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From this Monday's extended edition of Morning Joe on MSNBC, Chuck Todd is asked about the new PAC, Organizing for Action, which as we noted here is building on the Obama campaign apparatus to continue support for his policy objectives and after discussing the new organization, Todd had one question. He wasn't sure how they were going to appeal to Republicans and get their votes.

I wonder if he's ever said the same thing about a single Republican PAC. Anyone think he asked how Rove's Crossroads GPS was going to get more Democrats to vote for Republicans? Maybe they ought to worry about advocating for policies their own voters care about first Chuck.

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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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Apparently Rep. Legitimate-Rape Akin hasn't learned that he should keep his yap shut when it comes to anything involving women-- Todd Akin: Claire McCaskill Was Much More 'Ladylike' In 2006:

Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin (Mo.) told reporters on Thursday that his opponent, Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill, was much more "ladylike" in her 2006 campaign against Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) than she is in her campaign against Akin.

McCaskill “had a confidence and was very much more sort of ladylike,” Akin told a Bloomberg reporter at a stop on his "Common Sense" bus tour in Jefferson City, Mo. “In the debate we had Friday, she came out swinging, and I think that’s because she was threatened." [...]

UPDATE: 4:35 p.m. -- Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called on the Republican Party to denounce Akin’s remark about McCaskill and revoke its support for the GOP Senate candidate.

"Todd Akin is at it again with another comment that's demeaning to women and offensive to all," she said in a statement. "What's truly astonishing is that the national party embraced Todd Akin yesterday and now refuses to repudiate his statement. Unless the national party condemns Todd Akin and his latest comments, every Republican candidate in the country will be held accountable for their support of Akin's beliefs and sentiments."

And the GOP had this response -- Republicans On Akin’s Latest Flap: We’re Not Touching That One:

National Republicans are keeping a steely distance from Missouri Senate nominee Todd Akin once more after he said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) wasn’t “ladylike” in their last debate.

“Decline to comment,” said a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“I think it’s best if the NRSC weighs in on these questions because we’re so focused on the presidential,” an RNC spokesperson said.

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This Friday morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough and regular Mark Halperin decided to go after President Obama for what he said on a campaign stop in Florida this week, where he talked to voters about Mitt Romney's plans to turn Medicare into a voucher system and balance the budget off of the backs of seniors rather than asking the rich to pay more in taxes.

They both tried to paint the President as unfairly attacking Romney and for not differentiating between those who are on the program today and those who would be affected by the changes. Then Halperin admits that Paul Ryan's plan, which Romney has endorsed, is indeed radical and that there very well could be changes to current seniors' benefits. Halperin also thinks Republicans deserve some credit for "at least trying more new ideas" and that Democrats had better get on board to "save" these programs. Sorry Mark, but eliminating and privatizing them is not "saving" any of our social safety nets, it's gutting and getting rid of them. And it's not "new" since Republicans have been trying to get rid of the New Deal programs since the day any of them were enacted.

It is enough to make someone's head spin watching these two attempt to play the false equivalency game here and pretend "both sides" are equally at fault on the here and that anything the President said is unfounded. As Halperin admits, Republicans do want to fundamentally change Medicare and I don't think any current seniors want to see those benefits cut for their children. And I don't believe President Obama is out there misrepresenting what the Republicans would like to do. He told voters Romney and the Republicans would like to turn Medicare into a voucher program and they don't want to raise taxes on millionaires. Those things are true. Republicans have already talked continually about how it would not affect current seniors when Paul Ryan first proposed his budget, and it didn't make their ideas any less popular.

Rough transcript below the fold.

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Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul on Tuesday admitted that he got a monthly Social Security check, a program that he eventually wants to eliminate.

During an interview on MSNBC, Paul insisted that he would preserve Social Security longer than some of the others in his party.

"I want young people to opt out of Social Security," the Texas congressman told MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle. "In my more pragmatic stands on how we get to the place I want to go, actually I'm probably offering a program where some of these programs that we have taught people to be so dependant on, I would probably preserve them longer than others because we are going to lose them because of the bankruptcy that is coming."

"Are you on Social Security," The Huffington Post's Sam Stein wondered. "Do you get Social Security checks?"

"I do," Paul replied.

"You just told younger generations that they should wean themselves off of this social contract but you haven't done it yourself," Stein noted. "You're not the wealthiest man in Congress, I'm not saying that. But you have enough means to take care of yourself in retirement. Shouldn't you provide an example?"

