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If anyone needs a break from the typical fare we're treated to on the bobblehead shows on Sundays, check out some of Chris Hayes' show from this Saturday. It's rare that this kind of in depth and comprehensive discussion happens, even rarer where the discussion is so good, it's worth highlighting multiple segments. But that's exactly the case with this discussion of President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage made during his state of the union address, that is already being clouded by the fog of talking points in DC:

Then we’ll dive deep on the president’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 $9 an hour, and to index the minimum wage according to inflation, so that it keeps pace with the cost of living. Republicans and business groups have lined up in opposition to a minimum wage increase, and in doing so, they’ve repeated a talking point that has been common in Washington for decades: that an increase in the minimum wage would lead to reductions in employment. As it turns out, there’s a growing body of empirical evidence that indicates that minimum wage increases, within a certain range, have no negative impact on employment, and may actually boost worker productivity and consumer demand, providing a much-needed stimulus to the economy.

For the most part, Hayes' guests were outstanding and really informative to listen to, with the exception of the Hispanic Leadership Network's Jennifer Sevilla Korn. She may be the kinder, gentler face of the Republican Party with toned down rhetoric with respect to the immigration issue, but on Hayes' show, she was nothing but a right wing talking points regurgitation machine with little to no facts to back up her assertions.

If you listen to her carefully during her time on the show, she was challenged by Hayes quite a few times to give specifics for her claims about minimum wage supposedly causing businesses not to hire or that it might cause inflation. How often does that happen? And just like a typical conservative, she never answers him. The same can't be said for the others on the panel who were more than willing to talk about specifics and shoot holes straight through her talking points.

In the segment above, Lew Prince, owner of Vintage Vinyl, Inc. a small business in St. Louis, Missouri, talked about his invitation to come to the White House with a number of other small business owners and they were asked by President Obama "What can I do for you?" Prince recounted that the first thing they all said in unison was to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour, because "putting three hundred bucks a month in the hands of the customers is the best economic stimulus the country can have and that money tends to get spent in the businesses more than any other."

Unlike Korn, Prince's point is backed up by research.

A 2011 study by the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank finds that minimum wage increases raise incomes and increase consumer spending, especially triggering car purchases. The authors examine 23 years of household spending data and find that for every dollar increase for a minimum wage worker results in $2,800 in new consumer spending by his or her household over the following year.

A 2009 study by the Economic Policy Institute estimates that Obama’s campaign pledge to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011 would inject $60 billion in additional spending into the economy.

The National Employment Law Project's Tsedeye Gebreselassie followed up by discussing the fact that 74 percent of the public supports raising the minimum wage. Unlike the conservatives speaking out against it, they understand that that one cannot live on the current wage and that the minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. They know the opposition is with the lawmakers supporting the top wage earners only.

Korn cites some unspecified economist-- who of course isn't a partisan--telling her that raising minimum wage is going to cause inflation. While that might be true if it is raised too high or if the economy was in a period of stagflation, that's not the political environment we have now and Prince countered her argument quite nicely.

PRINCE: You won't get a business owner that says that and I'll tell you what, the portion of wages, that is in my cost, is actually relatively small and even in the manufacturing and a whole lot of areas. It is relatively small. My overhead is complicated and large, and the minimum wage and the wage, is actually a small part of it. And prices in America, this is, you know, the great secret – prices in America are not set by the cost of making something or doing something. Prices are set by what market research tells most companies you are willing to pay. You know, the reason a beer is ten bucks at Yankee stadium isn't because...

HAYES: Of course not.

PRINCE: … you can get it there to the bar across the street where it is two bucks.

In the next segment the panel discussed the two different arguments we're seeing from Republicans on why they're against raising the minimum wage. One being the that it will cause a negative effect on employment and the other being that it will cause price spikes that the system cannot absorb.

