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It wouldn't be a Saturday morning on Fox "news" if they didn't have at least five or ten of these type of segments their so-called "business block," bashing unions and blaming workers for the problems with our economy. And as always on these shows, they have one Fox "Democrat" on there, who agrees to come on and be ganged up on five to one with very little chance to speak.

Host Brenda Buttner opened up the show asking if the protests against Wal-Mart and the airlines are a bigger threat to a jobs recovery than this "fiscal cliff" which is usually their favorite topic to fearmonger over and push for cuts to our social safety nets and austerity.

Naturally, most of them agreed and did their best to portray unions as the big, bad bullies, even though unionization in the United States is at an all time low and the companies as the poor, aggrieved parties who are being "kicked around" by those union thugs. And the unions are now going to get Congress to allow for easier unionization because President Obama won reelection, never mind the fact that Republicans are still controlling the House and that they couldn't get that passed when the Democrats did have both houses of Congress and the presidency.

I will give their lonely "Democratic consultant" Steve Murphy credit for at least pointing out that it's a good thing for the economy for workers to have money in their pockets and that wages are at all time low right now. He also pointed out that there are economies in northern Europe doing very well with high levels of unionization and that the United States' economy was doing better when we had higher levels of unionization as well, which of course was met by jeers and sneers from the rest of the panel members.

And of course the notion that we should be able to do anything about outsourcing, states competing against each other with a race to the bottom on wages was treated as an impossibility. And naturally, the topic of CEO pay, hedge funds and the Romney/Bain model of extracting wealth from companies, and the increasing income disparity we've seen for decades now never came up.

Another day on Fox, another day of divide and conquer and attack workers as being overpaid, or unreasonable for wanting to earn a living wage and maybe retire with some dignity before they drop dead. I'm sure their wingnut welfare from Uncle Rupert for spreading this anti-worker propaganda pays a whole lot better than those people out there working in the Walmart stores, or for the auto companies or for the airlines.

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After Meet the Press host David Gregory asks House Majority Eric Cantor about Mitt Romney's dishonest ad where he claims that Jeep is planning on sending American jobs over to China, when Romney himself believes it's a good business model "to outsource in order to make companies competitive," Cantor initially tries to hedge and claims Romney would be the one who would care about plants opening here in America. He also cites an endorsement by Lee Iacocca as some sort of proof that he cares about these things and wants to get the economy back on track.

When Gregory tries to pin him down and asks him if the ad is deceptive, Cantor pulls the "I havent' seen the ad" dodge and tells Gregory it's not running in Virginia. He then goes on to attack President Obama as not being willing to work across the aisle, because we all know Mr. 800-Plus Vetoes Romney would be much more willing to reach across the aisle if he's elected.

And naturally we got no follow up or push back from David Gregory on any of that. If it's Sunday, it's meet the Republicans and their unfettered talking points. I'm wondering, if Cantor was telling the truth about not seeing the ad, why is he being sent out there as a surrogate for Mitt Romney? I don't believe for one minute he hasn't either seen it, or read about what's in it though. Yeah, he has no idea what's in it, but he knows it hasn't aired in his state yet.

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Here we go again with Willard telling about his thousandth or so lie out on the campaign trail, but this time we find out that apparently badly sourced right wing blogs are his fact checking department. Explains a lot, doesn't it?

Romney repeats false claim of Jeep outsourcing to China; Chrysler refutes story:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney repeated a false claim Thursday night that Chrysler Group may move all Jeep vehicle production to China, drawing criticism from the Obama campaign, which said the Michigan native had blatantly skewed a news wire story.

Romney’s comments came the same day that the Free Press reported that 1,100 new Chrysler workers will begin making the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango SUVs at a plant in Detroit next week.

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said during a rally in Defiance, Ohio, before 12,000 cheering supporters, according to several reports. “I will fight for every good job in America, I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair, America will win.

Romney apparently was referencing conservative bloggers who misrepresented a Bloomberg story from Monday that discussed Chrysler’s decision to consider starting Jeep production in China, the world’s largest new-vehicle market.

That story, while accurate, sparked a raft of other stories and blogs that incorrectly concluded that Chrysler might close plants or move Jeep production from the U.S. to China.

Gualberto Ranieri, Chrysler’s vice president of communications, criticized those stories Thursday even before Romney made his comments.

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Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland delivered a barn burner of a speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention this Tuesday night and landed some body blows to Mitt Romney for everything from his offshore tax havens to his vulture capitalism at Bain to wanting to allow Detroit to go bankrupt, which would have devastated Ohio's economy.

