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Bill Maher wound up his New Rules segment on this Friday evening's Real Time by going after today's crop of Ayn Rand worshiping Libertarians in a rant where Maher basically said he didn't leave Libertarianism, it left him. As he noted, even though he's expressed support for the philosophy in the past, it was because it "meant he didn't want big government my bedroom, or my medicine chest and especially not on the second drawer of the nightstand on the left side of my bed."

I'm sure he'll have all of the Ron and Rand Paul supporters mad at him after he lumped them in with their fellow Ayn Rand fan, Paul Ryan, for basically taking the movement and turning it into a “creepy obsession with free market capitalism.”

Maher thinks the movement has basically lost its collective mind these days, and I would argue you could say the same for the Republican party as well, which as a whole has adopted these very same "principles" if you want to be generous enough to call them that.

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Hey, what do you know. Mark Shields, the normally hapless faux liberal that The PBS Newshour puts across from Bobo week after week, actually called David Brooks out for his hackery. Republicans just mindlessly repeat these ridiculous claims that big evil government just needs to "get out of the way" and let the private sector get to creating those jobs -- and they're almost never called on it. This was one of those rare times that Brooks had someone actually take him to task for it.

MARK SHIELDS: Getting government out of the way, I love that. That's a great one, after what we have been through in this country with absolutely no control. And we just learned again this week that banks too big to fail are even too big to be reprimanded, controlled by the federal government.

Later in the segment, Brooks attempted to defend his remarks and Shields hit back at him again, this time for his hypocrisy on what is or is not good government spending. Brooks responded by backpedaling so fast, you could see tread marks:

DAVID BROOKS: Well, it sort of doesn't feel like the first year of an administration, like the first few months. It feels kind of exhaustion.

Those of us who -- we have interviews in the White House, interviews in Congress. They have differences, not as big as they think. They have a lot of mythology about the other sides. And so just having these meetings would be a good thing, personal relationships.

And so I think we have begun to see a little change in mode, as I say. Secondly, they have created space for some deals, so the people right now, there are eight senators sitting in Capitol Hill doing immigration. They're making incredible progress, really good progress. And I think that's part of the tune.

And if I could just defend this idea of getting government out of the way, listen, we have got 24 percent of the economy as the government. We're not shrinking into Hong Kong wonderland here. But it's -- without question, just in a cyclical sense, uncertainty about Washington, these fiscal catastrophes, these debt ceiling, middle-of-the-night things, that's had an unnerving effect on investment. And if we could just stop that, that would help the economy.

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Nobel prize winning economist and columnist Paul Krugman sat down the MSNBC's Ed Schultz this Friday evening to discuss the recent madness we've been watching with this budget sequestration, which President Obama signed into law this Friday evening. Once again we find Krugman being one of the few voices of reason who is allowed some air time on our corporate media, discussing the fact that this deficit fetishism we're seeing from our politicians is exactly the wrong conversation we should be having right now.

What we should be talking about first and foremost is getting Americans back to work. It was also good to hear some push back against the constant chatter we're hearing from the Villagers in the media who are continually pushing for Chained CPI, and pretending as though cutting Social Security benefits in exchange for "tax reform" -- a.k.a. lowering taxes on rich people and corporations -- is something anyone should think is acceptable, or "balanced" or that would do a thing to help lower the deficit. It would have been nice to hear either of them say out loud that Social Security does not add to the deficit during this interview, but it was only implied and not clarified for the audience.

Here's more on Krugman's conversation with Schultz via Raw Story: Paul Krugman: Sequester ‘was designed to be stupid’:

“This was designed to be stupid,” Krugman said. “The whole point was, this was supposed to be a doomsday device that would force the [Democratic and Republican] parties to reach an agreement. Of course, they didn’t, and here it goes.”

While the effect of the spending cuts would take time to manifest, Krugman told Schultz, they would definitely be felt by late 2013.

“This is exactly what the doctor did not order,” he said.

While the spending cuts were conceived as a fix for the federal deficit, Krugman said, this was not the time to implement that kind of measure. Instead, he said, the government should be taking advantage of low interest rates and a high number of unemployed construction workers to invest in infrastructure and education.

