“Decimation Of Health Care For The Poor And Uninsured”: Mitt Romney Puts Women’s Lives At Risk
If you want to see what women’s health care in America will be like if Mitt Romney becomes president, just look at Texas and Arizona.
Both states are in the news these past few weeks for trying to prevent women from getting health care at Planned Parenthood. It’s wrong, and it will have devastating consequences for women for years to come—and Mitt Romney wants to do it in all 50 states.
Romney said in November that he wants to eliminate the nation’s family-planning program, which was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970 and provides essential preventive health services to more than 5 million people a year, the vast majority of whom are poor and uninsured.
Beyond the millions of people who are helped by this health-care program, investing in family planning saves the government money—for every dollar spent on family planning, experts say taxpayers save around $4.
Romney said in March that, if elected president, he would “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. He clarified his remarks to say he would end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Either way, he would seek to dismantle a nationwide network of community-based health centers that one in five American women rely on for care at some point in their lives.
This isn’t about abortion. These health-care programs provide blood pressure and cholesterol monitoring, flu shots, breast-cancer screenings, Pap tests, and birth control. Planned Parenthood is the only medical care many women receive all year.
Michele Azzaro knows what Mitt Romney’s America would look like—because she’s already experiencing it in Texas.
Azzaro has been a Planned Parenthood patient in Dallas for more than 20 years. Planned Parenthood was there when she had a breast-cancer scare, and her local health center has been there when she needs her yearly cholesterol test.
Last year, Texas drastically cut its family-planning funding, the same way Mitt Romney says he would cut federal funding. Michele lost access to annual breast screenings and the birth-control pills she needs to manage her painful uterine fibroids.
She isn’t alone.
An estimated 160,000 women lost their health care when Texas slashed its family-planning program last year. Now, the state is trying to throw more women off health care by taking Planned Parenthood out of the state’s Women’s Health Program. Planned Parenthood health centers provide care to 52,000 women in the program.
Texas’s program provides low-income working women in Texas with lifesaving cancer screenings, well-woman exams, contraception, screenings for diabetes and high blood pressure, and testing for sexually transmitted infections. The program was sponsored and implemented by Republicans less than a decade ago—an indication of how far to the right some in the party have gone in just a few years.
Planned Parenthood sued the state in federal court in order to continue providing these critical health services to women, and last week a federal appeals court blocked the state’s effort to deny women the health care they rely on at Planned Parenthood while the lawsuit proceeds.
Meanwhile, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently signed legislation that cuts state funding for Planned Parenthood’s preventive care. The new law could cut 4,000 women off from the health care they need.
What’s happening in Texas and Arizona isn’t about Planned Parenthood. It’s about Michele Azzaro—and the 3 million people a year who rely on us for cancer screenings, birth control, and well-woman exams.
Our patients aren’t making a political statement when they come to Planned Parenthood. But they’re not afraid to make a political statement to keep the health care they rely on when they vote in November.
“The Darkest Art Of All”: Mitt Romney’s Character Assassination Game
The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done. That’s the real Rosetta stone. And that’s what Mitt Romney did this week when he called Barack Obama’s tough, but hardly extraordinary, ads about Bain Capital “character assassination.” He’s trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts—and I hope your memory isn’t so short that you forget that he knows a thing or two about the topic himself.
Republicans have perfected many a dark campaign art over the years, from racial nudging and winking to suggesting that we’ll all be killed by terrorists if voters elect Democrats. But projection is the darkest art of all. And it’s so simple! When Republicans are acting like a mob—down in Dade County, for example—they accuse the Democrats of having a mob mentality. When they’re planning on blowing holes in the budget deficit bigger than the one the iceberg laid on the Titanic, via Paul Ryan’s budget and tax cuts for the rich, they stand up and accuse the Democrats of blowing holes in the budget. It works pretty well, too. All the conservative blogs pick up on it, and Fox and so on. And then, when the mainstream media sit down to write about the subject at hand, stories will note that “The GOP has been saying for months…”
This is what is happening here. Romney is trying to do two things. First, he’s trying to make any criticism of his Bain record out of bounds. Aware of course that he’s been forced by reality to revise downward from “more than 100,000” to “thousands” the number of jobs he helped create at Bain, he knows that he can’t use Bain as a plus to the extent that he wanted to. Think about it—the cornerstone of his career, the thing he spent 15 years of his life doing, the business he built (with Mr. Bain’s blessing and seed money)—pretty much out the window now. So that being the case, he needs to eliminate it as a minus. See if the referee will toss it out, if the judge (the media) will rule it inadmissible.
