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A CNN panel of journalists and other experts on Wednesday called on President Barack Obama to appoint former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as the "secretary of business."

CNN host Wolf Blitzer noted that Obama would need to name new cabinet members after being re-elected and it would be "a pretty good idea" to choose some Republicans.

"Look at what the president did last night in his speech," Republican strategist Alex Castellanos remarked. "He said he was going to call Mitt Romney and talk about how to move forward together. That was incredibly generous and also incredibly smart politically."

Blitzer suggested that Obama could "go bold" and pick someone like Romney as the secretary of Treasury.

"As soon as the president talked about Mitt Romney and calling him up, the social media was abuzz with the idea, what about appointing Mitt Romney as the secretary of Commerce," senior political analyst David Gergen observed. "Wouldn't that be an interesting thing? I think it's probably a non-starter, but it does emphasize, he does need a CEO business person."

"The president suggested the other day maybe creating a new secretary of business," Blitzer agreed.

"What if Mitt Romney was in that cabinet?" host Suzanne Malveaux specualted. "I mean, he brought Hillary Clinton, kept her close to him, by his side. So, you never know. It could be part of the strategy."

During an interview that aired on MSNBC last week, Obama had floated the idea of "one secretary of business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like giving loans to SBA or helping companies with exports."

But Romney immediately slammed the idea as just "another bureaucrat."

"I don't think adding a new chair in his cabinet will help add millions of jobs on Main Street," the Republican candidate told a crowd of supporters on Virginia. "His solution to everything is to add another bureaucrat."

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After going through a montage of political pundits and their predictions for the upcoming election and the fact that the likes of Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris are perpetually wrong with theirs, Stewart had this response to Morris pretending there might be some accountability for the fact that he's never right about anything.

STEWART: But I can show you a prediction that was wrong today. It comes via Dick Morris, king of Wrong Mountain, and it concerns accountability for pundits. [...]

MORRIS: You know, after the election, either I'm going to have to go through a big reckoning, or they are.

STEWART: No. You won't and they won't. Nobody will. Because you're pundits. You live in a reckoning free zone. One thing we learned is that punditry is like musical chairs. The only difference is, in punditry, when the music stops, nobody ever loses their f**king chair. They just keep adding more chairs.

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While I'd be more than happy to see the electoral college go by the wayside and candidates have to campaign in all fifty states instead of only focusing on a few swing states, I'm already really tired of hearing the talking heads in the media talk about what a tragedy a split between the two would be this time around, when there was no concern whatsoever when Bush did the same when the Supreme Court handed him his first presidential election back in 2000.

Here's more on that from Kathleen Geier at The Washington Monthly -- Election 2012: the G.O.P. whining begins:

So it’s not surprisingly that some Republican leaders are already switching gears; in anticipation of a Romney loss, they are already looking for ways to discredit an Obama victory. Here are some of the most popular excuses you’ll be hearing: [...]

— Another popular argument to try to discredit the president: hey, Obama may be “the choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites,” but that’s not Amurka, buddy! Everyone knows that Amurka is white people. ‘Specially white people who are dudes. Oh, and of course, rich people! The notion non-whites, the poor, urban dwellers, and unmarried women are second-class citizens whose votes shouldn’t count is straight-up racism and sexism of the most despicable kind. Obama’s detractors will use prettied up phrases — they’ll say he didn’t win over “middle America” or (as per Atrios) “the heartland,” but what they mean is that the votes of those who don’t have white skin or possess a penis, or a piece of paper that legally connects them to a penis-holder, should not count. This argument is of course shameful and beneath contempt. and anyone who makes it should immediately be called on it.

— Another excuse they are cooking up seems to be the argument that if Obama doesn’t win the popular vote by a large margin, it doesn’t count. Funny, but when one of their own lost the popular vote in 2000 yet was appointed to the presidency by the Supreme Court, they had the chutzpah not only to treat his victory as 100% kosher, but to try to brand it as a mandate to boot! Clearly, though, we’re supposed to flush that recent example down the memory hole.

Here's Bob Schieffer and David Gergen doing just that on this Sunday's Face the Nation:

SCHIEFFER: Let me just say, David Gergen, I think the worst of all worlds would be if one of the candidates won the popular vote and other won the electoral college.

GERGEN: I agree. I agree. That's what's happened very rarely in our history

SCHIEFFER: But do you see any possibility that could happen this time?

GERGEN: Theoretically, absolutely. We're in a situation now, where Romney, in several polls is either tied or ahead in the national vote, yet he's behind in the electoral college. So yes, Charlie Cook thinks there's a one in three chance of doing that.

