I’d say that this is the last straw, but readers here know that I reached my last straw on Objectively Unfit Mitt Romney four years ago.

What follows is something like the tenth “last straw”:

Jonathan Martin at Politico points out (HT Ricochet) that Romney backed Issue 2 in a Facebook posting in June.

Romney was visiting a phone bank devoted to getting out the vote for Issues 2 and 3.

Another day, another Mitt-flop. As leftist Michael Kinsley wrote in March: “His convenient and implausibly explained reversals on issues say all we need to know about his character. He will do or say anything to become president.” That line of attack makes Romney the only top-tier Republican candidate who can lose to Barack Obama next year.

It’s no secret that the ORPINO (Ohio Republican Party In Name Only) establishment is behind Romney’s quest for the GOP nomination.

If Kevin DeWine, Jon Husted, George Voinovich, and the rest of his Ohio supporters are choking on Mitt Romney’s emptiness today, it serves them right.

(Image at top is from BlueMassGroup.com)

UPDATE, 5 P.M.: Flippity-doo-da, Flippity-day (at Fox News) — “Romney Offers ’110 Percent’ Backing to Ohio Bargaining Bill After Confusion Over Support.”

As if any media outlets who reported the Mitt-flip will report the Mitt-flop.

Zheesh — The guy’s been on the campaign trail the better part of five years, and he still hasn’t learned when to keep his flippin’ mouth shut.

Has anyone else noticed how the left has pretty much left Wal-Mart, the pre-2009 nexus of all capitalist evil, alone during the past few years? That’s because the chain and its CEO endorsed ObamaCare that year.

In an editorial today, the Wall Street Journal looks at how the chain’s sellout to ObamaCare has ended up hurting its employees (bolds are mine):

Last week the largest private U.S. employer announced that it would no longer offer health coverage to part-time workers and would sharply increase premiums for its other “associates.” Wal-Mart says the changes are a response to climbing health-care costs, not the Affordable Care Act per se, though even this is an indictment: The bill that the company claimed would help isn’t helping. But Wal-Mart’s errant political judgment is less important than what its crash benefits diet says about the future of employer-sponsored insurance.

Under the company’s new policy, new workers who put in fewer than 24 hours a week on average won’t qualify for any Wal-Mart health plan, while those under 33 hours won’t be able to add a spouse. Other premiums and deductibles will jump in 2012, some by as much as 40%.

While the company won’t disclose how many of its 1.4 million employees it does cover, Wal-Mart is unusual in that it belongs to the 42% of large businesses that offer coverage to part-time workers, according to a 2011 Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

That and other concessions were part of Wal-Mart’s mid-2000s campaign to placate its liberal critics, a bid that reached its apotheosis in its embrace of ObamaCare. Mr. Duke’s 2009 endorsement was co-signed by Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union and John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, the Obama Administration’s outside political-policy shop. Expect these political friends with benefits to turn on Wal-Mart now as it is forced into more such triage to manage its health costs, like the rest of the business world.

The larger danger is what happens when the new law’s subsidized insurance exchanges become operational in 2014 and scramble the labor market. The Obama plan exposes businesses to “pay or play” penalties that are supposed to keep the employer market from unraveling and that Wal-Mart supported in part to shackle its smaller competitors. But once the regulations are finalized, many businesses may look rationally at the new incentives and conclude that shedding their health costs and paying the penalties is cheaper than the status quo.

This will be especially true in industries with large numbers of low-wage, low-skill workers—like hotels, restaurants and, yes, retail …

… It’s hard to miss the irony in the Obama health-care revolution eating its own children, but other business leaders looking on agog at the brave new insurance world that Wal-Mart helped to create probably have another word for it.

Another common employer response will be to avoid the penalties entirely by ensuring that part-time workers are limited to fewer hours than ObamaCare’s threshold coverage level, which appears to be 25 hours per week. James Sherk at Heritage (“Obamacare Will Price Less Skilled Workers Out of Full-Time Jobs”) predicts that many employers will look at the cost structure imposed on them by having full-time lower-wage workers and conclude that they can’t afford to have very many, if any, full-time low-wage workers. Wal-Mart will almost certainly be among those who will figure this out — scratch that, they’ve probably already figured it out.

