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The Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel on Sunday said that Republicans were succeeding at using "weapons of mass distraction" to obstruct President Barack Obama's second term agenda.

During an ABC News panel discussion about the a number of scandals that Republicans are using to attack the Obama administration, Washington Post columnist George Will asserted that IRS scrutiny of tea party groups was like Watergate because "it's the use of the federal machinery to punish enemies of the administration."

"Watergate? Seriously, George?" Vanden Heuvel replied. "I mean, Watergate was a scandal unique in its depths of criminality. You had a president at the heart of the White House directing the subversion of the FBI and other institutions, including the IRS... And the key scandal -- which you will disagree with -- is that we had after Citizens United a flood of money coming in, and you had groups which were clearly political and partisan trying to use this 501(c)4 [tax-exempt] categorization to escape political scrutiny."

Vanden Heuvel went on to point out that the Republican Party was trying to substitute the so-called scandal at the IRS, attacks in Benghazi and the Justice Department's seizure of Associate Press phone records for a real political agenda.

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Sen. Marco Rubio sent out a letter this Monday, calling for the IRS commissioner to resign in the wake of the latest dust up over the agency's admission that there were some conservative groups targeted by the branch in Cincinnati. The problem with his request -- the IRS commissioner when these scandals occurred was a Bush appointee who no longer heads the department:

Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman, who was appointed by President Bush in 2008 and held by President Obama, left the agency in Nov. 9, 2012. Any pre-election misconduct would have had to occur on his watch. The current acting commissioner is Steven T. Miller -- a permanent replacement has not been nominated.

When TPM originally posted their report on this, they had not heard back from Rubio's office. As they noted in their update, here's their response:

In response to TPM's query, Rubio's spokesman Alex Conant noted that Miller was deputy commissioner when the targeting took place. He did not suggest the IRS acted inappropriately under Miller's watch as acting commissioner.

"He was Deputy IRS Commissioner when all this occurred," Conant said in an email.

So after someone pointed out to them that it was a Bushie that was in charge when these supposed abuses took place, now he wants the acting-director fired, even though the practice was not continued under their watch. Chris Jansing couldn't be bothered to point that out in the clip above, where she basically just read Rubio's letter with no context.

Some saner coverage of the topic aired a little later on the network, with both Joy Reid and Katrina vanden Heuvel doing a fine job of trying to put this story into its proper perspective and with Reid making sure the audience knew just who Rubio was initially calling to have fired -- someone who no longer works for the agency. Vanden Heuvel made some very good points about the fact that all of these groups ought to be getting a lot more scrutiny after the flood of them that came in after the Citizens United ruling.

In the meantime, all this is going to be is an excuse for more Obama derangement syndrome out of Republicans -- which is in full force already -- and more partisan witch hunts in the form of more hearings from Darrell Issa.

Video and Rubio's letter below the fold.

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After the release of Paul Ryan's new budget -- which looked a whole lot like his old budget -- despite the fact that the public rejected their policies when he and Mitt Romney lost the last election -- the panel members on MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner this Tuesday were asked to weigh in on Ryan's proposal and this latest round of budget negotiations.

There were a lot of good points made about Ryan's ridiculous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and the fact that he just wants to go after programs that help the poor, the elderly and the most vulnerable in our society and that his "budget" has a lot of numbers that don't add up. Ari Melber then made this point on how Ryan is regarded in political circles:

MELBER: I think Joy is hitting on something really important, which is those are the twin falsehoods, even apart from the hypocrisy of his record. One is, that just because it has numbers in it, doesn't make it a budget, right? My lottery ticket is not a budget. It's just a bunch of numbers on the page. And this thing [...] has a lot of numbers and as everyone has said, doesn't add up. It's more like fan fiction for Ayn Rand than it is a budget. And he's not a deficit hawk. To Joy's point, he's a health care hawk. He is interested in going after every health care program that's basically on the books from Obamacare, as you just articulated, to Medicaid, the program that is the most important for poor people, who need help and also for our society, because when we use medicine, preventative care for poor people, it actually saves all of us money, so it's good on both moral and efficiency terms and that's what's so frustrating here. I think Washington has called him serious for so long, they're over invested in treating this fake charade like it's a budget.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel followed up very nicely on Melber's points just a little bit later in the segment.

