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More fearmongering from one of the guys who helped break the bank under Bush: Portman: ‘We Need To Face Facts, We’re Going Broke’:

Sen. Rob Portman delivered the Republican weekly address, saying, “We need to face facts: we’re going broke.” Portman is considered by many to be near the top of Mitt Romney’s list of potential running mates. CNN reports that Portman on Saturday will appear at the opening of a Romney campaign office in Ohio.

As Ben Adler at The Nation wrote last month, here's why the Romney campaign might want to avoid choosing Portman as their pick for vice president: Meet Rob Portman, Bush Republican:

If Mitt Romney is looking for a running mate to completely undermine his argument that his campaign represents the outsider-businessman, fiscally responsible alternative, he would be hard-pressed to find a better choice than Senator Rob Portman (R-OH). And yet the freshman senator and Washington insider is reportedly high on Romney’s vice-presidential short list. (This past weekend he was one of the chosen few attendees at Romney’s mysterious confab with big donors and nominal outside organizers such as Karl Rove.)

Portman’s pedigree is that of a generic establishment Republican career politician. Born in Cincinnati, Portman graduated from a private high school, Dartmouth and the University of Michigan Law School. After law school he moved to Washington, DC, where he worked for the paradigmatic lobbying firm Patton Boggs. Portman registered as a foreign agent, because he represented repressive foreign autocracies such as the Sultanate of Oman and the Republic of Haiti (ruled at the time by infamous dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier). In 1989 Portman joined President George H.W. Bush’s administration as assistant White House counsel, later serving as White House director of legislative affairs.

In 1993 Portman entered a special Congressional election back in Ohio. Portman’s Congressional career was hardly that of a legislative powerhouse. His signature accomplishments include authoring laws to eliminate capital gains taxes on most home sales and drug prevention efforts.

While lobbying for dictators would usually be a prospective running mate’s biggest liability, it is not Portman’s. By far the biggest risk in choosing Portman would be his role in the failed policies of President George W. Bush’s administration. Portman served during Bush’s second term as US Trade Representative and then as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Read on...

Transcript of Portman's remarks below the fold.

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It seems we can add yet another Republican to the list of those embarrassing themselves this year with this birther nonsense -- Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler. She decided to join the ranks of Rep. Cliff Stearns and Arizona's wingnut Sheriff Joe Arpaio with pandering to the worst elements within the GOP base with this fearmongering and not so thinly veiled racism with trying to paint Barack Obama as "the other" or "foreign."

From Progress Missouri -- Vicky Hartzler is still a birther. "I have doubts that it is really his real birth certificate.":

It's April 2012, but Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler is still worried that Barack Obama is an illegal immigrant with a forged birth certificate. As first reported by the Sedalia Democrat, Rep. Hartlzer expressed "a lot of doubts" about the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate at a town hall in Sedalia, MO on April 5. Jerry Schmidt of Show Me Progress has the whole thing on video.

"You know I have a lot of doubts about all [Obama's birth certificate]....I don’t understand why he didn’t show that right away." When asked to clarify her doubts during press availability after the event, Hartzler said: “I have doubts that it is really his real birth certificate, and I think a lot of Americans do, but they claim it is, so we are just going to go with that.”

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The lawyer for the woman who in 1999 accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment said Friday that the then-CEO had not told the truth about his actions, but his client did not want to relive the "series of inappropriate behaviors" by coming forward.

"In 1999, I was retained by a female employee of the National Restaurant Association concerning several instances of sexual harassment by the then-CEO," Joel Bennett told reporters. "She made a complaint in good faith about a series of inappropriate behaviors and unwanted advances from the CEO. Those complaints were resolved in an agreement with her acceptance of a monetary settlement. She and her husband see no value in revisiting this matter now, nor in discussing the matter any further, publicly or privately. In fact, it would be extremely painful to do so. ... My client stands by the complaint she made."

Bennett added that his client believed that this statement refuted the Republican presidential candidate's claim that no sexual harassment had taken place.

"I don't remember the exact time period of the incidents, but it was over a period of a month or two as I recall. ... We're not going to get into what was physical and what was verbal. It qualified as sexual harassment in our opinion."

Moments after Bennett spoke to reporters, the National Restaurant Association released a statement saying the organization had been willing to waive their confidentiality agreement.

