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Justice

EXCLUSIVE: Romney Campaign Incorrectly Trains Iowa Poll Watchers To Check For Photo ID

By Scott Keyes on Nov 1, 2012 at 1:00 pm

Earlier this week, ThinkProgress released internal documents from the Romney campaign detailing how it is training poll watchers to mislead voters in Wisconsin. Now, according to new documents, Wisconsin may not be the only state where Romney’s campaign is equipping volunteers with deceptive information.

A new ThinkProgress investigation has found that in Iowa, Romney poll watchers are being trained to watch for voters who show up without a photo ID, even though no voter ID law exists in the state.

In a training video for Romney poll watchers in Iowa, the narrator tells volunteers to be on the lookout for anytime “a voter fails to show a voter ID and they are still permitted to vote.” If that happens, he says, “alert the legal team so they can handle the problem.” The text of the campaign’s slide, however, says something contradictory, instructing volunteers when poll workers should check the voter’s ID. Despite the mixed messages, the slide ends with: “If an election worker is not checking photo ID, please call the legal hotline immediately.”

NARRATOR: Naturally, you’re probably wondering what irregularities may come up throughout the day. We’ll walk you through some quick examples. First, there may be an instance where a voter fails to show a voter ID and they are still permitted to vote. If you notice this, use the legal help button to alert the legal team so they can handle the problem and you can get back to checking voters.

Watch it:

The text on the video notes that utility bills and other government documents are acceptable forms of ID, but that section is contradicted by the narrator’s decree to be on the lookout for anyone who tries to vote without a photo ID and text at the bottom warning poll watchers to be on the lookout for voters who lack photo ID. In sum, the training material is, at best, highly misleading.

Iowa in not a voter ID state. ThinkProgress asked a representative at the Iowa Secretary of State’s office whether it would be incorrect to say that voter ID is required in Iowa. “That’s right,” she confirmed. Voters do not need ID on Election Day; they can show a current utility bill (including cell phone bill), bank statement, paycheck, or other government document, but are not required to do so.

This video is part of Romney’s massive nationwide poll-watcher effort on Election Day. The campaign is training 34,000 volunteers to fan out in swing states across the country and monitor for voter fraud. Romney personally touted Project ORCA in a video released Wednesday evening, telling poll watchers that they’ll “be the key link in providing critical, real-time information to me.” Because of the program, Romney said, “our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on Election Day.”

Update

After ThinkProgress published this story, the Romney campaign scrubbed the original training video from the web. It has since been replaced with an alternate video that does not mention photo ID. We captured the original video, which you can see below:

Update

A number of readers have noted that, in fact, most Iowans aren’t required to show any identification at all, including non-photo forms like a utility bill or pay stub, though it’s still helpful to bring if you have it readily available.

Update

According to Reuters, the office of Iowa’s Secretary of State, Matt Schultz (R), “contacted the state director of the Romney campaign” to make clear that the state did not require photo ID to vote.

Education

Ann Romney: We Need To ‘Throw Out’ The Public Education System

By Josh Israel on Oct 29, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Romney Visits Philadelphia Charter SchoolAnn Romney told Good Housekeeping magazine that the campaign issue closest to her heart is taking on teachers unions and dismantling public education as we know it. In an interview, she told the publication:

I’ve been a First Lady of the State. I have seen what happens to people’s lives if they don’t get a proper education. And we know the answers to that. The charter schools have provided the answers. The teachers’ unions are preventing those things from happening, from bringing real change to our educational system. We need to throw out the system.

This attack on public school teachers echoes one that has been frequently heard in her husband’s stump speeches and debates. In his Friday economic speech, he said “It matters for the child in a failing school, unable to go to the school of his parent’s choosing, because the teacher’s union that funds the President’s campaign opposes school choice.”

Both Romneys have it wrong. President Obama has also consistently supported charter schools as a supplement to traditional schools. In May, he declared in his “Charter School Week” proclamation, “charter schools serve as incubators of innovation in neighborhoods across our country.” Obama has opposed, however, proposals to take taxpayer money out of public schools and to fund private and parochial schools that do not have to achieve the same standards. Romney has embraced a risky school voucher scheme. Studies have also shown that charter schools may not necessarily improve children’s education.

