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After the release of Paul Ryan's new budget -- which looked a whole lot like his old budget -- despite the fact that the public rejected their policies when he and Mitt Romney lost the last election -- the panel members on MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner this Tuesday were asked to weigh in on Ryan's proposal and this latest round of budget negotiations.

There were a lot of good points made about Ryan's ridiculous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and the fact that he just wants to go after programs that help the poor, the elderly and the most vulnerable in our society and that his "budget" has a lot of numbers that don't add up. Ari Melber then made this point on how Ryan is regarded in political circles:

MELBER: I think Joy is hitting on something really important, which is those are the twin falsehoods, even apart from the hypocrisy of his record. One is, that just because it has numbers in it, doesn't make it a budget, right? My lottery ticket is not a budget. It's just a bunch of numbers on the page. And this thing [...] has a lot of numbers and as everyone has said, doesn't add up. It's more like fan fiction for Ayn Rand than it is a budget. And he's not a deficit hawk. To Joy's point, he's a health care hawk. He is interested in going after every health care program that's basically on the books from Obamacare, as you just articulated, to Medicaid, the program that is the most important for poor people, who need help and also for our society, because when we use medicine, preventative care for poor people, it actually saves all of us money, so it's good on both moral and efficiency terms and that's what's so frustrating here. I think Washington has called him serious for so long, they're over invested in treating this fake charade like it's a budget.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel followed up very nicely on Melber's points just a little bit later in the segment.

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While I agree with my colleague here at C&L that Ezra Klein went too easy on David Brooks and that it would have been nice to see Brooks called out directly for being a clueless liar who doesn't even appear to understand the policy proposals he's criticizing, Klein handed a load of ammunition to a host of others who weren't quite so worried about being polite.

Here are some of the examples that I've come across and I'm sure the list is getting longer as I type:

Booman at The Booman Tribune: David Brooks is a Fraud

Digby's Hullabaloo: Breaking: David Brooks doesn't know what he's talking about

Greg Sargent's The Plum Line: The Morning Plum: Questions for the “blame it on both sides” crowd

Doug Galt at Balloon Juice: Velvet glove, pimp slap

And from Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog: 'But I've read Robert Rubin's tax plan...'

Somehow the PBS Newshour decided that all of the criticism Brooks has been getting wasn't important enough to bring up when asking him for his opinion on the sequester during his regular segment with Mark Shields this Friday. Imagine that. Obviously there's no punishment for bad behavior over at PBS. And just as he did during an interview on NPR that same day, Brooks doubled down on some of the lies he told in his column.

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We've written about this over and over again here at C&L and what a bad idea it is to be calling for the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to be raised -- how it just inflicts pain on the poor at a time of record income disparity. Not to mention the fact that there are other ways to address our debt and deficits other than attacking our social safety nets! It was nice to see Ezra Klein once again give some grief to the wealthy CEOs and pundits out there who have downplayed just how damaging these policies are for anyone who actually works for a living and is not sitting in some cushy, over-paid job. They don't care when or if they retire because they love their jobs.

Meanwhile, working people are in so much pain from the hard work they do, they take a big hit on their benefits to retire early.

For anyone that missed the segment, you can check that out here: Ezra Klein: Raising Social Security Retirement Age Concentrates Pain on the Poor.

Klein discussed the recent news that CEOs and The Business Roundtable are pushing to have the retirement ages raised to 70, but don't want the income cap raised on Social Security, because heaven forbid we do anything to harm those uber-wealthy "job creators." As Klein notes, while they didn't mind pushing for those with much lower incomes to take a big hit on their retirement benefits, the wealthiest among us aren't willing to share in that sacrifice themselves. They're drawing the line when it comes to raising their own Social Security taxes as Reuters reported:

But the group rejected shoring up Social Security by making incomes above the maximum annual threshold - which in 2012 was $110,100 - subject to payroll taxes, saying that would hurt the economy.

"You would have to raise the base upon which the taxes are applied very substantially to drive a sufficient level of revenue to address the long-term solvency of the program," Loveman said.

"That would be far more damaging to economic growth than what we're asking people to consider," he added. "If you raise the tax rate on people who earn over the current threshold, you'll have an immediate deleterious effect on employment and economic activity."

I was very happy to hear the way Klein followed up on this:

KLEIN: So if you're a CEO who makes maybe $1 million, you're only taxed for Social Security on first tenth, tenth of your income. If you're making $60,000 a year, a normal worker, every one of your $60,000 is taxed for Social Security. And this is the kind of thing, it just drives me crazy. Because you know what the flip side of these guys loving their jobs and never, ever, ever wanting to leave, not even when they're old and their back hurts and they've got lots of grand kids is and the money to take all those grand kids to an island?

