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I'm not sure what the producers of MSNBC's UP with Steve Kornacki felt that Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform's Mattie Duppler was going to add to the debate on this Sunday's show, but after watching her on there, apparently it was to keep the rest of the guests busy debunking the endless string of lies she told during her time on the panel.

During a discussion ranging from what percentage of GDP is needs to be taxed, to the size and scope of government, to whether Americans even know what the federal government spends money on, or how many people realize that President Obama has lowered their taxes, the conversation got a bit contentious when Duppler trotted out the old "because of Obama, government spending is out of control" canard.

After the Center for American Progress' Neera Tanden made the point that the central thesis of Republicans' economic strategy has been tax cuts, and that it has been proven that tax cuts don't produce economic growth, here's Duppler's response.

DUPPLER: That's not the central thesis of the Republican party. It is one of the tenets of the Republican party. (crosstalk) But you also have explosive government growth. You've got government spending that's out of control and that...

JOHNSTON: It's not out of control. […] The government is rapidly shrinking under Obama.

DUPPLER: After he exploded it. After he increased spending by eighty-four percent. I mean, seriously, this is laughable that you're telling me that are just (crosstalk).

JOHNSTON: This would put us into a depression. You want to put us into a depression. (crosstalk).

NADLER: This is the central lie...

DUPPLER: I'm challenging your assertion that the deficit and the size of government is shrinking after Obama and congressional Democrats took spending and the size of government to all time highs.

NADLER: This is the central lie... this is the central lie of our political debate right now... what you just said.

JOHNSTON: Absolutely.

NADLER: The fact is, what happened to our deficit is, after it was cut... after it went up because of the Bush tax cuts and the wars and everything, since Obama took office, remember, the CBO before Obama took office said the 2009 deficit was going to be $1.4 trillion and it was. Why? And it was hugely increased. Why? Because when you get a recession, you get a depression such as we were in, two things happen.

One, revenues plummet, taxes plummet. People aren't working. They don't pay taxes, number one. And so taxes plummeted. And number two, automatic spending on unemployment insurance and on food stamps goes up because more people don't have money to eat with...

JOHNSTON: And Jerry, if you don't have part two, that you did, that's when you get the great depression.

After Duppler continued to insist that from a "small government perspective" government spending is still too high, David Cay Johnston reminded her of just what that philosophy is going to cost us.

JOHNSTON: We are going to be poorer in the future because we are cutting spending on basic research. The cell phones that we all have have grown from government spending in the past. The jet airplanes we fly come from government spending, the computers we use, the math in them, all come from government spending. [...] We need to be spending money on government research, development and education and Republicans want to cut all that.

After Duppler said she wanted to know how we were supposed to fund these things, Tanden pointed out the obvious... paying taxes. Duppler pretended that cutting taxes was not "the central tenet" of the Republican party, but thanks to her group, that's exactly what it's been.

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Any time I hear Rep. Marsha Blackburn start talking about "adult conversations" and Republicans needing to pay attention to their tone on any topic, I'm reminded of this little hissy fit she threw on the floor of the House just after the health care bill passed. Blackburn appeared on MSNBC's The Cycle and was asked about the immigration proposal put forth by a group of Senators this Monday and the fact that Republicans have been losing Latino voters in droves over the last few election cycles.

Her response was that they need to do a better job of getting their message out to the voters and that "sometimes their messengers aren't as good" or maybe they just haven't repeated their message enough times to be getting through to the voters. If she thinks the GOP needs some better messengers, maybe she ought to take a good look in the mirror and start spending a little less time throwing flames in front of the cameras.

And note to Rep. Blackburn, as Susie pointed out this Monday... the problem is not your messaging. It's you. She was all smiles for this interview but repeating the same rhetoric we've been hearing out of her for years now. You'd better secure the border first, even though migration from Mexico is at zero or below. No amnesty. Fix ICE even though we've had record deportations over the last year.

She and her cohorts have lots of obstacles lined up against making any meaningful changes to our immigration policy, regardless of all of the rhetoric we're hearing out of them right now.