Unlike Mitt Romney, President Obama’s campaign has not taken a single contribution from political action committees — teachers’ unions or otherwise. The National Education Association’s super PAC, NEA Advocacy Fund, has not made a single expenditure on the presidential race. While some individuals employed by the union have donated to the Obama campaign out of their personal funds, those contributions amount to less than one 1/100th of a percent of his total contributions.

Mitt Romney has made the questionable boast that as governor of Massachusetts, he made the state’s public schools number one in the nation. Those schools — with great union teachers — show that standards and certification are part of the solution, not the problem.

Politics

Follow The Money: Why Romney Wants A Bigger Navy

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Oct 25, 2012 at 12:00 pm

The airwaves of three key battleground states — Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire — were hit this morning with advertisements from the Romney campaign about the size of the American navy. “Our navy is smaller now than any time since 1917,” Romney warns in the radio spots. A narrator adds, “As commander in chief, Mitt Romney… will invest in our military.”

Expanding the Navy has become a theme of the campaign; during Monday’s debate Romney used the same line, and Obama responded with a now-famous zinger about “horses and bayonets.” But new information discovered by Wired casts a new light on Romney’s push to beef up ship building: One of his top military advisers is in the ship building business.

John Lehman was Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, but is now an investment banker with stakes in several ship building companies:

Lehman is the founder and chairman of J.F. Lehman & Company, a private equity firm. He also sits on several corporate boards.

Lehman invested in a government-backed “Superferry” in Hawaii — a business that ultimately failed, but not before boosting the standing of Austal USA, an Alabama shipbuilder that constructed the ferry service’s ships. Austal USA’s rising fortunes in turn benefited international defense giant BAE Systems, which then bought up shipyards owned by Lehman in order to work more closely with Austal USA.

When all was said and done, the roundtrip deal helped net Lehman’s firm a reported $180 million. And besides that, Lehman continues to own shipyards that do lucrative maintenance work for the Navy. Even leaving aside the intricate ferry-and-shipyard series of deals, Lehman still stands a decent chance of profiting from the naval buildup he is helping to plan.

Lehman is one of Romney’s “special advisers” on his Foreign Policy and National Security Advisory Team, and his particular emphasis as an adviser is on the Defense work group. Lehman has spoken publicly on Romney’s behalf about the expansion of the Navy, pushing the Romney campaign’s line that the Navy needs to produce 15 new ships a year, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Romney believes the military must use at least 4 percent of the nation’s entire GDP, and plans to increase the military budget by an unpaid-for $2.1 trillion.

Navy ships are simply not a their smallest since 1917. But moreover, the argument that the United States should build out its ship resources is based on an outdated form of warfare. While ship production may well be declining, both the Air Force and Navy have a larger variety of specialized war vessels, such as submarines, that serve more effective and particular functions.

Economy

Ann Romney To Visit Cancer Center That Benefited From Stimulus Funds

By Igor Volsky on Oct 10, 2012 at 9:28 am

Ann Romney, a breast cancer survivor, will visit the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida on Wednesday — which has received millions from the stimulus (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). Her husband and his running mate Paul Ryan both opposed the measure, which President Obama signed into law in February of 2009.

Ann will tour the location and “meet with patients and members of their families.”

The Moffit H. Lee Cancer & Research Institute is Florida’s only Comprehensive Cancer Center that conducts “extensive research on cancer as well as providing advanced forms of treatment.” It benefits from “significant federal research funding,” including $23,920,428 from the stimulus:

Romney and Ryan have criticized the president’s stimulus and its results. Romney has said the president’s vision has failed and released a statement saying “the only thing President Obama’s stimulus has produced is a series of broken promises” on the three-year anniversary of the stimulus. These comments haven’t stopped the candidates from campaigning at sites that have benefited from the funding, however.

Romney appeared at Watson Truck & Supply in Hobbs, New Mexico, which benefitted from $400,744 in stimulus funds, fundraised at the home of a recipient of stimulus funds, and bashed the stimulus at a small Ohio college that took $80,000 in Recovery Act money. 

Security

Romney Shifts Threshold For Military Action On Iran To Nuke Weapons ‘Capability’

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 21, 2012 at 11:36 am

Mitt Romney told a group of rabbis and other Jewish leaders on a telephone call on Thursday that an Iranian nuclear weapons capability would be his threshold in which he would launch a military strike on the Islamic Republic, Foreign Policy reports:

“With regards to the red line, I would image Prime Minister Netanyahu is referring to a red line over which if Iran crossed it would take military action. And for me, it is unacceptable or Iran to have the capability of building a nuclear weapon, which they could use in the Middle East or elsewhere,” Romney said. “So for me, the red line is nuclear capability. We do not want them to have the capacity of building a bomb that threatens ourselves, our friends, and the world.”

