Majority FM's Sam Seder and our friend Digby from Hullabaloo discuss the trial balloon on raising the Medicare age that was thrown out there by the administration this week, whether the administration still wants a "grand bargain" and what a bad idea it would be for them to give in to Republicans and their hostage taking by agreeing to raise that age.

As we've already discussed here over and over again, partially privatizing Medicare and throwing seniors to the mercy of the private insurance industry does nothing but shift costs and as Sam and Digby discussed, it's not even a smart move politically for the Democrats to consider making. They wrapped things up discussing what we might be in for with these debt ceiling negotiations after we get through the current round of hostage taking by Republicans.

From Majority FM:

Blogger Digby joins Sam Seder on the show to discuss the backlash against women in America today and Rush Limbaugh's role in waking the country up to it.

From the Majority Report, live M-F 11:30am EST and via daily podcast at http://Majority.FM:

Digby of the blog Hullabaloo joins Sam Seder as they talk Ron Paul, Gary John & Libertarianism as it relates to the 2012 elections.

With all of the talk about raising the retirement age, as Digby pointed out, here's some unconventional wisdom on the topic from James Galbraith.

ACTUALLY, THE RETIREMENT AGE IS TOO HIGH:

The most dangerous conventional wisdom in the world today is the idea that with an older population, people must work longer and retire with less. [...]

Such cuts have a perversely powerful logic: "We" are living longer. There are fewer workers to support each elderly person. Therefore "we" should work longer.

But in the first place, "we" are not living longer. Wealthier elderly are; the non-wealthy not so much. Raising the retirement age cuts benefits for those who can't wait to retire and who often won't live long. Meanwhile, richer people with soft jobs work on: For them, it's an easy call.

Second, many workers retire because they can't find jobs. They're unemployed -- or expect to become so. Extending the retirement age for them just means a longer job search, a futile waste of time and effort. [...]

In the United States, the financial crisis has left the country with 11 million fewer jobs than Americans need now. No matter how aggressive the policy, we are not going to find 11 million new jobs soon. So common sense suggests we should make some decisions about who should have the first crack: older people, who have already worked three or four decades at hard jobs? Or younger people, many just out of school, with fresh skills and ambitions?

The answer is obvious. Older people who would like to retire and would do so if they could afford it should get some help. The right step is to reduce, not increase, the full-benefits retirement age. As a rough cut, why not enact a three-year window during which the age for receiving full Social Security benefits would drop to 62 -- providing a voluntary, one-time, grab-it-now bonus for leaving work? Let them go home! With a secure pension and medical care, they will be happier. Young people who need work will be happier. And there will also be more jobs. With pension security, older people will consume services until the end of their lives. They will become, each and every one, an employer.

Our own Logan Murphy wrote about this back in August of 2009 when Thom Hartmann suggested something similar. Thom Hartmann: Lower The Retirement Age From 65 To 55:

As always, Thom Hartmann makes a lot of sense:

One of the most powerful forms of stimulus we could apply to our economy right now would be to lower the current Social Security retirement age from the current 65-67 to 55, and increase the benefits back to where they were in inflation-adjusted 1960s dollars by raising them between 10 to 20 percent (so people could actually live, albeit modestly, on Social Security).

The right-wing reaction to this, of course, will be to say that with fewer people working and more people drawing benefits, it would bankrupt Social Security and destroy the economy. But history shows the exact reverse.

Instead, it would eliminate the problem of unemployment in the United States. All those Boomers retiring would make room in the labor market for all the recent high-school and college graduates who are now finding it so hard to find a job.

Hartmann goes on in the article to discuss in detail about how lowering the retirement age would open up thousands of jobs nationwide, and how wages for working class Americans have been devastated since the days of Ronald Reagan and our old pal Alan Greenspan started gutting unions and trying to lower our standard of living.

Thom debated the issue with John Lott in the video above.

An epic rant on the politics of hard times:

My thanks to Digby for a Netroots Nation panel where she talked about translating economic jargon and creating a new economic narrative. Some of what she said is applied here.

