Mitt Romney pledged to repeal Obamacare in its entirety on Wednesday evening, but joked that he would be happy to be known as the grandfather of the federal law. “Now and then the president says I’m the grandfather of Obamacare. I don’t think he meant that as a compliment, but I’ll take it,” Romney said at a Univision forum, adding, “this was during my primary we thought it might not be helpful.” Watch it:

Romney went on to praise the success of reform in Massachusetts, noting that almost every child now has access to health insurance. The former governor recently raised the ire of conservatives for saying, during an appearance on Meet The Press, that he would maintain some parts of the federal law. He steered clear of that tonight.

As Pennsylvania’s strict voter ID law returns to the lower court for reconsideration, its original sponsor, Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-PA), told KDKA Radio Wednesday morning that his law will only disenfranchise “lazy” people, like the ones Mitt Romney was talking about in the leaked video of a private fundraiser.

When asked about the voter ID law’s disenfranchisement of the 750,000 Pennsylvanians who cannot get IDs, Metcalfe cited Romney’s offhand dismissal of the 47% of the country who will never “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” as proof that those people don’t deserve the right to vote:

HOST: Are you absolutely convinced…that the methods to implement this law are effective and will in fact make sure no legitimate voter will be disenfranchised?

METCALFE: I don’t believe any legitimate voter that actually wants to exercise that right and takes on the according responsiblity that goes with that right to secure their photo ID will be disenfranchised. As Mitt Romney said, 47% of the people that are living off the public dole, living off their neighbors’ hard work, and we have a lot of people out there that are too lazy to get up and get out there and get the ID they need. If individuals are too lazy, the state can’t fix that.

Listen:

Though Romney has claimed his remark was simply “inelegant,” the message seemed to hit home with Metcalfe. Metcalfe’s colleague, Rep. Mike Turzai (R-PA) admitted earlier this year that Pennsylvania’s voter ID law would “allow Governor Romney to win.” Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s DMVs and Social Security offices have been overrun with so-called “lazy” people navigating a maze of bureaucracy in order to get the ID that will allow them to cast their vote.

A day after criticizing Mitt Romney for saying that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent upon government” and see themselves as victims, Republican senator Scott Brown (MA) refused to say if he supports his party’s nominee for president. Asked by reporters on Wednesday if he still backs Romney’s candidacy, Brown — who is battling a tight race for re-election against Elizabeth Warren — demurred, saying only that he doesn’t agree with him on everything:

“He’s working hard to get his message out. I don’t agree with him on everything but that’s what being an independent senator is about: criticizing my party when it’s appropriate and then praising people when they have an opportunity to do something well,” he said before stepping into an elevator off the Senate floor.

The remarks represent the most substantial backlash from Republicans following Mother Jones’ release of a secret video of Romney telling wealthy donors at a fundraiser in Florida that he doesn’t have to worry about half the country because they won’t vote for him anyway.

Brown and Romney share an adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, and the former Massachusetts governor campaigned for Brown during a 2010 special election in the state to fill Ted Kennedy’ seat. “[W]e’ve done a bunch of fundraisers for Scott,” Romney bragged during a January 2010 appearance on Fox News, “my team is helping run his campaign!” During another interview he added, “[H]e’s an independent-minded Republican. He’s not just a, you know, rubber stamp kind of guy.”

President Obama wants to “criminalize” free speech, according to a leading GOP congressmen.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) discussed the President’s response after an anti-Muslim video provoked widespread riots in Libya and elsewhere, telling radio host Mike Huckabee that Obama “has a general trend of subordinating the constitutional rights.” Obama had released a statement the morning after the violence that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens saying, “While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.” Both Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reaffirmed the importance of free speech in their responses to the violence.

Franks went on to argue that Obama is taking aim at the First Amendment: “I really believe that this administration is moving towards being willing to criminalize certain things that we hold as free speech in America.”

FRANKS: I believe that there is ubiquitous evidence that this administration has a general trend of subordinating the constitutional rights that we hold very dearly as Americans to placate sometimes our enemies who have nothing but derision toward us, and I’m convinced that it is playing out even in the events of recent days. I really believe that this administration is moving towards being willing to criminalize certain things that we hold as free speech in America. [...] When we begin to say that we’re going to potentially criminalize people criticizing a religion, then we are stepping away from the First Amendment and one of the foundations that made America the greatest country in the world.

Listen to it:

Earlier this week, the filmmaker voluntarily agreed for an interview with the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department, not the Obama administration, and has not been charged with a crime.

Barack Obama isn’t the only one to denounce actions meant to purposefully provoke people. In 2006, the Bush Administration similarly criticized anti-Muslim provocations, as did Mitt Romney in 2010.

Franks has made a habit of accusing Obama of violating the Constitution. Last year, Franks floated the idea of impeaching Obama in an interview with ThinkProgress.

The media focus on political minutiae in the presidential campaign can often crowd out the substantive issues that the winner will have to deal with once taking office. And while the candidates themselves occasionally talk about these issues, there’s a number of critical concerns that get no attention, including some of the worst problems (in terms of the harm they cause to people’s lives) in the United States and the world. To address this lamentable state of affairs, ThinkProgress has compiled a list of ten of the most significant problems being severely underserved by the campaign and American political discourse more broadly. In no particular order:

MASS INCARCERATION AND THE DRUG WAR

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik termed “mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history…perhaps the fundamental fact [of American society], as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” Indeed, as Gopnik notes, there are more black men are in prison today than were enslaved then and more total people in prison than there were in Stalin’s gulags at their largest. The result of this wave of imprisonment was structural inequality so severe that it was called “the new Jim Crow” by a famous book of the same title, as the strict limitations placed on convicted felons have rendered millions black Americans second-class citizens. One of the principal causes of the rise of mass incarceration is the War on Drugs, which has failed abysmally at limiting the use of dangerous drugs but succeeded wildly at aiding and abetting racial inequality in the United States and the murderous drug trade abroad. The Justice Department recently doubled down on these policies by initiating a massive crackdown on medical marijuana in states that have legalized the drug’s medicinal use.

THE HOUSING MARKET

Though it’s well-known that the housing bubble collapse precipitated the financial collapse, the subsequent woes of the housing market have received comparatively little attention. John Griffith, Julia Gordon, and David Sanchez, in a recent report for the Center for American Progress, call the current housing market “one of the biggest drags on our recovery,” writing that “The historic decline in home prices since 2006 has cost Americans more than $7 trillion in household wealth, forced millions of families out of their homes, and left nearly one in four homeowners owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Private investment in housing is a fraction of its historic norm, translating to billions in lost economic output and millions of missing jobs. And more than five years into the crisis, the U.S. mortgage market remains on life support as the federal government guaranteed more than 95 percent of home loans made last year.”

THE INDIA/PAKISTAN CONFLICT

As the United States exits Afghanistan, tensions are likely to flare up again between the two nuclear-armed states over concerns about terrorism and relative influence in the country. The status of the contested Jammu-Kashmir province also remains unresolved. Former Pakistani director of Arms Control and Disarmament Affairs, Feroz Hassan Khan, concluded in a paper published by the US Army War College that “this region seems to be the one place in the world most likely to suffer nuclear warfare due to the seemingly undiminished national, religious, and ethnic animosities between these two countries.”
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