Pro-Gingrich SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, has launched MittsBloodMoney.com, showing the 7:42 minute mini-documentary called Blood Money.
Under "The Document's heading, the site explains:
Debating in Tampa, Florida in late-January, while falsely characterizing Newt Gingrich’s income from his government consulting work, Mitt Romney denied that Bain did “any work with the government like Medicaid and Medicare”. Now we learn that Bain, under Romney’s “supervision”, purchased and ran the Damon Corporation, who pled guilty to Federal conspiracy charges as a result of tens of millions of dollars in systemic Medicare fraud committed under Romney’s and Bain’s control. Damon was fined over $119-million which was, at the time, the largest criminal healthcare fine in Massachusetts history and Mr. Romney’s participation was characterized in 1996 by Corporate Crime Reporter thusly: “As manager and board member of Damon Corp, Mitt Romney sits at the center of one of the top 15 corporate crimes of the 1990’s.” Watch the substantiated mini-documentary, BLOOD MONEY: MITT ROMNEY’S MEDICARE SCANDAL, to learn the truth about Mitt Romney.
Video below:
PolitiFact takes the statement of the BloodMoney video above "While Romney was a director of the Damon Corporation, the company was defrauding Medicare of millions," and rates it "mostly true".
The ad claims that, "While Romney was a director of the Damon Corporation, the company was defrauding Medicare of millions." That's true, but Romney was never implicated personally with the fraudulent activity at the company, and it was one of many companies with which Bain was involved. It’s also difficult to assess whether Romney knew about the fraud or should have known, and what he did to stop it. So the statement is correct but leaves out context. We rate this statement Mostly True.
WapoFact Checker takes a look at the mini film and concludes:
The Damon case is certainly a valid subject for scrutiny of Romney’s business record. He was on the company’s board at the time criminal fraud was taking place, and his statements about his knowledge of the federal investigation have been inconsistent. But the film goes too far in suggesting that Romney was responsible for running the company — or that he sold it to avoid a federal probe.
Fact Check gives it two Pinocchios after that conclusion.
PolitiFact addresses the massive liberal criticism after PolitiFact named the "lie of the Year 2011" to be the Democrats' statement that "Republicans voted to end Medicare."
PolitFact, in the same piece, provides links to two other fact check organizations that found that very same statement to be untrue. One being The Washington Post's The Fact Checker which named that statement and others from both Republicans and Democrats in their "The biggest Pinocchios of 2011," piece and the other was FactCheck.org who named it a "Democratic Whopper."
Via PolitiFact:
PolitiFact had its latest brush with the Echo Chamber Nation this week. We gave our Lie of the Year to the Democrats' claim that the Republicans "voted to end Medicare." That set off a firestorm in the liberal blogosphere, with many saying that claim was not actually wrong. We've received about 1,500 e-mails about our choice and only a few agreed with us.
Some of the response has been substantive and thoughtful. The critics said we ignored the long-term effects of Rep. Paul Ryan's plan and that we were wrong to consider his privatized approach to be Medicare. In their view, that is an end to Medicare.
We've read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.
Our competitors FactCheck.org and the Washington Post's FactChecker had also said the Medicare claim was false — and this week both picked it for their biggest-falsehoods-of-the-year lists.
Some of our critics wrongly attributed our choice to our readers' poll and said we were swayed by a lobbying campaign by Ryan. But our editors made the choice and the poll was not a factor.
PolitiFact has issued their 2011 "Lie of the Year", naming the Democrats' claim that "Republicans voted to end Medicare."
Background:
Republicans muscled a budget through the House of Representatives in April that they said would take an important step toward reducing the federal deficit. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the plan kept Medicare intact for people 55 or older, but dramatically changed the program for everyone else by privatizing it and providing government subsidies.
Democrats pounced. Just four days after the party-line vote, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a Web ad that said seniors will have to pay $12,500 more for health care "because Republicans voted to end Medicare."
Rep. Steve Israel of New York, head of the DCCC, appeared on cable news shows and declared that Republicans voted to "terminate Medicare." A Web video from the Agenda Project, a liberal group, said the plan would leave the country "without Medicare" and showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. And just last month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a fundraising appeal that said: "House Republicans’ vote to end Medicare is a shameful act of betrayal."
After two years of being pounded by Republicans with often false charges about the 2010 health care law, the Democrats were turning the tables.
PolitiFact reports that they debunked the claim in nine different fact-checks, rating those Democrats' claims "False" or "Pants on Fire" in each instance.
Findings:
• They ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare -- or even the people 55 to 65 who would join the program in the next 10 years.
• They used harsh terms such as "end" and "kill" when the program would still exist, although in a privatized system.
• They used pictures and video of elderly people who clearly were too old to be affected by the Ryan plan. The DCCC video that aired four days after the vote featured an elderly man who had to take a job as a stripper to pay his medical bills.
Despite the typical liberal justification for the outright lies from people like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and The New Republic, and their complaints claiming PolitiFact was wrong but they, the liberals, were right, PolitiFact shows that other fact-check organizations confirmed their own findings.
But PolitiFact was not alone. Other independent fact-checkers also said the claim was false.
"Medicare would remain an entitlement program, but it would also be more costly to future beneficiaries. It would not end," noted FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker concluded that while there’s "a worthwhile debate" about whether Ryan’s proposal should be adopted, "it is not true to claim Republicans are trying to ‘kill’ Medicare."
Predictably, some of those same liars are whining about PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year 2011."
According to polling on what Americans list as priorities, the federal deficit is listed in the top three in multiple polling from a variety of organizations, such as CBS News, New York Times, CNN and Bloomberg polling, just to name a few examples.
