Conservative media outlets have been abuzz this week with a misleading detail from a new book and the Republican National Committee (RNC) has been only too happy to add fuel to the fire.

“Barack Obama has already held more re-election fundraising events than every elected president since Richard Nixon combined,” the (UK) Daily Mail reported Sunday, based on Brendan J. Doherty’s new book The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign. The paper also observed that Ronald Reagan did not have a single fundraising event for his 1984 re-election.

Despite the GOP’s overt support for unlimited campaign fundraising, RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski blasted Obama for fundraising for his re-election:

It’s no surprise that the Campaigner-In-Chief has taken raising money for his re-election to a whole new level. The worst part is the American taxpayer has been footing the bill.

Though many on the right have gleefully repeated that President Obama has had more fundraising events than his five predecessors, they ignore something very important: context. President Obama is stuck spending so much time raising money for his re-election campaign for two major reasons.

First, the nation’s public financing system for presidential candidates, which went into effect in 1976 and was used by Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush for their re-elections, has fallen apart. The maximum $91.2 million available for the major parties’ nominees is insufficient for the costs of a modern national campaign. Neither Obama nor Mitt Romney will participate in the system this year. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who lost his presidential bid after accepting the funds and associated limits, said that “no Republican in his or her right mind is going to agree to public financing. I mean, that’s dead. That is over.” Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), the 2004 loser, strongly discouraged his party’s 2008 nominee from accepting the grants, noting that it was insufficient to “adequately fund the campaigns.”

But this was not always true. The five previous presidents needed to raise money for only their primary campaign, as public financing would kick in for the general. Reagan, meanwhile, was able to avoid raising any money entirely because he faced no primary and thus automatically received the Republican nomination and the the public financing that came with it. (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also escaped re-nomination contests, but opted to use some primary funds to boost their standing for the general.)

Second, President Obama is the first president to run for re-election in the post-Citizens United world. While other Presidents ran against opponents whose fundraising was limited by individual contribution limits, Obama has to keep pace with not just the Romney campaign, but also with outside groups that can raise and spend unlimited sums of money raised from wealthy donors and big corporations, which on balance support Republicans. Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super PAC and Crossroads GPS 501(c)(4) alone may have $200 million or more to spend on television attack ads, and numerous other right-wing organizations are also getting into the act.

Also, unlike most of his predecessors and Mitt Romney, Obama has vowed to not accept PAC money, accept donations from lobbyists, or allow any registered lobbyists to “bundle” contributions for his campaign. That leaves fundraising from generous donors as the only way to afford a modern presidential campaign.

Former Bush political adviser Mark McKinnon criticized the Romney campaign for its handling of former foreign policy spokesman Ric Grenell, who resigned from the campaign just weeks after being hired. Romney had been under fire from anti-gay activists on the far right for taking on Grenell, who is openly gay, and instead of standing up the haters, the campaign muzzled the Grenell, then grudgingly accepted his resignation in order to avoid a confrontation.

McKinnon, who also served on Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) 2008 presidential run and went on to found the group No Lables, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell today that Grenell’s departure is “very unfortunate” and said Romney should have stood by his aide, because Americans want a president who has “clear convictions and stands behind his decisions”:

MCKINNON: It’s disappointing, it’s frustrating for a lot of us Republicans who would like to see more people like Grenell in positions of authority. … Clearly, he was being muzzled for some reason…and that seems to a response to pressure from the right.

These are examples where people like me would like to see Mitt Romney stand up and say, I don’t care what people think, this is my guy, I’m standing behind him, and I want him out front. We need to see more examples of that, because what people ultimately want in a president is somebody who’s strong, somebody who’s bold, somebody who has clear convictions and stands behind his decisions.

Watch it:

McKinnon added that “the problem was not edgy,” referring to Grenell’s controversial tweets disparaging women and political opponents. The “Romney folks were well aware of how edgy he was. And I think they wanted an edgy guy in the position.”

After the Boston Herald reported that Elizabeth Warren listed herself as “Native American” while she was a professor at Harvard Law School, Sen. Scott Brown’s (R-MA) campaign quickly attacked his Democratic opponent for listing herself as a minority, insinuating that she did so for professional gain. “Prof. Warren needs to come clean about her motivations for making these claims and explain the contradictions between her rhetoric and the record,” said Brown campaign spokesman Jim Barnett.

But Warren, who is likely 1/32 Cherokee (though it’s unclear if her great-great-great grandmother was full-blooded), fought back against Brown’s accusations, saying she grew up discussing her Native American heritage and hoped to meet others who shared similar roots, according to the Boston Herald:

“I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off,” said Warren.

The Harvard Law professor argued she didn’t use her minority status to get her teaching jobs, and slammed her Republican rival U.S. Sen.Scott Brown for suggesting otherwise.

“The only one as I understand it who’s raising any question about whether or not I was qualified for my job is Scott Brown and I think I am qualified and frankly I’m a little shocked to hear anybody raise a question about whether or not I’m qualified to hold a job teaching,” she said, pushing to put Brown on defense. “What does he think it takes for a woman to be qualified?”

Warren is right to be proud of her roots, and it is unfair for Brown’s campaign and others to attack her for it by accusing her of claiming minority status to improve her career. Native Americans faced discrimination and societal pressure to hide their backgrounds for years, and until 2005, Boston even had an antiquated law on the books that banned Native Americans from entering the city.

