Gingrich’s Super PAC was even more aggressive, purchasing a lengthy documentary-style video that assailed Bain Capital, and running other ads hitting Romney for killing jobs at Bain.

But now that Gingrich is supporting Romney and campaigning for him, the former House Speaker is criticizing attacks on Bain, saying they won’t work. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Gingrich did not exactly recant, but did acknowledge the ineffectiveness of one attack he used on Romney – the private equity firm Bain Capital. When Gingrich accused Romney and Bain of taking over companies and downsizing them at the expense of workers, he was widely condemned by fellow Republicans and eventually backed off.

This week the Obama campaign released an ad along those same lines. Gingrich said his experience should be a lesson to Obama: “that dog won’t hunt.”

Gingrich said the attack will not resonate in voters’ minds as they think: “You want me to be mad because in one company somewhere Romney may have in fact been involved in someone losing their job while you as president have been involved in millions of people losing their jobs?”

Perhaps Gingrich just thinks attacks on Romney’s record won’t be successful, or perhaps he’s trying to Etch-A-Sketch away the myriad attacks he launched against on the former Massachusetts governor during the primary, now that Romney is the presumed GOP nominee and it’s useful for Gingrich to curry favor with him.

At a press conference in Florida today, Romney repeated that he “repudiated” the Wright attack. But when asked about his comments on Hannity’s show, Romney said he stood by them, even though he said he couldn’t remember them:

ROMNEY: I’m actually gonna — I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was. I’ll go back and take a look at what was said there.

Watch it:

But Allen said he does not think sexual orientation should be a consideration for judges. “What I’d look at as far as judges is, I’d look at their qualifications. As far as judges are concerned, sexual orientation is not one of their criteria for being a judge,” Allen said during a campaign stop in Prince William County, according to Inside Nova.

Allen is hardly an LGBT-friendly lawmaker. He’s said that gay rights are not civil rights, co-sponsored a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality, and often used to raise the specter of same-sex marriage in stump speeches.

An audio recording of the event was posted online by a supporter, who said, “I’m glad the congressman said it. Not enough have. More should.”

But now, Coffman, who has tried to paint himself as a moderate, is backtracking. “I misspoke and I apologize,” he said in a statement. “I have confidence in President Obama’s citizenship and legitimacy as President of the United States. … I don’t believe the president shares my belief in American Exceptionalism,” he explained.

A spokesperson for State Rep. Joe Miklosi (D), Coffman’s Democratic challenger, slammed Coffnamn’s “outrageous comments,” saying they “once again make clear that Mike Coffman is Colorado’s version of Rush Limbaugh. This kind of extremism is why Washington doesn’t work.” “We need leaders who will work together for solutions, not join the far right birther fringe or attack the President of the United States as un-American,” the spokesperson added.

Coffman is facing a tough reelection battle in a newly redrawn district that is more competitive than before.

He’s the latest Republican to join a new wave of birtherism.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R)

In an interview with the Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Martinez acknowledged the problem. “I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign,” she said. Indeed, one recent poll found a startling 68 point gap between Romney and President Obama among Hispanics. “But now there’s an opportunity for Gov. Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why,” she added.

Part of that may be softening his immigration stance, which was among the harshest in the GOP primary. Romney said his immigration policy would be to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they would choose to “self-deport.” But Martinez balked at this. “‘Self-deport?’ What the heck does that mean?” Martinez “snap[ped] at Romano.

Martinez also called for he GOP to “outflank the president–on the left–by proposing its own comprehensive plan” — something that is highly unlikely for Romney to support considering that he’s vowed to veto the DREAM Act and his immigration adviser, the controversial activist behind Arizona’s anti-immigration law, said his candidate will not support any legislation that opens a path to citizenship for immigrants.

But perhaps Romney-Martinez 2012 is not meant to be anyway, as Martinez has repeatedly said she’s not interested in being vice president and Romney is supposedly looking for an “incredibly boring white guy” — criteria which excludes Martinez at least twice over.

The ad implies that the plant would not have been built without Romney’s assistance. Steele Dynamics “almost never got started,” the narrator says. “When others shied away, Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team stepped in.”

But the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported at the time (via Nexis), that Bain was just one of eight financiers for the project — hardly the lone white knight:

Financing to build the plant is coming from the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, NBD Bank, Fort Wayne National Bank, Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Germany and the Paris Bank. Capital and Bain Capital are also investors.

