After Van Jones gave his speeches both at Netroots Nation 2011 and with his Rebuild the Dream movement, I was glad to see him get some air time on MSNBC to talk about the political games the Republicans are playing with their hostage taking on raising the debt ceiling. We'd be well served if we had more of their Democratic counterparts speaking this clearly and succinctly as Jones and former adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, Jared Bernstein did here.

I really liked Jones' hand grenade analogy on Medicare. I actually think the Republicans are cynical enough to try to force the Democrats to make cuts to the program and then try to run against them on it in 2012 and hope that the public is uninformed enough along with a complicit media that would help with that factor for them to get away with it. As Jones noted, they need to get out there and defend the program if they don't want that hand grenade to blow up in their face.

I don't know about anyone else, but as someone who has been following this issue, I'm sick to death of the Republicans throwing temper tantrums and telling the public that they'd be willing to let the world's economy crash if they don't get their way on tax cuts whether it be Cantor or McConnell of any of the rest of them. It's long past time for the majority of our media to start calling out these hostage takers if they would like to still have a country worth living in, and not one in the middle of another depression, which there's some argument about whether we're already there now. For far too many Americans sadly, we may as well be.

O'DONNELL: In the House, they walked out of the budget negotiations. Cantor, simply because they were talking about tax expenditures. No one, the Democrats, the Vice President, no one was talking about raising income tax rates of any kind, just going after the expenditures. BERNSTEIN: That is a key point, that is a key, I wrote about that on my blog today. It's a key point. No one was, the thing that you hear Republicans inveigh against the most and the conservative supply side theory economist, the thing they inveigh against the most is an increase in tax rates, but if you broaden the base and close loopholes, you're not increasing rates. And so that's the way, that's the direction that this panel needs to head now I think. O'DONNELL: Van, Sen. Chuck Schumer said today that they were looking at possibilities in Medicare, the what they call the delivery system in Medicare. There might be some ways to shave things there. Not cuts that would in any way affect beneficiaries. This is the kind of cuts that Democrats have done many times before. President Clinton did $200 billion in that his first six months in office, he did a big Medicare cut, but it was all on the provider side of the equation. If the Democrats go into Medicare in that way, will that undercut any of the argument they've been making against Paul Ryan? JONES: You know, we're going to have to get all the way through this process, because I will say this. Somebody throws you a hand grenade, you can try to fiddle with it, or you can throw it back. And part of the problem is, that we get so earnest trying to figure out, well maybe we can do this, maybe we can do that, and we are holding the hand grenade they want us to hold. Here's the bottom line, Medicare, the main threat to Medicare, is coming from the Republican Party, that's the main threat. And Democrats need to stand up and defend the basic principles of this program, which is a sound program. When we begin to accept the terms of debate of the other side and start to fool around and fiddle with the hand grenade, we always wind up with the explosion in our face.