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From this Sunday's Meet the Press:-- shorter Peggy Noonan -- You'll take the GOP's wedge issues away when you pry them from their cold, dead hands.

TODD: You know, Peggy, what's been interesting about this week is all of the big polarizing issues of the last two generations, culturally, all popped up in one week and one of it had to do with the Supreme Court and gay marriage, with abortion, this culture wars, normally when it comes back, it's something that's helpful to Republicans. Is it good this time for the conservative movement to have these issues out there?

NOONAN: I don't know. I think all of these cultural issues, as I guess we call them, have been major issues in America for almost half a century, really. The abortion argument was going on fifty years ago. Roe came forty years ago. It is hard to resolve these issues because they're not just cultural issues. They are moral issues and Americans feel differently about them. So I think one way or another, they'll probably be bubbling out there for a long time and it's not the worst thing.

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During a discussion about RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his latest effort to try to "fix" the GOP and his so-called "minority outreach initiative," which, as we already discussed here, looks like it's headed to be a massive flop, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough decided he'd give old Reince a hand with that minority outreach program by badgering guest Eugene Robinson and demanding he name "the top three issues that make that sort of outreach difficult for Republicans."

Note to Joe Scarborough -- if you want to help out with reaching out to African-Americans, here's a few things you could do. One, don't do it while badgering one of your African-American guests to rattle off a list while you brow beat them and presume that they would want to speak for every other African-American in the country. And don't pretend you don't know full well what the real answers to your questions are already.

Here's a hint on why the Republicans lost the majority of the African-American vote: The New Deal and the Civil Rights Act. And then we there's the Southern Strategy and demonizing and fearmongering to win elections. And to this day you can throw in voter disenfranchisement, these White Supremacist groups and militias cropping up everywhere, the birther movement, the overt racism we saw come from these TeaBirchers and the fact that the Republican party looks like they've completely lost their minds since the election of the first black president.

I'll leave it at that but the list is miles long when it comes to what Republicans have done to slowly disenfranchise the majority of the electorate other than old white men. Good luck with that outreach program Reince. You're going to need it.

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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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“What kind of country do we want to have?” That was the question asked by Mitt Romney's new running mate Paul Ryan during his speech this Saturday morning aboard the USS Wisconsin. It was also the question asked by Chris Matthews when he played the clip of Ryan on Hardball this Saturday. And it was a question met with some terrible answers from one of Matthews' guests, FreedomWorks CEO Matt Kibbe.

Eugene Robinson pointed out that Ryan's budget doesn't balance anything and has draconian cuts to the poor while asking the rich to do nothing. After he stated that he didn't understand how Republicans were going to win based on a slogan of 'I've got mine, you get yours' approach, Matthews brought up Ayn Rand and the GOP mimicking her philosophy.

Kibbe responded by saying Matthews needs to spend some more time reading Ayn Rand, even though Matthews already professed to having read her books and having long outgrown them, a common trait among people who employ critical thinking skills and age-appropriate maturity levels. I guess Kibbe wants Matthews to get back in touch with his inner fifteen-year-old if he seriously thinks he should be picking Rand's novels up again for a refresher now.

If this is the right's response to just how radical Paul Ryan and his proposals have been, I'm flabbergasted. Read more Ayn Rand. Really? Karoli already posted Kibbe and his organization going nuts over the pick of Ryan just after it was announced.

The Plum Line's Greg Sargent posted on just how radical the pick of Ryan is and his post got a mention during this segment, which I was happy to see. Letting Kibbe spew his Libertarian nonsense, not so much.

With Ryan pick, Romney doubles down on economic radicalism:

In picking Ryan, Romney is confirming his commitment to full-flown economic radicalism — something that he had kept well disguised until the Tax Policy Center study unmasked it. The central idea driving the GOP ticket is not just that tax hikes on the rich must be avoided at all costs. It’s that dramatically reducing the tax burden on the wealthy — coupled with deep cuts to social programs and a quasi-voucherizing of Medicare — is the route back to prosperity.

Call it the “Ryan/Romney vision.” Not the “Romney/Ryan vision.” The “Ryan/Romney vision.” The Ryan pick was urged upon Romney by conservatives who wanted him to “go bold,” i.e., to confirm beyond doubt that he will govern from the Ryan blueprint. “We want the Ryan budget,” Grover Norquist said recently, adding that the paramount requirement in the next president is that he have “enough working digits to handle a pen” to sign it. The Ryan pick is a triumph for this wing of the party.

After all, we already know Romney has the skills to handle a pen. He is now confirming what he intends to sign with it.

The Ryan pick is also a break with Romney’s previous theory of the race. He had previously intended to make the campaign about nothing more than a referendum on the economy and Obama’s stewardship of it. Now it will be a choice between two starkly different ideological visions, one that drags the race onto the turf of tax fairness and entitlements — which is much more in line with the debate Dems wanted.

Go read the entire post, but here's a bit more on how the media is going to play into this election and how this debate is framed:

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Given the fact that Mitt Romney passed basically the same plan as Governor of Massachusetts and is desperately trying to ignore that now, and given that the individual provisions in the plan for the most part are more popular than the polling on the Affordable Care Act as a whole, I don't understand how anyone could believe that it's beneficial for President Obama to ignore the law rather than campaigning on it.

