During an interview on CNN with Republican Virginia state delegate Robert Marshall, host Brooke Baldwin compared the struggle for LGBT rights to discrimination against African Americans and asked the lawmaker why he voted to block Richmond prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland from becoming a judge in a misdemeanor court.

"Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks never took an oath of office that they broke," Marshall explained, claiming that Thorne-Begland lied about his sexuality to join that military in the late 1980s.

"Sodomy is not a civil right. It's not the same as a civil rights movement," Marshall insisted.

"You bring up sodomy," the shocked CNN host noted. "Is the reason why you voted against him because he's gay, pure and simple?"

"Sorry, you're mischaracterizing that," Marshall replied. "I said sodomy is not a civil right, and there's an effort by homosexual lobbyists to equate the two. That's wrong. It's a pattern of behavior."

"From what I understand, this would have been a misdemeanor court," Baldwin countered. "In fact, one of your own Republican colleagues there in the House sponsoring his nomination, sponsoring Thorne-Beglan's nomination said this -- quote -- 'It is without question that Thorne-Beglan is extremely qualified.' The type of issues, social issues that would touch upon someone's constitutional interpretation, these things do not even come up in district court. Still, you feel that he would be unqualified to sit on that bench?"

"We don't accept everybody who is nominated. Moreover, he would preside -- he could preside as a district judge for a marriage of two guys if he wanted to, in violation of the law," Marshall opined. "Moreover, if you have a bar-room fight between a homosexual and heterosexual, I'm concerned about possible bias."

"Why would a homosexual - why would a gay person be more likely to be biased in the bar room example than say, you would?" CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill wondered. "I mean, to be quite frank, I would be more concerned you would be biased against the gay or lesbian person in that case."

"I wouldn't apply to be a judge," Marshall explained. "I am an advocate."

"But you are writing law," Baldwin pointed out.

"That's my job," the lawmaker quipped. "When I was in public school, we all went through a ritual. I know you may find it strange, that said keep us from temptation. This was because we said the Lord's Prayer. Nobody - nobody should go where they'll be tempted. That includes me, that includes you, that includes a prospective judge."

In its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States determined that so-called sodomy laws in Texas and 13 other states, including Virginia, were unconstitutional.

By Wendell Potter - The Affordable Care Act might havebeen able to curtail spending further if it hadn’t been for Sarah Palin’s reckless rhetoric. It was Palin who charged that a provision of the law allowing Medicare to pay doctors for having end-of-life discussions with their patients would lead to government-run “death panels.”

That provision was important because, according to the Congressional Research Service, about one-fourth of total Medicare spending is for the last year of life, and a lot of that spending could be avoided if more folks received counseling from their doctors on what they should do to ensure that their wishes are carried out when the grim reaper comes calling.

No one understands this better than Dan Morhaim, an adjunct professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and deputy majority leader of the Maryland House of Delegates. Morhaim, who also has been an emergency room physician and internist, has seen many cases in which people were hooked up to machines in vain attempts to restore their health — so many, in fact, that he wrote a book that should be required reading on Capitol Hill.

After reading Morhaim’s book, “The Better End—Surviving (and Dying) on Your Own Terms in Today’s Modern Medical World,” you’ll want to be sure you have a living will or advance directive in place—for your own good, for your family’s good and for your country’s as well.

Advance directives, which allow you to specify the kind of care you want as you approach the end of life, “offer something rare and important in our modern medical system,” Morhaim wrote. “They provide an opportunity to exert influence.”

And that’s never been more important, Morhaim contends. “As the baby boom generation reaches its senior years, as new lifesaving medical treatments are announced almost weekly and as our health care system confronts a crisis of affordability, the need is urgent for ordinary people to demand participation in end-of-life decisions.”

Another physician lawmaker who once shared Morhaim’s passion on this issue is Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana. Boustany, a heart surgeon, was one of three Republicans who cosponsored a bill in 2009 that formed the basis of the provision Palin maligned and mischaracterized.

When other Republicans began adopting Palin’s talking point, Boustany was forced to defend his support of the original bill. He was quoted as saying that he knew of many situations in which a critically ill patient hadn’t made his wishes known, leaving family members with the burden of making end-of-life treatment decisions. “This happens every day, multiple times, in hospitals across the country,” he said. “It’s a very important issue.”

The principal sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said he was stunned when the controversy erupted. “It’s just beyond bizarre,” he told reporters at the time, noting that his bill had broad bipartisan support before Palin posted the death-panel charge on her Facebook page.

One of the original advocates of overhauling Medicare by providing direct but limited government support to individual patients says the current House Republican plan that includes this provision should be rejected by Congress.

In a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee late last month, Henry Aaron, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and one of the original advocates of so-called premium support plans as an alternative to traditional Medicare spending, explained that he had “changed his mind” about the potential effectiveness of the premium support plan that is a key element of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) House budget proposal. As Aaron put it:

While I would not go so far as to argue that premium support should never be considered for Medicare, I believe that there are overwhelming and persuasive reasons why it should not be enacted now. I also have become less confident that premium support, even if it works for the rest of the population, would be desirable for Medicare.

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.)..."I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don't know that," Coffman said. "But I do know this, that in his heart, he's not an American. He's just not an American."

After a short pause, which Elbert County Republican Chairman Scott Wills recalled as "deafening silence," Coffman was met with applause, tentative at first.

This comes just one month after another GOP freshman, Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler, expressed her own doubts about the President's place of birth.

In a letter to Citizens United supporters, Mike Huckabee made clear his feelings about President Barack Obama. Commenting about how he doesn't trust the president, he went on to say that Obama has surrounded himself with "morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics."

Said Huckabee:

Listen, you're a person of faith and so am I. In his administration and now on his re-election campaign, President Obama has surrounded himself with morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics.

The case for Jindal has been made before and now the argument is joined by Grover Norquist

The war over Bain has finally arrived.

And Republicans throughout the political universe are wondering whether Mitt Romney is ready.

As the Obama campaign this week began a concerted attack on the presumptive GOP nominee for his tenure at the private equity firm he managed, strategists in both parties say the Republican has yet to give a confident, detailed explanation of his Bain Capital tenure that silences questions about his biography as a businessman. So far in 2012, Romney — who is centering his presidential campaign on economic leadership — has rarely if ever managed to speak about Bain in any but the most defensive of terms.

The anti-Bain message is an attack Romney has faced in every race of his political career, sometimes managing to control the damage — and other times, like his 1994 Senate bid, watching his campaign go up in smoke as a result.

[The reaction President Barack Obama received from the audience at Barnard College on Monday] represents a telling contrast from the one his opponent, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, received Saturday when he delivered the commencement address at the evangelical Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Both schools are representative of each man's political base - for Obama, college-educated women and youths, for Romney, socially conservative Christians.

But while Obama's reaction was enthusiastic, Romney's reception felt polite. The president's speech rallied supporters already dedicated to his cause; Romney simply tendered a peace treaty to men and women who view him warily. Some students at Liberty, after all, were worried the GOP's putative nominee would be booed.

...That difference in tone between the two events might be indicative of how each base feels about their respective standard-bearer. Obama, after a first term plagued by criticism from what former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called "the professional left," has consolidated his base. Liberals have closed ranks in large part thanks in large part to a newly populist economic pitch, a GOP primary that presented a clear contrast between Obama and the GOP, and, most recently, his support of gay marriage.

Romney, in contrast, still has to approach the Republican Party's social conservatives gingerly, careful not to veer too sharply to the middle lest he incur their wrath. Note how he's equivocated on the issue of gay parents adopting children.

Today the Obama team unveiled its hard-hitting ad campaign focusing on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital with an exposé of the handling of Armco / GS Technologies / GS Industries, aka GST Steel:

Kansas City's GST Steel had been making steel rods for 105 years when Romney and his partners took control in 1993. They cut corners and extracted profit from the business at every turn, placing it deeply in debt. When the company eventually declared bankruptcy, workers not only lost their jobs but were denied their full pensions and health insurance, and the government was forced to step in and provide a bailout.

Read more at RomneyEconomics.com.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney delivers the commencement address to the graduating class of Liberty University, the world's largest Christian university, telling them that marriage is between "one man and one woman".

...

The Lynchburg, Virginia, school, founded by the late television evangelist Jerry Falwell, is a bastion for conservative Christian thought. Its theology students are taught that Mormonism - Mr Romney's religion - is a cult.

But Mr Romney seized the opportunity to try to show evangelicals that he and they have much in common, and carefully avoided talking about his own faith. Instead, Mr Romney appealed to the "free exercise of religious faith" as a cherished American value.

"Perhaps religious conscience upsets the designs of those who feel that the highest wisdom and authority comes from government," said Mr Romney. "But from the beginning, this nation has trusted in God, not man."

Here's a link to the full transcript of Romney's speech, and here's a link to a video of the full commencement address.

Rep. Michele Bachmann insisted Thursday she’s withdrawing her Swiss citizenship to “make it perfectly clear” that she’s a “proud American citizen,” but intense criticism from the right may have forced her decision.  The news that the Minnesota Republican became a Swiss citizen on March 19 was greeted poorly by conservative blogs — which normally argue in her favor — as writers called her dual citizenship “treason,” “career-ending” and an “insult."

A former Bachmann congressional staffer told POLITICO that the congresswoman sometimes acts “impulsively” and suggests that she must have registered for citizenship without considering all consequences.

“She didn’t think there was anything wrong with holding or applying for Swiss citizenship while serving as a member of the U.S. Congress. She didn’t think it might be perceived as a conflict of interest as a candidate for president or for reelection to her House seat,” said the staffer. “But one might think she’d be better served to focus first on her constituents in Minnesota and then on her fellow citizens in Switzerland.”

Mark Krikorian, an influential anti-immigration writer who contributes to the National Review and heads the Center for Immigration Studies, led the charge in the blogosphere with three articles in two days about how Bachmann’s dual citizenship was wrong.  “This is outrageous and she needs to hear about it… Dual citizenship isn’t simply a matter of convenience, a way to make travel easier or a sentimental tie to the Auld Sod,” argued Krikorian. “It’s an insult to both countries.”  Elsewhere, the criticism was even fiercer.  “Dual Citizenship Is Treason,” blared a headline at the Daily Paul, a website “inspired by” Ron Paul.

Arizona businesses that designate themselves to be a "religiously affiliated employer" will no longer have to include contraceptives in the insurance coverage they provide for their workers.

Gov. Jan Brewer signed legislation to broaden an exemption to a 2002 law, which spells out that businesses that provide prescription drugs as part of their health insurance plans cannot exclude birth control pills. The governor said she was satisfied with the last-minute compromise worked out by lawmakers.

"In its final form, this bill is about nothing more than preserving religious freedom to which were all constitutionally entitled," Brewer said in a prepared statement. "Mandating that a religious institution provide a service in direct contradiction with its faith would represent an obvious encroachment upon the First Amendment."

...Ron Johnson, who lobbies on behalf of the bishops, said that reference to "abortion inducing drugs" relates to what is known as the "morning-after pill," essentially high doses of hormones.

One explanation of how that drug works is that it prevents a woman from ovulating. But there also are those who believe that it prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb, which some say is the equivalent of abortion.

Johnson noted the entire fight in Arizona, however, could be rendered moot depending on what happens in Washington.

...Brewer also took her own slap at the Obama administration.

"It's ObamaCare that created this issue by forcing church-affiliated employers and non-profits to offer services in violation of their religious faith," she said in her statement.

ABC News' Robin Roberts: Mitt Romney just said that he deserves credit for the revival of the U.S. auto industry.

President Obama: (Laughs.)

Roberts: How do you respond to that?

The President: Well, you know I think this is one of those Etch-A-Sketch moments. I don't think anybody takes that seriously. People remember his position which was "let's let Detroit go bankrupt." So, had we followed his advice, at that time, GM and Chrysler would have gone under, and we would have lost probably a million jobs throughout the Midwest.

State treasurer Richard Mourdock (R) rehashed a favorite GOP talking point — that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay income taxes — at the town hall in Columbus City, Indiana, comparing those 47 percent to the Confederate states that seceded from the Union in an attempt to protect and expand slavery. Referencing Lincoln’s speech, Mourdock said that as long as nearly half of Americans don’t pay taxes, “we are a house divided” that is presumably on the point to another fight, this time between the rich and the poor:

MOURDOCK: What he meant by that was that slavery was either going to be totally eliminated from the United States or it was no longer just going to be restricted to the Southern states, it was going to go everywhere. I am here to suggest to you that we are in a house divided. You know this past April, when our federal taxes were paid, 47 percent — 47 percent — of all American households paid no income tax. In fact, half of that 47 percent almost, actually got tax money back from the government that they never paid -– because a few years ago we revised the welfare program to make it part of the tax code. When 47 percent are paying no income taxes — they do pay Social Security — but they are not paying income taxes, and 53 percent are carrying the load, we are a house divided.

Watch it

Former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has become a citizen of Switzerland, a European country with a government philosophy almost nothing like her own.

