In an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC Thursday, billionaire Santorum backer Foster Friess said that debates over the candidate's personal objections to contraception are overblown, adding that, in his day, "gals" used aspirin as birth control.

In a rather strange joke, Friess said: "This contraception thing, my gosh it's so inexpensive. Back in my day they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives, the gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly." Friess is presumably saying all women who didn't want to become pregnant were abstinent and thus had no need for birth control.

MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell stuttered for a moment before saying, "Excuse me, I'm just trying to catch my breath from that."

Earlier in his comments, Friess dismissed the debate over Santorum's personal objections to birth control as a waste of time, saying that America has bigger problems to face. But his colorful comments suggest birth control will not be leaving the headlines any time soon.

Conservative reporter Matt Lewis wrote yesterday that Santorum's earlier comments about birth control will make trouble for Santorum's campaign, and suggested that the candidate might need to have a "contraception speech" to clarify his position. "It's not okay because it's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," Santorum said in October about contraception, though he has also said that he supports individuals' choice to use it.

Claudia Bushman at home near Columbia, where she teaches about Mormonism. (Liz Goodwin)

Claudia L. Bushman, a 76-year-old Columbia professor and practicing Mormon, is a feisty critic and an obedient follower of her church. Within the Mormon community, she's known for founding Exponent II, a feminist newspaper in Boston. In the 1970s, Bushman and her friends argued for greater inclusion of women in the all-male leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, angering some in the church's Salt Lake City headquarters. Bushman resigned as the newspaper's editor after church elders demanded it.

But right now, Bushman's claim to fame is that she knew Mitt Romney and his family during that same era, when they were in the same Latter-day Saint congregation--called a ward--in Cambridge, Mass., while Romney was studying for business and law degrees at Harvard. She had just turned down a request to go on CNN to talk about Ann Romney when Yahoo News spoke with her last week at her Manhattan apartment.

'He's not an unreasonable person'

It's funny that Mitt Romney is now considered awkward in public, Bushman said, because she remembers him as very suave. Hard-working, ambitious and good-looking couples turned up in the ward every fall, to attend Harvard and MIT and other schools.

He was "another one of those good-looking, promising students at Harvard," Bushman told Yahoo News. "There were plenty of those guys, just an awful lot of them."

"They really are impressive people," she said of the Romneys.

Most news coverage of Romney's time as a bishop and stake president (leading a single ward and a group of wards, respectively) from 1981 to 1994 in Boston has focused on his counseling a woman in his ward against an abortion, even though she had a blood clot in her pelvis that endangered her life.

"At a time when I would have appreciated nurturing and support from spiritual leaders and friends, I got judgment, criticism, prejudicial advice, and rejection," the woman wrote anonymously in Exponent II. The story first attracted national attention when Romney made a run for the Senate against Ted Kennedy in 1994 as a candidate who supports abortion rights. (The woman later identified herself as Carrel Sheldon in a biography of Romney by Ronald B. Scott.)

Bushman was very close with Sheldon, who worked on Exponent II with her, but she said she thinks Romney's behavior in the case was unusual. Bushman had left Boston for a teaching position in Delaware when the incident happened.

"I would say that that was not necessarily typical that he came down hard on that case," Bushman told Yahoo News. He was willing to negotiate with the group of feminist Mormons in Boston who wanted the Church to let women into more important roles and decision-making, she said.

"I had other friends … who persuaded Mitt to have a meeting where the women could air their grievances," she said. "He said, 'Well all right I'll do it, but I'll get in trouble with Salt Lake for doing it.' ... He's not an unreasonable person."

Bushman thinks Romney has changed in his efforts to win the Republican presidential nomination, staking out positions to the right of his church on abortion and immigration. "He's not a person of deep principles so much as he's a manager that figures things out," she says. "He says things that I don't think he believes. He says things that make me cringe. But he's not a bad man, he's a good man."

A celebration after the August 2010 decision (AP/Jeff Chalu)

The 9th Circuit Court in California struck down as unconstitutional the state's voter-passed ban on gay marriage Tuesday, ruling 2-1 that it violates the rights of gay Californians.

[View a slideshow of demonstrations around Prop. 8 here]

"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the decision. The court concludes that the law violates the 14th Amendment rights of gay couples to equal protection under the law. Access to gay marriage will remain on hold pending appeals to the decision.

You can watch an ABC News report on the ruling below:

The Circuit Court backed up District Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled in August of 2010 that the state of California has no "rational basis" to single out gay men and women as ineligible for marriage. The group fighting for Prop. 8, which passed in 2008 after thousands of gay couples had already married, appealed Walker's decision arguing that it should be vacated because Walker is gay and has a same-sex partner. The 9th Circuit Court judges denied this motion.