Rep. Blackburn weighs in on new immigration proposal:

Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) who joined the show, said that along with other Republicans she is waiting to see what the exact details are and what other options are available. Rep. Blackburn said overall the “good thing is people are coming out and saying let’s get this problem solved and I like the fact that it has gone from being a back burner issue to a front burner issue.” However, when it comes to the bill there are certain “must haves” that she believes need to be included.

We need to make certain that we have a secure border, amnesty should not be included as it has not worked before and will not work again, those that are in our country need to pay and right their wrongs, she said. Rep. Blackburn continued to say, “Finally, you have to make certain that ICE is going to clean up their act, and that the immigration service is going to finally be a service that works. We all appreciate legal immigration, we want to encourage legal immigration and bring those individuals that want to come to America to seek a better life, we want to make certain they have the ability to be here legally.”

The eight senators do agree with Rep. Blackburn when it comes to borders; they said that before we can start creating permanent residents, we must first work on securing America’s borders and launch an employment verification system that actually works. As Rep. Blackburn said during the show, “This is a time to be very honest with the American people, just to say this is where we are, these are the facts, help us work through to a solution. I have to tell you I certainly hope that we do.”

Talk is cheap. I will be surprised if anything actually gets through the House, but we'll see. And I certainly don't underestimate the ability for any of them to come up with a really bad bill that doesn't have any labor protections in it.

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While discussing the White House commission on gun violence meeting this week, which the NRA has been invited to attend, along with Vice President Joe Biden's remarks that an executive order is on the table as part of a solution to curb the gun violence in the United States, Howard Fineman did his best to pin down MSNBC's The Cycle co-host S.E. Cupp and get an answer as to why any civilian out there needs an assault weapon or a high capacity magazine. To on one's surprise, she couldn't give him an answer.

Rather than answering his question, she started playing games with semantics on what the definition of an assault rifle, or high capacity, or rapid fire was and claimed that there were reasons someone would want them outside of the military or specialized police forces. When Fineman asked her to give one example, she punted and said she didn't want to take up the time allotted to the other hosts.

I still don't know why MSNBC hired Cupp. She's as thick as a brick and takes great pride in just being as annoying as humanly possible rather than bringing a bit of intellectual honesty to single debate. This is just the latest example of what she does on a daily basis to make sure this stinker of a show stays exactly that.

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Thank goodness there is at least one of these talking head shows on Sundays where Republican talking points are pushed back and where it's not just a bunch of millionaire pundits talking about how we need to inflict pain on our senior citizens, and raise the Medicare age in order to appease the GOP during these deficit negotiations. That show is Up With Chris Hayes.

While discussing the Republicans' absolute refusal to raise taxes, their dire warnings about the economy collapsing when Bill Clinton raised taxes, guest host Steve Kornacki asked former Romney advisor Avik Roy how he reconciled that with the similar rhetoric we're hearing from Republicans today. Roy argued that things are different now because of the “Obama levels of spending” and that the rich today are somehow shouldering way too much of the tax burden, therefore we're going to have to raise everyone's taxes in order to balance the budget.

Here's some of the response he got from the rest of the panel.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: The average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has fallen back to the level of 1966 when Johnson was president, and the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent have gone in today's dollars from 4 million to 22 million. In 2010, the first year of the recovery, 37 percent of all of the increased income in the entire country went to 15,600 households.

We have created a privatized system to redistribute upwards and the reason people at the top are sharing a larger share of the income taxes because their incomes are growing at this enormous rate, but their burden is falling. And to suggest we don't need to raise more revenue by applying it to people who are a success depends on this government, on living in this society, with its rules that make it possible to make that money is just outrageous. It is arguing that we should burden the poor and help the rich.

[...]

LAURA FLANDERS: No, you're right. we have 50, 5-0 million Americans living in poverty at this point with food stamp help for many of them. We've got 9 million Americans over the age of 50 who are food insecure. One in three of us have no savings whatsoever.

I mean, you talk the Johnson years, in that period, '65 to '73 the war on poverty reduced poverty by 43 percent. We know how to do it. It works. That's what we should be talking about. We are in a crisis where we're going to see stimulus. We're going to see stimulus of poverty and hunger in this country and it's shameful. And again, going back to '63, you had more than 60 percent of Americans, I think even in1983, 60 percent of Americans had private pension plans. Now, it's under 20 percent.

