Mitt Romney’s Blood Money

Here’s another Mitt Romney Bain Capital video:

I’ve been checking this story out, and it appears to be all true. Basically: In 1989, while Mittens was CEO, Bain Capital bought a medical testing company called Damon Corporation. Bain took Damon public in 1991, and Mittens sat on the board of directors. Damon was sold to Corning in 1993 for a nice profit to Bain. Mittens personally made $473,000 on the deal, according to The Real Romney by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman.

Very soon thereafter the sale it was revealed that Damon had been under federal investigation, and in 1996 Damon pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud. They’d been over-billing Medicare for unnecessary tests. Federal prosecutors say that the over-billing was going on from 1988 to 1993, during the entire time the company was owned by Bain. The feds credited Corning for helping out the fraud; no word about Bain.

Today Mittens said he didn’t know about the fraud, but when he was running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 he said that he had “blown the whistle” on Damon and had taken steps to stop the fraud. There’s no indication that Bain did anything except send some lawyers over to review Damon’s Medicare billing practices, which appears to have gone nowhere. In any event, no Bain executive, including Romney, was implicated in the fraud.

If Mittens is the nominee, I doubt this will be the last we’ll hear of the Damon Corporation and Labscam.

The Twilight of the Newt

Nate Silver expects Mittens to win Florida, and conventional wisdom says that will effectively be the end of the contest. If true, we have only a few more days to snark about Newt. Unfortunately I am snarked out at the moment. Even Charles Pierce is out sick, and his replacement’s efforts fall a bit short on the coffee-snorting meter.

But if any of you are in the mood to snark, be my guest.