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In case anyone did not already know, Rush Limbaugh is not the only blowhard, lying wingnut in his family. His brother, David Limbaugh was a guest on C-SPAN's Washington Journal this Saturday morning. Apparently he is not getting quite enough help from World Net Daily and Fox News to promote his book “The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic,” and C-SPAN thought they'd give him a hand as well.

Limbaugh was asked by a caller how Republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility when all of the Republican presidents in his lifetime ran up the deficit and the fact that they only seem to care about tax cuts while calling for cuts to “entitlements.”

Limbaugh's response was to blame the Democrats for what happened under St. Ronnie, start talking about Bill Clinton and give Gingrich credit for his budget and then say no one should care what they've done in the past, but look to the future instead. And hey, let's adopt Paul Ryan's budget plan, which he pretends would do something to fix the problems with the deficit instead of what it really does, which is to give more tax cuts to the rich, take it out of the hides of the working class, privatize our social safety nets and increase the deficit, not lower it.

A little later in the show, another called rightfully called him out for what he is, which is the lunatic fringe of the Republican party and that we've been living with the results of thirty years of Reaganomics and the fact that Republicans' solutions for everything is tax cuts for the rich. The caller also talked about the bank bailouts at the expense of the working class and the fact that businesses are sitting on trillions of dollars instead of investing while they hope to see another Republican make their way into the White House.

Limbaugh's response was to claim that the tax cuts are not responsible for our deficits, blame it on “entitlements,” by which I'm sure he's lumping Social Security in with our other social safety nets, and claim that there's no way anyone should be asking anyone to pay higher rates for investment income and that those rates should be lower than those paid for their actual labor.

This guy's a piece of work. C-SPAN should be forced to fact-check these guys when they come on this show and lie like a rug, preferably in real time with rebuttals running in the chryon just below their face on the screen.

He was recently on Fox getting a Hannity-job while promoting this book as well, which you can read more about from our friends at News Hounds here: Fox Promotes Obama As "Great Destroyer" Meme In Concert With Limbaugh.

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I don't always get a chance to catch C-SPAN's morning call in show, Washington Journal, but when I do, I can usually immediately tell which callers have been watching way too much Fox News or listening to too much hate talk radio. They've got all of their talking points down pat. Here's Charles from Bella Vista, Arkansas:

CHARLES: Say, Krugman and the people in Congress, they want to spend the money. We're $16 trillion in debt and we borrow forty cents on every dollar. Our children and grandchildren can't afford this.

Krugman keeps saying, well we've got to spend money to get out of the hole. You ask him what country or what instance that ever worked and all he can ever say is well, they never spent enough money to really prove my theory. And free trade and capitalism has worked fine. And when the government gets out of the way...

SWAIN: And so Charles, let me ask you about the situation we're in right now with this fiscal crisis and the aftermath. You want that Washington still stay totally out of the way? No more spending? You don't want the Fed to do anything? What's your prescription?

CHARLES: Absolutely. I don't want the government in anything. Free trade and capitalism has worked. This country made it. They become great by standing back and lettin' the people do the work.

And people, you can't steal from one person to give to another. The gimme' people are now at 50 percent and you can't win that argument. We get a little more people that want something for nothing, it's never going to come out of the hole.

First off, as to the lie about Krugman, he has cited an example of when spending got us out of an economic hole and it was this pesky little thing the caller apparently doesn't know anything about called a world war. Second, he's repeating the lie we hear from the right that half of the country doesn't pay any taxes, when that's only true if you're looking at income tax alone and ignoring all the other taxes everyone pays, and even Republicans used to agree with leveling the playing field in that regard with something called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which was supported by that terrible Socialist and wealth redistributor Ronald Reagan.

The caller also ignored that a whole bunch of the people who are not paying income taxes are seniors who are on fixed incomes and should not be paying any taxes on their very limited retirement incomes. I would love to be able to find out if he's one of them. It would not surprise me since he sounded like he could be older.

And last off, when he talks about those who are wanting "something for nothing," we all know he's not talking about white people. I have a feeling no one's ever pointed out to this man that more white Americans than black are receiving food stamps right now.

Not that it would probably make much difference if anyone tried. These people have their preconceived notions and they're sticking to them and facts be damned. They can go get their own set of facts from the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh instead.

