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I'm not sure what the producers of MSNBC's UP with Steve Kornacki felt that Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform's Mattie Duppler was going to add to the debate on this Sunday's show, but after watching her on there, apparently it was to keep the rest of the guests busy debunking the endless string of lies she told during her time on the panel.

During a discussion ranging from what percentage of GDP is needs to be taxed, to the size and scope of government, to whether Americans even know what the federal government spends money on, or how many people realize that President Obama has lowered their taxes, the conversation got a bit contentious when Duppler trotted out the old "because of Obama, government spending is out of control" canard.

After the Center for American Progress' Neera Tanden made the point that the central thesis of Republicans' economic strategy has been tax cuts, and that it has been proven that tax cuts don't produce economic growth, here's Duppler's response.

DUPPLER: That's not the central thesis of the Republican party. It is one of the tenets of the Republican party. (crosstalk) But you also have explosive government growth. You've got government spending that's out of control and that...

JOHNSTON: It's not out of control. […] The government is rapidly shrinking under Obama.

DUPPLER: After he exploded it. After he increased spending by eighty-four percent. I mean, seriously, this is laughable that you're telling me that are just (crosstalk).

JOHNSTON: This would put us into a depression. You want to put us into a depression. (crosstalk).

NADLER: This is the central lie...

DUPPLER: I'm challenging your assertion that the deficit and the size of government is shrinking after Obama and congressional Democrats took spending and the size of government to all time highs.

NADLER: This is the central lie... this is the central lie of our political debate right now... what you just said.

JOHNSTON: Absolutely.

NADLER: The fact is, what happened to our deficit is, after it was cut... after it went up because of the Bush tax cuts and the wars and everything, since Obama took office, remember, the CBO before Obama took office said the 2009 deficit was going to be $1.4 trillion and it was. Why? And it was hugely increased. Why? Because when you get a recession, you get a depression such as we were in, two things happen.

One, revenues plummet, taxes plummet. People aren't working. They don't pay taxes, number one. And so taxes plummeted. And number two, automatic spending on unemployment insurance and on food stamps goes up because more people don't have money to eat with...

JOHNSTON: And Jerry, if you don't have part two, that you did, that's when you get the great depression.

After Duppler continued to insist that from a "small government perspective" government spending is still too high, David Cay Johnston reminded her of just what that philosophy is going to cost us.

JOHNSTON: We are going to be poorer in the future because we are cutting spending on basic research. The cell phones that we all have have grown from government spending in the past. The jet airplanes we fly come from government spending, the computers we use, the math in them, all come from government spending. [...] We need to be spending money on government research, development and education and Republicans want to cut all that.

After Duppler said she wanted to know how we were supposed to fund these things, Tanden pointed out the obvious... paying taxes. Duppler pretended that cutting taxes was not "the central tenet" of the Republican party, but thanks to her group, that's exactly what it's been.

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On this Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi was once again sent out to do interviews for the show, this time in New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. After watching so many of these so-called "tea partiers" who were out there waving signs saying to keep the government's hands off of their Medicare during the health care debate debacle, the responses here were not that surprising.

In the end, none of the people she talked to wanted to have Social Security, Medicare, education, unemployment insurance, hurricane relief or anything else cut to balance the budget. About the only thing they agreed on was cutting Congressional salaries and foreign aid, which as Maher rightfully noted when the segment was over, doesn't do anything to balance the federal budget.

The cognitive dissonance on display was disheartening, but sadly, not unexpected or surprising. Tragically, what was also missing was any meaningful follow up on the fact that Social Security doesn't add a dime to the deficit or about the root causes of what's driving up health care costs and what can be done to help lower the deficit without destroying our social safety nets, which even self proclaimed "tea party" members don't want to see happen when it affects their own lives.

