Democrats hit Romney on “Band-Aid” comment
By Jason McLure
Even as Newt Gingrich has soared to the top of most Republican presidential polls, Democrats continue to focus their attacks on former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Today New Hampshire and Iowa Democrats unveiled a new website attacking Romney for calling the president’s jobs bill a “temporary little band aid” during a debate in October.
Democrats say passing the jobs bill, which would extend a payroll tax cut for employees, would save the average family $1,500 next year – or “four months of groceries, over seven months of gasoline, an electric bill for an entire year,” according to a video on the site, littlebandaids.com.
It also takes a swipe at Romney’s wealth, estimated to be around $250 million, with the line “$1,500 might be a Band-Aid to Mitt Romney, but to a middle-class family, $1,500 goes a long way.”
As part of the effort, President Obama’s re-election campaign also released a new online tax calculator allowing people to compute how much money the extension would save them.
“President Obama’s failed policies have devastated millions of Americans with record jobs loss and record home loss, and that is why he is looking at a one-term proposition,” said Andrea Saul, a Romney spokesperson.
Romney opens ad offensive against Obama
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s first television commercial attacking Barack Obama’s record hits the airwaves in New Hampshire on Tuesday — just in time to welcome the president on a visit to the early primary state.
A discussion of jobs was on the agenda for Obama’s quick trip to a high school in Manchester. But Romney didn’t wait for the president’s arrival.
The former Massachusetts governor previewed his new ad Monday night on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” show.
The 60-second spot opens with a shot of Obama delivering a campaign speech in New Hampshire — in Oct. 2008. About a third of the way in, the ad shifts focus to Romney.
“The contrast between what he said and what he did is so stark, people will recognize we really do need to have someone new lead this country,” Romney said, describing what he’s trying to convey in the TV spot. “And then I, of course, described why I’m the right person for that responsibility.”
And the reviews from the Obama campaign are in. “… Romney launches a deceitful and dishonest attack rather than outline his own record or plans for the future.” — Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.
Here’s the Romney spot posted on YouTube:
Looks like Mr. Romney can’t fight using the truth, so instead he resorts to lies in his advertising. Doesn’t bode well for this lying Mormon to be elected POTUS.
Washington Extra – Turkey talks
The good news? Thanksgiving will not be interrupted by eleventh-hour negotiations by the “super committee” to strike a deal to cut the burgeoning deficit. After months of work, the 11 men and one woman called it quits today. Their statement said “it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement.” No mention of the word on everyone’s tongues: failure.
Even in the early days of the super committee, we are learning, hope was in short supply. At one of the early breakfast meetings, members kept saying how hard it would be to reach agreement. South Carolina’s Democratic Representative James Clyburn said to his fellow panel members: “Do you want to know what’s hard? Desegregating South Carolina in the 1950s. I met my wife in jail.”
Right now, it’s hard to believe this Congress “can build on this committee’s work,” as the committee co-chairs said hopefully in their statement. There seems to be little faith left on the Hill. Just look at the harsh words from Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, who said the panel’s failure “represents yet another regrettable milestone in Congress’s steady march toward abject ineffectiveness.”
As our grade school grammar teachers would remind us, turkeys are done and people are finished. And the super committee? Done. Over. History.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
US deficit panel fails to reach deal U.S. lawmakers abandoned their high-profile effort to rein in the country’s ballooning debt in a sign that Washington likely will not be able to resolve a dispute over taxes and spending until 2013. Republican and Democratic members of a 12-member congressional “super committee” said they were unable to resolve their significant differences as they ran up against a deadline to deliver a plan that would cut U.S. deficits by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years.
For more of this story by Thomas Ferraro and Richard Cowan, read here.
Highlights from the GOP Thanksgiving Family Forum
Six of the Republican presidential candidates met at the First Federated Church in Des Moines, Iowa, last night for a dinnertime “family discussion” at the Thanksgiving Family Forum. Gathered around a wooden table garnished with a centerpiece of artificial pumpkins, moderator Frank Luntz asked Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum about their views on social issues, morality, personal responsibility, and God. Neither of the two Mormon candidates, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, were in attendance. Here are some of the most memorable moments:
1. Gingrich tells OWS: “Go get a job — right after you take a bath.”
Asked about the role of personal responsibility in society, Gingrich quoted John Smith (of Pocahontas fame): “In 1607 in the first English speaking permanent colony, [Smith said] to the aristocrats who had paid their way and didn’t want to work: ‘If you don’t work, you won’t eat.’”
The same principle, he said, should apply to Occupy Wall Street protesters, all of whom “start with a premise that we all owe them everything.”
They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from places they they don’t want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park so that they can self-righteously explain that they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything” (1:10:05).
“Go get a job,” he said. “Right after you take a bath.”
2. Perry says we’re sending billions of dollars to China, where they abort 35,000 children per day
@DwDunphy:
You know if Dr. Paul were less honest, less intelligent, less geniune, and less consistent in his positions, he might make more friends… especially in the media
Gingrich fascinated by Romney computer wipe
Republican Newt Gingrich had not heard of a controversy surrounding some of the final actions of rival Mitt Romney’s staff when Romney was governor of Massachusetts, but suggested the ploy might even turn up in one of his books in the future.
The Boston Globe reported this week that when Romney was leaving the statehouse in 2006 after one term as governor, eleven of his staff were allowed to use their own money to purchase their work computers’ hard drives, and the Romney administration’s emails were all wiped from a server.
“They did what?” Gingrich said when asked about it at a press conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a film screening. “I’m now in non-candidate mode, of simply being curious as a citizen.”
Gingrich said he had “no idea” what Romney or his staff might have hoped to achieve, adding, “you should ask him that.”
