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It appears that Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski isn't the only one digging through C-SPAN's archives for old footage. Kudos to the crew at Up With Chris Hayes for this find which puts on full display Rep. Paul Ryan's complete hypocrisy when it comes to stimulus spending and whether it helps the economy. It appears Etch-A-Sketch Mittens has found himself the perfect running mate, since he's just like him when it comes to flip flopping.

VIDEO: Paul Ryan defended stimulus in 2002, when George W. Bush wanted it:

Long before he became one of the right’s most vocal critics of the idea that government spending could help boost the flagging economy, Rep. Paul Ryan offered a forceful, full-throated defense of stimulus spending — when then-President George W. Bush wanted it in 2002.

Ryan has denounced the 2009 Recovery Act signed by President Obama as “a wasteful spending spree” and “failed neo-Keynesian experiment,” and – as The Huffington Post pointed out this morning — dismissed as “sugar-high economics” the idea that government spending, through measures like payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, can help shore up a faltering economy.

But in 2002, when then-President Bush was seeking a roughly $120 billion package of tax cuts, tax incentives for business and unemployment benefits to jump-start the economy, Ryan offered a vigorous defense of the plan. “What we're trying to accomplish today with the passage of this third stimulus package is to create jobs and help the unemployed,” Ryan said in video that aired today on Up w/ Chris Hayes. The remarks came during a House debate on the measure on Feb. 14, 2002.

Ryan’s comments reveal a strikingly different economic analysis than the one he has become known for in recent years as the “intellectual leader” of the Republican Party and, now, Mitt Romney’s running mate. In 2002, Ryan argued that unemployment would remain at elevated levels even after the economy began to recover, and that aggressive stimulus would be a necessary and effective antidote.

“What we're trying to accomplish here is the recognition of the fact that in recessions, unemployment lags on well after a recovery has taken place,” Ryan said at the time. “We have a lot of laid-off workers, and more layoffs are occurring. And we know, as a historical fact, that even if our economy begins to slowly recover, unemployment is going to linger on and on well after that recovery takes place.”

Ryan’s advocacy of stimulus spending wasn’t limited to Washington, either. When he returned home to face constituents, he used similar language to make the case for the Bush stimulus bill. “You have to spend a little to grow a little,” Ryan told constituents at a town hall in Wisconsin in January 2002, according to the Journal-Times, a local newspaper. “What we're trying to do is stimulate that part of the economy that's on its back." [...]

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Leave it to Fox's Megyn Kelly, and one of her guests this Fourth of July, right wing radio host Michael Graham, to use statistics put out there in a column at Uncle Rupert's Wall Street Journal to attack anyone and everyone who is receiving any kind of government benefit -- in order to paint us as a country of lazy, mooching loafers who don't want to work.

Or in other words, the government is giving way too much money to those horrible black and brown people and taking it from all you hard-working white people who earned your money. What the other guest, Fox regular and milquetoast faux "liberal" Leslie Marshall, actually pointed out is, those "government benefits" are things like Social Security and Medicare. With the baby boomers becoming retirement age now, we're not going to see any decreases in the number of people applying for those benefits. And as she noted, farm subsidies are government aid as well, but Republicans never seem to be too fond of getting rid of those. She rightfully noted that student loans could also be included in that category, but most of the people using the program don't think of themselves as being on government assistance.

I'm fairly sure this is the article that Kelly used in the segment, but it's hard to say for sure since she and her staff didn't cite their sources for the information they were discussing: Number of the Week: Half of U.S. Lives in Household Getting Benefits. The post is a push for austerity and changes to Social Security and Medicare (which everyone knows full well means privatizing them) and fearmongering over letting the Bush tax cuts expire.

All in all, this segment was pretty misleading because they're using a statistic which says half of the population lives in a household where at least one person receives some sort of government benefit. Then they try to twist that into half of all Americans receiving some sort of government benefit. Well, that's not the same thing. Without a much more detailed breakdown of those numbers, what benefits, what percentage of Americans as a whole are receiving any particular benefit, the numbers they're citing here are pretty meaningless and don't tell us a whole lot.

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Anyone who frequents this blog even if you don't watch Fox at all, knows how terrible a lot of their "business block" coverage is on Saturday mornings because I try to make a habit of posting at least some of it when I've got the stomach for or the time to watch any of it. This was another typically horrid segment with Cashin' In host Cheryl Casone opening up the show by saying there is a "new debate" over whether spending on "entitlements" are "doing damage to America."