“What kind of spending would it take to keep us on the track that we’re on right now?” Schultz asked, noting a continued pattern of private sector job growth despite Republican resistance to a new jobs bill since the stimulus package of 2009.

“If we would just stop cutting, the growth would probably keep going,” Krugman answered. “If spending had grown as fast in this recovery as it has in past recoveries, we’d be spending something like $200 billion a year — state, local and federal — more, maybe $300 billion a year more. Maybe $300 billion a year more. We’d have about a million and a half more public sector workers than we do right now, because we’ve been laying them off at [an] unprecedented pace. So, I think $300 billion a year of additional spending would be appropriate and would mean, if we did it, that we would be pretty close to full employment at this point.”

Greg Sargent made the same point in his column this week as well: The Morning Plum: Happy Sequester Day! We’re still stuck in the wrong conversation.:

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Rachel Maddow tore into Mississippi Republicans and their Gov. Phil Bryant, who claim to be "small government" conservatives, for using government regulations to shut down the state's last abortion clinic, regardless of the fact that it's supposed to still be legal in the United States. They all claim to hate those pesky regulations, unless it means using them to target women's reproductive health for ideological reasons.

As she noted, unless something changes, come January, they will have succeeded in essentially making abortion illegal in their state: Mississippi’s Only Abortion Clinic Could Be Forced To Close In January:

Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the only abortion clinic in the entire state of Mississippi — has been fighting to remain open after Republican legislators, aiming to force the clinic to close, passed a restrictive regulation requiring its doctors to secure hospital admitting privileges. A Bush-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked the measure in July to give the clinic’s doctors more time to apply for privileges at area hospitals, but that order expires in early January. And so far, all seven hospitals in the area have denied privileges to the doctors.

The Center for Reproductive Rights filed a motion Wednesday asking a judge to stop the law from being implemented — and forcing the clinic to stop providing abortion care — before January 6, 2013. If it closes, women in Mississippi will no longer have access to abortion in the state: [...]

Hospitals reportedly denied privileges to clinic doctors because the fact that they provide abortion services “is inconsistent with this Hospital’s policies and practices as concerns abortion and, in particular, elective abortions.” Mississippi has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation, as well as the lowest abortion rate.

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Melissa Harris-Perry's new show on MSNBC along with Chris Hayes' Up are generally are some of the most intelligent, well rounded discussions on cable television. That said, I really do not understand why the producers of Perry's show thought bringing in Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie was going to add anything informative to the conversation this Saturday.

It's not as though anything he said here was going to come as a surprise for anyone that's followed him. Typical Libertarian clap-trap was all he had to add to the panel segments. Jonathan Chait did a nice take down of Gillespie and his water carrying for the Koch brothers last year which I'll share a bit of here:

Koch Fiends:

Reason's Nick Gillespie endorses a post from Reddit pointing out that the Koch brothers (who also fund Reason) believe in some things that liberals also believe in:

The KOCH brothers must be stopped. They gave $40K to Scott Walker, the MAX allowed by state law. That's small potatoes compared to the $100+ million they give to other organizations. These organizations will terrify you. If the anti-union thing weren't enough, here are bigger and better reasons to stop the evil Kochs. They are trying to:

1. decriminalize drugs,
2. legalize gay marriage,
3. repeal the Patriot Act,
4. end the police state,
5. cut defense spending.

This is a pretty silly argument. The Koch brothers are right-wing libertarians. They believe in limited government almost across the board, but their energies are devoted to economics in general and policies that benefit them in particular. When the Koch brothers get involved in politics, they support right-wing and Republican causes: [...]

Gillespie's implication is that, if you're horrified by the Bush administration's civil rights record and supportive of gay marriage, the Koch brothers are for you. In fact, they're not. They work very hard to elect Bush and members of Congress who will support his agenda. They support think-tanks that oppose right-wing defense and civil liberties as long as they also support right-wing economic policies.

Another way to put this is that the Kochs will happily put their money behind candidates and intellectuals who agree with their economic agenda but disagree with their social agenda. They will never put their money behind candidates or intellectuals of whom the reverse is true.

