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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xv0Xo9W1a8&feature=g-u-u Obozo has a new ad on his YouTube channel featuring Mitt Romney selling the individual mandate and why it was necessary. Can anyone really explain how ObamaCare as a major campaign issue is going to benefit Mittens?

July 3, 2012 Romney Campaign Declaring Cease Fire on Health Care Posted by Staff In the aftermath of the Supreme Court health care ruling, the early conventional wisdom was that an unfavorable health care ruling at the court would be good for Republicans politically, even as it was a serious policy setback for conservatives. But that's not shaping up to be the case. Mitt Romney, after giving a brief statement decrying the decision, has been virtually silent on criticizing the health care law. He's been on vacation and his campaign has been giving off clear signals that it doesn't want...

While Congressional Republicans have seized on the Supreme Court’s ruling that President Obama’s health care overhaul is constitutional as a tax, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist undercut that line of argument Monday, saying that the governor agrees with Mr. Obama that the law is not a tax. “The governor has consistently described the mandate in Massachusetts as a penalty,” Eric Fehrnstrom, Mr. Romney’s strategist, said on MSNBC. “The governor disagreed with the ruling of the court; he agreed with the dissent that was written by Justice Scalia, which clearly states the mandate was not a tax.”

Once-secret emails from Mitt Romney's time as governor that were revealed today spurred a flurry of comments about the candidate's support for the so-called individual mandate. Yet there's another issue that's been revived: Romney's secrecy. When Romney left the governor's office in Massachusetts, his staff erased all the emails from a computer server and bought the hard drives used to store data, so that their correspondence would stay hidden. Or so they thought. Tom Trimarco, Romney's administration and finance secretary, never deleted his emails. Some of them surfaced today in The Wall Street Journal, which submitted a public information request...

As I mentioned yesterday, back in 2009 Mitt Romney took to the pages of USA Today to tell President Obama that as he came up with a healthcare plan he should consider using “tax penalties” as Massachusetts did or “tax credits, as others have proposed” to help cover the costs of health care. The “tax penalties” is Mitt Romney’s individual mandate, a key portion the Obama Administration has credited all along as having been embraced in Obamacare. Since pointing out yesterday that, in his own words, Mitt Romney supported a national individual mandate, his supporters have gone totally insane on...

I was going to blog about Romney’s recent flip-flops on the minimum wage issue and bilingual education – flip-flop #36 and #37, but when I saw Ann Coulter’s recent column praising RomneyCare, I have to admit, I just lost it. She called RomneyCare “free-market” and claims it’s a “conservative” approach to health care. Apparently, the individual mandate is something we conservatives should all run out into the streets and start celebrating. I was shocked. One of her arguments seems to be that a number of conservative politicians and the Heritage Foundation originally supported RomneyCare and therefore, that makes it conservative....

"Whoa Nellie! Where did THIS come from? The Fox News network, with its deep bench of producers, associate producers and “investigative journalists” didn’t have access to these video clips? Of course they did. The truth is that this is about as scandalous as the Machiavellianism their sister company Sky News engaged in their phone tapping/hacking scandal that caused Rupert Murdoch’s son James to resign in humiliation. Fox news apparently sat on these clips as though they didn’t exist – just as they CONCEALED the fact they damned well knew – that Mitt Romney repeatedly lied to us and his challengers...

A new poll shows Mitt Romney, who is locked in a prolonged GOP nomination fight, with lagging approval ratings, raising questions about his strength in a likely November match-up with President Obama. Half of those surveyed hold unfavorable views of the GOP front-runner, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll released Wednesday finds. In the poll, 50 percent of all surveyed and 52 percent of registered voters held unfavorable opinions of Romney. Thirty-four percent hold positive views on Romney, the lowest for any leading presidential contender in Post/ABC polls dating back to 1984. The poll also finds that Romney’s unfavorability tops...

A defining moment in Mitt Romney's post-pro-life-conversion political career came in his third year as governor of Massachusetts, when he decided Catholic hospitals would be required under his interpretation of a new state law to give rape victims a drug that can induce abortions. Romney announced this decision — saying it was the "right thing for hospitals" to do — just two days after he had taken the opposite position. The story begins in 1975, when Massachusetts enacted a law that said, "No privately controlled hospital .. shall be required to permit any patient to have an abortion ... or...

Forget Michigan. If Rick Santorum really wants to hand Mitt Romney his head he ought to challenge him in Massachusetts. It is here, not in Michigan, where Romney, governor for four years, made his political bones, first by running unsuccessfully against the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, and then defeating Democrat Shannon O'Brien for governor in 2002. It is also here where thousands of people -- to their total surprise -- woke up the other day to find that Romney ran the state as a "severely conservative" governor for four years. Who knew? That was before he declined to run for...

