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The former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) says that the Republican Party has been "cast in the negative" by the media for opposing marriage equality, but the focus should be on how the party is compassionate for allowing LGBT people hospital visitation rights.

During a Sunday panel discussion on Fox News, host Chris Wallace asked former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie, who was also a senior advisor to former nominee Mitt Romney and former President George W. Bush, how the Republican Party would deal with the public opinion quickly trending toward equal rights for LGBT people.

"I don't see the Republican Party or most Republicans changing in terms of marriage is between one man and one woman," Gillespie explained. "I do think that in the context of this debate, as in so many other debates, Republicans have been cast in the negative -- you know in the negative, saying we're opposing something as opposed to talking about what most Republicans are for."

"Most Republicans are also for the benefits of marriage in the legal system that are afforded protections like, for example, hospital visitation rights or survivorship benefits," he added. "And I think you'll hear more Republicans making that point, that we can do those things without having the government sanction same sex marriage."

Wallace wondered if Gillespie would have any problem with the 2016 Republican Party platform saying that "marriage is between a man and a woman."

"I wouldn't have any problem with that," the former RNC chairman insisted. "I believe the platform right now calls for a federal constitutional amendment to ban it. There may be a debate about that. I don't think you would ever see the Republican Party platform say we're in favor of same sex marriage."

(h/t: @igorvolsky)

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I thought one of President Obama's better moments during the debate this week was when he pointed out that access to affordable contraception was not only a health issue for women, but an economic issue as well. During some of that exchange, Mitt Romney once again attempted to obscure his opposition to the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage mandate and the following day, had one of his surrogates out there claiming that women don't really care about access to affordable contraception and calling it a "peripheral" issue."

As Steve Benen noted, we've seen this act before back in April when Gov. Nikki Haley was out there claiming that women don't care about contraception as well, and this Wednesday, we were treated to round two of this nonsense -- Birth control is not a 'hypothetical situation':

Kerry Healey, Romney's lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, fresh off her borderline-comical turn in the post-debate spin room last night, sat down with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell today, and the host asked questions Healey presumably expected, noting Romney's support for the Blunt Amendment, for example.

Inexplicably, the Romney surrogate described the consequences of the candidate's own proposals as "some hypothetical situation." Healey added that even having a discussion about women being able to afford contraception is a "peripheral" issue.

This arrogant attitude is extraordinary. Under Romney's preferred agenda, employers can end contraception coverage for their women employees, and millions of Americans would no longer be able to afford birth control.

Asked to defend this right-wing nonsense, the Romney campaign's defense is that the question is irrelevant -- as if the issue is so trivial, it's not even worth their time.

If this is Team Romney's attempt to appear in touch with the needs of working families, it's likely to backfire.

Postscript: On a related note, Ed Gillespie said he was "wrong" last night to explain that Romney opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. For those keeping score at home, the Romney campaign, over the course of less than a day, has had no position on the law, been opposed to the law, and then supportive of the law.

As Nicole noted in her post about Nikki Haley:

And if by some chance I ignored all good sense and did the things above, when asked to proffer up proof that there isn't a war on women's rights within the GOP, I sure as hell wouldn't be stupid enough to say, "Well, women don't care about contraception."

The Romney campaign doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from what this did to them in the polls with women earlier this year.

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Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, is insisting that the former Massachusetts governor has not recently tried to soften his positions -- particularly on abortion -- to appeal to independent voters.

CNN's Candy Crowley pointed out on Sunday that former President Bill Clinton had declared that "old moderate Mitt" back following Romney's performance in the first presidential debate because the GOP hopeful had claimed that his health care proposals covered pre-existing conditions, he favored some forms of business regulation and asserted that he was not trying to cut taxes for wealthy Americans.

"He is running on the same platform he's run on through the Republican Party primary," Gillespie told Crowley. "The country is a center-right country. They want to have less federal spending, they want to get us on a path to a balanced budget, they want a free enterprise-driven economy that fosters job creation, not a government-centered economy that fosters economic stagnation."

Crowley reminded Gillespie that Romney had told the Des Moines Register last week that he had no intentions of restricting abortion rights, which appeared to be a drastic contradiction to promises he made during the Republican primary.

“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” Romney explained to the paper’s editorial board.

But the candidate was then forced to walk back those comments the next day, telling reporters that he would be a “pro-life president. The actions I’ll take immediately are to remove funding for Planned Parenthood. It will not be part of my budget.”