It is ignorant to attack Warren based on an arbitrary limit on how much Native American blood she has, when the tribe doesn’t even do that themselves. Just like Warren, the chief of the Cherokee Nation is only 1/32 Native American.

At a fundraiser in Virginia last night, Mitt Romney touted his experience running the Salt Lake City Olympic Games in 2002 — a familiar refrain — but also introduced a new rhetorical line about something more specific: lapel pins. He told a story about the “We Stand United” American flag pins he commissioned for the games, which took place just months after the terror attacks on 9/11. Romney touted his creation of the pins as a means to explain how he hopes to bring Americans together:

ROMNEY: And so we created a little pin and we notified people that we’re now going to be selling these pins and the proceeds are going to go [to charity]. … I just remember going downstairs after it was announced — we were in a big, tall skyscraper in Salt Lake City, and it must have been next door I think where they were selling these pins, and there was a line all the way down the street.

Watch it:

Complicating Romney’s patriotic message is the fact that the pins were made in China, according to a website run by the Utah state government’s culture department, as TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro pointed out on Twitter.

Outsourcing has been a latent issue in the campaign, and just yesterday the Obama campaign released an ad hitting Romney for “shipp[ing] American jobs to places like Mexico and China” when he led Bain Capital. Indeed, Bain was outsourcing jobs even while Romney was governor. And his top economic adviser Greg Mankiw (who was recently promoted to chairman of Harvard’s economics department) said that “offshoring” American jobs is a good thing.

Meanwhile, Lynn Sweet at the Chicago Sun-Times notes that a conference call hosted by the Republican National Committee (RNC) yesterday attacking President Obama for “high unemployment” was hosted by a firm in The Philippines (apparently a subcontractor of Verizon, whom the RNC used).

A 119 days after she dropped out of the presidential race Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will finally endorse presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney today.

“She really liked Romney during all the debates,” he former campaign manager said. You wouldn’t have known it from watching the debates, where Bachmann repeatedly trashed Romney, as she did for months during her primary bid. Here are Bachmann’s 10 best hits on Romney:

1. CAN’T BEAT OBAMA — “He cannot beat Obama,” Bachmann told ABC News in December. “It’s not going to happen.”

2. ‘NEWTROMNEY’ — During the moment that Newt Gingrich was on top, Bachmann lumped the two leading candidates together as single entity — “NewtRomney” — a corrupt insider who supported socialized Medicine and other nefarious liberal polices. “When you take a look and people say this is a two man race I would agree, but the one man is ‘NewtRomney’ and the other man is Michele Bachmann, the only proven consistent conservative,” she told CBS News.

3. ROMNEY WRONG ON IMMIGRATION, CLIMATE, STIMULUS — Bachmann went on to say that ” ‘NewtRomney‘ are on the same side as the president when it comes to cap and trade, the $700 billion bailout, illegal immigration, even the payroll tax this week.” “NewtRomney” also “advocated for the healthcare mandate,” she said.

4. ‘BIG GOVERNMENT CANDIDATE’ — During a debate in Iowa, Bachmann charged that “Mitt Romney is the big government candidate.”

5. ‘CHAMELEON’ — In a speech in Florida, Bachmann called Romney a “chameleon” for his propensity to change positions in the political winds.

6. NOT PRO-LIFE — At the same speech, she said, “If you look at Mitt Romney, he…has been very inconsistent on his positions. He has been both sides of the abortion issue, on both sides of the issue of same-sex marriage.”

7. PRO-GAY MARRAIGE — Bachmann accused Romney of signing “189 same-sex marriage licenses.” This attack was false, but Bachmann said it cast doubt on Romney’s willingness “to fight against same-sex marriage.”

8. INDIVIDUAL MANDATE — Bachmann repeatedly hit Mitt Romney for implementing the antecedent of ObamaCare while governor of Massachusetts, saying the dreaded individual mandate “was Newt Gingrich’s idea, and Mitt Romney implemented it.”

9. NOT COMMITTED TO REPEALING OBAMACARE — Bachmann often criticized Romney’s plan to repeal Obamacare, which she said didn’t go far enough. “You’ve got to full-scale repeal it, and I don’t think the governors have that level of commitment to do it,” she said in a radio interview in Iowa.

10. ROMNEY ENDORSEMENT FALSE — Back in February, Bachmann seemed to take offense at the prospect of endorsing Romney, demanding the Boston Globe retract a “completely false” story reporting that negations were in the works. “Let me be absolutely clear — there are absolutely no negotiations between me and the Romney campaign regarding any pending endorsement of Governor Romney,” she said in a statement.

See Rick Santorum’s and Gingrich’s best hits on Romney before they endorsed him.

Mitt Romney and many other top Republican officals have quietly met with Fox News chief Roger Ailes, Politico reports today. Both House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have privately met with Ailes — McConnell speaks with Ailes “regularly” and the two are “confidant[s] of more than two decades” — while Romney and Ailes have “mutual respect for one another,” a spokesperson said.

Why Republicans would want to meet with Ailes, who was a Republican political operative before entering broadcast news, is obvious. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) himself said, the network is “a powerful voice in the Republican Party.” The channel claims to be an impartial and “fair and balanced” source, but it clearly plays a major role in shaping and advancing conservative narratives, and thus can be a huge asset to GOP politicians.

The investigation into Fox News’ parent company NewsCorp’s operations in U.K. have exposed the lengths to which politicians went to curry favor with Rupert Murdoch and his media empire there, and the American conservatives’ meetings with Ailes seem to be in the same vein.