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We've written about this over and over again here at C&L and what a bad idea it is to be calling for the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to be raised -- how it just inflicts pain on the poor at a time of record income disparity. Not to mention the fact that there are other ways to address our debt and deficits other than attacking our social safety nets! It was nice to see Ezra Klein once again give some grief to the wealthy CEOs and pundits out there who have downplayed just how damaging these policies are for anyone who actually works for a living and is not sitting in some cushy, over-paid job. They don't care when or if they retire because they love their jobs.

Meanwhile, working people are in so much pain from the hard work they do, they take a big hit on their benefits to retire early.

For anyone that missed the segment, you can check that out here: Ezra Klein: Raising Social Security Retirement Age Concentrates Pain on the Poor.

Klein discussed the recent news that CEOs and The Business Roundtable are pushing to have the retirement ages raised to 70, but don't want the income cap raised on Social Security, because heaven forbid we do anything to harm those uber-wealthy "job creators." As Klein notes, while they didn't mind pushing for those with much lower incomes to take a big hit on their retirement benefits, the wealthiest among us aren't willing to share in that sacrifice themselves. They're drawing the line when it comes to raising their own Social Security taxes as Reuters reported:

But the group rejected shoring up Social Security by making incomes above the maximum annual threshold - which in 2012 was $110,100 - subject to payroll taxes, saying that would hurt the economy.

"You would have to raise the base upon which the taxes are applied very substantially to drive a sufficient level of revenue to address the long-term solvency of the program," Loveman said.

"That would be far more damaging to economic growth than what we're asking people to consider," he added. "If you raise the tax rate on people who earn over the current threshold, you'll have an immediate deleterious effect on employment and economic activity."

I was very happy to hear the way Klein followed up on this:

KLEIN: So if you're a CEO who makes maybe $1 million, you're only taxed for Social Security on first tenth, tenth of your income. If you're making $60,000 a year, a normal worker, every one of your $60,000 is taxed for Social Security. And this is the kind of thing, it just drives me crazy. Because you know what the flip side of these guys loving their jobs and never, ever, ever wanting to leave, not even when they're old and their back hurts and they've got lots of grand kids is and the money to take all those grand kids to an island?

They're also not going to stop being CEO of Caesar's because they're paying payroll taxes on more of their income, because they love their jobs. But that is the shell game that gets played here. Folks at the top have convinced themselves that things that won't hurt them at all like raising the retirement age are easy, no brainers, because they won't hurt anybody at all. They're just common sense.

And then they've also convinced themselves that things that will hurt them, will devastate the economy. So when they're saying no to paying higher taxes, they're not being selfish, they're just protecting jobs and growth. As Upton Sinclair liked to say, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

Groups like The Business Roundtable, they have a big voice and they like to quote themselves in the economy and argue that what they say and what they do are informed and driven by just wanting what is best for jobs and for growth and for their company. But it seems to often come down to what is best for the CEOs. It is good to be on the top.

Sadly, yes it is. And those on top seem to be more and more detached from the lives of everyday Americans as the rest of us face those realities on a day-to-day basis. Segments like this one with Klein calling them out for it on cable television unfortunately are all too rare an occurrence these days.

You can read more about this push to raise the retirement age at Klein's blog here: CEOs want to raise the retirement age to 70,

And here's more from Think Progress: Wealthy CEOs Want To Force Americans To Retire Later.

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On CNN's Reliable Sources this Sunday, Howard Kurtz did a segment focusing on whether the pundits out there in the media who were telling everyone it would be a Romney blowout, should pay a price for being continually wrong with their predictions. I think Kurtz misses the forest for the trees with his criticism, primarily because any real analysis about just how bad most of the corporate media's election coverage was, would require him taking a look at his own network and not just Fox News.

First and foremost, if we're ever going to do anything about getting the money out of politics, we're not going to get much help, if any, out of the industries primarily profiting from it, which is all of the television stations and radio stations across the country. You're not going to see the pundits out there saying much about all of those advertising dollars when their companies and everyone they work with is thriving because of it.

And then there's the issue of Rove and his ilk on Fox, who was not just that he was misleading viewers with overly optimistic predictions about the election results, but also running a PAC. Fox continually failed to disclose Rove's involvement in the election. They also made a regular habit of bringing on Romney campaign advisers as pundits and failing to disclose their roles as well..

