During Sunday’s Republican Presidential debate in Florida, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tried to distance his Massachusetts Health Care plan from Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) most recent health care proposal.

We solved the problem of health care in our state not by having government take it over, the way Hillary Clinton would [but] with private, free-enterprise approaches…Hillary says the federal government’s going to tell you what kind of insurance, and it’s all government insurance.

Romney emphasized that “we’re not going to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House by acting like Hillary Clinton.” But as Fact Checker points out, the plan Romney signed into law in Massachusetts sure acts like Clinton’s proposal. “Both plans mandate universal health care coverage and subsidize health care for people on low incomes. The main difference is that Clinton’s proposal permits people to switch to a Medicare-type plan and increases taxes at higher income levels.”

Rather than “having government take it over,” Clinton’s proposal incorporates the very same “private, free-enterprise approaches” Romney advocates. Clinton’s plan “offers people a choice. If they are happy with their present health plan, they can keep it. Otherwise, they can switch to the plans offered to members of Congress, or a government-run plan similar to Medicare.”

On Sunday, it seemed like Romney wanted to have it both ways. While egregiously misrepresenting, even lying about Clinton’s proposal to win Republican favor, Romney praised the same MIT economist, Jonathan Gruber, who helped design both his Massachusetts plan and Clinton’s proposal.

We wanted them insured, but we didn’t want government to have to pick up a new bill. And so we spent a lot of time working on it. We didn’t just have a bunch of bureaucrats. We had a professor from MIT, an investment banker, a head of a consulting firm.

Today, the House will vote on a watered-down version of the Employment Non- Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill that “would make it illegal to fire, refuse to hire, or fail to promote employees simply based on sexual orientation.”

The measure enjoys wide public support. According to a recent poll by Hart Research Associates,”60 percent of voters support a federal law to prevent discrimination in the workplace.” During his third debate with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), even President Bush acknowledged that homosexuals should be respected.

You know, Bob, I don’t know [if homosexuality is a choice]. I just don’t know. I do know that we have a choice to make in America and that is to treat people with tolerance and respect and dignity. It’s important that we do that. And I also know in a free society people, consenting adults can live the way they want to live. And that’s to be honored.

But apparently, the President now believes that businesses are not part of the America that treats “people with tolerance and respect and dignity.” Yesterday, the White House issued a Statement of Administration Policy “making clear that despite the exemption compromise, “senior advisors” will still recommend that President Bush veto the bill.”

H.R.3685 is inconsistent with the right to the free exercise of religion as codified by Congress in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

Indeed, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) states that “government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.” Yet the law has this exemption:

Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

Ending discrimination in the workplace, regardless of one’s religious convictions, has ample legal precedent. As the ACLU points out, during the last fifty years, “Congress has responded when it found that the merit system was not working, and that some Americans were being denied employment for reasons that were arbitrary and unfair, such as discrimination based on race, religion, gender, national origin, and disability.” Laws aimed at restoring the merit system “have been — and continue to be — an essential part of making the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection of the law a reality.”

In its basic structure, ENDA parallels Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, religion, gender, and national origin. It provides the same procedures and remedies that Title VII provides, except that it explicitly excludes any of the affirmative action relief that is sometimes available to address race and gender discrimination.

Moreover, under the President’s reasoning, a business should be able to fire an employee for engaging in an adulterous affair, premarital sex, fathering a child out of wedlock, or any other behavior an employer finds immoral. Pam’s House Blend asks:

What if you worked for a company where the person in charge was athiest and had a deep resentment for people of faith, especially those that expressed that faith, not just by evangelizing on the job, but simply by putting up their favorite prayer or passage in their cubicle. Now imagine that employer firing that person for even the smallest expression of their chosen faith regardless of the fact that the person might be the hardest, and most efficient worker for that company. Wouldn’t that just get your blood boiling?

To protect minorities from becoming targets of workplace discrimination, President Bush must sign ENDA and extend to them the “tolerance and respect and dignity” he promised.

Rudy Giuliani’s ridicule of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) recent claim that the country can’t afford her ideas was the highlight of tonight’s GOP Presidential Debate in Florida. Giuliani quoted Clinton as saying, “I have a million ideas. America cannot afford them all” and proclaimed “No kidding, Hillary. America can’t afford you!”

