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Liz Claman hosts a show on the Fox Business Network, the Murdoch outfit that exists solely to carry the water for the MOTUs on Wall Street. And on "This Week" Sunday morning, she did just that -- suggesting that any criticism of Willard's record at Bain Capital is akin to claiming the president was born in Kenya.

BROWNSTEIN: -- broader point, though, when Rush Limbaugh called the Georgetown student a slut, Romney was almost silent. Rick Santorum said Kennedy made him want to throw up. Mitt Romney was silent. These were all opportunities to identify yourself as kind of a more centrist. And he's not taking it. And it is having a cost.

If you look at some of those upper middle class, socially liberal, economically moderate white voters, Obama is holding them -- especially the women -- and that is the thin margin that is keeping him on top, and I think it's a consistent challenge for Romney.

CLAMAN: Both of these people, President Obama and Mitt Romney, better get off the whole birther issue, the cars on dog roofs, the Bain Capital, these are side shows. Americans care about the main act and that is jobs, the economy.

And at this point, we're not seeing enough jobs. The economy incrementally getting better, and where are the ideas? We better start presenting them.

Stop talking about Bain Capital -- it's a distraction! Except when Mitt Romney does it.

You see, since Willard's running away from his record as governor of Massachusetts, he's primarily citing his experience and accomplishments at Bain Capital as the justification for his candidacy. This is from his campaign website:

After graduating from Brigham Young University in 1971, he earned dual degrees from Harvard Law and Harvard Business School. After working as a business consultant for several years, Mitt founded the investment firm Bain Capital in 1984. Under his leadership, Bain Capital helped to launch or rebuild hundreds of companies, including household names such as Staples, Bright Horizons, and The Sports Authority. As Bain Capital was growing in prominence, Mitt returned to his old consulting firm, Bain & Company, as CEO. In a time of financial turmoil at the company, he led a successful turnaround.

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Willard sat down for a foot massage interview with Mark Halperin, and made this prediction.

ROMNEY: I can tell you, that over a period of four years, by virtue of the polices that we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent or perhaps a little lower. Depdends in part on the rate of growth of the globe, as well as what we're seeing here in the United States, but we'd get the rate down quite substantially.

In October 2009, the unemployment rate peaked at 10%. Today, it's at 8.1%. And economists are saying that by the end of 2013, even if the socialist Kenyan job killer is re-elected, the unemployment rate will drop to 7.5%.

So Willard is saying, then, that all these awesome job creating policies he learned at Bain will lower the unemployment rate a whopping 1.5 percent in three years over what's already been predicted.

That's pretty thin gruel.

The latest web video from the Mitt Romney campaign attacks President Barack Obama's comments about Romney's time at Bain Capital. The video asks if viewers are tired of Obama's attacks on 'free enterprise' and says that his 'key supporters' are, then trots out Corey Booker, Harold Ford Jr. and Steven Rattner as Obama's 'key supporters'. While these obviously aren't Obama's key supporters, the ad is also an attempt to change the topic from Romney's time at Bain, which was more about hurting working families than it was about 'free enterprise'. Ford is notorious for his right-wing positions and Booker took numerous contributions to his 2002 campaign from Bain executives.

Lis Smith, an Obama campaign spokeswoman responded to the video:

Mitt Romney’s partners, employees, and top supporters have all been clear: his tenure at Bain Capital was about creating wealth for himself and his investors, not creating jobs. Mitt Romney’s focus has always been getting a high return on his investments, no matter the cost to workers, companies or communities. That’s what Romney did at Ampad when he and his partners drove the company into bankruptcy after loading it with debt, firing 250 Indiana workers, and extracting $100 million for themselves. And those are the very same economic values he’d bring to the presidency – America can’t afford Romney Economics.

