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Here we go again with yet another Republican trying to pretend there's an ounce of daylight between what Paul Ryan believes and what Todd Akin believes when it comes to what exemptions there ought to be allowed on abortions. Matalin wants people to believe that there's no harm done by pulling taxpayer funding for women's reproductive services, even though anyone paying an ounce of attention knows that means you're telling poor women they're on their own for a service they can't afford to pay for.

Matalin also pulled out their tired talking point on how cheap and widely available birth control is, claiming that it only costs "$9 a month" and you can "get it anywhere." You can't just go "get it anywhere" and need to go see a doctor and pay for a visit, something Republicans would like to make women start paying out of pocket for again if they have health insurance, since they want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And unless you're getting a discounted price from Planned Parenthood, which Republicans wish didn't exist, or you have health insurance with prescription drug coverage, I don't know of any place you can buy birth control for under $10 a month. And once again, she's touting something that Democrats made free with no co-pay under the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans have vowed to repeal. So again, if Republicans had their way, women would be paying for all of this out of their own pockets and spending a lot more than a few dollars a month.

The Republicans can pretend all day long that no one cares about any of this, but they're wrong. Women's reproductive issues are tied directly to their economic issues and you can't separate the two. If you can't control your health care costs and your own reproduction, you can't control your own economic situation. Whether you have a choice about having children and when makes all the difference in the world to women being able to go to school and to find a job. Matalin seems to think that somehow those things are not intertwined, or she at least hopes she can convince the CNN viewers to believe it.

As Cornell Belcher explained, the Republicans have got a huge gender gap right now and rhetoric like we heard out of Akin is not going to help them. Matalin knows that full well along with the rest of them, or they wouldn't be so quick to throw Akin under the bus for daring to tell the truth about what most of them actually believe.

Transcript below the fold.

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John King knew he was going to be criticized for bringing in Birther queen Orly Taitz during a segment which began with talking about whether or not Gov. Jan Brewer is going to sign Arizona's Birther law which just made its way through their state legislature.

Here's the damage control from King at the end of the segment from the criticism he knew he had coming:

KING: I'm going to end the conversation now. People are entitled to go to your Web site and I hope we can talk again. But I'm going to end this conversation tonight right now.

Listen, I sit in meetings for those of you at home and I'm going to pick this up and read it all.

For those at home who says, you know, you crazy jerk, why are you even going down this road? I'm going down this road because our job is not just to cover things that we know to be true. It's our job is to cover things that people are talking about in politics. And to try, to try to have rational conversations about why people believe what they believe, even if our reporting suggests what they believe is not true.

And we will continue to do that. I can assure you, we will never be perfect, but we try to do it in a respectful way.

There's nothing "respectful" about spending at least half of the 12 minutes of a segment of your show allowing some discredited Birther nut like Taitz to rant and rave and spew conspiracy theories that you know aren't true. Well, at least someone on CNN admitted what we already knew was true: Facts don't matter much in their reporting. If some wingnut politician or political figure says something, they must cover it in the name of being "fair and balanced."

King went on to ask if the White House is somehow more worried about the Birther nonsense than they're letting on and if they're trying to "at least use a subtle message to rebut this." Yeah, that's it, John. They're speaking to the Birthers in coded messages that the rest of us somehow missed.

Transcript of the portion via CNN below the fold.

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CNN is already trying to look like Fox-lite on a regular basis and their hire of Dana Loesch just looks like one more step in that direction. I thought their hire of Erick Erickson was bad until they decided that we somehow need to hear on a regular basis the political insights of that know-nothing, astroturf “tea party” leader, Andrew Breitbart buddy and embarrassment to the city of St. Louis, Dana Loesch.

Anderson Cooper had her on as a member of a panel to discuss what sort of fights we might be in for with raising the debt ceiling and the recent agreement made to finally get a budget voted on for last year, and par for the course, she had nothing to add to the discussion other than far-right-wing talking points and apparently a complete lack of understanding about the services Planned Parenthood provides to low-income women who have nowhere else to turn in their areas for health care, and just how dangerous it is playing chicken with defaulting on our debt.

I guess it was too much trouble to ask Loesch what economists she was talking about when she said it would not be harmful to our economy if the debt ceiling were not raised. And I'd love for Loesch and other so-called conservatives to tell me where they were at when George W. Bush was breaking the bank that President Obama inherited, and why this was not a controversy when Republicans just took it for granted that the debt ceiling would be raised with two wars left off the books and a huge giveaway to the drug industry with their Medicare Part D prescription drug plan.

I hope to hell the president doesn't give into the Republican hostage-taking, and have read some hopeful news that he's not going to, but we'll see. If his record so far with giving into them wasn't so bad already, I might feel differently, but talk is cheap. I'd prefer to judge someone by their actions rather than what they say they'll do. I like what Matt Yglesias wrote here as a response to the hostage-taking and I hope someone over at the White House reads his blog -- A Debt Ceiling Hostage Rescue Strategy:

As Jon Chait and Josh Marshall write this morning, the way the tax cut deal and the appropriations deal went down makes it clear that the White House needs a better hostage rescue strategy heading into the debt ceiling fight. Fortunately, I think one is available. Read on...

