Mitt Romney's latest attack, an effort to capitalize on conservative resentment of those on government assistance, falsely accuses President Obama of dropping work requirements for welfare recipients. And it doesn't mention that Romney himself supported doing something similar as governor of Massachusetts.

"On July 12th, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements,” a new ad from the Romney campaign tells voters.  “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check." (You can watch the ad above.)

Romney followed that up Tuesday by taking the attack to the campaign trail. TPM reports that after praising welfare reform at an event in Illinois, he declared: “President Obama has tried to reverse that accomplishment by taking the work out of welfare.”

This is a lie. Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services did indeed announce a policy shift which lets states “test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.” But HHS made very clear that states must show their approach is better at moving people from welfare to work.

"HHS will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals of TANF," the department wrote in announcing the move.

If a state proposed a system in which "they just send you your welfare check," it clearly wouldn't be approved.

Even if it weren't false, the Romney attack would still be stunningly hypocritical. Back in 2005, Romney joined other GOP governors in urging Congress  (pdf) to grant states exactly this kind of flexibility in meeting the goals of welfare reform. 

“Increased waiver authority, allowable work activities, availability of partial work credit and the ability to coordinate state programs are all important aspects of moving recipients from welfare to work,” Romney and his fellow governors wrote.

The ad is the second demonstrably false attack to come from Team Romney in the last three days. Over the weekend, the campaign charged that a lawsuit filed in Ohio by the Obama campaign aimed to "undermine" voting rights for members of the military. In fact, the lawsuit asked a judge to restore extended early voting for all citizens, after Republicans last year changed the law so that it applied only to those in the military. Should the lawsuit succeed, military voters would be unaffected.

Late Update, 2:58pm: White House press secretary Jay Carney slammed Romney’s welfare attack as “categorically false” and “blatantly dishonest.”

Late Late Update, 5:05pm: And the Obama campaign, echoing Lean Forward, called the attack "hypocritical and false." 

Christopher Devargas / Reuters

At the end of last week, it didn't look like Republican voter suppression efforts could get any more shameful. But over the weekend, the Mitt Romney campaign took things up to 11, jumping into the fray to accuse President Obama of discriminating against military voters.

To explain: As The Rachel Maddow Show detailed Thursday night, and Lean Forward recapped Friday, Ohio is the latest major swing-state—joining Florida and Pennsylvania—where the GOP bid to make voting harder, especially for Democratic groups, is in the spotlight. The Obama campaign is suing to reverse a measure signed last year by Republican Gov. John Kasich that scrapped the last three days of early voting for everyone except military voters. 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 Maddow recounted in detail, excessive wait times at urban polling places on Election Day 2004 had led to a congressional report (pdf) urging reform. 

That's pretty much where things stood Saturday morning. That day, Romney's campaign released a statement charging: “President Obama’s lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period is an outrage.” The statement suggested that the lawsuit aims to "undermine" the voting rights of military voters. 

In reality, of course, the suit does no such thing. Rather than preventing military personnel from voting during the three days at issue, it seeks to restore that opportunity for all voters—as was the case before last year when Kasich and GOP lawmakers changed the law. (You can see for yourself by reading the Obama campaign's brief [pdf]. The relevant excerpt is at the bottom of page 4).

The Obama camapign was quick to point that out. “The way frankly Governor Romney has stated it is completely false and misleading,” David Axelrod, a top Obama aide, said on Fox News Sunday. “That suit is about whether the rest of Ohio should have the same right. And I think it’s shameful that Governor Romney would hide behind our servicemen and women to try and win a lawsuit to deprive other Ohioans, deprive other Ohioans of the right to vote.”

So on Sunday, Team Romney issued a new statement that subtly backed off the charge that Obama sought to "undermine" military voting rights, but continued to imply, falsely, that the suit somehow targeted the military.

“It is not only constitutional, but commendable that the Ohio legislature granted military voters and their families this accommodation,” Katie Biber, a lawyer with the Romney campaign, said in Sunday's statement. "It is despicable for the Obama campaign to challenge Ohio’s lawful decision.”

Of course, Biber didn't mention that the legislature only granted the "accommodation" to military voters after first taking it away for everyone else. 

What's despicable, some might say, is that Republicans would first make it harder to vote, then seek to gain further political advantage by misrepresenting the Obama campaign's effort to fix the problem.

It's been three years, as of Tuesday, since Congress last raised the federal minimum wage. And many advocates for the poor say that with low-wage workers struggling, it's time to do it again.