"Notwithstanding the Association’s ongoing policy of maintaining the privacy of all personnel matters, we have advised Mr. Bennett that we are willing to waive the confidentiality of this matter and permit Mr. Bennett’s client to comment," the statement said. "As indicated in Mr. Bennett’s statement, his client prefers not to be further involved with this matter and we will respect her decision."

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A woman in Iowa on Thursday gave Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney a lesson in why his support for a state constitutional amendment to define life as beginning at conception would have effectively ended up banning many forms of birth control.

Earlier this month, the candidate told Fox News host and evangelical Christian Mike Huckabee that he would have supported a state constitutional amendment to ban abortion if it would have prevented abortions from being covered by the health care law he enacted while serving as the governor of Massachusetts.

"Would you have supported a constitutional amendment that would have established definition of life beginning of life at conception?" Huckabee asked.

"Absolutely," Romney replied.

At a town hall event in Sioux City, Iowa Thursday, a woman told Romney that she was concerned about what this meant for hormonal birth control.

"That would essentially mean banning most forms of birth control," she noted. "Ninety-eight percent of American women, including me, use birth control. So, could you help me understand why you oppose the use of birth control?"

"I don't," Romney declared. "Life begins at conception; birth control prevents conception."

"What I believe is the right course as regards to abortion and life is that I would like to see the Supreme Court return this right to the states and let states create their own legislation with regards to life. That's my view. And states will make different decisions which is their right to do so. And my view is that I'm not out campaigning for an amendment of some kind. I am campaigning to see justices ultimately appointed to the Supreme Court that will follow the Constitution, return to the states the right to make decision themselves."

Romney's plan to "return the right to the states" would allow them to enforce life-begins-at-conception laws, effectively banning the forms of birth control that he claims not to be against.

"I don't know if you want to have some staff look into this, but hormonal forms of birth control work a little differently," the woman pointed out. "They actually prevent implantation, not conception. So, it would ban hormonal forms of birth control which is what most women use."

"As someone who uses birth control, this is a very terrifying prospect for me so I hope that you can, you know, look into that."

In fact, many anti-abortion advocates define conception and fertilization as the same thing.

"At the moment of conception, a male sperm unites with a female ovum," according to the Pro-Life Action League. "After fertilization, the tiny human being travels down the fallopian tube. Implantation, which occurs 8 to 10 days after fertilization, refers to the point at which the baby (now scientifically referred to as an "embryo"), implants in the mother's uterus and begins to draw nourishment."

A 2005 Guttmacher Institute report found that 18 states, including Massachusetts, defined pregnancy as beginning with fertilization or conception.

"[I]t is likely that the proponents of the state laws may have been unaware of how the various contraceptive methods actually work, and were probably not taking aim at them directly," the report states. "On the other hand, many in the antiabortion movement clearly understand the modes of action for contraceptive methods, especially the hormonal methods. Understanding that, they have to know that the end result of enforcing a definition that pregnancy begins at fertilization would implicate not just some hormonal methods, but all of them."

The fringe anti-abortion group Personhood USA has recently been successful at getting more states to take up their legislation that defines life as beginning at fertilization.

Not much more needs be said. Except maybe "Ponzi Scheme".

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With the exit of Tim Pawlenty from the Republican 2012 primary race this weekend, I would just like to say that I'm glad this is the last time we're going to hear this type of completely disrespectful trash talk about President Obama from man who decided the best way to get a leg up in that primary was to try to out-wingnut his fellow Minnesotan, Michele Bachmann.

During the speeches the day before the final vote in the Ames Straw Poll that led to him dropping out of the 2012 primary race, Pawlenty decided to once again compare President Obama to a "manure spreader in a windstorm."

I've got some issues with President Obama's policies as well, but I have a lot of trouble listening to someone who governed his state the way Pawlenty did and this type of just pure hyperbolic name calling. You want to argue substance on governing policies, go argue them. This type of nonsense reminds me more of what you'd hear from Rush Limbaugh and right wing radio than what you should hear from someone who is expected to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.

Republicans would work themselves into a lather if anyone dared to say anything negative about George W. Bush for running our country into the ground, but now it's apparently alright to say the President of the United States is throwing s**t into the wind, and that's somehow acceptable as what passes for a political debate in this country. This is the second time Pawlenty has made this same type of statement and we didn't hear a peep from our corporate media the first time he did it. Now that he's out of the race, I suspect it's less likely they'll bring it up this week after he did it again.

