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Top Romney aide: Romney can change his positions after primary, like an Etch-a-Sketch

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Finally, proof that Mitt Romney is a liberal masquerading as a conservative – from his own campaign spokesman.

Look:

ABC News has the raw story.

Excerpt:

For a candidate who has spent months battling the title of “flip-flopper,” perhaps the last thing he would want associated with his name is an Etch A Sketch, those do-over drawing boards that let you shake your scribbles away with the flick of a wrist.

Unfortunately Mitt Romney won’t be able to shake away this comparison any time soon. When his campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom was asked this morning on CNN how the GOP frontrunner would make the pivot to the general election, Fehrnstrom compared Romney’s primary campaign to an Etch A Sketch, a gaffe that spread like wildfire to Romney’s rival’s stump speeches.

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch,” Fehrnstrom told CNN’s John Fugelsang. “You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again. But I will say, if you look at the exit polling data in Illinois, you’ll see that Mitt Romney is broadly acceptable to most of the factions in the party. You have to do that in order to become the nominee…”

Within hours, Romney’s opponents seized on the comments, using them to reinforce the notion that the former Massachusetts governor will, as Rick Santorum said, “say anything to get elected.”

“We’re not looking for someone who’s the Etch A Sketch candidate,” Santorum said in a campaign speech just hours after Fehrnstrom’s comments. “We’re looking for someone who writes what they believe in stone and stands true to what they say.”

Both the Santorum and Newt Gingrich campaigns made pit stops at the toy store to pick up Etch A Sketches of their own, deploying their new visual aids at speeches and rallies in Maryland and Louisiana today.

Conservative Republican Rick Santorum reacts to this clip. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

This morning on CNN, senior advisor to the Romney Campaign, Eric Fehrnstrom, admits his candidate and their campaign is based on the “etch-a-sketch” model when asked by if the positions he’s taken in the Republican primary have been too conservative.

Hogan Gidley, National Communications Director, said: “We all knew Mitt Romney didn’t have any core convictions, but we appreciate his staff going on national television to affirm that point for anyone who had any doubts.  With the two year anniversary of the signing of ObamaCare upon us, can voters really believe that the man who urged the President to use his healthcare plan in Massachusetts as a model would really repealObamaCare?  Or is that promise just something they would ‘shake up and restart’ with when Romney hits the general election.

Voters can trust that Rick Santorum will say what he believes, and do what he says.  They may not always agree with Rick Santorum, but they can trust him because they know he is a man of principle.  Clearly, the same cannot be said of Governor Romney.”

Do you think Mitt Romney is a conservative? If you do, check out the links below.

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Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity plan balances the budget without raising taxes

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Americans for Tax Reform explains what’s in it.

Excerpt:

The main details are:

Revenue neutrality.  The budget calls for the House Ways and Means Committee to produce a tax reform package with a tax revenue target of between 18 and 19 percent of GDP.  This is in line with historical revenue figures.  By contrast, big government budgets like “Gang of Six,” “Simpson-Bowles,” and the Obama budget call for a long-range revenue target of over 20 percent of GDP.  The Ryan budget is a no tax hikes budget.

Six personal rates down to two.  The Ryan budget replaces the current six-rate personal income tax structure (10, 15, 25, 28, 33, and 35 percent) with a two-rate system of 10 and 25 percent.  This will result in a lower tax rate on the majority of small business profits, from 33 or 35 percent down to 25 percent.

Repeals Obamacare tax hikes.  The Ryan budget eliminates the entire Obamacare law.  This includes repealing the 20 new or higher taxes which have taken or are about to take effect from that law.

Eliminate the AMT.  The Ryan budget eliminates the AMT, instead favoring a simpler system with lower rates and a broad tax base.

Lower rates on businesses.  As said above, the Ryan budget lowers the tax rate on the majority of small business profits to 25 percent.  It also lowers the federal income tax rate on larger corporate employers from 35 percent (the highest in the developed world) to 25 percent (closer to the developed nation average).  While this makes American companies more competitive, it would still leave us with a higher corporate income tax rate than the developed nation average, Canada, and the United Kingdom.  In order to make us truly internationally-competitive, the federal rate must fall to 20 percent or less.

No more picking winners and losers in the tax code.  In order to target revenues at 18-19 percent of GDP with tax rates no higher than 25 percent, the Ways and Means Committee will have to curtail or eliminate most tax exclusions, adjustments, deductions, and credits.  That means that all consumed income will be taxed once and only once.  No longer will the tax code favor one type of economic behavior over another.

