RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Vetting Romney

Romney's going to win and win big. Independents won't fall for that shit again.

...Last month, Romney held an eight point advantage on who can best improve the economy; now Obama holds a six point advantage. Among independents, there’s also been a big swing.

In June, Romney led Obama by 23 points, 54-31, among independents on the economy. That lead has dwindled down to four points; Romney now leads among them on the issue by 43-39.

And this is even more interesting: The swing on the economy has been bigger in the dozen battleground states than it has been nationally, though the difference is within the margin of error.
...

Mitt Romney's Own 2002 Testimony Undermines Bain Departure Claim
Posted: 07/12/2012 6:54 pm Updated: 07/13/2012 8:51 am

Politics News . WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney's repeated claim that he played no part in executive decision-making related to Bain Capital after 1999 is false, according to Romney's own testimony in June 2002, in which he admitted to sitting on the board of the LifeLike Co., a dollmaker that was a Bain investment during the period.

Romney has consistently insisted that he was too busy organizing the 2002 Winter Olympics to take part in Bain business between 1999 and that event. But in the testimony, which was provided to The Huffington Post, Romney noted that he regularly traveled back to Massachusetts. "[T]here were a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth," he said.

Romney's sworn testimony was given as part of a hearing to determine whether he had sufficient residency status in Massachusetts to run for governor.

...

Kristol: Romney 'crazy' not to release tax returns
7Comments (12) By MANU RAJU | 7/15/12 10:01 AM EDT Bill Kristol and the Obama campaign agree on something: Mitt Romney should immediately release his tax returns.

"He should release the tax returns tomorrow. It's crazy," Kristol said on "Fox News Sunday." "You gotta release six, eight, 10 years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two."

The conservative commentator said the presumptive Republican presidential nominee then should give a speech on Thursday calling for a "serious" debate with President Barack Obama on capitalism, allowing the campaign to turn the page and put the focus back on the president's record.

Romney has only released his 2010 tax returns and estimated returns for last year, but he has refused to release additional documents even though it's been common practice for candidates to do so, prompting scathing criticism from the Obama campaign.

People from his own party would normally be helping defend Romney against this stuff at this point. This is a case of at least some in the GOP thinking Romney is blowing it and feel it's either say something or watch him lose.

Did Mitt Romney pay any federal taxes at all in 2009?
Posted by Ezra Klein on July 17, 2012 at 2:50 pm

On the issue of Mitt Romney’s tax returns, my colleague George Will put it simply: “The cost of not releasing the returns are clear. Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

The question is what could be in them that would be so damaging to the Romney campaign. Right now, the most popular theory is that Romney simply didn’t pay any federal taxes at all in 2009. As Joshua Green wrote, ” It’s possible that he suffered a large enough capital loss that, carried forward and coupled with his various offshore tax havens, he wound up paying no U.S. federal taxes at all in 2009.”


My guess is the person who spends the most time wondering why Mitt Romney didn't clean up his taxes in 2008 is...Mitt Romney. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

But the tax experts I’ve spoken to are skeptical. “Romney had a $4.8 million capital loss carryover coming into 2010,” says Edward Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California. “So that means no capital gain income in 2009. If you look on the first page [of his 2010 tax return], though, he had lots of ordinary income (interest mostly), and dividends, which are taxed at the same rate as capital gains but which cannot be sheltered from tax by capital losses. So presumably he had some positive income tax in 2009.”

Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, agrees. “It’s unlikely that his taxable income was zero or even close enough to zero that his credits would zero out his tax liability completely,” he says.

But Daniel Shaviro, a tax professor at New York University, isn’t so sure. “I think there’s an excellent chance that [Romney] didn’t pay any taxes in 2008 or 2009,” he says. But to get from a small federal tax liability to no federal tax liability, Romney would have needed to engage in incredibly aggressive tax planning. Shaviro mentions picking loser investments to get some benefits from “loss harvesting,” unusual tax shelters, and a bevy of other stuff that, frankly, I don’t totally understand.

The overriding question, though, is why would Romney do any of this. As Shaviro says, “If you were running for president and in his position, wouldn’t you think of telling your transaction people not to take you down too low in 2008 and 2009?”

...

