In the art of political warfare, if you’re on defense, you are losing. After being pilloried by the press and even among their own party’s establishment for a series of stoopid gaffes, outright lies and displays of monumental ignorance over the past month or so, Republican presidential candidates and the party’s propagandists are now desperately trying to get off defense by breitbarting Pres. Obama over a comment he made at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting over the weekend.

In a Q&A with Boeing CEO James McNerney at the APEC CEO Business Summit, Pres. Obama said that corporate leaders have “been a little bit lazy” in their efforts to recruit new foreign investments in manufacturing in the United States. He went on to cite his administration’s efforts to address the corporate sector’s laziness in attracting new business through its SelectUSA program which “organizes all the government agencies to work with state and local governments where they’re seeking assistance from us, to go out there and make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States and put outstanding U.S. workers back to work.” (Emphasis added.)

Deploying a deceptive tactic out of the playbook of racist provocateur Andrew Breitbart, Republicans, including candidates Rick Perry and Mitt Romney and propagandists like the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, have taken the president’s comment out of context, implying that he was criticizing the American people as being lazy.

Here’s the transcript of the president’s comment, in context:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We’ve brought more enforcement actions against China over the last couple of years than had taken place in many of the preceding years, not because we’re looking for conflict, but simply because we want to make sure that the interests of American workers and American businesses are protected.

MR. McNERNEY: I think one related question, looking at the world from the Chinese side, is what they would characterize as impediments to investment in the United States. And so that discussion I’m sure will be part of whatever dialogue you have. And so how are you thinking about that?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, this is an issue, generally. I think it’s important to remember that the United States is still the largest recipient of foreign investment in the world. And there are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity — our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture.

But we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — well, people will want to come here and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America. And so one of things that my administration has done is set up something called SelectUSA that organizes all the government agencies to work with state and local governments where they’re seeking assistance from us, to go out there and make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States and put outstanding U.S. workers back to work in the United States of America.

And we think that we can do much better than we’re doing right now. Because of our federalist system, sometimes a foreign investor comes in and they’ve got to navigate not only federal rules, but they’ve also got to navigate state and local governments that may have their own sets of interests. Being able to create if not a one-stop shop, then at least no more than a couple of stops for people to be able to come into the United States and make investments, that’s something that we want to encourage.

Read in context, it’s clear that the president was actually criticizing efforts of corporatists and their main lobbying group, the deceptively named U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (The U.S. Chamber has no relationship with chambers of commerce in cities and towns, which provide a vital service to local communities.) One of the U.S. Chamber’s core missions is to promote American business interests in foreign markets. What it does in practice, however, is facilitate shipping American jobs overseas.

Lies like this one work in two ways. First, they put Democrats on defense as they assert the truth — and, as noted, when you’re on defense, you are losing. This takes the Democrats off message and fills the news hole with partisan back-and-forth, which regular non-political voters view as political bickering.

The second way lies like these are effective for Republicans is that they go unrebutted in the GOP media so that right wingers who only get their “news” from Fox and Limbaugh will accept as gospel that the president of the United States said Americans are lazy — just as they believe he went on an apology tour around the world, which, of course, also never happened.

On the other hand, the experience of Andrew Breitbart offers a cautionary tale for lying liars like Perry, Romney and Krauthammer. Breitbart and his protege, the felon James O’Keefe, have been caught selectively editing video and smearing people by taking comments out of context so often that they are viewed as buffoons by many in the establishment media.

It is unlikely that the corporate media would ever dismiss figures as august as Perry, Romney and Krauthammer as buffoons, but with lies as lazily constructed and easily disproved as this one, the risk is certainly there.

The Valentine’s Day 2011 issue of the National Enquirer features a story alleging that GOP Speaker John Boehner has had adulterous dalliances “with at least two different women” in Washington.

Frankly, the article, which was leaked by the website Boy Culture, seems pretty thin. There’s a rehash of the story broken by Mike Stark, an openly liberal D.C. journalist, after Labor Day alleging that Boehner, 61, had had an ongoing affair with a printing industry lobbyist, Lisbeth Lyons, who appears to be in her late thirties or early forties.

From left: Debbie Boehner, Lisbeth Lyons, Leigh LaMora

The speaker and his wife Debbie, a real estate agent in Ohio, have been married for 37 years and have two children. But there may be more here than a politician breaking a pledge to his wife. If the allegations are true, it appears Boehner’s affair smacks of corruption, according to Stark:

Wonder how well Boehner’s zero-tolerance pledge regarding corruption will hold up when it comes out that several hundred paper-making jobs were lost in his district and he refused to do anything about it at the same time he was sleeping with a lobbyist for the printing industry that was very happy to get their cheap paper from China.

