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After discussing the pick of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's running mate and whether or not the columns at either the Wall Street Journal or the National Review might have pushed Romney into choosing Ryan or not, host John Roberts asks Bill Kristol about the likely attacks coming against Ryan from Democrats. And even Bill Kristol had to wonder if Republicans are going to be able to defend the tax cuts for the wealthy.

KRISTOL: I think taxes are the tougher attack ads. They combined, obviously, they're cutting Medicare. Why do they have to cut Medicare and gut education and do all these other horrible things when they insist on giving those tax cuts to the wealthy. But actually, if you look at polling, it's a pretty close call. People do know that entitlements have to be reformed. Even President Obama has said so. Hasn't done much about it. I think Republicans can pretty easily, honestly hold their own on that.

It's the tax cuts for the wealthy where Republicans have not done a particularly good job of defending it and I think you'll see the Democratic attacks really focus on that side of the equation.

ROBERTS: Steve Moore?

MOORE: Well, Bill is right. We know, we've known this for two years that the Democratic attack line would be we're going to cut entitlements and give tax cuts to the rich, because that's what the Democrats always do. Bill what I think is really exciting about having Paul on the ticket now is, who's better to defend those policies than Paul is and he knows this stuff better than anyone.

As the Think Progress post linked above noted:

Paul Ryan’s infamous budget — which Romney embraced — replaces “the current tax structure with two brackets — 25 percent and 10 percent — and cut the top rate from 35 percent.” Federal tax collections would fall “by about $4.5 trillion over the next decade” as a result. To avoid increasing the national debt, the budget proposes massive cuts in social programs and “special-interest loopholes and tax shelters that litter the code.”

But 62 percent of the savings would come from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, who would also experience a tax increase. That’s because while Ryan “would extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year, he would not extend President Obama’s tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes, which will expire at the same time.” Households “earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.”

Later in the segment Moore called anyone who dares to point out that Republicans want to do exactly that, gut our social safety nets while giving tax cuts to their rich friends, running on the politics of fear and envy. You hear that all you lazy moochers out there? You're just jealous of those job-creating achievers.... yeah, that's the ticket.

Here's to hoping things work out for Mitt Romney as they did for the last person who took Bloody Bill Kristol's advice as to who to choose for a running mate.

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While discussing whether the "war on terror" is over or not and some of the documents that were newly released that were acquired in the raid on Osama bin Laden's complex, The National Review's Rich Lowry decided to take a cheap shot at Media Matters. Apparently if a spokesman for a terrorist organization says something bad about Fox, that means the watchdog site Media Matters that also does not like Fox are exactly the same.

Here's the offending quote by the al Qaeda spokesman:

Adam Gadahn: In general, and not matter what material we send, I suggest that we should distribute it to more than one channel, so that there will be a healthy competition between the channels in broadcasting the material, so that no other channel takes the lead. It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News, let her die in anger.

Fox News Watch, which this segment is from, is supposed to be Fox's sorry excuse for a media watchdog site, that calls out biases in the "mainstream" evil liberal media, as opposed to all that "fair and balanced" reporting we get from Fox.

The show's equivalent we have from CNN is Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources. It's usually a toss up from week to week on which one is worse with failing completely to be any sort of check on whether we're getting any honest reporting from our corporate media, and instead of adding to making their so-called "reporting" worse.

The right absolutely hates Media Matters because they dare to record and often just post without comment, what comes out of their mouths on a daily basis. But that's the equivalent of siding with terrorists in Rich Lowry's world. I'm sure if anyone actually asks him about this later, he'll write it off as another sorry attempt at right wing humor and claim that he was just joking, because everyone knows that it's completely hilarious when you call people you disagree with terrorist sympathizers.

And h/t to Media Matters for flagging this clip.

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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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Well, we managed to get Pat Buchanan off the air on MSNBC, but that didn't stop him from rearing his ugly head on PBS over the weekend to sing the praises of one Charles Murray, along with host John McLaughlin and The National Review's Rich Lowry.

John McLaughlin opened the second segment of the show bemoaning the decline of marriage in the United States along with the number of children who are born out of wedlock.

For a little refresher on just who Charles Murray is, I'll just refer back to David Brooks singing his praises earlier this month on Charlie Rose's show which I posted here -- David Brooks: The Villagers' Mr. 'Common Sense Center'.

As was linked and quoted in that post, Charles Pierce took apart Brooks' op-ed preceding that interview in his article here -- Our Mr. Brooks Finds Another Very Important Thinker. Rich Lowry in the clip above failed to mention the entire title of Murray's book just as Brooks did, which is as Pierce noted Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Somehow that whole "state of white America" portion of the title didn't seem to be very relevant to either of them. Imagine that?

As Media Matters documented before Buchanan finally got the boot from MSNBC, and as Buchanan mentioned in the clip above, Buchanan cited Murray's work in his recent book -- Pat Buchanan Won't Disavow Idea That Minorities Have Inferior Genes:

In his new book Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan cites The Atlantic article and the work of Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve with Herrnstein. The Bell Curve argues that there's racial differences in intelligence. Buchanan wrote in his book.

It seems trying to mainstream Murray's ideas are nothing new for our corporate media or for The McLaughlin Group in particular. From FAIR back in Feb. 1995 -- Racism Resurgent - How Media Let The Bell Curve's Pseudo-Science Define the Agenda on Race:

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