David Gregory paints this phony outrage as a firestorm, but Friedman has to correct him. Even Tom Brokaw was stunned at the ignorance and stupidity of the right wingers going ballistic over President Obama's speech to our school kids.

Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: We brought it up with David Axelrod. Well, this has created such a firestorm. Here's the New Canaan Public Schools, writing a parent letter, and in it they say this. "In developing their plans our principals have considered issues such as developmental appropriateness, curricular relevance, the time at which the speech is being broadcast and the importance of teachers assuming responsibility for the selection of instructional materials. In elementary schools the administration and faculty will view the speech, download it and after discussing it, make decisions regarding how it might be used in the future--including deciding its appropriateness for various grade levels. Parents will be notified, if and when, the decision to show the speech is made." Tom Brokaw, talk about tortured language. What's going on here?

MR. FRIEDMAN: Signs of the apocalypse. I mean, really.

MR. BROKAW: It's stunning to me. I come from a time and a place in America where it would be thrilling to have a president of the United States address your school about the importance of studying and staying in school. And this president, whatever else you think about his political philosophy, is a symbol of working hard, coming from difficult circumstances and getting to where he is in part because of education. I think it's so ripe for satire, it's unbelievable. The superintendent of the Gettysburg Public School System said today that they have devised a plan for students to be shielded from a President Abraham Lincoln who will be coming to make an address. Look, that is the most tortured thing I can possibly imagine, what we just read there. It sounds like East Germany trying to form some restrictions on people leaving the eastern sector to go into the western sector. I think it's perfectly appropriate for parents to say, "I don't want my child to hear that. I would rather keep them out or put them in a different school that day." But this is completely out of control, in my judgment. And it's not--it's not partisan. I mean, if--when I was a student or when my children were in school...

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. BROKAW: ...if it had been Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or George Bush, the idea of hearing a president of the United States saying we should study hard and that's how we advance and we all need to get in on, on this, I think is an appropriate message.

MR. GREGORY: Mayor Giuliani, you ran for president and one of the things that I've noticed in my experience covering a Republican president,George W. Bush, is the lack of respect for the institution of the presidency. Whether it's people saying during Bush's time, "Hey, he's not my president." Well, no, yes, he is. Does that trouble you?

MR. GIULIANI: Yes, it does, and Tom is right. But the difference is we looked at President Eisenhower or President Reagan, even up to about that point, even President Bush 41 differently. There's a lack of respect for the president, there's a lack of respect for politicians. And David Axelrod said, "Well, this isn't politics." Everything the president does nowadays is politics, for better or worse. And I think that's what you're seeing. You're seeing people distrust the president's motives or the administration's motives. It's not just about the speech, it's about the lesson plan. I think it's unfortunate and I think, you know, what's the--it almost seems a shame to say what's the harm in a president speaking to a group of children.

FMR. REP. FORD: I wish when I was in fourth...

MR. GIULIANI: I think, I think the president should be given the opportunity to do it.

MR. FRIEDMAN: But David, you know, you said, it's a firestorm. And we live in the age of firestorms. You know, today, or this week, it's the president speaking in school. What it needs is for people to stand up and say that's flat out stupid, OK? That's flat out stupid what you're talking about. The president of the United States, addressing schoolchildren in this country to study hard, work hard because that's the way you advance in today's global economy. And instead of that, we kind of dance around it, you know. It's flat out stupid.

Wow, Friedman said something I can get behind here. "Signs of the apocalypse." That's how their reaction is to everything done by the president. Why didn't Gregory call it stupid too? Rudy couldn't even defend their actions. That's saying a lot when the only thing he can come up with is that it's all politics now. How does that make it OK? When will the media start acting like the f*&king media? They can't even do it for something as absurd as this.