In fact, Romney’s website promises that the former Massachusetts governor would appoint Supreme Court justices to reverse Rov. v. Wade and eliminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. In 2007, Romney said that he would be “delighted” to sign a bill banning all abortions nationwide because it would be “terrific.”

"What the governor has said is that he thinks Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided," Gillespie declared on Sunday. "Life is a very important issue in this election, as is the economy and as is national security. All of these issues play a very important role."

"The fact is he is a pro-life candidate, he will be a pro-life president and he doesn't believe we should federally fund abortion," the senior adviser added. "And he believes that Roe was wrongly decided and that this is an issue that is best left to the American people and their elected representatives. [He's been] completely consistent throughout."

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As Karoli explained this week, Republicans going after the funding for things like PBS, and "Planned Parenthood, NOAA, EPA, NPR, medical research, the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change, the OAS, and of course, Obamacare" is nothing new, but that didn't stop Romney adviser Ed Gillespie from pretending that Romney wasn't putting a target on Big Bird and PBS during the first presidential debate.

Gillespie admits that the amount of money is a pittance when it comes to what's actually adding to our deficit, but hey, we've got to start somewhere. Everyone knows they hate PBS for ideological reasons and that they aren't serious about deficit reduction unless it's an excuse to destroy every social safety that exists, or as in this case, to destroy an institution they hate because they disagree with their philosophy.

I'm not sure what else you'd call gutting the funding to PBS other than "targeting" when there's no other logical reason for going after them and when you can simultaneously repeat over and over again that raising taxes on the rich is a waste of time because you won't collect enough revenue to put a meaningful dent the deficit. If this was supposed to be some kind of a "joke" then maybe Romney needs to tell that to his friends in the House, because they're taking actual votes to cut the funding and not just talking about it.

And Gillespie's remarks about Big Bird being "commercially successful" are pretty callous when the people who rely on that type of programming are the ones who can't afford to be making donations to PBS, and may very well not be able to afford cable.

Transcript below the fold.

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Nothing like throwing more old people under the bus. If we want to keep Medicare solvent, how about lowering the age and Medicare for all instead of only having the most expensive and sickest Americans participating in it? No, Ed Gillespie informs us this week that Romney wants to raise the eligibility age instead.

From Think Progress: Romney Adviser Says GOP Would Extend Medicare’s Solvency By Raising The Eligibility Age:

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney pledged to restore Obamacare’s savings in the Medicare program — a move that would move up the insolvency date of the program’s trust fund from 2024 to 2016.

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie how the campaign would extend the life of the program if the Romney-Ryan reforms won’t kick in until 2023, long after Medicare reached insolvency. Gillespie replied by insisting that a Romney administration would raise the age eligibility to 67: [...]

Numerous studies have shown that booting 65- and 66-year-olds from Medicare would in fact have only modest savings, while raising health care costs across the board for seniors. Though Medicare spending itself would be reduced by 5 percent, the seniors taken out of the system would then have to turn to employers, other government programs and the states, increasing costs. As a result many of the people who would otherwise have enrolled in Medicare would face higher premiums for health insurance, higher out-of-pocket costs for health care, or both.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates costs could “total $11.4 billion — twice the net savings to the federal government” in 2014 alone. Medicare’s market power would inevitably suffer as well: [...]

Beginning in 2023, Ryan’s FY 2013 budget would “raise the eligibility age for Medicare — now 65 — by two months per year until it reaches age 67 in 2034.” But if Romney hopes to extend the life of the trust fund by booting younger seniors off of the program, he would have to institute the policy sooner and faster than Ryan has proposed.

Transcript below the fold.

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As Mitt Romney's campaign was trying to distance itself from his running mate's proposed budget on Sunday, senior adviser Ed Gillespie admitted that the candidate "would have signed" Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) controversial plan.

After the Republican presidential hopeful on Saturday announced that he had selected Ryan as the vice presidential nominee, CNN obtained a campaign memo that sought to distinguish Romney's policies from Ryan's budget proposal.

"Gov. Romney applauds Paul Ryan for going in the right direction with his budget, and as president he will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance," the memo said.

In a briefing to reporters on Sunday, campaign spokesman Kevin Madden tried to prevent the race from turning into a referendum on Ryan.

"Gov. Romney is at the top of the ticket," Madden insisted. "And Governor Romney's vision for the country is something that Congressman Ryan supports."

