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It seems Mitt Romney only believes poll numbers when they end up in his favor -- Romney On Polls: ‘You Can Ask Questions And Get Any Answer You Want’:

Confronted with polling from New York City showing parents standing with teachers unions at an NBC News education forum Tuesday, Mitt Romney took a swipe at poll results in general. During a question and answer session at the NBC event, a New York public schools parent told Romney that polling showed parents "support the union to protect our kids three to one over the mayor and the chancellor."

Romney, who spent much of the session condemning teachers' unions, said the results were meaningless.

"I don't believe it for a minute," Romney said. "I know something about polls, and you can ask questions and get any answer you want."

Romney didn't only get the polling wrong, he also got a quote wrong while attacking the teacher's union -- Romney Defames Teachers at NBC News Education Event:

During his presentation today at an NBC News Education forum in New York City, Mitt Romney repeatedly declared his belief that teachers' unions do not care about students or education, that those aren't "teachers' interests." In order to "prove" his case, he evoked (and mis-attributed) a right-wing canard about a speech by a senior teachers' union official, further demonstrating his contempt for educators.

In response to a question from a member of a New York City school board, who cited a recent Quinnipiac study showing NYC parents trust the teachers' union nearly twice as much as the mayor to protect their children's interests, Romney expressed disbelief in the poll. He then went on to "quote" the "head of the national teachers' union as having said, 'We don't care about the children. We care about the teachers.' in order to back his anti-union position. Unfortunately for Governor Romney, he got both the speaker and the full quotation wrong.

As Media Matters recently reported, this was actually a 2009 speech by Bob Chanin, former general counsel (not head) of the National Education Association, which was incompletely excerpted by both Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh to try to make the same anti-union point as did Governor Romney today. Media Matters then produced a substantial excerpt from the speech, placing in bold the mid-sentence to mid-sentence portion focused upon by Limbaugh, Hannity and now Romney, but including the rest of the context to demonstrate that Chanin was actually making the opposite point: Read on...

As they noted, given the way he launched his campaign, and I'll add, the amount of lying he's done since, this comes as no big surprise.

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I would really love to see Sam Seder get his own show at either MSNBC or Current TV. He did a fine job filling in for Chris Hayes on Up this weekend, and here's his opening from Sunday's show -- How Republicans are using the crisis of poverty... against Obama:

At the Values Voters Summit on Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan whose budget was approved by the House with sweeping cuts to aid for the poor responded to new figures from the Census Bureau this week showing that 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line last year—a rate basically unchanged from the year before—but a rate not seen in this country in nearly 20 years.

Here's what Ryan had to say about Obama's record on poverty:

"The Obama economic agenda failed, not because it was stopped, but because it was passed. And here is what we got: Prolonged joblessness across the country. Twenty-three million Americans struggling to find work. Family income in decline. Fifteen percent of Americans living in poverty. Here we are, after four years of economic stewardship under these self-proclaimed advocates of the poor, and what do they have to show for it? More people in poverty, and less upward mobility wherever you look."

It's not the first time this election cycle that we've seen the right raise the specter of the poor. But poverty is raised not to offer prescriptions or remedies but to be used as a cudgel, as a means of playing on middle class fears of losing ground by suggesting not so much that they, too, could become impoverished but that the threat to their economic stability is the poor themselves, who are taking that ground from them.

Calling President Obama the "food stamp President" is not bemoaning the plight of those Americans who, in the wake of a devastating financial crisis have lost the means to put food on the table for their families, but rather, to imply that some "other" is living large, while the rest of "us" struggle. That said, we do know something about the people Romney relies on and what they believe about poverty.

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MSNBC's Ed Schultz and E.J. Dionne highlighted some of Media Matters reporting this Wednesday evening on Fox News running 42 segments taking President Obama's words out of context during a campaign stop in Virginia. And now we've got the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney repeating the distortions as well.

As both Schultz and Dionne pointed out, the Romney campaign is desperate to change the subject from his time at Bain Capital and his refusal to release his tax returns and they're getting desperate. Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes what the President was talking about during his speech and as Schultz and Dionne noted, he was making the same points as we heard from Elizabeth Warren when she said this on a speaking tour last year: There's Nobody in This Country Who Got Rich on His Own, Says Elizabeth Warren.

Romney knows he's lying and distorting Obama's words, but he's been lying so much on the campaign trail, he's not going to stop now. And at a campaign stop in Ohio, Romney let the audience there know he actually agreed with President Obama's underlying point: Romney Doubles Down On ‘You Didn’t Build That’ — Then Affirms Obama’s Point. As Ed Schultz pointed out, they can't run against the President's actual record or what he's been saying on the campaign trail, so they've got to resort to making things up.

