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During this holiday weekend, when so many Americans are relying on our roads and bridges to get us across the country to celebrate with our friends and relatives, Ed Schultz took the Republicans to task for refusing to do something about our crumbling bridges and infrastructure.

As Ed noted, the failure of the I-5 Washington bridge is just a symptom of a much wider problem and one that's only going to continue to get worse if the House Republicans don't finally decide that preventing Americans from being killed while driving on our roads matters more than making President Obama look bad.

As we have discussed here time and again as well, since actually fixing and repairing our infrastructure would put Americans back to work and potentially make President Obama look good, Republicans have been blocking what used to be easily passed bipartisan legislation.

President Obama has repeatedly been calling on Congress to approve more spending on infrastructure and as Schultz and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown discussed in the clip below, if we don't get the GOP to quit obstructing on this matter sometime soon, we may not have much of a country left for the next generation. Their hope is that big business finally gets tired enough of it that they start putting the pressure on the Republicans to do something about it.

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Here's more from David Cay Johnston on how foolish the Republican's refusal to spend money on infrastructure now has been: Pay to Fix America’s Crumbling Infrastructure Now, or Pay More Later:

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Cue the right-wing outrage over this Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher in 10...9...8... for the way he ended his New Rules segment while talking about the dangers of record income disparity in the United States:

MAHER: If you're rich, you should be begging the government to redistribute your wealth, because you know what happens in countries where there's a huge disparity between the rich and the poor? The rich get kidnapped. It happens seventy two times a day in Mexico.

He went onto talk about people resorting to using flame throwers on their cars in South Africa to stop it. He made a lot of really good points about what's happening to our society in the wake of the latest remake of The Great Gatsby being released, and our new Gilded Age which is worse than the last one. I'm sure all those on the right will hear is that he wants to raise your taxes and the clamor will be "Why doesn't he just volunteer to pay more himself?" -- because we all know how well just asking the wealthy to voluntarily pay more taxes, and only a tiny portion of them actually doing it, would work to solve our economic problems and the huge wealth gap we have now.

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Digby flagged this segment from this Sunday's Fareed Zakaria GPS, and as she noted, Zakaria seems to be singing a very different tune now on whether austerity is popular with the masses in Europe than he was four years ago. And as she noted, being wrong never seems to get anyone kicked out of the club once you've gained entry as one of the Very Serious People by our corporate media.

Fareed Zakaria four years ago in a post called The Center Holds: In Britain even pain is popular":

Three weeks ago the new chancellor, 39-year-old Tory George Osborne, presented a budget that promised to get Britain’s fiscal house in order with sharp cuts in spending, coupled with tax increases. It landed in the midst of a heated debate across the industrialized world about how to best get the economy back on track. Osborne and his boss, Prime Minister David Cameron, have come down firmly on one side of this debate, hoping that a major effort to reduce the deficit will reassure bond markets and investors that Britain is a safe and compelling place to put their money.

Leaving aside the economics of this, what struck me as I spent time in Britain last week was the politics of deficit reduction. Having announced major cuts in popular programs, plus hefty tax increases, the Cameron government might be expected to be losing popularity by the day. But in fact the budget was well received by the public—though attacked ferociously from the left—and the governing coalition has actually inched up a bit in the polls.

There are several possible reasons for this. Cameron has played the public role of prime minister exceedingly well, making a pitch-perfect apology for the British Army’s wrongful use of force in Northern Ireland in 1972, and handling himself on the global stage with grace and ease. It’s also true, of course, that the effect of the cuts and taxes have not yet been felt, and when that happens, the government’s poll ratings might plunge. But clearly the honesty of the budget has resonated with voters.

It’s heartening to see a government do something that it must have thought would be deeply unpopular, and then be rewarded by the public...

I love this description of how he reacted to the commentary from his guests. Potted plant indeed:

Zakaria still rails against "entitlements" (which his earlier guest Stephen Haas described as a "cancer" to no objection from anyone) but he hasn't exactly come clean about the disastrous effects of the austerity measures in Europe that "heartened him" so strongly, has he? No, today he sits there like a potted plant while the bill of indictment rolls right over him.

