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As Think Progress noted, after complaining and fearmongering about the mandate that will require insurance companies to cover the cost of contraceptives at no cost, and lying and calling emergency contraception "an abortion pill," which it's not, now he going to be fundraising with the drug manufacturer's chairman.

Romney To Fundraise With Plan B Maker Despite Denouncing Emergency Contraception As ‘Abortive Pills’:

In particular, Romney denounced the fact that insurance plans would now be required to cover Plan B, a form of emergency contraception that he falsely referred to on numerous occasions as “abortive pills.” This is what Romney said in Colorado on February 6, 2012:

ROMNEY: This same administration said that the churches and the institutions they run, such as schools and let’s say adoption agencies, hospitals, that they have to provide for their employees free of charge, contraceptives, morning after pills, in other words abortive pills, and the like at no cost. Think what that does to people in faiths that do not share those views. This is a violation of conscience.

(Plan B works just like regular birth control pills and is not, in fact, an abortifacient.)

The Miami Herald’s Marc Caputo reports that next week the Romney campaign will be doing a major fundraising blitz across Florida, including an event “at the Star Island manse of pharmaceutical magnate Phil and Pat Frost where dinner costs $50,000.”

As they also noted in their post, this is not the first time he's done this. Go read the post for the rest of the list. And as they reported, here's more on the campaign's response:

Bloomberg News reports that the Romney campaign refused to comment on this story:

Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, didn’t respond to a request for comment on how the candidate, who opposes abortion rights, could accept support from the maker of “abortive pills.”

The list of Mitt Romney's lies, contradictions, flip flops and obfuscations just grows longer and longer each day. I'm happy to see that Al Sharpton covered this topic on his show this Tuesday since it hasn't gotten a lot of airplay anywhere else that I've seen, but he should have noted that Romney was lying about Plan B being an "abortion pill." He failed to point that out in the segment above.

From the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders -- Deficit Hawk Hypocrites:

Who caused deficits? Some of the same people in Congress who bemoan all the red ink in the federal budget actually created the problem. At a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders called out the hypocrites who showered the wealthy with tax breaks, who let pharmaceutical companies rip off taxpayers, and who launched wars without calling on the country to pay the price.

Don't forget that Bernie Sanders is one of the candidates we're supporting at our Blue America page and you can make a donation here.

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From Fox News's Journal Editorial Report, The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot's biggest miss of 2009 is big pharma cutting a deal with the White House on the health care bill because heaven forbid they might end up with some price controls put on them. Nothing like watching these compassionate conservatives looking out for the poor little old pharmaceutical industry is there?

Gigot: My miss is for the big drug company CEO’s, those who got in bed with the Obama administration on health care reform. They thought they’d get a deal, save themselves from spending too much money, but in the end they helped to make this pass by spending tens of millions on advertising and when it does pass, price controls are in their future. Just goes to show you that big business, if you’re relying on them to help you and help the free enterprise system, they’ll always let you down.

If they were going to have any meaningful price controls, they'd have passed Sen. Dorgan's amendment.

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Rachel Maddow talks to Glenn Greenwald about Joe Lieberman's threat to filibuster the health care bill if it contains a public option, Evan Bayh quickly following suit and the financial gain being made by both men and their spouses for doing so.

Maddow: Sen. Lieberman has made it very clear that he plans to oppose health reform that includes a public option. He’ll filibuster it in fact which would be historic. What do you think is motivating him?

Greenwald: Well I think you have to look first of all at a Research 2000 Daily KOS poll that was taken last month that shows that a margin of 68 to 21% of Connecticut voters, the people who he’s essentially representing, favor a public option. That’s a 47 point margin which is almost impossible to find on almost any other issue. So when you ask why he’s doing this, it’s clearly not because the people he’s supposed to be representing favor it.

I think clearly what it’s about is primarily that fact that the industry that he’s serving by doing this—by preventing competition with the public option—is an industry from which he receives very substantial benefits. He’s drowning in campaign contributions from the insurance industry, the health care industry, the pharmaceutical industry—more than $2.5 million.

In early 2005 his wife was hired by a large P.R. firm, Hill & Knowlton, in the pharmaceutical division, which at the time was representing the health care giant Glaxo in major legislation before the Senate. And several months later Joe Lieberman was on the floor of the Senate offering legislation that would directly steer huge amounts of incentives to that company in order to develop vaccines.

So I think what you’re seeing here is the kind of legalized corruption, legalized bribery that runs the United States Senate; only in this case it’s particularly sleazy and transparent because Lieberman is ready to gut the major initiative of the Democratic Party.

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From The Colbert Report:

Republicans and Democrats should march in pride parades and proudly announce their relationship with lobbyists.

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Rachel Maddow talks to David Sirota about why including a "trigger" in the health care bill is a poison pill that assures we won't have any real reform. David reiterates what he wrote in his op-ed The Trigger Mechanism:

Recall that over the last decade, a maverick group of progressive and conservative lawmakers pushed bills to let Americans purchase cheaper, FDA-approved prescription drugs from other industrialized nations. It was (and is) a commonsense idea - other countries allow importation, and the practice helps lower health costs by permitting consumers to buy medicines at the lowest world market price, not just at an artificially inflated domestic premium.

As with today's public option surveys, polls on importation showed strong national support for the concept. So rather than murder the drug legislation outright, congressional leaders joined the Clinton and Bush administrations in backing a "compromise": Importation bills were passed, but only those that gave the secretary of Health and Human Services the power to trigger - or not trigger - final implementation.

