Thom Hartmann talked about the sequester with Jamie Weinstein, who's an editor at the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson's rag. He pointed out that Republicans are now trying to lay all of the blame on President Obama's feet, even though House Speaker previously said that he got "98 percent of what I wanted" with the deal. Thom says the real reason that Republicans want to see sequestration go through is that it's going to tank the economy and they want to blame President Obama.

It's more of the same. Republicans are more than happy to inflict economic damage onto the American economy if they think they'll benefit from it politically. I'm pretty sure Weinstein and his ilk will do their best to make sure that happens and that there is no accountability if Republicans don't reach some deal next week, when Congress comes back from vacation.

Hartmann also took on Weinstein over whether it's fair to be asking those who make their living from capital gains and investments to pay the same tax rates as those of us who work for a living instead of just shuffling money around, like the Mitt Romneys of the world. He pointed out that even the Republican St. Ronnie agreed back in the day and had Republican crowds cheering for the rich to pay their fair share of taxes.

Weinstein responded with some weasel words about the average tax rate of most millionaires, which is a distraction from the point Hartmann was making about the difference in how income from work compared to income from investments is taxed, and whether we've got too many Mitt Romneys out there who are paying lower tax rates than those who work for them.

All in all, I'd say Weinstein brought a knife to a gun fight, because he didn't do a very good job of rebutting most of Hartmann's points.

I don't know how all of this is going to end up, but right now, I'm about as cynical as Hartmann when it comes to what kind of damage Republicans will inflict on this country if they think they won't pay a political cost for their actions. As long as we've got a compliant media treating their actions as normal or as something the public should consider acceptable, they don't have any reason to change their behavior.

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Fox's Neil Cavuto spent the two opening segments of his show this Thursday evening doing damage control for the Romney campaign, after the Boston Globe among others have been reporting on his time at Bain Capital and whether he profited personally from seeing jobs shipped overseas and a race to the bottom for America, when he's running on knowing how to manage our economy and as a "job creator."

First Cavuto brought in The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein, who we just previously got this crack reporting from on how Jon Stewart is a terrible person for making a lot of money during his appearance on Fox & Friends earlier this month. Weinstein and Cavuto's latest defense for Mitt Romney -- those in glass houses can't throw stones and that evil Nancy Pelosi made money off of foreign investments. Therefore she is exactly like Mitt Romney and no one can ever say anything bad about him.

Sorry Scooter, but Nancy Pelosi is not running for president. She is not going out there and claiming to be a "job creator" as the reason she's qualified to be president. And investing in foreign companies does not equal buying up U.S. companies, busting their unions, raiding their pension funds, telling everyone they're fired and can reapply for their jobs at half their previous wages and lining your pocket whether that investment went bad or went well and what Mitt Romney did during his time at Bain. You can play the false equivalency game all you want, but whether we think both things are good or bad or just business as usual in a global economy, they're not equal. And if Pelosi were running for president, you can bet Republicans would be using this against her in political ads, just at The Daily Caller is attacking her for it now.

Cavuto then moved on to discussing a recent Gallup poll that showed one in five voters being less likely to vote for him because of his wealth. If we had a more educated public as to how he attained that wealth, or who were paying attention to this election yet, I've got to wonder what those numbers might be. I'm not sure how you ever spin just the fact that he's wealthy being a negative with one in five into a good thing.

Cavuto wrapped things up with bringing in Suffolk University Political Research Center's David Paleologos who did his best to muddy the waters on the poll and Romney's problems with average voters as well. We've had a lot of rich presidents, so why is Romney being rich such a bad thing? Voters don't really care that Romney is rich and what "his balance sheet is," they care about "their own balance sheets." Barack Obama made a lot of money selling his books as well.

The last bit of this interview and the verbal gymnastics it took to get to their conclusions is pretty astounding.

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Once again the clowns over at Fox show us that understanding nuance isn't exactly their strong point: Fox & Friends Wages Class Warfare On Jon Stewart:

You know how Fox News yells “class warfare” the moment someone talks about income disparity? Apparently, it’s OK to complain about someone else’s wealth when it’s Jon Stewart earning the big bucks. Fox & Friends, along with the Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein, thought it was big proof of Stewart’s hypocrisy to sneer about Stewart’s earnings and the news that he’s supposedly “on track” to being worth more than Mitt Romney. Of course, they missed Stewart’s main point, which is not that Romney is rich, per se, but that his favor-the-wealthy policies are self-serving while Stewart supports ones that are not.

They picked a week when Stewart is on vacation and won't be able to respond to them for some time. They were complaining about what Stewart pays his staff when I doubt any of them have a clue what he pays them and they made a ridiculous statement about Stewart lending some of his wealth to "poor, struggling" Steve Carell or Stephen Colbert. Last I checked, one of them had a successful movie career and the other has his own show right after Stewart, so I have no idea why they would think either of them are broke or need Stewart to give them money, but I would imagine they don't either.

I think Tucker Carlson still just wants to get even with Jon Stewart for making a fool out of him on Crossfire years ago if his Daily Caller doesn't have anything better than this to attack him for.

As John already pointed out, the Koch brothers are attempting to buy influence over who gets hired at Florida State University among other prominent universities around the country. Thom Hartmann took up that same debate with the deputy editor of Tucker Carlson's rag, the Daily Caller, Jamie Weinstein, and guess which side of the debate Weinstein was on?

While Hartmann argued that education all the way through the college level ought to be a basic right for all Americans so that those from poor upbringings might have a chance for upward mobility, and that the influence of those like the Kochs was doing nothing but teaching our kids junk science, Weinstein didn't have a problem with corporate America influencing the curriculum in our colleges. Weinstein argued that somehow those donations were making college more affordable for average citizens and that those being pressured by the corporations donating to the schools to teach an agenda more friendly to their causes is somehow bringing some "diversity" to that curriculum.

Hartmann reminded Weinstein of why we started tenure for college professors a century ago in the United States in the first place, which greatly resembles what's going on now.

Hartmann: Do you know how tenure started?

Weinstein: Because they were afraid of people getting fired for their political views.

Hartmann: Yeah, well, it was Scott Nearing, Scott and Helen Nearing. It was in 1915 and Scott Nearing was with the University of Pennsylvania and he spoke out against child labor and one of the provosts, one of the guys who was on the board of the college actually ran a factory that employed children as labor and the Supreme Court a year later or two years later had ruled that the child labor was Constitutional. And so they fired Scott Nearing and that led to such a backlash in the academic world that within five years, you had tenure. And this seems like the exact opposite of that.

Weinstein: No, what we have right now was the opposite problem in the United States which is that we have these university professors who get tenure and it's now just a funneling place where there is very little diversity of opinion in university faculties, especially in the arts and sciences programs. You would find more diversity of opinion in President Bush's Cabinet than you would in government departments across this country.

Hartmann countered that diversity of skin color did not mean diversity of opinion and Weinstein claimed that there was diversity of opinion and said that Bush had a Democrat in his Cabinet. I'm not sure who he was talking about here because none come to mind to me and the segment ran out of time with Hartmann before he got a clarification.

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