The establishment media has been typically reluctant to report on this story. The New York Times was supposedly preparing an expose to be published before the midterms last year, according to a truly dubious source, the GOP-Fox propaganda daily, the New York Post, which reported in September that:

Insiders on Capitol Hill are buzzing about an upcoming New York Times exposé that will detail an alleged Boehner affair. Sources say the Times is looking for the right time to drop the story in October to sway the election, similar to how the Times reported during the 2008 presidential campaign on an alleged John McCain affair that supposedly had taken place many years before and that was flatly denied by the woman in question.

The New York Times never published results of its investigation, if there ever was one.

In January, the New Yorker, which is generally known as a liberal bastion, published a puff piece on Boehner by Republican Peter Boyer, in which Boyer not only failed to mention allegations about Boehner’s alleged affair with Lyons, he also rewrote the history of events leading up to the forced resignation of GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1998. According to Boyer, Gingrich was forced out because younger House Republican colleagues, including Boehner, did not like Gingrich’s constant prattling about the future. Boyer spuriously omitted the real reason, which was that Gingrich had become a liability to Republicans’ control of the House because he had been engaged in an affair with a staffer — his current wife, Callista Bisek — at the same time he had driven the impeachment of Pres. Bill Clinton because Clinton had committed perjury about his affair with a staffer, Monica Lewinsky, in a civil-lawsuit deposition.

So where does Boehner rank on the GOP-adultery hypocrisy meter? Mike Stark recalls that:

It was Minority Leader John Boehner … who told abstinence education advocate Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) that he had to resign from Congress after having an affair with a staffer. It was also Boehner that told members of his caucus that they had to stop using the “party house” to entertain young Republican female lobbyists.

To his credit, Boehner has never made it a habit to pontificate about “family values,” but his voting record on marriage-related social and civil-rights issues is what you might expect from an Ohio good ol’ boy and a Republican politician on the make:

• Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation. (Nov 2007)
• Voted YES on Constitutionally defining marriage as one-man-one-woman. (Jul 2006)
• Voted YES on Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage. (Sep 2004)
• Voted YES on banning gay adoptions in DC. (Jul 1999)
• Rated 7% by the ACLU, indicating an anti-civil rights voting record. (Dec 2002)
• Rated 0% by the HRC, indicating an anti-gay-rights stance. (Dec 2006)

So what comes next? Back in the Clinton era, if the U.S. Treasury could have collected a dollar every time a Republican used the phrase “where there’s smoke there’s fire” in their six year hunt to bring down the president and first lady, there would be no deficit now, and yet Republicans wasted hundreds of hours on hearings and investigations and nearly $100 million taxpayers’ dollars on Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and even Socks-the-Cat-gate before they finally hit paydirt with the Lewinsky matter. On the other hand, the National Enquirer, which scored a coup in its expose of John Edwards’ extramarital affair, certainly has credibility when it comes to rooting out philandering pols.

Right now, however, the question buzzing behind-the-scenes in the capitol is who is feeding information about the alleged affairs to the media.

The number one suspect is Tea Partyist and Christian extremist Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, but last week Stark denied Pence was his source, with a caveat:

[Pence] looked down, pursed his lips and shook his head as if to deny. Most people I know would have taken that as a flat denial, and I’m certain that’s how it was intended.

But here’s another secret… In law school, when you are taking depositions, you are taught that the answers to “yes or no” questions must be spoken … Anyway, Washington has definitely jaded me. I have extreme difficulty accepting anything our elected leaders say as gospel; I’m a natural (extreme) skeptic. So all I can do is report what happened and let y’all make up your own mind.

Earlier this month, Pence announced he is retiring from Congress to run for governor back in his home state.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars suggests it might be one of the “Young Guns” in the House leadership:

From my perspective, this has the signs of a classic hit. We already know the House ideologues weren’t thrilled about having Boehner as Speaker — as conservative as he is, he looks like a flaming liberal compared to some of the new cowboys. It may not have been Pence, but I’ll bet it was coordinated with him — and the nakedly ambitious Eric Cantor, whose relationship with Boehner could be described as “tense.”

