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Dee Dee Benkie, a former Bush campaign aide, was on Fox News' America Live with Heather Childers, fearmongering about their favorite topic of the holiday season: the dread Fiscal Cliff. She was demanding that President Obama actually be president instead of the "mac-daddy candidate" and lead on the fiscal issues. She was quite adamant that the Republicans needed new leadership in the House and Senate, which means that Boehner and McConnell must go. She wants Marco Rubio the earth expert to be the minority leader.

Benkie was also all over Grover Norquist, who has become the favored scapegoat for some right-wingers as they look to pass the blame around.

BENKIE: I think Grover is over too. I mean, what is the deal with this guy? He should not be running Washington. He is part of the problem and we do need to find a way to work together.

Jehmu Greene, a lefty Fox Newsie who apologized to Tucker Carlson for calling him a bow-tie wearing white boy, agreed also that we need to take away Grover Norquist's death grip on the GOP so a deal can be made. Then Dee Dee got to talk about what she really wanted to discuss: spending in Washington.

BENKIE: What we have to stop to is the spending, the spending is so terrible in D.C. The waste is unbelievable when we have so much debt. We have to address that right away.

CHILDERS: What spending cuts?

BENKIE: We've got to cut across the board. I mean, Washington D.C. is so bloated, such terrible waste, and we're broke right now as a country. We need to make sure we can take care of Americans and I don't mean in a way (inaudible) as far as all the entitlements. I mean, we take care of the people who need to be -- we need to take care of the job creators so we don't have a stranglehold on them as far as taxing them to death, and then we've got to adjust Obamacare because it's really, a lot of the businesses right now are struggling. There's so much to be worked on.

CHILDERS) John Boehner said Obamacare needs to be on the table.

GREENE: Obamacare is the law of the land ladies and let's not forget it.

CHILDERS: We'll see.

Dee Dee just throws in a sentence or two about how we have to support the middle class, but then retreats to the republican familiar position of cutting taxes for businesses. Nothing about how we should save Medicare and Medicaid from cruel and unjust cuts just to appease the business owners.

Nope, it's the non-job-creating peons who need to shoulder the sacrifice. As always.

Monday morning President Obama laid the foundation for the core battle of this election: preserving tax cuts for those earning $250,000 or less while rolling them back for the 2 percent who earn more than that.

Immediately, the Romney campaign responded with this:

President Obama’s response to even more bad economic news is a massive tax increase.

Lie #1: "Massive Tax Increase"
Only in Karl Rove's America could it be true that maintaining lower tax rates for 98 percent of individual taxpayers is a "massive tax increase." Just in case there's any doubt here, we are talking about less than a 5 percent increase in taxes on anyone with earned income in excess of $250,000. Will someone at the Romney campaign please let me know how this "massive tax increase" compares with the Affordable Care Act as the "biggest tax increase in US history"? Settle down, boys. Your caviar might rebel if you don't. Onward.

It just proves again that the President doesn’t have a clue how to get America working again and help the middle class. The President’s latest bad idea is to raise taxes on families, job creators, and small businesses.

Lie #2: "Raising taxes on families, job creators and small businesses."

First, a look at what Mitt Romney calls "small business." Romney is referring to those "small businesses" known as pass-through entities. Rachel Maddow explained how these work to the benefit of the ultra-wealthy a couple of years back.

In a nutshell, those "pass-through entities", usually LLCs (Limited Liability Companies) or LPs (Limited Partnerships) pass through all of the income and expenses to owners instead of paying taxes as a business entity. Those owners then include that business income and/or expense on their tax returns. On the one tax return Mitt Romney released, for example, nearly all of the $26 million he declared as income was attributable to pass-through entities, some of them located in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda and others located here in the United States. Because some of that pass-through income came to him as "carried interest", he also paid a far lower tax rate on $12.5 million in income in 2010.

Here are some of the "small businesses" that generated income for the Romney Family Trust in 2010:

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In the wake of the debt-ceiling crisis he helped manufacture last summer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell boasted it was "a hostage that's worth ransoming" which "also is a new template" for the future. As it turns out, those threats were among the few true words McConnell has uttered. Because while he's promising once again to blackmail the White House over the debt ceiling, the Kentucky Republican claimed it's because "we'd like to do something about the nation's biggest problem, spending and debt, which of course is the reason for this economic malaise." Of course, as the data show, it's the very austerity policies here and in Europe which are costing jobs and hurting growth.

But Mitch McConnell's myth-making hardly ends there. On the economy, taxes, deficits, health care and so much else, virtually all of McConnell's talking points are tried - and untrue.

