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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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Apparently President Obama is now capable of time travel, since wingnut Rep. Marsha Blackburn accused him of harming American Motors, while defending Willard's big lie he keeps telling about Jeep moving all of its production to China.

Congresswoman Accuses Obama Of ‘Harming’ Auto Company That Went Defunct In 1988:

A Republican congresswoman accused the Obama administration of promulgating regulations that are undermining job creation at an auto manufacturer that has been defunct since 1988. She was responding to a question on Monday about Mitt Romney’s dishonest claims regarding Jeep moving its production overseas.

During an appearance on MSNBC, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) dodged a question about Romney’s debunked Jeep claims and instead attacked the Obama administration for issuing regulations that are harming workers at American Motors Corporation, a company once headed by George Romney. AMC was sold to Chrysler during the Ronald Reagan administration and its brands were then discontinued:

CHIRS JENSING (HOST): Let me ask you about some of the things going on on the campaign trail, and there’s a controversy about Mitt Romney telling voters that jeep is going to move production to China. According to the company that’s entirely false. Is he lying about that?

BLACKBURN: Oh, well, I don’t know. I haven’t talked with with the campaign staff about that. I will say this. For workers in the auto industry, across the board, whether it is GM, whether it’s Nissan, whether it’s American Motors, individuals are very concerned about the impact of regulation that the EPA and OSHA and other federal agencies are heaping on our manufacturers.

It seems Romney and his surrogates don't care how low they have to go or whose intelligence they have to insult if they think it will help them win this election. Let's hope this headline from Business Insider is correct on the consequences for that -- Mitt Romney Has Been Telling A Huge Whopper About The Auto Industry, And His Campaign Is Finally Paying For It.

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Apparently the woman who will go down as one of the worst vice presidential picks in recent history, Sarah Palin, thinks that the Obama administration needs her advice about what to do about Joe Biden, after he had wingnuts heads exploding all over the Internet this week. Palin appeared on Greta Van Susteren's show on Fox this Tuesday evening and told the Fox host that President Obama needs to dump Biden after his comments about Republicans wanting to "put y'all back in chains" in regard to deregulating Wall Street.

As Karoli already noted today: No, Wingers. Joe Biden Did Not Make A Racial Gaffe.

And as we all know, anytime you hear a right-winger praising Hillary Clinton, it's faux praise. They hate her with every fiber of their being just as much as they did her husband and as they do President Obama. Any praise heaped on any of them by someone on the right should always be taken with a huge helping of salt.

Later in the interview after Greta voiced her disdain for how terrible Sen. Harry Reid's accusations were on Romney's tax returns, even though we don't know yet whether Reid has a reliable source or not, Palin managed to go from just criticizing Reid to jumping the shark on their other extremist candidates.

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, I do think that, if I were to look at who's been dirtier, I do find that Sen. Harry Reid's sort of anonymous source on the returns (inaudible) didn't prepare and accusing Gov. Romney of killing someone, but I do find that, you know, just beyond the pale in terms of.. they do live in...

PALIN: Name one prominent Republican who even comes close to what, like what Alan Grayson, Harry Reid, Joe Biden come up with and spew to the American public. I can't think of one prominent Republican, who talks the way that they talk and certainly wouldn't get away with the way that they talk.

Yeah right. I can name more than just a few and for starters there would be Jim DeMint, Allen West, Joe Walsh, Michele Bachmann and a list too long to name here. Nothing more than the usual amount of projection going on from Palin here.

It's too bad Greta didn't ask her why she's being passed over for a speaking slot at their convention this year, but somehow that topic never came up.

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As Media Matters reported, Fox's John Stossell went on Fox & Friends to discuss his special Rich Man, Poor Man which aired on both of their networks, and made some dubious claims about what's happened to income growth for those who are living in poverty:

Fox Mangles Data To Claim "The Poor" Are Getting "Richer":

Fox's John Stossel claimed that it's a "myth" that "the poor are getting poorer" and that they are actually getting "richer." In fact, incomes for the bottom fifth have shown almost no growth in recent decades, and the numbers Stossel used to support his argument were cherry-picked.

