This afternoon in New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich referred to the Congressional Budget Office — the body responsible for scoring the affect of congressional legislation on the deficit — as “a reactionary socialist institution.” As Political Correction’s Jamison Foser points out, Gingrich has been accusing the CBO of socialism since at least 1994, even though he has relied on the budget office repeatedly to produce nonpartisan scores of critical legislation. Here he is talking about the importance of the CBO in 1995:

Let me say, first of all, that we knew the President would veto the Balanced Budget Act. We’re still very proud of the fact that — as a team — House and Senate Republican passed the first balanced budget in a generation. And we did it working together, solving tremendous number of problems. We did it honestly, using the Congressional Budget Office which was tough. [...]

And yet, I have to say that I have mixed emotions today. On the one hand the President said yesterday he’s going to send up a seven-year balanced budget. It won’t yet be scored by the Congressional Budget Office. But they’ve agreed the Congressional Budget Office would do the scoring.

Now, just to make clear why that’s important. The so-called “balanced budget” of the President over here, when scored by the Congressional Budget Office, suddenly became a $200 billion a year deficit. So, we can’t rely on some phony White House score. And we want to just make clear that our first principle is that whatever the President sends up, we’re going to insist on honest scoring to get honest numbers, which were the ground rules that we wrote the Balanced Budget Act by.

This kind of animosity — or some degree of it — is prevalent in both parties, with Democrats demonstrating a good deal of frustration during the health reform effort about the CBO’s refusal to score prevention and delivery reform provisions as savings. In fact as Paul Starr has pointed out, “Obama agreed to delay implementation of the major provisions of the [health] law until January 2014,” as a way to ensure a good deficit reduction score from the agency. “CBO is God around here,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) likes to say, “because policy lives and dies by CBO’s word. Like the Bible, a CBO document can mean different things to different people and it’s easy to pull things out in isolation to justify a position.”

But molding legislation to CBO rules and whims certainly doesn’t make for the very best policy. The office follows budgetary rules that Congress “originally established in the conference report on the Balanced Budget Act of 1997″ and Gingrich personally voted for, and so if lawmakers aren’t happy with the CBO’s assumption, they have a means of changing them. (That is, if they can ever stop cherry picking favorable scores while complaining about unfavorable numbers.)

GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney isn’t exactly known for his consistency on women’s health issues. He’s spent much of his time running away from his pro-choice record as governor of Massachusetts, and frequently panders to social conservatives by flirting with extreme legislation like the recently defeated “personhood” amendment in Mississippi.

In an interview today with the Nashua Telegraph, Romney doubled down on his position of having no position at all. When asked to clarify his stance on abortion and redefining personhood, Romney made the laughable claim, “I’ve had the same position since I faced this issue as governor”:

ROMNEY: I’ve had the same position since I faced this issue as governor. As you know when I campaigned I said I wouldn’t change the law, which effectively meant pro-choice legislation would be kept in place. But then when a bill came to my desk to expand, if you will, the killing of human life, embryos, I vetoed that…We in Massachusetts had provision that said life begins at conception that did not prevent contraceptives or in vitro fertilization but it did protect the life of an unborn child. For instance, in the instance of cloning or for stem cell research. And I came out very squarely on the side of life.

Watch it:

Romney effectively avoids taking a position on extreme modern incarnations of personhood legislation by simply noting that Massachusetts had a different sort of life-at-conception legislation that did not criminalize contraception.

When asked about his position on personhood legislation last month, Romney once again studiously avoided addressing the stickier side of the issue — whether he supports hormonal contraception (like birth control pills) that can also prevent eggs from being implanted, which many conservatives think is tantamount to abortion. Romney has also been less-than-straight about his pro-states’ rights approach to abortion. Although he claimed that “I would like to see the Supreme Court return this right to the states,” he has recently pledged to push for federal abortion restrictions.

During a roundtable in South Carolina on Veterans’ Day, Mitt Romney floated the idea of partially privatizing the veterans health care system, saying, “Sometimes you wonder if there would be some way to introduce some private-sector competition, somebody else that could come in and say, you know, that each soldier gets X thousand dollars attributed to them, and then they can choose whether they want to go in the government system or in a private system with the money that follows them.”

Veterans groups swiftly condemned the proposal, and today Romney himself backed away from privatization in an interview with the Nashua Telegraph:

ROMNEY: I have no proposal of that nature [to privatize the VA]. We has a group of veterans and said, ‘tell me about the quality of your care.’ Some were concerned about the quality of their health care. I said, ‘what kind of options do you have, what do you think about a system that let you go to private as well as VA hospitals?’ The response was mixed, but I don’t have any proposal of that nature. We have a VA system that needs to be improved and I’ve got no plans to change that other than to make it better and to invest more money in providing for our veterans.

