Posted on 08/07/2012 5:34:00 PM PDT by kristinn
No description at YouTube, so my write up:
CNN's Brianna Kielar spoke with Joe Soptic, a former steelworker featured in a new pro-Obama super PAC ad who was laid off in 2001 when Bain Capital closed the company he had worked at for a reported 30 years. Without directly accusing Soptic and Priorities USA of being despicable liars, CNN lets its reporting call them out as despicable liars.
Soptic told CNN his wife had her own health insurance at her own job when he was laid off. Soptic said his wife quit her job a year or two later due to an unspecified injury, thereby losing her own health insurance. But Soptic still blames her death in 2006 from a brief bout with cancer due to his lack of family health insurance because he was laid off in 2001. In the Priorities USA ad, Soptic says it was a "short time later" from when he was laid off to when his wife got sick and died. CNN reports it was actually five years.
This is incredible and despicable doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s slander and libel with malicious intent and someone needs to pay for this.
Did Joe find another job before his wife quit her job? Also, how long till someone divulges the unspecified injury she sustained?
He stated that when the husband lost his job the wife was still employed elsewhere and had medical insurance through her employer. Sometime later she voluntarily quit her job and lost her health insurance. It was after she left her job that she discovered she had cancer.
This will be al over the news tomorrow but the seed has been planted by this filthy, underhanded video.
Woman Mentioned In Priorities Ad Died In '06 (Politico)
The pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action lobbed a heavy-duty attack at Mitt Romney this morning, airing an ad that links the closure of a GST Steel plant in Kansas City to the loss of a family’s health insurance — and the death of a woman some time later.
The man speaking in the ad, Joe Soptic, says, “Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care and my family lost their health care. And a short time after that my wife became ill.” Soptic explains he’s not exactly sure when his wife became sick, but that when he took her to the hospital she had undetected, advanced cancer and died 22 days later.
The Romney campaign has pushed back on other GST Steel-related attacks by arguing that the plant in Kansas City closed after he stepped away from his management job at Bain. (Democrats counter that Romney was still listed as a top executive at Bain through 2002, and that he built up the private equity firm during the time it invested in GST Steel.)
In the case of this particularly jarring super PAC ad, it may also be relevant that Soptic’s wife died in 2006, years after the GST factory closed down.
A 2006 story in the Kansas City Star reported the death of Ranae Soptic, a former champion roller skater: “Soptic went to the hospital for pneumonia, but doctors found signs of very advanced cancer, and she died two weeks later on June 22.”
I asked Priorities USA strategist Bill Burton to explain the connection between Romney, Bain and a cancer fatality that happened near the end of Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts. The lapse in time between the plant closing and Soptic’s death doesn’t mean the ad is invalid, but it raises questions about the cause and effect relationship here.
“We’re illustrating how long it took for communities and individuals to recover from the closing of these businesses,” Burton responded. “Families and individuals had to find new jobs, new sources of health insurance and a way to make up for the pensions they lost. Mitt Romney has had an enduring impact on the lives of thousands of men and women and for many of them, that impact has been devastating.”
Like most of the outside-group ads in the 2012 race, the fairness of this one is open to interpretation. But both the Priorities attack and the new welfare-themed hit on Obama from the Romney campaign are provoking more intense outrage — both publicly and privately — than most of the other spots we’ve seen this summer.
Romney took a leave of absence from Bain in February, 1999 to run the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
Upon the successful completion of the Olympics, he resigned from Bain.
Once again, excellent post.
Thank you for doing what you do, Kristinn.
What WE need to do is go on our local news sites that have message boards and, “Special Investigative Reporters,” and post this there for their, “Fact check,” articles.
Start the debate. Open people’s eyes.
Don’t let them get away with their crap.
Here’s my example:
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/politics/31338921/detail.html
What’s next thing the Obamatons will accuse Romney of doing: volcanic eruptions, floods, earthquakes, mass starvation, the heartbreak of psoriasis?
This whole thing should fall under some criminal code...this is outrageous!!!!
Yep..gotta give them kudos here although they left out the fact that Obama’s million dollar bundler was running Bain at the time.
Just watched the CNN video...HA! No wonder Carney didn’t answer that question today at the presser...
Sununu is on Hannity right now answering this lieing ad. I do not think he and Hannity have heard yet that CNN debunked it as a lie. LOL!!! Maybe Mark Levin can text message Hannity.
Color me surprised. Maybe Obama rejected Clinton and this is payback. Hard to believe CNN is capable of anything close to honest journalism...Time will tell.
That is bad when a Dem tells a lie so big that even CNN won’t cover for him.
Can Obama’s staff be so incompetant and stupid that no one there realized this would come out and backfire like this?
I hope so
They still think the media is carrying their water
You’d think with this rotten fish under a White House carpet somewhere, ‘Bammy’d be a little more careful about commenting on ANY government involvement in broke/closing businesses..
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=209811
More precisely, CNN works for liberals. Not necessarily for Obama, who is harming liberalism.
I am on Twitter and following Mark Levin and the Right Scoop. They just sent out tweets on this and I retweeted it. I don’t have a lot of followers but I do my part.
I’ve heard of someone being partisan but this really takes the cake that you would twist your own personal tragedy like this to help any political candidate. There is absolutely no factual basis for any of the allegations in attempting to attach this to Romney - not even the closing of the plant because not only was Romney gone at the time it went belly up, it would have gone belly up even sooner without Bain’s intervention to try to keep it afloat. Since she had her own insurance he wouldn’t have even likely had her added on to his own insurance as a “family plan” at the time he was laid off anyway...this is wrong on so many levels - factually and morally. This takes this campaign even further into the gutter than thought possible.
I wonder how MSNBC will cover this? Justin Bieber’s twin and Mathews will try their level best to fly cover.
I see the loathsome Bill Burton has slimed his way into the campaign.
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