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Rachel Maddow sat down with The New York Time's Paul Krugman to discuss a topic from one of his recent op-eds, which was now vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan's lie packed speech at the Republican National Convention this week, whether he should be considered a Very Serious Person by our Villager chattering class that seems to love him despite the fact that the man wants to turn Medicare into a voucher system for our seniors.

Republicans keep pretending this is palatable because it won't affect current seniors, but I've got to wonder if they're really so cynical to believe that current seniors don't care about their children and grandchildren, or that they won't find out that if we would follow through on Romney's plans to revoke the Affordable Care Act, current seniors would be harmed. The sad conclusion is that the GOP is planning on the stupidity of low information voters to carry them along this election. Here's to hoping they are proven wrong if they really think running on privatizing Medicare and turning it into a voucher system is a good idea and that most people won't figure that out once it's said and done.

Here's Krugman's latest on the topic from the NYT: The Medicare Killers:

Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.

Some of his fibs were trivial but telling, like his suggestion that President Obama is responsible for a closed auto plant in his hometown, even though the plant closed before Mr. Obama took office. Others were infuriating, like his sanctimonious declaration that “the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” This from a man proposing savage cuts in Medicaid, which would cause tens of millions of vulnerable Americans to lose health coverage.

And Mr. Ryan — who has proposed $4.3 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, versus only about $1.7 trillion in specific spending cuts — is still posing as a deficit hawk.

But Mr. Ryan’s big lie — and, yes, it deserves that designation — was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program.

Before I get there, let me just mention that Mr. Ryan has now gone all-in on the party line that the president’s plan to trim Medicare expenses by around $700 billion over the next decade — savings achieved by paying less to insurance companies and hospitals, not by reducing benefits — is a terrible, terrible thing. Yet, just a few days ago, Mr. Ryan was still touting his own budget plan, which included those very same savings.

But back to the big lie. The Republican Party is now firmly committed to replacing Medicare with what we might call Vouchercare. The government would no longer pay your major medical bills; instead, it would give you a voucher that could be applied to the purchase of private insurance. And, if the voucher proved insufficient to buy decent coverage, hey, that would be your problem.

Moreover, the vouchers almost certainly would be inadequate; their value would be set by a formula taking no account of likely increases in health care costs.

Why would anyone think that this was a good idea? The G.O.P. platform says that it “will empower millions of seniors to control their personal health care decisions.” Indeed. Because those of us too young for Medicare just feel so personally empowered, you know, when dealing with insurance companies. Read on...

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It seems Lawrence O'Donnell isn't the only one who believes the Democrats might have to take the country over the so-called "fiscal cliff" to manage to get any cooperation from Republicans in actually trying to govern the country. Here's Paul Krugman's response on this week's Fareed Zakaria GPS:

ZAKARIA: Final issue, fiscal cliff. Do you -- I assume you think it would be a bad thing, a drag on the GDP.

ROGOFF: Yeah, yeah.

ZAKARIA: Do you think it's likely to happen?

ROGOFF: No, but I'm not sure because it's so divisive, and one side or the other may see a gain. I have no idea what's going to come out of it. I think the clear thing is we don't know which direction they're going to turn if they don't go off the cliff. Are they going to get higher taxes, lower government spending, some combination. I have no idea. And that uncertainty weighs very heavily on businesses right now.

KRUGMAN: Well, I mean, it's a game of chicken. And I actually think if Obama's re-elected, I think that there's a quite good chance that for a month or two we actually will go off the cliff, which doesn't do that much harm. It's brief, because I think Obama if he is re-elected, he has to say government by blackmail, it's not an acceptable way to run this country. And so, I'm going to call you guys bluff and let the people who are paying for your campaigns come running and demanding that you make a compromise with me. So I actually -- I would put, you know, pretty substantial odds that we will in fact, at least temporarily, see those rates go up. And then -- then it's a different game.

Paul Krugman at Netroots Nation 2012 this Saturday morning: If You Don’t Know Someone Suffering Financially, You Must Be A Romney:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Saturday morning called the current state of the U.S. economy “incredibly awful.”

“If you don’t know multiple people who are suffering, then you must be living in a very rarefied environment,” he said in a brief address to the Netroots Nation conference. “You must be maybe a member of the Romney clan, or something.”

Krugman is out with a new book, “End This Depression Now!”, and he told the progressive gathering that the country’s economic problems are solvable.

“None of this has to be happening. We didn’t have a plague of locusts, we were not hit by a tsunami, there wasn’t some act of God that created this terrible situation. It was acts of man.”

