These are the actions of either a man who is desperate because he knows he's going to lose, or is so certain they can rig the votes on his behalf that he can say whatever demented thing that pops into his head:

Mitt Romney suggested Saturday in Virginia Beach that President Obama wants to remove God from coins, provoking a fierce retort from the president's campaign.

"I will not take God out of our platform," the Republican nominee said after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. "I will not take God off our coins, and I will not take God out of my heart."

Would that be the same God that told you to fire all those people when you worked at Bain, Mitt?

In response, Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith called the insinsuation false and an act of desperation.

"It’s disappointing to see Mitt Romney try to throw a Hail Mary by launching extreme and untrue attacks against the President and associating with some of the most strident and divisive voices in the Republican Party, including Rep. Steve King and Pat Robertson," she said in a statement. "This isn’t a recipe for making America stronger, it’s a recipe for division and taking us backward."

I think this is the first time in seven years I absolutely refused to find an accompanying video for a post. Sorry, but no. Nevertheless, this endorsement has to make Mittens just a little uncomfortable:

It wasn't exactly “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” but porn star Jenna Jameson has put her spin on the presidential race: "I'm very looking forward to a Republican being back in office. When you're rich, you want a Republican in office."

All together now, you Occupy folks: “We told you so!”

Jameson’s “let them eat cake” moment came Thursday in San Francisco while she was “sipping champagne in a VIP room at Gold Club in the city's South of Market neighborhood,” according to CBS San Francisco. It added that she “made the comments exclusively to a CBS SF staffer who was attending an event marking the 8th anniversary of the gentlemen's club.”

If anyone knows getting screwed over, it's an adult film star successful enough to be worth an estimated $30 million. I wonder if Jameson knows that it was Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign that influenced the Marriott corporation (on which board Romney sat) to remove porn from the hotels, resulting in a fairly significant income reduction. That couldn't have been good for Jameson's bottom line either.

Someone I know who is much more familiar with Jameson's ... ahem...body of work insisted that Jameson is far too generous a person to cop a "I got mine, screw you" Republican stance, but I remain unconvinced. To be fair, Jameson described herself as "extremely liberal" and supported Hillary Clinton in the last election. So maybe this is a great big middle finger to Romney, tying him to an industry that hurt him badly with social conservatives the last time around.

Either way, it's frickin' hilarious.

(thanks to Scarce, since CBS miscoded their embeds)

Is what's sauce for the goose also sauce for the gander? In RomneyWorld, not so much:

Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney's "Every Town Counts" bus tour made a slight detour from its planned route through eastern Pennsylvania after over 100 protestors affiliated with the Obama campaign and MoveOn.org showed up at a gas station where he was scheduled to stop.

Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and an Obama supporter, also showed up at the scheduled stop - a Wawa gas station in Quakertown. The Romney campaign had sent advance staff to the location, but as the number of protestors grew, they decided to find a quieter location.

Ah, remember the good ol' days of campaign decorum? You know, when a candidate could send a bus to his rival's speeches to drive donuts in the parking lot, honking? Oh, wait.

Just because they're from MoveOn doesn't make them affiliated with the actual campaign, though it's nice of CBS to conflate the two. It's telling that President Obama went ahead and delivered his speech, unfazed by the frat boy antics of official campaign workers. But have some protestors (Freedom of Speech, what a quaint notion) and Romney goes running.

(h/t Heather at VideoCafe)

Stop me if you heard this one before: A rising Republican star cultivates a reputation as a hardline immigration opponent, and sets his sights on jumping from Pinal County Sheriff to the US House of Representatives. He's saying all the right things to attract voters in the state that also elected Jan Brewer and Russell Pearce and up until this week, looked likely to win. He's even ingratiated himself into the national Republican establishment by becoming the Arizona chair for the Mitt Romney campaign. But it turns out that this Republican star, Paul Babeu, had a very dark secret:

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu — who became the face of Arizona border security nationally after he started stridently opposing illegal immigration — threatened his Mexican ex-lover with deportation when the man refused to promise never to disclose their years-long relationship, the former boyfriend and his lawyer tell New Times. [..]

Informed of the situation, Nancy-Jo Merritt, a longtime Phoenix immigration attorney, says such a threat would be indicative of an "atmosphere that's been created politically in this state, so that if you get angry at someone who is Hispanic, you immediately jump down to the level of threatening to deport him.

