Never mind the flip-flopping on his stance on immigration or whether he's hoping his family and their supporters will be doing their part to give Americans a big heaping helping of revisionist history when it comes to his brother's time in office, as Ring of Fire's Mike Papantonio and guest Sam Seder reminded their listeners this week, there is a whole host of other issues that the public should know about if Jeb Bush does actually throw his hat into the ring and runs for president in 2016.

As Pap noted, it's time to stop this campaign before it starts, because we sure as hell can't count on our "mainstream media" to do their part and tell their viewers that Jeb Bush has every bit as much baggage as his brother.

It seems Florida's current Gov. Rick Scott isn't the only one with problems involving Medicare fraud: Jeb Bush Lobbied On Behalf Of Infamous Medicare Swindler, Says Former HHS Secretary.

He was right there with the rest of the PNAC neocons who brought us the invasion of Iraq.

Mother Jones has more on some of the Bush family corruption problems mentioned here along with a host of others in this post: Bush Family Value$.

And as Sam discussed during the interview, eight years is probably not long enough to erase the nation's collective memory about just what a disaster George W. Bush was and for Jebbie to be out there trying to revive the family name. Sadly if the Villagers in the corporate media who care more about a horse race than issues have their way, no one will ever discuss any of Bush's past or he and his family's corruption.

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Rush Limbaugh says that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia should be "honored" to be compared to be compared to him over the justice's recent suggestion that voting rights were a "racial entitlement."

During oral arguments about the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act last week, Scalia had pointed out that the law had enjoyed multiple nearly-unanimous reauthorizations because lawmakers were scared to be seen voting against discrimination, calling it “a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Several media outlets -- like Mother Jones and Salon -- noted that Scalia's argument was not unlike something that would have been expected from Limbaugh. And MSNBC's Al Sharpton observed that the Supreme Court justice had a history of taking cues from Fox News and conservative radio hosts.

On Monday, Limbaugh declared that he would be "honored" to be compared to himself and so Scalia should be too.

"Imagine that!" Limbaugh exclaimed. "Arguably one of the most well-endowed intellects in court's history, Antonin Scalia, was accused of sounding like me. And I'm sure it's a big day for him too!"

"This is one of those things that goes both ways. I know if I were Antonin Scalia, I would be honored. Just like I am honored to be compared to him."

(h/t: Media Matters)

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Georgia state Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers recently convened the Republican caucus at the Georgia State Capitol to discuss an alleged conspiracy between President Barack Obama, non-governmental organizations, state government entities and chambers of commerce to create a United Nations communist dictatorship.

Mother Jones' Tim Murphy on Wednesday reported that the meeting had included a presentation by Field Searcy, a conservative activist who was booted from the Georgia Tea Party over conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The main focus of the event was something called Agenda 21, which conservatives warn is move towards dictatorship by "expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities." Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich even "explicitly repudiate[d] what Obama has done on Agenda 21" during a primary debate last year.

The meeting of Republican lawmakers in Georgia was held on Oct. 11, but Bryan Long of the progressive group Better Georgia told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that his group delayed release of the video because of media focus on the presidential campaign. Better Georgia was able to record about 52 minutes of video before being escorted from the building.

The event also included Fox News contributor Dick Morris, who cautioned lawmakers that Obama would "force everyone into the cities from whence our ancestors fled."

"Our own governments are doing this," Searcy said of the Agenda 21 "conspiracy to transform America from the land of the free, to the land of the collective."

Searcy explained that the government was using "a process known as the Delphi technique" to convince suburbanites to move into the inner cities.

"The Delphi technique was developed by the Rand Corporation during the Cold War as a mind-control technique," the conservative activist insisted. "It's also known as 'consensive process.' But basically the goal of the Delphi technique is to lead a targeted group of people to a pre-determined outcome while keeping the illusion of being open to public input."

One slide presented at the meeting compared Obama's alleged plot to "Stalin's Five Year Plan" and "Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward."

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Rogers introduced legislation in January to recognize "the destructive and insidious nature of the United Nations Agenda 21."

That bill stated that "according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded by society and the environment which would be accomplished by socialists and communist redistribution of wealth."

(h/t: Addicting Info)

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It seems Bill O'Reilly is terribly upset that that damned communist Mother Jones went and did something horrible, like letting us here Romney's own words from his time at Bain Capital, and so naturally he does his best to try to deflect from the situation by attacking the messenger.

I hate to break it to Bill-O, but if he thinks the average voter out there who hasn't been propagandized by Fox and right wing hate talk is going to hear the word "harvest" and not think of a vulture capitalist that just wants to extract the wealth from a company and raid pensions and salaries, I think he's sadly mistaken.

And you've just got to love the irony of O'Reilly in one breath defending the type of business Mitt Romney ran, and then in the next bemoaning median income going down. Par for the course for a network that keeps telling its viewers that everything that's wrong with the world started the day America elected Barack Obama.

