How’s Mitt Romney claiming credit for the auto bailout playing with anti-bailout Republicans on Capitol Hill? It’s tricky. Very tricky.

TPM Reader GJ recalls contacting Maurice Sendak about using Where The Wild Things Are images in his high school’s yearbook:

I think your question regarding the generation gap concerning the familiarity of Maurice Sendak confuses two issues: familiarity with the man and familiarity with his work.

I was born in the late 1970s. I most certainly read Where the Wild Things Are as a child. Not only that, while in high school (in the 1990s), our yearbook committee decided to go with a Where the Wild Things Are theme. The yearbook staff wrote to Mr. Sendak to ask him if it was ok to use the book’s imagery. Rather than sending a simple yes or no response back, he mailed the school a set of entirely new and original drawings just for our yearbook! It was amazing.

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RNC Hispanic outreach director tweets that she misspoke about Romney not having an immigration policy yet:

I misspoke, Romney’s position on immigration is clear mi.tt/KiMi3x

— Bettina Inclan (@BettinaInclan) May 8, 2012

RNC’s Hispanic outreach director tells reporters in DC that Mitt Romney is still deciding on what his position on immigration is and therefore she cannot comment on what his position is. Seriously.

Ferocious pushback from 20something fans of Maurice Sendak.

Look, former auto czar Steve Rattner isn’t an unbiased observer on the auto bailout. He’s a longtime Dem fundraiser who was directly involved in the bailout (there was also that whole New York state pension fund unpleasantness). I don’t expect Rattner to cut Mitt any slack. But he made one point in our interview with him this morning that bears repeating.

Before we even got to the managed bankruptcy in 2009 that Romney says he called for all along, there were a series of emergency loans in late 2008 to the carmakers from the federal government that Romney opposed. This isn’t a throwaway use of the word “emergency.” Those were do-or-die loans. There was no time to go through a managed bankruptcy then. Those loans are what kept Detroit afloat until a managed bankruptcy. Romney opposed them. If Romney’s position had prevailed, there would have been no emergency loans and no auto industry left to put through a managed bankruptcy.

Former auto czar Steve Rattner reacts to Mitt Romney taking credit for the auto bailout: “I’ve read, I think, everything Romney’s had to say on this subject, and the level of flip flopping and dissembling is truly mindboggling. He’s been on every side of the auto rescue at different times and said different things, so it’s hard to know what he honestly thinks.”

TPM Reader PP is feeling a little curmudgeonly today (and that’s not a bad thing):

Is Romney taking credit for the auto recovery really anyone takes seriously? Besides getting tied up in irritation about what his position really was, the frank facts of history are that it doesn’t matter what his positions were/are/might have been, anymore that it mattered what I or you or most people thought at the time.

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I got an inkling that something was amiss when our assistant editor suggested I add mention of Where The Wild Things Are to this post. So I informally polled the 20somethings on our team and sure enough Maurice Sendak was not a top-of-the-brain name for them. Some hadn’t heard of him, for others it rang a bell but wasn’t immediately clear who he was. This despite the 2009 motion picture treatment of Where The Wild Things Are (which raises another point: In The Night Kitchen doesn’t get its due).

Were children of the ’80s not saturated with Sendak the way we were in the ’70s? Is my sample size too small? For what it’s worth, Shel Silverstein was more familiar to this cohort. So maybe there is hope? Read More

A big Washington Post story last week reported that the economic dislocation of the last four years had significantly reduced Hispanic and African American voter registration numbers nationwide. Under economic distress, uprooting and relocating, a lot of minority voters simply hadn’t managed to re-register. That makes intuitive sense, and it’s the kind of subterranean socioeconomic or demographic shift that can have big impacts on election outcomes.

But the story of those registration numbers is actually a bit more complicated than that. The raw Census data the Post relied on isn’t the best proxy for voter registration, an expert in the field tells TPM. Another tell that there may be more to this story: rather than using the Post piece to exhort its legions of field operatives and volunteers, the Obama campaign is dismissing it.

Brian Beutler has our story.