I think way too much attention is given to one inflammatory remark by Sununu, while ignoring how Sununu destroyed Andrea Mitchell, and the liberal media focus on Romney's tax returns, which is in truth a non-issue.
Even factcheck.org and rthe Washington post have given the Obama smear campaign on Romney's alleged outsourcing four Pinnochios, for Obama's levels of distortion and complete fabrication.

Do you even know how many years John McCain released of tax returns before the 2008 election?
TWO.

It's a non-issue. Romney has been campaigning for president since 2007. And has probably been planning to run for president since at least 2005. Does anyone really believe he has allowed anything dirty or questionable in his finances during these 8 years, knowing the level of scrutiny it could potentially have? Of course not.

That said, I think Romney should release the info, so that even in the worst scensrio, it will be old news by the time of the election.

The Sununu that the media and other liberal slanderers don't want you to see:

As I've said before if there was nothing for Romney to hide he would have released them already. My guess is he probably didn't do anything outright illegal but what is legal and what is moral and ethical can be very different things.

Obama's birth certificate and Romney's tax returns are not a valid comparison. Obama released his birth certificate before he was elected.

... Plenty of douches wouldn't accept it but it was still proven.
...

No he didn't. You can't even get a driver's license with that shit.

Nice try though.

Obama's birth certificate and Romney's tax returns are not a valid comparison...

As someone who is reasonably able to discuss the idea that elements within in the government was behind the single most important event in our lifetimes so far (9/11),

the idea that Obama, the Dems, the FEC, and even John McCain (to an extent) went to great lengths (even losing) to allow someone not American to run and assume the presidency of the United States doesn't stretch credulity...it breaks it.

I have never had my short form birth certificate denied as being unacceptable for anything.

CLAIM: As distinguished from a "long-form" Certificate of Live Birth, the "short-form" Certification of Live Birth issued by Hawaii and posted online by the Obama campaign isn't a "real" or "valid" birth certificate.

EXAMPLE:
Personal message from a reader dated Oct. 28, 2008:
[T]he Obama campaign did finally present a document which they claimed validated his eligibility (per the Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section I) as a "Natural born citizen" to have his name on the ballot in contention for the office of the President of the United States of America. However, contrary to what the few media outlets who are giving this outrageous claim any attention at all have concurred, what the Obama campaign supplied was not, in fact, a "birth certificate". What they supplied was actually a "Certificate of Live Birth." There is a major difference between a "birth certificate" and a "Certificate of Live Birth." Aside from the level of detail differentiating the documents (hospital of record, doctor, height, weight, etc) - in the state of Hawaii, one authenticates natural born citizenship, and the other doesn't.
STATUS: FALSE. According to both the Hawaii state government website and a June 6, 2009 article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the computer-generated Certification of Live Birth is the only kind of birth record now issued by the state (original records are stored electronically), so the distinction between "short-form" and "long-form" is moot. When a citizen of Hawaii requests a certified copy of his or her birth certificate from the state, a Certification of Live Birth — what people are calling the "short-form," and what Obama released to the public — is what they get. According to Hawaii Health Department spokesperson Janice Okubo, a COLB contains "all the information needed by all federal government agencies for transactions requiring a birth certificate."

.....Where did I say Obama isn't a citizen? I was making a point about his reluctance to put an issue to bed by flashing his papers the same way people say Romney should. Or are you cool with the tune, "if [he/she] has nothing to hide, then prove it" for any given accusation?

MEM is trying to argue that simply because Obama provided one document that-that negates the demand for another--as if the principle behind that and Romney's case was truly any different.

4 Pinocchios for Obama’s newest anti-Romney ad



Posted by Glenn Kessler
6:00 AM ET, 06/21/2012
TheWashingtonPost

[youtube video]
“Running for governor, Mitt Romney campaigned as a job creator. But as a corporate raider, he shipped jobs to China and Mexico. As governor, he did the same thing: Outsourcing state jobs to India.”

— Voiceover of new Barack Obama campaign ad


The Obama campaign apparently loves to ding former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney with the charge of “outsourcing.” On several occasions, we have faulted the campaign for its claims, apparently to little avail.

Now, all of the claims have been combined in one 30-second ad, with the added incendiary charge that Romney was a “corporate raider.” Let’s look anew at this material.


