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Sen. Marco Rubio sent out a letter this Monday, calling for the IRS commissioner to resign in the wake of the latest dust up over the agency's admission that there were some conservative groups targeted by the branch in Cincinnati. The problem with his request -- the IRS commissioner when these scandals occurred was a Bush appointee who no longer heads the department:

Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman, who was appointed by President Bush in 2008 and held by President Obama, left the agency in Nov. 9, 2012. Any pre-election misconduct would have had to occur on his watch. The current acting commissioner is Steven T. Miller -- a permanent replacement has not been nominated.

When TPM originally posted their report on this, they had not heard back from Rubio's office. As they noted in their update, here's their response:

In response to TPM's query, Rubio's spokesman Alex Conant noted that Miller was deputy commissioner when the targeting took place. He did not suggest the IRS acted inappropriately under Miller's watch as acting commissioner.

"He was Deputy IRS Commissioner when all this occurred," Conant said in an email.

So after someone pointed out to them that it was a Bushie that was in charge when these supposed abuses took place, now he wants the acting-director fired, even though the practice was not continued under their watch. Chris Jansing couldn't be bothered to point that out in the clip above, where she basically just read Rubio's letter with no context.

Some saner coverage of the topic aired a little later on the network, with both Joy Reid and Katrina vanden Heuvel doing a fine job of trying to put this story into its proper perspective and with Reid making sure the audience knew just who Rubio was initially calling to have fired -- someone who no longer works for the agency. Vanden Heuvel made some very good points about the fact that all of these groups ought to be getting a lot more scrutiny after the flood of them that came in after the Citizens United ruling.

In the meantime, all this is going to be is an excuse for more Obama derangement syndrome out of Republicans -- which is in full force already -- and more partisan witch hunts in the form of more hearings from Darrell Issa.

Video and Rubio's letter below the fold.

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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, panel member and Hayes' fellow contributor at The Nation brought up a topic at the end of the show that we unfortunately don't hear too often on MSNBC, which is the fact that the "Fix the Debt" campaign is not really interested in "fixing" anything. They're funded by a bunch of billionaires that are pushing for austerity measures and who are really just interested in lowering their taxes.

Sadly I don't expect we'll be seeing any disclaimers from the network every time they have one of these lobbyists from Pete Peterson's group on any time soon though, especially considering they've got one of them on their payroll. The more we complain, the more the so-called "liberal" network puts Ed Rendell on the air without disclosing his conflict of interests on the matter and he's just the tip of the iceberg when you look at the entire list of their leadership.

As Nichols informed the viewers here, there is a new web site that's been launched by The Center for Media and Democracy called PRWatch which has a lot more information on "Fix the Debt." You can check out the site here: PRWatch.

And here is more from one of their recent posts: Pete Peterson’s “Fix the Debt” Astroturf Supergroup Detailed in New Online Resource at PetersonPyramid.org:

Madison, WI -- One of the most hypocritical corporate PR campaigns in decades is advancing inside the beltway, attempting to convince the White House, Congress, and the American people that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner that will destroy our economy unless urgent action is taken. Soon this astroturf supergroup may be coming to a state near you.

“We would not be here if it wasn’t for the Peterson Foundation and Pete Peterson. They laid the groundwork and we stand here on their shoulders.” – Fix the Debt Co-Founder Erskine Bowles

Today the Center for Media and Democracy launches a new wiki resources on the funding, leaders, partner groups and lobbyists of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, see it here at PetersonPyramid.org.

Move over David Koch and George Soros! The effort is being bankrolled by one of the wealthiest men in the nation. Peter G. Peterson made a fortune at the Blackstone Group on Wall Street. He conveniently cashed out with $2 billion shortly before the 2008 financial meltdown and now has pledged to spend $1 billion of that payout to convince Americans -- who overwhelmingly want to keep and strengthen Social Security and Medicare -- that these programs threaten our very existence as a nation.

His task is a tough one. [...]

Key to the strategy is ginning up a crisis. In lockstep, the CEOs, politicians, and partner organizations stormed the media last fall warning of the looming disaster of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” Breaching the fiscal cliff “will lead to chaos,” warned Erskine Bowles; “derail the fragile recovery,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein; generate a "shock to the financial markets and a painful return to the recession,” said the CEO of Morgan Stanley.

But this chorus of calamity was pure hype. One Fix the Debt steering committee member, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen, let slip that the strategy was to create an “artificial crisis” that would force Congress to act.

Their goal is to achieve a Simpson-Bowles style “grand bargain” on an austerity agenda for the United States by the nation’s 237th birthday on July 4, 2013. [...]