But in a Sunday morning appearance on CNN, Gillespie was forced to admit that Romney supported Ryan's budget and would have signed it into law.

"Well, as Governor Romney has made clear, if the Romney -- sorry, if the Ryan budget had come to his desk as president, he would have signed it, of course," Gillespie told CNN's Candy Crowley. "And one of the reasons that he chose Congressman Ryan is his willingness to put forward innovative solutions in the budget."

Meanwhile, Democrats like Obama campaign senior adviser David Axelrod were calling the Ryan budget a "prescription for economic catastrophe" because it would turn Medicare into a voucher system while giving tax breaks to wealthy Americans.

"This was a guy who rubber stamped every aspect of the Bush economic policy, including not paying for two wars, a Medicare prescription plan, two big tax cuts,” Axelrod told ABC's David Gregory on Sunday. “And now he wants trillions of dollars of more budget-busting tax cuts skewed to the wealthy.”

"He’s the guy who’s the architect of a plan to end Medicare as we know it and turn it into a voucher program and ship thousands of dollars of costs onto senior citizens," the senior Obama adviser added on ABC's This Week. "He’s someone who was the architect of a Social Security privatization scheme that was so out there that even George Bush called it irresponsible, and he believes that we should ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest."

(h/t: Think Progress)

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After Romney adviser Ed Gillespie came on CNN this weekend and claimed that Mitt Romney had "retired retroactively" from Bain Capital, the Obama campaign has continued to hit back hard at this nonsense. As Obama campaign adviser Stephanie Cutter explained to Wolf Blitzer, when your name in on the letterhead and you're drawing a salary from the company, it's a hard sell to most Americans that you're not responsible for that company's business dealings.

The Obama campaign has not backed down since Romney and his surrogates started whining and demanding they apologize for pointing out the fact that lying to the SEC is indeed a felony. It's about time we saw some spine from a Democratic campaign instead of them caving to the naysayers. I think Cutter has learned all to well from watching what they did to John Kerry years ago and isn't going to allow that to happen again this time around.

They've put Mitt Romney on his heels and they need to leave him there from now until the election and ignore the media or the pundits screaming about how mean they're being. Romney's been lying like a rug from the day he started campaigning and hasn't been called out for it. He's got everything coming they can dish out at him and then some.

And not everyone is keeping their powder dry as the Obama campaign has been when it comes to whether Romney committed a felony on his financial disclosure form. Andrew Sullivan just came straight out and accused Romney of lying and committing perjury: Yes, Romney Perjured Himself:

The claim that he committed a felony by falsely reporting his role at Bain Capital under oath is what has really gotten under Romney's skin. But it seems pretty clear to me that he signed a federal financial disclosure form, under the penalty of perjury, saying he had not been involved "in any way" with Bain after he left for Utah in February 1999. That's a strong statement. And it is directly undercut by Romney's own statement in his 2002 attempt to prove residency to run for governor: [...]

So the question of whether Romney committed a felony in his financial disclosure form is a very real one - because Romney and Romney's lawyer provide the strongest evidence that it was perjury. Now we have more contemporaneous evidence that Romney perjured himself: [...]

If there was a good deal of time back and forth in the first few months and some business conducted all the way through to December ("pretty much exclusively"), and if Romney's own lawyer tells an inquiry that Romney's work for Bain "continued unabated just as they had," then it is incontrovertibly true that Romney's statement under oath that he was not involved "in any way" in Bain business after February 1999 was a lie under oath.

I thought Republicans cared about perjury when it comes to high office. I mean, they impeached a sitting president for it. But their current candidate is an obvious perjurer and thereby a felon. How long will it take before this sinks in?

That's going to leave a mark. Romney just continues to get hammered by all sides and I don't see any sign of it letting up any time soon.

Transcript below the fold.

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This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I've heard out of a Republican in a while and that's saying a lot given the amount of lies that come out of most of their mouths most of the time their lips are moving. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl appeared on Meet the Press this Sunday and actually tried to blame outsourcing by corporations on taxes, regulation and "Obamacare" when asked about the dust up over Mitt Romney's outsourcing at Bain Capital.

It's pretty bad when even hack David Gregory has to point out that it's pretty hard to be blaming "Obamacare" or the Affordable Care Act for companies shipping jobs overseas since the practice has been going on for decades now. The truth of the matter is companies ship jobs overseas for cheap labor for one reason and that's to maximize profits. It's not for any concern for American citizens or the American economy. And because they're rewarded and not punished by our tax laws for doing so, we're not going to see the practice stop until our laws are changed.

