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Republicans have done a whole lot of things to damage their "brand" and still haven't figured out what to do to quit being the "stupid party" after their losses in the last election, but note to Kathleen Parker -- refusing to raise taxes in order to lower the budget deficit is not one of them. The majority of their own constituents don't agree with them on this issue, but that didn't stop Parker from pretending it would damage them on this Sunday's Meet the Press:

GREGORY: What's striking to me is that these issues are still so hard and that the elections didn't seem to solve them completely enough. […] Is that true? I mean, why didn't it?

PARKER: Why didn't it? Because, look, the Republicans cannot give on taxes. They simply can't. It would damage their brand permanently and the President is unwilling... he is insisting on raising revenue through taxes. There's no way for them to have a meeting of the minds when those differences exist and that's not going to change.

Republicans are not worried about damaging their brand on tax increases with anyone other than the members of the one percent who are paying to keep them in office.

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Unlike another former presidential candidate who's showing up on those shows literally every other week because he apparently can't get enough of hearing himself talk in front of the cameras, we found out Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is not quite so fond of them during the hearings on Benghazi this Wednesday.

Apparently Clinton not appearing on the Sunday shows right after the attack in Benghazi was of great concern to wingnut Rep. "You Lie" Joe Wilson and here's how Clinton responded to him when asked about it: Clinton: Going On Sunday Shows ‘Is Not My Favorite Thing To Do’:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday conceded that going on the Sunday morning talk shows "is not my favorite thing to do." After the Benghazi attack in September 2012, UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on the Sunday programs to deliver the U.S. message.

"There are other things I prefer to do on Sunday mornings," Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, adding that she hasn't appeared on a Sunday show in more than a year.

Wilson continued his line of questioning, reading from an op-ed written by a retired foreign service officer, William Boudreau last year. Clinton addressed the majority of the concerns addressed in the column and here's more on one of the many right wing memes being pushed in the article, which is that the White House and their national security team were supposedly watching the attacks in real time. They weren't and this article explains where that lie originated before the right wing blogs and Fox picked it up and ran with it: How a Real News Story Became the 'Obama Watched Them Die' Meme.

Clinton also discussed something I hadn't heard before on the issue of why they did not have Marines guarding the compound.

CLINTON: Because historically, Marine guards are at posts where there is classified information. Marine guards have not historically had the responsibility for protecting personnel. Their job is to protect, and if necessary, destroy classified material. At our compound, there was no classified material.

I have no doubt that no matter what Clinton said during these hearings, it won't satisfy the right who was just itching to take her down and who wanted to turn the tragedy in Benghazi into some grand conspiracy theory in the run up to the presidential election. I don't think the right did themselves any favors putting the likes of Wilson and his counterparts in the House, or flame throwers in the Senate like Ron Johnson and Rand Paul on display for all to see.

I will be surprised if we don't see another bump in her popularity ratings once some new polls come out following this fiasco. I'm not a big fan of Hillary Clinton, but I gained some new respect for her after watching the way she handled herself during these hearings. She's got a lot more patience than I would have had for these Republicans throwing every ounce of mud against the wall to see what would stick over this drummed up fake scandal they've been screaming about for months.

Transcript of the exchange below the fold.

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What is it with these Republicans who just can't stop themselves from coming just a hair shy of calling the President of the United States "uppity?" Last week, Bill-O was calling him "cocky" during his Talking Points Memo segment on Fox. Now we've got Lady McCheney Mary Matalin on Mrs. Greenspan's show calling him too "self-reverential" and "self-righteous" and that he wants Republicans to go along with him and pretend they care about doing their jobs and legislating, he'd better start acting nicer to them.

Andrea Mitchell reminded her that he didn't exactly have much good will from the other side, what with them immediately plotting on how to obstruct everything he tried to do from the day he got elected --during that now-famous meeting with Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich. We also had Mitch McConnell out there just stating openly that his "single most important" goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Matalin feigned ignorance and pretended she had no idea what Mitchell was talking about. She said the GOP leadership didn't attend meetings and the last time she checked, neither Luntz nor Gingrich were in office at the time of that meeting.

