Mitt Romney Is Financially Invested In The Birth Control He Seeks To Restrict
Mitt Romney has attacked the Obama administration’s regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide reproductive health care services — including contraception — by arguing that the rule is undermining the religious liberties of Catholics and imposing “a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.” As ThinkProgress has reported, Romney’s newfound sensitivities contradict his record as governor of Massachusetts — where he accepted a very similar contraception equity law — and his previous public commitments to increasing public funding for birth control. In 2005, Romney even asked the Massachusetts Department of Health to issue regulations requiring all hospitals to issue emergency contraception to rape victims, without providing an exception for Catholic hospitals.
Now, an examination of Romney’s financial investments reveals that the very same GOP frontrunner who is now petitioning the White House to extend the regulation’s conscience clause and exclude more women from the benefits of birth control is himself invested in and profiting from pharmaceutical companies that produce the frequently prescribed and extremely common medication:
Romney’s Goldman Sachs 2002 Exchange Place Fund, valued at over a million dollars in 2010, brought in nearly $600,000 in gains in 2010 and is invested in:
– Watson Pharmaceuticals: manufacturer of nine forms of emergency contraception (which Romney incorrectly identifies as “abortifacients“). – Johnson & Johnson: launched the first U.S. prescription birth control product in 1931 and produces various forms of birth control. – Merck: produces various forms of birth control – Mylan: produces birth control medication and filed the first application for a generic birth control pill last year. – Pfizer: a contraception producer that recently had to recall about a million packs of birth-control pills that weren’t packaged correctly.
Romney often disclaims any responsibility for or knowledge of his own investments by claiming that they are held in a private trust. But since filing his legally-required public financial disclosure reports and certifying that the information is “true, complete, and correct” to the best of his knowledge, the trust ceased to be a “blind trust” as he knew what was in it. Romney signed such disclosure forms last August and during his unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid in August 2007.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, February 8, 2012
Get Ready For Buyer’s Remorse, Rick Santorum Edition
We’ve had two—or is it three?—helpings of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, more iterations of former Gov. Mitt Romney than you can shake $10,000 at, so should anyone be surprised that we’re getting a second dose of Rick Santorum? The former Pennsylvania senator scored a political hat trick with convincing victories in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota last night. Sure Missouri was a beauty contest and Colorado and Minnesota didn’t actually select delegates, but neither did Iowa and no one said that set of caucuses was meritless.
Now Santorum must accomplish the 2012 political equivalent of defying gravity. For if there has been one rule in this chaotic nomination race, it is that what goes up must come down.
As I wrote in my column this week:
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s convincing victories in Florida on Tuesday and Nevada on Saturday, perhaps the GOP will rally to the former Massachusetts governor and embrace him in a manner which they have resisted thus far.
But through the first month of primary contests, Republican voters haven’t been much about embracing. They’ve been too busy running away from candidates. Romney’s New Hampshire victory, for example, sparked pronouncements that with two wins under his belt (the Iowa caucuses not yet having been retroactively awarded to Rick Santorum), he was marching to the nomination. This prompted a scramble away from Romney, right into the waiting arms of Newt Gingrich.
The former House speaker then easily won South Carolina and gave Republicans another acute case of buyer’s remorse. …
So now maybe GOP voters will settle in with Romney for the long haul. Or maybe they’ll look again at Romney and see a transparently inauthentic conservative of convenience with a propensity for mind-boggling gaffes (“I’m also unemployed,” and “Corporations are people, my friend,” and “Well, the banks aren’t bad people,” and so on.)
And as surely as Mitt Romney rose, bringing new pronouncements of his inevitability, he fell. Conservatives still don’t like him.
But can Santorum avoid a buyer’s remorse come-down? There are a number of factors weighing against him, starting with money and organization. It seems likely that Team Romney will turn its focus on Santorum the way it did on Gingrich after South Carolina (though as of this morning, Gingrich remained in the Mitt-bot’s sights). As Santorum noted Tuesday night, “Tonight we had an opportunity to see what a campaign looks like when one candidate isn’t outspent five- or ten-to-one by negative ads impugning their integrity and distorting their record.” Does anyone think that Santorum will get another clear shot where he isn’t heavily outspent and drilled with negative ads?
