Romney says Komen shouldn’t give money to Planned Parenthood - and neither should the govt
By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, February 6, 2012 10:20 PM
WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he doesn’t think a prominent breast cancer charity should continue giving grants to Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion services.
The Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer charity had announced it would cut funds to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening, then dropped those plans after a public backlash last week.
On Monday, Romney told conservative radio host Scott Hennen that he didn’t think Komen should continue giving money to Planned Parenthood. Romney says the government should stop giving Planned Parenthood money, too.
A spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, Stephanie Cutter, called Romney’s comments “the ultimate hypocrisy” because as governor of Massachusetts he supported the same birth-control policy that President Barack Obama supports.
Romney once supported abortion rights but now opposes abortion.
Margaret Chase Smith arrived at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in July 1964. Smith Library/Associated Press
By JAMIE STIEHM February 2, 2012, 12:54 am
In the winter line-up of Republican presidential candidates, a moderate pro-choice Republican woman has no choice. She might feel as if she were so, well, last century.
It is not news that the Republican Party has moved further right on social issues over the past few decades, but the 2012 campaign is a clear marker showing that the party has left legal abortion behind. All the contenders, past and present, adamantly oppose legal abortion, even the libertarian obstetrician-gynecologist, Ron Paul. Overturning legal abortion may in fact be the one thing they all agree on — so it doesn’t come up much in debates, speeches or interviews. But it is on their agenda.
The one woman in the race, Michele Bachmann, made her anti-abortion views known more strongly than most before dropping out after the Iowa caucuses. At a debate in December [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/with-gingrich-away-bachmann-makes-play-for-iowa/ ], she chastised Gingrich for missing a chance to “defund” Planned Parenthood when he was speaker of the House. Then Bachmann pressed Gingrich harder still for supporting House candidates who favor keeping late-term abortions legal: “He said he would support and campaign for Republicans that support the barbaric practice of ‘partial birth’ abortion,” Bachmann said. “I would never do that.”
Early on, at summer forums before a vote was cast, Rick Santorum staked out the most extreme ground: requiring women and girls who are victims of rape or incest to carry a pregnancy to term. “To put them through another trauma of an abortion, I think is too much to ask,” he declared at an Iowa presidential debate. “One violence is enough.” In June, Santorum told David Gregory on Meet the Press that doctors who performed abortions in cases of rape or incest should be criminally charged [ http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/06/santorum-all-abortion-doctors-should-be-criminally-charged/html ].
For two generations of American women, Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision, defined abortion as a private individual decision. Broadly speaking, polls show the American public lives with this framework and is not looking for a fight to tear it down. But a recent Pew Research Center poll [ http://www.people-press.org/2011/05/04/section-8-domestic-issues-and-social-policy/html ] shows that the question is a close call, with 54% of the public supporting legal abortion in most or all cases and 42% of the public opposed to legal abortion in most or all cases. The numbers show that the argument over abortion remains divisive, but also that there is an uneasy equilibrium.
Even Jon Huntsman, supposedly the Republican who was most appealing to Democrats, signed a law when he was governor of Utah to outlaw most abortions if Roe v. Wade were overturned. Running for president, he liked to say that two of his daughters were adopted and that he was grateful to their mothers for bearing them. Lest he seem soft next to the rest, Huntsman reminded voters [ http://2012.republican-candidates.org/Huntsman/Abortion.php ] of the “trigger” law: “I signed the bill that would trigger the ban on abortion in Utah if Roe v. Wade were overturned.”
Mitt Romney, the winner in Florida and now the clear front-runner, was pro-choice when he ran against the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1994, although Romney was personally against abortion. During a debate with Romney, Kennedy remarked, “I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple-choice [ http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/us/the-1994-campaign-excerpt-from-debate-by-kennedy-and-romney.html ].” During the same debate, Romney said, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal. I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S Senate candidate.”
Romney also spoke with sorrow about a death in the family from an illegal abortion. By 2002, however, when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he presented himself as a “pro-life” politician who would not change the pro-choice laws of the liberal state he would govern. In the last decade, Romney has become more outspoken in his opposition to abortion, though as a “pro-life president” he says he’d make exceptions for rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.
Romney likes to brag about how many years he has been married (42), in a not-so-subtle dig at the thrice-wed Newt Gingrich. The race’s most mercurial candidate, Gingrich never presented himself as a feminist, far from it. In private, his messy divorces do not hold up well to scrutiny from any direction. Women voters in Florida substantially favored Romney. Gingrich’s opposition to abortion rights, always solid, became more aggressive over the course of the campaign. To the surprise of some, he took a “personhood” movement pledge [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/28/gingrich-perry-bachmann-and-santorum-go-extreme-on-abortion.html ] to oppose abortion, with no exceptions.
More significant in shaping the Republican stance toward women was Gingrich’s Contract with America, which lifted him to the perch of House Speaker in 1995. The Contract with America cut women out of the picture of Republican policy and rhetoric. As it turns out, the contract was a harbinger of a wave in Republican politics that is regathering its strength this winter.
On the Republican campaign trail, all candidates ever talk about when they talk about women is abortion – and to some extent, marriage and motherhood. That reduces Republican women primary voters down to a simple equation. This silence — or absence of political dialogue — on women takes a while to notice, but it is plainly there. With abortion a hot topic that Republicans prefer to avoid in front of large national audiences, women seem scarce and even invisible. Yet they are a majority of the American electorate.
Early in the campaign, workplace issues like sexual harassment flickered only when allegations of improper sexual conduct toward women colleagues caused Herman Cain’s downfall.