This isn’t the first time Giuliani misrepresented Clinton’s statements. This time, he got the quote (mostly) right but he stripped her comments out of context and falsely suggested that Clinton’s domestic programs would increase the national deficit. Ironically, according to the Boston Globe, Clinton made the comments in the context of fiscal restraint.

Clinton recently floated the idea of issuing a $5,000 bond to each baby born in the United States to help pay for college and a first home, but it immediately inspired Republican ridicule and she quickly said she would not implement the proposal.

She defended that decision yesterday, saying she is focusing on proposals with more political support and she is not formally proposing anything she can’t fund without increasing the deficit: “I have a million ideas. The country can’t afford them all.”

No word yet on whether Rudy Giuliani believes that the $1.2 trillion the Bush administration has spent on the war in Iraq is something Americans can afford.

During tonight’s GOP presidential debate in Florida, while defending his conservative credentials, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed that during his years as mayor, he was the toughest crime fighter in America. “I brought down crime more than anyone in the history of this country…I took the crime capital of America and I turned into the safest city in the country,” Giuliani said.

But as PolitiFact points out, “Giuliani’s big claims come with big caveats. While the statistics he cites are accurate, independent experts and studies of the phenomenon suggest Giuliani exaggerates his role.” Consider the following:

- Violent crime in New York began falling three years before Giuliani took office in 1994, U.S. Justice Department records show. Property crime began falling four years before. The decline accelerated during his administration, but the “turnaround” he claims credit for started before him.

- New York was no anomaly, but was part of a trend that saw crime fall sharply nationwide in the 1990s, particularly in big cities. The city with the best record for reducing violent crime during this period? San Francisco.

- Independent studies generally have failed to link the tactics of the Giuliani administration with the large decrease in crime rates.

Read more here.

Yesterday, President Bush “derided Democrats for running a do-nothing Congress that has failed to address critical domestic, economic and security issues in the nine months since they took control of Capitol Hill.”

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. “Congressional oversight of the executive branch has intensified under Democratic rule, especially in the House, following years of inattention and deference by their Republican predecessors under unified government.”

Moreover, as ThinkProgress has pointed out, the “110th Congress has had more roll call votes this year than any other Congress in history, almost doubling the number under the previous Congress overseen by Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL).” If Bush has forgotten that he has signed 96 bills into law since the opening of the 110th Congress, then here is a sampling of some of the “do nothing” he has overseen:

- Implementation of the 9-11 Commission recommendations

- Lobbying and ethics reform

- An increase in the minimum wage

- Reform of foreign investment rules

- A competitiveness package encouraging scientific research and innovation

In fact, “the Democratic Congress’s legislative harvest this year has been bountiful compared with that of its Republican counterpart in 1995,” despite Republican attempts to obstruct legislative progress. Bush has vetoed popular legislative initiatives, axing bills expanding children’s health care, timetables to “responsibly redeploy from Iraq” and an expansion of life-saving medical research on stem cells,” while Congressional Republicans have tried to block legislation. According to a July McClatchy report, “1 in 6 roll-call votes in the Senate this year have been cloture votes.”

If this pace of blocking legislation continues, this 110th Congress will be on track to roughly triple the previous record number of cloture votes.

While Democrats should do more to challenge the President on Iraq, public dissatisfaction with Bush’s policies and Republican obstructionism has contributed to the body’s sagging poll numbers. According to a recent Brookings Institution report,”Congress is catching the diffuse blame” for “public discontent with the direction of the country, the war in Iraq, the state of the economy and the performance of the president.”

Democrats correctly point to polling evidence that while Congress as an institution gets low marks, the public also rates the Democrats substantially higher than the Republicans on almost every important public issue and prefers to maintain the current majority in power.

It seems that the American public would rather Republicans “do nothing” than obstruct the Democratic agenda.

The ACLU is reporting that the Department of Defense improperly collaborated with the FBI and issued “hundreds of national security letters (NSLs) to obtain private and sensitive records of people within the United States without court approval.” According to ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero

The Department of Defense may have secretly and illegally conducted surveillance beyond the powers it was granted by Congress. It also appears as if the FBI is serving as a lackey for the DoD in misusing the Patriot Act powers. At the very least, it certainly looks like the FBI and DoD are conspiring to evade limits placed on the Department of Defense’s surveillance powers.

