No Class

President Obama announced today how he was going to pay for his jobs bill, and it was an unexpected answer . . . he wants to tax the rich!

Yes, Barack Obama, the same Barack Obama who capitulated on extending the Bush tax cuts back in December, announced that he was advocating, in addition to cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, a tax increase on Americans making more than $250,000 a year to balance the shared sacrifice and asking the wealthy to pay the same rate their employees do.  Well, as expected, Republicans went ballistic, accusing the President of "class warfare" by singling out the more privileged among us to pay more taxes.  But Obama looks like he's going to stand firm this time, saying that it's necessary.  "This isn't class warfare," he said.  "It's math." 

Math? Like science, that's a subject Republicans consistently deny.

Anyway, the proposed tax increases in Obama's proposal, unlike the social spending cuts, have no chance of getting through a Republican House.  Speaker Boehner and his band of brothers (note how the House Republican leadership is all-male?) will keep insisting that it's "class warfare" to pick the pockets of  America's "job creators."  Class warfare . . . job creators . . ..  Frank Luntz is behind all this, I know it.

It's hard to take the Republicans seriously on the issue of class when they have none.  That goes especially for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), who has indicated that he refuses to investigate the Internet and phone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (including the phone hacking of families of 9/11 victims), because the Justice Department already is doing so, adding that the News Corporation hacking affair involves a "foreign entity" (even though Americans were hacked from the U.K., and Murdoch's company is based in the U.S.) and because "we don't want to start picking on media whether they’re the left or the right just because we can."

Do keep that in mind next time a Republican commentator goes on Fox News to ridicule MSNBC.

And, oh yes, if News Corporation weren't afraid of what someone might find out, why was Alec Baldwin's joke about the scandal cut out of the Emmys, which the Fox broadcast network aired this past Sunday?