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I'm not sure what poll Grover Norquist is talking about here, but I am sure there's no way to magically turn the NRA's 4.3 million members into 20 percent of the population of the United States, which is over 300 million. But that's exactly what he did on ABC's This Week in response to The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel pointing out that the NRA isn't even representing the interest of their members, but the gun manufacturers instead.

There have been recent polls taken like this one, which reported that of those surveyed, 22 percent said they owned gun and about 7 percent said they belonged to the NRA, which is still a lot higher than the number the NRA itself claims to have as members. I guess it's not surprising that Norquist would like to overstate their influence since he's one of their board members.

VANDEN HEUVEL: This is the importance, the NRA is built on myths at this point in many ways. The NRA has 4 million members. It is essentially a lobby for gun manufacturers, not for its members, the majority of them, according to a poll commissioned by Frank Luntz, Republican pollster, do not agree with the NRA's positions on background checks, on ban on assault weapons. I think that's very important, because the NRA's myth has put us in a stranglehold in this country.

The other thing I'd say is I respect the noble sentiments about the need to treat mental illness, the need to deal with the video games in our culture, but other western industrialized countries have mental illness problems, have video culture. Japan is at the cutting edge. They don't allow access to military assault-style -- this is not about freedom, this is about tyranny and destruction.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The thing is, it's about all of this, this is what frustrates me...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: ...I mean, you can't say it's got to be about one thing and not the other it's go to be about...

(CROSSTALK)

VANDEN HEUVEL: The mental illness argument has been used to evade action. More guns and bullets, more dead children. We must, must regulate guns. And I do think it's a tipping point moment, not just The Daily News and The New York Post, but you're seeing pro-NRA senators like Senator Manchin, Senator Warner, Governor Hickenlooper in Colorado, others saying we must move, speed is of the essence.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I agree with that. And I think we're just saying that Senator Manchin did say we have to consider everything comprehensively. We should give Grover a chance to respond to some of this now.

NORQUIST: I think -- look, the National Rifle Association represents a great number of Americans and 20 percent will tell you in polls that they belong to the NRA. And so one, there's a very important issue, one is we should support the First Amendment as well as the Second Amendment. I'm not quite sure -- some people's suggestions of censorship there worry me.

But look, one, we have got to calm down and not take tragedies like this, crimes like this, and use them for political purposes. President Obama has been president for four years. If he thought that some gun control would solve this problem he should have been pushing it four years ago. He didn't.

Democrats had a majority in the House and a super majority in the House and the Senate for the first two years that they were in office. If they thought that this was really an important issue, they might have done something then. They didn't. So what they're now doing is politicizing a tragedy rather than trying to do something that might...

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From this Sunday's This Week on ABC, The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel was the one voice of reason, pushing back against the idea that austerity and budget cuts are going to somehow solve our country's economic problems, or the notion that the debt and deficit should be our biggest concern.

VANDEN HEUVEL: I agree with Paul Gigot. Americans voted decisively for fair share taxes on the richest, for protecting Social Security and Medicare, but also for growth and investment. You cannot get growth and investment with the spending cuts as they are laid out in the grand bargain.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And certainly not the sequester.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Certainly not the sequester. So I think part of the problem we're having, George, is the fundamental assumptions overriding this entire discussion. Senator Murray said that we have a big debt and deficit problem -- no, we don't. We have a big public investment and jobs problem.

(CROSSTALK)

VANDEN HEUVEL: Last point. We're not Greece. Austerity, if you believe in evidence-based politics and economics, you look at what's going on in Europe, and austerity, which we may have American-style in this country if we proceed the way we are doing, has led to economic pain, has led to killing growth. Killing growth.

(CROSSTALK)

VANDEN HEUVEL: And debt and deficit.

Amen to that sister. This needs to be repeated as often as possible whenever we hear the fearmongering about falling off of the "fiscal cliff" and the real danger to our economy that austerity measures pose. As she pointed out, the deficit can be taken care of later, but we've got to get the unemployment numbers down first and Americans back to work.

Full transcript of the segment above below the fold.

