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Judd Gregg just had a meltdown on MSNBC that came out of nowhere. He's been attacking everything Obama, almost from the minute he turned down a Cabinet post offer from the White House, but his performance today was really weird. The conversation was about spending and, as usual, Gregg was acting like the incredible deficit freak that he is.

Melissa Francis is a CNBC talker who believes just like he does, and for some reason he mistook her for a dirty f*&king hippy and claimed she was setting him up as a man who wants to cut all spending on education. In fact, the only thing people like him and Ron Paul believe will work for America is to cut all government spending and federal programs and then just give tax cuts to the rich.

Then, Contessa Brewer brought up the fact that many economists think that when FDR became a deficit hawk so soon after expanding spending that he helped stop the country's economic growth. She asked him if he thought money from education should be cut, he went off and called them liars.

Gregg: First off, nobody is saying no money for schools, what an absurd statement to make. And what a dishonest statement to make. On its face you're being fundamentally dishonest when you make that type of statement.

Brewer: Senator, you're going to be asked to cut certain programs from government if you're on the Senate banking committee. Which programs -- just tell us -- would you cut?
--

Gregg: And then it gets misrepresented by people like yourself who say they are going to, if you do any of this stuff you're going to end up not funding education. I mean that statement alone is the most irresponsible statement I've heard from a reporter probably in a month.

Brewer: It wasn't a statement, it was a question.

Gregg deliberately misconstrued what they said, and the conversation went downhill from there. Gregg acted like a typical conservative bully around women, and if they were both men he would not have tried to call them liars. Meanwhile, Contessa ended the interview very professionally. He owes Brewer and Francis an apology for his behavior.

And Digby explains why the question about cutting education is based in reality.

I'll let Gregg's tantrum stand on it's own. But I would just point out that it's not absurd in the least to ask if Republicans would cut education. Indeed, it's absurd to suggest otherwise:

President Ronald Reagan promised during the 1980 presidential election to eliminate the Department of Education as a cabinet post,[1] but he was not able to do so with a Democratic House of Representatives. In the 1982 State of the Union Address, he pledged:
“
The budget plan I submit to you on Feb. 8 will realize major savings by dismantling the Department of Education.[2]
”
Throughout the 1980s, the abolition of the Department of Education was a part of the Republican Party platform, but the administration of President George H. W. Bush declined to implement this idea.

So, not only was Brewer right to ask whether Gregg planned to cut education as part of a deficit reduction plan, there has been a very longstanding belief among conservatives that they should not be funding education at all.

If there was anyone at fault for spreading misinformation and lies on television it's Gregg with his irresponsible deficit fearmongering and Hooverite prescriptions for the economy. God help us if he and his ilk actually get their way.

And you can't help but scratch your head when you think that a year ago, when everyone knew that the economy was in deep trouble and would need a lot of stimulus, the administration actually named this guy to be Commerce Secretary, a department which Gregg had voted to eliminate as well. That tells you a lot about their judgment at the time.

Digby wrote up the full transcript:

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(They were just as suspicious of us)

For all the saber rattling and threats and accusations during the Cold War period, there were times, especially in the late 1950s, where signs of thaw in relations were starting to become noticed.

One was the great cultural exchange that went on between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. We got the Bolshoi Ballet and they got Louis Armstrong. Our pianist (Van Cliburn) won the prestigious Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. Soviet cinema was being seen on a regular basis in art house movie theaters around the country.

And so the barriers started to come down, a little bit - but not for long. In December of 1957, CBS Radio, in what was hailed as a milestone, not only in broadcasting, but in East-West communications, hosted a program from their Radio Beat series. The program dealt with Education and the perceptions both the Russians and the Americans had towards each other.

Dwight Cook (CBS News): “We believe in the broadcast that you’re about to hear, that one of the rare firsts of this year, is coming about. Because for the first time, as far as we know, in the history of radio you’re going to hear an actual, unrehearsed discussion between a group of educators sitting in a studio in Moscow Russia and another group of educators sitting around a table with me here in CBS New York. Our discussion is going to be on the purpose of Education.”