But that's what we got from Savannah Guthrie on this Sunday's Meet the Press along with her repeating the Republicans' talking point that Romney can now campaign on Obama being a big tax and spend liberal and claim the administration "raised taxes, a national healthcare tax." Never mind that the penalties in Mitt Romney's plan were harsher than the fees for the insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act and that it's not a tax, it's a penalty regardless of whether the IRS is collecting the money or not.

This is good for Mitt Romney if our media allows it to be and this is the kind of "reporting" we get on the matter, where the politics and who said what matters more than the substance of the arguments, which campaign is lying constantly and if they're not going to explain to Americans just what is in the new law instead of spending endless hours debating the politics around it.

The Obama campaign could be doing a better job of explaining to the public what's in the law and getting some better surrogates out there on a regular basis doing just that, but the media has utterly fallen down on their jobs when it comes to properly explaining what the Affordable Care Act does and does not do. Gregory and Guthrie just gave us another typical example of that here.

If Republicans are going to campaign on repealing the law, the media should explain to the public what exactly it is they're campaigning against and be specific, and make them have to answer for it.

Transcript below the fold.

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GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain appeared on MBNBC following the Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Library and I have to think he probably enjoyed being interviewed by hosts of their prime time lineup, with the exception of Eugene Robinson who is just one of their regular contributors, about as much as someone would having a root canal done, since his assertions were actually challenged rather than the friendly type of interviews he's used to over at Fox News where you'll normally find him showing up on the air.

Al Sharpton started if off with challenging him with his views on states' rights and pointed out that if it weren't for the federal government stepping in and doing something about states that wanted to suppress minority rights, people like himself and Cain would not even be allowed to run for president right now. Cain countered by saying he wasn't talking about civil rights and said he doesn't want to touch “those kind of rights” and that it was other pesky overreaches by the federal government he was talking about.

He then went on to say he was offering actual “solutions” to issues like keeping Social Security solvent and cited his support for us moving to a model like Chile. Eugene Robinson pointed out that he'd actually covered South America and Chile for The Washington Post, and that what Chile had done there was indeed privatization of their pension system. Robinson asked Cain what the difference was between “privatization and privatization.”

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From this past Friday's Morning Joe and as Dave Dayden noted in his Weekly Roundup for August 26, 2011, I sincerely hope that Elijah Cummings didn’t just figure this out as well. The Republicans have done nothing but obstruct and as Cummings noted during this interview, even to the detriment of their own constituents if it means they're successful in taking down President Obama.

Cummings was hopeful that President Obama is going to come out with some bold plan in the coming weeks to finally push back at Republicans for their unwillingness to put Americans back to work and draw some contrast on what he'd like to get done even if they continue to block him. I hope that's true because I don't think he's going to be reelected if he doesn't.

Here's more from The Hill on Cummings' interview this past Friday -- Dem lawmaker: GOPers don't want Obama to accomplish anything:

Republicans don't want President Obama to achieve anything while he's in office, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said.

Cummings said he hoped that the president would unveil a bold plan for job creation when Congress reconvenes from recess, which includes new spending. He predicted Republicans will shoot down such a plan.

"I think the president needs to come out with a bold plan, a very rational plan and then we must present that to the nation, he must present that to the nation too and then have the Republicans say why they can't do it," Cummings said Friday on MSNBC.

"Now, understand, I don't think that the Republicans want this president to achieve hardly anything. I think the president is right, they are much more concerned about the next election than the next generation, and sometimes their own constituents," Cummings continued.

That's something that's been obvious to a lot of us for a long time now. When President Obama quits pretending that there's any hope of compromising with these people and instead starts beating them over the head politically for their obstruction is another matter.

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The second half of this segment has to be one of the more humorous things I've seen on the Rachel Maddow Show in a while. After asking whether Mitt Romney has just decided to say the hell with pretending like he's some sort of "man of the people" and embraced his inner Thurston Howell III, she and Eugene Robinson took to pondering which of the other characters from that show we might see our current crop of Republican presidential candidates cast as.

For anyone not old enough to have watched the series, Thurston Howell III was the extremely wealthy stereotypical Northeastern millionaire from Gilligan's Island. During the first part of the segment, Rachel laid out what we've seen from Romney on the campaign trail so far, like criticizing President Obama for not already having a jobs plan and being late to the game with that; and then announcing he's going to come out with his own jobs plan on the same day.

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While discussing whether this birther nonsense is ultimately going to harm the Republican Party once their presidential candidates get through the primary race and have to start campaigning in the general election, Peggy Noonan did her best to downplay just how much of the Republican base believes that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. She also tried to blame the media for "whipping up" the story to make the conservative base look bad.

NOONAN: I think it is an issue that speaks to a small but passionate part of the anti-Obama base. I'm a little surprised over the years at how it's taken off. I think Donald Trump has taken to whipping it up and so people talk about it. But I don't think that it is a serious issue that will make anybody feel pro or anti-Obama. It doesn't change anything.

