This morning's Face the Nation was an interesting contrast in style. Bob Schieffer led off with Haley Barbour in what can only be a softball interview about Republicans, their chances in 2012, and the current field of candidates. In the second half, he suddenly got a bit more strident in his questioning of Nancy Pelosi, but she managed to place responsibility where it truly belongs. Here's the money moment:

Schieffer: The fact is, the Congress has been in session since January and it's done basically nothing.

Pelosi: Well you can talk to Mr. Boehner about that.

Schieffer: So it's all their fault. It's not your fault.

Pelosi: Well no, they set the agenda. We have said every day that they're there another day goes by and there's no jobs agenda or jobs bill that has come to the floor. But again, it's about how we can work together to go forward. These issues are bigger than politics, they're bigger than elections. They're about the country that we will live in. And what we will see as we go forward is one vision of America that's encompassed in the Republican budget plan that abolishes Medicare, that makes college unaffordable for nearly ten million young people in our country, that takes us deeper into debt and does not create jobs, or you can talk about an agenda that talks about making it in America, investing in American education, innovation and that's what campaigns are about.

The opener on this conversation drives me a little crazy. Blaming a President for the economy without holding Congress' feet to the fire is disingenuous, given Congress' responsibilities with regard to appropriations and setting the national agenda that the President must then act upon. Yet in this current session of Congress, we've seen numerous votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, legislate a woman's right to choose into oblivion, the defunding of agencies like NOAA and the EPA, and an overall agenda that kills jobs in the public sector at the very least. So what exactly does the President have to do with any of that?

And Pelosi delivers that message quite effectively. Bothered about the jobs report? Talk to Mr. Boehner, because he's the guy who has set the agenda for this session of Congress. Democrats should be running with this message and asking Americans whether or not they understand Congress' role in the economy and what this crazy Republican House of Representatives is doing to tank it.

Schieffer pushes back on her

It pains me to trot out my disgraced Lakers, blindly beloved since childhood, as the big bad bully who frightfully illustrates what is happening to us all. But it fits: The mega-rich Giant bludgeoning the hapless little guy until he goes splat on the ground.

The Goliath Andrew Bynum, or at least the people who manage his cracked image, knew enough to apologize for his assault on the scrappy Lilliputian named J.J. Barea. And he will cough up $700,000 in fines and lost wages.

The GOP? Not so much.

While crippling the middle class, demonizing and de-funding the poor and the unemployed, while walling off the wombs of women like a condemned lot full of slums, even while killing Medicare, the Republicans and their billionaire puppeteers simply sneer all the more. Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Rick Scott, Dan Snyder, Boehner, Cantor, Bachmann and the Pauls seem genetically incapable of remorse or fair play.

They will never stop throwing their vicious "Koch-ed" elbows into the neck of nearly every American. They will never apologize. And with their bought-and-corrupted legislatures and Supreme Court, they will never be fined or suspended.

Splat, splat, splat we all go. It stings. It’s demoralizing. And still there is one thing that these bullies remain deathly afraid of: that we all pick our battered bodies off the hard floor again and again and vote them out of the game.

After a 90-minute meeting at the White House, President Obama came out with a terse statement reminding the public that a government shutdown isn't some romantic trip into the past, but instead causes some meaningful hardship to everyday Americans, who might be waiting for a tax refund, or have loved ones fighting with no pay in Afghanistan, for example. He made it clear (twice now) that the numbers aren't the issue -- they've been met.

That tells me it's about the policy riders, and that is indeed what Speaker Boehner signals in his statement with Harry Reid just afterward. In fact, Boehner looks like a guy who is shoved in a really tight spot because he refused to stand up to the tea party, saying he would not make a deal that couldn't be approved by 218 Republicans, which of course means the tea party must be appeased.

It's those policy riders that are giving Boehner heartburn. The Senate isn't going to do a deal that de-funds the EPA, repeals the Affordable Care Act, and all the other nonsense demanded by the TeaBirchers. Just assume at this point that the budget is being held hostage by the 100 or so protesting on Capitol Hill earlier today, which leaves Boehner with a terrible choice. Will he choose votes, or money? Big corporate money doesn't want a shutdown. Tea Party populists think it's an awesome idea.

Who will win?