All very polite and non-confrontational - no dissidents commandeering the microphone shouting about Gulags. Three leading educators from the U.S. sitting around asking questions of three leading educators from the Soviet Union - and vice versa. What it did was establish the idea that neither of the two super powers really knew anything about each other.

It was short lived however. When the U2 Spyplane scandal surfaced in 1960, what little thaw there had been froze solid and stayed that way for a very long time before resuming.

But in the late 1950s there was that window of opportunity.

From The Thom Hartmann Show Dec. 2, 2009

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A school district near San Diego has now officially apologized for disallowing their students from watchign President Obama's speech last week. They had done so in a late night, "emergency" Labor Day vote overriding the District Superintendent who on the previous Friday had sent out notices that teachers would show the speech and that parents could opt out if they didn't want their kids to watch.

Apparently this wasn't good enough for the La Mesa-Spring Valley School Board trustees, who on a 3-2 vote overturned that, and initially wanted to bar the speech completely but settled for showing a recording at a later date. Rick Winet, a trustee, wrote "I would not and will not ever support this sort of selfish, socialistic message," calling it "a direct assault on The Constitution of The United States of America."

Naturally such blatant wingnuttery didn't go down well with the citizenry, even in a Republican district in California, and a mini revolt ensued with the School Board flooded with angry e-mails and phone calls.

If you wish to contact the Board by mail, send to:

Board of Education
La Mesa-Spring Valley School District
4750 Date Ave.
La Mesa, CA 91942
(619) 668-5700
Penny.Halgren@lmsvsd.k12.ca.us

h/t TheWrap.com

At the Toronto Film Festival, filmmaker Michael Moore excoriated newspapers for seeking profits and for "slitting their own throats".

Be warned! Visiting the website where the actual HypnObama (tm) is housed (at Zaius Nation, of course) could cause unforeseen diligence in education!

Open Thread below....

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When even Joe Scarborough is calling you out for fear mongering, you've got a problem.

From Think Progress:

Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted that conservatives are freaking out over President Obama’s upcoming speech to schoolchildren about “persisting and succeeding in school,” claiming that it is actually aimed at political indoctrination. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, host Joe Scarborough ripped into the hyperventilating conservatives. “Seriously, why don’t we want the president of the United States, any president of the United States, delivering the message to kids: work hard, stay in school, succeed,” said Scarborough, adding, “get your ratings if you want, you’re just screwing your political party.”

Dishonest morons motivated purely by ideology have decided to throw a scream-fest over a proposed "stay in school" speech from the President to children.

President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.

This is no small, isolated fit, thrown by random nutjobs. The New York Times, Washington Post,LA Times, AP, and others all ran stories this morning about the coordinated national effort to either keep children at home so they can't hear their president's pro-education message, or demanding that local schools block the message altogether.

The people organizing this protest and the people mad about the President daring to "indoctrinate" their children are the people who said nothing when Ronald Reagan talked favorably about tax cuts to schoolkids, when George Bush sat in a classroom on 9/11, and when they waged a campaign to put PRAYER in American schools. It's OK, then, to indoctrinate your children to almighty God, but not for them to hear a speech about hard work from the elected President of the United States. Conservatives have waged war on respect.

But the award for lack of self-awareness has to go to NBC News, which asks today:

Finally, here’s one more thought about the entire controversy over Obama’s education speech on Tuesday: Since the White House has said the text of the speech will be available for 24 hours before he delivers it and since they altered the lesson plan language, why is this still a controversy? The ability of the conservative media machine to generate a controversy for this White House is amazing. In fact, this is an example of a story that percolates where it becomes harder and harder for some to claim there's some knee-jerk liberal media bias. (Does anyone remember these kinds of controversies in the summer of 2001?) The ability of some conservatives to create media firestorms is still much greater than liberals these days.

Now, at least they admit that it's impossible to claim liberal media bias, meaning they understand who's to blame here. But do they really have to say "The ability of the conservative media machine to generate a controversy for this White House is amazing"? Isn't the answer that the non-conservative media will simply blindly follow whatever conservative media decides to gun up? Don't media types privilege conservative mini-controversies and hissy fits? Isn't there literally no way they could lay off something like this? Isn't that the problem?

Conservatives have cracked the code: yell real loud about some invented outrage, and watch the media chase the soccer ball. They actually don't have to cover it.