So these elders that you're talking about, young people with greater unemployment than ever before. I mean, this is the stuff that we want to be talking about after the last election, children and poverty are exploding.

JOAN WALSH: And also... we need higher tax rates for the tippy top earners because everybody likes to talk about building the middle class or rebuilding the middle class. Well, the top tax rate that the middle class we in the '40s,' 50s and '60s. The top marginal rate was in the 90's. I'm not saying you should go back to that, but you can't say at 37 percent.

They followed up with more discussion on tax loopholes and deductions, who they favor, what should be done to make sure they're not upside down with whether they benefit the working class. Laura Flanders brought up the issue of a Wall Street transaction tax, which gets mentioned far too rarely. She also discussed that while everyone is pushing for cuts to Medicare and raising the age to receive benefits, none of them want to talk about defense cuts.

If you missed the show, the whole thing was worth watching. It's generally a nice break from the typical Sunday show fare and this week was no exception. Go check it out here.

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It seems that, as Susie formerly called him, Pete Peterson's pet dog, the smarmy David Walker, made his way back onto MSNBC this Friday and surprise, surprise, he's endorsing Mitt Romney. Color me not shocked, even though the media constantly tries to portray this guy as some bipartisan straight shooter.

Apparently Walker isn't too happy that he hasn't managed to get his "grand bargain" passed under President Obama and he twists himself in knots trying to defend Romney's fuzzy math on his budget numbers that simply don't add up without raising taxes on the middle class and resorts to more or less questioning what the definition of middle class is.

As Susie noted in the post linked above, regardless of what Walker says here, she went to one of his seminars and the people who were in attendance were not buying the snake oil the man and his group were selling. You can read more about Walker and Pete Peterson here: Peterson's Grand Bargain Campaign To Kick Off After Election and here: Meet Pete Peterson, Architect of Social Security and Medicare Cuts.

Rough transcript of Walker's interview below the fold.

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The Daily Show's Jon Stewart and Jason Jones took a few shots at the media and their obsession with poll watching this Wednesday evening. I don't know about anyone else, but the media's desire to treat politics like a sporting event instead of something which actually has real implications on peoples' lives is really giving me a headache of late, and Stewart just hit one of the reasons squarely on the head here.

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I've already expressed my disdain for this woman and the fact that MSNBC gave her a spot co-hosting a show here -- S.E. Cupp Defends Disenfranchising Millions of Voters as Solution to 86 Cases of Voter Fraud. Apparently Esquire's Charles Pierce isn't any more fond of her than I am.

S.E. Cupp Is a Colossal Idiot:

In case you've missed it, MSNBC has compensated for the loss of Dylan Ratigan in the afternoon by moving Martin Bashir to 4 p.m. Eastern, and filling Bashir's old 3 p.m. slot with something called The Cycle, which is kind of Around The Horn for young pundits. The regular cast includes the younger generation among MSNBC's apparently inexhaustible reservoir of Political Analysts. These include Krystal Ball, Steve Kornacki, Touré, and S.E. Cupp and, this afternoon, as the program was winding down, Ms. Cupp spent a good four minutes being, weight for age, the dumbest person in the history of cable television:

To review: Talking about the president's tax proposal, Ms. Cupp rather loosely termed the president's tax policy "collectivist." (And, yes, both Mao and Stalin laughed uproariously as their spits turned over the flames of hell.) Kornacki gently reminded her that an increase in the marginal income tax tax rate is a lot of things — including, to my mind, a pretty good idea, but no matter — but it is in no way "collectivist," if English words have any meaning in, you know, English. Read on...

MSNBC really needs to rethink why they want to have this woman on the air... ever... at all... as a host or a guest. She lowers the IQ in the room when she enters it and sucks most of the oxygen out as well. I'm not sure how anyone ever possibly comes out better or smarter for the experience of being forced to maintain a dialog with her.

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Here we go again with MSNBC's replacement in the afternoon for Martin Bashir's show, The Cycle, after Bashir moved into Dylan Ratigan's old time slot, and more proof that the network really screwed the pooch with giving S.E. Cupp a spot as one of the co-hosts on this god awful show.