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I was fairly sure that wingnut Rep. Steve King would say something completely ridiculous or untrue as soon as I saw his name on the list of guests on C-SPAN's Washington Journal earlier this week. The crew over at Think Progress proved me right when they flagged this portion of King's interview that morning:

Steve King Claims Obamacare Will Grow The Number Of Uninsured, Calls For ‘Personal Responsibility’:

During an appearance on CSPAN’s Washington Journal Thursday morning, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) claimed that the Affordable Care Act would increase the number of Americans without health insurance, dismissing analysis showing that 30 million people would gain coverage under the law.

“Everybody in America has access to health care, and we even have many many organizations that make sure they fill those holes,” King explained. “The effort was to increase the number of insured in America and that number does not look like it will increase under Obamacare”:

KING: We’re actually going to get more people uninsured under Obamacare and this creates the foundation for a one-size-fits-all federally-run socialized medicine system. We’re not completely there and I think we are a lot better off to let the free markets do this and encourage people to be personally responsible.

King’s analysis of health policy couldn’t be more wrong. While organizations and hospitals do provide emergency services to uninsured Americans, the cost of that uncompensated care is shifted to private premium payers, resulting in higher health care spending system-wide. Obamacare accepts King’s premise of encouraging personal responsibility and will require able-bodied citizens to pay for their own health care expenses beginning in 2014.

As they noted, King also expressed his opposition to requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions and allowing kids to stay on their parent's health insurance plans, which may end up being at odds with his own leadership, once they finally release their alternative plan to the public.

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On this Wednesday morning's call in show on C-SPAN, Washington Journal, after first listening to a caller who talked about how badly George W. Bush screwed up the economy and that if we have another stolen election like the one that put him in office we might see another revolution, the discussion turned to George W. Bush's appearance at the New York Historical Society this week.

The guests were Sean Spicer, Republican National Committee, Communications Director and Brad Woodhouse, Democratic National Committee, Communications Director, and here's what Spicer had to say in defense of George W. Bush.

SPICER: I think he leaves a great legacy. I mean, in terms of what he did for job creation, getting this country... and obviously our attempts to deal with the war on terror. But I think, ironically, last night I was sitting there trying to do my taxes and thinking “Oh my gosh, the so-called Bush tax cuts are expiring” and how that will actually, you know, for what I owe this year, how much more I'm going to have to pay next year because of that.

So I think a lot of people are having buyers... are looking back saying George W. Bush actually did have some... a strong vision for this country and you know, there's been bumper stickers all over town saying “Miss me yet?” And I think a lot of people are going, wow, he actually, compared to what we have now... you do look and talk about the economy and say, hey, that was probably much better than where we are now.

Remember, the Democrats had a problem when unemployment was at 4.9 percent that Bush wasn't tackling jobs and the economy. Now it's at 8.2 and there's talk about how great the President's doing tackling it so...

WOODHOUSE: I am so glad the RNC just embraced the fall of 2008. That's where we got the Bush economy. That's where we got from the tax cuts. That's what we got from the deregulation of Wall Street. That's what we got from the deregulation of polluters and big oil, is we got the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the RNC just embraced that as an example to go forward.

It's too bad Woodhouse didn't have a copy of Steve Benen's bikini graph handy to show Spicer since he decided it was a good idea to brag about job creation under George W. Bush. The numbers today aren't great, but we aren't falling off a cliff like we were when Bush left office.

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From this Tuesday morning's Washington Journal on C-SPAN, apparently Bloody Bill Kristol is tired of Republicans having to deal with Ron Paul for his stance in opposition to some of our military interventions and would just be happy if he left the party all together instead of the current crop of GOP candidates having to worry about "being nice to him" during the debates.

This obviously didn't sit too well with one of his supporters who called in directly after the comments were made. Leave it to the neo-con Kristol to attack Paul for one of the few things I agree with him on.

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On Tuesday's morning call-in show on C-SPAN, Washington Journal, a caller from Texas demonstrates what happens to your brain after watching too much Fox News and paying attention to Red State's Erick Erickson and his ridiculous "We are the 53%" campaign he launched in response to the Occupy Wall Street protests.

SAMUAL FROM TEXAS: I think a lot of people are getting onto the whole 9-9-9 plan because it's something easy to remember and you know, we're just overburdened with the tax system we have. People lately are really talking the ninety nine percent verses the one percent. I think something more here is another number – it's forty six, fifty four. I may be a little off there but I believe those are the numbers.

