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CNN host Erin Burnett on Wednesday suggested that the National Rifle Association (NRA) had not crossed the line by targeting President Barack Obama's daughters in an advertisement.

The NRA advertisement released on Tuesday branded the president an "elitist hypocrite" for opposing armed guards in schools while his own daughters were being protected by the Secret Service. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney slammed the ad as "repugnant and cowardly" because "a president's children should not be used as pawns in a political fight."

Speaking to Burnett on Wednesday, CNN contributor Roland Martin agreed that the NRA was "weak and cowardly."

"There's no need to invoke the president's daughter's in this conversation," Martin insisted. "I can guarantee you that had anybody invoked the daughters of President George W. Bush in a similar ad attacking him, folks on the right would be just as upset. It makes no sense."

"But what about the fact that politicians use their kids when they want to politically all the time?" Burnett wondered.

The CNN host then displayed a photo of Bill and Hillary Clinton holding hands with their daughter Chelsea, followed by a second photo of Barack Obama with his arms around daughters Malia and Sasha.

Burnett explained: "Remember the famous picture of Chelsea Clinton, after the Monica Lewinski affair, walking between her parents? Or -- hold on, let me just finish -- this time before the DNC, when the White House released the picture of the president with his two daughters snuggling on the couch -- there it is -- watching Michelle Obama."

"You know, they use their children for political purposes when they want to," she opined.

"First of all, walking with Chelsea to the helicopter, they were going on vacation," Martin replied. "And so what are they supposed to do? Take her to another helicopter or through the back door or somewhere?"

"It was the hand holding!" Burnett interrupted.

"Okay, so what? If there was a photo and there was no hand holding then it's okay?" Martin shot back. "I mean, seriously, that is not the same as putting an ad out where you mentioning the president's daughters. It makes no sense. And, again, if you're the NRA, you don't have to actually do that, you don't have to go that far. If you want to do that, why don't you go to Chicago and say, 'How many armed guards are in Chicago schools where the president is from?' That's legitimate."

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CNN host Candy Crowley on Wednesday stood her ground and refused to backtrack as a surrogate for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney insisted that she had been "wrong" to fact check the GOP hopeful's claim that President Barack Obama had not referred to the attacks in Libya as "acts of terror."

While moderating Tuesday night's second 2012 presidential debate, Crowley had briefly stunned Romney when she undermined his claim that Obama had not taken the Benghazi attacks seriously.

“He did call it an act of terror,” she had told the former Massachusetts governor. “It did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea of there being a riot out there about this tape to come out.”

By the next morning, conservatives were insisting that Crowley had backtracked because she later explained that Romney was "right in the main" but "picked the wrong word" by saying that Obama had not called the attacks terrorism.

"This morning, Paul Ryan, who has been making the rounds on the morning shows, says, 'Well, she's already backtracked,'" CNN host Soledad O'Brien pointed out to Crowley on Wednesday morning. "Are you backtracking on what you said in that fact check last night?"

"Goodness, I hope they get back to one another," Crowley replied, adding that her comments following the debate were "exactly the same" as the original fact check. "He did say 'acts of terror,' call it an act of terror, but, Gov. Romney, you are perfectly right that it took weeks for them to get past the tape."

"Not a backtrack?" O'Brien wondered.

"No!" Crowley said. "Now, did the president say, 'This was an act of terror'? The president did not say [that], he said, these 'acts of terror.' But he was in the Rose Garden to talk about Benghazi so I don't think that's a leap."

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who was appearing on Wednesday morning's CNN panel as a Romney surrogate, told Crowley that "it wasn't necessarily your place to try to be fact checker right there. I happen to think that your assessment of that was wrong. ... It's not the role of the moderator to say, 'Mr's President, you're right.'"

"Nonsense," CNN liberal contributor Roland Martin quipped. "The congressman is dead wrong. If you stand there and say something that is wrong, you should be corrected on the spot. Look, I have no problem even having a table of fact checkers there. We shouldn't wait until the debate is over and then have different people saying, this was right, this was wrong. More people are watching that singular debate than they're watching anyone's particular coverage."

"And so if you say something and it's wrong, you check them right then," he added.