But in a January 2007 interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Vice President Dick Cheney described the practice of issuing national security letters as a “perfectly legitimate activity.”

There’s nothing wrong with it or illegal. It doesn’t violate people’s civil rights. And if an institution that receives one of these national security letters disagrees with it, they’re free to go to court to try to stop its execution.”

The ACLU documents seem to contradict Cheney’s assertions. “Although compliance with Defense Department-issued NSLs is voluntary, the coercive language found in these letters would lead a reader to believe compliance was mandatory.” Moreover, while “the Defense Department told Congress that it seeks NSL assistance from the FBI only in joint investigations… an internal program review shows that the military asks the FBI to issue NSLs in strictly Defense Department investigations.”

UPDATE: The Washington Post reminds us that “earlier this year, the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI may have improperly obtained phone, bank and other records of thousands of people inside the United States since 2003 by using national security letters and exigent letters, or emergency demands for records. “

Today in Arkansas (where 9.4% ( 67,123) of children go without health insurance), picking up where the GOP smear campaign left off, President Bush disingenuously defended his veto of the popular SCHIP expansion legislation.

My attitude is, let’s help the poor children. Let’s make sure the program does what it’s supposed to do…A program was created to help poor children with struggling families. When I was the governor of Texas, I supported it, and as president I supported it. But the piece of legislation I got doesn’t focus on the poor children.

President Bush may not have read the legislation he vetoed. As The Body Politik has pointed out, “the overwhelming majority of children who would gain health coverage… are precisely the low-income children the President says he wants to focus on.”

According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the SCHIP bill “at least 85 percent of the otherwise-uninsured children who would gain coverage under the bill have incomes below states’ current SCHIP eligibility limits;” two-thirds of “those who gain SCHIP coverage…would otherwise be uninsured.”

Moreover, since SCHIP needs “14 billion more over the next five years to keep covering current enrollees, let alone reach more of the nation’s nearly 9 million uninsured children,” Bush’s willingness to pony up just $5 billion is “tantamount to a cut.”

“The Senate already has enough votes, 67, to defeat Bush’s veto, so all the drama is on the House side for this showdown.” Firedoglake reports that “the vote to override the SCHIP veto will held on Thursday.” Please contact these representatives and encourage them to support children’s healthcare.

On Friday, Mitt Romney suggested that overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, would move the country towards a place “where there was no abortion.”

“I would love to see an America where there was no abortion. But that’s not where the American people are…What I do want to see, and where I think the American people are today, is to see a conservative jurist on the Supreme Court and to see Roe v. Wade overturned.”

Romney’s naiveté is contradicted by the facts. According to a study released yesterday by The World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute, “abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.”

Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said.

Rather than reducing the number of abortions, overturning Roe v. Wade would jeopardize women’s lives. Romney had it right in 1994 (”I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.”) and 2002 (”The choice to have an abortion is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not the government’s.”). Unfortunatley, since he decided to seek the Republican nomination for president, Romney has been willing to place politics ahead of women’s well being.

In fact, by dismissing the science that contradicts his new-found ideology, Romney, like Rudy, is following in the footsteps of our current president.

The Republicans of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce issued a satirical press release grossly misrepresenting the vetoed legislation that would have expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Based in the fictional Springfield from The Simpsons, the release featured the rich Montgomery Burns and Mayor Quimby jockeying for government funded health care.

The release quoted Burns saying, “The little darlings are needy? Me, too. I need somebody to pay ,” suggesting that well-off parents would be allowed access to free health care should SCHIP be expanded.

Such scenarios, however, have absolutely no basis in reality. Under the vetoed plan, parents would only be eligible for coverage if they work low-income, uninsured jobs and the poorest children be “first in line” for coverage. The release comes just a day after the Republican Leadership in the Senate was found by ThinkProgress to be propagating known fictions about 12-year-old SCHIP beneficiary Graeme Frost. As Paul Krugman recapped in the New York Times:

Right-wingers began “insisting that the Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister attend private schools (they’re on scholarship), because they have a house in a neighborhood where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood was rundown and considered dangerous) and because Mr. Frost owns a business (it was dissolved in 1999).”