In what can only be interpreted as a smack in Eric Cantor's face, John Boehner will campaign alongside Rich Iott, Nazi re-enactor. Not only will he campaign alongside him, he's funneled more cash to Iott's campaign than previously reported.

The DCCC had some choice comments to make about it:

Not only has John Boehner recruited, embraced, and financed a disgraced Nazi enthusiast running for Congress, but now Boehner is pouring gasoline on the fire by throwing a campaign rally for him," said DCCC spokesman Ryan Rudominer. "Thumbing his nose at our nation's veterans, women, and people of the Jewish faith, all the while refusing to stand up for basic American values in order to try and win an election, apparently this is what Boehner meant when he said, 'We're not going to be any different than what we've been.

Taking out the hyperbole that tends to dominate the final week of any election cycle for a minute, I just have to sit back and wonder about how it can be that Republicans are so confident about sewing up the House majority. If they really think they've got it in the bag, why send the future Speaker of the House on the campaign trail with a guy who thinks SS officers were interesting enough that he spent his weekends pretending he was one?

Hmmm. Things to ponder.

I know some of the Democrats are a little wacky, but this? These Republicans are just plain nuts. I'd forgotten what it was like to have the inmates in charge of the asylum. Their ability to communicate such deep denial seems to have paid off for them politically, at least for a while:

Rescinding the federal law to overhaul the health care system, the first objective of House Republicans who ascended to power this week, would ratchet up the federal deficit by about $230 billion over the next decade and leave 32 million more Americans uninsured, according to congressional budget analysts. The rough estimate by the Congressional Budget Office also predicts that most Americans would pay more for private health insurance if the law were repealed. The 10-page forecast was delivered to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), installed a day earlier to shepherd the new GOP majority. He immediately dismissed it.

The CBO's assessment, arriving as Republicans have mobilized to make the law's repeal the first major House vote of the new Congress, touches on a sensitive area for the GOP. Republicans are vowing to take tough measures to reduce the deficit, although they already have exempted the health care measure from rules requiring that any spending increases be accompanied by offsetting reductions so that the net effect on the deficit is null.

The CBO's analysis provided an early glimpse of the brute force politics spreading across Capitol Hill and beyond in the new era of divided government. The broad changes to the health care system, pushed through Congress by Democrats who controlled both the House and the Senate until this week, are among President Obama's proudest domestic accomplishments - and now a central target of the GOP. On Thursday, congressional Democrats and their allies seized the budget analysts' prediction as ammunition. "It's plain and simple: We can't afford to increase the deficit by nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, especially with the very first substantive vote of the 112th Congress," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana).

With equal speed, Boehner and other House Republicans repudiated the forecast of the non-partisan CBO, saying that its analysts had relied on flawed assumptions they had been provided by Democrats. "CBO is entitled to their opinion," Boehner declared at his first news conference as speaker.

Specifically, the CBO, in what it called a preliminary analysis, said that the law's repeal would cost $145 billion by 2019 and $230 billion by 2021, then swell after that, because various money-saving and revenue-raising provisions would be undone. The 32 million uninsured Americans refers to the number predicted to gain coverage under the law.

(h/t David N.)

On his recent book-signing swing through the Bay Area, I was lucky enough to have David Neiwert and his daughter stay with me and my family. David and I bonded deeply over our common love of all things Python and took the opportunity to introduce my eldest to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a movie I think both David and I can recite verbatim. During this scene, David and I looked at each other and laughed because this is the exact kind of logic we see playing on Fox News every day to intimate some sort of problem with Obama. I mean, obviously, if Obama floats on water, he must be a witch, no, make that a Marxist...er, Communist....no, make that a socialist...yeah! That's it...if he weighs the same as a duck, he must be a socialist! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the deep thinking of the average Fox News viewer.

The big news is that the Big Man himself, President Barack Obama, has decided that he needs to get in front of the cameras to talk healthcare reform rather than let everyone else do it. So he's going to be all over the Sunday shows. I mean, all of them. Well, not Fox News Sunday. And you can bet that Fox is pouting about being snubbed.