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During one of Wolf Blitzer's "strategy sessions" on The Situation Room on CNN, Wolf Blitzer brought on former Cheney adviser Mary Matalin and one of their regular contributors, Roland Martin to discuss President Obama and his recent push to get what amounts to an alternative minimum tax on millionaires, or the "Buffett rule" passed so that people like Warren Buffet aren't paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Naturally Matalin thought that is a terrible campaign strategy, and who does she think President Obama should be taking advice from? Mark Penn -- Hillary Clinton's former adviser that helped her lose the primary race to then Sen. Obama and who left her campaign with her still owing him hundreds of thousands of dollars for his lousy advice. I agree with Roland Martin here and Penn is the last person any Democrat should be taking advice from right now, or for that matter, ever.

I also agree with Martin that President Obama should be going out to every area of the country where poverty is terrible and hitting Republicans upside the head politically for wanting to protect their rich campaign donors so they don't have their taxes raised.

And on a last note, if I had a dime for every time one of these Republican talking heads used the term "class warfare" to mean heaven forbid don't raise taxes on the so-called "job creators", who aren't creating any jobs, I'd be able to retire early. I really hope most Americans are not silly enough to fall for their rhetoric after it's become very obvious after the Bush years that cutting taxes on the rich does nothing to create jobs unless you target those tax cuts specifically for hiring Americans, instead of rewarding them for shipping jobs overseas as we do now.

Sadly we're not yet hearing a conversation in our corporate media or from enough in the Democratic Party about doing something about our terrible trade laws and trade imbalances and fixing the tax code to quit rewarding companies for a race to the bottom with forcing American workers to compete with slave labor overseas.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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Apparently David Gergen agreed with fellow CNN contributor Erick Erickson following Michele Bachmann's response to President Obama's State of the Union address that either Michele Bachmann or Paul Ryan had any factual information to share with us.

GERGEN: But I agree with Erick, she reinforced what Ryan said. She reinforced what Ryan said. She came at it a different way but provided a lot of facts and figures.

Facts and figures huh? Okay David. As I already linked in my post with Bachmann's speech, Media Matters' Political Correction decided to be a whole lot more responsible than CNN with fact-checking of Michele Bachmann. Granted they had a research team to put work before they had to weigh in on what Bachmann said, unlike the immediate response here, but don't tell me that these talking heads at CNN didn't realize that Bachmann was telling some obvious lies as well. And don't tell me that CNN could not have put a fact checking team together as quickly as Media Matters did if they wanted to. Since their management apparently doesn't care that they barely need to be one step above the right wing liars over at Fox, I'm sure they won't have any problems with what was said during this segment.

And you can't really say time is a factor with their lack of fact-checking on Bachmann since a day later, they're still getting it wrong.

Good thing we've got that "best political team on television" looking out for the rest of us, isn't it?

Here's a little more from Digby on this:

Bachman? Hilarious. I wonder if Palin is going to make fun of her odd use of the teleprompter.

But more hilarious than that was the response of the CNN gasbags, who said she reinforced Ryan's Reaganesque message, but (according to David Gergen) with more facts and figures. [...]

Meanwhile, gasbags everywhere were very concerned that Obama didn't concentrate more on deficit reduction and the obvious necessity to destroy Social Security and Medicare as soon as humanly possible. They seem to be on something of a crusade.

Here's more of the transcript via CNN of their round table pretending that they weren't giving a crazy lady air time by choosing to air Bachmann's SOTU response.

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You've got to love it when CNN puts the "BREAKING NEWS!" banner on a story that's not yet been confirmed yet. The Villagers on the panel segment of John King's show are apparently all aflutter over the prospect of William Daley joining the Obama administration because heaven forbid this administration hasn't been friendly enough to big business and Wall Street already.

We can't continue to have our Wall Street masters of the universe continuing to go around with their feelings hurt, now can we?

KING: Let's begin there with that breaking news. I'm told tonight by several top Democratic sources including two current senior Obama administration officials that banking executive William Daley is being considered as a possible chief of staff candidate. Daley is the brother of the Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and was commerce secretary back in the Clinton administration. He also was a top official in the Gore presidential campaign back in 2000.

My sources tell me Daley's name figures prominently as the president and his close advisers debate how to respond to the new environment of divided government here in Washington, and how to put the White House on the best possible footing heading into the president's re-election campaign in 2012. One of these sources said that as of last week, Daley had not, not been offered the job.

Another said whether to make that offer was part of the president's work on his Hawaii vacation. And a third source confirming a Bloomberg news report this afternoon that Daley's name was part of a broader discussion about White House changes for the new year and the new political environment. So why consider Bill Daley and what does it signal about the president's thinking after the midterm election shellacking?

Gloria Borger is here. She's been working her sources this evening too. Also with us, CNN contributors Roland Martin, a veteran himself of Chicago politics, John Avlon and Erick Erickson. Gloria, let me start with you.

