After cowardly Senators caved to the NRA and voted to defeat the Manchin-Toomey amendment to the gun safety bill allowing for near-universal background checks, a visibly angry President Obama took to his bully pulpit and spoke plainly about his disappointment and anger at the Senate.

Key moments:

But instead of supporting this compromise, the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill. They claimed that it would create some sort of “big brother” gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite. This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry. Plain and simple, right there in the text. But that didn’t matter.

But the fact is most of these senators could not offer any good reason why we wouldn’t want to make it harder for criminals and those with severe mental illnesses to buy a gun. There were no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this. It came down to politics -- the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections. They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-Second Amendment.

And obviously, a lot of Republicans had that fear, but Democrats had that fear, too. And so they caved to the pressure, and they started looking for an excuse -- any excuse -- to vote “no.”

One common argument I heard was that this legislation wouldn’t prevent all future massacres. And that’s true. As I said from the start, no single piece of legislation can stop every act of violence and evil. We learned that tragically just two days ago. But if action by Congress could have saved one person, one child, a few hundred, a few thousand -- if it could have prevented those people from losing their lives to gun violence in the future while preserving our Second Amendment rights, we had an obligation to try.

And this legislation met that test. And too many senators failed theirs.

I've heard some say that blocking this step would be a victory. And my question is, a victory for who? A victory for what? All that happened today was the preservation of the loophole that lets dangerous criminals buy guns without a background check. That didn’t make our kids safer. Victory for not doing something that 90 percent of Americans, 80 percent of Republicans, the vast majority of your constituents wanted to get done? It begs the question, who are we here to represent?

Then he laid down the gauntlet:

So to change Washington, you, the American people, are going to have to sustain some passion about this. And when necessary, you’ve got to send the right people to Washington. And that requires strength, and it requires persistence.

It just grinds me that the wingnuts in the NRA have enough power to cow Senators into voting against what the majority of people in this country want.

Here are the names of the Democrats voting no, excluding Harry Reid, who voted no to keep the bill alive: Pryor, Begich, Baucus, and Heitkamp. Republicans who voted yes: McCain, Toomey, Collins, and Kirk. Shame on the NRA-owned Democrats and props to the Republicans who stepped up.

That was just the background check piece. Here's what happened on the assault weapons ban:

An amendment, put forth by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), to re-establish a federal ban on certain assault weapons was defeated by a vote of 40-60. A near-united Republican conference voted against the measure, with just one GOP senator, Mark Kirk (Ill.), voting in its favor.

As the President said, this is just Round One.

Last week, the Boston Phoenix published a fabulous long read on Nadia Naffe, James O'Keefe, and the slimy underbelly of conservative "journalism." I use that term guardedly and with a large grain of salt.

We've told pieces of Nadia's story here, here and here, but reporter Chris Faraone dug deep into the ugly that is conservative media and dredged a lot more sludge up to the surface. I highly recommend taking a few minutes and reading the whole thing.

Nadia's story is bad enough, but it isn't unique. Conservative media, particularly online, is nothing more than an organized and well-funded smear machine, and they don't care who they hit as long as they're viewed as an "enemy."

Charlie Pierce:

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Here's one for your Facebook page. It seems like Mitt Romney isn't the only Republican with Romnesia. Enjoy this collection of his current Republican boosted saying what they really think about the Mittster! Dear God, even Newt Gingrich is telling the truth.

With friends like these, huh, Mitt?

Rachel Maddow makes the argument I was making yesterday about why it matters that Mitt Romney has no sense of right, wrong, morals or ethics. It really does matter, and to those who think I'm being redundant, I'd encourage you to start asking the questions alongside me about why it is that his moral and ethical failures are glossed over so completely in the press coverage of the man.

Here's the latest one. Mitt Romney looked at an audience during a speech on Thursday and told them this, flat-out:

One must ask whether we will still be a free enterprise nation and whether we will still have economic freedom. America is on the cusp of having a government-run economy. President Obama is transforming America into something very different than the land of the free and the land of opportunity.

Just about everything that comes out of Romney's mouth is a lie, and no regular reader here should be surprised by that. But what is surprising is how easily he does it, and that he never, ever, ever is sorry for it. Not even a little bit sorry for it.

The Mormon religion adheres to the tenets of the Bible, and in the Bible Jesus gives this admonition:

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

That wasn't meant to get preachy on you as much as it was to frame the seriousness of what Mitt Romney is doing inside of his claim to be some kind of holy and righteous man, just for the record. Because when you tell lies like that, or look people in the eye and straight up lie about Solyndra, or when you tell people a lefty author says Obama pushed the Affordable Care Act to intentionally slow down the economic recovery, then it is apparent to all who are listening that Mitt Romney is speaking in his native tongue of lies. There's nothing even slightly righteous about that, nothing good, and nothing worthy of the Oval Office.

