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Who didn't see this cynical move coming? President Obama offers up cuts to Social Security benefits that Republicans want and they immediately turn around and attack him for it. They've done it before, so there's no reason to believe they weren't going to do it again.

It's terrible policy and as this so clearly illustrates, terrible politics as well: Fiscal frauds:

Okay, if this isn’t the clarifying moment we’ve been waiting for, nothing will ever be.

This afternoon on CNN, GOP Rep. Greg Walden, the chairman of the NRCC, opened fire on Obama’s budget by claiming it is an assault on seniors:

“I’ll tell you when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taken $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare and now coming back at seniors again, I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine certainly and around the country,” he said on CNN Wednesday afternoon.

This makes it all but certain that Republicans will use Obama’s Chained CPI proposal to attack Democrats in the 2014 elections for cutting Social Security. Brian Beutler points out that this vindicates the warnings of those on the left who predicted this would happen. [...]

But I wanted to focus on another aspect of what this attack from Walden tells us.

For one thing, it directly contradicts what GOP leaders themselves said earlier today. Remember, John Boehner and Eric Cantor effectively endorsed Chained CPI by claiming we should proceed with those cuts while not raising taxes. Boehner said Obama “deserves some credit” for embracing it. But now the NRCC chair is calling it an assault on seniors?

You could not illustrate the farcical nature of the GOP position on all this more perfectly.

This is what happens when you try to negotiate with hypocrites who don't care if they're talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Looks like Tommy Christopher at Mediaite figured out what we've been saying over here for a long time now... that David Gregory is a right wing tool who's constantly advocating for really bad Republican economic policies along with a bunch of his fellow Villagers in the media: David Gregory Tells Morning Joe That President Obama Must Gut Medicare To Succeed:

On a very special 2nd Quadrennial Barack Obama Day edition of Morning Joe, Meet The Press host David Gregory provided some more evidence against the mythical “liberal media bias” when he endorsed the emerging Beltway media consensus that in order to deal with debt and deficits, President Obama is going to have to gut Medicare. “He’s got to be able to convince his own party, but also to do something that, frankly, Americans don’t want done,” Gregory said of Medicare, “which is to have to give back some things.”

[...] what’s significant is that Gregory wasn’t offering merely pragmatic political advice, but actually endorsing the idea that the way to solve our fiscal problems involves cutting Medicare for beneficiaries.

Unfortunately for America, President Obama has already indicated a willingness to move in that direction, having already placed raising the Medicare eligibility age on the table. Raising the age will only shift those costs, at higher rates, and only partially away from the federal government. Those two extra years will either be paid for by the seniors themselves, who will be charged up to 3 times as much for health insurance on the individual market, or by the government in the form of Medicaid for those who can’t afford private insurance, or by private insurance companies.

What no one is talking about is that Medicare is a huge break for private insurers, who get to lay off their highest-risk patients onto the government. People with retiree group health insurance will be covered by their health insurance for those two extra years, at great expense to those companies. The amount of money they pay out in claims will far outstrip what they can take in in premiums, and the additional premiums will fall on those retirees’ employers.

The other problem is that, relatively speaking, 65 and 66 year-olds are bargains for Medicare, and eliminating them from the program would only succeed at making the overall pool of Medicare recipients older and sicker. If there was a way to eliminate the last 2 years of eligibility, you’d be on to something.

Gregory and his fellow beltway hacks Joe Scarborough and Tom Brokaw have been singing this tune for some time now as we've pointed out here over, and over, and over, and over and over again. And as Christopher rightfully noted out, there are ways to make Medicare solvent without turning it over to the private insurance market:

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I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting really tired of watching a bunch of extremely rich pundits sit around and tell the rest of us that there just hasn't been enough shared sacrifice from the working class, the elderly and the poor yet in order to solve our deficit problem. But that's exactly what the viewers are treated to day after day on MSNBC's three hour long Villager conventional wisdom regurgitation-fest called Morning Joe.