Watch it:

Romney’s characterization of veterans’ reactions is rose-colored to say the least. In 2008 — when then-GOP presidential nominee offered a very similar proposal — AMVETS, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars argued that while veterans should have access to private care, providing “rural veterans greater access to VA-sponsored care exclusively through private providers” would undermine the existing health care system. In their annual report, “The Independent Budget,” the groups argued that the VA’s “specialized health-care programs” would “suffer irreparable impact by the loss of veterans from those programs” and argued that the prosthetic research program “would lose focus and purpose were service-connected and other enrolled veterans no longer present in VA health care.”

The fully integrated veterans’ health care structure of doctors and hospitals actually provides veterans with benefits that are the envy of the rest of the health care system. A study by the RAND Corporation found that “VA patients were more likely to receive recommended care” and “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow up.” So Romney is right to back away from efforts to privatize the system that already delivers “higher quality of care” than private providers. Now if only he would apply that same logic to some of his other health care proposals.

During a campaign appearance at BAE Systems this morning — a mega defense contractor — Mitt Romney accused President Obama of trapping the super committee into failure in order to reduce defense spending by $600 billion. The former Massachusetts governor criticized Obama for not personally involving himself in the committee’s negotiations and called on the president to introduce legislation that would undo the triggered cuts to military spending and instead target health care funding for the poor:

ROMNEY: In a setting like this, the idea that we’re going to devastate our military is simply unacceptable. I would call on the president and do call on the president to immediately introduce legislation which says we will not have a $600 billion cut to America’s military. We should not cut any funding from our base defense budget, that should not occur. And I would apply the $600 billion that were anticipated on being imposed upon the military, I would take those and apply them into other parts of the federal budget. And there are a number of candidates for that, one of course would be to take something like Medicaid, which is our health care program to the poor and return that program to the states…by doing that you more than compensate for the $600 billion that would be restored to the defense budget.

Watch it:

But Romney has it backwards: cuts to the military would likely have almost zero impact on national security — as they would target the many wasteful, costly weapons programs, many of which are barely even used. Defense contractors like BAE sometimes overcharge and bilk taxpayers, billing the government far more than the “fair and reasonable” price for parts and services. In 2010, BAE Systems pleaded “guilty to one charge of conspiring to make false statements to the U.S. government over regulatory filings.”

Reductions to Medicaid, on the other hand, would significantly increase costs for beneficiaries and the nation and undermine care for lower-income Americans who need it most. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded, if Romney implemented his proposal to “return” Medicaid “to the states” and significantly reduced federal funding, governors would have to cope with the shortfall by “cutting payment rates for doctors, hospitals or nursing homes; reducing the scope of benefits covered; or limiting eligibility,” the budget office concluded. As a result, enrollees could “face more limited access to care,” higher out-of-pocket costs, and “providers could face more uncompensated care as beneficiaries lost coverage for certain benefits or lost coverage altogether.”

Americans overwhelmingly oppose additional cuts to the Medicaid program — which states are already curtailing during a period of heightened eligibility — but 51 percent of voters support reducing the bloated military budget.

Anti-abortion forces are pushing ahead with the so-called personhood initiatives, despite suffering defeat in Mississippi, where a mostly conservative electorate soundly rejected the notion that life should begin at conception. The group, Personhood USA, plans to hold a press conference later today to announce their renewed efforts to pursue personhood amendments in Colorado, Oregon, and Montana:

Organizers said Saturday they are banking on broad grassroots support, with volunteers circulating petitions at grocery stores, and a new game plan. The new version of the measure “will protect every child, no matter their size, level of development, gender, age or race,” said Jennifer Mason, spokeswoman for Personhood USA.

New language “will explain again that every human being is a person from their earliest moments,” Mason said. “And it will include some extra information that hopefully will prohibit lies of our opponents. … It will be a departure from what we’ve done before.”

Personhood initiatives have failed twice before in Colorado by a 3-1 margin, as the medical community and women’s groups used public forums to “cast the measure as misguided, arguing that, beyond ending abortion, declaring fertilization as the starting point for life would lead to a prohibition of emergency contraception in rape cases and limit treatment for miscarriages, tubal pregnancies and infertility.” The same arguments succeeded in Mississippi, where doctors, national conservatives, and even religious leaders all came out against the measure. Mississippi’s Governor-Elect Phil Bryant (R), however, predicts that the personhood proposal or something similar may “resurface in the 2012 legislature” and conservatives are still advancing the initiative in states across the country.

The GOP presidential candidates have mostly avoided taking a position on the issue, although Newt Gingrich suggested on Saturday that he would support a national personhood amendment.