But I think it goes to this question of governing. To me the question no longer has been not who is going to the win, but can the winner govern? Can the winner get us out of this mess that we're in and get the grand bargain and do the other kind of things that need to ignite this country.

And the fact is, as it's narrowed down, it's gotten so close, I think governing becomes harder. I thought at one point Obama could break out of this thing and win a big victory, in which case he'd have a lot of leverage. And I thought at one point Romney could potentially break out.

Now I think neither person is going -- I don't think the winner is going to have a mandate. I don't think winner is going to have a clear mandate. We're really going to have a country that remains bitterly and closely divided and it's tough to govern.

The reason we've had a country that's "tough to govern" is because of the unprecedented amount of obstruction from Republicans who cared more about making President Obama a one term president than whether they were doing harm to our country and to our economy. We're not going to hear that out of the beltway Villagers who have to pretend that all things and all sides are equal at all times though. The "worst of all worlds" is that we have a media that allows it to continue and lies about how they're conducting their business in order to help dumb down the electorate that doesn't pay enough attention to politics. Sadly, I don't see any hope of that changing in the near future. These media companies need to be broken up yesterday.

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From this Sunday's Face the Nation, Peggy Noonan once again proves herself to be one of the more petty and partisan pundits out there, even though she normally does her best to dress that up with lofty rhetoric which generally amounts to nothing more than empty platitudes.

I wish it were as easy as she pretends here to just ignore or blow off just how damaging to our country the Republicans obstructing just about everything President Obama has tried to get passed since he got elected has been to some meaningful economic recovery in America. I for one am sick and tired of any of them pretending, as the panel did here, that St. Ronnie or any other president could have dealt with this obstructionist, do-nothing, record setting with their refusal to work with the other side Republican House and filibustering minority in the Senate.

Tell those people who are still out of work "boo-hoo" Peggy and see what kind of response you get.

SCHIEFFER: Well, you know, that brings up a point. I mean, you know, this week you saw President Obama say, look, what I have learned is you can't run Washington from the inside, that you have to run it from the outside.

I guess what he meant was you have to bring pressure from the outside. But, you know, one of the main criticisms of President Obama is he's not very good at the inside game. And one reason that we're in the gridlock we're in right now is he is just not good at brokering deals.

NOONAN: Totally true.

CORN: But I disagree with that. I think, if you look at the tax cut deal after the November 2010 elections, that he actually got a lot more than the Republicans, if you look how he got START passed and "Don't ask, Don't tell." There are a lot of stories in which he has gone and done stuff, kind of, more on the inside than on the outside, and it's ticked off his base because they haven't seen this because it has been too much inside Washington. So it, sort of, cuts both ways.

STENGEL: He's nostalgic for the Obama of 2008 when he could run as an outsider. It's always easier to run, even when you're an incumbent, to run as an outsider. And he doesn't have that message anymore. So he lapsed back into that. The problem is he hasn't shown us why he as president needs to be rehired.

NOONAN: When a president of four years says, excuse me, "You can't change Washington from the inside," he is saying "I failed to change Washington from the inside."

He could not negotiate. He was no Reagan sitting down with Tip O'Neill.

GERGEN: Exactly.

NOONAN: If you if you are big, you can make a deal with the other side; you can move it forward. If you can't do that, then I guess you have to talk about how you can't change things.

GERGEN: I want to come back to this. I don't think you can read the Bob Woodward book and conclude that President Obama is good at the inside game. You just can't read it and figure that.

(CROSSTALK)

GERGEN: But anyway, he's a (INAUDIBLE), he has spent a lot of time doing it. But beyond that, you know, the classic book on the presidency was written by Dick Neustadt years ago, it's called "Presidential Power."

His whole argument was it is a combination. You have to be good at the outside game and the inside game. So two together. And President Obama's notion that you can do this from the outside simply doesn't work in contemporary politics.

(CROSSTALK)

SCHIEFFER: Well, have we ever had a president that was really good at both?

GERGEN: We have had occasional presidents who were really good at both.

(CROSSTALK)

GERGEN: Reagan was the best.

NOONAN: Ronald Reagan.

GERGEN: And Clinton was very good at it.

NOONAN: Ronald Reagan, LBJ, up to a certain extent.

(CROSSTALK)

CORN: ... the party Republicans, though. And, you know, you listen so someone like -- you know, look at the book that Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann wrote, and they're not flaming radicals.

And they blame the obstructionism mainly, almost essentially, on the Republicans coming in and saying, we don't care if you are Clinton or Ronald Reagan, we are just going to throw monkey wrenches into the works again and again and again, and see what happens at the next election.

NOONAN: Oh, my goodness. Boo-hoo.

(CROSSTALK)

NOONAN: Boo-hoo.