Thankfully, Mitchell did remind her that a good deal of the leadership was there, but that didn't stop her from going right back after President Obama and complaining that he wasn't talking nicely enough to those poor sensitive Republicans.

Here's a little reminder of just what went on during that meeting from James Wolcott: The Conspiracy to Commit Legislative Constipation:

In a scene reminiscent of the summit meeting of mob bosses in The Godfather, Republican House leaders were summoned by evil marshmallow and message-crafter Frank Luntz to hash out a strategy to cope with the defeat of their party in 2008 and the election of the newly inaugurated President Obama, according to Robert Draper's just published book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

From a report on Draper's revelation by Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian UK (the bolding is mine):

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

In his book, Draper opens with the heady atmosphere in Washington on the days running up to the inauguration and the day itself, which attracted 1.8 million to the mall to witness Obama being sworn in as America's first black president.

Those numbers contributed to a growing sense of unease among Republicans as much the defeat in the White House race the previous November. The 15 Republicans were in a sombre mood as they gathered at the Caucus Room in Washington, an upscale restaurant where a New York strip steak costs $51.

Attending the dinner were House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. From the Senate were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl. Others present were former House Speaker and future – and failed – presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who organised the dinner and sent out the invitations.

The dinner table was set in a square at Luntz's request so everyone could see one another and talk freely. The session lasted four hours and by the end the sombre mood had lifted: they had conceived a plan. They would take back the House in November 2010, which they did, and use it as a spear to mortally wound Obama in 2011 and take back the Senate and White House in 2012, Draper writes.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," said Keven McCarthy, quoted by Draper. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The Republicans have done that, bringing Washington to a near standstill several times during Obama's first term over debt and other issues.

Their locked-shut buttocks will unclench of course should Mitt Romney be elected, at which point they'll be passing legislation like street hawkers handing out strip-club flyers. Every bill will be named after Reagan or some other sentimental favorite.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've about had it up to here with these Republicans and their supposed hurt feelings as an excuse for obstruction when they've disrespected President Obama and called him every name in the book for years. Matalin's pearl clutching is growing tiresome --to put it mildly.

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After we saw New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and New York Rep. Peter King tear into House Speaker John Boehner for cancelling the vote on Hurricane Sandy relief over the holidays, Jon Stewart took his turn upon returning from vacation this Monday and he got some knocks in at the rest of the House Republicans as well.

Stewart singled out Representatives Paul Ryan and Steven Palazzo for voting against the bill once Boehner finally did bring it to the floor, and as we noted here as did Think Progress, they weren't alone. 67 of them voted against the bill, 37 of whom had previously asked for disaster aid for their home states.

Here's how Stewart concluded his rant:

“This is just a simple down the middle, black and white, cut and dry, warm cup of what would Jesus or any other human being that is not an asshole do, and you blew it,” Stewart remarked.

Ryan said he opposed the disaster relief funds because the legislation contained “pork-barrel spending.”

“It’s one f**king page,” Stewart said, aghast. “It’s two paragraphs that add 9.7 billion to the national flood insurance program and nothing else. There is as much pork in here as in the mini-fridge in the break-room at PETA. There is no pork in this thing!”

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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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Surprise, surprise! It's all sour grapes over at Fox now that it seems Republicans are finally going to allow a clean vote on this so-called “fiscal cliff” bill that had passed the Senate. Leave it to their resident curmudgeon Charles Krauthammer to use the opportunity to paint President Obama as some evil Socialist who just wants to extract money from those hard-working rich people so that the lazy, good-for-nothing moochers out there can have their “entitlements.”

Never mind that he's completely wrong about President Obama being willing to negotiate with Republicans (far too often with the hostage taking we've witnessed), or that Republicans were the ones who originally voted to have these tax cuts expire. And never mind that we've got record income disparity and if we want to pay for a democratic society with a middle class, we should have a progressive tax code where the rich pay their share.

And of course no segment on Fox would be complete without some revisionist history in the form of St. Reagan worship.