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This has to be one of the most bizarre things I've seen in a long time. Chris Matthews has Howard Dean and Joan Walsh on to discuss the Shirley Sherrod debacle and what Andrew Breitbart did to slime her and the Obama administration's response and when both Walsh and Dean point out to Matthews that despite his assertions to the contrary, Breitbart's video was highly edited, Matthews goes ballistic on them and claims that the nearly hour long video wasn't edited because Breitbart included this bit.

Sherrod: That's when it was revealed to me that's it's about poor versus those who have. It's not so much about white... it is about white and black but it's not, you know... it opened my eyes. Because I took him to one of his own.

Apparently in Tweety's mind, Breitbart including that somehow absolved him from the editing of the tape he did. The more Walsh and Dean tried to point out to Matthews that the tape was edited and that what he was saying wasn't true, the more agitated he got.

Digby was kind enough to transcribe some of this nonsense for us and I've got a couple of theories for why Matthews acted the way he did. Her transcript along with what MSNBC aired in place of this along with part two of the segment they apparently didn't want anyone to watch below the fold.

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Lawrence O'Donnell talks to EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman about the claims that the oil is now "disappearing" from the Gulf of Mexico. There's no way in hell that much oil just goes away. Digby's got more on this here The Good News Is The Poison:

BP seems to have ably headed off the worst of the PR disaster by keeping the worst of the oil more or less off the shoreline. The actual disaster may have been made worse by the use of toxic chemicals. So it's all good.

That's what they want us to believe anyway. We need more Hugh Kaufman's out there to counter this nonsense.

O‘DONNELL: Today is day 100 of the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, and a whistle-blower has come forth from the Environmental Protection Agency, charging the EPA with helping BP to downplay the environmental impact of its supposed cleanup efforts. You will meet him in a moment.

But if the cleanup has been compared to letting the criminal clean up the crime scene—we begin our fourth story tonight with news about the cops.

“The Washington Post” reports that federal agents who call themselves the BP squad are investigating whether BP, Transocean, or Halliburton, even before the blowout, lied to regulators, obstructed justice, or faked the test results for their equipment—including the blowout preventer that, needless to say, failed to prevent a blowout. Specifically, sources told “The Post,” investigators are asking whether inspectors at the Minerals Management Agency went easy on the rig and why.

BP, yesterday, revealed that it is now the subject of an investigation by the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, into something—no word yet on exactly whether that is related to the spill.
And while Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says the oil is becoming harder to find, the Natural Resources Defense Council‘s annual report on beaches found no downturn in the number of beach closures or advisories since the spill was capped. The NRDC reports that the number of beach closures and advisories this year, 2,200, is roughly 10 times more than last year. And it predicts that the impact will last for years.

And in a cable news exclusive, that whistle-blower we mentioned joins us now. EPA senior policy analyst, Hugh Kaufman, is a veteran and legend of the agency, having had a hand in Love Canal and the creation of the Superfund and helped expose the EPA cover-up of air quality at ground zero.
Mr. Kaufman, what should we know about the dispersants used in the Gulf that the EPA isn‘t telling us?

KAUFMAN: Well, first of all, the dispersants mixed with the oil and the water is extremely toxic. Sweden has done studies on this. Israel has done studies on this.

And the only real purpose of using so many dispersants with the oil was to cover up the volume of oil that was released from that well. So, that and lying about how much is coming out was a mechanism to help BP save billions of dollars in fines.

O‘DONNELL: Should they have not used dispersants at all?

KAUFMAN: That‘s correct. If they did not use dispersants, they would have been able to get most of that oil off of the surface and would not have endangered all of the fish and ecosystem underneath the water that now will be affected for decades on down the line.

I was listening to some of the, quote, “experts” who are being paid by BP at universities who are saying that the oil has disappeared. It hasn‘t disappeared. It‘s throughout thousands of square miles in the Gulf, mixed with dispersants, and because the temperatures down there are so cold, they‘re going to be around for decades.