Krugman, who has seen an advance copy of his newspaper’s review of “End This Depression,” dinged the Times’ book review editor. [...]

Krugman concluded that Americans are living under the tyranny of “very serious people” — people like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, he said. “Solving this depression is not fundamentally an economic problem, it’s a political problem.”

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I don't always get a chance to catch C-SPAN's morning call in show, Washington Journal, but when I do, I can usually immediately tell which callers have been watching way too much Fox News or listening to too much hate talk radio. They've got all of their talking points down pat. Here's Charles from Bella Vista, Arkansas:

CHARLES: Say, Krugman and the people in Congress, they want to spend the money. We're $16 trillion in debt and we borrow forty cents on every dollar. Our children and grandchildren can't afford this.

Krugman keeps saying, well we've got to spend money to get out of the hole. You ask him what country or what instance that ever worked and all he can ever say is well, they never spent enough money to really prove my theory. And free trade and capitalism has worked fine. And when the government gets out of the way...

SWAIN: And so Charles, let me ask you about the situation we're in right now with this fiscal crisis and the aftermath. You want that Washington still stay totally out of the way? No more spending? You don't want the Fed to do anything? What's your prescription?

CHARLES: Absolutely. I don't want the government in anything. Free trade and capitalism has worked. This country made it. They become great by standing back and lettin' the people do the work.

And people, you can't steal from one person to give to another. The gimme' people are now at 50 percent and you can't win that argument. We get a little more people that want something for nothing, it's never going to come out of the hole.

First off, as to the lie about Krugman, he has cited an example of when spending got us out of an economic hole and it was this pesky little thing the caller apparently doesn't know anything about called a world war. Second, he's repeating the lie we hear from the right that half of the country doesn't pay any taxes, when that's only true if you're looking at income tax alone and ignoring all the other taxes everyone pays, and even Republicans used to agree with leveling the playing field in that regard with something called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which was supported by that terrible Socialist and wealth redistributor Ronald Reagan.

The caller also ignored that a whole bunch of the people who are not paying income taxes are seniors who are on fixed incomes and should not be paying any taxes on their very limited retirement incomes. I would love to be able to find out if he's one of them. It would not surprise me since he sounded like he could be older.

And last off, when he talks about those who are wanting "something for nothing," we all know he's not talking about white people. I have a feeling no one's ever pointed out to this man that more white Americans than black are receiving food stamps right now.

Not that it would probably make much difference if anyone tried. These people have their preconceived notions and they're sticking to them and facts be damned. They can go get their own set of facts from the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh instead.

A good clip from the BBC's Newsnight program last week. The basic conservative arguments used in favor of austerity here are being used more so in Britain, to not surprisingly disastrous results.

Jeremy Paxman is joined by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, venture capitalist Jon Moulton and Conservative MP Andrea Leadsom to discuss whether austerity is always the best method for resolving a country's national debt problem.

Moulton brought up the Estonian 'miracle' at the very end, which was dismissed by Krugman. The Estonian President Toomas Ilves has since gone on a twitter war against Krugman for his comments.

Here's a taste of what was said.

Jon Moulton: You know, I struggle to attack an Nobel Prize winner, but I think you’re really, seriously wrong. The issue about austerity here is really we have too large a state. We’ve let the economy go from thirty-odd percent to pushing fifty percent public sector. If you want growth you need a larger private sector, not a larger public sector. You’re also ignoring, as your book does, I’ve just been reading it when, while waiting to come on, the very simple moral dimension of what you’re recommending, which is that we run up more debt. The only thing that that does enables us to live better today at the expense of those who follow us. That’s quite a serious moral argument, and you cannot ignore it.

Krugman: I actually would put the moral argument very differently. And I look, I certainly look at the US and it’s true here as well, if I think about the future generation, I think that the crime we are committing against the next generation is not that we’re going to leave them with more debt, that’s a venial sin, the crime is that all of these students are graduating from college with no job prospects, are graduating from college with debts that they have incurred to get an expensive education and then there are no jobs – that damage that we are inflicting, the damage we are inflicting on the next generation by not having jobs for them, (Andrea interrupting: Yeah, but that’s...) which is the result of misguided austerity right now, (Jon interrupting sounds) that is the great sin…

Jon Moulton: Those jobs will be generated when people move from the public sector to the private sector.

Andrea Leadsom: Yeah, yeah. What we need to be doing is really making it easier for young people to start their own businesses. Making it far, far easier for new entrepreneurs. When you say we have to give them jobs, create jobs, we shouldn’t be about creating jobs, we should be about enabling the economy to create jobs by low tax regime, opportunities for people to start up new businesses, and so on, not by creating jobs.

