From The Daily.com:

(On) a cold December Sunday in the 1980s Romney got a phone call from a Mormon bishop in Utah who said the adult daughter of one of his members — a single mother who did not belong to the church — needed help. The woman’s heating oil had been turned off in the dead of winter.

Enlisting his young sons to help, Romney loaded up his Gran Torino with firewood and drove the car from the family’s generous house in the leafy Boston suburb of Belmont to the woman’s home in the hardscrabble Dorchester neighborhood downtown..

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Years after a business partner died unexpectedly, Romney helped the man’s surviving daughter go to medical school with loans for tuition — loans he forgave when she graduated.

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Stories like these are legion. Romney gathering neighbors in a quick effort to clear out a burning house until firefighters arrived on the scene. Showing up unsolicited to clear a hornet’s nest near an injured church member’s house. Organizing a New York City search for a business partner’s missing daughter.

The sad part of the story in the Daily.com is that these good works may be being avoided because they are related to Mitt’s Mormon faith. It’s disappointing that just because one may disagree with Mormonism, his campaign feels they can’t paint the full picture of who Mitt Romney really is. Sure, he is a very successful businessman, but he also clearly cared about those around him. The Christian faith (and yes, Mormonism IS Christian) demands that we care for the poor. Not the government. Us. We are called, as individuals, to care for the poor.

Have we agreed as a society to implement programs that can be distributed through the government to help the poor? Yes. And almost all of us agree with helping those who cannot take care of themselves through the government. It is the false narrative of the left that pretends that conservatives want to do away with programs for the poor. We do not. But somewhere along the way these programs became bloated, wasteful, and full of fraud, wasting our money and NOT helping the poor, but creating subculture in our society that is now trapped in generational poverty and dependence on the government. All entitlement programs need to be reevaluated, scaled down, stripped of fraud and waste, and made to work for all those who are truly needy. This is the desire of conservatives, not getting rid of these programs.

But as Christians, our faith asks us to use our resources, personally, to help the poor. And we do. Protestant and Catholic faiths give billions to help the poor around the world. In my faith, Catholic Relief Services helped more than 100 million poor and vulnerable people in nearly 100 countries around the world in just 2010 alone. CRS doesn’t waste it’s money on bureaucracy, fraud, and waste either. It is one of the most efficient organizations in the world. In fiscal year 2010, 95 percent of the money CRS spent went directly to programs that benefit the poor. Catholic Charities provides help from food to basic needs, disaster relief, prenatal services, food pantries and soup kitchens; job training; family counseling; emergency financial assistance for heat, electricity and other needs; shelters for the homeless and battered women; and advocacy for the poor in legislatures and in government agencies.

Mormonism follows the same view. The quote on their humanitarian Aid page says, We are “to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to provide for the widow, to dry up the tear of the orphan, to comfort the afflicted, whether in this church, or in any other, or in no church at all…”-Joseph Smith, “Times and Seasons,” March 15, 1842

In the same way the Catholic faith helps the poor around the world, so does Mormonism: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has donated more than $1 billion in cash and material assistance to 167 different countries in need of humanitarian aid since it started keeping track in 1985.”

So, let’s ignore the left’s false narrative of Mitt Romney being some greedy guy who doesn’t care about the poor. Clearly he does. He gave more than $7 million to charity in 2010 and 2011. He donated 16 percent to charity from 2010 to 2011. Knowing and stating that the government could do a much better job than it does taking care of the poor, is just stating the truth. The left will always whine about any cuts because it helps them politically. But we have to face the truth of our spending. We have to be grownups and stand firm against waste and fraud. It does no good for the truly needy when our taxpayer money is being thrown down the hole of greed and fraud.

Here is a great review of Mitt Romney’s entitlement reform plan. Here is Mitt’s speech.

Here are some highlights from that speech:

It took 43 presidents over 200 years to accumulate $6.3 trillion of national debt. President Obama is on track to borrow and spend nearly that much in just one term.

His fundamental error is that he believes government creates jobs and opportunity. He’s wrong. He puts his faith in government. I put my faith in people.

That is why I will make government simpler, smaller, and smarter.

This is not only good for the economy, it is a moral imperative. We cannot with moral conscience borrow trillions of dollars that can only be repaid by our children. We cannot so weaken our economic foundation that we jeopardize our ability to preserve freedom.

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I learned how to balance budgets in business. In the private sector, you have no choice—you either balance your budget or you go broke. And you spend every dollar like it’s your own, because it is.

Someone should have told that to Solyndra. The federal government gave them a $535 million loan guarantee to build a factory in Fremont, California. The footprint covered 5 football fields. They had robots that whistled Disney songs. I am not kidding. They had “spa-like showers with liquid-crystal displays of the water temperature.” The company headquarters was called the “Taj Mahal” of office buildings. That’s how government starts a company.

Let me compare Solyndra with Staples, a company I helped get started. Our headquarters was located in the back of an empty food warehouse. We got some used office furniture – old Naugahyde chairs. You had to be an athlete to get out of them. Every penny we had went into selling the product and attracting new customers.

That’s a difference between the private sector and government–fiscal responsibility.

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Today, nine federal agencies run 47 different federal worker retraining programs at a cost of $18 billion a year. Just imagine how much is spent on overhead. I will send those workforce training dollars back to the states, empowering them to retrain workers in ways that fit the needs of their respective economies. In the process, we can save billions of dollars.

Finally, in addition to cutting programs and returning programs to states, there is a third approach to reining-in federal spending. It is to impose far greater productivity and efficiency on government itself, just like is regularly done in every successful business in the country.

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There are still other ways to make the federal government work more efficiently and effectively. We will attack the rampant fraud that exists in numerous government programs by enacting far stiffer penalties for those who steal from taxpayers. Cutting improper payments in half can save more than $60 billion a year. And we can save nearly $11 billion a year by repealing a political giveaway that protects unions from competition and drives up the cost of government contracts: it’s time to repeal Davis Bacon.

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In sum, I will make the federal government simpler, smaller, and smarter by eliminating programs, by sending programs back to the states, and by making government more productive. I will provide for the national defense, enforce our laws, preserve our safety net, and honor all our promises to our elderly. This is the right course for a moral nation.

Read the whole thing. It is excellent. We are finally getting to know Mitt Romney. He has a vision for this country to lead us back to prosperity. That is good for all Americans. Don’t let the false narrative of the left and the media fool you. Romney is a good man, family oriented, generous, caring, and he has a plan to get America back on it’s feet. Let’s not let the media distract us with issues that don’t matter, and stories that aren’t true. Let’s get to know the real Mitt Romney.