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Generally, my husband and I watch the Sunday shows together. He's a good sounding board and will tell me if I'm getting too in the weeds with our clip selections. Generally speaking, he's more cynical than me about politics but less cynical about the media. This morning, he redlined on both when he heard Romney surrogate and Republican strategist Mary Matalin utter these laughable words:

The only way the Obama campaign can run against Romney is distort his position or the Republican position. There is no -- nor has there ever been -- any Republican position that's been no regulations. We are for regulations and always have been. What common sense means clear and uniform and predictably enforced.

Wuh-what? Apparently, the reason Republicans long so much for the mythical days of yore is because there will be no video or audio to contradict their lying lies. To wit:

The Blind Spot in Mitt Romney's Economic Plan: What Romney would do: Cut taxes and regulations, shrink government, undo pretty much the entire Obama agenda, and stick it to labor.
House GOP announces jobs plan focused on cutting regs and taxes, August 2011
GOP jobs plan: Cut regulations and debt, reform taxes, September 2011
GOP's 'Reform 2.0' package targets business regulations and property taxes, January 2012
GOP Targets Safety Net Programs, Financial Regulations To Avoid Defense Cuts, April 2012
Cut regulation, boost insurance market, GOP candidates say, May 2012

The entire GOP plank has been about letting the "free market" decide and getting "big government" out of the way. But we can look around and see the manifestations of the free market lies (looking at you, Goldman Sachs) and Americans aren't buying it any more. So now, the Republican mouthpieces like Matalin have no choice but to spin an obvious lie to weasel out from behind an economic point of view that has done nothing but bring disaster to the 99 percent.

What color is the sky in her world? Because I'm pretty sure we're not sharing the same universe.

Former presidential candidate and current Minnesota congresswoman (and loony) Michele Bachmann told CBN's David Brody that the Lord had called her to run (no word on whether the Lord was interested in her wasting vast amounts of money or just having some fun with her for a few months) and that divine inspiration is to be credited for her running an "almost mistake-free" campaign. The only two blemishes? Not knowing Elvis Presley's birthday and John Wayne's birthplace. That's it:

“I think one thing I learned is a person has to be extremely careful with what they say,” said Bachmann. “Make sure you have Elvis Presley’s birthday down, because that’s very important, and know where John Wayne was born. Those are two extremely important pieces of information.

“The media loves to beat everybody up,” said Brody.

“What they focus on is kind of amazing, when it looks like the house is burning down around us, that’s what they care about,” Bachmann responded.

Brody went on to say that Bachmann ran “a pretty impeccable campaign” to which Bachmann responded “it really was.”

“We were extremely careful and we were almost mistake free but for those two points,” said Bachmann referring to the Elvis and John Wayne gaffes.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! *wipes tears from my eyes* Next she's going to tell Brody that Marcus is a very manly man. Look, I don't even like Politifact because they have a demonstrable right wing bias, and even they noted that Michele Bachmann--given every benefit of doubt--had the highest "False/Pants on Fire" record of the presidential candidates, at 59 percent (only 9 percent was rated "True"). So perhaps it's not surprising that she has no memory of saying

That it's not true people forgo health insurance because of cost;
That she wanted to pull the US embassy out of Iran;
That the Iraqi people should be paying us for invading and occupying their country;
that President Obama has spent $805 billion and cost 4,400 lives liberating Iraq;
that HPV vaccinations cause mental retardation;
and that President Obama's trip to India cost $200 million a day.

And that's just what I found with a cursory search of this site when we bothered to cover her at all.

But go ahead and believe it was nothing more than John Wayne and Elvis Presley marring your campaign.

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Dick Cheney is still on his book tour and Sunday he disgraced CBS with an appearance on Face The Nation. Not only has he proclaimed that he was the Decider in Chief of the Bush administration during the 9/11 attacks in his book and the military refused his order to shoot civilian planes down, but he had the audacity to lie about how the Iraq invasion escalated into a full blown civil war after the invasion was over. He responded to Colin Powell's criticisms of the job he did as VP.

COLIN POWELL: "He says that I went out of my way not to present my positions to the President but to take them outside of the administration. That's nonsense. The President knows and I had told him what I thought about every issue of the day. Mister Cheney may forget that I'm the one who said to President Bush 'If you break it, you own it, and you've got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we've to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase.' And Mister Cheney and many of his colleagues were not prepared for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.

Remember, Cheney was the one who kept telling America that the Iraq conflict was in its last throes (as far back as 2005) over and over again as the violence kept escalating. Schieffer actually asked the right question.

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this...was it a mistake to get rid of all the people in the army? To disband the army as they did?

