Rachel doing what she does best, going into the thicket of details of how conservative groups purportedly there to support conservative causes are more often just a means to line the pockets of a few select individuals. In this case, Maddow details the Dick Morris/Newsmax unholy alliance which looks illegal but probably isn't; the Dick Armey/Matt Kibbe/FreedomWorks scam; and the Mike Huckabee effort to defeat Obamacare with monies from the unsuspecting. That many of these individuals and efforts are related to Fox News should surprise no one.

Rachel Maddow reviews the many ways the conservative movement is rife with scammers more interested in making a buck off the fear and paranoia of conservative media audiences than they are in crafting cogent political arguments.

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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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Georgia state Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers recently convened the Republican caucus at the Georgia State Capitol to discuss an alleged conspiracy between President Barack Obama, non-governmental organizations, state government entities and chambers of commerce to create a United Nations communist dictatorship.

Mother Jones' Tim Murphy on Wednesday reported that the meeting had included a presentation by Field Searcy, a conservative activist who was booted from the Georgia Tea Party over conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The main focus of the event was something called Agenda 21, which conservatives warn is move towards dictatorship by "expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities." Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich even "explicitly repudiate[d] what Obama has done on Agenda 21" during a primary debate last year.

The meeting of Republican lawmakers in Georgia was held on Oct. 11, but Bryan Long of the progressive group Better Georgia told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that his group delayed release of the video because of media focus on the presidential campaign. Better Georgia was able to record about 52 minutes of video before being escorted from the building.

The event also included Fox News contributor Dick Morris, who cautioned lawmakers that Obama would "force everyone into the cities from whence our ancestors fled."

"Our own governments are doing this," Searcy said of the Agenda 21 "conspiracy to transform America from the land of the free, to the land of the collective."

Searcy explained that the government was using "a process known as the Delphi technique" to convince suburbanites to move into the inner cities.

"The Delphi technique was developed by the Rand Corporation during the Cold War as a mind-control technique," the conservative activist insisted. "It's also known as 'consensive process.' But basically the goal of the Delphi technique is to lead a targeted group of people to a pre-determined outcome while keeping the illusion of being open to public input."

One slide presented at the meeting compared Obama's alleged plot to "Stalin's Five Year Plan" and "Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward."

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Rogers introduced legislation in January to recognize "the destructive and insidious nature of the United Nations Agenda 21."

That bill stated that "according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded by society and the environment which would be accomplished by socialists and communist redistribution of wealth."

(h/t: Addicting Info)

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I'm not sure if there's anything more pathetic than watching Dick Morris, who as we've chronicled here at C&L, is always wrong about just about everything, arguing with Sean Hannity about whether voters are angry over his predictions of a Romney landslide. That is other than him admitting that he predicted a Romney win in order to help him be elected.

Here's more from our fellow C&L contributor Ellen over at News Hounds on that -- Dick Morris: I Predicted Romney’s Landslide To Help Him Win:

Dick Morris visited the Hannity show tonight to explain how he got it so wrong with his prediction of a “landslidey” Romney win. After blaming Hurricane Sandy and acknowledging that he got it “dead wrong” about the demographic turnout, Morris made a jaw-dropping admission. That his prediction was designed to help turn around Romney’s failing campaign.

Morris hinted at what was to come when he said early on, “I called it as I saw it from the polling and I did the best I could and I also worked very hard for Romney.” That right there is disturbing. Morris is billed by Fox News as a “political analyst” and is usually introduced on the air, as he is in this segment, as “former Clinton advisor.” And he did not disclose that he was working for Romney when he made his predictions, at least none that I saw.

But later, Morris openly admitted his prediction was an election ploy:

Sean, I hope people aren’t mad at me about it… I spoke about what I believed and I think that there was a period of time when the Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory and I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said. And at the time that I said it, I believe I was right.

In other words, don’t hold a grudge because was only trying to help the home team.

I'm not sure who is signing Morris' paycheck other than Fox, but I've got news for them. You're not getting your money's worth out of this really bad liar.

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From this Friday's Real Time With Bill Maher, Bill's annual election reel, "In Memoriam."

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After going through a montage of political pundits and their predictions for the upcoming election and the fact that the likes of Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris are perpetually wrong with theirs, Stewart had this response to Morris pretending there might be some accountability for the fact that he's never right about anything.

STEWART: But I can show you a prediction that was wrong today. It comes via Dick Morris, king of Wrong Mountain, and it concerns accountability for pundits. [...]

MORRIS: You know, after the election, either I'm going to have to go through a big reckoning, or they are.

STEWART: No. You won't and they won't. Nobody will. Because you're pundits. You live in a reckoning free zone. One thing we learned is that punditry is like musical chairs. The only difference is, in punditry, when the music stops, nobody ever loses their f**king chair. They just keep adding more chairs.

