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I'm not sure how the Republican party came to be known as the party of "compassionate conservatism," unless it was simply because they used to at least pretend to care about the problems of the middle and low-income class people. In this 2007 video of Republican Mitt Romney's exchange with a wheelchair bound man suffering from a rare and deadly form of muscular dystrophy, Romney's compassionate conservatism takes an icy cold form, as he turns his back on the ill young man, Clayton Holton, and walks away without answering his question.

This exchange, and others like it, will no doubt keep cropping up to haunt Romney throughout his campaign. His complete inability to relate to, or show anything resembling empathy towards mainstream Americans is stunningly on display here. If his position on medical marijuana was due to something he believes is a greater good, as a contender for president of the United States, he should certainly be able to articulate that.However this is likely due to the fact that Romney has no real solutions for real people's problems.

Transcript:

Sick Man: "I suffer from an extremely rare type of muscular dystrophy and I have to take medication or I'll die. Right now I weigh less than 80 pounds, I have all my life. Um, I have support of 5 of my doctors that I am living proof that Medical Marijuana works. I am completely against legalizing it for everyone but there is medical . . ."

Romney: "And you have synthetic marijuana that's available and other . . . "

Sick Man: "It makes me sick. I've tried it and it makes me throw up. I have tried all the medications they are and all the forms they come in after my stimulators, the steroids. I have muscular dystrophy, that's completely against my DNA."

Romney: "I'm sorry to hear that."

Sick Man: "My question to you is, will you arrest me and my doctors if I get medical marijuana?"

Romney: "I'm not in favor of medical marijuana."

(Romney looks away, moves on to next person mid-conversation)

Sick Man: "So, will you have me arrested? . . . "

Romney: "Hi, how are you?" (moving on to next person in line)

Sick Man: "Excuse me, will you please answer my question?"

3rd Person: "You're not going to answer his question, Governor?"

Romney: "I think I have."

3rd Person: "No, he asked you if you were going to arrest him. He asked if you were going to arrest patients like him, Governor? You're just going to ignore a person in a wheelchair?"

Romney: "I spoke with him."

3rd Person: "Yeah, but you didn't answer his question!"

Granted, the Obama administration's stance on medical marijuana isn't any more appealing to medical marijuana advocates than Romney's, and came under fire from Democrat Nancy Pelosi earlier this month for the continued raids on marijuana dispensaries. The difference is that I doubt Obama would turn his back and walk away from someone with a legitimate concern about any issue, let alone a sick man in a wheel chair.

At least Romney didn't throw this man down on the ground and cut his hair off.

Clayton Holton, while still wheel-chair bound, and suffering the effects of the muscular dystrophy as it ravages his body, he is able to maintain some semblance of normalcy in his quality of life. He continues to credit marijuana for keeping him alive, and remains a staunch advocate of medical marijuana.

[Video Credit: Heather, H/T Ministry of Truth]

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Wow. Here I thought Mitt Romney's cruel streak was in that he likes to fire people. Five of Romney's former classmates from a prestigious all-boys college prep school recall a "vicious" attack on a new student who Romney and others believed to be gay.

The Washington Post reports:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

Romney never received any punishment for his actions.

Lauber was expelled from the school after being caught smoking on school grounds. He "came out" to family and close friends. Among other jobs, he later worked as a civilian contractor in Bosnia and Iraq. He died of liver cancer in 2004, according to his sisters.

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Herman Cain released yet another "Sick of Stimulus" commercial Friday, and it's as bizarre as the first two.

In the commercial, a farmer is feeding his chickens and is attacked by the birds in a scene that could be straight out of a Hitchcock movie. The farmer is then pecked to death.

"This is the average American taxpayer feeding big government," says the same little girl who appeared in the previous two commercials.

It seems the metaphor is to liken "Big Government" to the chickens, with the government's need for taxes as ravenous as the chickens' appetites.

I'm sure sick of Republicans complaining about "Big Government" when it comes to raises taxes on the rich and then "crickets" when asked if legislation requiring trans-vaginal ultrasounds isn't also big government.

As in previous Cain commercials, the young girl closes out the commercial by asking, "Any questions?" A macabrel depiction of the farmer's corpse raises his bony hand.