By contrast, whatever he did in his personal life, President Clinton brought a sound grasp of women’s lives to the stump and to the Oval Office. The first bill he signed into law, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, was a huge gift to working women. President Obama signed the pay equity act named for Lilly Ledbetter [ http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1874954,00.html ]. His affordable health care act would make birth control more freely available.
Republicanism has not always been this way, even recently. Constance Morella, a popular Republican pro-choice congresswoman from Maryland, represented a liberal district, but was defeated in 2002 by a Democrat, Chris Van Hollen. There are not many more like her on the House side.
Margaret Chase Smith, a senator from Maine, the grand old dame of the Republican party, wore a rose every day, including on the first of June in 1950 when she gave the brave, brilliant “Declaration of Conscience” speech [ http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/margaretchasesmithconscience.html ] she is best know for, denouncing her fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. Beforehand, she saw McCarthy on the Senate trolley car, looked him in the eye, and told him he would not like what he was about to hear. Smith ran for president in 1964; she lost her seat in the senate in 1972, after serving four terms.
What would she say about Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann — the two leading Republican women during the campaigns of 2008 and 2012 — and their brand of Christian right politics?
Senator Smith’s memory in the Capitol building lingers. She gave New England Republican women a proud name. To this day, Maine’s senators are both Republican pro-choice women, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
Out of five Republican women in the Senate, Snowe and Collins may be the last of the moderates. Seen as period pieces from a lost Republicanism, they are vulnerable to challenges from their right. Snowe, up for re-election this fall, is a target of the Tea Party movement. If she loses, Republican women will have even less choice.
Was the Super Bowl ad featuring Clint Eastwood, “It’s Halftime In America,” a Chrysler ad or an Obama re-election ad?
Confusion abounded.
After all, the spot seemed to tout the success of the auto bailouts, which the four remaining Republican presidential candidates were against. Halftime is also an easy metaphor for a president who’s nearing the end of one term but seeking a second.
@CharlesMBlow Charles M. Blow Some of you make a good point: Did David Axelrod find a way to sneak an Obama re-election ad into the Superbowl? #Clint Mon Feb 6 1:25:14 via Charles M. Blow
This is a sign of what happens when you have the government getting in bed with big business like the bailout of the auto companies. They begin to, the leadership of the auto companies feel they need to do something to repay their political patrons. Remember, we lost $1.8 billion as taxpayers on the government bailout of Chrysler, and we’re going to lose $14 billion in the bailout of Chrysler and General Motors. And you got to bet in the boardrooms and management suites of these two big car companies, they are saying to themselves, “Look, the president bailed us out rather than making us go through the normal bankruptcy, he bailed us out. We’re going to end up not having to pay back this money to the taxpayers.”
Rove went on to say:
This is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising and the best wishes of the management, which is benefited by getting a bunch of our money that they’ll never pay back.
We shouldn’t be bailing out the banks and car companies. If a C.E.O. can’t figure out how to make his company profitable, then he shouldn’t be the C.E.O.
There is a lot of confusion swirling around under that furrowed brow.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to Rove’s deceptive lateral pass of all the Chrysler bailout blame to the Obama administration.
The Detroit News was quick to point out yesterday that it was George W. Bush who stroked the first check to Chrysler.
Rove didn’t mention that it was Bush who first agreed to save Chrysler. How convenient. Chrysler nearly collapsed in late 2008 under private equity ownership. Bush agreed to a $4 billion bailout of the company.
Chrysler received $4 billion on Jan. 2, 2009, (18 days before Obama took office) and $8.5 billion on April 30 (when Obama was president), according to this Government Accountability Office report [ http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10151.pdf ] (page 9) on TARP.
FactCheck.org went on to outline what happened next, citing a Government Accountability Office report issued on May 10:
When Chrysler filed for bankruptcy [ http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/30/news/companies/chrysler_bankruptcy/index.htm ] on April 30, 2009, the “new Chrysler” that emerged assumed only some of the $4 billion loaned by the Bush administration. In a new report [ http://www.gao.gov/htext/d11471.html ] issued last month, the G.A.O. explained that Treasury — under the Obama administration — “wrote off $1.6 billion” of the “original $4 billion loan extended to the old Chrysler.”
As of May, Chrysler had “returned more than $10.6 billion of that amount to taxpayers through principal repayments, interest and cancelled commitments.” However, Treasury conceded that it “is unlikely to fully recover its remaining outstanding investment of $1.9 billion in Chrysler.”
The federal government on Thursday shed the last of its stake in Chrysler, giving majority control of the carmaker to Fiat, the Italian company, while leaving taxpayers $1.3 billion short of recovering the full investment they made two years ago to keep Chrysler from going out of business.
The article continued:
The Treasury Department said in a statement [ http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg1253.aspx ] that it had recovered $11.2 billion of the $12.5 billion it lent to Chrysler and that it would write off the bulk of the balance. The unpaid portion is on the balance sheet of the “old Chrysler” — a collection of unwanted assets being liquidated in bankruptcy.
In all, the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, Mich., reckons the government’s bailouts of the U.S. auto industry spared more than 1.14 million jobs in 2009, and prevented ‘additional personal income losses’ of nearly $97 billion in 2009 and 2010. Another 314,400 jobs were saved in 2010. The research organization based its conclusions on the potential impact of auto-industry collapse for jobs at U.S. automakers and suppliers, and ripple effects on the economy at large.
When viewed this way, a $1.3 billion loss, or as Rove puts it a $1.8 billion loss, is negligible and well worth it.
Trying to eschew Bush’s role in order to tarnish Obama’s results is fundamentally dishonest.
Trying to put the bailouts or the loss solely on Obama is simply dishonest.
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