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Fox & Friends hosted Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council and an advisor to President Obama on economic policy, to preview the president’s State of the Union address tonight. Although Sperling told them that the focus would be on jobs and strengthening the middle class, the Curvy Couch Crew responded by obsessing over cuts to “entitlements” and carping about spending. Boosting employment? Helping the middle class? They neatly avoided the whole subject.

Sperling, when asked for a “20-second preview” said the president would hone in on “what we can do, working together, bi-partisan way, to strengthen the middle class.” He added that “a stronger middle class, better educated, working, in manufacturing, innovation, entrepreneurship, small business, these are the things that drive further economic growth.” He said that the administration has made “a lot of progress since the deep recession of 2009” but that “we have a lot further to go on job creation, on bringing down the deficit, and investing in our people.”

The only discussion about jobs was Brian Kilmeade’s comment that unemployment has just gone up in “year five” of Obama’s presidency. Apparently, he and his co-hosts thought that was all the consideration the subject deserved. He moved on to cite a Fox News poll that found 83% of respondents think government has a “spending problem.” From there, he took a swipe at Nancy Pelosi for saying otherwise and “asked” if the White House agrees.

In my opinion, Sperling should have sidestepped and highlighted what was obviously a pre-planned gotcha question that had nothing to do with the State of the Union address. But, instead, Sperling fell right into the trap of framing cuts as the Big Issue and, even worse, threw Democratic Leader Pelosi under the bus by saying the Obama administration believes “you absolutely have to bring down spending” but “in a balanced way.” He touted how much has already been cut and that there are more cuts on the table.

But, of course, that wasn’t good enough. Steve Doocy griped, “You’ve had five years, why hasn’t this administration addressed fixing entitlements with the Republicans?”

When it was Gretchen Carlson’s turn, she said, “One of the big buzzwords” in the SOTU would be “investment, which is another word for 'stimulus.'” She sneered, “Is the president really going to ask this country for more stimulus money?” She didn’t seem to care about how the previous stimulus increased employment for millions of Americans.

Sperling brought it back to jobs. “Today, we have now created twice as many jobs in this recovery as happened under President Bush in the previous recovery, even though this recovery (sic) was far deeper. …The economy has created 500,000 manufacturing jobs, we haven’t seen that in over 20 years. So you are totally right to suggest we have a lot further to go. That’s why the president has a singular focus on the economy, on middle class jobs, and making more progress.”

Oops, time up. But even as the segment was closing, Kilmeade was changing the subject. “It’s just hard to believe that we’re gonna print more money in order to pull ourselves out of it.”

The hosts could have questioned whether President Obama’s policies would accomplish any of his job-creating, middle-class-strengthening goals. But they were so busy talking about spending, they never got there. Which suggests the Republicans have no plan for the middle class and that that’s what the hosts really didn’t want to talk about.

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If anyone is still suffering from the illusion that we get any better programming from public broadcasting than we do from the majority of our corporate media, that is determined to push our politicians into going after our social safety nets, you need look no further than their regular Friday evening series featuring The New York Times' overpaid op-ed columnist and Republican turd polisher David Brooks and their favorite faux liberal, Mark Shields.

This week, Brooks was still carping about how the so-called "fiscal cliff" deal went over and that we didn't get any meaningful deficit reduction from the debacle, or in other words, he's mad that President Obama didn't give away the store and gut our social safety net programs. And for "balance" the viewers got treated to Shields repeating every right-wing trope in the book about how those who would like to see our New Deal programs remain in place are expecting a "free lunch" or being selfish because they don't want to cut Social Security benefits and "don't want to pay" for the benefits they receive from government.

Who needs right-wing Republicans when you've got the likes of Shields out there repeating their talking points for them? And as I've written here along with a ton of others, no mention about what's really needed to solve our deficit problems without balancing budgets on the backs of the poor, working class and elderly. No mention about getting us back to full employment and what policies should be fixed to bring jobs back to the United States that pay a living wage. No mention of the enormous income disparity and concentration of wealth at the top. No mention of the fact that Social Security not adding to our deficit and that there are some fairly simple ways to keep it solvent for decades to come.

Instead it's more talk of who is acting like an "adult" by doing their best to make those gaps between the rich and the poor even worse. What irritates the hell out of me about shows like this is that there are people out there, like my dad, who watch this stuff and think it's unbiased programming because it's PBS.