BAIER: I mean, if you look at his deficit and debt commission, the Simpson-Bowles commission and the recommendations that came out of there (sorry Bret, but there were no recommendations from that commission, it failed) and what has not been followed through on, now two years ago, it's pretty remarkable.

KRAUTHAMMER: But he's not interested in that. And he's not interested in leading on spending. He's not interested in cutting spending. I think if you look at this in a large view, it's now becoming very clear who he is and what he wants to do. He's now in his second term. He's liberated.

He can be open about what he wants to do. He once said on '08 that Reagan was a historical President in a way that Clinton or Nixon was not. He meant Reagan changed the nature of the country. He got it hooked on low taxes, less government and an increase in inequality, is the way Obama sees it.

He sees his historical role, Obama, is to undo Reaganism and that means, not to cut spending. It means to raise taxes and he let the cat out of the bag on Monday. In that little rally he had, he said to Republicans, you're not getting any spending today and you know that, any spending cuts, but he said that if you think that you can get spending cuts after this in the rest of our negotiations, the answer is no. If you want a cut in spending, you're going to have to increase taxes on the rich.

Remember, he got an increase in revenues now by raising the rates on the rich. Well, now he's going to return, as he said on Monday and get increased revenue from the rich by eliminating deductions, the other way to do it. So he has no interest in anything other than raising the level of taxation, to sort of pre-Reagan levels, so he can support the entitlement state, which is what his presidency is all about. It's a very long view and I think he's attacking it in exactly the right way, if you were of his ideology.

Yeah, that's the ticket. The Kenyan usurper Socialist Communist just wants to beat up on the poor, oppressed rich people and steal all of their money for those lazy, undeserving seniors who would like their Social Security benefits so they don't starve. Krauthammer's still stuck in the '60's if he thinks this sort of talk is going to move most people when you still have so many people hurting from the recession and unemployed. That said, he knows he's speaking to the Fox viewers here, who are probably stuck right there with him.

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It seems the House Republicans finally woke to the fact that their demands to amend the bill that just made it through the Senate to avert the so-called "fiscal cliff" were going nowhere: New Year’s on the ‘cliff’ _ House to vote on Senate bill as GOP backs off demands for changes:

Maneuvered into a political corner, House Republicans abandoned demands for changes in emergency legislation to prevent widespread tax increases and painful across-the-board spending cuts and cleared the way for a final, climactic New Year’s night vote.

The decision capped a day of intense political calculations for conservatives who control the House. They had to weigh their desire to cut spending against the fear that the Senate would refuse to consider any changes they made in the “fiscal cliff” bill, sending it into limbo and saddling Republicans with the blame for a whopping middle class tax increase.

Adding to the GOP discomfort, one Senate Democratic leadership aide said Majority Leader Harry Reid would “absolutely not take up the bill” if the House changed it. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity, citing a requirement to keep internal deliberations private.

The legislation cleared the Senate hours earlier on a lopsided pre-dawn vote of 89-8. Administration officials met at the White House to monitor its progress.

“I do not support the bill. We are looking, though, for the best path forward,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., declared after one meeting of the party’s rank-and-file.

Despite Cantor’s remarks, Speaker John Boehner took no public position on the bill as he sought to negotiate a conclusion to the final crisis of a two-year term full of them. Read on...

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The House Democrats took a page out of Bill Frist's playbook, calling for an up or down vote on the legislation that passed in the Senate on New Years Eve: House Dem Leaders Call For Vote On Senate Fiscal Cliff Deal:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called on GOP leadership to hold a "straight up or down vote" on the Senate-passed legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.

Flanked by Democratic leaders, she told reporters in the Capitol that Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has a duty to permit a floor vote in order to prevent middle class taxes from rising.

And we're hearing noise on the other side about killing the deal with Eric Cantor saying he's against it: Cantor Opposes Fiscal Cliff Deal:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) came out against the fiscal cliff deal passed by the Senate, according to Republican members in attendance at a closed-door meeting of the House GOP conference Tuesday afternoon.