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Thank goodness there is at least one of these talking head shows on Sundays where Republican talking points are pushed back and where it's not just a bunch of millionaire pundits talking about how we need to inflict pain on our senior citizens, and raise the Medicare age in order to appease the GOP during these deficit negotiations. That show is Up With Chris Hayes.

While discussing the Republicans' absolute refusal to raise taxes, their dire warnings about the economy collapsing when Bill Clinton raised taxes, guest host Steve Kornacki asked former Romney advisor Avik Roy how he reconciled that with the similar rhetoric we're hearing from Republicans today. Roy argued that things are different now because of the “Obama levels of spending” and that the rich today are somehow shouldering way too much of the tax burden, therefore we're going to have to raise everyone's taxes in order to balance the budget.

Here's some of the response he got from the rest of the panel.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: The average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has fallen back to the level of 1966 when Johnson was president, and the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent have gone in today's dollars from 4 million to 22 million. In 2010, the first year of the recovery, 37 percent of all of the increased income in the entire country went to 15,600 households.

We have created a privatized system to redistribute upwards and the reason people at the top are sharing a larger share of the income taxes because their incomes are growing at this enormous rate, but their burden is falling. And to suggest we don't need to raise more revenue by applying it to people who are a success depends on this government, on living in this society, with its rules that make it possible to make that money is just outrageous. It is arguing that we should burden the poor and help the rich.

[...]

LAURA FLANDERS: No, you're right. we have 50, 5-0 million Americans living in poverty at this point with food stamp help for many of them. We've got 9 million Americans over the age of 50 who are food insecure. One in three of us have no savings whatsoever.

I mean, you talk the Johnson years, in that period, '65 to '73 the war on poverty reduced poverty by 43 percent. We know how to do it. It works. That's what we should be talking about. We are in a crisis where we're going to see stimulus. We're going to see stimulus of poverty and hunger in this country and it's shameful. And again, going back to '63, you had more than 60 percent of Americans, I think even in1983, 60 percent of Americans had private pension plans. Now, it's under 20 percent.

So these elders that you're talking about, young people with greater unemployment than ever before. I mean, this is the stuff that we want to be talking about after the last election, children and poverty are exploding.

JOAN WALSH: And also... we need higher tax rates for the tippy top earners because everybody likes to talk about building the middle class or rebuilding the middle class. Well, the top tax rate that the middle class we in the '40s,' 50s and '60s. The top marginal rate was in the 90's. I'm not saying you should go back to that, but you can't say at 37 percent.

They followed up with more discussion on tax loopholes and deductions, who they favor, what should be done to make sure they're not upside down with whether they benefit the working class. Laura Flanders brought up the issue of a Wall Street transaction tax, which gets mentioned far too rarely. She also discussed that while everyone is pushing for cuts to Medicare and raising the age to receive benefits, none of them want to talk about defense cuts.

If you missed the show, the whole thing was worth watching. It's generally a nice break from the typical Sunday show fare and this week was no exception. Go check it out here.

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Chris Hayes and his Story of the Week on the predicament for Republican party and conservatives who are "creating their own electoral enemies" with "its visceral appeal to anxieties and fears of white Christians."

After listening to Republicans discussing their some of their losses after this last election, I'd say they're more than aware that they've got a problem, but are unwilling to admit they need to do more than put a little nicer window dressing on their policies. And I don't see them giving up on the fearmongering any time soon. It's all they've got left.

White identity politics doomed 2012 Republican effort:

Of all the surprising and revealing results from Tuesday night, there is one relatively small bit of exit polling data that I think is the key to understanding the entire evening.

You’ve probably heard by now that Mitt Romney won white voters by a sizable margin, while Barack Obama ran up huge margins among African-Americans and Latinos.

In fact, he won Latinos by 71% to 27%, an even wider margin than in 2008 when he won them 67% to 31%. But almost no one has noticed what to me is the most shocking result, and that’s how the two candidates did with Asian-American voters.