In an interview Tuesday with the Swiss television station Schweizer Fernsehen, Bachmann said her husband, Marcus Bachmann, was born to Swiss immigrants and that her family visits Switzerland often. Marcus Bachmann was granted Swiss citizenship on March 19, and Michele Bachmann, as his spouse, automatically gained the same, according to the station.

The interviewer informed Bachmann, a Minnesota representative and favorite of the Tea Party movement, that she is now eligible to seek public office in Switzerland.

The Miami Herald’s Marc Caputo reports that next week the Romney campaign will be doing a major fundraising blitz across Florida, including an event “at the Star Island manse of pharmaceutical magnate Phil and Pat Frost where dinner costs $50,000.”

Who is Dr. Phil Frost? He is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Teva Pharmaceuticals, a major manufacturer of contraceptives. Its North American website prominently advertises several forms of contraception, including Plan B One Step, which Romney previously denounced as an “abortive pill”:

This isn’t Romney’s first instance of hypocrisy on this issue. Earlier this year, ThinkProgress revealed Romney’s hypocrisy, noting that he was financially invested in — and profiting from — the very products he was seeking to restrict affordable access to:

Romney’s Goldman Sachs 2002 Exchange Place Fund, valued at over a million dollars in 2010, brought in nearly $600,000 in gains in 2010 and is invested in:

- Watson Pharmaceuticals: manufacturer of nine forms of emergency contraception (which Romney incorrectly identifies as “abortifacients“).
- Johnson & Johnson: launched the first U.S. prescription birth control product in 1931 and produces various forms of birth control.
- Merck: produces various forms of birth control
- Mylan: produces birth control medication and filed the first application for a generic birth control pill last year.
- Pfizer: a contraception producer that recently had to recall about a million packs of birth-control pills that weren’t packaged correctly.

Rep. Rick Berg (R-N.D.), who is running for the state's open U.S. Senate seat, was caught off guard when approached by a voter who wanted to know the state's minimum wage.

In the exchange, posted by the North Dakota Democratic Party, a young woman approaches Berg at a campaign event and asks him what the minimum wage is in the state.

"Hmmm," Berg replies. He then points to someone standing nearby and says, "This guy would know."

"I think it's probably seven something," he adds. "It depends -- they don’t have a minimum wage for waitresses in North Dakota."

They then ask someone else. That person says it's the same as the federal minimum wage, and asks Berg, "You know what that is?"

"Oh! Put it back on my shoulders!" the congressman jokingly replies.

The minimum wage in North Dakota is $7.25 an hour, which is the same as the federal minimum wage.

Senate candidates are increasingly being tripped up on minimum wage questions. At a recent Missouri GOP Senate debate, the four candidates vying for a chance to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) did not know the amount of the minimum wage. They opposed raising it, however.

This afternoon at a town hall in Cleveland, Ohio, Mitt Romney took a question about the Constitution from a supporter who said she believed that President Obama was "operating outside the Constitution" and "should be tried for treason."

Instead of challenging the absurd notion that President Obama should be tried for treason, Romney delivered a word salad about how he personally loved the Constitution and then invited the woman to explain in more detail what she meant.

The woman proceeded to spout references to Executive Orders, including one that she said involved the Secret Service restricting the rights of citizens to protest.

Romney, who is protected by a detail of Secret Service agents, said "I will be happy to look at what he has done about the Secret Service with respect to protests."

"What women want is competence . . . and Mitt Romney is competence in spades," said the former GOP presidential candidate during an appearance on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday...

“There's not a Republican war on women. That's coming from the Obama re-election team, because everything they do right now is,  any word that you hear will go through the grid of Obama's re-election,” she said...

“Mitt Romney is making a very positive case for women. Women know they can trust someone. What women want more than anything is jobs and the economy to turn around. That is the big issue,” said Bachmann.

“That's what Mitt Romney has spent his life delivering, and that's what he'll do if he's president of the United States. And I believe he will be president of the United States.”

On the same show, former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, however, argued that Bachmann's view of female voters was woefully out of touch.

"Women are terrified about what the Republicans are talking about," Dean said. He called Bachmann's comments on the female electorate "purely ridiculous."

Batten down the hatches, the neocons are coming...again. Mitt Romney already has his national security team lined up. No big surprises in it -- it reads like a re-air of the Bush Administration, and Sean Hannity is in his element.

Here are the people Sean Hannity calls "the best, brightest military minds, heroes" that he has ever had the opportunity to meet. Evidently he doesn't get out much. Sean's list includes Oliver North (convicted felon), Gen. Thomas McInerney (birther), KT McFarland (Reagan PR hack), Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Republican tea party water carrier, and more.

Hannity's purpose in convening this tribunal was to try the president for the crime of "spiking the football." Well, that and also to foment some sympathies for a war with Iran, and also pimp some participants' books, and also to further justify torture. It truly was a shameless display from a shameless partisan who feels not even a pang of compunction at stirring up support for more senseless death and destruction in the world.

Speaking [on ABC's This Week] about presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney selecting a vice presidential running mate, McCain said that the “primary, absolute, most important aspect is if something happened to him, would that person be well qualified to take that place?”

McCain then said: “I happen to believe that was the … primary factor on my decision in 2008, and I know it will be Mitt’s.”

Here's a link to a video clip of the complete interview. The V.P. comment is near the end, at about the 5.30 minute mark.

Ron Paul Raining on Romey's Parade - Mitt Romney may be getting all the splashy headlines in his march toward the August Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., but fellow Republican Ron Paul has been steadily fundraising, visiting primary states, picking up delegates and gaining control of state party organizations.

Backers of the libertarian-leaning U.S. representative from Texas -- the lone active challenger to Romney -- have taken control of the Iowa Republican Party and become more influential in party politics in several other states, The Hill and other media outlets reported.

State GOP organizations are usually responsible for get-out-the-vote efforts and other duties necessary for a successful election. If officials aren't Romney supporters, the former Massachusetts governor and Republicans down-ticket could suffer an enthusiasm gap.

By using party rules, Paul-ites have engineered post-primary organizing coups in several states, confirming what party insiders say would be an attempt to enhance Paul's role at the convention and in party's platform deliberations, The Washington Times said.

In Massachusetts -- the state where Romney governed -- Paul loyalists recently helped block more than half of Romney's preferred nominees from being named delegates at state party caucuses even though Romney won the state in a cakewalk.

While Paul is given virtually no chance of claiming the nomination in Tampa, he sure can try to jam up things and possibly deny Romney the nomination on the first ballot, insiders said. A candidate needs 1,144 delegates to win the party nod.

Paul's strength in Iowa and Nevada, two swing states in the presidential election, has emerged as Romney's biggest concern, observers told The Hill.

In fact, national party leaders wrote a letter to their state counterparts in Nevada, which Romney won.

In a letter delivered Wednesday to Nevada GOP Chairman Michael McDonald, RNC chief counsel John R. Philippe Jr. said if Ron Paul delegates were allowed to take too many slots for the national convention, Nevada's contingent may not be seated, the Las Vegas Sun reported.

"I believe it is highly likely that any committee with jurisdiction over the matter would find improper any change to the election, selection, allocation or binding of delegates, thus jeopardizing the seating of Nevada's entire delegation to the national convention," Philippe said in his letter but noting his letter was advisory only.

In Iowa, the state's new party chairman, A.J. Spiker, is a Paul supporter, as are a majority of the state party's central committee members. Spiker has pledged to work for all of the party's nominees.

Iowa originally was reported going for Romney, but a recount awarded the win to former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who has left the campaign.

Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, said he believes Spiker and others in the state party structure may not be inclined to do the work necessary to help Romney win there.

"This could be problematic for Romney down the road and problematic for Iowa Republicans in general," Robinson said. "I think Iowa's going to be very tough, very difficult for Mitt Romney this fall."

Ron Paul supporters take over Maine GOP convention - In a major upset, Ron Paul supporters narrowly won the chairmanship of the Maine Republican Convention today.

Paul supporter Brent Tweed edged Charles Cragin 1,118 to 1,114 in a very close vote.

The vote came after Paul supporters elected Ron Morrell secretary. Morrell got 1,119 votes out of 2,204 to be elected convention secretary.

Paul supporters are here in large numbers, with more than 500 having attended an organizational meeting last night and even more here today, said Matthew McDonald, a Waldo delegate and Paul supporter.

Those who support Paul are hoping to get at least 13 delegates, which would be a majority of those chosen for the national convention.

The chairman controls the meeting, including who can speak and what happens to procedural motions that are made. Because of that, the chairman can have a huge impact on the outcome of the convention and who is elected as delegates.

The upset is also a blow to Mitt Romney's campaign, which shows he has yet to be fully embraced by Maine Republicans.

Ron Paul Backers Take Over Alaska GOP - The presidential hopes, and long-term legacy within the Republican Party, of conservative-libertarian Ron Paul scored a major victory last Saturday, after backers of the Texas congressman were elected as party chairman and co-chairman at the Alaska state convention last week.

Russ Millette was elected the party’s chairman, beating out a candidate backed by outgoing chair Randy Ruedrich. The establishment Republican, who has run the Alaska GOP since 2000, decided to not run again. Debra Holle Brown, another Paul supporter, was voted in as co-chair.

At Nevada GOP convention Paul supporters oust two Romney backers from RNC - In a show of anti-establishment political power at Saturday's Nevada Republican Convention, GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul's supporters ousted two Mitt Romney backers from the Republican National Committee.

The vote came during a day of clashes between the two camps as Paul backers sought to install his people in the party hierarchy and elect as many Nevada delegates as possible to the national convention in Tampa, Fla.

RNC National Committeeman Bob List, a former Nevada governor, lost election to James Smack, the vice chairman of the state GOP and a longtime Paul supporter from Fallon. The vote was 932 for Smack and 623 for List.

RNC National Committeewoman Heidi Smith lost to Diana Orrock, one of Paul's backers. They have been taking control of the Clark County GOP for the past year. Carol Del Carlo of Incline Village also was in the running. Orrock got 902 votes to 429 for Del Carlo and 231 for Smith.

Each state has a female and male RNC representative on the committee, which runs the national Republican Party, a key duty in 2012 when the White House is at stake as well as control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

The new RNC committeeman and committeewoman won't begin serving their four-year terms until after the national GOP convention in August, when they'll be formally installed.

But having Paul supporters at the RNC could expand the Texas congressman's influence beyond the 2012 campaign as he promotes smaller government and more liberties.

Ron, Rand Paul hold joint tea party rally in Austin, Texas - Republican Presidential hopeful Ron Paul is teaming up with son Rand for what organizers promise will be a "massive" rally at the Texas Capitol.

The national Tea Party Express is sponsoring the [May 6th] event...

On Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law The Whole Woman’s Health Funding Priority Act, which bans Planned Parenthood and similar groups that offer abortions to women from receiving state funding. “This is a common-sense law that tightens existing state regulations and closes loopholes in order to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund abortions, whether directly or indirectly,” Brewer said. “By signing this measure into law, I stand with the majority of Americans who oppose the use of taxpayer funds for abortion.”

By Arnold Schwarzenegger - I've been writing my memoirs recently, and looking back at how I came to my political identity has reminded me that this election cycle marks my 44th year as a Republican. I can't imagine being anything else.

That's why I am so bothered by the party's recent loss of two up-and-coming Republicans: San Diego mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher, currently a state assemblyman, and former assemblyman and current Congressional candidate Anthony Adams, both of whom left the party to become independents. On the one hand, I respect their standing up for principle. On the other, I hate to see them go.

I'm sure they would have preferred to remain Republicans, but in the current climate, the extreme right wing of the party is targeting anyone who doesn't meet its strict criteria. Its new and narrow litmus test for party membership doesn't allow compromise.

I bumped up against that rigidity many times as governor. Not surprisingly, the party wasn't always too happy with me. But I had taken an oath to serve the people, not my party. Some advisors whose opinions I respect urged me to consider leaving the party and instead identify myself as a "decline to state" voter. But I'm too stubborn to leave a party I believe in.

It's time for the Republicans who are so bent on enforcing conformity to ask themselves a question: What would Ronald Reagan have done? He worked hard to maintain a welcoming, open and diverse Republican Party. He would have been appalled to see Republicans like Fletcher and Adams conclude that they had no other option than to leave the party.

We need to remind the Republicans who want to enforce ideological purity that if they succeed, they will undo Reagan's work to create an inclusive party that could fit many different views.

Liz Cheney has been making the rounds at Wyoming political events this spring and her desire to move back to the state has Republicans from Cheyenne to Washington buzzing about a potential future campaign.

With little fanfare, Cheney, a former State Department official and the eldest daughter of the former vice president, has spoken at six events in different corners of the sprawling state this year. She has been especially busy on the GOP dinner circuit. Cheney has already hit four county Lincoln Day Dinners and keynoted the dinner following the Wyoming GOP convention last month. She also accompanied and appeared on stage with her father when he made his first public appearance following his heart transplant at the state convention.

Cheney is currently a McLean, Va., resident and there has long been speculation among Republicans that she would eventually run for office there. But Cheney, a mother of five, is seeing her oldest child off to college this year and, along with her husband Philip, has long considered returning to the state that her father represented in the House. They hope to buy a house in Jackson Hole, where her parents also have a residence, but the move is not a sure thing.