As National Journal’s Alex Roarty writes:
Romney won’t have to look hard for way[s] to attack Santorum, whose 16-year career in Washington provides an array of easy targets. The former governor has already criticized his support for congressional earmarks, and Santorum will also be forced to explain his 2004 endorsement of then moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter against a Republican challenger (Specter later switched into the Democratic Party).
More broadly, Romney can argue his business background makes him better suited to turn around the country than a career politician–a tactic that helped him overcome Gingrich.
We might also be reminded that Santorum’s last act in public life before running for president was receiving a historic drubbing from the voters of Pennsylvania, losing his seat by 18 points.
As for Romney, he must feel rather like Michael Corleone in the otherwise forgettable Godfather: Part III, who laments, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.” No pivot to the center and the general election for Mitt. He’ll need to turn his focus back to figuring out how to placate his own party, possibly with a hard tack to the right on the social issues which (a) have been Santorum’s bread and butter and (b) are suddenly at the heart of the national political conversation (birth control and gay marriage). This is not the stuff of which winning general election candidates are made.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 8, 2012
“Oop’s, He Did It Again”: When Romney Agreed With Obama On Contraception
For months, Republican presidential candidates have been eager, if not desperate, to accuse President Obama of waging a “war on religion.” Rick Perry got the ball rolling quite a while ago, but his more successful rivals have picked up on the same line.
The problem for the GOP candidates has been substantive: they knew they wanted to accuse Obama of being hostile towards faith communities, but they couldn’t explain why. Republicans saw value in the attack — the drive to paint the president as “The Other” has been a constant for four years — but they had absolutely no idea how to bolster the smear.
This week, Mitt Romney seems to have settled on a policy to match the attack: the Obama administration’s decision to require coverage of contraception as preventive care under the Affordable Care Act is, according to the former governor, an “attack on religious liberty.”
Romney told voters in Colorado yesterday that “churches and the institutions they run” will “have to provide for their employees, free of charge, contraceptives, morning-after pills — in other words abortive pills and the like — at no cost.”
As a substantive matter, Romney’s lying. The administration’s policy already exempts churches and other houses of worship and “doesn’t require any individual or employer to violate a religious belief — it simply ensures that their employees with different beliefs have the same access to birth control as all other women.”
But as a matter of consistency, Romney has another problem: he’s not only lying; he’s also denouncing Obama for adopting a policy similar to one Romney used to support.
Mitt Romney accused President Obama this week of ordering “religious organizations to violate their conscience,” referring to a White House decision that requires all health plans – even those covering employees at Catholic hospitals, charities, and colleges – to provide free birth control. But a review of Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor shows that he once took a similar step.
Oops.
While Romney was on the attack yesterday, condemning the idea of requiring religious institutions to provide emergency contraception, as governor, a previous iteration of Romney required all Massachusetts hospitals, including Catholic hospitals, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims.
Some Catholic leaders now point to inconsistency in Romney’s criticism of the president and characterize his new stance as politically expedient, even as they welcome it.
“The initial injury to Catholic religious freedom came not from the Obama administration but from the Romney administration,” said C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. “President Obama’s plan certainly constitutes an assault on the constitutional rights of Catholics, but I’m not sure Governor Romney is in a position to assert that, given his own very mixed record on this.” […]
“Governor Romney afterwards lamented that and campaigned around the country as someone in favor of religious freedom and traditional morality,” Doyle said. “He is very consistent at working both sides of the street on the same issue at the same time. His record on this issue has been one of very cynical and tactical manipulation.”
It’s the latest in a series of examples of Romney 2.0 interfering with the ambitions of Romney 5.0.
Mitt Romney: The Front-Runner Who Leaves The GOP Cold
Okay, now it’s settled, right? I mean, it must be settled by now. Mitt Romney is going to be the nominee. Eat your peas, Republicans, and then fall in line, because Romney’s the guy. Right?
Probably.
Even at this point, after Romney trounced Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary and the Nevada caucuses, there are some fairly compelling reasons for Republicans to pause before bowing to the party establishment’s decision that Mitt must be It.
First is the fact that so many GOP voters still can’t summon much enthusiasm for their likely standard-bearer. In a poll released last week, the Pew Research Center found that an incredible 52 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents consider the field of candidates only fair or poor. Just 46 percent assessed the field as good or excellent — compared to 68 percent who were satisfied with the contenders at the same point in the battle for the nomination four years ago.
