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We all knew this was coming, given how much Jon Stewart already loves CNN. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Stewart had a field day after CNN's debacle where they claimed a suspect had been arrested for the Boston Marathon bombing.

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Rep. Steve King (R-IA) suggested that advocates of gun safety proposed measures to curb violence after the December massacre of 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut because they are "anti-Second Amendment people" and want to end the right to bear arms.

In an interview before President Barack Obama's second inaugural speech, CNN's John King asked the Iowa tea party-backed congressman if Republicans were "chastened" after losing seats in the House, Senate and the presidency.

"A few of them are, but I'm certainly not," King replied. "And those of us that won the election, we see our constituents as deserving the best representation we can give them. We won elections too. So, this is an interesting day today, this peaceful transfer in a constitutional way of the power envisioned by our founding fathers. And they understood the separation of powers. They knew there was going to be a clash and a confrontation and a struggle between the parties, but we also know we have to run this government."

"So, it's going to be interesting as this unfolds," he added. "This should be a healing day. And then tomorrow morning we can start that harder work."

On the subject of "that harder work," the CNN host wondered how King felt about Obama's proposals for universal background checks and a ban on high-capacity magazines.

"Those people that want to confiscate guns -- the anti-Second Amendment people -- took an opportunity as soon as the Sandy Hook tragedy took place," the Iowa Republican explained.

King said that he also planned to oppose any efforts by his own party to reform immigration if it meant giving citizenship to immigrants who came to the United States illegally.

"The immigration [reform push] was launched the morning after the election before they actually analyzed the exit polls," he observed. "I think some Republicans overreacted."

"But to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime," he insisted. "Now, if that's what this bill does then it would fit the definition of amnesty."

King predicted that gun safety legislation and immigration reform would be "stretched out over time."

"The prudent things hopefully will come together, and that's the only thing that should get to the president's desk," he asserted.

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At a so-called "storm relief event" on Tuesday, GOP hopeful Mitt Romney repeatedly refused to answer questions about his promise to the federal agency responsible for responding to disasters like Hurricane Sandy, which devastated much of the east coast this week.

"TV pool asked Romney at least five times whether he would eliminate FEMA as president/what he would do with FEMA," according to a pool report. "He ignored the [questions] but they are audible on cam. The music stopped at points and the [questions] would have been audible to him."

A subsequent pool report elaborated on some of the specific questions the Republican presidential nominee refused to answer:

"Gov are you going to eliminate FEMA?" a print pooler shouted, receiving no response.
Wires reporters asked more questions about FEMA that were ignored.

Romney kept coming over near pool to pick up more water. He ignored these questions:

"Gov are you going to see some storm damage?"

"Gov has [New Jersey Gov.] Chris Christie invited you to come survey storm damage?"

"Gov you've been asked 14 times, why are you refusing to answer the question?"

As The Huffington Post's Ryan Grimm noted on Sunday, Romney had pledged to "absolutely" abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency when asked about it by CNN's John King during a Republican primary debate earlier this year.

"Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction," the former Massachusetts governor said, adding that it would be "even better" to "send it back to the private sector."

At the time, King even pressed Romney on whether he would completely eliminate federal disaster relief.

"We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids," the candidate insisted."It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all."

Campaign spokesperson Amanda Henneberg on Monday reiterated that Romney still believed that disaster relief should be left up to the states.

"Governor Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions," Henneberg said. "As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA."

The Grio managing editor Joy Reid told MSNBC's Alex Wagner on Tuesday that Romney might have a good reason for wanting to avoid questions about FEMA less than a week before the election.

"Do you know who likes FEMA? Florida," Reid explained. "Florida loves FEMA and Florida is a very close state and Florida has had to rely on FEMA a lot because a lot of hurricanes have hit there. And you know who else is about to like FEMA? West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. I mean, there are a lot of states where people say, 'I don't like the government, I don't want the government in my life.' But when something like this happens, you know who you want in your life? The government."

Nice job by the DNC with their latest ad, hitting Mitt Romney for his remarks about the 47 percent that don't pay federal income taxes.

