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Here we go again with more fearmongering from Fox and crazy-eyes, lying wingnut Rep. Michele Bachmann. The scandal-mongering continues with more attacks on the IRS. Now, not only is the department evil incarnate for going after those poor, poor tea partiers who are upset about delays in getting their tax exempt status -- that none of them deserved in the first place -- now the IRS is literally going to kill people as the "enforcer of Obamacare."

The death panels are back again and Bachmann has suddenly developed a concern about what Americans with pre-existing conditions are going to do to get insurance coverage. It's funny that they only care about that issue now that it involves repealing President Obama's health care law. I would love for someone to explain to me just what the Republicans and the likes of Bachmann have ever done or plan to do to help those who have been denied health insurance. Repealing the health care law with nothing to replace it will only make the matter worse, not better. That doesn't seem to matter much in wingnut world though.

It obviously didn't matter to Bachmann, who bragged to Cashin' In guest host Eric Bolling that they again wasted the taxpayers' time and money with yet another repeal vote this week, and who has convinced herself that after the mid-term elections, President Obama is going to be forced into having to sign a repeal of the law himself after the Senate follows the House's lead and passes it, I guess after half of the country dies from the IRS denying them health care... or something in the fantasy that is going on in Bachmann's mind.

Oh... and expect more hearings. I'm sure America can hardly wait for the clown show we already saw in Issa's committee last week to continue for months or years on end.

As Media Matters recently reported, this is typical of what the viewers over at Fox have been being treated to for some time now: Grasping For New Scandals, Fox Fearmongers That Obamacare Will Allow IRS To Deny Medical Treatment.

Go read the whole post for some debunking of Bachmann and Bolling's fearmongering here.

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Someone must have gotten Sean Hannity's talking points cross wired this week, because for once he wasn't reading straight from the script the Republican leadership sends over to him every morning. He didn't seem to happy when Ann Coulter of all people challenged him after he complained about the Republicans unwillingness to shut down the government and instead pass another stopgap measure to keep the government funded.

Despite Hannity's apparent belief that the entire country hates President Obama as much as he does and that opposing everything he does is somehow a good governing philosophy, most of the country would not look kindly on Republicans for this sort of brinksmanship.

Coulter Clashes With Hannity Over The GOP: ‘Passion And Principle Is Great, But You Need To Win Elections’:

Sean Hannity tonight said Congress should not have passed a continuing resolution on the budget earlier today, arguing that the GOP needs to take a stand if it is going to successfully repeal Obamacare. Ann Coulter disagreed vehemently with Hannity, saying that the Republican party needs to prioritize winning elections over “passion and principle” until they have clear majorities in both the House and Senate. [...]

Coulter argued that the government shutdown under Bill Clinton actually hurt Republicans, but Hannity shot back by saying the GOP held onto the House after it. She rolled her eyes at the idea of shutting down the government just to spite the president, saying that the party runs the risk of looking “impotent.” Hannity said that once Obamacare is fully implemented, it will be even harder for the GOP to fight for repeal. Coulter agreed that the health care law is horrible, but said the GOP needs to win in 2014 and 2016 if it wants to be in a better position to deal with it.

Hannity argued that “the single best thing” the Republican party can do to energize the base is to “take a stand against Obama,” citing the public response to Rand Paul over his drone filibuster. Coulter said that was more a consequence of the media happening to be in agreement with a Republican on something, though she admitted she personally loves drones.

Yeah, that nonexistent liberal media that's always beating up on Republicans. The only "principle" that the Republicans actually care about is not raising taxes on rich people and they don't care about deficits until there's a Democrat in the White House. Partial transcript below the fold.

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It seems House Minority Leader Eric Cantor, like his cohort John Boehner, is still living in fantasy-land when it comes to their ability to "repeal" the Affordable Care Act. Here he is on Fox this Monday, saying he wants "Obamacare" to be "on the table" during the upcoming deft and deficit negotiations.