CHENEY: Well, it may have been a mistake. It wasn't as though we had total control over everything. In effect, what happened for a large part of it was they just packed up and went home. They disappeared back into the countryside and went back to their private lives. So they weren't there, it wasn't as though they'd all found a place where they were waiting for us to come in and take command of the army.

What was that? The army's response to being disbanded by the Bush administration immediately destroyed what fragile peace there was and turned the Sunnis Muslims against the Shiite Muslims, leading to a horrifying blood bath.

Probably the single decision that triggered the hostilities was when Paul Bremer was appointed in Iraq and he unceremoniously told Saddam's former army members that they were not allowed to be part of the newly forming government.

Sweeping away remnants of pre-war Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, on Friday dissolved the Iraqi Armed Forces, the ministries of Defense and Information, and other security institutions that supported Saddam Hussein's regime.

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People who are insured have been self-rationing as a result of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. So of course the insurance companies are whining that they need rate increases because the day is coming when their policy holders will actually use their insurance is surely looming, and then they won't have record profits any longer.

And of course, everyone who is fortunate enough to have insurance knows that rationing occurs every time you go to the doctor. If you buy insurance and have a pre-existing condition, there is no coverage for that condition for a specified waiting period, if ever. You also know that you can't just walk in and demand procedures. You have to get preauthorization letters to see specialists, who then have to get the authorization from your insurance company before they can perform any procedure deemed necessary and appropriate.

And pity the poor soul who turns up with a serious condition that requires long term or intesive treatment. They will spend all their time and energy fighting for the care they need to survive. What is this if not rationing?

Or consider lifetime caps. A million dollar lifetime cap is pretty standard. Now consider the family whose seven year old child gets cancer. It can easily happen that such a child will reach that cap in two or three years. Then the family that is probably on the hook for 20% of every charge the child has incurred face paying cash for all future care for that child, unless they are so financially wiped out by the disease that the child can get Medicaid. You know Medicaid -- that is the other program they are out to kill.

Do they really want to talk about "death panels" considering the way the system they not only defend, but want to return the worst parts of, really works?

Mitch McConnell is continuing with his gig singing backup on the Paul Ryan Roadmap to Ruin tour, telling Fox news Sunday yesterday that Ryan's scheme is "very sensible" and will "save Medicare." He then trotted out the discredited "death panels" BS, saying that the ACA will empower "a board that would ration health care," before adding "Let's just stipulate that nobody's trying to throw grandma off the cliff," alluding to an ad run by an "independent" interest group against Jane Corwin in the recent New York 26th Congressional Districe special election.

Let's unpack what McConnell is asserting, shall we?

McConnell seems to be implying that rationing is not occuring now, when it most certainly is, in every healthcare delivery system, everywhere. For starters, the uninsured are subject to the harshest rationing of all. If they can't pay cash, they don't get healthcare.

People who are insured have been self-rationing as a result of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. So of course the insurance companies are whining that they need rate increases because the day is coming when their policy holders will actually use their insurance is surely looming, and then they won't have record profits any longer.

And of course, everyone who is fortunate enough to have insurance knows that rationing occurs every time you go to the doctor. If you buy insurance and have a pre-existing condition, there is no coverage for that condition for a specified waiting period, if ever. You also know that you can't just walk in and demand procedures. You have to get preauthorization letters to see specialists, who then have to get the authorization from your insurance company before they can perform any procedure deemed necessary and appropriate.

And pity the poor soul who turns up with a serious condition that requires long term or intesive treatment. They will spend all their time and energy fighting for the care they need to survive. What is this if not rationing?

Or consider lifetime caps. A million dollar lifetime cap is pretty standard. Now consider the family whose seven year old child gets cancer. It can easily happen that such a child will reach that cap in two or three years. Then the family that is probably on the hook for 20% of every charge the child has incurred face paying cash for all future care for that child, unless they are so financially wiped out by the disease that the child can get Medicaid. You know Medicaid -- that is the other program they are out to kill.

Do they really want to talk about "death panels" considering the way the system they not only defend, but want to return the worst parts of, works?

Now I realize that McConnell was on Fox, and I don't expect any challenge from the propagandists there. But I do expect the person who is sent out to be the "token leftie" on a round table to be not Ruth Marcus who, on /Meet the Press/ had the following exchange with David Gregory:

GREGORY: So, Ruth Marcus, what wins here: bold leadership on Medicare and the argument that the Democrats won’t do something courageous, or the Democrats who say, “Hey, those guys want to take away my Medicare”?

MARCUS: I regret to inform you that I think it’s the latter. And I think when you were asking Senator McConnell if Medicare was the new third rail of American politics, I think the question was wrong in a sense because it’s the old third rail of American politics.