"If what [Babeu's attorney] says is correct [about Jose's being illegal], either the sheriff had a long relationship with someone he knew was undocumented, while all the time being Mr. Bluster about the border and using it for political gain," or he threatened to deport someone he just broke up with, Merritt says.

"That's just the worst kind of hypocrisy."

For his part, Babeu admits that he is gay, quit the Romney campaign, but denied that he threatened his boyfriend (whose immigration status is under question) with deportation if he outed him. Howie Klein:

Meanwhile, Babeu, a former boarding school headmaster who claims he was repeatedly molested as a child by a Catholic priest, is still deluding himself that he can continue running for Congress against GOP incumbent Paul Gosar. That should be over by Monday. Babeu's press conference a couple hours ago is stunning. He admitted he's gay and tried painting himself as a victim, although he did acknowledge the relationship between himself and Jose.

Arizona senator John McCain--whose impeccable ability to judge character includes asking Sarah Palin to be his running mate and the architect of our current financial woes Phil Gramm as his economic advisor--was quick to defend his "friend":

“Well of course Sheriff Babeu is a friend of mine. I do not know the details except what has been published in the media and I am sure there will be a through and complete investigation if there is any allegations of wrongdoing,” said McCain, R-Ariz.,. “All I can say is that he also deserves the benefit, as every citizen does, of innocence until proven guilty.”

Well, that's all fine and good, but will Sen. McCain actually say something if the allegations are proven true?

Around 10 p.m. on Tuesday night, Mitt Romney's (independent) Super PAC released its six month campaign finance data, just a few hours after his big win in the Florida primary. This is what the campaign to Restore Our Future looks like (all info compiled from FEC Data between Jul. 1, 2011 and Dec. 31, 2011):

Total raised from individuals and organizations: $17,947,952

Total spent: $6,535,213.64

Greatest amount raised from one donor: This is actually a tie between four donors, each gave $1 million:

1. Rooney Holdings, Inc - a large Manhattan private investment firm and construction company. Rooney Holdings built Cowboys Stadium, the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center and the George H.W. Presidential Library. The CEO and President L. Francis Rooney was the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See from 2005 - 2008.

2. Robert Mercer of East Setauket, N.Y. - Mercer is co-CEO for Renaissance Technologies Corp., one of the world's largest private hedge funds. He owns this house and pays $303,678 per year in property taxes on it.

3. Julian Robertson of Locust Valley, N.Y. - Robertson is a former hedge fund manager who founded Tiger Management Corp. In 2011, his fortune was estimated at $2.4 billion, according to Forbes.

4. Paul Singer of New York, N.Y. - Singer is the founder and CEO of the hedge fund Elliott Management Corporation. His firm manages $17 billion in assets, he personally has a net worth of $900 million, which is almost four times as much as Mitt Romney

Top five total contributions by state:
1. New York - $4.63 million
2. Florida - $3.33 million
3. California - $1.90 million
4. Massachusetts - $1.67 million
5. Texas - $1.58 million

Total raised from corporations, with no individual name given (7/1/11 - 12/31/11) - $6,540,000

The average contribution was about $98,000. Romney and Restore Our Future spent a combined $6.28 million on Florida ads in the final week leading up to the primary, according to the Associated Press. $4 million came from Restore Our Future. In case you aren't sure what a Super PAC is and how the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision allowed them to exist - read this.

And here's a chart of the data that shows what this all means to the average American:

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Mitt Romney’s hurdle in winning the love/respect/admiration/fear of his party can be summed up in one photo: It was taken by his son, Tagg (doesn’t Sarah Palin have a kid with that name?) and put on Twitter this week. It’s of Romney and his wife Ann, presumably in a hotel basement, side-by-side pouring detergent into washing machines. Mitt is, of course, wearing a starched button up shirt and jeans, which is what people who never do laundry think people would wear when they do laundry. (Personally, if I have a clean starched shirt and jeans that’s an indication I don’t need to do laundry yet.) “Nothing like the glamorous life on the road,” the intermittent front-runner’s son tweeted with the pic.

This photo comes in the same week as Romney’s tax return where we learned Romney doesn’t actually work. He is in fact, as he’s claimed, unemployed. His money…makes his money. Millions and millions. He pays a tax rate of 13.9 percent – far lower than your average laundromat owner.

Which leads me to ask: Why is Mitt being photographed doing his laundry? Were there no Dukakis tanks available?