Still, Cheney's schedule and some of her rhetoric suggests someone who is eyeing an eventual campaign.

"Let me tell you why Wyoming's style of politics is so important," Cheney said last month at the Park County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner, according to the Cody Enterprise. "There is a personal touch here that gets amazing people into office."

Talking to local radio station KGOS-KERM after speaking to Republicans at the Goshen County Lincoln-Reagan dinner, on the opposite end of the state from Cody, Cheney explained that her father was most proud of his days representing Wyoming.

"He has said to me that there is no title that he felt prouder of professionally than when he was called 'The Gentleman from Wyoming,'" Cheney said, adding that her dad was also honored to serve as defense secretary and vice president.

Sounding every bit the aspiring politician, Cheney has demurred when asked about her ambitions.

"Right now, I'm focused on the presidential campaign and getting Mitt Romney elected," she told the Cody paper.

Cheney declined to be interviewed by POLITICO.

Mitt Romney: "The President’s a nice guy, but he’s never had a job in the private sector."

But as Politicker pointed out:

It’s impossible to question Mr. Romney’s bonafides as a businessman, but we’re rather dubious of his claim President Obama has never held a private sectory job. For example, in 2001, the future president witnessed the 9/11 attacks from his offices at the Chicago law firm Miner, Barnhill and Galland. That sounds like a private sector job to us.

Yes, that job was in the private sector, and President Obama worked there for 12 years. In addition, at least three of the jobs he held as a young man were in the private sector: his first job after obtaining his bachelor's degree was at Business International Corporation and he held summer jobs at Sidney Austin, LLP and at Hopkins & Sutter.

So, I think we have to call this latest Romney claim another lie inaccurate.

Here's where Nugent lost it.

"You are many things, you are not moderate," Glor pointed out.

After a defensive aside related to his charity work, Nugent's temper rose and he began to yell at the reporter. "I'm an extremely loving, passionate man, and people who investigate me honestly, without the baggage of political correctness, ascertain the conclusion that I'm a damn nice guy. And if you can find a screening process more powerful than that I'll [BLEEP], [BLEEP], [BLEEP], [BLEEP]."

A momentary pause ensued before Nugent directed his focus off-screen, "Or [BLEEP][BLEEP][BLEEP] -- How's that sound?"

Noted Glor, this last statement was aimed at a female CBS news producer off camera.

Wow! No wonder Mitt Romney was so anxious to get Nugent's endorsement.

From The Hill:

In the discussion with CBN host David Brody, Bachmann is asked what lessons she learned from the 2012 campaign:

Michele Bachmann: I think one thing I learned is a person has to be extremely careful with what they say. Make sure you have Elvis Presley’s birthday down, because that’s very important, and know where John Wayne was born. Those are two extremely important pieces of information.

David Brody: Oh, the media loves to beat everybody up.

Michele Bachmann: What they focus on is kind of amazing, when it looks like the house is burning down around us, that’s what they care about.

David Brody: You ran pretty much an impeccable campaign, in terms of a mistake-free campaign.

Michele Bachmann: Thank you, it really was.

David Brody: It pretty much was.

Bachmann: It really was, we were extremely careful, and we were almost mistake-free, but for those two points, Elvis Presley’s birthday and John Wayne’s birthplace. I’ve apologized, and we moved beyond.

While on the campaign trail, Bachmann said that cowboy actor John Wayne was born in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. In fact, it was the infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy who was born there. The Minnesota congresswoman later wished singer Elvis Presley a happy birthday on the 34th anniversary of the iconic singer's death.

From Wonkette:

In this world, however, we can think of several more mistakes Michele Bachmann made. What’s the first one, off the top of the head?

This one

And also there was that time she needlessly attempted to make Rick Perry look stupid by claiming that a cancer vaccine makes girls “suffer retardation,” or that teabagger manifesto she signed comparing the enslavement of African-Americans favorably to life as a black person under Barack Obama’s tyrannical rule and yadda yadda we do not have another year to finish this list.

By Kevin Noble Maillard - If you are 1/32 Cherokee and your grandfather has high cheekbones, does that make you Native American? It depends. Last Friday, Republicans in Massachusetts questioned Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s racial ancestry. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has accused her of using minority status as an American Indian to advance her career as a law professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. The Brown campaign calls her ties to the Cherokee and Delaware nations a “hypocritical sham.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, Warren defended herself, saying, “Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.” Despite her personal belief in her origins, her opponents have seized this moment in an unnecessary fire drill that guarantees media attention and forestalls real debate.

This tactic is straight from the Republican cookbook of fake controversy. First, you need a rarefied elected office typically occupied by a certain breed of privileged men. Both the Presidency and the Senate fit this bill. Second, add a bit of interracial intrigue. It could be Kenyan economists eloping with Midwestern anthropologists, or white frontiersmen pairing with indigenous women. Third, throw in some suspicion about their qualifications and ambitions. Last but not least, demand documentation of ancestry and be dissatisfied upon its receipt. Voila! You have a genuine birther movement.

The Republican approach to race is to feign that it is irrelevant — until it becomes politically advantageous to bring it up. Birthers question Obama’s state of origin (and implicitly his multiracial heritage) in efforts to disqualify him from the presidency. They characterize him as “other.” For Warren, Massachusetts Republicans place doubts on her racial claims to portray her as an opportunistic academic seeking special treatment. In both birther camps, opponents look to ancestral origins as the smoking gun, and ride the ambiguity for the duration...

The Brown campaign asserts that Warren knowingly classified herself as Native American in the 1990s when Harvard weathered sharp criticism for its lack of faculty diversity. During this time, they argue, Warren relied upon this classification to enhance her employment opportunities and to improve Harvard’s numbers. Her faculty mentors at Harvard deny this and assert that the law school hired Warren without any knowledge of her ancestry...

Yesterday, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) stopped by Crosstalk, the flagship radio program of the far-right group VCY America (Voice of Christian Youth)

Walker: "Well it’s interesting, look at the March to March numbers, March of last year to March of this year, there’s a reason why we had some challenges there, particularly early on. In March, April and May, people can remember what was happening, thank goodness its passed now, you can remember what was happening last Spring in our state’s Capitol. There was a lot of uncertainty, particularly for small businesses, I know having held listening sessions all around this state, small business owners more than anything want certainty, they didn’t see that around the Capitol last year so that was one of the biggest challenges out there."

But the Christian Science Monitor reports that under Walker’s leadership the “state’s lead in job losses is significantly greater than the rest of the 50 states,” including 4,300 lost jobs just this March, long-after the protests took place...

Towards the end of the interview, Walker boasted of supporting “pro-patient, pro-women” policies. However, Walker made it more difficult for women seeking justice as a result of pay discrimination lawsuits by repealing provisions of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act, made it more difficult for women seeking an abortion and birth control, and defunded Planned Parenthood, which “cuts off 12,000 women who do not have health insurance from getting preventive health care” and hurts a program that saved the state money by focusing on preventative care.

Walker: "In our state it is today, and will continue to be as long as I am governor, against the law for any employer to discriminate against a woman for employment or a promotion or anything else to deal with the workplace. It has been and it continues to be and it will be as long as I am the governor. They just love trying to make things out of nothing out there. When it comes to the pro-life legislation we passed, I would argue the things that we did are pro-women.

"They’re pro-patient, they’re pro-women, they’re making sure that patients get all the facts at their disposal. And for those who claim to be about giving people a choice, shouldn’t it be an informed choice? Shouldn’t it be a choice without pressure from others out there?"

* "[H]e cannot beat Obama because his policy is the basis for Obamacare… It's too identical. It's not going to happen."

* "The reason President Obama and some Republicans can get behind socialized medicine is because they share the same core political philosophy about the purpose of government… We cannot preserve liberty for ourselves and our posterity if the choice in next November is between a frugal socialist and an out-of-control socialist."

* "If you want to talk about a poster child for crony capitalism it would be Newt Gingrich as the ultimate consummate influence peddler. But also Mitt Romney is also cut out of the same cloth in that he has been a consummate Washington, D.C. insider."

**********************************

M.Bach who said Mitt who is "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."

Or was it the Bachmann who in Florida said that Romney "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 – he in fact signed 189 marriage licenses for same-sex couples for the state of Massachusetts when he was governor."

Compiled from articles by Joe Garafoli and Dennis DiClaudio.

Governor Scott Walker raised two-thirds of his campaign money from outside Wisconsin in his most recent report filed with the state's election agency.

According to an analysis from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, more than $8 million of the roughly $13 million the governor raised this year came from individual donors living in other states. That's 66 percent of all the governor's individual contributions. It follows a reporting period covering late last year where the governor raised 61-percent of his money from out-of-state donors.

Citing Second Amendment protections in the U.S. Constitution, [Florida Governor Rick] Scott told Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn that conventions and guns have co-existed since the nation’s birth and would continue to do so during the four-day event beginning August 27.

“It is unclear how disarming law abiding citizens would better protect them from the dangers and threats posed by those who would flout the law,” the Republican governor said in a letter on Tuesday.

In a letter to Scott, Buckhorn said the Tampa City Council had banned a host of items from the area surrounding the convention facility, a list that includes water guns, poles and pieces of wood.

“One noticeable item missing from the city’s temporary ordinance is firearms,” Buckhorn wrote.

Ha ha, look at them all, thinking there’s any possibility they’ll ever get their money back:

Relief can’t come soon enough for the Gingrich campaign’s anxious creditors. The campaign owes Moby Dick Airways $1.1 million for travel and charter flights.; the Patriot Group, a Virginia security company, $449,502 for helping to protect the candidate; and McKenna, Long and Aldridge, a law firm with offices in Atlanta, $183,658 for legal services, the reports show.
But many of the campaign’s creditors are small businesses that say they will suffer major hardship if they are not paid.

In Phoenix, a company called Pro-Production Services is owed $32,506 for providing stages, lighting and sound equipment for a series of campaign appearances by Gingrich in Nevada last January.

“We floated quite a bit of money — a lot of out-of-pocket costs that we covered,” said Ryan Driscoll, a project manager for the company. “I am a little worried. Nobody wants to lose 32 grand.”

Vic Buttermore, owner of Signs Unlimited in Ocala, Fla., says he’s “keeping my fingers crossed” the Gingrich campaign will pony up the $15,000 it still owes for an order of 25,000 “Newt 2012″ lawn signs.

in Jonathan Weisman's profile of Ryan for the New York Times:

Ryan likes to dispel two "urban legends" around him. First, he said, he is not a disciple of Rand, the strident libertarian. Second, he never drove the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

In fact, there is some truth to both. In a 2009 Facebook video, Ryan said the "kind of thinking" in the Rand epics "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" was "sorely needed right now."

As for the Wienermobile, one summer as he was pressing Oscar Mayer Lunchables and turkey bacon on meat buyers in rural Minnesota, two "very nice young ladies" who were driving the hot-dog-shaped vehicle did let him "take it for a spin," he confessed.

This is classic NYT Beltway-style soft-pedaling: Ryan didn't merely say a few nice things about Rand in that 2009 video, which you can watch above. Here's the whole transcript:

RYAN: You know, it doesn't surprise me that sales of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have surged lately with the Obama administration coming in, because it's that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living right in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.

But more to the point is this: The issue that is under assault, the attack on democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America, is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what matters most. It is not enough to say that President Obama's taxes are too big, the health-care plan doesn't work for this or that policy reason, it is the morality of what is occurring right now and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack. And it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on, and we need that kind of comment more and more than ever.

Contrast that with what he tried to claim last week:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

"Swiss Bank Account" highlights Mitt Romney's belief that a strong economy is built on outsourcing, loopholes and risky financial deals. As a corporate CEO, he shipped American jobs to places like Mexico and China. As governor, Romney outsourced state jobs to India, and now as a candidate for president he is pushing tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.Romney's economic scheme stands in stark contrast with President Obama's efforts to continue moving the country forward by rebuilding an economy that's meant to last, by out-building, out-innovating and out-educating the rest of the world, and making the things the rest of the world buys by closing loopholes and providing incentives that are bringing jobs back to America.

About a month after Mitt Romney ended his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in February 2008, his eldest son, Tagg, and Spencer Zwick, the campaign’s top fund-raiser, met with a beef company executive who had been a major campaign donor over dinner at the posh Torrey Pines resort in San Diego.

This meeting, however, was not about politics. Instead, the younger Romney, who had been a senior adviser to his father, and Mr. Zwick presented the executive, John R. Miller, with a business proposition: the opportunity to invest in a private equity fund they were starting, Solamere Capital.

Neither had experience in private equity. But what the close friends did have was the Romney name and a Rolodex of deep-pocketed potential investors who had backed Mr. Romney’s presidential run — more than enough to start them down that familiar path from politics to profit.

Two years later, despite a challenging fund-raising climate for private equity, Solamere, named after a wealthy enclave in Utah’s Deer Valley where the Romneys have a winter home, finished raising its first fund. The firm blew past its $200 million goal, securing $244 million from 64 investors, including a critical, early $10 million from Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, and hefty commitments from wealthy supporters of the campaign.

