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As Adam Peck at Think Progress noted, this is just the latest version of McConnell saying the Republican's top priority should be defeating President Obama rather than governing: Tea Party Senator: ‘I Don’t Think What Washington Needs Is More Compromise’:

For the last two years, Republicans in Congress have achieved new levels of obstructionism never before seen in Washington, passing fewer bills than any other session of Congress since such information began being recorded in the 1940s.

But if voters sent a message to the GOP in November by reelecting President Obama and voting out Republicans in both the Senate and the House, freshman tea party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) seems to have missed the memo. He appeared on Fox News Sunday:

I think the fiscal cliff deal was a lousy one, but moving forward with the debt ceiling and those who believe in limited spending and solving the debt…I don’t think what Washington needs is more compromise, I think what Washington needs is more common sense and more principle.

Cruz has said that he would not have voted for fiscal cliff agreement. Pressed by guest host John Roberts, Cruz extended his no-compromise agenda to everything from new revenue to gun control to the impending nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) as Secretary of Defense.

I remember back when we had someone named Bush as president and the right wing screaming about our politicians being akin to traitors if they didn't want to support his agenda and go invade a couple of countries on the credit card. Now it's just considered business as usual.

Full transcript below the fold. Roberts was so guest hosting terrible he actually made me miss having Chris Wallace on there.

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I don't know who Chuck Todd thought he was kidding on MSNBC's Morning Joe this Thursday, but it seems it might be himself. He started out this segment pretending that if President Obama just reached out to Republicans and gave them more of what they want on this so-called "fiscal cliff" deal to try to get a "grand bargain," then maybe they'd get around to working with him on immigration or gun control.

TODD: There is incentive I think for the President to do whatever it takes, even if it means maybe going further than he ever anticipated in trying to get a big deal, because if he's got to spend all of 2013 dealing with budget impasse after budget impasse, so he can't get it done here in this lame duck. Then it takes January. He's got to use his inaugural and the State of the Union to argue about fiscal and deficit issues and tax issues. Then you have the debt ceiling.

I mean, if that's how the first three or four months play out, when does immigration get done Mike? I'm still trying to figure that out. When does he get to the gun issue which they seem intent on trying to do? When does he start dealing with energy? There's a whole domestic – and by the way, let's remember second term – domestically they don't last four years. You've got about a year, maybe a little bit more before the mid-term election when you can get something done through Congress.

So, if this is – and by the way, the bitterness that is setting in, in the personal relationships between the President and Mitch McConnell, the President and Speaker Boehner – I think make it that much worse.

He turned right around just a little bit later and contradicted himself, saying that the Republican base is never going to allow any compromise with the President and that their voters won't reward it. And he called them "playing with political fire" because the one group of their constituents they do care about, the business community, might finally get sick of them holding the debt ceiling hostage and putting our economy at risk.

I'm not sure where Chuck Todd has been for the last four years, but I've seen absolutely no evidence that any Republicans plan on compromising with the President, ever on any issues. I don't know why he believes if he just caves in on these negotiations and of course throws his base under the bus, which is what you know Todd is talking about here, that he'd get a year out of them to work on anything. If they come forth with any legislation on either immigration or gun control, you know it's going to be something awful that no one on the left will want to vote for, like turning immigrants into some sort of underclass that never has a chance for citizenship or to unionize, or putting more guns in our schools.

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Heaven forbid CBS's Bob Schieffer might want any of their viewers to have to think too hard about who is actually mucking up the works when it comes to the gridlock and gamesmanship being played over the extension of this payroll tax holiday.

Here we go with the Villagers favorite game of "both sides" are equally at fault when it's the Republicans obstructing and making it impossible to govern -- Schieffer: "Dysfunctional" Congress does nothing -- again:

If you ever needed any proof that the congress is totally dysfunctional and unable to do anything - even something it wants - their failure to agree on a payroll tax cut extension is it.

Forget who is at fault. They all are for letting it go this far. Both sides are so determined to undermine the other that they can't even figure out how to do something they both want: Extend the payroll tax cut.

If this gridlock continues, it will be a fitting end to a year in which Congress accomplished absolutely nothing.

Nothing, unless you want to give them credit for not allowing the government to shut down. I give them no credit for that because I think that is the least we should expect of the people we send to Washington. Yet, that was what they spent most of their time arguing about.

What made this latest episode more odious than usual, is that by sending the legislation to a conference committee, House Republicans killed Senate legislation but did not have to go on record as saying they had voted to give people a tax increase. But make no mistake. That is exactly what they have done if this stands.

There is a reason that Congress has a 9-percent approval rating, and today's antics are like putting up a neon sign to remind people of it.

So he admits it's the Republicans who are playing games, but still wants to treat both parties as being equally unreasonable. Way to keep things "fair and balanced" there Bob.

I've got a chart for Bob to take a look at if he thinks all sides are equal with their responsibility for the gridlock in Washington from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones -- Chart of the Day: Republicans and the Filibuster.

