You'd think Stephen Moore would know better than to go toe-to-toe with Rachel Maddow over health care reform. Yet that's exactly what he does in this segment, and as Heather noted at the time, he got his ass handed to him.
Stephen Moore, for those who may not know, is the founder of Club for Growth and sits on the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. He's responsible for most of the WSJ editorials that were entitled "Obamacare blah blah blah".
Moore is one of the biggest Koch-heads of them all, and he really doesn't like Obamacare. I'm sure he really doesn't like Rachel Maddow after this segment either.
Still, Maddow's smackdown was so delicious you made it the 39th most viewed video at C&L this year.
The American Job Act also carries a provision that would protect the unemployed from being discriminated against when they apply for a new job. It seems like a logical step because Obama is trying to get American workers back to work. The many people who lost their jobs by no fault of their own, but as a repercussion of the financial collapse created by the banksters. Apparently Republicans and their mouthpieces are objecting to this protection even though they know workers are being discriminated against for being out of work for an extended period of time. Robert Pear:
President Obama is backing legislation that would prohibit employers from discriminating against job applicants because they are unemployed.
Under the proposal, it would be "an unlawful employment practice" if a business with 15 or more employees refused to hire a person "because of the individual's status as unemployed."
Unsuccessful job applicants could sue and recover damages for violations, just as when an employer discriminates on the basis of a person's race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
Obama's proposal would also prohibit employment agencies and websites from carrying advertisements for job openings that exclude people who are unemployed.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has received reports of such advertisements but does not have data to show how common they are.
After I spoke to Anderson, I poked around at CareerBuilder.com and I found this job: Medical-equipment sales, St. Petersburg, Fla. Only, it says in bold caps, "MUST BE CURRENTLY EMPLOYED" or you won't get an interview and your resume will be deleted. I found similar ads that exclude the unemployed -- for restaurant managers in Atlanta, Houston and Iowa City; a service manager in New Jersey; an executive assistant at a New York hedge fund. Those listings would be illegal under legislation proposed by Democrats in Congress.
Enter Stephen Moore from the Wall Street Journal. He's a big business gasbag who always gets airtime to prop up what's best for Wall Street. This legislation actually ties him up in knots in this interview with Matthews. Chris exposes him as an idiot for siding with discrimination against workers out of work. The babbling Moore says it's wrong to say the Irish need not apply and being out of work shouldn't be held against you, but it's your problem for not having a job so the company use your unemployment record against you because you should already have a job when you start looking for a new one. The only time workers had any real power looking for work was when the economy was humming and companies were expanding back in the Clinton days so people did actually look for more perks and better pay while they had a job, but with over 9 percent unemployment across this country, not having a job is only an indicator of a bad economy.
In a nationally televised address to the American people on March 4, 1987, President Ronald Reagan admitted he had traded arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal and declared, "This happened on my watch." Sadly, that may have been the last time a Republican leader took ownership of a disaster by simply acknowledging the calendar. After all, according to the Republicans' ever-malleable timelines, the Clinton economic boom came thanks to Ronald Reagan, President Bush inherited a recession and 9/11 from his Democratic predecessor, and the financial collapse in 2008 was the "Obama Bear Market." And now, the GOP's new math dictates, George W. Bush deserves the credit for killing Osama Bin Laden.
No doubt, the elimination of the Al Qaeda chieftain was the culmination of years of intelligence work and military asset building that spanned the Bush and Obama administrations. But while President Bush diverted resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, shuttered the CIA's Bin Laden unit and cancelled a 2005 U.S. special operations raid into Pakistan, it was Barack Obama who as promised tripled U.S. troop strength and repeatedly declared that "that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights."
That's a far cry from President Bush declaration on March 13, 2002 - just six months after the carnage of 9/11 - that in the wake of the failure to capture Bin Laden in Tora Bora, "I truly am not that concerned about him."
Nevertheless, according to the latest Republican revisionist history, George W. Bush did everything but pull the trigger on Sunday. (More ironic still, Bush’s supporters accused President Obama of taking a “victory lap” after the death of Bin Laden, which occurred exactly 8 years to the day after Dubya appeared in a flight suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.)