Indeed, the “press release” and their previous smear campaign betrays the callous zeal with which House Republicans and some Senate Republicans have sought to prevent the needed expansion of SCHIP. While an astounding 91% of Americans want “Congress to help states cover more uninsured children”, a “vast majority [of Americans] also supported covering uninsured parents in low-income working families,” and “more than 600,000 children joined the ranks of the uninsured last year,” House Republicans are more concerned with scoring cheap brownie points with an out-of-touch Bush administration. (via Atrios, Wonkette)

*Seriously Joe, stop.

Yesterday, The Body Politik noted that while former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani portrays himself as an expert on terrorism, his actual statements and policy judgments usually reveal his ignorance. Today, Josh Marshall notes that Rudy Giuliani has hired “Michael Rubin as Senior Iran and Turkey Advisor and Middle East Advisory Board Member.”

Rubin worked at “Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans” and “like the most interesting and frightening neos, Michael is that perfect mix of extreme factual knowledge and extreme lack of judgment, prone to wild-eyed theories and fantasies of various sorts but all in the end leading inexorably toward catastrophic policy moves for the United States.” Below is a sampling of Rubin’s greatest hits:

- IRAQ: “The question with Iraq is not whether they were involved on Sept. 11. The question with Iraq is, do we think they have the capacity, the will and the means to create mass casualties in the United States. I think they do. The evidence shows they do. And then the issue is, why should we wait and sacrifice another 5,000 innocent lives?” [10/24/01 Yale Daily News]

- “September 11 has helped to persuade the region that the United States isn’t going to take it anymore. Even onerous regimes are eager or willing to be part of the U.S. coalition against Usama bin Ladin’s terrorism. Under resolute U.S. leadership, some of this spirit could be mobilized against Iraq.… [Ankara, Amman, Kuwait City, and Riyadh] want to see a plan that is focused, determined, and close-ended. If the United States can produce one, its regional allies will fall into line.”[Winter/02, Middle East Quarterly]

- “The Kurds themselves, many of them patriotic veterans of the Iraqi Army do not wish to split from Iraq; they do want a federal, unified and democratic Iraq. Their only problem is with Saddam Husayn himself. Until he is removed, nothing can proceed.” [ 7/10/01, Middle East Forum]

- The New York Times reports that Rubin advised The Lincoln Group, a Pentagon contractor that paid Iraqi newspapers to print American propaganda, on the content of the propaganda campaign in Iraq. [1/2/06, NYT]

- IRAN: “U.S. and Iranian interests in Iraq are diametrically opposed, and will continue to be until one side wins and the other loses.” Diplomacy with Iran is “a mirage, a tactical tool to divert U.S. policy attention away from the Revolutionary Guards and intelligence officials charged with implementing the Iranian leadership’s objectives…For the U.S. government to succeed in Iraq, it must engage not with the illusion of Iranian policy, but refine its strategies to neutralize and counter the Iranian strategies.” [8/09/07, Washington Post]

- “In the wake of Sadr’s uprising, Washington is faced with the same choice: End Iran’s infiltration through forceful action, or wish it away. How long can we afford to keep choosing the latter?“ [4/26/04, New Republic]

- ISLAMIC WORLD: “In the Islamic world, confrontation may work better than dialogue. As the Taliban were driven from Kabul, Afghans spontaneously celebrated, cheering America in the streets…Washington should not negotiate with rogue regimes, at least not until they move beyond mere rhetoric and unilaterally cease all weapons proliferation and terror sponsorship without precondition.” [12/12/01, Opinion Journal]

- REGIME CHANGE IN SYRIA: The Asia Times reported that Michael Rubin and the usual neo-con suspects “signed a report released three years ago that called for using military force to disarm Syria of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to end its military presence in Lebanon.” [4/17/03, Asia Times]

By recruiting hard line neo-conservatives, Giuliani is tacitly endorsing the failed foreign policy of the Bush administration. If the war on terror and the war in Iraq have radicalized jihadists and increased the terror threat, Giuliani’s willingness to pursue a confrontational and militant foreign policy– possibly extending the war to Iran– would jeopardize American safety and security.