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  (Photo: Face the Nation)

President Obama on Friday craftily announced a major shift on immigration policy, just a few hours after Republican rival Mitt Romney hit the road on his “Every Town Counts” bus tour. Former Republican National Committee chairman and BET.com commentator Michael Steele called it a “gotcha” move and his fellow GOPers complained over the weekend that it was purely “politics.” Maybe so, but as they well know, in an election this tight, every vote counts and both Obama and Romney will need every Latino one that they can get in November.

As Romney’s caravan rolled from state to state, he hoped to turn the media’s attention to his criticisms of Obama’s handling of the economy. Instead, they wanted to know if he would repeal the president’s executive order that prevents an estimated 800,000 young Latinos from being deported if they meet certain criteria and also enables them to work legally in the U.S.

So, where does he stand? The answer only Romney knows as he repeatedly dodged the question or gave vague responses.

“He has a great allergy to specifics and details,” conservative columnist and commentator Rich Lowry said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday. “And he actually said in an interview a little while ago that he thinks one of the things that hurt him in his 1994 race against Ted Kennedy was that he was too specific so it creates these targets for the other side.”

But Romney was very specific on his way to the nomination, suggesting that illegal immigrants “self-deport,” taking a very hard-line stance on immigration to win the hearts and votes of die-hard conservatives.

So now he’s stuck in part because those same conservatives don’t want to hear about comprehensive immigration reform. That’s why it also will be interesting to hear what Romney has to say when he addresses a conference of Latino elected officials later in the week.

The big question is: Will he say what he means or what he thinks Hispanics or conservatives want to hear? Unfortunately for Romney, he can’t have it both ways.

(Photos: Courtesy Romney For President, Inc; Courtesy Democratic National Committee)

Mitt Romney is taking it old-school, embarking a five-day road trip Friday morning that may not set tongues wagging like his now-infamous family voyage to Canada when he strapped poor family dog Seamus to the roof of the station wagon, but could turn out to be rather interesting. That’s because the GOP White House hopeful has got some uninvited travel companions on what his campaign has dubbed the “Every Town Counts” tour.

The Democratic National Committee plans to hit each of the six battleground states where Romney aims to highlight how President Obama has allegedly ignored Americans’ “everyday concerns” and offered them “no hope for the future.” The DNC is calling its trip the “Middle Class Under the Bus” tour and each stop will “feature representatives from Massachusetts who will speak from firsthand knowledge about what Romney Economics meant for economic growth and the middle class” during the his tenure as governor.

And it’s not the only organization hitching its wagon to the event. MoveOn.org plans to send protesters to each of the sites where the GOP candidate is scheduled to deliver speeches and also is following the tour in its “Romneymobile,” an SUV tricked out with decals of his largest corporate sponsors and a fake dog strapped to the roof. The group is calling its version of the trip the “Every Millionaire Counts” tour.

Want to go along for the ride? ABC News has created a Google map to track “how he rolls.”

(Photo: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton)

The amount of money that teams Obama and Romney will raise to pummel each other along the campaign trail this year is going to be epic — and kind of scary. Already they’ve spent enough money on negative advertising to support a small developing nation. Even scarier is that the two campaigns have agreed that it’s a good idea to allow voters to text message campaign donations. And Monday night, the Federal Election Commission voted in favor of it.

The goal is to counter the impact of the big, bad super PACs that watchdog and other groups fear will be able to essentially buy the presidential and other federal elections because of the unrestricted amounts of money they can collect. Now ordinary Americans will be able play their part in the democratic process. And just like concertgoers wave lighters as they sway in unison along with songs that move them emotionally, a fired up campaign rally crowd can whip out their cell phones to make a donation.

“With billionaires and super PACs drowning out the voices of hardworking Americans, text message campaign contributions can enhance the role of small donors and, combined with public matching funds, could provide a megaphone for the masses,” said Nick Nyhart, president of Public Campaign.

At first, some people will be excited when they see a text message from Obama or Romney responding to their contributions. But dialers beware: those messages will grow more frequent and kind of weird with requests and reminders from the candidates’ surrogates talking about “midnight” deadlines, “help me celebrate my anniversary,” and “I want to see you at the convention.”

That’s when the thrill starts feeling more like spam.

(Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for AFI)

Comedian Don Rickles is old-school and built a career on his acerbic wit. In fact, there was a time when he could get away with saying anything to get a laugh, including racist comments. Not anymore.

