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Sen. Kelly Ayotte was once again asked by her constituents at a town hall meeting about her vote against the Manchin-Toomey background check legislation and her response this time around was to make stuff up:

Before saying anything about New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, let's establish one thing: Although the Manchin-Toomey background check proposal would have expanded background checks for gun purchases, it wouldn't have created a national firearms registry. In fact, it would have strengthened existing law barring the creation of any such registry and stiffened penalties against any official who violated or tried to violate the prohibition.

With that said, check out Ayotte's explanation on Thursday afternoon for why she voted against expanded background checks:

I will tell you in terms of a universal background check, as it's been framed, I have a lot of concerns about that leading to a registry that will lead to a privacy situation for lawful firearms owners.

That's total bull. The text of the legislation would have explicitly prohibited the creation of a national gun registry in not one, not two, but three separate places. Read on...

Here's more from Steve Benen: The facts Ayotte doesn't want her constituents to know:

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UPDATE from Susie: After making a classic non-apology apology ("If I offended anyone" -- gee, ya think?), Dr. Ben Carson offered to withdraw as a graduation speaker at Johns Hopkins University:

"I think people have completely taken the wrong meaning out of what I was saying," the 61-year-old surgeon said in a telephone interview Friday. "First of all, I certainly believe gay people should have all the rights that anybody else has. What I was basically saying is that as far as marriage is concerned that has traditionally been between a man and a woman and nobody should be able to change that."

"Now perhaps the examples were not the best choice of words, and I certainly apologize if I offended anyone," he added. "But the point that I was making was that no group of individuals, whoever they are, whatever their belief systems, gets to change traditional definitions. The reason I believe the way I do, I will readily confess, is because I am a Christian who believes in The Bible."

The Bible, he explained, "...says we have an obligation to love our fellow man as ourselves, and I love everybody the same -- all homosexuals. Everybody who knows me knows I would never say anything to intentionally hurt someone."

Well! Isn't that "nice" of him? I wonder which traditional definition of marriage he's using. The one where King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines, or something else?

***

Fox's new favorite, Dr. Ben Carson, who has come under fire this week for his remarks on Sean Hannity's show where he compared gay marriage to NAMBLA and bestiality, made an appearance on Andrea Mitchell's show on MSNBC and did a really lousy job of defending them, claiming that he was "taken out of context" and wasn't actually trying to equate all of those things.

Mitchell responded by reading Carson's words right back to him and correctly noted that he was equating those things when he used in the very same sentence, gay marriage along with "things that are illegal." Carson responded by claiming that it was not his intention for his words to be taken that way. Yeah, how could all of those silly viewers have gotten the idea he was equating gay marriage with men who want to have sex with boys and bestiality just because he rattled them off one after the other?

Carson has come under fire from his colleague at Johns Hopkins which Media Matters reported on here: "Nasty, Petty, And Ill-Informed": Ben Carson's Johns Hopkins Colleague Responds To His Marriage Equality Attack :

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As Digby noted, it seems the Republicans are now trying to kill the Frankenstein monster they created:

Karl Rove was instrumental in creating this monster. Now it's got a mind of its own.

It's hard to know how this will play out. The Tea Party is really just the re-branding of the far right of the Republican Party. But it may just be that the establishment made a mistake in doing that. They don't see themselves as Republicans anymore. They see themselves as a distinct movement that wants to explicitly run the Republican Party.

The wingnuts have always had real power within their Party but they didn't know it. Now they do. And they have spent the last 30 years having people like Karl Rove rev them up and expand their egos into believing they represent a majority of Americans and have a responsibility to hew to their principles no matter what. It was a good way to market conservatism. But it was never true.

Rove, Tea Party in GOP civil war:

As they try to pick up the pieces from last fall’s defeat, the establishment and Tea Party wings of the GOP are at each other’s throats.

Karl Rove, fresh off the multi-million dollar disaster that was 2012, has launched a new initiative, The New York Times reported Saturday. Known as the Conservative Victory Project, the group, a spin-off of Rove’s American Crossroads, will help recruit establishment Republicans, as well as defend Senate incumbents against challenges from more conservative candidates.

The aim, in a nutshell, is to push back against the Tea Party and bring the GOP’s nominating process back under the control of the party’s Washington power-brokers. In recent cycles, Tea Party-backed Senate candidates have won the Republican nomination over more moderate GOPers, only to be defeated in the general election. In several cases—think of Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks—they’ve been done in thanks in part to campaign trail slip-ups that more seasoned candidates might have avoided.