The HuffPo has the entire speech, but here's the portion from the clip above:

Now, Mitt Romney, he lives by a different code. To him, American workers are just numbers on a spreadsheet.

To him, all profits are created equal, whether made on our shores or off. That's why companies Romney invested in were dubbed "outsourcing pioneers." Our nation was built by pioneers—pioneers who accepted untold risks in pursuit of freedom, not by pioneers seeking offshore profits at the expense of American workers here at home.

Mitt Romney proudly wrote an op-ed entitled, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." If he had had his way, devastation would have cascaded from Michigan to Ohio and across the nation. Mitt Romney never saw the point of building something when he could profit from tearing it down. If Mitt was Santa Claus, he'd fire the reindeer and outsource the elves.

Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps. In Matthew, chapter 6, verse 21, the scriptures teach us that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. My friends, any man who aspires to be our president should keep both his treasure and his heart in the United States of America. And it's well past time for Mitt Romney to come clean with the American people.

On what he's saying about the president's policy for welfare to work, he's lying. Simple as that. On his tax returns, he's hiding. You have to wonder, just what is so embarrassing that he's gone to such great lengths to bury the truth? Whatever he's doing to avoid taxes, can it possibly be worse than the Romney-Ryan tax plan that would have sliced Mitt's total tax rate to less than one percent?

My friends, there is a true choice in this election. Barack Obama is betting on the American worker. Mitt Romney is betting on a Bermuda shell corporation. Barack Obama saved the American auto industry. Mitt Romney saved on his taxes. Barack Obama is an economic patriot. Mitt Romney is an outsourcing pioneer. My friends, the stakes are too high, the differences too stark to sit this one out. Let us stand as one on November 6th and move this country forward by re-electing President Barack Obama.

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If it's Friday, it means PBS viewers are going to be treated to their regular dose of hackery from David Brooks during one of his appearances on The Newshour. This week Brooks is asked to weigh in on the presidential election and Brooks wants us to believe that one, the only voters who might be moved by the fact that Mitt Romney made massive amounts of money shipping jobs overseas are "people who don't pay attention to politics."

I'm not sure what world he's living in, but that is one issue I can tell you those who don't pay attention to politics along with those that do definitely don't like and are not happy about. I don't think it matters if you pay attention to politics or not to decide that you might not want the guy that you would never want to buy the company you work for, ever, because he'll raid your pension, fire you, make you reapply for work for half your previous salary and then maybe have the whole joint close up shortly after while he walks off with millions of dollars. I think there are some votes to be moved if that narrative makes its way into the general electorate's consciences.

Brooks also wants us to believe that "companies that outsource do create more jobs domestically." I don't know what jobs he's talking about, but I've seen no evidence of that. They do create a lot of jobs, just not in the United States. That would be the whole point of outsourcing them David, to get that cheap labor overseas to keep your overhead down, because God knows that CEO's got to make his huge salary for the year or the world will come to an end.

The one thing I've found about Brooks is that he likes to repeat himself a lot and once he's got his talking points for the week, he's going to go out there and repeat them in every venue he gets a chance to. He said pretty much the same thing during his conversation with Gail Collins which was published earlier this week here but elaborated quite a bit more than in the PBS clip above: The Debate We Should Be Having:

David: Obama’s ad is cynicism on stilts. Companies that outsource jobs become more competitive. They grow faster and then end up hiring more people at home. Outsourcing increases employment levels. Outsourcing increases productivity. It also decreases the prices consumers pay for stuff. Obama knows all this. He’s just paying the economic nationalism card for his own gain.

As for Bain leveraging debt on companies, that’s overstated. Companies Bain bought did not have higher default rates than other companies. That’s true for private equity firms as a whole too. I don’t like the way these firms prosper even when the turnarounds fail, but overall, their strongest incentive is to make the turnaround succeed.

Gail: I acknowledge that most of that behavior at Bain seems to have happened after the fatal year of 1999. But here’s the weird part of the argument we’ve been having about when Romney really, truly severed himself from Bain. Whenever it was, he’s never suggested that there’s anything that happened after he left that he disapproves of.

David: Nor should he. Outsourcing jobs is sometimes a good decision. So is firing people. When the government ran G.M. and Chrysler, Obama fired people and he sold Chrysler to a foreign company.

Besides, do people find it immoral when Toyota outsources jobs to America — or Nissan or Airbus or any other foreign company? Somehow outsourcing that comes here is wonderful but outsourcing that goes there is unpatriotic.

It seems lost on Brooks that the "outsourcing" those foreign companies are doing is to sell goods in America. The outsourcing the companies Mittens shipped overseas were to use cheap foreign labor and sell the goods back to America. It's not the same thing. And President Obama didn't "fire" anyone. He bailed out the auto companies to keep our economy from being destroyed. He wasn't running them.

