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Jon Stewart Takes Apart Mitt Romney's '47 Percent' Comments

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We all knew this was coming. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart does his best to unpack Mitt Romney's ridiculous assertions about that lazy, mooching 47 percent that just wants to live off of the government dole. And in the process we get treated to a Mr. Smithers analogy and Stewart pointing out that apparently Mittens' own parents would not be supporters of his, since they were on welfare.

And last but not least Stewart compared Romney's disastrous press conference the previous night to the captain of a cruise ship trying to convince the everyone to stay calm while blowing up his life jacket, just before hitting an iceberg.

If the Romney campaign thinks these leaked tapes from Mother Jones are going away any time soon, I think they're sadly mistaken.



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This from The Daily Show last night was brilliant. A truer biopic than the one shown at the convention.



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A actor and activist who is famous for his role in the 1987 film "La Bamba" on Sunday said that Mitt Romney has begun pandering to Hispanic voters now that he has become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

"We call that Hispandering," Esai Morales told CBS News' John Dickerson in a recent interview. "The problem is that, you know, with Romney, he's says his grandparents or his father was born in Mexico. I surprised I'm not seeing him in a photo op outside of a taco stand."

"But I'm in the middle on this one," he added. "I was looking forward to a lot more immigration reform from our current president. I supported him."

"Remember what you promised us," Morales advised President Barack Obama. "Be true to yourself because every time you don't, you give the opposition a lot of ammunition to say, you know, where's that change that was promised?"

During the Republican primary battle, Romney had courted conservative voters with anti-immigration positions. He called Arizona's tough immigration law a "model" for the country; he promised to veto the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act; and he said that undocumented immigrants should self-deport.

But now that the former Massachusetts governor has pivoted to his general election campaign, he is considering support for a version of the DREAM Act sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and insisting that he only supported the uncontroversial parts of the Arizona immigration law.



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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday told a story about his father closing a factory in Michigan that he said tickled his funny bone.

Speaking to thousands of Wisconsin voters during a tele-town hall, the former Massachusetts governor recalled what he described as a "humorous" anecdote that left some Michigan workers without jobs, according to the Journal Sentinel.

"One of [the] most humorous I think relates to my father," Romney remarked. "You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors. ... They had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and another one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin."

"Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign," he continued, explaining that his father later participated in a parade where a high school band only knew how to play Wisconsin's fight song.

"Every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin," Romney chuckled.

The Detroit News noted that Hudson Motor Car Co. production was moved from Michigan to Wisconsin in 1954 after the company merged with Nash-Kelvinator and became American Motors. While some workers were asked to relocate to Wisconsin, 4,300 more lost their jobs.

Romney's awkward sense of humor has been a problem for him throughout his campaign.

During a January Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Nashua, New Hampshire, the candidate joked that he liked "to be able to fire people."

At an event in Rochester, New Hampshire, the multimillionaire told voters that he also had also worried about getting a pink slip.

“I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired,” Romney said. “There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.”

In February, he tried to relate to voters in Michigan by telling them that his wife "drives a couple of Cadillacs."

The Wall Street Journal determined that Bain Capital, a venture capital company founded by Romney, forced about 22 percent of the companies it acquired to file for bankruptcy or shut down completely, “sometimes with substantial job losses.”

(H/T: Maddow Blog)



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As Nicole already noted, this weekend was the launch of Melissa Harris-Perry's new weekend show on MSNBC. I've got to say, the show was as refreshing as Chris Hayes' weekend show, which is sadly airing way too early for those without their recorders set to watch it in most parts of the country. Maybe MSNBC can hold off on those endless hours of Lockup and To Catch A Predator episodes to run both shows later in the day.

During this segment, Melissa's panel members took a look at an appearance by Mitt Romney's father, former Gov. George Romney, on Meet the Press from back in 1967 and just how far the Republican Party and our entire political dialog has been shifted to the right. She also asked whether the current debate over contraception is a result of the "daddy state" and the authoritarianism which has accompanied that shift.

From Harris-Perry's new blog, her panel members included:

Baratunde Thurston, digital director of The Onion, comedian and co-founder of Jack & Jill Politics. Author of the recently-published (and hilarious) How to Be Black. Read Melissa's review of it here.

Chloe Angyal, freelance writer and editor at Feministing, where she blogs about gender, sex, politics, pop culture and body image. Currently writing her doctoral thesis on romantic comedies; read her recent Jezebel piece, "I Spent a Year Watching Rom-Coms and This is the Crap I Learned."

Dorian Warren, assistant professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Watch him talk about the "recession generation" with Melissa as she guest-hosted "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" last summer.



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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney may be in the lead in the Palmetto state, but that doesn't mean South Carolinians necessarily like him.

During a Fox News debate at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center on Monday, the Republican audience booed loudly after being told that Romney's father was born in Mexico.

In a report last week, NBC revealed that Romney's great grandfather, Miles Park Romney, had fled to Mexico with other Mormons to escape persecution for polygamy. Romney's father, George, was later born in the northern Mexico colony of Colonia Dublan.

At the age of five, George Romney returned to the United States illegally after the Mexican Revolution broke out.

"With regards to immigration policy, that those that come here illegally should not be given favoritism or a special route to becoming residents or citizens that's not given to those people that stayed in line legally," the candidate told debate moderator Juan Williams. "I think we have to follow the law and insist that those that have come here illegally ultimately return home, apply, get in line with everyone else."

The audience later booed again when Williams asked if former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had "belittled the poor and racial minorities" by declaring that black Americans should demand jobs, not foodstamps.

Audiences at other GOP debates have booed a gay soldier, cheered the death penalty and cheered child labor.

UPDATE:

As usual, the MSM didn't credit John Amato's post about Romney's family and their polygamist Mexican exodus back in 1885. Since this story was published "Romney Family Files: Fled to Mexico Due to a Polygamy Ban Making Them 'The First Displaced Persons of the 20th Century'" many other news organizations are digging into the story.



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Host Christine Romans filling in for Eliot Spitzer on CNN's In the Arena allowed their regular network contributor David Gergen, who's always painted as some bastion of even handed "centrism" because of the fact that he's served as a political adviser for administrations on both sides of the aisle to get away with lying about Mitt Romney's record on job creation.

David Gergen did his best job to conflate what either other Mormon businesses have done to create jobs in America or what Mitt Romney's father might have done to create jobs to Mitt Romney, completely ignoring Mittens horrid record of destroying jobs at Bain Capital.

As I've already noted, it's really pitiful that Stephen Colbert did a better job of telling the truth about Romney's record on job creation than our corporate media has. Gergen just gave us another example here.

GERGEN: The other thing is that Mormon business people we know have created a lot of jobs. And including his father who I have known for 40 years who is a terrific guy. They come from very good family. But they are very, very good at creating jobs.

ROMANS: Well, that's a good point because jobs is what's so important here.