Mitt Romney has already been roundly criticized—and not just by liberals—for his politicized response to the Libyan crisis, in which he falsely accused the Obama administration of "sympathizing" with the Libyan attackers.

But as Ezra Klein pointed out while guest hosting The Ed Show Wednesday, it wasn't just that Romney got the facts wrong. The notion that the U.S. embassy in Egypt betrayed American values by putting out a statement condemning religious bigotry would have come as news to the Bush administration. Here's what President Bush's State Department spokesman said in response to the 2006 Danish cartoons that lampooned the Prophet Muhammed and sparked violent protests by Muslims around the world: 

Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-semitic images ... as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief.

As The New York Times reported at the time, "a core mission of [the Bush administration's] foreign policy is to emphasize respect for Islam in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Indeed, as Klein went on to note, in May 2008, President Bush apologized to Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki after an American solider went on a shooting spree in Iraq. "He apologized for that, in the sense that he said that we take it very seriously, we were concerned about the reaction, we wanted them to know that the president knew that this was wrong..." White House press secretary Dana Perino said at the time.

In addition to his rash statement on the Libyan crisis, of course, Romney has falsely accused Obama of going on an "apology tour," seeking forgiveness from world leaders. Funny, there's no record of Romney raising a peep.

Michael Morley

Last month, a coalition of military groups intervened in a major voting-rights case in Ohio on the side of Republican officials—helping the GOP to make the false charge that the Obama campaign is working to suppress the military vote. The coalition has been described in media reports as above the partisan fray. But according to one key participant, it was organized by a Washington-based Republican lawyer and political operative who has helped launch several other efforts to intervene in voting cases in swing states across the country, always to the benefit of the GOP. And its main point of contact is a Washington lobbyist and former Republican Senate aide who runs a conservative advocacy group.

The involvement of national-level Republicans highlights how crucial the bid to reduce early voting in Ohio is to the party’s—and Mitt Romney’s—hopes this fall.

Earlier this summer, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee sued the state of Ohio over a Republican-backed law that ended early voting in the three days before Election Day for everyone except members of the military, making it harder for hundreds of thousands of Ohioans—disproportionately African-Americans, research suggests—to vote. Not long afterwards, a coalition of 15 military groups filed documents (pdf) asking to intervene in the lawsuit on the side of the defendant, Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted. The military groups sought “to defend the fundamental constitutional right to vote of members of the U.S. Armed Forces,” according to their brief.

A judge ruled late last month in favor of the Obama campaign, ordering Husted to direct local election boards to prepare to allow early voting for everyone. Husted—joined by the coalition of military groups—is appealing the ruling.

The military coalition has largely escaped scrutiny, even though it appears to have been organized as part of a concerted effort to lend support to Republicans in voting cases—some, as in Ohio, involving efforts to restrict voting rights—in swing states across the country.

The coalition—made up of volunteer groups like the U.S. Army Association, the U.S. Navy Association, and the National Guard Association—was assembled by Michael Morley, a Republican lawyer and political operative, according to Bob Carey, who serves as a point of contact for the coalition. “Michael Morley approached these organizations and put it together himself,” Carey told Lean Forward.

Morley, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment via phone and email and whose name does not appear on the coalition's court filing, served in the Bush administration as a special assistant to the Army General Counsel. He's also a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA)—a group of GOP election lawyers that has in the past worked to spread concern over voter fraud despite little evidence that such fraud exists— according to the RNLA's website. And he appears to have carved out a niche this year launching legal efforts to intervene in voting disputes in swing states, on behalf of Republicans seeking to limit voting rights or otherwise advantage the party's candidates. Among the recent initiatives he's been involved in:

• In May, Morley filed a motion seeking to intervene in a lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s controversial Republican-backed voter ID law. He was representing a group of voters who backed the law, saying they were seeking to protect their own votes from being diluted by fraudulent voting.

• In June, Morley filed a similar motion (pdf) on behalf of Wisconsin voters, opposing a lawsuit that challenged a voter ID law pushed by Gov. Scott Walker and state Republicans.

• Last month, Morley represented a group of Iowa voters seeking to knock Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson off the ballot in that state. Johnson, who ran in the Republican presidential primary, could draw crucial votes away from Mitt Romney this fall.

