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Karl Rove was back on Fox again this Thursday, still making excuses for blowing through all of those billionaires' money and with a major dose of projection when it comes to which party believes in voter suppression -- Karl Rove: Obama Won 'By Suppressing The Vote' :

Mitt Romney lost the election because President Barack Obama engaged in voter suppression, according to Republican political strategist Karl Rove.

"He succeeded by suppressing the vote," Rove said in an interview on Fox News with anchor Megyn Kelly on Thursday afternoon, "by saying to people, 'You may not like who I am and I know you can't bring yourself to vote for me, but I'm going to paint this other guy as simply a rich guy who only cares about himself.'"

Rove didn't actually give any examples of ways in which Obama made it harder for people to exercise their constitutional right at the polls -- things like voter ID laws, which have been pushed by GOP legislatures around the country. In fact, Obama specifically said in his victory speech that it was unfair that people had to wait in line for hours to vote, which occurred in part because Republicans reduced the time period for early voting.

Rove did say that Obama had aired attack ads and painted Romney as out-of-touch with the concerns of ordinary voters, but these are fairly common tactics in politics, and Rove is certainly no stranger to them.

"Fifty-three percent in the exit polls said on Election Day that Mitt Romney's policies would only help the rich. And they voted for Obama by a 9 to 1 margin," added Rove. "Of the 21 percent of the electorate who said that the most important characteristic in a president was that he cares about people like me, they voted for President Obama by almost a 9 to 1 margin. They effectively denigrated Mitt Romney's character, business acumen, business experience and made him unworthy."

Kelly then pointed out that whoever runs in 2016 on the Democratic ticket is not likely to go any easier on Republicans. Rove replied that the GOP needed to be quicker to responding to attacks, saying the Romney campaign did not do so effectively enough.

"The first group to respond to the attacks on Bain Capital was not the Romney campaign, it was American Crossroads with an ad in July. We don't do defense all that well," said Rove, saying it was sometimes more effective to have the candidate appear in an ad and respond directly to the charges being leveled.

Someone needs to explain the difference to Turdblossom between voter suppression and running a good campaign.

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Mitt Romney says he's been encouraged by all of the regular Americans who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps that he has met while traveling across the country stumping to be the next president of the United States.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican nominee told supporters in Salem, Virginia that he had been "inspired" by Harold Hamm, a "truck driver" turned billionaire oil tycoon who gave a pro-Romney super PAC nearly $1 million and later became chairman of Romney's "Energy Policy Advisory Group."

"I go to various parts of the country and I'm just inspired by what I see," Romney explained. "Met a guy named Harold Hamm. Harold Hamm is a truck driver for 10 years, saves his money driving trucks to get an education, gets a college degree in geology. He happens to look at maps of the United States [and] concludes that there must be some energy in the mountains of North Dakota and so he goes up there and starts drilling for oil."

"First well, nothing. Second well, nothing. Sixteen straight dry holes, gets nothing. I'm told that a dry hole costs about $5 million. I can't imagine where he got the investors to give him that kind of money. On the 17th hole, they got their return because they hit that black gold known as oil. Now, it's estimated that in this Bakken range there are about 20 billion barrels of oil!"

The candidate added: "Harold is doing just fine, by the way."

Forbes puts Hamm at number 36 on their list of billionaires in the United States. Earlier this year, he complained to Businessweek that he had not gotten enough attention from President Barack Obama during a White House meeting last year.

"It was like, if you’re in the oil-and-gas industry, you don’t matter," he recalled.

Last October, he gave the maximum contribution of $2,500 directly to Mitt Romney's campaign and on April 3 he donated $985,000 to Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC.

On March 1, the Romney campaign announced that Hamm had been named as the chairman of their "Energy Policy Advisory Group."

Hamm has since slammed Obama's energy policy as a failure, even though the Wall Street Journal reported that "almost all" of his wealth was generated during the president's first term.

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As Karoli explained to us here, billionaire Joe Ricketts' first attempt at smearing President Obama didn't go over so well once his plans where leaked to the press. Lawrence O'Donnell took him apart in his Rewrite segment this Thursday evening for his latest endeavor, where he's teaming up with wingnut Dinesh D’Souza and investing in a new "documentary" based on D'Souza's book The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

As O'Donnell reported, Joe Ricketts' son, who is a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, has tried to distance himself from his father's hatred of President Obama, but that apparently has not been enough to stop him from investing in this latest smear campaign.

O'DONNELL: Having been forced to give up on that project, Ricketts is now funding a movie that will insist on the basis of absolutely no evidence and in fact with actual proof to the contrary, that President Obama's mind is completely controlled, from the grave by his father, Barack Obama Sr., who President Obama met once, when he was ten years old. […]

The movie Ricketts is financing is based on a rage filled book entitled The Roots of Obama's Rage. All of the rage in the book belongs to its author, Dinesh D'Souza. The Economist called the book, “incomprehensible.” Even the conservative Weekly Standard said correctly that the book is full of “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” And that's from D'Souza's friends at The Weekly Standard.

This is the book in a nutshell. D'Souza writes that Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade. That would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50 percent of their income of overall taxes to pay even more. That's it. That's the book. But it does not explain why President Obama wants them to pay lower tax rates than they did under presidents Reagan, Nixon and Eisenhower, all Republicans.

We don't know the exact day on which Dinesh D'Souza lost his mind. Nor do we know if he's just pretending to be stark raving mad to collect the money of his clearly crazy patron, TD Ameritrade billionaire, Joe Ricketts.