If Kurtz wants to give an honest assessment of the coverage of this presidential election, there's a lot more wrong with it than just pundits getting predictions wrong. And what I noted here is just the tip of the iceberg. Endless focus on polls and the horse race, rather than substance, the issue of media consolidation, fake balance where there is none and a host of other issues are a lot bigger problem than talking heads being rewarded for failure.

Full transcript of Kurtz and his panel's remarks below the fold.

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(Chuck Todd: Republicans will give Democrats all the revenue they want, if they just agree to raise the retirement age. Trust them.)

I don't know about anyone else, but as someone who has actually worked at one of those jobs where you take a shower at the end of the work day and not before you go in, I'm sick to death of watching these overpaid television pundits and their counterparts in the Congress, nonchalantly discussing raising the retirement age. It may not matter much to them, but there are real economic hardships involved when you force the average wage earner out there to continue to work until they drop dead if the retirement age is raised any higher than it already is now.

If our beltway Villagers and politicians really believe that it's no big deal to raise the retirement age for the rest of America, how about we ask them to walk a mile in our shoes? I wonder if any of them would decide that maybe it's not such a great idea to be doing physical labor well into your late sixties if they were the ones actually having to do those jobs?

I wonder if Chuck Todd would be a little more worried about when he might be able to retire if he were say, some migrant worker picking berries and in need of daily visits to the chiropractor he can't afford because his back is screaming all day from being bent over?

Or how Mrs. Greenspan would feel if she were working at Mickey-D's flipping burgers and serving fries and standing on a ceramic floor, with her varicose veins getting worse by the minute?

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Stephen Colbert did a fine job of making a mockery of Joe Scarborough and his criticism of New York Times blogger, Nate Silver and his hackery where he told the viewers at MSNBC that they should take Scarborough and his "gut" more seriously than Silver and math, because as Colbert explained here, we all know math has a liberal bias.

Here's more from Media Matters on the segment Colbert was making fun of during this segment.

Pundits Vs. Nate Silver, Data Vs. "Gut":

Nate Silver has a computer model. Each day he plugs the data from the various national and swing state polls into that model, numbers are crunched, simulations are run, and he posts the results on his New York Times blog indicating who is more likely to win the presidential election: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. (As of this posting, Silver's analysis has Obama winning in 74.6 percent of scenarios.) And for this, Silver is coming under attack from pundits who insist that their gut feeling tells them the race is a true toss-up.

"Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes," complained Joe Scarborough on the October 29 Morning Joe. [...]

It makes sense that pundits like Scarborough and Brooks would have it out for a numbers guy like Silver. Their oeuvre is the intangible. They analyze based on gut feelings and nonspecifics. Their great trick is to transform the utterly unquantifiable into something approaching concrete certainty.

Nate Silver joined Colbert in the following segment and he didn't get him to call Scarborough out by name, but he didn't have any kind words for pundits during the interview and quite frankly, I don't blame him. He was a lot kinder than I would have been with Scarborough given how rotten, nasty, personal, and wrong Scarborough was to him on Morning Joe.

You can watch Silver's interview with Colbert below the fold.

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After going through a montage of political pundits and their predictions for the upcoming election and the fact that the likes of Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris are perpetually wrong with theirs, Stewart had this response to Morris pretending there might be some accountability for the fact that he's never right about anything.

STEWART: But I can show you a prediction that was wrong today. It comes via Dick Morris, king of Wrong Mountain, and it concerns accountability for pundits. [...]

MORRIS: You know, after the election, either I'm going to have to go through a big reckoning, or they are.

STEWART: No. You won't and they won't. Nobody will. Because you're pundits. You live in a reckoning free zone. One thing we learned is that punditry is like musical chairs. The only difference is, in punditry, when the music stops, nobody ever loses their f**king chair. They just keep adding more chairs.

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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.

It's time for your weekly podcast from our own Driftglass and Bluegal, otherwise known at The Professional Left. Enjoy the podcast and don't forget to vote for Bluegal if you'd like to help send her and Driftie to Netroots Nation this year at Democracy for America's site.

You can listen to the archives or make a donation to help keep these going at http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/. And here are some related links to this week's podcast.

1. Lewis Black signs on as Donald Trump's campaign manager.

2. Paul Wolfowitz.

3. Yeats' "The Second Coming".

4. Tom Friedman, "The Mustache of Understanding" .

5. Ginni Thomas hired by Bib-and-Tucker Carlson.

6. Steve Forbes gets eated.

7. Constantine's Sword.

Time for your weekly Driftglass and Bluegal podcast, extended bonus edition this week. Happy Birthday Fran! Have a nice weekend everybody.