Such workers are going to have to get two part-time jobs to earn the equivalent of a full-time paycheck — if they even can do so in this flat economy — and still won’t have employer-sponsored healthcare coverage (nor will they earn overtime for working more than 40 hours, which they would if they worked at one place).

So-called “friends” of the low-skilled workers like the Obama administration, Wal-Mart, and organized labor are causing them far more harm than the eeeeeevil 1% (whom Obama hypocritically accesses as a campaign-finance ATM) against whom the “occupy” movement is currently demonstrating.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder will follow later. Other topics are also fair game.

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NewsBusters — “Jewish Leaders Join (Media Research Center’s Brent) Bozell’s Demand for Network Coverage of Anti-Semitism at ‘Occupy Wall Street’”

Chronicle of Higher Education (HT Instapundit) — “Rise in Sticker Price at Public Colleges Outpaces That at Private Colleges for 5th Year in a Row”

Joel B. Pollak at BigGovernment — “Barack Obama Led #OccupyChicago – Circa 1988″

Kyle-Anne Shiver at PJ Media — “Why Herman Cain Electrifies the Grassroots: Five Voters Speak Out”

Erick Ericksen at RedState on WaPo blogger Jennifer Rubin — “Not only is she not a conservative, she’s shilling for one candidate while being paid by the Washington Post.” Unsurprisingly, the candidate is Mitt Romney. More: “On Tuesday alone, Rubin wrote eight attacks on Rick Perry alone in a column styled as ‘commentary from a conservative perspective.’”

John Stossel at Townhall — “School Competition Rescues Kids”

Walter E. Williams — “The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding ‘people before profits’ — as if profit motivation were the source of mankind’s troubles — when it’s often the absence of profit motivation that’s the true villain.”

Political Calculations (at Townhall; more complete post at his own place) — “The Real Story Behind ‘Rising’ U.S. Income Inequality.” The “real story is that income inequality has barely risen in the 16 years addressed.

CBS/NYT Poll: Cain 25, Romney 21, Gingrich 10, Paul 8, Perry 6, which moves Cain’s Real Clear Politics poll-roundup advantage to a single point. But again, as is all too frequently the case, the poll uses a muddled preference question: “Which one of these candidates would you like to see the Republican Party nominate for President in 2012 - Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, RonPaul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, or would you like to see someone else nominated?”

NewsBusters — “OWS Supporter Michael Moore Lies on National Television About His Wealth: No I’m Not Worth Millions.” Yes he is.

From Rome:

Oct 21, 2011 / 06:13 am

Sister Elvira Maria de Witt, DCJ, is an opera singer turned nun who has found a new way to win vocations to the religious life—by going online.

“The Netherlands had a lot of missionaries. I didn’t come into this congregation, give up my whole career as a singer – and I was really good – to let it die. Come on Jesus!” the feisty, young Dutch religious sister told CNA while visiting Rome.

“But I asked myself, where should I find new people?”

So, after considering going to bars and soccer games to find young people but concluding “I don’t think I can go there,” she came up with her bold broadband plan.

From a slow start in 2001, she now receives up to 300 e-mails a week, and they are mostly from the young.

“Some questions about the faith or that they don’t feel well or are depressed,” she explained. Others are from girls who are pregnant and have nowhere else to turn for advice. Still more are young people wanting to know about the Catholic faith and religious life – most of whom are not Catholic themselves.

“There are questions about how to pray better or how to pray the Rosary or questions like how do I go to confession? What should I say and where can I find somebody?”

Sister Elvira is the novice mistress at the Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus convent in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht. She believes that her online presence – now extended to Facebook and a blog – is giving answers that are not readily available elsewhere in her country.
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On Saturday, Barbara Hollingsworth at the Washington Examiner (HT Peter Roff at US News) reported on the latest development in lawsuit filed by former congressman Steve “Sore Loser” Driehaus against Susan B. Anthony’s List (SBA).