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Nice job by the DNC with their latest ad, hitting Mitt Romney for his remarks about the 47 percent that don't pay federal income taxes.

Talking to wealthy donors, Mitt Romney disdainfully dismissed half of America

Tweet this: http://bit.ly/T4XV5k
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I'm still waiting for Romney to release his tax returns so we can find out if there were any years he was part of the 47 percent himself.

UPDATE: Here's the video transcript:

VOICEOVER: The Romney campaign is in crisis mode, scrambling to explain a secretly recorded tape where Romney tells wealthy donors nearly half of all Americans see themselves as victims.

BRIAN WILLIAMS (NBC): He talked about citizens who see themselves as victims; pay no income taxes. He went on to say his job was not to worry about those people.

JOHN KING (CNN): What he said in that speech was that all of them don't pay taxes. All of them are victims. All of them want free healthcare--think they're entitled to free housing. He essentially smeared everyone.

GRAPHIC OF DAVID BROOKS EDITORIAL:

It suggest that he really doesn't know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A. Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security and Medicare?

ANCHOR (CNN): If Mr. Romney is so upset that so many Americans are not paying income taxes, does that mean taxes on middle class or lower middle class Americans will go up?

KING (CNN): A lot of Americans of all income stripes have struggled the last few years and the risk for Governor Romney is that it is insulting to them. As a kid, my family was on food stamps for a few years when my dad got sick.

We didn't feel entitled and we weren't victims. And my father was actually pretty embarrassed about the whole thing. But in the end my mother was grateful because she was able to feed her kids.

DAVID GERGEN (with former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer looking on) (CNN): It was almost oafish for someone who has a bank account in Cayman Islands, in order to reduce taxes, to criticize someone in need.

ANNE KORNBLUT (WASHINGTON POST): It's going to reverberate with working class white people who don't pay taxes. It's going to reverberate with women. It's going to reverberate with military families. I don't think there's any group that's not going to in some way be--either hear about what he said or see themselves somehow reflected in it.

GERGEN (CNN): It's not just this comment. It's a pattern. It's a series over time. Americans tend to create a circle in their mind of people inside that circle who would make a credible, comfortable president; someone they could see in that office and they would feel comfortable with. I think this pattern of statements is increasingly placing Mitt Romney outside that circle for a growing number of Americans.

Ad ends with:

Mitt Romney:
Outside the circle.

(h/t FiredUpinCA for the transcript.)

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Leave it to Stephen Colbert to take some of the talking heads on cable news to task in a way that only he can. After pointing out that even Fox's web site featured an article which called Paul Ryan's speech "an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech" and the Romney campaign stating that "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," Colbert made a mockery of some of CNN's coverage which we featured here at C&L.

Thank you Stephen for putting into perspective why allowing these lies to go unchecked or to excuse them is so dangerous. It's really pathetic that we continually have to turn to a fake news show on a comedy channel to debunk the propaganda on the "news" channels.

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More fearmongering on the Super Committee failing to reach a deal to avoid the automatic triggered cuts that will come if the committee can't reach agreement soon. If you knew nothing about what the Republicans latest offer was and were just watching the segment above, you'd think both sides were being terribly unreasonable and wondering why, oh why that silly John Kerry won't give in and let the Republicans have what they want and that the Democrats had been offered some sort of "balanced" deal.

From Dave Dayden over at FDL News Desk, here's what the Republicans were offering today -- Republican’s Latest Super Committee Offer is a 181:1 Ratio of Spending Cuts to Tax Increases.

Whoo boy that's some real balance there. Why won't those silly Democrats agree to that very "serious" plan? I can't imagine. Here's more from DDay.

Republicans apparently just submitted a last-ditch effort to get agreement on the Super Committee. It was a $545 billion proposal, less than half of the minimum requirement to avoid all of the automatic trigger cuts. And it included $3 billion in tax increases.

For those of you scoring at home, that’s a ratio of about 181:1.

Democrats rejected it.

It’s almost getting fun to watch the catfood commission fail so thoroughly. If we’re already submitting proposals of less than half the minimum requirement, then there’s nothing left to fear from this thing. It’s also good news that the unbalanced proposal was rejected, because that probably included a lot of cuts already offered in past proposals by Democrats.

It will be fun to watch Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and David Walker and Maya MacGuineas and all the rest whine and cry next week when this thing gets a real Viking funeral. What they know, but won’t tell you, is that simply doing nothing would lead to $7.1 trillion in deficit reduction. In other words, just offsetting any changes to current law will accomplish about twice as much as their alleged goal for cutting deficits. They won’t tell you this because it comes primarily from letting tax cuts expire. [...]