This Wednesday was no exception and immediately following the so-called "fiscal cliff" debacle coming to a conclusion, and the pundits on there didn't miss a beat with demands that President Obama had better get out there and use his bully pulpit to explain to the American people that we're all just going to have to be willing to give a little more in order for Republicans to not kill the hostage called the world's economy over this upcoming debt ceiling standoff.

This week we had Tom Brokaw going on Meet the Press and telling everyone that there's nothing wrong with raising the retirement age for Social Security and telling the lie that Americans are living longer. It's little wonder he'd have that view since he's not ever going to have to worry about his retirement security. And yes, rich people like himself are living to be older. Not so much for most of the rest of us.

If these guys want to go on the air and pontificate about how we ought to get a pound of flesh out of the working class, I think their salaries and net worth ought to be displayed right under their names in the chryon for the viewers. Maybe they'd feel a little differently about their opinions.

According to Forbes, Brokaw has an estimated net worth of $70 million.

And if the site Celebrity Networth is accurate, Scarborough's is $18 million and Brzezinski's is $8 million.

I'm not sure what some of the others who were on there this Wednesday like David Walker, Chuck Todd, Dan Senor, Richard Haas and Mark Halperin are worth, but I'm pretty sure they're all being paid really well and aren't worried about relying on Social Security for a comfortable retirement as well. But every one of them was joining in on carping about the deficit that none of them cared about it when Bush was blowing holes in it a mile wide with tax cuts and wars that weren't paid for. Deficits only matter when Democrats are elected as president.

And as far as Walker's claim that his group has gone around the country and gotten a positive response from ordinary people as they explained to them that they need to cut our social safety nets in order to balance the budget, well, that's not the experience our own Susie Madrak had when she went to one of them. As she noted:

You know what most of them wanted to do? Soak the rich -- and cut defense spending. [...]

I thought maybe it was just my table, but when they tabulated the results, it was pretty much the same throughout the crowded ballroom of several hundred attendees.

And of course absent from this conversation was any discussion about what to do to get Americans back to work. If we were at full employment and had some sort of decent economic growth in the United States, this deficit problem would take care of itself because we'd have more people paying taxes.

They also keep pretending like Social Security adds to our deficit. It doesn't and it has a surplus. And if they want to solve the problem with Medicare, we need to fix our health care costs over all. We pay way more than any other developed country with worse outcomes and putting seniors into the private insurance market doesn't solve the problem. It just shifts the costs around and drives them up. But you won't hear that discussion while they're pounding their fists about lowing the deficit.

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I've seen a number of interviews with Rep. Peter DeFazio over the last week or so and all of them were very good, but this one was one of the more satisfying, because CNN's Erin Burnett finally got a little push back with her fearmongering over the "fiscal cliff" and playing concern troll for Wall Street. I was happy to see DeFazio get a chance to make a lot of very good points about these negotiations and what we should be focusing on to solve our deficit problems, and number one on that list is jobs.

As DeFazio rightfully noted, if we want to actually solve our deficit problem, we need to be getting Americans back to work and contributing to our tax base. And he did a really good job laying out the fact that raising the age for Medicare enrollment would, rather than save money, probably end up costing American taxpayers more, because you'd just be shifting costs from Medicare to the subsidies for the private insurance exchanges.

I was also happy to see him push back at the hysteria that "the markets are going to react badly" if some deal on this "fiscal cliff" isn't reached soon. As he noted, if there's real value there in those stocks, any changes in the market are going to be temporary and Congress should not be reacting to their threats out of fear as they have in the past.

Full transcript below the fold and more with his appearance on Ed Schultz's show earlier this week as well.

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The Young Turks Cenk Uygur with some follow up to the story Karoli wrote earlier this week, on the CEO's having fits over Obamacare -- Papa John’s owner can afford a turntable for his limousines, ‘but he doesn’t have enough money for health insurance for his employees’:

Cenk and Current TV correspondent Jacki Schechner call out Papa John’s Pizza owner John Schnatter for claiming he can’t afford Obamacare. Schnatter took home almost $3 million in 2011 alone, and holds Papa John’s stock worth $297 million. “He has a moat! This dude has a moat on his house,” Cenk says, and but he’s still complaining about needing to pitch in for his employees’ healthcare.

