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This Sunday's Up With Chris Hayes was not quite as annoying as when they brought in Michael Steele for the entire hour to ruin the show, but I'm really not sure what arguing with supply-side economics, Club for Growth, professional liars like Stephen Moore brings to the table, especially when a lot of the lies he was spewing went unchallenged.

Note to Chris Hayes. If I want to hear Stephen Moore spout B.S. I can turn on any one of about a dozen shows that he's regularly on week after week, day after day. I watch your show because I don't want to listen to anyone having inane arguments with lying wingnuts.

Hayes did get Moore to admit, begrudgingly, that Romney might end up facing enough public pressure that he's forced to release more of his tax returns in the weeks to come. I am not holding my breath to see that happen any time before the election, but I'm happy to see Republicans having to admit it's a real problem for Romney.

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We've had an awful lot of really terrible reporting on the so-called Fast and Furious "scandal," primarily from the right, Fox "News" and right wing hate talk and in the mean time, we also were lucky enough to have some good reporting on the issue, like Cenk here from this week, or Rachel Maddow from this week as well. This Saturday on Chris Hayes' show on MSNBC, we were treated to even more in depth coverage of the issue with this really great interview of Forbes reporter Katherine Eban.

If anyone has not read the entire article yet, here's the link: The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal.

Here's a rough transcript of the early portion of Eban's time on the show and the portion about the kids being paid for the gun walking and how ATF's hands were tied was just astounding to me, but in this day and age with the NRA having the hold it does over our members of Congress, nothing should be surprising these days.

HAYES: So Katherine, let's start with the context. I think one of the most important things about this article […] it was sort of unclear, like what was the whole problem it was set up to solve, that, it was a point unclear, like what exactly was the issue they faced? And one of the things you created is the context of this, which is that there is a massive flow right now, of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico. In fact, 70 percent of weapons recovered in Mexico come from the U.S., which is a startling statistic and that's largely due to the fact that Mexico has very tight gun restrictions and the U.S., particularly along the southwest border has particularly lax ones.

So what was the idea behind this operation to begin with?

EBAN: What's alleged or what in fact is the idea behind the operation?

HAYES: Let's go with the facts. I think the allegations have gotten a lot of time. So what was the idea?

EBAN: Basically the idea behind this ATF investigation, it's not a program, it's a single investigation called Fast and Furious was to stop straw purchasers from buying guns that they were then funneling to Mexican drug cartels.

HAYES: Explain what a straw purchaser is.

EBAN: A straw purchaser is basically somebody the cartels tap who can legally go and buy weapons, so in Arizona that might be an 18 year old kid who is not old enough to buy beer, but who, if he has no criminal record, or she, can go into a gun dealership and buy 50 AK47's, pay in cash and face no waiting period, no need for extra permits.

So there are lots of kids in Arizona for example who want to make a few extra bucks. This is what they do.

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Suspended Politico reporter Joe Williams on Monday accused conservative publications like the late Andrew Breitbart's Big Media and Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller of acting like a "schoolyard bully" by deliberately targeting him after he said GOP hopeful Mitt Romney was more comfortable around "white folks."

Speaking out for the first time since Politico suspended him indefinitely, Williams told Current TV's Bill Press that Big Media used "selective evidence" from comments about Romney on MSNBC and his Twitter account because they were in the business of "gathering scalps" from the so-called liberal media.

"It became about me and not about what I said," he explained. "And that was something that was common to a lot of what you talked about earlier: Chris Hayes, David Shuster, the list goes on. And, you know, now my name is on that list. But the problem I see here is it's not going to stop there."

"Part of the issue here is the fact that we have an organization -- we have a couple of organizations that have very clear agendas," Williams continued. "They're funded -- we don't quite exactly know how, but, certainly, they get their money to do what they do. Their agenda is quite clear. Their agenda is to make enough noise, to push back hard enough that organizations -- independent organizations, independent news organizations that have foundations, that have credibility to their name -- fold."

"Basically it's the schoolyard bully concept where if you make enough noise, if you push back hard enough, people are not going to fight back. ... They're in the business of gathering scalps."

When it comes to the comments about Romney, Williams did not seem eager to apologize.

"If I apologize for that, there are going to be many other people who have to as well because this is not a new sentiment," he pointed out, noting that the phrase "white folks" had been like waving a red flag in front of bull. "To me in my personal opinion at this point, those two words were the ones that set people off. You know, 'white folks,' 'Mitt Romney.' It's a match to a tender keg to certain segments of people who decided they want to push back on what they believe is the liberal media."

Williams also wouldn't say if he wanted to stay on at Politico.

"That's a question that we're working on," he told Press.

