Yesterday, President Obama’s debt commission held its second public meeting, as it works to come up with a recommendation for Congress to vote on by December. And evidently the right-wing is extremely concerned that the commission will propose some tax increases, because it is pushing Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) to preemptively rule tax increases off the table. Hatch is slated to become the Senate Finance Committee’s ranking member next year, so he will have significant input over any tax bill that makes it way before Congress.

And Hatch, who is sprinting ever further to the right in the face of a potential 2012 primary challenge from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), played right along:

“Everybody knows I’m a tax cutter and not a tax increaser, so the odds are that I probably couldn’t support something that would increase taxes, especially given the amount of spending going on,” said Hatch.

“We’d like to get a commitment from all Republicans on the Finance panel to oppose new taxes,” said Andrew Roth, vice president for government affairs for the far right-wing, anti-tax crusading Club for Growth. “It would be political suicide for Orrin Hatch to not do so.”

As Ali Frick pointed out, this shows that “conservatives don’t actually want to take action to reduce the deficit.” Indeed, it’s just one more indication of the pure deficit peacockery that is prevalent on the right, wherein there is much consternation and fearmongering about deficits, but responsible solutions for addressing them are dismissed out of hand.

It’s the simple truth that the country’s long-term deficits cannot be brought down without a reasonable mix of spending cuts and tax increases. As Michael Linden and Michael Ettlinger found, excepting debt obligations and benefits for current Social Security beneficiaries, the entire rest of the budget would have to be cut by almost 30 percent to eliminate the deficit by 2014. That’s 30 percent of everything: defense, child care, veteran’s benefits, you name it.

And there are Republicans out there who get it: just none of them have to face the wrath of the Club for Growth. Former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who co-chairs the deficit commission, has “dismissed claims from Republicans that reining in deficits would be easy or accomplished with spending cuts alone.” “To say that all we have to do is take care of waste, fraud and abuse, and foreign aid is a like a sparrow’s belch in the midst of typhoon,” he said. “That is nothing, less than one percent of the budget.”

Former GOP Senator Pete Domenici, meanwhile has said, “I’m sorry that some Republicans think otherwise, but I was there [in the Senate] a long time, and I don’t think you can do spending alone…It’s got to be a package, and – to my way of thinking – it’s got to have taxes on the table.” Former Reagan official Bruce Bartlett put it this way:

Every serious budget analyst — I mean every — knows that revenues must be part of the solution to our deficit problem. We can debate how much and what form higher revenues will take, but the idea that we can or even should embark on serious deficit reduction with no tax increase whatsoever is grossly immature and unworthy of consideration.

Yet that’s exactly what the far right is pushing, with Hatch’s tacit approval.

In the 38 days since British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, 15 to 40 million gallons of oil have gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, covering sea life, washing onto beaches, and making those working to clean it up ill. And as the days progress, more and more pieces of evidence confirming BP’s gross negligence when it came to safety precautions are coming to light.

However, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) took to the House floor today to espouse his own unique theory about the cause of the spill. According to Gohmert, it was the simple fact that the oil rig inspector’s are union members:

As we’ve had hearings regarding the oil spill out in the Gulf, there’ve been some staggering things come forward and the media’s not grabbing it like they should and letting everyone know. Who knew that the inspectors inspecting the offshore rigs were unionized. So they had union limits on how many hours and travel and this kind of things. These guys are like the military, they’re out there to protect the environment, and we’re going to put limits on them? They gotta be out there protecting us. And yesterday, Director Birnbaum, when asked ‘what kind of checks and balances do you have?’, she said ‘we sent them out in pairs of two.’ And then I asked ‘then was it a good idea that the last inspection team of two were a unionized father and son team?’…This thing stinks and it needs to be cleaned up.

Watch it:

Now, at least some oil rig inspectors at MMS are, in fact, unionized. But that’s all that Gohmert got right.

MMS’ inspectors were undeniably negligent when it came to inspecting the Deepwater rig. But that negligence had nothing to do with their work rules and everything to do with the fact that, under President Bush, the MMS was bought by the oil industry. According to an inspector general’s report, MMS allowed industry officials “to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency.” In exchange, MMS officials received “meals, tickets to sporting events and gifts” from the very industry it was supposed to be regulating.

And of course, who can forget that MMS employees under Bush were “partying, having sex, using drugs and accepting gifts and ski trips and golf outings from energy company representatives with whom they did government business.” This isn’t about work rules. It’s the end-result of a political philosophy based on deregulation and no enforcement of safety laws.