Romney’s new so-called “red line” represents a shift from what he said just last week, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that his red line is the same as President Obama’s.

A nuclear weapons capability is not easily defined and as many experts have observed, Iran currently has the capability to produce a nuclear weapon. Before Romney’s interview with ABC, his campaign aides had said that an Iranian nuclear weapons capability would be the GOP presidential nominee’s “red line.” But they would not specify their definition of “capability.”

President Obama has said that he won’t allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. The Obama administration is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran, such as those outlined in a new bipartisan expert report released last week. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

NEWS FLASH

Ann Romney Backs Out Of Values Voters Summit | The Family Research Council has a particularly manipulative way of advertising its Values Voters Summit, which takes place this week in Washington, DC. The hate group lists all of the speakers it has invited, then gives them asterisks when they confirm that they are attending. Apparently this tactic even applies to their hour-by-hour itinerary, which is how Ann Romney became listed as a featured speaker. But now, despite Mitt Romney’s campaign has backed away from the invitation and made it clear that Ann will not be present, such that she has even been removed from the itinerary entirely. Vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is still scheduled to speak, among other notable Republicans. The following unconfirmed speakers remain on FRC’s agenda: Kirk Cameron, Mike Huckabee, Todd Starnes, and Glenn Beck.

LGBT

LGBT Allies Discourage Lawmakers From Participating In Values Voters Conference

By Zack Ford on Sep 11, 2012 at 1:27 pm

Values Voters Summit Confirmed and Invited Speakers

Several prominent social justice groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, and National Council of La Raza, have sent a letter discouraging public officials from participating in the Family Research Council’s Values Voters Summit this weekend. Among the confirmed speakers are vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-WI), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), and Ann Romney, among many other prominent Republican lawmakers and conservative voices.

The letter highlights FRC’s anti-gay smears, as well as that of affiliate American Family Association, both groups the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed “hate groups:

The FRC is far outside of the mainstream. It has engaged in repeated, groundless demonization — portraying LGBT people as sick, vile, incestuous, violent, perverted, and a danger to the nation. One of its officials has gone so far as to say homosexuality should be criminalized. [...]

We urge you to decline the FRC’s invitation and not share the stage with and lend your credibility to an organization that spreads demonizing falsehoods about other people.

The letter may not deter any of these speakers, but it does hold them accountable for their affiliation. The speakers’ rhetoric will likely cater to the social conservative base, but their mere presence at the conference will speak volumes to the general public.

Health

Ann Romney Refuses To Answer Questions About Birth Control

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Sep 7, 2012 at 3:21 pm

In an interview with KWQC-TV6 today, Ann Romney refused to comment on the issues stemming from the ongoing War on Women, declining to address whether she believes women should have access to contraception through their employer-based insurance plans. Such questions are irrelevant, Romney said, because this election is not going to be about birth control:

KWQC TV6: Do you believe that employer-provided health insurance should be required to cover birth control?

ANN ROMNEY: Again, you’re asking me questions that are not about what this election is going to be about. This election is going to be about the economy and jobs.

KWQC TV6: Well, a Pew research poll shows those issues are very important to women, ranking them either “important” or “very important. [...]

ANN ROMNEY: Listen, I’ve been across this country, I’ve been for a year-and-a-half on the campaign trail. I’ve spoken with thousands of women and they are telling me, they’re telling me a couple of things, one they say they’re praying for me which is really wonderful, and then they’re saying, ‘please help, please help. We are so worried about our jobs.’ So really if you want to try to pull me off of the other messages it’s not going to work because I know because I’ve been out there. [...]

I’m going to talk to you about the economy and about job creation and about how my husband is the right person for the right time. This is going to be an election that is very important for women, and we are going to make sure that their economic prosperity is more certain under a President Romney.

Despite Romney’s attempt to pivot to the economy, her claim that birth control is “off message” ignores the real economic situation of women across America. In fact, access to reproductive health services is inextricably linked to the economic issues that countless women face. For example, the Obamacare provision that requires employer-based coverage for contraception — which Ann Romney sidestepped after the interviewer brought it up twice — attempts to address the fact that one in three American women report having struggled to afford birth control at some point in their lives. And when women risk pregnancy without reliable access to contraception, they strain their own finances with the expensive addition of a dependent, as well as incur millions in taxpayer costs for medical care.