In the segment above, Gillespie pulled the Castro card on Harris-Perry when she dared to say that she was disgusted that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin was going to renounce his citizenship rather than pay taxes on his new found earnings since taking their company public and wondered why that was allowed to be legal in America. So of course she's the equivalent of some evil communist in Gillespie's world.

In the next segment, the panel followed up on some of their discussion from earlier in the show on Wall Street and the need to regulate the global financial industries, and Gillespie changed topics suddenly and told the panel he that the problem with Social Security is that it shouldn't exist.

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Rachel Maddow took a look at Scott Brown's record since entering the Senate where he has been called one of Wall Street's favorite Congressmen and for good reason. As she reminded us, Brown's contribution to the Wall Street regulatory overhaul was to make sure that the $19 billion it cost to pay for additional oversight was going to be dumped on the tax payers instead of the financial institutions footing the bill. And now he's got donations flooding in from New York even though he's running for office in Massachusetts.

And of course the other reason Wall Street is opening their wallets for Brown is because he's the only thing standing between Elizabeth Warren and the United States Senate.

Elizabeth Warren called for Jamie Dimon to resign from the New York Fed this week:

Elizabeth Warren called on JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to resign from his post on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's board, citing the need for "responsibility and accountability" in the financial industry.

Dimon, who disclosed a $2 billion loss by the banking giant last week, should "send a signal to the American people that Wall Street bankers get it and to show that they understand the need for responsibility and accountability," Warren said in a statement following Dimon's Sunday appearance on "Meet the Press."

During that interview, Dimon said he "absolutely" believed that the enormous loss would give regulators more ammunition against the banks. Warren latched onto that comment, stating that Dimon's place on the board of directors gave him the power to advise the New York Fed on "management oversight and policy," creating what the Massachusetts Democrat feels is a clear conflict of interest.

"We need to stop the cycle of bankers taking on risky activities, getting bailed out by the taxpayers, then using their army of lobbyists to water down regulations," Warren said. "We need a tough cop on the beat so that no one steals your purse on Main Street or your pension on Wall Street."

You can watch her interview with Rachel below the fold.

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You can always count on Republicans to take their worst qualities and attempt to project them onto the Democrats and President Obama. Marco Rubio could not give Chris Wallace a real answer to his question about which of President Obama's policies are doing harm to small businesses, so instead he resorts to some of the most commonly repeated lies we've been hearing from Republicans on the national debt, tax increases and the health care law.

And he accuses President Obama of waging "class warfare" because he's dared to suggest the rich should pay slightly more in taxes. Someone needs to explain to Rubio what the definition of "class warfare" is, because it is definitely being waged, but it's his side that's waging and winning it.

If Mitt Romney does pick Marco Rubio for a running mate, he'll fit right in with the ticket since Mitt Romney can't stop lying out on the campaign trail either. Here's their exchange and more below the fold on what Wallace let him get away with unchallenged.

WALLACE: When you say that the president's policies make it harder to start a new business or hire people, give me two examples where you think, the Obama policy would make it harder and Romney would make it easier.

RUBIO: Sure. Well, first of all, the president has run up a $5 trillion debt, which creates tremendous worry about the future. People look at that and say, OK, this is a country that's running up massive debts. They are destined for a massive tax increases to pay it off. That scares people from investing in the American economy. And without investment money, how are you going to open a business or grow an existing one.

The second thing is uncertainty about the tax code. You have a president that constantly goes around the country using the tax code as a weapon for class warfare, dividing Americans against each other, constantly looking for -- he thinks the solution to every problem the nation faces is some sort of tax increase on somebody.

The third is a regulatory environment. Just the health care law alone is an endless stream of regulations that scare people. So, if you are a small business person, you are afraid to hire employees because you have no idea how much it's going to cost you to comply with the health care law. Those are just three stark examples that I didn't make them up, that I'm hearing from real people here in Florida that are afraid of hiring people or starting a new business because of things directly attributable to this president and his administration.