Here's more from Media Matters: REPORT: Fox News Spends Two-Plus Hours Distorting Obama's Small Business Comments:

Over two days, Fox News spent 42 segments and more than two hours of airtime manufacturing a scandal by deceptively editing comments President Obama made at a campaign appearance in Virginia.

On July 13, Obama made the unremarkable observation that business owners do not achieve success in a vacuum, but that public infrastructure - such as roads, schools, and fire departments - create a community that supports businesses:

OBAMA: If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

Media conservatives have distorted those comments to accuse the president of expressing hostility toward business.

In discussing the speech relentlessly in the past 2 days, Fox has fixated on the passage where Obama said, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." But Fox ignores what Obama was talking about before saying "you didn't build that," when he touted "this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive," and said: "Somebody invested in those roads and bridges."

Fox's manufactured controversy has now become the focus of an official Mitt Romney campaign ad. Read on...

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I'm not sure what "liberals" Washington Post columnist Charles Lane was talking about on this week's Fox News Sunday when he said this, but I've got a few words for his assumptions about how "liberals" are going to have to act if Supreme Court Justice John Roberts overturns part of the Voting Rights Act or affirmative action and that's "I don't think so pal."

LANE: What he has done in his brilliant opinion is to sacrifice a pawn, called the individual mandate and put the entire Great Society in check. And he has done that by getting two liberal justices to agree with him in a seven to two ruling that there are serious limitations on the federal government's ability to use its spending power to get the states to cooperate in welfare and education programs, which is really how everything works, or a lot of things work including education, Medicaid, etc.

And he has done that and gotten liberals to applaud him for it, so that now, next term when Voting Rights Act Section 5 and affirmative action in colleges come up before the court as they're going to and he votes with the other four conservatives to strike them down, all those liberals who might otherwise complain will now have to acknowledge that this fair-minded statesman, John Roberts, was involved in that decision.

This is a man of great brilliance and all those conservatives who are griping about this ruling need to give it a second thought.

Here's what most liberals still think of John Roberts, no matter how he ruled on this insurance friendly, Republican health care law he just upheld: 10 Ways John Roberts Is Still A Conservative’s Best Friend.

And calling someone ruling to keep "the Great Society in check" "brilliant" has to be one of the most crass things I've heard come out of anyone's mouth in a while now.

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Earlier this week, The Daily Show decided to take on the Tucson Unified school board and their decision to outlaw Mexican-American studies in their classrooms.

Here's more from the LA Times on the board's decision -- Mexican American studies: 'Daily Show' segment strikes a nerve:

After that stint on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” the Tucson Unified school board is probably wishing it had hired a media consultant before trying to explain its position on the district’s controversial Mexican American Studies program.

Normally, when people are featured on a television show, they call family and friends and let them know the time and channel. That might not be the case for board member Michael Hicks, who appeared in a segment about the ethnic studies controversy.

The Tucson school board voted to end the program after Arizona's education chief had ruled the district in violation of a controversial state law banning classes designed for a particular ethnic group or that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government."

Defenders of the Mexican American Studies program have said it does no such thing. Some board members said they voted to discontinue the program under duress because the legislation allowed the state to withhold funding from the district unless it complied with the law.

The law and the board's vote -- and protests by Latino students -- have prompted fiery discussions in Tucson and across the state. Into that atmosphere stepped Hicks when he explained his vote on "The Daily Show."

"My concern was a lot of the radical ideas that they were teaching in these classes," Hicks is quoted as saying.

"Telling these kids that this is their land, the whites took it over and the only way to get out from beneath the gringo — which is the white man — is by bloodshed."

The segment quotes him as saying he has never gone to any of the classrooms and based his opinions on "hearsay."

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says that even his home-schooled 12-year-old could "out-reason" HBO comedian Bill Maher.

During his Friday "New Rules" segment, Maher had called out Santorum's stance against public education.

"The Taliban may want to live in the eighth century but the Christian right wants to go back even further -- to Adam and Eve, who screwed it up for everybody when they ate an apple from the Tree of Knowledge," Maher explained on the March 9 broadcast. "Rick Santorum home schools his children because he doesn't want them eating that fucking apple. He wants them locked up in the Christian madrassa that is the family living room, not out in public, where they could be infected by the virus of reason."

"If you're a kid and the only adults you've ever met are mom and dad then they're also the smartest adults you've ever met. Why not keep it that way? Why mess up paradise with a lot of knowledge? After all, a mind is a terrible thing to open."