It's too bad that no one on the panel asked Peggy Noonan if she'd seen this recent report from Public Policy Polling:

Birthers make a majority among those voters who say they're likely to participate in a Republican primary next year. 51% say they don't think Barack Obama was born in the United States to just 28% who firmly believe that he was and 21% who are unsure. The GOP birther majority is a new development. The last time PPP tested this question nationally, in August of 2009, only 44% of Republicans said they thought Obama was born outside the country while 36% said that he definitely was born in the United States. If anything birtherism is on the rise.

And I'd love for her to explain why Donald Trump is seeing a huge rise in the polls since he started going out there spouting this birther nonsense -- Obama Birth Certificate Issue Turns Trump into Big Problem for GOP:

The Barack Obama birth certificate controversy may or may not impact the 2012 election. Since those outside of the tea party aren't focused that much on the birth certificate -- or alleged lack thereof -- it probably won't get anyone elected president. However, the Republican primary is only for GOP voters, so if the issue is going to resonate, it would do so there. As such, new numbers about Donald Trump's rise in the polls, after outing himself as a "birther" send a troubling message to the mainstream GOP.

Republicans as a whole are being blamed for the issue, as asking these questions about Obama strikes many as racist. But most Republican candidates who aren't tea party icons aren't touching it since they know it is unlikely to come off well in a wider presidential election. Yet it now seems it can help someone in a Republican primary, however.

Rather than acknowledge that the problem is the wingnut Republican base and their primary voters, Noonan blames the media.

NOONAN:I think birthers stuff is confined mostly to people who really hate Obama and it's their number four reason for hating him. Do you know what I mean? They've sort of got a list and it's part of the list. But it's not this positive for anybody. I often think that the mainstream media whips it up because it makes the conservative base look bad.

Yeah, that's the ticket. It's a plot by that evil liberal media that wants to attack conservatives. Sorry Nooners, but they're doing a good enough job of that own their without any help. Scarborough went on to complain about how unfairly all of those poor TeaBirchers out there protesting were being treated compared to the evil dirty hippie union thug protesters. Scarborough thinks his show is the only place that showed offensive signs from the union rallies and that the media only focused on showing signs from the “tea party” protests. Apparently he doesn't watch Fox. And no one had to make an effort just to find at few offensive signs at those "tea party" rallies. They were all over the place.

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David Brooks thinks that the public is going to need to be "educated" to understand why our politicians feel the need to be making these draconian budget cuts at a time when we have so many unemployed or underemployed in America and when our economy is still struggling to recover after the meltdown on Wall Street. I think the bigger problem is way too many of them taking seriously anything the likes of David Brooks and his fellow Villagers have to say about budget cuts.

He also made this bizarre statement during this segment on Meet the Press that makes no sense to me at all.

BROOKS: We're going to cut things that are consumption or we're going to cut--and this is the politically hard part but the unavoidable point--we're going to take money away from affluent seniors and we're going to direct it to young people who are learning the most. We're going to transfer money to those who we can really invest in. And that's the politically difficult thing. But the fact is, we have a redistribution machine sending money from the young to the old. We've got to reverse that.

I assume he's talking about means testing Social Security and turning it into a welfare program, but the rest of it just sounds like psycho-babble to me. Maybe someone else can interpret it for me but I'm having some trouble decoding his Villager double-speak here. And sorry David but the only income redistribution I've seen going on is from the poor to the rich, not from the young to the old.

And someone needs to remind David Brooks that Social Security is not responsible for our deficit problems. They keep having these conversations day in and day out in our media where they conflate Social Security with Medicare and Medicaid and lump them together as "entitlements".

As Eugene Robinson rightfully pointed out here, what Americans do care about is job creation. We're never going to fix the problem with our deficit if we don't get people back to work. But instead of having rational conversations about how we actually do that, we're continually hearing how the working class just hasn't sacrificed enough when we have some of the worst income disparity in America since the Gilded Age.

Here's the full transcript.

GREGORY: Let's get right to it and I want to talk about the immediate stalemate here in Washington over the budget. This is something from our poll that was quite interesting, this question of role of government. Should the government do more or less? Fifty-one percent say do more; 46 percent say it's already doing too many things. I mean, this is the crux of the debate over reining in government spending.

BROOKS: Right. The country really doesn't know what, what it wants and that's the essential problem. The country wants more government than it's willing to pay for. And so the question is, how do you get out of that situation? It's going to take a public education campaign to explain to people with pie charts and all the rest, "Here's what we've got, here's what's coming. Where do we cut?" And so, as you said earlier, neither party wants to go first. I was with a bunch of Republicans yesterday, and they are sort of--have talked themselves into taking on entitlements in some form. And now that they've taken this step off the cliff, they're saying, "Eh, how we going to do that?" And they haven't quite figured that out. The Democrats, meanwhile, and the White House is sort of hanging back, playing a little rope-a-dope...

GREGORY: Right.

BROOKS: ...and letting them go forward. And that might be the smart strategy. The downside of that strategy is the president looks passive in this debate, and, and there's some weakness there.

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