The first Sick of Stimulus spot was released in February and showed the same little girl throwing a goldfish on the ground.

"This is the economy," the young girl says. As the fish flops around on the ground, the girl then throws water on the fish and says, "This is the economy on stimulus." The commercial also ends with the girl asking, "Any questions?" Cain stated the goldfish was not harmed.

In the second commercial, the girl places a bunny into a straw bed and says, "This is small business under the current tax code." The rabbit bed then hurls the bunny (now replaced by a fake bunny) into the air. Similar to skeet shooting, the fake bunny is then shot by an actor dressed in a suit.

This spot also ends with the girl asking, "Any questions?"

All three commercials close with a shot of Cain standing on a bluff, staring out over an animated barren rocky landscape, head turned away from the camera.

These are not the first unusual commercials Cain has released. Campaign manager Mark Block ended a spot by puffing on a cigarette and blowing smoke toward the camera in a now much-parodied commercial.

The former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, who withdrew from the presidential campaign after allegations of infidelity, is also organizing an event called "Cain's Revolution on the Hill" in Washington on April 16 to protest the tax code.

Cain has endorsed fellow Georgian Newt Gingrich for president.

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Rick Santorum was well into his speech during a campaign rally in Arlington Heights, Ill., on Friday when two men in the crowd embraced in a rather passionate kiss, prompting a "mic check" and two guards to escort them from the rally.

The crowd reacted with audible screams, gasps and wagging fingers. Another man jumped up and followed the pair out as the audience began chanting "U-S-A" until they left the gym at Christian Liberty Academy where Santorum was speaking.

Santorum, who often expresses his opposition to homosexuality, continued his speech without addressing the incident, prompting cheers from the audience. It wasn't clear whether the two men are gay or simply making a political statement.

"I don't think the message should be about what my sexuality is," one of them told a reporter. "It's the message that [Santorum's] saying about sexuality that matters."

[Hat tip Patch.com]

And I am both proud and saddened to bring it to you...

In a nutshell, a collection of some of Santorum's craziest statements on abortion, contraception, homosexuality, global warming, Social Security, blacks (or "blahs"), Hitler, napkins, freedom and the left.

For daily updates on creepy sh*t Santorum says, visit Santorum Exposed on Facebook.

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In Sunday morning's Concord Debate, asked what would happen if his son told him he was gay, Republican candidate Rick Santorum said, “I would love him as much as I did the second before he said it.”

But, Santorum has been asked that question before, and he had a different response at that time. In a 2003 interview, he was asked what he would tell a son who admitted to being attracted to men. Essentially, he said that his son should remain celibate.

“I would try to point out to them what is the right thing to do. And we have many temptations to do things we shouldn’t do,” he continued. “It doesn’t mean you have to submit.”

Santorum added that all parents should help steer their children in a direction “that would lead them to a better and happier life.”

Then, when pressed on whether he would still love his son, he replied, “It’s all you can do.”

That interview came after Santorum compared homosexuality to a host of illegal and devious acts.

He told The Associated Press in 2003, “If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual gay sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery, you have the right to anything.”

While it's difficult for me to imagine Santorum actually loving someone other than himself...I don't doubt for a second that the first thing he would do if one of his spawn were to admit to being gay would be to drop the child off at the Bachmann's Exorcism Clinic for Evil Gays.

Isn't it a little ironic, too, that the man with this medieval attitude towards gays is also the same man who blasted Barack Obama for "Hubris" and "Snobbery" for saying that he thinks all children should go to college?

“This is the kind of snobbery that we see from those that think they know how to run our lives. Rise up America, defend your own freedoms,” Santorum said of Obama's statement.

What about from those who want to tell you when to have sex, how to have sex, and with whom?

I can't think of a more appropriate way to begin the Republican caucus day in Iowa, than with Chris Matthews' closing segment of Hardball Monday night. This stinging rebuke should haunt Mitt Romney for years to come.

'"Let Me Finish" tonight with this", Matthews begins:

This Republican caucus in Iowa has the looks of a travesty, a victory of dollars over democracy, financial equity over equality.