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MARCUS: This play has been run time after time. If you go back and look at the quotes from President Clinton back when he needed to win re-election, they sound a lot like the quotes from Democrats today about don’t let those Republicans take away your Medicare. The difference is that the debt is bigger, the deficit is bigger, the gap is bigger, and the situation is more dire. But I think that, sadly, the lesson of New York 26 is “mediscare” works.

"Mediscare" Ruth? Seriously? And why is it a sad state of affairs when the truth wins out? And why is is scandalous to show an ad that shows the republicans throwing Grandma off a cliff, but "Death Panels" got parrotted by the mainstream media as if they were real; the M$M dutifully "reported" the lies of republicans as "republicans say," and no investigation or actual journalism takes place.

Sadly, the transcript fails to note how very close David Brooks came to wetting himself, he was so eagerly in agreement.

Steve Benen shares my exasperation and summed it up perfectly.

Sigh.

It’s exasperating, but it’s worth reemphasizing what too many establishment types simply refuse to understand: Democrats are telling the truth. Indeed, Dems are doing what the media is reluctant to do: offering an accurate assessment of the Republican plan for Medicare. If voters find the GOP proposal frightening, the problem is with the plan, not with Democrats’ rhetoric.

I’m at a loss to understand what, exactly, Ruth Marcus, David Brooks, and their cohorts would have Dems do. Congressional Republicans have a plan to end Medicare and replace it with a privatized voucher scheme. The proposal would not only help rewrite the social contract, it would also shift crushing costs onto the backs of seniors, freeing up money for tax breaks for the wealthy. The plan is needlessly cruel, and any serious evaluation of the GOP’s arithmetic shows that the policy is a fraud.

Which part of this description is false? None of it, but apparently, Democrats just aren’t supposed to mention any of this. One party is allowed to present this agenda, but the other party is expected to sit quietly on their hands.

Once again, it’s important that the establishment recognize the difference between demagoguery and ringing an alarm. Demagoguery relies on falsehoods to scare people — it’s about playing on folks’ worst instincts, being divisive in a deceptive sort of way, effectively fooling people into believing something they shouldn’t.

But political rhetoric isn’t “demagoguery” when it’s true. If a political message leads the mainstream to feel scared, it’s not necessarily “scare tactics” if people have good reason to worry.

What the Democrats are doing is not demagoguery, it is sounding an alarm. The republicans are up to no good. They are out to do real damage and destroy Medicare as we know it. What is offensive isn't that the Democrats are calling the republicans out. What is offensive is that the cocktail-weenie-waggers in the Washington press corps steno-pool find the truth offensive.

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You know the time-tested-and-proven adage -- a gaffe is when a politician opens his mouth and what he or she really believes comes out. Sometimes it's the revelation that the politician is barking mad and doesn't have the foggiest notion what they are talking about.

We only have to look back a week for a perfect example of this phenomenon, when Mitch McConnell said this in an interview with Congressional Quarterly:

"Last week, the Social Security trustees issued a report saying Social Security and Medicare are not sustainable under their current structure."

Back in the day, when we had a functioning press corps instead of a cocktail-weenie-wagging press corpse; back when we had real reporters doing actual journalism instead of the steno-pool full of faithful scribes who can be counted on to regurgitate right-wing talking points unchallenged; back then, that sort of nonsense would have been a bit in the teeth of the reporter, who would have done his or her homework ahead of time, and McConnell would have been hammered mercilessly with the fact that the trustees said no such thing.

"Projected long-run program costs for both Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable under currently scheduled financing."

There is a world of difference between what McConnell said the trustees reported and what the McConnell said they reported.

McConnell's implication is that there is a hair-on-fire emergency and Social Security has to be fundamentally changed because it's doomed to bankruptcy otherwise; when in fact what the trustees presented was an either/or -- either revenues will have to be raised, or benefits will have to be cut decades down the road.

The essential Dean Baker had the best analogy I have seen on McConnell's misrepresentation:

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You may recall this video. It was the first of two posted on Big Government's site two weeks ago alleging that UMSL Professor Don Giljum and UMKC Professor Judy Ancel were teaching impressionable young college students how to become union thugs, which they were not. I posted the unedited versions (as did Media Matters) proving that once again, the videos had been edited to give the appearance that these professors were saying something exactly opposite of that which was alleged by Breitbart and Co.

Monday UMSL published this statement absolving Giljum and Ancel of any and all wrongdoing:

The excerpts that were made public showing the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) instructor Don Giljum and students as well as the UMKC instructor and students were definitely taken out of context, with their meaning highly distorted through splicing and editing from different times within a class period and across multiple class periods.

If this were a fair and just world, these professors would receive a profuse apology from Dana Loesch, Andrew Breitbart, their respective universities, and Don Giljum would be invited to rescind his resignation with a public invitation to teach the very same class again next semester.

