——————————WHAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY STANDS FOR TODAY
LISTEN TO MITT ROMNEY, he’s telling you everything you need to know about him — “You will hear words from people running for office that sound great. But sometimes what people say is not a perfect example of what they’re going to do.” [...] Romney says he wants to put the nation on a path to a balanced budget while also cutting an array of taxes, building up the Navy and Air Force and adding 100,000 active-duty military personnel. He says he would slash domestic spending and reduce tax loopholes but has offered few details. Cut taxes for the rich, cut spending on investment in people and infrastructure, increase military spending and whammo: balanced budget. — Daily Kos
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GOV. JERRY BROWN: the Republican Party is like a cult – On CBS News’ Face the Nation Sunday morning, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said that politics had changed a “hell of a lot” since he started his career as a public official. “It’s more polarized, the money is more centrally collected and distributed by the two major parties, there is — particularly on the Republican side — an enforcement of discipline that’s ideological,” he explained. “And as was mentioned today in The Washington Post, it takes on the quality of a cult.” — Raw Story
REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST ALEX CASTELLANOS denied that women make 77 cents for a man’s dollar in the workplace and noted, “there are lots of reasons for that.” “Now we know, at least from both of your perspectives,” [Rachel] Maddow said, pointing to Castellanos and Romney surrogate Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), “women are not fairing worse than men in the economy that women aren’t getting paid less for equal work.” “It’s about policy and whether or not you want to fix some of the structural discrimination that women really do face that Republicans don’t believe is happening,” she added. — Think Progress
- The problem of ‘working from different facts’ – There’s simply no shared foundation of reality, which in turn shapes the policy debate in unproductive ways. The left sees gender-based pay disparity and looks for mechanisms to address the problem; the right rejects the existence of the disparity and sees no use for the solutions because, to them, there is no problem.
NEWT GINGRICH will drop out Wednesday — According to Fox News sources, the still technically in-the-running Republican — now without supporters or a security detail — will officially end his campaign on Wednesday. Earlier reports said he would call it quits on Tuesday, but apparently he needs our attention for just a teeny, tiny while longer. — Daily Intel
FLORIDA PASTOR TERRY JONES held another Koran-burning ceremony yesterday in a portable fire pit, despite a Pentagon warning that this could jeopardize American troops overseas… — Gainesville Sun
ROMNEY PERFORMS A TWISTING, DOUBLE, BACKWARDS FLIP FLOP: Romney top advisor Eric Fehrnstrom says that not only did Mitt Romney not oppose auto bailout but that President Obama actually got the idea from Mitt. — TPM
image: Bob Cesca
PRESIDENT OBAMA / DEMOCRATS————————————————————
SENATE DEMOCRATS will soon hold a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would update and strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a senior Democratic Senate aide confirms to me. “This vote is going to happen,” the aide says. The vote means this will likely be the next major battle in the war over women, and it could put Mitt Romney in a delicate political spot. It will force a choice: Either he supports the measure, which would put him at odds with the Senate GOP caucus (which voted against the bill two years ago), or he opposes it, which would put Romney at odds with his own rhetorical support for equal pay for women, potentially damaging him further among crucial female swing voters. — Greg Sargent
ROBERT GIBBS: Romney’s slogan is ‘Obama didn’t clean up our mess fast enough‘ — “I think sometimes you listen to the Romney campaign and they do think a lot people in this country are stupid,” Gibbs told NBC’s David Gregory. “Their message is: You didn’t clean up our mess fast enough.” “The last six months of the Bush administration, we lost three and half million jobs. We know this about Mitt Romney: He’s not a job creator. When he was governor of Massachusetts, they were 47th out of 50 in job creation. His experience is in downsizing, outsourcing jobs and bankrupting companies and walking away with a lot of money for himself.” Gibbs added: “His economic ideas are the failed economic ideas that we tried for eight years, tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and letting Wall Street go back to writing the rules all over again. That is the policies that got us into this mess.” — Raw Story
OBAMA SPIKES the bin Laden football — After taking a low-key approach to the killing of Osama bin Laden for most of the past year, the Obama campaign released a video on Friday taking credit for green-lighting the operation and questioning whether Mitt Romney would have made the same call. Conservatives scoffed, claiming that the raid was a no-brainer that any president would have approved. I don’t know who’s right, but if you want to decide for yourself you probably ought to know just how the entire operation was planned and what part Obama played. — Mother Jones
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WHAT SHOULD WE DO to help America’s young? Basically, the opposite of what Mr. Romney and his friends want. We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy — the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard. Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren’t just America’s future; they’re the future of the tax base, too. A mind is a terrible thing to waste; wasting the minds of a whole generation is even more terrible. Let’s stop doing it. — Paul Krugman