The point is not to let all of this happen; the point is not even to pay for all the fixes to this, necessarily. The point is to show that the medium term budget is ALREADY in primary balance, and that just relatively following that guide path – even while allowing for targeted measures to improve the economy – is completely sufficient, rather than cutting everyone’s Social Security and Medicare benefits.

181:1, and host Erin Burnett and her panel of Jim Bianco, John Avlon and David Gergen were allowing the viewers of CNN to think the Democrats were being offered anything they should have taken seriously. We need to just let these Bush tax cuts expire and put an end to this saber rattling over austerity measures, but the Villagers in the corporate media are desperate to continue to push the narrative that there are no solutions for this other than inflicting pain on the majority of the electorate rather than ask the richest among us to pay any more taxes.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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It looks like Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus was batting two for two this Wednesday, first appearing on MSNBC and being apparently clueless that anchor Thomas Roberts is an openly gay man and probably unintentionally insulting him and then later appearing on Erin Burnett's Out Front on CNN, and dismissing Newt Gingrich's lobbying efforts that we dare not call lobbying.

I've heard some sorry defenses of people who basically are willing to sell their souls to do anything for a buck over the years, but Jacobus and her defense of Gingrich here was one of the more pitiful I've heard in a long time. All I know is that as any of us who have been following Newt Gringrich for some time now have known, the man has more baggage both personally and politically than most people who don't follow politics can possibly imagine, and all the happy talk from this panel here on how his doublespeak now doesn't matter much is really ridiculous. Even those supposed "tea partiers" that he's been courting aren't going to be happy about the lobbying for Freddie Mac. And that doesn't even begin to touch on the hypocrisy of him calling for Barney Frank among others to be jailed along with other equally outrageous statements he's made when it comes to Frannie and Freddie.

The rest of them on the panel weren't much better and naturally host Erin Burnett didn't question a one of them on whether Newt is actually a viable candidate, even if he is the new GOP's flavor of the week since they all hate Romney from the bottom of their hearts.

I'm not sure how much more out of touch a group might have to be to consider the type of fees Gringrich charged just business as usual and nothing the peons should get upset about when it comes to income disparity in the United States and something that any of them should be concerned about. That's about what I'd expect from a bunch of overpaid CNN contributors who are in the one percent as well. I'm not sure what else Gingrich or a lot of the rest of them have to do to finally make themselves disqualified from being a serious presidential candidate as this GOP primary race goes on, but sadly I think we're about to find out just how low that standard goes.

Full transcript below the fold.

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As House Republicans threaten another government shutdown if they don't get some steep cuts in return for disaster relief and as Democrats look like they're finally standing up to the hostage taking, what do we get from David Gergen, Gloria Borger and host Anderson Cooper on CNN? More false equivalencies and the "both sides" are playing politics game.

For a more honest assessment of what's going on, here's more from TPM -- CRUNCH TIME: House GOP Jams Senate With Government Funding Bill, Partisan Budget Cuts For Disaster Aid:

House Republicans closed ranks just after midnight on Friday morning, and passed legislation to avert a government shutdown at the end of the month. The vote tally was 219-203.

But the bill received almost no Democratic support and faces an uncertain future in the U.S. Senate because Republicans have used the funding bill as a vehicle for disaster relief money, and insisted it be paid for by slashing funds for jobs programs Democrats support. Dems say the GOP legislation provides insufficient aid, and sets a dangerous precedent by requiring those funds to be offset with partisan budget cuts.

"The bill the House will vote on tonight is not an honest effort at compromise," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in a statement anticipating its passage. "It fails to provide the relief that our fellow Americans need as they struggle to rebuild their lives in the wake of floods, wildfires and hurricanes, and it will be rejected by the Senate."

A livid Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) told reporters Thursday night "We're fed up with this...we're sick of it, we're tired of it."

Democrats are pushing Republicans to strip the disaster aid provisions from the bill entirely and pass a clean funding bill, and separate, emergency, Senate-passed legislation to provide relief to disaster-stricken regions across the country. At her weekly press conference Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) pointed to a potential compromise. Read on...

UPDATE: It appears that we had some bipartisan objection to the House's hostage taking in the Senate -- Cram It! Senate Dems And Republicans Reject Holding Disaster Aid Hostage.

Gergen and Borger's hackery from CNN last night below the fold.

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Time for your weekly podcast with The Professional Left, otherwise known as our own Driftglass and Bluegal.

Links for this week's podcast include:

David Gergen reports "offensive" debate behavior.

Lawrence O'Donnell goes full Driftglass

David Corn on liars at the GOP debates.

You can listen to the archives at The Professional Left Podcast and you can make a donation there if you'd like to help keep these going. And you can follow them on Facebook at The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal.

Enjoy the podcast peeps and have a great weekend.