BP itself also cut short safety procedures, skipped quality tests, and appointed inexperienced managers to key positions. The New York Times added today that “several days before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, BP officials chose, partly for financial reasons, to use a type of casing for the well that the company knew was the riskier of two options.”

These choices, as the Wall Street Journal put it, allowed BP to “minimize costly delays,” but they also led directly to the catastrophe in the Gulf. Gohmert is simply grasping at straws in order to direct blame away from the culpable parties.

This week, after Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) was unable to muster any Republican support for it in the Senate, Rep. Dave Obey (D-WI) said that he would attach a $23 billion bill aimed at preventing mass teacher layoffs to the House version of the fiscal year 2010 war supplemental. The Senate is currently debating the supplemental, and the House plans to move on it next.

Ever since this proposal for teacher funding started making the rounds, Republicans have been mischaracterizing it as a “bailout,” and the top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), said that he would push his party to vote against the war supplemental if it included the money for teachers.

Today, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) appeared on Fox News to talk about the effort. (Fox’s Bill Hemmer was a tad confused, and said that the teacher money would be attached to the extenders bill currently before the House, which continues various tax breaks and important social safety net programs, like unemployment insurance.) When asked if he would support the money for teachers, Cantor dismissed the funding because he’s focused on “priorities.” He then poo-pooed the idea of extending unemployment benefits as “a far cry from the original intent” of the program:

Q: Some are pushing in this bill for $23 billion to make sure that teachers are not laid off in certain parts of the country. Education’s important too, as you well know. You wonder if you go ahead and pay for it or force these schools districts to find another place to get the money or cut back. How’s that going over?

CANTOR: Again, it’s assessing priorities. Some of the spending bill that they’re talking about right now is extending unemployment insurance, is extending COBRA insurance. All these things, in tough times, certainly are worthwhile programs. But let’s pay for ‘em…Part of this bill now is extending unemployment insurance to 99 weeks. That’s a far cry from the original intent, just a few years ago, of 26 weeks of unemployment insurance.

Watch it:

Up to 300,000 teachers across the country are facing layoffs, and Cantor’s own state of Virginia is looking at 2,000 layoffs this year. In addition to layoffs, school districts are cutting summer school, moving to four-day school weeks and eliminating caps on class size, all in order to handle draconian budget cuts that have either already been made or are certainly coming if the federal government doesn’t act.

As far as the extension of unemployment benefits, 1.2 million Americans who are currently eligible for extended benefits will have the rug pulled out from under them in June without an extension. Plus, according to the Center for American Progress’ Christian Weller, the average length of unemployment is currently 31.2 weeks, “and 44.1 percent of the unemployed were out of a job for 27 weeks or more.” “This is a new record for long-term unemployment,” he added.

Given that, it makes sense to ensure that all eligible workers receive their benefits. (The extension does not create a new tier of benefits for workers who have exhausted theirs.) But instead, Cantor would rather wax rhetorically about priorities and play with his gimmicky YouCut toy.

Five weeks into the worst environmental catastrophe in the history of the United States, even the right-wing Fox networks are turning on BP, the foreign oil behemoth responsible for the hundred-million-gallon oil gusher now fouling the shores of Louisiana. On Monday, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith challenged top White House adviser David Axelrod why the administration continues to trust BP, whose CEO Tony Hayward bet the disaster will have a “very very modest” impact on the Gulf of Mexico, claimed BP had “contained” the spill, and complained that Americans are too litigious:

And this is the chief executive of the company that’s in charge of cleaning up this disaster now? Who calls us litigious? Who makes comments about the comparative volume of oil and then says the environmental impact is very minimal? And this is the guy we as Americans are supposed to entrust with the largest ecological disaster in American history? Tony Hayward?

On Wednesday, Fox Business Network anchor Liz Claman interviewed John Williams, executive director of the Southern Shrimper Alliance, whose industry is threatened with extinction by the millions of gallons of dispersed oil contaminating the Gulf Coast. Claman noted that “we can’t trust BP”:

I think one thing we do know is that we can’t trust BP with information at this point. They were the ones, absolutely, you’re correct, who said, “Oh, don’t worry, the oil will not reach the beaches.” Oh, come on!

Watch a compilation:

This righteous anger at big oil is a remarkable turnaround for the networks that lied about the oil spills caused by Hurricane Katrina, deny the threat of oil pollution to the planet, and shilled for offshore drilling during the “Drill, Baby, Drill” summer of 2008.