Pre-Sunday News Read:"No more false equivalence. Both sides are not equally to blame."

[TomCADem]

The Sunday News programs will once again work overtime tomorrow to defend Republicans by arguing that Democrats are just as unreasonable. Boehner gets a free pass on disastrous Plan B stunt because we are told Democrats are just as bad. This is the biggest racket and assist being given to Republicans now. The false equivalency that is pushed as analysis and objectivity.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-no-more-false-equivalence-both-sides-are-not-equally-to-blame/2012/12/03/c26d003a-3d51-11e2-8a5c-473797be602c_blog.html

The air is thick with mournful predictions that the impasse in Washington is so deep that going over the fiscal cliff may be inevitable. There will be a great deal of finger-pointing this week over who is to blame. But guess what: There is an actual set of facts here. They are central to understanding the current situation, and belong in every account of what is going wrong:

1) Democrats have offered a comprehensive proposal that meaningfully details the tax hikes they would like to see and contains substantial deficit reduction, but Republican leaders have not offered a comprehensive proposal that meaningfully details the spending cuts they would like to see. And what Republicans have proposed -- such as it is -- doesn't contain nearly as much in deficit reduction as the Dem plan does.

2) Many experts believe that substantial deficit reduction simply requires Republicans to drop their opposition to raising tax rates on the rich.

Those are just facts. The White House has proposed a deficit reduction package that contains $1.6 trillion in new revenues and around $600 billion in spending cuts, much of them to Medicare. By contrast, the most specific spending cut proposal we've seen from Republicans came from Mitch McConnell on Friday: Higher Medicare premiums on the wealthy; raising the eligibility age; slower cost-of-living increases for Social Security; new revenues but no hike in tax rates. The revenue side of McConnell's proposal is too lacking in detail to calculate how much it would bring in; meanwhile, Paul Krugman's back of the envelope calculations suggest his spending cuts would amount to all of $300 billion.

As always, there simply isn't any equivalence here. Even if you think the Democratic offer is too light on spending cuts, the basic fact remains that Dems have made a substantial proposal, while Republicans haven't. Dems have meaningfully detailed what they want, and Republicans haven't. Republicans keep telling us that Obama must show "leadership" by detailing the spending cuts the White House is willing to accept, and that the Dem proposals are not "serious" because they have yet to do this. But how are we supposed to know what will count as "serious" spending cuts, if Republicans won't detail what they want? It's doubly curious that Republicans refuse to do this, given that they keep saying the 2012 election gave them a mandate for cutting spending.

[Cha]

1. Thanks TomCADem

So many people on to the Sunday Shows and how they prop up republicon asshole lying gasbags.

K&R

[cui bono]

2. Yup. So sick of the "both sides" meme on this sort of thing. n/t

[TomCADem]

3. Yet, This Morning, The Sunday Pundits Were Pushing This...

...and the only purpose for pushing the meme is to give Republicans some cover for their efforts to hold out on behalf of the rich.

[Third Doctor]

4. This whole

mess was caused by the GOP (a fact the msm does not report). They were convinced Obama would not win again so these chickens would not come home to roost.