Krugman: But how many--you know, the average young person is not going to start a business, there has to be (Andrea interrupting: But why not?) an expanding economy which is not happening, and is not happening because we’re not providing the neccessary support, and by the way, I think you [Andrea Leadsom], you’ve just given me confirmation of something that people like me tend to say which is that actually none of this is at all about fiscal responsibility, it’s all about exploiting the current situation to pursue an ideological goal of a smaller state, and, you know, we can argue about whether the British state is too large, but look at Sweden, which is actually weathering this very well with a much larger state than you have, so that, that’s a great diversion, that’s suggesting that you’re not actually sincere, it’s not really the budget deficit that’s the concern, you’re looking for a way to exploit this debt, deficit situation…(both Joe and Andrea interrupting, garbled)

Jon Moulton: You’re wrong and you accuse us of lying.

Krugman: No, I think that it’s probably just that you are, you’re mingling together concepts that are really quite separate.

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After Cory Booker went out and undermined some of the recent attack ads by the Obama campaign during his appearance on Meet the Press this weekend, and President Obama's defense of those attacks, telling reporters that the issue is not a distraction but instead critical to evaluating Mitt Romney's qualifications to be president, Paul Krugman agreed during his appearance on Current TV's The War Room with Jennifer Granholm.

Krugman: Romney ‘really does not understand the economy at all’ :

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman joins Jennifer Granholm in The War Room to discuss candidate Mitt Romney. Krugman says, in spite of his protestations, Romney’s business career is fair game. “Yes, he made a lot of money. He made a lot of money in ways that were often not good for workers.” Krugman points out that what made Romney an effective businessman may be the opposite of what’s needed from the leader of a country: “What a President needs to do is not what you need to do if you’re trying to make a bunch of money for private equity for investors.”

Krugman also pointed out the need for more stimulus spending right now to get the economy out of this depression we've been in:

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Vice President Joe Biden was out on the campaign trail this week in Ohio, and on the attack over Mitt Romney's record as a so-called "job creator" and a businessman who "knows how to create jobs" and get our economy moving again. Fox's Neil Cavuto brought on his former fellow Fox contributor turned Ohio Governor John Kasich to respond.

Kasich of course tried to downplay the credit the Obama administration was attempting to take for Ohio's economy improving and their unemployment rate falling below the national average, and instead credited himself for making Ohio a more business friendly state and making the same points we've been hearing from Republicans ad nauseum on what Paul Krugman has rightfully called "the confidence fairy." Forget the fact that what drives businesses to make investments and grow their companies are consumers and whether the general public has enough disposable income to afford their products. Kasich wants you to believe, like all Republicans, that fear of over-regulation, rather than a lack of customers is what's stifling our economy.

The "confidence" businesses actually need is going to be driven up by a strong middle class and consumers who can afford their products; which as we've seen over the last few decades is what Republicans are determined to destroy.

The Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern pointed out earlier this year exactly why Kasich does not deserve credit for turning Ohio's economy around: REMARKS: Chairman Redfern Says Kasich Should Credit Obama, Brown, Dems for Ohio’s Improving Economy in State of the State Address:

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As Steve Benen noted, on the heels of the $2 billion loss by JPMorgan Chase, here was the RNC Chairman Reince Priebus' reaction on Meet the Press this Sunday -- RNC Chief: Leave Wall Street alone:

JPMorgan's reckless, $2 billion fiasco appears to have a silver lining of sorts: the bank's bad bets help demonstrate the need for safeguards in the system. In his new column, Paul Krugman thanks JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon for offering "an object demonstration of why Wall Street does, in fact, need to be regulated."

And yet, somehow, some still don't see it that way. On NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus, common sense be damned, argued that the JPMorgan mess changes nothing.

Host David Gregory asked a straightforward question: "In light of the losses on Wall Street this week, you think we need less financial regulation rather than more?" In Preibus' mind, it's not even a close call: "I think we need less." The RNC chief added that Democrats have "made things worse" by approving new safeguards and adding new layers of accountability to the financial system.

It reminded me of an Upton Sinclair line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

This really isn't that complicated. In 2008, Wall Street, left to its own devises, nearly collapsed the global financial system. Four years later, institutions like JPMorgan are still taking enormous risks in reckless schemes. It's hard to even conceive of a straight-face argument against sensible regulations in light of recent developments, but the chairman of the Republican National Committee was on national television anyway, arguing that policymakers should be doing less. Read on...