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As Digby wrote this week, let's Make Tim Geithner Cry:

Since I suspect that hippie punching is going to become the default Democratic strategy going forward I'm not sure if this sort of thing will actually help. But we really have no choice but to try:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is advising the White House not to put Elizabeth Warren in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- a watchdog agency she invented!

Can you sign our urgent petition to the President?

Read on...

Sen. Bernie Sanders agrees. Statement: Sanders on Consumer Financial Protection Director Nomination:

July 22, 2010

Sen. Bernie Sanders made the following statement at a Capitol Hill press conference alongside Sen. Tom Harkin and members of the U.S. House of Representatives:

"I think most Americans believe that the Wall Street Reform bill signed into law yesterday by President Obama is a step in the right direction.

"But, I also believe most Americans feel that given that the outrageous greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street caused the horrendous recession that we are still suffering through, it is absolutely necessary that we have a strong, smart consumer advocate who will look out for their needs as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

"The American people want someone who is prepared to represent them vigorously and someone who, when appropriate, is prepared to stand up to the enormously powerful CEOs on Wall Street who have fought so hard against any meaningful consumer protections.

"It's clear to me that Professor Elizabeth Warren is that person.

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Rep. Alan Grayson and former Rudy Giuliani staffer and king of the false equivalencies Wingnut author John Avlon had a little dust up over polls on John King's show. Grayson took Avlon to task over a recent Gallup poll which shows President Obama's approval rating down to 38% with independent voters. What I wish he'd have called him out for is his claim that voters are more worried about the debt than jobs and the economy. Since he used the words "independent voters" and didn't say which poll he was citing it's impossible to say if he was cherry picking some statistics.

The larger problem with what Avlon did here is one that Digby pointed out a few weeks ago.

Conflation Fail:

FAIR does an overview of the polls which show that the beltway obsession with the deficit is not, in fact, shared by the country.

But I did want to highlight this one piece of evidence supporting my contention that to the extent people do care about --- they just don't understand it. [...]

This is one of the reasons why I have been so frantic that the administration was feeding into the deficit hysteria. They don't seem to get that people don't actually care about "the deficit," they care about "the economy" and they fail to make a distinction between the two, especially since we have right wing wrecking crew that makes a point of conflating the two.

It's a problem.

Yes it is and people like Avlon here hyping fears over the deficit is just another example.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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Bigot Rush Limbaugh took Keith's top honors on the Worst Persons list for this bit of blatant racism.

Limbaugh: "If Obama Weren't Black He'd Be a Tour Guide in Honolulu":

Rush Limbaugh joined other right-wing media figures in freaking out over a remark by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden during a recent interview with Al Jazeera. In discussing Obama's efforts to improve Muslim outreach, Bolden said that Obama "wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering." Rush used this noncontroversial comment to attack the Obama administration while simultaneously stating that "most of these claims about Muslim contributions to science and math are myths."

Rush then took some time to race-bait Obama supporters and the liberal media. He said that Obama "wouldn't have been voted president if he weren't black," adding, "If Obama weren't black he'd be a tour guide in Honolulu." Rush also accused the liberal media of wanting the GOP to fire Michael Steele "so they can ... write about the Republicans firing a black guy." Read on...

UPDATE: And there's this from Digby on Limbaugh:

I'm awfully glad that racism is no longer mainstream on the right anymore or this man might have the most popular radio show in the country with 25 million listeners a week. Or this absurdity of a scandal trumped up by a GOP hitman might be breathlessly discussed by Republican operatives as the "sleeper issue for the 2010 midterms."

Thank goodness we don't have to worry about that anymore.

Yeah, thank goodness. Heaven forbid people might think Republicans were still following Lee Atwater's playbook in this day and age or that we might still have some problems with our DOJ continuing to be politicized from Bush holdovers that haven't been fired yet.

Runners up were Glenn Beck for going after Will Bunch for making money off of his Beck University that Susie told us about on Friday. And next on Keith's list was wingnut Rep. Steve King for lying and claiming that Obama refused to wave the Jones Act which Think Progress took apart in this post Promising ‘Well-Informed Truth,’ Steve King Says Obama Not Helping LA On Oil Spill Because Jindal Is A Republican.