From Mike Luckovich

The Soon-To-Be-Legendary "Etch-A-Sketch" Gaffe

I think they're gonna be talking about this particular Romney gaffe for a long time:

Now that he’s a few steps closer to winning the nomination, is Mitt Romney about to wipe clean all that he has said during the tough nomination fight?

Comments by his top communication’s adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, suggest maybe so. And the “Etch A Sketch” gaffe, as it’s already known, has stirred a hornet’s nest on Twitter and a blast of criticism from Mr. Romney’s top rivals.

Speaking on CNN Wednesday morning, Mr. Fehrnstrom was asked if the campaign worried that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich “might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election.”

To which Mr. Ferhnstrom responded: “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.” * * *

Christ, what is it with these people? Just when they start getting some momentum, something like this happens. I can see Romney making such a gaffe -- he's a walking gaffe machine. But his advisors should know better.

The DNC jumped all over this, and so did the Santorum and Gingrich camps. I'm not sure yet, but I have a feeling this will end up being remembered right up there with Dukakis in a Tank and the Dean Scream.

In fact, it's even worse than Dukakis in a Tank because it's pretty hard to waive around a tank during a campaign speech. But Etch-A-Sketches are easy to waive around, which is exactly what both Santorum and Gingrich did on the campaign trail today.

Then again, Romney didn't commit the gaffe himself, so that might help a bit. But handing your political opponents a prop like an Etch-A-Sketch is inexcusable.

Quote of the Week

"I’ll repeal Obamacare on my first day in office."

- Mitt Romney.

That's going to be a pretty busy first day in office for you, Mitt, given that before you'll be in the position to repeal ObamaCare on that first day, you'll initially need to find some way to abolish both the House and the Senate -- all on your first day. Good luck with that.

Obama Crushing GOP Re: Latino Vote

The results of this FoxNews poll was released a couple weeks ago, but it continues to get a lot of coverage on the Internets, and for good reason:

Despite growing disappointment in his handling of immigration issues, Latino voters favor President Barack Obama by six-to-one over any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, showed a Fox News Latino poll conducted under the direction of Latin Insights and released Monday.

The national poll of likely Latino voters indicated that 73 percent of them approved of Obama’s performance in office, with over half those questioned looking favorably upon his handling of the healthcare debate and the economy, at 66 percent and 58 percent respectively. ***

[T]he poll shows that the overwhelming choice among likely Latino voters is President Obama. In head-to-head match-ups none of the GOP candidates would garner more than 14 percent of the Latino vote come November, the poll said.

As Steve Benen points out, McCain lost the Latino vote to Obama by a whopping 36 percentage points in 2008. But according to the FOX poll, Obama's advantage over Romney now stands at 56%. When you combine this number with the fallout the GOP is currently experiencing with women -- Obama enjoys a 20 percentage point lead over Romney with female voters -- my only conclusion is that Romney will have to name a Latino or a woman as his running mate.

Porn Again?

What is it with this guy?

Rick Santorum has garnered quite a bit of attention recently for his animated remarks against pornography, and on two separate Sunday shows the Republican presidential candidate refused to cede an inch, doubling down on his crusade against “hard-core pornography.”

A recently added section on the candidate’s website declares that America is “suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography,” and laments that the “Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.” The site goes on to say that the Justice Department “seems to favor pornographers over children and families.”

Asked to defend this odd claim, Santorum argued Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that the Justice Department is not enforcing pornography laws as rigorously as President George W. Bush’s DOJ did.

Although I thought it was strange that Santorum made those comments on porn recently, I just figured it was a one-shot deal to pander to his fellow members of the American Taliban. But it now appears that Santorum wants to really push this issue.

This Is Interesting . . .

Oral arguments on the U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the 2010 health-care law begin in a little over a week, and this Wall Street Journal piece details how difficult it is to score a seat for the proceedings. I found this intriguing:

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, who helped draft the law, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a top-ranking Republican on the Judiciary committee, say they have confirmed seats.

Senator Hatch, like all Republicans, currently opposes ObamaCare's central feature, the Individual Mandate. But this wasn't always the case:

Hatch's opposition is ironic, or some would say, politically motivated. The last time Congress debated a health overhaul, when Bill Clinton was president, Hatch and several other senators who now oppose the so-called individual mandate actually supported a bill that would have required it.

Hatch more than merely supported the Individual Mandate -- he actually co-sponsored a bill (first introduced the late Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I.) that would have included it:

Chafee's plan, one of several Republican alternatives, created a universal tax deduction for health insurance and gave the poor vouchers to buy policies. It also required everyone to buy insurance -- an individual mandate.

Chafee's plan was backed by a group of Republican senators, including Hatch, according to news reports from the time. When the plan was formally introduced as legislation, Hatch was one of the co-sponsors. Two other current senators also co-sponsored the plan: Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

The huge GOP flip-flop on the Individual Mandate is, in my opinion, the biggest under-reported political story since the under-reporting that occurred during the run-up to the Bush Administration's debacle in Iraq.

ObamaCare is probably the most important piece of social legislation enacted in a generation; so one would think it would be a big story that many of those who are now virulently opposed to the law once supported its central feature. Christ, even Radical Right-Wing Extremist Senator Jim Motherfucking DeMint (R-WV) -- who famously pronounced that the GOP was going to "break" Obama on this issue and that it would be the President's "Waterloo" -- actually supported an individual mandate on the national level as recently as 2007!

A major theme of the Obama reelection campaign should be that Republicans are so hell-bent on obstructuing Obama that they have willingly flip-flopped on issues that they not only once supported, but were once their ideas in the first place. There are many such examples of this, but the flip-flop on the mandate should be Exhibit A for the Obama team when it comes to the issue of GOP obstructionism.

