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Mike Pence apparently decided that Rep. John Shadegg shouldn't be the only Republican coming on Morning Joe this week and showing the American public just whose interests his party is looking out for.

Rep. Pence: The Best Thing For The Unemployed Is Tax Cuts For Millionaires:

Unemployment benefits expired for millions of jobless Americans at midnight, marking the first time in four decades that Congress has failed to provide benefits with so many Americans out of work. Republican lawmakers who blocked an extension of benefits maintain that the country simply cannot afford to spend $12 billion on the unemployed, even as they fight to secure permanent tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, which will heap hundreds of billions on to the deficit.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe today, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) said that while he is "deeply sympathetic" to the plight of the unemployed, "we've got to make the cuts necessary to offset those costs." During the interview, Pence claimed that Republicans are "anxious to support" struggling Americans, "particularly in the holiday season." However, asked whether he would accept a compromise that paid for unemployment benefits by allowing tax cuts to expire only on income over $1 million, Pence insisted that the jobless are better off swallowing tax cuts for the very rich than receiving immediate relief.

Pressed further on his priorities by Time's Mark Halperin, Pence awkwardly joked that he's "not good at chess," before falling back on his talking points. "I think the minimum that we have to do right now for Americans that are struggling in unemployment in this economy is make sure that no American sees a tax increase," he said.

HALPERIN: If your leaders came to you and said, "We have a deal with the White House. We're going to extend unemployment benefits, but the tax cuts for the people making over a million dollars a year will not be extended, but that helps to pay for it," would you take deal? Would you vote for that package?

PENCE: Look, I think the worst thing you could do for people that are struggling in this economy and looking for a job is raising taxes on any American. We don't wanna help with one hand and take away with another.

HALPERIN: Would you rather extend the tax cuts for every American, including those making over a million, or have the unemployment benefits extended if that's the choice?

PENCE: [Laughs] Yeah, good. This isn't a corner, but I feel the paint. You know? I'm good, nice move. I played chess with my son the other day and I lost, so, you know, I'm not good at this chess thing. [Laughs] Let me tell you, I think the minimum that we have to do right now for Americans that are struggling in unemployment in this economy is make sure that no American sees a tax increase.

And as Steve Benen pointed out after watching this exchange:

To fully appreciate the stupidity of the display, it's worth watching the video. The printed words just don't do it justice.

Watching this morning's exchange, I'm reminded of something Matt Yglesias wrote last year about the Indiana congressman. "Mike Pence is a moron, and any movement that would hold the guy up as a hero is bankrupt," Matt explained, adding, "I would refer you to this post from September about the earth-shattering ignorance and stupidity of Mike Pence.... [I]t's really staggering. In my admittedly brief experience talking to him, his inability to grasp the basic contours of policy question was obvious and overwhelming."

Remember, Pence is not only thinking about a presidential campaign, in September, he won the Family Research Council's Values Voter presidential straw poll.

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Marsha Blackburn appeared on CNN's State of the Union with Candy Crowley and it seems she's hoping no one remembers this rant on the House floor from back in March when the health care bill passed where she was attacking Social Security.

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Marsha Blackburn Attacks Social Security

BLACKBURN: My colleagues are celebrating the birth of a great new entitlement program today. Only they see dependency on the Federal government and the death of freedom as a cause for celebration. My colleagues celebrate this day as being like the day when Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid were passed. They forget that today those programs are insolvent and will likely crush our children under their debt. My colleagues are overjoyed that soon their goal of having Americans dependent on the Federal government for mortgages, student loans, retirement and health care will be realized.

That is a chilling goal. My colleagues cheer that this bill is paid for. They ignore the fact that it is our children who will pay for their greed. My colleagues shame us for scaring the American people about the contents of this bill. We know the consequences of this bill will be frightening and horrible. Freedom dies a little bit today, unfortunately some are celebrating and I yield back.