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Christine O'Donnell appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday evening during the segment immediately following his opening monologue and blamed her witch ad debacle on her advisers and wanted to get into it with Maher over whether it's fair or not to continue to blame Bush for the troubles with the economy we're still having today. Thankfully, her time was cut short since she was not a member of the panel on the show - or at least she wasn't until the Internet only Overtime segment.

As with all of his shows, Bill Maher always brings all of the guests back in for the on-line version only end of his show and listening to the stupidity that came out of Christine O'Donnell's mouth during this segment was just truly astounding. She was asked how she rectified her supposed "small government conservatism" with the intrusion into people's lives with her social beliefs, and she pretty much spent the entire rest of the segment tying herself in knots, not being able to explain the differences between or need for states' rights and when the federal government needs to step in, revising history, and just making crap up when it suited her.

The other guests who were uselessly trying to reason with her, which was pretty much impossible since you can't reason with someone who's head is thick as a brick, mainly looked like they were all just ready to bang their own heads on the desk by the time this thing was over.

I can honestly say I pity David Simon, Steve Schmidt, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jim VandeHei, well, maybe not VandeHei, but the rest of them for having to sit through this debacle and try to argue with this know nothing teabagger.

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In yet another example of why George Stephanopoulos is a terrible host on ABC's This Week, here he is saving Tim Pawlenty just as Katrina vanden Heuvel was trying to pin him down on the fact that President Obama ought to get some credit for saving the auto industry in Mitt Romney's home state. Pawlenty lies and says that Romney, who said to let Detroit go bankrupt, would have saved the industry as well. Cue George Stephanopoulos making sure vanden Heuvel can't finish her point by bringing in George Will.

Vanden Heuvel did a good job of pointing out the record amount of obstruction we've seen from Republicans in regard to job creation as well during that little time she was allowed to speak. I guess some follow up from Stephanopoulos pointing out that Romney was not at all interested in saving the American auto industry is just too much to ask.

Transcript below the fold.

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Melissa Harris-Perry's new show on MSNBC along with Chris Hayes' Up are generally are some of the most intelligent, well rounded discussions on cable television. That said, I really do not understand why the producers of Perry's show thought bringing in Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie was going to add anything informative to the conversation this Saturday.

It's not as though anything he said here was going to come as a surprise for anyone that's followed him. Typical Libertarian clap-trap was all he had to add to the panel segments. Jonathan Chait did a nice take down of Gillespie and his water carrying for the Koch brothers last year which I'll share a bit of here:

Koch Fiends:

Reason's Nick Gillespie endorses a post from Reddit pointing out that the Koch brothers (who also fund Reason) believe in some things that liberals also believe in:

The KOCH brothers must be stopped. They gave $40K to Scott Walker, the MAX allowed by state law. That's small potatoes compared to the $100+ million they give to other organizations. These organizations will terrify you. If the anti-union thing weren't enough, here are bigger and better reasons to stop the evil Kochs. They are trying to:

1. decriminalize drugs,
2. legalize gay marriage,
3. repeal the Patriot Act,
4. end the police state,
5. cut defense spending.

This is a pretty silly argument. The Koch brothers are right-wing libertarians. They believe in limited government almost across the board, but their energies are devoted to economics in general and policies that benefit them in particular. When the Koch brothers get involved in politics, they support right-wing and Republican causes: [...]

Gillespie's implication is that, if you're horrified by the Bush administration's civil rights record and supportive of gay marriage, the Koch brothers are for you. In fact, they're not. They work very hard to elect Bush and members of Congress who will support his agenda. They support think-tanks that oppose right-wing defense and civil liberties as long as they also support right-wing economic policies.

Another way to put this is that the Kochs will happily put their money behind candidates and intellectuals who agree with their economic agenda but disagree with their social agenda. They will never put their money behind candidates or intellectuals of whom the reverse is true.

In the segment above, Gillespie pulled the Castro card on Harris-Perry when she dared to say that she was disgusted that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin was going to renounce his citizenship rather than pay taxes on his new found earnings since taking their company public and wondered why that was allowed to be legal in America. So of course she's the equivalent of some evil communist in Gillespie's world.

In the next segment, the panel followed up on some of their discussion from earlier in the show on Wall Street and the need to regulate the global financial industries, and Gillespie changed topics suddenly and told the panel he that the problem with Social Security is that it shouldn't exist.