WATCH RACHEL MADDOW'S SEGMENT MONDAY NIGHT ON THE NATIONWIDE GOP WAR ON VOTING:

Carey, the coalition's point of contact, is himself a well-connected Washington lobbyist and former aide to Republican senators Spencer Abraham and George Allen, who has served as director of a Defense Department program that helps military and overseas voters to cast ballots. In addition to his work at a lobbying firm founded by Abraham, Carey currently helps run the National Defense Committee, a conservative military advocacy group.

The involvement of the military coalition has lent crucial backing to the Republican charge that the Obama campaign's lawsuit seeks to suppress the military vote, which tends to skew Republican. Pete Hegseth, a conservative activist and former Army captain who ran unsuccessfully this year for the Republican Senate nomination in Minnesota appeared last month on Fox News on behalf of the coalition to stoke concern over the Obama campaign’s lawsuit. “It’s so shamefully political, what they’re doing,” Hegseth said of the suit. Mitt Romney’s campaign accused Obama of seeking to “undermine” military voting rights, and Ohio GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel claimed the president was “trying to suppress the military vote.”

News reports and independent fact-checkers have been quick to label those charges false: The Democrats’ lawsuit asks that early voting hours be extended for everyone, leaving military voters unaffected. 

Morley isn’t the only Beltway Republican lawyer involved with the Ohio effort. As Rachel Maddow reported Monday, citing the liberal Ohio blog Plunderbund, Husted has been getting help from Washington-based William Consovoy, who also has been involved this year in legal bids to curtail voting rights in Florida and Alabama.

In Ohio, the military coalition’s brief—which appears to have been drawn up quickly; it misspells the name of Judge Peter Economus—argues that although Democrats weren’t asking for early voting days for service-members to be cut, their lawsuit nonetheless threatened military voting rights because it sought to have special consideration for the military declared unconstitutional, setting a precedent that could lead to such consideration being banned in the future.

“Although the relief Plaintiffs seek is an overall extension of Ohio’s early voting period, the means through which Plaintiffs are attempting to attain it—a ruling that it is arbitrary and unconstitutional to grant extra time for early voting solely to military voters and overseas citizens—is both legally inappropriate and squarely contrary to the legal interests and constitutional rights of Intervenors, their members, and the courageous men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces,” the coalition’s brief argued.

"The entirety of federal and Ohio law on military voting is based around differentiating military voters and giving them more time," Carey told Lean Forward. 

And in his own interview with Lean Forward, Hegseth called “offensive” the lawsuit’s claim that giving the military special voting accommodations is arbitrary.

But by dismissing the Obama campaign’s lawsuit, an appeals court could nonetheless ensure that civilians are unable to vote in the three days before the election, throwing up a hurdle in front of hundreds of thousands of Ohio voters who have used those days in past years. And not all of the coalition’s members appear to be on board with that outcome.

“We have no problem at all if every citizen has full early voting rights,” John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard Association told Lean Forward. “We just want to make sure that members of the military have full rights to vote.”

Asked why his group was involved in an effort that could reduce early voting for millions, Goheen was philosophical.

“When these things start, you don’t know where they're really headed,” he said. “Like any motion which a whole lot of organizations have signed on to, we don’t necessarily agree with every word choice.”

Moments after Paul Ryan's speech, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin got into a fiesty and heated exchange with the MSNBC panel. Walker defended Ryan's misleading claim that Obama failed to save a Wisconsin auto plant, and even appeared to claim that for Wisconsin workers, the Obama administration's auto bailout hasn't been a success. 

As you can guess, Rachel, Ed, Al and company didn't let him off the hook. Watch:

Jay Laprete / AP

In an effort to raise money from conservatives, Josh Mandel, the Republican candidate for Ohio's U.S. Senate seat, is falsely accusing President Obama of "trying to suppress the military vote." Even in a political environment awash in hard-hitting and often misleading charges, the accusation stands out as a flat-out lie.

"President Obama and the Democratic National Committee are trying to suppress the military vote in Ohio," writes Mandel in a fundraising email sent Monday afternoon to conservative activists and obtained by Lean Forward. Mandel trails the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Sherrod Brown, in polls of the race.

The email goes on to quote a report in the right-wing news outlet Newsmax:

In a move that could have an impact on the final result of the presidential election, Barack Obama’s campaign has sued Ohio to block a measure which extends early voting for members of the military. 

"As a veteran, this absolutely makes my blood boil," Mandel adds, before asking for money.

