Posted on 12/16/2007 9:48:47 AM PST by JRochelle
Hard to conjure up that image but it's true. Thomspon sends out an e-mail blast taking issue with Romney's statement today on MTP that "every piece of legislation which came to my desk in the coming years as a Governor, I came down on the side of preserving the sanctity of life." The "fact check" includes this:
"Romney's health care legislation provides taxpayer-funded abortions for a co-pay of just $50. Romney vetoed EIGHT provisions in his health care bill that he deemed objectionable, including the expansion of dental benefits to Medicaid recipients. He did not veto Planned Parenthoods' guaranteed position on the Advisory Board or ensure that abortions were covered only in medically necessary situations (as required by MA court ruling). All abortions are covered in the Commonwealth Care program with no medically necessary limitation. Under the program, abortions are available for a copay of $50...
Romney included in his health care legislation a guarantee that Planned Parenthood would have a representative on his MassHealth Payment Policy Advisory Board. No such provision was included for a pro-life representative. ...
Romney forced private Catholic hospitals to provide the morning-after-pill, a position applauded by Democrats and pro-abortions groups. .."
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Do you know what your medical insurance copay for an abortion is?
It’s not the media that’s the problem. They can keep ignoring him. It’s the voters that we have to get to stop ignoring him.
If the voters pay attention, Fred could come back.
From what I’ve seen, Duncan Hunter did not file the required number of signatures to be on the ballot in Virginia. If so, that means I can’t vote for him.
I saw we got enough signatures for Thompson.
well no WONDER he’s been “tearing up” on TV lately.....the facts are getting in the way of his nomination...
I’m surprised he had such a good grade. The way the mitt-haters talk here, I was expecting he’d have an “F” rating, seeing as they claim he’s a gun-grabber.
I guess the NRA saw things a lot differently than the mitt-haters. An “A” would be better, but a “B” is 3 grades up from an “F”, meaning there were a LOT of people much worse on guns.
He’s been consistant on that issue. He supports some form of an assault weapons ban, one that is less restrictive than the current AWB.
So if one makes it out of congress, he will sign it, just as President Bush would have signed it.
There are candidates who won’t sign an AWB. I guess if the AWB is your single issue, and you’d rather have Hillary Clinton as president than live under the remote possibility of losing your chance to purchase a machine gun, you should vote for someone else.
A lot of what Romney is attacked for never happened — like your suggestion he’s trying to hide from his support of a new AWB.
“The “50 dollar abortion” has already been argued ad nauseum, and even Thompson acknowledges that abortions are required to be covered.”
If Romney were prolife, he could have vetoed the entire plan to prevent the $50 abortion provision. It is a bad plan, anyway, a mandate on the taxpayers. It should have been vetoed even without the bargain basement abortion coverage in it. This is another example of Romney caving to the left as he did when he eagerly implemented the Goodridge decision to foist gay marriage on the people of Massachusetts.
Under Romney, Massachusetts beame the only state to require every citizen to pay for every other citizen’s abortion. Even California only requires public funds for abortion for medicaid eligible women.
This is the main reason Romney is tanking in Iowa.
Go Fred.
To start with there is no “current” AWB, it expired.
True assault weapons, selective fire, haven’t been available to the general population since the 1930’s.
The RATS and a few NE liberal RINO’s would sign laws banning semi-auto sporting arms. They would also ban handguns.
No Republican that is as anti-gun as Romney and Rooty will ever be elected POTUS.
Without the Gun and pro-life issue Republicans can’t carry the south.
Romney is wasting his time and money now.
Romney got a grade of “B” from the NRA before he ever served in public office. In his one act on guns in Mass, he passed a bill supported by the NRA. He supports the courts overturning DC’s ban on guns, and he supports the rights of individuals to both keep arms AND carry them.
He’s not a gun person. I’m not a gun person either, although I oppose the particulars of the AWB from 1994. He would be more likely to speak more strongly about guns if he had lived a life that put in around guns.
But he’s got good people on his staff, and from what he says he’ll be a strong advocate for the general right to keep and bear arms. However, if I were a single-issue candidate, and that issue was owning assault rifles, I’d probably rank him 4th. I still might vote for him as the only one of those 4 who can win the primary and the general election.
But that’s true for me on a host of issues. For most things I care about, Fred Thompson is fine. If he wins the nomination, I’ll be happy, and I sent him money and helped collect signatures for him in Virginia.
But since his campaign sank like a rock for so long, I had to throw my support behind the most conservative candidate who had an organization that could beat Rudy and win the general election, and that conservative was Mitt Romney.
Since I’m not a gun person, I probably don’t put the ban on a few weapons as a major issue that more avid gun owners do. My position has been that some guns have always been banned — as you point out, true assault weapons are already restricted.
I would note that I think a clear reading of the 2nd amendment would require you to lift the ban on pure assault weapons. If the purpose was to allow citizens to rise up against government, we need weapons as good as those controlled by the government.
But I don’t see any candidates calling for lifting the ban on currently banned weapons — which once again shows that everybody makes compromises, and the issue is really just a matter of a minor adjustment to where you draw the line between “allowed” and “not allowed”.