And while the video touts Romney’s “private-sector” team, the company was successful thanks in part to big government subsidies and grants — $37 million from the state of Indiana and DeKalb County. And as the Los Angeles Times reported in January of this year, the county even raised taxes on residents to help fund the mill:

The county promised $23.4 million in property tax abatements and tax increment finance bonds, as well as a new income tax to generate economic development funds. The latter was required by the state, which shelled out another $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, workforce training and funds for roads.

A new quarter-percent tax on DeKalb County residents financed infrastructure improvements such as roads and railroad exchanges that benefited Steel Dynamics.

Indeed, while Romney and conservative allies have attacked President Obama for employing “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism” to create green jobs, Romney-backed Steel Dynamics enjoyed government largesse on the local level. As the LA Times noted, “The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be ‘corporate welfare.’”

Bain invested $18.2 million in Steel Dynamics in 1994. Five years later, it sold its stake for $104 million, walking away with $85 million profit.

Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Boston has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.

BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.

This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago. It’s a welcome return to reality, but calls into question any piece of evidence the campaign puts forward. (In 1994, he claimed in an ad that he created 10,000 jobs at Bain.)

Meanwhile, even the “thousands of jobs” figure should be suspect, as the evidence the campaign offers to support it is an editorial from the right-wing Washington Examiner endorsing Romney. Could the Romney campaign not find a single better piece of evidence — a news article, government data, or economist’s estimate, for instance — than an unsubstantiated opinion article from a paper that is simultaneously declaring that it favors Romney’s election?

And his assertion on his record as governor also fails to include the context that his state was 47th out of 50 on job creation.

The RNC jumped on the video of Rattner on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, while the National Review, Daily Caller, and others were almost immediately up with stories about “former Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner” criticizing the president’s campaign.

But before conservatives pounce, they may want to watch Rattner’s entire remarks, which are really an indictment of Romney.

“Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs,” Rattner said. “Bain Capital’s responsibility was never to create 100,000 jobs, or some other number, it was to make profits for its investors.” Rattner — who spent his career at Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street firms — made it clear that he thinks the ad is “unfair” only because it assumes that companies should care about their employees. Watch it:

Technically, of course, Ratter is right — companies’ only legal obligation is to create value for their owners. But as Rattner notes, Romney has built his campaign on claiming that Bain was actually some kind of altruistic job creation machine. Just this morning, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul said, “Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as Governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation.”

By acknowledging that “Bain Capital’s responsibility was never to create…jobs,” Ratter is unwittingly endorsing the entire message of the Obama campaign ads, which is that Bain prioritized profits for it wealthy owners over jobs and pensions for its middle-class employees.

Prioritizing profit above all else is, of course, fine for someone running a private equity firm. But it’s not likely to win over voters in the fall, so Romney has disingenuously tried to paint Bain as something other than the profit-hungry corporation that it was. The Obama campaign was merely pointing out the human consequences.

Meanwhile, Rattner, who was embroiled in scandal relating to an alleged kickback scheme involving New York state’s pension fund, and paid tens of millions of dollars in settlements after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and New York state filed lawsuits, may not be the best arbiter of fairness in high finance.

“You see,” Walker said in a February 11, 2011 speech. “Despite a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard over the past 11 days, the bill I put forward isn’t aimed at state workers, and it certainly isn’t a battle with unions.”

Labor activists and Democrats, of course, claimed that the legislation’s true purpose was to break unions in the state, in order to help ensure more Republicans would get elected in the future. Now, a video released today by a Wisconsin documentary filmmaker should put any doubt to rest and show that Walker was lying through his teeth the entire time that he claimed his bill had nothing to do with undermining unions.

In the video, shot on January 18, 2011 — just before Walker introduced the Budget Repair Bill and a month before his speech — Walker tells a billionaire campaign contributor that the forthcoming budget bill is the first step in an elaborate strategy to “divide and conquer” unions in the state.

Speaking with Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks, who has since become Walker’s single-largest campaign contributor and the biggest donor in Wisconsin history, Walker says the bill will help make Wisconsin a right-to-work and “completely red” state. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which first reported the exchange, transcribed the conversation:

“Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions -” [Hendricks asked]

“Oh, yeah,” Walker broke in.