They're also not going to stop being CEO of Caesar's because they're paying payroll taxes on more of their income, because they love their jobs. But that is the shell game that gets played here. Folks at the top have convinced themselves that things that won't hurt them at all like raising the retirement age are easy, no brainers, because they won't hurt anybody at all. They're just common sense.

And then they've also convinced themselves that things that will hurt them, will devastate the economy. So when they're saying no to paying higher taxes, they're not being selfish, they're just protecting jobs and growth. As Upton Sinclair liked to say, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

Groups like The Business Roundtable, they have a big voice and they like to quote themselves in the economy and argue that what they say and what they do are informed and driven by just wanting what is best for jobs and for growth and for their company. But it seems to often come down to what is best for the CEOs. It is good to be on the top.

Sadly, yes it is. And those on top seem to be more and more detached from the lives of everyday Americans as the rest of us face those realities on a day-to-day basis. Segments like this one with Klein calling them out for it on cable television unfortunately are all too rare an occurrence these days.

You can read more about this push to raise the retirement age at Klein's blog here: CEOs want to raise the retirement age to 70,

And here's more from Think Progress: Wealthy CEOs Want To Force Americans To Retire Later.

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Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday said that she would be willing force a "thoughtful" shutdown of parts of the United States government if President Barack Obama did not agree to deep spending cuts.

"What we want to make certain is that this president, this administration, this bureaucracy realizes that kicking the can must stop," she told MSNBC's Chris Jansing. "It is spending cuts and it is imperative that we reduce the size of the federal government, that we get in on a mega-diet, that we end this out-of-control spending."

"There is the option of government shutdown," the Tennessee Republican continued. "There is an option of raising the debt ceiling in short-term increments... There's also the plan of three dollars in cuts for every one dollar of debt limit increase. So, the healthy thing is this, we are having a good discussion on it."

Jansing pointed to a study by the Bipartisan Policy Center which found that the government could continue to fund interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps during a shutdown -- but it would mean that almost every other federal program would grind to a halt.

"[B]ut doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else," The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote last week. "The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease."

"I think that there is a way to avoid default," Blackburn insisted. "If it requires shutting down certain portions of the government, let's look at that. Let's put these option on the table, be very thoughtful, but get this spending pattern broken. We cannot afford a $4 billion a day deficit and trillion dollar plus deficits every single year."

"So, it requires thoughtfulness and it requires that we are going to have a plan to work through this. I think that's where we as Republicans are headed."

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In a welcome change of pace from what we saw on the Sunday shows and on his own network last week, guest host Ezra Klein took the Last Word viewers through what we could actually expect to happen if our politicians were irresponsible enough to allow the United States to default on our debt.

This is what would happen if we breach the debt ceiling:

Want to make sure your calendar is clear when we hit the debt ceiling? Then don’t schedule anything between Feb. 15 and March 1.

That, according to a new analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, is the likely range for debt-ceiling doomsday: The day when the Treasury Department runs out of room to maneuver and we actually begin to default on obligations. Either Congress figures out the debt ceiling before that date or things get very bad, very fast.

Imagine we hit the debt ceiling Feb. 15. The BPC’s analysis suggests that federal spending over the next month will be about $450 billion. Federal revenues will be nearer to $277 billion. That means that the government will have to default on about 40 percent of its obligations.

The choices it will face quickly become stark. It can cover interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, education, food stamps and other low-income transfers, and a handful of other programs, but doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else. The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease.

This is the difference between a debt-ceiling shutdown and a government shutdown. As Shai Akabas, a research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, puts it, “in a government shutdown, the government is shutting down future obligations. With the debt ceiling, They’ve already obligated the money. They owe these people the payments now, and they can’t make them.”

Then, of course, there’s the financial-market chaos. Trillions of dollars in derivatives and other financial products are based on the interest rate that the federal government pays when borrowing. U.S. government debt is, after all, supposed to be the safest investment in the world, and so it’s used to “benchmark” all other sorts of debt. A spike in the Treasury rate would mean a spike in credit card rates and mortgage rates, not to mention all manner of more esoteric financial derivatives. The damage to the economy would be tremendous, and it would occur at every level, from individuals looking for a loan to buy a house to hedge funders trying to play the markets. Read on...

Ezra needs to send his post over to the other hosts on MSNBC like David Gregory and Joe Scarborough so they quit lying to their audiences about the consequences of default and pretending that it would only be a partial government shutdown.

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The Senate is broken so badly due to GOP obstruction that, as Ezra Klein pointed out in the segment above, they're less popular than the idea of the United States becoming a communist country, so hey, why fix anything? Right? It seems Grandpa McGrumpy is getting some help from a Democrat in the Senate to undermine Jeff Merkley's attempt at filibuster reform.

