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Given he's from New York and has done more than his share to make sure our government policies are friendly to Wall Street, the big banks and the hedge fund managers, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Chuck Schumer take his fellow Senator, Jon Kyl to task for trying to pretend that you're going to hurt a lot of small businesses if you raise taxes on those making over $250,000 a year.

I've heard this argument so many times from Republicans, it's ridiculous and ABC This Week host Jonathan Karl wasn't much better than Kyl here with trying to pretend like you're going to damage the economy if the wealthiest among us have their taxes go up a few percentage points for their income over a quarter of a million dollars.

KARL:  But I've got to ask you about this question about -- because this is one of the big sticking points left, is whose taxes go up?  Is it people making over $250,000, as the president wants, or Republicans suggested nobody, or people making over a $1 million?
 
But you, Senator Schumer, had proposed raising taxes only on those making over $1 million.  And I want to take a look at what you said about this proposal, going at $250,000.  This was last year.  You said, "In the eyes of many, it is hard to ask households making $250,000 or $300,000 a year -- in large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that is associated with wealth.  It also would affect too many small businesses." 
 
Weren't you right back then, when you said it was wrong to raise taxes on those...
 
(CROSSTALK) 
 
SCHUMER:  Well, look, we offered that to our Republican colleagues two years ago, when the political landscape was different.  They rejected it.  And then the president, sticking to $250,000, campaigned on it openly, overtly.  He won the election on it overwhelmingly on that issue; 60 percent of the public was with him. 
 
So that is our position.  It's a position that brings in more revenues.  And what we have learned, as the fiscal situation deteriorated, if you go much higher than $250,000, to raise the rest of the revenues you need, you're going to hurt the middle class as you take away their tax deductions.  So it's the right place...
 
KARL:  But you said back then...
 
SCHUMER:  ... to be.
 
KARL:  But you said back then it would affect too many small businesses.  Frankly, you sounded a little like Senator Kyl. 
 
SCHUMER:  Well, the bottom line is very, very simple, and that is that if you do -- if you go much above $250,000, you're going to hurt the middle class even worse and small businesses even worse by having to take away tax deductions.  That's not the place we were at two years ago.  It is the place we're at now, because the situation is deteriorating. 
 
KYL:  Jonathan, it's exactly the opposite.  The higher you set that level, the less small business you're going to hit.  And you're exactly right, and Chuck was right back when he talked about a million, because the increase in the tax rates for individual taxpayers sweeps in about a million small-business owners.  Remember, about half of small businesses are women-owned.  And it sweeps them up because they don't pay corporate tax rates; they pay as individuals. 
 
KARL:  But -- but...
 
SCHUMER:  Wait a second.  That's counting big hedge funds as small businesses, big Hollywood productions, like Oprah Winfrey, as small businesses.  It affects very few.  We all know mom-and-pop small businesses, the dry cleaner down the street and others, don't make millions and millions of dollars.

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In a face to face confrontation that aired on Sunday, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) called out Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) for using "weasel words" to suggest that President Barack Obama knew about former CIA Director David Petraeus' sex scandal prior to the November election.

Hutchinson told CNN's Candy Crowley and a panel of lawmakers that she couldn't believe that an email threat that Paula Broadwell, Petraeus' mistress, allegedly made to another woman triggered a low-level FBI investigation that the president would not have known about.

"I'm very worried about this," she opined. "Did it really trigger an FBI investigation of the CIA director? At a low level? And it wasn't raised to a higher level? I mean, if anybody is investigating the director of the CIA, the president of the United States should know immediately. And I feel like, A, we don't know enough and, B, I have great concerns about a lot of this surrounding..."

"Nobody was investigating the director of the CIA," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) interrupted. "What they were inquiring into was whether or not somebody had unauthorized access or was taking advantage of access to the director."

"But at what level were these decisions being made?" Hutchinson insisted. "I just think there needs to be a whole lot more."

"Are you suggesting that there was some cover up, that the FBI was playing games, Kay?" Frank wondered. "I think we ought to be explicit about this. I'm troubled by the implication of your statement. Are you suggesting that something wasn't legitimate here? Because that would trouble me."