One uncertainty about Boehner’s alleged philandering, if it’s true, is how widely known it is among Beltway insiders, including reporters. In its profile of Boehner last fall, what made the New Yorker’s glaring omission of the role Gingrich’s affair played in his ouster in 1998 a journalistic sin was that Gingrich’s affair was common knowledge among journalists and pols in the capitol as early as 1995.

In other words, the DC establishment was complicit in keeping Speaker Gingrich’s affair secret for four years — the affair was not publicly revealed until 1999, after Gingrich was forced out. If past is prologue then there could well be a similar conspiracy of silence among Beltway insiders today about the current speaker’s sex life.

Boehner, cover of Dec. 13, 2010, New Yorker

Peter Boyer’s nearly 9,000 word profile of Speaker John Boehner in the New Yorker last month filled in a few gaps in what is commonly known about Boehner’s biography, but there was a notable item missing — the fact that just four months ago the Capitol was aswirl with rumors that Boehner was having an extramarital affair with a (female) lobbyist.

Similarly, in describing events that led to the ouster in 1998 of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Boyer omitted one of the central reasons — some would say the real reason — Gingrich was forced out: At the same time he was driving efforts to impeach Pres. Bill Clinton over a perjurious cover-up of an affair with a staffer, Gingrich was himself engaged in an affair with a congressional staffer, his current wife, Callista Bisek.

The tone of Boyer’s piece is mostly positive. We learn that Boehner pulled himself up from a hardscrabble childhood — his parents were Catholic, had umpteen children and ran a bar in Reading, Ohio. After a stint in the Navy, he worked his way through college and eventually landed a job in industrial sales, made big bucks and then entered politics.

Boyer notes in passing that Boehner likes to golf, drink wine — although Boyer did not address Boehner’s occasional, apparently drunken performances on the House floor — and that he smokes two packs a day. (After the profile came out, there was a report that, as speaker, Boehner will ignore rules about where smoking is allowed in the Capitol, because, you know, rules are for little people.)

Boehner was elected to Congress in 1990 and quickly became cozy with lobbyists, so cozy that five years later — the year Gingrich became speaker — Boehner made a little news when he was caught red-handed handing out bribes campaign donations from the Big Tobacco lobby to Republican members of Congress on the House floor. (Turns out that while it may be unseemly to hand out checks from political benefactors on the floor of the House while Congress is in session, it is not illegal.)

In 1998, Boehner was part of an attempted coup against Gingrich. The speaker survived the plot only to resign abruptly a few months later, after the midterms in November. Here’s how Boyer described events leading up to Gingrich’s resignation:

The top members of the Gingrich leadership team—Dick Armey, the Majority Leader [now a highly paid corporate tea-party organizer]; Tom DeLay, the Majority Whip [who was recently found guilty on corruption charges]; Bill Paxon, the leadership chairman; and Boehner—met to discuss what one person close to the situation at the time describes as “Newt’s disconnect from the conference, and his disconnect from being Speaker.” The leadership circle, aware of gathering unrest among some of the conference’s younger members, considered whether Gingrich’s assets were enough to warrant his continuing as Speaker. This person went on, “The discussion was ‘How can we support Newt, and all the good that he has—he’s an idea machine, he’s inspirational, we love him on the stump, he raises money—but insulate ourselves from the craziness of, back in 1997, Newt talking about what 2012 would look like? The upsetting of the daily apple cart?’ ” Events resolved themselves when Armey, after meeting with the young conspirators, had second thoughts and informed Gingrich of the rebellion. Paxon resigned from his leadership position the next day. Boehner insisted that he was not an instigator of the attempted putsch, although some close to Gingrich still count him a conspirator. “It was all of them,” Frank Luntz, one of Gingrich’s most loyal admirers, and one of the shapers of the Contract with America, says. “It was DeLay, it was Boehner, it was Paxon, and it was Armey—all four of them. And the beginning of the blow-apart, the real explosion, was when that effort failed, when Newt was informed of it—then it became every man for himself.”

After the 1998 election, in which the Republicans lost five House seats, Gingrich called his leadership team and announced that he was leaving Congress. “I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” he told them.

Not a peep about Gingrich’s affair with a staffer, which, had it been revealed during the campaign that fall, would have jeopardized the Republicans’ impeachment of Clinton, not to mention their majority in the House.