(Click a link to jump to the details for each below):

• "Obama Made the Economy Worse"
• "No Evidence Whatsoever That the Bush Tax Cuts Actually Diminished Revenue"
• "Punishing Job Creators"
• "We Look a Lot Like Greece Already"
• Public Sector Layoffs Are a "Local" Problem
• 47 Million Uninsured Americans "Don't Go Without Health Care"
• The Public Option "May Cost You Your Life"
• Democrats Are "Sticking It to Seniors with Cuts to Medicare"

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For the perpetual tax-cutters of the Republican Party, last week's surrender on the payroll tax cut extension for 160 million working Americans was an especially damaging one. While tried if untrue GOP talking points that "tax cuts pay for themselves" and "never need to be offset" were thoroughly debunked, new polling shows the large Republican lead on the tax issue has virtually evaporated.

All of which explains why Eric Cantor and House Republicans are now proposing the "JOBS Act," a package of anti-regulatory measures and a whopping 20 percent tax cut for small businesses. Sadly for Cantor, a mountain of evidence shows that customer demand, and not government regulations, is the biggest burden to small business hiring. And with the total federal tax burden having hit its lowest level since 1950, the GOP would deliver billions in budget-busting tax breaks to millions who need them least.

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On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner took Barack Obama to task for the President's claim that he had not yet seen a jobs plan from Republicans. "I want to make sure," Boehner lectured the President, "you have all the facts."

As it turns out, this is one of those rare occasions where John Boehner is right. After all, that same day Boehner's Republican colleagues in the Senate introduced their own GOP jobs plan titled the "Jobs Through Growth Act." Of course, President Obama could be forgiven for assuming the GOP had nothing new to say on the subject of the economy. Because as a quick glance reveals, John McCain's new "Jobs Through Growth Act" like Eric Cantor's "House Republican Plan for America's Job Creators" is just a cynical rehash of the same tried and untrue policies the GOP has been pushing for years.

That the Senate Republicans' ersatz plan is a merely a repackaging of a years-old Republican wish list is apparent from the description on John McCain's web site. It's not merely a litany of existing GOP legislation; the call for upper class tax cuts, cutting federal regulations and tort reform could have come straight out of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign playbook. And the demands for steep spending cuts, a balanced budget amendment, 25% tax rates for individuals and corporations and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act are just a copy and paste from the Republicans' Ryan budget, the GOP "Pledge to America", the Tea Party "Contract from America" and other recent conservative manifestoes mercifully consigned to the dustbin of history.

Of course, if you think you've heard this story before, that's because you have.

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All Things Considered's Melissa Block talked to economist Justin Wolfers professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania about the term "job creators." Because according to Ayn Rand John Boehner, they're on strike. And if we just get these awesome-in-every-way people to get off that picket line and make us some more JOBS - everything will be wonderful.

From NPR:

As President Obama pushes Congress to pass his jobs bill, Republicans argue the administration's policies hurt "job creators." The phrase "job creators" comes up often these days in political rhetoric. So we wanted to understand who exactly the jobs creators are.

Melissa Block: We hear a lot about small businesses being the engine of job growth in country. How true is that?

Justin Wolfers: Categorically false. Small businesses create a lot of jobs but they also destroy a lot of jobs.

Melissa Block: How so?

Justin Wolfers: Small businesses, firms that are just starting out, some succeed and a bunch of them fail. If we only count the success, which would be the wrong thing to do, then we say they create an enormous number of jobs. But you know how difficult it is to start a successful small business. I'm sure they're doing a lot of hiring in total but they're also doing a lot of firing as well.

But this was the kicker:

Justin Wolfers: This is when the rhetoric of small businesses I think really leads us astray. If you actually look at the data of what we mean by small businesses or what they actually are, they're things like real estate agents or my hair dresser. They'll lawyers or they're doctors. You talk to these folks do they have any interest in innovating or bringing new products to market or any of the things we think of as being the engines of economic growth. The answer is no. My dry cleaner likes to take my clothes and give me them to me four days later. Most small businesses don't have any ambitions of being the engines of economic growth or the engines of jobs.

The GOP just has to have a deity - the need to revere something. It's no longer the President. It's clearly not the troops. They have to worship something - "job creators" are their latest Reagan.

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner peppered his address to the Economic Club of Washington with a dozen mentions of America's so-called "job creators." But in claiming that high taxes and unnecessary regulations have "pummeled" his supposed job producers, Boehner willingly misrepresented the source of and solutions to the nation's economic problems. After all, recent surveys show that regulations and taxes are not killing small business. With corporations flush with cash and the total federal tax burden at a 60 year low, the U.S. instead faces a demand crisis fueled by staggering household debt.

But John Boehner perpetrated the biggest fraud of his address when he declared, "Job creators in America are essentially on strike." If so, they've been on the picket line for a decade. As it turns out, George W. Bush's tax breaks for the wealthy sadly coincided with the worst period of job creation of any president since Herbert Hoover.

