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On CNN's Reliable Sources this Sunday, Howard Kurtz did a segment focusing on whether the pundits out there in the media who were telling everyone it would be a Romney blowout, should pay a price for being continually wrong with their predictions. I think Kurtz misses the forest for the trees with his criticism, primarily because any real analysis about just how bad most of the corporate media's election coverage was, would require him taking a look at his own network and not just Fox News.

First and foremost, if we're ever going to do anything about getting the money out of politics, we're not going to get much help, if any, out of the industries primarily profiting from it, which is all of the television stations and radio stations across the country. You're not going to see the pundits out there saying much about all of those advertising dollars when their companies and everyone they work with is thriving because of it.

And then there's the issue of Rove and his ilk on Fox, who was not just that he was misleading viewers with overly optimistic predictions about the election results, but also running a PAC. Fox continually failed to disclose Rove's involvement in the election. They also made a regular habit of bringing on Romney campaign advisers as pundits and failing to disclose their roles as well..

If Kurtz wants to give an honest assessment of the coverage of this presidential election, there's a lot more wrong with it than just pundits getting predictions wrong. And what I noted here is just the tip of the iceberg. Endless focus on polls and the horse race, rather than substance, the issue of media consolidation, fake balance where there is none and a host of other issues are a lot bigger problem than talking heads being rewarded for failure.

Full transcript of Kurtz and his panel's remarks below the fold.

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As John Aravosis noted here, if we weren't already sure what Lindsey Graham has been up to with exploiting the tragedy in Libya, we have our answer now -- GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham running campaign ads on Benghazi tragedy:

For anyone still wondering why Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has taken the lead for the GOP, along with John McCain, on trying to exploit the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya two months ago, we now have our answer.

Lindsey Graham is using our dead ambassador for his re-election campaign.

Even Mitt Romney wasn’t this morbidly brazen.

But the evidence is incontrovertible. Lindsey Graham is running campaign ads about Benghazi. One such ad was found by Alvin McEwen of Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters on the Talk Points Memo site, and another on Daily Kos (Alvin forwarded them to me): [...]

And when you click on the ad, it takes you to a petition on LindseyGraham.com, the Republican Senator’s campaign site that asks you to “sign the petition if you want answers”: [...]

Oh we’d like answers all right.

Starting with why the Republicans keep treating the deaths of four Americans as if they’ve won the lottery. Who does Lindsey Graham think he is, Mitt Romney?

As Steve Kornacki at Salon informed us this spring, Graham is likely to face a "tea party" primary challenger in 2014. So here he was on Meet the Press this morning, continuing to beat the drum on Benghazi and demanding that a select committee be formed, even though he and McCain's third amigo, Joe Lieberman already threw them under the bus -- Lieberman: Select Committee on Benghazi Not Needed.

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As Jon Stewart noted in the opening segment of The Daily Show this Thursday evening, the week before the general election, the people of New York might have it rough right now in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, but they can be grateful for one thing -- that they're not living in "swing state hell" like the residents of Ohio are now.

As Stewart joked, between all the political ads, robocalls and politicians on the campaign trail that are inundating the voters in the state, they're going to need their electricity turned off to get some relief. Daily Show regular Wyatt Cenac "reported" from an "undisclosed bunker," since there was no where else to go to escape the ads, not even the neighboring states.

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As Dave Johnson at Campaign for America's Future noted last week, even though Mitt Romney's been running nothing but one dishonest campaign ad after another since announcing his recent run for president, the media has finally found a campaign ad they can "cluck tongues at" and it's not a Romney ad:

After a series of blatantly dishonest Mitt Romney campaign ads have been saturating the airwaves -- one even editing audio to make it sound as if the President said something that he never said --our media elites have finally found an ad to click their tongues at. A pro-Obama ad from super PAC Priorities USA Action features Joe Soptic explaining what happened to his wife after the Bain Capital laid him off, taking away their health insurance. The ad has not even been run on TV [...]

Note, this is not an Obama campaign ad. It is illegal for a campaign to coordinate or even communicate or coordinate with these outside groups.

The Romney campaign responded with an ad saying that this ad came from the Obama campaign itself -- yet another in a series of lies from the Romney campaign. [...]

Again, this was not an Obama campaign ad, and has never been aired on TV. Contrast the elite media reaction to this ad with their reaction to the dishonest ads that the Romney campaign has been running on TV, using doctored audio, claiming Obama is "gutting welfare reform," accusing Obama of "war on religion," accusing Obama of corruption, etc. The media elites say this ad, showing what happens to families when they are laid off and lose their health insurance, "crossed a line." Not calling a sitting President a "Marxist" ot the lie about "death panels" or "palling around with terrorists" or doctored audio in an ad from a presidential candidate -- but explaining the tragedy of being laid off and losing health insurance is what "crosses a line."

Case in point, this Sunday's Meet the Press and David Gregory doing his best to add to the list at Dave's post. I was glad to see some push back from Axelrod though.