At an American Film Institute tribute to actress Shirley MacLaine last Thursday, “Mr. Warmth,” as he is known, insulted President Obama in a joke that received a cold reception, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

“I shouldn’t make fun of the Blacks,” the 86-year-old said. “President Obama is a personal friend of mine. He was over to the house yesterday, but the mop broke.”

It’s not his first attempt at humor at the Obama’s expense. Soon after Obama won his 2008 presidential election, Rickles, in an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, joked about Obama playing basketball in the White House, which also was not received well.

“It was a joke as were the other comments Don made that night,” said a Rickles representative of the latest incident. “Anyone who knows him knows he’s not a racist.”

Politically correct humor is probably an oxymoron to Rickles and many people will likely give Rickles, an equal opportunity insulter who spares no one, including himself, a pass. At his age, it’s unlikely that the old dog is prepared to learn new tricks. But he is old enough to know that when it comes to the president, regardless of who’s occupying the White House, he needs to bite that acerbic tongue, especially if he’s one of “the Blacks.”

(Photos from left: Joe Raedle/Getty Images,Rainier Ehrhardt/Getty Images)

By Joyce Jones

Last week Mitt Romney’s campaign sent a group of hecklers to disrupt a rally in Boston led by Obama senior campaign strategist David Axelrod to target the former Massachusetts governor’s jobs record. It was tit for tat, according to Romney, who made an unfounded claim that Team Obama has done the same at events hosted by his campaign.

“Most of the events I go to, or many of the events I go to, there are large groups of, if you will, Obama supporters there heckling me,” Romney told reporters. “And at some point you say, ‘You know what, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.’ If they’re going to be heckling us, why we’re not going to sit back and play by very different rules.”

But apparently the rules change when it comes to comparisons of the opponents’ job creation records. Romney frequently complains when the president points to the economic crisis his administration inherited from former President George W. Bush to tout his administration’s achievements in moving the nation’s economy from the brink of disaster. Romney said at a fundraiser in San Diego recently that Obama is “very good at finding other people to blame.”

Now that Obama’s campaign has shifted its focus from Bain Capital, the venture capital firm Romney once led and that he frequently cites as the reason he’s best qualified to reduce stubbornly high unemployment in the U.S., Team Romney is singing the same song.

“He inherited a $3 billion projected deficit,” Ed Gillespie, a senior advisor to Romney, said on Fox News Sunday, responding to the decline in job creation during Romney’s tenure as governor.

“When Mitt Romney arrived, Massachusetts was an economic basket house,” top aide Eric Fehrnstrom said on ABC’s This Week.

Axelrod called such remarks “breathtaking hypocrisy” in a conference call with reporters this week, and he has a point. But that didn’t stop Kerry Healey, Romney’s lieutenant governor, from evoking the double standard in an interview with CNN’s John King Tuesday night.

“What voters want to know is what direction are you moving,” she said.

But what she and the other surrogates really meant, it seems, is that what’s sauce for Romney isn’t sauce for Obama.

(Photo: Mike Hewitt/ALLSPORT)

By Joyce Jones

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has tapped Mike Leavitt, who served as Health and Human Services secretary and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under former President George W. Bush, to lead his presidential transition team. Like Romney, Leavitt’s a Mormon, businessman and former governor, and he’s also considered to be more moderate than “severely conservative,” as the candidate once described himself. “And already, plugged-in Republicans from Washington to Salt Lake City are buzzing that Leavitt could make his own transition next January into the job of White House chief of staff or as a Valerie Jarrett-like personal counselor to a President Romney,” Politico reports.

It’s a sign of both confidence and of how competitive the contest between Romney and President Obama will be, but also brings to mind old sayings about counting chickens before they hatch.

In a conference call with reporters, David Axelrod, Obama’s senior campaign strategist, said that it is typical for campaigns to try to get a jump-start on its transition to office. But the fact that Romney’s campaign has made the news public is purely political, he told BET.com, and it “will ultimately be part of the dustbin of history.”

“I think we’re going to win that election. People understand that we’ve come through a very hard time, and we have to keep pushing forward. We can’t go back to the policies that so punished the country and the middle class and set us back and exploded our debt and really threatened our future and the future of our children,” Axelrod said. “That’s not the path that they’re going to choose.”

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

By Joyce Jones

Newt Gingrich shared some interesting thoughts this week about whether birther claims are racist and it’s his assertion that they are not, Politico reports.

“I think that Obama creates very powerful emotions about him, largely because of the radicalization of his views. And I think that that’s a key fact,” he told reporters before the Mitt Romney fundraiser Donald Trump hosted in Las Vegas.