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The Daily Show's Jon Stewart and Jason Jones took a few shots at the media and their obsession with poll watching this Wednesday evening. I don't know about anyone else, but the media's desire to treat politics like a sporting event instead of something which actually has real implications on peoples' lives is really giving me a headache of late, and Stewart just hit one of the reasons squarely on the head here.

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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, Chris' Story of the Week and the Republicans who have been living in their own alternative universe these days as they refuse to accept the reality that the poll numbers in the presidential race really are not looking good for Mitt Romney.

The Republican bubble trap:

If you follow politics, you probably noticed that polling of the presidential election has swung quite decidedly in the president's favor over the last few weeks. The Real Clear Politics polling average now has Obama up 4.1 points over Mitt Romney in national polls and Nate Silver's prediction model at his FiveThirtyEight blog put Barack Obama's odds of winning the election above 80% for the first time ever. Swing state polling out just this week seems to confirm the trend.

A new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS poll of swing states of Ohio and Florida, show surprisingly strong leads for Obama. And the Gallup tracking poll, which has showed a near dead heat for almost the entirety of the campaign now shows Obama up 6 points. It's pretty hard to survey the polling data and not come to the conclusion that Barack Obama is beating Mitt Romney, that if the election were held today Barack Obama would win, and that Romney has a relatively steep, though certainly not insurmountable, uphill climb to victory. That is, of course, unless you operate in the alternate epistemic universe of right-wing media.

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Ron Reagan, the liberal son of former President Ronald Reagan, on Thursday said that the so-called 'poll truthers' at Fox News like Karl Rove and Dick Morris who deny any poll that says President Barack Obama is ahead were so out of touch that they must be smoking a crack pipe in the network's green room.

During a Monday segment on Fox News, Morris had claimed that Romney was "in a very strong position" even though polls showed him down in all nine battleground states.

"I believe if the election were held today, I believe Romney would win by four or five points," Morris explained. "I believe he would carry Florida, Ohio, Virginia. I believe he would carry Nevada. I believe he would carry Pennsylvania -- Pennsylvania. And I believe he would be competitive in Michigan."

"People need to understand that the polling this year is the worst it's ever been," he insisted. "Because this is the first election where if I tell you who's going to vote, I can tell you how they're going to vote. ... And the models these folks are using are crazy. They assume a Democratic edge of six or seven points."

On Thursday, MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked Reagan why Fox News would invite Morris on to slam even their own poll -- which showed Obama leading Romney nationally, 48-43.

"You sometimes imagine that back in the Republican green room, there's this giant crack pipe that they're all hitting on constantly, hitting it hard," Reagan joked.

"It's time to say, 'Don't bogart that, Morris' because I think he's been on that pipe longer than most," Matthews agreed.

"It's true, he bought the pipe, I think," Reagan added. "But let's not give them too much credit here. The rank and file actually believes some of this nonsense. They believe that evolution didn't happen, global warming is a hoax, Obama is a Kenyan. But the people like Dick Morris -- and Sean Hannity for that matter, who has spread a lot of this kind of propaganda -- they know better than this and there is a method to their madness here."

"They're not delusional, they're dishonest. They're not crazy, they're craven... What they're trying to do here and accomplish here is to say in advance, if President Obama wins this election, it's because the pollsters suppressed the Republican vote, it's therefore an illegitimate election, he's not really president. They're setting the table for that."

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Dick Morris confidently predicted on Hannity that Mitt Romney would win the election and, barring any debate meltdowns, by a comfortable margin of "4 or 5 points", and that he'd also win Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Sean Hannity guffawed some but Morris kept on, insisting the public polling done this year was heavily skewed in Obama's favor and that it couldn't be trusted (except for Rasmussen, and a few others of course).

Now, it would be easy to dismiss Dick Morris as the crackpot he undoubtedly is, but he's not the only one out there spewing this garbage. Here's Karl Rove, also on Fox, also from Monday.

More of the crazy talk about "skewed polls". Via The National Journal:

On Monday, the news website Buzzfeed interviewed a Virginia-based blogger who re-weights public polls to reflect the partisan trends reported by automated pollster Rasmussen Reports. Dean Chambers, the blogger, then presents the adjusted data in charts on his website, unskewedpolls.com.

As of late Monday, Chambers' website claimed that an average of polls conducted since Labor Day show Mitt Romney leading Obama, 52 percent to 44 percent. The website and its findings were trumpeted on the Drudge Report, the conservative-leaning news-aggregation site that has tended to highlight polls more favorable to Romney and less favorable to the president.

So what does it tell us when the entirety of the Rightwing Noise machine goes into overdrive like this? You could write a book, or several, on the implications of all this including how brazen things are getting at Fox News and elsewhere.