As Cenk rightfully pointed out, maybe they could afford to pay for health insurance if they just quit giving away so many of those free pizzas.

And as this article from Forbes reported, the cost per pizza may be quite a bit lower than was originally estimated -- Breaking Down Centi-Millionaire 'Papa' John Schnatter's Obamacare Math

Here's more from The Daily Show where, as Cenk opened with above, Jon Stewart tore into the CEOs as well -- Jon Stewart Rips Attempted Secessionists And CEOs For Whining About Obama's Re-Election.

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Lawrence O'Donnell had some fun with the "can't take a joke crowd" such as the prudes over at Fox GOPTV and Rush Limbaugh and their collective freak out over the new Obama for America ad featuring Lena Dunham. As O'Donnell noted, everyone carping about the sexual overtones of the ad which he showed in his video montage thinks that their idol, Ronald Reagan is a saint. But as O'Donnell noted, they seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that it was their precious St. Ronnie that made his own "first time" joke way before Dunham did.

Ronald Reagan Made A ‘First Time’ Voting Joke 32 Years Before Lena Dunham Did:

Some conservative were outraged Thursday, when the Obama campaign posted a Web ad starring Lena Dunham, creator of the TV show “Girls,” in which she speaks about her “first time” voting, using innuendo to compare it to a girl losing her virginity.

“Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy…someone who really cares about and understands women,” Dunham said in the video, discussing such issues as health insurance, birth control, ending the war in Iraq, equal pay for women, gay marriage, and other big issues.

She then recalled her own “first time” voting four years ago: “It was this line in the sand — before, I was a girl; now I was a woman. I went to the polling station, I pulled back the curtain, I voted for Barack Obama.”

But just as every generation thinks it invented sex, a “first time” joke about voting goes way back to another presidential candidate: Ronald Reagan, less than a week before he ushered in the Republican landslide of 1980.

You've got to just love these Republicans. You can make all the misogynistic jokes you want if you're Rush Limbaugh and now suddenly, as O'Donnell pointed out, he's trying to paint himself as some defender of women's sensibilities. I've got news for you Rushbo. You don't speak for women and most of us would prefer if you kept your yap shut when it came to speaking about us and our issues at all... ever.

Sadly, I don't expect he's going away any time soon as much as it would benefit the honesty in the public discourse to have him gone forever and par for the course, here's just another example in right wing world of IOKIYAR and don't dare mention to us our selective amnesia if it conflicts with our talking points for the day.

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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says that if President Barack Obama's health care reform law is going to force insurance companies to cover contraception then "it's only fair" that men are provided with pills to treat erectile dysfunction.

Speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce earlier this week, the surrogate for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney hinted at the controversy over the Obama's administration's mandate that all health insurance cover contraception for women and warned that the "commissars in Washington" could expand coverage even further in the future.

"They get to write the list of what is legally sufficient health insurance," he explained. "I hate to bring this up because I don't think Gov. Romney would like me to bring this up, but I will. This is what made health care in Massachusetts three times more expensive than people thought. Because when they sat down to define health insurance, everybody added everything to the list and the cost of health insurance went way up."

"That's going to happen on a national level," Giuliani continued. "And you know an Obama appointed commission is going to cover everything. If you cover condoms, I mean, you've got to cover everything, right?"

"If you cover condoms, you should cover Viagra. It's only fair."

In fact, most insurance companies -- including plans offered by Catholic institutions -- began covering Viagra as soon it became available in 1998.

(h/t: The Blaze)

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Karoli already broke down this lie that Romney has been telling out on the campaign trail here at C&L. This Wednesday on MSNBC, Willard's number one neocon fan girl was out there doing some history revisionism for Romney as well -- Wash. Post's Jennifer Rubin Pushes Lie That Romney Health Care Plan Covers Pre-Existing Conditions:

Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin falsely claimed that Republican candidate Mitt Romney's health care plan always included a provision insuring that those with pre-existing conditions are not denied insurance coverage. In fact, this is the exact opposite of what the Romney campaign has said.