Transcript via CNN:

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Hey John Boehner... where are the jobs? Oh, I guess they don't matter if it's government employees potentially getting hammered from the GOP's proposed spending cuts.

Boehner: If Jobs Are Lost As A Result Of GOP Spending Cuts 'So Be It':

If House Republicans succeed in cutting tens of billions of dollars in discretionary spending over the next six months, some of the most immediate victims will be federal employees, many of whose jobs will be slashed as their agencies pare back.

At a press conference in the lobby of RNC headquarters Tuesday morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) shrugged this off as collateral damage.

"In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs," Boehner said. "If some of those jobs are lost so be it. We're broke."

Some of those employees will no doubt collect unemployment insurance, so the government's obligation to them won't disappear with their jobs.

As TPM and John King pointed out, his numbers are wrong too.

And you've got to love CNN's favorite phony baloney "centrist" hack John Avlon defending Boehner here. Talking like some tough guy when you're doing real damage to real people's lives isn't going to win him any points in the minds of most of the electorate. It would be nice if his constituency at home finally had a belly full of him.

UPDATE: And here's more from Steve Benen. Apparently Villager Mark Halperin is trying to trivialize this as some sort of minor gaffe by Boehner. As Steve explains, it's not.

And Rachel Maddow opened her show by asking if John Boehner is just not very good at his job considering the way the last month has gone for him, with this remark just being the latest in a series of missteps.

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It looks like Digby is as tired of Mr. Wingnuts John Avlon’s hackery on CNN as I am. As she noted Avlon and the other Villagers on the panel of John King’s show are just desperate for our political class to just get along, or in other words for the Democrats to capitulate to the demands of Republicans.

BTW, the "centrist" ex-Giuliani speechwriter John Avlon was on CNN just now, wringing his hands and arguing ad nauseam that all the American people want is for everyone to just stop the fighting. John King was very sympathetic and agreed.

Is that what all those Republicans who voted for far right Tea Party candidates want? What I heard was that want their politicians to fight as hard as possible for their agenda. Liberals want the same thing. The only constituency that seems to be upset by the fighting is the Village constituency which is obviously quite agitated to be wasting time dealing wit such silliness as unemployment insurance and social security cuts and tax breaks for millionaires. Who cares about that trivia?

There are issues worth getting passionate about, like the horror of unauthorized presidential fellatio or the horror of unauthorized leaking of documents to the press, but arguing over things that affect Real Americans is the last thing Real Americans want. Just ask the Villagers, our self-designated celebrity millionaire stand-ins. They know us better than we know ourselves.

I’m also as sick as she is about seeing unemployment extensions for the most vulnerable among us being held hostage by the Republicans in exchange for tax cuts for the rich. They’ve already let them expire. I would guess nothing less than an extension of the Bush tax cuts for two years just in time to muck up the 2012 elections will be demanded to extend those unemployment benefits. Sadly there are probably enough rotten Blue Dogs that will vote with Republicans to make sure the rich still gets theirs and that the ransom being demanded from the working class and the poor is paid.

And then we get to look forward to having this fight again just in time for the presidential elections if they give them a two year extension as a “compromise”. Good job Democrats! I’m wondering where I can get a job to give you such politically savvy advice and if it includes a pension?

Full transcript below the fold.

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Nothing like having Republican dirty tricksters tell us that we'd better not raise taxes on the rich and let those Bush tax cuts expire because we're a "connected society", but that's exactly the argument Alex Castellanos made on John King's show while doing his best job of channeling Rand Paul.

CASTELLANOS: There's a difference between 3.2, which is -- trillion which is what the president's plan would cost and then another 700 billion which is what the Republicans would add. However, the economic --

(CROSSTALK)

CASTELLANOS: -- and -- no the economic argument is this. We are in a connected society now. Can you tax just the rich people's side of the water bucket? Can you take money out of that? We've just seen Wall Street melt down and everybody's homes lose value. I think both sides have an economic as well political argument here that is this the time to take that much money out of the private sector --

Sorry Alex but the only part of that "bucket" most of us are seeing is the little bit the rich have decided to allow to trickle down our heads and it ain't water that's trickling down. Here's Rand Paul with some similar nonsense.

"I would say that [Democrats] must be in favor of a second American depression, because if you raise taxes to that consequence, that’s what will happen in this country," Paul told CNN host Wolf Blitzer.

"What if they just raised taxes on the richest, those making more than 250,000 dollars a year?" Blitzer asked.

"Well, the thing is, we're all interconnected. There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor," Paul explained. "You remember a few years ago, when they tried to tax the yachts, that didn’t work."

"You know who lost their jobs?" he continued. "The people making the boats, the guys making 50,000 and 60,000 dollars a year lost their jobs. We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone. Let’s keep taxes low and let’s cut spending."