The reality is very different. As we explained earlier this month when Mitt Romney tried to make his own political hay out of the episode, the Obama campaign is challenging a Republican-backed measure that scrapped the last three days of early voting for everyone except military voters. But rather than asking that early voting for service-members be cut too, the suit seeks to restore the last three days of early voting for all voters. (You can see for yourself by reading the Obama campaign's brief [pdf]. The relevant excerpt is at the bottom of page 4).

In other words, if the Obama campaign's lawsuit succeeds, military voting will be unaffected, while voting will be made easier for non-military Ohioans. To claim, as Mandel does, that Obama is "trying to suppress the military vote" is a flat-out lie.

It's worth recalling some of the background here, too. The law the Obama campaign is challenging, which got rid of the last three days of early voting for everyone but the military, was signed last year by Republican Gov. John Kasich. Republicans went ahead with the new law even though in 2008, over 93,000 people took advantage of those last three days to vote, and despite the fact that, as Rachel Maddow recounted in detail, excessive wait times at urban polling places on Election Day 2004 had led to a congressional report (pdf) urging reform. 

It's bad enough that Ohio Republicans are making it harder for Democratic-leaning groups to vote. That they're also making up a lie about Obama suppressing the military vote is mind-bogglingly cynical.

A spokesman for the Mandel campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Republican effort to suppress the vote in Ohio is the "biggest story in this presidential race," according to Ed Schultz. And in a fiery appearance on Ed's show, an Ohio lawmaker pulled no punches in describing what's happening.

The GOP has shortened voting hours in all 88 counties since 2008, the host of The Ed Show reminded viewers Thursday. And he noted that 47% of voters—predominantly African-Americans—last time around took advantage of extended hours to cast their ballots.

Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner took it from there. "This is nothing more than uniform voter suppression, make no mistake about it," she told Shultz. 

Turner pointed out that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, had cut voting on Sunday—a day when many blacks have traditionally gone to the polls after church. "We know exactly who their targets are," she said, estimating that around 200,000 Ohioans would be affected by the loss of extended voting hours.

Turner was just getting warmed up.

"I'm gonna tell you something, Ed," she went on. "If you are poor, working-class, middle-class, elderly, African-American, Hispanic, or a woman, you are SOL when it comes to Republicans. They are making it very clear that they don't care, that they are here to oppress and suppress, and they don't care how they steal the vote." 

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) joined Ed Schultz Wednesday night to talk about a new report showing that we could be headed for another recession next year if Congress refuses to take action. But she also found time to mention her effort to up the pressure on Mitt Romney to release his tax returns, via a petition she says she'll deliver to Romney Thursday.

"I think we know that Mitt Romney shipped jobs overseas by the tens of thousands," Boxer said on The Ed Show. "Did he also ship money overseas? I want to know that and my constituents want to know that."

Boxer invoked the example of Romney's father George, the governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate himself.

"You know, father knows best," she said. "His dad said, 12 years of income tax returns, that's what you should do, son. He talked to all of us, he said, if you run for president, you have to do that."

Boxer said people who want to sign can go to barbaraboxer.com/mitt.

Rep. Todd Akin has now made three separate radio appearances and cut a 30-second ad to apologize for his comments about rape. And yet, he still appears determined to hold onto that distinction between "legitimate rape" and other types of rape that helped get him in so much trouble in the first place. And among social conservatives, he’s far from alone.

Asked Monday by Mike Huckabee whether by “legitimate rape” he might have meant “forcible rape,” Akin grasped the lifeline with both hands. “I was talking about forcible rape,” he said. “I used the wrong word.” In other words, Akin still wants to distinguish between a violent rape and, say, a drunken date rape. And Huckabee seemed eager to support that distinction.

It’s not just them. Rep. Ron Paul recently used an equally peculiar phrase to get at the same idea. If Paul’s daughter or grand-daughter were raped, CNN’s Piers Morgan asked him in February, would he force her to have the child? “No, if it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room,” the Texas lawmaker replied (itals ours).

So: “Legitimate rape,” “forcible rape,” “honest rape”—what’s going on here?  What’s with this strange GOP obsession with  parsing different categories of rape, and implying that some count more than others?

It all goes back to abortion, of course and the relentless conservative drive in recent years to limit exceptions to abortion restrictions—in this case by flat-out redefining rape.