The Facts


The phrase “corporate raider” has a particular meaning in the world of finance. Here’s the definition on Investopedia:


“An investor who buys a large number of shares in a corporation whose assets appear to be undervalued. The large share purchase would give the corporate raider significant voting rights, which could then be used to push changes in the company’s leadership and management. This would increase share value and thus generate a massive return for the raider.”

In other words, this is generally an adversarial stance, in which an investor sees an undervalued asset and forces management to spin off assets, take the company private or break it up.

In a previous life, The Fact Checker covered renowned corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and his ilk. We also have closely studied Bain Capital and can find no examples that come close to this situation; its deals were done in close association with management. Indeed, Bain generally held onto its investments for four or five years, in contrast to the quick bust-em-ups of real corporate raiders. So calling Romney a “corporate raider” is a real stretch.

So how does the Obama campaign justify this phrase? It cites a single Reuters story from last August, about a campaign stop in New Hampshire, written by a stringer. Buried in the article is a reference to Romney as a “former corporate raider.”

“Reuters typically refers to Romney as a ‘former private equity executive’ or something along those lines,” said Ros Krasny, the Boston bureau chief. “Of the hundreds of times we have referenced Romney over the past year or more, honestly, that example from [the stringer] must have just slipped through the net — 10 months ago.”

A better source for Romney’s behavior as an investor might be someone who actually worked on Wall Street, such as former Obama auto czar Steven Rattner. “Bain Capital is not now, nor has it ever been, some kind of Gordon Gekko-like, fire-breathing corporate raider that slashed and burned companies, immolating jobs wherever they appear in its path,” Rattner wrote in Politico this year.

Regarding the outsourcing claims, we have frowned on these before. The Obama campaign rests its case on three examples of Bain-controlled companies sending jobs overseas. But only one of the examples — involving Holson Burns Group — took place when Romney was actively managing Bain Capital.

Regarding the other claims, concerning Canadian electronics maker SMTC Manufacturing and customer service firm Modus Media, the Obama campaign tries to take advantage of a gray area in which Romney had stepped down from Bain — to manage the Salt Lake City Olympics — but had not sold his shares in the firm. We had previously given the Obama campaign Three Pinocchios for such tactics.

The Modus Media case is also not an example of shipping jobs overseas. The company closed one plant in California and transferred the jobs to North Carolina, Washington and Utah. At the same time, it opened an unrelated plant in Mexico. The Obama campaign once trumpeted the fact that we had dinged a conservative Super PAC for making the same leap in logic.

The claim that Romney outsourced jobs as governor is equally overblown.

This concerns Romney’s veto of a bill that would have prohibited Massachusetts from contracting with companies that outsourced the state’s work to other countries. Lawmakers were especially concerned about a $160,000-a-month contract with Citigroup to operate a system of electronic food-stamp cards that included a customer phone service center in India.

Both the liberal editorial page of the Boston Globe and conservative editorial page of the Boston Herald urged Romney to veto the amendment, saying it would cost the state money. Romney agreed, saying the measure did not protect state jobs — the call center might have moved from India to another state — but “had the potential of costing our citizens a lot more money.” The Democratic-dominated Massachusetts legislature did not override his veto, even though it overturned 117 others, suggesting that there was little real support for the measure.

When the food-stamp contract expired, the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance insisted that those jobs be returned to the United States. But they ended up in a call center based in Utah — just as Romney had predicted.

As we mentioned, we recounted this ancient Massachusetts history before, giving the campaign Two Pinocchios. So we were very surprised that the Obama campaign cited that critical Fact Checker column as a source for the ad in its back-up materials.

The ad also cites as a source a Boston Globe article from last month that merely reports on an earlier ad making similar charges. That’s highly circular reasoning — and is not fair play.

Upon hearing this ad was under consideration for a tough rating, the Obama campaign supplied reams of additional SEC documents regarding Romney’s ownership in Bain after he left for the Olympics, most of which we had examined previously when we first looked at this question. The campaign also supplied SEC documents showing that two of these companies, Modus and SMTC, as well as one called Stream International (a predecessor of Modus), earned money in part by helping other companies subcontract work overseas. Some of this business predated Romney’s departure from Bain, but thus far it seems a slim case for this particular ad.