It's really disheartening to see just how much the Pete Petersons of the world have managed to dominate this conversation, where instead of talking about what is driving up our health care costs, what to do to contain them and whether The Affordable Care Act is going to address those costs once the law is fully implemented, we're seeing discussions on every network from PBS to Fox to you name it in between, pretending as though all of those things exist in a vacuum and the only solutions are for the working class to make some more sacrifices. It's actually beyond disheartening. It's really disgusting and inexcusable.

Transcript via PBS below the fold.

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This week on Fox News Sunday, viewers were treated to yet another round of Bill Kristol giving advice to Republicans on how to negotiate on extending tax cuts for the middle class, or at least what he considers middle class.

After previously saying that Republicans are not going to be able to defend tax cuts for the wealthy, that they should not "fall on their sword" to defend millionaires, that a lot of the "tea party" groups won't care if millionaires pay more taxes and that they're going to look like they don't care about the middle class, Kristol was once again trying to get the line drawn at a million dollars in income instead of the $250 thousand threshold the President is insisting on.

Kristol went so far this time as to call raising taxes on everyone with incomes between $250K and a million "extreme" and opined about how hard it might be on those families if they're paying college tuition. These guys never seem to mind throwing additional tax burdens on those who are truly middle class all across America, or going after benefits for people on fixed incomes that rely on programs like Social Security and Medicare, but lord knows we can't burden someone who is making over a quarter of a million dollars a year with a slightly larger tax burden. They also love to give people the impression that those higher taxes would be paid on their entire income. They'd still be benefiting from the lower rates on their income below $250,000.

Transcript below the fold.

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From this Wednesday's Starting Point, Republicans aren't doing a very good job defending themselves for wanting to keep most Americans and our economy hostage to retain those tax cuts for the richest among us: GOP Rep. Has No Answer For Why Republicans Won’t Vote For Middle-Class Tax Cuts:

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, could not explain during an interview on Wednesday why House Republicans are holding middle- and low-income tax cuts hostage to the cuts for the wealthiest Americans in the fiscal cliff showdown. When pressed by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, Hensarling first cited complaints about spending, but when O’Brien asked why he couldn’t set spending levels aside and compromise on taxes first, he had nothing but unrelated talking points: [...]

Hensarling’s invocation of Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) proposal is not only not an answer to O’Brien’s question — as it doesn’t explain what’s wrong with the simple solution O’Brien poses — but it’s also not anything close to balanced. While Boehner’s plan contains an array of draconian spending cuts, it doesn’t propose any actual increased revenue, relying instead on the same voodoo as the Romney tax plan.

As Zack noted, his analysis on the electoral math is also wrong and irrelevant.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Ah yes... Ronald Reagan... that great man of the working people and the American middle class... or at least he was in the alternative reality that is called Peggy Noonan's brain. After her predictions of "Romney rising" in the polls and that the enthusiasm factor would "carry the day" for his big win, Noonan was asked by This Week host George Stephanopoulos about the fact that the presidential election wasn't even close.

Noonan gave the audience a big dose of revisionist history on Reagan. And like most Republicans since Romney lost the election, seems to believe that Republicans don't really need to do anything differently. They just need to work on their messaging. I hate to break it to you Peggy, but it's not just the rhetoric. It's your policies. And they haven't gotten any better since Reagan did his best to help destroy our middle class.

It does seem impossible for Nooners to have a conversation about anything, without dragging out St. Ronnie's corpse to worship. It's pretty humorous given the fact that their party is so far off the cliff these days that he wouldn't make it through a GOP primary race right now.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Peggy Noonan, one of the things they're going to have to absorb is one of the points you've made is that this election in the end actually wasn't all that close, President Obama, 330 electoral votes. They're still counting the popular vote...

NOONAN: Yes, they are.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... but he's above the -- he has more than a 3 percent lead over Mitt Romney right now.

NOONAN: Yeah. I think -- I mean, from the beginning, it struck me as this is not just the re-election of a president. This is the rebuffing, if that's the right word, of the Republicans.