Since the 1976 Hyde Amendment, restrictions on the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions have included exceptions for women who got pregnant via rape or incest. But last year, a Republican bill—co-sponsored by Rep. Paul Ryan and called a top priority by Speaker John Boehner—aimed to narrow the rape exception to “forcible rape.” As Mother Jones explained at the time:

This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion.

Anti-abortion groups left little doubt about their position, arguing that the law had never been interpreted to count statutory rape as rape. “We do not believe that the Hyde Amendment has ever been construed to permit federal funding of abortion based merely on the youth of the mother (“statutory rape”),” Douglas Johnson, of the National Right to Life Committee told LifeNews.com.

In other words, statutory rape shouldn't count as real rape. The new “forcible rape” language was only needed, Johnson said, to prevent pro-choice groups from trying to widen the definition of rape so that it would now apply to statutory rape.

But it’s not only about statutory rape. In that February CNN interview, Paul went on to say that though victims of “honest rape” should have access to emergency contraceptive services, "if you talk about somebody coming in and they say, 'Well, I was raped and I'm seven months pregnant and I don't want to have anything to do with it,' it's a little bit different story."

In other words, distinguishing between “honest rape” and other types of rape is necessary because women lie about rape. So only those who immediately report the crime should be allowed to terminate their pregnancies. In reality, of course, experts say it’s extremely common for women not to immediately report a rape, out of a combination of factors including trauma, shame, and fear of one’s attacker.  

In fact, if the Republican Party had its way, the forcible rape debate would be moot, because there just wouldn't be any exceptions to abortion restrictions. In the run-up to its Tampa convention, the party this week passed a “Human Life Amendment”—just as it did in 2004 and 2008—which opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest. 

Since Wednesday's court ruling, Pennsylvania's controversial voter ID law, which could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of predominantly Democratic voters, now looks more likely than not to be in place on Election Day. So Thursday night, The Ed Show looked at what voting rights groups are doing to help make sure everyone can cast a ballot. 

It's a huge challenge. Voters who lack an ID—estimated at as many as 758,000, or 9 percent of the state—need to assemble several types of docuemtnation including a birth certificate, then find time to get to the DMV in order to get an ID before the election.

Zach Stallberg of the Committee of 70, a Philadelphia-based good-government group, said as many as 145 organizations, including the NAACP, the ACLU, bar associations, and neighborhood groups, have come together to start work.

"We are runnig an aggressive, all-out drive to make sure that people know what they need," Stallberg said. "We're knocking on doors, we're driving them to the transportation centers, we're helping counsel them through the process." 

Stallberg added: "We're doing everything possible in a nonpartisan way to make sure that as many people as possible can vote."

Meanwhile on the other side of the state in Allegheny County, Steven Singer, a teacher, told Ed he'd started a petition on the issue, which had gained 2300 signatures in two weeks. Singer is calling on local election officials not to enforce the ID law.

Singer said the law "violates people's civil rights," adding: "The parents of the kids I teach are adversely affected by this law, and I just can't sit by and let that happen. These people deserve the right to vote, it's that simple."

The Obama campaign so far has been relatively quiet about Pennsylvania's voting law, for reasons that aren't clear. "Obama does have people assigned to voter ID in Pennsylvania," Stallberg said. "We just haven't seen much of the result."  

The stakes are high. President Obama won Pennsylvania relatively comfortably last time around, but it's expected to be closer this time. And if hundreds of thousands of Obama supporters are barred from voting, that could make all the difference.

"This is gonna be one of the biggest political lifts when it comes to advocacy I think we've ever seen in contemporary times," said Ed Schultz. "And if it doesn't happen, I'm not convinced that President Obama can win Pennsylvania."

Ann Romney says her husband won't be releasing any more tax returns—because it'll just give Democrats more fodder to attack him. Her comment echoed the line of defense Mitt Romney used last month.

"We have been very transparent to what's legally required of us," Ann Romney told Natalie Morales on Rock Center with Brian Williams. "But, the more we release, the more we get attacked, the more we get questioned, the more we get pushed. and so we have done what is legally required of us, and there is gonna be no more tax releases."

The comments, which could give new momentum to the furor over the Romney's tax returns, were highlighted on The Ed Show Wednesday. 

Ann Romney continued: "Mitt is honest, his integrity is just golden."

