Out numbered as usual like any actual liberal on the Sunday bobble head shows, Katrina Vanden Heuvel makes some great points about why job creation is so important right now for some actual economic recovery to take place, and she's right about the so called health care reform.

VANDEN HEUVEL: You know, John Kenneth Galbraith once said that astrology -- that economic forecasting exists to make astrology look good. In these conditions, Matt, it’s very hard to have predicted what we would see. And don’t forget, the danger of the health care reform is that is it weakened and diluted in the way that the recovery package was so as to address Republicans’ concerns.

That could have been a stronger recovery -- but not strong enough to do what you rightly suggest, which is, parks, bridges, tunnels, an industrial policy, which may make George go berserk because it sounds like socialism, which it isn’t, every advanced industrialized country has an industrial policy which would address the auto industry. Build light rail, buses.

Full transcript below the fold.

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ABC's Cokie Roberts disagrees with celebrities who have called for charges against Roman Polanski to be dropped. "Roman Polanski is a criminal," Roberts said Sunday. "He raped and drugged and raped and sodomized a child. And then was a fugitive from justice. As far as I'm concerned, just take him out and shoot him."

RIDDLE: If Dick Cheney were caught red-handed tossing burning kittens at homeless veterans from the White House lawn, what would be the first three words out of Cokie Roberts' mouth?

A: "But the Democrats...."

Cokie Roberts and her husband just penned an article that attacks liberals who have gone after the Ben Nelson's of the Democratic Party that are sabotaging health care reform. Steve and Cokie Roberts: Blessed are the majority makers. You see in Villagese, it's the few Ben Nelson's that has given President Obama the majority in Congress and not the other 257 House members and 59 Senators that actually give him the majority. To Cokie, the public option is nothing more than a gift to liberals that has no inherent significant in it that will impact health care reform. Sitting from her desk on the set of ABC, Cokie says she can craft the perfect health care bill without blinking an eye. Isn't she special?

STEPHANOPOULOS: it'll force him to go slower, which is probably a good thing, but the problem he may have is actually managing his liberal base.

ROBERTS: Absolutely, I think that is going to be the problem because look....you could sit here right now, even though it's complicated we can sit at this table and write a bill...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Insurance reforms, some costs control...

ROBERTS: And, but no public option and it's a bill that's actually been there for a very long time. You can take the Wyden-Bennett, it is a bipartisan bill. And Howard Baker and Bob Dole have a bill, you know there are bills out there that are doable. And if I had to guess in the end I think that's probably what is going to happen is something much more watered down ...

STEPHANOPOULOS:...But will the Howard Dean wing of the party go along?

ROBERTS: No, they are going to be absolutely furious and that is the problem that he's got right now. He's already got the liberals

NOONAN: Maybe it would be good for the president if he got absolutely furious about something.

ROBERTS: Well, I think that's the middle advantage. (Cokie's last words were tough to hear)

NOONAN: I understand what's going on, we got a little middle stuff going on around here, we got some centrism. That ain't so bad.

Peggy Noonan is so cute talking about centrism. That's a word she would never use if Reagan and Bush were in charge. Cokie is insufferable with her rant because it makes no sense, but that's a Villager for you. See, any elitist gasbag can craft sweeping health care reforms in an hour. I'm shocked that ABC didn't devote a ten minute segment so that Cokie could lead the round table to write the exact legislation that Congress should vote on and President Obama would sign into law. It would have saved the country so much time and energy. Why didn't she think of that? That Cokie is so brilliant.

In Cokie's world, we're the problem. It's not the obstructionist Republicans and all the health care establishment groups that have fought to block health care reform since 1948. Naw, it's OK for them to destroy it just like ABC's first guest---Newt Gingrich did. What Gingrich does is perfectly acceptable to the beltway weenies because that's the way she likes it. It's those dirty f*&king hippies that want true health care reform that are the problem. We actually have a voice at the table now and that's too much for her. How dare we ask for a good bill and not some watered down piece of crap that Roberts has a hankering for? The serious people in Washington think that Obama should trash his base while Bush should embrace his. Typical 1988 conventional wisdom. Conservative opposition to everything Democratic is the way the world turns under Cokie and the DC insiders. Oh, and what type of health care does she enjoy today? Conservative opposition to everything Democratic is the way the world turns under Cokie. Oh, and what type of health care does she enjoy?