Many Fix the Debt firms pay a very low or even a negative average tax rate, contributing to the nation's deficit. Fix the Debt is secretly pushing for a major tax break that would exempt profits earned overseas by U.S. firms from taxation and encourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs. While the Fix the Debt CEOs call for cuts to Social Security, many of the publicly-traded Fix the Debt firms underfund their employee pension plans -- making their workers even more dependent on the popular social insurance plan that American workers pay into with each paycheck.

And as Hayes mentioned during the segment as well, Nichols contributed to The Nation's article on Peterson's group here: Stacking the Deck: The Phony 'Fix the Debt' Campaign.

I hope everyone checks out the entire article and the rest of the resources at PRWatch and I wanted to share just one more item from there. From their SourceWatch page: Fix the Debt Leaders and Conflicts of Interest:

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Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Monday attempted to give the panelists on MSNBC's Morning Joe a lesson about why austerity and drastic spending cuts were the wrong solution in tough economic times.

"Our track record is actually not bad, we've tended to reduce our debt at least relative to GDP when the economy was strong," Krugman told host Joe Scarborough. "We tend to increase when the economy is week, but that's what you should do. So this is not a hard call. I mean, as long as we have four million people who have been unemployed for more than a year, this is not a time to be worrying about reducing the budget deficit. Give me something that looks more like a normal employment situation and I'll become a deficit hawk, but not now."

"I think we can begin to address our entitlement problems without putting on the brakes, without austerity," Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass asserted. "If we don't, what worries me about what people like Paul Krugman and others are recommending is we leave ourselves incredibly vulnerable to higher interest rates, to future Hurricane Sandys, to future wars, to bond markets, that we put ourselves in an incredibly vulnerable position."

"Washington doesn't work that way," Krugman pointed out. "If you spend a lot of your time talking about the debt and the entitlements are the big problem, the message that actually what we need to is promote jobs gets lost. And in fact, we spent the last two and a half years focused entirely on arguing about the long-term deficit and entitlements and doing nothing for employment right now. That balance has got to shift."

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), who co-chairs the corporate-sponsored Fix the Debt campaign, insisted that Krugman's argument "makes no sense" because the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan "said we can do both," cut the debt and spur the economy.

"So two guys can write a report that calls for all kinds of good stuff and they can't even get their own commission to agree on the report," Krugman laughed. "And you're saying this should be our policy? We need to focus on what is urgent right now, which is creating jobs and getting this economy back to full employment."

"But the way you do that is to build a political coalition to do something about the long-term debt," Rendell declared.

"Have you been living in the same country as I have these past five years?" Krugman quipped.

"My message is, we've got a coming collapse if we don't take care of our entitlements," Scarborough remarked.

"It's a long way off, it's not necessarily even true," Krugman replied. "All you're saying is that we should lock in now the health care changes that we think we would have had to make within 15 years."

"Not just lock in changes," Haass interrupted. "We've got to make real cuts over the next decade."

"No we don't," Krugman shot back.

"Yes, we do," Haass said. "We have got to find another $2 trillion [because your argument is] based upon rosy assumptions you're right. But what if those assumptions are wrong? You're basically willing take enormous risks with the American economy."

"People like me have been saying for five years, don't worry about these deficit things for the time being, they're a non-issue," Krugman observed. "Other people have been saying, 'Imminent crisis, imminent crisis!' How many times do they have to be wrong and do people like me have to be right before people start to believe this?"

"You're right until the day you're wrong, and that's a bad day," Haass grumbled.

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Sadly it seems MSNBC has found yet another former Pennsylvania Democrat to come on the air to advocate for rewarding Republicans for their obstruction and intransigence over the last four years. We were already treated to "Fix the Debt" corporate shill Ed Rendell arguing for cutting benefits to our seniors with the chained CPI as way to figure the cost of living increases for Social Security and for raising the age for Medicare eligibility. And in a subsequent interview, he was not only pushing to cut our social safety nets, but to help get more Republicans elected to office as well.

This Saturday, former Rep. Joe Sestak took up Rendell's mantle and recommended that President Obama nominate former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison for transportation secretary. I probably would not be as irritated at Sestak for this interview had I not heard him earlier this week talking about how reasonable cutting the benefits to our seniors would be and that Democrats are going to have to give into the idea that this chained CPI is coming and there's nothing they can do about it if we want to fix our deficit problems. Never mind that Social Security does not add a dime to our deficit. He did the same thing a little later in this segment but wasn't quite as specific as he'd been in the previous interview on which cuts are going to have to be made to our social safety nets.

Sestak took to the air here to call for more privatization of our infrastructure and nominating a Republican who could get that passed as the solution to fixing our crumbling roads and bridges. It makes me start to wonder if anyone besides MSNBC is signing a paycheck for him just like they are for Ed Rendell, because these sure as hell aren't positions Democrats who don't want to have themselves considered as Republican-lite should be advocating for.