As Steve pointed out, this is Mitt Romney's position as well and they're counting on the public hating regulation as much or more than they hate Wall Street. That's the talking point they've been hammering home regardless of how reckless Wall Street and the bankers have been in the aftermath of the crash and ever since President Obama took office, so I don't expect them to change now. Forget about the fact that Wall Street took our economy down, regulations are terrible. I suspect our media doing a terrible job of explaining why their views are wrong and why we ought to keep the gambling separate from the banking industry has a lot to do with why Republicans have not suffered more greatly when it comes to public opinion on the matter. Interviews like this one with David Gregory sure aren't helping any.

Transcript below the fold.

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Peggy Noonan is terribly unhappy with President Obama for not being nice enough to Mitt Romney while on the campaign trail and for campaigning right now at all for that matter, because everyone knows it would be so much better for him to just allow Mitt Romney to go out there and lie constantly about him without ever responding.

Steve Benen took note of Noonan's complaints in her column at the Wall Street Journal this Friday and it appears she continued with the carping right into the panel segment on ABC's This Week. Here's more from Steve.

Suffering fools gladly:

One of the overarching problems with Paul Ryan's House Republican budget plan, approved by 95% of the GOP caucus last week, is that it's hard to know where to start with its flaws. It is, after all, less a budget plan and more a right-wing fantasy. [...]

Paul Krugman takes a crack at this challenge today, arguing that you can learn everything you need to know about Ryan's House Republican budget "by understanding two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million." [...]

I mention of all of this, not to rehash just how offensive Ryan's vision really is, but because two prominent pundits -- the New York Times' David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan -- complain in their columns today that President Obama was a big meanie when he criticized the Ryan plan, backed enthusiastically by Mitt Romney, in a speech this week. For the conservative media figures, Obama should have been more accepting of the Ayn Rand acolyte's extremism, instead of rejecting the Ryan plan so forcefully.

The columnists didn't say Obama's remarks were inaccurate, but rather, Brooks and Noonan believe it was impolite for the president to make these accurate observations out loud.

And here she was again on This Week:

TAPPER: What did you hear as you listened to the candidates?

NOONAN: I heard the beginning of what is going to be a tough and maybe even brutal campaign. We were talking in the green room about something feels funny this year. Something feels unsatisfying, but also sort of negative I think is an obvious word.

The president -- first of all, I wasn't that aware that Mr. Romney has started his campaign, but boy, it's obvious that Mr. Obama has. He was tough. He was stark. He was dividing and labeling. Normally at this point, a candidate for the presidency, an incumbent candidate, will take a more benign, embracing tone. There was none of that. It was stark, dividing, us versus them, and that suggests brutal days ahead for the next seven months, I think.

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Rachel Maddow took the so-called "nonpartisan fact checking" web site, PolitiFact to the woodshed this Wednesday night for yet another incident where the site doesn't seem to understand what the definition of what a "fact" is.

Paul Krugman has more on what set Rachel off this evening here -- When Facts Aren’t Facts:

The criterion, according to Politifact, seems to be that a fact isn’t a fact if it helps a Democratic narrative.

Jared Bernstein watches the train wreck. Obama said:

In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.

which is just true. Period.

But Politifact rated it as only “half true” because he was “essentially taking credit for job growth”. He didn’t actually take credit — and even if he had, a fact is still a fact.

I do not think that word means what Politifact thinks it means.

Paul followed up on that post which I'll share just a bit of here -- Finding the Truth:

Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage. In the case of Obama’s job statement, Politifact first called it only half true, then upgraded that to mostly true, not because Obama said anything factually incorrect, but because Politifact perceived Obama as trying to imply that he was responsible for the gains.

This is deeply wrong on two levels. First, fact-checking should be about checking facts — not about trying to impose some sort of Marquess of Queensbury rules on how you’re allowed to use facts. Aside from undermining the mission, this makes the whole thing subjective — notice that Politifact wasn’t even analyzing what Obama said, they were analyzing their impression about what he might have been trying to imply. Leave that for the talking heads! [...]

But having defined its role as something that goes beyond checking facts to saying whether the facts are being used in some “proper” way, it then finds itself under pressure to be “even-handed”, which ends up meaning making excuses for Republican falsehoods and finding ways to criticize Democratic true statements.

And as Karoli already noted here at C&L, this is far from the first incident with this sort of behavior from the site -- Politifact Lie of the Year? More Like Politifact Pander of the Year.

Rachel Maddow had it right tonight with the end of her commentary:

MADDOW: PolitiFact, you are fired! You are a mess. You are fired. You are undermining the definition of the word fact in the English language by pretending to it in your name. The English language wants its word back. You are an embarrassment. You sully the reputation of anyone who cites you as the authority on "factishness" let alone facts. You are fired!