Cokie says she finds the screaming, angry people at healthcare town hall meetings "unpleasant." She "doesn't know how we got here" and wonders if it doesn't have to do with...

The lack of nuns. No, really. That's what she said.

Right, Cokie. Because it couldn't possibly have been orchestrated by the many powerful and monied interests opposing healthcare reform! It couldn't possibly be the logical fruition of the years of poison seeds sown by the Republican party and their powerful allies.

What a dope. Sister Francis Bernadine (my homeroom teacher) would have smacked her across the head for not paying attention.

The panel on This Week wasn't much better than the one on Fox News Sunday with their whitewashing of torture and whether there should be investigations. The worst of them being George Will and Peggy Noonan. When asked about whether there will be prosecutions for those that devised the policies on torture George Will thought the Obama administration was striking the right "balance".

Will: Yes. His balance was right. Whether Congress will stick to it or not, the New York Times and others of that faction are inciting Congress have hearings on this and perhaps they will. Perhaps they should. The problem with transparency is it's transparent for the terrorists as well and as you had a clip on here of former Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff saying, the bad guys train to resist what they know we can use and they are helped by when they are captured knowing what we cannot use. So this has a cost.

No George. They already knew that we were waterboarding. Your argument is bunk. You and Brit Hume really need to get with the program here. Next on the list is Cokie Roberts who is just oh so glad that those CIA tapes were destroyed.

Roberts: That's certainly true but we don't have, give them ammunition, and you know whoever at the CIA destroyed the tapes of the waterboarding, it was the wrong thing to do but I'm really glad they did it because I would hate to have those tapes out on the Internet and people uh, being using those because I think they would be wonderful recruiting tools for terrorists and the truth is we do wonderful work all around the world, this country, people in this country, organizations in this country, the US government get no credit for it, partly because of these kinds of techniques and just getting them out of there I think is just tremendously helpful.

So Cokie, do you really think that the terrorists don't know what went on because those tapes aren't there to watch? Do you really think this was not already a recruiting tool without the tapes? I fail to follow your logic here. The only thing not having the tapes out there assures is that the people who were in them are never held accountable for what they did.

Then we have Sam Donaldson who throws out the whole Nuremberg trials argument in one fell swoop by giving the CIA agents a pass who tortured prisoners.

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From This Week the panel discussion on the stimulus package. Following Stephanopolous' opening Republican frame that the money from the stimulus package isn't going to make its way into the economy right away, Paul Krugman shows us why talking heads in the media should not argue with Nobel Laureates in economics.

The panel on This Week discussing what McCain needs to do to pull out this election and apparently the last argument they feel he or any of the Republicans has left is fear of lack of a divided government. It amazes me that these talking heads in the media didn't have this mortal fear when the Republicans had control of everything. After admitting that the Republicans are losing the independents and the middle George Will makes this observation near the end of the discussion:

The need to Sen. McCain to rally the base and appeal to the base, first of all even though the base is as you said in the earlier segment much smaller than it was then, was implicit in the numbers from 2006, in 2006 Republican candidates in the off year elections got more votes from Evangelical Christians than Democratic got from African Americans and labor union members combined. Evangelical Christians by....(crosstalk)..I'm just telling you..that base is not just the base. It is almost the Republican party.

