Democrats going to be able to say "Look at Paul Ryan, look at the House Republicans. They want to kill Medicare.
They want to kill Medicaid. They want to gut the programs that you depend on." Aren't you playing into the Democrats hands?

RYAN: We are. We are giving them a political weapon to go against us, but they will have to lie and demagogue to make that a political weapon. Look, we don't change benefits for anybody over the age of 55. We save Medicare. We save Medicaid. We save these entitlement programs. We repair our social safety nets and we get our country a debt free country for our children and grandchildren's generation, and we get jobs. We get economic growth.

They are going to demagogue it and it's that demagoguery that has always prevented political leaders in the past from trying to fix the problem. We can't keep kicking the can down the road. The president has punted. We're not going to follow suit and yes, we will be giving our political advisaries things to use against us in the next election and shame on them if they do it.

Sorry Paul, but I say shame on any of them if they go along with your plan.

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That tea party is so grass rootsy they're holding strategy sessions at The Heritage Foundation. Good thing they're just looking out for the little people. I found C-SPAN's description of this program rather odd:

Tea Party leaders talked about the future of the movement among new members of the 112th Congress. Following their remarks, they responded to audience members' questions.

"Tea Party leaders" huh. And just who are those "leaders"?

• Michael Franc, Vice President, Government Relations, Heritage Foundation
• Ed Morrissey from HotAir
• Billie Tucker First Coast Tea Party
• Byron York, Washington Examiner

I didn't know Franc, Morrissey and York were "Tea Party leaders". The only self-identified "Tea Party" leader who was there, Billie Tucker had this to say about "entitlements".

Q: Now all three of you have mentioned that for true financial reform we need to cut back on entitlements. Is there the motivation and the courage and the desire for the tea party to go into that fight? That's a long hard fight to cut Social Security, food stamps, Medicare, all those programs.

TUCKER: Yes and we've had discussions about that because we know it is a problem. Again, the American people are smart and the tea party members are smart. And they know we cannot talk about, you know, doing away with spending without really looking at the entitlement programs. The word that we do not like in the tea party movement is to say that Social Security is entitlement.

People are sick of that and they want that changed. They paid into a system that was set up by this government, again, sort of like this health care, was not entitlement; we all paid into it. The problem is corruption happened and they didn't do with the money what they were supposed to do with the money. So we're willing to work on that issue, but we're not willing to give it all up, because they screwed it up. Does that make sense?

But when it comes to entitlements for people that are not willing to work, absolutely, we're willing to talk about that as well. Because there are a lot of good people out there that can get to work but they're now being paid... they're on the dole of the government and we can't have that.

So we're willing to negotiate. We're going to take care of the people who paid into the system. I've got a 85 year old mother in law who lives with us. She paid into that system and doggone it she's gonna' get out what she's entitled to. And she's willing to give up a little but not everything for people that are unwilling to work.

Gee, I wonder who she could be talking about here?

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h/t Paddy

I don't think I ever want to cross Anthony Weiner after watching this. He lets the Republicans have it on the House Floor and rightfully so. I feel the same way about the Republicans doing this.

House GOP leaders: 9/11 first responders aid bill 'a massive new entitlement program':

House Republican leadership is advising its members to vote against a bipartisan bill that would, among other things, bolster medical support to Sept. 11 victims.

The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009, sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), would provide medical monitoring to those exposed to toxins at ground zero, bolster treatment at specialized centers for those afflicted by toxins on Sept. 11 and reopen a compensation fund to provide for the economic loss of victims.

And it’s all paid for by closing a tax loophole on foreign companies with U.S. subsidiaries, Democrats said.

But according to Republicans, it’s a job-killing growth of government that would create a new entitlement and waste taxpayer dollars.

The bill, if passed, would reopen the Victims Compensation Fund until 2031 — instead of litigation, victims could try to get money from the fund. Republicans are calling the extension “well beyond what is needed to take care of latent claims,” according to a policy statement from the GOP.

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On C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Tucker Carlson is asked where he think this country is heading, and Carlson, the son of Swanson food fortune heiress Patricia Caroline Swanson and Richard Warner Carlson, would like the peons to prepare to have their entitlements slashed because he claims there aren't enough of his ilk to pay off the debt. Heaven forbid someone might want to tax his inheritance instead.

Carlson: There certainly is a feeling that things are really off track, more off track than any time in my conscious lifetime anyway, and debt is clearly the problem. I mean in two years the national debt will be 100% of GDP and that's unsustainable... that's not a real country, that's not sustainable, you can't have that. That's third world and so clearly there are going to have to be radical adjustments.

There aren't enough rich people in this country to pay down the debt to the extent is needs to be paid down. So we're going to have to turn back, it seems to me our expenditures and that means cutting entitlements; Social Security and particularly Medicare, that will need to be dealt with.

I think the basic assumptions of American life which are the assumptions of, increasingly of Socialism, that government will be there for you and take care of you are going to be reexamined pretty soon. I hope so and the one other thing I would say is the trend in the last thirty years in this country has been away from risk. Risk is bad and anything that is even slightly dangerous is terrifying; smoking, see-saws, you know anything that's going to hurt you is really, really bad.

And the result is the country's gotten grayer and less interesting because the flip side of risk is of course joy and I hope that we're moving back from that and maybe accepting risk as part of life. We all it turns out, I have heard anyway, die in the end and maybe we should just accept that and live with the greater degree of courage and happiness. Maybe be a tiny bit more like Israel it seems to me would be good.