Morally Corrupt Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan Spread $500 Billion Medicare Lie

Morally Corrupt Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan Spread $500 Billion Medicare Lie

Just one day after President Obama declared that the Republican budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) would “ultimately end Medicare as we know it,” his likely Republican opponent appeared at the Newspaper Association of America and threw the accusation right back at him. Obama, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said, “has taken a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it” and “is the only President to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare”:

    ROMNEY: I’d be willing to consider the President’s plan, but he doesn’t have one. That’s right: In over three years, he has failed to enact or even propose a serious plan to solve our entitlement crisis.

    Instead, he has taken a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it. He is the only President to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare. And, as a result, more than half of doctors say they will cut back on treating seniors. He is destroying the Medicare Advantage program, eliminating the coverage that millions of seniors depend on and reducing choice by two-thirds.

    To control Medicare cost, he has created an unelected, unaccountable panel with the power to prevent Medicare from providing certain treatments. The result will be fewer treatments and services available to patients in need, and nowhere else to turn.


Romney rarely lets the facts get in the way of his rhetoric, but these oft-repeated accusations ring particularly hallow — and are hardly rare. The savings achieved in Medicare through the Affordable Care Act will help stabilize Medicare by eliminating overpayments to private insurers and slowly phasing in payment adjustments that encourage greater efficiency. As a result, the law extends the life of the Medicare trust fund by eight years and allows seniors to retain all of their guaranteed Medicare benefits. Medicare beneficiaries are already paying less for prescription drug coverage and receiving preventive care as a result of the law, while enrollment in Medicare Advantage has increased and premiums have fallen. The law, in other words, does exactly the opposite of Romney’s claim: it expands Medicare “as we know it.”

That doesn’t mean that it solves all of our health care cost problems. It doesn’t and Obama has proposed accelerating some of the law’s cost-control mechanisms to further lower the growth of spending. But Romney has labeled such efforts “rationing” and is offering an alternative “premium support” scheme that transforms senior’s guaranteed Medicare benefit into a voucher and significantly reduces the government’s contribution to the program. As a result, seniors will likely pay more for their health care, while the market clout and purchasing power of traditional Medicare — which has led on delivery reform and efficiencies — will shrink. So if the question is, which candidate ends Medicare for seniors, it’s hard to see how Romney’s plan to push future retirees into private insurance doesn’t fit the bill.

Are Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan men or gutter scum. Its hard to tell by how they display their values. Romney has recently said he is running on his Medicare plan and not Ryan's. Guess what, an analysis of the Romney plan shows that he would give seniors the shaft as well, Romney Budget Proposals Would Require Massive Cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Other Programs

Will Media Find Their Way to Discover Just How Radical Paul Ryan Is?

By contrast, Representative Ryan has an extreme right-wing agenda that predates both the Great Society and the New Deal. He has put forward plans that would cut and privatize both Social Security and Medicare. He has also called for essentially zeroing out most categories of federal spending.

While Ryan supports current levels of military spending, the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of his budget shows that there will be essentially nothing left for anything else by 2040. The CBO analysis of the Ryan budget (prepared under his direction) shows that spending on all items other than health care and Social Security would fall to 4.75 percent of GDP by 2040 and to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050.

The military budget currently is more than 4.0 percent of GDP. In the post-World War II era it has never been less than 3.0 percent. This means that Ryan's budget would leave nothing for running the State Department, the Park Service, the Food and Drug Administration, the Justice Department, the National Institutes of Health and the other areas that comprise the federal government as it now exists.

The government plays a major role in financing drug and medical research. Ryan, true to his dog eat dog roots would rather people die than benefit from the positive role government can play is an advanced economy.

The Mystery Candidate For King of America, Mitt Romney

The Mystery Candidate For King of America, Mitt Romney

Presidential candidates try as best they can to control their public image. But by modern standards, Mitt Romney has taken his quest for secrecy to extraordinary lengths. Here's all there is to know about what we don't know about Romney.

His Old Emails

Reporters looking for emails and other records from Romney's tenure as Massachusetts governor are out of luck.