In an interview on Monday, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Santorum if President Barack Obama and liberals had any standing to lecture about civil discourse after a pro-Obama super PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Maher.

"There isn't an interview that went by over the last week where I wasn't asked a question about Rush Limbaugh," Santorum complained. "And yet repeatedly, these folks on the left, whether it's Maher or Letterman or you name it, they're out there trashing anybody who stands up for Christian conservative values, anybody who dares to actually teach their children faith in their home."

"All of a sudden, if you're instilling faith and teaching them about God in your home, you're a madrassa, according to these folks, and as if reason doesn't take place in the home," he added. "Our -- our children will out-reason him -- my 12-year-old will out-reason Bill Maher when it comes to understanding, you know, what, you know, how logic works because he is completely illogical."

(H/T: Newsbusters)

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says that 20 years ago people couldn't even imagine cell phones, but now they are commonplace because Americans "recognize the rights God has given every person."

Speaking to supporters in Chillicothe, Ohio on Friday, the former Pennsylvania senator explained that the U.S. had "transformed the world" with the a new form of government.

"In the previous 2,000 years, life did not change," he said. "And then America came around and said, 'No, no more dictators, no more kings, no more classes, no more nobility.' We believe in limited government, not an all-powerful state. We believe that if we liberate people, we recognize the rights that God has given every person then the world will change."

"How many people have a cell phone?" he asked. "The young folks here, 20 years ago, there were no cell phones to speak of. And now people who 20 years ago couldn't conceive of a cell phone, now can't live without one."

"Let me assure you if the government had taken over the technology sector of our economy 25 years ago, no one would ever have heard of a cell phone. Because what we would be doing is we would be making sure everybody had pagers and allocated them equivalently across everybody."

According to the nonprofit research institute SRI International, over 10 million Americans had cell phones by 1992.

EDITOR'S NOTE: And he said his grades were "docked" because he was a conservative. Cough.

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Wednesday suggested that President Barack Obama wanted to every kid to go to college so they could be brainwashed into being a liberal.

Speaking to a crowd of Floridians at the First Baptist Church of Naples, Santorum said that churches and families were under "assault" by the president and liberals.

"We've lost, unfortunately, our entertainment industry," the candidate explained. "We've lost our higher education. That was the first to go a long time ago. It's no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college. The indoctrination that occurs at American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America -- and it is indoctrination."

"If they taught Judeo-Christian ideology, they would be stripped of every dollar. If they teach radical secular ideology, they get all the government support that they can possibly get. As you know, 62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it. And I bet you there are people in this room who give money to colleges and universities who are undermining the very principles of our country every single day by indoctrinating kids in left-wing ideology. And you continue to give to these colleges and universities. Let me have a suggestion: Stop it!"

Santorum added: "What they say is, look, their values trump your religious values. The government can tell you they're going to starve you by taking money away, by taking out the charitable deductions. They're going to weaken you by passing statutes to change the institution of marriage, which will ultimately make what is preached here hate speech and bigotry."

Last month, the former Pennsylvania senator warned voters in Iowa that colleges and universities had become "indoctrination centers for the left."

For his part, President Barack Obama spoke about the importance of college affordability during his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday.

"We can't just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we'll run out of money," he said. "So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down."

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Talk about a war on Christmas.

The music teacher at Cherry Knoll Elementary School in Michigan decided to replace the word "gay" in the popular Christmas carol "Deck the Halls" because students were giggling.

"Don we now our gay apparel" is one line in the song, but the teacher changed it to "bright apparel," according to The Chicago Tribune.

Principal Chris Parker immediately reversed the decision when he found out about it.

"This would have been a great opportunity to teach that 'gay' has more than one meaning and is not a bad word," Parker explained to 7&4 News in Traverse City.

"We have an anti-bullying and discrimination policy which includes sexual orientation. So going forward, the teach will be addressing, 'This is how we are supposed to be reacting. This is the way to be respectful about this,'" he added.

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Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul told NBC's David Gregory Sunday that he would "eventually" end all federal aid to students.

"As you well know, you have a lot of support among young people," Gregory noted. "They're borrowing to pay for college at record levels. Would you abolish all federal student aid?"

"Eventually," Paul admitted. "But my program doesn't do it. There's a transition in this."

"But that's your ultimate aim?" Gregory wondered.

"Yes," Paul replied. "Because there's no authority to do this and just think of all this willingness to want to help every student to get a college education. So, they're a trillion dollars in debt, we don't have any jobs for them, the quality of education has gone down. So, it's a failed program."

Last week in Las Vegas, Paul put forth his plan to slash $1 trillion from the federal budget by ending the departments of Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Interior. The Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and Department of Defense would also see deep cuts.