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Who would have thought a study that wasn't peer reviewed could have caused so much misery for so many? Stephen Colbert did a great job of taking down the deficit hawks who relied on the flawed Reinhart-Rogoff study, as only he can on his show this Tuesday evening.

Now if we could just get our President and Congressional leaders to quit listening to the likes of Simpson and Bowles, who are still out there pushing a new plan for austerity, even after it was revealed that theirs relied on the discredited research.

Colbert got in a lot of good shots during the segment, but I think this was my favorite, other than what he did with Reinhart and Rogoff's names.

Colbert: Of course they didn't share their data. If they can't use Excel, I doubt they can send an email attachment.

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I guess PBS decided that "Fix the Debt" campaign's Steve Rattner wasn't getting quite enough air time, what with his near daily appearances on MSNBC's Morning Joe, because Charlie Rose and his producers gave him some unfettered air time Monday evening.

Rose asks why President Obama should care about the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" thinks about his policies, and whether he's willing to go after our social safety nets. I'd love to know the last time Rose asked whether a Republican president should just ignore the base of his party and suggested that what they think doesn't matter all that much. To his credit, Rattner did admit that President Obama has good reason to pay attention to those that just reelected him, and that they should not be ignored.

He also briefly alluded to the conversation he had during the panel segment on This Week, where his fellow guest Steve Brill rightfully pointed out that lowering the Medicare age would actually save money, but rather than getting into the weeds on that discussion, Rattner only admitted that maybe raising the age might not be "such a good idea." Heaven forbid anyone might actually discuss the heart of Brill's arguments, because it runs counter to the Villager narrative that we must raise the Medicare eligibility age in order to control our health care costs.

Instead, the conversation turned to whether President Obama is entitled to change his mind on the issue or not and with Rattner again pushing for "significant changes to entitlements" as long as there "was a reasonable response from the Republicans on revenues." The idea that Republicans are ever going to come around on taxes seems pretty ridiculous, and as Karoli noted here on our health care costs, the problem is not with the cost to administer Medicare or with the consumers out there, it's with the providers Congress refuses to reign in.

Rose and Rattner were also extremely dismissive of Paul Krugman, who has written extensively about the fact that the debt and the deficit are not urgent issues now and not what we should be focusing on, with Rose calling him "a Nobel Prize winner, but also a minority opinion."

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As Digby rightfully noted after taking a look at some of the reporting on this new Simpson-Bowles plan, "we see the folly of asking for a "balanced approach" when you are negotiating with partisan thugs." Once again, we see that Overton window continually being shoved to the right when there are other alternatives out there, like the package offered by the Progressive Caucus in the House. That, of course, will be ignored, because the Villagers don't seem to consider anyone Serious unless they're talking about austerity and inflicting pain on the working class.

Here's more from Greg Sargent at The Plum Line: Simpson-Bowles and the mythical, arbitrary “center”:

Like a pair of aging crooners hoping to recapture past glory with a long-awaited reunion tour, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson released a new version of their deficit reduction plan today. Ezra Klein ferrets out the real news in the plan: It asks for far less in new revenues, and more in spending cuts, than the previous Simpson-Bowles plan did.

Whereas the previous Simpson-Bowles plan contained a roughly even split of revenues and cuts, the new one reduces the revenue “ask” dramatically, with the result that the overall plan is lopsidedly tilted towards cuts. The reason pinpointed by Klein is particularly striking:

This isn’t meant to be an update to Simpson-Bowles 1.0. Rather, it’s meant to be an outline for a new grand bargain. To that end, Simpson and Bowles began with Obama and Boehner’s final offers from the fiscal cliff deal. That helps explain why their tax ask has fallen so far: Obama’s final tax ask was far lower than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles plan, while Boehner’s tilt towards spending cuts was far greater than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles.

In other words, the plan roughly represents the ideological midpoint between the Obama and Boehner fiscal cliff blueprints — which is why the plan is so heavily tilted towards cuts. As Kevin Drum notes, this is particularly odd, given that spending cuts have already been “75 percent of the deficit reduction we’ve done so far.” Drum adds: “this sure makes it hard to take Simpson-Bowles 2.0 seriously as a plan.” Read on ...