Democrat Driehaus, who served one term in Congress before losing to Republican Steve Chabot, is suing SBA under a Ohio’s False Statement Law for “loss of livelihood.” Seriously. Driehaus says that his vote for ObamaCare, which has no prolife protections hard-wired into the law, was not a betrayal of his prolife beliefs. SBA says it was a betrayal, and is correct. Driehaus’s excuse was that President Obama wrote up an Executive Order with supposed prolife protections, which of course can be revoked at any whimsical presidential moment — like, say, January 21, 2013 if he’s reelected (or January 19, 2013 if he’s not).

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Items:

• SF Chronicle: “Police, Occupy Oakland backers clash downtown”
• LA Times: “Police raid Occupy Oakland encampment, arrest dozens”

Indispensable background from Zombie at PJMedia: “Is Occupy Oakland as Bad as They Say? No. It’s worse than you can imagine.”

Go there for the full extent of the graphic truth. Here’s some of the narrative, including a few mini-grabs from Zombie’s pics (bolds are mine, Warning – disturbing descriptions) –

Much ado has been made about recent media reports describing Occupy Oakland as a cross between Lord of the Fliesand Animal House. The leftist magazine Mother Jones was furious about the negative coverage, deeming it “The Right-Wing Media Assault on Occupy Oakland,” and attempting to debunk the bad press. But Big Journalism lashed back with an article entitled MotherJones: Truth To Unflattering Reports On OWS.

Out of curiosity, I decided to check out the scene for myself to settle the matter.

… During the boring speeches, I strolled around the encampment and discovered that many of the reports about Occupy Oakland are, unfortunately, true. Let’s look at them one by one:

Drug Use and Commerce

Everywhere I went, I encountered people taking drugs — mostly marijuana. Many of them were understandably camera-shy. But … (one) guy stood right on the main walkway and puffed away on a drug pipe.

The ground around and inside the camp was also littered with other evidence of drug use …

Disgustingness

The City of Oakland issued an eviction notice the day before the rally, citing sanitation issues, garbage, rats and other hygiene problems at the encampment. The protesters announced that they simply wouldn’t budge, and the city temporarily caved in, so for now the standoff continues, though the eviction notices are still taped up around the plaza. But as far as I could tell — yes, the city has a very good point. The place was pretty disgusting.

… all over the camp were signs that said “Not a toilet,” because some occupiers basically relieve themselves wherever and whenever they feel the urge. Disgusted campers started putting up signs so that their particular tents wouldn’t be on the receiving end of any effluvia. …

Intimidating “Internal Security” Teams

Occupy Oakland has agreed by consensus to not cooperate with the Oakland Police Department under any circumstances. But as the law-breaking and nuisance behavior within the encampment started to grow, the evolving mini-society found it necessary to appoint its own ersatz police force.

… There also seemed to be a possibly separate “rally security force” consisting of guys wearing Black Panther buttons on their berets.

… Remember Lovelle Mixon, the serial rapist, child molester and murderer who single-handedly committed one of the worst mass killings of police officers in American history? Yeah, that guy. Well, the anti-police sentiment at Occupy Oakland is so intense that they regard Lovelle Mixon as a hero!! Whatever other crimes he may have committed, if he offed some pigs, then all is forgiven. F*ck the Po-lice! Power to the people!

… there are so many crime victims at the camp that the Occupiers have found it necessary to establish a donation fund to help them — presumably to replace stolen items.

Good luck with that.

Yeah, all of this is just like the Tea Party.

From Building a Better Ohio:

All true. All reasons to vote “Yes” on Issue 2.

President Obama has decided to ban coverage by local reporters of his latest visit to the 1%-ers’ ATM machine in San Francisco, as relayed by Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle:

President Obama is scheduled to appear before hundreds of donors at a $7,500-a-plate noontime fundraiser today at San Francisco’s W Hotel – but not a single local reporter will be allowed inside to cover his only stop in the area, the White House said Monday.