The small firm, including Tagg Romney, 42, Mr. Zwick, 32, and a third partner they brought in, Eric Scheuermann, 47, the only one with a private equity background, is in line to collect at least $16.8 million in fees over the first six years of the fund, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm has earned a 20 percent return since 2010, despite having invested only about half of its money so far.

It is not unusual for start-ups looking for investors to approach friends and relatives. But the overlap between the elder Romney’s political apparatus and Solamere adds a different, potentially nettlesome dimension, given the widespread presumption since the last presidential election that the former Massachusetts governor was next in line for the Republican nomination.

Solamere’s founders dispute any notion that they have cashed in on their political connections, arguing that Solamere, like any fund, has had to persuade investors on its merits.

“No one we went to as an investor said, ‘Oh, your dad is Mitt Romney, I’m going to give you $10 million,” Tagg Romney said, noting that his father’s political future was uncertain when the firm began. He added, “Our relationships with people got us in the door, but that did not get us investors.”

Even so, Mitt Romney was the featured speaker at Solamere’s first investor conference in Deer Valley in January 2010. Mr. Romney, who made his fortune in private equity at Bain Capital, also gave early strategic advice.

While Solamere has not operated exactly as a subsidiary of the Romney campaign, it has seemed that way at times. The firm shared its first address with the Romney campaign headquarters in Boston. Later, the company was located in the same building as Mr. Romney’s leadership PAC, Free and Strong America, before moving to trendy Newbury Street in Boston.

When Mr. Zwick was leading Solamere’s fund-raising in 2008 and 2009, he was also raising money for the leadership PAC, which paid his finance consulting firm, SJZ, LLC, more than $425,000 during those years.

Solamere began sending offering memorandums to prospective investors in May 2008, around the time the leadership PAC began collecting checks, raising the possibility that Mr. Zwick was soliciting some people for both ventures.

Mr. Zwick insisted there was no conflict, explaining that the work he did for the political committee was relatively low-key. He said the payments to his firm went to other contractors, and that he was a volunteer.

Talking Points Memo in an article titled, "Why Mitt Romney Won't Take GOP Down Another VP Rabbit Hole" quoted a strategist who said my mom is "a case study on what not to do. The McCain campaign really screwed up by going in and picking someone who was just gonna shake up the ticket when they should have picked someone who's safe."

In other words, the pundits say Senator McCain made a huge mistake. But where's the evidence to back up this conventional wisdom?  I'm not a pundit, but I remember the race.  I was there. I remember the frenzied crowds after my mom joined the ticket.  I remember the huge fundraising surge.  I remember her convention speech.  I even remember how McCain/Palin took a polling lead over Obama/Biden.

Then the economy melted down.  You could feel people's fear.  You could see it in their eyes on the trail.  McCain suspended his campaign to rush back to Washington to deal with the crisis.  A lot of people criticized him, but he did what he thought was right.  And guess what, the economy was melting down while Republicans were in charge.

Take a good look at this list of polls.  Shortly after Senator McCain picked my mom, the polls turned favorable.  But he lost the lead for good the week he suspended his campaign, and we never got it back.  Not in a single poll.

But even then, my Mom helped.  A lot.  She raised millions of dollars that helped us fight hard until the last moment. And Senator McCain actually performed better among those for whom the "Palin Pick" was very important to their vote.  Immediate post-election polling shows a large majority of Republicans thought my mom helped Senator McCain and more than 90% had a favorable or very favorable view of her.

...Mom answered the call to serve her country, energized the base, and inspired millions. Plus, she did it with good humor and grace.  I don't know what else she could've reasonably be [sic] expected to do.

The economy was collapsing, and the Democrats had nominated "The One."  My mom worked wonders, and it was such a joy watching her connect with Americans from coast to coast.  But she could not work miracles.

By Jon Meacham: Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is “politicizing” an important national event. In this sense, “politicizing” might be best translated as “beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.” The [Bill Clinton] ad itself raises intriguing, substantive, legitimate questions — and the ferocious, sputtering Republican reaction is proof positive that they know it, or at least suspect it.

The ad’s theme is that Obama made a courageous and risky decision to send in the SEALs. Here the President has history and facts on his side: it was a courageous and risky call. Had the mission failed, had it been another Desert One, the very people now criticizing the President for trumpeting the achievement would be beginning their second year of excoriating Obama for weakness and fecklessness. And anyone weighing whether to re-elect the President should take the bin Laden operation into account: it is a powerful exhibit that Obama is a steely Commander in Chief — a critical test for many Americans.

...I take what President Clinton says in the ad seriously: “Look, he knew what would happen,” Clinton says of Obama. “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there and it hadn’t been bin Laden? Suppose they had been captured or killed? The downside would have been horrible. But he reasoned, ‘I cannot in good conscience do nothing.’ He took the harder, more honorable path and the one that produced, in my opinion, the more honorable and best result.”

The way to put oneself in a position to take the harder, more honorable political path is to argue for one’s virtues in a vigorous way. That’s what Obama has done, and is doing. There’ll be more punches coming.

Asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley whether Romney’s wealth presented him with a “hill to climb” in tough economic times, Boehner said it wouldn’t because “the American people don’t want to vote for a loser”:

CROWLEY: You know, he comes from a privileged background. You did not come from a privileged background. This is a time — an economic time when people are hurting and have been hurting for quite some time.

Do you think that someone who is as wealthy as he is, who has had as much privilege as he is, has a hill to climb to overcome that?

BOEHNER: No. The American people don’t want to vote for a loser. They don’t want to vote for someone that hasn’t been successful. I think Mitt Romney has an opportunity to show the American people that they, too, can succeed.

“Recall Walker” bumper stickers dotted the workers’ parking lot at the Georgia Pacific paper mill on Day Street here one recent afternoon, proof of their union’s role in the effort to oust Gov. Scott Walker from office early for his legislation limiting public employees’ bargaining rights.

But among the largest donors to Mr. Walker and his cause are the plant’s owners, the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch, the latter of whom has said of the recall election to be held in June, “If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power.”

The recall vote here has been billed as a critical test of labor muscle versus corporate money. But it is only a warm-up for a confrontation that will play out during the presidential election, which both sides view as the biggest political showdown in at least 30 years between pro- and anti-union forces — a labor-management fight writ large.

The same national groups flooding the streets and the airwaves in Wisconsin — the Koch-supported group Americans for Prosperity on the right, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., teachers unions and the United Steelworkers on the left — are emerging as important outside supporters of President Obama and Mitt Romney, each side empowered by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

That ruling is not only giving wealthy donors like the Kochs greater options for pouring tens of millions of dollars into the presidential election. It is also giving unions — many of them representing workers in some of the major donors’ own factories — the ability for the first time ever to spend money from union treasuries for campaigning among nonunion voters.

The combination of the squeeze on state budgets, high rates of unemployment and the conservative movement’s revived energy provided an opening for Republican efforts, often business-backed, to promote tough-on-labor legislation in key states. Those efforts have succeeded in rolling back gains made by unions over decades, prompting vows from labor to fight back with newly engaged members shaken from self-described complacency.

One of Mitt Romney's top advisers said Saturday that President Obama's decision to bailout Chrysler and General Motors was actually Romney's idea.

"[Romney's] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that," Eric Fehrnstrom, senior adviser to the Romney campaign, said.

"The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney's advice."

The claim appears to be a shift from Mitt Romney's November 2008 op-ed in The New York Times, headlined, "Let Detroit go bankrupt."

Wiener was spending time in the Angeles City red light district when he apparently stopped a photographer on the street to take a picture of him posing with a quartet of scantily clad women in an area well known as a hub of prostitution.

It turned out, however, the photographer was not just some American tourist taking in the sights. He was a professional photographer named John Keatley, who was in the country documenting the sex tourism industry.

Now, the Bernalillo County commissioner and ex-state senator is facing questions about what exactly he was doing there after the photographer posted the photos online along with a description of the encounter.

"You can't assume anyone there on the street is there for sex," Keatley said Thursday in an interview with TPM. "But my encounter with Michael Wiener was very different…It was very obvious to me that he was not respectful to women. He was there to have a good time."

Keatley said the women in the photo were what are called "bar girls." They are often prostitutes who work at bars in a section of the city known to have one of the most booming sex trades in the world. "There is this place where everyone is for sale and boatloads of Americans are going there for one purpose only," Keatley said.

Albuquerque, N.M., television station KOB-TV confronted the Republican commissioner with the photograph this week and gave him a chance to respond. Wiener acknowledged he was the person shown in the picture but denied he was there to pay for sex. He said he was in the area with his girlfriend and that the two of them were waiting to catch a plane to visit his daughter in a nearby city.

Think Progresss: [Romney Attacks Stimulus At College That Took Stimulus Funds] "Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney campaigned with Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who presides over one of the least job-creating states in America, today at Otterbein College — a school that benefited from the passage of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the stimulus."

The last time the Republicans were in charge they collapsed the economy and left us in complete economic and fiscal meltdown. We know this because we all lived it.

Romney and his surrogates have revealed an ongoing Cold War fixation. Former Reagan Navy Secretary John Lehman and former Bush administration Ambassador Pierre Prosper, on Thursday derailed Romney messaging in a conference call with reporters by raising the specter of the “Soviet Union” and slamming Obama for not protecting Czechoslovakia — a country that was peacefully dissolved in 1993 and now exists as the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Obama is “withdrawing from leading the free world in maintaining stability around the world,” Lehman said. “What Obama calls ‘leading from behind.’”

One of the worst examples, according to Lehman, is happening at the top of the world.

“We’re seeing the Soviets pushing into the Arctic with no response from us. In fact, the only response is to announce the early retirement of the last remaining icebreaker.”

...The call was meant as a prebuttal to Vice President Biden’s foreign policy speech in New York Thursday, where he warned that Romney wants to return to a Bush-era foreign policy.

“He acts like he thinks the Cold War’s still on,” Biden said this month. “I don’t know where he’s been.”

Romney has not done much to burst that rhetorical balloon. After Biden’s remarks, Romney condemned Obama, but not without confusing modern-day Russia with the nation that came before it.

“Obama ‘entered into an agreement with the Soviets, excuse me, with Russia’ in the nuclear arms START treaty that effectively required the United States to reduce its weapons stockpile while allowing Russia to increase its stockpile,” Romney said on April 20.

Richard Grenell, a former Bush administration official who joined the Romney campaign Thursday as national security and foreign policy spokesman, appears to have deleted more than 800 of his past tweets following scrutiny over numerous swipes aimed at the media, prominent Democratic women and the Gingriches. Grenell also apparently took down his personal site, which featured writing on politics, foreign affairs and the media.

On Friday afternoon, Grenell still featured a link to his personal site (http://www.richardgrenell.com) on his Twitter profile, which then showed that he had tweeted 7,577 times, according to a screenshot taken Friday by The Huffington Post. By Sunday morning, Grenell's Twitter feed only listed 6,759 tweets and his personal site is no longer available. (Some examples of past writing have been archived on the Internet and can be found http://www.richardgrenell.com/">here.)

In the Twitter-fueled 2012 election, it's not surprising that reporters quickly began digging through Grenell's Twitter feed, even before he got a chance to scrub out a number of impolitic and sexist comments.

ThinkProgress noted Grenell's tendency to make cutting remarks about the appearances of prominent women in media and politics, including his tweet advising MSNBC host Rachel Maddow "to take a breath and put on a necklace," and another suggesting she resembled Justin Bieber.

In another tweet, Grenell wrote that "Hillary is starting to look liek Madeline [sic] Albright." He discussed First Lady Michelle Obama working out and "sweating on the East Room carpet." He also asked whether Callista Gingrich's "hair snaps on," and on another occasion, commented how Gingrich's third wife "stands there like she is wife #1." Politico flagged more examples and noted Grenell's "old pastime" of "ridiculing the Gingriches."

When contacted about Romney's hiring of Grenell and his removal of online writing, a campaign spokesperson referred The Huffington Post to a response Grenell gave to Politico. "My tweets were written to be tongue-in-cheek and humorous but I can now see how they can also be hurtful," Grenell said. "I didn’t mean them that way and will remove them from twitter. I apologize for any hurt they caused."

Maddow certainly didn't think Grenell's tweets were so "tongue-in-cheek" or "humorous," pointing out the ones written about her during Friday night's show, while asking if the Romney campaign sees "any sign that they understand that a long, string of really nasty, sexist tweets about Callista Gingrich's appearance might be alienating to people who might otherwise consider voting for Mr. Romney."

“I think when we win, it will not only reaffirm what we did. It will send a powerful message to every politician…in our state and even in our city governments who are trying to take on the tough issues and do the right thing,” Walker said [at a fundraiser in Chicago on Friday]. “It will send a powerful, powerful message that you can stick your neck out, you can make the tough choices and there will be voters helping you along the way.”

With several dozen union members demonstrating on a sidewalk outside, Walker touted the creation of 15,600 private sector jobs in the first three months of the year and the lowering of Wisconsin’s unemployment rate to 6.8 percent from 6.9 percent a month earlier.