In a recent study, the Government Accountability Office found that "between 36 and 122 million adults reported medical conditions that could result in a health insurer restricting coverage."

This is why one of the major features of the Affordable Care Act is its requirement that insurance companies not deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The ACA prohibits insurers in the private individual market from denying coverage, charging higher-than-average premiums, or restricting coverage to individuals based on the individual's health status.

During the first presidential debate, Romney claimed that his health care plan includes protections for pre-existing conditions. But as CNN reported following the debate, top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom clarified that this protection only applied to people who already had health insurance, not those seeking health insurance for the first time. [...]

PolitiFact evaluated Romney's claim following the debate that his plan insured coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and found it "mostly false."

But on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown, Rubin stated that Romney's "plan always covered pre-existing issues." Read on...

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Mitt Romney once again proves he can flip flop at the speed of light, this time over his statements on Meet the Press where he gave a lot of people the impression he actually wanted to do something about making sure those with preexisting conditions could get health insurance.

Karoli wasn't too impressed with what Romney said this Sunday and had already explained why his "replacement" was going to be exactly what we've got now. If there was any doubt, now his staff is out there with a "clarification."

Within Hours, Mitt Romney Takes Back Everything He Said About Preexisting Conditions:

On national TV this morning, with millions of people watching, Mitt Romney told David Gregory that there were parts of Obamacare he actually liked. In fact, he said, one of the goals of his healthcare plan "is to make sure that those with preexisting conditions can get coverage." A few hours later, with approximately zero people listening, a spokesman quietly "clarified" what he meant:

In reference to how Romney would deal with those with preexisting conditions and young adults who want to remain on their parents’ plans, a Romney aide responded that there had been no change in Romney’s position and that “in a competitive environment, the marketplace will make available plans that include coverage for what there is demand for. He was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features.”

As it happens, we already have a competitive market for individual insurance. In addition, we already have demand for coverage of preexisting conditions. And yet, the marketplace doesn't make policies available to people with preexisting conditions.

Why? Because policies that cover preexisting conditions are big money losers unless you charge premiums high enough that no one could afford them. Because of that, nobody bothers to offer them in the first place. That's how the free market works. It would be nice if Romney could explain how he intends to square this circle. Read on...

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Here we go again with yet another Republican trying to pretend there's an ounce of daylight between what Paul Ryan believes and what Todd Akin believes when it comes to what exemptions there ought to be allowed on abortions. Matalin wants people to believe that there's no harm done by pulling taxpayer funding for women's reproductive services, even though anyone paying an ounce of attention knows that means you're telling poor women they're on their own for a service they can't afford to pay for.

Matalin also pulled out their tired talking point on how cheap and widely available birth control is, claiming that it only costs "$9 a month" and you can "get it anywhere." You can't just go "get it anywhere" and need to go see a doctor and pay for a visit, something Republicans would like to make women start paying out of pocket for again if they have health insurance, since they want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And unless you're getting a discounted price from Planned Parenthood, which Republicans wish didn't exist, or you have health insurance with prescription drug coverage, I don't know of any place you can buy birth control for under $10 a month. And once again, she's touting something that Democrats made free with no co-pay under the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans have vowed to repeal. So again, if Republicans had their way, women would be paying for all of this out of their own pockets and spending a lot more than a few dollars a month.

The Republicans can pretend all day long that no one cares about any of this, but they're wrong. Women's reproductive issues are tied directly to their economic issues and you can't separate the two. If you can't control your health care costs and your own reproduction, you can't control your own economic situation. Whether you have a choice about having children and when makes all the difference in the world to women being able to go to school and to find a job. Matalin seems to think that somehow those things are not intertwined, or she at least hopes she can convince the CNN viewers to believe it.

As Cornell Belcher explained, the Republicans have got a huge gender gap right now and rhetoric like we heard out of Akin is not going to help them. Matalin knows that full well along with the rest of them, or they wouldn't be so quick to throw Akin under the bus for daring to tell the truth about what most of them actually believe.

Transcript below the fold.

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