Despite Romney's claims to the contrary, his time at Bain was about making money, not about creating jobs. From Bloomberg:

A top surrogate to Mitt Romney said making money—rather than creating jobs—was the primary goal of the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee when he was running Bain Capital LLC, saying he ‘acted responsibly’ as chief executive officer of the private-equity firm. ‘The role of private equity as fiduciaries is certainly to make money,’ said Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples Inc. (SPLS), in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s ‘Political Capital,’ airing this weekend.

And...

A Bloomberg review of several Bain deals during Romney’s tenure showed that workers in some firms had indications their jobs might be in jeopardy soon after Bain moved into management. In other cases, pink slips arrived after Bain and its investors had collected their profits and left debts behind.

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In the wake of its failure in Europe, Republicans must sense that being cheerleaders for austerity isn't a big winner in America. So what does Paul Ryan (R-WI) do, since his budget slashes tax rates on the wealthy and services for working people? He just pretends it doesn't.

GREGORY: This question of austerity in Europe. They had failing economies, nearly depressed economies. The answer throughout the region was to slash their budgets. Has it failed?

RYAN: Well, no David. I would say, they've also raised taxes, they have...This is a cautionary tale of what happens when politicians who make a lot of empty promises end up running out of the ability to borrow money at cheap rates and now they're broken promises. It's a cautionary tale of what will happen to us if we stay on the path we're on. What we're saying is let's get on growth and prevent austerity. The whole premise of our budget is to preempt austerity by getting our borrowing under control, having tax reform for economic growth, and preventing Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid from going bankrupt. That preempts austerity, the President, his budget...puts us on a path toward European austerity.

So now President Obama wants austerity? Seriously? I thought he was the biggest taxer and spender EVAH?

Of course, none of this makes any sense at all. Ryan's budget cuts spending by $5.3T over the next 10 years, including basically ending Medicare -- while giving huge tax cuts to rich people. That's the definition of austerity.

Oh, and if Ryan's so worried about "getting our borrowing under control" -- why does his budget make the debt worse?

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It can't be repeated enough: Republicans really don't care about debt or deficits. Case in point, Mittens gave a big speech on Tuesday in Iowa attacking the President over the national debt -- and yet, he wants to make it $2.6T larger in 10 years. And on Wednesday's Morning Joe, Scarborough put this very simple, direct question to Paul Ryan:

SCARBOROUGH: You're talking about how Mitt Romney's going to be responsible. You look at Mitt Romney's plans, though -- you add them all up -- the deficit goes up just as much as it does under Barack Obama. You know, if you look at their plans, there's not a big difference. [...] At the end of the day, Paul, how much is the national debt going to be reduced under Mitt Romney's tax plans and spending plans?

Ryan's response? He huffily protests that Romney's plan is very different from Obama's because it cuts "entitlements." But did you hear him ever say how much the deficit will actually come down under Mitt Romney? Me neither.

Also, Scarborough is wrong -- Romney would actually increase the deficit much more than Obama.

So why is Ryan praising Romney's plans? Because they reflect Republican values: cutting taxes even lower for rich people, while slashing services for the elderly and poor.

But this has absolutely nothing to do with debt and deficits, and Republicans should be called out on this little con game they've been playing every time.

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades released a video on Monday that gathers together all of Mitt Romney's anti-union statements during the 2012 campaign. He covers a lot of ground. If elected, he said he would:

Anyone who closely followed the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida remembers that one of the key reasons that George W. Bush "won" the state was the fact that thousands of black voters were falsely purged from the voter rolls in advance of the election, preventing those Floridians from voting, most of whom would've voted for Al Gore. In 2012, Republicans are looking at purging 180,000 Hispanics from the voting rolls. Is history repeating itself?

In 2000, more than 20,000 voters -- most of them African American -- were prevented from voting because they had names similar to convicted felons. People who had the full right to vote, most of whom had never been convicted of a serious crime, were prevented from voting by Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and the Republicans in Tallahassee. Most black voters in Florida, like elsewhere, voted for Al Gore. And considering the state went to George W. Bush by less than 550 votes, it's clear that the purge was a major factor in stealing the election for the governor's brother.