But then he's a card-carrying Very Serious Person which means never having to say you're sorry.

Ain't that the truth? I don't always get a chance to watch all of his show every week, but I don't recall seeing him doing much to rebut that flawed economic study by Reinhart and Rogoff which the right has used to justify austerity as well. Most of our corporate media has done their best to ignore that, even as many of them, as Zakaria was here, have finally been forced to admit that maybe that whole push for austerity isn't working out so well.

Full transcript below the fold.

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As Steve Benen did such a wonderful job of explaining in his post this Monday, Republicans continually claim to be the anti-tax party, but that label should come with an asterisk, because they really don't mind raising taxes on the poor. Those moochers had better get "some skin in the game" or else.

Case in point, one Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) who apparently decided that Mitt Romney didn't piss off quite enough Americans during the last election with his 47 percent remarks.

When Republicans endorse tax increases:

But as those who watch Republican politics closely know, the anti-tax rule needs an asterisk. The party hates tax increases with every fiber of its being, unless you're poor. Luke Johnson flagged this quote from Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.).

"You know, folks mock Mitt Romney for what he said, but he's right. Forty-seven percent of American citizens pay zero in income taxes. It's just true," Woodall said, according to remarks recorded by Georgia Fair Share. [...]

"In fact, the bottom 30% of American citizens profit from the tax code because they're getting refundable tax credits back," Woodall says in the video. "I don't care if you're paying a dollar. You need to believe that you are involved in the process, and you need to have skin in the game."

There are a couple of relevant angles to this. First, Romney's "47 percent" thesis wasn't just the percentage of Americans who don't pay income taxes; it was also about characterizing nearly half the country, including seniors and veterans, as lazy parasites.

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From ABC's This Week, Sen. Jeff Sessions was happy to do a little fearmongering over the effect of more legal immigration on our economy and cites a flawed study from a right-wing anti-immigration group while doing it. Republican Senator Blatantly Lies and Claims More Legal Immigration Is Bad for the Economy :

The conflict within the Republican Party on immigration was fully exposed when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) made the opposite point on Fox News Sunday, “When with we reform our legal immigration system, we get these people that are already here now paying their taxes and not taking anything out of the system, this will be a net positive for the country economically now and in the future.”

Rubio was making the argument to his fellow Republicans that they can get something for nothing by increasing legal immigration, but both liberal and conservative analysts agree that adding more legal immigrants will be good for the economy.

Sen. Sessions was relying on a paper from the anti-immigrant Center For Immigration Studies (CIS). The right wing group arrived at their conclusion that immigration reform would have a net negative impact by not counting the 11 million immigrants that already illegally in the country.

Republicans like Jeff Sessions are preaching to a vanishing choir. Read on...

As Sen. Chuck Schumer rightfully explained during the segment, what's driving down wages are those working in the shadows right now. Republicans like Sessions don't want a path to legalization for these immigrants because they don't want them voting and they like the cheap labor for business. I don't pretend to know what the legislation is going to look like that comes out of the Senate this week, but I do have no doubt that whatever their starting point is, Republicans will do their part to muck up the works and make it worse.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Another Saturday, another segment on Faux News where they're attacking the poor and food stamp recipients, which, other than attacking union members, seems to be one of their favorite pastimes during their so-called "business block," From Cavuto on Business, after Cavuto opens the segment dismayed about all of the people "on the dole" still receiving food stamps and guest Dagen McDowell carrying on about how this is proof that "big government" is out of control, we got this bit of nastiness out of regular, Charles Payne:

CAVUTO: The argument, Charles Payne, is that once you get them, it's hard to stop them, so the benefit is there and it's hard to take the benefit of it away and the more people that are getting them, then it's just exponentially grows.