In Florida, exit polls confirmed Pew’s findings: Nearly four in 10 GOP voters said they were unhappy with their choices. It is reasonable to assume that many Republicans who didn’t bother to vote — and thus were not sampled in exit polls — are probably even less enthusiastic.
Last May, as the roster of candidates was shaping up, just 43 percent of Republicans thought the field was fair or poor, according to Pew. In other words, the better Republican voters come to know these candidates, including Romney, the less they like them.
Still, somebody is going to get nominated. At this point, Romney has shown he can beat Gingrich almost everywhere. But that “almost” is important.
Gingrich won big in South Carolina. And while Romney rolled up huge margins in the southern and central parts of Florida, Gingrich beat him in the panhandle counties that border Alabama and Georgia — a part of the state, demographically and culturally, that isn’t South Beach but, rather, just plain South.
This is significant because the South is the Republican Party’s heartland. Romney has shown in other contests that he can put a check mark in every ideological box — that despite Gingrich’s taunt of “Massachusetts moderate,” he can still win the support of voters who call themselves “very conservative” or who say they are Tea Party members. But maybe the relevant pejorative is the “Massachusetts” part.
So far, Romney has not shown that he can connect with and excite voters in the South the way Gingrich does. If the bruised, battered, underfunded Gingrich campaign can survive long enough — and if Gingrich can rediscover the in-your-face mojo that gave him such a lift in the South Carolina debates — he could potentially beat Romney in Georgia and Tennessee on Super Tuesday, March 6, and in Alabama and Mississippi a week later.
At that point, if I were a GOP pooh-bah, I’d have to worry about going into the November elections with a candidate at the top of the ticket who had received so little love from the party’s most loyal supporters.
Maybe the Gingrich insurgency will prove to be nothing more than a sad, divisive ego trip. Maybe Romney will show that he can win — or at least compete — in the South. Realistically, chances are that his superior resources, organization and discipline will prevail in the end.
Then what? Well, if you believe the polls, Romney probably loses to President Obama in the fall.
A new Washington Post poll, released Monday, shows that Obama leads Romney, 51 percent to 45 percent, among registered voters. The poll also showed that Obama’s approval rating is at 50 percent, the first time it has reached that benchmark since May, right after Osama bin Laden was killed. On protecting the middle class and dealing with taxes, international affairs and terrorism, voters believe Obama would do a better job than Romney.
But perhaps the most important figure — found not in the poll but in Labor Department statistics released Friday — is 8.3 percent. That’s the unemployment rate for January, and it is the lowest since February 2009, right after Obama took office.
Romney’s central argument for the presidency is that he will do a better job of managing the economy. Despite their overall preference for Obama, many voters buy that premise. But if the unemployment rate continues to fall, it won’t matter whether Republicans go with the safe bet or the mercurial firebrand. Economic recovery almost surely equals four more years.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 6, 2012
Staples Co-Founder: Allowing Women To Breastfeed At Work Will Cost Jobs
Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg is speaking out against a serious threat to economic recovery and job creation: breastfeeding moms.
Stemberg, a longtime supporter of Republican policies and candidates like Mitt Romney, complained recently that President Obama’s health care reform law hurts businesses by requiring them to provide what he dubbed “lactation chambers” for new moms who need to breastfeed at work:
Tom Stemberg, co-founder of mega-office supply chain Staples is questioning an Obamacare provision that discourages job creation by dictating employers funnel their capital into lactation chambers.
“Do you want [farming retailer] Tractor Supply to open stores or would you rather they take their capital and do what Obamacare and its 2,700 pages dictates – which is to open a lactation chamber at every single store that they have?” he asked.
“I’m big on breastfeeding; my wife breastfed,” Stenberg added. “I’m all for that. I don’t think every retail store in America should have to go to lactation chambers, which is what Obamacare foresees.
Stemberg was presumably referring to provisions in the Affordable Care Act that require employers to give lactating mothers “reasonable break time” to nurse their child, as well as “a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public…” The place they provide for new moms does not have to be a dedicated room as long as it’s private and can be called into use when female employees need it.
Stemberg, who has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Romney’s campaign and SuperPAC, added that repealing the health care law should be at the top of the next president’s “to-do” list.
As of early January, the Labor Department had already cited 23 companies, including Starbucks and McDonald’s stores, for violating the new protections for breastfeeding employees.
By: Marie Diamond, Think Progress, February 7, 2012
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