You can listen to past editions here and at http://dgbgpodcast.blogspot.com/, and the podcast is also available on i-Tunes. If you enjoy these as much as I do, donations are greatly appreciated. Please consider throwing five bucks in the hat.

Cenk Uygur took on one of my least favorite pundits, John Avlon, in this segment on The Young Turks and did what you never see anyone in the our "mainstream media" do when allowing this hack to come on their shows, which is to call him out for the fact that there is no one on the left that you can honestly compare to the ultra-crazies we have on the right side of the aisle right now. The best Avlon could muster without going back to the 60's was to call unions left wing extremists.

Cenk made some other really great points like just how far to the right our country has moved when it comes to what you'd call a "centrist" these days and does a good job of attempting to explain to Avlon that what he calls "centrist" is actually "corporatist" and that when it comes to the issues that really matter to most Americans and what is causing to get hammered economically, unlike the wedge issues that get everyone riled up, people on the left and progressives are losing those battles, whether it be the bank bailouts, health care reform or tax breaks for the rich and for corporations. He also did a really good job explaining just how far what used to be called the center has shifted to the right where the positions of those on the left are what used to be considered moderate and that a lot of Republicans from past eras would be run out of today's Republican Party.

My only quibble with Cenk about this interview would be that he allowed Avlon to filibuster him a bit too often. He did finally have enough of it later in the interview and stopped him so he could make his points. He also allowed him to be portrayed as "independent" and didn't point out to his viewers that he worked for Rudy Giuliani.

That said it was a breath of fresh air to see this guy get challenged in the manner he deserves for once and premise of his book, which tries to paint people on the left as extremists when they're not and that calls centrism giving corporate America anything it wants, called a bunch of nonsense, which it is. Avlon finally showed his true colors with being an anti-union zealot in this interview with Cenk. It doesn't surprise me one bit but makes me dislike him even more than I did before listening to him call us "extremists" who are destroying America and the Democratic Party.

It's a long interview, over twenty minutes but if you've got that time to spare it is well worth is watching the king of the false equivalencies get his talking points taken apart for once. Good for Cenk. It would be nice to see MSNBC give him a job if they allowed him to do the type of interviews he just did here instead of just having him on Ratigan's show to debate wingnuts in a five minute debate box with Ratigan controlling the narrative. I'd say this interview ranks right up there with his take down of S.E. Cupp and Wayne Allyn Root.

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Geraldo Rivera goes after Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings for his reporting which led to the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and goes so far as to compare him to al Qaeda. This is coming from the same guy that the military kicked out of Iraq back in 2003 because he disclosed information about troop movements on the air. He made similar remarks earlier in the week on Fox when he appeared with KT McFarland when he said "whoever was in charge of putting that reporter with those soldiers in that context allowed a rat to be in an eagle's nest." More on that from Reason Magazne:

Losing the War in Afghanistan? Blame Rolling Stone, Suggests Geraldo Rivera:

And now some pundits are making the reporter, Michael Hastings, out to be the bad guy. [...]

True, there are strategic implications: We learned that the top general in Afghanistan surrounds himself with idiots. As KT McFarland points out in the video, public officials and their aides should know better than to make disparaging and derogatory remarks in front of reporters. Far from having jeopardized our mission in Afghanistan—which is what Rivera is implying—the Rolling Stone article reveals important details about the people McChrystal relied on. Like, for instance, the McChrystal aide who described a meeting with a French minister as "f**king gay." Does this sound like the best team to head a war effort where the U.S. needs to win the hearts and minds of the people in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

I suspect Rivera is probably just jealous that someone went out and did real reporting for a change. Other journalists are jealous, too. Check out Jon Stewart making fun of them here.

During this interview with O'Reilly, Geraldo rails on about how the soldiers remarks should have been considered "off the record", he claims that they didn't know they were beig interviewed, he accuses Rolling Stone Magazine of being just as dangerous as al Qaeda to the mission in Afghanistan and wanting to rush the story to press without checking with the military first and even O'Reilly who obviously hates Rolling Stone for the article they did about him has to call out Geraldo for going over the top.

O'Reilly tells him that Rolling Stone claims they ran the quotes by Gen. McChrystal and he allowed the story to go to print and Geraldo does a complete 180 and says he'll take the magazine at their word and then credits Gen. McChrystal for "not trying to sleaze away." I guess it was asking too much of Geraldo to maybe actually find out himself if the magazine cleared the story with the military first before he went on the air and accused their reporter of being akin to a terrorist.

Transcript below the fold.

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