The premise for why this "debate" is happening -- New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his recent attack on Americans receiving government "entitlements" that we covered here at C&L in these two posts:

Gov. Christie: 'We're Turning Into A Paternalistic Entitlement Society'. Oh Really, Governor?

Christie: Americans 'on Couch Waiting for Government Check'

What followed was the panel of Tracy Byrnes, Jonathan Hoenig and Wayne Rogers all repeating Christie's lines about how receiving everything from food stamps, to unemployment benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, to mortgage loan modifications was somehow destroying America and turning us all into a bunch of lazy slobs that don't want to work and just sitting home waiting for their checks to arrive.

For "balance" we had former professional wrestler and conservative John Layfield actually pointing out that it might be a good idea to feed people so we don't end up having another revolution in America if massive amounts of people are starving. And milquetoast "liberal" and Fox regular Julian Epstein countering with how "reasonable" it would have been for President Obama to have made some "grand bargain" with Republicans and agreed to austerity measures in the middle of trying to recover from a recession.

And they ended the segment with regular Jonathan Hoenig, who is always reading straight from some script by Ayn Rand, saying we'd have real "freedom" in America if we just got rid of Medicaid and Medicare all together.

I have to wonder just how many people that watch these shows and take them seriously instead the sorry, sad joke that they actually are, consider themselves members of the "tea party" and are receiving Medicaid benefits. The terrible thing is segments like this would be laughable if they weren't so dangerous, because there are so many out there that buy into the nasty rhetoric they were spouting here.

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So much for the House Republicans reaching a deal on the extension of the payroll tax holiday and of unemployment benefits. Here's John Boehner caving to demands for more hostage taking by his caucus -- Boehner Says House G.O.P. Opposes Deal on Payroll Tax:

A day after the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to extend a payroll tax cut for two months, House Republicans made clear Sunday that they would not support the measure.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who had urged his members on Saturday to support the bill, did an about-face on Sunday and said he and other House Republicans were opposed to the temporary extension, part of a $33 billion package of bills that the Senate passed Saturday by an 89-to-10 vote. In addition to extending the payroll tax cut for millions of American workers, the legislation also extends unemployment benefits and avoid cuts in payments to doctors who accept Medicare. The measure would be effective through February.

But in an interview with NBC’s “Meet The Press’ on Sunday, Mr. Boehner said the two-month extension, would be “just kicking the can down the road.”

“It’s time to just stop, do our work, resolve the differences, and extend this for one year,” Mr. Boehner said. “How can you have tax policy for two months?”

Here's more from Steve Benen -- Republicans may yet kill middle-class tax cut:

The Hill reported that rank-and-file House Republicans “voiced extreme opposition” to the compromise.

This is what happens when American elect radical children to run a chamber of Congress.

Some House GOP leaders say they want an extension. A few rank-and-file House Republicans don’t want to be on the hook for a middle-class tax increase. If Boehner wanted to reach out to House Dems on this, he probably wouldn’t have much trouble pulling 218 votes together.

But that’s just not how the process works anymore. The Speaker isn’t calling the shots; he’s taking the orders. And as of yesterday, Boehner’s caucus told him this isn’t good enough.

The radicalized House GOP caucus doesn’t want a middle-class tax cut, and is only open to the possibility if they’re rewarded with a series of right-wing goodies. House Republicans said they’d demand an expedited Keystone decision, and Senate Republicans successfully negotiated that into the deal.

Now House Republicans are considering holding the deal hostage (again) to see what else they can get.

There were some sighs of relief yesterday morning, when it looked like we wouldn’t have to worry about the payroll issue again until February. That relief was clearly premature — one must never underestimate what the House GOP is capable of.

Transcript via NBC below the fold.

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While most Americans were taking the day off for this Thanksgiving holiday, sadly the one thing we can count on is that the propaganda machine over at Fox, never, ever, takes the day off. Here's the Wall Street Journal's resident hack Stephen Moore with Megyn Kelly fill in Rick Folbaum, opining over the so-called "Super Committee" failing to reach a deal and calling unemployment insurance "essentially what's a welfare benefit."

Nothing like trying to paint unemployment beneficiaries as lazy slackers or "welfare recipients" - as though they haven't worked to pay into an insurance program that helps protect them if they can't find a job in these horrible economic times, and downplaying, as Moore did here, the effect that has on the rest of America's economy if those benefits are cut off.

