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Sean Hannity among others at Fox have been flogging this story all week; Hannity's interview with Palin above just being one of the latest examples. It appears Tucker Carlson's rag, the Daily Caller started this fake controversy and surprise, surprise, Fox decided to glom onto it.

Here's more from Media Matters -- "Corrupt": Fox News Launches Fact-Free Attack On Health Care Reform Waivers:

Fox News, amplifying a fake controversy started by the Daily Caller, is claiming that 38 health-care reform "waivers" granted to businesses in Northern California are evidence of Rep. Nancy Pelosi and President Obama's "corruption." But the business owner who actually requested the waivers said that they were in no way connected to Pelosi and were part of an annual request for businesses throughout the country, not just in Pelosi's congressional district. Read on...

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From our friends at Newshounds, the death panels and Betsy McCaughey are back fearmongering over end-of-life counseling. Sweet Jesus, these people make my head hurt. I thought we had seen the last of this shyster once the health care bill passed, but apparently I was wrong.

Fox News Tries To Rehabilitate Palin’s Discredited “Death Panels” Smear:

As The New York Times reported yesterday, the Obama administration has enacted Medicare regulations to include an end-of-life planning provision similar to one struck out of the health care reform bill after Sarah Palin “touched off a political storm over ‘death panels.’” Palin’s “death panels” accusation wasn’t just a lie, it was PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year for 2009. But good ol’ Fox News resuscitated the lie and gave it new life by just “asking” if the new regulations mark the return of death panels. Fortunately, Democratic Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers and liberal pundit Caroline Heldman forcefully rebutted the suggestion.

The possible return of “death panels” was all over Fox News today with segments with such FoxNews.com titles as, ‘Death Panel’ Comeback? Return of Death Panels? and ‘Death Panel’ Deception? The ‘Death Panel’ Comeback? segment, on The O’Reilly Factor, featured Media Matters 2009 Health Care Misinformer of the Year: Betsy McCaughey. [...]

But substitute host Eric Bolling distorted those details in his introduction to the O’Reilly Factor segment (the first video below). Bolling said, “Now the reports that President Obama is bringing back end of life planning with the Medicare regulation set to go into effect next week. The White House says, ‘No, that’s not true,’ issued a statement blaming a law signed by President Bush. So what’s really going on?” Bolling later said, “Whether or not this was brought up in the Bush Administration, who cares?”

Bolling made no pretense of independence, supposedly a hallmark of The Factor. “I thought we were done with this (death panels)… but they’re back.” Bolling offered no challenge to McCaughey’s misinformation (government will be scripting end-of-life decisions, the Obama administration is enacting via regulation what it could not enact via legislation) but asked her to “take our viewer exactly what this regulation says… It incentives them to discuss end-of-life decisions.” To Heldman, he asked, “Do we really need to incentivize doctors to ask Grandma whether she wants to pull the plug year after year after year? Isn’t once enough?”

Heldman, already a News Hounds Top Dog, was in especially good form in the segment.

Yeah, heaven forbid the government might pay to help you take the burden off of your family about what to do with you if they don't feel it's worth keeping you alive and longer and you would have agreed if given the chance. The horror!

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When asked by Sean Hannity how Republicans are going to counter attacks by Democrats that their leadership doesn't care that they are supporting policies that characterize "Republicans as wanting to kick granny out on the street and have grandma and grandpa eat dog food", Newt Gingrich offered this defense of their incoming committee chairs.

HANNITY: Let’s look ahead to the next Congress. When they start to take power in the House on Jan. 5th and we have more Republican Senators, first order of business I think is going to be to repeal health care, cut spending. You lived through this. How long is it going to be before Democrats start characterizing Republicans as wanting to kick granny out on the street and have grandma and grandpa eat dog food.

GINGRICH: Well I’m sure some left wingers will start doing it on Christmas day. But I think the key is for Speaker Boehner and the Republican team in the House to calmly and methodically focus on job creation, then to focus on a series of hearings on Obama-care and then repeal it and begin to replace it with a much better plan, and then to cut spending and to control spending.