And here's more on that from Steve Benen: Meet the new Simpson-Bowles plan:

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I assume Rep. Paul Ryan was talking about Bill Clinton during this interview on Meet the Press, and not endorsing Hillary for 2016, since Erskine Bowles was Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff, but this is pretty rich coming from someone who helped to derail the Simpson-Bowles plan when he was a member of that commission.

You also gotta love Republicans praising Bill Clinton (the man their party impeached while he was in office and that they treated with about as much disdain as the current resident of the White House) as some great bipartisan savior with whom they're all enamored now.

I'm sure they do love some of the actual bipartisanship we got from Clinton, like bad trade deals and banking deregulation, but to pretend that this modern-day Republican party would be acting any better if we had a Clinton in office is laughable.

GREGORY: It was interesting, on the day of the inauguration Brian Williams and I and others were talking and we noticed some video during the luncheon after the inauguration. And one of the things that caught our eye was a great moment here, you have your back to us, but there are you and you're speaking. You're with Secretary Clinton but also President Clinton. And that's just one of those moments where you say, "Gosh, what were they talking about?" Any advice there coming from --

(crosstalk)

RYAN: We were talking about personal health. Both of us lost our dads when we were young and we were just talking. I got concussions when I was young and Hillary was talking about hers. And we were just kind of chumming it up. Look, if we had a Clinton presidency, if we had Erskine Bowles, Chief Staff of the White House or president of the United States, I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now. That's not the kind of presidency we're dealing with right now.

GREGORY: And you don't blame conservatives, particularly in the House--

RYAN: Everybody. Look both--

GREGORY: --for thwarting the effort?

RYAN: Both parties. Forget about just the recent past. Both parties got us to the mess we are in, this fiscal crisis. Republicans and Democrats. And you know what? It's going to take both parties to solve this problem. That's the kind of leadership we need today.

GREGORY: So how do you think about 2016 and a presidential run?

PAUL RYAN: I don't.

GREGORY: You don't. You're not thinking about it now?

RYAN: I think it's just premature. I've got an important job to do. I represent Wisconsin. I'm chairman of the budget committee at the time we have a fiscal crisis. I think I can do my job representing the people I work for by focusing on that right now than focusing on these distant things.

GREGORY: But you'll take serious look at it?

RYAN: I'll decide later about that. Right now I'm just focused on this.

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Surprise, surprise! It's all sour grapes over at Fox now that it seems Republicans are finally going to allow a clean vote on this so-called “fiscal cliff” bill that had passed the Senate. Leave it to their resident curmudgeon Charles Krauthammer to use the opportunity to paint President Obama as some evil Socialist who just wants to extract money from those hard-working rich people so that the lazy, good-for-nothing moochers out there can have their “entitlements.”

Never mind that he's completely wrong about President Obama being willing to negotiate with Republicans (far too often with the hostage taking we've witnessed), or that Republicans were the ones who originally voted to have these tax cuts expire. And never mind that we've got record income disparity and if we want to pay for a democratic society with a middle class, we should have a progressive tax code where the rich pay their share.

And of course no segment on Fox would be complete without some revisionist history in the form of St. Reagan worship.

BAIER: I mean, if you look at his deficit and debt commission, the Simpson-Bowles commission and the recommendations that came out of there (sorry Bret, but there were no recommendations from that commission, it failed) and what has not been followed through on, now two years ago, it's pretty remarkable.

KRAUTHAMMER: But he's not interested in that. And he's not interested in leading on spending. He's not interested in cutting spending. I think if you look at this in a large view, it's now becoming very clear who he is and what he wants to do. He's now in his second term. He's liberated.

He can be open about what he wants to do. He once said on '08 that Reagan was a historical President in a way that Clinton or Nixon was not. He meant Reagan changed the nature of the country. He got it hooked on low taxes, less government and an increase in inequality, is the way Obama sees it.

