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Looks like Mitt Romney might want to get himself a better Communications Director than Gail Gitcho. From this Thursday night's Anderson Cooper 360: Anderson Cooper Explains Non-Partisan Congressional Budget Office To Top Romney Adviser:

Romney Communications Director Gail Gitcho says the “CBO” report from the Obama administration claimed that the stimulus would keep unemployment below eight percent. The CBO doesn't work for Obama, as Cooper notes, and it never wrote that. The eight percent figure comes from a projection authored by Obama aides before he even took office.

These surrogates get used to getting a lot of fact-free, unchallenged air time way too often. It was nice to see one of them challenged when trying to tell a few whoppers as Gitcho was here. We've already discussed the fact that the Romney campaign just can't quit lying. Here's Steve Benen's latest compilation from this week: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXII.

Full transcript via CNN:

COOPER: So, Gail, the big focus today was jobs. Something Governor Romney had to say about public sector jobs got a lot of attention a few days ago. I just want to remind our viewers what he had to say back then.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: He wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Didn't he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It's time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: Now, you know, the Obama campaign has hit those comments hard, saying he wants to fire firemen, police and teachers. Then earlier this week Governor Romney pushed back with these comments.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: Of course, teachers and firemen and policemen are hired at the local level. And also by states. The federal government doesn't pay for teachers, firefighters or policemen. So, obviously, that's completely absurd.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: But the federal government, though, does provide billions of dollars every year in essential funding for schools and first responders and a big percentage of that aid goes to pay for personnel. Like more than $14 billion I think under Title 1 this year. Billions more programs for improving special education and a lot of that is hiring special education teachers, community policing support. So without that federal aid, many of those positions would disappear.

Would Governor Romney want to cut those federal programs?

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Chris Hayes decided to revisit his Welcome to Inequalistan segment which we featured from the second week of his his new series on MSNBC as his “story of the week” on this Saturday's show. Hayes opened up the segment by showing a scene from Annie Hall where Marshall McLuhan made a cameo appearance to correct one of the characters in the movie who was misrepresenting his work, telling him “You know nothing of my work” and Woody Allen addressing the camera directly in the movie, saying “If life was only like this.”

HAYES: Well, this week, we had kind of the wonk version of exactly that scene because for over a month, the Occupy Wall Street movement around the country has been growing and occupying the nation's attention with the same simple rallying cry... “We are the ninety nine percent.” And though there are no concrete demands or agenda, the one complaint, the central complaint is clear. The top one percent have managed to rig the game in their favor and capture a shocking percentage of the nation's total wealth.

And then amidst dismissals from the establishment and attacks from conservatives aimed at the wooly headed, naive, drum-circling hippies, comes a new report from the Congressional Budget Office that says to Occupy Wall Street critics, “You know nothing of my work.”

Hayes showed this chart from the recent CBO report which shows the shares of market income for the different income groups in 1979 compared to 2007 and as he noted, the only group that increased their share of the national income was the upper one percent of the country's wealthiest individuals.

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Well it looks like the one thing you can count on from Alan Greenspan is to be consistent, consistently partisan that is. Whenever a Democrat is in the White House deficits matter and when a Republican is in office, they don't. Now that a Democratic is back in office, Greenspan is concerned about the deficit if the health care bill wasn't scored properly by the CBO.

TAPPER: The president signed massive health care reform legislation into law a few weeks ago. You have expressed concern about the legislation, as it was making its way through the process, about whether or not it did enough to contain costs. What did you think about the final legislation? Does it contain costs enough?

GREENSPAN: Well, the CBO, incidentally, Congressional Budget Office, which is really a first-rate operation, says that it does. The problem is not their estimates, but the range of potential error in those estimates.

And when you're dealing with an economy in which debt is becoming -- federal debt is becoming ever increasingly a problem, it strikes me that when you're dealing with public policy and you're in a position where you have to ask yourself, "What happens if we are wrong?"

In other words, in the case now, where our buffer between our capacity to borrow and our actual debt is narrowing, for the first time, I think, in the American history, there's a question, supposing we are wrong on the cost estimates, and, indeed, they are actually much higher than the best estimates can generate, the consequences are very severe, whereas if they are too high, it's very easy to adjust.

So I think it's -- it's -- there's an issue over and above the question of what's the best cost estimate. There's a policy strategy here which I think requires us to lean in an ever more conservative area with respect to judging...

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: So it might have been too rosy, the projections, you're saying?

GREENSPAN: Possibly. I don't know that. But I do know that the probability that it might be is much higher than we would like.



Rachel Maddow: Stimulus Showdown

Rachel reminds the Democrats that they won the election mainly because the public did not trust the Republicans to run the economy and so they should fight against the GOP obstructing the stimulus bill. From Think Progress, it looks like they already caved on the family planning provision in the bill.

Rachel also takes the editorial staff at the Wall Street Journal to task for their article citing the debunked, nonexistent CBO report which the media has cited 81 times in the last six days. Talk about marching in lock step.

Rachel followed with David Sirota, who opined over why the Democrats are so worried about getting bipartisan support for the bill and what the costs are when appeasing Republicans.



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Hey look who else apparently has their fax machine from the RNC in good working order. John King. King opens up this discussion on the stimulus package with Mike Pence by citing the nonexistent CBO report which was debunked by the Huffington Post. I guess it's a good thing these guys don't get their "news" from blogs, huh?



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I've already posted one example of this, and now here's a second one I happened across. Zach Wamp went on Washington Journal and repeated the CBO stimulus lie debunked by the HuffPo. This is going to be an ongoing theme and the subject of more posts here at Video Cafe until these guys quit repeating this lie.



On Hardball while discussing the Obama administration's proposed stimulus package, Brian Bilbray cites a report by the CBO saying much of the money would not be spent until after 2011. As reported by the Huffington Post, it turns out that report by the CBO does not exist. I can't believe it. Republicans just making crap up again. I'm shocked! Heh.