“- and become a right-to-work?” Hendricks continued. “What can we do to help you?”

“Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill,” Walker said. “The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

Watch the exchange, which is part of a documentary to be released soon:

While it’s by now almost universally understood that Walker’s intentions all along were to deliver a body blow to labor, the video confirms definitively that Walker pushed the legislation under false pretenses and in bad faith. This is, unfortunately, hardly shocking, as even Walker tacitly acknowledges it now, but shows that Walker intentionally deceived the legislature and the public.

Walker also claimed publicly all along that he’s not interested in making Wisconsin a “right-to-work” state, telling the Journal-Sentinel just last month, “Private sector unions are my partner in economic development.”

Thanks to this bill, Walker is now facing a recall election against former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D), who said of the video, “This is another colossal bait and switch that goes directly to his honesty.” “What he claims he is not in favor of publicly, to the person who has made the largest contribution in state history, he says exactly the opposite. You can’t trust him,” Barrett added.

Missouri Senate Candidate Sarah Steelman

“There was nothing violent about what he said…no one perceived it as a threat,” Steeleman told KZRG in Joplin. No one, that is, except for the FBI, which reportedly interviewed the activist who made the comment, Scott Boston, and the Capitol Police, which assigned McCaskill extra protection. Boston later said he did not intend the comment to be a threat.

Steelman, did say that the “kill” comment was a poor choice of words and “a bad joke,” but dismissed the controversy and defended Boston:

STEELMAN: Are we just we just going to abandon all common sense in this country and anytime anybody says anything, the government is just going to come down and send FBI agents to knock on your door? Are we going to have thought and speech police? [...]

This is part of the problem in Washington…and people jump on somebody like Scott Boston, an individual, and they can put the whole force of the federal government on this guy.

The liberal research organization American Bridge recorded the interview:

Steeleman was at the rally with her son, who applauded Boston’s comment. Steelman’s Republican primary opponent John Brunner issued a strong rebuke of Boston’s comment, saying, “This type of rhetoric is unconscionable and I reject this kind of politics.” “Comments like these have no place in this U.S. Senate campaign, or any other campaign in this country, because they don’t represent American values,” the Republican said.

“Aren’t there — aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about?” he said, cutting off her question. “This is a significant issue in Colorado,” she replied. “We’ve got enormous issues that we face, but you want talk about — go ahead — you want to talk about marijuana?” Romney said, sounding a bit exasperated. Romney explained that he wanted to talk about national issues like the economy and Iran. Watch it:

While Romney’s popular image is that of a staid, almost robotic businessman, his temper has flared up publicly on occasion. His own family has a term for these moments: “Mitt-frontations.”

“My view is that marriage itself is a relationship between a man and women, and that’s my own preference, I know other people have differing views,” he said. Asked if he Obama had flip-flopped, Romney said only, “you’re a better judge of that than I,” to a reporter. “If that’s the case, you’ll be able to make that determination on your own,” he added. Watch it:

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney took a hard line against same-sex marriage after the state Supreme Court legalized it. “On my watch, we fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage,” he declared to the conservative crowd at CPAC this year. He also signed the anti-gay National Organization For Marriage’s (NOM) pledge, in which he promised to fight for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage and defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In 2003 and 2004, Romney touted his opposition to marriage equality to curry favor with the GOP base, and even testified before the Senate Judicial Committee in favor of a federal ban on same-sex marriage.

Now, Romney says that excluding gay people from marrying is merely his “preference”? With this muted response, he’s a bit all over the map.

When Romney was locked in a tough Republican primary against hardcore social conservatives, it suited him to go on the attack on marriage. But now that he’s trying to appeal to independents in the general election and talk exclusively about the economy, he’s just trying to move on as quickly as possible. But the social conservatives who never quite trusted him may not let him.

Sam Steelman

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the comment was met with “mild applause” from the audience, including, according to a video provided to ThinkProgress by the liberal research group American Bridge, Steelman’s son, Sam. Sam Steelman also serves as his mother’s “deputy [campaign] manager” and acts as a “campaign spokesman.”

