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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) says that President Barack Obama "is the most radical president we've ever seen," but Republicans who failed to stick to conservative principles are also to blame for the nation's problems.

In an interview that aired Wednesday on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, CBN's David Brody told Cruz that the media had dubbed him "the Republican Barack Obama" and a "GOP rock star."

"I try to pay very little attention to the media," Cruz insisted. "It is, as you know, a fickle creature."

Instead, Brody said Cruz was focused on creating a "new Republican Party."

"I think President Obama is the most radical president we've ever seen, but I think an awful lot of Republicans failed to stand for principle and contributed to getting us into this mess," the senator explained.

During an appearance at a weapons manufacturer in Texas on Tuesday, Cruz accused both Democrats and Republicans of trying to "silence" him for using McCarthyism to smear Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel with suggestions that the former Nebraska senator had taken $200,000 from North Korea.

"Washington has a long tradition of trying to hurl insults to silence those who they don't like what they're saying," Cruz told the crowd.

"A lot of media attention has been focused on the attacks leveled on me and I would encourage all of you if you want to write stories on that great, knock yourself out, but I would ask for every ten stories you write, attacking me, perhaps write one story on the substance of Chuck Hagel's record."

Salon's Joan Walsh on Wednesday observed that Cruz was just the latest tea party lawmaker to use former Sen. Joe McCarthy's tactics while playing the victim.

"Playing the persecuted, he challenged reporters to at least investigate Hagel a little bit while they’re attacking him," Walsh wrote. "That’s good advice. Because if they do, they’ll find no substance to Cruz’s charges in Hagel’s 'record,' but a lot of substance to charges that he’s a 21stcentury Joe McCarthy in Cruz’s."

(h/t: The Huffington Post)

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I was very glad to see that Salon's Joan Walsh is about as tired of those in the media playing the "both sides" false equivalency game, where they compare the craziness that's become the mainstream on the right to some either nonexistent, or out of the mainstream entity on the left, for the sake of so-called balance or fairness, as I am.

It was nice to see her call out The Daily Beast's Lauren Ashburn for doing just that on this Wednesday's edition of Hardball with guest host Michael Smerconish filling in for Chris Matthews. Here's more on that from Walsh herself in her column at Salon: The wingnut trifecta:

Right-wing claims that Hillary Clinton faked illness to avoid testifying about the Benghazi tragedy would be funny if they weren’t so ugly. It’s the wingnut trifecta, smearing our most popular past Democratic president, Bill Clinton, along with our current president, Barack Obama, and the current 2016 front-runner, all with one shot. Imagine birtherism crossed with the worst of the hateful anti-Clinton lies, like the “Vince Foster was murdered” claim. That’s Hillary-health trutherism.[...]

I talked about the crazy Benghazi allegations on “Hardball” today and I was surprised to find myself in strong disagreement with the Daily Beast’s Lauren Ashburn. Ashburn acted shocked at the Clinton slurs; I argued they’re just the latest outbreak of Clinton-Obama derangement syndrome. But even more significant, Ashburn tried to declare that both sides are somehow equally to blame for the “incivility” of our current political debate, claiming that someone (she didn’t say who or where) had wished death on former President George Bush when the news broke that he was in the intensive care unit.

I’m on record, often, saying that false equivalence about haters on the right and left is dangerous. To equate Democrats and Republicans on this front, you’d have to imagine, say, Susan Rice suggesting something that crazy, not to mention unethical, about Mitt Romney’s secretary of state, had the 2012 race ended differently. And you can’t equate some random commenter on the HuffPost with people like Krauthammer and Hannity who have regular perches atop Fox News. That would be like Chris Matthews wishing death on the former president; it would never happen.

I agree completely, except I wasn't surprised by what Ashburn said. She's one of Howard Kurtz's favorite guests on his Sunday show on CNN where what she did during the Hardball segment is the norm and not the exception.

h/t Captain Kangaroo

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I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Joan Walsh get a chance to give Dick Armey his due after the way he treated her on Hardball back in early 2009. While discussing the mess over at FreedomWorks, which Karoli already wrote about here, Walsh called Armey and his fellow astroturfers exactly what they are -- a bunch of grifters.

Matthews took issue with the description, but I'd say Walsh is spot on. Armey and his ilk have lined their pockets, nicely extracting money from their rich backers and from those naive enough to actually believe that this so-called "tea party" is a grassroots movement, instead of what it actually is: a rebranding effort to get the Bush stink off of the label Republican.

Unlike Matthews and his producers, who seem more worried about trying to book Armey and Kibbe as guests on his show, his colleague at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow called out Armey among a host of others who are getting rich off of these con games earlier this month. Karoli wrote about that here: Rachel Maddow Slams Conservative Fox Commentators and Other Right Wing Scammers and MSNBC now has the transcript up for that show as well.