Democrats have been trying to get Republicans to actually do something about this problem as Sen. Dick Durbin pointed out in his reply to Kyl's nonsense. Sen. Debbie Stabenow has introduced legislation that would "eliminate tax breaks allowing companies to deduct expenses associated with moving operations overseas, while still encouraging them to assist displaced workers. It also would provide a tax credit to corporations that bring jobs back to the United States."

So far the response from Republicans has been for John Boehner to refuse to allow it to come to the floor for a vote in the House and we're looking at the Senate voting on the bill later this month. Naturally when Durbin was trying to elicit a response from Kyl on whether the Republicans in the Senate would vote for the bill or not, David Gregory managed to change the subject so he had no chance for follow up with him.

Instead Kyl was allowed to spout his "we can't raise taxes on the job creators" nonsense with Gregory leaving him unchallenged on their B.S. talking point as well. For once I'd like someone to ask Kyl and his ilk why, if cutting taxes supposedly created jobs, we weren't at full employment while Bush was in office, or given his latest ridiculous argument here, why we didn't see outsourcing under Bush end or at least be reduced as well. If we had an actual journalist instead of a Republican water carrier hosting this show, we wouldn't even see the likes of Kyl show up as a guest, because it would not take a whole lot of follow up to make him look extremely foolish with the arguments he was trying to make here.

Transcript below the fold.

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Conservative columnist George Will on Sunday said a series of attacks and questions about Mitt Romney's association with Bain Capital, his tax returns and offshore investments were adding up to trouble for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

"Mitt Romney's losing at this point in a big way," Will told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "If something's going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why -- given that Mr. Romney knew the day that [Sen. John] McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again -- that he didn't get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest."

"He's done nothing illegal, nothing unseemly, nothing improper, but lots that impolitic -- and he's now in the politics business," Will added.

The Boston Globe reported on Thursday that Romney was listed as the "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" of Bain even after he repeatedly claimed he had retired in 1999.

President Barack Obama's campaign spent the better part of Thursday and Friday using that report to connect Romney to American jobs that Bain allegedly helped send overseas. They also hammered him for not releasing more than two years of tax returns and having offshore investments and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Switzerland.

By late Friday afternoon, Romney had scheduled last-minute interviews with five different television networks to defend himself, but the damage had already been done.

On Sunday, Obama surrogates like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the GOP candidate's "whining" about the Obama campaign called into question how he would handle more serious issues like Russia and China if elected president. And Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) told NBC that Romney was running from his record at Bain "like a scalded cat."

Meanwhile, Romney supporters like adviser Ed Gillespie were on the defensive, trying to explain away the discrepancies in the former Massachusetts governor's record by claiming he had "retired retroactively" after taking a part-time leave of absence from Bain in 1999.

“He’s not a felon,” Gillespie insisted to CNN’s Candy Crowley. “And so it’s sad to see -- we now know this president will say or do anything to keep the highest office in the land, even if it means demeaning the highest office in the land.”

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Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie on Sunday compared Bain Capital sending jobs overseas while Mitt Romney was the CEO to President Barack Obama's campaign "outsourcing" telemarketing to places like Omaha, Nebraska.

Appearing on CNN, Gillespie ripped The Washington Post for reporting that Bain had invested in companies that outsourced jobs to China and India, calling it "a breathless headline over a baseless story."

"The reporter confused the notion of outsourcing -- now a lot of American companies outsource," Gillespie explained. "They outsource domestically as well. For example, the Obama for America campaign outsources from its own campaign telemarketing services."

"To Omaha or wherever it is," CNN host Candy Crowley pointed out. "But we're talking about foreign jobs here."

"I think the reporter confused the notion of outsourcing -- which happens all the time when you don't do all of your services in house, you go outside -- to moving jobs offshore," Gillespie continued. "And yes, there were companies that Bain invested in that did engage in outsourcing. A lot of companies do, obviously. It's an economic model that makes sense."

The liberal blog Think Progress has noted that the Romney campaign is technically correct that there is a difference between "outsourcing" and "offshoring."

But the effect is similar: Jobs are provided to people in other countries instead of the U.S.

"This simply doesn’t change the fact that Bain, under Romney, invested in companies whose sole purpose was to move jobs to other countries, directly countering the narrative that Romney has been trying to set," Think Progress' Pat Garofalo and Igor Volsky wrote last week.

(h/t: Think Progress)