Now, Asian-Americans made up a very small sliver of the electorate, just 3%, so a presidential candidate’s performance within that group doesn’t necessarily carry with it massive electoral consequences.

But Asian-Americans are also, according to the latest census, the fastest growing racial sub category in America. In fact, the census projects that by mid-century they will make up 9% of the country. And as it happens, Asian-Americans are also the nation’s highest earning ethnicity, with median incomes even higher than those of whites.

So you might have predicted that Mitt Romney would do well with them, since he won among voters making more than $100,000 a year.

But he did not. He got creamed, losing Asian-American voters 73% to 26%. This is a shocking result not only because just 20 years ago George HW Bush carried Asian-Americans comfortably, or because the margin is so wide,but because the entire category of Asian-American is so obviously a construction there’s little reason to suspect members of the group would vote with each other in any discernible pattern.

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Here we go with another CEO pushing the boundaries of what's legal when it comes to attempting to coerce their employees into voting for the candidate of their choice -- Exclusive: CEO suggests employees' jobs may be at stake if Romney doesn't win:

Westgate Resorts CEO David Siegel came under fire this week for sending an email to his employees demanding that they vote for Mitt Romney and threatening to downsize the company if they don't. But Siegel's email isn't an outlier. It fits a pattern of imperious CEOs attempting to marshal the support of their employees in pursuit of their own political interests.

Up w/ Chris Hayes has exclusively obtained an email sent by the CEO of a Florida-based software firm, ASG Software Solutions, to his over 1,000 employees asking them to vote for Romney for president and suggesting that their jobs may be at stake if Romney doesn't win. The subject line of the email, sent by ASG President and CEO Arthur Allen on Sept. 30, asks: "Will the US Presidential election directly impact your future jobs at ASG? Please read below."

Allen then suggests that the company may have to downsize, or be bought by a larger company, if President Obama is re-elected, and suggests that massive cuts and layoffs would ensue if that occurs.

"We have been able to keep ASG an independent company while still growing our revenues and customers. But I can tell you, if the US re-elects President Obama, our chances of staying independent are slim to none," Allen writes. "If we fail as a nation to make the right choice on November 6th, and we lose our independence as a company, I don't want to hear any complaints regarding the fallout that will most likely come.

Allen adds: "I am asking you to give us one more chance to stay independent by voting in a new President and administration on November 6th. Even then, we still might not be able to remain independent, but it will at least give us a chance. If we don't, that chance goes away."

Up w/ Chris attempted to contact Allen several times via phone and email during business hours on Friday. His outgoing message said he was out of the country, so Up w/ Chris also placed calls and sent emails to several other officials at ASG during business hours on Friday as well. We have not received a response.

The full text of Allen's email is available at the link above.

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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, Chris' Story of the Week and the Republicans who have been living in their own alternative universe these days as they refuse to accept the reality that the poll numbers in the presidential race really are not looking good for Mitt Romney.

The Republican bubble trap:

If you follow politics, you probably noticed that polling of the presidential election has swung quite decidedly in the president's favor over the last few weeks. The Real Clear Politics polling average now has Obama up 4.1 points over Mitt Romney in national polls and Nate Silver's prediction model at his FiveThirtyEight blog put Barack Obama's odds of winning the election above 80% for the first time ever. Swing state polling out just this week seems to confirm the trend.

A new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS poll of swing states of Ohio and Florida, show surprisingly strong leads for Obama. And the Gallup tracking poll, which has showed a near dead heat for almost the entirety of the campaign now shows Obama up 6 points. It's pretty hard to survey the polling data and not come to the conclusion that Barack Obama is beating Mitt Romney, that if the election were held today Barack Obama would win, and that Romney has a relatively steep, though certainly not insurmountable, uphill climb to victory. That is, of course, unless you operate in the alternate epistemic universe of right-wing media.