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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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While I do not agree with all of the points Fareed Zakaria made during this segment, like comparing protecting our social safety nets to the Republicans rigidity on tax increases and painting those as being somehow equivalent; especially if you're talking about raising the retirement age on Social Security instead of raising the income cap to keep it solvent for the long term. That said, I was glad to see someone point out just how destructive the Republicans use of the filibuster has been as he did here. And I agree with his points on the need to do more spending on education and infrastructure to get our economy growing again.

Transcript via CNN:

ZAKARIA: We've downgraded ourselves. We've demonstrated to ourselves, the world, to global markets that our political system is broken and that we are incapable of implementing sensible public policy.

The actual cut to the 2012 budget, which is the only budget over which this Congress has any control, is $21 billion out of a total of $3 trillion in expenditures. Everything else can and will be changed by future Congresses. What the deal does is once again kick tough choices down the road, this time to a Congressional supercommission that will have to come up with a larger plan to reduce our debt. And it does nothing to spur growth, and, without growth, the debt and the deficit will expand well above current projections.

The manner in which the deal was produced has added poison to an already toxic atmosphere in Washington, making compromise even more difficult. Democrats now feel they need to mirror the Tea Party's tactics because they worked and they are becoming unyielding on any cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare. Republicans, emboldened by the success of their bullying, have closed ranks more solidly around a no-tax agenda, which is great, but the only solution to America's debt dilemma needs to involve both cuts to entitlement programs and higher tax revenues. Congress is more polarized than ever before, and that polarization has resulted in paralysis. More than two years into the Obama administration, hundreds of key positions in government remain vacant for lack of Senate confirmation. The Treasury Department, for example, had to handle the global financial crisis, recession, bank stress tests, the automaker bailouts, as well as its usual duties with about a dozen of its senior positions, almost its entire top management, vacant, nobody in there.

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I was thankful to see Paul Krugman get some air time on PBS's Charlie Rose on this Friday's show, but sadly he got stuck debating David Brooks, who blathered on endlessly in the segment previous to what I clipped here, calling austerity measures reasonable and chastising Republicans for being unwilling to strike a deal with President Obama on spending cuts during this debt ceiling debate debacle.

Krugman did a nice job of shooting down Brooks' talking points defending the astroturf "tea partiers" on the size of government being too large and with pointing out the extreme level of obstructionism we've seen from Republicans since Obama took office. He also expressed his concerns that many of us have with President Obama governing way too far to the right and with being way too accommodating to Republicans while this madness from the other party is going on.

ROSE: There are two questions. One, if you look at the dysfunctionality of government in this case, who's responsible for them?

BROOKS: I don't pretend it's symmetrical... I wouldn't say it's symmetrical here. I do think the president and the Democrats have been much more flexible than the Republicans have been. I say that with a little pain maybe, but that's just simply the case. The president, to his credit has made his allies extremely uncomfortable, and if you were around in Washington yesterday when the entire Senate Democratic caucus erupted in fury, you saw that first hand. And so I think the Republicans are... it's a good short term negotiating strategy, but they are not seizing a deal which should be out there for them.

I'm sort of mystified why if the president is offering a $3 trillion in the reduction of government, why they're not seizing upon that and potentially settling either for nothing or maybe $500 million. I mean, it's just mystifying to me why they don't take this deal.

ROSE: Well, then take a guess. What's the answer?

BROOKS: Well, there are a lot of things. One, they will tell you they go home and nobody wants any more taxes. We ran on that, we pledged it. Second, and I think this part is bipartisan, the hatred is so strong, there is great personal resistance to doing a deal with the devil. And they regard Obama, or Boehner and Cantor as the devil. There's just sort of this emotional resistance to getting in a room, shaking their hand and having your picture taken.

And so even beneath the substance of it there's a great deal of emotional resistance, and when... even when the president makes an offer, which is a pretty good offer for Republicans, they're always looking for the weaknesses in it.

(crosstalk)

KRUGMAN: This is a longer term story. It's not just what's happened during these negotiations. The underlying reason we have dysfunctional politics right now is the radicalization of the Republican Party. I mean, Bruce Bartlett, a Republican, or maybe now an excommunicated Republican just said basically Obama is a moderate conservative. He's basically governing to the right of Richard Nixon. But what's happened is that the Republican Party has gone so far off into an extreme right wing position that we have gridlock because basically one party cannot say yes.

They cannot say yes to anything that might be coming from the other party. In a basic sense they don't accept the legitimacy of government by the other party.

BROOKS: To be fair to them, they would say that we've had government at a certain level of GDP for decade after decades, and roughly the same, and over the last couple of years its leapt up significantly, so if we want to bring it back to that level, to the 2008 level (crosstalk) that's the argument they would make.

KRUGMAN: David, all of that is the recession. All of that is that the ratio of government to GDP is higher because GDP is down and safety net programs; unemployment insurance and Medicaid and a few other programs that respond to hard times are up. If you take that out, there has been no increase in the size of government. That's an entire myth.

BROOKS: There is a long term trend of health care spending. I mean this is, and Paul and I have come back to this a couple of times in this conversation...

KRUGMAN: Right.