As Fran rightfully pointed out a couple of weeks ago, this show "has all the markings of a summer replacement series" and that's probably giving it way too much credit. I caught some of this on the satellite radio this Wednesday afternoon and this has to be one of the more obnoxious appearances I've had the unfortunate circumstance of listening to since I first had the unfortunate circumstance of ever hearing the woman's name in the first place.

The segment, I assume was supposed to be a serious interview with The Nation's Ari Berman, who's done some excellent reporting on the problem we've got going on right now across the country and voter disenfranchisement, some of which you can read about here: Discriminatory Texas Voter ID Law Challenged in Federal Court .

Rather than the other hosts and their guest being allowed to have a sane debate on the topic, the viewers were treated to Cupp demanding that the rest of them explain to her how to solve the 86 cases of voter fraud which were prosecuted under the Bush administration, as though those cases being prosecuted wasn't a solution in and of itself and her defending the disenfranchisement of millions of voters in order to do something about the minute number of actual fraud cases, that almost never happen and are not statistically a problem when it comes to the integrity of our elections in the United States. Unlike, you know, throwing millions of people off of the voting rolls because less than a hundred may have had some irregularity with how they voted.

If Cupp is so worried about the types of problems that were likely to be found in those 86 cases, maybe we can get her to go ballistic over her buddies Ann Coulter and Mitt Romney and making sure they're both voting from the addresses where they actually reside. Listening to her rail on over and over about them not having a "solution" to those cases of voter fraud, when they ended up in the courts, was enough to make me want to throw something at my TV set when going back to record this debacle.

If MSNBC doesn't want to lose all of their viewers in this time slot, they'll start looking for a new host and a new format for that matter. Four hosts don't work. The show has mainly been a shoutfest with them talking over each other constantly since it first aired and S.E. Cupp has no business hosting anything. The woman is just another know nothing flame thrower who is a bad guest and an even worse host. I put up with watching a lot of really bad television to help with monitoring cable "news" for C&L and this show is already somewhere in the range of Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity awful with trying to watch or listen to any of it.

If MSNBC were serious about having anyone want to watch their network in this time slot, they'd consider giving it to someone like Sam Seder. They'd also take Michael Steele out of Pat Buchanan's old cot on the set and send him packing as well. He's ruining shows from Morning Joe straight on through their prime time programming.

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It appears Newt Gingrich isn't done throwing more red meat to his base given the remarks he made on who he would want to appoint as Secretary of State were he to be elected president.

Gingrich: ‘I Will Ask John Bolton To Be Secretary Of State’:

At a forum hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich proclaimed that, if elected president, he would appoint former Bush administration U.N. ambassador John Bolton to be Secretary of State. Gingrich said he would require Bolton to restructure the U.S.’s entire diplomatic structure, and seek a more business-like atmosphere at State. Gingrich made the announcement to raucous applause [...]

The Senate refused to confirm the pugnacious Fox New contributor as U.N. envoy in 2006, forcing a recess appointment. Known for extremely hawkish positions and undiplomatic conduct, Bolton has maintained close ties to the Islamophobic right — but sometimes only when the money was good enough.

Here's more from Raw Story on Keith Olbermann's follow up on the topic with Steve Kornacki above -- Steve Kornacki explains tribalism of Gingrich’s support for Bolton:

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It looks like the Jim DeMint's of the world got their way on the Senate passing a spending bill before this session is over. I guess the Republicans finally had enough of being mocked for their hypocrisy on earmarks and worrying about primary challengers. But first and foremost, the Republicans like DeMint are just doing their best to run out the clock on the last hours of the lame duck session of Congress so the Democrats can get as little passed as possible.

BREAKING: Senate Democrats give up bid to pass $1.1 trillion spending bill:

In a dramatic twist played out on the floor of the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid conceded Thursday night he lacked the votes to bring up a nearly $1.1 trillion spending bill designed to fund the federal government for the rest of the current fiscal year.

Reid, D-Nevada, accused Republicans of withdrawing previously pledged support for the bill, and said he would work with the Senate Republican leader to draft a short-term spending measure that would keep the government running beyond Saturday, when the current spending authorization resolution expires.

The panel on AC 360 discussed Harry Reid's decision to pull the bill and the Republicans hypocrisy on earmarks with coming out against it.

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