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From this Sunday's Up With Chris Hayes, his Story of the Week where he discusses the disconnect between the ultra-wealthy campaign donors who we saw asking painfully ridiculous questions to Mitt Romney during that secretly recorded fundraiser of his from earlier this year, and the lives of the rest of us. As Chris asked, how different would our politics look if the Romney's of the world were forced to sit down with and listen to rooms full or ordinary workers day after day instead of these out of touch, wealthy plutocrats who do not share the same concerns as most of the country.

Hayes: This is what plutocracy looks like:

The video of Mitt Romney talking to donors that Mother Jones posted last week is an incredible artifact from an entire culture and civilization that exists in our midst, but which we hardly ever get to see: the world of the high-end donor. And, whoo boy it is not pretty. The first thing that jumps out is that a lot of the questions are really inane.

In fact, I almost feel sorry for Mitt Romney having to sit there and politely smile and nod as donors pick through their salad and tell him that what he really needs to do to win is "take the gloves off" or "show your face more on tv"—something he's been doing more or less non-stop.

The folks in the room all but advise Romney to simply tour around the country reading passages of Ayn Rand novels out loud at his campaign rallies and hectoring the idiotic masses to bow before their obvious superior. Romney, who is many things, but not a total fool, gently explains that that probably is not the best way to go about attempting to win over the Obama voters he needs to be elected. Almost none of the advice Romney gets during the tape is very good, some of it's terrible.

That's not novel, of course, everyone who watches politics closely thinks they have the secret insight that will win the election. Unlike the millions of other political junkies and backseat drivers, this small coterie of folks, by sole virtue of their wealth, gets to impose their invaluable insights on the actual candidate. It would be like the head coach of the Giants, Tom Coughlin, having to spend most of the week between games meeting with the opinionated fans who call into sports talk radio with their theories about how the Giants should be blitzing on every down, or lining up two quarterbacks under center.

This is the power of money not just in politics, but in society more broadly: the power to make people listen to your ideas no matter how dumb or uninformed. The other thing that stood out to me was just how under siege, persecuted, and victimized these extremely wealthy people appear to feel.

Keep in mind we're talking about a fundraiser that cost $50,000 a plate. Fifty thousand dollars also happens to be the median household income in the U.S. So the kind of wealth you need to have to be in the room with Romney is the kind of wealth that means you can just pony up as much money as many Americans make in a year to listen to Mitt Romney trash talk the very people who make in a year the same amount you just ponied up for dinner. Read on...

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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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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, Chris takes a look at the message we saw coming out of this year's Republican National Convention and as he concluded "It's an ugly message, but in a time of anxiety and diminished expectations, not a stupid one." It may not be stupid but it's extremely cynical.

The RNC’s backward-looking tour of nostalgia:

This week the Republican party gathered in Tampa to tell a terrible and tragic tale of American decline. They couldn't quite say that, explicitly, of course. This is the party of Reagan and sunny optimism, or so they'd like to present themselves, but you couldn't help notice that the three days of speeches on the convention floor were an orgy of imagined persecution, grievance and doleful recollections of halcyon days gone by.

But the packaging for this message was insistent invocation of American greatness. As Rachel Maddow's team documented in a montage for MSNBC's convention coverage, almost every single speaker told a story of upward mobility, usually taken from their own family's past: tracing the arc of the American dream that had brought them to the podium.

Part of this is just standard political treacle, a way for, say, an extremely wealthy prep school graduate like Ann Romney, to seem relatable. But the larger reason this was such a dominant theme at the RNC is that the Republican Party's platform and tribal identity are zealously committed to the notion of American exceptionalism, and when people talk about American exceptionalism, this is usually what they mean. [...]

Somewhat oddly almost every single one of the stories of "we-built-it," plucky American success didn't revolve around the speakers own experience of social mobility but rather that of their hardworking relatives and ancestors. It struck me, listening to these invocations of the labors of previous generations as a slightly odd note, a backward looking tour of nostalgia for an America that we are losing. But of course, that's precisely the message of the Republican party this year and its a potent one because it's based on a core reality.