Election

Ann Romney: ‘We’re Used To’ Passing Up Multi-Million Dollar Jobs

By Aviva Shen and Annie-Rose Strasser on Aug 31, 2012 at 10:23 am

On Friday, Fox & Friends asked Ann Romney if it was difficult for the couple to turn down a $30 million job offer after Mitt lost the 2008 presidential nomination. Ann, who has been trying to help her husband connect with middle class voters, replied that such job opportunities are commonplace for the former governor and CEO:

BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): The report is after Mitt Romney lost to John McCain for the nomination, he got an offer from a fund, $30 million a year, go back into the financial world, have all types of success. How hard was the decision not to do that?

ROMNEY: Well, we’re used to kind of passing offers up like that. For us, our life is not about making money. We’ve been very blessed financially. Our life is now about giving back. I always trust that Mitt can always make another dollar. Poor guy, he took no pay when he did the Olympics for three years and no pay when he was governor for four years.

Watch it:

Though she’s acknowledged they have been “blessed financially,” Romney has been working hard this week to prove the couple’s empathy with middle class families. In her convention speech, Romney included herself among the nation’s struggling moms, declaring “We don’t want easy,” but lamented “that price at the pump you just can’t believe, the grocery bills that just get bigger; all those things that used to be free, like school sports, are now one more bill to pay.” In both her convention speech and on Fox and Friends Friday morning, she emphasized the couple’s poorer days in college, when they lived in a basement and “ate a lot of pasta and tuna fish.”

But the Romneys have had trouble selling this story to the public, often making casual remarks that bely their lack of common ground with middle class voters. In past interviews, Ann has explained they got through these hard student days by selling off a little of Mitt’s stock, a birthday president from his father, former Governor George Romney, after he took over American Motors.

Here are a few other ways Ann has addressed the couple’s wealth:

  • “I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing.” [Fox News, 3/5/12]
  • “Remember, we’d been paying $62 a month rent, but here, rents were $ 400, and for a dump. This is when we took the now-famous loan that Mitt talks about from his father and bought a $42,000 home in Belmont, and you know? The mortgage payment was less than rent.” [Boston Globe, 10/20/94]
  • “I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids.” [Prescott Bush Awards Dinner, 4/24/12]
  • “We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life.” [ABC News, 7/19/12]

Justice

Jeb Bush: GOP Should ‘Stop Acting Stupid’ With Latino Voters

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Aug 29, 2012 at 5:03 pm

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) has often disagreed with the Republican party’s increasingly hardline immigration positions. He called GOP immigration policies “short-sighted” in June. And in January, he said that “it makes no sense” for states to pass harmful anti-immigrant laws like Arizona’s and Alabama’s — both written by Kris Kobach, the Romney campaign’s informal immigration adviser — because they turn off Latino voters.

Bush repeated his criticism of his party’s immigration policies Tuesday:

Speaking at a panel discussion at the Republican National Convention, Bush repeated his frequent warning that the party must change its tone, an admonition he has frequently raised about the party’s hardline position on immigration.

“The future of our party is to reach out consistently to have a tone that is open and hospitable to people who share values,’’ he said, adding “the conservative cause would be the governing philosophy as far as the eye could see … and that’s doable if we just stop acting stupid.”

In an interview yesterday, Bush told Univision’s Jorge Ramos that the Republican party has an issue with its tone when talking to Latino voters, and he said “there’s a price to pay” for continuing to focus on extreme immigration laws. “You have to show a respect that the louder, angrier voices of the Republican party don’t understand,” Bush added.

Increasingly, the Republican party is becoming more extreme on immigration issues. Mitt Romney staked out most far-right positions on immigration during the GOP primary, and the only area of immigration policy where he has been consistent is his support for harsh enforcement measures, like state laws to mirror Arizona’s SB 1070 and encouraging self-deportation. The GOP’s platform even calls for cutting off federal funds from colleges that offer in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants, which would endanger Pell Grants and research funding.

As Ann Romney insists that Latino voters need to “get past some of their biases” and support Republicans, it’s unlikely that GOP officials will take Bush’s advice and moderate their immigration policies.

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