(h/t Dave)

Finally, someone pushes back against the media's need to create false equivalencies! Nobel Economics Prize shortlister Paul Krugman tries to make a cogent point about how there are those in the Republican Party who simply cannot accept a Democrat governing:

KRUGMAN: This is also…this is not just about McCain, what he did. The fact of the matter is, for a long time, we’ve had a substantial fraction of the Republican base that just does not regard the Democrats governing as legitimate. Remember, the Clinton years, craziness, right? That they were murderers, drug smugglers, and the imminent prospect of what looks like a Democratic victory would drive a lot of these people crazy even if Sarah Palin wasn’t saying these inflammatory things. It’s going to be very ugly after the election.

Only to have Cokie Roberts try to draw the false equivalency of Democrats not accepting the results of the 2000 and 2004 elections:

ROBERTS: On both sides, that’s true. I also think you’ve had a huge number of Democrats who think the Republicans are illegitimate and that was particularly true after the 2000 election and to some degree, after 2004. And so, you really do have, at the core of each party, people who are not ready to accept the verdict of the election.

Um, Cokie? Not the same thing at all. By all standards, Bill Clinton won the elections. The witch hunt that went after him had nothing to do with the legitimacy of his election...they just threw as much mud as they could to see if something would stick, regardless of truth--Vince Foster, Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers/Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky.

The Democrats who view this administration as illegitimate do so because there is significant (and almost wholly media-ignored evidence) that the election was manipulated for George W. Bush. We don't need to make up scandals that go nowhere...we just need to find some backbone in DC to actually investigate those openly before us.

It's unfortunate, however, that Krugman is not given the opportunity to explain why he rejects such false equivalencies...allowing something other than the standard GOP framing out there.

Krugman also raises an important point that I think all of us should bear in mind even after the election. Assuming that trends stay the way they are in the next three weeks and Obama is elected, our job is far from over. It is not inaccurate to say that much of these slings and arrows pointed towards Obama are the foundation for the work the Republican Party will spend the next 4-8 years to de-legitimize an Obama presidency. At its core, this faction of the GOP believes that Obama does not deserve the presidency -- because he is not like them -- and will stop at nothing to bring him down, just as we saw with Clinton. The particulars are different: birth certificate, secret Muslim beliefs, anti-American pastor, consorting with terrorists, and if we're completely honest, the color of his skin as well. But while the specific allegations are different, the tactic is exactly the same.

On ABC's THIS WEEK, Cokie said this about Obama going to Hawaii:

  Download | Play (h/t Heather)

 Roberts: …going off this week I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be at Myrtle Beach and if he’s going to take a vacation at this time. I just think this is not the time to do that.

Responding to Cokie Roberts ridiculous statements about Obama's vacation to the state of Hawaii--here's a little message for her via email from Senator Akaka's office:

"Saying our 50th state is somehow "foreign," does a great disservice to the hard working, patriotic Americans who call Hawaii home. For months people have been asking me, 'when is Sen. Obama going to come home?' I'm so glad he found time to visit his sister and his grandmother, show his daughters more of his home state, and relax a little. Hawaii is a great U.S. destination, just ask the 5.5 million Americans who visited last year for business and pleasure.

I wonder how many times Cokie has been there herself?

  Even though Cokie Roberts knows that Obama's grandmother lives in Hawaii, he's still acting like an elitist snob for taking a vacation instead of some place common people go, like Myrtle Beach, SC.  Hey, it's a party town. I think Obama should have Cokie make all his vacation plans from now on.

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

Roberts: ...going off this week I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be at Myrtle Beach and if he's going to take a vacation at this time. I just think this is not the time to do that.

We're all so happy that Cokie is a concern troll and hey, she knows Hawaii is a state and all.  Wow, what a concession.  It's so exotic, visiting your grandmother. Really, it's just more of the chattering class talking amongst themselves. Who cares where Obama goes on vacation except for the wanking elites?  Are they bothered by the fact that McCain takes off every weekend and goes to one of his eight homes? Of course that's not elitist at all, is it, Cokie? 

UPDATE: (Nicole) In addition to his elitist vacation spot, the McCain campaign and the RNC put out a mocking "Barack Obama's Hawaii Travel Guide" that, among other things, bashes Obama for attending a private school on scholarship there.  Jon Perr has it.