And she added: "Beyond paying our taxes, we also pay ten percent of our income to charity. So we have no issues that way and the only reason we dont disclose more is we'd just become a bigger target."

Pressed to elaborate, she said: "It'll just give them more ammunition."

In July, Mr. Romney said he wouldn't release any additional returns because he didn't want the Democrats to "take what's there, twist it, distort it, dishonestly use it in attack ads."

In an appearance on The Ed Show Wednesday, Howard Dean compared the Republican strategy to muddy the waters on Medicare to "propaganda techniques" used by the Soviet Union. 

"What they're using is old propaganda techniques that were actually used by the Soviets many years ago," Dean, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, told Ed Schultz. "They say something that's not true, and then they're gonna spend $200 million saying it again and again and again hoping that somebody beleives it."

Lately, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have been claiming that President Obama cut $716 billion from Medicare. As we and many others have noted, the claim is deeply misleading: Those cuts affect providers and insurance companies, and leave seniors' care untouched. Meanwhile, Ryan's own plan for Medicare would end the program as we know it, turning it into a system of vouchers, and leaving many seniors unable to foot the bill for coverage, studies have shown.

Dean, who came close to capturing the Democratic nomination in 2004, argued that Romney and Ryan will have trouble convincing Americans that they're the defenders of Medicare, because the party's reputations on the issue are so well-established. 

"Here's the problem that they have: Very few people in America believe that the Republicans care about Medicare, because they've tried to hurt it in so many ways," he said. "Nor do they believe that they care about middle-class people. They do believe that whatever the faults of the Democrats, they have stood up for Social Security and Medicare."

Dean concluded: "So propaganda didn't work in Russia and it's not gonna work here. It generally does not work when people know that it's a lie."

Even before Mitt Romney announced he was picking Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, President Obama's campaign had been trying to make the election into a choice between "two fundamentally different visions" for the country. Romney's vision, Obama has been arguing, means a country in which everyone looks out for themselves, the rich get richer while working Americans suffer, and we avoid making the kind of forward-looking investments in things like education, infrastructure, and innovation that are needed to win the future.

Romney's decision to pick Ryan (you can watch the formal announcement above) means that argument is even easier to make. Check out this statement that just went out from Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager:

In naming Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has chosen a leader of the House Republicans who shares his commitment to the flawed theory that new budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens on the middle class and seniors, will somehow deliver a stronger economy. The architect of the radical Republican House budget, Ryan, like Romney, proposed an additional $250,000 tax cut for millionaires, and deep cuts in education from Head Start to college aid. His plan also would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors. As a member of Congress, Ryan rubber-stamped the reckless Bush economic policies that exploded our deficit and crashed our economy. Now the Romney-Ryan ticket would take us back by repeating the same, catastrophic mistakes.

Little wonder Democrats are said to be high-fiving over the choice.

Mitt Romney introduces Rep. Paul Ryan as his runningmate.

In picking Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has taken a risk. The Wisconsin lawmaker has emerged in recent years as the ideological standard-bearer for his party, and in particular for its radical push to shrink the size of government. "To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life," Ryan Lizza wrote in The New Yorker  last week. "The person to understand is Paul Ryan."

Here are 5 things you should know about Romney's new running mate:

• The Ryan budget, "The Path to Prosperity," would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher program, slash food stamps for struggling Americans, and turn Medicaid over to the states. Virtually the entire GOP, including Romney, have signed onto the plan as a centerpiece of the party's legislative agenda.

• Ryan's plan also would further tilt the tax system toward the rich. He'd extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2 percent, but not President Obama’s cuts for those who earn the least. Here's a chart, compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which shows the skewed distribution:

• Ryan also supports privatizing Social Security and turning it over to Wall Street. Had the plan been in effect during the 2008 financial crisis, millions of seniors' benefits would likely have been decimated.

• The economy suffers from a lack of demand, and by slashing spending, Ryan's plan would worsen the problem. It would result in over 4 million lost jobs over the next 2 years, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.

• Though he has tried to deny her influence recently, Ryan has claimed to be a devotee of the radical libertarian writer Ayn Rand. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he once said at a Washington event in Rand's honor. “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.” Rand's philosophy centers on the notion that selfishness in the pursuit of profit is a virtue and that altruism is "evil," as she put it.

Looking for one piece of writing that captures what Ryan's all about? Read this masterful profile by New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, "The Legendary Paul Ryan."