In the final months of Romney's four-year stint as governor, as the Boston Globe reported, 11 of his top staffers purchased the hard drives in their government-issued computers, preventing state archivists from accessing any of their emails. In its final days, the Romney administration also replaced computers and scrubbed state government servers of all the administration's emails. As the top attorney for Romney's replacement, Deval Patrick, put it: "The governor's office has found no e-mails from 2002-2006 in our possession."

The Romney administration did turn over to state archivists hundreds of boxes of records, including memos, emails, and other communications among state agencies and cabinet members. However, the boxes containing those records were hand-picked and given over voluntarily by Romney's staff. It stands to reason that any embarrassing or revealing information—say, internal planning or deliberations about Romney's universal health care legislation—did not make it into the Romney administration's record dump.

Pam Wilmot, the director of Common Cause Massachusetts, the Bay State affiliate of the good-government lobbying group, says no previous administration went to the same lengths as Romney's to keep its communications secret from reporters and the public. "In retrospect, there does seem to be a substantial difference between [Romney's] administration and other administrations on transparency," Wilmot says.

Offshore Accounts

Mitt Romney might not see anything wrong with putting his money into offshore investment holdings to avoid US taxes, but he hasn't been especially keen on letting the public know how much he's done it. According to a recent story by the Associated Press, Romney failed to include more than 20 investment holdings on his federal financial disclosure reports. Of those, at least seven were in foreign countries.

The only reason the public knows about these financial instruments now is that Romney, under duress, finally released his 2010 tax returns, which showed the existence of dozens of investments, many of which were never included on his state or federal disclosure forms. Among them was Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which is based in Bermuda, a notorious tax haven. Romney used Sankaty, which he owned, as his partnership stake in many Bain Capital deals in the late 1990s. Sankaty was involved in Bain's takeover of Domino's Pizza and also controlled 50,000 shares of Global-Tech Appliances, the Chinese appliance firm that profited handsomely from the outsourcing of American jobs.
Romney never listed his ownership of Sankaty on Massachusetts disclosure forms when he ran for governor. And then, in 2003, Romney transferred Sankaty to his wife's trust the day before he was sworn in as governor of Massachusetts. The transfer did not have to be made public, and it allowed him to keep the investment secret by describing it in disclosure forms as simply part of a blind trust that held "various investments and securities," according to AP.

Romney's 2010 tax returns show that Sankaty doesn't have any assets at the moment, but tax experts told AP that it could still be used for future tax benefits with his remaining Bain investments. But he has refused to answer any questions about why he still has the Bermuda company, or what he plans to do with it.


Bundlers

The Obama campaign returned $200,000 dollars in February after the New York Times discovered it had been raised by two men whose brother was angling for a presidential pardon that would exonerate him for fraud and drug-related criminal charges. Despite the president's pledge not to take money from lobbyists, several of his big bundlers are connected to special interests in Washington. Former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine was one of Obama's biggest bundlers, but he has since come under investigation and the campaign has returned the money.

The reason we know all this is that Obama, like every other recent presidential candidate, discloses his bundlers—those well connected elites with the social ties to raise huge sums of money for their preferred candidate while getting around regulatory limits on how much one person can give. Romney runs ads attacking Obama as a "crony capitalist" for supposedly rewarding his most generous campaign contributors, but he will not say who his own bundlers are. Romney is not required by law to do so—but previous candidates have.


"Since bundling became one of the prominent means of raising money, the presidential candidates of the two main parties have released that list," says Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, a group that supports campaign finance reform. "It's hard to assess who are the real kingpins in [the Romney] campaign."

Romney's stance makes it hard for voters to figure out what his donors might want in exchange for their cash, argues Kathy Kiely, managing editor of the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, which reports on transparency and campaign finance issues. "If someone's running for public office, the voters have an interest in knowing who's writing the big checks and how much they're writing," Kiely says. "If nobody knows that this person, or this company, has written you a seven-figure check, it makes it a lot easier to do them a favor."