A group of prominent liberal-leaning economists including Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Laura Tyson, and Robert Reich sent a letter Monday to congressional leaders urging them to raise the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $9.80 by 2014. "At a time when persistent high unemployment is putting enormous downward pressure on wages, such a minimum wage increase would provide a much-needed boost to the earnings of low-wage workers," the group wrote.

Stiglitz is a former chief economist for the World Bank, Sachs runs Columbia University's Earth Institute, Tyson served as President Clinton's top economic adviser, and Reich served as Clinton's Labor Secretary.

Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller, Democrats from Iowa and California respectively, have introduced measures to raise the minimum wage to $9.80. But President Obama hasn't made the issue a priority. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has twisted himself in knots on the subject, first saying he supports indexing the minimum wage to inflation, then backing down after an outcry from conservatives.

A coalition of liberal and labor groups is organizing rallies Tuesday in support of a raise, in 30 cities across the country. Some rallies will target companies owned by Bain Capital, the private-equity firm founded by Romney.

A raise wouldn't just benefit the roughly 20 million American workers who make the current minimum, supporters argue. "Another nearly 9 million workers whose wages are just above the new minimum would likely see a wage increase through 'spillover' effects, as employers adjust their internal wage ladders," the economists wrote in the letter to Congress.

Advocates of a raise note that the value of the minimum wage has steadily declined in recent decades. In 1968, it was worth over $10 in 2012 dollars, almost one third more than it is today, according to the chart below, which was compiled by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a labor-backed group.

Opponents argue that the move would raise the cost of hiring for employers, especially small businesses, exacerbating the unemployment problem. But in their letter, organized by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, the economists noted that "the weight of evidence now show[s] that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market."

Indeed, they added, a raise would likely stimulate the economy and boost job growth, because low-income workers have little choice but to spend new income, rather than save it. 

In addition, new data compiled by NELP (pdf) show that two out of three low-wage workers are employed not by small businesses but by large corporations. Most such corporations have recovered from the Great Recession and are in strong financial positions, NELP's data show. 

Mitt Romney responded moments ago to the Supreme Court's ruling upholding President Obama's healthcare law, calling, as he has before, for the law to be replaced.

"I will act to repeal Obamacare," Romney declared, adding that though the court had declared the law constitutional, "what they did not do is say that Obamacare is good law or that it's good policy."

Romney charged that the law raises taxes by $500 billion, cuts Medicare by roughly the same amount, adds "trillions" to the deficit. He added that it would force up to 20 million Americans to lose insurance they want to keep, and called it a "job-killer."

In fact, as MSNBC's Ed Schultz pointed out after Romney spoke, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the law will bring down costs. And there's little hard evidence that it will cost jobs, or has done so. Nor is it clear how Americans who want to keep their insurance will be unable to do so. 

Romney laid out the principles he thinks should replace the law, saying that Americans with pre-existing conditions should be protected. 

"Gotta make sure that those people who have pre-existing conditions know that they will be insured," he said, in what might be seen as an attempt to tread a more moderate path on the issue than others in his party. But Romney's camapign has already made clear that he doesn't intend to require insurers to cover those with pre-existing conditions, so it's not clear what today's comment means. 

Romney said that by electing him this November, voters will be choosing to "return to a time when the American people will have their own choice in healthcare."

Later Thursday, Romney's campaign sent out a fundraising pitch in response to the court's ruling. 

Who's the immigrant and who's the American? Rep. Luis Gutierrez posed that question in a quiz for Congress on Wednesday, designed to point up the folly of Arizona's harsh immigration law. Then on The Ed Show, Ed Schultz put the same quiz to Gutierrez.

Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, took to the House floor with a sequence of pictures showing pairs of celebrities. For instance, he showed Justin Bieber and his girlfriend, Selena Gomez. Which is the immigrant, and which was born in America, he asked. Gutierrez posed the same question for other pairs, including the basketball stars Tony Parker and Jeremy Lin, and the journalists Ted Koppel and Geraldo Rivera. 

The answer, of course, is that the first of the two in each case—Bieber, Parker, and Koppel—are the ones who were born overseas, while the second of each pair was born here. Based on the names and appearances of the people in question, you might well have guessed the reverse, of course.

Gutierrez's point was to demonstrate the absurdity of Arizona's immigration law, which requires law enforcement to ask for proof of citizenship if they have reason to suspect someone is here illegally. Much of the law was struck down by the Supreme Court Monday.

"Justin, when you perform in Phoenix, remember to bring your papers," Gutierrez told Bieber.