"I am suggesting that I have great concerns about the legitimacy of this," Hutchinson repeated.

"Using 'great concern' is kind of a weasel word," Frank shot back.

"No, I don't think it's a weasel word," Hutchinson replied. "A general in our military and the CIA director, to all of the sudden have this kind of upheaval when it appears that the president didn't know until two months later? Two months later?"

"It seems to me, frankly, that you're kind of hinting at something bad and I don't see what that could be," Frank pointed out. "I find those kind of implications very troubling. Do you distrust the FBI? Is [FBI Director Robert] Mueller lying? Who are you accusing of not having done the right thing?"

"I tell you what troubles me to some extent, Candy, if this was an investigation into David Petraeus' bank account instead of his sex life, all of us would be paying a lot less attention to it," the Massachusetts congressman added. "And I'm troubled by the prurience of some of this. And the prominence it's getting is -- privacy shouldn't totally disappear."

Earlier this month, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told reporters that the policy of not sharing facts about ongoing investigations with the White House had been followed because "there was not a threat to national security."

(h/t: Think Progress)

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This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I've heard out of a Republican in a while and that's saying a lot given the amount of lies that come out of most of their mouths most of the time their lips are moving. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl appeared on Meet the Press this Sunday and actually tried to blame outsourcing by corporations on taxes, regulation and "Obamacare" when asked about the dust up over Mitt Romney's outsourcing at Bain Capital.

It's pretty bad when even hack David Gregory has to point out that it's pretty hard to be blaming "Obamacare" or the Affordable Care Act for companies shipping jobs overseas since the practice has been going on for decades now. The truth of the matter is companies ship jobs overseas for cheap labor for one reason and that's to maximize profits. It's not for any concern for American citizens or the American economy. And because they're rewarded and not punished by our tax laws for doing so, we're not going to see the practice stop until our laws are changed.

Democrats have been trying to get Republicans to actually do something about this problem as Sen. Dick Durbin pointed out in his reply to Kyl's nonsense. Sen. Debbie Stabenow has introduced legislation that would "eliminate tax breaks allowing companies to deduct expenses associated with moving operations overseas, while still encouraging them to assist displaced workers. It also would provide a tax credit to corporations that bring jobs back to the United States."

So far the response from Republicans has been for John Boehner to refuse to allow it to come to the floor for a vote in the House and we're looking at the Senate voting on the bill later this month. Naturally when Durbin was trying to elicit a response from Kyl on whether the Republicans in the Senate would vote for the bill or not, David Gregory managed to change the subject so he had no chance for follow up with him.

Instead Kyl was allowed to spout his "we can't raise taxes on the job creators" nonsense with Gregory leaving him unchallenged on their B.S. talking point as well. For once I'd like someone to ask Kyl and his ilk why, if cutting taxes supposedly created jobs, we weren't at full employment while Bush was in office, or given his latest ridiculous argument here, why we didn't see outsourcing under Bush end or at least be reduced as well. If we had an actual journalist instead of a Republican water carrier hosting this show, we wouldn't even see the likes of Kyl show up as a guest, because it would not take a whole lot of follow up to make him look extremely foolish with the arguments he was trying to make here.

Transcript below the fold.

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Jon Stewart hit the hypocritical Republicans this Tuesday night for their apparent problems with basic math and their opposition to passing the Buffett rule after attacking the money spent on Planned Parenthood:

STEWART: So, let's see if I can get this straight. $47 billion in millionaires’ money is less than $300 million in mammograms and birth control.

They might care about the public noticing their blatant hypocrisy if they were capable of feeling shame, but they've made it obvious over the years that they are not.

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Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl (R) insists that he wasn't pressured by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist into sabotaging a deal to lower the U.S. budget deficit.

After Kyl indicated that he was open to a super committee deal that would raise revenues as well as cut spending, Politico reported that Norquist called Kyl with "the tone of a teacher scolding a second grader."

"So, I call Kyl. 'What did you say? What did you mean? How can we work together on this?'" Norquist recalled asking the senator.