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Last night on Countdown, Eugene Robinson and Keith Olbermann agreed on the risks for Obama: If he doesn't come up with a viable public option, he will very likely face a challenger in the Democratic primary.

Olbermann: But what about the risk of passing some sort of interim measure here and we hear Congressman [Raul] Grijalva, who's the head of the Progressive Caucus having released a statement last night about grave concerns about these contacts supposedly from the administration to health care reform advocacy organizations they are going to cease supporting the public option. What good does it profit a man to win a bill and lose the base of his party?

Robinson: In the medium term and in the long run it doesn't strike me as a great idea. I mean look, you could say okay, this is the best bill we can get. Is the liberal Progressive Caucus going to thwart what is possible in search of the perfect? And so you could put them in that position and you could maybe wrestle them into going along with what they consider a bad bill, but there's a lot else on the table. He's, our involvement in Afghanistan is deepening, we're talking about Iraq, we're talking about Guantanamo. We're talking about a lot of issues on which the Progressive Caucus is going to have a lot to say and I don't think you want them to be in a foul mood.

Olbermann: No, no, no because he's compromised on everything so far and as self defeating as it might be, the Progressive Caucus and progressives would abandon him if necessary if this were to be the policy of this administration into 2012. If it's necessary to find somebody else to run against him, I think they'd do it no matter how destructive that might seem at face value.

Robinson: Well, I think that is possible. We are a more polarized nation right now and I think searching for a mythical center, a mythical compromise between doing something and doing nothing, ah... there's nothing in the middle there, you know. Either you're going to do something or you're not and I think you've got to choose.

Olbermann: The middle has been nothing all this time. This is just a different variant of it.

Meanwhile, the House Dems' Progressive Caucus has fired a return shot across the bow. Last night they delivered a letter to the White House: Not only will they not support a House bill, they will not vote for the final bill without it and asked for a meeting with the president:

We continue to support the robust public option that was reported out of the Committees on Ways and Means and Education and Labor and will not vote for a weakened bill on the House Floor or returning from a Conference with the Senate.

Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Medicare rates-not negotiated rates-is unacceptable.(...)

A health reform bill without a robust public option will not achieve the health reform this country so desperately needs. We cannot vote for anything less.

To date, only six members have signed. If they get to 40, we have a very different ballgame.

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Rachel Maddow on the Republicans attempt at revisionist history that Ted Kennedy would have been all about compromising to the point of making it a lousy bill just to get something passed on health care reform.

Maddow: In other words if only Ted Kennedy were still here. If only he had a health care bill those Republicans say they would have voted for that. You know, ah, Ted Kennedy did have a health care bill. Senator Kennedy was chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee which approved a health care reform package in July. It's called the Kennedy bill. And Senator Kennedy, helped write that bill. Senators Hatch, and McCain and Gregg, all voted against it. But the revisionist history goes even deeper. They aren't just saying they would have voted for a Kennedy health care bill, even though they had the chance and they didn't.

They're saying they would have voted for a Kennedy health care bill because Ted Kennedy would have compromised with them, because Ted Kennedy was all about making concessions to Republicans.

[.....]

Apparently in the history of Ted Kennedy's life and work as imagined by the GOP today Senator Kennedy was the great compromiser. Ready to water down health care reform in order to bring Republicans on board.

As Rachel notes, Kennedy was anything but that. And to add to Rachel's point, here's a little mash up of some of the "news" coverage from today calling for "Kennedy-like" bipartisanship.

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Later in her show Rachel gave some kudos to friend of the site Bob Cesca for his column at the HuffPo titled, Healthcare Reform Named After Ted Kennedy Must Not Suck. If there's one point to get across with all this yapping about what Senator Kennedy would have or would not have done to reform our health care system, I agree with Rachel that Bob's very simple, yet honest statement hits the nail on the head. Bipartisanship be damned if it means passing a lousy piece of legislation, and do not put Senator Kennedy's name on it if that's what we're going to end up with.

