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CNN's Jack Cafferty asks why Republicans aren't thrilled with Mitt Romney during his "Cafferty File" segment and the the answers aren't pretty to say the least.

What Cafferty and Beinart both ignore when discussing the GOP base and what candidate they would ever settle for, is the fact that they're not "conservatives" as Blue Texan so rightfully pointed out, they're radical. I think that bears repeating any time someone mentions the Republican base and tries to pretend there's anything "conservative" about this bunch. The party has been taken over by the John Birch Society, who now call themselves the "tea party", or as Amato likes to call them, TeaBirchers. And sadly for poor old Mitt, they can't stand him and they're not going away quietly.

CAFFERTY: It seems Mitt Romney is not selling what conservatives want to buy. Apparently, his focus on jobs and the economy isn't connecting with the right wing of his party.

Peter Beinart writes in "The Daily Beast" the Republican base is more fired up about how to keep government from destroying our liberty than had you how to use government to grow the economy.

Yes, conservatives see shrinking government and boosting the economy as related, but their focus is on greater freedom. It helps explain the success of many of the previous GOP candidates who caught fire this time around, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and currently, Rick Santorum. All of them described the 2012 election on some level, as a struggle between government tyranny and individual freedoms.

Chances are, in November, more Americans want to hear how the next president can fix the economy, create jobs -- and that would play into Romney's strength. But for now, he's got to figure out how to make conservatives like him.

And here's a hint: his speech over the weekend is not the answer. In that speech he described himself as a, quote, "severely conservative Republican governor." That is just awful. Severely conservative? It sounds like a disease. It once again highlighted he's got problems on the right.

But Romney did get some good news over the weekend after the Santorum sweep last Tuesday, Romney narrowly defeated Ron Paul to win the Maine caucuses and he won the straw poll vote at CPAC as well.

And there's this -- should Romney become the nominee eventually, conservatives could fall into line faster if it means defeating President Obama in the fall.

So here's the question: Why can't Mitt Romney catch fire with conservatives?

Go to CNN.com/CaffertyFile and post a comment on my blog, or go to our post on THE SITUATION ROOM's Facebook page -- Jess. [...]

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From CNN's The Situation Room, Jack Cafferty asks about something that's sure to be an issue if Texas Gov. Rick Perry actually wins the GOP presidential nomination for 2012 -- How much will it hurt Rick Perry that nearly 1 in 5 Texans live in poverty?:

Rick Perry loves to talk about all the jobs he's created in Texas... but that's only part of the story... and a bit misleading at that.

The other part of the Perry story is that nearly 1 in 5 Texans in the state where he is the governor are living below the poverty line; and that the poverty rate is growing faster in Texas than the national average.

CNN Money reports that Texas ranks 6th in terms of people living in poverty.

Both demographic and economic factors play into this high poverty rate - more than half the state are minorities and many Texans have little education. Especially in southern Texas, many families live in shanty housing with no electricity or indoor plumbing. In 2011.

Also, the poor in Texas don't get much help. The state has one of the lowest rates of spending on its citizens per capita; and it has the highest share of those without health insurance.

Relatively few Texans collect food stamps - even though many more qualify for them - and receiving cash assistance is difficult. Experts say part of the reason more people don't seek help is the Texas mentality that you should pick yourself up by your own bootstraps.

For his part, Texas governor Rick Perry says creating jobs is the best way to help his citizens. And it's true that Texas has created 40% of the jobs added in the U.S. in the past two years.

But many of these new jobs are low-paying ones. More than half a million workers in Texas last year were paid at or below the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. That's just $15,000 dollars a year for someone working full-time.

Texas has the highest percentage of minimum wage workers in the country... tying with Mississippi at nearly 10%.

With jobs and the economy sure to be the top issue in 2012...

Here’s my question to you: How much will it hurt Rick Perry that nearly one in five Texans are living in poverty?

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It looks like Jack Cafferty decided to carry a little water for the AstroTurf "tea party" with a bit of fearmongering over our debt and deficit with this dishonest bit of editorializing on CNN's The Situation Room. First of all, repeat after me Jack -- there is no tea party. The so-called "tea party" is nothing more than the far right-wing of the Republican Party that's been with us for ages now, with big monied corporate interests along with your sorry excuse for a "news" channel along with Fox promoting them.

And all of your attempted re-branding here is not going to change that. And if Cafferty wants to blame the problems with our debt and deficit on the current administration, I've got a couple of charts and an article at the New York Times he needs to read -- How the Deficit Got This Big.

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Jack Cafferty almost pretends here that Donald Trump was ever a serious presidential candidate for 2012 and asks if there's any doubt that he doesn't have a chance in hell of winning after the thumping he took at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last weekend by President Obama and SNL's Seth Meyers.