Naturally Moore thinks that we should not "soak the rich" (as he claims Democrats want to do) in order to get the deficit under control. That's the same deficit he and his ilk never had one iota of concern over when Bush was breaking the bank with his two unfunded wars that were left off the books, the Medicare Part D giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry that wasn't paid for, and tax cuts for his rich buddies that they didn't need.

Leave it to Fox to continue to trash those who cannot find a job due to the same conservative economic policies that Moore has been supporting for years now, and for them to make sure that even on a holiday, they're going to stay live and keep misinforming their viewers. Sadly I can't do my monitoring of cable news for the site without seeing Moore's mug on the airways way too frequently, whether it be HBO, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, or Fox.

We'd all be better off if Fox had taken the day off like the rest of our corporate media did this holiday for the most part, but that goes for their coverage on a daily basis as well. As we've already written about here, those Fox viewers are less informed than those who watch no news at all.

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Gov. Nikki Haley (R) told the Lexington Rotary Club Thursday that she wants South Carolinians to undergo drug screenings before they can receive unemployment benefits.

"I so want drug testing," she said. "I so want it."

"The problem is that I've got to make sure the numbers work... It's certainly not off the table for me. It's something that I've been wanting since the first day I walked into office, but we do have not make sure it's not politically popular, it's actually a good feasible thing to do."

The South Carolina Republican recalled a story about the high rate of drug test failures at the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory.

"Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them -- this was back before the campaign -- when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test, and of the half that was left, of that 50 percent, the other half couldn't read and write properly," Haley explained.

But Department of Energy spokesman Jim Giusti told The Huffington Post's Arthur Delaney that the failure rate was far lower than Haley had claimed.

"Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test," Giusti said. "At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act, we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive."

He added that job applicants are not even tested at the River Site until after they have been hired.

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Mitt Romney stood up for those poor downtrodden corporate "people" that those evil liberals who crashed his event in Iowa this Thursday were asking to have their taxes raised on, but if you're one of the long-term unemployed, well, it appears you're on your own.

During the Republican debate in Iowa, when asked if he would extend unemployment benefits for those who are about to lose their benefits in a few months, not only did Romney say that he would not extend them, but he also touted the idea of privatizing unemployment benefits and changing our current system to one offering unemployment insurance savings accounts.

What could possibly go wrong? I haven't read much on this, so I'm no expert and it would be nice to hear more from anyone who is in the comments section, but this just looks to this layman as another way to draw money out of another one of our social safety nets in the name of "personal responsibility." Romney said this would "make the system work better by giving people responsibility for their own employment opportunities." That's rich since they don't have much control over those "opportunities" if there are no jobs to be found in the first place. Not everyone's got a rich family and the "opportunity" to become some multimillionaire vulture capitalist like our buddy Mittens here did. Some of us have to make money the old fashioned way, like actually working for it.

And god knows with some of the greatest income disparity since the Gilded Age, we can't have our priorities be spending more money on anti-poverty programs, now can we? No, better to be reducing those taxes and burdensome regulations on those "job creators" because the have-mores are just struggling so badly right now in Mitt Romney and the GOP's fantasy-land. Heaven forbid we do anything to hurt their feelings or they might go Galt on us and leave the country and take their jobs with them.

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On Fox's Bulls & Bears, after having a really ridiculous discussion about whether President Obama was "fearmongering" or not when he said he could not guarantee that Social Security checks would go out if our members of Congress were actually irresponsible enough to allow the United States government to default on our debt guest Caroline Heldman points out that it would more likely be things like unemployment, housing and food stamps that would end up getting cut. To which we got this screaming reply by one of their regular guests, Tobin Smith.

SMITH: Well Caroline, I can't believe I'm saying this now, but I'm so fed up with this, cut it! I mean, give people the sense, the visceral sense of what it is to be spending, of having 40% of our spending coming from real money and borrowing the 60% of it. Cut it! Let the chips fall where they may. And then we'll find out what really important in this (inaudible).

Of course getting rid of the Bush tax cuts that were sold as being acceptable at the time because we had a budget surplus must be kept in place along with spending on the military industrial complex, but hey, if the poor have to feel some pain to see how much our country is borrowing now because Republicans decide we don't want to pay for busting the budget under the Bush administration and after bailing Wall Street out, that's just fine and dandy.