Now the Rick Scott administration -- which by any standard is thought to be less ethical than the Jeb Bush administration -- is preparing a voter purge list that could reach 180,000 strong. Since the purge list is specifically targeted at trying to stop undocumented immigrants from voting, the list will be almost completely Hispanic. And despite the fact that Cuban-American Floridians tend to vote Republican, the majority of Florida Hispanics are not of Cuban heritage. If the list is successfully completed, then, it's obvious that it will disproportionately target Democratic voters. Just like the Bush-Harris list from 2000.

The full universe of potentially ineligible voters that state elections officials plan to check for possible removal from the roles is about 180,000, a spokesman for the Division of Elections said Friday, reports David Royse of the News Service of Florida.

Elections spokesman Chris Cate told the News Service that in all, when matching voter rolls against newly available citizenship data from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, officials found that number of possible matches, and began further investigating each one to see if they were likely to be wrongly registered to vote.

Officials reported earlier this week that they had forwarded the first batch of those names, about 2,600 to local supervisors of elections for further review and for each voter to be notified that they were on a list of people suspected of being illegally registered.

“Everyone of those individuals would be contacted by supervisors,” Cate said.

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In what was an expected outcome, but still one that is a bit shocking, tea party-aligned candidate Richard Mourdock defeated Sen. Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary on Tuesday. Mourdock is the state's treasurer and he hasn't spent much time on the national scene, but it's clear that he's one of the most extreme right-wing candidates running in the 2012 elections. Let's take a closer look...

Despite the fact that Indiana's economy depends heavily on the auto industry and the fact that Indiana greatly benefited from the auto industry bailout, Mourdock argued in an editorial in the South Bend Tribune that the bailout was illegal:

By any traditional legal analysis, fundamental elements of the Obama administration’s Chrysler bankruptcy plan were illegal. It turned 200 years of U.S. bankruptcy law on its head by awarding more value to a select group of unsecured creditors than to secured creditors. Others are apparently willing to tolerate the violation of federal bankruptcy laws simply because they liked the result: It helped their friends. But most Americans, including the Hoosier retirees who had their property stolen away, see such picking and choosing by the federal government as fundamentally un-American.

Mourdock has consistently railed against bipartisanship:

Those who want to call out for bipartisanship are wrong. It is bipartisanship that has taken this country to the very brink of bankruptcy.

He opposes the direct election of senators (while running to be directly elected as a senator):

Repealing the 17th amendment. Do I think it will ever happen? No. Is it something that I would like to see? Yes it is. And I’ll tell you the trackers in the room, my Democrat tracker friends who are here as they always are probably seeing something that you’ll see in a tv commercial not too far from now. You know the issue of the 17th amendment is so troubling to me, our founding fathers, again those geniuses, made the point that the House of Representatives was there to represent the people. The Senate was there to represent the states. In other words the government of the states. I will tell you as someone who spends a lot of time in the statehouse obviously, and a lot of time in local government, one of the most frustrating things state government and local government deals with are called unfunded mandates. It’s where the federal government will say you must do this, and we’re not going to pay for it. You got to figure out a way to go get the money and you must do this. How many unfunded mandates do you think would be coming from the United States Congress, if those same Senators had to come back every two years to help those people get reelected so they would elect them. You know I think most senators if they had to come back every two years and by the way that would solve another problem. It would solve the idea that Senators move out of their state and never return. But it would cause those senators to have much greater contact with their states. You know just think of this. In today’s you see millions and millions of dollars spent on Senate campaigns. Two years ago, in 2010, Sharon Angle out in Nevada spent 31 million dollars, just herself. How much money would be spent in federal senate races if the state legislators were electing those people. You just took the money out of politics. Is that a bad thing? (AB 21 Tracking Footage, 2/4/12)

He thinks that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are unconstitutional, and shows that he doesn't understand basic constitutional law or the Ninth Amendment or the Elastic Clause:

I challenge you in Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution where those so-called enumerated powers are listed. I challenge you to find words that talk about Medicare or Medicaid or, yes, even Social Security. You know, Article I, Section 8 says the U.S. government shall have the power to tax to pay off its debts, to pay for its defense, and then it says to provide for the general welfare.