Still, March saw a decline of 4,300 private-sector jobs in the state after two months of job growth. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday the largest year-over-year percentage decrease in employment in the nation occurred in Wisconsin. Walker had promised 250,000 new jobs in his first term.

Congress would permanently repeal the Social Services Block Grant under a plan passed by the House Ways and Means Committee Thursday, slashing $1.7 billion a year that goes to help fund daycare, protective services for children, special services to persons with disabilities, adoption, health-related services, foster care for children or adults, and much more. That plan would also effectively exclude many immigrants from collecting the Child Tax Credit and take away subsidies for health coverage provided by the health reform law.

Food stamps would lose nearly $36 billion under a plan reported by the House agriculture committee, which could mean 2 million Americans cut from food assistance – and children make up half of food stamp recipients. Because food stamp eligibility also qualifies children for school nutrition programs (like free and reduced-price lunch), some 280,000 children stand to lose those, too.

White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed any attempt to link the scandal in Colombia, a row over a lavish conference held by the government's administrative agency and a furor over soldiers who had posed with corpses in Afghanistan.

"It is preposterous to politicize the Secret Service, to politicize the behavior of the terrible conduct of some soldiers in Afghanistan in a war that's been going on for 10 years," Carney said.

"What they're doing is trying to turn these incidents, one that's still under investigation, to political advantage.

"It's a ridiculous assertion that trivializes both the very serious nature of the endeavor that our military is engaged in in Afghanistan and the very serious nature, both of the work that the Secret Service does."

In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Palin, the former Republican vice presidential nominee, suggested that scandal over Secret Service agents who consorted with prostitutes in Colombia last week was a symptom of a government "run amok."

"The president, the CEO of this operation called our federal government, has got to start cracking down on these agencies," Palin said.

There's plenty of convention content available on the group's web page and YouTube channel, but you won't find any footage of the Sunday afternoon discussion with Nugent — an NRA board member — that led Mitt Romney to distance himself from Nugent and prompted the Secret Service to schedule a meeting with him.

"If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year," Nugent told a crowd at the convention. That comment piqued the interest of the Secret Service, who'll be meeting with Nugent Thursday.

A full year after Obama released his birth certificate, a significant number of Republican officials across the country still are unable to disavow themselves of the notion that the president was not born in this country.

This week, a leading Republican candidate in one of the most competitive congressional districts in the country revealed himself as the newest member of the birther club. Richard Hudson, a former congressional chief of staff, told a Tea Party in Salisbury on Tuesday that "there's no question President Obama's hiding something on his citizenship." Hudson, "the frontrunner for the GOP nomination" in North Carolina's 8th congressional district according to Roll Call, also pledged that if elected he would introduce legislation "that requires any candidate for president or vice president to be certified by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as being a citizen."

HUDSON: There's no question President Obama's hiding something on his citizenship. If you elect me to Congress to represent you, I'll introduce legislation that requires any candidate for president or vice president to be certified by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as being a citizen. Whether that's a birth certificate or whatever it means, I'm going to make real simple from now on if you want to run for president, you're need to know you're going to have to prove you're a citizen.

Nearly four years after National Gypsum shuttered its drywall plant in Lorain, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will reuse the facility on Henderson Drive as a backdrop for his message that President Barack Obama has failed to create jobs.

Romney's speech today will act as a rebuttal to remarks Obama delivered on Wednesday at Lorain County Community College, where the president praised the college's job-training efforts and claimed Republicans would cut such programs.

Republicans contend Obama has done almost nothing to create jobs.

"What we're saying is, he has been given three years to turn the economy around and bring back jobs," said Romney spokesman Ryan Williams. "He has had time and hundreds of billions of dollars to turn around the economy and he has not done that."

But should Obama be linked to the Lorain plant's demise?

City officials in Lorain question whether the drywall factory – which closed during the George W. Bush administration because of a construction industry slump -- could appropriately be used to illustrate that message.

"When you have to clean up a mess that was created over eight years, you will not get it done in four," said Lorain City Council President Joel Arredondo, a Democrat who attended Obama's Wednesday speech. "After four years, we are better off than we were before."

Unemployment in Ohio was 8.6 percent when Obama took office in January 2009, peaked at 10.6 percent from July 2009 to January 2010, and fell to 7.6 percent in February 2012.

[Missouri state Sen. Brian] Nieves has proposed an amendment to his state’s constitution that would prohibit all branches of state government in Missouri from recognizing, enforcing or acting on “certain actions” of the federal government. It’s called “nullification” – the idea that states can simply ignore federal laws they don’t like – and it’s all the rage on the radical right, pushed by the likes of the John Birch Society and the Tenth Amendment Center.

What’s astounding is the traction the idea is getting among people who ought to know better. Nieves’ amendment, which would have to be approved by Missouri voters, is still alive in the legislature four months after it was proposed. It’s even been approved by the Senate’s General Laws Committee.

Nieves, a Tea Party favorite who has described himself as a “Patriot candidate” and who has appeared in a film produced by Patriot conspiracy-monger Gary Franchi, is nothing if not extreme. He’s previously shown his disdain for the Constitution as a leading member of State Legislators for Legal Immigration, a group of state lawmakers that is working to end the 14^th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to all people born within the United States. Apparently, the 14^th amendment, enacted in the wake of the Civil War, really bugs him.

In a major escalation of a slowly building fight over funding the government, the White House has warned House Republicans, in no uncertain terms, that the government will shut down in September if the GOP does not adhere to an agreement they cut with Democrats in August during the standoff over raising the nation's debt limit.

"Until the House of Representatives indicates that it will abide by last summer's agreement, the President will not be able to sign any appropriations bills," writes Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget, in a letter addressed to congressional appropriators Wednesday.

The message is simple: The government will shut down just ahead of the 2012 presidential election if Republicans break faith with the debt limit deal.

 

"If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year."

Some took that to be an assassination threat. Whether it was or not—and the Secret Service thinks it's worth discussing with the aging rocker—why is someone so close to getting the GOP nomination not taking it seriously when such a remark emerges from someone whose endorsement Romney sought and received early last month?

Why not a full-throated denouncing? Why not use this as an opportunity to tell Americans that the eliminationist rhetoric we've been hearing so much of since Obama was elected is unacceptable and deserves to be called out for what it is? Be civil? Puhleez. This guy and others far less well known are way beyond finger-wagging.

The Romney campaign claims it did not solicit Nugent's support. Then why did Romney phone the guy just before he gave his endorsement? Nugent said he's backing Romney because the candidate personally pledged in that phone conversation not to mess with anybody's guns. Since Romney agreed, one could, using Republican logic, call Nugent an advisor to campaign.

Yet all Romney had to say about this and other sewage Nugent spewed was a brief talk-nice comment. And it didn't even come directly from Romney, but rather a spokesperson.

As for Nugent himself, apparently convinced that his rancid declarations may somehow get him a new record contract from, say, Tea Party Productions, he has chosen to stand by his remarks at the NRA confab:

“I spoke at the NRA and I will stand by my speech. It was 100 percent positive,” Nugent told the Dana Loesch radio show today. “It’s about we the people taking back our American dream from the corrupt monsters in the federal government under this administration and the communist czars he’s appointed.” [...]

“See, I’m a black Jew at a Nazi-Klan rally, and there are some power-abusing corrupt monsters in our federal government that despise me because I have the audacity to speak the truth to identify the violations of our government, particularly Eric Holder and the president and Tim Geithner, ad nauseam,” Nugent told Loesch.

“I have never in my life threatened anyone’s life. I’m incapable of threatening anyone’s life. Because I’m about positive change, my entire speech, all my articles,” he later added.

Riiiiiiiiight. Nugent's past commentary has included tidbits such as the president should "suck on my machine gun" and Hillary Clinton is a "toxic c*nt" and, well, a whole barf bag full of "positive change" statements.

Investigators at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement identified "possible criminal and ethical violations" by freshman Rep. David Rivera (R-FL). Among these were filing erroneous personal financial reports while a member of the Florida House of Representatives, falsely amending those disclosures after media criticism, and using campaign and government accounts to reimburse his own personal expenses...

In 2010, now-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) promised that if his party won the majority in the midterm elections, he (as majority leader) 'institute a zero-tolerance policy' on ethics violations. In light of these serious charges, the Republican leadership could show its commitment to this policy by beginning an Ethics Committee investigation, stripping him of his committee assignments, calling for his resignation or even moving to remove him from Congress. It has done none of these things. Even with these apparent ethical breaches, they continue to let Rivera serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee (and, ironically, its Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee) and the Committee on Natural Resources.

 

"Mitt Romney surrogate Ted Nugent made offensive comments about President Obama and November's elections this weekend that are despicable, deplorable and completely beyond the pale," DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. "He called the Administration 'vile', 'evil' and 'America-hating', and said much worse. Yet what have we heard from Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, who should be outraged that someone representing them is using language like this to make a political point? Absolutely nothing."

...Now, the Secret Service is said to be looking in to Nugent's threats.

Petition: Tell Romney to Denounce Nugent's Hateful Speech

Mitt Romney's surrogates are crossing the line, calling the President's administration "vile," "evil," and "America-hating"—but so far Romney has refused to condemn it.

It's on him to stop the violent rhetoric before it gets out of control.

[Michele] Bachmann told "Meet the Press" that women need to be allowed to control their own bodies. But of course, that's only when it comes having the Affordable Care Act thrust upon them.

BACHMANN: What we want is women to be able to make their own choices [...] We want women to make their own choices in healthcare. You see that’s the lie that happens under Obamacare. The President of the United States effectively becomes a health care dictator. Women don’t need anyone to tell them what to do on health care. We want women to have their own choices, their own money, that way they can make their own choices for the future of their own bodies.

Bachmann isn't the only female Republican who has been striking a cognitive dissidence when it comes to "choice" -- where choice means saying no to affordable health care as part of health reform. At a GOP rally against the Affordable Care Act, the party brought out multiple female House members to redefine "choice."

“We want to make certain that we are the ones that are in charge of making those health care decisions and that we are the ones working with physicians,” said Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn during a rally at the capitol opposing the Affordable Care Act.

“[T]his is putting government bureaucrats between us and our doctor. It gives government the decision making power, not us,” agreed Florida Rep. Sandy Adams apparently without the slightest trace of irony.

Governor Jan Brewer promised her political action committee called "JAN PAC" would work to secure the nation's border, create Arizona jobs and fight President Obama's politics.

But federal disclosure records show one of JAN PAC's largest expenditures was purchasing nearly $2,500 dollars of the Governor's book "Scorpions for Breakfast".

"She is not doing what she said she was going to do with the funds. She is creating a political persona on her book, on her fight against whatever she wants to fight against, but not solving the issues facing Arizonans." said Luis Heredia, Executive Director of Arizona's Democratic Party.

Mitt Romney went well beyond his standard stump speech at a closed-door fundraiser on Sunday evening, and offered some of the most specific details to date about the policies he would pursue if elected.

In a speech to donors in the backyard of a private home here [Palm Beach, Fla.], the former Massachusetts governor and presumptive GOP presidential nominee outlined his plans to potentially eliminate or consolidate federal agencies, win back Latino voters and reform the nation's tax code.

The fundraiser was held inside a Palm Beach house, but apparently Romney's remarks were audible to reporters gathered outside.

From a policy standpoint, the biggest revelation appears to be that he would look to eliminate the second home mortgage deduction and deductions for state and local taxes in order to keep his promise to cut tax rates across-the-board without lowering the overall share of the tax burden that wealthy Americans shoulder.

Perhaps more notable, though, were comments from Romney – and his wife – about his campaign's strategic thinking.

Romney spoke in broad terms about his desire to merge or eliminate various departments and agencies and floating HUD as a possible contender for elimination, before saying: "But I'm not going to actually go through these one by one." He then apparently told the crowd that he would overhaul the Education department but wouldn't eliminate it altogether, in part because trying to do so would cause severe political blowback.

Essentially, Romney was admitting to his donor friends that his goal as a candidate is to avoid letting voters see the fine print on most of his promises, lest they find something to object to. This smacks of the intentional campaign trail vagueness that he's been accusing Obama of. It also reflects the same calculation that Democrats say defines the Paul Ryan budget blueprint that Republicans have rallied behind, a document that calls for paying for massive tax cuts by closing loopholes and ending various deductions without specifying any.

Now that Romney has secured the endorsement of nativist and Tea Party extremist Russell Pearce, he is joined by our whacky State Governor — Jan Brewer. The more Mitt Romney receives endorsements from Tea Party extremists, the heavier that millstone will get around his neck.

From THINK PROGRESS:

Nativist Gov. Jan Brewer Endorses Romney | On Meet the Press this morning, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) endorsed Mitt Romney for President. Although Brewer offered little explanation for her decision, citing only Romney’s “pro-business background” and his “political history,” it is not the least bit surprising that one of the nation’s leading nativist politicians is now backing Romney. Brewer signed SB 1070, the first of a wave of anti-immigrant bills authored by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who has also endorsed Romney. Romney also campaigned with Kobach on Martin Luther King Day, despite the fact that Kobach is an attorney with the legal arm of an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center designates a “nativist hate group.”