And just to bring home the point, Ed Schultz posed the same quiz for Gutierrez on the air Wednesday night. Schultz showed pictures of the baseball players Alex Rodriguez and Jason Bay, as well as the actors Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling. Again, the second of each pair might seem more likely to have been born in the U.S., based on their name and looks. But in fact, A-Rod and Mendes are the natural born Americans, while Bay and Gosling were both born in Canada.

How did Gutierrez do? He got Mendes right, but whiffed on A-Rod. 

But he nailed the larger point. "There's limited resources," Gutierrez said. "And I want the police going after drug dealers, murderers, rapists, gang-bangers, bad people. Not the Windex ... lady cleaning some window at midnight at some store."

In the wake of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling striking down Montana’s century-old campaign finance law, Governor Brian Schweitzer is warning that corporate interests across the country “are going to own everything from the White House to the courthouse.”

The court's 5-4 ruling extended the logic of the 2010 Citizens United decision, giving corporations the right to spend unlimited sums on independent expenditure campaigns. Schweitzer, a Democrat, joined Ed Schultz to bring home just how far-reaching the decision’s implications could be.

“We’ve had 100 years of clean elections,” Schweitzer said. “And now the Supreme Court back there in Washington D.C., they think they know better for us in Montana.”

He went on:

They tell us we have to accept dirty, secret, corporate, and even foreign money, pouring into Montana, taking over everything from the courthouse all the way to the statehouse. And I’ll tell you this, until we get this reversed, the corporate  interests—and they will be foreign corporate interests as well—they are going to own everything from the white house to the courthouse. That’s what’s in store for us.

Schweitzer said until now in his state, legislators could spend around $2000-5000 to get elected, making it possible for ordinary citizens to run for office and to fund grassroots campaigns. But now those days are likely over.

“Lets face it: Money is power,” Schweitzer continued. “Money buys television advertisements. And if you have enough money buying enough television advertisements, you can sway the election. Not just sway, buy. And so there is not going to be the other side of the story.”

Schweitzer went on to explain just how profoundly the court's decision could change Montana politics:

Today, we have a two-party system. Well, in the future we’ll have a two-party system as well: The corporate party, and the corporate-lite party. Because anybody who stands up to the dirty, secret, even foreign corporation money, they’ll squash you like a bug. The big pharmaceutical companies, the military-industrial complex, the insurance companies, if anybody stands up to ‘em, they’ll drop a million or two million or ten million, whatever it takes, and they’ll put you right out of  business. And that voice for the people will be lost.

Tim Pawlenty is said to be the Romney campaign's latest flavor of the month for its vice presidential selection. And Wednesday on The Ed Show, Ed explained why Romney and the former Minnesota governor might indeed be a dream ticket—for the Obama campaign.

Schultz took us back to 2007, when the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis collapsed thanks to structural problems, killing 13. The accident came after Pawlenty, then the governor, had gutted transportation funding, and had refused to fund inspections which could have prevented accidents like the collapse.

That's not all. By the end of his term, Pawlenty had left 9 percent of Minnesotans without health insurance, and had added just 6,200 jobs in eight years, despite a booming national economy. And he stuck the state with a record $5 billion budget deficit.

Mike Hatch, a Democratic former Minnesota Attorney General joined Ed to talk about Pawlenty's lackluster record. 

"If fiscal repsonsibilty is a key component of the selection, the governor fails in that regard," said Hatch. "I don't think leaving the state with a $5 billion deficit is fiscally responsible."

Rep. Luis Gutierrez predicted Monday that support for President Obama's decision to stop deporting young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as kids will only grow stronger once the public gets an up-close view of the people whose lives are affected.

On The Ed Show, host Ed Schultz noted poll numbers showing that 49 percent of Latino voters say Friday's announcement makes them more likely to vote for Obama. And Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, added:

Wait for two months down the road, when tens of thousands of people make lines [to receive work permits]. Young people, smart people, Americans. When people start talking to them and seeing the people in the lines, and you see them getting their work permits and their work documents, wait till then. This is, for the Latino community, a real civil rights issue ... Just wait till those kids line up and you see the happiness. America is a country that loves its children. 

Gutierrez didn't make the comparison, but the dynamic he predicted is similar to what's happened on gay marriage and gay rights generally, in which public opinion has grown more favorable toward gay people as they've become more visible.

In response to Obama's announcement, Mitt Romney and his fellow Republicans have suggested that Obama should have left the issue of immigration to Congress. In an interview Sunday, Romney criticized Obama for having "jumped in", though he repeatedly refused to say whether he'd repeal the order if elected president.

But Gutierrez told Schultz Obama had fixed a problem Congress wouldn't. He noted that in 2010, the House passed the DREAM Act, but it died in the Senate after a Republican filibuster. 