As tax cut-receiving Tea Baggers and town hall hecklers continue their tirades over health care reform, their kin in the Obama birth certificate denial crowd perpetuate their mass delusion. But lost in the fury is what might be deemed the Iron Law of Birtherism. That is, the birther movement is strongest in precisely those states where Republicans poll best and health care is worst. And as it turns out, there is a Birther Corollary: education, working conditions and myriad other indicators of social failure are generally most dismal in the most red of states.

In the staggering DailyKos/Research 2000 poll released 10 days ago, a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. (Nationally, only 11% of Americans denied Obama's natural citizenship, with another 12% in doubt.) This is a uniquely Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008. And to be sure, the old times there are not forgotten. As Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent concluded, "as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn't know where Obama was born."

That the birther movement would take hold in the states of the old Confederacy should come as little surprise. While Americans rejected George W. Bush's Republican Party on Election Day in November, in counties across much of the South voters actually increased their support for the GOP candidate John McCain over Bush four years earlier. The interactive New York Times map above tells the tale of November's losers still fighting their failed 2008 campaign by other means:

That helps explains why when it comes to the delusion over Obama's citizenship, as Steve Benen observed, one of these things is not like the other:

"Outside the South, this madness is gaining very little traction, and remains a fringe conspiracy theory. Within the South, it's practically mainstream."

But that brand of racial flat-earthism is not all that's practically mainstream in the South.

Consider, for example, abysmal health care.

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Marking his symbolic 100th day in office, President Barack Obama told Midwesterners Wednesday: "I'm pleased with the progress we've made but I'm not satisfied.

"We have begun to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, and we've begun the work of remaking America," Obama proclaimed. But he acknowledged, "We've got a lot of work to do because on our first day in office, we found challenges of unprecedented size and scope."

He defended his ambitious, costly plan, saying: "These challenges could not be met with half measures. They couldn't be met with the same, old formulas. They couldn't be confronted in isolation. They demanded action that was bold and sustained." And, Obama countered critics who said he's taking on too much, as he works to turn around the recession while revamping energy, education and health care in the United States. "The changes that we've made are the changes we promised," Obama said. "We're doing what we said we'd do

I think we've held him accountable which has been often and also shown strong support for the challenges he faces after inheriting an FDR-like economic disaster and two Bush wars at the same time. I also make sure to monitor the media and the Villagers to try and keep the coverage as honest as possible. Now that is a challenge. We also keep an eye on the radicalized right wing base that's getting scarier by the day.
Hillary Clinton has been a huge winner so far since she became SOS. Remember how the media went nuts over that pick?

Eric Boehlert writes: 100 days of the media's trivial pursuit

Campaign For America's Future has a host of articles up by great writers: 100 Days Forward

What are your thoughts on his first 100 days?

February 02, 2009 C-SPAN

There goes Bush's last alleged achievement:

Taliban militants have banned female education in the northwest Pakistan valley of Swat, depriving more than 40,000 girls of schooling, officials said on Saturday.

"My daughters are sitting at home," said Mohammad Ayub, father of two girls whose school was blown up by militants in October. "Their future looks bleak because they will stay uneducated."

There has been fighting in the valley for more than a year, but residents say the military is losing control to militants who aim to impose a severe form of Islamic law.

Swat is just one front the militants have opened up as violence has spread across Northwest Frontier province from adjoining semi-autonomous tribal areas that border Afghanistan.

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After David Gregory reads a quote from John Boehner bashing the Democrats' plan to clean up George Bush's mess and get the economy going again, Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel forcefully defends the proposal and beats back the bogus criticism.

NBC:

MR. GREGORY: But an additional $700 billion?

MR. EMANUEL: President Obama's been very clear, you cannot have a strong economy that does not have a strong middle class. And the, the approach has been to provide the middle class with a tax cut, and also to start getting the economy moving again by making critical investments. That's why we want to create three and a half million jobs.

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. EMANUEL: The--it is no doubt you have to couple it, which has been very clear, which is why the President-elect Obama has called for an--a summit on fiscal responsibility to change the way we spend money, to do it in a more efficient way, to get rid of waste and fraud, but also to deal with the challenges that for too long have been kicked down the road.

Rahm Emanuel was Obama's first and perhaps wisest choice. Chief of Staff requires a certain skill set and Rahm fills the role perfectly. It's no wonder that GOPers went berserk when it was announced.

Full transcript below the fold.

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