BROOKS: Health care spending is the problem.

KRUGMAN: Yeah.

BROOKS: And so there are two wildly different views of how you address that issue. And Republicans look out and see health care spending increasing, swallowing up everything else and they say we need something like the Ryan plan in order to fundamentally reform the structure of the program. And that's not a radically irresponsible position. It's a position you can disagree with, but it doesn't make them loons, I would say.

KRUGMAN: Well... we can go on. We should also point out that we have an enormous amount of obstructionism at all levels. Right? There's a tremendous number of unfilled positions. To a large extent Obama is trying to govern now with a hollow administration because he can't get officials approved. We had my former MIT colleague, Nobel Laureate Peter Diamond rejected for the Federal Reserve Board.

This is a crazy... uhh... this is what is making America ungovernable. It is the extremism of one party. You actually have an extremely accommodating, I would say alarmingly accommodating Democratic president, but a Republican Party that just won't deal.

I found Brooks' doublespeak on these “tea party” Republicans amusing – and I use that term loosely, because there is no “tea party”, it's the extreme right wing of the Republican base – where he had to admit that they're completely incapable of governing because of their deep-seated hatred for President Obama, but he felt compelled to defend them anyway after that admission.

Naturally Brooks played the Villager game of “both sides” are equal in this segment where he tried to pretend that there is some visceral hatred by Democrats of Boehner and Cantor that somehow compares to the right wing literally losing their minds from day one after our first black president got elected, which is just nonsense. When Brooks can find some Democrats out there with posters of Boehner and Cantor as witch doctors with bones through their noses or something similarly crazed and just downright hateful someone let me know, will they?

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CNN's Fareed Zakaria sat down with economists Paul Krugman and Raghuram Rajan, and both men painted a very gloomy picture (to say the least) for what kind of shape the United States economy is going to be in if all we have is gridlock for the next two years, which Krugman believes is inevitable.

Krugman also thinks that we'll be facing at least one government shutdown in the next two years. And of course as Eric Cantor already said today, if that happens the Republicans will try to make political hay out of it and put the blame on President Obama.

Anyone who didn't realize what they were voting for when they put these TeaPublicans back into office are going to be finding out the hard way very soon. And if the Democrats don't start acting like they care about the working class in this country instead of catering to corporate "centrists" and Blue Dogs, they're not going to fare much better. It would be nice to see some Democrats who aren't Republicans with a "D" behind their name trying to get some of these House seats back we lost this time around. I know this blog and Blue America will be doing their part to see that it happens.

Transcript via CNN.

ZAKARIA: Paul Krugman wrote before the election that if Republicans took control of even one House of Congress it would be, quote, "terrible," unquote. Well, of course, that's what happened on Tuesday, so how terrible will it be?

"New York Times" columnist, Nobel Prize winner, Princeton professor Paul Krugman joins me now, along with Raghuram Rajan.

Rajan was the chief economist of the IMF, is now a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and his last book, "Fault Lines" won the "Financial Times'" Business Book of the Year Award. He and Paul Krugman have sparred in blogs and essays, but I believe this is the first time they will do so in person, if they do indeed spar. Paul Krugman, what is going to be so terrible about the Republicans coming to power?

PAUL KRUGMAN, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Mostly - well, first of all, there's almost likely, almost certain to be extreme clashes. I would put pretty heavy odds on - on at least one government shutdown during the next two years. This is going to be - you know, we're looking back fondly on the statesmanship of Newt Gingrich.

But, beyond that, it means no action. It means that we're probably going to see unemployment benefits, extended unemployment benefits, expire at exactly the moment when that would do the most harm. It means no chance of doing anything, really, to tackle the economy's problems.

So we're basically going to be uber -- Herbert Hoover-ing our economic policies at exactly the worst moment for - for the American public.

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I guess George Will forgot about the good old days when all the media pundits were telling Americans that it was unpatriotic if the Democrats didn't concede to George Bush's will because he had a "mandate." Now the obstruction we've seen for the last two years that will worsen after the mid-term elections means that the government is working. Okay George. George Will thinks whatever gets Republicans elected is just fantastic no matter how much harm it does to the country or our economy.

And like the rest of the talking heads in our media cooperation and bipartisanship means Democrats going along with everything Republicans want and ignoring their base.

WILL: Doesn't matter, though, because if Mitch McConnell has 48 senators, he will always have 41 senators for whatever he wants to have 41 for.

Let me just say this. The Republican Party is being told to be the party of no. No more stimulus spending. No cap-and-trade. No card check. None of this other stuff. Gridlock is not an American problem. It's an American achievement. The framers of our Constitution didn't want an efficient government; they wanted a safe government. To which end they filled it with slowing and blocking mechanisms. Three branches of government, two branches of the legislative branch, veto, veto override, supermajority, judicial review.

(CROSSTALK)

ROBERTS: And we added to that the partisan rate so that we not only have institutional gridlock, we have partisan gridlock, which the voters overwhelmingly voted for.

WILL: What I'm saying, Cokie, is that when we have gridlock, the system is working.