But David Gregory follows the president with two of the most prominent chuckleheads in the GOP: Boehner and Graham. And John King is giving Mitch McConnell the last word on State of the Union, while Stephanopoulos fills out his roundtable with GOP strategist Ed Gillespie and perennial George Will on This Week. So I'm hard-pressed to see how this is any different than appearing on Fox News. Just beware if they start to advocate burning at the stake as the answer.

ABC's "This Week" - President Barack Obama.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Obama.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Obama; House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio; Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Helene Cooper, Rick Stengel, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker. Topics: What is behind the recent populist outrage against the Obama agenda? Is Afghanistan becoming President Obama's Vietnam? Meter Questions: Was the anti-Obama venom unavoidable? YES: 6 NO: 6; Has Obama Got Command Back? YES: 12 No: 0.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Obama; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - A rare and exclusive interview with the President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev. Have the US and Russia truly hit the "reset" button? How does he respond to Vice President Biden's criticism of Russia's "withering" economy?

"Fox News Sunday" - Bertha Lewis, chief executive officer of ACORN; Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.; Fred Smith, chairman and chief executive of FedEx Corp.; Steve Odland, chairman and chief executive of Office Depot Inc.; John Chambers, chairman and chief executive of Cisco.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

Emptywheel: Former Sen. Bob Graham says the CIA is making sh*t up. Holy Joe says they always told him the truth.  At least one Republican disagrees...sometimes. Still, I applaud the Wingnutosphere's sudden, inexplicable desire for accountabilty.

Hit & Run: Drug Czar calls for an end to the 'War on Drugs'

The Brad Blog: Rove to be questioned by Special Prosecutor on U.S. Attorney firings today

Happy Valley News Hour: The Fanboyification of the GOP

The Reaction: Does anybody really give a damn other than the "variable values" lunatics?

The Political Carnival: Scouts train to fight terrorists

Nancy Pelosi rebuts the right-wing frothing accusing her of knowing about waterboarding after having been briefed on it by the Bush White House:

WASHINGTON - Under strong attack from Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA and Bush administration of misleading her about waterboarding detainees in the war on terror and sharply rebutted claims she was complicit in its use.

"To the contrary ... we were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used," she told reporters, referring to a formal CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

Pelosi said she subsequently learned that other lawmakers were told several months later by the CIA about the use of waterboarding.

Oh, the wingnuts will go crazy. But Pelosi is certainly more credible about this than Dick Cheney or John "Orange Man" Boehner.

Wow, it's going down to the wire with many NO votes...207-226 right now.

The Market is tanking badly too...And Newt Gingrich issues a statement that I heard on MSNBC which says he would reluctantly vote for it...Hmmm....

UPDATE: It failed....No one trusts Bush and McCain did nothing....

This mess shows that Conservatism is a failure. I know we are dismayed by our politicians, but don't forget that under conservative leadership, we've had the total collapse of our financial sector and we can never stop saying that.

And if the media tries to portray Republicans as hero figures I'll start my own drinking game.

Crying Boehner is saying it's Pelosi's fault because she gave a partisan speech. What jokers. A speech made them vote against it. They are saying it is not a partisan crisis, but an economic one. Sure---that was caused by Republican/McCain hunger for deregulation.

Will McCain suspend his campaign again and try to cancel Palin's debate?

The "Battered Spouse Syndrome" has hit the Congressional Democrats. Again.

House Minority Leader John "Cry Baby" Boehner got the vay-puhs (can't you see him clutching his pearls in horror?) from Rep. Pete Stark's harsh words after the SCHIP vote last week...what delicate sensibilities the minority party has! My gosh, it's almost as if Rep. Stark was heartless enough to be glib about the lives of our troops in harm's way. So naturally, because we can't have mean words or insinuations that our President isn't a Very Serious Person, Boehner introduced a privileged resolution to censure Pete Stark.

Chairman Bennie Thompson moved to table the resolution (which basically meant that they weren't going to consider it; all these ridiculous parliamentary procedures give me a headache) and the resolution was tabled with a vote of 196-173.

Howie at DWT:

You might be interested in knowing that 5 Democrats voted with the Republicans on condemning Rep Stark and another 8-- all reactionaries-- voted "Present," refusing to come to Stark's defense. You can probably guess the names of the disgraceful 13 Democrats. Howie has the list here.

Despite the tabling of the resolution, an apparently chastened Stark did formally apologize:

(thanks to TPM for vid)