Coverage instead is being restricted to a small pool of Washington-based reporters – a move that is a sharp departure from the practices of past administrations, political observers said.

Three former top White House press aides called the move insular and politically short-sighted. And some press watchers said it is hypocritical for an administration that Obama promised would be “the most transparent in history.”

… Earlier this year, the White House threatened to ban The Chronicle from future local pool coverage after political writer Carla Marinucci, serving as a print pool reporter, recorded a video of a protest inside a fundraiser.

The White House said Marinucci had violated a rule forbidding print reporters from recording video. But there is no such rule. The White House denied making the threat.

Marinucci is of course among the locals who won’t be allowed to attend — and instead of following their alleged convictions and banning her, they decided to ban every local news source.

What makes Obama an ingrate is the fact that Marinucci deserves partial credit — arguably huge credit — for Obama’s primary victory over Hillary Clinton and his presidential triumph over John McCain.

In a January 17, 2008 interview with the Chronicle written up by Marinucci and Garofoli, Obama said the following about his energy policy ideas:

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.

The only thing I’ve said with respect to coal, I haven’t been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a (sic) ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.

Although the paper posted the video, Marinucci, who actually authored the writeup (link is to article as saved at the ProQuest library database), didn’t consider the quote about coal companies going bankrupt if they try to build new plants under his authoritarian energy regime newsworthy, and didn’t mention the statement’s existence.

Based on where things were at the time of Obama’s interview (he was NOT the clear leader), it’s safe to say that Hillary Clinton could have used the raw material, and perhaps could have fended off Obama on Super Tuesday and won her party’s nomination.

As POR Economy creators Nancy Pelosi, Obama, and Harry Reid ramped up their anti-energy rhetoric during the summer of 2008, the passage just cited remained virtually invisible. Marinucci had to know that what Obama had said in January was legitimate news, and that the electorate’s knowledge of Obama’s stated objective to use cap and trade to prevent new coal plant construction and to bankrupt anyone who tried would have badly hurt his campaign. But she kept it hidden. Naked Emperor exposed it in the final days of the campaign. By that time, thanks in part to the travesty known as “early voting,” it didn’t make much of a difference.

And in spite of this, she and he local media colleagues are banned from Obama’s San Francisco appearance.

What an ingrate this man is. He should be using the occasion to hand Ms. Marinucci a trophy: Second-Most Valuable Press Apparatchik.

Ryan Lizza, writing at the time for The New Republic, as explained here, “deserves” the Most Valuable Press Apparatchik trophy, because he alone knows (besides parishoners, and they’re not going to talk) that Obama’s claim never to have read the church bulletins of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ was false. He virtually wrote it in March 2007 when he noted that Obama was “taking notes” during Wright’s sermon. Obama was more than likely doing so in that day’s bulletin’s blank “Notes” pages. Exposing such a simple statement (“I don’t read the bulletins” as a lie could have badly hurt Obama’s campaign. Given when the excitement over Wright occurred (March 2008), it probably wouldn’t have sunk his nomination, but it would have been very harmful in the general.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder follows. Other topics are also fair game.

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At Politico (“Democrats duck President Obama”) — “In trips to Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — all states that he carried in 2008 — members of Congress were notably missing from the president’s side.”

I’d be more impressed with Karl Rove’s attempts to talk down Herman Cain’s campaign and ridicule his admittedly problematic verbal stumbles if he had done similar talk-downs about Mitt Romney’s belief in globaloney, the disaster and ObamaCare prototype known as Romneycare, illegal immigrants benefiting from RomneyCare — and if you go back far enough, RomneyCare’s putting subsidized abortion with a $50 copay into Massachusetts law for the first time and Romney’s oath-breaking, extraconstitutional unilateral imposition of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. But Rove has done none of that. He’s an establishment Republican hack who gave us Arlen Specter (again) in Pennsylvania when we could have and should have had Pat Toomey in 2004. He demands that we close ranks around RINO primary winners while ripping into conservative primary winners he doesn’t like if his guy loses (e.g., Christine O’Donnell). If I were Herman Cain, I’d wear Karl Rove’s criticisms as a badge of honor.