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From this Saturday's The Journal Editorial Report on Fox, host Paul Gigot asks his panel what they expect from President Obama during his second term, and after the initial response from Jason Riley, saying that the president is going to be looking to fund his first term agenda, because "socialized medicine is expensive," fellow panelist Daniel Henninger threw out this stink bomb:

GIGOT: Dan, what about this theory from liberals, which is -- and they're cheering it -- no more mister nice guy. The president is going to take on Republicans. He was way to compromising in the first term -- not that I recognize that president -- but that's the line that they're taking. And so, you know... look, he's going to put them in their place. He's going to demonize them, stigmatize them. Is that what we're going to see? What is that...

HENNINGER: We are going to see it. I mean, the left has been looking for years for an answer to right wing talk radio and they've got one -- the President of the United States. He's like a left wing talk show host.

Uh.... in a word Dan... NO. We've got plenty of "left wing" talk show hosts out there and they're mostly way to the left of President Obama. They went on to complain that President Obama is to blame for making the Republicans look bad and that he's causing them to fight among themselves, as though they needed an ounce of help in that department.

And the Republican health care plan he helped get passed that you all loved until a Democrat proposed it isn't "socialism." These wingnuts just keep pushing that Overton window further and further to the right.

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It appears that Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski isn't the only one digging through C-SPAN's archives for old footage. Kudos to the crew at Up With Chris Hayes for this find which puts on full display Rep. Paul Ryan's complete hypocrisy when it comes to stimulus spending and whether it helps the economy. It appears Etch-A-Sketch Mittens has found himself the perfect running mate, since he's just like him when it comes to flip flopping.

VIDEO: Paul Ryan defended stimulus in 2002, when George W. Bush wanted it:

Long before he became one of the right’s most vocal critics of the idea that government spending could help boost the flagging economy, Rep. Paul Ryan offered a forceful, full-throated defense of stimulus spending — when then-President George W. Bush wanted it in 2002.

Ryan has denounced the 2009 Recovery Act signed by President Obama as “a wasteful spending spree” and “failed neo-Keynesian experiment,” and – as The Huffington Post pointed out this morning — dismissed as “sugar-high economics” the idea that government spending, through measures like payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, can help shore up a faltering economy.

But in 2002, when then-President Bush was seeking a roughly $120 billion package of tax cuts, tax incentives for business and unemployment benefits to jump-start the economy, Ryan offered a vigorous defense of the plan. “What we're trying to accomplish today with the passage of this third stimulus package is to create jobs and help the unemployed,” Ryan said in video that aired today on Up w/ Chris Hayes. The remarks came during a House debate on the measure on Feb. 14, 2002.

Ryan’s comments reveal a strikingly different economic analysis than the one he has become known for in recent years as the “intellectual leader” of the Republican Party and, now, Mitt Romney’s running mate. In 2002, Ryan argued that unemployment would remain at elevated levels even after the economy began to recover, and that aggressive stimulus would be a necessary and effective antidote.

“What we're trying to accomplish here is the recognition of the fact that in recessions, unemployment lags on well after a recovery has taken place,” Ryan said at the time. “We have a lot of laid-off workers, and more layoffs are occurring. And we know, as a historical fact, that even if our economy begins to slowly recover, unemployment is going to linger on and on well after that recovery takes place.”

Ryan’s advocacy of stimulus spending wasn’t limited to Washington, either. When he returned home to face constituents, he used similar language to make the case for the Bush stimulus bill. “You have to spend a little to grow a little,” Ryan told constituents at a town hall in Wisconsin in January 2002, according to the Journal-Times, a local newspaper. “What we're trying to do is stimulate that part of the economy that's on its back." [...]

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Ed Schultz spoke to Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Jonathan Alter about the tentative deal to extend the payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance. When asked why it appears Republicans are finally giving in and willing to pass the measures without demanding offsets, both Schakowsky and Alter noted the obvious; they're looking at their poll numbers and hearing from their constituents and responding to the fact that the electorate is fed up with their obstruction.