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Katrina vanden Heuvel has a terrific op-ed out this week, calling for an end to the attacks and scapegoating we've seen of government employees, blaming them as being responsible for America's economic woes, and naturally that's exactly what we got more of when MSNBC's resident bigot-in-chief Pat Buchanan got to take his turn asking her questions about the article on this Tuesday's Morning Joe.

Buchanan trots out the tired "the government's too big" talking point and it was nice to see some push back against these ridiculous analogies, as she did here, for once. It's just too bad she didn't hit him for conflating what our politicians, their staffers and lobbyists are making who live around Washington D.C. and your average government worker across the country that vanden Heuvel was writing about in her column, like teachers, firefighters and policemen. They're not making the kind of salaries that Buchanan ridiculously pulled out of his hat in an attempt to try to paint all government workers as being overpaid.

Once vanden Heuvel started making some good points on our tax burden on the rich being too low and crony capitalism, Scarborough was more than happy to change the topic and put an end to the segment.

Rough transcript:

BUCHANAN: I want to ask my friend Katrina about government workers, because I grew up in D.C. … in D.C. now federal employees now make twice as much on average as the average American. D.C.'s unemployment level is five or six percent. Fairfax and Montgomery County, two of the richest counties in the United States. We now have twice as many government workers in America as manufacturing workers.

The country can't go on like that Katrina.

VANDEN HEUVEL: Well, you're talking about a race to the bottom Pat. I'm talking about a race to the top. We should have more manufacturing workers. We should have more workers in the private sector. Why take down government workers? And why not uplift... lift all boats should be lifted Pat. And I think the inequality in this country is an inequality that needs to be addressed in the total sense because this country is not broke.

It is the debate and the establishment consensus in this country that the economy is, that is broke. And in what you just said to me, is a broken idea... we need to bring down government workers in order to lift up the economy. We need to boost demand by doing (crosstalk).

BUCHANAN: It's too big Katrina.

VANDEN HEUVEL: What's too big?

BUCHANAN: The government is too large. It's gotten gigantic. It's why Europe is going under...

VANDEN HEUVEL: That is not...

BUCHANAN: …and it's why the United States is going under.

VANDEN HEUVEL: You know, what is not too big is that the tax burden of the very, very richest is the lowest it has been in maybe eight decades Pat. I think we need a radical rethinking, re-shifting of this country. Crony capitalism is not what this country is supposed to be about.

BUCHANAN: More money from the private sector to build up government? The government's too big Katrina.

VANDEN HEUVEL: I think you need both lifted up and both as we were talking about work hand in hand.

You can read Katrina's op-ed they were discussing here -- Stop bashing government workers.

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We've had way too few voices calling out this kabuki theater on the debt ceiling for what it is, a manufactured political crisis, when the real crisis is the lack of jobs in the United States. Katrina Vanden Heuvel did just that on Reliable Sources today.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Yes. So I think in the last weeks, we've seen more attention paid for the fact you no longer have a Republican Party Richard Nixon would recognize.

This is an extremist Republican Party willing to blow up the global economy by tethering draconian, cruel deficit cuts to the debt ceiling -- a debt ceiling, by the way, Republicans seven times voted for to lift under George W. Bush. But I think the largest crisis the media -- the media malpractice, Howard, is the fact that you have the idea, the concept that America is bankrupt. It is not bankrupt. What is bankrupt is the inside the Beltway consensus that the real crisis in this country is about deficits and debt. When you look at the front pages in the last days, the last few years, Howard, what is it? It is a jobs crisis.

So, when you listen to Bill Daley on "Meet the Press" this morning and he said President Obama came to Washington to do something big, what we need is coverage of what a grand bargain on jobs could be, and the consequences of what we're seeing inside the beltway for millions of Americans.

Naturally no progressive can come on CNN without a conservative being put on as well for "balance", so we got treated to Tony Blankley giving the usual Republican talking points on their refusal to raise taxes when we've got some of the greatest income disparity since the Gilded Age and painting Democrats who don't like this deal as being unreasonable for not wanting to see our social safety nets cut instead of raising taxes on the rich.

Full transcript below the fold.

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