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney responds to Sarah Palin saying she is not convinced he is a conservative during his appearance on Wednesday's "FOX & Friends." "Well we should probably spend some time with Sarah Palin, although she is hard to find. She's on your show all the time," Romney said. "I'm not quite sure what she'd be referring to. I'm pro-life, pro-traditional marriage. I believe in the second amendment. As governor, I balanced the budget every year I was in office. Put in place a $2 million rainy-day fund. Cut taxes 19 times," he also said.

Mitt Romney won the presidential straw poll Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an unofficial endorsement from party activists that nevertheless helps the former Massachusetts governor burnish his conservative image. The Republican presidential candidate won with 38 percent of the vote at the Washington conference, the leading annual meet-up of American conservatives. The victory breaks a two-year winning streak by Ron Paul.

Sorry, Ann. I have adored you as a commentator, as you know, and appreciate your kind words about me in the past. But in discussing the individual mandate in your piece last week, "Three Cheers for RomneyCare," you honestly don't know what you are talking about. In the process, you are transgressing on my own work and past policy achievements, and grossly undermining the policy and political case against Obamacare. Read on, and I will explain in full. It was me, working for and with conservative health policy guru John Goodman, who first rang the alarm bell for conservatives over...

* Does a President have that authority?* By: Larry Walker, Jr. *In his Nevada victory speech, Mitt Romney once again publicly declared, “I will repeal Obamacare”. How so? Will Willard Mitt Romney single-handedly repeal Obamacare?Although I am in favor of repealing Obamacare, and replacing it with a free-market solution, the last time I checked the Constitution, I wasn’t able to locate any passage granting the President of the United States the sole authority for repealing any law. Frankly I’m tired of hearing the same old false promise over and over again.The truth is that in order to repeal or amend...

Former Sen. Norm Coleman is advising Mitt Romney. He has also advised us not to get our hopes up about Obamacare repeal. "You will not repeal the act in its entirety, but you will see major changes, particularly if there is a Republican president," Coleman told BioCentury This Week television in an interview that aired on Sunday. "You can't whole-cloth throw it out. But you can substantially change what's been done."

Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico has a new article up that addresses one of the biggest liabilities of Mitt Romney’s health care law in Massachusetts: the fact that health-insurance premiums in Massachusetts have skyrocketed since the law was put into place. Even though Romney promised at the time that the law would reduce the cost of health insurance (sound familiar?), today, as Haberkorn reports, Romneycare’s defenders claim that the law was never meant to reduce health costs. Indeed, Timothy Murphy, Secretary of Health and Human Services under Romney, told her that reducing costs was not “the proper role of government.” Huh?...

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain on Wednesday said his rival Mitt Romney would have to “deal with” the health care law he passed in Massachusetts, which Cain grouped with ObamaCare as “government-centered” health care. “I do not support the Massachusetts health care law,” Cain said at a lunch sponsored by the American Spectator and held at the offices of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. While he didn't explicitly say the two laws were similar, he did mention them in tandem, emphasizing, “I want to get to get away from this government takeover to health care.” He said he preferred...

After watching the GOP presidential debate the other night, it was hard to avoid this conclusion: Mitt Romney looks more and more like the GOP presidential nominee. He's the best debater. He's got his issues and his rejoinders down pat. He brushes away his opponents like lint on his lapel. And all with such ease. That said, there's a teensy problem he just can't seem to beat: Conservatives don't like him. Or trust him. Or really want him to be the GOP nominee. Sure, you say, Republicans never like their nominees, and they still manage to vote for them. There...

As the presidential candidates continue to debate defunding Obamacare , it’s important to remember that the bill has already received $105 billion in advance appropriations. Imagine how this law may expand if President Obama wins a second term or if the law’s architect, Mitt Romney, is elected president. Video follows

If you Google “Romney inevitable” you get 1,980,000 results. The Romney campaign is hoping that the more his inevitability is discussed, the truer it will become. There is something to that. Political players want to be on the winning team. Donors don’t want to waste their money. It’s heady stuff, I imagine, for the Romney team to read pieces like this by Jonathan Martin: “Hours after Chris Christie signaled he believes Mitt Romney is the Republican party’s inevitable nominee, Romney and the rest of the GOP field went about proving him right. Romney again outclassed the opposition in Tuesday’s Bloomberg/Washington...