Talking to wealthy donors, Mitt Romney disdainfully dismissed half of America

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I'm still waiting for Romney to release his tax returns so we can find out if there were any years he was part of the 47 percent himself.

UPDATE: Here's the video transcript:

VOICEOVER: The Romney campaign is in crisis mode, scrambling to explain a secretly recorded tape where Romney tells wealthy donors nearly half of all Americans see themselves as victims.

BRIAN WILLIAMS (NBC): He talked about citizens who see themselves as victims; pay no income taxes. He went on to say his job was not to worry about those people.

JOHN KING (CNN): What he said in that speech was that all of them don't pay taxes. All of them are victims. All of them want free healthcare--think they're entitled to free housing. He essentially smeared everyone.

GRAPHIC OF DAVID BROOKS EDITORIAL:

It suggest that he really doesn't know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A. Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security and Medicare?

ANCHOR (CNN): If Mr. Romney is so upset that so many Americans are not paying income taxes, does that mean taxes on middle class or lower middle class Americans will go up?

KING (CNN): A lot of Americans of all income stripes have struggled the last few years and the risk for Governor Romney is that it is insulting to them. As a kid, my family was on food stamps for a few years when my dad got sick.

We didn't feel entitled and we weren't victims. And my father was actually pretty embarrassed about the whole thing. But in the end my mother was grateful because she was able to feed her kids.

DAVID GERGEN (with former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer looking on) (CNN): It was almost oafish for someone who has a bank account in Cayman Islands, in order to reduce taxes, to criticize someone in need.

ANNE KORNBLUT (WASHINGTON POST): It's going to reverberate with working class white people who don't pay taxes. It's going to reverberate with women. It's going to reverberate with military families. I don't think there's any group that's not going to in some way be--either hear about what he said or see themselves somehow reflected in it.

GERGEN (CNN): It's not just this comment. It's a pattern. It's a series over time. Americans tend to create a circle in their mind of people inside that circle who would make a credible, comfortable president; someone they could see in that office and they would feel comfortable with. I think this pattern of statements is increasingly placing Mitt Romney outside that circle for a growing number of Americans.

Ad ends with:

Mitt Romney:
Outside the circle.

(h/t FiredUpinCA for the transcript.)

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National conventions are tightly scripted, mostly made-for-tv events these days. What drama there was during the roll call vote by the states at the Republican National Convention was mostly confined to some anger from Ron Paul supporters on their shabby treatment. Case in point, the rather strange decision to not announce Ron Paul's votes at all from the stage. Someone from each state would come to the microphone, proudly announce their state totals for each candidate, and then when repeated from the stage, any votes not for Mitt Romney would not be named at all . A bit surreal. John King on CNN called the move "petty" and "fifth grade level". (Even Wolf Blitzer put on his serious face for that one.) A few minutes later John Sununu, a Romney surrogate and rules committee chairman for the convention, came on to explain that there were still hard feelings at some state levels where they felt the Ron Paul supporters had "hijacked" their conventions.

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Please... let it be Paul Ryan - Romney to announce running mate Saturday in Va.:

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will announce his running mate Saturday morning in Norfolk, Va., his campaign said Friday night.

The short list of candidates - if there is one - is believed to include Ohio Rep. Rob Portman, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. In a statement issued Friday night, the Romney campaign said the running mate would be revealed at 9 a.m. EDT at the Nauticus Museum. Romney is kicking off a four-day bus tour through swing states.

Speculation has focused in recent days on Ryan, the seven-term congressman. Conservative pundits have been urging Romney to choose Ryan in large part because of his authorship of a House-backed budget plan that seeks to curb overall entitlement spending and changes Medicaid into a voucher-like system to save costs.

Pawlenty was maintaining his Saturday schedule campaigning for Romney in New Hampshire, an official close to Pawlenty's political team said. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak ahead of the formal announcement.

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial on Thursday, praised Ryan as a strong choice for Romney: "The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election. More than any other politician, the House budget chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline."

Romney's choice comes as he tries to repair an image damaged by negative Democratic advertising and shift the trajectory of a campaign that's seen him lose ground to President Barack Obama. Read on...