In my view, this (“Honda hires 1,000 more for its Indiana auto plant”) could have occurred in Ohio if its Commercial Activities Tax didn’t exist.

Walter Williams (“Ever Notice the Left Attack Wealthy CEOs But Not Wealthy Liberal Celebrities?”) — That would in quite a few cases be “wealthier celebrities.”

In a column written in advance of Bobby Jindal’s landslide reelection victory in the Louisiana gubernatorial contest, Jim Geraghty at National Review wrote: “Somehow, his achievements have triggered a complete implosion of Democratic gubernatorial ambitions in a state that has had four Republican governors in 125 years …” Well, yes and no. Jindal has been a tremendous governor, but the fact is that Hurricane Katrina, while packaged by the national press as a supposed failure of President George W. Bush and FEMA, was properly seen by Bayou State residents as a complete failure of leadership by then-Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco and her party. Louisiana Democrats have paid a horrible and richly deserved price for that failure.

George Will characterizes Mitt Romney as the Republican Party’s Michael Dukakis. Dukakis lost. On today’s realities, Romney is the only candidate in the GOP field who could lose to Obama.

Another near-bankruptcy milestone. It’s hardly an accident.

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Note: This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Sunday.

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On October 14 (a Friday, naturally), Tim Geithner’s bunch released the final Monthly Treasury Statement of the 2011 fiscal year. It showed that for the third consecutive year, the federal government’s reported deficit was well over $1 trillion — $1.298614 trillion, to be exact.

That brought the three-year deficit total to just over $4 trillion. Less than $400 billion of that occurred while George W. Bush was still president. Since Barack Obama entered the White House bound and determined to “stimulate” the economy with dramatic — and, it’s now clear, intended to be permanent — increases in federal spending, the rest is largely on him, with unfortunate recent assists from a too-timid House GOP majority.

The reported deficits don’t even tell the whole story. From Inauguration Day 2009 through September 30, 2011, the national debt increased by $4.16 trillion to almost $14.8 trillion. In the first 19 days of October alone, we’ve seen another $141 billion piled on. Almost $600 billion has been added since the conclusion of the debt-ceiling melodramatics on August 1.

As has been the case since Obama became community-organizer-in-chief, we must continue to question whether the damage he and his team have wrought, which has brought us from economic peril to the brink of economic calamity, is the result of incompetence or intention. The evidence in support of the latter continues to grow.

Obama recently told ABC’s Jake Tapper: “… the economy is not where it wants to be and even though I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones, we’re still going through difficult circumstances.”

Those who believe that economic improvement is not paramount on the president’s priority list pick up plenty of ammo from this revealing sentence. Obama spoke as if the economy is a living, breathing animal with its own wishes and desires separate from the rest of us. It seems that he didn’t want to tell Tapper that “it isn’t where we want it to be,” because to do so would have been an admission that meaningful economic improvement is a really important goal. That gambit left the next phrase wide open, giving the president free rein to express a belief about all of the administration’s “choices we’ve made” being right, without specifically saying what they have been right for.

If the goal really is to bankrupt the country, Obama, his administration, and his party (again on their own, until very recently) could hardly be going at it more effectively. From an already ridiculous $2.73 trillion in fiscal 2007, annual spending has increased by 32% to $3.60 trillion in the fiscal year just ended. The “stimulus” was far more than a failed initiative by any reasonable measurement; it was also used as a vehicle to move the “you can’t cut anything from this without being labeled a heartless meanie” baseline to an absolutely unsustainable level. The baseline continues moving ever upward: While Washington whined about austerity and making supposedly tough choices, fiscal 2011 spending came in 4% ahead of last year.

On October 19, Harry Reid perhaps inadvertently gave away the likelihood that the economic well-being of all Americans is not uppermost in the minds of the POR Economy’s architects (Nancy Pelosi, Obama, and Reid) when he asserted on the Senate floor: “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about.”

