Fact-checking Bachmann -
We are going to vet a statement in the column that we had previously discussed in an online chat. We probably did not do it full justice then, and Bachmann continues to say it — including on the Sunday morning TV shows this past weekend. A number of readers sent e-mails curious to know the truth, so we are happy to oblige. …
“We had one employee at the federal Department of Transportation that made $170,000 a year at the beginning of the recession. We had the trillion-dollar stimulus, and 18 months into the recession, we had 1,690 employees making over $170,000. Government has really been growing at — a lot of largesse, but the people in the real world aren’t. And that’s what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world.”
— Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Aug. 14, 2011 ….
The example she cites — the number of Transportation Department employees making more than $170,000 — uses the metric of “the beginning of the recession.” There’s a reason for that phrase: The recession started in December 2007, 13 months before Obama became president. In other words, Bachmann gives the impression that she is talking about something that Obama did, but in fact, the big increase in government pay that she denounces started under Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.
In fact, the apparent source of Bachmann’s claim, a 2009 article in USA Today, made it clear that Bush recommended across-the-board raises that, after they got through Congress, resulted in boosts of 3 percent in January 2008 and 3.9 percent in January 2009. By contrast, Obama in 2010 recommended the smallest federal pay raise since 1975 — 2 percent — and then froze salaries in 2011.
Democrat Kirsten Powers: Stop attacking Evangelicals!
Jon Huntsman had some harsh words for Obama’s bus tour and some kind remarks about Perry -
Jon Huntsman called into The Don Wade and Roma Show on ABC News Radio affiliate WLS today, condemning President Obama for leaving Washington DC to embark on a three-state bus tour. “Come on, let’s face the facts,” Huntsman said. “ Bus tours are great and I particularly like it when a good rock band is on tour, but to have the president or anybody else, when the most important thing they can be doing is standing up and say, okay, the regulations of this country are what are strangling business, that’s why capital isn’t making its way to the marketplace, that’s why people aren’t hiring, that’s why there’s zero confidence in our future, because we’re stuck in bureaucratic red tape.”
Wade then played a clip from ABC’s This Week, where Laura Ingraham noted that the President no longer participates in a daily economy briefing.
“ Unbelievable,” Huntsman replied. “What else matters? What else matters in this country? You know I hate to be so crass because families give their all to the military. I know that you all have, and our family has, too. Our future isn’t going to be in Afghanistan, our future isn’t going to be in Iraq. Our future is based on whether or not this nation is ready for the 21st-century competitive challenges, and that’s across the Pacific Ocean, and that’s an economic challenge.” …
When asked about Governor Rick Perry’s explosive 2012 entrance, Huntsman replied: “ Rick is a friend and he’s a good man and I salute Rick Perry. He has a good jobs record, that will make two of us in the race who have good job records. In order to beat President Obama, let’s face the facts, because 2012 will be about which candidate can speak up with the message that speaks to economic expansion and jobs, period,” Huntsman continued. “That’s all that people care about, they want to get out of the hole there.
Romney calls the tour Obama’s “Magical Misery bus tour.”
Romney on taxes:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told an audience in Plymouth yesterday that he wants to lower tax rates but isn’t looking for the wealthiest to pay less. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said he will release a plan this fall to cut personal and corporate tax rates while simplifying the tax code. He said he favors eliminating some loopholes and credits and possibly decreasing the number of tax brackets.
But Romney said he does not want to cut taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
“I’m not for tax cuts for the rich,” Romney said. “The rich can take care of themselves. I want to get America working again. And so I want to make sure that whatever we do in the tax code, we’re not giving a windfall to the very wealthy.” …
When asked why he did not support raising taxes on the rich, Romney said some businesses – including the Common Man – pay a personal income tax. “If we raise taxes on wealthy people, that means businesses see their taxes go up,” he said. “I don’t want to raise taxes on employers. Certainly not now.”
Romney also argued that raising taxes on the rich would not solve an underlying budgetary imbalance. He pointed to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that said taxing top earners at 100 percent would not yield enough money to run the government. Instead of raising taxes, he said, the government should cut spending and promote economic growth….
“We’re only inches away from no longer being a free nation, a free economy, that is,” Romney said. “My view is no, no, no, you’re taking too much already. I do not want to raise taxes.”
At least one political analyst thinks it’s over for Romney now that Perry is in the race>
The “ignored candidate”, Ron Paul has a new tv ad out:
He’s ignored because he always runs and never wins.
Does Perry pack heat?
While Texas Gov. Rick Perry was campaigning at the Iowa State Fair, a reporter from Politico.com asked him whether he was armed. Perry, a known gun owner and enthusiast, refused to answer the question. “That’s why it’s called ‘concealed,’ ” Perry told the reporter.
And that’s why — unless there are some Texas-sized skeletons in his closet — we’ll be calling Perry “the Republican nominee.
This is not a boring book. More to the point, it’s not even a book about Rick Perry. It’s a book about Rick Perry’s ideas. And his big idea is that most everything the federal government does is unconstitutional. The book is fundamentally about the 10th amendment: that’s the one that says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” …
Rick Perry thinks we’ve swung way too far towards the clauses allowing Congress to, you know, actually solve problems. In his book, he suggests that courts went too far when they used the Commerce Clause to justify “federal laws regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, creating national minimum wage laws, [and] establishing national labor laws.” That’s a lot of the federal government for one guy to dislike.
He also thinks the federal government should butt out of education — kind of ironic given that No Child Left Behind was passed by George W. Bush, who Perry called “an incredibly good president,” and based on programs Bush pioneered in Texas — and that we have a problem with activist judges, even though a world in which all these programs were declared unconstitutional would be a world in which activist judges basically invalidated a century of popular sovereignty.
But Perry isn’t such a fan of popular sovereignty, either. He’d like to repeal the 17th Amendment, which would mean giving states, rather than voters, the power to select senators, as he believes the 17th Amendment was part of an unwise effort to take power away from the states. You can’t fault the guy for inconsistency.
The book is here. And apparently others are writing books on Perry.
Will immigration hurt Perry?
Maybe we’ll use predator drones for border security:
Like most in the GOP, Perry espoused a muscular support for Israel amid a turbulent Mideast, saying, “Israel is not ever gonna have to worry, if I’m the president to the United States, where we’re gonna be.” …
Texas already spends $152 million on its own on that effort, he said, and the state’s governor called for both up to 1,000 National Guard troops and the non-lethal use of unmanned aerial vehicles to patrol and monitor the 1,200-mile-long Texas-Mexico border.
“You can secure it, and the way you do it is you put boots on the ground – substantial number of boots on the ground,” he said.
As for using aircraft such as Predator drones, Perry noted many unarmed aircraft are already flown in the area each day as practice for the Air Force pilots who will guide them overseas. “Why not be flying those missions and using that real-time information to help our law enforcement?” Perry said. “Because if we will commit to that, I will suggest to you that we will be able to drive the drug cartels away from that border.”
Is Perry good for commodities?
Perry enjoys a double digit lead as frontrunner in a new Rasmussen poll :
According to the telephone survey, Perry has the support of 29% of likely Republican primary voters. Romney, who has heretofore been viewed as the frontrunner, earned 18%, while Bachmann picked up 13%.
Perhaps more significantly, Perry captured 39% of the vote among members of the Tea Party, with Bachmann coming in a distant second with 21% support. The numbers indicate that Perry is already starting to chip away at Bachmann’s social conservative base — Tea Party support split almost evenly between Bachmann and in a Rasmussen poll conducted just two weeks ago.
And bringing up the rear, Thaddeus McCotter penned a column for NRO: The Great Deflation .
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