Dueling Filibuster Proposals Leave Reformers Scrambling:

The two leading champions of weakening the Senate filibuster on Friday criticized a bipartisan proposal that was unveiled in the afternoon with scaled-back reforms, and they pushed for their own package to make more sweeping changes to the rules.

Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Tom Udall (D-NM) promptly said the alternate proposal put forth by Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Carl Levin (D-MI) is too weak and does nothing to prevent senators from filibustering quietly and escaping public accountability for their obstruction — the centerpiece of the Merkley-Udall “talking filibuster” plan.

The McCain-Levin proposal, unveiled Friday after bipartisan negotiations, would make it easier for the majority leader to bypass motions to proceed and guarantee the minority two amendments on legislation regardless of relevancy, Steven S. Smith, an expert on Congress at Washington University in St. Louis, told TPM. It would also remove obstacles on motions to go to conference and approve minor presidential nominations.

Levin told reporters in the Capitol that the plan “will hopefully overcome the gridlock that has so permeated the U.S. Senate.” He added: “It is a bipartisan proposal.”

The Merkley-Udall proposal, by contrast, essentially eliminates the ability of senators to block debate on legislation and forces senators who want to prevent a vote on a bill to speak ceaselessly on the Senate floor until one side gives in. [...]

The pro-reform Fix The Senate Now Coalition also called on Reid to say “thanks, but no thanks” to the McCain-Levin plan.

“Instead of a serious reform effort, today’s offering is little more than a status quo, business as usual, recipe for continued Senate gridlock,” the organization said in a written statement. “[W]e hope the Senate Democratic caucus rejects today’s salvo outright.”

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If anyone missed this over the holiday, it's a very heartwarming story about actor Jack Klugman's real legacy and how he managed to roll obstructionist Sen. Orrin Hatch: Jack Klugman’s secret, lifesaving legacy:

The actor Jack Klugman died on Christmas Eve at age 90. Klugman was best known for his roles as the unkempt sportswriter in “The Odd Couple” and as the crusading medical examiner on “Quincy, M.E.” the wildly popular 1980s medical drama. Few people remember it today, but he also played an instrumental role in passing critical health-care legislation, the Orphan Drug Act, through Congress in the early 1980s, using “Quincy” and his own celebrity to roll Sen. Orrin Hatch (R), who was blocking the bill.

Klugman’s unlikely star turn in Washington stemmed from a 1980 hearing by the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment on the problem of developing treatments for rare diseases. The problem was that many terrible diseases didn’t afflict enough people to entice pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments. Hence they were ”orphan” diseases. They included Tourette’s syndrome, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida, ALS and many more. The situation was especially tragic because scientists who discovered promising treatments often couldn’t interest drug makers, who didn’t see potential for profit.

The issue of orphan diseases was so obscure that only a single newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, sent a reporter to the hearing (and the Times only did so because a local boy suffering from Tourette’s testified). But the article caught the eye of a Hollywood writer and producer named Maurice Klugman, who himself suffered from a rare cancer and also happened to be Jack Klugman’s brother. Maurice Klugman wrote an episode of “Quincy” about Tourette’s and the orphan drug problem.

Go read the rest at the link above. RIP Jack Klugman.

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MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Friday recommended that Republicans "walk out" of talks completely because President Barack Obama's first budget offer was "loaded with Democratic priorities," citing an imperfect memory of the way President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) harmoniously "worked together" to reach a deal in 1995.

On Thursday, Republicans aides circulated what they said was the first White House budget offer. It reportedly included $1.6 trillion in taxes, $400 billion in entitlement spending cuts and $200 billion in new stimulus of payroll tax cuts and an efforts to encourage homeowners to refinance. The White House also wants a debt limit increase as part of the deal to avoid the crisis that ended with U.S. credit being downgraded in 2011.

On MSNBC Friday morning, Scarborough said that he would have laughed out loud if he had been in the room when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was making the offer.

"I would have said, 'We're all busy people, this is a critical time, if you're going to come over here and insult us and intentionally try to provoke us, you can do that but I'm going back to work now,'" Scarborough explained. "And I'd walk out."

"Was it necessary for the president to be so proactive with something even The New York Times said was -- quote -- 'loaded with Democratic priorities' and really gave Republicans nothing?" the conservative MSNBC host wondered. "I think they were awfully reckless yesterday with this first offer."

"Look at the other side that they're dealing with," co-host Mika Brzezinski pointed out. "Look at who they're dealing with, many of the same people as the last four years. So, what would you do if you knew who you were up against? Would you come out there with something that was incredibly giving from the get-go?"

"My response to [House Speaker] John Boehner would be very simple, just stop talking to them," Scarborough opined. "Don't talk to them until they make a serious offer... I've got to say that I'm really stunned by what happened yesterday."