The truth may set you free, but not if you're a Republican and the subject is taxes. After all, 95% of American families as promised received a tax cut from the Obama stimulus package. And while three-quarters of Americans support President Obama's proposal to roll back the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to their Clinton-era levels, it turns out that affluent voters, too, chose Barack Obama over John McCain. Making matters worse, a Gallup poll Monday revealed that Americans' "views of income taxes among most positive since 1956."

So as their furious followers head off to their April 15th orgy of tea-bagging, the leadership of the GOP and its amen corner in the right-wing media have instead turned to tall tales on taxes.

Here, then, are 10 Republican Tax Day lies:

1. President Obama will raise taxes on small businesses.
2. The estate tax devastates small businesses and family farms.
3. 40% of Americans pay no taxes.
4. Tax cuts always increase revenue.
5. The GOP is the party of fiscal discipline.
6. Ronald Reagan was the greatest tax cutter of all time.
7. FDR caused the Great Depression, or at least made it worse.
8. Obama's cap-and-trade plan will cost each American family $3,100 a year.
9. Obama's tax proposals will undermine charitable giving.
10. The rich pay too much in taxes already.

For the details behind each of the GOP's Tax Day deceits, continue reading.

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Erin Burnett states the obvious when it comes to one of the reasons that people in this country are pissed off right now which is the huge disparity between the salaries of those at the top and every day working people. My question is why in the hell are she and Tom Brokaw the ones Gregory brings in to discuss the economy on Meet the Press?

MR. GREGORY: It leads me so perfectly to a question about what happened this week. Why was this week a kind of tipping point? Here's the cover of Newsweek magazine. You've got an angry mob with pitchforks and the headline, "The Thinking Man's Guide to Populist Rage." Editor Jon Meacham writes this: "It was, in a way, overdue. Beginning last September, when the financial sector of the economy collapsed and the markets melted down, a resurgence of American populism seemed inevitable. ... And yet the temper of the time, shaped in large measure by Barack Obama's own coolness, remained calm. ... You might think of the period between September 2008 and March 2009, then, as a kind of economic phony war, the term historians use to describe the months that elapsed between Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 to the broader outrake of--outbreak, rather--of hostilities in late April and early May of 1940. In this analogy, the AIG bonuses that were revealed last week are rather like the battle for France--the point after which nothing would be the same."

Your take, Tom, on what happened this week.

MR. BROKAW: Well, I--my take, I think it's understandable. One of the things that I've been saying is that for a year now, for a full year nothing that the American people have been told about the financial condition of this country has proved to be true. And very good people--Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase said last June, after Bear Stearns collapsed, "Well, we think we've seen the worst for Wall Street now. We still have the housing crisis to go."

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MR. BROKAW: Well, we hadn't seen the worst from Wall Street. And this AIG bonus thing exploded in everyone's faces. Meanwhile, across the country car dealers are going under as they watch GM get bailouts and GMAC come and clear off their lots of the vehicles that they owe money on. Mom and pop and regional retail stores are closing up or cutting back severely. I know one banker who was dealing with a client who got in some credit card difficulty and, as he said, the day that Citibank got 5 percent money from the government this client, a single mom, had her penalty bumped up 2 points on her credit card late payments. And he said, "How do you explain that?" That would ricochet up and down any Main Street. So there has been this steady building. And I think that not just the administration, but the political culture in Washington has been insufficiently attentive to what's going on on Wall--on Main Street, at the other end of the pipeline. They need to hear from those people, make them feel like they're part of the process and make them understand how we can all go forward and we not just feel your pain, but we hear what you're saying.

MR. GREGORY: And I just feel like, Erin, there's been a, a breaking of contracts. If there was a social contract between American investors and Wall Street, it was, "Look, we don't really get a lot of what you do..."

MR. BROKAW: Yeah, right.

MR. GREGORY: "...but we count on you for the long-term wealth." And all of the sudden that evaporates. And when it comes to government, hey, government's got to be looking out for us, protecting us. That seems not to have happened. It's that loss of faith that I brought up with the leaders in the earlier discussion.