Talking Points Memo & Top Story

The far-left magazine Mother Jones (possibly one of Fidel Castro's favorite publications) has put out another old video of Mitt Romney, in which he says Bain Capital 'was formed to invest in start-up companies and ongoing companies ... then harvest them at a significant profit.' Even though Mother Jones is appalled, that's what capitalism is! You grow companies, you make them more profitable, then if you're lucky you sell them for lots of money. Sometimes the free market is brutal, but it does provide vast opportunity for those willing to work hard and take chances.

Capitalism has made the USA the most powerful nation on Earth; it's the primary reason people all over the world are desperate to come here. But apparently some who support President Obama don't much like capitalism. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who criticized Romney's comments, doesn't like the fact that some American companies maximize profits by limiting compensation to workers and controlling their hiring. Reich wants guaranteed wages, salaries, and tenure, all the things that happen in socialistic countries. The question is, does President Obama believe the same things that Dr. Reich and Mother Jones magazine believe? The answer to that question is ... maybe.

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Samuel L. Jackson admonishes apathetic voters for this year's presidential election, reminding them what the stakes are. via Mother Jones:

Jackson, 63, narrates the video in a Seussian fashion, paying homage to the audiobook he recorded for Adam Mansbach's children's book sendup Go the F**k to Sleep. The clip consists primarily of the actor, clad in jeans and a black beret, magically appearing in houses and hurling obscenities and Democratic talking points at unsuspecting white suburbanites.

In one scene, for example, Jackson intones:

Sorry, my friend, but there's no time to snore.
And out-of-touch millionaires just declared war.
On schools, the environment, unions, fair pay.
We're all on our own if Romney has his way.
And he's against safety nets, if you fall, tough luck.
So I strongly suggest that you wake the f**k up.

The civically engaged actor promptly rematerializes to shout at the disaffected teens who organized bake sales to support of Obama's 2008 bid but have since lost interest:

STOP BULLSHITTIN'. GET OUT THERE AND SELL SOME CAKES AND COOKIES. NOOOWWWW!!!

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From this Sunday's Up With Chris Hayes, his Story of the Week where he discusses the disconnect between the ultra-wealthy campaign donors who we saw asking painfully ridiculous questions to Mitt Romney during that secretly recorded fundraiser of his from earlier this year, and the lives of the rest of us. As Chris asked, how different would our politics look if the Romney's of the world were forced to sit down with and listen to rooms full or ordinary workers day after day instead of these out of touch, wealthy plutocrats who do not share the same concerns as most of the country.

Hayes: This is what plutocracy looks like:

The video of Mitt Romney talking to donors that Mother Jones posted last week is an incredible artifact from an entire culture and civilization that exists in our midst, but which we hardly ever get to see: the world of the high-end donor. And, whoo boy it is not pretty. The first thing that jumps out is that a lot of the questions are really inane.

In fact, I almost feel sorry for Mitt Romney having to sit there and politely smile and nod as donors pick through their salad and tell him that what he really needs to do to win is "take the gloves off" or "show your face more on tv"—something he's been doing more or less non-stop.

The folks in the room all but advise Romney to simply tour around the country reading passages of Ayn Rand novels out loud at his campaign rallies and hectoring the idiotic masses to bow before their obvious superior. Romney, who is many things, but not a total fool, gently explains that that probably is not the best way to go about attempting to win over the Obama voters he needs to be elected. Almost none of the advice Romney gets during the tape is very good, some of it's terrible.

That's not novel, of course, everyone who watches politics closely thinks they have the secret insight that will win the election. Unlike the millions of other political junkies and backseat drivers, this small coterie of folks, by sole virtue of their wealth, gets to impose their invaluable insights on the actual candidate. It would be like the head coach of the Giants, Tom Coughlin, having to spend most of the week between games meeting with the opinionated fans who call into sports talk radio with their theories about how the Giants should be blitzing on every down, or lining up two quarterbacks under center.

This is the power of money not just in politics, but in society more broadly: the power to make people listen to your ideas no matter how dumb or uninformed. The other thing that stood out to me was just how under siege, persecuted, and victimized these extremely wealthy people appear to feel.

Keep in mind we're talking about a fundraiser that cost $50,000 a plate. Fifty thousand dollars also happens to be the median household income in the U.S. So the kind of wealth you need to have to be in the room with Romney is the kind of wealth that means you can just pony up as much money as many Americans make in a year to listen to Mitt Romney trash talk the very people who make in a year the same amount you just ponied up for dinner. Read on...

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Bay Buchanan, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney's campaign, on Sunday doubled down on the Republican presidential nominee's comment that 47 percent of Americans refused to take personal responsibility for their lives by asserting that the entire country was "a nation of people dependent on their government."

In video published by Mother Jones last week, Mitt Romney had told wealthy donors that 47 percent the country were "dependant" on government and were going to vote for President Barack Obama.

