Cory Booker, the popular and progressive mayor of Newark, New Jersey, attacked the Obama campaign for making an issue of Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital during an appearance today on Meet the Press.

Romney has placed his career at Bain the center of his campaign. On several occassions Romney has asserted that, while at Bain, he was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs. Multiple independent fact checkers have concluded that Romney’s claims on jobs is simply false.

The Obama campaign has responded by highlighting instances where Romney’s actions at Bain Capital resulted in substantial job loses. On Meet the Press, Booker called criticizing Romney’s time at Bain “ridiculous” and “nauseating.” He also equated criticisms of Romney’s buisness record with racially charged attacks against Obama centered around Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Watch it:

At Salon, Steve Koracki speculates that Booker defended private equity to help cultivate Wall Street donors for a future state-wide race. Many of these donors have abandoned Obama, hoping for gentler treatment from a President Romney.

By this afternoon, Booker had started to walk back his criticisms of Obama and his campaign. Here’s what he said in a video posted to YouTube late today:

Mitt Romney has made his buisness record a center piece of his campaign. He’s talked about himself as a job creator. Therefore it is reasonable, and in fact I encourage it, for the Obama campaign to examine that record and to discuss it. I have no problem with that. I believe, in many ways, Mitt Romney is not being honest about his role and his record even as a business person and is shaping it to serve his political purposes and not necessarily including all the facts from his time there.

This clarification, however, is unlikely to find its way into the RNC press release touting Booker’s initial remarks.

In today’s New York Times, former cable news anchor Campbell Brown attacks President Obama for “condescending” to women with a “paternalistic,” “fake,” and “grating” attitude. In the 10th paragraph, she discloses that her husband Dan Senor is a top advisor to Mitt Romney.

Brown launches her assault based on Obama’s commencement address at Barnard College — the women’s college at Columbia University — and suggests that though “it’s a tough economy,” he shouldn’t have encouraged the young women there that they are “tougher” and that “things will get better” in the nation’s job market.

Brown’s primary contention is that Obama is ignoring economic issues related to women to focus on things like abortion rights and affordable access to contraception. To justify her attack, Brown cites a handful of stories from personal friends and relatives, then cites polling data:

The struggling women in my life all laughed when I asked them if contraception or abortion rights would be a major factor in their decision about this election. For them, and for most other women, the economy overwhelms everything else….

Another recent Pew Research Center survey found that voters, when thinking about whom to vote for in the fall, are most concerned about the economy (86 percent) and jobs (84 percent). Near the bottom of the list were some of the hot-button social issues.

She’s right: the economy and jobs are at the top of voters’ lists of issues. But it’s not at the expense of all other issues. Indeed, the same Pew poll Brown cites shows that more than a third of voters ranked “abortion” and “birth control” — 39 and 34 percent, respectively — as “very important” issues. And, according to the report, “Birth control is significantly more important to women (40% very important) than men (27%).”

Four pages past Brown’s essay in the Times’s Sunday Review, the Times editorial board takes Republicans to task and outlines their continuing assault on women’s issues. The problem with Romney — elided by Brown — is that he shares many of these extreme views. Brown writes:

Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”

A career “independent journalist,” which Brown claims in her disclosure to be, would be prompted to ask why the Romney campaign dodged a question on whether he supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a landmark 2009 law (signed by Obama) that empowers women to seek restitution for pay discrimination. The campaign quickly covered itself with the hedge that Romney “supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law.” Republicans in Congress opposed the law when it was debated. Only two GOP senators — Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who side with the President against their party on women’s issues — voted for it.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus

Rather than denounce the proposal or the dangers of having a small group of rich outside donors and corporations free to spend as much as they want to influence elections, Priebus blamed Obama.

After lamenting that Romney and his party had to spend a day and a half dealing with the fallout from the Super PAC proposal, Priebus told Crowley:

I know how it works. It’s the Democrats and Barack Obama that want the story out there. He wants the story to play out in the media, because for every day that [Obama adviser] David Axelrod and this President don’t have to talk about their broken promises when it comes to jobs, the debt, and the deficit — the more time they can talk about hypotheticals that may or may not come true — is a day they want to win on. So, look, this president’s got a bigger problem and his problem is no matter what he puts out there, no matter what distractions he puts out there, he can’t change the truth and escape the reality of where we are in this American economy. And it’s no good.

Watch the video:

It was, of course, actually a Republican strategist with a long history of race-baiting ads who proposed these attack ads for a Super PAC led by a billionaire determined to defeat President Obama’s re-election.

And it was Mitt Romney who, back in February, made similar attacks on President Obama saying: “I don’t know what is worse, him listening to Rev. Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation.” When asked this week about the comments, Romney told reporters “I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” This, of course, the same Romney who repudiated the Super PAC proposal as “character assassination.”

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett (R)

Bennett is the latest Republican elected official to call into question Obama’s place of birth in recent months. His comments were first flagged by the site White House Dossier:

BENNETT: First of all, I’m not playing to the birthers, I’m not a birther. I believe that the president was born in Hawaii, or at least I hope he was…Hawaii has a special provision in their law that allows other government officials from other states to request what’s called a verification in lieu of a certified copy of a birth certificate. So I’m not asking for the certified copy of the birth certificate at all…I was frankly expecting that they would very quickly and very simply say ‘yes.’ Eight weeks later, they haven’t said, I can’t seem to get them to say yes.

In fact, Hawaii said “yes” over a year ago. Last April, Obama released a certified copy of his long form birth certificate to the public. And while that did nothing to quell the furor of birthers like Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, it more than meets Bennett’s verification requirement.

And yet Bennett is insisting on still more costly and time-consuming work by the state of Hawaii to verify they have the original document on hand. The reason for his suspicion? Arpaio’s sham investigation into the copy released by President Obama raised sufficient questions:

BENNETT: When Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s posse released a press conference a few week ago, or a month ago or whenever it was, that the birth certificate posted on the White House website might be fraudulent, I started getting, as you might imagine, literally over 1,200 emails from people saying ‘well that’s proof, you should require the president to produce the original of his birth certificate in order to be on the ballot of Arizona.’

Arpaio’s press conference more closely resembled an SNL parody than a serious investigation, and it was widely ridiculed for employing faulty “science” and drawing wild conclusions based on little more than technological anomalies.

Bennett is hardly the first person to propose removing Obama from the general election ballot this fall, but as secretary of state, he is in a position to actually act on those threats. Bennett’s insistence that he is not a birther and is simply doing his due diligence as the state’s top election official is a distinction without difference, as it ignores the fact that he is accepting as possibility that Obama’s publicly available birth certificate is fraudulent.