Other entitlement programs which include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Unemployment insurance, as of 2010, took up over 58 percent of America's expenses. (Chart below from Business Insider)
There is no doubt that our government's spending practice of spending more money than we have has led to historically high deficits and that current entitlement programs are unsustainable and further add to the deficit.
Using just Social Security as an example, FactCheck.org, via the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) own figures, has found that SS has "has passed a tipping point."
For years it generated more revenue than it consumed, holding down the overall federal deficit and allowing Congress to spend more freely for other things. But those days are gone. Rather than lessening the federal deficit, Social Security has at last — as long predicted — become a drag on the government’s overall finances.
As recently as October, CBO was projecting that it would be 2016 before outlays regularly exceed revenues. But Social Security’s fiscal troubles are more severe than was thought, and the latest projections show the permanent deficits started several years ahead of earlier predictions.
A deficit Supercommittee was created, a 12-member bi-partisan panel formed with the express purpose of making a deal that would reverse the country’s economic mess and reduce the deficit. The goal was to slash at least $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts
At the time the Supercommittee was formed, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee from 2004, said "The world is watching. And our strength at home determines our strength in the world."
Democratic co-chair of the Supercommittee, Senator Patty Murray of Washington stated "Many worry our government is broken. And at times, it’s easy to share their fear. The committee has the opportunity to show the American people we can still come together, put politics aside and solve a problem plaguing our country."
The Republican co-chair, sitting next to Murray, said "Will history record that we wrote the first chapter of America’s decline? Or will history record that we kept faith with the founding fathers and previous generations and left the next generation with greater blessings of liberty and vaults of limitless opportunities? The choice is ours, let the work begin."
Now, both parties are quickly trying to figure out how to turn the committee’s embarrassing failure into a political win for their side.
The Democratic message: We stood up to Republicans looking to gut Social Security, slash Medicare and permanently extend the Bush-era tax cuts for high income Americans.
The Republican counterattack: Democrats wanted little more than tax increases and refused to consider changes to deficit-driving health care entitlements. Both sides are positioning themselves as the party that compromised and sought a middle-ground.
Only one side of the political spectrum is applauding the failure of the Supercommittee to accomplish it's goals.
Judging by the reaction from the blogosphere, the deficit supercommittee’s failure is a victory for the left.
Liberal bloggers are praising the widely expected collapse in bipartisan talks and the apparent failure of supercommittee to come to an agreement on deficit reduction, noting that it was the best outcome that they could have hoped for.
Pretty much says it all right there. Liberals never wanted any reform of entitlements combined with a reduction of Government spending, which would require a "shared sacrifice." The only sacrifice Liberals propose is to raise taxes to continue to pay off the interest of money borrowed to support entitlement programs and government spending that is now at levels that cannot be sustained in the long term.
Contrary to much press coverage, the committee’s Republicans opened the door to compromise by abandoning — as they should have — opposition to tax increases. Sen. Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania proposed a tax “reform” that would raise income taxes by $250 billion over a decade. First, he would impose across-the-board reductions of most itemized deductions and use the resulting revenue gains to cut all tax rates. Next, he would adjust the rates for the top two brackets so that they’d be high enough to produce the $250 billion. All the tax increase would fall on people in the top brackets.
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin called Toomey’s proposal a “breakthrough.” With good reason: It came from a “no new taxes, over my dead body” Republican who had signed Grover Norquist’s pledge against any tax increases. But the details of Toomey’s plan are murky, and many Democrats claim that it would cut taxes for the rich. Democrats also didn’t respond with an equal concession: a willingness to deal with Social Security and Medicare.
Democrats never wanted the Supercommittee to succeed and their supporters have no problem admitting it.
Former three-term Republican Senator Judd Gregg asks "Where in the world is Obama?" when the Supercommittee came on to it's last days to offer a solution.
Conservatives are not the only ones asking that question either. H/T to Hot Air, we have a video of one of the Democratic members of the panel, Senator Joe Manchin, saying that Obama needed to do something, yet Obama didn't.
I was just watching Little Herman Munster's solution to A-merry-ca's budget problems. He calls his blue print "The Path to Prosperity". Little Herman wants to cut six trillion in spending from O's budget. (Because we all know that you black folks don't know how to spend money. I mean how many Cadillacs can you drive?)
Folks, make no mistake, Little Herman is going to give the business to almost 90% of the A-merry-can people to hook up a few of the republican's wealthy friends. (Think Koch brothers)
He says that his plan to...ahem ahem, revise Medicare and Medicaid, won't affect seniors over 55. But there will be some changes. Changes, of course, is a gross understatement. Folks, he would end Medicare and Medicair. (He would actually leave Medicaid to the states, so he would end it on the federal level.) Sorry grandma and grandpa, it's time to brush up on your greeting skills. Wal-Mart loves you guys. As for Social Security? You can kiss that good bye as well.
But, don't worry folks, if we adopt Little Herman's plan jobs will come back because corporations will be flush with cash and...wait, they are flush with cash now; where are the jobs? Anyway, thanks to Little Herman, we will balance the budget and insure that our children have a future...well, at least until we have to fight another war and spend all of our cash defending our shores against those evil Muslims, again.
I read a wonderful article today on the fight between the have and the have- nots in this country (h/t Greg Fuller), and you all would do well to read it as well:
"It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.." [More]
One thing I didn't hear Little Herman talk about was trying to raise revenue instead of cutting everything in sight. I was thinking that maybe a good way to raise revenue would be to tax some of these corporations and the rich folks who own and run them. I mean if grandma is going to sacrifice a bottle of her trazodone every month, why can't one of these fat- cats sacrifice a country club membership?