And his fellow House members aren't happy about the spending in the bill: Boehner Aide: GOP Members Concerned With Lack Of Spending Cuts In Senate Bill:

House Republicans expressed "universal concern" with the lack of spending cuts in the fiscal cliff deal passed overwhelmingly by the Senate, said Speaker John Boehner's spokesman Brendan Buck.

"The Speaker and Leader laid out options to the members and listened to feedback," Buck said in an emailed statement. "The lack of spending cuts in the Senate bill was a universal concern amongst members in today’s meeting. Conversations with members will continue throughout the afternoon on the path forward."

They're still saying they may vote on the bill tonight. I wonder how long they're going to obstruct the deal if the markets start opening and reacting to what's happened.

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House Republicans are pushing to amend the "fiscal cliff" deal that just passed in the Senate, but as Rep. Barney Frank told TPM, "if House Republicans amend the Senate bill to include spending cuts, they'll effectively kill the deal.":

"If they do, that'll kill the package," he said after a Democratic caucus meeting.

"I would not predict what these people will try to do because they are in thrall to extremists," Frank said. "But if they amend this I don't know how they think they -- an amendment basically says, our ideology is too rigid and we're not really trying to really [reach a deal]."

Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) office said his members have expressed "universal concern" with the agreement's lack of spending cuts. Rumors on Capitol Hill are that the House GOP is considering amending the legislation and sending it back to the Senate.

House Democratic leaders demanded an up-or-down vote on the Senate deal on Tuesday afternoon.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) declined to discuss whether a GOP amendment to include spending cuts would threaten the bill.

"Look, the country deserves an up or down vote on the compromise bipartisan bill that passed the Senate," he told TPM. "What we're calling for is an up or down vote. Let democracy work its will. ... Let's just take this step by step."

Here's more from The Hill: Senate-passed 'fiscal cliff' agreement in trouble in House:

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During part of CNN's god-awful coverage of these ongoing negotiations over the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and the defense spending sequestration that none of them in Congress like, Your Money host Ali Velshi was co-hosting their live coverage, and he allowed Tenn. Rep. Marsha Blackburn to get away with painting the Democrats as the ones who are being stubborn and unreasonable during these talks, and to lay the blame for no deal being made on the Senate.

She did get some push back from Velshi, but of course it was the sort we see on that network all the time with the false equivalency game, where they're pretending like "both sides" are acting like petulant children for not reaching some deal and painting cuts to Social Security as harmless and a solution to our budget deficits, even though they'll cause a lot of pain for poor seniors and Social Security does not contribute to the deficit.

Velshi asked Blackburn who was at fault for the impasse, after complaining about the markets potentially reacting to the intransigence in Washington, why they were screwing around until the last minute before coming to a deal and Blackburn's response was that the Senate could have prevented this if they'd just passed all of the legislation that the House sent over to Harry Reid's desk. Paperwork! How dare Harry Reid not pick up their paperwork and send it all through?

Never mind the fact that we are supposed to have three co-equal branches of government and that they knew full well they were wasting everyone's time sending bills over they knew had no chance in hell of passing, or that some of them didn't even have support from Republicans in the Senate or that they were at fault for the bills being held up.

Here's more on some of what she cited here: House ‘Reconciliation’ Bill Was Anything But.

Democrats make last-minute stab at tax extenders

Preventing Crushing Defense Cuts

Too his credit, Velshi came back and reminded her that the House couldn't even pass Boehner's "Plan B" debacle that went down in flames just before Christmas. That said, he let her get away again with pretending that herself or the House Republicans have an ounce of interest in bipartisanship or working with anyone and doing anything other than obstructing if they don't get everything they want.

I don't know how many people watch Velshi's show on the weekends, but he's on there every single week, screaming about this impending doom if the Congress fails to work out a deal and then he brings in hacks like Stephen Moore and economists from right wing think tanks to debate about it. Or he's got Norquist on there every time you turn around. You can add him to the list of Villagers who seem intent on painting anyone that doesn't want to inflict some pain on our seniors and the most vulnerable among us as not being Serious, or adults. As Digby noted today: Fiscal cliff notes: The Villagers are stimulated by the prospect of human sacrifice.