DAVID GREGORY: Those of us who cover these campaigns understand that even though there's a big choice here it's not as if some of the personal destruction back and forth is going to go away. And we've seen a lot of that this week. And Governor Romney has taken particular aim at an ad that's being run by the president's own Super PAC run by a former press aide to the campaign and in the White House. And this is a campaign about Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain, even though the story that's highlighted in the Super PAC ad happened after Mitt Romney left. Let me play a portion of this and also show you how Mitt Romney's responding to it. Watch.

(VIDEO NOT TRANSCRIBED)

DAVID GREGORY: Disrespecting the office of the presidency is the charge from Mitt Romney about ads like that with the implication that somehow Bain and Mitt Romney was responsible for that woman's death. How do you respond to that?

DAVID AXELROD: Well, I certainly don't think that would be a fair implication. That isn't stated in the ad. It's not a fair implication. But what is true is that Governor Romney and his partners loaded that company with debt, walked away with millions of dollars and left the workers there bereft, without the healthcare they were promised, without the pensions and other benefits that they were promised. And that is emblematic of the kind of--

DAVID GREGORY: You don't think that ad-- (OVERTALK)

DAVID AXELROD: --of work that he did. That is important.

DAVID GREGORY: It doesn't cross the line--

DAVID AXELROD: But let me ask you--

DAVID GREGORY: --in the debate?

DAVID AXELROD: --ask you something, David. How does Mitt Romney, in the very week that he's running an ad that he approves. At the end he says, "I'm Mitt Romney and I approve this message." Millions and millions and millions of dollars accusing the president of removing the work requirement from welfare, which every single person who's looked at it, every expert, every news organization, every fact checker has said is patently false.

And he is lecturing people on the quality of campaigns? He ought to be ashamed of himself. He ought to tell his own campaign in the commercials that he controls, "Take that off. It's not true. It's not fair." When he does that, maybe he'll have some standing to lecture other people on the quality of the campaign.

DAVID GREGORY: We're in a new gear in this campaign, clearly. David Axelrod, thank you very much.

DAVID AXELROD: All right, thank you.

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Say what you will about whether Obama supporter Bill Burton and his Super PAC, Priorities USA and their latest campaign ad is fair to Mitt Romney or not. Fair or not, if nothing else, it's proven one thing and that is if you are a Democrat and you run an ad which makes claims that the media can distort or paint as dubious, you're going to be savaged by the press. If you're Mitt Romney, there is absolutely no punishment for lying non-stop by the corporate media.

As Steve Benen has been documenting, the Romney campaign has been lying non-stop since he's been running for office and his latest installment from last week of his series can be read here: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXVIII.

But never mind that, Fox's Shannon Bream and Ed Henry did a whole lot of water carrying for Mittens this Thursday afternoon where they relayed Romney's response to the Burton ad, without a care in the world for the sheer amount of lying we've seen from Romney day after day and month after month.

Here's Romney's statement about the Burton ad:

This campaign and the people working with him have focused almost exclusively on personal attacks. You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad, They were embarrassed. But today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on just running them.

Mitt Romney ought to have lightening striking him for the audacity of being willing to say that out loud. Romney's been lying about President Obama in his campaign ads and that's from day one, the very first one where he took the President out of context on the economy, and it's just gone on from there.

Benen started his running list back in January of this year. If you've got endless hours to try to keep up on the sheer volume of Romney lies since that time if you weren't already, here's the latest list Steve ended his post with:

Previous editions of Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII

And don't count on our lazy, complicit, corporate media to relay most of what's in that list to anyone. They'd rather be screaming about how terribly unfair it is to point out that vulture capitalists might actually ruin lives and communities for years to come after they go in and raid pension funds, trash union contracts and extract every dime they can suck out of a company so they can pocket millions while people that worked for those companies for decades wind up with nothing.

That's a story none of them want to tell about Mitt Romney, which is the main reason they all lose their collective minds after another ad comes out attacking his time at Bain. What's really ironic about this whole thing is that Burton's PAC was only going to run the ad in a few swing states and the collective freakout by the right and the corporate media just ended up giving him a whole lot of free air time.

I say good for Jim Graves for calling out fearmongering Rep. Michele Bachmann for her McCarthyism. Sadly, all that money she's raising off of the hatred is exactly why John Boehner won't do anything about it.

Bachmann Opponent Calls Her Joe McCarthy In New Video:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is touting her $1 million fundraising haul last month, which came as she faced criticism from both sides of the aisle over her comments about Muslims in the US government. In response, her Democratic opponent – hotel executive Jim Graves – launched a web video directly comparing her to former Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI):

“I have a message for Rep. Bachmann: it’s nothing to be proud of,” Graves said of his opponent's fundaising in an email to supporters Thursday. “That money was the direct result of a hateful and dangerous witch-hunt that viciously smeared a dedicated public servant. It echoed of a dark time in our nation’s history that we thought was behind us.”

“McCarthyism was dangerous then,” Graves’ video reads. “It’s dangerous now.”

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Here we go again with the talking heads on Fox, defending Mitt Romney's dishonest "you didn't build that" ad. Context doesn't matter. Lies don't matter. Policy doesn't matter. Reality doesn't matter. You can say anything and all that matters is how the voters "feel" and there is never any penalty with the media for lying every time your lips are moving. Juan Williams tried pushing back at the nonsense from Wallace and the other panel members, but he may as well have been talking to himself.

