More from Romney: ‘Big Bird’ should endorse Corn Flakes to help pay for PBS

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign stop Friday, Feb. 10, 2012, in Portland, Maine. (AP photo by Robert Bukaty)

GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney covered a lot of different topics in his town hall-style appearance in Portland Friday night — too many to pack into a wrap-up of the event. But here — very early on the morning after, just hours before Romney and Republican rival Ron Paul figure to be touring caucuses around the state in hopes of being named the winner Saturday of the Maine GOP’s presidential preference poll — it’s probably worth passing along a few things that didn’t get into the Friday night deadline story.

Here’s what Romney said on the topic of federal funding for the Public Broadcasting Service:

The federal government gives $100 million to PBS so they don’t have to take advertising. I’d rather let Big Bird get to know Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and not have to borrow money from China to pay for it.

On the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act:

The big banks aren’t hurt one bit by the Dodd-Frank bill. They’re smiling ear-to-ear. It’s the small and medium-sized banks that are hurt by the Dodd-Frank bill (because they can’t as easily absorb the legal costs of complying with the regulations).

On fracking, a process by which companies can inject a highly pressurized fluid into buried rock to create new access points to fossil fuels, which has been criticized in cases for being environmentally unfriendly:

Seventy percent of the oil in this country is fracked today, so it’s already being done and it’s not affecting our water supply.

On the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – widely called the federal stimulus – signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009:

He said he was going to borrow $787 billion and your kids will pay for that. The interest on it for years and the principal, that’ll be paid for by the next generation. And so he borrowed that money and he said that would allow him to hold unemployment below 8 percent. It has not been below 8 percent since. [It’s been] 35 straight months above 8 percent, and that’s not just a number, that’s millions of families.

On the Constitution:

When our country is faced with adversity, instead of finding some new plan, we should look to the principles in our founding documents. … The president says he wants to transform America. I don’t want to transform America. I want to go back to the principles of our founding documents.

On the cost of education in America:

We’re bowing too much to the teachers unions and not supporting parents and kids. … I love our teachers, but I’m not wild about the bosses of their unions that are using their dues.

On the size of the federal government:

There is no competition for government, and so they can just get bigger and bigger and bigger and tax you more and more and more. And there’s nothing you can do about it except elect people like me who will fix it. … Back in the second World War, we commissioned 1,000 ships a year and we had 1,000 people in Navy purchasing. John Lehman was the one who told me this, and during the Reagan years, when he was Secretary [of the Navy], we commissioned 15 ships a year and Navy purchasing had grown to 4,000 people. Then he said today, we commission nine ships a year, and Navy purchasing has grown to 24,000 people.

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.