Romney playing role in Calif. governor race (Meg Whitman)

Globe Staff ^ | February 21, 2009 | Sasha Issenberg

[restornu]

WASHINGTON - From a Lexington office complex, Mitt Romney's political action committee has ensured the former presidential candidate's omnipresence on cable news shows, ....

But for the next year and a half, the center of Romney's political universe will shift west to Sacramento, where key parts of his operation have reassembled on behalf of Meg Whitman, a longtime friend and former business colleague ....

The former eBay CEO is still readying her headquarters, but it has already become something of a campaign-in-exile for Romney's ambitions, which could include another presidential run in 2012....

"Mitt's going to be involved in dozens and dozens of races, but one that he's particularly excited about is the race for governor of California," said Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman....

A Whitman victory could deliver Romney a valuable foothold in a state that will likely be a big, early prize on the Republican nominating calendar. Her 2010 campaign will also offer a...

Romney and Whitman both harshly criticized the $787 billion stimulus package championed by President Obama and congressional Democrats, saying it includes too much bloated spending and not enough tax cuts. Whitman is also railing against the plan, signed into law yesterday, of tax increases and spending cuts to plug California's $42 billion budget deficit, saying in a statement it "will kill jobs, hurt families, and make future deficits worse."

The parallel careers of Romney and Whitman - ...

Yet Romney is the only one of the three considered a possible 2012 presidential candidate, ...

[Badeye]

Everyone in the forum understood the question I asked you three times.

And you pinged me again, and wasted my time again.

[EternalVigilance]

If you love Mitt Romney so much, back his play to the hilt! Don’t be shy. Come on! Get the Whitman bandwagon rolling here on FreeRepublic.com, the premiere conservative website in America! I’m sure you and Mitt will have no problem drumming up support here for a pro-abort, gun-grabbing socialist! /s

[Jim Robinson]

I agree. Screw Whitman and the Romney he rode in with.

[ejonesie22]

LOL...

Indeed, I would love to see how well that goes over. I bet the effort would not be near the level of the one in Mitt’s name...

[EternalVigilance]

They’re awful quiet, aren’t they.

[ejonesie22]

Having to confer with HQ. Have to stay on current message.

[EternalVigilance]

Here’s my response to their diversionary attempt to tear down Ronald Reagan:

Ronald Reagan:

Excerpt...

Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court’s result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right. Shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision, Professor John Hart Ely, now Dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that the opinion “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a “right” so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born. Yet that is what the Court ruled.

As an act of “raw judicial power” (to use Justice White’s biting phrase), the decision by the seven-man majority in Roe v. Wade has so far been made to stick. But the Court’s decision has by no means settled the debate. Instead, Roe v. Wade has become a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation.

Abortion concerns not just the unborn child, it concerns every one of us. The English poet, John Donne, wrote: “. . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the unborn — without diminishing the value of all human life.

Excerpt....

Despite the formidable obstacles before us, we must not lose heart. This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was not overturned in a day, or a year, or even a decade. At first, only a minority of Americans recognized and deplored the moral crisis brought about by denying the full humanity of our black brothers and sisters; but that minority persisted in their vision and finally prevailed. They did it by appealing to the hearts and minds of their countrymen, to the truth of human dignity under God. From their example, we know that respect for the sacred value of human life is too deeply engrained in the hearts of our people to remain forever suppressed. But the great majority of the American people have not yet made their voices heard, and we cannot expect them to — any more than the public voice arose against slavery — until the issue is clearly framed and presented.

What, then, is the real issue? I have often said that when we talk about abortion, we are talking about two lives — the life of the mother and the life of the unborn child. Why else do we call a pregnant woman a mother? I have also said that anyone who doesn’t feel sure whether we are talking about a second human life should clearly give life the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn.

The case against abortion does not rest here, however, for medical practice confirms at every step the correctness of these moral sensibilities. Modern medicine treats the unborn child as a patient. Medical pioneers have made great breakthroughs in treating the unborn — for genetic problems, vitamin deficiencies, irregular heart rhythms, and other medical conditions. Who can forget George Will’s moving account of the little boy who underwent brain surgery six times during the nine weeks before he was born? Who is the patient if not that tiny unborn human being who can feel pain when he or she is approached by doctors who come to kill rather than to cure?

The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law — the same right we have.

excerpt...

Obviously, some influential people want to deny that every human life has intrinsic, sacred worth. They insist that a member of the human race must have certain qualities before they accord him or her status as a “human being.”

Events have borne out the editorial in a California medical journal which explained three years before Roe v. Wade that the social acceptance of abortion is a “defiance of the long-held Western ethic of intrinsic and equal value for every human life regardless of its stage, condition, or status.”

Every legislator, every doctor, and every citizen needs to recognize that the real issue is whether to affirm and protect the sanctity of all human life, or to embrace a social ethic where some human lives are valued and others are not. As a nation, we must choose between the sanctity of life ethic and the “quality of life” ethic.