Quote of the Week

"I always believed that when you run for president of the United States, it should be illegal to read off a teleprompter. Because all you're doing is reading someone else's words to people. You know, when you're running for president, people should know not what someone's writing for you after they've had pollsters and speech writers test it."

Rick Santorum.

I love how Republicans are always going after Obama because he uses teleprompters. Of course, what they are trying to imply is that this poor, unfortunate Negro is such an idiot that he can't even string a few sentences together without help from a machine -- and what they are hoping when they make such an attack is that nobody in their audience has ever watched an Obama press conference or tuned in to the 2008 presidential debates.

I like what Jonathan Chait had to say about all this:

[T]he Republican war on TelePrompTers has poetically backfired. It began as a quasi-racist meme among the fever swamps of the right, a way for right-wingers to express their belief that Obama is a brainless talking doll. By catering to it, Republicans backed themselves into a position where they can’t use TelePrompTers at all. The result is a series of rambling election night speeches that manage to be at once frightening and dull. The speeches, like the race, just go on and on and on.

Fucking-A.

I Like Bill Maher . . .

. . . but he's dead wrong on this issue:

Bill Maher continued to diminish Rush Limbaugh’s sexist attacks on Sandra Fluke and attack liberals for overreacting. On his HBO show last night, Maher said that liberals should “put this in perspective… a guy made a bad joke.” He added in that in America “sometimes you’re made to feel uncomfortable.”

Actually, Limbaugh launched hateful attacks against Fluke seventy times over three days. You can watch all of Limbaugh’s attacks on Fluke here. He doesn’t appear to be joking.

Maher insisted that he was not, in fact, defending Limbaugh but “defending living in a country where people don’t have to be afraid that they might go out of the bounds for one minute. Do we all want to be talking like White House spokesmen?” * * *

Look, I understand what Maher is trying to say, but in saying it he's equating himself with Rush Limbaugh, and there really is no comparison. I doubt Maher gets many calls from Democrats apologizing because they said something negative about him. Maher is a comedian, for Christ's Sake.

Limbaugh, however, is always receiving apologies from Republicans who criticize him -- an example can be found here -- and the reason he receives such apologies is because Limbaugh is the de facto head of the GOP -- at least he was prior to the recent dust-up.

Holy Shit!

I haven't posted at all on Rush Limbaugh's problems with sponsors -- I've been laughing so hard over it that it's been difficult to take a break to blog -- but this is certainly worth a post:

The fallout over Rush Limbaugh’s controversial comments about a Georgetown University law student continues. After dozens of sponsors said they would no longer advertise on The Rush Limbaugh Show, Thursday’s New York broadcast included five minutes of silence and an advertising lineup consisting almost entirely of public service announcements.

The dead airtime was spread out over four instances during the three-hour broadcast. WABC 770 AM in New York was silent for two and a half minutes before the show, save for one ad, then again near the end of the show’s first hour. Hours two and three each contained one minute of silence each, reports Think Progress.

Super Tuesday Prediction

The two states that Santorum has the best chance to win -- Ohio and Tennessee -- will both go to Romney, which will mark the end of Santorum's campaign and will essentially mean that Romney becomes the GOP's de facto nominee. Santorum was recently ahead in both states -- and still has a lead in some polls -- but Mitt has the momentum now.

In other words, the campaign for the General Election will start on Wednesday, which is fine with me. Bring it on.

Santorum had a shot at prolonging this thing, but he blew it by focusing on loser social issues for the GOP -- such as contraception -- and he helped damage the GOP brand in the process:

Four in 10 of all adults say the GOP nominating process has given them a less favorable impression of the Republican Party, versus just slightly more than one in 10 with a more favorable opinion.

Additionally, when asked to describe the GOP nominating battle in a word or phrase, nearly 70 percent of respondents – including six in 10 independents and even more than half of Republicans – answered with a negative comment. * * *

And perhaps most significantly, the GOP primary process has taken a toll on the Republican presidential candidates, including front-runner Mitt Romney, who is seen more unfavorably and whose standing with independents remains underwater.

Conservative Website RedState Finds A Gem From Romney's Past

I enjoy checking out Right-Wing websites and television when things are going badly for the GOP, and this last week was definitely a bad one for Republicans. This post from Erick Erickson at RedState is pretty interesting:

Had Michigan not been as close, the Democrats would have waited to spring this on us in the general election. Luckily we have it now and I hope Ohio voters are paying attention.

In July 2009, Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed in USA Today urging Barack Obama to use an individual mandate at the national level to control healthcare costs.

On the campaign trail now, Mitt Romney says the individual mandate is appropriate for Massachusetts, but not the nation. Repeatedly in debates, Romney has said he opposes a national individual mandate.

But back in 2009, as Barack Obama was formulating his healthcare vision for the country, Mitt Romney encouraged him publicly to use an individual mandate. In his op-ed, Governor Romney suggested that the federal government learn from Massachusetts how to make healthcare available for all. One of those things was “Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others."

Needless to say, this is a disaster for the Romney Camp. Mitt, all throughout the current campaign, has taken the ridiculous position that RomneyCare was right for Massachusetts but wrong for the country. Now it turns out that he encourage Obama to pass RomneyCare on the national level, which is essentially what ended up happening.

We'll see if this particular story gets any play during the run-up to Super Tuesday. If it does, then it could affect the outcome of some of this Tuesday's too-close-to-call primaries (like Ohio and Tennessee).

Quote Of The Week

“Republicans being against sex is not good. Sex is popular.”

- Veteran Republican strategist Alex Castellanos.