DOWNLOADS: (432)

PLAYS: (5968)

Embed

Mandy Patinkin sat down with Stephen Colbert to discuss the his character in the Showtime series, Homeland, and what followed was a righteous rant and debate with Colbert -- with Colbert in full character -- on terrorism, whether we bear any personal responsibility for it here in the United States and the fact that words and not weapons are going to be the solution to our problems.

DOWNLOADS: (153)

PLAYS: (539)

Embed

From the party that was willing to take the country hostage during their debt ceiling brinksmanship, that has responded to the election of our first black president with a record amount of obstruction, and from a man who wasn't even willing to allow the word "compromise" to be used when talking about negotiating with Democrats, now House Speaker John Boehner wants us to believe he's willing to negotiate in good faith on those tax cuts that are going to expire next year.

Which of course means give us all of our tax cuts for the rich or nothing. Lawrence O'Donnell's been advocating for just allowing them to expire and force them to go over the fiscal cliff so the Republicans can actually negotiate in good faith since they'll no longer be beholden to Grover Norquist's no new taxes pledge and they'll get something passed withing the first few weeks of the year. Watching the Republicans in action and given what they've been like to deal with over the last few years, I'd say he's right.

The Republicans have become Lucy with the football when it comes to trying to negotiate with them on anything and Boehner can't even control his own caucus. I think there's a good chance Boehner will end up going down in history as the worst Speaker of the House of the most unpopular Congress, ever, and for good reason.

Transcript via Fox below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (2248)

PLAYS: (7263)

Embed

Cenk Uygur had better not stay on vacation for too much longer or he might find his job in jeopardy from the Rev. Al Sharpton who's been filling in for him for the last week or so. Sharpton has shown himself to be more than willing to go head to head with these right-wing conservative House members over the last week and this Monday's interview with Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA) and self proclaimed astroturf "tea party" member was no exception.

I wish more people would give these people the same treatment every time they came on the air and maybe they'd decide doing television interviews wasn't such a good idea any more, but I don't have any hope of that happening any time soon.

Sharpton started out with hitting him for his uber-patriotic nonsense of claiming to "love America" and asking him if he also loved actual Americans like seniors on Social Security and working people who need Medicaid. Sharpton summed that up nicely when he said to Graves "I appreciate you loving America, but do you love Americans that have to survive in America?"

Graves comeback to that was to say that Sharpton had probably never been to a tea party rally, but a lot of them are on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and pretended that their policies are actually going to preserve our social safety nets rather than destroy them and that their new slogan of “cut, cap and balance” was just common sense that most Americans should agree with.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (914)

PLAYS: (903)

Embed

It looks like even after being offered some kind of grand bargain by the Obama administration on deficit reduction, Speaker of the House John Boehner has rejected the offer because it included revenue increases.

Deficit Talks Scaled Back Over Tax Increases:

Citing differences over tax revenues, House Speaker John A. Boehner said on Saturday night that he would pull back from joint efforts with President Obama to reach a sweeping $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan tied to a proposal to increase the federal debt limit.

On the eve of a second round of high-level bipartisan talks set for Sunday, Mr. Boehner issued a statement saying he would now urge negotiators to instead focus on crafting a smaller package more in line with the $2 trillion to $3 trillion in spending cuts and revenue increases negotiated earlier by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes,” Mr. Boehner said. “I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.”

Here's more from Dave Dayden -- Boehner Bugs Out of Grand Bargain, Says Medium-Level Deal Only Option:

The day that the grand bargain proposal was released, to great fanfare, on Thursday, I was immediately skeptical because I didn’t see anything in the stories suggesting that Republicans were at all willing to swallow $1 trillion in tax increases. Indeed, they never moved on revenue. And as the President was demanding an actual grand bargain, with revenues in the deal, as part of a deal that would have cut entitlements, Republicans couldn’t stomach it.

Where do we go from here? Boehner suggested the smaller deal that was part of the Biden talks. But this was the deal that Republicans essentially rejected a couple weeks ago, which had nearly $2 trillion in spending cuts and around $400 billion in revenue. I don’t know how they would go back to this at this point, but it’s possible that a patch to the alternative minimum tax, a perennial Washington favorite, would be included in the deal, to cover the revenue and allow Republicans to say that the package is revenue-neutral. It would merely mean that the AMT, which is patched every year so it doesn’t hit the middle class, would actually be paid for this time around. But it would be a net $0 in revenue from the baseline.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (1054)

PLAYS: (1946)

Embed

Ed Schultz expressed some of the same frustration I have right now with President Obama continuing to put out the olive branches to Republicans and as he said, “have an amiable tone about it” and asked economist David Cay Johnston about the upcoming meetings between Republicans and the White House which is about to take place, and if anything positive for average Americans might come out of it.

Johnston wasn't optimistic and he's not the first person I've seen ask if the GOP is actually crass enough that they might be willing to actually tank our economy because of their rigid political ideology and their absolute unwillingness to raise taxes or do anything else that would get Americans back to work if heaven forbid it might make President Obama look good.

I hope to hell he's wrong and I don't know if it will do an ounce of good or not, but I would hope these members of Congress start having their phones ring and their inboxes filling up from any of their constituents who are following what's going on with this hostage taking telling them they've had enough of it.