As I said back then, it's too bad she didn't show the same indignation for those tax cuts for the rich or endless military occupations that she loves so much. I'm wondering if their direct attacks on Social Security have been giving them some headaches from real life voters because in her interview with Crowley she changes her tune a bit.

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Apparently Sarah Palin took to her Twitter page again and posted this.

Extreme Greenies:see now why we push"drill,baby,drill"of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?

Matthews is wondering what's going on in her brain with this latest flip-flop. Apparently not much Chris. She recites whatever her handlers and ghostwriter tell her to say.

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As Rachel notes, as always, IOKIYAR. Would Orrin Hatch’s amendment make Illinois Senate candidate Mark Kirk a criminal?:

So Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduces an amendment making it a crime to lie about your military service, and just days later, a Republican senate candidate is caught misrepresenting his service.

The question is: Does the bill apply to Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) in the same way it applied to the original target -- Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D)? Would Kirk have committed a crime?

The answer, according to Hatch’s office, is no.

“The amendment’s intent is clear – it would make lying about serving in active duty in the military for the purposes of career advancement a misdemeanor,” Hatch spokesman Antonia Ferrier said. Read on...

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Candy Crowley actually points out the Republicans hypocrisy on the use of reconciliation and also asks McConnell a question you don't hear too often which is whether the public might like not being thrown off of insurance rolls or having their payouts capped if the health care bill does get passed. Of course we don't get any follow up when he doesn't respond to those specifics and trots out the tired lines about tort reform and cuts to Medicare, by which he means Medicare Advantage.

Par for the course all he's saying is that if the Democrats will just adopt all of Republican's ideas for "reform" they'll play nice and work with them. Yeah, sure you will Mitch.

And even though Crowley asks McConnell if this is all just a political calculation on his part, she doesn't ask him why anyone should actually believe that the Republicans would work with the Democrats on anything.

It would really be nice to see these guys knocked off of their talking points and challenged on whether they’re telling the truth or not, but if it’s a Republican on any of these Sunday bobble head shows you aren’t going to see it.

Transcript via CNN.

CROWLEY: Let me start with your ending position after the summit. And that is, start over again. Short of that, is there any way the president can reconfigure this bill that would get your support?

MCCONNELL: I don't think so, Candy. I mean, this is a massive overhaul of one-sixth of the economy. Republicans just don't believe that half-a-trillion dollars in Medicare cuts and a half-a-trillion dollars in new taxes and possibly higher insurance premiums for all of those on the individual market is the definition of reform.

We -- we had a chance Thursday actually to display some of our brightest, most knowledgeable Republicans. I thought it was actually very good for us because it certainly refuted the notion that Republicans are not interested in this subject and not knowledgeable about it and don't have alternatives.

And we laid out a number of different things that we think will make a lot more sense, to go step by step to fix the cost problem. And also, it's important to remember, the American people do not want this bill. They have paid a lot of attention to this issue. They have focused on it like a laser for months. The surveys are...

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Rachel Maddow continues hitting the Republicans for their rank hypocrisy on slamming the stimulus bill while at the same time celebrating the benefits of the stimulus in their home districts.

For more here's the report from Think Progress on these hypocrites -- REPORT: After Voting To Kill Recovery, 110 GOP Lawmakers Tout Its Success, Ask For More Money:

Today marks the one year anniversary of President Obama signing into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus. As the economy continued to crater after President Bush left office, Obama’s stimulus sought to provide tax cuts for 95% of working Americans, funds to buoy cash-strapped state governments, new construction and infrastructure projects, and other programs to create jobs, retrain workers, and promote economic activity throughout the country. In December, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the stimulus had successfully created up to 1.6 million jobs, and today, a report shows the Recovery Act will ultimately create 2.5 million jobs. Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute found that the stimulus had boosted the U.S. economy by 4 percent. Read on...

Rachel Maddow calls out Dick Cheney and the Republicans who are parroting him for criticizing the Obama administration for reading terrorists their Miranda rights when every single person that was arrested on terrorism charges under the Bush administration was read their Miranda rights as well.