If the economy could talk, it would have vocally objected (all employment figures are seasonally adjusted):

• The private sector is still down 6.2 million jobs from its January 2008 peak.
• Non-postal federal government employment has increased by 339,000 in the past four years.
• Employment in primary and secondary public education, which unjustifiably leaped by 290,000, or 3.7%, from January 2005 through September 2008, while enrollment barely budged (up by less than 0.2%), is now back to where it was.

Yet in the legislation to which Reid refers, he and his Democratic colleagues want to “save 400,000 teacher jobs and thousands of first-responder jobs that have either been cut or could soon be cut.” What’s really behind this, as Rush Limbaugh accurately discerned on October 20, is Reid’s need to fund his party’s 2012 election campaigns with public-sector union dues — the private sector be damned. The prospect that the campaign money well won’t be sufficiently deep has Joe Biden babbling, and doubling down with full White House support, about how rapes will increase and it will all the fault of Republicans if the bill doesn’t pass.

Oh, and I almost forget to note that this $35 billion boondoggle, suddenly more important than building roads and bridges, which was supposedly the big priority just a month ago, is supposed to be funded by a surtax on “millionaires” — y’know, the people who would likely be creating jobs by growing their businesses or investing more aggressively if they weren’t already so intimidated by the administration’s regulatory and authoritarian overhang.

The placement of public-sector jobs over private, even though without the private sector’s taxes the public sector can’t exist, is only the latest evidence that Obama’s “choices we’ve made” — he, his administration, and his party — are about something other than economic growth and the country’s fiscal well-being. Meanwhile, real incomes have fallen dramatically, and millions of former jobholders are slowly but surely becoming virtually unemployable beyond entry level through no fault of their own. The government’s “investment” choices could hardly be more corrupt or crony-driven. Its green-obsessive determination to stifle domestic energy exploration and development could hardly be more immovable. The hostility of labor, environmental and other regulators could hardly be more obvious.

Presidential candidate Herman Cain is largely right when he says that the mostly misguided Occupy Wall Street crowd should relocate its primary headquarters to just outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I would also suggest deploying a contingent to the Capitol. Far more important are the required deployments of sensible citizens to the voting booths in 2012 to give Obama, Reid, Pelosi, and so many others who are ruining the futures of so many a chance to join the ranks of those who have lost their jobs. Whether we can hold out that long — or until January 20, 2013, given potential for last-minute presidential mischief — remains highly problematic.

From Niagara Falls:

Updated: October 18, 2011, 9:41 AM

Three police officers who responded to a call near the old Rainbow Centre Mall last month thought they were handling a routine call involving a woman needing medical help.

But when the episode suddenly turned more dire, the men ended up doing more than getting her help; they saved her life.

For their efforts, Officers Paul Kudela, John Shuster and Franco Tallarico were recognized Monday by the Niagara Falls City Council.

“Every day that I’m superintendent of police is a good day,” John R. Chella told the Council. “But today is an exceptionally good day.”
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Despite all the huffing and puffing over Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s alleged “embellishing” at the Washington Post, the fact is that his parents were Cuban exiles (meaning number 5 at link: “anyone separated from his or her country or home voluntarily or by force of circumstances”). That fact essentially undercuts everything about the WaPo article except the problem with the opening sentence of the biography at Rubio’s Senate web site, which has been corrected.

That didn’t stop two Associated Press writers, Brendan Farrington and Laura Wides-Munoz from doing quite a bit of embellishing of their own (a better word would be “mischaracterizing”) in an item currently time-stamped early Saturday morning, while pretending that the rebuttal to the Post written by Mark Caputo at the Miami Herald doesn’t exist. The AP pair’s pathetic prose has two particular howlers which simply must be debunked.

First, there’s the matter of whether Rubio is getting a break from the Cuban exile community which he somehow doesn’t deserve (bolds are mine throughout this post):

So far, prominent members of the Cuban American community are standing by him, including the head of one of Miami’s oldest and most respected exile groups, who said Friday that he is willing to give the rising GOP star and tea-party favorite a pass.

Uh, no, that’s not what the Cuban exile lead the AP pair quoted said:
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