JOHNSTON: I don't think so Ed and I think it's getting to be very, very troubling. You know there's an assumption out there that eventually the Republicans will come around and they'll have to settle so we don't default. I think we have to consider the very real possibility that they're willing to submarine the entire history of American economic dominance in the last seventy years or so, in order to achieve a point.

And there's nowhere if you think about it for the Republicans to go. They have made cutting taxes their sole issue. There's no...

SCHULTZ: That's right.

JOHNSTON: ...there's no idea of any other kind, of building the country. I was in China last week and you marvel at the roads they build, at the way that government has seized the future. What the Republicans have done is painted themselves into a corner. And they have nowhere to go but to say more and more tax cuts and even if it means that the country goes into much deeper trouble than it's in now. And that will happen if we don't pay our debts.

Dr. James Peterson followed with one of the better points I've heard made in a while about just what the demands of the Republicans are after Schultz pointed out that they don't seem to listen to anyone that doesn't have money.

PETERSON: That's pretty much the long and the short of it. They want everyone else to tighten their belts. They want school teachers and educators – tighten your belts, poor folk – tighten your belts, immigrants – tighten your belts, every social service to tighten its belt, Medicare – tighten your belts. But they want to insulate the people you're calling job creators, that's very generous Ed.

SCHULTZ: Yeah.

PETERSON: They're not job creators. They're debt shufflers and CEO's of multinational corporations that outsource our labor force. So in the end I have no idea how the Republicans can see how we're going to move forward and progress in this country playing this chicken game with the debt ceiling.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (186)

PLAYS: (1301)

Embed

On this week's Fox News Sunday, the Washington Examiner's Chris Stirewalt apparently thinks negotiating entails one side getting everything they want and then stomping off before giving even one iota of the concessions they agreed to when talks started. In my world, that's called bargaining in bad faith, or hostage taking, not negotiating.

BREAM: Chris, you had sort of a visceral reaction when Bill said they won't reach a deal.

STIREWALT: Well, look, the problem for the president in all of this is that he can have a deal anytime he wants. He's driving the bus and he can stop at any moment.

He feels tremendous pressure from markets, tremendous pressure from the largest question that looms over his reelection, which is the condition of the economy. He needs a deal quickly.

Now, he can stop today. They already have a deal in principle for $1.4 trillion, $1.5 trillion in cuts, with the cap extension to match. That takes them maybe not to the 2012 election, but very close. It's a year's worth of borrowing, probably.

And he can stop this buggy any time he wants and they can have a deal. But he's afraid to do that because of two things.

One, he wants to make sure that they get it past the election so that he doesn't have to go through this next summer. And the other problem is, as Nina pointed out, he took a lot of blowback for extending the Bush tax rates. That was a big deal. Supporters did not like it, Democratic members of Congress felt that he sold them out.

So he feels political pressure to push this to the end. But every day longer he goes, the less the markets like it and the more damage to the economy it does. It's a real sweet spot.

DOWNLOADS: (220)

PLAYS: (336)

Embed

Chris Matthews brought on Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston to discuss what kind of problems Republicans are going to have after voting for Paul Ryan's budget plan that voucherizes Medicare after their recent loss in New York's 26th congressional district.

Kingston claimed that the Republicans really want to negotiate with the Democrats and that the only problem is that they have refused to put a plan of their own on the table to deal with the rising costs of Medicare. What Kinston neglects to say here is that Democrats have been more than willing to negotiate with Republicans and sadly already passed what amounts to Bob Dole or Mitt Romney's health care plans and the ones who are drawing a line in the sand are Republicans with their absolute refusal to put any type of tax increases on the table or to even start to regulate their friends in the insurance industry.

Kingston and his fellow Republicans in Congress are hoping that the Democrats throw them a lifeline so they don't have the issue to beat them upside the head with in the upcoming election. I don't know what kind of "grand bargain" Biden and his group are working on, but my fears are they're going to do exactly that. They'd be better off to just leave them flailing in the wind on this one until the upcoming election.

What I really get tired of while watching these discussions on television is they never get to just what's really running up our health care costs. What it's going to take for the public to finally get fed up with all of this and demand loudly that we either have a single-payer health care plan for everyone or that these insurance industries are regulated in the same way that they are in some countries in Europe, I don't know.

I'm tired of hearing that we're broke when our politicians refuse to roll back those Bush tax cuts that are driving up our deficit. I'm tired of this starve the beast nonsense where they're going to leave us with nothing but rich and poor because we don't care about taking care of the most vulnerable in society. I'm tired of these politicians who are looking out for their corporate donors pretending that they have a care in the world for their constituents that actually live in their districts. I'm tired of them pretending that government has no role in society when we know that there are a lot of things government does more efficiently than the private sector, like providing health insurance where there is no profit model. And I'm tired of no one advocating for a single-payer model to fix the problems with our health care costs being allowed on the air to counter the likes of Kingston.

DOWNLOADS: (363)

PLAYS: (1958)

Embed

The Nation's Chris Hayes filling in for Rachel Maddow takes a look at the negotiating tactics being used by the GOP where they're more than willing to hold the country hostage to get their agenda passed no matter how damaging it is to our country and the Democrats never ending willingness to meet the crazy half way.