Republican Leader Wants Deficit-Reducing Obamacare ‘On The Table’ In Debt Talks:

Echoing House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) recent op-ed calling for a repeal of Obamacare through “oversight,” Cantor claimed that the law is a bloated entitlement and burden on the federal deficit that must be on the table during budget talks:

BILL HEMMER (HOST): In these negotiations, is Obamacare being negotiated?

CANTOR: If the president is serious about joining us and fixing the problem, he ought to be putting Obamacare on the table. There is no question in my mind, that is the largest expansion of government programs that we’ve seen.

HEMMER: Can you say at the moment that that is being talked about?

CANTOR: All I can say is that the president has got to get serious and the Speaker is correct, that Obamacare is such an expansion of government spending and involvement in folks’ lives it ought to be on the table.

HEMMER: You wonder what he is willing to concede on that.

While Republicans have been full-throated in parroting claims that Obamacare is not fiscally viable, the fact is that the health reform law actually reduces the deficit by billions in the next decade and by over $1 trillion in the decade after that, and repealing Obamacare would consequently increase the national debt while taking away Americans’ health benefits.

As the post at Think Progress also noted, Cantor is wrong about the law's support which has been gaining in popularity in recent months.

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Ezra Klein took a shot at John Boehner and the Republicans for pretending that they can still repeal Obamacare through the congressional oversight process. As ridiculous as that assertion is, that doesn't mean they're not going to do their best to still attempt to chip away at it where possible, but at this point, pretending that they can use the oversight process to somehow repeal the law, is just ludicrous.

After seeming to come to his senses and admitting that "Obamacare is the law of the land" Boehner quickly changed course and penned an op-ed for the Cincinnati Enquirer, arguing that the law "should be on the table for cuts in a deficit reduction deal." The White House shot that down pretty quickly, but as Klein's fellow contributor at The Washington Post wrote this week, you could still see tweaks to the law which the Democrats might go along with.

And as Klein noted, Boehner is up against the insurers and pharmaceutical companies who are now working with liberal advocacy groups, who both want to see as many Americans insured as possible for varying reasons. One wants more customers and the other wants to see as many people as possible have access to affordable health care.

Rough transcript below the fold.

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More silliness from the gang that couldn't shoot straight. One assumes that because of the holiday they'll think no one will notice their bizarre messaging inconsistencies.

(CBS News) Two days after his top adviser insisted otherwise, Mitt Romney on Wednesday told CBS News chief political correspondent Jan Crawford that President Obama's individual mandate - upheld last week by the Supreme Court - is "a tax."

"The Supreme Court has spoken, and while I agreed with the dissent, that's taken over by the fact that the majority of the court said it's a tax, and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There's no way around that," the presumptive GOP presidential nominee told Crawford in an exclusive interview, referring to the court's 5-4 ruling that largely upheld the president's signature health care law, with the individual mandate as a tax.

"I said that I agreed with the dissent, and the dissent made it very clear that they felt it was unconstitutional," Romney continued. "But the dissent lost - it's in the minority."

The individual mandate is uniquely problematic for Romney, whose health care legislation as Massachusetts governor also included a mandate. But as an anti-tax increase candidate, Romney has relied on the argument that at the state level, governors can tax on mandate under "police powers" - a fact that Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts noted in his opinion.

Still, Romney's remarks contradict a backpedaling maneuver Monday by his senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom. After the campaign had initially hopped aboard with critics saying the court's ruling indicated the health care law is a massive tax increase on Americans, Fehrnstrom - no doubt eyeing potential backlash relating to Romney's own past mandate - told MSNBC that Romney "agreed with the dissent written by Justice Scalia which very clearly stated that the mandate was not a tax."

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Looks like someone's having a little trouble keeping their talking points straight. RNC Chairman Contradicts Romney Camp, Says Mandate Is A Tax:

The Romney campaign has been taking pains to emphasize they believe the individual mandate is not a tax. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus didn’t get that memo.

On CNN’s “Starting Point” Tuesday morning, Priebus said that the position of both the RNC and the Romney campaign is that the mandate is, in fact, a tax.