MS. BURNETT: I think you, you put it in a great way when you said it's a breaking of a contract; which does, in a sense, sort of explain why there is such public support for breaking formal legal contracts...

MR. GREGORY: Hm.

MS. BURNETT: ...when people feel they've been so let down, as you're talking about. Because the irony of this is that even though it seems it's about the money when it comes to these bonuses, it really isn't. When you look at the bonuses paid last year, the $18.6 billion number from Wall Street that so shocked people, if you taxed that at the, at the House bill rate, that's only .6 percent of the tax revenue that the United States government took in a year ago. It's an infant--it's incredibly small. So in a sense it really isn't about the money, it's about this broader shift. The average executive in this country of a publicly traded company, not just Wall Street, makes 400 times the average worker. And that has been a dramatic shift over the past two decades. That is something that is causing some of the anger here. In a sense it's been building, and this is the moment where it breaks.

Really Erin? Aren't we the observant one? I don't know about everyone else but in my world where I have to go work one of those things called...you know...a job, and not one surrounded by inside the beltway and Wall Street talking heads, this is not something new. People have actually been pissed off about the over the top executive pay in the United States for a long time. I'm so glad you finally bothered to notice. You finally put enough of them out of their homes and guess what? They're going to start beating down someone's door because on top of being pissed off, they now also have nothing more to lose.

Erin Burnett's been too busy talking about how great it is for a company's stock when they lay a bunch of their workers off or snuggling up to the Wall Street CEO's that got us into this mess to have taken much notice before the villagers were marching with pitchforks in the streets. Now she's going to share her vast wisdom on populist outrage with us.

FO writes to the C&L inbox after watching Tom on Meet the Press Sunday: "What is a "senior Republican" doing calling Brokaw for campaign advice?"

MR. BROKAW: Chuck, a very senior Republican was startled the other day when he called me and said, ‘What in the world is going on in Florida? Why are we in trouble there?’

He is moderating Tuesday's Presidential Debate so I think it's called "working the refs." I'd kind of like to know who that Republican is.

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There's a whole lot of rationalizing going on in media circles over the laughable and admitted stump-speech-disguised-as-a-Vice-Presidential-debate last week. Moderator Gwen Ifill apparently thinks that if the candidates themselves weren't worried about staying on topic or engaging one another, it wasn't her job to make them do so.

The understanding was that we were going to have a debate. And one of the interesting things about debates, that people forget -- especially with this one, there was so much obsession about Sarah Palin -- is that there are two people on stage. And their job – you know this, you’re doing this Tuesday night – are to debate each other. The moderator’s job is to control their debate. If they have decided, as Joe Biden decided, that he was going to debate John McCain and she decided she was going to give a stump speech to the American people, there’s very little a moderator can do, other than say, “No, no, no, listen, I ask the questions! Please, please answer!” So I guess I knew going in that they all had their goals for that debate.

I was taken, going in, it can now be said, by how many of the questions that people volunteered to me were all about her. There was 99%, I would say, was all about her. 99% of the analysis afterward were about her. It was as if Joe Biden wasn’t part of this deal. And if she wasn’t challenged on the things she said that were not completely correct, or if she wasn’t challenged on changing the subject and answering the questions, by her competitor, I had another job to do at the table.

By her own admission, Ifill recognizes that it's the moderator's job to control the debate--and says that Palin "blew her off"--but since neither of the candidates called out the other for not following the debate rules, she has "another job at the table". Um, huh?

Why bother having a moderator at that point, Ifill? What other job was monopolizing your time?

Transcripts below the fold:

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We've shown before that since his naming as Tim Russert's interim replacement how completely one-sided Tom Brokaw has been in terms of Republican framing.   But this truly takes the cake.  After letting McCain spokesman (and Official WATB) Steve Schmidt let loose with a bunch of lies (more on that later) against Obama that campaign manager David Axelrod easily shows for the crap it is, Tom Brokaw in the interest of fairness cites an NBC/WSJ poll that says that more Americans think McCain is "best equipped" to be Commander in Chief.