My understanding is, Congressman Paul Ryan, the new Chairman of The Budget Committee is ready to move on the spending side. I think Dave Camp is very prepared to move on the jobs side on Ways and Means and I think that Fred Upton is very prepared to move on Obama-care, so I think you’re going to see a Republican team in the House from day one prepared to move towards a healthier, more prosperous, more employed America. And I think that’s good news for the country.

I'm just curious how Paul Ryan, who wants to privatize Social Security among a ton of other terrible ideas with his Roadmap for America's Future, Dave Camp who supports outsourcing of American jobs and Fred Upton who wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act -- which despite all its faults is better than what any Republicans are offering as an alternative are in any way shape or form -- concerned about job creation in the United States or keeping our social safety nets intact so that we don't literally throw grandma and grandpa out on the streets and tell them to go eat dog food.

Republicans don't care about job creation and their policies don't create jobs. The only thing they care about are their rich campaign donors, and Newt is just doing a preemptive strike here with what's sure to be the backlash as that becomes more painfully obvious when they have to take some responsibility for governing with their control of the House.

They decided to ignore Darrell Issa and the endless hearings we're going to get out of his Oversight Committee and whether we're going to get to look forward to another set of impeachment hearings over bulls**t as we had when Bill Clinton was in office during which Newt Gingrich was blasting him for the same sexual improprieties he was participating in himself.

Hannity finished up the segment with trying to get Gingrich to say if he was running for president in 2012 by asking him where we'd see him campaigning. I think other than Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich is about the worst person the GOP could possibly nominate as their candidate, so hey... go for it, Newt.

From The Colbert Report:

Maybe the Republicans will love President Obama if he repeals the estate tax, increases defense spending and privatizes Social Security.

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While discussing America's current economic situation and whether voters think it's going to improve or not on CNN's Your Money, panel member Candy Crowley made this bizarre statement as to how our political leadership should react to the recommendations from the Catfood commission's co-chairs, Simpson and Bowles.

CROWLEY: Well, they're going to try next year. I mean, here's the problem. Everybody talks about reducing the debt and reducing the deficit, which are two separate things. But nonetheless, we've had this debt commission come and say, well, here's how you do it. And there's just three big ticket items, right? Federally funded health care, the Pentagon and Social Security. Well, you know, what you need here are three politicians, the Speaker, the Majority Leader in the Senate, and the president who don't care about re-election to kind of try to lead this. Because when you look at all the polling, the public is not for cutting any of those or changing the benefits.

MARTIN: There you go.

CROWLEY: And you can't get to it any other way.

First of all, since when do any politicians not care about being reelected? Sadly it seems to be all they care about too often and raising money to do it rather than looking after their constituents. Second, the "everybody" that's obsessed with deficit reduction are not the American voters, but our beltway Villagers and the politicians who have decided to use this opportunity for some good old Shock Doctrine type changes to our social safety nets.

Next we get Crowley saying we need to address "federally funded health care", by which I assume she means Medicaid. Of course no mention there that the reason it is so expensive is the government is paying for the oldest and sickest patients while the insurance companies get to make a profit off of the rest of us and how opening that system up to everyone would make it viable and allow the rest of us to quit making the insurance company CEO's rich.

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After Vice President Joe Biden asked the Democratic base to "buck up" and "quit whining" but still be sure to get out and vote in the mid-term elections, the response from a lot of the Democratic base was unsurprisingly less than enthusiastic. Lawrence O'Donnell talked to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee's Adam Green about President Obama's interview in Rolling Stone.