Sarah Palin responded to a harsh comment Fox News chief Roger Ailes made about her earlier this week.

During a speech at the University of North Carolina, Ailes said that "Sarah Palin had no chance to be president." The quote came from New York Magazine editor Gabriel Sherman's Twitter feed. Sherman, who was at the event, is writing a book about Ailes and the rise of Fox News. Ailes was at the university addressing a group of journalism students.

Palin responded to Ailes' remarks in an exclusive interview with Breitbart.com. Palin called the remarks "interesting."

She said, "I wonder if he is aware that the same thing was said about me when I ran for city council, mayor, and eventually governor." She added, "No doubt many people who are told they can’t do something will work that much harder, and they succeed." She suggested Breitbart.com send her employer the documentary recently made about her, "The Undefeated." Palin said, "The theme of Steve’s film isn’t about me, but about the idea of not letting others dictate one’s path in life and never giving up when you’re fighting for something precious like our exceptional nation and our children’s futures. So, would you send a copy of “The Undefeated” to him?"

Though many politicians sympathize with those who are saddled with exorbitant student debt, Foxx, who chairs the House subcommittee on higher education, had a different take. Appearing on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, the North Carolina congresswoman recounted her own experience paying for college, where she worked her way through and graduated after seven years. Foxx then pointed to her own experience as justification for why she has “very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt.” “There’s no reason for that,” she concluded:

FOXX: I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. [...] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.

By Rob Boston, Church & State Magazine - The refrain has become commonplace: There is a “war on religion.” Faith is under assault. The administration of President Barack Obama has unleashed a bombardment on religion unlike anything ever seen.

The average American would be hard-pressed to see evidence of this “war.” Millions of people meet regularly in houses of worship. What’s more, those institutions are tax exempt. Many denominations participate in taxpayer-funded social service programs. Their clergy regularly speak out on the issues of the day. In the political arena, religious leaders are treated with great respect.

Furthermore, religious organizations often get special breaks that aren’t accorded to their secular counterparts. Houses of worship aren’t required to report their income to the Internal Revenue Service. They don’t have to apply for tax-exempt status; they receive it automatically as soon as they form. Religious entities are routinely exempted from employment laws, anti-discrimination measures and even routine health and safety inspections.

Unlike secular lobbies, religious groups that work with legislators on Capitol Hill don’t have to register with the federal government and are free from the stringent reporting requirements imposed on any group that seeks to influence legislation.

Religion in America would seem to be thriving in this “hands-off” atmosphere, as evidenced by church attendance rates, which in the United States tend to be higher than any other Western nation. So where springs this “war on religion” talk?

Twin dynamics, mutually related and interdependent, are likely at work. On one hand, some religious groups are upping their demands for even more exemptions from general laws. When these are not always extended, leaders of these groups scream about hostility toward religion and say they are being discriminated against. This catches the attention of right-wing political leaders, who toss gasoline on the rhetorical fires...

...With the economy improving, Republicans may be on the verge of losing a powerful piece of ammunition to use against Obama. The party’s Religious Right faction is eager to push social issues to the front and center as a way of mobilizing the base.

Many political leaders are happy to parrot this line. For the time being, they’ve latched on to the birth control issue as their leading example of this alleged war.

Their proposed cuts include:

– ELIMINATING RESOLUTION AUTHORITY: This is a power included in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2008 that allows the government to dissolve a failed financial firm without resorting to the ad hoc bailouts of 2008. Ryan explicitly called for its repeal in the budget, even though it would leave the government powerless to act should another big bank bring the economy to the brink of disaster, other than handing it a bailout.

– ELIMINATING FORECLOSURE PREVENTION PROGRAM: The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) has undoubtedly fallen woefully short of its goals, reaching far fewer homeowners than it was supposed to. But House Republicans want to eliminate it entirely, even with 3.6 homeowners estimated to go into foreclosure in the next two years.

– CUTTING THE CONSUMER PROTECTION BUREAU’S BUDGET BY TWO-THIRDS: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a budget of just shy of $600 million for fiscal year 2013. House Republicans propose [cutting that by two-thirds], even as the agency begins reining in abuses in the student loan and home mortgage industries.

Six in 10 Americans favor Congress passing the so-called "Buffett Rule," which would mandate a minimum 30% tax rate for Americans with a household income of $1 million per year or more. Majorities of both Democrats and independents favor the policy, while a majority of Republicans oppose it.

President Barack Obama has pushed this tax policy in recent appearances, and the U.S. Senate may vote on it next week. Few observers believe it has a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House to become law before the end of the year.

The proposed legislation was informally dubbed the "Buffett Rule" after billionaire investor Warren Buffett asserted that he should not be allowed to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. Gallup's question about the proposal, included in its April 9-12 Economy and Personal Finance survey, asked if "households earning $1 million a year or more" should pay a minimum of 30% of their income in taxes. The actual law to be voted on by the Senate would include more complex "phase in" clauses for those making between $1 and $2 million per year.

The president's joint tax return with his wife, Michelle, released by the White House on Friday, reveals they paid tax at a rate of 20.5% on income of $789,674 in 2011.

The Obamas' earnings fell by nearly $1m on the previous year as sales of the president's bestselling books declined. The first couple paid $162,074 in income tax. They also donated a similar amount to 39 charities.

The vice-president, Joe Biden, and his wife, Jill, paid tax at 23% on income of $379,035.

The release of the returns was politically charged because the president has built part of his re-election campaign around accusing the Republicans of giving millionaires tax breaks paid for by cutting services to the less well off.

The White House has also targeted Romney, who paid tax at less than 15% over the past two years on his multimillion-dollar income from a vast fortune.

Obama has been campaigning for the imposition of the "Buffett rule" that would see those earning more than $1m a year, whether from salary or investments, pay tax at a rate of at least 30%. The rule is named after the business magnate, Warren Buffet, who called for the rich to pay more to the treasury because he said it is wrong that he should be taxed at a lower rate than his secretary.

The White House acknowledged that the president believes he should pay more tax.

"Under the president's own tax proposals, including the expiration of the high-income tax cuts and limitations on the value of tax preferences for high-income households, he would pay more in taxes while ensuring we cut taxes for the middle class and those trying to get in it," it said...

...Romney, his likely rival in the presidential election, who has an estimated fortune of $220m yet paid tax at a rate of less than 15% on income of $45m over the past two years. Most of the income, which places Romney in the top 1% of earners in the US, was derived from investments, which are subject to a lower tax rate.

In what some might consider an act of GOP political suicide, Newt Gingrich slammed Fox News earlier this week, saying that the cable news channel has favored Mitt Romney throughout the 2012 Republican race—and that CNN has been the more "fair-and-balanced" network this cycle.

"I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through," Gingrich said during a meeting with tea party leaders in Delaware on Wednesday, according RealClearPolitics.com, which said it was granted access to the private event. "In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we're more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That's just a fact."

Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world, receiving more than $6 billion annually-or about $8 million every-day. Until the US stops lending its weight to Israel through biased and unfair support, a truly just peace will remain elusive.

[Mitt Romney] doesn't see what's so wrong with using a TelePrompter. In a video leaked to Gawker.com by a disgruntled (and now fired) Fox News employee known as the "Fox Mole," the presumptive nominee is shown chatting with Sean Hannity before going on air. After producers inform Hannity there is a script for the segment - which Hannity will read off a "prompter" - the two men mock Mr. Obama for using a TelePrompter, with Hannity saying, "I think Obama sleeps with his."

But the two then sing the praises of the device in keeping a candidate from saying something he might regret.

"It does make some sense though" to use a teleprompter, Romney tells Hannity. "I do understand."

He adds: "It keeps you from saying something you don't mean, you get the message out precisely the way you want to get the message out." Romney says he has used a TelePrompter "maybe five times" in the campaign. Romney in recent months has tended to use a teleprompter for most major speeches.

"It's smart," Hannity agrees. "You're right. You don't want to make a mistake. I'll tell you, they're out to just eviscerate anybody who makes a mistake."

Arizona‘s Legislature yesterday afternoon passed three harsh anti-abortion bills, including one that defines pregnancy as being two weeks before conception. Known in some circles as the “egg drop” bill, lawmakers apparently believe they are more knowledgable than physicians at determining gestational age...

“State Rep. Kimberly Yee (R-Phoenix), the bill’s sponsor, was not immediately available for comment. Her assistant said that Yee, a former aide to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), was voting on the House floor,” The Huffington Post reports:

State Rep. Matt Heinz (D-Tucson), a physician, said he did not want the state to set the gestational age since science could not provide a precise one. “I imagine it will be a legal dispute. How can a judge determine gestational age?” Heinz said. “If medical science can only determine gestational age to within 10-14 days, how can a superior court judge do it?”

...The 18th week bill includes a new definition for when pregnancy begins. All of the bills passed the Senate and now head to Gov. Jan Brewer (R) for her signature or veto. Passage of the late-term abortion bill would give Arizona the earliest definition of late-term abortion in the country; most states use 20 weeks as a definition.

A sentence in the bill defines gestational age as “calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman,” which would move the beginning of a pregnancy up two weeks prior to conception.

President Obama has his opponent: Mitt Romney. Here are some things we all need to remember about him—and make sure our friends know, too.

With this week's announcement by Rick Santorum that he is pulling out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination, all of the candidates who said God told them to run have dropped out.

Last December Herman Cain was the first to lose faith. In January Representative Michele Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry turned their backs on the Almighty's bidding. And now that Santorum has rejected the Lord's call, America has no God endorsed candidates running for the highest office in the land.

How do you explain this?

“I don’t think it’s good, frankly, for our country, to undermine our president, and I don’t intend to do so,” Bush said.

He said the Bush Institute is “an opportunity to be engaged in public policy in a positive way.”

“When you get out of office, it’s kind of a daunting feeling. I mean, you serve, you’ve given it your all, and all of a sudden, you’ve got some years ahead of you,” he said. “And I have decided to stay out of the limelight.”

Bush said he is asked often if he misses the presidency.

“Really, I really don’t. I mean, I enjoyed it. It was an unbelievably interesting experience ….Yeah, it was inconvenient to have to stop at some stop signs — stop lights here coming over here,” he joked.

“But I do miss being commander in chief,” he said. “A lot.”

To keep contact with the troops, Bush said he hosts mountain biking and golf outings for veterans.

as Romney pivots to a general election campaign against Obama, nothing will be more critical than winning the hearts and minds of social conservatives who would likely prove the difference in what is expected to be a close election determined by the turnout of each camp’s core constituency.

But the process of winning over evangelicals won’t be easy.

Romney has kept key social conservative leaders at arm’s length, and evangelicals have shown him little love in return. That breach will take time and effort to overcome.

“Right now, Romney is lacking a compelling narrative to close the deal,” said Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, whose leadership has often cast a wary eye at Romney. “He’s going to have a base intensity problem unless he can unify the conservative base.”

“There is a significant challenge” for Romney to convince social and Christian conservatives that they can’t “just to sit back and disengage,” agreed Deal Hudson, a veteran Republican consultant for outreach to Catholic voters.

Yet Romney has no choice, because in many respects religious conservatives are the quintessential voters of the 2012 cycle for Republicans.

Evangelicals in particular are not only turning out in record numbers — they represent upwards of half of all ballots cast in the GOP primaries — but they bring a religious intensity and commitment to their agenda that channels the Tea Party passion that has mobilized the populist base and rocked the political elites. Moreover, these faith-based voters want a candidate who reflects their own consistency and single-mindedness — not a calculating wonk who will run an “Etch-a-Sketch” campaign in the general election, to invoke the unfortunate analogy uttered by a Romney adviser.

“To have a candidate who tacks one way depending on where the wind is blowing feeds into that cynicism and really makes it difficult to get out the vote for them,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, which has pumped money and resources into supporting Santorum.

A post-primary move to the center to battle Obama would be Romney’s “biggest mistake,” Hudson said. “That would just kill him.”

There are, however, several factors working in Romney’s favor, according to his allies and some of his faith-based “frenemies” — the religious conservatives who increasingly, if grudgingly, acknowledge they may have to settle for Romney as the GOP nominee:

— Running mate: “He must pick a well-known social conservative” as a running mate, Land wrote. Romney has a range of good options, any of which is sure to please the Christian right. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan are among those frequently mentioned, with South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, a Tea Party leader, also generating some buzz; DeMint would also bring energy and flair to the race, not to mention Southern voters who have not warmed to Romney.

— Harnessing enthusiasm: While the primaries have been a slog, they have also galvanized social conservatives. If Romney can harness their enthusiasm, he will have a significant advantage in November. “The idea that they (social conservatives) would falter now would be a shocker to me, given what we’ve seen on the ground,” said Dannenfelser, who reiterated that she and her organization will stick with Santorum as long as he stays in the race.