Sometimes in what we're told we have to try to crack the reporting code and one of the things that strikes me is officially White House officials are saying no comment. Not go away. No comment.

BORGER: No comment. Can't confirm or deny. And you know this is something our White House correspondent Ed Henry was hearing back in early September. He was getting a whiff of this. He was waved away from it. I was waved away from it. It is very clear that this White House has been doing an internal review led by the current chief of staff, Pete Rouse, about what they need to do heading in to a new Congress with a new political reality and the political reality, as you pointed out, is a divided Congress and Bill Daley is somebody who really knows how to reach out to Republicans.

We saw that when he passed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement when Bill Clinton was there. And I bet they're going to -- you know that's one reason that he's attractive to them.

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While discussing America's current economic situation and whether voters think it's going to improve or not on CNN's Your Money, panel member Candy Crowley made this bizarre statement as to how our political leadership should react to the recommendations from the Catfood commission's co-chairs, Simpson and Bowles.

CROWLEY: Well, they're going to try next year. I mean, here's the problem. Everybody talks about reducing the debt and reducing the deficit, which are two separate things. But nonetheless, we've had this debt commission come and say, well, here's how you do it. And there's just three big ticket items, right? Federally funded health care, the Pentagon and Social Security. Well, you know, what you need here are three politicians, the Speaker, the Majority Leader in the Senate, and the president who don't care about re-election to kind of try to lead this. Because when you look at all the polling, the public is not for cutting any of those or changing the benefits.

MARTIN: There you go.

CROWLEY: And you can't get to it any other way.

First of all, since when do any politicians not care about being reelected? Sadly it seems to be all they care about too often and raising money to do it rather than looking after their constituents. Second, the "everybody" that's obsessed with deficit reduction are not the American voters, but our beltway Villagers and the politicians who have decided to use this opportunity for some good old Shock Doctrine type changes to our social safety nets.

Next we get Crowley saying we need to address "federally funded health care", by which I assume she means Medicaid. Of course no mention there that the reason it is so expensive is the government is paying for the oldest and sickest patients while the insurance companies get to make a profit off of the rest of us and how opening that system up to everyone would make it viable and allow the rest of us to quit making the insurance company CEO's rich.

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The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore thinks that all of those unemployed people out there right now just need to get off of their lazy asses and go find a job despite the fact that, as the other panelists pointed out, there just aren't jobs out there to be found. And in the next breath he was defending extending the Bush tax cuts, claiming that it's going to hurt the "job creators" if those taxes go up.

I guess it was too much to ask of the other panels to have Stephen Moore why unemployment is so high right now and why the economy tanked under George Bush if those tax cuts created jobs. Every time one of these Republicans goes on the air repeating this nonsense, someone needs to be holding up Steve Benen's monthly jobs report chart so the public can see clearly what those Bush tax cuts did to create jobs.

And for more charts and a reminder about what happens to the economy when Democrats are in charge, here's our own Jon Perr's post from back in July -- GOP Leaders Remind Voters the Economy Does Better Under Democrats.

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During a panel discussion on John King USA about PBS's decision to edit out some of Tina Fey's remarks criticizing Sarah Palin while accepting The Mark Twain Prize, Mrs. John King Dana Bash points out that this is not the first time PBS has been "accused of editing to favor Republicans" and that PBS has been accused of being too liberal. It's too bad that the panel and Bash didn't bother to point out the fact that this edit by PBS of Fey's remarks shouldn't be all that surprising to anyone paying attention since the network took a turn to the right some years ago.

That said, I don't expect anything better from anyone on CNN. Introspection as to how our media is not serving their basic purpose as the fourth estate in America isn't exactly their strong point to put it lightly. Since sadly Bill Moyers left the air at PBS... again... I'm not sure why anyone would perceive that network to be "too liberal" other than from listening to the Villager's on their television sets telling them that it is day in and day out. If anyone thinks that The McLaughlin Group or the PBS Newshour or Charlie Rose are liberal, they're not watching those shows. I consider Frontline to be fairly neutral in their reporting and that's about the extent of what I might watch on that network on any kind of a regular basis. They've got Tavis Smiley on there on a nightly basis but his show sure as hell doesn't make up for the shows that lean to the right or the loss of Bill Moyers. He just gave right wing hack Dennis Miller a sad and sorry softball interview on the same night this panel segment aired.

Here's what got ignored during this segment where they made light of the editing of Tina Fey's remarks.