As long as we've got Democrats like Rendell and Sestak shilling for Republicans and their policies on that so-called "liberal" network MSNBC, who needs Republicans?

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Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to be one of the stand-up guys in the Senate with telling it straight when it comes to the fact that Social Security does not add a dime to our deficit and that if President Obama wants to do something about the deficit, he needs to be cutting that corporate welfare, instead of talking about balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable in our society and our veterans.

Sanders joined Ed Schultz on MSNBC this Friday evening. After Schultz took the viewers through some of the goading by Republicans who are trying to get President Obama to do their dirty work for them and go after our New Deal social safety nets, and a clip of Ronald Reagan explaining that Social Security does not contribute to the deficit, he asked Sanders if he trusted President Obama not to cave into their demands.

Sanders said no, but if enough of us make our voices heard along with the slew of progressive groups who are pushing back hard against these potential cuts, he feels he will be responsive to the voters. All I can say is I hope he's right about the President listening, and I know he's right about the need for everyone who doesn't want to see these programs cut to make their voices heard and get on the phone, email, write letters, call and make sure that both President Obama and your members of Congress know to how you feel.

They need to be hearing from someone besides the Ed Rendell and Pete Petersons of the world. I'm grateful that we've got Ed Schultz giving us a break from the otherwise constant drumbeat on his network, calling going after our social safety nets adult, serious and balanced in exchange for Republican hostage taking. on raising the debt ceiling after their party spent like drunken sailors and now don't want to pay their credit card bill.

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Bernie was still pushing for one item that would help with our deficit that sadly has gone nowhere with those looking out for the 1 percent since it was introduced over a year ago, a tax on Wall Street speculation:

Legislation was introduced on Wednesday to impose a financial transaction tax on the trading of stocks, bonds and derivatives. The measure would reduce gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy, and significantly reduce the deficit without harming average Americans. "This bill offers us a clear choice. We can balance the budget on the backs of working Americans and senior citizens on fixed incomes or we can ask the gamblers on Wall Street to pay a little bit more in taxes," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a cosponsor of the bill.

Under the proposal, there would be a speculation fee of 0.03 percent on credit default swaps, derivatives, stocks, bonds, and other financial transactions. It would yield about $200 billion in new revenue over the coming decade. The lead sponsor in the Senate is Tom Harkin. Rep. Peter DeFazio filed companion legislation in the House.

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I'm not necessarily some fan of former Gov. Ed Rendell and I've watched him step all over some of the Democrats' messaging of late when it came to the attack ads we've seen from the Obama campaign for Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital. I was glad to see him jump on Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart with his attempt to deflect from Romney not releasing his tax returns with the standard Republican talking point, which is the fantasy that President Obama refuses to talk about his record on the economy and job creation.

As Rendel pointed out, President Obama has talked a lot about what he's done to try to get Americans back to work and sadly what wasn't hit on here enough is the amount of Republican obstruction he's had to deal with in the process. The fact that Schieffer had on so many guests at once on this week's Face the Nation, on top of him insisting that the topic be changed probably had a lot to do with no follow up in that regard being part of the conversation.

Our horrid "mainstream media" and the beltway Villagers love the he said, she said back and forth, but rarely want any real analysis of who's telling the truth and who's lying, as we just got right here from Schieffer. He barely admits that the GOP Rep is probably full of it and then is ready to move on, because we all know more arguing between the rest of his guests is so much more important than whether one of them just lied to the audience.

Progressives may not like that we got a watered down health care law instead of Medicare for all or that President Obama hasn't done enough to brow beat Republicans in public for the fact that they really don't care about governing this country and would rather obstruct than make sure our government functions. That said, despite what a lot of his base thinks about how he's governed, President Obama has spoken often about what he managed to get accomplished regardless of the record amount of obstruction he's had to deal with.

This GOP Rep has his talking points down pat, but he refuses to accept any responsibility for his own party and how they've failed to govern and failed to cooperate in making sure our country functions and that jobs are created. Someone just coming home to take a month and a half off after they refused to pass a farm bill when there are massive droughts across the country should be disqualified for having anything to say about anything when it comes to how someone else in government is going their job.

I'd also really love to see that talking point about Romney debunked for once and for all and that talking about the economy just has to be "good for" his campaign. Why? What evidence is there that anything he wants to do would help our economy? But we hear that repeated over and over by the beltway media. "If we're talking about the economy, it's good for Romney." I say tell me why, because I see no evidence of that being remotely true.

Transcript below the fold.

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Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) on Sunday advised presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to pick tea party favorite Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) as his running mate.

During a panel discussion about Romney's selection for the Republican ticket, CBS host Bob Schieffer asked Rendell if he had a prediction.