Forty six percent of Americans or right around there pay no personal income tax. And the other fifty four percent pay all of it and I think that's the real number and you know, we're basically having to carry the rest of the country on our back. And I'm not saying, you know, all these ninety nine percenters out there are poor people or anything. I think a lot of them are just people who've been handed everything in their life. But I like the ninety nine plan. If nothing else, everybody starts to pay their fair share, instead of one part of the country carrying the rest who's not doing anything.

Listen to the caller try to respond after host Greta Brawner points out that under Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan, billionaire investor Warren Buffett would likely pay no income tax at all as the Huffington Post reported here -- Warren Buffett Would Most Likely Pay No Income Tax Under Herman Cain's '999' Tax Plan: Analysis.

You can almost smell the hairs burning off their head through the television screen. Sadly, Brawner did not point out the the caller that even though many do not pay any federal income taxes, they pay plenty of other taxes and many of them are also Social Security recipients.

Solidarity Pizza Fund:

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From C-SPAN's Washington Journal, during open phones on a question related to a recent E.J. Dionne Washington Post column: "Where is the left's tea party movement equivalent?" Following a perfectly sane question on Twitter from someone on the left, host Libby Casey had this exchange with a Republican caller from New York.

CRAIG FROM DOWNSVILLE, NY: I believe the reason the tea party is viewed as a peaceful force is because the tea party is a peaceful force. And the tea party's not top down, as the leftists would like to have you believe. The tea party... my tea party was started when one of my neighbors asked me to go on a bus trip to Washington D. C. to try to put an end to the government ruling the people, as opposed to the people running the government.

Now you look at these leftists protests and you tell me there's someone there you're proudly associated with, looking at their behavior. And then you look at the tea party record and then you look at the way the left wing media represents everybody. Then you tell me that's an honest and fair comparison.

CASEY: Craig, after you went to that... I'm assuming you did go to the rally in Washington...

CRAIG: What's that?

CASEY: I'm assuming you did go to that tea party rally...

CRAIG: I have been to every rally in Washington...

CASEY: And what have you done to keep up with it?

CRAIG: And I'm not interested in having the public decide what my health care is going to be. I'd prefer to do that myself.

CASEY: Okay. What we're wondering is how you've stayed involved? What are you doing on the activism level locally in your community...

CRAIG: I'm a union laborer, and I do not accept what I consider to be propaganda at work. I spread the word of independence. I've got my shop steward reading Atlas Shrugged right now. That's what's going to happen. A little truth is going to be taught in this country instead of the propaganda that's been taught here for thirty years.

There are so many things wrong with this crazy person's phone call it's hard to know where to begin, but for one, I'm pretty sure he isn't aware of who was paying for those buses he was riding to go to those “tea party” rallies on Washington D.C. if he's even telling the truth about anything he's saying here and isn't just off his meds for the day. And second, if the man is actually in a union, he doesn't deserve to be.

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I try to monitor C-SPAN's morning call-in show Washington Journal when I get a chance just to see what viewers of that network and the public are saying about the topics of the day and this one jumped out at me this morning as being from someone who's been watching too much Fox News or for that matter possibly a lot of the rest of our corporate media with the right wing talking points this woman rattled off when weighing in on this debt ceiling kabuki theater.

How someone comes off thinking that President Obama sounds like a partisan when he has, to the dismay of liberals, bent over backwards to make concessions to Republicans, or says he's playing the "class warfare card" is beyond me, but obviously this person has no idea what "class warfare" even means, or that they're probably losing that war.

She also was informed enough to realize that there was a deficit commission put together that went nowhere and in her defense, the one thing she said here that I agreed with completely is that doing that again may very well be a colossal waste of time, but then she lost me with saying she really didn't understand this whole concept of the debt ceiling at all, and even though she admitted she was clueless on what they're debating about, claimed the whole thing is just some scare tactic by both sides.

It goes without saying that since she does not understand what the debt ceiling is and thought it was about future spending, she obviously has no clue that this is about approving raising the debt ceiling for spending that the Congress has already approved, and not what they might spend in the future. It also seems pretty obvious she did not listen to the president's speech at all this week or she would already know that.

It pains me to hear just how misinformed our citizens are in the United States and this is just one example coming from someone who actually knows just enough to know that a deficit commission existed but not a whole lot else on the specifics of what's going on in this debate. This is your brain on Fox or after hearing too much right wing propaganda from somewhere else. There is class warfare going on. Unfortunately too many people don't even understand what that means or who is waging it.