During the investigation into Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, it had also come to light that two GOP House leaders who’d been instrumental in the inquisition, Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois and Oversight Chairman Dan Burton of Indiana, had had extramarital affairs of their own. Voter disgust with Republican hypocrisy on adultery was already near the tipping point. If Gingrich’s affair with Bisek had been revealed in, say, October 1998, the revelation could well have cost Republicans control of the House in November.

We know now that the GOP leadership was well aware that Gingrich’s affair had put the election — and their grasp on power — at risk. In the run-up to the impeachment, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt had grown so disgusted with Republicans’ hypocritical moralizing that he’d set up a $1 million reward fund, offering cash prizes to anyone who could provide documentary proof that a “family values” Republican had engaged in an extramarital affair. Flynt’s reward took down Gingrich’s would-be replacement as speaker — Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., who was apparently quite a naughty boy — before Livingston could even be sworn in.

Flynt was aware of Gingrich’s affair, which had been whispered about in Washington as far back as 1995, Gingrich’s first year as speaker, according to “Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal,” by Larry J. Sabato, Mark Stencel, S. Robert Lichter:

[At the time of investigations into Clinton, the press] ignored House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s romance with a House committee aide. The relationship with Callista Bisek only received widespread attention in the summer of 1999, seven months after Gingrich left office, when a supermarket tabloid [the Star] staked out the couple’s comings and goings in Washington and a Georgia judge ordered the Hill staffer deposed as part of the former speaker’s divorce proceedings. Rumors of the Gingrich-Bisek affair circulated before then. Bisek was identified in a 1995 profile of Gingrich as the speaker’s “favorite breakfast companion,” a reference that was repeated at the time in a London newspaper and by Time magazine columnist Margaret Carlson. During the impeachment debate … the muckraking online magazine online magazine Salon mentioned “persistent (though unproven) rumors” about a Gingrich affair in a September 1998 article. A few months later, [Flynt] alluded vaguely to Bisek in the “Flynt Report,” his glossy report about congressional misdeeds, identifying her at the end of a two-page spread on the speaker as a former congressman’s aide.

Republicans had timed the Clinton impeachment to play out during the 1998 election, hoping that moral outrage would energize voters. But even without the revelation that Gingrich, the man driving the impeachment, was having an affair with a staffer himself, their naked politicization of the impeachment — a classic Republican over-reach — backfired. Voters rallied around the president instead, and Clinton’s approval ratings rose above 60 percent and stayed there for the rest of his term. The impeachment trial started in the House on Dec. 19, 1998, during the lame duck session. The president was acquitted by the Senate on Feb. 12, 1999.

The allegations about Boehner’s affair surfaced after Labor Day last year:

Mike Stark, an activist and blogger, intercepted Leader Boehner after his highly publicized “Pledge to America” unveiling to ask him about the accusation:

“Speaker Boehner, have you been cheating with Lisbeth Lyons, the lobbyist for the American Printing Association?” Stark asks. Boehner did not respond.

Stark later contacted Lyons, the vice president of Government Affairs at Printing Industries of America, to get a comment on the allegations. She didn’t provide any.

But a purported expose in the New York Times failed to materialize, apparently because the Times’ investigation was attacked as being politically motivated by — get this — the New York Post, a Republican propaganda daily that is a vanity project of Fox channel owner Rupert Murdoch. (The Post loses as much as $30 million per year, according to recent estimates, and so operates entirely on subsidies from Murdoch’s GOP-Fox television channel.)

In an item under the headline, “Liberal media goes on attack against GOP’s Boehner,” the Republican tabloid’s gossip writers asserted:

Liberal media outlets are trying to smear the highest-ranking Republican in the House just weeks before the midterm elections with a deal-breaking scandal before he has a chance to take the speaker’s chair from Nancy Pelosi…

Insiders on Capitol Hill are buzzing about an upcoming New York Times exposé that will detail an alleged Boehner affair. Sources say the Times is looking for the right time to drop the story in October to sway the election, similar to how the Times reported during the 2008 presidential campaign on an alleged John McCain affair that supposedly had taken place many years before and that was flatly denied by the woman in question.

Lyons later told the GOP tabloid that the rumors were “unfounded.” The Post also got a statement from a spokesman in Boehner’s office in Washington, who used the opportunity to insert Republican pre-election talking points attacking Democrats on jobs into the narrative:

A rep for Boehner’s office said, “This is bullshit. The American people oppose Washington Democrats’ job killing, so their desperate liberal allies are resorting to outright lies. It’s low, and it’s dirty.”

