Megyn Kelly went there on her show Wednesday, but you knew this was the goal all along, right? Republicans have wet dreams every night of a special prosecutor so they can harass Barack Obama through the last three and a half years of his presidency and make sure they don't get anything done. From Benghazi to Fast and Furious, they're practically squirming with anticipation.

For the recipe to work, they have to distort the facts in order to suggest something happened that didn't. Via Media Matters:

Fox News ignored President Obama's explicit demand for accountability in the wake of news that the Internal Revenue Service applied extra scrutiny to conservative groups. The network's omission gave it cover to accuse Obama of not taking the IRS's actions seriously and to call for a special prosecutor.

They also ignored the fact that the IG's report clearly stated that targeting was not exclusively limited to conservatives, because of course, that would be too much like the truth. Instead, they tried to pretend the president wasn't taking the scandal seriously, and went even farther into fantasyland in order to gin up their audience for only one thing.

Kelly and Stirewalt used their mischaracterization of Obama's response to call for a special prosecutor into the IRS's actions. Stirewalt told Kelly that if he were the president, he would "find a Republican of good standing" to appoint as an independent investigator. Kelly responded with the charge, "Where is the harm to this administration, if as these IRS employees state, no one outside of the IRS had anything to do with this, this was just IRS employees deciding to target conservatives. So if the White House and no one else had anything to do with it, where is the harm? Why doesn't the president just say 'absolutely'?"

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I love me some Sally Kohn. She's one of the few who can go on Fox News as a liberal and actually talk like a liberal, as opposed to the faux types they usually put on. Sally is also probably the only person I know who can write something like this on the Fox News website:

In other words, every single idea and initiative that President Obama outlined in his State of the Union Address will not only strengthen our economic standing as a nation but also falls squarely within the values and priorities of the majority of American voters. Those trying to argue otherwise are obviously intoxicated by the recycled air of their own ideological bubble. A bubble that, by any realistic measure of popular opinion or electoral power, is clearly shrinking.

Who recycles that air? Wouldn't be Fox News, now would it?

Megyn Kelly doesn't seem to mind that Sally takes on the wildest of the wild corporate self-promoting Young Gun types, and anyone else they throw at her with equal parts snark and ferocity. Sally wins,, too, just like she did in this segment. Sally faced off with Ben Ferguson, the "America's youngest nationally syndicated talk radio host" and legend in his own mind.

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Wednesday was a day of shame for Fox News and Megyn Kelly because they found an even darker shade of Goebbel-esque propaganda to paint their airwaves. Yesterday was also a day of gun control hearings which featured talk of background checks, assault weapons and high capacity magazines. Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly led the way, trying to bring sanity to the proceeding and they managed to offset the lunatic ramblings of Wayne LaPierre.

"Too many children are dying," she said. "We must do something."

Giffords, who survived a gunshot to the head two years ago during an assassination attempt that left six people dead, read slowly but forcefully from prepared remarks, and acknowledged that "speaking is difficult."

"But I need to say something important. Violence is a big problem," she said. "It will be hard. But the time is now. You must act. Be bold. Be courageous. Americans are counting on you."

That didn't stop Wayne from utterly embarrassing himself. And it also set the stage for another embarrassment; this time from FOX who used another tragic shooting to promote their pro-gun agenda:

Kelly: Well, a big hearing today in Washington DC as witnesses both for and against testified about firearms the second amendment and ways to keep our children safe.

But as we watched this debate about assault weapons and high capacity magazines, we are hearing a growing number of people suggesting that adding a ban on those will not address America's gun violence. That point illustrated in part today in a heartbreaking story out of Chicago. A fifteen-year-old honor student was shot and killed near her school. Just last week this woman had taken part in events surrounding president Obama's inauguration in DC and now she is dead, thanks to a senseless act. Trace Gallagher has the story.

Megyn Kelly and Fox News are trying to make the case against putting in actual regulations on an out-of-control gun culture in this country by using the tragic death of Hadiya Pendleton, the girl who had just attended President Obama's second inauguration, to make a point. They argue that, since she got killed by a handgun in Chicago, which has very strict gun laws, a ban on high-capacity mags and Bushmasters would be useless. I mean, this is sick.

