[Lamplighter]

The news media are pouncing on Romney in his failed
attempt to express his concern for the middle class.
Unfortunately, this stone in the stone soup is having
troubles even getting out of his own troubles.
It's reminiscent of Gerald Ford trying to explain SNL.

NY Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN (Op Ed)
Published: February 2, 2012

Romney Isn’t Concerned

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what
he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context.
But he quite clearly did mean what he said.
And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.<snip>

On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs
— yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,”
and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy
“very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help,
those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.

But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare
that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that
those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?

Specifically, the candidate has endorsed Representative Paul Ryan’s plan
for drastic cuts in federal spending — with almost two-thirds of the proposed spending cuts
coming at the expense of low-income Americans.

To the extent that Mr. Romney has differentiated his position from the Ryan plan,
it is in the direction of even harsher cuts for the poor;
his Medicaid proposal appears to involve a 40 percent reduction
in financing compared with current law.

And besides all that:

Yesterday, Romney accepted the endorsement of The Donald.
Why would Mitt do that ? He could have made more points by
rejecting it, or at least ignoring it. Maybe he just wanted to piss off The Newt again.