Lawmakers reach tentative deal on payroll tax, jobless benefits:

House-Senate talks on renewing a payroll tax cut that delivers about $20 a week to the average worker yielded a tentative agreement Tuesday, with lawmakers hopeful of unveiling the pact Wednesday and sending the measure to President Barack Obama as early as this week.

Under the outlines of the emerging agreement, a 2 percentage-point cut in the Social Security payroll tax would be extended through the end of the year, with the nearly $100 billion cost added to the deficit. Jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed would be renewed as well, with the $30 billion or so cost paid for in part through auctioning broadcast spectrum to wireless companies and requiring federal workers to contribute more toward their pensions.

Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said it was described to lawmakers as a tentative agreement.

The payroll tax cut and renewing jobless benefits were key planks in Obama's jobs program, which was announced in September. The payroll tax cut benefits 160 million Americans and delivers a tax cut of about $20 a week for a typical worker making $50,000 a year. People making a $100,000 salary would get a $2,000 tax cut.

The deal would not only be a win for Obama but would take the payroll tax fight — which put Republicans on the defensive — off the table for the fall election campaign. Read on...

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Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is doubling down on his assertion that Barack Obama is a "food stamp president" by suggesting that the current White House resident doesn't even think "work is good."

During a Fox News debate in South Carolina Monday, moderator Bret Baier lobbed the former House Speaker a softball question, asking if he supported 99 weeks of unemployment benefits. The Georgia Republican is on record saying, "I don’t want to pay people 99 weeks to do nothing."

"The help we ought to give them is to connect them to a business-run training program to acquire the skills to be employable," Gingrich explained. "Ninety-nine weeks is an associate degree."

"It tells you everything you need to know about Barack Obama and the five of us [Republican candidates] that we actually think work is good," he added to the delight of the conservative South Carolina audience.

"And we think unconditional efforts by the best food stamp president in American to maximize dependency is terrible for the future of this country."

Later in the evening, the audience booed moderator Juan Williams for asking if Gingrich had “belittled the poor and racial minorities” by declaring that black Americans should demand jobs, not foodstamps.

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Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich asserted Monday that workers who lose their jobs were being paid by the government for "99 weeks to do nothing."

Speaking to about 200 employees at Insight Technology, a defense contractor in New Hampshire, the former U.S. House Speaker called for funds workers pay into unemployment insurance to be diverted to training programs.

"I am willing to continue unemployment compensation, but I would attach to it a training requirement," the Georgia Republican explained. "So if you sign up for unemployment compensation, you would also sign up for a business to get trained to learn a new skill. Because by definition, the reason you're signing up for unemployment compensation is you're not finding a job at your current skill level."

"Now if you took all the money we spent in the last five years for unemployment compensation, if that had been a worker training fund, you'd have a dramatically better-trained work force. We have thousands of jobs available that people can't fill. You have people over here that want a job, but they don't have the skill. You have jobs over here that requires a skill that's not currently available," he added.

"I don't want to pay people 99 weeks to do nothing."

The former House Speaker was most like referring to a program called "Georgia Works" where companies are provided unemployed trainees for free. The state provides a $240 stipend -- cut back from $600 last fall -- to the trainee each week for up to eight weeks.

"It looks more like work than training," National Employment Law Project deputy director Andrew Stettner said after reviewing the program. "You can’t try someone out and not pay them. It’s not allowed under our nation’s labor laws."

But the idea has enjoyed some level of bipartisan support.

“The Georgia plan sounds pretty interesting,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) told Fox News host Chris Wallace in September. “I think that’s something we are looking at, which is unemployment reform.”

Democratic President Barack Obama has also praised the program.

"There is a smart program in Georgia," Obama said during an August bus tour. "You're essentially earning a salary and getting your foot in the door into that company."

Federal unemployment insurance currently provides up to 99 weeks of benefits, but that would be scaled by to 26 weeks if Congress does not extend the program by Dec. 31.