So why would Peter Boyer ignore this possible chink in the new speaker’s armor? Was the New Yorker spooked by the GOP-Post’s attack on the New York Times? Was overlooking the alleged affair part of a deal Boyer struck with Boehner or his people to get their cooperation? (If so, it’s depressing to think that Mr. Shawn’s magazine would stoop to crony journalism.)

Or perhaps Boyer looked into the allegations and found that they were indeed “bullshit.” But if so, why not mention that fact and clear Boehner in the article?

More likely, Boyer and the New Yorker, along with their peers and colleagues in the establishment media, have reached a groupthink consensus that it’s best to ignore Boehner’s alleged affair — just as elite journos chose not to report on Gingrich’s affair with staffer Callista Bisek in the 1990s, even though, given Gingrich’s lead role in politicizing (and thereby publicizing) Clinton’s peccadilloes, his own workplace dalliance would seem to have been fair game.

Whatever the reason, New Yorker readers have certainly come to expect more from the magazine, which has set the bar for excellence in journalism since 1925.

Mike Barnicle’s debate with outgoing Arizona GOP-T Rep. John Shadegg on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” has gotten attention because of the outrageous new Grover Norquistian talking point about unemployment benefits that Shadegg trotted out:

BARNICLE: What about the fact that unemployment benefits pumped into the economy are an immediate benefit to the economy. Immediate.

SHADEGG: No, they’re not. Unemployed people hire people? Really? I didn’t know that.

BARNICLE: Unemployed people spend money, Congressman, because they have no money.

SHADEGG: Ah — ah — So your answer is it’s the spending of money that drives the economy. I don’t think that’s right. It’s the creation of jobs that drive the economy.

BARNICLE: But if you spend money in a variety store –

SHADEGG: Actually, the truth is the unemployed will spend as little of that money as they possibly can. Job creators create jobs.

A little later, Barnicle followed up on unemployment benefits:

BARNICLE: Let’s go back to what you said about unemployment checks. Unemployment checks, people don’t spend that money?

SHADEGG: No. They will spend as little as they can because they’ll hold on to it as long as they can. In reality, they don’t create jobs. You still haven’t told me how unemployed people create jobs.

Shadegg was, of course, lying. In reality, consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the economy — and unemployment checks are immediately stimulative. Unemployed people use their checks to pay rent or mortgages, keep their utilities on, buy groceries and generally keep local economies active. The unemployed may not create jobs but the cash from their benefit checks prevents supermarkets and other retail outlets from having to lay off workers.

Shadegg also repeated the demonstrably false claim that the wealthy people who have received the Bush tax breaks are “job creators.” These wealthy folks — whom Republicans spin as “small business owners” — have had these tax breaks for 10 years. So here’s a question for these millionaire small-business owners: Where are the jobs?

What could make a group of politicians — especially pols who campaign as promoters of “Christian values” — behave so heartlessly? What would make them so eager to vote to make their own constituents penniless?

During the midterm campaigns, GOP Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell repeatedly described the single plank in his party’s platform for the next two years this way: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Other times he described undercutting the president as the Republicans’ “top priority.”

Not jobs, not cutting the deficit, not tax cuts for the wealthy nor even denying benefits to the unemployed — the “single most important thing” Republicans are doing now and will do until November 2012 is work to undermine the president of the United States.

In service to his party’s top priority, Shadegg went on “Morning Joe” armed with carefully rehearsed debate points, ready to do what Republicans do best — forcefully make arguments that are false and empty sound ironclad and irrefutable in order to convince listeners that lies are the truth.

But it really wasn’t Shadegg’s audacious lying that was remarkable — you can see that 24/7 on Fox — it was his swagger, the near-giddiness with which he consigned 2 million unemployed Americans to the wolves at the same time that he was demanding tax breaks for people so wealthy they don’t need to work.

What Shadegg’s bravado telegraphed is that Republicans are so confident about their position that they don’t feel the need to feign compassion, to cloak themselves in false piety.

In poker terms, Shadegg’s glee is a “tell.” When Republicans put this sort of unctuous certitude on display, it’s a sign they have started to believe their own spin and are misjudging the public support for their position. We’ve seen it before — in the lead-up to their shutting down the government in 1995, when they impeached Pres. Clinton in 1998, and in days before the Supreme Court ruled on Bush v. Gore in 2000. During the run-up to George Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, Republicans’ misplaced certitude turned ugly when they started questioning the patriotism of anyone who doubted their claims about Saddam’s WMD stockpiles, his inquiries about Nigerian yellow cake or his nuclear-armed drones capable of flying 7,000 miles from Baghdad to Miami.