Incomes At The Bottom Have Shown Almost No Growth In Decades; Stossel Calls It "Getting Richer"

Stossel: "The Rich Have Gotten Richer, But So Have The Poor." From Fox News' Fox & Friends:

STOSSEL: There are just two myths. One is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And the truth is yes, over time the rich have gotten richer, but so have the poor -- 20 percent richer since I was in college. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/24/12]

CBPP: "The Era Of Shared Prosperity Ended In The 1970s." From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report:

Census family income data show that the era of shared prosperity ended in the 1970s and illustrate the divergence in income that has emerged since that time. CBO data allow us to look at what has happened to comprehensive income since 1979 -- both before and after taxes -- and offer a better view of what has happened at the top of the distribution.

As Figure 2 shows, between 1979 and 2007, average income after taxes in the top 1 percent of the distribution rose 277 percent, meaning that it nearly quadrupled. That compares with increases of about 40 percent in the middle 60 percent of the distribution and 18 percent in the bottom fifth.

The report included this graph:

[Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 3/5/12]

Media Matters has a lot more charts and information in their post along with debunking more of what Stossel said on the air.

Here's the promo for Stossel's special which you can watch the very beginning of in the clip above from Fox Business Channel where it originally aired this week: Rich Man, Poor Man:

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I have to say that Rep. Marsha Blackburn is generally one of the more infuriating Republican politicians to watch on television because her usual tactic is to talk over and filibuster whoever the other guest is on with her and run out the clock so they don't get a chance to talk. Rep. Barney Frank was having none of that during his appearance with her on This Week and I was glad to see him call her out for her voting record when it comes to deregulating the financial industries.

Republicans constantly complain about the bailouts and these institutions being 'too big to fail" as Blackburn did here, but in the end, they just want to continue to leave them to their own ends and let the "free market" prevail. Blackburn was very upset with Frank and claimed he was trying to "speak for her" and here's how he handled it:

FRANK: Well, I'm sorry, but she voted against this. This pattern of interruption and filibuster is really not a good way to discuss important issues. She voted for no regulation at all in 2010. They all did.

BLACKBURN: No. No, Barney. You can't speak for me. I didn't speak for you.

FRANK: That was the vote that you took! You voted...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Thank you. I -- I got to go. I got to go.

FRANK: I'm -- I'm quoting your vote. I'm not speaking for you.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Thank you both for your time this morning.

FRANK: I'm quoting your vote.

Good for him. Full transcript of their exchange below the fold.

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After the news that JP Morgan Chase lost $2 billion on high-risk credit derivatives this week, as usual, Sen. Bernie Sanders was one of our few voices of reason out there about what to do with these still too-big-to-fail institutions -- break them up.

From the Senator's press releases: Break Up Big Banks:

J.P. Morgan Chase revealed that its in-house trading operation lost $2 billion in the past six weeks. "The debacle at J.P. Morgan Chase reaffirms my view that the largest six banks in this country, including J.P. Morgan Chase, which have assets equivalent to two-thirds of our GDP, must be broken up. This is important in order to bring more competition into the financial marketplace and to prevent another ‘too-big-to-fail' bailout," Sen. Bernie Sanders said. "At a time when 23 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed, huge financial institutions should not be involved in ‘making wagers or high-stake bets.' They should be investing in the productive economy creating jobs and improving our standard of living."

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Ed Schultz spoke to Sen. Bernie Sanders about the disappointing jobs numbers to come out this week and leave it to Bernie to make sure the conversation was devoid of any spin and to get to the heart of the problem with our economy right now, which is the severe income disparity.

