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Charlie Rose actually broke from his standard fare which is generally populated by the likes of David Brooks and Tom Friedman and their cohorts in the corporate media and had a conversation with authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer about their new book, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government.

After watching this interview, I don't think Mitt Romney will be recommending this particular edition of Rose's show as required viewing any time soon. Both men discussed the fact that if we truly want to get our economy moving, those "job creators" are middle class consumers and the fact that when all of us are doing better and there is shared prosperity. That is something that is still completely lost on our political class these days, with way too many of them still pushing the idea that austerity and tackling our debt without putting Americans back to work is going to solve our problems with our sluggish economy.

If anyone has any doubts about why austerity measures like those pushed by the conservatives both here and in the U.K. are not a model we want to follow, just go look at the chart and read Steve Benen's post here -- Why the U.K. recession matters in U.S. politics.

They cited Henry Ford's theory that it was better to overpay his workers so that they could afford the product they were producing and advocated for taxes going up on the rich and for the taxes on investments to be raised, even if they're kept just slightly lower on those on wages and labor, so not to stifle the incentive for investments in America.

Whether anyone agrees or disagrees with all of the authors' points made during this interview, I think it was a whole lot more healthy discussion than what we're typically treated to from our corporate media. I don't think Rose made up for the countless hours he's allowed of Brooks and Friedman and their ilk to be spouting nonsense on his show unchallenged with this interview, but he certainly took a step in the right direction with having them on and with allowing a conversation where what we've been hearing over and over from Republican politicians on how jobs are created in our economy is challenged.

They both thoroughly debunked trickle-down economics and why it does not work and why Mitt Romney is full of crap with his talking points about being a “job creator” while he was at Bain during this interview.

Here's a short description of their book from Amazon:

American democracy is informed by the 18th century’s most cutting edge thinking on society, economics, and government. We’ve learned some things in the intervening 230 years about self interest, social behaviors, and how the world works. Now, authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that some fundamental assumptions about citizenship, society, economics, and government need updating. For many years the dominant metaphor for understanding markets and government has been the machine. Liu and Hanauer view democracy not as a machine, but as a garden. A successful garden functions according to the inexorable tendencies of nature, but it also requires goals, regular tending, and an understanding of connected ecosystems. The latest ideas from science, social science, and economics—the cutting-edge ideas of today--generate these simple but revolutionary ideas:

True self interest is mutual interest. (Society, it turns out, is an ecosystem that is healthiest when we take care of the whole.)

More of their interview below the fold.

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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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While I agree with my colleague here at C&L that Ezra Klein went too easy on David Brooks and that it would have been nice to see Brooks called out directly for being a clueless liar who doesn't even appear to understand the policy proposals he's criticizing, Klein handed a load of ammunition to a host of others who weren't quite so worried about being polite.

Here are some of the examples that I've come across and I'm sure the list is getting longer as I type:

Booman at The Booman Tribune: David Brooks is a Fraud

Digby's Hullabaloo: Breaking: David Brooks doesn't know what he's talking about

Greg Sargent's The Plum Line: The Morning Plum: Questions for the “blame it on both sides” crowd

Doug Galt at Balloon Juice: Velvet glove, pimp slap

And from Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog: 'But I've read Robert Rubin's tax plan...'

Somehow the PBS Newshour decided that all of the criticism Brooks has been getting wasn't important enough to bring up when asking him for his opinion on the sequester during his regular segment with Mark Shields this Friday. Imagine that. Obviously there's no punishment for bad behavior over at PBS. And just as he did during an interview on NPR that same day, Brooks doubled down on some of the lies he told in his column.

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I'm not sure why PBS and CBS News feel that the public needs to be treated to yet another fawning interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney, but maybe they're hoping to pick up some of that Fox viewership, because Charlie Rose's hour long disgrace propping this guy up is what we're usually treated to on that network.

Apparently Cheney doesn't mind the drone program and called it a "good program" -- but what bothers him about it is not what should disturb most of us, like whether it's legal, the lack of oversight, overreach by the executive branch and the fact that dropping bombs on civilians' heads is just going to create more enemies and potential blowback when people rightfully get sick of watching their friends and their family members killed.

No, Cheney doesn't care about any of that. What bothers him is that we're killing these supposed terrorists instead of torturing them as we were doing under the Bush administration.