The obvious way to do that is to call any mention of it character assassination. Are those ads really character assassination? Do they say, for example: “Mitt Romney must be a really terrible and malevolent human being to have thrown those poor steel workers out on the street”? Because that would be an attack on Romney’s character. But no, they do not. They say Mitt Romney did us dirt. They’re emotional, sure. And if you want to say emotionally manipulative, all right by me. And yes, Joe Biden took it all a step or two further with his Ohio speech, saying Romney doesn’t understand the rest of us and so on.
But come on. That’s politics. Those aren’t character attacks. They’re salvos in a debate about what kinds of capitalism are good for regular people and what kinds aren’t. Campaigns Democratic or Republican don’t exactly elevate debates, Lord knows; but if we’re going to have arguments about how our society works, that’s a pretty useful one to have.
But the character-assassination label will come in handy—and this is Romney’s second purpose—when the Republican attacks on Obama really start. Maybe Romney is telling the truth, and his campaign will be all about how Obama promised nice things and seems like a nice young man but failed to deliver on them. His polling tells him he has to campaign like that for now, because Obama is far more likable to more people than he.
Something tells me, though, that the Romney campaign will eventually lower the boom. One might argue that it has already. What’s “apologizing for America,” after all? Aside from being a cheap and contemptible lie, is it not a kind of assault on the character of the president of the United States to accuse him of doing something that he hasn’t done, especially when the accusation is obviously meant to carry treasonous connotations? Romney’s “apologizing for America” line has always told us a great deal about character—Romney’s, not the president’s.
Don’t forget, finally, that Romney is pretty adept at character assassination himself. What do you call it when in those crucial primaries that he barely won against Rick Santorum—Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin—he was outspending Santorum six and nine and 12 to one with incredibly negative ads? Or the “tsunami of sleaze,” as my colleague John Avlon put it at the time that the Romney campaign dumped on Newt Gingrich in Florida, where 92 percent of the aired TV ads were negative? Those gutter attacks, aired over and over and over, are, it is worth remembering, the main reason the guy is the nominee. He was tied or behind in all those states until he emptied the trash. He wasn’t winning them over with his wit.
So it’s a bit rich to hear him saying now that he’s sad to see Obama in the gutter and he’s going to keep it on the up and up. But at some point, he’ll attack. And when he does, he’ll sigh sadly and say that he was forced into this position by that mean Obama, and he’ll count on everyone to forget the primary season, the foulest one by far in the modern history of American politics, for which the man who neither drinks nor swears bears the vast majority of the blame. That, come to think of it, is a “character” issue too.
BY: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 19, 2012
“Hiding In The Shadows”: A New False Equivalency About That So-Called Obama “Enemies List”
TNR’s Alec MacGillis comments on Kimberly Strassel’s silly Wall St. Journal article, “The President Has a List,” which likens one of the Obama campaign’s websites posting of “A brief history of Romney’s donors” to Nixon’s ‘White House Enemies List.” According to Strassel,
In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.
In other words, “Gasp….How dare they rat out our rich donors!”
MacGillis has a little fun with Strassel’s warped reasoning, and notes,
Got that? Identifying on a campaign Web site the people who are giving to the opponent’s super PAC in six and seven-figure increments is the equivalent of Nixon’s enemies list, which, as John Dean explained it at the time, was designed to “screw” targeted individuals via “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.”