— Highlighting the differences: When the primaries end, Republicans will be able to focus on criticizing Obama rather than competing to see who among the GOP candidates is most “severely conservative,” in Romney’s self-description. That in turn will show voters that “the 2012 race really represents the triumph of the conservative movement,” said David French, an evangelical and a Romney ally who co-wrote a new book, “Why Evangelicals Should Support Mitt Romney (and Feel Good About It!).” ‘’The daylight between the candidates on the social issues is non-existent.”

— Anyone but Obama: Obama is still the opponent, and many evangelicals believe that will be enough to unify social conservatives to back the GOP ticket.

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll out today finds President Obama...

– Beats Romney 10 points, 49 to 39 percent, on "protecting the middle class."
– Edges Romney by three points on "creating jobs" and "handling taxes." Up two points on "supporting small business."
– Crushes Romney by 17 points, 53 to 36 percent, on "handling international affairs," and seven points on "handling terrorism."
– Beats Romney eight points on "dealing with social issues such as abortion and gay marriage."

On personal traits, Obama's edge is even bigger: "He has a better than 2-to-1 advantage as the more friendly and likable of the two, and nearly that margin as 'more inspiring.'"

...Romney is up eight percentage points among male voters but trails by 19 among women.

The Buffett Rule, named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, would ensure that every American pays their fair share of taxes. A look back in time shows that President Obama is not the only president who thinks restoring fairness to the tax code is a good idea.

Rush Limbaugh, the longstanding undisputed king of conservative talk radio who's been dogged by controversy recently, is about to face some more heat. Not from the left, but this time from the right.

On Monday, former Arkansas governor and one-time Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will launch a three-hour radio program on almost 200 stations across the country, going voice-to-voice with Limbaugh in the noon-to-3 p.m. time slot, Monday through Friday.

Cumulus Media, which owns and operates the new program, is already pitching Huckabee to listeners and advertisers as the "safe alternative" to a man who has recently found himself under weeks of intense fire - not for the first time - and who some believe could be vulnerable to a challenge from someone offering a kinder, gentler conservative voice.

"Our tagline is, 'More conversation, less confrontation'," Huckabee told POLITICO. "I'm going to treat every guest with respect and civility. Nobody is going to come on and get into a shouting match with me. That's just not my style."

Making a direct comparison with Limbaugh, John Dickey, the co-COO of Cumulus Media, adds, "This is going to be safer from a commercial standpoint, and more respectful from a listener's perspective. I think that environment has been sorely lacking in talk radio."

While representatives of "The Rush Limbaugh Show," a Clear Channel property, and its syndicator, Premiere Networks, agree Huckabee will, in fact, offer a "safer" alternative, they strongly reject any suggestion that he poses a threat to Limbaugh's audience and enormous influence. In their eyes, Huckabee is just the latest in a long line of would-be competitors who have never been able to measure up.

"There is no alternative to Rush Limbaugh — he is an original," said Julie Talbott, Premiere's president of Content and Affiliate Relations. "He has maintained his success through his unique brand of talk radio [that is] compelling, thought-provoking, and strikes an emotional cord. Historically, lukewarm, 'safer' content isn't what attracts and retains audiences."

"Baseball is a more interesting game when you play it, rather than talk about it. So is radio," Limbaugh spokesperson Brian Glicklich told POLITICO. "Rush Limbaugh's box score extends back decades, right to today. We'll look forward to Huckabee's first one."

A Premiere spokesperson declined POLITICO's request to speak with Limbaugh.

Huckabee, who has never met Limbaugh, does indeed join a long list of conservative voices who have gone up against Limbaugh in the noon time slot, competing for pull among the base of the Republican party. The most well-known of those now-vanished competitors is Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly, who hosted the nationally syndicated show, "The Radio Factor," for seven years and became the second-most listened-to talk radio host on the airwaves. In 2009, O'Reilly was replaced by former Sen. Fred Thompson, who — like Huckabee — was trumpeted as an alternative to Limbaugh, but was never able to get traction. He ended the show last year.

"As Fred Thompson discovered, Rush Limbaugh completely dominates talk radio every day from noon to 3. If history is any guide, Huckabee will probably have a lot of trouble pulling away Rush's loyal listeners," one GOP consultant told POLITICO. "Rush is influential because of the size and engagement of his listeners. If he criticizes a Republican [officeholder], that office's phones will be shut down for days with angry callers. Mike Huckabee will not have that sort of audience."

Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt sees Huckabee's trajectory differently.

"Rush Limbaugh has been on top for so long, he's very good at what he does, and his audience listens to him. But he's a polarizing figure in the larger culture," Schmidt, a former advisor to John McCain, told POLITICO. "[Huckabee] is conservatism with a smile, which is a big difference in a party where the message is so often delivered angrily."

By James Werrell - [Governor Nikki] Haley was on the show [The View] to plug her new autobiography, “Can’t Is Not An Option.” After a few softball questions from the four hosts, Haley was asked about her views on women’s rights.

Inexplicably, Haley volunteered: “Women don’t care about contraception. They care about jobs and the economy and raising their families ...”

At that point she was cut off by Joy Behar, one of the hosts, who said, “Well, they care about contraception, too.” Behar then alluded to Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s public disdain for birth control when it conflicts with religious values.

“Well, the media cares about contraception,” Haley countered, “While we care about contraception, let’s be clear: All we’re saying is, we don’t want government to mandate when we have to have it and when we don’t. We want to be able to make that decision. We don’t need government making that decision for us.”

Huh? That’s exactly backwards from what has occurred in the recent brouhaha over providing free contraceptives to women.

The uproar started because new rules in the Affordable Health Care Act – “Obamacare” to its detractors – require most employers to provide free contraceptives to employees through company health plans. While churches and religious institutions would be exempt, church-affiliated organizations such as hospitals and schools would have to allow employees to get contraceptives from insurers that cover the organizations’ health care.

In other words, government isn’t trying to mandate when women can have contraception or when they con’t. Obamacare is trying to ensure that women can get free contraceptives whenever they need them.

Who’s making that decision? Women, not the government.

Blasting the federal government is Haley’s default argument for just about anything – that is, when she’s not blasting the media. But her argument in this case is preposterous; it just makes no sense.

So, at a town hall meeting in central Iowa on Tuesday, Shirley Grant attempted to set the record straight. A supporter of Planned Parenthood and advocate of healthcare access for low-income women, Grant had more than a few choice words for...Rep. Steve King about his incessant attacks on the organization.

Basically, she owned Rep. King—and it wasn’t very hard.

Grant starting off by throwing the ole double standard back at King: Pro-choice women, she patiently explained, want to “take charge of their own destiny” just as he “took charge” of his own as a young man. Then Grant fired off this elegant statement:

My daughter says, “Throw out the word ‘birth control,’ Mom. Planned Parenthood isn’t that.” She says it is for hormone replacement, and that means you use those pills for many, many, many different areas of women’s lives. I find it very offensive that men think they can tell women what to do with their own life. I think the political arena is making a big mistake when they don’t work with Planned Parenthood, instead of against it. They do so many good things.

Watch the video.

By Laurence H. Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. - No one in the world -- certainly none of the justices -- can have been surprised to learn that Obama believes his signature domestic achievement fully complies with the Constitution and ought to be upheld -- or that the Supreme Court has a decades-old tradition of treading lightly when major regulations of interstate commerce come before it.

After the president made that entirely clear Tuesday, some suggested that it would be best for presidents not to comment on cases pending before the Supreme Court even while the rest of the nation continues to debate the underlying constitutional issues.

I was among those who took that view while others suggested that, as the entire nation continues to discuss the constitutionality of a vital economic measure, artificially muzzling the nation's chief executive ill serves the purposes of open public debate on importance issues.

That's something about which people can reasonably differ. But there's no reasonable basis for seeing in the president's comments either a challenge to the court's authority as an independent branch of government or a clumsy attempt to pressure it politically or to influence its deliberations.

This president knows as well as anyone how utterly implausible it would be to think that the justices might be swayed in their constitutional views by his brief remarks, which did little more than reiterate a core theme of the government's legal briefs (namely, the critical importance of strong judicial deference to the elected branches on complex matters of economic regulation like national health care policy). This theme has received a full airing in media commentary, congressional hearings, legal scholarship and lower court judicial opinions. Nobody could really believe that the president's candid expression of a view that everyone already attributed to him would move the judicial calculus even a micrometer...

...That said, we have recently witnessed a shocking misuse of power in relation to these events. But it came from the judiciary rather than the president. Judge Jerry Smith of the 5th Circuit responded to the president's comments by ordering the Department of Justice to submit a three-page, single-spaced memo stating the administration's position on judicial authority to invalidate unconstitutional laws. Attorney General Eric Holder filed that memo Thursday [PDF], reiterating the plain import of the president's remarks and stating that "the power of the courts to review the constitutionality of legislation is beyond dispute."

Smith's gratuitous order is little more than a thinly concealed insult to the president, the Justice Department and the administration. It constitutes a shocking departure from norms of judicial behavior. While such partisan bickering might be expected from the minority leader of the Senate or from commentators like Rush Limbaugh, who drew upon Obama's remarks in yet another entry in their relentless attacks on the president, it is hardly to be expected of a federal judge.

Schlafly says contraception issue contrived

[Phyllis] Schlafly, who led a grass-roots fight to prevent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, spoke Wednesday at The Citadel as part of the military college’s new course, Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America.

Most women are concerned about issues such as jobs and religious liberty, Schlafly said, not issues being drummed up by feminists to foster support for President Barack Obama.

And feminists are working through the media and other channels because the American public no longer seems to strongly support their agenda, Schlafly said. “Feminists are having a hard time being elected because they essentially are unlikable,” she said.

Schlafly talked to a group of Citadel students about the culture of conservatism and the history of the religious right. She told the all-male group that “feminist is a bad word and everything they stand for is bad.”

And she warned them about having personal relationships with feminists. “Find out if your girlfriend is a feminist before you get too far into it,” she said. “Some of them are pretty. They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.”

Donald ‪Trump accused President Obama of making a secret deal with Saudi leaders in order to lower gasoline prices ahead of the 2012 presidential election. ‬

"Even though gasoline and oil prices are going through the roof, I have no doubt in my mind that President Obama made a deal with the Saudis to flood the markets with oil before the election, so he can at least keep it down a little bit," said Trump in his Web series "From the Desk of Donald Trump," which was uploaded to YouTube Wednesday.

"After the election it's going to be a mess. You're going to see numbers like you've never seen if he wins. Let's hope he doesn't win," he said.

Trump, who has endorsed GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, offered no evidence for his claim. The real estate mogul has been a harsh critic of Obama, repeatedly slamming the president's policies and leadership in his Web series and interviews. ‬

"Remember I said it — if he [Obama] wins, oil and gasoline through the roof like never before. I believe a deal was made. It's a sinister deal, but let's see whether or not I was right," Trump added.

Mitt Romney has asked Americans to elect him President based on his experience as a corporate buyout specialist. Each week, new questions are raised about whether he took unusual steps to avoid paying his fair share in taxes. Today’s report suggests that Governor Romney is exploiting a loophole in order to shield his assets and investments from public review.

Mitt Romney has put his personal financial assets in a black box and hid the key, attempting to play by a different set of rules than any candidate in recent history. In fact, Mitt Romney’s own father released 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president. President Bush released his tax returns dating back to 1991. And President Obama released his returns dating back to 2000 when he ran for president.

Governor Romney provided 23 years worth of tax returns to the McCain campaign so they could determine if he would make a suitable Vice President. He must meet that same standard now so that the American people may judge whether he would be a suitable President, and whether there are any conflicts of interest that could cloud his judgment...

...The Washington Post reported today that Mitt Romney is using a loophole to avoid disclosing his financial records: http://OFA.BO/svM9ND

@Messina2012: "Each week, new questions are raised about whether he took unusual steps to avoid paying his fair share in taxes."

So what's Romney hiding? Tweet @MittRomney to demand he release his tax returns. #WhatsRomneyHiding

"Barack Obama four years ago referred to this area of Pennsylvania, right here, as a place that clings to their guns and their bibles," Santorum told supporters in Hollidaysburg, a town in southwestern Pennsylvania known for its social conservatism.

"You're damn right we do!" he said, to a loud roar of approval...

..."You're right we cling; we cling to our faith," he said, to nods and "Yes sirs" from the crowd.

"We cling to the rights that are God-given, that are guaranteed under our constitution, including the right to protect ourselves and those we love with the second amendment -- an individual right to bear arms."

By Michael Hirsh - No one would have thought of the comparison six months ago, before the economic data turned a bit more bright and Mitt Romney went a lot more Right. But based on President Obama’s feisty speech on Tuesday—now widely seen as the opening barrage of the fall campaign—the template for his reelection effort could well be Bill Clinton’s smashingly successful 1996 run against a hapless Bob Dole.

In that campaign, then-President Clinton sought early on to tie the center-right Kansas senator to the then-far-right Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House. In particular he warned voters that “Dole-Gingrich” would cost them large parts of their Social Security and Medicare. The charges stuck in a devastating way, helped by Dole’s decision to run with a zealous supply-sider, former Rep. Jack Kemp.