The Daily Caller on Monday revealed a March 30 tweet where Williams had accused Politico of an "overlay of blatant racism," calling it the "secret sauce in the Politico shitburger."

"Certainly at that point I was venting, I was spouting, I had frustrations at work, there were frustrations in some of the things that I saw that was going on on the Politico landscape," he recalled. "And I vented and in error and I vented in a public place and that was a huge mistake."

"There are a lot of frustrations in Washington, a lot of things that have racist kind of aura," Williams added. "Politico, by and large, has a lot of things to deal with, questions as far as that's concerned. Well, [minority] representation. Diversity is a problem for the entire D.C. press corps and I don't think Politico is an exception in that regard."

From this Saturday's show, Chris Hayes on the White House's failure to understand that it did not matter how far they moved to the right on anything from the health care law, to immigration, to gun control, Republicans don't care much about reality. They're going to create their own reality instead for political gain. As he noted at the end of his monologue:

And so, that's why promoting this implausible conspiracy theory about a secret plot to make gun owners look bad by giving guns to Mexican traffickers is so important to the right and the NRA. It's why they've been flogging Fast and Furious and why the NRA scored the vote on contempt. Since there is no actual case that the President wants to crush gun-rights, they have to make one.Because this is post-truth politics. Because you cannot make political gains with substantive concessions. They're still going to call you a gun-hating Kenyan socialist.

I think as evidenced by the White House's announcement last week of protections for DREAM Act eligible youth, that they are finally starting to wake up to that fact.

The panel discussion followed with Hayes' guests, Jose Antonio Vargas, Michael Ian Black, L. Joy Williams and the New York Times Ross Douthat, who as expected as soon as I saw his name on the guest list for this weekend, had lots of false equivalencies to offer on things such as GOP obstruction and their abuse of the filibuster to what is or is not a political witch hunt and when it's actually fair to say an administration is shredding our Constitution or not and why.

I think Hayes point on Republicans and their feigned outrage over the death of the border agent in this Fast and Furious case can't be repeated often enough as well. They don't show the same outrage or grief about the 30-thousand people killed every year by guns, so we know full well this is not about them having one iota of concern for gun control. It's pure politics.

More of Hayes commentary below the fold: The era of post-truth politics:

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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, Chris asks a provocative question about the Fed's unwillingness to do more about unemployment in America: Hayes: Is Ben Bernanke trying to get Mitt Romney elected president?:

On Thursday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke went up to Capitol Hill to testify in front of the Joint Economic Committee. He faced a fairly skeptical, even hostile, audience, primarily the Republicans who think Bernanke has been doing too much to help the economy.

Rep. Kevin Brady: I wish you would look the market in the eye and say The Fed has done all it can perhaps too much.
Sen. Jim DeMint: I think you'd have to agree that the activism has been unprecedented.

Bernanke was his normal, mild-mannered, calm self, largely untroubled by his interlocutors' barbs.

Sen. Dan Coats: Given the kind of fragile state - fragile world that we're looking at and particularly the situation at night as it's unfolding do you sleep well at night?
Bernanke: Do I see-?
Sen. Dan Coats: Do you sleep well at night?
Bernanke: I generally sleep pretty well. But I have a lot to do during the day and I need to be well rested.

And he assured the members of Congress that if things get really bad, the Fed will be there to help.

"As always, the Federal Reserve remains prepared to take action as needed to protect the U.S. financial system and economy in the event that financial stresses escalate," Bernanke said.

But the point is that things are already bad. And Bernanke was never asked the one question that had I been sitting up on the dais I would have liked to ask him: "Mr. Chairman: your academic research shows the necessity of central bankers taking aggressive, sometimes unprecedented action in the wake of financial crisis in order to avoid long term stagnation and economic misery. And yet, as Federal Reserve chairman you seem to be entirely ignoring your own research. The Fed refuses to take action to address the jobs crisis in this country, even as inflation stays at or below target. You are ignoring your legal mandate, ignoring your own research, ignoring the misery of millions who are unemployed for no good reason. My question for you, Mr. Chairman, is: Are you trying to get Mitt Romney elected president?" Read on...

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While discussing Florida's history of voter suppression on this Sunday's Up w/Chris Hayes, former RNC chair Michael Steele did his best to try to pretend that one, Republicans really don't want to keep people from voting and two, that there's no racism involved with what they're doing across the country with purging these voting rolls.

Thankfully we had Chris Hayes, Ari Berman and Bob Herbert there to counter Steele's arguments with some of those pesky things called "facts." Steele also did his best to try to downplay whether what's going on in Florida would make any difference in swinging an election or not. As Berman reminded him, since he's apparently chosen to ignore our very recent history, the number of people purged from the voting rolls when Bush had the state handed to him back in 2000 was twenty two times Bush's margin of victory there.