Nixon’s white house enemies list was about harassing citizens who dared to publicly criticize the President. Outing fat cat donors who hide in the shadows is not quite the same thing. MacGillis explains it well, along with citing the hypocritical double standard of the GOP and their media defenders:
When you are giving at levels hundreds of times larger than the $2,500 maximum for a regular donation to a campaign, or thousands of times larger than the size checks regular people send to candidates, then you are setting yourself apart. And the only thing that the rest of the citizenry has left to right the balance even slightly is to give you some added scrutiny–to see what personal interests, biases, you name it, might be prompting you to influence the political system in such an outsized way. It’s all we’ve got, really–the Internet, the phone call, the visit to the courthouse. And yes, this applies to everyone. Why does everyone on the right know so much about George Soros? Because they were outraged at the scale of his giving in 2004 and 2006 and dug up everything they could on him. As is only right and proper. And now people are going to look into Frank VanderSloot, Harold Simmons and Paul Singer and the rest of Romney’s million-dollar club.
Fair enough. If rich donors want to use their wealth to influence elections, the notion that they should have their anonymity in doing so protected is not likely to win much sympathy outside their ranks.
By: The Democratic Strategist, Staff, May 17, 2012
“Precisely Imprecise”: Romney Not Familiar With Questioning Obama’s Faith, But Stands By It
After the political world was consumed by yesterday’s New York Times’ report on the racist strategy memo for a Republican super PAC to “Defeat Barack Hussein Obama,” Mitt Romney was forced to “repudiate” it. But what of his own statement, back in February, invoking the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Sean Hannity, after Hannity played a clip of President Obama talking about religious diversity in America?
Romney said: “I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said whatever it was.” No, that wasn’t mistranscribed. He said that. If there’s ever been a perfect encapsulation of Romney as a candidate, there it is.
Here’s what Romney was referring to–or not remembering precisely or exactly. As reported by Politico yesterday, in February, during a Romney appearance on his show, Hannity played a clip of an Obama speech in which the president said, “Given the increasing diversity of America’s populations, the dangers of sectarianism are greater than ever. Whatever we once were we are no longer a Christian nation.” Obama was talking about religious pluralism, but Romney took it as a cue to question his patriotism, by invoking Wright. His answer to Hannity:
The other part of his quote is also an unusual thing, where he says that sectarianism (presents) a great threat. Look, he may not be much of a student of history but perhaps he doesn’t recall that from the very beginning, America had many different sects, many different religions, that part of our founding principle was that we would be a nation of religious tolerance. Also, without question, the legal code in this country is based upon Judeo-Christian values and teachings, Biblical teachings, and for the president not to understand that a wide array of religions and a conviction that Judeo-Christian philosophy is an integral part of our foundation is really an extraordinary thing. I think again that the president takes his philosophical leanings in this regard, not from those who are ardent believers in various faiths but instead from those who would like to see America (more secular. And I’m not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we … must be a less Christian nation.
That’s an even more florid pander to the Christian right than Romney’s Liberty University commencement speech last weekend. He’s not precisely familiar with it, but he stands by it, for sure.
The Romney camp is working hard at putting distance between the candidate and any race-baiting strategies that might be deployed by its allies. But of course Romney himself–even if he’s not precisely familiar with it now–is not above questioning the president’s patriotism, his commitment to Christianity, and the alleged anti-American-ness of Wright, and therefore Obama.
It’s true, of course, that Romney was feebly acknowledging religious pluralism; he has at one time argued that there is no religious test for the presidency. (I wonder if he’s familiar, precisely, exactly, or otherwise, with that today.) When Romney spoke to Hannity last February, it was on the heels of the presidential debate for which he had hired former Liberty University debate coach Brett O’Donnell, and in which he perfected parroting the religious right’s Christian nation ideology in an answer. Faced with a question from Hannity about Obama’s fealty to this Republican ideology, Romney seized the opportunity to invoke Wright.
