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QOTD from Marco Rubio on this Sunday's Meet the Press:

And I think the best way to do that is for the Republican Party to prove, as I think we can, that we are the party of upward mobility. We are not the party of the people who have made it. Certainly we don't begrudge people who have made it. We celebrate what they've done. And in America, we've always celebrated success.

But we are the party that stands for the people who are trying to make it, the people who are trying to start a business out of the spare bedroom of their home, who are trying to give their kids a better life.

Riiiigggghhht. I don't think you could say the majority of those in the Congress other than the Progressive Caucus in the House and a few I could count on one hand in the Senate are looking out for most of us these days, but Republicans have shown by their actions for a long time now just who they represent, and it's definitely those "who have made it" -- or in other words, the 1 percent.

Full transcript below the fold.

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If anyone would like a change of pace from the typical debates we've seen over this "fiscal cliff" deal and who made out and who didn't, the upcoming debacle over raising the debt ceiling and what's really lead to the lack of upward mobility and record income disparity in the United States, I'd highly recommend you set aside some time to watch at least the first few segments from Up With Chris Hayes from this Saturday.

Unlike most of the brain-draining discussions we're treated to on the majority of our corporate media and despite the presence of guest Veronique de Rugy appearing again in less than a month on Hayes' show, I don't think most of our readers here will be disappointed with the discussions that went on.

As Hayes has been talking about for some time now, if you really want to know who our members of Congress represent, forget the rhetoric and look at how they vote and who they protect when we see them finally act and not just what we hear them saying during their posturing on television. As was pointed out during the discussions here, despite the fact that President Obama talked about protecting the middle class in this deal, most Americans are going to see their taxes go up with the expiration of the payroll tax holiday.

As the panel members discussed during the segments, there was bipartisan agreement on that for some good reasons, like not wanting to undermine the integrity of the Social Security trust fund. But as was also noted, that should have been replaced with a renewal of the Making Work Pay tax credit, which you can read more about here: Making Work Pay vs. the payroll tax cut, in two charts.

Sadly, our Congress is still showing themselves to be more worried about their rich campaign donors and this deal to make it through their last round of Shock Doctrine governance was no exception.

You can read more on all of this from Hayes' blog here and more video below the fold: The fiscal cliff deal: A tax hike for the real middle class:

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I've heard Lady-Mc-Cheney, Mary Matalin say a lot of ridiculous things in her defense of Mitt Romney, but this segment from Anderson Cooper's show on CNN this Thursday evening may have set a new low, even for Matalin's standards, which generally range from low to non-existent. Apparently labor unions, paying people minimum wage instead of slave wages and poverty programs that keep people from starving when times are tough are harming upward mobility in America.

And in this idiot's world, women being allowed to control their own reproductive health and having access to birth control is not one of the primary economic factors in most women's lives, but instead something that has no affect on whether they get "upward mobility opportunities" as well. Really astounding from someone who I assume was alive and cognizant during the last half a century or so and who has been around long enough to maybe remember the days when women were discriminated against because they might not be able to remain at a job, because heaven forbid they might end up pregnant.

Who needs misogynistic men around when you've got women like Matalin doing as much or more damage to her own gender as her male counterparts could ever hope to do.

As to the rest of the segment on CNN, I was glad to see The New York Times' Charles Blow call out Matalin for presuming to know what's best for African-American voters and the fact that you can't separate the issues she was discussing from the economic impact on the lives of average American workers, no matter what their race or gender.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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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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On this Sunday's State of the Union, when asked if Mitt Romney coming from a privileged background is going to harm him in the presidential election, Speaker of the House John Boehner did his best to try to pretend that Romney is just another example of how average Americans can work their way up the economic ladder, despite the fact that upward mobility doesn't really exist in the United States anymore.

Boehner thinks Americans "don't want to vote for a loser" but ignores the fact that Mitt Romney made his millions making sure that a whole lot of Americans were never going to have a chance at even earning a middle class living, much less achieving the sort of "success" Boehner was touting here.

If anyone has not read Pete Kotz's article on Romney at The Village Voice about his time at Bain, I highly recommend it -- Mitt Romney, American Parasite.

If being a "winner" means taking over companies, busting unions, destroying communities, sucking the benefits and retirement packages dry to line you and your investors' pockets, bringing in incompetent people to manage companies that only care about production and throw safety and good work practices out the window and moving on to your next target, then I guess Mitt Romney is your man. For most Americans, he was the guy that you live in fear of coming in and buying out your place of employment if you're still lucky enough to have any kind of retirement package, seniority rights, benefits, or are making a living wage.

Transcript below the fold.

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The panel on Up With Chris Hayes this Saturday of Sam Seder, Bob Herbert, Josh Barro and Victoria Defrancesco Soto had a discussion on the growing wealth inequality and lack up social mobility which are being made worse by things like Republicans wanting to cut a billion dollars in food assistance for the poor in their proposed Farm Bill.

