Lie of the Day: Romney on Obamacare

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From Mitt Romney, telling a friendly audience about a disturbing passage from Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists:

In this book he says that there was a discussion about the fact that Obamacare would slow down the economic recovery in this country and they knew that before they passed it. But they concluded that we would all forget how long the recovery took once it had happened, so they decided to go ahead. The idea that they knowingly slowed down our recovery […] is something which I think deserves a lot of explaining.

You know, I expect political candidates to bend the truth a fair amount. Maybe I don’t like it, but it’s the way the game is played and it’s the way the game has always been played.

But Romney’s willingness to flat-out lie is singular. Usually presidential candidates leave that kind of thing to surrogates, so they have deniability if they’re called on it. Personally, they limit themselves to cherry picking and semi-defensible twisting of reality. After all, a plain lie is so very unpresidential.

But Romney doesn’t much seem to care about that. I guess he’s figured out that something like this works on the campaign trail but isn’t a big enough deal to ever attract any national attention. So why not?

In any case, Jon Chait has chapter and verse of the truth here if you’re interested. The chart comparing flat-out whoppers between Romney and Obama comes from one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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