Romney is destroying the only opponent he fears for the nomination, with the relentless wealth-driven advertising campaign the voter can only escape if he turns off his television set. He`s doing it without his fingerprints on the ads, without his face or his name attached to it. He`s doing it while he stands before crowds, reciting their verses from "America the Beautiful".

If there`s ever been a more cynical use of money and media, it is hard to recall it. And so, what exactly will Tuesday nights results mean, will they mean that Iowa likes Romney? Or will it say that the voters of Iowa have been used to destroy his most formidable national opponent?

What it looks like Iowa will say, in the headlines at least, is what it says often, that it likes the candidate who adheres most closely to the evangelical line. In this case, they have a perfect vessel, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. He`s pro-life, he educates his children at home, he`s opposed to same sex marriage. He is to the evangelicals and other Christian conservatives, one of them.

So, if Santorum gets up around the high 30s tomorrow night, that will be about right.

Continue reading »

[Ed. note: We break into our countdown of top videos for a few notable videos of the past 24 hours]

Here we have Republican Newt Gingrich tearing up as he recalls times with his mother, who struggled with mental illness and died of cancer in 2003 - or - here we have Republican Newt Gingrich desperately trying to save his floundering campaign by crying a couple of days before voting starts. Your call.

"You'll get me all teary-eyed, Callista will tell you, I get teary-eyed every time we sing Christmas carols. My mother sang in the choir and loved singing in the choir," Gingrich said, referring to his wife, as he fought back tears.

"But I identify my mother with being happy, loving life, having a sense of joy in her friends, but what she introduced me to, is late in her life she ended up in a long-term-care facility. She had bipolar disease, and depression, and she gradually acquired some physical ailments, and that introduced me to the issue of long-term care, which I did with Bob Kerrey for three years, and that introduced me to the issue of Alzheimers, which I did with Bob Kerrey for three more years, and my whole emphasis on brain science comes indirectly from dealing with the real problems of real people in my family," the former House Speaker continued, at moments stopping to cry.

The audience sympathetically cheered for Gingrich as he spoke about his mother.

"I do policy much easier than I do personal," Gingrich joked.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz asked how his mother would react if she was at the event Friday, Gingrich said she would have been working the crowd.

"She'd be talking to all these people, and she'd be telling them how nice I was," Gingrich said to laughter.

[Video via TPM]

[ Photo via Flickr]

Newt Gingrich personally urged members of Congress to vote for a controversial Medicare expansion bill in 2003, confirm two GOP congressmen who were in the room.

Gingrich, who is running for president, has said he never lobbied members of Congress after he resigned as House speaker in 1998. But U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake and former congressman Butch Otter - now his state's governor - told The Des Moines Register this week that Gingrich met with on-the-fence Republicans to persuade them to vote for the prescription drug bill.

Flake and Otter, who have both endorsed Mitt Romney for president, said about 30 Republican House members were holding out against the bill in the fall of 2003 because they were concerned that the proposal would expand the federal deficit when Gingrich held a private meeting of Republican House members.

“He told us, ‘If you can’t pass this bill, you don’t deserve to govern as Republicans,’ ” said Flake, who represents an Arizona district. “…If that’s not lobbying, I don’t know what is.”

Otter said: “I can’t define lobbying, but as a Supreme Court justice once said about pornography, I know it when I see it. I felt we were being lobbied.”

Yes, it was the Republicans driving the clown car the last time that Congress screwed with Medicare. In case you don't recall, Medicare Part D was passed in 2003, and went into effect in 2006 leaving thousands of seniors without medication, and introduced us to the "doughnut hole." Trips to the pharmacy became a "nightmare" for seniors with new co-pays for previously free medications, mountains of time-consuming, mind-numbing paperwork to fill out even with staff especially trained to help navigate the mess.

Seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D plans pay 58 percent more for the most commonly prescribed drugs than Americans who buy their medications through health plans administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a 2007 report.

Under the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug law, the government is barred from harnessing the buying power of 22.5 million Americans - the number of people now receiving some kind of drug benefits under Medicare - to get a better deal on prescription medications.

For example, the cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor, the cost of a year's supply of 20 milligram tablets would be $1,485.96 under the cheapest Medicare Part D plan, compared to $127.44 under the VA.

$1,485.96...that's a lot of doughnut holes.

All I want for Christmas...