As Green noted, no one is telling the Democratic base not to go out and vote this year and none of us wants to see the Republican Party back in power to run the country off the cliff again. That said, what we liberals did want to see was the Obama administration fight for progressive ideals and as Green said, not making backroom sweetheart deals with Joe Lieberman when they needed him. Especially since when they needed Dennis Kucinich to go along with them, they actively campaigned in his district to put pressure on him to vote for the health care bill. They didn't use the bully-pulpit and public pressure to get the Blue Dog Conserva-Dems in line but they were more than happy to do it to undermine their progressive base. If they think that's a strategy to motivate the base to get out there and vote for them this year, they're sadly mistaken.

And all of that doesn't even begin to address the fact that they haven't gone after the Bush administration for their crimes and are continuing way too many of those policies like warrantless wiretapping, drone attacks, our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo and the list goes on and on.

Unlike Republicans, liberals and the Democratic base are not going to support policies just because the leadership of the Democratic Party wants us to support them. "Because they're better than Republicans" is not as strong a motivation as actually standing strong for progressive principles. I think most of us who follow politics understand fully the kind of obstruction they're up against and that given that, they're lucky to have gotten anything passed. But there's no question that few liberal principles even make it to the table in fear of that obstruction.

I think there's a debate to be had over whether they would have gotten anything passed had they gone after the Bush administration, or had they pushed harder for a progressive agenda. Maybe that would have meant maybe a Lieberman bolting and caucusing with the Republicans or who knows what kind of reaction out of the Republicans and corporate Democrats, as though what we're seeing already isn't bad enough.

Cenk Uygur came on Dylan Ratigan's show for his daily rant segment and the video is below the fold. Cenk responded to Biden's comments about bucking up and not whining.

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They just can't stop themselves. Sen. John Barrasso was the guest on C-SPAN’s Newsmakers program over the weekend and he’s still out there trying to hawk the idea that there wasn’t any bipartisan cooperation when writing the health care bill. He pretends that if the numbers in the Senate get worse for Democrats that we’re going to see some cooperation from Republicans because the Democrats will have to quit putting forth bills that are “far to the left”.

When National Journal’s Terence Samuel asks him why the Democrats couldn’t get more things passed with their large majorities they had in both the House and the Senate instead of admitting that the Democrats got no or next to nothing in the way of cooperation from the Republicans along with dealing with their “centrist” or better put “corporate” Conserva-Dems, Barrasso claims the problem is that their positions were “extreme” and out of the “mainstream”. So in Barrasso’s world, Bob Dole’s health care plan or something resembling Romney-Care is “extreme”.

Barrasso then defends the Republicans use of the filibuster by using that good old tea party fallback—the “Founding Fathers” wanted the Senate to be a place to “let things cool down”. While that is true, I don’t think by “cool” they meant to put legislation into the deep freezer Senator.

Host Susan Swain asks Barrasso if he’d support some sort of filibuster reform, which of course he doesn’t because he knows the Republicans are doing just fine with their record levels of obstruction and preventing Democrats from getting even the mildest of any type of reforms through the Congress and then blaming the Democrats for not getting anything done. They’ve been relying on the fact that unfortunately most Americans don’t even know what a filibuster is or understand the arcane rules of the Senate. Barrasso thinks the rules “have worked well.” They’ve worked well alright, for his party to help keep running America into a ditch.

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If Eric Cantor thought he was going to get a friendly interview on the O'Reilly Factor last Thursday night with guest host Laura Ingraham, he was sadly mistaken. Ingraham hammered Cantor about whether the Republicans would bring forth a bill to repeal "Obamacare" if they regain control of the House of Representatives to which Cantor responded "Absolutely I will pledge to do that! Are you kidding? Of course!"

As even Ingraham acknowledged though it's not likely the Republicans will have the numbers to over ride a veto by President Obama. Cantor laid out what their strategy will be instead of they regain control of the House.

So we are faced with a situation where, hopefully, this November, a conservative majority will regain position in the House. And we're going to do everything we can to repeal the Bill, to delay the Bill, to defund the Bill, to do all of the above. I mean, these things go hand in hand, Laura.