“Romney can’t run from his record. At Bain and in Massachusetts, he had the chance to keep jobs in America and sent them overseas instead,” said Kara Carscaden, deputy press secretary for the Obama campaign. “Even while he was at the Olympics, Romney owned and profited from Bain, continues to profit from it today and cannot ignore what Bain did during that time. Whether it’s outsourcing public jobs to India or shipping private ones to Mexico and China, Romney’s record is clear.”




The Pinocchio Test


The Obama campaign fails to make its case. On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue, from the use of “corporate raider” to its examples of alleged outsourcing. Simply repeating the same debunked claims won’t make them any more correct.


[awarded: ] Four Pinocchios

M E M really shouldn't have brought up Factcheck sites...

4 Pinocchios for an unproven Romney claim of ‘crony capitalism’
Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:02 AM ET, 07/18/2012 TheWashingtonPost
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“I am ashamed to say that we’re seeing our president hand out money to the businesses of campaign contributors, when he gave money, $500 million in loans to a company called Fisker that makes high end electric cars, and they make the cars now in Finland. That is wrong and it’s got to stop. That kind of crony capitalism does not create jobs and it does not create jobs here.”

— Mitt Romney, Irwin, Pa., July 17, 2012

Hoping to turn attention away from questions about his departure from Bain Capital a decade ago, Mitt Romney this week has sought to focus attention on what he calls President Obama’s “crony capitalism.” We have dealt with this charge before, but this week it seems the Romney campaign has upped the ante, trying to make a connection between the president’s contributors and the president’s policies.

We will deal with some of these claims in more detail at a later date, but today we will look at the question of Fisker Automotive. This case keeps coming up, and it really feels like whack-a-mole. Romney now has raised the stakes by asserting a connection between the loan and campaign contributors. And his campaign was sufficiently proud of his statement that it e-mailed it to reporters.



The Facts


Fisker has developed a luxury plug-in electric sedan called the Karma that retails for $108,000, currently manufactured in Finland. It hopes to develop a $50,000 sedan named the Atlantic that would be manufactured in Delaware.

Earlier this week, Romney aides held a briefing for reporters. Senior adviser Ed Gillespie singled out John Doerr, a wealthy venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who was instrumental in funding Netscape, Amazon, Google and other Internet companies.

“You know you have John Doerr who raised a lot of money for President Obama, you know, got appointed to an economic recovery advisory board,” Gillespie said. “And, then, his firm had a big investment in Fisker Automotive which got over half a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy, which did not result in jobs being created in America, but actually jobs being created overseas in Finland, but Kleiner Perkins did quite well.”

Gillespie appears to be suggesting that because Doerr raised money for Obama, he was rewarded with a big loan for a company in which his firm invested. But the logic is more the political equivalent of bank shot in pool — and the ball doesn’t quite get in the pocker.

First of all, the Kleiner partner mostly closely associated with the Fisker investment is Ray Lane, who features the Fisker logo on his Kleiner Web page. There’s even a YouTube clip of him getting into his Karma sedan.


The contributions database at OpenSecrets.org shows that Lane contributes to some Democrats but mostly Republicans — and he gave money to Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain in 2008, not Barack Obama or other Democrats running for president. He also contributed to George W. Bush in 2003 and Bob Dole in 1995. (However, he has praised the Obama administration for its willingness to back alternative energy ventures, saying it would be “silly” to think an automobile company could be created without government help.)

And speaking of Kleiner, a regular contributor to Romney and a $100,000 contributor to Romney’s SuperPAC Restore Our Future is Meg Whitman, the database shows. Whitman, now chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, was a strategic advisor to Kleiner in 2011.

UPDATE: Doerr was not absent from the issue. We should have noted that Doerr is listed on Kleiner’s “Greentech” team, that he testified before Congress in January, 2009, on investing in green technology as a strategy for economic recovery, and Time magazine reported that Obama relied on advice from Doerr and and other green-energy advocates, just as the Bush administration relied on advice from representatives of the oil, natural-gas and coal industries.