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CREDO SuperPac has announced the eighth member of its 'Tea Party Ten' members of Congress that it will seek to defeat in the 2012 elections, Dan Lungren of California. The 10 are chosen on the basis of their extreme positions and rhetoric and the fact that they are vulnerable. Most of them were elected in the 'wave' election of 2010 and could easily lose in 2012 if they have strong challengers.

Sometimes the actions of elected representatives become so odious that urgent action is required. Many of the Tea Party-affiliated House Republicans were elected in 2010 on a wave of concern about a very troubled economy and with millions of dollars in expenditures by political groups associated with Karl Rove or the Koch brothers. Their actions in Congress have been beyond the pale.

They voted to deny the science on global warming, to change the very definition of rape, to deny funds to Planned Parenthood for the provision of contraception, to expand tax breaks for the top 1%, and to eliminate Medicare and leave seniors and the disabled at the mercy of the insurance industry.

Lungren was announced Wednesday as the latest Republican added to the campaign. His headline reads "California's Rick Santorum":

For more than 30 years, Dan Lungren has stood for Tea Party extremism and radical assaults on equality. When the Obama Administration refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, Dan Lungren was happy to sink $1.5 million of our tax dollars into a contract with a former Bush Administration official to uphold this discriminatory law. But denying equal rights to lesbian and gay couples is about the only thing Lungren wants to fund. He voted for the Ryan budget to slash social services and end Medicare as we know it. He voted to defund Planned Parenthood, cut Pell Grants for one third of University of California undergraduates, cut $125 million from K-12 education in California, and eliminate Headstart funding for 14,000 low income children in his district. His position on women's issues are even more extreme: Lungren has sponsored legislation that would have outlawed abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and is so anti-woman that he called the Obama Administration's new regulations on no-cost birth control an "assault" on the First Amendment.

Lungren joins Mike Fitzpatrick (PA), Joe Walsh (IL), Frank Guinta (NH), Sean Duffy (WI), Steve King (IA), Chip Cravaack (MN) and Allen West (FL) on the list. Two members of the Tea Party Ten remain to be unveiled.

Those interested in getting Lungren and the rest of the Tea Party Ten out of office can sign the CREDO pledge or contribute.

In an interview with Greta Van Susteren, Mitt Romney blamed teachers unions for the problems with American schools and, in particular, pointed out that California's school decline was because of unions.

Mitt Romney said that America’s schools have gotten worse because “we’ve basically given our school system to the teachers unions.” As an example, he pointed to California, noting, “it used to have some of the best schools in the country, and now it’s ranked near the very bottom.”

Think Progress points out that the real culprit is tax cuts:

Specifically, a ballot initiative enacted in 1978 called Proposition 13 that capped property taxes, which were, at the time, the primary funder of public schools. As the Santa Monica, California-based think tank The Rand Corporation noted:

"Indeed, Proposition 13 marked a dramatic turning point in funding for K–12 public education in California. Revenues and expenditures per pupil had grown fairly rapidly both in California and nationwide until the early 1980s. But California fell well behind the nation by the late 1980s. Despite recent funding increases for K–12 education, California schools have continued to spend far below the national average. Measured in year 2000 dollars, spending per pupil in California went from more than $600 above the national average in 1978 to more than $600 below the national average in 2000."

For Romney's claim to be valid, there would have to be some correlation between states with weak unions and strong student performance and vice versa. The weakest unions tend to be in "right-to-work" (for less) states, which include: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Guam, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.

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