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Matt Taibbi sat down with Current TV's Eliot Spitzer to discuss the bipartisan debacle just passed by the Congress and signed by President Obama last week called the JOBS Act and the potential political fallout if this is made into an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign.

Our own Jon Perr has been writing about what a terrible bill this was from the time it was introduced, when Eric Cantor was first pushing it on Fox News. Sadly, as Taibbi and Spitzer pointed out in the segment above, the law is going to effectively repeal about half of the meaningful rules that were put in place to prevent another bubble and all this did was take away what competitive advantage the stock market had in the United States because investors felt they could trust they were being told the truth about the companies they were investing in and their accounting methods.

Matt has more in his recent article at Rolling Stone here -- Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse:

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Chuck Todd really should have just stuck to being a pollster, because ever since Tim Russert brought him on at MSNBC, he really has gone from someone who used to be pretty good at analysis of voter trends and elections for Roll Call and with his regular appearances on C-SPAN, to pretty much just another Villager hack once MSNBC hired him. I remember actually enjoying him sharing some of his insights on election coverage on Washington Journal, before he decided to join the D.C. cocktail circuit with the rest of the Villagers.

Todd seems to have made the move quite easily and unfortunately from someone who used to be more concerned about reporting facts and statistics and trends to the typical inside the beltway type of "reporting" we see from his colleagues Chris Matthews, David Gregory and Andrea Mitchell, among others.

His interview with Rep. Tom Price from this Wednesday is just the latest example of that. Todd was terribly upset with Stephen Colbert for making a "mockery" of his brand of "journalism" but sadly as Nicole noted, Todd's done a good enough job of that all by himself.

He did it again here by letting Price claim that you're going to kill the Confidence Fairies if you raise the capital gains tax and that will somehow lead to more offshoring of jobs.

That you shouldn't tax capital gains because that money has supposedly already been taxed.

That the Community Reinvestment Act and giving loans to poor people somehow caused the housing crisis.

That Republicans care anything about closing loopholes for businesses or doing anything about offshoring our jobs.

That unions are harming our economy or the working class.

That we need to lower the corporate tax rate.

And that we'd be "punishing businesses" if we dared to tax them if they want to repatriate the money they've been hiding offshore to avoid taxes in the United States.

If Chuck Todd considers himself a "journalist" you'd think he'd have bothered to push back a bit more harshly at any one of these lies, but that's not what we got during this interview. Heaven forbid he might lose some access for the next interview with Price or one of his colleagues to potentially keep the ratings up on his show if he dared to call him out for anything he lied about here.

I'm sure the salary is much better for Todd since he made the move to MSNBC from Roll Call. Sadly what he's contributing to the national political dialog for the most part has gone down the sewer while his salary has gone up for adding to the pollution.

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Nothing like a little hyperbole first thing on a Sunday morning from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) when it comes to looking out for the interests of consumers. Republicans don't want a check on the banks period and they're using the excuse of not having any oversight in order to hamstring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau set up by Elizabeth Warren.

Sadly if they were allowed to gain control over it, I have a feeling it would not be to make sure it works in the interest of the consumers, but instead to make sure it doesn't work at all, just as they're doing right now.

Here's Graham with the latest excuse for their continued obstruction for the benefit of the 1 percent on this Sunday's Meet the Press.

MR. GREGORY: Senator Graham, is the issue, as the president argues, income inequality? Or is it something more fundamental in the economy?

SEN. GRAHAM: No...

MR. GREGORY: Is it national decline?

SEN. GRAHAM: I think the issue is that his failure--he's, he's got a failed presidency, and he didn't talk about the things he has done to make America a stronger, better place in a bipartisan fashion. Ronald Reagan sat down with Tip O'Neill to solve the Social Security problem. Bill Clinton sat down with Newt Gingrich to balance the budget and end welfare as we know it. This whole speech is about pitting one group of Americans against the others. And his policies are the biggest threat to the hard-working Americans. If you're a union guy, the pipeline would be good news for you because it would create 20,000 jobs. The NLRB in the hands of this administration almost cost a facility in South Carolina that would have cost 10,000 hard-working South Carolinians their jobs because of union politics. The environmental policies of this administration make it very hard to create a job.

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