I'm still just thoroughly disgusted with the media for the coverage the man got leading up to his skewering at the WHCD. Maybe a better question for Cafferty would be is the media done finally propping this grifter up which they never should have done in the first place? Since they're still propping Mr. Noun and a Verb and 9-11 Rudy pootie as somehow serious as well... again, I don't have much hope for when it will stop.

I think we need a new name for the embarrassingly large number of potential GOP candidates that are pretending they might run but are never going to and just want to line their pockets in the process. Maybe something like Grifterpalooza. Thoughts welcomed on that one.

From The Cafferty File -- Is a presidential run already over for Trump?:

The morning after his TV show "Celebrity Apprentice" was interrupted by the breaking news that Osama bin Laden had been killed, Donald Trump released a statement congratulating President Obama and calling for an end to party politics for "the next several days."

He has been uncharacteristically quiet since, especially for a guy who spent weeks adding fuel to the “birther” controversy, badgering the president on a number of issues and tiptoeing around talk of his own presidential run in 2012.

Chances are Trump has been quiet, in part, because he is still smarting from the White House Correspondents' dinner two Saturdays ago. President Obama and the evening's emcee, "Saturday Night Live's" Seth Myers, separately skewered Trump at the gala event with a series of jokes on everything from his lack of political experience to his hair. It was a world class beatdown, and by the look on his face - Trump was there– he didn't take the jokes very well. But luckily for him, the news on bin Laden limited that embarrassment quickly.

Last week Trump announced he was pulling out of an appearance to drive the Indianapolis 500 pace car at the upcoming race on May 29th. Trump said it wouldn't be appropriate for the spotlight to be on him during the race's 100th anniversary if he had a possible presidential run on his mind. It may be the first time in recorded history that Donald Trump declined the spotlight.

Then there's this: According to a CNN Opinion Research poll, 57 percent of Americans say Trump is tough enough to handle a crisis in this country and 51 percent say he can get the economy back on its feet. But only 37 percent say Trump can manage the government. And only about one-third says he's honest and trustworthy. These poll numbers are as dismal as his chances of being elected.

Here’s my question to you: Is a presidential run already over for Donald Trump?

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You know, I used to have some respect for Jack Cafferty even though I knew back then that we were on primarily opposite ends of the political spectrum because he spoke out against the Bush administration when that wasn't necessarily the most popular thing for a conservative to be doing, but he just lost me completely here. Calling Social Security a "welfare program" is just shameless.

The widows and orphans who receive those benefits do so after a spouse or a parent paid into the system and seniors receive the benefit after paying into it for their entire lives. And unemployment insurance is just that, insurance. It's not welfare. And does Jack really think we should just leave our elderly, the disabled and young mothers and children with no help to pay their medical bills at all? What cost does he think it would be to our society to just leave those people to rot on the streets?

Painting people who receive these benefits as "welfare" recipients paints a picture of a bunch of lazy unemployed people who don't want to work, and just want to sit on their duffs and collect government benefits. Does he think that most of the people receiving these benefits now haven't worked for a living most of their lives and paid into the system? At a time when we've got record unemployment and underemployment and a lot of good, decent, hard working Americans who would like to find jobs and can't, asking a question with this frame is doing nothing but trying to pit one middle or lower class individual in the United States against another and get them to resent each other. It's divide and conquer bulls**t to distract from us from those who have caused our economic problems and they are NOT the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, widows, orphans and young mothers and their children who don't have any health insurance. Shame on you Jack.

Here's his post at The Cafferty File. Thankfully a lot of the answers if you go read his entire comments section were a whole lot better than his question, but sadly a lot of the comments there were from individuals who've bought into the kind of resentment that Cafferty is peddling here.

What does it mean if social welfare benefits make up 1/3 of wages, salaries in U.S.?:

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From The Cafferty File Is U.S. entering a depression?:

Forget all the talk about an economic recovery - the U.S. just might be headed in the opposite direction.

Paul Krugman - who has a Nobel Prize in economics - writes in the New York Times that he fears we are in the early stages of a depression.

Krugman says a failure of policy is to blame - that it's a mistake for governments around the world to raise taxes and cut spending at this time. Krugman says nations should be spending more to stimulate the economy.

And, at the end of the day - it is the unemployed and their families who will pay the high cost of this depression. Krugman writes about the "tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again."

Speaking of the unemployed - almost one million Americans are losing their unemployment benefits because the Senate failed to extend the deadline.

The bill didn't get the 60 votes needed to pass because lawmakers are looking for ways to put the brakes on skyrocketing deficits.