"No," Paul said. "I think the programs are so designed, just as I use the post office too. I use government highways. I do that too. I use the banks. I use the Federal Reserve system. But that doesn't mean you can't work to remove this. The same way on Social Security, I am trying to make a transition."

"I personally don't see any inconsistency in that," he added.

(h/t: Mediaite)

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If anyone ever needed any proof that if you're a neocon, right-wing war monger, that was our version of Baghdad Bob with selling the failed invasion of Iraq as some kind of huge success, and that failure means you're going to stay on the wingnut welfare rolls from here to eternity, you need look no further than Dan Senor.

I had the unfortunate circumstance of catching some of Senor's appearance on Morning Joe this Friday, who is getting air time again because guess who he's a senior adviser for? Mitt Romney. So if we' wind up with Mittens as our next president, say hello to four more years of Bush redux on foreign policy.

Senor's appearance on Morning Joe and his background was summed up fantastically by Stephen "DarkSyde" Andrew over at freethoughtblogs.com and I'll share some of the beginning here, but everyone really needs to go read the entire post.

Dan Senor: the man who was too wrong to fail:

The symptoms of the Great American Demise are all around me. In the end, when we have finally reached full-blown third-world status and our grandkids compete in contests for best rat trap, we’ll be able to look back and know we did it entirely to ourselves. One beautiful example of how we managed to blow a massive US lead in wealth and technology can be found in one Dan Samuel Senor, a man too wrong to fail.

Senor is a textbook example of all that is Evil and Foul in the US, a full-blown neoconservative capo groomed to succeed by way of epic failure from his earliest professional years. But I only picked him because he happens to be in my face right now. As I write this, our so-called liberal cable news channel, MSNBC, has their morning VJ, Joe Scarborough, carrying water for the failures of recent years on my TV. Current guest on screen, Dan Senor.

Senor cruised into the big leagues at a young age after an obligatory stint at Harvard business school and spent most of the 1990s working for a Republican Senator in New York state followed by a brief foray as an advisor to the Carlyle Group. That’s a privately held venture capital equity firm, sort of the Bain Capital of choice for petro sheiks, international arms smugglers, and drug kingpins the world over who want to profit from leveraged buyouts and influence peddling in the noble fields of US defense pork barrel spending, Asian sweatshops, and middle east oil conquests.

The hiring of Dan Senor also caught the attention of Rachel Maddow, who talked about how disturbing it is that Romney is reassembling George W. Bush's foreign policy team on her show this Thursday night. More on that below the fold.

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Former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg joined the crew of Morning Joe and jumped all over the Huffington Post's Sam Stein when he pointed out that Social Security is solvent for the next twenty-some years. Gregg's reasoning -- it's not solvent because the taxpayers will either be asked to pay the money back they borrowed against it, or we borrow money from places like China.

So basically he thinks it's insolvent because he doesn't think the money should have to be paid back. This is coming from someone who never had a problem with deficits when George W. Bush and the Republicans were busy invading countries that weren't a threat to us and giving tax cuts to the rich which broke the bank, but now the world's going to come to an end because we're supposedly broke. Social Security is funded by our payroll taxes and does nothing to add to the deficit, but these guys can't stop lying and pretending it does.

And of course Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan -- who it appears still has a cot in the MSNBC studios since he's on there every time you turn around -- were happy to help him out ratcheting up the fear. If they want to make Social Security solvent for decades to come, all they need to do is raise the income cap. And shame on Gregg and the rest of them for wanting to balance the budget on the backs of seniors and acting like it's acceptable not to repay that trust fund.

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The Huffington Post's Sam Stein joined Countdown guest host Sam Seder to discuss the deal made by the White House and Republicans on extending the Bush tax cuts and whether they have the votes to pass the legislation. Stein stated that they likely had the votes despite opposition from the House progressives and did not think it would face a filibuster in the Senate.

As Stein noted, when the White House conceded that they would not be willing to allow the tax cuts to expire, they gave away the store on negotiations and just gave the Republicans more of an incentive to hold out longer than they were. Stein repeated what Ezra Klein wrote, included in my previous post, which is that the administration actually wants to have this fight again in 2012. He's exactly right that they're going to have a lot of trouble earning the trust of Democrats on whether they really want to see these tax cuts expire in two years.