He sees his historical role, Obama, is to undo Reaganism and that means, not to cut spending. It means to raise taxes and he let the cat out of the bag on Monday. In that little rally he had, he said to Republicans, you're not getting any spending today and you know that, any spending cuts, but he said that if you think that you can get spending cuts after this in the rest of our negotiations, the answer is no. If you want a cut in spending, you're going to have to increase taxes on the rich.

Remember, he got an increase in revenues now by raising the rates on the rich. Well, now he's going to return, as he said on Monday and get increased revenue from the rich by eliminating deductions, the other way to do it. So he has no interest in anything other than raising the level of taxation, to sort of pre-Reagan levels, so he can support the entitlement state, which is what his presidency is all about. It's a very long view and I think he's attacking it in exactly the right way, if you were of his ideology.

Yeah, that's the ticket. The Kenyan usurper Socialist Communist just wants to beat up on the poor, oppressed rich people and steal all of their money for those lazy, undeserving seniors who would like their Social Security benefits so they don't starve. Krauthammer's still stuck in the '60's if he thinks this sort of talk is going to move most people when you still have so many people hurting from the recession and unemployed. That said, he knows he's speaking to the Fox viewers here, who are probably stuck right there with him.

For anyone that missed it, former Sen. Alan Simpson, one of the co-chairs of the President's now defunct deficit commission, appeared on The Daily Show earlier this month and as Sam Seder rightfully pointed out in the clip above, the interview was just awful. Stewart allowed Simpson to get away with a ton of lies on everything from who owns our debt, to whether we're in danger of becoming like Greece where no one wants to loan us money any more, to the Peterson Foundations' lies about Social Security.

Sam's exactly right here and if Stewart was going to allow Simpson on his show, he should have done a better job doing his homework first. It's really just unacceptable that he allowed his audience to listen to this much garbage out of Simpson without more of it being debunked right on the spot.

It's a little long, but well worth the time if you have it to watch it and I'd highly recommend passing it along to anyone you know who might not realize what a load of garbage Simpson and his fellow fearmongers over the so-called bond vigilantes are peddling. Seder also took Simpson to task for his ridiculous “Gangnam Style” ad he's got out there trying to convince kids to buy into this "The Can Kicks Back" campaign of theirs.

Salon's Alex Pareene did a similar take down of Stewart shortly after his appearance which you can read here: Alan Simpson spins Jon Stewart and they've got the full interview posted as well for anyone that might want to watch it.

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It seems this ongoing feud between former Sen. Alan Simpson and anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist isn't going to end any time soon. Simpson went after Norquist again on Hardball this Tuesday while doing his usual fearmongering over the "fiscal cliff."

Alan Simpson on fiscal cliff: ‘Go big or go home’:

Piecemeal measures won’t save us from the fiscal cliff, former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY), told Hardball’s Chris Matthews on Tuesday. His advice for his former colleagues: “Go big or go home.”

“On Dec. 31st there’s a mess floating around right now, about $7.2 trillion bucks worth of stuff…[we’ve] got to do something,” Simpson said. [...]

Simpson said some lawmakers “love their party more than they love their country,” and that they would wait until the last minute to strike a deal. “They’re going to react right down to the last point when there’s going to be blood and hair and eyeballs all over the floor and they’re going to come up with something, but let me tell you, if it’s just kicking the can down the road, the can is now a 55 gallon drum filled with explosives. You can’t play that game anymore,” said Simpson.

If there’s no real deal, he said, “the markets are going to chop us up and it will be an unknown day.”

The former lawmaker also took a hit at conservative activist Grover Norquist’s crusade to get members of Congress to vow never to raise taxes.

“So how do you deal with guys who came to stop government, or Grover wandering the Earth in his white robe saying you want to drown government in the bathtub. I hope he slips in there with it,” Simpson said.

Of course Matthews let him get away with the typical false equivalency game they've been playing, where they pretend that the likes of Norquist is the equivalent of those on the left who don't want to see our social safety nets destroyed and calls everyone "loons." There's nothing "looney" about wanting to protect the poor, the elderly and the middle class and allowing people to retire with dignity, instead of having to work until they drop dead.