So they're going to take the weak tea we managed to get passed, most of which hasn't gone into effect yet and make it worse when what we need are improvements to the bill. Wonderful. Between that type of obstruction for obstruction's sake and Darrell Issa's endless witch hunts if the Republicans get back the House as well, they're going to make the days of the Clinton era look mild in comparison.

One last note on this interview as well, after the browbeating Cantor took from Ingraham during this segment, I've got to wonder if he'll be coming back on the air with her any time soon. Laura Ingraham tends to regularly emote about all of the warmth and fuzziness of a rattle snake IMHO.

Full transcript below the fold.

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As our own Jon Perr recently noted, the Republicans have been doing a lot of lying about the Bush tax cuts and how much they contributed to the deficit while pretending to care about deficit reduction -- Boehner Lies About Bush Tax Cuts and Deficits. Looks like former New York Gov. George Pataki decided to take his turn following in John Boehner's shoes with some revisionist history on MSNBC this morning.

Former Gov. Pataki Absurdly Claims That Heath Care Reform Is ‘One Of The Reasons We Have This Deficit’:

Republicans have been trying very hard to blame President Obama for the nation’s deficit (which he largely inherited from his predecessor), but former Gov. George Pataki (R-NY) today may have gone to the most absurd lengths yet. On MSNBC, Pataki said that the health care reform bill that became law this year is “one of the reasons we have this deficit”:

You just said that Boehner indicated Obamacare as one of the reasons we have this deficit, one of the reasons we have failed to create private sector jobs and he’s absolutely right.

Pataki made no attempt to explain how a law that was passed this year and has yet to be implemented could have possibly caused this year’s deficit. [...]

The Affordable Care Act not only adds nothing to the deficit this year, but is entirely deficit neutral. As Igor Volsky pointed out earlier, the Congressional Budget Office released a letter this week stating that the Affordable Care Act “will produce $143 billion in net budgetary savings over the 2010-2019 period.” Repealing the parts of the law that Republicans love to gripe about would cause an increase in deficits of $455 billion. Let’s repeat: repealing health care reform would increase, not decrease, the deficit.

Of course we got no push back from MSNBC's Chris Jansing. Can we get Cenk hired for her spot please?

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Former Mitt Romney Communications Strategist Kevin Madden insists that the Republican Party is being unfairly painted as the "Party of No" and that they have "put on the table substantive alternatives for the American public", but when pressed by Juan Williams about just what those ideas are, I only heard him give one specific, tax cuts. What I wish Williams would have asked him is why he thought Republicans should have been opposing the health care bill when it was basically nothing but his old boss' "Romney-care". That used to be one of their Republican "substantive alternatives" that they decided to obstruct because a Democrat proposed it.

MADDEN: The Democrats have spent the better part of almost two years now saying that the Republicans are the “Party of No” and it has not worked. It is also... it's a false argument because throughout the entire set whether it was the stimulus debate or the healthcare debate, the Republicans have put on the table substantive alternatives for the American public. They said at a time when the public is very angry about spending, we want to reduce spending. They've said in a time of a lot of uncertainty in the markets, they want more certainty with tax cuts and spur the private sector versus the government. And that is the contrast that we're seeing right now in a lot of these races, and it gives the Republicans a decided advantage.

And I'm not saying that in a -- I'm saying it in a clinical fashion. When you look at the anger about spending right now and the Democrats, every answer they have is a big government solution that has a huge price tag on it. And it puts them in very, very a difficult position. [crosstalk]

WILLIAMS: When I look at the numbers, here is what I see. Americans think less of Republicans than they do of the Democrats in Congress and much less than they do of President Obama. And when you are thinking about economic policy, Americans aren't about, oh, yeah, keep cutting taxes. No, people are saying let's be responsible in terms of how we spend money, let's reduce the deficit, let's get serious about our economic future. Let's not take radical steps, like oh, throw more money to the rich.

MADDEN: There is absolutely no credibility to that argument when you look at the Democrats... when you look at the spending bills they've passed in these last two years. They have no credibility.

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