Earlier on the same show, Eric Bolling let everyone know how wonderful he thought higher unemployment among federal workers was. Fantastic! Just get rid of all of them. Idiot. I think Bolling's doing his best to fill Glenn Beck's spot on Fox as being their most offensive talking head.

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As Rachel Maddow explained here, in states from Michigan, to Missouri to Florida, Republicans have been doing everything in their power to make their states as unresponsive to the needs of the poor and the unemployed as possible and to make sure the economy in their states do not improve in the process. But Florida Governor Rick Scott has managed to take that to a new low with a bill to drug test welfare recipients -- Welfare drug test bill heads to Fla. Gov. Scott.

So much for those so-called "small government" conservatives wanting to keep the government out of our lives. No regulations for businesses but mandatory drug testing for poor people and a complete waste of the taxpayers' money.

Here's more on Florida's cuts to their unemployment benefits -- Deal struck to further cut Florida unemployment benefits:

Out-of-work Floridians would receive fewer state benefits while businesses pay less tax under a controversial proposal approved Friday by a divided Legislature.

The deal, which Gov. Rick Scott is expected to sign into law, immediately cuts unemployment benefits by 11.5 percent.

Jobless Floridians would continue to receive a maximum payment of $275 per week, among the lowest of any state in the country. But they would be paid for no more than 23 weeks, instead of 26.

Cutting the number of weeks was a victory for Scott and the Republican House, which had fought Senate sponsor Nancy Detert to reduce the number of weeks. The bill, HB 7005, passed along party lines in both the Senate and the House. [...]

The bill also makes it easier for a business to show employees were fired for cause, preventing them from receiving benefits. Unemployment tax rates for businesses are largely tied to the number of former workers receiving jobless benefits.

"It's a disaster," said AFL-CIO spokesman Rich Templin.

And here's more from the HuffPo on the bill:

For Jobless, Florida Set To Become Stingiest State In America:

Thanks to a pending law, next January Florida will become the stingiest state in America when it comes to unemployment insurance benefits.

A bill awaiting Republican Gov. Rick Scott's signature will cut unemployment taxes on businesses by reducing the maximum benefits for people laid off through no fault of their own to 23 weeks. That's three fewer weeks than the standard 26 weeks provided by nearly every state for the past 50 years. And as the unemployment rate falls, benefits will diminish on a sliding scale, with a floor of just 12 weeks when the rate is 5 percent or lower. [...]

National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, has said Florida will take first place in what the group has called a "race to the bottom" once Gov. Scott signs the bill. Florida is the third state after Michigan and Missouri to cut the standard 26 weeks of benefits. The reductions in the Florida bill, which are the steepest by far, will take effect in January.

Transcript below the fold.

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Apparently Michigan's Governor Rick Snyder is doing his best not only to trash his state's economy, but also to inflict as much pain as humanly possible on the poor and unemployed there while he's at it.

Michigan whacks unemployment benefits, other states seek same 'devil take the hindmost' approach:

With the official jobless rate still hovering around 9 percent and the real damage a good deal higher than that, states have been spending a lot of money—borrowed federal money to the tune of $45.9 billion—on unemployment compensation benefits. Having implied or stated outright that these government payments make laid-off workers lazy, several Republican governors and Republican-led legislatures want to avoid or at least reduce their obligations to pay such benefits. Michigan leads the pack. Governor Rick Snyder signed into law Monday a cut in future benefits from the nationwide standard of 26 weeks to 20 weeks beginning in January 2012. [...]

Representative Sander M. Levin (MI-12) called the law a reckless move that could harm hundreds of thousands of workers. “It turns the clock back 50 years at a time when unemployment is at historic highs since the Depression," he said. "I think that Michigan should not be to unemployment insurance what Wisconsin has become to collective bargaining.”

Snyder claims he wants to focus on jobs instead of joblessness. A clever bit of propaganda that will no doubt have a lot of tax-cutting involved. In fact, besides putting the screws to those alleged bon bon-eating, cable-watching layabouts, the key impetus behind the new law is that it would reduce in the future how much employers pay into the state's unemployment fund.

And as Rachel Maddow discussed with CEPR's Dean Baker, a conservative think tank, Mackinac Center For Public Policy has also targeted her with some of their over-the-top FOIA requests. Conservative Think Tank Seeks Michigan Profs' Emails About Wisconsin Union Battle ... And Maddow:

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