"I just want to go on record, I'm for Michele Bachmann for vice president," Rendell laughed. "I want everyone to be clear about that."

"But I do think that Gov. Romney has chosen the right criteria," the former Pennsylvania governor continued. "He's going to pick someone who he believes is ready to be president. Gov. [Bob] McDonnell would fit that bill. So would Sen. [Rob] Portman and some of the others that are being talked about."

"People don't vote for vice president. Although, let me say that I believe that America has a spectacular vice president [in Joe Biden], who's done just an amazing job. And I think that weighs on President Obama's side."

It's no secret that Rendell believes that Bachmann would scare independent voters away from supporting Romney in the same way former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin may have hurt Sen. John McCain's chances in 2008.

Bachmann has been mired in debt since suspending her failed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination earlier this year. Recent polls have indicated that her re-election to the House is not certain this year, with 34 percent of voters in her district giving a "poor" rating.

The Minnesota Republican has most recently come under fire from Republicans and Democrats for suggesting that that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, had infiltrated the U.S. government on behalf of radical Islamists in the Muslim Brotherhood.

(h/t: Politico)

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From ABC's This Week, after formally attacking Mitt Romney and saying if the Republicans nominate him, they're going to lose, Ann Coulter now says "Romney has had a Midas touch with everything he's done." I would imagine some of his investors might have felt that way. Not so much if you were unfortunate enough to work at one of the companies his firm took over.

COULTER: It's not just that I was magnificent at Bain and I should be president; it's that Romney has had a Midas touch with everything he's done.

RENDELL: Massachusetts?

COULTER: Hang on. You keep interpreting me. This is going to get through. First of all, yes, as governor of Massachusetts, with an 85 percent Democratic legislature, he -- he slashed spending, which is what our federal government needs.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you didn't like his health care plan in Massachusetts.

RENDELL: Great health care plan.

COULTER: Then, at Bain -- I mean, about, what 75 percent, 80 percent of the businesses that were going to bankrupt, he does turn around. He's a green eyeshade kind of guy. He will do what no president, not even Ronald Reagan, has ever done, and that is go through the budget and cut the spending. And there's a lot to be cut.

And the Olympics, which was also going bankrupt and is an enormous business. And the Midas touch man comes in and turns around this nearly bankrupt institution. It is not just Bain. It is everything he touches.

And these ads are unfair because -- and they keep changing, to my notice.

Because, if you look at what he's actually done and who's talking here, they're always the president of the union that shut down a plant in a business that was going out of -- bankrupt.

I'm not so sure the people who lived in Massachusetts would agree with her either.

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Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) on Sunday advised justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down President Barack Obama's landmark health care reform law in order to improve their public approval rating.

A New York Times/CBS News poll released last week showed that approval of the high court had slipped to 44 percent. Sixty percent now oppose life tenure for justices, and 76 percent believe their rulings are influenced by personal opinions.

"The American people are at a high ebb of their disapproval of Obamacare," Huckabee shrugged when confronted with the poll numbers on Sunday. "So if the Supreme Court wants to improve their standing if they see this poll, they will overturn Obamacare.

"First on the basis of the law and the Constitution -- which is the primary reason they ought to do it -- and then because they, in fact, realize that it's just bad policy."

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While discussing President Obama's announcement that he will run for reelection on Hardball, Chris Matthews allowed long time Republican campaign operative Ed Rollins to punt on whether he knew what the potential (or maybe not) Republican candidates were up to with the birther talk we've been hearing out of the likes of Donald Trump and others and tells Rollins that "everyone knows" "what they're up to with that."

Two points on this. First of all, Rollins has been around long enough to be one of the big players in Republican politics and in helping with the Republican's Southern Strategy over the last thirty years or so and he knows full well where this "crapola" that Matthews asked about is coming from. And second, just because the Republican Party has gone off the rails with catering to the right wing of their base, that doesn't make Ed Rollins "mainstream" as Matthews called him here. He's still a right winger who's not been above playing the race card in the past and his ideology is hard right.

I'm quite sure Matthews has been following politics for long enough to know this, but it didn't stop him from painting Rollins as some sort of moderate Republican that doesn't belong in the party any more. Never mind his work for Nixon, or Reagan or Bush or that he was just running Huckabee's campaign last time around who's hardly what anyone could consider a moderate as well. He's just a "mainstream guy" now! Oh goodie.

It's horrid just how far to the right our political dialog has moved for that to be the conventional wisdom from our beltway Villagers like Matthews. Not bats**t insane equals the new center. Wonderful.

And a last note on this birther crap that none of them ever want to admit. Calling the president a "Kenyan" is just code for the N-word they're not allowed to say in public and all of them damn well know it.

Transcript below the fold.

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