“As a novelist, by the way, it’s a lot of fun,” he added.
Romney, campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday, said he and his staff “followed the law as intended and as written.”
The Romney campaign has attempted to use the controversy as a fundraising tool. Campaign manager Matt Rhoades sent an email late on Friday linking Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, an ally of Barack Obama, with the computer story.
Romney admitted today during an interview with the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire that his administration deleted emails because they didn’t want “opposition research teams” to have access to them.
Romney clearly broke precedent with the hard drive buybacks, as staffers for previous administration called the purchases “unheard of.” Terry Dolan, who worked in six previous administrations in the state, told the Boston Globe, “That had never happened prior to the end of the Romney administration. I don’t remember anybody buying their hard drives. I don’t remember anybody buying anything.”
I’m sure Romney checked with his legal advisors to make sure they were not technically violating any laws, but wiping servers and taking hard drives sounds like something the Cheney administration would have done.
Herman Cain promises more “Powerful Pauses”
White House hopeful Herman Cain defended his now infamous “Milwaukee pause” while stumping in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Thursday, and even termed a new phrase putting a positive spin on his apparent gaffe.
Earlier this week Cain stumbled in an interview at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, pausing at length when asked a question about U.S. policy in Libya.
“Unlike politicians, I don’t shoot from the lip,” Cain told Reuters at the Airport Diner, saying that as a businessman he takes in information and considers it before responding.
Cain noted that as candidates rise in the polls they need to become more discliplined in their public pronouncements.
“Like the thing in Milwaukee this week,” Cain offered. “It wasn’t a mental lapse. It was a thoughtful pause.”
“You can look forward to more ‘Powerful Pauses.’”
Cain seeks “Cuban” lesson in Miami
Herman Cain landed in the heart of Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood on Wednesday and tried out his signature “9-9-9″ tax proposal in Spanish — “nueve, nueve, nueve” — (just the numbers, not the details).
After sampling Cuban coffee and a croqueta the Republican presidential candidate and former pizza executive asked: “How do you say ‘delicious’ in Cuban?” Here’s video from Fox News.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Front Photo Credit: REUTERS/Joe Skipper (Cain at ‘Versailles’ restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood)
He should probably try taking a “Foreign Policy” lesson or an “Economics” lesson first.
Washington Extra – Patriotic millionaires
As Democrats and Republicans hunkered down on opposite sides of the Capitol on Wednesday, showing no signs of a compromise on slashing the deficit, a group called the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength made its move.
Nearly 140 members wrote a letter to President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress to “do the right thing” and “raise our taxes.” Next they hit up the bipartisan “super committee,” laboring under a Nov. 23 deadline to reach agreement on the deficit or trigger unpalatable budget cuts.
One of the corporate patriots said if Congress ended Bush-era tax cuts it would affect him and his fellow millionaires in his group “about as much as a dead fly interrupts a picnic.”
Another added “those of us who can afford it should step up. That is our message to the super committee. We hope they listen.”
Yeah, well, good luck with that. With just a week to go and members expressing some pretty serious doubts about a deal, the super committee twelve sound like they can’t even listen to each other.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Deficit committee locked in budget stalemate
Really?
Does anyone believe this kind of propaganda anymore?
If you want to donate money to charity or the state nobody would stop you…
Newt goes back to school
Newt Gingrich may not have thrilled a crowd of Iowa school kids with all of his answers on Tuesday, but he cannot be accused of pandering to them.
Gingrich didn’t score points with the 200 or so middle and high schoolers in Osage, Iowa, with his answer to the U.S. falling behind in the brain race with China.
“You’ve got to study more,” he told the kids, who stared back. “Scores in the end aren’t the teacher’s problem; they are the student’s problem.”
The kids were quiet and attentive for the 45 minutes the former US House Speaker spent with them in the gym at Osage Middle School, but their reactions afterward were decidedly mixed.
Some were thrilled with Gingrich’s visit, including Alexandra Burns, 14, the daughter of a local Republican legislator who invited Gingrich after meeting him with her father.
“How cool was that?” she shouted after Gingrich left.
I don’t agree with much Newt Gingrich has to say, but he is correct when he says that the responsibility to do well in school lies with the students. I used to be a teacher and I can tell you firsthand, students aren’t held accountable for anything anymore.
Newt’s campaign contributions surge alongside his rising favorability
Newly anointed Republican front-runner Newt Gingrich has raised more money since October 1 than during the rest of his presidential campaign, as rising poll numbers have prompted his fans to open their wallets.
The former Speaker of the House of Representatives has raised at least $3 million since October 1, said campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond. The donations have averaged $100 each and he is attracting 1,000 new donors each day.
In contrast, Gingrich took in less than $800,000 in the third quarter ending September 30, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. At that point, he was trailing far behind most of his rivals for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination — former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, businessman Herman Cain and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman.
Gingrich’s presidential campaign has been surging as his rivals have stumbled. Gingrich garnered 28 percent of support among Republican primary voters, besting Cain at 25 percent and Romney at 18 percent, according to a Public Policy Polling survey released on Monday. In the poll, conducted Nov. 10 through Nov. 13, Gingrich’s backing is up 13 percentage points from a comparable survey taken a month ago.
Speaking at a winery on Monday night where Gingrich and his wife Callista were signing books and showing a documentary, Hammond said big donors are starting to come back to Gingrich, whose campaign seemed near death in July after an exodus of most of his staff.
“We are seeing the beginning of the large-dollar donors coming back,” he said.
Newt, Freddi Mac, $ millions, “big doners”…
Geez, please make it stop…..
It’s such a shame or should I say sham.
I only make about $40k a year. I’ll take a band-aid, especially seeing as how I paid for it to begin with.