Rough transcript below the fold.

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Grover Norquist was asked a very specific question about one of the talking points that we hear constantly from Republicans, that you can't raise taxes on the small businesses and "job creators" or you'll do terrible damages to those businesses and put them under and of course when he had some actual numbers put in his face, he couldn't defend it.

Rather than address the fact that yes, this is something Republicans claim over and over on the air and defend the talking point, Norquist punts and turns the conversation to tanning salon taxes being increased, the possibility of increasing taxes on big oil companies and whether or not you can trust President Obama to keep campaign promises with not raising taxes on anyone earning over $250,000 a year.

Sorry Grover, but that's not what the man asked you about. He asked if increasing someone's taxes who makes $300,000 a year by a pittance was really going to mean they didn't have the ability to create jobs any more and you got forced to tell the truth here, no, it won't. It's too bad the caller didn't get a chance to do a follow up with him because the useless C-SPAN hosts like Peter Slen here sure aren't going to.

KEN: The Republican argument says do not raise any taxes or the revenue side, because those are the job makers. And if we do that we're going to crush the jobs. Now explain, I want to understand this. So if somebody making $300,000, they've got a small business, they're creating jobs; the tax increases would be for over $250,000 and I think it's a 4% rate.

Now if I have that right, we're saying that the Democrats want to raise taxes for that $50,000 at 4%, $2000 annually on that $300,000 income, so that person's making $25,000 a month. We're going to raise their taxes $2000 a year, or $160 a month; so are we saying, are the Republicans saying that if you raise taxes on somebody making $25,000 a month, by $160, the equivalent of their cable bill, all of the sudden, their business is going to collapse?

NORQUIST: Umm... no. The concerns about what President Obama want to do on taxes under present structure, Obama wants to take the tax rate which is now 35% on individuals and companies, we're talking the uprate and take that up to 44%. He takes it up to 40% by by one and two and the 2001 tax cut. There are tax increases in Obama-care. On our web site at atr.org there's a list of all the tax increases that exist on, as part of Obama-care's nationalization of health care.

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After being asked if Rupert Murdoch's scandal in the U.K. might affect his operation here in the United States, Tucker Carlson, who is a frequent guest on Fox News, of course carries water for his Uncle Rupert on this morning's edition of C-SPAN's Washington Journal.

CARLSON: Well Fox News is a huge and vital part, as far as I can tell from the publicly available data on this question of News Corporation. Fox is a profit center. Fox is very successful and in my view for good reason. Um... Fox is fine. As far as I know Fox has not been implicated in this and I don't expect it will be.

Maybe someone should ask Carlson if he's read any of these posts by Media Matters.

Three Things You Should Know About NOTW's Hollywood Operation

9-11 Families: Investigate Murdoch In U.S.

Shareholder Lawsuit: Phone-Hacking Scandal Damaged News Corp.'s Image

Tucker went on to claim that a lot of the outrage strikes him as being politically motivated and said that if people are upset with what News of the World did when they were spying on people, they should be equally upset about the government doing it and that they're hypocrites if they're not. I don't remember ever hearing Tucker Carlson complain about the Patriot Act before this. And I would imagine that most of the people who are complaining about what Murdoch did don't like the Patriot Act too terribly much either and have voiced their opposition to it.

Finally Carlson was asked about the claims that Fox is ignoring the story and instead of answering the question, he immediately went on to attack the rest of the media that is covering it as being liberal and just having it out for Rupert Murdoch and Fox.

SCULLY: CNN and MSNBC, two of your former employers...

CARLSON: Yes.

SCULLY: ...have been running stories saying that Fox is ignoring this story.

CARLSON: Of course they are. They're Fox's competitors. Of course. They love it. The New York Times is going wall to wall. I mean this is like a new 9-11 for the New York Times. I was reading the Times a minute ago... I read the New York Times everyday. I think it's a great newspaper. It's a very left wing paper however and they're not good at hiding their agenda sometimes. Sometimes they are. But they've got a lot of good stuff on there in their pages, but they are just going hard on this story and gleefully so.

They don't like Rupert Murdoch. They don't like his politics. They hate Fox. They hate Fox's politics. Their editor, the guy who was the editor up until a couple of weeks ago has said so in public. So yeah, of course they're reveling in it, as is their right by the way. And you know, I understand that. When your enemy is in trouble, pounce.