"And then he went down on the [Senate] floor, and he gave a colloquy about how we're against any tax increases of any sort. Boom!"

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank noted that as the committee was just hours away from complete failure, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) made a final effort to reach a deal last Monday.

"[O]bservers knew the effort was going nowhere for one simple reason: Kyl was in the room," Milbank wrote.

"Is that story true?" Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Kyl Sunday. "Are you and other Republicans somehow cowed by Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge?"

"The answer to both questions is absolutely not," Kyl declared. "And the proof in the pudding is the fact that the so-called Toomey plan that the Republicans -- all six of us -- offered to the Democrats would have specifically raised tax revenues."

The plan Kyl claimed Republicans offered, which was authored by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), would have been a massive tax cut for the rich. At the end of 2012, the top tax rate is set to rise to 39.6 percent as Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire. But under the Toomey plan, top rates would have dropped to 28 percent, which is even lower than they are now.

"It would have been the biggest tax cut since Calvin Coolidge," Kerry told NBC's David Gregory. "And we all know how that turned out."

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Here we go again with Mr. 'Not Intended to Be a Factual Statement" Sen. Jon Kyl, looking out for those so-called "job creators." When asked by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday if he'd support an extension of the payroll tax holiday, Kyl claimed that giving tax cuts to the middle class does not stimulate job creation. When Wallace countered him with some numbers showing that it did, Kyl responded by citing that hack Art Laffer and calling him a "respected economist."

As our own Jon Perr wrote earlier this week -- Republicans Violate Norquist Pledge over Payroll Tax Cut Extension:

The Wall Street Journal greeted the failure of the Congressional debt super committee with an editorial titled, "Thank You, Grover Norquist." That gratitude should have surprised no one. After all, Norquist's anti-tax pledge led handcuffed committee Republicans not just to oppose even modest tax increases on the richest Americans, but to demand another tax cut payday for the privileged while slashing federal spending.

As it turns out, however, a tax increase isn't always a tax increase for Norquist's GOP servants. Not, that is, when those receiving the tax cut are working Americans and the President proposing it is a Democrat. Because after they spent 2010 ensuring the extension of the Bush tax cut windfall for the wealthy by insisting "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans," GOP leaders are demanding exactly that for President Obama's proposal for continued payroll tax relief. Read on...

Full transcript below the fold.

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On this Sunday's Meet the Press, Sen. Jon Kyl was asked what he thought of GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's statement that the Occupy Wall Street protesters should "Go get a job right after you take a bath" and Kyl wasn't willing to put an ounce of daylight between his views and those of the former Speaker of the House.

Here he is doing his best Ayn Rand imitation talking about the "wealth producers" and going on to blame Democrats for the gridlock we've seen in Washington DC caused by Republican obstruction, which was naturally left unchallenged by host David Gregory. Heaven forbid he might have reminded him of the record number of filibusters we've seen from Republicans in the Senate.

GREGORY: I want to ask you this. The Occupy Wall Street movement and protests around the country have become a political issue. And as we talk about income inequality, we talk about America's debt, this was the scene in Northern California at UC Davis. Pepper spray being used on protesters. Newt Gingrich was very critical of this movement. I want to play something that he said and ask for your view on it. This was Newt Gingrich in Iowa.

(Videotape, last night)

GINGRICH: All of the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. They take over a public park they didn't pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn't pay for, to beg for food from places they don't want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes. Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, "Go get a job right after you take a bath."

(End videotape)

GREGORY: Do you agree with that?

KYL: Well, I think it expresses the, the attitude of a lot of these folks who somehow think money grows on trees and they're entitled to it. And they don't understand how wealth is produced in this country. It's produced by people who work and who invest, who take a risk in a small business, for example. They hire people, and that produces wealth to the government that they can then take advantage of. But it doesn't seem to me they have adequate appreciation of how our free market system works to produce the wealth that's really made us the envy of the world.

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“Will the Supercommittee save Congress from Congress’ archenemy: the American people?”

The debt ceiling debacle's first act is now over and we can look forward to the second part with the rise of the super committee.