But the news has triggered a full-blown revolt among conservative activists, both inside and outside Washington. Read on...

And here's more from Steve Benen: Welcoming the Conservative Victory Project to the field:

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What is it with these Republicans who just can't stop themselves from coming just a hair shy of calling the President of the United States "uppity?" Last week, Bill-O was calling him "cocky" during his Talking Points Memo segment on Fox. Now we've got Lady McCheney Mary Matalin on Mrs. Greenspan's show calling him too "self-reverential" and "self-righteous" and that he wants Republicans to go along with him and pretend they care about doing their jobs and legislating, he'd better start acting nicer to them.

Andrea Mitchell reminded her that he didn't exactly have much good will from the other side, what with them immediately plotting on how to obstruct everything he tried to do from the day he got elected --during that now-famous meeting with Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich. We also had Mitch McConnell out there just stating openly that his "single most important" goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Matalin feigned ignorance and pretended she had no idea what Mitchell was talking about. She said the GOP leadership didn't attend meetings and the last time she checked, neither Luntz nor Gingrich were in office at the time of that meeting.

Thankfully, Mitchell did remind her that a good deal of the leadership was there, but that didn't stop her from going right back after President Obama and complaining that he wasn't talking nicely enough to those poor sensitive Republicans.

Here's a little reminder of just what went on during that meeting from James Wolcott: The Conspiracy to Commit Legislative Constipation:

In a scene reminiscent of the summit meeting of mob bosses in The Godfather, Republican House leaders were summoned by evil marshmallow and message-crafter Frank Luntz to hash out a strategy to cope with the defeat of their party in 2008 and the election of the newly inaugurated President Obama, according to Robert Draper's just published book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

From a report on Draper's revelation by Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian UK (the bolding is mine):

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

In his book, Draper opens with the heady atmosphere in Washington on the days running up to the inauguration and the day itself, which attracted 1.8 million to the mall to witness Obama being sworn in as America's first black president.

Those numbers contributed to a growing sense of unease among Republicans as much the defeat in the White House race the previous November. The 15 Republicans were in a sombre mood as they gathered at the Caucus Room in Washington, an upscale restaurant where a New York strip steak costs $51.

Attending the dinner were House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. From the Senate were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl. Others present were former House Speaker and future – and failed – presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who organised the dinner and sent out the invitations.

The dinner table was set in a square at Luntz's request so everyone could see one another and talk freely. The session lasted four hours and by the end the sombre mood had lifted: they had conceived a plan. They would take back the House in November 2010, which they did, and use it as a spear to mortally wound Obama in 2011 and take back the Senate and White House in 2012, Draper writes.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," said Keven McCarthy, quoted by Draper. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The Republicans have done that, bringing Washington to a near standstill several times during Obama's first term over debt and other issues.

Their locked-shut buttocks will unclench of course should Mitt Romney be elected, at which point they'll be passing legislation like street hawkers handing out strip-club flyers. Every bill will be named after Reagan or some other sentimental favorite.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've about had it up to here with these Republicans and their supposed hurt feelings as an excuse for obstruction when they've disrespected President Obama and called him every name in the book for years. Matalin's pearl clutching is growing tiresome --to put it mildly.

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I'm not sure why MSNBC thinks that anyone from an organization that makes the NRA look like moderates deserves to get some air time or to be treated as someone the public should take seriously, but they brought Gun Owners of America's Erich Pratt (son of Larry Pratt) on to bash President Obama after his press conference today calling for sweeping new gun laws.

As Think Progress noted, he decided to dish out a bit of revisionist history on just when St. Ronnie was in support of gun control and as I noted this week, it was before he was president and well before he started exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's disease: Reagan Only Supported Gun Control Because He Was Senile, Prominent Gun Advocate Suggests:

As he unveiled his comprehensive package of gun safety regulations on Wednesday afternoon, President Obama urged Americans to stand up to irrational opponents of restrictions on military-style weapons, noting that even President Ronald Reagan supported sensible restrictions on assault weapons. “And by the way, so did Ronald Reagan, one of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment, who wrote to Congress in 1994 urging them — this is Ronald Reagan speaking — urging them to listen to the American public and to the law enforcement community and support a ban on the further manufacture of military-style assault weapons,” Obama said.