I don't think either party has been protectionist enough with our trade policies and the Democrats need to be fighting harder against outsourcing and hitting the Republicans for refusing to fix our tax laws which reward companies for shipping jobs overseas. That said, Brooks' remarks, as usual, are ridiculous and full of false equivalencies making excuses for Romney's behavior and pretending that no one is going to care he profited personally from being a corporate raider who went after pension funds, busted unions and shipped jobs overseas to line his own pocket. I sincerely hope he's wrong about who's paying attention or who starts to as the election gets closer. It seems to me to be typical Villager fare where if an argument is hitting home and working too well, he's going to trash it to try to discourage them from continuing the line of attack. Thankfully it appears the Obama campaign isn't paying much attention to Brooks and his ilk of late.

Transcript from PBS below the fold.

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This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I've heard out of a Republican in a while and that's saying a lot given the amount of lies that come out of most of their mouths most of the time their lips are moving. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl appeared on Meet the Press this Sunday and actually tried to blame outsourcing by corporations on taxes, regulation and "Obamacare" when asked about the dust up over Mitt Romney's outsourcing at Bain Capital.

It's pretty bad when even hack David Gregory has to point out that it's pretty hard to be blaming "Obamacare" or the Affordable Care Act for companies shipping jobs overseas since the practice has been going on for decades now. The truth of the matter is companies ship jobs overseas for cheap labor for one reason and that's to maximize profits. It's not for any concern for American citizens or the American economy. And because they're rewarded and not punished by our tax laws for doing so, we're not going to see the practice stop until our laws are changed.

Democrats have been trying to get Republicans to actually do something about this problem as Sen. Dick Durbin pointed out in his reply to Kyl's nonsense. Sen. Debbie Stabenow has introduced legislation that would "eliminate tax breaks allowing companies to deduct expenses associated with moving operations overseas, while still encouraging them to assist displaced workers. It also would provide a tax credit to corporations that bring jobs back to the United States."

So far the response from Republicans has been for John Boehner to refuse to allow it to come to the floor for a vote in the House and we're looking at the Senate voting on the bill later this month. Naturally when Durbin was trying to elicit a response from Kyl on whether the Republicans in the Senate would vote for the bill or not, David Gregory managed to change the subject so he had no chance for follow up with him.

Instead Kyl was allowed to spout his "we can't raise taxes on the job creators" nonsense with Gregory leaving him unchallenged on their B.S. talking point as well. For once I'd like someone to ask Kyl and his ilk why, if cutting taxes supposedly created jobs, we weren't at full employment while Bush was in office, or given his latest ridiculous argument here, why we didn't see outsourcing under Bush end or at least be reduced as well. If we had an actual journalist instead of a Republican water carrier hosting this show, we wouldn't even see the likes of Kyl show up as a guest, because it would not take a whole lot of follow up to make him look extremely foolish with the arguments he was trying to make here.

Transcript below the fold.

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A senior adviser for Mitt Romney says that President Barack Obama will "say or do anything" to keep his job, including accusing the presumptive Republican presidential candidate of being in charge of Bain Capital when they helped send American jobs to China and other countries.

Ed Gillespie on Sunday lashed out at the Obama campaign for suggesting that Romney either lied to voters or broke the law when he said he retired from Bain in 1999, even though Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents listed him as the "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" until 2002.

"He's not a felon," Gillespie insisted to CNN's Candy Crowley. "That's what this campaign on the Obama side was reduced to. And it's sad to see -- and I think Americans now know -- you've got these baseless charges on moving jobs overseas, which independent fact checkers have said are not true; they're, indeed, a lie. Then a completely reckless and unfounded accusation of criminal activity."

"And so it's sad to see -- we now know this president will say or do anything to keep the highest office in the land, even if it means demeaning the highest office in the land."

Crowley asked Gillespie how he could explain a 1999 news release from Bain that announced Romney had taken "a part-time leave of absence" from the company, but did not say that he had retired.

"He took a leave of absence from his company to go save the Olympics," Gillespie explained. "There may have been thought at the time that it could be part time. It was not part time. The Olympics was in a shambles. There was corruption."

"He took a leave of absence and in fact, Candy, he ended up not going back at all and retired retroactively to February of 1999 as a result."

Until a series of last-minute interviews on Friday of last week, Romney had stood by the claim that he "retired" from Bain in 1999.

(h/t: Think Progress)

The accompanying note at the end of the ad is explicit. That this came directly from the Obama campaign and not a SuperPAC is rather amazing. This is a direct challenge to everything Mitt Romney stands for.