In the tracking video, Sam, chatting with his mother, can be clearly seen applauding after activist Scott Boston says, “We have to kill the Claire Bear ladies and gentlemen.” Watch it:

The Missouri Democratic Party hit Steelman for not immediately denouncing Boston’s comments, and the video suggests she heard it. Later, Steelman told the Huffington Post, “I may disagree with the words Mr. Boston chose in his statement, but I understand his frustration and I emphatically support his right to express his views.”

Tea Party-backed Mourdock is not just ideological, he is adamantly opposed to bipartisanship. In fact, he’s called for more partisanship in Washington, saying he’s more interested in destroying Democrats than solving the nation’s problems by working with them.

Appearing on MSNBC this morning with host Chuck Todd, Mourdock offered his own definition of bipartisanship:

MOURDOCK: I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. … If we [win the House, Senate, and White House], bipartisanship means they have to come our way, and if we’re successful in getting the numbers, we’ll work towards that.

Watch it:

As TP Justice Editor Ian Millhiser notes, Mourdock’s win means Democrats have no choice but to reform the filibuster: “The parties are too far apart. The Republicans are too eager to obstruct, and the handful of GOPers with a history of bipartisanship [like Lugar] will be too spooked to reach across the aisle. America could go years with one or more Supreme Court seats vacant.”

A couple of years ago when conservative activists were making noise about primarying Lugar, former Republican senator and UN ambassador John Danforth told the New York Times, “If Dick Lugar, having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”

Apparently, that time has come.

Sen. Clarie McCaskill (D-MO)

Scott Boston, a St. Louis Tea Party activist, said, “She walks around like she’s some sort of Rainbow Brite Care Bear or something but really she’s an evil monster.” “We have to kill the Claire Bear,” he added.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that local police are performing more patrols around the senator’s house at the request of the Capitol Police, and that she now has extra security at public events.

Steelman has not made a public comment condemning Boston’s comments, despite being present at the event supporting her, and neither have McCaskill’s other GOP challengers, Rep. Tod Akin (R-MO) or John Brunner. Boston later said he did not intend the comment to be a threat.

In a statement provided to ThinkProgress, Missouri Democratic Party spokesperson Caitlin Legacki, said, “The kind of language in this threat is totally unacceptable and needs to be immediately renounced by Todd Akin, John Brunner and Sarah Steelman.”

“What makes America different from the rest of the world is that we settle our political disagreements without threats of violence. Akin, Brunner and Steelman need to make it crystal clear to their supporters that this kind of language will not be tolerated in any venue under any circumstances. If they refuse to do so, these three candidates are sending a clear message that they endorse the kind of inflammatory language that could lead to violence, or something worse,” Legacki said.

This is surprising to a lot of people, including, apparently, one of Romney’s chief surrogates — Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee, who has been campaigning for Romney. “Romney said that he was responsible for the auto bailout?” Mccain asked TPM’s Brian Beutler today when asked about Romney’s comments. He went to criticize the deal that Romney is now trying to take credit for: “I know that if the auto companies had gone into bankruptcy like thousands of small businesses had to do across America, they could’ve emerged without the sweetheart deal for the unions like was orchestrated by the Obama administration.”

Whitley is facing a primary today against Richard Hudson, who has also questioned Obama’s birth place, though has since walked back the claim a bit.

Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN)

In Wisconsin, Democrats will decide who their nominee will be to go up against Gov. Scott Walker (R) in his upcoming recall election. The party and labor organizations have been split between two candidates for much of the race, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk, though Barett is the clear favorite and more likely to beat Walker in the recall. Barrett also served five terms in the U.S. House and lost to Walker narrowly in the 2010 gubernatorial race. Falk has been more closely tied to the protest movement against Walker, however. Labor unions and other progressive activists have vowed to unite behind whoever wins in order to oust Walker on June 5.

Indiana has another key primary today, this one on the Republican side, where long-time Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) is in the fight of his political life against Tea Party-backed state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R). Most observers expect Lugar to lose today, ending his 36-year career in the Senate. A Lugar loss would likely make it easier for Democrats to pick up the seat in November, which otherwise would have been a cake walk for Republicans to hold.

And in North Carolina, voters will take on an anti-gay ballot measure that has attracted national attention and organization. Marriage equality is already banned in the state, but North Carolina Amendment One would prohibit civil unions and domestic partnerships as well, and is written so broadly that it could even imperil heterosexual couples.