Asked about Reagan’s position during an appearance on MSNBC shortly after Obama’s remarks, Erich Pratt of Gun Owners of America, suggested that Reagan only supported greater restrictions because he was senile:

ANDREA MITCHELL (HOST): What’s the problem with registering a gun? If you have a bushmaster, first of all, why would you have one?

PRATT: President Reagan owned an AR-15.

MITCHELL: And he supported gun control. He advocated…

PRATT: In his later years. We have to keep that in account.

MITCHELL: In his later years he was almost killed by John Hinckley.

PRATT: But all through his presidency he opposed gun control, that’s my point.

Read on...

Pratt was also defending the NRA's new ad that they decided to double down on today, even though, as Andrea Mitchell noted, it's generally considered off limits to be going after the children of presidents. These groups don't care how low they have to go if it gets their base whipped into a frenzy and protects the gun manufacturers who are funding them.

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Bill O'Reilly caught a really bad case of selective amnesia on his show this Monday night, when he pretended he didn't have any idea that his fellow host at Fox had gone on the air, not once, but at least three times, blaming the shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, CT on the "removal of god" from our schools.

Bill-O had his regular guest, flame thrower Bernard Goldberg on and the two of them were very quick to attack MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell for supposedly politicizing the shooting because she dared to talk about the fact that maybe we should have some reasonable gun laws in the United States. But when Goldberg actually criticized Fox for doing the same thing and politicizing the attack to suit an agenda, and without calling out Huckabee by name, slammed him for his remarks about school prayer, O'Reilly decided to act like he didn't have a clue as to what Goldberg was talking about.

If O'Reilly needs a refresher as to Huckabee's remarks, someone can tell him to go watch what he said here and here. As much as O'Reilly hates but follows Media Matters, who have had this on their front page for days now, I don't think there's a chance in hell he didn't know about what HuckaJesus said.

Here's your "fair and balanced" discussion on Fox. Goldberg with false equivalencies and Bill-O pretending he doesn't know about the hackery from the religious wingnut on his own network.

And if anyone needed any more proof that Huckabee is a blathering idiot, go read this article from this past April: Gunman Kills 7 in a Rampage at a Northern California University.

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From this Friday's Andrea Mitchell Reports, apparently Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a member of the House Budget Committee, doesn't understand what the debt ceiling is or how it works. Andrea Mitchell explains that to him when he complains that President Obama somehow wants an "unlimited credit card" for the spending he and his cohorts already voted for.

CHAFFETZ: The President said he was going to help curb back the debt and tackle this deficit. Instead the President has the gall to actually go out and suggest that we should get rid of the debt ceiling votes and take away Congress' ability to help put a lid on that. Essentially he wants a limitless credit card. [...]

MITCHELL: Let's talk about the debt ceiling for a second, because the debt ceiling is not more money. It's raising the level to accommodate what Congress has already appropriated. So it's not an unlimited credit card, and most serious economists think that it is an unnecessary act. Why not review the bidding on just how that debt ceiling should be used? Because it's used as a shotgun to the head of either party, either president.

CHAFFETZ: Look, there's got to be some limit to the debt we're putting forward in this country and I believe that we should have that discussion. In the past,it's driven the debate and the discussion about our out of control debt.

Amazing how that concern for the deficit they've got now wasn't "driving the debate" when they were passing the Bush tax cuts, voting for a couple of wars they didn't want to pay for, or a prescription drug plan what wasn't paid for. Deficits didn't matter back then. They only matter when they want to use them as an excuse to destroy our social safety nets.

h/t Dave

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(Chuck Todd: Republicans will give Democrats all the revenue they want, if they just agree to raise the retirement age. Trust them.)

I don't know about anyone else, but as someone who has actually worked at one of those jobs where you take a shower at the end of the work day and not before you go in, I'm sick to death of watching these overpaid television pundits and their counterparts in the Congress, nonchalantly discussing raising the retirement age. It may not matter much to them, but there are real economic hardships involved when you force the average wage earner out there to continue to work until they drop dead if the retirement age is raised any higher than it already is now.

If our beltway Villagers and politicians really believe that it's no big deal to raise the retirement age for the rest of America, how about we ask them to walk a mile in our shoes? I wonder if any of them would decide that maybe it's not such a great idea to be doing physical labor well into your late sixties if they were the ones actually having to do those jobs?

I wonder if Chuck Todd would be a little more worried about when he might be able to retire if he were say, some migrant worker picking berries and in need of daily visits to the chiropractor he can't afford because his back is screaming all day from being bent over?