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You know, I used to have some respect for Jack Cafferty even though I knew back then that we were on primarily opposite ends of the political spectrum because he spoke out against the Bush administration when that wasn't necessarily the most popular thing for a conservative to be doing, but he just lost me completely here. Calling Social Security a "welfare program" is just shameless.

The widows and orphans who receive those benefits do so after a spouse or a parent paid into the system and seniors receive the benefit after paying into it for their entire lives. And unemployment insurance is just that, insurance. It's not welfare. And does Jack really think we should just leave our elderly, the disabled and young mothers and children with no help to pay their medical bills at all? What cost does he think it would be to our society to just leave those people to rot on the streets?

Painting people who receive these benefits as "welfare" recipients paints a picture of a bunch of lazy unemployed people who don't want to work, and just want to sit on their duffs and collect government benefits. Does he think that most of the people receiving these benefits now haven't worked for a living most of their lives and paid into the system? At a time when we've got record unemployment and underemployment and a lot of good, decent, hard working Americans who would like to find jobs and can't, asking a question with this frame is doing nothing but trying to pit one middle or lower class individual in the United States against another and get them to resent each other. It's divide and conquer bulls**t to distract from us from those who have caused our economic problems and they are NOT the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, widows, orphans and young mothers and their children who don't have any health insurance. Shame on you Jack.

Here's his post at The Cafferty File. Thankfully a lot of the answers if you go read his entire comments section were a whole lot better than his question, but sadly a lot of the comments there were from individuals who've bought into the kind of resentment that Cafferty is peddling here.

What does it mean if social welfare benefits make up 1/3 of wages, salaries in U.S.?:

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How would you like to be Gov. Jennifer Granholm and get stuck debating Dick Armey after the way he treated Rachel Maddow after their appearance together on Meet the Press and Joan Walsh on Hardball? I sure as hell don't envy her. For a little reminder of why no woman should ever want to appear on the air with the aptly named Dick Armey, he told Joan Walsh on Hardball "I'm so glad that you could never be my wife because I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day." Then after Rachel Maddow dared to challenge him for calling Medicare "tyranny" on Meet the Press, he insulted her at one of his phony astroturf teabagger rallies held by Americans for Prosperity and called her "some woman named Rachel Maddox" who "has a Ph.D. in something that doesn't matter." What a guy.

Granholm did a pretty good job of beating back teabagger Dick Armey's ridiculous arguments on Social Security and Medicare when Armey and David Gregory would let her get a word in. Armey's pretty good at filibustering for someone who came out of the House and not the Senate. You can't shut him up and he interrupts the other guests at every opportunity, which seems to be standard operating procedure for most Republicans when they go on television.

Americans do not want to see their benefits cut so the rich can keep their Bush tax cuts and to pay back the deficit after the treasury's been looted paying for these wars and tax cuts for the rich.

MR. GREGORY: Talking about your folks, you're talking about tea partiers around the country and the movement that you've written about. One of the arguments that Democrats make about some of the candidates who are supported by the tea party is that they're, frankly, too extreme for the--even the mainstream of the Republican Party. And I want to go through some of the top races and have you respond to that.

REP. ARMEY: Yeah.

MR. GREGORY: Colorado U.S. Senate race, Ken Buck, Republican nominee. He wants to eliminate the Energy and Education Departments, says separation of church and state is too strictly enforced. To Kentucky, Rand Paul, tea party candidate in the Senate race, critical, of course, of the minimum wage law, civil rights law, supports cutting back on unemployment insurance, calls Medicare socialized medicine. Nevada, Sharron Angle, for the Senate again, talks about no adoption for same sex couples, the U.S. should pull out of the U.N., privatize Medicare and Social Security. And finally, in Utah in the Senate race, you've got Mike Lee. He wants to repeal the progressive income tax, supports changing the 14th Amendment of birthright citizenship. If this is the tea party's impact on national politics, there's certainly a lot of Democrats who say too extreme for the mainstream of the political country.