Steve Benen tracks Mitt's mendacity on a weekly basis. So far he has over twenty installments. TWENTY.

You know Mitt Romney is a lying liar and so do I. Now go tell that nice lady down the street who thinks he'd be better for this country than the black guy who's already there.

After the disastrous comparison of the Romney campaign and Romney himself as an Etch A Sketch -- a blank slate to be rewritten to fit the moment -- Rachel Maddow finally did what no journalist to date has bothered to do. She enumerated the lies he tells daily, the cynicism with which those lies are told, and goes on to explain why Romney is undermining democracy and the office of President when he lies so easily just to get the job. Romney's own words bolster the lack of conviction to any set of ideals. This is what he said:

"I'm running as a conservative Republican," he said. "I'll be running as a conservative Republican nominee."

So you know, I was a vampire for Halloween, too, but I've always been a Democrat and if I ran for office, I'd be running as me, not a definition of the party designation next to my name.

My 18-year old daughter got it right away as she watched this segment, asking if Americans are really this stupid. Sadly, I had to answer her in the affirmative. It really has to be difficult for members of a party to hate their candidate, know he lies with ease, and yet stand up and wave the flag for him. Yet it seems that more Republicans than not are doing just that.

Steve Benen described Morphing Mittens' many versions:

Romney 1.0 was an independent who distanced himself from Reagan; Romney 2.0 was a moderate Republican with self-described "progressive" views on social issues and health care; Romney 3.0 was a social conservative who cared deeply about the culture war; and Romney 4.0 is a far-right businessman who represents the GOP establishment and the top 1%.

What will Romney 5.0 look like? I don't know; I guess we'll have to wait until after Fehrnstrom & Co. shake the Etch A Sketch and hit the reset button.

As Maddow argues, a man who can lie and shift with such ease not only poisons democracy should not be considered to hold higher office. It just plays right to the "untrustworthy government" theme conservatives love, but it's a terrible way to lead.

On Thursday morning, Jim DeMint went on "Morning Joe" to pimp his new book -- Now or Never: Saving America from Slightly Higher Taxes on Rich People Economic Collapse -- and peddled a bunch of lies. All of which went completely unchallenged by the panel, of course.

It all started with Scarborough serving up a nice, fat softball to DeMint.

SCARBOROUGH: We were just saying earlier in the show one of the big problems over the past ten years has been the fact that you had a Republican president who doubled the national debt, with a Republican Congress for six years. Now you have a Democratic president who is going to double the debt again...what do we do to stop the bleeding?

DEMINT: Well, that's what the book's all about. 2012 could be our last chance to turn this thing around. The only way the Republicans in the House now can stop the bleeding is if they shut the government down.

Great plan!

And notice: there's absolutely no mention of the fact that taxes are currently at historic lows, and were cut under the previous administration before the country launched two wars, created a massive new domestic security agency -- and fell into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

None of that has contributed to the deficit at all. Nope, it's just "spending" that's the problem. Amazing.

And it just got worse.

DEMINT: Now we've got the tension between those who want centralized power, government control of education, health care, transportation, energy -- and Republicans who I think finding their footing around their core principles of we need to devolve power out of Washington, we need to decentralize, because that's what makes America work. [...]

The Democrats are there to beat us. Every policy that they introduce is to centralize power. They are completely incapable of cutting spending because their constiuency is based on dependency on government and those who want more government.

Nice racist dogwhistle at the end there. But how many lies can DeMint cram into two paragraphs?

First, you think someone on the panel would point out to DeMint that government payrolls have dropped by 500,000 jobs under Obama. Isn't that what Teabaggers want? Smaller government?

Also, someone may have pointed out that energy companies and the health care industry are making record profits. Again, kind of an odd thing to happen under a bunch of socialists who want to nationalize everything.

Hey, Brokaw and Meacham. You call yourselves journalists? How can these two let this BS go unchallenged? Awful.

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Our number four most viewed C&L video for 2011 comes courtesy of Dave Neiwert with serial liar Michele Bachmann making an appearance on CBS's Face the Nation, piling lies upon more lies. From back in June before PolitiFact decided to make a complete mockery of themselves.

Bachmann's response to her twenty some plus "pants on fire" lies... Obama lies too!!! Pay no attention to anything I've said.

This is Medicare: A single payer system which covers costs for the elderly and disabled. It is paid for by payroll taxes. It is not a voucher program. It is straight-up single payer health insurance.

For Politifact to call Democrats' claim that Republicans voted to kill Medicare the Lie of the Year is patently absurd. It is a weird exercise in Orwellian double-speak. Up is down, right is wrong, vouchers equal Medicare. And worse, Politifact's logic requires so many leaps it will make your brain hurt.