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Nothing smokes out the wingnut crazy quite like suggesting, as Bob Costas did the other day, that it might be a wee bit too easy to get a hold on the all the guns floating around this country. Take Lars Larson on Fox News.

LARSON: Well, I don't say this lightly Megyn, but Bob Costas, based on the standards of our society today and the standards of our industry...deserves to be fired for these remarks. He's done the equivalent of suggesting that 300M Americans be stripped of a right so important that the Founders of our country put it in the Constitution.

Costas did nothing of the sort. Also, I love it when right-wing propagandists talk about their "standards" on Fox News. Snort.

LARSON: If he had suggested stripping Civil Rights from any other group large or small in this country, for instance, Megyn, if today you said black Americans shouldn't be able to vote, you'd probably either be disciplined or fired tomorrow or later on this afternoon.

Follow that? Somehow "our gun culture is destructive" became "blacks shouldn't be able to vote."

Anyway, there's plenty more crazy in this segment. Love when they compare Costas' criticism of our gun culture to Hank Williams Jr.'s "Obama's like Hitler!" remarks.

Charming.

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Dee Dee Benkie, a former Bush campaign aide, was on Fox News' America Live with Heather Childers, fearmongering about their favorite topic of the holiday season: the dread Fiscal Cliff. She was demanding that President Obama actually be president instead of the "mac-daddy candidate" and lead on the fiscal issues. She was quite adamant that the Republicans needed new leadership in the House and Senate, which means that Boehner and McConnell must go. She wants Marco Rubio the earth expert to be the minority leader.

Benkie was also all over Grover Norquist, who has become the favored scapegoat for some right-wingers as they look to pass the blame around.

BENKIE: I think Grover is over too. I mean, what is the deal with this guy? He should not be running Washington. He is part of the problem and we do need to find a way to work together.

Jehmu Greene, a lefty Fox Newsie who apologized to Tucker Carlson for calling him a bow-tie wearing white boy, agreed also that we need to take away Grover Norquist's death grip on the GOP so a deal can be made. Then Dee Dee got to talk about what she really wanted to discuss: spending in Washington.

BENKIE: What we have to stop to is the spending, the spending is so terrible in D.C. The waste is unbelievable when we have so much debt. We have to address that right away.

CHILDERS: What spending cuts?

BENKIE: We've got to cut across the board. I mean, Washington D.C. is so bloated, such terrible waste, and we're broke right now as a country. We need to make sure we can take care of Americans and I don't mean in a way (inaudible) as far as all the entitlements. I mean, we take care of the people who need to be -- we need to take care of the job creators so we don't have a stranglehold on them as far as taxing them to death, and then we've got to adjust Obamacare because it's really, a lot of the businesses right now are struggling. There's so much to be worked on.

CHILDERS) John Boehner said Obamacare needs to be on the table.

GREENE: Obamacare is the law of the land ladies and let's not forget it.

CHILDERS: We'll see.

Dee Dee just throws in a sentence or two about how we have to support the middle class, but then retreats to the republican familiar position of cutting taxes for businesses. Nothing about how we should save Medicare and Medicaid from cruel and unjust cuts just to appease the business owners.

Nope, it's the non-job-creating peons who need to shoulder the sacrifice. As always.

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Oddly enough, there's been no mention this morning on Fox News (at least not that I have caught) of today's New York Times story about the Bush administration's manifest failure to heed a litany of warnings prior to the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. Huh.

Oh, but they have been all over ex-Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen's WaPo op-ed claiming that President Obama has been skipping out on attending his Presidential Daily Briefings, the daily national-security rundown each president receives:

President Obama is touting his foreign policy experience on the campaign trail, but startling new statistics suggest that national security has not necessarily been the personal priority the president makes it out to be. It turns out that more than half the time, the commander in chief does not attend his daily intelligence meeting.

The Government Accountability Institute, a new conservative investigative research organization, examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

Naturally, Dick Cheney was quick to chime in:

“If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden,” Cheney told The Daily Caller in an email through a spokeswoman.