O'Donnell also knocked D'Souza for his so-called “scholarship” as president of The King's College and called D'Souza “the Donald Trump of college presidents.” It seems D'Souza is as much of a “scholar” as anyone teaching at another institution that puts a right-wing agenda before facts, which is the better known Liberty University.

More on Ricketts' latest efforts from The New York Times here below the fold: Billionaire Finds New Role in Effort to Defeat Obama:

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Andrea Mitchell asked Obama Super PAC head Bill Burton about calls by Republicans for Priorities USA to return the $1 million donation Bill Maher gave to his organization after some of the sexist remarks Maher made about Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Burton never directly addressed whether the money should be returned or not, but shot back at the notion that there's any equivalence between a comedian's remarks and "the de facto leader of the Republican Party."

Burton also pointed out that this is probably a debate the Romney campaign would prefer not to have after he embraced the endorsement of Ted Nugent after some of the horrible things he's said about Hillary Clinton. Personally I think Maher made himself look completely ridiculous for defending Rush Limbaugh and saying he'd "apologized" for his remarks about Sandra Fluke. Maher apparently doesn't understand what the definition of an apology is if he thinks what Rush said qualifies as one.

And for the record, I thought Maher should have apologized to them, even though I took a bunch of hell for it at the time. I agree with Burton's sentiments here though and there is no equivalence between the position Rush Limbaugh holds in the Republican Party, what he does and has done for three hours a day for the last twenty years, day in and day out, with insulting women, minorities and everyone under the sun other than the crusty old white racist men that listen to him, and Bill Maher making a few remarks, saying something insulting about a couple of women who are in positions of power, and who both had done a lot of damage themselves to the women's rights movement. It is just not the same and they should let the Republicans continue to whine and keep the donation.

Here's more from The Hill on Burton's interview -- Obama super-PAC head: Maher remarks ‘vulgar,’ but not comparable to Limbaugh:

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Bill Maher visited the set of Hardball this Monday to discuss why he gave his donation to the Obama Super PAC last week. Despite the weak field on the Republican side and Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney's series of gaffes, with the money pouring into the PACS on the other side, Maher doesn't feel anyone who supports President Obama should be taking the upcoming election for granted.

Maher said he was "trying to throw a snowball to create an avalanche here to let the liberals who do think that this is already in the bag" since not all of the country sees it that way and thinks the upcoming is going to be close.

He missed a couple of other points besides the money to be concerned about in regards to the integrity of the next election, which are the massive voter disenfranchisement which is going on across the country in every state where Republicans control the state governments with the passage of these voter ID laws and those electronic voting machines and tabulators.

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Madam Speaker just uploaded this bit of winningness.

In a first step to reform the money in politics, House Democrats are reintroducing the DISCLOSE Act today to get unlimited, secret donations out of politics. The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United opened the floodgates to unrestricted special interest campaign donations in American elections—permitting corporations to spend unlimited funds, directly or through third parties and Political Action Committees organized for those purposes, to influence Federal elections and opened the door for the emergence of Super PACs.

Learn more at http://www.facebook.com/StopColbert

From The Daily Show:

As a citizen addressing the general public, Stephen calls on the Colbert Super PAC not to run vicious character assassinations ads that can be traced back to him.

It's a shame it's taking a couple of comedians to truly display just how terrible that Citizens United ruling was and what it's done to political campaigns.

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The folks behind Stephen Colbert's Super PAC released this gem last night, promising a 'major ad buy' in South Carolina, all the way from Charleston to North Charleston. The narration is by John Lithgow.

Colbert Super PAC Ad - Attack In B Minor For Strings

If corporations are people, then Mitt Romney is Mitt the Ripper.

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Nothing like watching Republicans eating their own. On Fox's America Live, host Megyn Kelly first talked to Newt Gingrich Super PAC, Winning Our Future, adviser Rick Tyler about the half hour long documentary, When Mitt Romney Came to Town, now being aired heavily in South Carolina, which attacks Romney for his time at Bain Capital and his claims that he's somehow a "job creator."

Tyler defended the documentary, calling Romney a vulture capitalist, who unlike venture capitalists who come up with new services and innovations, make their money picking companies apart and raiding their pension funds.

For anyone who hasn't seen the documentary, it's available on line now, and it's pretty scathing. You can watch the entire video here -- King of Bain.

And we may have gotten rid of Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, but unfortunately we've still got his sister Bay showing up on Fox (where I suspect we'll see more of Pat as well) and Kelly followed up by bringing her on to defend Romney. When asked about Romney's time at Bain Capital, Buchanan rambled on with their usual talking points that you're just attacking the "free enterprise system" if anyone dares to say anything negative about how Romney and his rich friends conducted business there, painted what they did as a positive for the economy and called the Gingrich campaign "desperate" for the attacks.

I can't disagree that they're not, but I don't think Romney's going to come out of this unscathed. His Super PAC went after Gingrich hard in Iowa and it's payback time from Newt.

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Jon Stewart took a shot at all of those 99 percent of the 1 percent fellow GOP presidential contenders of Mitt Romney who are now terribly upset with his Super PAC ads and calling him out for being a rich guy who's out of touch with the working class.

STEWART: Oh, it's not fair. He's using unlimited money to buy influence. Rigging the system in some way. Interesting. I can't imagine how frustrated and helpless you Newt Gingrich must feel. Hey, how did guys like Mitt Romney come to be anyway? [...]

You're mad at Mitt Romney? But that's like saying... it's like saying Mitt Romney answered the eHarmony ad and now you're saying it's unfair. That it's not what you meant and you don't mean it that much. Mitt Romney is the pure distillation of conservative economic policies. But now that you have to go up against him, now it's unfair? Republicans, you can't say, release the kraken and then when the kraken turns on you, be all like... that's a very scary kraken.