Protesters outside the Alabama statehouse in November. (AP/Dave Martin)Some U.S.-born children with parents who are illegal immigrants have been denied food stamps under Alabama's new immigration law, Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen told Yahoo News on Monday.

Five people have called into the group's Alabama hotline to say they were denied food stamps because they couldn't prove they were legal residents, even though the food stamps are for their children, who are citizens.

Cohen says the civil rights group, which has already filed two lawsuits against Alabama over the law, will most likely bring another suit over the denied food stamps.

The law makes it a felony for a government employee to engage in "business transactions" with illegal immigrants, which some government employees have interpreted very broadly. Illegal immigrants have been told they can't pay their utility bills or even their taxes because it would count as a "transaction" with the government, according to Cohen.

Barry Spear, a spokesman for Alabama's Department of Human Services, said in an email to Yahoo News that it is not the agency's policy to demand proof of citizenship from the guardians of Americans who need food stamps. "We are unaware of any violations of the policy," Spear said.

Romney campaigning in Florida. (AP/Charles Dharapak)

Mitt Romney--who was labeled "anti-immigrant" by Newt Gingrich for saying illegal immigrants should self-deport--did very well with Hispanic voters in Florida, who helped him handily win Tuesday's primary.

Fifty four percent of Hispanic voters in the Florida exit poll said they voted for Romney, compared to just 45 percent of white voters. The ex-governor worked for their vote: softening his opposition to the Dream Act, running Spanish-language ads starring one of his sons, and lining up key endorsements from Cuban-American politicians in the state.

But this brief honeymoon is over, according to Stanford professor and Latino Decisions pollster Gary Segura. "Latinos matter to Republicans in Florida and ... on general election day," Segura said. The majority of Hispanic voters in the West are Democrats or Democrat-leaning and aren't likely to show up to vote in the Republican primaries. In Nevada, only 5 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers are Hispanic, even though Latinos make up more than a quarter of the total population. And immigration reform, which Romney opposes, is a personal and important issue for many Western Latino voters.

Gingrich was unsuccessful in using Romney's anti-illegal immigrant stance against him in Florida, but immigration reform doesn't carry the same weight for Latinos in the state as it does nationwide. Many of Florida's Hispanic Republicans are of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent. Cubans and Puerto Ricans don't face the same immigration hurdles as other Latinos because Cubans are granted a path to citizenship once they arrive to the country and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, not immigrants.

President Obama touted January's jobs gains as a signal of economy recovery and warned Congress not to "muck it up" in a speech at Fire Station No. 5 in Arlington, Virginia.

Obama said he had a message for Congress--pass the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance extension without "drama" or delay. "Do not slow down the recovery we're on now. Don't muck it up," he said.

Obama had good economic news to tout in his speech. The economy added 243,000 jobs in January--the most jobs added since last April--and the unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent, according to the jobs report released Friday morning. The unemployment rate is the lowest it's been in three years.

Inserting himself back into the presidential race, Donald Trump managed on Wednesday night and Thursday morning to get the nation's major news organizations in a tangle about whether he would endorse Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich during a Thursday afternoon appearance in Las Vegas.

Just before 4 p.m. ET on Thursday, Trump appeared with Mitt Romney and his wife for a very brief news conference.

"It's my honor, real honor, and privilege to endorse Mitt Romney," Trump said. "He's not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country that we all love. So Governor Romney, go out and get 'em." You can watch video of the endorsement above.

Romney and Trump shook hands. "There are some things you can't imagine in life and this is one of them," Romney said as he took the podium and recited a stump speech.

The short to-do was in marked contrast to the circus-like atmosphere in the lead up to the endorsement. The Donald caused quite a bit of confusion yesterday when he issued a statement saying he would be making a "major announcement" about the race. The Associated Press and the New York Times reported late Wednesday night that Trump would be endorsing Newt Gingrich, citing sources close to the former Speaker's campaign. Dozens of news outlets picked up on the story.

Vargas lobbying for the Dream Act in 2010. (AP/Alex Brandon)Young immigration activists are planning a rally in Las Vegas on Thursday to protest a military-only version of the Dream Act that has been endorsed by both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, which they call "insulting."

"We want to make sure that they're not running on this platform," Erika Andiola, an organizer of the rally, told Yahoo News. Protesters plan to try to confront candidates with their personal immigration stories, as undocumented student Lucy Allain did to Romney during a January fundraiser in New York.

Both Gingrich and Romney oppose the original Dream Act, a 10-year-old proposal that would give legal status to young illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children and who attend at least two years of college or join the military.

Romney announced his support for a military-only iteration of the law after hitting the campaign trail in Florida, where more than 10 percent of GOP primary voters are Hispanic. Both candidates have tried to attract Hispanic voters in Florida and beyond--who overwhelmingly support the Dream Act--without alienating Republican voters who worry that legalization measures would serve as a "magnet" that would attract more illegal immigration.