Or how Mrs. Greenspan would feel if she were working at Mickey-D's flipping burgers and serving fries and standing on a ceramic floor, with her varicose veins getting worse by the minute?

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Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) on Monday said that GOP hopeful Mitt Romney's ad suggesting that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China was "100 percent correct and accurate" -- even though fact checkers have determined the claim is false.

"I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China," the Republican presidential candidate told supporters in Defiance, Ohio last week.

In an ad released on Sunday, the campaign repeated the claim, saying that Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians, who are going to build Jeeps in China."

The candidate apparently picked up idea that Chrysler was going to move all production to China from conservative bloggers who twisted an otherwise-accurate story from Bloomberg News.

And even Gualberto Ranieri, Chrysler’s vice president of communications, has said that the claims are just not true.

"Despite clear and accurate reporting, the take has given birth to a number of stories making readers believe that Chrysler plans to shift all Jeep production to China from North America, and therefore idle assembly lines and U.S. workforce," Ranieri wrote on Oct. 25. "It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats."

"A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments," he added.

After reviewing the ad on Sunday, BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins tweeted: "There's really no good explanation or excuse for it. Mitt Romney's Jeep ad is misleading. Full stop."

"Ads that mislead or stretch the truth are nothing new for presidential campaigns," Business Insider's Grace Wyler explained. "But this ad — and Romney's comments last week — has prompted harsh criticism from the media, likely because it strikes reporters as not only disingenuous, but irresponsible. For Romney to suggest that the livelihoods of specific voters — namely workers at the Jeep plant in Toledo — are in danger in order to win an election comes across to many as the type of fear-mongering that no one wants in a president. "

During an interview on Monday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell asked Chaffetz if the Romney campaign should stop running the ad.

"No!" Chaffetz replied. "It's 100 percent correct and accurate. The Romney campaign stands behind it."

For its part, President Barack Obama's campaign released an ad on Monday calling Romney's assertion an outright "lie."

"When the auto industry faced collapse, Mitt Romney turned his back," the Obama ad says. "Even the conservative Detroit News criticized Romney for his ‘wrong-headedness’ on the bailout."

"And now, after Romney’s false claim of Jeep outsourcing to China, Chrysler itself has refuted Romney’s lie."

Speaking to supporters in Youngstown, Ohio on Monday, Vice President Joe Biden said Romney's ad was "absolutely, patently false" and he had "never seen anything like that."

"Have they no shame?" the vice president wondered. "Romney will say anything, absolutely anything to win it seems."

(h/t: Political Carnival)

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I thought one of President Obama's better moments during the debate this week was when he pointed out that access to affordable contraception was not only a health issue for women, but an economic issue as well. During some of that exchange, Mitt Romney once again attempted to obscure his opposition to the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage mandate and the following day, had one of his surrogates out there claiming that women don't really care about access to affordable contraception and calling it a "peripheral" issue."

As Steve Benen noted, we've seen this act before back in April when Gov. Nikki Haley was out there claiming that women don't care about contraception as well, and this Wednesday, we were treated to round two of this nonsense -- Birth control is not a 'hypothetical situation':

Kerry Healey, Romney's lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, fresh off her borderline-comical turn in the post-debate spin room last night, sat down with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell today, and the host asked questions Healey presumably expected, noting Romney's support for the Blunt Amendment, for example.

Inexplicably, the Romney surrogate described the consequences of the candidate's own proposals as "some hypothetical situation." Healey added that even having a discussion about women being able to afford contraception is a "peripheral" issue.

This arrogant attitude is extraordinary. Under Romney's preferred agenda, employers can end contraception coverage for their women employees, and millions of Americans would no longer be able to afford birth control.

Asked to defend this right-wing nonsense, the Romney campaign's defense is that the question is irrelevant -- as if the issue is so trivial, it's not even worth their time.

If this is Team Romney's attempt to appear in touch with the needs of working families, it's likely to backfire.

Postscript: On a related note, Ed Gillespie said he was "wrong" last night to explain that Romney opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. For those keeping score at home, the Romney campaign, over the course of less than a day, has had no position on the law, been opposed to the law, and then supportive of the law.

As Nicole noted in her post about Nikki Haley:

And if by some chance I ignored all good sense and did the things above, when asked to proffer up proof that there isn't a war on women's rights within the GOP, I sure as hell wouldn't be stupid enough to say, "Well, women don't care about contraception."

The Romney campaign doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from what this did to them in the polls with women earlier this year.