Bob Herbert made a really great point late into the first clip when they were discussing the fact that SNAP, which used to be called food stamps, is subsidizing corporations that don't want to pay a living wage and that we ought to be raising the minimum wage among other things to remedy that. I think that's a point that is not mentioned nearly often enough when we see the likes of Paul Ryan demagoguing the needed expansion of the program. A good deal of those people using the program to keep from starving are not unemployed, but are the working poor.

More great discussion on the Romney's trying to rewrite the fact that they inherited great wealth instead of admitting they were born with huge advantages that most Americans are never going to be lucky enough to have below the fold.

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With the upcoming primary in Florida next week, the Republicans decided to trot out their "golden boy" Marco Rubio for a good bit of projection on who it was that tanked our economy and to rattle off their usual list of grievances about President Obama not magically fixing the mess he inherited from George W. Bush in the face of unprecedented obstruction by the Republicans in the Congress.

What Rubio dished out here was more of their upside down definition of "class warfare" where they obviously think most Americans are too stupid to know what the actual definition of class warfare is and that it's their wealthy political donors who are winning that war right now with record income disparity in the United States.

Rubio also repeated the zombie lie that we've been hearing from Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, that "Obama made the economy worse." Jon Perr debunked that lie already for C&L in his post here -- Romney's Big Lie on the Economy Gets Bigger. And for a little reminder about that economic mess the Obama administration was left and who caused our current deficit, I'll just remind everyone again about this chart -- The Bush Deficit.

Rubio again says that the stimulus bill didn't work even though we know that Republicans have been talking out of both sides of their mouth on the issue since we know they were all clamoring for that money for their individual states and districts as we documented here, and here, and here, and here, and here. And we have more where those came from but I'll stop there.

Rubio pretends that the Republicans care about upward mobility and everyday Americans being able to get ahead, but their policies of trickle-down economics and tax breaks for the richest among us have led to nothing but record income disparity the likes of which we haven't seen since The Gilded Age, and their solutions are for more of the same that we saw under George W. Bush, but put on steroids. If this is really the message they want to carry into the general election, it's going to be interesting to see how the public responds once they all start trying to campaign on this around the country and try to sell this snake oil to someone besides Republican primary voters.

If the reactions from my coworkers, friends and family that I've spoken to so far are any indication, I don't think it's going to go well for them. I've gotten nothing but completely negative reaction from anyone who has been even remotely paying attention on their messaging, their "class warfare" rhetoric and even my lifelong Republican father has called the current crop of GOP presidential candidates "a bunch of clowns" after watching some of their debates.

Transcript via Real Clear Politics below the fold -- Rubio Gives GOP Weekly Address: Obama Has "Made Everything Worse":

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I don't know about anyone else, but I feel there's something rather disconcerting about about watching four extremely rich American immigrants who were all born on third base, discussing the reasons for lack of upward mobility in the United States, but that's exactly what we got here on CNN's weekend show, Your Money.

I guess they couldn't find anyone who actually grew up as a member of the working class or a union member or leader to potentially counter the likes of Mort Zuckerman, and statements such as this one that are inevitable when you allow him on the air:

ZUCKERMAN: Let me just say I really support what Arianna has just described. I think there are huge problems in this country and a lot of it, in my judgment, stems not from capitalism but from the government.

I'll focus on the first one, which is we have done a terrible job in providing enough education for the children of this country. There's a whole mismatch in terms of the number of people coming out looking for jobs and the qualifications that people need for jobs, particularly those who are educated, particularly in the world of science and technology.

There are shortages of people, there are literally millions of open jobs because we don't train --

VELSHI: But why does the free market not solve that problem?

ZUCKERMAN: Because the education is a government function. If there ever was a public function in this country from the days it started, it's public education and we've done a lousy job. Part of it is frankly because we have lousy teachers.

Part of the reason we have lousy teachers is we have teachers union that say won't deal with those issues. So there are lots of reasons why education is not being properly handled in this country.

But to me if I could think of one thing that would change it, it would be to change our system of education and make sure that our children were properly educated.

I can think of a lot of reasons as to why we are lacking upward mobility in the U.S., like outsourcing, a race to the bottom on wages (which is what Zuckerman is really advocating for here), union busting, corporate raiders and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney and his ilk, our terrible trade laws, lowering taxes on the rich, not regulating the financial sector, privatizing our commons, and some of the issues they did touch on during this segment. But not being able to fire enough of those terrible greedy overpaid teachers that have those damned unions representing them is not one of them that makes my list.

And Zakaria wasn't much better with basically saying we have to choose between our social safety nets or investing in infrastructure and education as though we can't do something about the unfairness in our tax structure and controlling the costs of providing medical benefits to Americans, like say, single-payer, and do both. I will give him credit though for admitting that austerity isn't going to solve our economic problems and at least bothering to mention that the people who are still employed are in the jobs you can't outsource. It would have been nice to hear the topic of the pure greed of a few and the race to the bottom that got us there though, which I don't expect from the likes of CNN. They play the same "fair and balanced" game Fox does. They're just not as blatant about it.

Full transcript below the fold.

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