“Those who deserve the credit are the men and women in our military and intelligence communities who worked for many years to track him down. They are the ones who deserve the thanks of a grateful nation.”

Ironic, isn't it, that people from the Bush administration, of all people, should be pointing an accusatory finger about Presidential Daily Briefings on this day -- Sept. 11, the anniversary of the day when George W. Bush's failure to respond to the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB came home to roost in a horrifying way.

They seem to have conveniently forgotten all about it. Thiessen was on with Megyn Kelly on Fox this morning and for some strange reason, the subject was never mentioned.

It's doubly strange because today's front-page NYT piece focuses on that PDB and the warnings leading up to it:

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Fox News continues their campaign of spreading propaganda about conservatives and Mitt Romney when Megyn Kelly plaintively cries to RMoney's five sons that nobody in America knows that Mitt Romney is a self-made man and not actually hatched out of the privileged class."It turns out that your dad is, in many ways, self-made."

My God, George Romney was worth a huge fortune and was Michigan royalty as their long-serving governor. If Romney fell into the kind of real hard times that average Americans do every day with no way out, George would have bailed him out as many times as was required. As it was, Romney got the privileged leg up of an expensive prep boarding school and Harvard education, courtesy of Dad's name and wealth. Many wealthy kids try to make it on their own and it's one thing for a person who has no safety net to venture out into the world, but another when you have a gold-plated safety net in the form of a rich and connected dad waiting their to catch you.

Megyn breathlessly gushes over Mitt like a love-struck puppy.

There was a shooting this morning at the Family Research Council building in Washington, DC. Details are sketchy, but it appears that a lone gunman shot a security guard and one other person.

Via ABC7:

A security guard at a conservative Christian lobbying group housed in a busy downtown Washington office building was shot and injured late Wednesday morning, police say.

The shooting took place either near or at the offices of the Family Research Council, which is located at 801 G Street, about a block west of the Verizon Center.

The guard, who was shot in the arm, was conscious and breathing after the incident. A suspect, who ABC 7's Jennifer Donelan reports was led out of the building in handcuffs, is in custody.

In a statement posted to their website, FRC President Tony Perkins said one of the victims worked with the organization.

Just like other recent shootings, this is reprehensible. It shouldn't matter whether it's a church, people in a movie theater, or employees at work in a conservative Christian organization. It's simply wrong, but once again we are still not talking about guns and gun violence and whether some reasonable controls on those guns are in order.

However, with that said, there are already some particularly odious things being said. Here's one from Bryan Fischer that really is disgusting:

If SPLC is right, that using irresponsible language re: homosexuality causes violence, then they to blame for FRC shooting.

— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) August 15, 2012

Via Life News, we have this Fox News quote, which strikes me as premature:

According to a Fox News report: “A suspect walked in and started yelling about things they (FRC) supported & opened fire.”

Until there is some kind of statement by the FBI about who this shooter is, I think it's enough to say that walking into anyone's workplace and shooting people is just simply wrong. It's wrong today, it's wrong yesterday, and it will be wrong tomorrow. We don't need to ramp up speculation and hateful rhetoric to know that.

Update: And here's the Fox News report, which was published after the Life News report. Interesting little circle they've got going there:

A security guard at the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C., was shot in the arm by a gunman who sources said expressed disagreement with the conservative group's policy positions.

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It is more than a little bit rich to consider that Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller is attacking Media Matters for America for some weird allegation of coordination with the White House. In case you weren't aware, the Daily Caller exists because Foster Friess, Rick Santorum's billionaire, has tossed millions into the venture. I'm certain he doesn't expect anything in return for that investment, right? I'm equally certain that they're not skewing their Republican primary coverage in favor of Rick Santorum. Right?

Here's the content of the attack against Media Matters. Carlson's outfit alleges that there is direct coordination of messages between the White House and outside media, and he has unsourced quotes and a private memo to prove it! And because they view Media Matters' head David Brock as paranoid, these things should somehow prove the need to strip them of their tax-exempt status. Of course, this is part of a larger campaign that has been ongoing since July of last year to try to strip Media Matters of their tax-exempt status.