Yeah, and prior to Romney's healthcare plan, the state provided abortion to low income women free of charge. At least now they have to pay something.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts provided tax-payer funded abortions before Romney because Supreme Judicial Court mandaded it. There's nothing he or the legislature could have done about that.
Unless you would expect Romney to immitate Judge Moore and defy the court. And we all know how effective Judge Moore's strategy was.
If you really expect nothing less than that your politicans defy court rulings you don't like, I suggest you go tilt at windmills with Judge Moore and leave the politics to the adults.
There are 70-100 million gun owners in the US and the majority of those are in the Republican party voters homes.
The RAT party dominated the south until they went nuts with the gun issue.
Just wait and see..
I strongly disagree that doing nothing about medical care is the “conservative” position.
But I look forward to seeing Fred Thompson’s plan which will prevent taxpayers from footing the bill for uninsured people’s medical coverage WITHOUT requiring proof of ability to pay, and WITHOUT allowing people to die on the sidewalks of hospitals if they can’t pay for treatment.
Because we pay through the nose right now, and there is NO WAY any politician is going to advocate letting people die when medical treatment is available but can’t be paid for. You can tell people they have to go without cable, but you will NOT get the population to vote for letting people die simply for lack of insurance.
Romney’s original plan was not perfect, and what the legislature did to it made it worse. But it was based on a sound principle that in order to keep taxpayers from footing the bill, you need to ensure that individuals CAN foot the bill. And if that means taxing them if they don’t have insurance, and using that tax money to pay for their care when they show up without insurance, well better them than me.
The Mass. government coverage already had abortion (so do every state, and almost ever private insurance). Abortion is a fairly low-cost procedure so even if you had private insurance and asked for a non-abortion option, it wouldn’t cost less. Plus if you ended up needing a medically necessary and expensive abortion to save the life of the mother, if you had insurance that didn’t cover it, the taxpayer would pick up the bill, meaning we’d all be paying for abortion in some cases.
The abortion part of the bill wasn’t “controversal” in that it was something already mandated, and that already existed in medicaid, medicare, virtually all private plans, and the public employee plans in Mass. A $50 co-pay is typical of HMO co-pays.
BTW, that’s only ONE of the possible policies, and it’s more expensive. There’s a cheaper plan with $100 abortions that most people would purchase to save money, and a different type of insurance that uses percentages instead of co-pays.
THe point being that having paid for insurance, a co-pay isn’t a “bargain-basement” price. It’s how insurance works. You pay a lot of money, and then when you need treatment you pay a deductable or a co-pay.
If Mitt asked me what to do, I would have said to veto it, even though the veto would be overridden. But that again is because I have a much more restrictive pro-life position than Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson.
it was not FOX or the drive by’s who saved immigration, it was us,period..........it will be Fred
And yet George Bush had little trouble gaining the votes of gun owners even though he ran on a promise that he would sign a renewal of the AWB.
I don’t think there are 70 million gun owners all that upset that they can’t go buy a new AK-47. (I say that because when they were passing the bill, I almost bought an AK-47 just so I could say I had a weapon that was now banned — a friend of mine had one for sale at his hardware store).
Compromise and negotiating once you win public office, is one thing. Your rhetoric borders on acceptance of liberalism and moderatism, as means to an end. If that means condoning the politics of socialism, so bit it. You’re all for it.
No wonder the anti-conservative, waffler and centrist pinhead Willard Mitt Romney is your hero. LOL
President Bush, before he was elected in 2000, said he would sign the renewal of the bill( which was already in place) ONLY if nothing was added to it.
The NRA endorsed Bush in 2000 and 2004.
President Bush then worked with the NRA, John Ashcroft, and Bill Frist to make sure it would die in the Senate and expire.
(President Bush got Frist allow the RATS to run wild adding so much crap that it died)
President Bush played the RATS like a banjo on that one.
The NRA wrote a great article that explained it all.
That’s the kind of compromise thinking that we usually engage in, except for when we want to play “gotcha” politics.
Romney signed an AWB that was endorsed by the NRA, and explained that he managed to get a bill that was much more in tune with what they wanted than they expected to get from the democrats.
The fact is that Bush PROMISED to approve AN EXTENSION of the existing AWB, just as Romney approved an extension of the AWB in Mass. Unfortunately, while in a generally pro-gun UNITED STATES, it was pretty easy to kill the AWB, it was impossible to do so in a liberal state like Massachusetts.
If it wasn’t for an election, we’d discuss issues rationally, weigh the pros and cons of legislative approaches, make the compromises to win the best we could win, and move on.
In the election season though, nobody really cares about issues, they just want to smear other candidates in the hopes that their candidate will somehow win by default. Ronald Reagan knew better, and he pulled the coalition together, by providing a positive message that resonated, rather than a message of negativity which said little more than “vote for me, because everybody else sucks so bad”.
“Romney signed an AWB that was endorsed by the NRA,...”
Wrong! Stop right there. The NRA would never support any AWB!
They did support Romney lowering restrictions on one gun bill in MA. Is was one tiny part of a bill that they supported. Even then I think it was a local chapter, not national NRA.
Romney lost the gun voters and is just wasting time on it now. His political life is limited to dark blue states.
Fortunately I hold your opinion in very low regard.
But I’m glad I’m getting to you anyway. Maybe eventually you’ll figure out what being a true thinking conservative means.
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