REP. ARMEY: Well, first, first of all, each one of these candidates won a Republican primary as a Republican candidate with a variety of different stresses on different issues. I am not going to take the Democrat Party's characterization of a Republican Party candidate's position on any issue as the gospel truth. I don't know if you've noticed, but politicians say insincere things; and, frankly, I don't quite listen to the Democrats on the candidates. But the voters paid attention to the candidates and made their choice. Now, the Democrats are--they have a guy down in, in South Carolina who wins the primary and, and is then convicted of a felony. They ought to concern themselves with, "What is the quality of our candidates, and can we meet the challenge of trying to race against these candidates?" who are going to beat their person in the, in the fall.

MR. GREGORY: Governor, is this an example of what, what they've called a mainstream political movement, some of these candidates and their views?

GOV. GRANHOLM: Well, you know, no. I think it's far outside the mainstream. In fact, one of the things--you just held up Paul Ryan's, you know, proposal regarding Medicare and regarding Social Security. I think a lot of which you've jumped onto as well. But there was a recent poll out that said that 85 percent of Americans don't want to see Social Security cut to solve the, the deficit. The reality is, you know, as a governor of the state that has had the toughest economic go-over the past eight years, I'm just really interested in what works to create jobs, what works. And the proposals that are coming from these candidates are not proposals that work. This is the laboratory of the states right here, and I can tell you what has worked. What has worked is the government smartly intervening to save the auto industry; smartly, strategically, surgically intervening to invest with the private sector to create, for example, the electric batteries for the vehicles; smartly intervening with the private sector to be able to do the breakthrough technologies that the private sector doesn't have the funds to be able to do. That's what other countries are doing. And we've got to realize that these economic models that just say, "We've got to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut," you know, who's applauding most is China. They're happy that this movement is happening...

MR. GREGORY: But there's...

GOV. GRANHOLM: ...that's going to continue to cut away.

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More compassionate conservatism from Mitch McConnell on CNN's State of the Union. Crowley actually does a pretty good job of pressing him for the reasons the GOP ought to be concerned about how this looks to voters but McConnell doesn't seem to care much. He wants their Bush tax cuts for the rich, which he frames as an increase to stay in place forever, end of story.

I wonder if McConnell is doing any town hall meetings during the upcoming recess. Maybe he can explain to the unemployed in his state to their face why he thinks those tax cuts are more important than making sure some of them don't end up on the street.

CROWLEY: Here with me now to discuss politics, jobless benefits and the Republican's groove is Senator Mitch McConnell. Thank you so much for being here.

MCCONNELL: Glad to be here, Candy.

CROWLEY: I want to play a little bit more about what the president had to say yesterday when he really was slamming Republicans for standing in the way of this extension of unemployment benefits. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: They say we shouldn't provide unemployment insurance because it costs money, so after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CROWLEY: Look, we're talking about $34 billion to extend unemployment to the long term unemployed, to give them more weeks of unemployment benefits. Doesn't he have a point? I mean, why in the world would you choose to take this down? I mean, the deficit's a trillion dollars this year, so for $34 billion that's going to help people with no jobs, you all are standing in the way of it.

MCCONNELL: Well, the budget is over a trillion dollars, too, and somewhere in the course of spending a trillion dollars, we ought to be able to find enough to pay for a program for the unemployed. We're -- we're all for extending unemployment insurance. The question is when are we going to get serious, Candy, about the debt?

We recently passed a $13 trillion cumulative deficit threshold. When are we going to get serious about this? This administration has been on an incredible spending spree.

CROWLEY: I get that point and I understand what you're saying and I think the American people are concerned about the deficit spending. But you all -- when Republicans were in charge six of the eight years that President Bush was here, you were Majority Leader at times during that, you spent on a prescription drug bill that was not paid for that is far more expensive than this unemployment bill is. You had two wars, ongoing wars that were not paid for.

So for you now to stand up and say, well, we're for balancing the budget, and, by the way, you've got to pay for these unemployment benefits, it just seems dissonant to the trials of the American people, particularly those without jobs.

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