“My job is is not to worry about those people,” Romney declared. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

During a panel segment on NBC's Meet the Press, Democratic strategist Dee Dee Myers said that Romney's comments showed that he had a "very limited universe" and "really has no feel for what real people are doing."

"To characterize the personal life of Mitt Romney as Dee Dee has is to show that she does not know the man, she does not know what he has done," Buchanan shot back. "This is a man who has spent a life in serving others. That is the basis of what he believes."

"We are in perilous times in this country," she continued. "We are looking at financial ruin."

"We are a nation of people dependant on their government, and that is what Barack Obama gives us. And he promises more of that in four more years."

(h/t: Think Progress)

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As Media Matters noted, if Mitt Romney was hoping to find some friendly territory after the previous day with the leaked tapes of his "47 percent" rant and the disastrous press conference that followed later that evening, he wasn't going to find any friendlier territory than Neil Cavuto's show on Fox.

Romney Turns To Fox News' Chief "47 Percent" Antagonist: Neil Cavuto:

Mitt Romney, taking a considerable amount of heat over leaked videos showing him bashing 47 percent of voters as incorrigible moochers, will reportedly sit down with Fox News' Neil Cavuto this afternoon for an interview. From a damage control perspective, that move makes a lot of sense. You'd be hard-pressed to find a media figure more antagonistic toward the poor, more contemptuous of recipients of government benefits, and more sympathetic to Romney's line of attack than Neil Cavuto.

To recap, Mother Jones published a surreptitiously filmed video of Romney at a fundraiser telling donors that "there are 47 percent who are with [President Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims ... These are people who pay no income tax." Romney added: "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

It's an argument tailor-made for Cavuto's sensibilities.

Lots more there with Cavuto trashing the poor as moochers and bemoaning the rich being asked to pay more in taxes with lots of video to boot. And as TPM noted, Mittens decided to play the "I know you are, but what am I?" game again during the interview as well -- Mitt Romney To Obama: No, You Have A Hidden Video Problem:

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Romney adviser Bay Buchanan on Tuesday declared that the release of leaked campaign videos showing the Republican presidential nominee writing off 47 percent of the country as "dependant" and "entitled" was just a "bump in the road."

In an edited video published by Mother Jones on Monday, Mitt Romney had told wealthy donors that almost half of the country "pay no income tax" and were going to vote for President Barack Obama.

"My job is is not to worry about those people," Romney asserted. "I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

On Tuesday, Buchanan had the unenviable task of trying to do damage control while being grilled by CNN host Soledad O'Brien.

"As a candidate, he can't worry about those he can't get," Buchanan explained, adding that the media should be focusing on "one out of every six Americans are in poverty today and that 47 million are taking food stamps in order to take care of themselves and their families."

"Listen, I fully understand the strategy is to turn to the 'real problem' and talk about something else, but I'm going to keep you on this," O'Brien said. "He says 47 percent of Americans pay no tax. That's not correct. ... Forty-seven percent of those people who pay no income tax -- look at that chart there -- 61 percent of those folks, they're paying payroll tax, money is coming out of their paycheck. It's being described as the myth of sort of the deadbeat nation."

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David Corn, who broke the story about the Romney fundraiser which we posted here -- Mitt Romney's Uncensored Disdain for Poor People and Minorities -- joined Rachel Maddow with the latest updates on the story and revealed who the host was at the event where Romney made his remarks.

Here's more from his latest article at Mother Jones -- Romney "47 Percent" Fundraiser Host: Hedge Fund Manager Who Likes Sex Parties:

When Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser dismissed all Barack Obama voters as moochers and victims—showing disdain for nearly half of the American electorate—he was speaking at the home of controversial private equity manager Marc Leder in Boca Raton on May 17, 2012. This is evident from references made by Romney within the full video recording of the event that has been reviewed by Mother Jones.

When Mother Jones first disclosed secret video of Romney's remarks, we were obliged to not reveal details regarding the time and place of the event. That restriction has been lifted, as the story has garnered attention throughout the media. [...]

Romney made those remarks before donors who had paid $50,000 a plate to attend the dinner at Leder's swanky house.

Leder has long been a fan of Romney. In January, the New York Times reported:

Years ago, a visit to Mr. Romney's investment firm inspired Mr. Leder to get into private equity in the first place. Mr. Romney was an early investor in some of the deals done by Mr. Leder's investment company, Sun Capital, which today oversees about $8 billion in equity.

Read on...

And as Rachel also noted, the Obama campaign responded to Mitt Romney's remarks and here is their statement:

CHICAGO – “It's shocking that a candidate for President of the United States would go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that half the American people view themselves as ‘victims,’ entitled to handouts, and are unwilling to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their lives. It’s hard to serve as president for all Americans when you’ve disdainfully written off half the nation.” – Jim Messina, Obama for America Campaign Manager