"All the president has done is do through executive action exactly what Marco Rubio's legislation would have done," Gutierrez added. "Give them a work visa which is renewable. Would [Rubio's] have been permanent? Absolutely. But this is a solution to a problem."

Florida's former Secretary of State, a Republican, is saying he "didn't feel comfortable" carrying out Governor Rick Scott's controversial voter purge because the list he was using was so flawed.

As Michael Eric Dyson explained Wednesday on The Ed Show, Kurt Browning told The Miami Herald that it was clear to him the state didn't have a reliable list with which to conduct the purge, which is now the subject of a federal lawsuit. 

"I didn't feel comfortable rolling this out," Browning said. "Something was telling me this isn't going to fly. We didnt have our i's dotted and our t's crossed when I was there." 

Of course, after Browning stepped down, the purge went forward under his replacement, Ken Detzner. The purge, The Herald reports, used a DMV database that had "limited and often-outdated citizenship information that carried a high risk of making lawful voters look like noncitizens."

 And wouldn't you know it, scores of legitimate voters have been tossed off the rolls—though many likely won't find out until they try to vote in November.

New York mayor Mike Bloomberg recently defended his controversial "stop and frisk" policy, which allows police to stop and search people on the street without cause. The policy, said the mayor, "should be mended, not ended."

On The Ed Show Monday, Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union said the NYPD's approach is racially biased.

"The NYPD isn’t stopping suspected criminals, they're stopping suspected black and Latino people," said Lieberman. "And that’s racial profiling and its illegal."

In response, the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald denied that race is involved.

"Race has nothing to do with the way the NYPD developed its tactics," said Mac Donald. "It's going into neighborhoods where people are being most victimized by crime. That crime is what drives where the police go. And nothing has had as large an effect in saving minority lives as the New York Proactive Policing."

But Lieberman said stop and frisk doesn't just happen in heavily minority neighborhoods. 

"It's not just in communities of color, unfortunately, black and Latino people are profiled wherever they go in the city," Lieberman pointed out. "In Park Slope, which has a vast majority of white people, blacks and Latinos constitute way more than a majority that are stopped and frisked. The same is true in the West Village in Manhattan. So this isn’t about communities with high populations of color. This is about a policy that follows black and Latino people wherever they go in the city. And it's about stopping them and throwing them up against the wall whether they’ve done something wrong or not."

The top spokesman for the Democratic National Committee told Ed Schultz Wednesday that his party needs to make sure voters this fall know exactly who's behind the massive flood of corporate cash that's set to boost Republican prospects.

"We've got to expose the evildoers," the DNC's Brad Woodhouse said.

Woodhouse suggested Demcrats might have done a better job of drawing attention to the outside interests who poured money into the Wisconsin recall on behalf of Republican governor Scott Walker.

"We need to make sure people know, why are the Koch brothers interested in whats going on in Wisconsin?" he said.

He added that Democrats also planned to use their superior organization and turnout operation. "[Republicans] have no ground game, and we're gonna exploit that," he said.

That might not sound too encouraging to Democrats. Many Walker opponents pointed to the Dems' supposed ground advantage before Tuesday night, but it ended up making little difference.

Still, Woodhouse pointed out that the size of the spending advantage that Republicans enjoyed in Wisconsin—seven to one, by some estimates—is unlikely to be repeated in November.

"It's one thing to be outspent one and a half to one or two to one," he said. "You can't be outspent seven or eight to one, and I don't think there's any chance that President Obama's gonna be outspent seven or eight to one."

And asked by Schultz about Obama's struggles with white working-class voters, Woodhouse went after Mitt Romney for his record as a private equity executive.

"Mitt Romney's not the person to attract those votes," Woodhouse said. "Mitt Romney was laying those people off to profit for himself and for his investors and for his partners when he was at Bain Capital."

A Wisconsin voter received a robocall Monday night falsely informing him that if he had already signed a recall petition, he didn't need to vote in Tuesday's recall, he told Lean Forward.

Ed Tuite of Eau Claire said the call came around 8pm Monday night, and that it did not identify the person or group behind the effort.

"That would be as blatant voter suppression as I've heard," Tuite fumed, adding he and his wife weren't taken in, and voted Tuesday morning.

Tuite's account jibes with several other reports of similar calls, some of which have noted that the caller's voice sounded suspiciously like that of Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate for governor. Tuite said the voice in his call, too, sounded like Barrett's.

Gov. Scott Walker's campaign has denied having any role in the robocalls.