It’s a small comfort that it’s Republicans, not Democrats, who end up paying a political price for their over-reaching. The public blamed Speaker Newt Gingrich, not Pres. Clinton, for the government shutdown. Pres. Clinton’s approval ratings rose to the mid-sixties during the impeachment and remained there for the rest of his term. Voter remorse kicked in within months after Bush, not Al Gore, was inaugurated — Bush received a boost in popularity after the 9/11 attacks but eventually became the least popular president in the history of presidential polling.

After Bush invaded Iraq, Americans quickly learned that his pretexts for the war were all false — that either he had lied to them about the danger posed by Iraq or he’d taken the nation to war based on bad intelligence, making him the most incompetent commander-in-chief the United States has ever had.

Unfortunately, it’s the American people, not Republicans or Democrats in Washington, who pay the real price for the GOP’s serial over-reaching. In every instance of it, by the time the truth behind has been revealed, the damage has been done — and none have paid a bigger price for Republican over-reach than the needless sacrifice of the thousands of military personnel who were killed and wounded in Iraq.

It appears now that we’re about to experience deja vu all over again. Republicans are poised to upend the lives of 2 million people in order to score political points now, ignoring the fact that these unemployed Americans are not just voters, they are these same Republican pols’ constituents.

Another indicator that Republicans are in over-reach mode is that they’re ignoring the optics of kicking folks who are already down at the shank of the holiday season. Can you spell G.R.I.N.C.H.?

And talk about a war on Christmas!

It doesn’t require psychic ability or even a keen sense of political science to predict blow back from the public if Republicans go through with this. What’s truly depressing, though, is that, as before, by the time there is a reckoning, the damage to the 2 million jobless Americans and their families will already have been done.

Transcript from MSNBC (including edits, corrections):

BILL BARNICLE: Congressman, please forgive me, but I’m kind of an economic illiterate, but I keep hearing from some Republicans they would vote for extension of unemployment benefits that are to expire today if those unemployment benefits are paid for, yet these same Republicans say they will vote to extend all the Bush tax cuts when those are unpaid for. My question to you is in this lame duck session that we’re approaching, would you vote for the extension of unemployment benefits right now, today, up or down, yes or no?

REP. JOHN SHADEGG, R-ARIZ.: If they were paid for and if we extend the tax cuts. The issue is jobs. Come on! The american people sent this message pretty clearly. They want us focused getting this economy going. I’m sorry you can’t see that helping people with unemployment and not enacting massive new tax increases, which will damage the job creation market are linked. they make sense together. Of course, Republicans don’t want to tax the job creators because that will bring revenue down. Increasing — you cite me an economist who says increasing taxes in a down economy is a good idea. I’m waiting.

BARNICLE: What about the fact that unemployment benefits pumped into the economy are an immediate benefit to the economy. Immediate.

SHADEGG: No, they’re not. Unemployed people hire people? Really? I didn’t know that.

BARNICLE: Unemployed people spend money, Congressman, because they have no money.

SHADEGG: Ah — Ah — So your answer is it’s the spending of money that drives the economy. I don’t think that’s right. It’s the creation of jobs that drive the economy.

BARNICLE: But if you spend money in a variety store –

SHADEGG: Actually, the truth is the unemployed will spend as little of that money as they possibly can. Job creators create jobs. If you want to unburden the economy –

BARNICLE: You ever been unemployed?

SHADEGG: Yes, I have.

BARNICLE: Did you save it?

SHADEGG: Matter of fact, I will be. In about 32 days, I will be unemployed and I’ve been unemployed in the past. The issue is do we want to continue to do what the current administration or the current congress has done, which is ignore the issue of jobs and increase taxes and not focus on the needs of the American people or do we want to try something that might work, like not increasing taxes on the economy? This is a tax increase in a down economy. I still didn’t hear you name the economist who says it’s a good idea to raise taxes in a down economy.

BARNICLE: I don’t trust economists. They got us into this trouble to begin with. Let’s go back to what you said about unemployment checks. Unemployment checks, people don’t spend that money?

SHADEGG: No. They will spend as little as they can because they’ll hold on to it as long as they can. In reality, they don’t create jobs. You still haven’t told me how unemployed people create jobs. Your answer is, I don’t trust economists. Look, we’ve been doing what you proposed we continue to do, raising unemployment and extending that.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: John Shadegg, John, John, don’t be personal here. we know you’re going to be unemployed and everybody knows — Here’s the thing. People don’t know that this S.OB. act of your is just a routine.