Meanwhile, the actual announcement of Kleiner’s investment took place before Obama became president. Here’s part of an Associated Press account, under the headline “E-car startups try to compete with major companies”:

Fisker raised more than $90 million in venture capital in 2008, the company said. Its investors include top venture capital firms such as California-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, of which former Vice President Al Gore is a partner, and Palo Alto Investors.
Tesla [a rival auto company] has raised at least $165 million since 2006, according to estimates by analysts, and its top investors include Musk, former eBay Inc. President Jeffrey Skoll, and Google Inc.’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Tesla announced $40 million in financing in November to expand its powertrain venture and continue development.
Both are seeking significant funding from the Energy Department’s $25 billion loan program to develop advanced vehicles. The outgoing Bush administration has not yet announced any awards.
In other words, Kleiner raised venture capital for Fisker before Obama became president. Moreover, Fisker had applied for a loan under the Bush administration.

The loan was approved by the Obama administration, but unlike the situation with Solyndra that we have previously detailed, Fisker received its loan under the original Bush program. The announcement details how the first part of the loan, $169 million, would be used to work “with primarily U.S. suppliers to complete the company’s first vehicle, the Fisker Karma.” The second part of the loan, $359.36 million, will be used for “the manufacture of a plug-in hybrid in the U.S.”

Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher said the Energy Department knew from the beginning that the Karma cars would be produced in Finland, by a contract manufacturer, with about 50 percent of the value of the car sourced from American suppliers. He said the entire loan has been used for design and engineering work in the United States, and the actual production in Finland was paid for by private investors.

Still, as The Washington Post has documented, Fisker is a troubled company. The General Accounting Office has also raised questions about the Energy Department’s ability to manage the loans.

But, contrary to Romney’s suggestion, Fisker has not received $500 million because much of the second tranche of its loan was suspended by the Energy Department after the company missed deadlines. Ormisher said the company has drawn down $193 million of the $529 million loan, but has raised $1 billion from private investors. He said that accountants and the Energy Department had independently verified that all of the government loan money was spent in the United States. He also said the company intends to pay back the loan with interest, and is in negotiations with the Energy Department for the suspension of the remaining monies to be lifted.

The loan suspension did result in a couple dozen layoffs at what is hoped to be a Delaware manufacturing plant. But about 1,000 Karmas have been sold, Ormisher said, resulting in $100 million in revenue. He said at least 500 jobs had been created in the United States as a result of the Energy Department loan.

The Romney campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Romney’s misleading history of tax returns issued by presidential contenders
Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:00 AM ET, 07/17/2012 TheWashingtonPost
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(Evan Vucci/AP - AP)
“John McCain ran for president and released two years of tax returns. John Kerry ran for president; you know, his wife, who has hundreds of millions of dollars, she never released her tax returns. Somehow this wasn’t an issue.”

— Mitt Romney, on Fox News, July 16, 2012

“It's standard for the last Republican nominee, the last Democratic nominee.”

— Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” July 15, 2012, answering a question on why Romney will release only two years of tax returns.

In trying to fend off demands — from both Democrats and even some Republicans — that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney release more than two years of tax returns, his campaign has sought to claim that releasing two years of tax returns is normal. (Romney so far has released his 2010 return and an estimate for his 2011 return.)

Is that really the case? Let’s check out Gillespie’s claim, presumably about McCain and President Obama, and Romney’s claim that the tax returns of Teresa Heinz Kerry were “not an issue.”




The Facts


The Tax History Project run by TaxAnalysts has a fascinating Web page with the tax returns of presidents and presidential candidates, dating all the way back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. McCain, it is correct, released two years of tax returns, but Obama released seven years of tax returns.

Looking over the years at Obama’s returns, one can see how he suddenly became a wealthy man in 2005 from sales of his reissued memoir. In that year, he earned more than $1 million in income from book sales.

So Gillespie is simply wrong to claim that it is standard for the “last Democratic nominee.” (The Romney campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

In fact, McCain is really the exception. John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000, George W. Bush in 2000, Bob Dole in 1996, Bill Clinton in 1992 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 all released many years of tax returns when they ran for president against the incumbent, either at the time or because they had routinely released tax returns while in public office. (There was no incumbent in 2000.) Dole, in fact, released tax returns for a whopping 30 years.