Our heroes include: “The Senator Drone,” (Sen. Reid) who will “talk to you about things for a long time,” “Professor Kvetch,” Jon Kyl as "The Trickler" (his golden stream shielding the rich), (Sen. Charles Schumer) “drowning out opponents with his supersonic whine,” and “Old-Man Man” (Sen. John McCain), the guy who's lawn you must not tread upon.

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As unhappy as I am about how this whole debt ceiling hostage taking is going and wondering what we're in for after we get more details on what's being agreed to right now, I was glad to see someone finally push back at this Republican talking point I hear them repeat day after day, week after week -- Democrats never passed a budget and so that makes the horrid Ryan budget passed by the House somehow "responsible."

Sen. Dick Durbin finally shot that one down on Fox News Sunday this morning and explained why they never got anything passed -- 60 votes -- or in other words, Republican filibusters and obstruction.

BAIER: Senator Kyl, when you hear the president say this no way to run the government, you know, that we'll likely also face another standoff at the end of September when the continuing resolution runs out and government funding -- you know, we're up against another government shutdown. You know, former White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once famously said, "Never waste a crisis."

Do Republicans now risk become the -- becoming the party that's always pushing up to the cliff, always using that cliff to try to extract concessions? I mean, do you fear the American people will have crisis fatigue, if they don't already, and that it will hurt your party?

KYL: You mentioned the possibility of a continuing resolution. Why would Congress have to pass a continuing resolution? Because the Senate Democrats now, for the third year in a row, will not have passed a budget. That's their job.

The House Republicans have passed a budget. Senate Democrats said no to that budget. So I think it's very unfair to suggest that Republicans are responsible.

We don't have the votes in the U.S. Senate. But where they do have the votes, in the House of Representatives, they've done their job.

BAIER: Senator Durbin, why haven't the Senate Democrats passed a budget?

DURBIN: It's called 60 votes. And what it boils down to is this: we have 53 Democratic senators.

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In the Republican Weekly Address, Sen. Jon Kyl continued with more of the GOP's latest excuse for why no one can ever dare to take tax rates back to where they were when Bill Clinton was in office. Heaven forbid we can't raise taxes on the "job creators." Republicans care about job creation, alright ... just not in the United States.

Maybe once they've destroyed our economy entirely where people here will work for a few dollars an hour, those "job creators" will decide to start blessing us again and creating more jobs here at home. Kyl also seems to have a bad case of amnesia if he's not going to acknowledge just who did that "runaway spending" he's talking about here.

Kyl's part of the problem with his votes for the Bush tax cuts, the illegal invasions of countries that were not a threat to us and the giveaways to the pharmaceutical industry -- not to mention he and his fellow Republicans' aversion to any type of regulation that might have prevented the financial meltdown and subsequent bailouts that have done terrible harm to our economy.

Kyl claims that raising the debt ceiling without significant spending cuts would be irresponsible. Sorry Jon, but your reckless spending that you refused to pay for or even put on the books that caused us to go from a surplus to a deficit in the first place is what's irresponsible. Now your party just continues to prove that you're completely incapable of governing as well. Slash, pillage, burn and destroy is all these people understand.

Weekly remarks by Sen. Jon Kyl, as provided by Republican Party leadership

Good morning. I am Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona.

By now, most Americans know that lawmakers in Washington are engaged in a difficult debate about the nation’s ‘debt ceiling,’ the legal limit to the amount of money the federal government can borrow.

The debt ceiling is currently set at a little more than 14 trillion dollars, and if Congress and the president don’t reach an agreement to raise it by this coming Tuesday, the Treasury secretary tells us America will no longer be able to pay all its bills.

The consequences of missing this deadline could be severe, precisely because Washington....
...borrows so much money -- more than 40 cents out of every dollar it spends. So, spending would have to shrink by 40% very quickly.

What’s more, markets would likely respond, dropping in value and hurting the retirement savings of millions of Americans.

Republicans have tried to work with Democrats to avoid this result and put our country on a better path, but we need them to work with us.

We start from the understanding that the reason the debt ceiling is a problem is because of runaway Washington spending. So, Republicans have been united in the belief that raising the debt ceiling without making significant spending reductions would be irresponsible.

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