Mitt Romney's not the solution. He's the problem.

via Politico

The Obama campaign is out with a new ad this morning, "Firms," that hits Mitt Romney on outsourcing jobs over audio of Romney singing "America the Beautiful."

"In business, Mitt Romney's firm shipped jobs to Mexico. And China," the text of the ad says, showing footage of foreign countries as Romney sings. "As Governor, Romney outsourced jobs to India."

The ad will run in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, per a release from the campaign.

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The Boston Globe's Christopher Rowland sat down with Rachel Maddow Thursday evening to discuss his recent article on Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital which has been the latest source of controversy this week over when Mitt Romney actually retired from Bain and what role he still played there after he left to run the Olympics in 1999.

As Mediaite reported, Rowland is standing by those claims: Boston Globe Journalist Defends Report On Romney-Bain Capital Ties To Rachel Maddow:

Rowland explained that in spite of Romney using a claim that he left Bain in 1999 as a “line of defense” and a major talking point, the documents uncovered show he still had executive ties to Bain in the subsequent three years. He made it clear the report wasn’t trying to say he was in the boardroom every single day in the next three years playing an active role in decisions, but the papers show he still had “oversight responsibility.”

Maddow asked him if it’s commonplace or “legally sound” for someone who has departed a company to still be referred to in legal paperwork as still holding a position of power in the company. Rowland pointed to experts who have said it isn’t exactly “kosher.” He added that the Romney camp has tried to explain the documents were something akin to “legacy filings,” but given that new partnerships were being created at Bain up until 2002, Roland doubted this was the case.

Romney’s campaign, of course, has heavily objected to the Globe story and demanded an apology for implying Romney was directly managing things at Bain after 1999, which they argued wasn’t the case. Maddow read out the explanation to Rowland and asked him if that was alleged at any point. Rowland explained the report simply wanted to present the facts of the situation.

“Our story was really limited to looking at the discrepancies and the contradictions in the paperwork. So if you look at what the SEC filings show, that Bain on paper was calling Mitt Romney their president and their leader and chief executive after 1999 up until 2002… It’s really difficult for most laymen and most people in the political sphere as well to understand how both these things can be true.”

Brian Beutler has an op-ed over at TPM which gets to the heart of Romney campaign's arguments about whether he should be held responsible for what happened at Bain after he left to run the Olympics as well: Cutting Through The Bain Bamboozlement:

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Fox's Neil Cavuto spent the two opening segments of his show this Thursday evening doing damage control for the Romney campaign, after the Boston Globe among others have been reporting on his time at Bain Capital and whether he profited personally from seeing jobs shipped overseas and a race to the bottom for America, when he's running on knowing how to manage our economy and as a "job creator."

First Cavuto brought in The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein, who we just previously got this crack reporting from on how Jon Stewart is a terrible person for making a lot of money during his appearance on Fox & Friends earlier this month. Weinstein and Cavuto's latest defense for Mitt Romney -- those in glass houses can't throw stones and that evil Nancy Pelosi made money off of foreign investments. Therefore she is exactly like Mitt Romney and no one can ever say anything bad about him.

Sorry Scooter, but Nancy Pelosi is not running for president. She is not going out there and claiming to be a "job creator" as the reason she's qualified to be president. And investing in foreign companies does not equal buying up U.S. companies, busting their unions, raiding their pension funds, telling everyone they're fired and can reapply for their jobs at half their previous wages and lining your pocket whether that investment went bad or went well and what Mitt Romney did during his time at Bain. You can play the false equivalency game all you want, but whether we think both things are good or bad or just business as usual in a global economy, they're not equal. And if Pelosi were running for president, you can bet Republicans would be using this against her in political ads, just at The Daily Caller is attacking her for it now.

Cavuto then moved on to discussing a recent Gallup poll that showed one in five voters being less likely to vote for him because of his wealth. If we had a more educated public as to how he attained that wealth, or who were paying attention to this election yet, I've got to wonder what those numbers might be. I'm not sure how you ever spin just the fact that he's wealthy being a negative with one in five into a good thing.

Cavuto wrapped things up with bringing in Suffolk University Political Research Center's David Paleologos who did his best to muddy the waters on the poll and Romney's problems with average voters as well. We've had a lot of rich presidents, so why is Romney being rich such a bad thing? Voters don't really care that Romney is rich and what "his balance sheet is," they care about "their own balance sheets." Barack Obama made a lot of money selling his books as well.

The last bit of this interview and the verbal gymnastics it took to get to their conclusions is pretty astounding.

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