Of course, Romney’s father, George Romney, is famous for having released 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in 1968, saying “one year could be a fluke.” As BuzzFeed showed, he paid an effective tax rate of 50 percent — those were days before the Reagan tax cuts.

And what of Kerry’s wife? Romney must have missed the controversy, largely fanned by Republicans, about her tax returns, in which they darkly suggested that she was secretly funding her husband’s presidential campaign. (She inherited the Heinz fortune from her late husband, and it was worth at least $500 million.)

A quick check of the clips shows that it was rather big issue, so much so that she eventually made public the first two pages of her 2003 return.

That was not enough for Republicans, who wanted an even broader look. Amusingly, we see that the Wall Street Journal editorial page complained that, with an effective tax rate of 12.4 percent, “she is paying a lower average rate than nearly all middle-class taxpayers paid in 2001” — similar to the line that the Obama campaign has been using about Romney’s tax rate.

Romney, in his Senate race against Ted Kennedy in 1994, demanded that Kennedy release his tax returns, and Kennedy refused. In his 2002 race for governor, Romney cited Kennedy’s refusal, quoting him as saying, “I value my privacy.” Romney added: “I think he was right and I was wrong.” He never released his tax returns in that campaign.

However, Romney did provide the McCain campaign with 23 years’ worth of tax returns as part of the vetting process for being considered for vice president. Those returns were not released publicly. The Romney tax returns for the years 2008 and 2009, which he has not released or shared with others, would reflect his earnings during the depths of the recent economic crisis.




The Pinocchio Test


McCain did release two years of tax returns, but the Romney campaign is being misleading with its suggestions that releasing two years of tax returns is some sort of standard for presidential contenders. Two years is actually the exception — only one challenger out of the last seven presidential nominees has released just two years of returns.

Moreover, Romney is wrong to suggest that releasing the tax returns of Kerry’s wife “wasn’t an issue” in the 2004 campaign. It was a big issue, because Republicans made it one.


Three Pinocchios

4 Pinocchios for Romney’s claim on an Obama health care pledge
Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:00 AM ET, 07/03/2012 TheWashingtonPost
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(mittromney.com) “Promise: President Obama promised to lower annual health insurance premiums by $2,500…Result: Annual health insurance premiums have increased by $2,393....Gap: health premium costs are $4,893 higher per family than President Obama promised.”

— new Facebook/Twitter post by the Romney campaign

Promises made during the heat of an election campaign sometimes come back to haunt politicians.

The campaign of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is trying to nail President Obama for making an iffy promise during the 2008 campaign — that premiums will be $2,500 lower under his health care plan. Instead, the Romney campaign argues in an effort to create a viral Facebook post, the swing has gone $4,893 the other way.

The Romney graphic is false on several levels, though Obama certainly left himself open to scrutiny with imprecise language in the 2008 campaign. Let’s take a look.


The Facts


The Romney campaign cites a statement from a 2007 speech by Obama, but it’s a pledge that was repeated often: “When I am president, we will have universal health care in this country by the end of my first term in office. It's a plan that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family's premiums by $2,500 a year.”


This particular quote is not very clear on when the savings would be realized, but in another speech, in 2008, Obama suggested it would be at the end of his first term — though to be fair, it is not clear if he is talking about the savings or enacting a new health care law:

“In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year. And we'll do it by investing in disease prevention, not just disease management; by investing in a paperless health care system to reduce administrative costs; and by covering every single American and making sure that they can take their health care with them if they lose their job. We'll also reduce costs for business and their workers by picking up the tab for some of the most expensive illnesses. And we won't do all this twenty years from now, or ten years from now. We'll do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States.”
The details of this number were further explained in an Obama campaign memo:



“Combining all of these effects — from improved health IT [information technology], better disease management, reduced insurance overhead, reinsurance, and reduced uncompensated care — under our “best-guess” assumptions, we estimate that businesses will save $140 billion annually in insurance premiums. The typical family will save $2500 per year.”

But note that Obama’s pledge came with an asterisk: He was not saying premiums would fall by that amount, as the Romney graphic asserts, but that costs would be that much lower than anticipated. In other words, if premiums were expected to rise by $5,000, they would only rise by $2,500 — that’s what Obama’s pledge meant, even if he was not too clear about it.

