This morning, Fox & Friends characterized Sen. Bob Casey’s (D-PA) Create Jobs & Save Benefits Act as a “$165 billion bailout” of union pensions. “It has been decades since you’ve seen an administration so prone to the influence of unions as this one is. I’m not going to say this is owned by the unions, but their influence on this administration is simply enormous,” Fox Business Network’s Stuart Varney claimed of the legislation, which is actually designed to partition “specific types of union pensions that are deemed to be insolvent.” Later in the day, the network went after House Republicans for co-sponsoring similar legislation in the House. On America Live with Megyn Kelly, the network showed a chart of the nine Republicans supporting the measure and questioned their sanity.

This didn’t go over well with Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-OH), a co-sponsor of the House measure, who took to the floor this afternoon to criticize Fox for its coverage. “I think as a Republican, I’m supposed to love Fox News and hate MSNBC,” he began. “Now, I’m going to tell you, I do hate MSNBC, but something just happened on Fox News that compelled me to come to the floor”:

LATOURETTE: They’ve run this diagram and it really is a, I think, blaspheming my good friend Pat Tiberi from Ohio and indicating that there are nine Republicans supporting a bill that will bail out unions. Well, that’s nonsense and I don’t know who the pin head and weenie is at Fox News that decided to put that story together. But the true facts of this piece of legislation are as follows. This bill will save the taxpayers by saying to those corporations that have union pension plans, if you find yourselves in a bind, rather than thrusting that upon the taxpayer, it spreads out over five years the ability to bring those pension plans up to speed. That’s good government, it’s a good bill. It’s a good Tiberi bill and I don’t know what they’re doing at Fox News, but they should stop smoking it and get back to reporting the facts.

Watch it:

LaTourette may soon regret his remarks. Last month, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) criticized Fox News for pushing misinformation about health care reform, but later walked back his comments after being confronted by host Neil Cavuto.

The House of Representatives is currently working its way through a bill that extends several popular business tax credits as well as important social safety net provisions like unemployment insurance. But of course, these things cost money, and the bill’s authors — led by Sens. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) — have come up with a series of offsets to partially cover the bill’s cost.

One of these is a change in the taxation of carried interest, or the payment that hedge fund and private equity managers receive for successfully managing other people’s money. Currently, these managers are inexplicably allowed to pay the capital gains rate (which is meant to encourage investment) on money that they receive in exchange for providing a service. It’s as if we taxed the proceeds of a movie that go to its lead actor as capital gains instead of income. Levin and Baucus have suggested that their pay be subject to normal income tax rates.

Of course, CNBC’s talking heads — who never miss an opportunity to defend the right of the wealthy to use tax havens or the sanctity of bonuses for bailed out bankers — are going nuts about the tax increase, led by devout supply-side devotee Larry Kudlow. They’re calling it “one of the five dumbest things in the history of the Earth,” a “job killer,” “mind boggling,” “patently unfair,” and the result of “left-wing social policy.” Watch a compilation:

What’s actually mind boggling is that CNBC’s cast of pundits and anchors thinks it’s entirely appropriate for both a janitor and a hedge fund manager to receive a paycheck, yet have the former be subject to income tax rates and the latter subject to the lower capital gains rate. As Citizens for Tax Justice explained:

The preferential income tax rate for capital gains was created to benefit those who invest their own money. The partnership income that investment managers earn is clearly compensation for services and not a return on investment (except to the extent that they actually have put up their own money — and the treatment of that won’t change). They should pay income taxes at ordinary rates on their compensation, just like everyone else, from the folks who sweep their floors or answer their phones to CEO’s exercising stock options and professional athletes getting playoff bonuses.

CNBC’s gang deploys a lot of rhetoric about innovation and job creation being smothered by the tax, but let’s be clear — investors will not see their taxes go up because of this change. It applies to managers, who are paid to take money from investors and make more money with it. These managers typically receive hundreds of millions — if not billions — annually for their services.

Baucus has said that there’s a “growing sense of inevitability” that the tax change will be adopted and Levin today added that it won’t be taken out of the legislation. “We’ve already worked hard to balance all of the needs, here,” Levin said. “The basic principle is, if it’s your money [at risk] you pay capital gains; if you’re managing other people’s money, essentially you pay ordinary income tax like everybody else.”