"I can tell you, it's not a hard ask, it's a partnership," he added. "And actually as much as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich loathed each other at times, they worked together to deal with Republicans like myself on balancing the budget on the first time in a generation, balancing it four years for for the first time since the 1920s, paying down the national debt. And you know what? Newt Gingrich always had to fight us on his right flank and he and Bill Clinton sat in the White House and strategized."

In fact, the budget negotiations between Clinton and Gingrich were no where near as smooth and cordial as Scarborough remembers. After Clinton passed his 1993 budget (and tax increases) with no Republicans votes, Gingrich led a 1993 effort to impeach the 42nd president of the United States in the House of Representatives. Clinton later was forced to shut down government for a total of 28 days in 1995 and 1996 over drastic cuts to spending on Medicare, education, public health and the environment. In the end, the parties did work together to create four consecutive balanced budgets for the first time since the 1920s. Forcing the government shutdown, however, marked the beginning of the end of Gingrich's career as Speaker.

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein noted on Thursday that the first White House budget proposal was a signal that President Barack Obama would no longer begin negotiations by conceding to Republican demands as he had done so many times during his first term.

"Previously, Obama’s pattern had been to offer plans that roughly tracked where he thought the compromise should end up," Klein wrote. "Perhaps the key lesson the White House took from the last couple of years is this: Don’t negotiate with yourself. If Republicans want to cut Medicare, let them propose the cuts. If they want to raise revenue through tax reform, let them identify the deductions. If they want deeper cuts in discretionary spending, let them settle on a number. And, above all, if they don’t like the White House’s preferred policies, let them propose their own."

"The GOP is right: This isn’t a serious proposal. But it’s not evidence that Obama isn’t serious. He’s very serious about not negotiating with himself, and his opening bid proves it."

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Ezra Klein took a shot at John Boehner and the Republicans for pretending that they can still repeal Obamacare through the congressional oversight process. As ridiculous as that assertion is, that doesn't mean they're not going to do their best to still attempt to chip away at it where possible, but at this point, pretending that they can use the oversight process to somehow repeal the law, is just ludicrous.

After seeming to come to his senses and admitting that "Obamacare is the law of the land" Boehner quickly changed course and penned an op-ed for the Cincinnati Enquirer, arguing that the law "should be on the table for cuts in a deficit reduction deal." The White House shot that down pretty quickly, but as Klein's fellow contributor at The Washington Post wrote this week, you could still see tweaks to the law which the Democrats might go along with.

And as Klein noted, Boehner is up against the insurers and pharmaceutical companies who are now working with liberal advocacy groups, who both want to see as many Americans insured as possible for varying reasons. One wants more customers and the other wants to see as many people as possible have access to affordable health care.

Rough transcript below the fold.

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Ezra Klein, filling in for MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell this Tuesday evening, ended this segment responding to Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein's assertion that the Social Security retirement age should be raised with a question that we all already know the answer to:

KLEIN: [A]ll these folks who like to talk about raising the Social Security retirement age as if it's a complete no-brainer, they need to think harder about why they have settled on the single cut to Social Security that will concentrate its pain on people who are poor, who haven't fully shared in the remarkable increase in life expectancy and who really don't like going to their jobs every day. Why are they the people who should sacrifice the most on Social Security?

Because they haven't bought the politicians, who as Klein noted, too often are more than happy to stay at their jobs until they drop dead, unlike most Americans out there.

I just want to thank Ezra Klein for saying on television what way too few of his fellow pundits are willing to say out loud. Raising the age equals a cut in benefits for the poor and those who work physical jobs that most people just cannot continue working as we get older and our health declines, and for advocating that the cap be lifted. And for pointing out again what he wrote in his article at The Washington Post last month -- There’s nothing ‘courageous’ about raising the Social Security retirement age.

Here's what Blankfein told CBS's Scott Pelley:

BLANKFEIN: You're going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people's expectations -- the entitlements and what people think that they're going to get, because it's not going to -- they're not going to get it.

PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. ... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

PELLEY: Because we can't afford them going forward?

BLANKFEIN: Because we can't afford them.

We wondered whether he thinks the government needs more revenue in the form of higher taxes.

BLANKFEIN: In the long run, there has to be more revenue. And, of course, the burden of that revenue will be disproportionately taken up by wealthier people. That's just logical.

PELLEY: So higher taxes on wealthier people?

BLANKFEIN: More taxes on wealthier people, to the extent that we need to raise more revenue, and we do need to raise some more revenue.

PELLEY: Why is an increase in revenue, in tax money, necessary? Why can't you just cut your way out of the deficit?

BLANKFEIN: For sure certain people in this country wouldn't like the society you would have if you did that, and personally, I don't think I would like it either, if we went as far as to close our entire budget deficit in that way.

PELLEY: What kind of society would it be?

BLANKFEIN: I think it would be one where the safety net would be more porous and lower to the ground.

Rough transcript of Klein's full response below the fold.

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