Via The Politico:

The top editors at the Daily Caller have come out with the first in a series of articles about the liberal media watchdog Media Matters For America, and in doing so they have suggested that MSNBC and reporters from the Washington Post, POLITICO, the Huffington Post and elsewhere have served as dumping grounds or willing surrogates for MMFA's research.

But in making this allegation, Carlson, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller, and Vince Coglianese, the senior online editor, do not cite specific examples to back up that allegation. And reached by phone this morning, Carlson suggested that he did not need to cite specific examples because the charges against the reporters were being made by staffers at MMFA, not by the Daily Caller.

"The charge is not our charge," Carlson explained. "The charge is being made by employees at Media Matters, who would know. This is not an editorial, it is reporting that we did out of which came the claim that we wrote in the story. I can't add to what they've already told us."

Pardon me here. Media Matters publishes its research for anyone to use. Isn't it likely that liberals would be most likely to use it? I certainly make sure to stop by their site and check because it's a lot easier than actually watching that junk 24/7, after all. This seems to me to be a non-story turned into a story in order to allow Megyn to renew Fox News' call to revoke Media Matters' tax-exempt status, which of course they do in the course of this interview, at about 6:50 or so:

KELLY: I don't know. Is there something you think needs to be done as a result of all of this? About Media Matters. I mean, are they-- in terms of tax dollars, in terms of just public awareness, or is it just a group that has an outlook like a lot of groups that have an outlook, and is entitled to that point of view?

COGLIANESE: Well, we believe that they deserve scrutiny. I mean, as a journalistic organization we believe that Media Matters deserves to be shown the light of day and let the people judge for themselves. Now you bring up the issue of tax exemption. They are a tax-exempt organization, a 501(c)(3).

Their proximity to the White House, their ability to coerce media, and really their efforts to destroy Fox News -- and by the way, that's not just like throwing out a term, they really do want to destroy this network -- really does raise questions.

Can an organization that claims tax-exempt status go after a media organization, a journalistic organization like Fox News and try and destroy its business? They went so far as to try to destroy Ford Motor Company's business in their efforts to take down Lou Dobbs on CNN.

This is an influential organization that's claiming tax-exempt status and it deserves scrutiny.

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Sandy Rios is a Fox Talker and Vice President of Family PAC Federal, a PAC supporting ultra-conservative candidates like Michele Bachmann, Marco Rubio, Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn. Evidently her gifts are limited to her abilities to repeat right wing talking points with alacrity and little more.

Her "discussion" with Fox contributor Jehmu Greene about the Susan G Komen Foundation's announcement to reverse themselves on some level with regard to Planned Parenthood paints a pretty vivid image of the differences between right and left when it comes to women's health.

Rios views the backlash by men and women across the country over the Komen Foundation's decision to withdraw funding for breast cancer screening from Planned Parenthood centers across the country as a mere "shakedown" while arguing that the foundation is a private enterprise which can do what it wants.

Not so fast, there, Ms. Rios. As long as donations to the foundation are tax-deductible, it is not a private enterprise. It is a taxpayer-subsidized enterprise with a stated mission to raise money for and fund breast cancer research and health initiatives to prevent and treat breast cancer. It is not a corporation created with private dollars to pursue private objectives. Not at all.

Rios' protests might actually be interesting if the statement released this morning by the Komen Foundation weren't so full of holes and hedges that you could play croquet on it. On first blush, it appeared to be a concession to the backlash, but upon closer inspection, it appears to be mostly a public relations move to keep a terrible situation from being even more terrible.

Since President and CEO Nancy Brinker has offered two separate and contradictory reasons for the original decision, there's no reason to expect they won't withhold grants from Planned Parenthood because they decide to add requirements, like on-site mammography, which Planned Parenthood contracts with third party providers for.

And as John Aravosis points out, they could show some contrition by approving the grant application from Planned Parenthood they've turned down once already.

But let's not allow facts to distract this wild-eyed woman on Fox from just going on and on about how Senators intimidated Brinker. Here's a question for Sandy Rios: Since abortions represent 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's overall health services delivered to women, then what she is saying is that 97 percent of health services delivered to women is worthless. Did she really mean that?

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