Cheney: Obama wants to weaken U.S. role in world:

Cheney insists that Obama's worldview and foreign policy is making the U.S. "vulnerable to the future."

And while Cheney voiced support for Obama's use of drones -- calling it a "good program" -- he said the president's national security nominees reflect "choices ... based on people who won't argue with him" and in the case of Hagel, "I think he wants a Republican to be the foil ... for what he wants to do to the Defense Department, which I think is to do serious, serious damage to our military capabilities."

Turning to a controversial policy of the George W. Bush administration, Cheney defended the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, saying that officials engaged in a "very long, difficult and elaborate process" with the Justice Department to determine "where the red line is."

"And we got approval for the programs that did go, that they were quote 'not torture,'" he said, but added that ultimately the administration stopped the use of waterboarding "because there was so much flak over it."

Rose did actually ask Cheney why he won't call the program torture during the interview, but there was zero follow up to this response. You can add this interview to the mile long list of evidence that proves that anyone who claims that PBS is some "liberal" network deserves to be mocked roundly for such a ridiculous assertion.

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It seems Paul Krugman is about as tired as I am of these talking heads and politicians who seem to be obsessed with inflicting pain on the working class. Republicans aren't going to be happy until they undo every New Deal program, destroy our social safety nets and destroy what's left of the dwindling middle class in America.

The PBS Newshour had Paul Krugman on this Tuesday evening to counter some of Erskine Bowles deficit fetishism from the previous night and all I can say is I hope the Democrats are listening to him. We don't have a deficit crisis. We've got a jobs crisis and what Republicans are proposing will just make that worse: Paul Krugman: Hasty Fiscal Fix to the Deficit Would Cause 'Austerity Bomb':

GWEN IFILL: Erskine Bowles may be one of the people you have written about in the past who you called deficit scolds who were touting a phantom menace known as the fiscal cliff.

PAUL KRUGMAN,PrincetonUniversity: Yes.

GWEN IFILL: Am I right about that?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Fiscal cliff is not a phantom menace. The deficit right now is, the notion that something terrible will happen if we don't deal with the deficit right away.

The fiscal cliff is a very different story. That's about reducing the deficit too fast.

GWEN IFILL: In fact, you call it an austerity bomb. Describe that, what you mean by that.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yes.

Well, what's happening is that we are scheduled, unless something is done, basically to do to ourselves gratuitously what has been happening to some of the European economies.

We're going to have substantial spending cuts, substantial tax increases at a time when the economy is still very weak. And, of course, that's a recipe for sliding back into recession.

So, we set ourselves up with the land mine in the road in front of our economy, which is not based on anything real. It's just based on our political mess.

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If you didn't get a chance to see this special on PBS this week, and you've got some spare time to check it out on line instead, I'd highly recommend making some time to watch this latest documentary from Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl.

From PBS: THE DUST BOWL:

THE DUST BOWL chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the "Great Plow-Up," followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Vivid interviews with twenty-six survivors of those hard times, combined with dramatic photographs and seldom seen movie footage, bring to life stories of incredible human suffering and equally incredible human perseverance. It is also a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us—a lesson we ignore at our peril.

You can watch episode two at the link above. The footage and pictures of those storms and their aftermath is just simply amazing and terrifying. Ken Burns has done a lot of really wonderful work with documenting our country's history and this latest from him is no exception.

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From Monday night's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart went after Mitt Romney and his fellow right-wingers like Lou Dobbs, for their priorities on deficit reduction where PBS, which is a minute portion of the budget would get slashed, but heaven forbid we can't touch those subsidies for the oil companies, because those amounts would be almost meaningless -- or so says Dobbs and his faulty math.

After pointing out the obvious and that it really can't be the deficit they're concerned about, Stewart made a mockery of the talking heads over at Fox for their attacks on Sesame Street as some kind of evil socialist indoctrination program that's harming our children by teaching them things like how to share.

Jon and his Daily Show senior correspondents, Wyatt Cenac and John Oliver had some suggestions for how to make Sesame Street more palatable to conservatives, like putting Ayn Rand on the recommended reading list for the kids.

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Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Thursday suggested that Big Bird's death at the hands of GOP hopeful Mitt Romney didn't have to be in vain because the Sesame Street character could be suitable for "eating."

During Wednesday night's presidential debate Romney had told moderator Jim Lehrer, "I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not gonna keep on spending money on things to borrow from China to pay for."