[When] we saw meathead David Gregory interviewing our friend Mike Murphy, the $90,000-a-month campaign guru for Meg “Biggest Loser” Whitman, on “Press the Meat” the other day, we felt compelled to get up off the floor and say something.

“We got beat and, you know, I ran the campaign, and I take responsibility for it,” Murphy said, at least acknowledging that he had been in the neighborhood. But then came excuse, No. 1: “It’s a very blue state and it’s getting bluer. As the red, you know, wave kind of went one way, there was a bit of a blue riptide coming the other way.”

And then, excuse No. 2: “CEO candidates who are doing kind of a tough medicine message . . . Meg and Carly Fiorina in California, they weren’t buying it. So we just couldn’t get there. We could win the Republicans, win the independents, but in California if you don’t win a lot of Democrats — you don’t win and we did not.”

Whoa there, big fella. “Win the independents?” If Meg and Carly had actually won the actual independents, they would be governor- and senator-elect.

Now it’s Murph’s job to spin. And when you make $2 million off a political client … you have good reason to try to convince the world that it was an impossible task. But it’s Gregory’s job — and since he didn’t do it, ours — to question his spin.

What you have to ask, though, is what was Murphy doing telling the California and national media — the day before the election — that his polling showed the race to be essentially tied and that Meg’s GOTV program was going to put her over the top?

Consultants have an obligation to work as hard as they can for their clients, but they also ought to consider their credibility with the reporters who will be covering them in the future. There are a lot of ways of doing both: “Look, it’s going to be close. This is a heavily Democratic state. But we think we’re going to do well.” Whatever…

Jerry Brown carried the independents in California even though the National Election Pool exit poll by Edison Research showed Whitman winning them 47-43 percent. That’s only because the NEP exit poll didn’t actually survey actual independents — or “Decline to State” voters as they’re known in California. They called “independent” anyone who didn’t think of him- or herself as a Democrat or a Republican.

We harp on this because we want to bust the myth that Whitman carried the independents in California BEFORE it becomes part of the historical narrative about the 2010 election…

Here’s the point: Brown won the moderates 60-35 percent and he beat Whitman in the polls that surveyed actual DTS — independent — voters. To win statewide in California you have to carry your party, win the independents and make some inroads into the other party. That’s what Brown did.

Christine O'Donnell speaking a Christian political rally after filing of embezzlement complaint was announced

O’Donnell became the right wing’s latest overnight celebrity when she defeated Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican primary on Sept. 14. She promotes herself as a Christian whose morality forbids her from lying. “A lie, whether it be a lie or an exaggeration, is disrespect to whoever you’re exaggerating or lying to, because it’s not respecting reality,” she said in a televised exchange years ago. When asked if her adherence to the truth would have prevented her from lying to protect Jewish families who were hiding from Nazis during World War II, she demurred. “You never have to practice deception,” she said. “God always provides a way out.” (In other words, “no.”)

The funds in question were donated to her two previous Senate campaigns, first in 2006, when she came in third out of three in the Republican primary, and then in 2008, when she won the GOP nomination but was soundly defeated by Sen. Joe Biden in the general election.

On AC360 Friday night, CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan told Anderson Cooper that witnesses had come forward who had firsthand knowledge that O’Donnell had illegally put donated funds to personal use in 2009 and early 2010 when she was not an active candidate for any office:

“It turns out Ms. O’Donnell has treated her campaign funds like they are her very own personal piggy bank. She’s used that money to pay for things like her rent, for gas, meals and even a bowling outing. And that’s just flat-out illegal,” said [Sloan]…

“For example, in 2009, Ms. O’Donnell wasn’t a candidate for anything, yet she had numerous campaign expenses, things like travel and gas, and yet she had no actual campaign,” Sloan said.

Earlier on Friday, CREW had issued a news alert in which the group added O’Donnell to its list of 2010’s most crooked candidates:

“Ms. O’Donnell has had no discernable job for several years, and instead has lived the life of a professional candidate, using the generosity of her campaign donors for her support,” said [Sloan]. “That may just be freeloading to most people, but it’s embezzlement for a federal candidate.”