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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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From Monday night's Massachusetts senate debate between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, here's another example of why David Gregory should not be moderating any more debates, ever. He used the debate to push his own agenda and his fetish with the now defunct Simpson-Bowles "plan" that isn't really a plan, since it never made it out of the committee.

Paul Krugman explained again last week why the likes of Gregory and his fellow Villagers pushing for austerity is so destructive if our politicians take their advice:

I ask that question because we already know what Mr. Obama will face if re-elected: a clamor from Beltway insiders demanding that he immediately return to his failed political strategy of 2011, in which he made a Grand Bargain over the budget deficit his overriding priority. Now is the time, he’ll be told, to fix America’s entitlement problem once and for all. There will be calls — as there were at the time of the Democratic National Convention — for him to officially endorse Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the co-chairmen of his deficit commission (although never accepted by the commission as a whole).

And Mr. Obama should just say no, for three reasons.

First, despite years of dire warnings from people like, well, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, we are not facing any kind of fiscal crisis. Indeed, U.S. borrowing costs are at historic lows, with investors actually willing to pay the government for the privilege of owning inflation-protected bonds. So reducing the budget deficit just isn’t the top priority for America at the moment; creating jobs is. For now, the administration’s political capital should be devoted to passing something like last year’s American Jobs Act and providing effective mortgage debt relief. [...]

Finally, despite the bizarre reverence it inspires in Beltway insiders — the same people, by the way, who assured us that Paul Ryan was a brave truth-teller — the fact is that Simpson-Bowles is a really bad plan, one that would undermine some key pieces of our safety net. And if a re-elected president were to endorse it, he would be betraying the trust of the voters who returned him to office.

And here's more from a couple of others who share my disgust with Gregory's pathetic performance as moderator. First from Charles Pierce -- Warren/Brown II — Out of the Ring and into the Classroom of National Ideas, Advantage: Professor:

There was a general consensus on several issues as we all filed out of Tsongas Arena on Monday night. The first was that incumbent U.S. Senator Scott Brown had done a little better than he'd done in his first debate with challenger Elizabeth Warren in that he dialed the essential dickitude of his essential personality back to about a six. The second was that Warren was not quite as good as she had been the first time around, although she finished very strongly. The third, and by far the most solidly held, consensus was that moderator David Gregory should be flogged through the streets for wasting everyone's time.

The Dancin' Master promised that the evening would be held "Meet The Press-style" and, alas, he delivered. (I kept waiting for John McCain to wander onto the stage out of pure reflex.) Gregory made such a terrible dog's breakfast of the his job that his performance can best be summed up by a question he asked late in the proceedings. "We've only got a few minutes left, so I'd like to touch on some other issues. The war in Afghanistan..." [...]

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I would really love to see Sam Seder get his own show at either MSNBC or Current TV. He did a fine job filling in for Chris Hayes on Up this weekend, and here's his opening from Sunday's show -- How Republicans are using the crisis of poverty... against Obama:

At the Values Voters Summit on Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan whose budget was approved by the House with sweeping cuts to aid for the poor responded to new figures from the Census Bureau this week showing that 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line last year—a rate basically unchanged from the year before—but a rate not seen in this country in nearly 20 years.

Here's what Ryan had to say about Obama's record on poverty:

"The Obama economic agenda failed, not because it was stopped, but because it was passed. And here is what we got: Prolonged joblessness across the country. Twenty-three million Americans struggling to find work. Family income in decline. Fifteen percent of Americans living in poverty. Here we are, after four years of economic stewardship under these self-proclaimed advocates of the poor, and what do they have to show for it? More people in poverty, and less upward mobility wherever you look."

It's not the first time this election cycle that we've seen the right raise the specter of the poor. But poverty is raised not to offer prescriptions or remedies but to be used as a cudgel, as a means of playing on middle class fears of losing ground by suggesting not so much that they, too, could become impoverished but that the threat to their economic stability is the poor themselves, who are taking that ground from them.

Calling President Obama the "food stamp President" is not bemoaning the plight of those Americans who, in the wake of a devastating financial crisis have lost the means to put food on the table for their families, but rather, to imply that some "other" is living large, while the rest of "us" struggle. That said, we do know something about the people Romney relies on and what they believe about poverty.

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