The same bill also contained another $24 billion for Medicaid funding for various states. And since they won't be getting that money right now, they will be forced to cut hundreds of millions of dollars, on top of what they've already cut.

It's getting very ugly out there.

Despite the Obama administration crowing about the so-called recovery summer - 78% of Americans say the economy is still in a recession according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Some recovery.

Here’s my question to you: Is the U.S. entering a depression?

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April 14, 2010 CNN

As we reported in the Cafferty File earlier this week - 47 percent of American households won't pay any federal income taxes this year... in other words, the U.S. has become a country where only half of us are paying for the services that are used by all of the U.S.

Here’s my question to you: Can America survive without the disappearing middle class?

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From The Cafferty File -- Catholic Church's child sex abuse linked to homosexuality?:

The Vatican claims to have it all figured out when it comes to the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests in the Catholic Church.

The pope's number two - Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone - insists the abuse is linked to homosexuality... and not celibacy.

Gay rights groups are outraged - saying it's a "perverse" strategy by the Vatican to "shirk its own ethical and legal responsibility"... and they're right.

To top it off - this official made the ludicrous claim in Chile, where one pedophile priest had sex with young girls - impregnating at least one teenager. One of his victims says when she told priests about the abuse at confession "they just told me to pray and that was it."

Meanwhile - as the church says it's overhauling its rules on how it handles accusations of sexual abuse, the Associated Press may have a smoking gun that proves Pope Benedict refused to do anything about this when he had the chance.

They report on a letter written in the 80s by then-cardinal Ratzinger, in which he resisted pleas to defrock a California priest who had sexually abused children. After sitting on the request for several years, Ratzinger eventually did nothing - instead asking the Oakland bishop to consider the "good of the universal church."

It eventually became the eleventh commandment in Catholicism: "Protect the church at all costs - to hell with the children."

Here’s my question to you: Is the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church linked to homosexuality?

Jack's viewer responses he read weren't much kinder to the church than he was for this nonsense. Apparently Jack's been reading Maureen Dowd's latest -- Worlds Without Women.

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From The Cafferty File: Should pope have to answer church sex abuse questions under oath?:

How sad that during the holiest period in the Catholic Church, the faithful are distracted by the sins of their church.

Today is Holy Thursday and tomorrow is Good Friday, the day Jesus died on the cross for the sins of all mankind. But this year, three days before Easter, the sins of the leaders of his church cast a dark shadow over the most joyous celebration in Catholicism, the resurrection.

Instead, the church is lashing out at those who dare to expose the sexual abuse of children by priests. The Vatican plays victim, claiming it was "attacked" by the New York Times during holy week.

It's the children who go to the Catholic Church who have been attacked. Thousands of them. In one case alone, a single priest abused 200 deaf children and nothing happened to him. Nothing. He wasn't punished by the church, instead he was protected by the church.

And he wasn't punished by the criminal justice system either. There has been no justice for 200 deaf children who were taught to trust and respect a priest who destroyed their innocence.

One spokesman for the church tries to write the sexual abuse of children off as a "homosexual crisis." Like that makes it ok... grown men abusing children is ok because it's a "homosexual crisis." Any excuse to avoid the truth.

Now a lawyer in Kentucky, William McMurry, wants to try to get some justice for the tens of thousands of children around the world who could never speak for themselves. No one would listen.

So here's the question: Should Pope Benedict be required to answer questions under oath about the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church?

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From The Cafferty File:

President Obama has the chance to use tomorrow's State of the Union address to reset his agenda and refocus the attention of the American people.

It's been a rough week for the president and his party - since the Democrats lost control of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts. Without their filibuster-proof majority, the president's signature issue of health care reform is on life support.

And the public doesn't appear too disappointed about that. A new poll shows 70 percent of Americans think the Democrats' loss of their super-majority is a good thing.

Meanwhile the president is expected to announce a three-year freeze on all non-security federal discretionary spending. He claims this could save $250 billion over 10 years - which is a start, but still just a drop in the bucket considering the country's $12.5 trillion debt.

And, expect some liberals - you know, the president's base - to push back hard. Already critics on the left are calling the proposed spending freeze a mistake of historic proportions. Some compare Mr. Obama to Republican Herbert Hoover, who failed to pull the U.S. out of the great depression.

Others liken this to Democrat FDR's move to cut back on government spending in 1937 - the economy tanked and so did the Democrats in the following midterm election.

There's lots more on the president's plate too, like the jobs situation - which doesn't show many signs of turning around. Unemployment is at 10 percent… up from seven percent when Mr. Obama took office.

Here’s my question to you: What should Pres. Obama emphasize in his State of the Union address tomorrow?

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