Ms. O’Donnell has demonstrated a disturbing pattern of fraud, lies and fiscal irresponsibility. On her campaign website she claimed to have graduated from a university years before she actually received her diploma — a mere two weeks ago. The IRS slapped liens against her to the tune of over $11,000, and records show that she has been essentially unemployed. Rather, she has lived in her campaign office and makes a profit by renting out rooms – in clear violation of campaign finance law. Ms. O’Donnell also lied when claimed she had won two counties in her 2008 Senate race against Senator Biden and when caught, lied again claiming the two had tied. In essences, Ms. O’Donnell has demonstrated a total disregard of ethics and integrity.

CREW is a nonpartisan ethics watchdog group that has recently targeted Democratic Reps. Charlie Rangel of New York, Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois and others, as well as Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. John Ensign of Nevada and Rep. Don Young of Alaska.

On CNN Friday night, Sloan said CREW would be filing the embezzlement and other complaints against O’Donnell on Monday, Sept. 20.

Around the same time Sloan was on CNN, on HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher played a clip from a 1999 appearance by O’Donnell on “Politically Incorrect,” which he also hosted, in which O’Donnell — who is now a Christian radical — claimed to have participated in witchcraft:

“I dabbled into witchcraft — I never joined a coven. But I did, I did. … I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do. . . .

“One of my first dates with a witch was on a Satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that. … We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a Satanic altar.”

On Saturday, O’Donnell appeared as a last minute addition to the line-up for the “Values Voter” conference, an annual right-wing Christian political event sponsored by the Family Research Council. During her 17-minute rambling, buzzword-laden but nonetheless well-received speech, she also appeared to be putting advance spin on the coming embezzlement charges:

“Will they attack us? Yes. Will they smear our backgrounds and distort our records? Undoubtedly. Will they lie about us, harass our families, namecall to try to intimidate us? They will. There’s nothing safe about it…”

Not long after her FRC appearance on Saturday, word circulated on Twitter and elsewhere that she had canceled an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation” the next morning, citing a prior commitment to attend a picnic in Delaware.

Until Kentucky’s tea bagger Senate candidate Ron Rand Paul canceled on “Meet the Press” this summer, it was unheard of for candidates — especially first-timers — to bail on Sunday morning political chat shows. (In fact, Paul was only the third guest to cancel in MTP’s 62-year history.)

But then came the astounding news that O’Donnell had also canceled an appearance the Fox channel’s GOP-friendly Sunday morning show — where, under normal conditions, she would have been guaranteed a free ride, with softball questions carefully selected not to cause controversy for her campaign.

The cancellation was also remarkable because earlier in the week O’Donnell’s mentor, Sarah Palin, had publicly advised her, on the Fox channel, to “speak through Fox…”

But while Chris Wallace, the ersatz journalist who hosts the GOP-Fox Sunday show, would likely have helped O’Donnell by ignoring her dabble in witchcraft, he could not have avoided asking her to explain the embezzlement charges without revealing himself as merely just another Republican mouthpiece on Fox’s propaganda team.

If the embezzlement charges are serious — and there are disgruntled former campaign staffers and volunteers who say they have direct knowledge that they are — then it’s a dead cinch O’Donnell’s lawyers are advising her not to submit to interviews in which she might say something incriminating, including even on Fox.

Update: I added a link to O’Donnell’s exchange on giving up Jews to Nazis, and updated the paragraph to include her exact words. What is accurate here is that had she meant that she would have done the compassionate thing and lied to Nazis to protect Jews from their killers, she would have said so.

– Talk radio and FOX News personality Glenn Beck, stating the obvious. No one doubts that the date of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was outside Beck’s frame of reference when he planned his “Restoring Honor” tea bagger rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, site of King’s world-changing speech.

Disgraced HCA Columbia Healthcare CEO Rick Scott (who was forced to resign rather than face criminal charges in the nation’s largest Medicaid fraud case, resulting in a $1.7 billion fine) sums up all the Republican lies about the Islamic Center in New York in one TV spot, going FOX News one better by tying construction of the facility to health care reform. Why Scott, who is running for governor of Florida — a state which will have little if any say in the issue — would chose this as a campaign platform is unclear.

Commentor “citizen x” on a Florida newspaper letter to the editor about Republican governor candidate Rick Scott’s new anti freedom of religion TV ad

– Number of Americans who mistakenly believe Pres. Obama is a Muslim who also report they were told this by the media, with 16 percent (the largest segment) attributing it to television. Another 11 percent say they figured it out themselves from the president’s “behavior and words.”