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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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I'm not sure what Politico's Ben White's background is, or if he's ever worked at a job where you were really glad you had a union in place to join, because you work in a dangerous environment, and because of those protections provided to you by the union, you could speak out about conditions on the job without fear of being fired or retribution, but it sure didn't sound like it after hearing his crass statements on MSNBC's Now With Alex Wagner.

I'm also really disgusted with the rest of the panel that was on there with him this Friday, because even though they made a lot of really great points about just what Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and his cohorts in the legislature were doing with passing this right to work for less legislation in their lame duck session, they let him get away with a really key issue that Rep. Brandon Dillon laid out so well during his speech this week.

The supporters of "right to work" don't really care about anyone's right to a job. What you're doing, as Ken already explained here, is arguing that it should be allowed that nonunion workers to get benefits that unions negotiate without having to pay their share for the process. And as Ken noted in that same post, "Proponents of 'right-to-work' laws argue that without such 'protections', workers can be forced to join unions, which is not true and is illegal under federal law and has been since 1947."

If Politico's White wants to have an honest debate about unions, rather than giving Republican taking points, maybe he could explain why it's fair for someone to benefit from the work and negotiating and legal representation a union is forced to give that employee, without that employee paying for those benefits, rather than the union being allowed to tell them that if they don't want to join, they're on their own. I thought Republicans loved the idea of someone "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps." But now they think it's perfectly acceptable for a union to protect them and pay legal fees and negotiate for fair wages for them, without them paying to make sure that union has enough money to conduct business?

And as much as I really like Joan Walsh and Joy Reid and agree with the points they made during this segment, they missed the ball by not making that exact point to White when he was so terribly concerned about the choices and benefits of these workers and whether it's unfair to have them pay their union dues or not. Here is the question he should have to answer. Is it fair to force a union to represent free riders who want representation, but refuse to pay for it?

I thought Republicans were all about personal responsibility. I guess not if it means someone being allowed to freeload from a union so you can bust them financially. Then it's perfectly fine in the name of "freedom."

If anyone would like to try to get White to respond as to why he thinks his comments here were acceptable and that unions should be forced to spend money representing those who don't want to pay to join, and why those that refuse to join should reap the benefits of what those unions negotiate for, you can let him know at @morningmoneyben.

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Joan Walsh was one of the many great writers out there who called Paul Ryan out for his lie-filled Republican National Convention speech this Wednesday evening and she appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, along with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz to discuss that very speech. As she noted in her conversation with Matthews in the clip above, it's important that the media quits with making excuses for these politicians and pretending this is just political rhetoric. When they're lying to the public, a lie needs to be called what it is, a lie.

And when it comes to lying, Ryan's speech wasn't just brazen with how easily disprovable the lies were in his speech, but for the sheer number as well. His speech was filed with them from beginning to end to an extent that should be shocking for anyone paying an ounce of attention to what's going on and the extreme disconnect between Ryan's rhetoric and how he's governed and what he's unwilling to take responsibility for, yet heap onto President Obama.

You can read more on Joan's response to Ryan's speech here: Paul Ryan’s brazen lies:

Paul Ryan gave a feisty anti-Obama speech that will have fact-checkers working for days. His most brazen lie accused President Obama of “raiding” Medicare by taking the exact same $716 billion that Ryan and the House GOP notoriously voted to slash. It was stunning.

But that’s not all. He attacked Obama for failing to keep open a Janesville GM plant that closed under Bush in 2008. He hit him for a credit-rating downgrade that S&P essentially blamed on GOP intransigence. He claimed that all taxpayers got from the 2009 stimulus was “more debt,” when most got a tax cut (and the stimulus is known to have saved between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs). He derided the president for walking away from the Simpson Bowles commission deficit-cutting recommendations when Ryan himself, a commission member, voted against those recommendations.

He blamed Obama for a deficit mostly created by programs he himself voted for – from two wars, tax cuts, new Medicare benefits and TARP.

And of course, he riffed on the tired central lie of the GOP convention: that the president said “government gets the credit” for small businesses, not the business owners themselves.

Other than that, it was a great speech.

Interestingly, for all his lies, Ryan didn’t repeat the Romney camp’s false claim that Obama did away with the welfare system’s work requirements. Maybe he ran out of time.

Ryan got off a few good zingers: “College grads shouldn’t have to live out their 20s in childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters.” He didn’t mention that he opposed legislation to keep student loan rates from doubling. His remarks about his childhood were slightly moving. He talked about losing his father at 16, and he called his mother, who went back to school and to work after that, his role model. But he never mentioned the Social Security death benefits that let him go to an out-of-state school. Occasionally he seemed to be going after swing voters, rather than his hard-right base, taking a more in sorrow than anger tone about Obama’s failings. Then he’d mix things up with nastiness and lies. Read on...

Addendum (Nicole): The Week notes fifteen ways the media avoids calling Paul Ryan a liar.