Look, I think there are many lessons to be learned over this election. There was a not ideal candidate. It was a not ideal campaign, et cetera, et cetera. But, yes, America is -- in America, something's always being born. It's always changing. Demographically it's changing. At the end of the day, elections are actually about ideas. They're about the stands each party takes.

The Republicans do have to sit down and say, what are we doing? And as important, how are we doing it?

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From The Thom Hartmann Show -- How Ronald Reagan killed the American Dream:

Thom Hartmann rants about the policies of Ronald Reagan that allowed large corporations like Mitt Romney's Bain Capital to turn the American Dream into a nightmare for so many.

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I would really love to see Sam Seder get his own show at either MSNBC or Current TV. He did a fine job filling in for Chris Hayes on Up this weekend, and here's his opening from Sunday's show -- How Republicans are using the crisis of poverty... against Obama:

At the Values Voters Summit on Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan whose budget was approved by the House with sweeping cuts to aid for the poor responded to new figures from the Census Bureau this week showing that 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line last year—a rate basically unchanged from the year before—but a rate not seen in this country in nearly 20 years.

Here's what Ryan had to say about Obama's record on poverty:

"The Obama economic agenda failed, not because it was stopped, but because it was passed. And here is what we got: Prolonged joblessness across the country. Twenty-three million Americans struggling to find work. Family income in decline. Fifteen percent of Americans living in poverty. Here we are, after four years of economic stewardship under these self-proclaimed advocates of the poor, and what do they have to show for it? More people in poverty, and less upward mobility wherever you look."

It's not the first time this election cycle that we've seen the right raise the specter of the poor. But poverty is raised not to offer prescriptions or remedies but to be used as a cudgel, as a means of playing on middle class fears of losing ground by suggesting not so much that they, too, could become impoverished but that the threat to their economic stability is the poor themselves, who are taking that ground from them.

Calling President Obama the "food stamp President" is not bemoaning the plight of those Americans who, in the wake of a devastating financial crisis have lost the means to put food on the table for their families, but rather, to imply that some "other" is living large, while the rest of "us" struggle. That said, we do know something about the people Romney relies on and what they believe about poverty.

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Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the great Senator from the state of Alabama did his best to diminish the fact that the Senate just passed the Democratic tax plan to extend the Bush tax cuts for all income under $250,000, which all of the Republicans just voted against during this interview on Fox over the weekend.

Passing tax cuts for the 99 percent, well that's just playing games and a political statement in Sessions' world. Unlike the very serious Republicans who are determined to hang on to those Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. God knows they can't go raisin' taxes on those "job creators." The world would come to an end if we asked millionaires to pay a few more percentage points in taxes don't ya' know.

Sessions also managed to completely ignore the fact that Republicans were the ones holding the economy hostage the last time we had the threat of a government shutdown. He even went so far as to pretend that Democrats believe there's some sort of political benefit to that sort of gamesmanship. I'm not sure where he got that idea, because the fact that Congress allowed our credit rating to be lowered the last time Republicans pulled this stunt is one of the reasons that Congress' approval ratings are at an all time low right now.

Sessions seemed to be suffering from the same memory lapse as his fellow Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who tried blaming the cuts to military spending as part of the sequestration plan, when Republicans are the ones who insisted we make the defense cuts rather than raise taxes.

Sessions followed that by pretending that spending on food stamps is not stimulative to the economy (which is utterly false) and attacking those who are dependent on our social safety nets during this horrible economy that his party is primarily responsible for creating. It's kind of tough pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps when there are no jobs to be found, or very few due to the fact that the economy has not recovered and the fact that Republicans have been doing everything within their power to make sure it stays that way.

Naturally there was no mention by the Fox host Uma Pemmaraju about Republican governors laying off government workers so they can give their corporate campaign donors tax cuts, or the fact that the Republicans have blocked almost every bit of stimulus or the jobs bills that the Democrats have tried to get passed. Heaven forbid facts are ever allowed to get in the way of a Republican's talking points on Fox.

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For all the fearmongering we hear out of our politicians on the right about how heaven forbid we're going to turn into Greece, the one country you never hear them talk about any more is Iceland. The reason they don't is, as Cenk Uygur explained on his show this Tuesday, they took a different path than the United States after their financial crisis and nationalized the banks, threw some the people responsible for the crash in jail and bailed out the homeowners instead of worrying about only bailing out the banks. And now they're coming back and their economy is growing again.

