Year: 2012

Mitt Said in January That Staying Home with Kids Wasn’t “Work”

Trish

It was only January — four short months ago– that former Gov. Mitt Romney applauded the idea of women abandoning their two-year-olds so they could experience “the dignity of work.” That’s work as compared to…what? Possibly, “never working a day in their lives?”

Mitt better warm up his Etch A Sketch for this one. The Mormon maladroit was caught on tape in New Hampshire, with Sen. John McCain looking doubtful, as Mitt upped his own bad bet by boasting that even if it cost the state more money to provide childcare, it was worth it to him to force women receiving assistance while he was governor of Massachusetts to get out of the house and…what was that word again? Oh yeah, WORK. You know, some number of days in their lives.

Obviously Mitt was pandering in this speech, which sets it apart not at all from every other speech he’s made. It’s always popular among the folks looking for support from Republicans and tea partiers to beat up on welfare recipients, dreaming up new and different ways to humiliate them (like drug testing) or run their lives for them, as Mitt was attempting to do here with his tough love paternalism. What they say doesn’t even have to make economic sense. Neither drug testing nor forcing needy mothers to put their children in daycare would save money. The point is to extract a pound of flesh along with that EBT card.

It’s speeches — and attitudes — like this that account for the gender gap in poll numbers that leave Republican candidates in the dust with women.

Gingrich Blasts Fox News

Buck Banks

I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through. 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.

— Newt Gingrich, accusing the cable network of having been been behind Mitt Romney from the beginning of the Republican presidential fight.

Gingrich was an employee of Fox as recently as last year, but was suspended as he geared up for a presidential bid.

TV Newser has a response from Fox News: “This is nothing other than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN — that’s the kind of man he is.”

Caught on Video: Sean Hannity’s Five-Second Flip-Flop on Teleprompter Use

Jon Ponder
Click the screenshot to see the video at Gawker.com
Click the screenshot to see the video at Gawker.com

Before his identity was uncovered and Fox News fired him, the “Fox Mole” provided a video to Gawker of an off-air, sotto voce pre-interview conversation between Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity in which they both criticized Pres. Obama’s use of teleprompters and then, literally within seconds, reversed themselves on the subject, with Hannity even agreeing that Romney’s dependence on teleprompters is “smart.”

In the video, Romney, a world-class champion flip-flopper, executes his 180-degree flip on teleprompters in a heart-stopping one-half of a second. It takes Hannity, the slow poke, just five seconds to completely reverse his opinion from being against teleprompters when the president uses them to being for them when Romney, the official presidential candidate of Fox News does — and 22 seconds after dissing the president, Hannity even tells Romney he is “smart” to use teleprompters because “they’re out to just eviscerate anybody who makes a mistake.” (The Gawker video is unembedable, but you can watch it by clicking here or the screenshot at the top.)

Here’s the transcript, which picks up at about 28 seconds into the video:

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