Stein has more in his article at The Huffington Post -- Rep. Peter Welch Circulates Letter Urging Dems To Submarine Tax Cut Deal:

Just minutes after we reported a potential tax cut deal between Republicans and the White House, the first congressional Democrat is out urging his colleagues to submarine the deal.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) circulated a letter to his colleagues urging them to oppose the deal on grounds that it is "fiscally irresponsible." Addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the letter reads as follows:

We oppose acceding to Republican demands to extend the Bush tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires for two reasons.

First, it is fiscally irresponsible. Adding $700 billion to our national debt, as this proposal would do, handcuffs our ability to offer a balanced plan to achieve fiscal stability without a punishing effect on our current commitments, including Social Security and Medicare.

Second, it is grossly unfair. This proposal will hurt, not help, the majority of Americans in the middle class and those working hard to get there. Even as Republicans seek to add $700 billion to our national debt, they oppose extending unemployment benefits to workers and resist COLA increases to seniors.

Without a doubt, the very same people who support this addition to our debt will oppose raising the debt ceiling to pay for it. We support extending tax cuts in full to 98 percent of American taxpayers, as the President initially proposed. He should not back down. Nor should we.

[...]

That said, the likelihood the final deal doesn't get enough votes for passage seems far-fetched. For starters, if all Republicans vote for the package, only 40 Democratic votes would be needed. The Blue Dog coalition could provide that. Moreover, Pelosi, who ostensibly signed off on the deal, could muster up the votes to help push it through.

UPDATE: A House Democrat aide emails the Huffington Post the following:

House Democrats haven't agreed to anything yet. Any package needs to be thoroughly reviewed and discussed in the caucus.

And one last note here, thank you Keith Olbermann for allowing Sam Seder to fill in for you. I'd love to see him get a spot hosting on MSNBC.

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I don't know about the rest of you but I get really tired of the media helping the Republican Party pretend that their lobbyist and corporate-funded astroturf Tea Party is anything other than a way to get the Bush stink off of the GOP brand. What's ironic is they're now having discussions about how to get rid of the crazy, wingnut, racist, nativist brand that has always been the extreme right wing base of the Republican Party -- since they're closely associating with this Tea Party "movement", the stink is coming from the Republicans as well.

What they'll never admit is that this is just more of the same from the GOP, which has had little other than fear, race-baiting and division of one sort or the other, where they pit working-class people against each other for electoral advantage for ages now. Instead we get treated to conversations like this one on John King's show on CNN, which isn't short of its usual hackery even when he's gone on vacation. Jessica Yellin has jumped right in to fill King's shoes while he's been gone.

CNN seems to be trying to figure out how they want to brand themselves lately. So far it looks like the strategy is just to be a kinder, gentler version of ClusterFox. MSNBC during the day and right up through Tweety's show is just about as bad. The only person in the media I've seen any honest reporting on with just what the "Tea Party movement" is and who is paying for, riling up and busing in those protesters is Rachel Maddow, God bless her.

I don't think I've seen a single show on CNN or most of cable or network news for that matter other than Rachel's show tell their viewers about who is funding the movement and what their industry ties are. They'd rather keep up with the perception that this is some real grass roots movement that has broken off from the Republican Party when that could not be further from the truth. The Tea Party movement is the Republican Party and they're tied at the hip with their corporate backers and their leaders and their agenda.

Any attempt to paint them as otherwise is just propaganda. Sadly, this conversation on CNN is just one more example of what we see day in and day out out of most of our corporate media, and it's not even one of the worst examples. The downright cheerleading from Fox with their coverage of the rallies and CNN not being too far behind with riding along with them on their tours had to be some of the worst.

There have been much bigger protests from the left on the Iraq invasion among other things and those received nothing short of a collective yawn from our "mainstream media". I guess covering issues that actually have millions of Americans rightfully upset with their government just isn't as interesting to them as pushing their latest Drudge/Politico/right wing talk radio/Republican talking point of the day.

CNN's hackery below the fold.

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Ed Schultz talks to The HuffPo's Ryan Grim about Sam Stein's recent article there GOPers Decrying "Socialized Medicine" Go To Govt. Hospital For Surgeries:

Republicans in Congress have raised the specter of a bloated, "socialized," bureaucrat-run nightmare of a health care system as a means of undermining the White House's effort at a systematic overhaul. And yet, as Democratic sources are now pointing out, when medical crisis hit close to home, many of these same officials turned to a government-run hospital for their own intensive care and difficult surgeries.

So apparently in Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Kit Bond, Roy Blunt and George Voinovich's worlds, what's good for me is not good for thee. More compassionate conservatism at its finest.