“Our position is the same as Mitt Romney’s position,” Priebus said. “It’s a tax.”

Priebus said that while he disagreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the health care law, the decision defined the provision requiring people to either purchase insurance or pay a fine as a tax. “It’s a tax, and the reason why it’s a tax is because the Supreme Court, No. 1, ruled it was a tax and No. 2, it’s what Barack Obama’s lawyer argued before the Supreme Court,” Priebus said.

The only problem: Priebus’s assessment, though he framed it as the joint belief of the RNC and the Romney campaign, is directly at odds with Romney’s recent statements.

In a rare agreement between the two campaigns, the Romney camp has shied from calling the mandate a tax because doing so would imply that Romney, too, created a tax in Massachusetts under his health care reform plan. “The governor believes what we put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty and he disagrees with the court’s ruling that it was a tax,” senior Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said Monday on MSNBC. Fehrnstrom said it was “correct” that Romney and President Obama agree on the issue.

Here's more from our regular commenter Mugsy on why the Republicans are so desperate to call it a tax and why it's not: Sorry Right Wingers, the Health Care Penalty is NOT a “Tax”. Roberts says so. (Updated with video)

Transcript of Priebus' exchange on CNN below the fold.

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Given the fact that Mitt Romney passed basically the same plan as Governor of Massachusetts and is desperately trying to ignore that now, and given that the individual provisions in the plan for the most part are more popular than the polling on the Affordable Care Act as a whole, I don't understand how anyone could believe that it's beneficial for President Obama to ignore the law rather than campaigning on it.

But that's what we got from Savannah Guthrie on this Sunday's Meet the Press along with her repeating the Republicans' talking point that Romney can now campaign on Obama being a big tax and spend liberal and claim the administration "raised taxes, a national healthcare tax." Never mind that the penalties in Mitt Romney's plan were harsher than the fees for the insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act and that it's not a tax, it's a penalty regardless of whether the IRS is collecting the money or not.

This is good for Mitt Romney if our media allows it to be and this is the kind of "reporting" we get on the matter, where the politics and who said what matters more than the substance of the arguments, which campaign is lying constantly and if they're not going to explain to Americans just what is in the new law instead of spending endless hours debating the politics around it.

The Obama campaign could be doing a better job of explaining to the public what's in the law and getting some better surrogates out there on a regular basis doing just that, but the media has utterly fallen down on their jobs when it comes to properly explaining what the Affordable Care Act does and does not do. Gregory and Guthrie just gave us another typical example of that here.

If Republicans are going to campaign on repealing the law, the media should explain to the public what exactly it is they're campaigning against and be specific, and make them have to answer for it.

Transcript below the fold.

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I'm not sure what "liberals" Washington Post columnist Charles Lane was talking about on this week's Fox News Sunday when he said this, but I've got a few words for his assumptions about how "liberals" are going to have to act if Supreme Court Justice John Roberts overturns part of the Voting Rights Act or affirmative action and that's "I don't think so pal."

LANE: What he has done in his brilliant opinion is to sacrifice a pawn, called the individual mandate and put the entire Great Society in check. And he has done that by getting two liberal justices to agree with him in a seven to two ruling that there are serious limitations on the federal government's ability to use its spending power to get the states to cooperate in welfare and education programs, which is really how everything works, or a lot of things work including education, Medicaid, etc.

And he has done that and gotten liberals to applaud him for it, so that now, next term when Voting Rights Act Section 5 and affirmative action in colleges come up before the court as they're going to and he votes with the other four conservatives to strike them down, all those liberals who might otherwise complain will now have to acknowledge that this fair-minded statesman, John Roberts, was involved in that decision.

This is a man of great brilliance and all those conservatives who are griping about this ruling need to give it a second thought.

Here's what most liberals still think of John Roberts, no matter how he ruled on this insurance friendly, Republican health care law he just upheld: 10 Ways John Roberts Is Still A Conservative’s Best Friend.

And calling someone ruling to keep "the Great Society in check" "brilliant" has to be one of the most crass things I've heard come out of anyone's mouth in a while now.