In the Washington Post this morning, religion columnist Lisa Miller asserts that Obama and Romney have very different views of God, and that when Americans “pull the lever this November, you will not just be voting for president. You will be saying what you believe about God.” Miller goes on to present an embarrassingly simplistic dichotomy: Romney “stands for the individualistic version of American success; Obama for the collectivist.” One of these views (of God) favors slashing taxes and government; the other shared sacrifice and gay marriage.
These are not, though, two cleanly differentiated views of God that in fact inspire each candidate’s politics. (There aren’t even, of course, two cleanly differentiated views of God in American religious life. But that’s another matter.) The candidate’s politics are informed by party, and by ideology; God is added later to justify them. That’s why Romney, born into a minority faith, can feel perfectly comfortable, when put in a room with Sean Hannity, claiming that America was founded on a religion other than his own, but that the other guy, who actually shares the religion that Romney claims the nation was founded upon, is the one who is undermining the proclaimed official national religion by promoting religious pluralism.
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, May 18, 2012
“Still Separate And Unequal”: Mitt Romney Fails To See America
After a third reading of Mitt Romney’s Liberty University commencement speech, I still fail to see how my Post colleague Michael Gerson could have described it as “more than good.”
Romney’s address struck me as standard fare for a college graduation. He hit all the familiar notes: gratitude to school and a nod to parents for sacrifices made; celebration of the virtues of hard work, devotion to principles, individualism, service, family. There was even a little shameless politicking, with Romney telling the audience “what the next four years might hold for me is yet to be determined. But . . . things are looking up, and I take your kind hospitality today as a sign of good things to come.”
It was the kind of speech that could have been delivered — sans the pandering and the references to more-contemporary figures (the late Chuck Colson; the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded Liberty University; and the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) — to college graduating classes in the 1950s or even in 1900.
The Liberty remarks, as seems to be true of many Romney speeches, reflected a rather constricted view of the country. Perhaps it’s because Romney chooses to deliver most of his lines to narrow audiences.
Missing in his Liberty offering, as with some other Romney speeches, is any recognition — not praises, mind you, but simple acknowledgment — that 21st-century America is more than a white, middle-class country.
He revealed no sense whatsoever of knowing that the overwhelming majority of Liberty grads will, in their adult lives, inhabit an America in which they will be the minority.
Romney’s speeches seem tailor-made for audiences that look pretty much like him.
At least that is what one is led to believe after observing where Romney chooses to go and what he has to say.
I tried to imagine Romney’s Liberty address being delivered to the graduates and their families at the 2012 commencement exercises I attended a week ago at historically black Howard University in Washington.
I cannot believe, however, that the Romney campaign apparatus would have allowed the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to tell an African American audience numbering in the thousands that Falwell was “a gracious Christian example” and a “courageous and big-hearted minister of the Gospel who . . . never hated an adversary.”
Indeed, Romney lauded Falwell, who famously said: “I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations.”
Romney spoke glowingly of the same Falwell who said of the landmark Supreme Court school desegregation decision: “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never had been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
The same Falwell who disparaged Nobel Peace Prize winner and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a phony. (Falwell later apologized for that remark and claimed that he had misspoken.)
And who can forget Falwell’s finger-pointing after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks? He declared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” show: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’ ”
I suspect if Romney spoke at Howard, he would have skipped that part about Falwell.
But what does the man who seeks to lead this country have to say about, and to, this rapidly changing nation of diverse people with diverse interests and needs?
Thus far, Romney’s thoughts and policy prescriptions seem focused on America’s largest — and slowest-growing — racial group: his own.
Democratic critics accuse Romney of having values that skew to the rich at the expense of the poor. They say he’s disconnected from the problems of average Americans; that he’s out of touch and just doesn’t get it.
Would that it were only a matter of determining whether Romney is on the side of the rich or middle class.
The question is much broader and more significant: When Mitt Romney thinks and speaks of Americans, do those who don’t look like him even come to mind?
Since he launched his presidential campaign, it’s been hard to tell. And Romney’s Liberty University speech was no help.
By: Colbert King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 18, 2012
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