Specifically, the secretary would have to first certify that imported medicines were "safe" (drug companies promote the lie that Canadian medicine is mortally dangerous - prompting Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, an importation proponent, to ask, "Where are the dead Canadians"?).

This trigger provision, of course, was lobbyists' poison pill - and it worked as they planned. Importation has never been implemented, as no HHS secretary has pulled the trigger. Hence, Americans are still barred from wholesale importation of lower-priced medicine - and pharmaceutical industry profiteering continues.

The moral of the story is that triggers are just another version of the old Blue Ribbon Commission trick. They are designed not as good public policy, but as devious political tactics to help dishonest lawmakers look like they support popular measures - all while guaranteeing those measures never become reality.

On importation, triggers gave corporatist politicians a way to seem like they were remaining true to their pro-consumer platitudes and "free trade" dogma at the same time they were strengthening an extreme form of anti-consumer protectionism for pharmaceutical companies.

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For anyone that didn't watch it, check out Bill Moyers show from this past weekend featuring the documentary Money-Driven Medicine. Here's how Bill wrapped up his show.

BILL MOYERS: MONEY-DRIVEN MEDICINE, a film produced by Alex Gibney, Peter Bull and Chris Matonti; directed by Andy Fredericks; and based on Maggie Mahar's book of the same name.

Log on to pbs.org and click on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL - Maggie Mahar will be there to answer your questions online. We'll link you to the Money-Driven Medicine website where there's more info about the book and the film. We'll also link you to some analysis of what advocates of reform are up against in taking on the health insurance industry, the drug lobby, and the Wall Street equity firms.

Take a look at this recent cover of BUSINESS WEEK. Reporters Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein write that the CEO's of the giant insurance companies should be smiling - their lobbyists have already won. Quote: "no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable."

And remember that television ad Barack Obama made as a candidate for president?

BARACK OBAMA: The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies. And you know what, the chairman of the committee who pushed the law through went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year. Imagine that. That's an example of the same old game-playing in Washington. I don't want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game-playing.

BILL MOYERS: Now look at this recent story in the LOS ANGELES TIMES. Lo and behold, since the election, the pharmaceutical industry's $2 million dollars a year superstar lobbyist Billy Tauzin has morphed into President Obama's pal. Tauzin says the President has promised not to pressure the drug companies to negotiate with the government for lower drug prices and has agreed not to allow cheaper drugs to be imported from Canada or Europe - contrary to the position taken by candidate Obama…

Each of these stories illuminates the scarlet thread that runs through Maggie Mahar's book - the story of how today's market-driven medical system gives Wall Street investors life and death control over our health care, turning medicine into a profit machine instead of a social service to meet human need. That's the conflict at the heart of next month's showdown in Washington.

I'm Bill Moyers. See you next time.

I am so thoroughly disgusted by what I'm watching now and the deals that are being cut on this sorry excuse for what is supposed to be health care reform that I am past the point of being fed up. Howard Dean had it right.

Howard Dean: You Don't Have Reform Without the Public Option:

My advocacy would be for this. If you're not going to have a public option, then don't call it health reform. Strip all the money out of the bill and just do something we did here in Vermont about fifteen years ago, guaranteed issue and community rating. Require insurance companies to insure everybody. Stop them from kicking people off and don't let them charge huge amounts of money for sicker patients.

That's not health reform. It's insurance reform. You won't do much for the uninsured but you will make the health insurance market work better for the people it does work for. And you know, that's an incremental step and I wouldn't want to throw that out, but I'd strip the money out of the bill because this is going to be and expensive bill and if you're not going to get reform then you shouldn't bother with the expense.

Amen Howard.

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Paul Krugman calls out John McCain for his double talk on controlling Medicare costs during this panel discussion with George Stephanopoulos on This Week. As Krugman notes, the Republicans and John McCain are trying to have it both ways and one one hand saying Medicare's costs need to be kept in check, and on the other hand scaring seniors into thinking that the President wants to cut their Medicare benefits, and refusing to have a rational debate on how those costs end up being controlled.

David Frum tries to defend the Medicare Advantage program which is one of the things the Obama administration wants to go after to control costs, and Krugman shoots a hole straight through his arguments and reminds him that wasteful spending is what Republicans are supposed to be against. George Will wraps things up with showing his love for the pharmaceutical industry and their profits.

WILL: We’ve been talking about this for about five minutes and the subject of cost, which is tiresome and depressing, has not come up.

REICH: I just mentioned it.

WILL: When we began this debate a few months ago, the costs were going to be paid primarily by two things. One, the proceeds from selling under cap and trade, the permits to emit carbon. And “B,” Medicare cuts. “B” is never going to happen. And we’ve given away what should have been sold, or so we say, the rights to emit carbon. Where are we going to pay for this?

KRUGMAN: Medicare stuff, I think, will, in fact, happen if anything passes. If you want to think about the utter, utter hypocrisy of the Republicans on this. We just heard John McCain . And early on in your conversation, he said basically Sarah Palin was right in saying death panels because the Democrats want Medicare to take into account the actual medical effectiveness --

STEPHANOPOULOS: They weren’t in support of the policy.

KRUGMAN: Right. And then later in the same conversation, he said, we have a terrible problem with entitlements with Medicare. We really need to do something to cut Medicare spending. And what possible way -- we should cut Medicare spending without any regard for the medical effectiveness of what it’s paying for? So, this is, you know, we have the Republicans actually standing fully against any sort of rational control of costs.

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