Now Obama is seeking to join Romney at the hip of another congressman, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., whose budget is so tea party-driven that a Congressional Budget Office study showed his planned cuts would effectively eliminate the entire U.S. government except for defense, Social Security, Medicare, children’s insurance, and interest payments.

And the president made a point of going into minute detail about just how far right the axis has shifted since 1996. “Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal,” he said to laughter. “In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget 'radical' and said it would contribute to 'right-wing social engineering.' "

To Rep. Steve King (R-IA), the problem is not that it’s legal for employers to fire an employee for being gay. It’s that the employee made his sexual orientation publicly known in the first place...

...[KING] “I would think that unless someone makes their sexuality public, it’s not anybody’s business, so neither is it our business to tell an employer who to hire.”

[SCOTT] KEYES: Would that encompass, for instance, the government being able to tell businesses who they can hire and fire?

KING: Yeah, they shouldn’t be able to do that [to] a private business.

KEYES: Even if those were to be regulations say on a matter of sexual orientation or gender or other stuff like that?

KING: How do you know someone’s sexual orientation? I don’t know how you discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation. That’s their business.

KEYES: I guess if it became public knowledge that an employee were lesbian or gay.

KING: You have private sector businesses here and they need to have freedom to operate. In the first place, I would think that unless someone makes their sexuality public, it’s not anybody’s business, so neither is it our business to tell an employer who to hire. He won’t know who to discriminate against in the first place.

Watch it

It looks like concern within Mitt Romney’s campaign that the prolonged Republican presidential primary could damage his standing among undecided voters has some legitimacy.

A new USA Today/Gallup poll gauging support among independents in swing states finds that President Obama holds a 48% to 39% advantage over the presumptive GOP nominee Romney, a significant change from polling conducted last year.

The poll, conducted before Romney’s primary victories on Tuesday, also places Obama’s overall support in 12 swing states above Romney’s, 51% to 42%.

Sarah Palin says there's one name at the top of her list if the Republican Party wants to "go rogue" in its pick for the vice presidential nominee: Rep. Allen West.

The former vice presidential candidate told Fox News's Sean Hannity on Tuesday that the Florida Republican would be a great choice for the 2012 ticket. She argued that the eventual presidential nominee shouldn't "think they have to go with somebody necessarily safe."

"Top of my list is Allen West," she said. "I love that he has that military experience. He is a public servant willing to serve for the right reasons. He understands the Constitution. He understands our national foreign policy issues that must be addressed. He has served. I really like him. There are so many, Sean, that are out there. And when I talk about going rogue, what I want to do is encourage the GOP nominee to not think that they have to go with somebody necessarily safe that conventional wisdom perhaps would lead somebody to believe that, if it's somebody, quote-unquote, safe, that they're not going to get beat up by the media, because no matter who it is."

"They're going to get beat up," Hannity agreed.

"They're going to get clobbered. The media will make things up about them and their record and their reputations and their families," Palin said. "So no matter who it is, so they might as well get someone who is passionate and strong, as I say, like about Allen West, understands the Constitution and wants to put government back on the side of the people."

To the fainting couch! Obama attacked the Supreme Court and threatened it with a backlash, should it strike down his tyrannical scheme to impose a government takeover of health care on the nation!

That's what many conservative writers and even some centrist ones are arguing. They are saying that Obama's words about the Court yesterday were "unsettling" and a "witch-hunt," and they're likening them to F.D.R.'s efforts to pack the Court in retaliation for decisions striking down New Deal initiatives.

Please. If what Obama said yesterday is an "attack," it's pretty timid stuff indeed.

--------------------------------------------

"What President Obama is doing here isn't right," [Sen. Mike] Johanns [R-Neb.] said Tuesday in an interview with local Nebraska radio station KLIN. "It is threatening, it is intimidating."

On Monday, Obama said that he was "confident the Supreme Court would uphold the law." He added that it would be "unprecedented" for the high court to rule the individual mandate unconstitutional and said that the court should not act without "judicial restraint" and overturn "a duly constituted and passed law."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) chastised Obama for the remarks on Tuesday.

"Only someone who would browbeat the Court during the State of the Union, and whose administration stifled speech during the health care debate, would try to intimidate the Court while it's deliberating one of the most consequential cases of our time," McConnell said in a statement. 

"This president's attempt to intimidate the Supreme Court falls well beyond distasteful politics; it demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for our system of checks and balances."

Excerpts from Greg Sargent's "Pass the smelling salts! Obama `attacked' SCOTUS!" in The Washington Post and Daniel Strauss' "GOP senator accuses Obama of threatening the Supreme Court" in The Hill.

A new Rasmussen Reports statewide survey shows that, if the recall election was held today, 52% of Likely Voters would vote to recall Governor Walker and remove him from office. Forty-seven percent (47%) would vote against the recall and let him continue to serve as governor.

If the Swing States Poll was bad news for Mitt Romney’s performance among women voters, then the latest Pew Research Center survey is even worse—among all women, the former Massachusetts governor trails President Obama by twenty percentage points, 58 to 38. Compared to McCain's campaign in 2008, Romney is underperforming by six percentage points.

The title speaks for itself. There is probably not a single major US newspaper or broadcaster who points out that the US is paying for almost everything Israel does, and has been doing so for decades.

A widening gender gap boosts Obama over Romney

President Obama has opened the first significant lead of the 2012 campaign in the nation's dozen top battleground states, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, boosted by a huge shift of women to his side.

In the fifth Swing States survey taken since last fall, Obama leads Republican front-runner Mitt Romney 51%-42% among registered voters just a month after the president had trailed him by two percentage points.

The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney's support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.

Romney's main advantage is among men 50 and older, swamping Obama 56%-38%.

Republicans' traditional strength among men "won't be good enough if we're losing women by nine points or 10 points," says Sara Taylor Fagen, a Republican strategist and former political adviser to President George W. Bush. "The focus on contraception has not been a good one for us..."

By Linda Martín Alcoff - In recent weeks, the state of Arizona has intensified its attack in its schools on an entire branch of study — critical race theory. Books and literature that, in the state’s view, meet that definition have been said to violate a provision in the state’s law that prohibits lessons “promoting racial resentment.” Officials are currently bringing to bear all their influence in the public school curriculum, going so far as to enter classrooms to confiscate books and other materials and to oversee what can be taught. After decades of debate over whether we might be able to curtail ever so slightly the proliferation of violent pornography, the censors have managed a quick and thorough coup over educational materials in ethnic studies.

I have been teaching critical race theory for almost 20 years. The phrase signifies quite a sophisticated concept for this crowd to wield, coined as it was by a consortium of theorists across several disciplines to signify the new cutting edge scholarship about race. Why not simply call it “scholarship about race,” you might ask? Because, as the censors might be surprised to find, these theorists want to leave open the question of what race is — if there is such a thing — rather than assuming it as a natural object of inquiry. Far from championing a single-minded program for the purpose of propaganda, the point of critical race theory is to formulate questions about race.

Arizona’s House Bill 2281, which was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer in May 2010, does not actually mention critical race theory, but the term has been all over the press with a “damning” image from 1990 of Barack Obama, then a Harvard law school student, hugging the law professor Derrick Bell, one of the field’s founders. State Superintendent Tom Horne devised the bill particularly to put a stop to what he describes as the “racist propaganda” of critical race theory, and now other conservatives are sounding the call against what they say is a “deeply disturbing theory.” Perhaps the negative publicity recently produced by the Republican stance on contraception has the party looking for a new target to shore up the base.

What the bill does say may sound to some ears as reasonable. It prohibits courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” or that are “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” The reality, of course, is that ethnic studies teachers are constantly trying to get students from multiple backgrounds in our classes, and many of us have even endeavored to make these courses required for all. But the other two issues raised by the bill, concerning “resentment” and “ethnic solidarity,” are a bit more complicated.

So what is critical race theory, in reality? The phrase is used differently in different disciplines, but it generally refers to the study of the ways in which racial concepts and ideas may be operating relatively covertly across social institutions and practices — as ideological drones, of a sort. As Michelle Alexander, in her influential new book, “The New Jim Crow,” argues, for example, we need to consider how what appear to be colorblind drug laws are nonetheless permeated with ideas about race in order to explain the massively disproportional rates of incarceration for African-Americans and Latinos. You can’t have that much racial disparity at the end point without something going on at the starting point. Many people think it is plausible, even obvious, that ideas about race are systemically operating in our criminal justice system, somehow, perhaps below the level of conscious intent. Critical race theory is an attempt to develop critical tools for analyzing the racist effects of legal practices, as well as other practices, that appear neutral, objective and colorblind.

By David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam - In reality, those Americans who support the Tea Party were (and remain) overwhelmingly partisan Republicans. They were politically active even in the pre-Tea Party days, and they were no more likely than anyone else to have suffered hardship during the recent economic downturn.

Indeed, it turns out that the strongest predictor of a Republican becoming a Tea Party supporter is whether he or she evinced a desire in our 2006 survey to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And that desire does not simply reflect members' high religiosity. Tea Partiers are, on average, more religiously observant than the typical American, but not more so than other Republicans. Rather, they are distinctively comfortable blending religion and politics.

Tea Partiers are more likely than other Republicans to say that U.S. laws and policies would be better if the country had more "deeply religious" elected officials, that it is appropriate for religious leaders to engage in political persuasion, and that religion should be brought into public debates over political issues. The Tea Party's generals might say that their overriding concern is smaller government, but the rank and file is after a godlier government.

Tea Partiers' views in this respect are increasingly out of step with those of most Americans. According to Gallup polls, as early as 1984, just as the alliance between religious and political conservatives was crystallizing, most Americans opposed the idea of religious groups campaigning against specific candidates.

Moreover, according to the widely respected national General Social Survey, as the public visibility of the religious right increased between 1991 and 2008, growing numbers of Americans expressed the conviction that religious leaders should not try to influence people's votes or government decisions. In 1991, 22% of those surveyed said they "strongly agree" that religious leaders should not try to influence government decisions; by 2008, that figure had nearly doubled, to 38%. In our 2011 survey, 80% of respondents said that it is not proper for religious leaders to tell people how to vote, and 70% said that religion should be "kept out of public debates over social and political issues."

It should thus come as no surprise that many Americans have negative views of the Tea Party. In the same 2011 poll, the Tea Party ranked at the bottom of a list of two dozen U.S. religious, political, and racial groups in terms of favorability. (It was even less liked than Muslims and atheists, two groups that regularly meet with public opprobrium.) One of the few groups approaching the unpopularity of the Tea Party was the religious right. Both movements (which overlap heavily) might have won the staunch support of a minority of American voters, but they have also won the staunch opposition of a much larger group.

After spending the last year investigating the scandal-free DOE Loan Guarantee Program, House Republicans have thrown in the towel. Instead of getting down to serious business, though (like, extending the Production Tax Credit), they’ve decided to waste more time and taxpayer money investigating another clean energy incentive: the Section 1603 tax credit reimbursement program.

Here’s what Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) had to say on this topic yesterday:

“You know, I made clear earlier this year that oversight of the Obama administration’s policies on jobs, on the economy, and its spending taxpayer dollars was going to be a priority. Two weeks ago, Chairman Upton at the Energy & Commerce Committee began looking into the Department of Energy’s Section 1603 grant program, a Solyndra-style ‘stimulus’ program that offers cash payments to renewable energy companies. More than $10 billion – that’s with a ‘b’ — $10 billion has been spent on this, and Secretary Chu said it created ‘tens of thousands of jobs,’ except there’s no evidence to support that.

“The Energy & Commerce Committee set a deadline for today for the Energy Department & Treasury Department to produce documents or information about what taxpayers got for their $10 billion. The administration thus far has failed to provide the committee with any information to justify this claim.

“Listen, the American people continue to ask the question ‘Where are the jobs?’ They deserve answers and they deserve the truth.”

Fair enough. Americans deserve to know the truth, and here it is: the 1603 program led to thousands of clean energy jobs, leveraged billions of dollars in private investment, and helped clean energy industries grow despite tough economic times.

Scott Walker, the embattled first-term Republican governor of Wisconsin, will face a recall election on June 5, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) ruled Friday. Walker's Lieutenant Governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, will also face a recall.

The board voted 5-0 in favor of a holding a recall election after finding that the recall ballots for both candidates garnered a sufficient number of valid signatures to proceed.

More than 900,900 valid signatures were collected in a petition to recall Walker, and more than 800,000 valid signatures were collected in a petition to recall Kleefisch. Only 540,208 signatures were required.

Walker became embroiled in controversy last spring after passing a controversial law that would essentially eliminate public workers' collective bargaining rights. Debate over the legislation sparked weeks of protests in the state, as well as a national conversation about the merits of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday afternoon that the budget proposal put forward by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is a "real vision" of how Republicans would govern if they had more control of Washington.

"So I applaud my colleagues," he said of those who worked on the Ryan budget, "for the tough decisions they've made, to try to do the right thing for the country, to lay out a real vision of what we were to do if we get more control here in this town. It's still a Democrat-run town."

Several Democrats have made the same point over the last few days, but in arguments against the Ryan budget, which they say would turn Medicare into a voucher program and cut too much from federal spending at a time when millions of people need these programs.