Michael Dobbs, our predecessor as The Fact Checker, awarded Obama Two Pinocchios for the pledge, saying it was based on shaky assumptions (such as a Rand Corp. study that was criticized by the Congressional Budget Office) and there was no guarantee that any savings would be passed on to consumers. Our colleagues at FactCheck.org also thought Obama’s pledge was highly dubious.

Of course, once Obama became president, the health care proposal he advocated as a candidate was significantly changed, even to the point of accepting the individual mandate that he had so criticized when Hillary Rodham Clinton promoted it. But the White House more or less stuck to the idea that costs would not rise as quickly as previously estimated — except that it would result in $2,000 in savings by 2019. (Recall also that the health care law will not be implemented until 2014, making a first-term pledge problematic.)

Now, let’s look at what the Romney campaign has done with the pledge. First, it assumes that Obama was saying that premiums would actually decline by $2,500, rather than decline from a projected increase. Then, it takes the 2011 Kaiser Family Foundation survey estimate (Exhibit 1.11) and subtracts the cost of a 2008 family premium ($12,680) from the cost of a 2011 premium ($15,073). Viola, an increase of $2,393—and a promise gap of $4,893.

The Romney campaign’s math is nonsensical. First of all, the Kaiser survey is conducted from January to May each year, so starting with the 2008 date makes little sense, since that is still George W. Bush’s term. Then the health care law was not passed until 2010, so the first year in which any impact could be seen from the law was in 2011.

But, as the Kaiser report notes, most of the provisions of the new law will not take effect in 2014. Thus far, other provisions, such as providing coverage for adult children up to age 26, appear to have had a modest impact on premiums--perhaps 1 to 2 percentage points. (The White House disputes even that effect.) Still, the full effect on premiums — including any possible savings — will not be seen until the law is completely implemented.

We had previously given the Republican National Committee Three Pinocchios for an ad that had focused on the single data point — the increase in premiums from 2010 to 2011 — and blamed all of the increase on the health care law. Now the Romney campaign has quadrupled the same error in an effort to claim that “health premium costs are $4,893 higher per family than President Obama promised.”


The Pinocchio Test


Obama in 2008 made a foolish, dubious pledge about health care premiums. As we have noted, he will have to answer to Americans if his law fails to live up to that promise by 2019 or if people feel misled by his lawyerly wording. He was warned when he got Two Pinocchios back in 2008.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. The Romney campaign has twisted the meaning of that pledge, and then blamed a partially implemented, one-year-old law for three years of premium increases, in order to concoct an absurd claim.

I can see why you would think that.

‘Anglo-Saxon’ comment hangs over Romney in Britain
By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, July 25, 2012 17:33 EDT Share on facebookShare on redditShare on diggShare on twitterShare on farkShare on stumbleupon20 Topics: mitt romney ♦ romney

WASHINGTON — The start of Mitt Romney’s foreign tour was overshadowed Wednesday by a reported remark by an aide that President Barack Obama doesn’t understand the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” shared by Britain and the United States.

The Republican White House hopeful’s campaign scrambled to deny that one of its operatives had told a British newspaper that Romney, unlike Obama, understands the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” underpinning the so-called special relationship with Britain.

In the context of previous jibes that the Democratic incumbent, the United States’ first black leader, does not understand American values and business practice, the latest alleged comments were seen as racially charged.


But Romney campaign spokeswoman Amanda Hennenberg said in a statement that the British report was mistaken.

“It’s not true,” she said. “If anyone said that, they weren’t reflecting the views of governor Romney or anyone inside the campaign.”

British newspaper The Daily Telegraph said it had interviewed two Romney advisers who said their man would be better than President Barack Obama at reinforcing the special bond between the United States and Britain.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” an unnamed adviser told the Telegraph. “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

...

Rolling with the G-Man on this one. We can talk about the successive waves of other European and non-European cultures into the USA. That's fine and dandy. It still doesn't change the fact that we started off as 13 fucking English colonies and that much of our customs and ideas on the government are deeply steeped in that heritage. Fuck, you aren't even guaranteed a trial by jury of your peers in freaking France!

There's a difference though from talking about a shared Anglo-Saxon heritage between two countries and saying Obama doesn't understand that heritage. Why would Obama as a fellow American understand that heritage any less than Romney?