Moves tax code from “worldwide taxation” to “territoriality.”  The Ways and Means Committee is directed to shift our tax code from one which seeks to tax income earned all over the world to one which only seeks to tax income earned in America.  This is known as “territoriality,” and it’s already been adopted by and large by our trading competitors.  By retaining a worldwide tax regime, we’re exposing our own countries to double taxation–once when they pay the foreign nation’s income tax, and again when they try to bring the money home.

This is what the budget does: (Debt as % of GDP)

Paul Ryan's 2013: The Path to Prosperity
Paul Ryan's 2013: The Path to Prosperity

Doug Ross has three nice charts explaining the details.

Is Barack Obama going to do anything about the debt?

According to CBS News, Obama has exploded our national debt, so there is no reason to trust anything he says about reducing the debt.

Excerpt:

The National Debt has now increased more during President Obama’s three years and two months in office than it did during 8 years of the George W. Bush presidency.

The Debt rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It has now gone up $4.939 trillion since President Obama took office.

The latest posting from the Bureau of Public Debt at the Treasury Department shows the National Debt now stands at $15.566 trillion. It was $10.626 trillion on President Bush’s last day in office, which coincided with President Obama’s first day.

The National Debt also now exceeds 100% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, the total value of goods and services.

Mr. Obama has been quick to blame his predecessor for the soaring Debt, saying Mr. Bush paid for two wars and a Medicare prescription drug program with borrowed funds.

The federal budget sent to Congress last month by Mr. Obama, projects the National Debt will continue to rise as far as the eye can see. The budget shows the Debt hitting $16.3 trillion in 2012, $17.5 trillion in 2013 and $25.9 trillion in 2022.

[…]His latest budget projects a $1.3 trillion deficit this year declining to $901 billion in 2012, and then annual deficits in the range of $500 billion to $700 billion in the 10 years to come.

If Mr. Obama wins re-election, and his budget projections prove accurate, the National Debt will top $20 trillion in 2016, the final year of his second term. That would mean the Debt increased by 87 percent, or $9.34 trillion, during his two terms.

Some of Bush’s debt total can be explained by considering that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid raised the debt by $5 trillion dollars over 4 years when they took control of the House and Senate in January of 2007. But they’re Democrats, and that’s what Democrats do.

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Santorum campaign relies on donated buses and door-to-door campaigning

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From socially liberal Business Week.

Excerpt:

With minimal campaign organization and less funds than his rivals, Santorum has boosted his campaign with the votes of a network of evangelical Christians, anti-abortion rights activists and home-schooling parents who are resisting frontrunner Mitt Romney. In a March 8-11 national Bloomberg Poll, likely voters who described themselves as “born again” or evangelical Christian backed Santorum by 42 percent compared with 28 percent for Romney.

“Romney’s inability to close out the race has given Santorum a golden opportunity to unite social conservatives behind him, and they are getting in line,” said Keith Appell, a Republican public relations executive who works with social conservative groups.

Parents who home school their children are spreading the message on Facebook. Southern Baptist pastors are promoting Santorum’s candidacy to their members. Anti-abortion rights advocates are boarding the “Rick Bus” for multi-state voter mobilization tours.

Two days before Tennessee’s primary, Santorum attended services on March 4 at the Bellevue Baptist Church, a 7,000- member organization in the Memphis suburbs.

[…]Santorum won the state’s primary.

Such efforts are helping the former Pennsylvania senator compensate for a campaign operation that trails Romney in every measure of strength: money, staff, and organization.

Romney raised $63 million for his campaign through January, compared with $7 million by Santorum. Santorum had spent $148,806 on salaries and benefits through January; Romney’s personnel costs have exceeded $4.5 million. Santorum recently opened a national campaign headquarters in Virginia; Romney’s offices near Boston Harbor have been open nearly a year.

He’s tapping into well organized yet loosely affiliated groups of activists whose leaders consider Santorum one of them. “Santorum has piggybacked on the top of other existing grassroots networks,” said Cleta Mitchell, his campaign counsel. “They’re basically activating their networks on his behalf.”

[…]Romney and a political action committee supporting him ran 64 percent of the commercials that aired in Mississippi and Alabama in the month before the primaries, compared to just 15 percent aired by Santorum’s backers, according to data from New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks advertising.

The article tries to paint Santorum as a social conservative, and he is. But he also has a solid economic plan, that’s targeted to the middle class, and especially manufacturing. Basically, Romney is burning through millions and millions of dollars to buy the nomination. But ordinary conservatives, especially social conservatives, like Rick Santorum best.

Rick Santorum