CNN host Piers Morgan asked Santorum on Thursday if he would also "kill Big Bird."

"Well, as a matter of fact, I've voted to kill Big Bird," Santorum replied proudly. "That doesn't mean I don't like Big Bird. You can kill things and still like them. I mean, maybe to eat them."

"That's probably not -- can we go back on that one," the former Pennsylvania senator added, waiving his hands at the camera.

"That was beautifully, badly phrased," Morgan agreed.

At a campaign event in Denver on Thursday, President Barack Obama had blasted Romney for refusing to close corporate tax loopholes and ruling out raising additional revenue to balance the nation’s budget.

“And when he was asked what he would actually do to cut the deficit and reduce spending, he said he’d eliminate funding for public television,” the president explained to boos from the crowd. “That was his answer. I mean, thank goodness somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird. It’s about time.”

“We didn’t know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit,” Obama quipped. “Elmo too.”

In fact, the $444 million in subsidies the U.S. government provided to Corporation for Public Broadcasting last year only accounted for .037 percent of the nation’s $1.2 trillion deficit.

(h/t: The Huffington Post)

If anyone wasn't already sure why we should be worried about people like billionaire Sheldon Adelson buying our elections here in the United States, you won't be left with much doubt after reading this article by ProPublica which was co-published with PBS' Frontline.

Rachel Maddow spoke to one of the co-authors of the article in the segment above, Stephen Engelberg.

Inside the Investigation of Leading Republican Money Man Sheldon Adelson

A decade ago gambling magnate and leading Republican donor Sheldon Adelson looked at a desolate spit of land in Macau and imagined a glittering strip of casinos, hotels and malls.

Where competitors saw obstacles, including Macau's hostility to outsiders and historic links to Chinese organized crime, Adelson envisaged a chance to make billions.

Adelson pushed his chips to the center of the table, keeping his nerve even as his company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in late 2008.

The Macau bet paid off, propelling Adelson into the ranks of the mega-rich and underwriting his role as the largest Republican donor in the 2012 campaign, providing tens of millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and other GOP causes.

Now, some of the methods Adelson used in Macau to save his company and help build a personal fortune estimated at $25 billion have come under expanding scrutiny by federal and Nevada investigators, according to people familiar with both inquiries.

Internal email and company documents, disclosed here for the first time, show that Adelson instructed a top executive to pay about $700,000 in legal fees to Leonel Alves, a Macau legislator whose firm was serving as an outside counsel to Las Vegas Sands.

The company's general counsel and an outside law firm warned that the arrangement could violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It is unknown whether Adelson was aware of these warnings. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bars American companies from paying foreign officials to "affect or influence any act or decision" for business gain.

Federal investigators are looking at whether the payments violate the statute because of Alves' government and political roles in Macau, people familiar with the inquiry said. Investigators were also said to be separately examining whether the company made any other payments to officials. An email by Alves to a senior company official, disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, quotes him as saying "someone high ranking in Beijing" had offered to resolve two vexing issues — a lawsuit by a Taiwanese businessman and Las Vegas Sands' request for permission to sell luxury apartments in Macau. Another email from Alves said the problems could be solved for a payment of $300 million. There is no evidence the offer was accepted. Both issues remain unresolved. Read on...

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Well, we got rid of this bigot on MSNBC, but he's still out there week after week on PBS with one of their other right wing relics, John McLaughlin, once again showing he's not quite ready for the 21st century with his hopes that we don't have a woman in the Oval Office for another few decades: Pat Buchanan Says, "Let's Hope" U.S. Doesn't Elect A Female President Until "2040 Or 2050," Then Claims He's Joking.

What's really sad relates somewhat to what Eleanor Clift pointed out, which is that politics is such a dirty game these days, you've got a lot of potentially good people who don't want to put up with the negative campaign ads and their name being dragged through the muck whether they're men or women. What did not get mentioned here is the issue of just how much money it takes to get elected and the impediment that is there to prevent anyone of any sex, gender, religion, party, or walk in life from having a chance to serve in elected office if you're not rich already or have the backing of those who are.

It is really pathetic that the United States is lagging behind a good portion of the rest of the world with the number of women in elected office or heaven forbid leading a country. It was sad to hear Buchanan hoping it remained that way for our highest office for decades to come, whether he claimed he's joking or not. I guess he's still bitter his girlfriend Palin didn't have a chance to get in there after she helped blow up John McCain's campaign.