Mitt's Correspondence Gap

George Romney, Mitt's father, relished the letters he exchanged with his four children. The elder Romney's archives—nearly 450 boxes of letters, clippings, microfilm, and more held at the University of Michigan—include a trove of letters between him and his children who were at college, on their Mormon missions abroad, or who had moved out of the family home.

Romney wanted details on everything: from his children's academic progress to their living arrangements and even their love lives. In a November 3, 1959, letter, Romney writes to Scott, then an undergraduate at Stanford University, that he was "always interested in the girls you are dating." George Romney continues, "Have you looked up that little blonde girl over at church—the Driggs girl?…Are there any good-looking Mormon girls going to Stanford?" In another letter to Scott, Romney chides his son for failing to maintain regular correspondence, a source of annoyance for Scott's mother, Lenore.

Yet all but absent from the Romney archives is correspondence with Mitt. The lone letter of note is one from Mitt to his parents while Mitt worked in France as a missionary. The letter's cheery tone belies the fact that Mitt had nearly died in a car crash one month earlier near the village of Beaulac. The wife of Duane Anderson, president of the Mormon mission in France and a mentor for Mitt, died from injuries sustained in the crash.

In the letter to his parents, Mitt writes that his missionary work "is going really well." He ends by urging his parents to share "his letters" with his siblings, suggesting that other letters exist. But those other letters aren't included in the Romney archives.

George Romney's archives span the years 1939 to 1973. It's unclear why so few of Mitt Romney's letters made it into his father's archive, or who possesses the letters today. What is apparent is that, in the sole public archive that his beloved father wanted the public to remember him by, Mitt is glaringly absent.

Tax Returns

Romney has released only one year of tax returns, and has said last year's return, once finalized, is as much as he's willing to disclose. He fears that the information in previous years' returns could be used against him by Democrats: "The opposition research of the Obama campaign is looking for anything they can use to distract from the failure of the president to reignite our economy," he told National Review. "I'm simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about."

Partisan attacks may be a risk of Romney releasing more tax returns—but his eschewing transparency raises questions about what the GOP candidate wants to hide. Previous presidential candidates have released multiple years of tax returns, either during the presidential race or prior runs for public office.

"If you don’t want people…to be suspicious, be open about it, and if you don’t want to be open about it, why are you running for public office?" Kiely says. "You've made a contract with the public: 'I'm asking you to trust me, so I should put my stuff out there.' So to the extent you're not doing that, I think it raises suspicions."

IRA Details

According to financial-disclosure firms he's filed, Romney's Individual Retirement Account—a tax-advantaged retirement plan—is worth at least $20.7 million and as much as $101.6 million. It grows tax-free. But it's unclear how Romney's IRA grew so large. The annual limit for contributions to an IRA is currently $17,000, which employers can match if they choose. The limit for personal and matching contributions combined was around $30,000 per year when Romney was at Bain, suggesting that the most he could have put into his IRA was around $450,000. But his IRA could be worth 200 times that. (Even if Romney released several years worth of tax returns, it may not explain why his IRA grew so large.)

Some financial and tax experts believe Romney may have used a complicated, highly technical tax dodge called a "blocker corporation" to get such a large amount of money into the IRA. Others have suggested that Romney put in some of his partnership shares in Bain Capital itself and valued them at zero because they represented future income—another obscure tax maneuver unavailable to most Americans. It's impossible to know for sure, because, as with so much else, Romney won't talk about it.

All of this sleazy behavior is fine with conservative Republican voters. Look back at the history of who conservatives vote into Office: Nixon- Watergate/self sabotaging peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Reagan - Iran-Contra ( using arms smuggling profits to make for hostage release), the HUD scandals, the second worst recession since 1929. They voted in known criminal Rick Scott as governor of Florida. They believed every lie Bush 43 told about Iraq even though there was plenty of information available that said he was greatly exaggerating and lying. Conservatism is the culture of moral corruption, so of course morally corrupt candidates don't bother conservative voters. It even seems that the sleazier their candidates are the more they like them. There is nothing remotely patriotic about that.