PAYNE: Yeah, well there's absolutely no doubt about that, that there's this idea that, you know, between the food stamps and the welfare and the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit and the local programs, you know, it gets a little comfortable to be in poverty, you know... and I know people are going to.... listen. No. Listen, I've lived it first hand. I've seen where people don't go to work because they get everything paid for them. The incentive is not there.

Yeah, all of those lucky ducky poor people who are just living the high life out there. Charlie Gasparino attempted to assert himself as somewhat of the voice of reason in the segment and a number of the members of the panel admitted that unemployment numbers are still terrible and people are hurting out there, but it really didn't get much better from there. Ben Stein made the ridiculous remark that "the war on hunger" appears to have been won, ignoring the fact that we've got millions of children in this country who don't know where their next meal is coming from -- and ignoring that lack of access to nutritious food and eating cheap junk that is bad for you instead is contributing to the problem with obesity, not that poor people out there have too much money to spend on food.

What we were treated to here is yet another example of Fox and their war on anti-poverty measures:

Not content to shame food stamps recipients and bully them into silence, Fox News is now targeting efforts to raise awareness of poverty and food insecurity.

The latest front in the Fox News war on anti-poverty measures takes aim at chef Mario Batali as he highlights the difficulties of living on food stamps -- problems that are routinely dismissed on Fox while the network pushes for drastic cuts to nutritional aid and other anti-poverty measures.

h/t Media Matters

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It was nice to see some push back from the constant drone we're treated to by the talking heads in the media, who apparently will not be happy until Democrats agree to inflict some more pain on their constituents and raise Medicare retirement age along with benefit cuts. As Krugman rightfully noted, all the happy talk about politicians sitting down and having dinner together isn't going to resolve the fundamental policy differences between the two parties -- or the fact that one of them wants to completely take down our social safety nets and privatize them.

He called out George Will as well who was demanding that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz explain whether Democrats would agree to raise the Medicare age:

KRUGMAN: Is it a condition of any Republican support that you have to go for really terrible policies? Because raising the Medicare age is a terrible policy. It raises medical costs, it does very little to improve the budget. It introduces a lot of hardship. Means testing in Medicare is a better policy. I don't particularly like it, but it's a better policy.

That's the whole idea. They know it's terrible policy and they want Democrats to do their bidding for them so they can immediately turn around and run ads against them in the mid-term elections. They were cynical enough to do it before and they'll do it again. So it's not just bad policy, it's bad and stupid politics as well.

The conventional wisdom talk from the Bloomberg White House corespondent here wasn't much better. There's nothing "optimistic" about these politicians potentially sticking it to the poor and the elderly when we've got record income disparity in the United States right now.

Full transcript below the fold.

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After previously giving dire warnings about the sequester in a recent op-ed he penned for The Wall Street Journal, House Speaker John Boehner did an about face and told Meet the Press' David Gregory that he wasn't sure if it was going to hurt the economy or not and he told Gregory “I don't think anyone quite understands how it gets resolved." If he really wants to get the country out of this self-inflicted mess, there's a pretty simple way, which is to pass the bill introduced by Rep. John Conyers this week, entitled the Cancel the Sequester Act of 2013.

While they're at it, they could pass the Progressive Caucus' budget rather than insisting on more austerity measures. Instead we're being treated to this Kabuki theatre: Boehner: 'I don't think anyone quite understands' how sequester gets resolved:

In an exclusive interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, House Speaker John Boehner said there is no easy way to stop the budget cuts -- known as the “sequester” – that began taking effect Friday night, and voiced uncertainty over how Washington can solve the overall fiscal problems that have consumed the nation’s politics for more than two years.

In an exclusive interview on Meet the Press, House Speaker John Boehner weighs in the economic impact of the sequester and whether or not it will hurt the country's economy.

“I don't think anyone quite understands how it gets resolved,” Boehner admitted in his interview with NBC’s David Gregory. [...]

But Boehner said, “I don't know whether it's going to hurt the economy or not. I don't think anyone quite understands how the sequester is really going to work.”