UPDATE: It appears my wish may have come true and that Romney is going to pick Ryan. I guess we'll see once the announcement is made in the morning. In the mean time, here's the crew over at MSNBC pretending that Ryan's budget policies don't matter all that much because as David Gregory let us know, some in the Republican party consider him a "visionary." If anyone wants a preview of what Meet the Press is likely to look like this Sunday, I'd say you've got one with this late night coverage of Romney's potential announcement of Ryan as his VP from MSNBC. Video below the fold.

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The Daily Show's Jon Stewart opened his show this Thursday night by giving CNN and Fox a hard time for jumping the gun in their coverage of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate in the health care law.

Stewart followed up by taking a few shots at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who says he wants to repeal and replace the health care law -- apparently with everything that's already in the health care law -- except for the mandate -- which as Jon noted, is how you pay for it and how Romney paid for his health care law as governor of Massachusetts.

via USA Today :

The race to be first with the news of the Supreme Court's ruling on the health care law tripped up CNN and Fox News, which erroneously reported that the heart of President Obama's law was struck down.

The justices upheld the requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance coverage -- the piece of the law known as the individual mandate -- but said the provision is constitutional as a tax.

CNN said on all of its platforms, including on Twitter, that the mandate was struck down. Fox News said the law was "unconstitutional."

"Supreme Ct. Kills Individual Mandate," flashed on the screen from CNN. The network's reporter, John King, told anchor Wolf Blitzer that the justices "gutted" the law and that it was "a direct blow to President Obama."

CNN had to send out this after its mistake:

Correction: The Supreme Court backs all parts of President Obama's signature health care law, including the individual mandate that requires all to have health insurance.

Jim Romenesko writes on his media blog that the Associated Press sent out a memo to reporters to quit pointing out CNN's mistake on social media networks.

"Please, immediately, stop taunting on social networks about CNN and others' SCOTUS ruling mistake and the AP getting it right," wrote David Scott, a regional editor at AP. "That's not the impression we want to reflect as an organization. Let our reporting take the lead."

One internet wag put the screw-up this way:

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As Think Progress reported today: Executive Privilege Does Not Apply Exclusively To Presidential Communications. Apparently it was asking too much for CNN's John King to have pointed that out to Sen. Chuck Grassley today. The Hill didn't inform their readers of that fact either in this report: White House move sets off lawmaker questions over 'Fast and Furious':

Republican leaders in both chambers are raising sharper questions about the White House's involvement in the controversial "Fast and Furious" program after President Obama invoked executive privilege to withhold documents from Republican investigators.

Both the White House and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder have claimed repeatedly that high-level officials – both in the Department of Justice and in the White House – were unaware of the nature of the botched program, which put firearms into the hands of known gun-runners in an effort to trace them to drug-smugglers along the Mexican border.

But with the White House moving unilaterally Wednesday to assert executive privilege over documents sought by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Republicans have grown more suspicious that those officials knew more than they've claimed.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the administration's maneuver "raises monumental questions" about who knew what – and when.

"How can the president assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the president exert executive privilege over documents he's supposedly never seen?" Grassley, who met with Holder Tuesday night, said Wednesday in a statement. "Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme? ... The questions from Congress go to determining what happened in a disastrous government program for accountability and so that it's never repeated again.”

The office of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was quick to raise similar concerns. Read on...

Here's more from Think Progress from earlier this week on Darrell Issa's witchhunt: Five Things To Know About The Republican Witchhunt Against Attorney General Holder.

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I guess CNN thinks Sarah Palin isn't getting quite enough face time on Fox News to pretend anyone thinks she's still relevant in the Republican primary race and to play out their little fantasy about there being a brokered convention this year, which would be a disaster for the Republican Party.

We've still got a lot of the "anyone but Mitt" crowd wishing that another Republican would get into the race, but Palin's name is never one you hear bantered about these days. It's usually either Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush, all of whom have their own litany of problems. The fact that the idea is completely ridiculous that any of them would jump in this late in the game, especially Palin who was a disaster the last time she was on the ticket, didn't seem faze the talking heads at CNN, or keep them from pushing the notion of Palin as the potential GOP savior during their primary coverage of Super Tuesday last night.

And note to CNN, Palin's not running in 2016 either.

Transcript below the fold.

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