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While quite a few Republicans are waking up to the fact that maybe it's not such a good idea to insult huge swaths of the voting public as Mitt Romney did when he made his remarks about President Obama winning the election because he gave "gifts" to minorities, women and young voters, it seems The Blaze's Will Cain hasn't gotten the message yet either.

This Sunday evening on CNN during Don Lemon's show, Cain appeared with regular LZ Granderson, and after Lemon played recordings of Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich and Haley Barbour all condemning Romney's remarks, both men were stunned when Cain decided to come to Romney's defense.

And as Granderson rightfully pointed out during the interview, besides being extremely insulting, Romney's remarks weren't even accurate, regardless of Cain's weak defense of them here. Cutting the middle man out of the student loan program, making sure women have affordable access to contraceptives, allowing people to stay on their parents' insurance plans, and allowing children who were brought to the United States to stay here instead of being deported are not "gifts." They're good policy.

If Cain wants to make sure that the Republican party remains the party of hateful old white men and help his buddy Willard make sure no one else ever wants to vote for them again, just keep talking buddy.

h/t Dave

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CNN has for the last year or so brought more and more of these Tea Party and right-wing ideologues onboard as contributors (Erick Erickson, Dana Loesch, Will Cain, are a few of the others). And for the most part they've behaved themselves on-air enough not to cause major controversies or headaches, even while their outside activities are among the most bitterly partisan around, or in the case of Loesch, just plain noxious. And we remember the blatant pandering with the so-called CNN/Tea Party Express Debate last September. So when CNN began to have Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express on regularly it was probably only a matter of time before her true colors would show themselves.

This morning Soledad O'Brien called Kremer out for a series of tweets she made recently. Kremer was unapologetic, but she didn't look too happy about it.

Huge difference between @mittromney & @barackobama is tht Mitt luvs America! We need a president that luvs this country! #RNC2012 #GOP2012

— Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) August 31, 2012

This deliberate strategy of trying to paint President Obama as "the other" should have ended with its failure in 2008, yet it persists in the constant refrain of dog-whistles we hear from these people: 'Marxist', 'Foreign', 'Muslim', with the sickness of Birtherism and the like. Republicans don't seem to care if they're seen as bigots anymore either, and in fact many have publicly embraced it.

Perhaps CNN has, inadvertently, done a public service by giving these bigots a more mainstream platform than they'd enjoy on Fox News but by continuing to pollute the public discourse we are all the poorer for it.

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Every time I hear one of these pundits on cable television use the word "spin" I try to remind myself that it's just a polite term for the word they ought to be using, which is "lie." Which is exactly what Will Cain was doing here on CNN's "The Situation Room." Republicans like Cain are desperate to try to downplay the huge gender gap they have right now, where as Dave already noted here, they're looking at a 2-1 deficit among female voters in swing states.

We can add Cain to the list of Republicans such as Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers who recently tried to claim that it's really the Democrats who are behind all of this "war on women" stuff. His arguments here were just as unconvincing.

And before I go any further, just a little reminder that Will Cain is a contributor to Glenn Beck's site, The Blaze, a site run by someone who was thrown off of Fox News for their over-the-top rhetoric and being too extreme for that network. Why he, or his fellow Blaze contributor, Amy Holmes, who is also a CNN regular on Howard Kurtz's show, or Dana Loesch and Erick Erickson for that matter, should be regularly polluting the airways at CNN is beyond me, but having any of them on is just another example of how that network has decided the best way to get ratings is to become Fox-lite.

We're fair and balanced don't ya' know. We've got your right wing flame throwers up against Democratic establishment types like Carville who could be considered center-left in their views at best. Actual liberals, or progressives are shut out of these "debates" too often because god knows we wouldn't want to allow any of them to embarrass the likes of Will Cain. That might be considered "uncivil" and we can't have that.

If Will Cain actually believes, and isn't just trying to "spin" the audience at CNN, that there is no "war on women" then I've got some reading for him to do.

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This sort of segment is one where CNN regularly makes me feel that they're even worse than Fox "news," because they don't have the same brainwashed viewership Fox does, but they're still pushing the same sort of fake balance and right wing memes that you see on the other network that calls themselves "news." And I use the term lightly for either of them.

The outrage over the shooting of Trayvon Martin that finally made its way into the national spotlight is well-deserved. And not just because of what happened to this one black child, who unfortunately found himself on the wrong end of a gun when he was doing nothing wrong. It really has rallied people from all across this country who are fed up with the racism that is still festering in way too many segments of our society.

It's gotten the attention of a national audience about how insane some of these gun laws are that have been passed in states all across the country. People are asking questions about why the NRA, ALEC and Walmart are happy to see people armed to the hilt and allowed to shoot first and ask questions later if it means more sales for the gun manufacturers rather than rational policies about when you ought to be considered to be defending yourself.

It has managed to have people all across the country talking about racial profiling, and white privilege, and the fact that no white child has to be taught at a young age that it might not be safe for you to run in public, or that you might be killed for how you dress, or if you're acting in a suspicious manner in public and you'd better stifle yourself in that regard if you don't want to be a target like Trayvon Martin was.