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It appears that Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski isn't the only one digging through C-SPAN's archives for old footage. Kudos to the crew at Up With Chris Hayes for this find which puts on full display Rep. Paul Ryan's complete hypocrisy when it comes to stimulus spending and whether it helps the economy. It appears Etch-A-Sketch Mittens has found himself the perfect running mate, since he's just like him when it comes to flip flopping.

VIDEO: Paul Ryan defended stimulus in 2002, when George W. Bush wanted it:

Long before he became one of the right’s most vocal critics of the idea that government spending could help boost the flagging economy, Rep. Paul Ryan offered a forceful, full-throated defense of stimulus spending — when then-President George W. Bush wanted it in 2002.

Ryan has denounced the 2009 Recovery Act signed by President Obama as “a wasteful spending spree” and “failed neo-Keynesian experiment,” and – as The Huffington Post pointed out this morning — dismissed as “sugar-high economics” the idea that government spending, through measures like payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, can help shore up a faltering economy.

But in 2002, when then-President Bush was seeking a roughly $120 billion package of tax cuts, tax incentives for business and unemployment benefits to jump-start the economy, Ryan offered a vigorous defense of the plan. “What we're trying to accomplish today with the passage of this third stimulus package is to create jobs and help the unemployed,” Ryan said in video that aired today on Up w/ Chris Hayes. The remarks came during a House debate on the measure on Feb. 14, 2002.

Ryan’s comments reveal a strikingly different economic analysis than the one he has become known for in recent years as the “intellectual leader” of the Republican Party and, now, Mitt Romney’s running mate. In 2002, Ryan argued that unemployment would remain at elevated levels even after the economy began to recover, and that aggressive stimulus would be a necessary and effective antidote.

“What we're trying to accomplish here is the recognition of the fact that in recessions, unemployment lags on well after a recovery has taken place,” Ryan said at the time. “We have a lot of laid-off workers, and more layoffs are occurring. And we know, as a historical fact, that even if our economy begins to slowly recover, unemployment is going to linger on and on well after that recovery takes place.”

Ryan’s advocacy of stimulus spending wasn’t limited to Washington, either. When he returned home to face constituents, he used similar language to make the case for the Bush stimulus bill. “You have to spend a little to grow a little,” Ryan told constituents at a town hall in Wisconsin in January 2002, according to the Journal-Times, a local newspaper. “What we're trying to do is stimulate that part of the economy that's on its back." [...]

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Chris Hayes opened up his show this Saturday with his "Story of the Week" on Rep. Paul Ryan and the difference between his belief system and worship of Ayn Rand his biography. As Hayes rightfully noted, sadly, this blatant hypocrisy from those who have benefited from our society while telling others to "sink or swim on their own" is a problem much bigger than just Paul Ryan.

Hayes: Is Paul Ryan a hypocrite?:

Since Paul Ryan was announced as the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, many progressives and even mainstream media outlets have noted that there's a fundamental tension between Ryan's belief system and his biography. Ryan is beloved by the conservative base because he is, by all accounts, a true believer, deeply influenced by the hyper-individualistic philosophy of romance novelist Ayn Rand. His speeches and talking points and the lengthy preamble to one of his first big budget documents paint a picture of a world divided into makers and takers, those who produce and those who mooch. To Rand, the ultimate good is freedom and all attempts to weave together a social safety net, to alleviate misery caused by misfortune are incursions on that freedom and thus suspect, even contemptible.

And for Ryan, there's a biographical dimension to this philosophy. Ryan suffered through a horrible tragedy in his teenage years when he discovered his father dead of a heart attack in his house. The death shook Ryan and he, says, changed his outlook. It changed the finances of the household: his mother went back to school and they took in his grandmother. Ryan says he concluded that "I've got to either sink or swim in life."

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