FDL's Dave Dayden has been writing about the financial crisis in depth for some time and he visited the set of The Young Turks to discuss whether the United States should be looking to Iceland as a model to emulate as he wrote about here: Iceland Provides Blueprint for How to Deal With the Financial Crisis:

I love this story. It’s one of those that calls to mind the old Margaret Mead dictum, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger.

Since the end of 2008, the island’s banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population, according to a report published this month by the Icelandic Financial Services Association.

So does the story end there? Did the people revolt and the banks give in, leading to a lower standard of living or some financial disaster or something? No. Debt deleveraging successfully brought back the Icelandic economy.

The island’s steps to resurrect itself since 2008, when its banks defaulted on $85 billion, are proving effective. Iceland’s economy will this year outgrow the euro area and the developed world on average, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates. It costs about the same to insure against an Icelandic default as it does to guard against a credit event in Belgium. Most polls now show Icelanders don’t want to join the European Union, where the debt crisis is in its third year.

The island’s households were helped by an agreement between the government and the banks, which are still partly controlled by the state, to forgive debt exceeding 110 percent of home values. On top of that, a Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 found loans indexed to foreign currencies were illegal, meaning households no longer need to cover krona losses.

We’ve heard in this country for the past several years of housing crisis that principal forgiveness rewards bad actors and causes moral hazard, and that we can’t do that to the poor, put-upon banks. Well guess what? Debt write-downs work. They generate a wealth effect among the population, and they help to end balance-sheet recessions and bring about economic growth. What’s more, Icelandic home values came back, just 3% off their September 2008 pre-crisis level. You can take the example of Iceland or you can take the example of the rest of Europe. It’s your choice. But the facts reveal that austerity is counter-productive, while debt forgiveness is extremely productive.

More there so go read the rest. Dave's interview with Cenk below the fold.

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I don't know about anyone else, but I feel there's something rather disconcerting about about watching four extremely rich American immigrants who were all born on third base, discussing the reasons for lack of upward mobility in the United States, but that's exactly what we got here on CNN's weekend show, Your Money.

I guess they couldn't find anyone who actually grew up as a member of the working class or a union member or leader to potentially counter the likes of Mort Zuckerman, and statements such as this one that are inevitable when you allow him on the air:

ZUCKERMAN: Let me just say I really support what Arianna has just described. I think there are huge problems in this country and a lot of it, in my judgment, stems not from capitalism but from the government.

I'll focus on the first one, which is we have done a terrible job in providing enough education for the children of this country. There's a whole mismatch in terms of the number of people coming out looking for jobs and the qualifications that people need for jobs, particularly those who are educated, particularly in the world of science and technology.

There are shortages of people, there are literally millions of open jobs because we don't train --

VELSHI: But why does the free market not solve that problem?

ZUCKERMAN: Because the education is a government function. If there ever was a public function in this country from the days it started, it's public education and we've done a lousy job. Part of it is frankly because we have lousy teachers.

Part of the reason we have lousy teachers is we have teachers union that say won't deal with those issues. So there are lots of reasons why education is not being properly handled in this country.

But to me if I could think of one thing that would change it, it would be to change our system of education and make sure that our children were properly educated.

I can think of a lot of reasons as to why we are lacking upward mobility in the U.S., like outsourcing, a race to the bottom on wages (which is what Zuckerman is really advocating for here), union busting, corporate raiders and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney and his ilk, our terrible trade laws, lowering taxes on the rich, not regulating the financial sector, privatizing our commons, and some of the issues they did touch on during this segment. But not being able to fire enough of those terrible greedy overpaid teachers that have those damned unions representing them is not one of them that makes my list.

And Zakaria wasn't much better with basically saying we have to choose between our social safety nets or investing in infrastructure and education as though we can't do something about the unfairness in our tax structure and controlling the costs of providing medical benefits to Americans, like say, single-payer, and do both. I will give him credit though for admitting that austerity isn't going to solve our economic problems and at least bothering to mention that the people who are still employed are in the jobs you can't outsource. It would have been nice to hear the topic of the pure greed of a few and the race to the bottom that got us there though, which I don't expect from the likes of CNN. They play the same "fair and balanced" game Fox does. They're just not as blatant about it.

Full transcript below the fold.

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