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Ah yes... Ronald Reagan... that great man of the working people and the American middle class... or at least he was in the alternative reality that is called Peggy Noonan's brain. After her predictions of "Romney rising" in the polls and that the enthusiasm factor would "carry the day" for his big win, Noonan was asked by This Week host George Stephanopoulos about the fact that the presidential election wasn't even close.

Noonan gave the audience a big dose of revisionist history on Reagan. And like most Republicans since Romney lost the election, seems to believe that Republicans don't really need to do anything differently. They just need to work on their messaging. I hate to break it to you Peggy, but it's not just the rhetoric. It's your policies. And they haven't gotten any better since Reagan did his best to help destroy our middle class.

It does seem impossible for Nooners to have a conversation about anything, without dragging out St. Ronnie's corpse to worship. It's pretty humorous given the fact that their party is so far off the cliff these days that he wouldn't make it through a GOP primary race right now.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Peggy Noonan, one of the things they're going to have to absorb is one of the points you've made is that this election in the end actually wasn't all that close, President Obama, 330 electoral votes. They're still counting the popular vote...

NOONAN: Yes, they are.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... but he's above the -- he has more than a 3 percent lead over Mitt Romney right now.

NOONAN: Yeah. I think -- I mean, from the beginning, it struck me as this is not just the re-election of a president. This is the rebuffing, if that's the right word, of the Republicans.

Look, I think there are many lessons to be learned over this election. There was a not ideal candidate. It was a not ideal campaign, et cetera, et cetera. But, yes, America is -- in America, something's always being born. It's always changing. Demographically it's changing. At the end of the day, elections are actually about ideas. They're about the stands each party takes.

The Republicans do have to sit down and say, what are we doing? And as important, how are we doing it?

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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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After the disappointing and frankly frightening results in this Tuesday's Wisconsin recall elections for someone like myself who has been a decades long union member and what it might mean for the future of the union movement if this emboldens Republicans to try to get rid of every union on the country, and the real possibility of seeing them push for putting a national right to work law on the books, I was glad to see at least one person leading a discussion on what's happened where we've got the working class voting against their own economic interests, and that was Ed Schultz.

If we had a few more discussions like this in our national media, rather than the constant union bashing we see instead, maybe more voters would be aware of the fact that pitting one group of workers against another just harms all of us. Sadly as Thomas Frank pointed out, this is something that's been going on for decades. And as E.J. Dionne noted, the severe decline in union membership on the United States has made it much easier for Republicans to play this game of divide and conquer with the working class.

This segment hit home for me particularly hard because it mirrored a conversation I had with a co-worker earlier the same day, who was asking me what I thought about what happened in Wisconsin and all the money poured in there and wondering how we've got so many within our own ranks who are union members and who are happy to have the security of that union membership when it comes to everything from decent wages, to health and retirement benefits, and some recourse with safety issues on the job to not worrying about being fired if they dare to speak up about problems in the work place, and yet consider themselves part of this ridiculous AstroTurf "tea party" movement.

Sadly I didn't have any good answers for him other than to make some of the same points made by Frank and Dionne here about the propaganda those members have been exposed to and the huge uphill battle we're facing to try to overcome that and the way unions are portrayed in the media.

Here's part of the conversation from Schultz's show where he was more or less following up on a discussion he'd had on MSNBC earlier that day on Alex Wagner's show and the need for union leadership to be doing more to educate their members. I agree with the points he made. The question is how do unions use the limited resources they have to potentially follow up on them when their ranks are under assault, which means their finances are as well.

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Jon Stewart took a shot at all of those 99 percent of the 1 percent fellow GOP presidential contenders of Mitt Romney who are now terribly upset with his Super PAC ads and calling him out for being a rich guy who's out of touch with the working class.

STEWART: Oh, it's not fair. He's using unlimited money to buy influence. Rigging the system in some way. Interesting. I can't imagine how frustrated and helpless you Newt Gingrich must feel. Hey, how did guys like Mitt Romney come to be anyway? [...]

You're mad at Mitt Romney? But that's like saying... it's like saying Mitt Romney answered the eHarmony ad and now you're saying it's unfair. That it's not what you meant and you don't mean it that much. Mitt Romney is the pure distillation of conservative economic policies. But now that you have to go up against him, now it's unfair? Republicans, you can't say, release the kraken and then when the kraken turns on you, be all like... that's a very scary kraken.

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While discussing the current crop of GOP candidates that are still standing after the Iowa caucuses and why Republican voters can't stand Mitt Romney and settled on Rick Santorum instead, David Brooks offered up this bit of infinite wisdom on The Charlie Rose Show on Santorum and who the Republican Party represents.

ROSE: But the great columnist at The New York Times David Brooks said the following. America does not want to see Harvard Law vs Harvard Law in the general election. So square that.

BROOKS: Yeah, well I think that's the key to Rick Santorum's perpetuation. He rose because he's a social conservative, but he's not only a social conservative. He's also a genuine working class kid. His grandfather was a coal miner as he says. His dad came over, was an immigrant and got an education through the G.I. Bill and he represented west Pennsylvania, the dying steel towns there.

And so he genuinely has these working class roots and what he said last night after his victory, or pseudo victory speech about the dignity of labor, that's marrying sort of social conservative values to the economy. And he talks about we can't have a growing economy without strong families, without strong communities.

And he lived that basically in the Senate. And so this country has had a lot of pseudo populists, coming up rising, but only getting so far... people from Mike Huckabee... ugh... even Dick Gephardt on the Democratic side. And if he can marry the social conservatives message with a really, an economic conservative, a really more populist working class message, and just sent off a working class vibe, he could do well because the Republican Party is the party of the working class.

