Romney Lies in Debate about the Morning-After Pills forced on Catholic Hospitals

Why let the facts get in the way when you are lying at the debates?  Does Romney have selective memory loss about his time as Governor since he had all the hard drives destroyed from his Administration?  Doesn't that sound like Nixon?  Kind of scary if you think about it as the last thing we need in the White House is another Nixon type.   The Romney lie I have put in bold in this article from the Weekly Standard, but here are the key words:

“Nope, absolutely not. Of course not. "

Did Romney think The Boston Globe no longer had an archives of their articles when this happened?  Not only did they have the article in the archive but the headline immediately points out Romney is lying:

“Romney says no hospitals are exempt from pill law.”

Between Romney not answering a simple question at the debate and the lies picked up by Fact Check, how can anyone say he had a good debate unless telling the truth is not part of a good debate performance?  Why couldn't he answer the question of the biggest misconception about him or is it because what some of us are writing is actually true?

Looks like Romney was caught in a whopper of a lie on forcing Catholic Hospitals to provide the Morning-After Pills:

Were Catholic Hospitals in Massachusetts Forced to Provide Morning-After Pills?
8:05 AM, Feb 24, 2012 • By JEFFREY H. ANDERSON

During Wednesday night’s Republican debate, moderator John King said, “Governor Romney, both Senator Santorum and Speaker Gingrich have said during your tenure as governor, you required Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. And Mr. Speaker, you compared the governor to President Obama, saying he infringed on Catholics’ rights. Governor, did you do that?” 

Romney replied, “Nope, absolutely not. Of course not. There was no requirement in Massachusetts for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims. That was entirely voluntary on their part. There was no such requirement.” 

Yet a headline in the Boston Globe on December 9, 2005 read, “Romney says no hospitals are exempt from pill law.” The first sentence of the corresponding article read, “Governor Mitt Romney reversed course on the state’s new emergency contraception law yesterday, saying that all hospitals in the state will be obligated to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims.” 

Newt Gingrich, who looked puzzled and incredulous as Romney was speaking, replied,
“Well, the reports we got were quite clear that the public health department [of Massachusetts] was prepared to give a waiver to Catholic hospitals about a morning-after abortion pill, and that the governor’s office issued explicit instructions saying that they believed it wasn’t possible under Massachusetts law to give them that waiver. Now, that was [in] the newspaper reports that came out. That’s something that both Senator Santorum and I have raised before.” 

The Boston Catholic Insider blog (courtesy of Quin Hillyer at the American Spectator) provides a much more detailed account of events, which essentially mirrors Gingrich’s understanding. The core of the account is as follows: 

“On December 7, 2005, Romney’s Department of Public Health said that Catholic and other privately-run hospitals could opt out of giving the morning-after pill to rape victims because of religious or moral objections…. 

“On December 8, 2005 Romney reversed the legal opinion of his own State Department of Public Health, instructing all Catholic hospitals and others to provide the chemical Plan B ‘morning after pill’ to rape victims.” 

On December 9, the Boston Globe headline appeared.

The Globe reported: 

“[Governor Romney’s] decision overturns a ruling made public this week by the state Department of Public Health that privately run hospitals could opt out of the requirement if they objected on moral or religious grounds. 

“Romney had initially supported that interpretation, but he said yesterday [Thursday] that he had changed direction after his legal counsel, Mark D. Nielsen, concluded Wednesday that the new law supersedes a preexisting statute that says private hospitals cannot be forced to provide abortions or contraception. 

“‘And on that basis, I have instructed the Department of Public Health to follow the conclusion of my own legal counsel and to adopt that sounder view,’ Romney said at the State House after signing a bill on capital gains taxes.”

(snip) 

“Asked yesterday to elaborate on that position, Romney said simply that the law was the law and that the state had to follow it. The governor characterized his own beliefs about emergency contraception this way: ‘My personal view, in my heart of hearts, is that people who are subject to rape should have the option of having emergency contraception or emergency contraception information.’”

After responding to Romney in the debate, Gingrich made the broader point about the inevitable tension between liberty and centralized government power, saying: 

“I want to go a step further, because this makes a point that Ron Paul has been making for a generation and that people need to take very seriously. When you have government as the central provider of services, you inevitably move towards tyranny, because the government has the power of force. You inevitably — and I think this is true whether it’s Romneycare or Obamacare or any other government centralized system — you inevitably move towards the coercion of the state and the state saying, ‘If you don’t do what we, the politicians, have defined, you will be punished either financially or you will be punished in some other way like going to jail.’ And that’s why we are, I think, at an enormous crossroads in this country.” 

Excerpt:  Read More at The Weekly Standard 

No wonder Romney doesn't want to run on his real record of Governor preferring to rewrite history about his record.  Once again he has been caught by Fact Check from Wednesday night's debate.  The first paragraph from the Boston Globe about Fact Checking had the best description of the debates I have seen:

Twenty Republican presidential debates later, the head-scratching claims kept coming.
Did Mitt Romney really cut taxes as Massachusetts governor, as he asserted yet again? Or did he raise them by hundreds of millions of dollars, as former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum alleged? And how could Newt Gingrich have given the nation four balanced budgets when he was only in Congress for two of them?
There was something old, something new in the misstatements of the candidates Wednesday in what was possibly the last GOP debate.

