Earlier today my colleague Guy Benson spoke with presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney about this morning’s New York Times article that reported a conservative SuperPac was planning to run ads criticizing the president’s relationship with Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright. The full interview will first air tonight on the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show between 6:00-9:00 pm EST (Guy will be guest hosting with Mary Katharine Ham), but you can catch a sneak peak of the conversation in the video below.

After the interview went viral, Megyn Kelley aired the clip on her television show America Live on the Fox News Channel.

As it happens, the right-leaning Super-PAC's proposal to run attacks ads highlighting President Obama’s 20-year relationship with Reverend Wright has since been rejected.

Both Mitt Romney and Obama's campaign denounced the ad proposal after it was reported in The New York Times Thursday morning. On Thursday afternoon, the Ending Spending Action Fund super-PAC, run by billionaire Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, put out a statement rejecting the plan to spend $10 million to link Obama and Wright in a "big, attention-arresting way."

The proposal "reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take. Mr. Ricketts intends to work hard to help elect a President this fall who shares his commitment to economic responsibility, but his efforts are and will continue to be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally," according to a statement from the Ending Spending Action Fund.

Romney personally repudiated the super-PAC's plan in an interview with the blog Town Hall.

Update: Jennifer Rubin absolutely unloads on the left's stunning hypocrisy.

The hypocrisy takes your breath away. After months and months of ”Mitt Romney is a MORMON” coverage and endless insinuation that Romney’s faith will be problem for him (or that he is obliged to defend the precepts of his faith), the mention of possible ads featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the left-wing media in hysterics.

If you want to argue that religion is off bounds and that what counts is a candidate’s public record, the candidates’ own words and his own explanation for how faith affects his public conduct, then that standard should be equally applied. If, however, you want to hold candidates accountable for the precepts of their place of worship, then that standard should also be applied even-handedly.

Whether exploration of faith for a given candidate is productive for his opponent is an entirely different matter. I’ve argued to my friends on the right that it’s useless to go back to the albeit-troubling record of President Obama in Wright’s church and his association with characters like Bill Ayers; Americans don’t care. Moreover, the far better evidence of Obama’s left-leaning ideology is his own record. Instead of recounting what Wright said about Jews, it’s more relevant to recount what Obama has said to and about (“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you”) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards, the woman behind the ObamaCare contraception mandate, isn't too happy with Mitt Romney's promise to repeal ObamaCare should he become the president in November. Predictibly, Richards is using the "women's health" argument in defense of ObamaCare, saying Mitt Romney is "no friend to women's health." Ironic considering Mitt Romney is married to a woman who had five children, beat breast cancer and lives with MS. More from Richards' op-ed today:

His promise to strike down the Affordable Care Act and its requirement that health plans cover birth control without co-pays, along with his pledge to end the nation's family planning program -- which provides preventive care to nearly 5 million women -- and his vow to "get rid" of Planned Parenthood would have real and serious consequences for millions of women nationwide.

Unlike Mitt Romney, we won't let politics interfere with the health care that one in five women in America have relied on at some point in their lives.

 

But Richards will allow politics, and the government, to get between a woman and her doctor through ObamaCare. Richards will allow politics to end the life of an unborn child.....900 times a day. Richards will not allow even the reality of abortion's devastating effects on women to come between her and $300 million per year in government funding.

Welcome to the "you're a racist if you disagree with Barack Obama" club, Jon Lovitz! Yesterday the Hollywood comedian appeared on Fox News with Megyn Kelly to not only express his disagreements with President Obama's vilify the rich rhetoric, but to also explain how he has been treated after telling a live audience that the idea that the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes is a bunch of bull.

Only in America can a guy start making duck calls in his garage, turn it into a million dollar industry and land his own tv show.

In an exclusive interview with Townhall, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney rebuked a conservative group that is reportedly planning to assail President Obama over his 20-year relationship with controversial Chicago pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
 

"I repudiate the effort by that PAC to promote an ad strategy of the nature they've described.  I would like to see this campaign focus on the economy, on getting people back to work, on seeing rising incomes and growing prosperity -- particularly for those in the middle class of America.  And I think what we've seen so far from the Obama campaign is a campaign of character assassination.  I hope that isn't the course of this campaign. So in regards to that PAC, I repudiate what they're thinking about ... It's interesting that we're talking about some Republican PAC that wants to go after the president [on Wright]; I hope people also are looking at what he's doing, and saying 'why is he running an attack campaign?  Why isn't he talking about his record?'"

Romney added that his campaign will release its first general election television ad in the coming days, which he described as "positive" in nature.  With his comments on the re-emergence of Rev. Wright as a factor in a presidential campaign, the former Massachusetts Governor has aligned his stance with that of Sen. John McCain, who refused to touch the issue in 2008.  The full interview with Gov. Romney will first air on today's edition of the nationally-syndicated Hugh Hewitt radio program.

Yesterday on MSNBC, Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore in a discussion with host Martin Bashir, claimed the GOP is anti-woman and anti-diversity in reference to the Violence Against Women Act, which passed yesterday.

The Republican-led House on Wednesday approved in a mostly partisan 222 to 205 vote its own version of a Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, rejecting Democratic requests to also permit a vote on the Senate-passed bill that passed in that chamber with bipartisan support. The Senate bill provides new protections for gay, immigrant, and Native American victims of domestic abuse while the House version does not.

And now, Rep. Trey Gowdy.

You know what's better than a Violence Against Women Act? The Second Amendment.

Watergate 2.0? Maybe not quite, but a number of Republican Representatives on the Hill and Capitol police are trying to figure out who is responsible for a series of burglaries that took place after hours in Congressional offices. The burglaries took place at night, doors were locked and because the Capitol is surrounded by police 24/7, evidence points to an inside job. The offices of Reps. Trey Gowdy, Jerry Lewis and Jon Runyan were affected.

More from the National Journal:

Puzzling break-ins over the last month at the offices of at least three House members and several committees have U.S. Capitol Police gumshoes working to find a pattern and the culprits, with missing items ranging from cash and expensive computer equipment to autographed baseballs and alcohol.

“The evidence points to someone with access to my office, and other offices in the Capitol complex, as the perpetrator,” freshman Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., surmised in a letter to the House’s Office of the Chief Administrative Officer.

Other offices hit—many of which handle information dealing with issues of national security, though nothing of a sensitive nature was reportedly taken—include those of Reps. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., and Jon Runyan, R-N.J.; the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security; and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Those looking for some common link might note that Lewis serves on Appropriations; Gowdy sits on Oversight; and Runyan is a member of the Armed Services Committee. Also, staffers on the House Oversight Subcommittee on Health Care, District of Columbia, Census, and the National Archives, which Gowdy chairs, reported that $200 of their money went missing during business hours.