I have no trouble identifying the answer our nation has always given to this basic question, and the answer that I hope and pray it will give in the future. American was founded by men and women who shared a vision of the value of each and every individual. They stated this vision clearly from the very start in the Declaration of Independence, using words that every schoolboy and schoolgirl can recite:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We fought a terrible war to guarantee that one category of mankind — black people in America — could not be denied the inalienable rights with which their Creator endowed them. The great champion of the sanctity of all human life in that day, Abraham Lincoln, gave us his assessment of the Declaration’s purpose. Speaking of the framers of that noble document, he said
:

This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all his creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on. . . They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.

He warned also of the danger we would face if we closed our eyes to the value of life in any category of human beings:

I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

When Congressman John A. Bingham of Ohio drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee the rights of life, liberty, and property to all human beings, he explained that all are “entitled to the protection of American law, because its divine spirit of equality declares that all men are created equal.” He said the right guaranteed by the amendment would therefore apply to “any human being.” Justice William Brennan, writing in another case decided only the year before Roe v. Wade, referred to our society as one that “strongly affirms the sanctity of life.”

End excerpt...

From Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation
http://www.nationalreview.com/document/reagan200406101030.asp

And the 1atest fruit of Reagan’s pro-life legacy:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2194767/posts?page=18

[ejonesie22]

I cannot even begin to express my level of disgust every time the Romneyites would invoke Reagan or equate Mitt with Reagan, especially on the abortion topic.

It was the very first thing that caused me pause on Romney.

Then I looked in to him and the die was cast in my book.

[Rameumptom]

>>Here’s my response to their diversionary attempt to tear down Ronald Reagan:

Intresting comment from someone who can't even admit that he would endorse Reagan.

I endorse Reagan Wholeheartedly as the best and most conservative persident of the 20th century in spite of the fact that he gave us Sandra Day O'Connor. Can you say the same?

BTW, Who did you vote for in 76? 80? If you voted for Reagan than you voted for someone who actively had chosen pro-abortionists to be his second in command. If you didn't vote for Reagan. Well then you don't have much of a leg to stand on in trying to claim his conservative banner.

Which is it?

Still waiting.

[ejonesie22]

BTW the mods just smoked a Romney troll on another thread (Troll house Cookies). He was not as slick as the others, must have been a trainee for 2012...

[ansel12]

“It was the very first thing that caused me pause on Romney”

---

When Romney started using his public appearances to begin creating a myth that Ronald Reagan was “adamantly pro-choice” it was just too much for many of us.

We really took a hard look at who the man was, and we didn’t like what we saw.

[ejonesie22]

That was the one lie that broke the camels back.

[Diogenesis]

GOP Backstabber (through surrogate) Romney: "Hit the phones today make all the promises you have to,
and…make sure that we get the funds that we need to keep on
propelling this campaign forward with power and energy."

"Look, I was an Independent during the time of Reagan/Bush.
I am not trying to return to Reagan/Bush."
(Mitt Romney, 1994 Senate Debate, Boston, MA, 10/25/94)

---

"I'm not running as the Republican view or a continuation of Republican values.
That's not what brings me to the race."
(Romney Video, accessed 9/19/07)

---

"I'm very clear I think, to the people across the Commonwealth -
my "R" didn't stand so much for Republican as it does for reform."
(Romney Video, accessed 9/19/07)

[EternalVigilance]

If you’re waiting for me to play your phony game by your rules, you’ll be waiting a very long time.

[ejonesie22]

They are on the clock, so they will take the time regardless of an outcome or not.

[EternalVigilance]

If they were paid by the lie or the evasion Romney would be broke, and they would be stinking rich.

[ejonesie22]

He is smart enough to keep it at minimum wage...

At least the ones who are not volunteering gladly for his cause and their agenda...

[Reagan Man]

Gotta dispute the falsehoods about Reagan coming from the Romney liars.

Richard Schweiker was a pro-life Republican (LINK:LINK) and "one of the first supporters of a pro-life amendment" to the Constitution.

From Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council:

"Ever since Ronald Reagan embraced a prospective pro-life running mate in 1976 in the person of Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-Pa.), the party of Lincoln has positioned itself as a champion of human life in the womb." LINK

[ejonesie22]

Wow, they really have no shame do they.

I mean this is as clear cut a lie as one of their number has told.

Of course I know where it comes from, but I digress...

[ejonesie22]

Well Rameumptom are you ready to spin harder?

I know admitting you are wrong is not part of the program you have followed all these years, so I am dying to see the escape gambit you'll play.

So here goes it.

How do you square this:

So the question again is would you endorse Reagan and his brand of conservatism? Keep in mind as well that in 1976 Reagan named his runnning mate as pro abortionist Richard Schweiker.

With the facts Reagan Man posted?

BTW yes I would and still do endorse Reagan...