Like his lieutenant Eric Cantor, John Boehner has been regurgitating the "job creators" talking point for months. (Arguably, the sound bite dates back to 1993, when Republicans deployed the same "job killing" language against the Clinton upper-income tax increases that preceded the 1990's economic boom.) In May, Boehner served up the "job creators" line seven times in a speech to the Economic Club of New York. Contending that "the mere threat of tax hikes causes uncertainty for job creators -- uncertainty that results in less risk-taking and fewer jobs," Speaker Boehner explained that same month just who his magical job creators are:

"The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's [President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."

If so, those expectations were sadly unmet under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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It's ironic that the CEO who is expected to defend his company against anti-trust allegations this week is the only person on the Sunday shows being honest about how to get Americans working again.

AMANPOUR: But you say significant stimulus. Obviously, this is a political environment where the only real conversation is about cutting. Do you see any expectation or possibility of a climate for more stimulus?

SCHMIDT: Well, that's a political question, but the current strategy is ludicrous. You have a situation where the private sector sees essentially no growth in demand. The classic solution is to have the government step in and, with short-term initiatives, help stimulate that demand. If they do it right, they'll invest in income and growth-producing things like highways and bridges and schools, new opportunities for the private sector to go then build businesses. Today not only is there no demand coming out of the government, but because of the housing crisis, nobody sees any improvement in their own liquidity, so nobody's buying anything.

AMANPOUR: So this is a pretty dark picture that you're painting. Add to that no confidence from the consumers and businesses sitting on something like $2 trillion worth of profits which they're not going to spend, apparently. Is the president -- does he have a material problem with the business community right now?

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Click here for larger image.

Judging from the furious reaction of some of the gilded-class crowd and their Republican protectors, billionaire Warren Buffett struck a nerve with his plea to Congress to "stop coddling the super-rich." Former American Express CEO, Harvey Golub and tea party sugar daddy Charles Koch were quick to protest respectively "the unfair way taxes are collected" and that "my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington." Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor attacked President Obama's "efforts to incite class warfare."

Of course, a truism of American politics is that the side decrying the class war is the one winning it. And at a time when the federal tax burden is at its lowest in 60 years and income inequality at its highest level in 80, Republicans would still rather wave the unbloodied shirt of class warfare than ask what America's rich and famous can do for their country.

That became abundantly clear during the debt ceiling crisis Republicans manufactured. Weeks before Cantor's Sunday op-ed in the Washington Post accused President Obama of class warfare and a desire to "make it harder to create jobs," his GOP colleagues were already singing from the same hymnal. Senators Dan Coats (R-IN) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) quickly called a proposed $4 trillion debt reduction deal 17 percent of which came from new revenues "class warfare." Utah's Orrin Hatch wasn't content to lament "the usual class warfare the Democrats always wage." The poor, Hatch insisted, "need to share some of the responsibility." As for a Senate resolution asking the same of millionaires, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions said that was "rather pathetic."

Of course, what is really pathetic is the declining tax burden on the small slice of Americans now taking an ever-larger piece of the economic pie.

Even after extorting in December a two-year extension to the upper-income Bush tax cuts and steep reductions in the estate tax impacting only 0.25 percent of families, Republicans refused to countenance a dime of new tax revenue as the debt ceiling debate began. First Eric Cantor and then John Boehner walked out of the debt compromise discussions with President Obama for the same reason. As Boehner put it in his national address in July, "I know those tax increases will destroy jobs."

Back in May, John Boehner explained to CBS News who Republicans would be trying to protect during the debt ceiling negotiations with President Obama:

"The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."

If so, those expectations were sadly unmet after the tax cuts of George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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That all six of the Republicans selected to the Congressional debt reduction "Super Committee" are signers of Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge is hardly surprising. But the choice of Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, is an especially fitting one for the GOP. After all, Kyl didn't merely define a generation of Republican talking points when he explained earlier this year that his was "not intended to be a factual statement." As it turns out, from regurgitating bogus claims that "tax cuts pay for themselves" and spur "job creators" to his war on the estate tax, Jon Kyl has long been a leading fabricator of GOP tax cut myths. And when it comes to super lies on taxes, his fellow Republican super committeemen are not far behind.

In June, the second ranking Senate Republican joined House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in walking out of debt reduction talks led by Vice President Biden because of their refusal to accept even a dime of new tax revenue. As Jon Kyl explained last summer (starting around the 1:20 mark above), tax cuts don't increase the national debt:

"You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."

Kyl's was just the latest repackaging of President Bush's long ago debunked claim that "you cut taxes and the tax revenues increase." Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison parroted that line, "Every major tax cut we've had in history has created more revenue." Then House Minority Leader John Boehner agreed, insisting last June that the Bush tax cuts had nothing to do with the depleted U.S. Treasury, "It's not the marginal tax rates ... that's not what led to the budget deficit. The revenue problem we have today is a result of what happened in the economic collapse some 18 months ago." For his part, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rushed to defend Kyl's fuzzy math:

"There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."

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