Pawlenty along with the lot of them did a whole lot of name calling during these speeches they gave during this straw poll in Iowa. What they did not give us were solutions to what's ailing our country other than more of their same tired policies... tax cuts for the rich, get rid of regulations, let the "free market" prevail, repeal "Obama-Care" and oh by the way, nothing that's gone wrong over the last thirty or forty years is our fault or the fault of conservative governance. All of our problems with the economy and jobs started when President Obama took office.

I'd say good luck to them selling that to average voters out there, were it not for the fact that our corporate media will help them put a positive spin on their talking points and they surely won't point out to viewers that the trickle-down economic policies they're still touting as credible have already been proven to be failed policies.

And on a final note to Pawlenty exiting this race, don't let the door hit you in the ass. The media kept painting this guy as some sort of "centrist" but he's just as far to the right of the rest of them running, which frankly scares the hell out of me.

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Salon's Dave Weigel captured this video of a voter in Iowa Monday telling Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann that a less-than-flattering photo of her had graced the cover of Newsweek magazine for a profile titled "The Queen of Rage."

"Have you seen it yet?" the voter asked.

"I have not," Bachmann replied.

"It's a big close-up of you, a wild-eyed photo with the headline, 'Queen of Rage,'" the voter explained.

"Ah-hah. Well, we'll have to take a look at that, won't we?" Bachmann said.

The candidate added that her campaign's message was "hope," not rage.

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On this weekend's Chris Matthews Show, Matthews' "Big Question" for the week was this: Of the Republicans running for president, which one offers the best chance of becoming, a great president? The response, mainly crickets by his panelists John Heilemann, Kelly O'Donnell, Gloria Borger. The only one willing to give him an answer was Joe Klein.

His response of what Republican president might end up on Mount Rushmore -- Barack Obama. That's a pretty sad state of affairs with our current field of Republican candidates when all of them were not willing to say anything good about any of them.

And someone should remind Joe Klein that to be an actual Republican these days and not the Villagers imaginary idea of what remains of the Republican Party, you have to be a bat shit crazy ideologue who's not willing to negotiate with anyone on anything if you think there's political gain in it and the public will fall for it.

I'm not any happier than a lot of us with how far both parties have moved to the right and how money is corrupting our political process, but sorry Joe, the party that has run off the cliff with being insane should not have their label attached to our current president.

I'd like for him to be further to the left like the rest of us, and as aggravated as I have gotten with what's he's been willing to concede to the other side and with validating a lot of their talking points, I would not wish having to navigate this current political climate he walked into and the Congress he's been forced to deal with on my worst enemy. And today's current Republican Party does not deserve to have anyone who is even half-way sane tagged with their label. They deserve to be called out for the zealots and TeaBirchers they are that have taken over their party.

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CNN's John King talked to former Bushie and Republican operative Ed Gillespie about whether we should actually take flame thrower Newt Gingrich's presidential run seriously and they focused in on whether it might bother voters that he's been married three times. What they failed to note is that the details of his two divorces and how that somehow squares with him being a so-called "Christian conservative" are completely at odds with each other and that hypocrisy might bother voters quite a bit more than the number of marriages he's had.

The HuffPo laid out a timeline of Gingrich's divorces and affairs here -- Newt Gingrich: Marriages, Divorces, Affairs Timeline.

And our corporate media continues to ignore that he left one of his wives while she was recovering from cancer surgery. So much for those family values. And as John wrote about here earlier this year, David Frum criticized Gingrich for not just dumping one sick wife, but two.

Fox "News" can attempt to clean up Gingrich's image all they want along with some of their fellow enablers in our corporate media as CNN did here, but I don't think there's enough lipstick out there to cover up this pig. Gingrich is nothing but a huge flaming hypocrite who says inflammatory things every chance he gets and I don't think he's any more a serious candidate for president than Trump was.

Transcript via CNN:

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The Republicans are holding their first presidential primary debate tonight in South Carolina and apparently a few of the participants didn't mind doubling down on the torture card. Chris Wallace asks for a show of hands and who would be willing to continue the Bush administration's use of waterboarding. Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum all raised their hands.

And guess who's sponsoring the event tonight? The John Birch Society and the Oath Keepers. Seriously. Digby has more here.

Jed Lewinson is live blogging the debate over at Daily KOS if you'd like to follow along -- First Republican presidential debate.