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It seems the National Review's John Derbyshire has caused quite a stir with a recent column he wrote for Taki’s Magazine, describing "the talk" he has given to his children about race. Chris Hayes and his panel discussed the column in the video above and here's how Hayes opened up the segment:

HAYES: In the wake of Trayvon Martin's death at the hand of George Zimmerman, plenty of black journalists who are also parents have written extensively of the advice they've given to their sons about dealing with the police so as to avoid a misunderstanding that might leave them dead. And what we've learned from Zimmerman is sometimes that talk doesn't even have to be about a police officer.

National Review writer John Derbyshire has written a piece for Taki's Magazine [...] about the talk he's had with his two teenagers, white teenagers, non-black teenagers I should say, to deal with black people. I'm going to read you some of the things he says. He tells them:

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

It is one of the most sort of avowedly racist things I've seen in a long time. Derbyshire has a reputation for being [...] an avowed racist. He is a white supremacist. He thinks white people are superior to black people and he writes about that in the piece and all this I.Q. craziness. What is really interesting is that he is a contributor to The National Review and one of the things that happens when you have conversations about race is that the right feels that it is unfairly called racist all the time, that it is constantly being singled out and that liberals use the race card and accusations of racism way to liberally and it's unfair.

And I think the response that I tend to have is you have people in your coalition, if you look at where are the racists in America, which coalition are they part of? They're part of your coalition.

As Hayes pointed out, it's up to those like the National Review to decide whether they want to align themselves with the likes of Derbyshire or not, and it's up to them to police those boundaries. Hayes followed up with some interesting discussion with his panel of Van Jones, Joan Walsh, Ann Friedman and Josh Barro, who as Hayes pointed out, wrote about the right's problem with race even before this latest screed by Derbyshire was published.

Our own John Amato wrote about Derbyshire way back in 2007 and you can read more about that here and here. And Think Progress has more on his background here:- Derbyshire In 2003: I’m A Proud ‘Racist’ and here: In 2009, Derbyshire Argued Women Shouldn’t Vote: ‘Women Voting Is Bad For Conservatism’.

And from Think Progress as well, here's more on Derbyshire's latest: National Review Writer Pens Racist Screed: ‘Avoid Concentrations Of Blacks,’ ‘Stay Out Of’ Their Neighborhoods:

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Ed Schultz reporting from Wisconsin awaiting the upcoming recall election of Scott Walker spoke to Salon's Joan Walsh and The Progressive's Ruth Conniff about the latest in the GOP's attack on women and their reproductive health.

As Ed noted, we had another attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Wisconsin Sunday night. Here's more from the HuffPo on that -- Planned Parenthood Bombed In Wisconsin:

A small bomb exploded outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Grand Chute, Wis., on Sunday night, and police are investigating to learn who planted the device.

According to WGBA-TV, police fire crews found the homemade explosive outside a window sill that they believe had set off a small fire, which burned out before fire crews arrived. The building sustained a small amount of damage.

The FBI has joined with the local police department to investigate the bombing. Leonard Peace, a spokesman for the FBI's Milwaukee Division, told The Huffington Post that the agency was notified of the incident on Sunday evening and initiated an investigation on Monday.

"The information that I have is that an unknown suspect placed a device at that location last evening, approximately 7:30 p.m.," Peace said. "The device caused minimal fire damage to the facility. At this point in time, we're reviewing the evidence to determine exactly what type of device it was."

Grand Chute Police Chief Greg Peterson told the Appleton Post Crescent that the bomb was made out of a plastic bottle and chemicals and "included agents of an incendiary quality." He added that he had not heard of any threats to the clinic prior to Sunday's incident.

Rick Santorum condemned the bombing, but is still pushing to defund the organization. And as Ed noted, Mitt Romney is still out on the campaign trail pushing to take away federal funding from Planned Parenthood as well.

Walsh and Conniff weighed in on the recent poll numbers showing a large shift for President Obama, primarily due to women voters and whether Mitt Romney or the Republicans are going to be able to do anything to shift those trends before the general election later in the year.

Video of their interview below the fold.

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Ed Schultz spoke to Salon's Joan Walsh and Obama Super PAC head Bill Burton about John McCain's statement that the GOP needs to "get off" of the war on women and start focusing on other issues if they don't want to be badly damaged in the upcoming election. As Schultz noted, it doesn't appear the state legislatures around the country are listening to his advice, with Tennessee just being the latest example.

Joan Walsh rightfully pointed out McCain's hypocrisy on the matter when he just voted for the Blunt amendment which would allow any employer and not just religious institutions to deny contraceptive coverage to women. They also discussed the "tell your boss why you're on the pill" bill making its way through the Arizona legislature and McCain now saying he doesn't want to see that bill pass either.

As all of them noted, Republicans like McCain or more than happy to appease their base with support of these kinds of laws, until they start backfiring on them politically as we're seeing now.