PBS Panders to Right With New Programming:

A new public television program called the Journal Editorial Report, featuring writers and editors from the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page, will debut tonight on public television stations around the country. The show joins Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered, hosted by conservative CNN pundit Tucker Carlson, and a planned program featuring conservative commentator Michael Medved as part of what many see as politically motivated decisions to bring more right-wing voices to public television.

According to reports in the public broadcasting newspaper Current (1/19/04, 6/7/04) and in the New Yorker (6/7/04), conservative complaints about the alleged liberal bias of the program Now With Bill Moyers contributed to the momentum to "balance" the PBS lineup. The new programs seem to be the result of that pressure. In fact, Now will soon see its role on public television diminish, as the program is cut from one hour to 30 minutes when Moyers voluntarily leaves the program later this year. He will be replaced by co-anchor David Brancaccio, formerly of the public radio business show Marketplace, who expresses no obvious ideology. If Carlson, Medved and the staff of the Wall Street Journal editorial page are all necessary to balance the liberal Moyers, by 2005 there will be no one on PBS to balance them. Read on...

And there's this.

PBS Stolen by Right Wing in Cunning Bait and Switch:

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Even though as we already know and as John just noted Andrew Breitbart is nothing more than a "major league smear merchant, who has no shame", David Gergen decides to give this wingnut some cover on AC 360. Yeah, the man who helped James O'Keefe play the media for fools on ACORN should now be given the benefit of the doubt. This guy's a nut job but David Gergen wants us all to think he should be taken seriously.

Joan Walsh is right. His "proof" that black congressmen lied about being called "nigger" is as useless as his ACORN clips. Joan, if you read this blog, maybe you could go have a talk with David Gergen and explain to him why the man should never be given one single ounce of credibility. As you said in your article:

AP also reports that Rep. Heath Shuler – a Blue Dog Democrat from North Carolina, no raving lefty – says he heard the slurs too.

That's four congressmen vs. Breitbart and his tea-party bullies. Which story do you believe?

I'm with you. I believe the Congressmen and Richard Trumka who said he heard the racist remarks as well. Shame on David Gergen for pretending Breitbart is nothing but another agitator who has little use for the truth if he thinks it will make a name and some money for himself.

Here's what Gergen said about Breitbart.

Gergen: I do want to disagree with Roland about the point about -- about Tea Party and the question of Congressman John Lewis walking across that street. That was an important moment. The accusation that had been called the N-word and spit upon was a searing moment during the health care debate.

And many of us took it as sort of like, that's what happened. Now, if it didn't happen, I think it's important to know that, because -- or if somebody was an impostor. Now we will have to -- maybe we will never know.

But I think it -- and the tea parties have every right to sort of say, hey, wait a minute, or Andrew Breitbart to say, wait a minute, if it didn't happen, let's get that clarified, because it did turn off an awful lot of Americans.

Sorry David, but it's already clarified that the man making the accusation is a known liar who should be treated as such. Not that your network to this day still isn't distorting the ACORN hit job done by Breitbart and his buddies. Here's how Cooper described that.

COOPER: That was Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who released the video of ACORN workers counseling actors posing as a pimp and a prostitute.

Yeah, there's some "fair and balanced" reporting. No mention that they misled the ACORN workers and weren't dressed as a pimp and a prostitute when they actually talked to them. Nice disclaimer there Anderson.

Transcript below the fold via CNN.

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So how does the media decide to handle Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's 'Confederate History Month' proclamation? Why trot out some racists who want to defend his original decision to ignore the issue of slavery of course. And what do all three of these interviews have in common? All three involve having someone of African American descent trying to argue with these Yahoos. First up we had Pat Buchanan on Hardball arguing that both sides were right in the Civil War and former DNC head Karen Finney. Finney posted this at Politico on the subject:

Gov. Bob McDonnell’s decision is shameful. If you’re going to declare April as “Confederate History Month” to commemorate, “… the Commonwealth’s shared history, to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present;” then have the courage and character to embrace the full truth, not hide from or censor it. This is not about being “PC”. [...]

For me this is very personal. My father, who is African American, is from Virginia. The Finney name comes from the man who once owned my family as slaves. My mother, Mildred Lee, is the great, great, great niece of Robert E. Lee, or “the General”, as he is referred to by my family. I am therefore the great, great, great, great niece of General Lee. That is my American story, a mixed race heritage that I am proud of, just as Virginia, the South and our country has a mixed history.

I think it was shameful to make her sit through Buchanan's crap on Hardball. More from CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 and MSNBC TV below the fold.

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