That was apparently completely lost on CNN regular contributor, Will Cain, who got very upset when the issue of racial profiling came up during this segment and who was basically taking the same line as Larry Pratt did the other day, which is that Zimmerman may have somehow been justified in shooting Martin and we can't be sure because no one knows what happened during the altercation between the two, if there was one.

Don Lemon managed to aggravate me even more than Cain did, because apparently it's all right to lie and pretend you don't know full well that the shooting of Trayvon Martin was not justified, when it was Zimmerman that was pursuing him even after being told to stand down by the police, as long as you're "civil" or "polite" to each other and don't yell too loudly.

It's muddying the waters on issues that are actually important and that Republicans don't want to discuss because it would mean admitting their complicity in that boy's death by pushing to have everyone in this country armed to the hilt. And it's not a "great conversation" when you allow the likes of Cain to pretend there's no racial aspect to the Martin shooting or what conversation we should be having about it now.

Transcript below the fold.

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What happens when you take a writer for Glenn Beck's The Blaze and give him a forum on CNN? Stupid stuff like this. From CNN's Starting Point.

WILL CAIN: You used this word several times, ‘access'. I hope you and I can agree on one term of this debate. That is, no one is attempting to ban contraception or limit access and make it illegal for women to have this! The debate is about who should be providing it, who should be paying for it. Should employers determine what is involved in their compensation, determined in their health care benefits or should the government make certain requirements of employers? Can we agree that is what this debate is about?

SANDRA FLUKE: Not exactly. I think there are multiple ways to limit access. Certainly making something illegal would be the most extreme form, but not covering it as a health care benefit the way other types of health care benefits are covered is another way to limit access and that’s what many women across the country are currently experiencing when they — even if they have insurance, co pays, can be as high as $50 a month, which is significant for a woman not making a lot of money.

WILL CAIN: But Sandra, couldn’t that same logic be applied to so many other things that health care doesn’t cover, such as gym memberships? Exercise is important to health but that’s not covered by health care insurance. Couldn’t that logic you’re using, saying access is denied because it’s not being offered to you for some reduced price, apply to so many things?

SANDRA FLUKE: I think that that’s not a fair comparison. And most women would tell you that’s not a fair comparison

The Blaze noted that host Soledad O'Brien also took issue with Cain's gym membership analogy after the Fluke segment ended.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: I would add to that, isn’t gym membership — isn’t part of her argument if gym membership were covered for other employees? It’s covered for other people at Georgetown. Her point was that the janitors actually get their contraception covered. The gym membership I think is a flawed analogy.

WILL CAIN: No, it focuses on the right question. Should employers determine the benefits or should the government be mandating what employers provide?

For Cain and others of his ilk, it's quite all right for an employer to dictate benefits and choose what is and what is not considered basic health coverage, as the market is all-knowing and all-powerful. Yet it is quite shameful for an entity representative of the people to have the same powers and judgement, as that would be dictatorial.

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Former CNN host and comedian D.L. Hughley proved that there are still some liberals out there that can embarrass us just as badly as Rep. Jack Kingston did on this weekend's Real Time with Bill Maher. The panel which also consisted of former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell and The National Review's Will Cain started the debate on climate change and whether it's real or not or has been properly labeled, and ended it with both Kingston and Hughley admitting that they did not believe in the theory of evolution.

It's pretty sad that the former Prime Minister's remarks that the over-use of antibiotics and the fact that bacteria evolve is proof that evolution does actually exist and has been proven to be real by scientific study seemed to fall on deaf ears by those two.

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I'm glad we've had a few liberals to stand up for the working class on that deficit commission like Jan Schakowsky since it looks like their recommendations are going nowhere for now. During her interview on CNN's Parker/Spitzer, Schakowsky explains to Parker fill-in Will Cain that out in the real world, there is not this obsession with deficit reduction or entitlement cuts that we're seeing out of our beltway Villagers chattering class. She also does a good job of explaining that Social Security does not reduce the deficit, despite being called unserious by Cain.

The bad news is, this is just a preview of what's yet to come. Here's more on that from Chris Bowers -- What happens next on the Deficit Commission.

Full transcript via CNN.

SPITZER: Let me ask you very simply, is this commission becoming a train wreck? I mean, it just seems hard to imagine, there are going to be 14 votes for any plan or any even piece of this plan as it's been rolled out it's been met with derision and opposition. What do you think? Fourteen votes in the cards for this plan?

SCHAKOWSKY: I don't see 14 votes for this plan, but I do think that if we would trim back our ambitions and make more of a laundry list of things that we could all agree on, and I think there would be some that point us at least in the right direction, that we could make a powerful statement, nonetheless. It seems, however, that Bowles- Simpson have done sort of Bowles-Simpson 2.0 that they're going to introduce -- we may even get a copy of it tonight that will be discussed tomorrow and then voted on Friday. If it still has a lot of the things that hurt the middle class, I'm an old-fashion Democrat and think we ought to stand up for middle class people, that cut social security benefits, that add to the cost of Medicare for the elderly that put very tough caps on discretionary spending which is mostly programs that help ordinary people, then I don't see how I can vote for this plan. And also, it doesn't have any kind of investment in the economy, helping to create jobs, which really does promote deficit reduction through growth.

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