Since the disastrous Gulf Coast oil spill, BP and the other companies responsible for the tragedy have been beefing up their lobbying and public relations efforts. Today, the oil giant has full-page ads in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today defending its response to the oil spill. From the ad:

Since the tragic accident on the Transcocean Deepwater Horizon rig first occurred, we have been committed to doing everything possible to stop the flow of oil at the seabed, collect the oil on the surface and keep it away from the shore.

BP has taken full responsibility for dealing with the spill. We are determined to do everything we can to minimize any impact. We will honor all legitimate claims.

BP’s ads come as a new poll finds that 76 percent of the American public disapproves of how the company is handling the spill. And BP is not taking “full responsibility” for the spill. In fact, officials have repeatedly tried to downplay the disaster and argued that attempts to accurately measure the rate of flow at the seabed are impossible and unnecessary:

– Tony Haywood, BP CEO: “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest. It is impossible to say and we will mount, as part of the aftermath, a very detailed environmental assessment as we go forward.” [5/18/10]

– Haywood: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” [5/14/10]

– Lamar McKay, President of BP America: “The volume estimates are based effectively on surface expression, because you can’t measure what’s coming out at the seabed.” [Senate testimony, 5/12/10]

– Tom Mueller, BP: “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.” [5/14/10]

– Doug Suttles, BP COO, Global Exploration: “Since the beginning, we’ve said it’s almost impossible to get a precise number. But ourselves and people from NOAA and others believe that something around 5,000 — it’s actually barrels a day — is the best estimate.” [ABC News, 5/14/10]

In Boston Globe op-ed today, columnist Derrick Z. Jackson hits BP for its ads:

It is difficult to conceive of a more resounding insult to our intelligence than BP’s full-page advertisements in the New York Times and USA Today about its response to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The most intriguing paragraph of the BP ad was, “This is an enormous team effort. More than 2,500 of our operational and technical personnel from around the world are working tirelessly in coordination with the U.S. Coast Guard, and federal, state and local government agencies.’’

But until Deepwater Horizon exploded, BP’s idea of working tirelessly with government agencies was lobbying them to bypass environmental-impact reviews for well permits. Yesterday, the Times had yet another story on how drilling projects have proceeded with environmental waivers, despite President Obama’s so-called moratorium on permits. Deepwater Horizon received an environmental waiver last year and received another one just before the April explosion.

While BP will likely survive this tragedy because of its massive profits, these attempts to shirk responsibility are already beginning to drag the company down in the public’s eyes.

This week, the House of Representatives is trying to pull together a package extending several popular tax breaks as well as important social safety net provisions like unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for laid-off workers. The bill costs about $200 billion, but is partially offset by a few tax changes, including the closing of a loophole that allow corporations to claim U.S. tax credits on profits earned overseas.

These unjustified tax breaks have been on the radar of Congress’ tax writers for the last few years, but so far they’ve remained in the tax code due to the pressure of big corporations, which obviously want to preserve their ability to exploit the tax code’s quirks. This time, even though the bill before Congress extends some of their favored tax provisions, like the Research and Development tax credit, the Big Business lobby is at it again, fighting to preserve its ability to use tax loopholes, at the expense of its own tax credits and the extension of unemployment benefits:

International Business Machines Corp. and trade groups for major U.S. companies are pressing Congress to defeat a jobs bill containing billions of dollars in taxes on their global operations…In a letter to lawmakers yesterday, Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world’s biggest computer-services provider, told lawmakers it “strongly opposes” the legislation and would rather do without the research credit than face new taxes on overseas profits.

The Chamber of Commerce has, of course, weighed in on behalf of big business, claiming that the legislation is a “job killer.” Closing the loophole in question would raise about $14.5 billion over ten years, or about $1.5 billion per year from the entire multinational corporation community.

The choice here for Congress is pretty stark. On one side, there’s the need to extend unemployment insurance for workers at a time when long-term unemployment is at record highs and the labor market is still incredibly weak, while at the same time extending tax breaks that help companies innovate and create jobs. On the other side, there’s the ability for multinational corporations to claim U.S. credits on profits that they don’t earn here or pay domestic taxes on.

According to the National Employment Law Project, 1.2 million Americans who are currently eligible for extended benefits will have the rug pulled out from under them in June if Congress doesn’t act. Of course, for months now there has been serious hostility to extending jobless benefits (which does not create a new tier of benefits, so workers who have run the full gamut of the extended program will still see their benefits disappear). Earlier this year, Republicans repeatedly mounted filibusters of extensions, and just yesterday Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) said that we should stop extending benefits “right now.”