Now the reason Gingrich knows that attempts to paint a picture of the president as not simply un-American but African — red meat to the kind of people who still don’t cotton to the idea of a Black family in the White House — aren’t racist is that no one accuses Reps. Allen West or Tim Scott, who are African-American, of not being U.S. citizens.

“So the idea of asserting that any charge against Obama somehow manages magically in the media to get back to racism, I think is just one ore device to protect Obama,” Gingrich said.

Sounds to me like the former House speaker is comparing Hawaiian pineapples to Florida oranges. First of all, Tea Party darlings West and Scott are drinking out of the same Kool-Aid vat when it comes to most issues related to Obama, so of course they’re not being called un-American. And one never knows what certain people may be whispering behind their backs. But I wouldn’t get too comfortable if I were them.

Just the other day, West expressed support for keeping some of the popular provisions in the Affordable Care Act, such as barring providers from rejecting people who have pre-existing conditions and keeping kids on their parents insurance plans until they’re 26. The original Tea Party group Freedom Works, Club for Growth and other conservative advocates want the entire law repealed.

You’d better watch your back, Allen West.

(Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

By Joyce Jones

Donald Trump is back on the birther bandwagon and his zeal for bashing President Obama could come back and bite Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney in the butt.

“A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book,” he said in an interview with The Daily Beast last week. “[Obama] said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”

The misguided mogul was referring to a decades-old client catalog produced by Obama’s literary agent that incorrectly claimed that the future president was born in Kenya. Miriam Goderich, who was an assistant at the agency at the time, publicly acknowledged that she’d misidentified Obama’s birthplace.

But why let the facts get in the way of an attack?

“He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said,” Trump rattled on. “Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”

Romney should take heed of the adage “if you lay down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas” since Trump is hosting a Las Vegas fundraiser for him next week. Will Romney denounce Trump’s dogged pursuit of his ridiculous birther theory, or remain silent and wake up with fleas? If Romney is smart, he’ll disassociate himself from Mr. Bad Combover because crucial independent voters might think twice about supporting him over Obama.

(Photo: Courtesy Cranbrook Schools)

Today’s edition of The Washington Post features an article about Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney that tarnishes the gleaming image he’s spent a lifetime creating. It focuses on an incident in which Romney led a band of boarding school boys in an attack on a fellow student that today would get him expelled from his alma mater, the prestigious Cranbrook School, and suggests that the student may have been bullied because he was gay.

New boy John Lauber had bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, The Post reports, and stood out from the other students whose hair was as manicured as the fields surrounding the single-sex school. It’s a look that former classmate Matthew Friedemann recalls appalled Romney, who described it as “wrong.”

Romney and his posse tackled and pinned Lauber to the floor in a room in their dorm and the future Massachusetts governor clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

It was a really cruel thing to do, but, hey, boys will be boys, right? What some may find more troubling is the contrast between Friedemann and other sources quoted in the piece, who years later are still haunted by the shameful memory, and the instigator. Romney said he didn’t remember the incident but later acknowledged doing “some stupid things in high school” and apologized for any harm he may have caused. Some pundits have asked if Romney doesn’t really remember or if he is simply not telling the truth.

Conservatives will slam the article as “gotcha journalism” and argue that Romney shouldn’t be judged by something he did as a kid. Others will cite a seeming lack of empathy for ordinary Americans frequently exhibited on the campaign trail and the way he bullied former presidential opponents with negative advertising and argue that it’s a statement about his character, or lack thereof.

(Photo: Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)

By Joyce Jones

Bristol Palin, the presumably first unwed teen mom to grace the stage of a national political convention and Dancing With the Stars reject, has taken exception to the influence Malia and Sasha Obama had on the president’s decision to come out of the closet and publicly support same-sex marriage. President Obama on Wednesday said that his daughters’ acceptance of friends with same-sex parents helped to prompt his “change in perspective.”

In a Thursday blog post titled “Hail to the Chiefs — Malia and Sasha Obama,” the eldest daughter of former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said that President Obama’s decision reflected “what many teenagers think after one too many episodes of Glee”:

“While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her [sic] friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’ not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that — as great as her friends may be — we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview,” Palin said.

This comes from a young woman who not only didn’t marry Levi Johnston, the father of her child, but also sought full custody and child support from him in 2009. Johnston also made the rounds on several television shows on which he said the Palins wouldn’t allow him to see his son.

Palin is now a born-again virgin who promotes teen pregnancy prevention. If she only had a brain.