The Mitt Romney of Interviews Past has struck again, this time on the issue of healthcare.

In an interview with 60 Minutes that aired last night, Romney talked up emergency room care, as part of his case that even if we repeal Obamacare, the uninsured will still have access to healthcare.

"If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and—and die," Romney said. "We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care."

But in an interview on Morning Joe in 2010, Romney defended his own universal health care bill in Massachusetts and spoke against emergency room care, saying “it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

And in 2007, Romney went further, calling emergency room care “socialism,” because taxpayers end up paying for it.

“Romney now is turning himself into a pretzel because he can’t admit that that’s what he did in Massachusetts and that’s what he used to think was a perfectly good idea,” The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn said.

The recent protests across the Arab world in response to an anti-Muslim film are yet another product of the “outrage industry,” author Salman Rushdie said in an exclusive interview with Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday's The Last Word.

“There are people in Islamic world whose job it is literally to find a flashpoint and use them to launch a larger attack against American values,” Rushdie said.

This latest outrage is not dissimilar to the fatwa that was declared on Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses 23 years ago. Rushdie's new book, the memoir Joseph Anton, documents the decade he spent in hiding after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini declared the fatwa.

Often, people in this so-called “outrage industry” don’t read or view the media they condemn, Rushdie said. In the case of the video that sparked the recent protests, “it got translated into Arabic and sent to these people. It just played into their hands and they used it.”

Regarding the controversy that surrounded The Satanic Verses, “it’s quite clear that the Ayatolla Khomeni didn’t read a 600-page book in English on his deathbed,” before issuing the fatwa, Rushdie said.

Indeed, on Monday's The Last Word, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—author of a recent controversial Newsweek piece—discussed the rage that lead her to burn that same book without having ever read it.

“I understood one thing, and that was anyone who offended or said anything insulting about the Prophet Mohammed should die," she said. "I did that unthinkingly, and I think the huge mobs we’re seeing are doing that unthinkingly, but that does not excuse the individual responsibilities once they leave the company of the crowd.”

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali was 19, she “piously, even gleefully” participated in a rally in Kenya to burn Salman Rushdie’s book—despite having never read it.

Ali, whose cover story was published today in Newsweek, uses her own personal experiences of what she calls "Muslim Rage" and unquestioning fanaticism as a lens to view the protests in the Middle East.

Her own blind rage is not unique, too: The brother of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, had not seen the internet video that sparked many of these protests, despite condemning and calling his supporters to act out against it, she said.

“I was taught to be loyal and fanatically loyal to the Qaran and the Prophet Mohammed,” Ali exclusively told The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell. “I understood one thing and that was anyone offended or said anything insulting about the Prophet Mohammed should die. I did that unthinkingly and I think the huge mobs we’re seeing are doing that unthinkingly but that does not excuse the individual responsibilities once they leave the company of the crowd.”

That responsibility is to value human life above religious outrage, Ali said. “The vast majority of Muslims, even though they may condemn violence, they may condemn murder, they haven’t found a way to bring themselves to understand that they may be offended but human life is more valuable than the offense taking in the name of human icons,” she added.

Obamacare will save the life of Stacey and Caleb Lihn’s daughter Zoe, the couple told Lawrence O'Donnell Monday.
 
Stacey Lihn won admirers across the country last week when she spoke movingly at the Democratic National Convention in support of Obamacare. “If Mitt Romney becomes president and Obamacare is repealed, there is a good chance she’ll hit her lifetime cap,” Lihn told convention-goers, stressing the need to maintain Obamacare’s ban on lifetime coverage caps. “There’s no way we can afford the care she needs to survive.”
 
Zoe Lihn was born with a heart defect. At just two years old, she’s already had two open-heart surgeries. She’ll need another in a year or two, at which point she’d likely reach her lifetime cap on insurance coverage—long before she can even vote.

“She has a chronic condition, she’s going to need care for her life,”  Stacey told O'Donnell on The Last Word Monday. “Those medical bills just keep adding up and adding up and it’s frightening to think about her appeal and losing that coverage.”

Caleb Lihn said the fear of losing insurance coverage for Zoe is “always in the back of our mind, sometimes in the front.” Meeting the cap and going uninsured be “devastating” for the family, he said, sending them into bankruptcy and putting their family of four on welfare just to keep their daughter alive.
 
“I’d never spoken to an audience before,” Stacey Lihn admitted to O’Donnell, when asked about her emotional plea for Obama's reelection.
 
Romney, who recently said he wanted to keep some parts of Obamacare, then backtracked, has said that the free market would ensure coverage for those who’ve reached their limit.

“That’s just absolutely not true, that would be great if that was true,” Stacey Lihn said, as her daughter clamored for attention. Once Zoe reaches her cap, "I don't see anyone saying I'll cover that child."

In his speech to the Democratic convention on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid slammed Mitt Romney again for not disclosing more than two years of tax returns.
 
“Never in modern American history has a presidential candidate tried so hard to hide himself from the people he hopes to serve,” Reid told convention-goers.
 
Speaking live with Hardball host Chris Matthews in Charlotte, Reid reiterated his criticisms. “Who is Mitt Romney? Why has he tried so hard to hide himself from the American people? Why won’t he show us his tax returns? Why won’t he talk about himself?” Reid asked. “He won’t, because he can’t, because if he did the American people would understand who was running for president and they wouldn’t like it.”
 
Reid alleged recently that he'd been told by an unnamed source that Romney hadn't paid income taxes for ten years. Reid wouldn’t respond directly to Matthews’s questions about whether or not he had probable cause to believe that, but said that due to offshore tax havens, Romney “did not invest in American institutions, so he got out of paying in taxes.”

Missouri's Claire McCaskill may not be the most liberal Democrat in the Senate, but she's one of Obama's biggest assets, according to The Last Word host Lawrence O'Donnell.

In June, McCaskill seemingly distanced herself from the president by announcing she wouldn’t be attending the Democratic convention. She said she never attends during her own campaigns, but O’Donnell said “there’s not much room for doubt that [distancing herself from Obama] is one of the reasons she won’t be attending.”

O'Donnell argued that Democrats are wrong when they criticize moderate Democrats from moderate states, saying that Obama “wouldn’t dream of criticizing” her, because “he wants Claire McCaskill to get re-elected in Missouri, a state he lost four years ago.”

According to O’Donnell, McCaskill has been “as helpful as any Democrat in an unsafe Senate seat has ever been.” In fact, she voted for the stimulus bill, the Affordable Care Act (something that is particularly unpopular in Missouri), and the confirmation of Sonia Sotomeyer and Elena Kagan.

“The votes that Claire McCaskill has cast for President Obama’s agenda have cost her so much politically that she has been [polling] significantly behind an abject imbecile,” O’Donnell said referring to Republican Rep. Todd Akin. 

"America should be thanking her for managing to prevent a member of the Missouri Republican party from winning that Senate seat six years ago," O'Donnell said. "And for sanity's sake, for America's sanity, America should be hoping Claire McCaskill can do it again."