Now for some of the real facts from the debate Wednesday nigh:

ROMNEY to Santorum: “You voted to raise the debt ceiling five times without compensating cuts in spending.’’ 

THE FACTS: Maybe so, but increases in the debt ceiling were not politically charged in the past as they are now. They just allow the government to pay bills run up by previous Congresses. To not pay them would be like deciding to stop paying a car loan or mortgage. In fact, President Ronald Reagan, an icon to most conservatives, supported increases in the debt limit 12 times over his two terms. The idea of insisting on offsetting spending cuts when raising the debt ceiling is relatively new.   

******

ROMNEY: “They finally realized I was right.’’ — On the government ushering the auto industry into and out of bankruptcy. 

THE FACTS: Romney did propose a bankruptcy process for the automakers before the government opted for that course. But there was a tremendous difference between the course he advocated and the one that was taken. GM and Chrysler went into bankruptcy on the strength of a massive bailout that Romney opposed. Neither Republican President George W. Bush nor Democratic President Barack Obama believed the automakers would have survived without that backup from taxpayers. Romney held out the possibility at the time of the government giving certain loan and warranty guarantees that would not have approached the nearly $85 billion bailout.   

******

SANTORUM: “Gov. Romney even today suggested raising taxes on the top 1 percent.’’ 

THE FACTS: Romney’s new proposal actually would lower tax rates across the board. The rate for the wealthiest Americans would drop to 28 percent from 35 percent. However, Romney’s call for unspecified new limits on tax deductions for higher-income taxpayers makes it impossible, absent more details, to assess the impact on any individual.  

******

NEWT GINGRICH: “When I was speaker … we balanced the budget for four consecutive years.’’  

THE FACTS: Gingrich has made this misstatement many times before. He was speaker from January 1995 to January 1999. During budget years 1996 and 1997, when Gingrich was House speaker, the government ran deficits totaling nearly $130 billion. In budget year 1998, which ended Sept. 30, 1998, there was a surplus of $69 billion. And in budget year 1999, during which Gingrich was speaker part of the time, there was a surplus of $126 billion. Thus, Gingrich can only claim credit for contributing to two years of a balanced budget, at most. 

******

ROMNEY: “I’m going to link the pay of government workers with the pay in the private sector. Government servants shouldn’t get more than the people who are paying taxes.’’ 

THE FACTS: It’s something of a myth that federal workers make out like gangbusters next to their private sector counterparts.

The latest Congressional Budget Office study found federal pay is, on average, only 2 percent higher than for comparable private sector workers. The discrepancy is larger among the least educated. Federal employees with just a high school diploma make 21 percent more than similar private workers. But federal workers tend to be more educated, older and concentrated in professional occupations — and they make 23 percent less, on average, than private sector counterparts. 

That advantage holds true when benefits are added to the mix: The federal professionals still lag, while federal employees with less education have a greater advantage over private sector workers. 

These are excerpts from the Fact Check of the debate on Wednesday.  You can read more at The Boston Globe.  Bottom line is not to believe everything you hear at a debate.  Checking Fact Check during and following the debate gives you the facts instead of spin from candidates.  Democrat Fact Check in 2008 for their debates was off the chart with lies and misstatements.  Not sure which was worse 2004 or 2008 from the Democrats when it came to lying and spinning at debates.

How about getting some honest candidates to run for President who tell the truth when asked a question instead of trying to score political points with lies and misstatements?  Wouldn't it be nice to turn into a debate and know you are going to find how how a candidate feels about an issue without spin or pandering?  Is it possible that in 2016 we could have debates with unbiased moderators and no spin?

Having liberal moderators for most of the Republican debates has not helped the process of electing our nominee to go against Obama in the fall.  Some moderators are more concerned about starting a cat fight among candidates then getting at the truth of what they believe.  The Republican Primary has been a disaster so far in the eyes of a lot of conservatives and now the establishment types are starting to say the same thing.  Time to change the way we elect our nominee starting with cleaning out the RNC which should have happened back in 2000 when the RNC Chair favored McCain over Bush in the primary.  A good friend and I sent an email to all members of the RNC asking them to remove the Chair -- didn't happen but we tried.

Bottom line is if Romney cannot tell the truth on an issue like the MA Morning-After Pill Mandate, how can we expect him to tell the truth as President?  Instead of a President with the nickname of "Tricky Dick,"  would we have one called "Tricky Mitt!"  No thanks, I will pass on Romney and hope that fellow conservatives have finally woken up to the fact that Romney and Paul are tag teaming and either vote for Santorum or Gingrich -- not my first choice or second choice but much better than Romney/Paul and 100 times better than Obama.