AXELROD: What has happened is, as Sen. Obama predicted from the beginning, that we got distracted in Iraq and now Osama bin Laden, who is the person who attacked the United States, killed 3,000 American citizens is now resurgent. He is stronger and that is the result of the misbegotten decisions of John McCain and he stubbornly wants to continue, even as the Iraqis won't take responsibility, sitting on $79 billion of their own surplus, while we spend $10 billion a month. It doesn't make sense. We can't take more of the same, Steve.

BROKAW: In fairness to everybody here, I'm just going to end on one note and that is that we continue to poll on who is best equipped to be Commander in Chief, John McCain continues to lead in that category, despite the criticism from Barack Obama by a factor of 53 to 42 percent in our latest NBC/WSJ poll.

See, here's the problem, Tom.  I have the latest NBC/WSJ poll (.pdf) taken September 19-22.  Guess what?  THOSE NUMBERS AREN'T IN THERE.  Pulled out of thin air, or an orifice of your choice.  In fact, in the MSNBC.com political coverage of this poll, the headline read: Obama Up 2 in NBC/WSJ Poll.  So where exactly are these numbers, Tom?  If you go to Gallup, the lead is even stronger (50 to 42%), which is pretty close to the numbers you attributed to McCain.

So Tom Brokaw -- in the interest of fairness to whom exactly, I'm unclear, since he is deliberately MISinforming the public -- tries to mitigate Axelrod's deft defense of Obama's judgment by lying and saying that most people believe McCain is still better equipped to be Commander in Chief. You can leave a comment at the Meet The Press Comment Form on Brokaw's campaigning on behalf of McCain.

And by the way, Schmidt's assertion that McCain called for Rumsfeld's resignation?  Big fat, stinking lie.  From the Obama campaign: 

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Gosh, who needs campaign surrogates when the mainstream media will only too gladly suffice?  Tom Brokaw continues in his role as Republican concern troll by citing an anonymous email from a military man (who is "not crazy" about McCain, natch; that only increases the credibility, right?) objecting to Biden's crack yesterday about seven kitchen tables because, after all, McCain was a POW.  And Chuck Todd agrees, that while Democrats--citing Maureen Dowd, who has never met a Democrat she didn't metaphorically castrate or feminize-- don't like it, it still works with voters.

BROKAW: Chuck Todd, a career military person-who is not crazy about John McCain-immediately emailed me about that crack about seven kitchen tables, saying, "Wait a minute, that's pretty gratuitous. Here's a guy who spent five years in prison, not knowing where his next meal was going to come from."

TODD: It's interesting that..that Democrats are getting a little more upset by that line of defense now. Coming, there's a column this morning by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times sort of laying out this case that you know, is the McCain campaign using the...using that defense too often to pushback everything, but it does work, I think, with voters.

You know, I normally think Todd's fairly astute, but this is just ridiculous.  I'm ready for Brokaw and Todd to appear in a YouTube video complete with smearing mascara, screaming "Leave McCain alone!" The reason that Democrats are getting upset is not that McCain is using it too often, it's that being a POW IS NOT A LINE OF DEFENSE.  Jumpin' Jiminy, these guys are clueless. 

McCain gets pulled over for speeding: "But Officer, I was a POW!" 

McCain misspells 'onomatopoeia' at the National Spelling Bee: "But judge, I was a POW!" 

McCain forgets to pay taxes on one of his multiple homes: "But Mr. IRS Auditor, I was a POW!"

That's how ludicrous McCain's "defense" is, and yet the media sees nothing wrong with it.  In fact, they're shocked by those who point out that being a POW isn't a "get out of gaffe" free card.  It's not working with the voters, you McCain Media types, it's working with you.  You're just not on the ball enough to know you're getting played.

Brian Williams announces that Tom Brokaw will take over Meet the Press until after the election. I knew they would never go with the crew they had on hand.

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