But it isn't a fair and just world, so here's what happened instead. BigGovernment published a "confession" of sorts called a "first-hand account" from Phillip Christofanelli, a young Ron Paul devotee, ardent member of the St. Louis chapter of Young Americans for Liberty (YAF), was a Ron Paul delegate in 2008, and has a past association with another James O'Keefe project. That project, like every single one O'Keefe has been involved with, was also a hoax, intended to embarrass the university and paint the Young Americans for Liberty as discriminated-against victims. (For Christofanelli's full first-hand account of the "Gulag" fiasco, please see page 12 of the March 2010 issue of Young American Revolution)

At the beginning of Mr. Christofanelli's "first-hand account" of the professor fiasco, he says this:

Since that time, an organization known as Insurgent Visuals has released videos of the class, which have gained considerable media attention. To be clear, I am not Insurgent Visuals, nor am I associated with them. I did not edit any videos or put them online. I did, however, download the original videos off of the class website and give them out in their entirety to a number of my friends in order to obtain other opinions on the propriety of what occurred in the class, and of the steps I should take moving forward.

Ah, yes. The mysterious "Insurgent Visuals". Who are they? Was there a way to find out if there was any association with the peripatetic James O'Keefe?

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Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is feeling bullied by gays. Not because they want equal protection under the law, not because they object to institutional discrimination against them, but because, well...they act gay.

Doesn't this seem a little bit similar to those folks who look illegal? Rep. King thinks they do it to entrap good people into discrimination lawsuits and things.

Raw Story:

If people wear their sexuality on their sleeve, then they want to bring litigation against someone that they would point their finger at and say “you discriminate,” it is an entrapment that is legalized by the ENDA Act, it appears to, and its a violation of the individual rights of employers to, at their own discretion, decide who they want to hire and who they want to fire. We don’t need more federal mandates. And we surely don’t need a political statement, and that’s what this is, too. This is the homosexual activist lobby taking it out on the rest of society. They are demanding affirmation for their lifestyle. That’s at the bottom of this.

OH, that must be why axe murderers don't wear bloody rags on their sleeve. They don't really care much about affirmation for their lifestyle. Or serial killers. They probably don't either.

I mean, come on. This is about as stupid, ignorant and wrong-headed as it gets. What I pull out of King's little rant is that he thinks gays are second class citizens, they're united in some kind of subversive plot to distract us all from matters of concern to their own agenda, and if they'd JUST KEEP THEIR DAMN GAYNESS IN THE CLOSET IT WOULD BE JUST FINE.

You know what? People who make stupid statements like King's are usually in the closet themselves and hate their own reluctance to come out. People are people. I don't care who they love, sleep with, have coffee with or work with, as long as they add something to this collection of human beings we call society.

More fundamentally, because they ARE people and they ARE citizens they are entitled to equal protection and treatment under the law, because that, Rep. King, is what being true to the Constitution really means.

And while we're on the subject of stupid comments about being gay, can someone please explain to me why the question of Elena Kagan's sexuality is relevant to her qualifications for the Supreme Court? (Yes, I *am* looking over at Andrew Sullivan)

Be gay, look gay. Be gay, look straight. Be gay, be single. Be gay, be married. But please, whatever it is, let it be an individual's choice.

Comments from Left Field: Shameless lies, and the lying liars who tell them

Your Right Hand Thief: Drilling is my business...and business is good!

The Overhead Wire: Conservative anti-transit pundits are worried about the new interest in public transportation.

William K. Wolfrum Chronicles: Jesus quits Christianity after viewing the GOP platform

Inside Iraq: Is a blog updated by Iraqi journalists working for McClatchy Newspapers. They are based in Baghdad and outlying provinces. These are firsthand accounts of their experiences. Their complete names are withheld for security.

The Freewayblogger is on a West Coast Peace Tour

CNN did a little piece on the history of Larry Flynt's outing of the lying liars in the Republican Congress who claim to be men of high morals and then cheat on their own...Several quit...Will Vitter be the next "family values" hypocrite to go?

Download | play Download | play (h/t Scarce)

Flynt: Payback is a bitch.

Hannity was crying last night about Larry as a way to shift the blame from the cheating Republicans to Flynt... Remember Bob Livingston during the Clinton days?

House Speaker-elect Bob Livingston, reeling from the admission of his own marital infidelities, stunned Washington Saturday by announcing he would not run for speaker when the 106th Congress convenes next month and will quit the House in mid-1999.

Dewine just sealed his fate against Sherrod Brown even though the GOP has already given up on him.

The Plain Dealer: The Republican Party last night refused to cancel commercials that claim Sherrod Brown was a longtime tax scofflaw - even though the state of Ohio says the ad's claim is untrue.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

Dewine: The ad Sherrod is true. Read my lips. The ad is true.

Ummm, no it's not. The lying liars at the RNC can't help themselves.