Sanders did not allow Schultz to paint a rosy picture about President Obama signing the rotten piece of "bipartisan" legislation cynically titled the JOBS Act, and pointed out that it's nothing more than just more deregulation of Wall Street. Sanders agreed with Schultz on the fact that after the kind of shape they left the economy in when George W. Bush left office -- where we were purging around 700,000 jobs a month -- and the fact that they've done nothing but obstruct anything the Democrats have tried to get passed which would actually create jobs, such as the transportation bill the Senate passed that's being stalled in the House right now -- hypocritical Republicans have no right to be criticizing President Obama about anything.

And as Sanders pointed out, there was a recent report that came out which points to the real problem with our economy and whether you can claim it's recovering or not, and that's the fact that all of the wealth is being redistributed to the top.

From Sen. Sanders web site -- The rich are different; they get richer:

Source: The Washington Post
By Harold Meyerson
April 2, 2012

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Jon Stewart took a shot at all of those 99 percent of the 1 percent fellow GOP presidential contenders of Mitt Romney who are now terribly upset with his Super PAC ads and calling him out for being a rich guy who's out of touch with the working class.

STEWART: Oh, it's not fair. He's using unlimited money to buy influence. Rigging the system in some way. Interesting. I can't imagine how frustrated and helpless you Newt Gingrich must feel. Hey, how did guys like Mitt Romney come to be anyway? [...]

You're mad at Mitt Romney? But that's like saying... it's like saying Mitt Romney answered the eHarmony ad and now you're saying it's unfair. That it's not what you meant and you don't mean it that much. Mitt Romney is the pure distillation of conservative economic policies. But now that you have to go up against him, now it's unfair? Republicans, you can't say, release the kraken and then when the kraken turns on you, be all like... that's a very scary kraken.

Looks like Bloomberg decided to carry a little water for his fellow one percenters on Wall Street by repeating the zombie lie that Fannie and Freddie caused the subprime housing bubble -- Mayor Bloomberg: ‘It Was Not The Banks That Created The Mortgage Crisis’:

A favorite conservative pastime since the financial crisis of 2008 struck is to try and deflect blame away from Wall Street and its excesses and onto Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and government housing policy. No matter how many times the theory that the government mortgage giants caused the crisis gets debunked, it keeps on coming back to life.

The latest political figure to join this parade was New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), who responded to a question about the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests by saying that the protesters’ grievances are “unfounded,” since “it was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis“:

“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress, who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not so sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have had them without that.

“But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”

As Digby noted, Mayor 1% joins the Limbaugh chorus:

Yeah. Let's not play the blame game. (Well, except we do need to teach the silly serfs --- who took loans from people who were offering them --- a lesson they won't soon forget.) [...]

The key is to ensure that the dizzy bimbos of the press, who worship his alleged "moderation", don't see his endorsement of this toxic rightwing propaganda as if it came down from Mt. Sinai.

I think this is a signal that the 1%ers are getting agitated for real (as opposed to the crocodile tears they shed everyday about being called "fat cats" by their friends in the White House.) Bloomberg has always been one of them, of course, but he's been the designated moderate, put out there to pretend that they give a damn about the peasants. He's joined the Limbaugh crowd with this one.

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Jon Perr and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs already explained today why Rick Perry's flat tax is just a terrible idea. This Tuesday, The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner expressed some similar sentiments on the PBS Newshour, where they had him arguing with The Wall Street Journal's resident hack and flat tax fan, Stephen Moore.

As Kuttner explained, Perry's plan is nothing more than a tax cut for the affluent who are the ones now paying above the 20 percent rate and who of course are going to opt to pay the lower amount, that would nothing to create jobs or simplify the current tax code. Kuttner also went after Moore for doing nothing more than repeating "slogans" rather than actually addressing any of the points he made about the problems with Perry's plan.

As Kuttner also pointed out, Perry's plan would actually make our deficit problems worse, which would of course mean conservatives calling for cuts to Social Security and other government programs that help the working class.

Full transcript below the fold.

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