Frankly I'm tired of the glib nature of almost everyone on cable news and the politicians when talking about this issue and not getting to the underbelly of what this debate is all about, and that is whether it is acceptable to torture prisoners or not and whether we should respect our Constitution or not when it comes to anyone who is arrested for anything. It really just speaks to what road we want to go down when it comes to our system of justice. Are we a nation of laws and think that our system of justice works pretty well, or do we torture people and think it's okay to force confessions out of prisoners with no regard to whether we're getting the truth out of them or not if it makes the public feel better?

BlueGal and Driftglass were talking about this on their podcast from last week, and Driftglass made a really great point. No one can blame the public for wanting revenge on people that they feel want to do America harm. And it's human nature to want revenge on someone, but that's not how our criminal justice system is set up. It's why as Driftglass noted we don't allow the family of someone who has been the victim of a violent crime to decide what happens to the person charged with that crime, no matter how sure they might think they are about whether the person charged is guilty or not.

Those family members are not thinking rationally. They want revenge. The cable news industry and right wing hate radio has allowed the public to think that it's okay to want that same sort of cowboy system of justice instead of our system of justice which was put in place to stop the lynch mob mentality the media is propagating now. I thought we didn't want to be a country where a king or a queen decided to exact revenge on someone with no trial. I thought we were still supposed to be a country where everyone, no matter who you are is presumed innocent until you have your day in court.

It's really just disgusting to watch the national dialog deteriorate into that. We used to be better than that before the media decided it was more important to cover up the crimes of the Bush administration and a good portion of the country seemed to lose their minds after the attacks on 9-11. We need to quit being afraid to allow our criminal justice system to work as much as the Cheney's and the Hannity's and the Limbaugh's and the rest of the yappers out there want to keep us afraid and throwing our own system of justice down the toilet out of revenge, spite and fear.

The Rachel Maddow Show's video site summed this one up as well as I could ever hope to.

Rachel Maddow holds Dick Cheney and Republican opportunists to account for their shameless hypocrisy, distortions and outright lies in criticizing President Obama's response to the attempted bombing of Flight 253 in the face of their abject, egregious failures to deal with terrorists threats to the United States when they were in power.

She also took at whack at her cohorts in the mainstream media for whether they want to act like journalists and fact check the B.S. that's being fed to them instead of just repeating it, or do their jobs. This was truly one of Rachel's finer moments on television.

I don't expect either of the Cheney's or any of the other hacks politicizing this terrorism debate to be coming on her show any time soon. Keep giving them hell Rachel.

MADDOW: After days of essentially unanswered Republican political attacks against the Obama administration, finally, today, we got the big kahuna. The white whale of Republican politics, former Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, involved in this.

After five days of Republicans owning the airwaves on this issue, doubling and then tripling down on politicizing this thwarted terrorist attack, with almost no opposition from the Democrats, the maestro of terror politics, Mr. Cheney, gave a statement to Politico.com today. Not decrying the terrorist incident itself, but instead using that attack as an opportunity to bash the president, to accuse the president of not keeping America safe.

Now, as is often the case in politics, when attacks from one side go unanswered for a long time, when one side gets the platform all to themselves, that side can sometimes get over-exuberant. They can overplay their hand. Republicans, left to their own devices, have in this case excitedly launched a series of obviously baseless, factually incorrect, demonstrably untrue and hypocritical attacks.

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Rachel Maddow weighed in on the ongoing dust-up between the White House and Fox News and the collective freak-out by Fox and the right wing over herself and Keith Olberman, among others, being invited to a meeting at the White House. She wrapped it up with this statement:

Maddow: You can be upset all you want that the president meets with people who you disagree with. But consider being fair and balanced in your criticism, at least admit that this White House has met with both sides while the Bush White House did not. You should especially admit that if you happened to have been a member of the Bush White House during that administration.

Keith joined Rachel later in the segment and talked about how hypocritical and completely disingenuous all of this pearl clutching has been by the right.

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Transcript below the fold.

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