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We all knew the talking heads over at Fox weren't going to react well after the Supreme Court upheld the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. On this Thursday evening's On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Caribou Barbie was given lots of fact-free air time to lie freely about the decision and what's supposedly in the health care law.

As Think Progress noted: Taxes Are The New Death Panels: Exposing The Latest Lie About Obamacare:

Republicans are responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the individual mandate by constructing a new “death panels”-like lie. The law, they argue, imposes a burdensome tax on millions of middle class families who will have to pay a penalty for not purchasing health care coverage by 2014. The line originates in the majority’s decision, which found that Congress has the authority to require individuals to buy coverage under its taxing power, but it doesn’t mean what the Republicans are suggesting. The truth is that the penalty for not buying insurance — $695 or 2.5 percent of household income — is well in line with other policies that are designed to encourage and promote a particular kind of economic behavior.

Someone needs to remind Van Susteren of those pesky facts, since she allowed Palin to get away with telling that same lie during this interview. We also had more tentherism talk and lies and fearmongering, which our friends over at News Hounds summed up nicely here: Sarah Palin Lectures President Obama On The Constitutionality Of Health Care Reform:

Less than 10 days after Fox News presented Sarah Palin to attack President Obama's understanding of the 10th Amendment with regard to immigration policy, she was back on the “fair and balanced” network to lecture him about it with regard to health care reform. While she was at it, she offered her insights into economics and taxes, too. And host Greta Van Susteren – who really is a lawyer – helped further the pretense that Palin was a legitimate expert every step of the way.

The basis for the whole discussion on last night's On The Record, arose from a Palin tweet earlier in the day. Referring to the Supreme Court ruling that the individual mandate in Obama’s health care reform legislation was a tax and therefore Constitutional, Palin tweeted, “Obama lied to the American people. Again. He said it wasn’t a tax. Obama lies; freedom dies.” It’s pretty much the same old, same old Palin. But to Van Susteren, that was grounds for probing her deeper thoughts.

Van Susteren asked, “That’s about 140 characters or less as to how you feel about this decision today. Now tell me, given more chance to amplify it, your view of what happened today.”

Palin said she tended to agree with the term “treachery” to describe Chief Justice Roberts' swing vote. But she said she was optimistic because health care reform is now in the hands of the people and that Congress can repeal it. “I want to see that done in July,” she said.

There’s zero chance of that happening but somehow Van Susteren didn’t want to point that out to the "we report, you decide' network's viewers. Instead, she asked her newly minted expert if Justice Roberts was correct in saying the mandate is a tax. And Van Susteren asked the question in a form designed to elicit an attack on President Obama.

More there so go read the rest. Full transcript below the fold.

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It appears the former militia leader and wingnut extraordinaire Mike Vanderboegh is far from done causing trouble yet. It seems he wasn't too happy after the Supreme Court made its ruling on the Affordable Care Act this Thursday, to put it mildly.

Ex-Militia Blogger Who Spawned Fast And Furious Scandal Predicts Armed Insurrection Over Health Care Decision:

Mike Vanderboegh, the ex-militia blogger who calls himself one of the "midwives" of the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, recently predicted that if the Supreme Court declared the health care reform bill to be constitutional, it would lead to violent insurrection against "government tyranny."

The blogger posted the statements, which come from a recent unpublished interview, the same day the House of Representatives voted to find Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt over his unwillingness to release documents related to Fast and Furious.

In the excerpts Vanderboegh posted on his blog "which deal with the decision today," he says of a then-potential decision upholding the health care law, "You may call tyranny a mandate or you may call it a tax, but it still is tyranny and invites the same response." He further predicts the response of his ilk: "If we refuse to obey, we will be fined. If we refuse to pay the fine, we will in time be jailed. If we refuse to report meekly to jail, we will be sent for by armed men. And if we refuse their violent invitation at the doorsteps of our own homes we will be killed -- unless we kill them first. ... I am on record as advocating the right of defensive violence against a tyrannical regime." Read on...