I turned this show on this morning and saw Steele on there and was really hoping he didn't remain as a guest for the entire show. So naturally he was the only one on there that didn't leave the set for the entire two hours. And this is the sort of nonsense we were treated to the entire time he was on.

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The panel on Up With Chris Hayes this Saturday of Sam Seder, Bob Herbert, Josh Barro and Victoria Defrancesco Soto had a discussion on the growing wealth inequality and lack up social mobility which are being made worse by things like Republicans wanting to cut a billion dollars in food assistance for the poor in their proposed Farm Bill.

Bob Herbert made a really great point late into the first clip when they were discussing the fact that SNAP, which used to be called food stamps, is subsidizing corporations that don't want to pay a living wage and that we ought to be raising the minimum wage among other things to remedy that. I think that's a point that is not mentioned nearly often enough when we see the likes of Paul Ryan demagoguing the needed expansion of the program. A good deal of those people using the program to keep from starving are not unemployed, but are the working poor.

More great discussion on the Romney's trying to rewrite the fact that they inherited great wealth instead of admitting they were born with huge advantages that most Americans are never going to be lucky enough to have below the fold.

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During another typically intelligent panel discussion on Chris Hayes' show on MSNBC this Sunday on the Republicans and Mitt Romney out there demagoguing President Obama asking Congress to pass the "Buffett Rule" so that millionaires and billionaires are not exploiting tax loopholes that allow them to pay far less of a percentage of their income in taxes compared to average working class citizens out there, David Cay Johnston brought up something I apparently missed earlier this year that he had reported on in January -- the fact that Mitt Romney was allowed to give his sons $100 million as a gift tax free, thanks to a tax loophole on "carried interest."

Romney’s gift from Congress:

When the Romney campaign disclosed in December that the couple’s five sons had a $100 million trust fund, I suspected that, in setting up the fund, the Romneys used a tax strategy that allows some very rich people to avoid paying gift taxes. But it was impossible to know if this was the case without seeing their tax returns going back years.

So when Mitt Romney released the family’s 2010 tax return last week, I went looking. I found a hint on pages 132 and 134 of the return. It showed that the value of property placed that year into another family trust, the Ann D. Romney Blind Trust, was, for tax purposes, zero. The Ann Romney trust is not the same trust as the one that holds the Romney sons’ $100 million, but I wondered if the Romneys used the same approach in prior years when it came to valuing property placed into the sons’ trust.

Reuters emailed the Romney campaign spokeswoman to ask how much the Romneys paid in gift taxes on assets put into the sons’ trust over the last 17 years. The spokeswoman, citing Brad Malt, the Romney family tax lawyer, answered: none.

The idea that someone could pay zero gift taxes on contributions to a $100 million trust fund may surprise people who have heard arguments that the wealthy are overburdened by gift and estate taxes. But the Romneys’ gift-tax avoidance strategy is perfectly legal. Read on...

Johnston posted a video explaining the loophole in his post at Reuters which you can watch below the fold.

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I have to say, I could not agree more with Chris Hayes and what he said about Hilary Rosen during his show on Saturday and who CNN chooses to represent "the left" on their network. Sadly, I could say the same thing about a whole lot of their other pundits or which politicians they bring on as well. And it's not just CNN. The corporate media as a whole is terrible about giving those who actually represent the working class and their interests any time on the air.

I'll give Hayes credit for being one of the exceptions to that rule.

HAYES: If CNN is looking to represent the left in their crossfire style segments, they could do a lot better than a lobbyist messaging guru with a who's-who list of corporate clients – women who is head of the Recording Industry Association of America when it was crushing Napster and who was forced to severe ties with the Huffington Post in 2010 because she had BP as a client at a time when it was, well, in the news.” We know there are literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, who could better represent the left in our national conversation.

Indeed there are.

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With Rick Santorum out of the Republican primary race and Mitt Romney now the presumptive nominee, Chris Hayes discussed the conventional wisdom that Romney will now inevitably attempt to "pivot" back to the middle and soften some of the very extreme positions he's taken while trying to get through their primary race. Hayes played a series of clips both from President Obama and Romney. He reminded us of some of Obama's broken campaign promises and followed up with some of the things Mitt Romney's said on the campaign trail.

Hayes has a point: it doesn't matter much what Romney says once he attempts to moderate some of the things he's said in those clips because today's Republican Party is not going to allow him to govern as a moderate.

HAYES: The President is a product of the party that nominates him and the party that will nominate Mitt Romney is unwaveringly committed to a singularly regressive agenda. No post election private reversion to the moderate meme will change that. So, as we enter the era of the pivot, don't listen to what Mitt Romney says. Look at what his party is doing.