And on the topic of lying, here's the latest from Steve Benen, who's been tracking the sheer volume of Romney's lies week after week: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXVII:

Paul Krugman, who's been nearly as frustrated by Mitt Romney's habitual dishonesty as I've been, noted this week that political observers should pause to appreciate "this remarkable spectacle." Krugman added, "I really don't think there's been anything like this in American political history: a presidential campaign, with a pretty good chance of winning, that is based entirely on cynical lies about what the sitting president has said."

I agree. Mitt Romney is, at a minimum, unique.

What's especially striking, in addition to the volume and frequency of the falsehoods, is how often the dishonesty is obvious. Jonathan Bernstein has labeled this "lazy mendacity" -- untruths based on "the indifference to any fact-checking," and "the insistence on continuing to use a lie long after it's been definitively debunked."

Add to that the cable yappers saying the lies don't matter, which the clip above is just one example of and it's sadly by no means limited to Fox. All of the networks have run similar segments. Go read the rest of Steve's post for the latest list of Romney's lies. There are twenty six new ones just for this week.

Transcript of the Fox News Sunday segment below the fold.

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Former C&L contributor and now Rachel Maddow Show producer and Maddow Blog contributor Steve Benen joined guest host Ezra Klein on Maddow's show and discussed the subject of one of his recent posts, which is the fact that Republicans can't run against President Obama's actual policies, so they have to resort to constantly taking him out of context.

All out of context, all the time:

The Republican National Committee is excitedly sending around this clip today, showing 17 seconds of a speech President Obama delivered to supporters in Oakland on Tuesday. Some of the RNC's media allies are already on board with the attack. [...]

The idea, apparently, is for voters to recoil at the notion that the president believes his economic plan has "worked." I appear to be in the minority, but I happen to think this is true -- the economy that was hemorrhaging jobs is now adding jobs; the economy that was shrinking is now growing; the stock market that was headed into a death spiral is now headed up; an auto industry that was on the verge of collapse is now thriving, etc.

That said, it's obviously a contentious point, and the economy is not yet close to where it needs to be. But as Dave Weigel noted, the significance of the RNC's gambit isn't a debate over the efficacy of Obama's policies, but rather, the Republicans' bad habit of wrenching quotes from context.

As Steve noted, he was talking about the Clinton era as compared to the Bush era and the RNC decided to just leave that part of the clip out. More with his running list of this nonsense below the fold.

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The Obama campaign wasn't spared either, but most of Lewis Black's epic rant on The Daily Show this Tuesday evening was directed towards the lying Romney campaign and their ridiculous "you didn't build that" ad and his hypocrisy on the subject.

Campaigns have finally arrived in the 21st century. They can produce bulls**t at the same rate as actual bulls.

...

So to be clear... running a business is something you do all by yourself. Running a four minute mile... that takes a village.

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The Rev. Al Sharpton spoke to Elizabeth Warren about her opponent for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, Scott Brown and his latest dishonest attack ad where he decided to take a page out of Mitten's book and take her and President Obama out of context.

Here's more on that from Greg Sargent: Scott Brown gets in on the Big Lie:

Obama’s now infamous “didn’t build that” speech is similar to Elizabeth Warren’s viral remarks about how the rich didn’t get rich on their own. So it’s not surprising that Senator Scott Brown has just released a new Web video (embedded below) tying Obama’s remarks to Warren’s and painting them as vaguely anti-American. Brown says: “I will never demonize you as business leaders and business owners.” Brown, apparently taken with the plaudits Romney has earned from the right for lying relentlessly about Obama’s quote, has now done the same. [...]

Just as Romney’s Web video does, the audio is edited to remove the chunk of the speech in which Obama talks about our “great American system” and “roads and bridges,” misleading listeners into believing that the “didn’t build that” line was an insult to business owners. Any listener would reasonably conclude that the language quoted above is exactly as Obama delivered it. [...]

This gives me an occasion to make another point. The whole ”didn’t build that” dust-up is important, because the larger falsehood on display here — that Obama demeans success — is absolutely central to the Republican case against Obama. The Republican argument — Romney’s argument — is partly that Obama’s active ill will towards business owners and entrepreneurs is helping stall the recovery, so you should replace him with a president who wants people to succeed.

There is a separate policy dispute under way, too — Republicans insist that deregulation and tax reform that will cut taxes for the rich further are the way to speed the recovery, while Obama says more government intervention is necessary. But Republicans have decided the policy difference isn’t enough. They also need to sow doubts about Obama’s alleged intentions and hostility towards private enterprise and individual initiative, to give voters a narrative about the Obama presidency and an explanation for the sluggish recovery that will make them more receptive to GOP tax and deregulatory policies they might otherwise greet with skepticism. The claim that Obama demeans success is central to that narrative. Without lies like this one about the “didn’t build that” quote, that claim and that narrative collapse. And that’s why this matters.

Don't forget you can donate to Elizabeth Warren's campaign at our Act Blue page if you'd like to help her replace Wall Street's favorite Senator, Scott Brown.