Oh yeah... since when? You know, one can argue legitimately about what's left of the Democratic Party that still represents the working class, but there is still a large progressive base in the Democratic Party and in the Congress that does still represent the working class. The Republican Party has been a wholly owned subsidiary of big money, the wealthy elites and the richest among us entirely for some time now.

And if anyone wants an example of what's wrong with a great deal of our politics, our media and how they frame issues and how Republicans vote, it's exactly what Brooks was describing here where maybe a “pseudo populist” like Santorum can fool enough rubes into voting for him because they think he shares their “values."

The subtext of that which doesn't get discussed of course if that those "values" actually mean telling women what they can do with their bodies and whether they can use birth control, or telling people who they can have sex with, or demonizing the poor by playing off of racial divisions.

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From the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders -- Virtually Everything That They Wanted:

As a Thanksgiving deadline nears for action by the powerful congressional committee on deficit reduction, Bernie sounded an alarm over reports that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid may be cut. "What we have to remember is that the last three times the Democrats negotiated with the Republicans, in almost every instance, they gave the Republicans virtually everything that they wanted."

Rough transcript below.

SANDERS: What we have to remember is that the last three times that the Democrats negotiated with the Republicans, in almost every instance, they gave the Republicans virtually everything that they wanted. In December, remember a year ago December, the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, the White House, and not only did they extend Bush's tax breaks for the wealthy, but they also provided new tax breaks in terms of the estate tax for the very, very richest people in this country.

Republicans got everything they wanted. In April, with the Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House, the Republicans as everyone remembers threatened to shut down the government and the Democrats went along with $78 billion in cuts from the President's budget request; hurt a whole lot of people and it was just not good.

In August, in an outrageous display of unprincipled gamesmanship, the Republicans for the first time in the history of this country were prepared to not have America pay our bills, default, and the Democrats caved in there as well, providing $2.5 trillion deficit reduction package.

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During their panel discussion on ABC's This Week, Christiane Amanpour actually took some time out to bring on Daily Kos blogger Jesse LaGreca, otherwise known as Ministry of Truth, to give his perspective on the Occupy Wall Street protests. LaGreca did a good job on there and called the corporate media out for ignoring the working class in the United States.

LAGRECA: Well I think the matter at hand is that the working class people in America - as you know, the ninety nine percent of Americans who aren't wealthy and aren't prospering in this economy have been entirely ignored by the media.

Our political leaders pander to us but they don't take action. They stand in the way of change. They filibuster on behalf of the wealthiest one percent. They fold on behalf of the wealthiest one percent. So the conversation we need to have is about the future, about what type of country we really want to be. And I think the most important thing we can do in our occupation is to continue to push the narrative that's been ignored by so many pundits and political leaders.

I mean the reality is, I'm the only working class person you're going to see on Sunday news, political news... maybe ever. And I think that's very indicative of the failures of our media, to report on the news that matter most to working class people.

I have seen some working class people on the Sunday shows, but they're usually just panel members in some focus group and not getting any individual air time like LaGreca did here. The working class is definitely not represented well on these shows though. As a rule, these Sunday shows won't book anyone that actually represents the progressive side of the aisle at all. Or when they do, they're far outnumbered, as LaGreca was here.

LaGreca is not some paid professional pundit who's used to being on television that has their rehearsed talking points down pat. Given that fact, I'd say he did very well and held his own on there. He had some points he wanted to make and he made sure he got a chance to make them whether they wanted to hear them or not.

From Democracy Now: Pioneering Comedian Roseanne Barr on Her Life on Screen as a “Working-Class Domestic Goddess”:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Emmy Award-winning actress Roseanne Barr starred in the popular and groundbreaking show on television titled simply "Roseanne," the first TV series to openly advocate for gay rights. "Roseanne" featured one of the first lesbian kisses on TV, in an episode when Roseanne kisses Mariel Hemingway. "Roseanne" was also the first sitcom to ever feature a gay marriage. The series tackled other controversial topics, as well: poverty, class, abortion and feminism. From her open support of unions in earlier shows to her tribute to Native Americans toward the end of the series, Roseanne never shied away from contentious issues. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich once praised Roseanne Barr for representing "the hopeless underclass of the female sex: polyester-clad, overweight occupants of the slow track; fast-food waitresses, factory workers, housewives, members of the invisible pink-collar army; the despised, the jilted, the underpaid." We play excerpts from the groundbreaking sitcom and speak with Barr about her childhood in Utah, where she was raised half-Jewish and half-Mormon, and talk about how she "made it OK for women to talk about their actual lives on television." [includes rush transcript]

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I think Bernie Sanders is one of the last people in the United States Senate that I can stand to listen to these days with all of this kabuki theater going on over raising the debt ceiling and the demands for deficit reduction on the backs of the working class and the poor along with Republicans drawing a line in the sand with their public refusals to raise taxes.

Ed Schultz asked Bernie about former President Bill Clinton tossing the idea about lowering the corporate tax rates in America in exchange for closing some loopholes, which Sanders shot down. We all know how that would turn out after watching how the Republicans are negotiating in bad faith on the budget right now. They'd get Democrats to agree that the tax rates should be lowered and then stomp off when they tried to get them to agree to which loopholes to close. That or the only ones they'd go after are those that affect the middle class and not the rich.

Bernie's still out there asking people to sign his petition, which now has well over 100,000 signatures. If you haven't signed yet, you can do so here.