Despite virtually no evidence to support the claim, GOP torture enthusiasts like Peter King (R-NY) trumpeted that "We obtained that information through waterboarding." House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was just one of a legion of conservatives explaining that credit had one degree of separation, announcing "I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing bin Laden to justice." While Sarah Palin refused to even utter Obama’s name in crediting President Bush, right-wing billionaire sugar daddy David Koch complained that Obama “just made the decision, it was obvious where the guy is.” Donald Rumsfeld similarly praised his former boss:
"All of this was made possible by the relentless, sustained pressure on al Qaeda that the Bush administration initiated after 9/11 and that the Obama administration has wisely chosen to continue."
But if Republican mythology states that George W. Bush is responsible for apprehending the mastermind of 9/11, the attacks ten years ago were all Bill Clinton's fault.
That's an interesting charge, given President Bush's response to the CIA presenter of the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief:
"All right. You've covered your ass, now."
That would be the same PDB about which Condoleezza Rice explained to the 9/11 Commission, "I believe the title was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." And while National Security Advisor Rice protested in 2002 that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would...try to use an airplane as a missile," counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had anticipated exactly that. As it turned out, the plan he presented to Rice in January 2001 only became the subject of a national security "principals meeting" in the days just before September 11. (Bush, you'll recall, spent the previous month at his Crawford, Texas ranch agonizing about his policy on stem cell research which his adviser Karen Hughes described at the time as "the most important decision of your presidency.") It's no wonder Sandy Berger told Rice during the transition that "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject."
Nevertheless, conservative theology required that the 9/11 attacks which occurred eight months into the Bush presidency were entirely Bill Clinton's fault. Then die-hard conservative Andrew Sullivan summed up the tried but untrue talking point, claiming "[Clinton] was more responsible than anyone for the gaping holes in national security and intelligence that made Sept. 11 possible. The buck must stop with him." A national security disaster that spanned both administrations, in the telling of Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft to the 9/11 Commission in April 2004, belonged solely to one man:
"But the simple fact of September 11 is this: we did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions, and starved for basic information technology. The old national intelligence system in place on September 11 was destined to fail."
According to Republican calculus, Bill Clinton was also responsible for every calamity which befell the economy under George W. Bush. Given that Clinton presided over the creation of 23 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in decades, robust economic growth and a balanced budget, that might seem like a dubious claim.
Dubious, that it, until conservatives clarify that the Clinton boom of the late 1990's was the result of the invisible hand of Ronald Reagan.
It was a busy weekend in the political spotlight for John McCain. On Friday, the man with 13 cars announced he would oppose the wild popular "cash for clunkers" program before claiming on Sunday that President Obama had failed the test of bipartisanship.
But it was his Wall Street Journal interview with editor Stephen Moore which may have been the most fascinating part of McCain's weekend. Fascinating, that is, as a study of revisionist history and selective amnesia by both men. While Moore now praises McCain as "one of the lead critics of Obamanomics," in the past the former Club for Growth president groused his organization's members "loathe" McCain. As for the ersatz maverick, McCain blamed the economic crisis and media bias rather than his own serial flip-flopping and miserable campaign for his defeat at the polls.
For his part, Moore skipped over his past animus towards the Arizona Senator. After all, in 2004, he announced, "We don't like McCain at all." The anti-tax, laissez faire Club for Growth tried, but did not find, what Moore deemed "a true, Reagan conservative" to oppose McCain in his '04 GOP primary. As last year's presidential primaries approached, the Club blasted McCain's opposition to the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, comparing him to "the likes of Ted Kennedy in his rhetorical attacks."
"I think John McCain, if he can get to the general election, he has a great chance of being president, especially if he's up against somebody like Hillary Clinton."
Of course, things didn't turn out that way. But to hear John McCain tell it, very little of what transpired was his fault.
For openers, he insisted, last fall's collapsing economy dealt him a losing hand:
He believes that he could have won the election had it not been for the market collapse in mid-September. "We were three points up on September 14. The next day the market lost 700 points and $1.2 trillion in wealth vanished, and by the end of the day we were seven points down. We lost the white college graduate voters, who became profoundly disillusioned with Republicans. And by the way, that was the way it ended up. We lost by seven points."
In reality, it was McCain's self-professed, self-evident ignorance on matters economic which undermined his credibility with voters. After all, McCain like his friend and adviser Phil Gramm called the recession "psychological" and prescribed eBay as the cure for what ailed the economy. On the very September day the market plummeted, McCain pronounced, "fundamentals of our economy are strong," the 18th time during the '08 campaign he had done so.