• They ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare -- or even the people 55 to 65 who would join the program in the next 10 years.

• They used harsh terms such as "end" and "kill" when the program would still exist, although in a privatized system.

• They used pictures and video of elderly people who clearly were too old to be affected by the Ryan plan. The DCCC video that aired four days after the vote featured an elderly man who had to take a job as a stripper to pay his medical bills.

"Both parties use entitlements as political weapons," Ryan said in an interview with PolitiFact. "Republicans do it to Democrats; Democrats do it to Republicans. So I knew that this would be a political weapon that the other side would use against us."

One of these things is not like the other. Vouchers are not Medicare. Medicare is not vouchers. Consider what would happen in ten years under the Ryan plan. You would have people coming into the system who would bear most of the cost themselves. Part of what they paid for Medicare would be padding insurers' coffers. Doctors, labs, hospitals and pharmaceutical manufacturers would be able to profit far more from those seniors coming in to voucherized health plans after ten years.

Worse, the seniors covered under traditional Medicare would find themselves squeezed out or put last in line because of the potential profit in the voucherized participants versus the plan where government is controlling costs.

Just for fun, I played with the differences when Ryan first proposed it, because my spouse would fall under the 55-65 group and I would be in the excluded voucher-eligible group. Let's just say it wasn't pretty at all. He would be able to receive the care he needed at a reasonable cost. I would need to save every single penny I could between now and age 66 to afford the differences, even as a relatively healthy person. In fact, healthy people are really hosed under the voucher plan, because we would be socked more for premiums from insurers with out availing ourselves of the benefits others need and would use.

Any way you turn it, Ryan's plan is not Medicare. As Ed points out, you can call it that, but that doesn't mean it really IS that.

Paul Krugman pronounces Politifact officially irrelevant:

Republicans voted to replace Medicare with a voucher system to buy private insurance — and not just that, a voucher system in which the value of the vouchers would systematically lag the cost of health care, so that there was no guarantee that seniors would even be able to afford private insurance.

The new scheme would still be called “Medicare”, but it would bear little resemblance to the current system, which guarantees essential care to all seniors.

Steve Benen is even more specific:

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Let's work to make this happen nationwide. From Civil Rights.org

In a victory for workers and labor advocates, the Connecticut legislature recently became the first in the nation to pass a statewide mandate for paid sick days.

Eighty percent of low-wage workers in the United States do not have any paid sick days, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. S.B. 913 will require employers with fifty or more employees to provide paid sick leave when workers are ill or need to care for their families. With the implementation of this bill, workers in Connecticut will no longer have to decide between feeding their families and staying home from work due to illness.

The really good news about this is that it applies to PART-TIME employees, as well. Too many companies avoid paying benefits to their employees by insisting on a part-time work force.

You should have heard the whining and moaning from Connecticut Republican legislators about how this bill was a...wait for it...."job killer."

You know what hurts a business? I stop shopping at stores when I see an obviously sick employee running a cash register. I can shop at home and not catch something. Shopping does not have to cost me days of being ill myself, let alone facing the misery of passing something on to my three kids.

There is national legislation on this, called The Healthy Families Act, that would enable all workers in the United States to earn up to seven paid sick days a year. Just one more reason we need to kick out the Republicans in the House and remove Blue Dogs from the Senate.

In a classic case of telling the boss what he wants to hear, WikiLeaks released cables asserting that Michael Moore's documentary Sicko was banned in Cuba. Only problem? It wasn't.

Michael Moore was as surprised as anyone when WikiLeaks revealed a US cable asserting that Cuban officials banned his Sicko documentary because it depicted a "mythical" view of health care there. He was even more surprised when the media picked up on the cable and reported it as gospel truth. (See the Guardian, whose report in turn got widely disseminated.) The problem is that the documentary—a damning assessment of the American health care system—was not banned in Cuba, he writes at the Huffington Post.

As Digby points out, we used to have this thing that would actually check out stories before running them.

If only there were professional people who gather facts and research issues and interview subjects who could be called upon to investigate such things. I recall that there used to be an organization called The New York Times which was interested in sorting out various secrets and lies but they seem to have gone into another business. (Some strange foreigners still practice this old fashioned craft but here in the US not so much.) Too bad. It could be useful.

The point is apt, and makes the Americans media's tweaking about Julian Assange look all that much more ridiculous, because it looks more and more that many of these cables were written by people looking to make the bosses happy, not truthfully inform them. Like those cables that asserted that the Saudis actively supported and encouraged US aggression against Iran, all of these leaks and revelations must be met with skepticism and investigation into its validity.

But that would require actual journalism...