Apparently pleased with his Average Joe “real street” cred, Romney happily explained the image to NBC News, “We do our laundry at least once a week, because we’ll be on the road for 30 straight days. Who else do you think is going to do our laundry?”

When you are a multi-multi-millionaire, I can think of millions of people who could do your laundry. Isn’t Romney taking away jobs by washing his own clothes? First he outsourced American jobs, destroyed companies while the CEO at Bain Capital – now his quirky down-homeness is denying a gig to a professional fluff and folder.

When you don’t actually think about the plight of working people, you can assume you’re connecting to their “kitchen table” concerns by saying you have to do laundry at least once a week. We all do our laundry that much. Mainly because if you’re middle-class (or the former middle-class), you don’t have weeks worth of clothes; therefore you wash clothes all the time. It’s like saying you pay your bills at least once a month. Or you fill up your car with gas at least once a week. Or you worry about money at least once every other day. For normal people, this goes without saying, but for a candidate trying to appear normal, well, let’s just say it doesn’t wash.

Speaking of which, does one really, as the GOP-dubbed “vulture capitalist” with holdings in the Cayman Islands and some Swiss bank accounts want to have oneself associated with the word “laundry”? If you’re admittedly doing accounting tricks to pay as little U.S. taxes as possible, don’t you want to avoid a word synonymous with rich guy malfeasance? “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” said Romney at the NBC debate on Monday night in Florida.

Right: Millionaire plus laundry equals accidental editorial cartoon.

What’s next for this guy? Dressing up as a pirate and walking through foreclosed neighborhoods?

Also do you really want, as a Mormon candidate, to open up a conversation about separating whites from colors?! Gah!

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Photos by Craig Hudson. A big thanks to Karoli for making them into a video.

Charleston, South Carolina is filled with beautiful people. When strangers walk past each other on the sidewalk they say hello. Men hold doors for women. At a crowded Starbucks the two most common words were "please" and "excuse me."

But that Southern decorum is contrasted by Charleston’s dark side. This is where at Fort Sumter the Civil War started. Even today, it can resemble a segregated city.

This dichotomy makes it a fitting place for a Republican party to showcase candidates as they struggle to find one that is presentable to the general public on the outside, but not too sinister on the inside.

On Friday, every contender for the Republican presidential nomination made a speech near Charleston, South Carolina. They’re competing for the state that has picked the eventual Republican nominee since 1980.

On Friday morning, Newt Gingrich was holding a slim lead over Mitt Romney. He had fought hard in the debate on Thursday to overcome allegations he had asked his second wife for an open marriage. And Romney’s decision not to release his tax returns until April gave even Rick Santorum and Ron Paul the feeling they had an opportunity to win South Carolina.

At 10 am on Friday at a large, hangar at the Charleston airport, Ron Paul came out from behind a curtain to a young woman’s cheer of “You’re the greatest!” The small crowd made the space feel empty.

“Quite frankly I feel pretty good about last night,” said Paul, on his debate performance. During his speech he bashed entitlement programs, promised a trillion in cuts to the federal budget and proclaimed the current government is “murdering our civil liberties.”

As he was leaving I asked him why he wasn’t running as a Libertarian, as he did in 1988, he snarled, “I’m a Republican.”

I left the hangar and headed downtown for the Stephen Colbert and Herman Cain rally at the College of Charleston. Colbert is a native son of Charleston.

A crowd of over 1,000 people had turned out to the shady courtyard dotted with oaks covered in Spanish moss. Colbert had a marching band and a gospel choir introduce him.

“It’s good to be back home,” said Colbert, “I hope this doesn’t turn into an occupation, but if it does, you’ll all be pepper sprayed very politely. We are in Charleston.”

He welcomed “the most beautiful people in the world” and then Herman Cain, “the man we’ve all gathered here to introduce me.” Cain was in top form. He has become a character of the character he created. He quoted Pokemon, sang, and endorsed we the people for president.

Colbert said to vote for Cain, because “Cain is me.”

After the rally, Dominique Awis, a College of Charleston student, said she was helping to mobilize students to vote for Cain tomorrow. She said most of the people she knew were going to vote for Cain.

Colbert drew easily the largest crowd of the day. He brought Cain because Cain will be on the ballot, while Colbert missed the window to register as a candidate.

“He’s making a whole mockery of the system,” said Ryan “The Bull” Johnson, a Charleston resident. “No one cares about the actual process, but throw a celebrity in and people want to be a part of it.”

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