The speaker said the House would pass a spending plan this week to fund the government through the end of the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, and that in his conversation with Obama at the White House Friday, the president had agreed “that we should not have any talk of a government shutdown. So I'm hopeful that the House and Senate will be able to work through this.”

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As Digby rightfully noted after taking a look at some of the reporting on this new Simpson-Bowles plan, "we see the folly of asking for a "balanced approach" when you are negotiating with partisan thugs." Once again, we see that Overton window continually being shoved to the right when there are other alternatives out there, like the package offered by the Progressive Caucus in the House. That, of course, will be ignored, because the Villagers don't seem to consider anyone Serious unless they're talking about austerity and inflicting pain on the working class.

Here's more from Greg Sargent at The Plum Line: Simpson-Bowles and the mythical, arbitrary “center”:

Like a pair of aging crooners hoping to recapture past glory with a long-awaited reunion tour, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson released a new version of their deficit reduction plan today. Ezra Klein ferrets out the real news in the plan: It asks for far less in new revenues, and more in spending cuts, than the previous Simpson-Bowles plan did.

Whereas the previous Simpson-Bowles plan contained a roughly even split of revenues and cuts, the new one reduces the revenue “ask” dramatically, with the result that the overall plan is lopsidedly tilted towards cuts. The reason pinpointed by Klein is particularly striking:

This isn’t meant to be an update to Simpson-Bowles 1.0. Rather, it’s meant to be an outline for a new grand bargain. To that end, Simpson and Bowles began with Obama and Boehner’s final offers from the fiscal cliff deal. That helps explain why their tax ask has fallen so far: Obama’s final tax ask was far lower than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles plan, while Boehner’s tilt towards spending cuts was far greater than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles.

In other words, the plan roughly represents the ideological midpoint between the Obama and Boehner fiscal cliff blueprints — which is why the plan is so heavily tilted towards cuts. As Kevin Drum notes, this is particularly odd, given that spending cuts have already been “75 percent of the deficit reduction we’ve done so far.” Drum adds: “this sure makes it hard to take Simpson-Bowles 2.0 seriously as a plan.” Read on ...

And here's more on that from Steve Benen: Meet the new Simpson-Bowles plan:

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After complaining about the fact that the economic recovery in the United States hasn't been as robust as most people would like to see and of course blaming President Obama for the number of people who are still out of work, The O'Reilly Factor's guest host, Laura Ingraham, brought in Fox regular Gary B. Smith and Demos' David Callahan to discuss the topic. To no one's surprise, when Callahan suggested that the wealth being generated by our economy is going to the 1 percent and that stronger labor unions and a higher minimum wage might help to fix that problem, he was immediately pooh-poohed by Ingraham.

INGRAHAM: Stronger labor unions? How do we compete with China, Vietnam, South Korea, India, when we are going to have stronger labor unions that insure that we have more work place regulations, more ways that business has to pay more money to make ends meet? The two things don't add up.

Ingraham went on to complain that it's unfair to blame our obstructionist Congress for any of the problems with our economy. She then allowed Smith to make the claim that unionization doesn't work and that is why we have record low levels of unionization in the United States.

Sorry Gary, but record low numbers of union members is not because unions "don't work" or because people don't want to join unions. It's due to union busting and having the laws stacked against them. Unions have worked just fine for what they're supposed to do, which is collectively bargain for better working conditions and wages for their membership -- and we can thank unions for things like ending child labor, the 40 hour work week, overtime pay, and a long list of other protections for workers too long to list here.

I have a question for Laura Ingraham. If she would like a race to the bottom in the name of staying competitive, maybe she can volunteer to work for that same wage, instead of being paid millions to bloviate on the radio and Fox “News”. If below-minimum wage keeps us competitive with Asia, I say let's start with her salary. What do you think Laura? You ready to work for a few dollars an hour or less?

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Ingraham has a net worth of $45 million and is paid $15 million a year. There's nothing like listening to a millionaire telling the rest of us how horrible it is for business that someone is actually paid a living wage.