The Pravda Chanel or as some call it, Fox News is "Doubling Down" On Deceptively Edited Comments

Fox News accused President Obama of "doubling down" on comments they helped characterize as "insulting" to business owners, but in doing so, Fox itself doubled down on its campaign to strip Obama's statements out of context to further a political agenda.

Obama spoke at a campaign event and pointed out how benefits such as American infrastructure factor in the success of small businesses. Fox deceptively edited the president's remarks to accuse him of telling small business owners that if they have a business, "you didn't build that."

This morning, Fox returned to the scandal they helped to manufacture, reporting that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Obama's comments "insulting" to business owners. Fox then turned its sights on another campaign event and accused President Obama of "doubling down." Here's the portion of the remarks that Fox chose to play as evidence:

    OBAMA: We did not build this country on our own. We built it together. And if Mr. Romney doesn't understand that, then he doesn't understand what it takes to grow this economy in the 21st century for everybody.

But the only way these comments can be portrayed as doubling down on an insult to business owners is to completely strip them of context. In the portion of Obama's speech that Fox chose to ignore, it's clear that he  explicitly touted the "drive and ingenuity of Americans who start businesses" as crucial to "what makes us such a robust dynamic economy." Here is what Obama actually said:

    OBAMA: As I said, I believe with all my heart that it is the drive and ingenuity of Americans who start businesses that lead to their success.  And by the way, that's why I've cut taxes on small businesses 18 times since I've been President.  (Applause.)  I believe the ability for somebody who is willing to work hard, and sweat and sacrifice to turn their idea into a profitable business, that's what makes us such a robust, dynamic economy.  We prize that.

    But I also believe that if you talk to any business owner -- small or large -- they'll tell you what also helps them succeed alongside their hard work, their initiative, their great ideas, is the ability to hire workers with the right skills and the right education.

    What helps them succeed is the ability to ship and sell their products on new roads and bridges and ports and wireless networks.  What helps them succeed is having access to cutting-edge technology, which like the Internet often starts with publicly funded research and development.  (Applause.)  And what helps them succeed is a strong and growing middle class, so they've got a broader base of customers.

Why is every Republican with access to the media distorting President Obama's reality based comments? Simple, conservative cannot win elected office without lying. That should tell every American something about the deep moral corruption and anti-Americanism of the Republican movement.

Jewish Voters, Republican Chutzpah

Questions of Character - Mitt Romney's Bain Stories Do Not Add Up

Questions of Character - Mitt Romney's Bain Stories Don't Add Up

Romney didn’t start pushing the idea that he’d severed all ties with Bain in ’99 until late in the ’02 campaign, when Democrats played up Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant, a move that cost 700 workers their jobs. Confronted with this potentially damaging attack, Romney pleaded ignorance, insisting he couldn’t have had anything to do with the closure because it came two years after he’d left. That’s the story he’s stuck with ever since – and especially this year, as national Democrats have taken up the GST story.

The point here isn’t that Romney was running Bain Capital and making all of its key decisions from 1999 to 2002. But the story he tells now absolves him of all responsibility for anything and everything Bain did in those years. This would be reasonable if Romney had forged a clear and total break with the company in 1999, but he didn’t. His statement to the ballot law commission 10 years ago was supported by just about all of his actions between 1999 and 2002: Until the final few months of his Olympic tenure, Romney’s break from Bain was supposed to temporary.

According to Fortune magazine - who is being fed documents by a Bain employee, we are supposed to believe that while Romney was listed as exclusive owner of Bain from 1999 until 2002 he had zero say in how the company was run. Did Romney tell the water-cooler guy to come twice a week instead of once - probably not, but Bain moved around hundreds of millions of dollars during that time and Romney claims he did not have a clue what Bain was doing - even though he was collecting income from Bain. Only a kool-aid drinking conservative could believe that load of BS. Another bad news cycle for Mitt Romney, even Republicans want him to come clean

Comically Awful Survey Says 83 Percent Of Doctors Might Quit Over Obamacare . Republicans live in their own little world with their own version of reality.