Month: February 2011
Verbatim
Over the last two years since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has added 200,000* new federal jobs and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. We’re broke!
— House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), bristling at criticisms that there might be job losses resulting from the his party’s promise of $100 billion in spending cuts this year, ABC News reports. (*The actual number of jobs created by the federal government since 2009 is 58,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.).
Alvin Greene Gets Only Minimal Support
1%
Share of votes that surprise 2010 U.S. Senate nominee Alvin Greene (D) garnered in a special election for a state legislative seat in South Carolina in the four-way race, according to an Edison Research Exit Poll of Democratic primary voters.
Majority Disapproves of Republican Plans to Cut Funding for Health Care Reform
55%
Share of the public that disapproves of the Republican idea to cut off funding for health care reform, while just 35% approve, according to a new CBS News poll.
Gingrich’s People are “Frugging” Again
frugging An unethical fundraising tactic where a telemarketer falsely claims to be a researcher conducting a poll, when in reality the “researcher” is attempting to solicit a donation. The Washington Post cites Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions advocacy group as example: “According to complaints on consumer-focused Web sites, some American Solutions calls begin with slanted polling questions before proceeding to a request for money. The tactic, known as ‘fundraising under the guise of research,’ or frugging, is discouraged as unethical by trade groups such as the Marketing Research Association.”
Boehner Caught Lying about the Number of Federal Jobs Created in the Past Two Years – So Be It
One of the Republicans’ most often-repeated “big lies” — the Goebbels-Rove tactic of repeating a falsehood over and over until it is perceived to be true or, as Rove put it, until a “new reality” has been created — is that the government cannot create jobs.
Boehner won control of the House last year by haranguing the president about “jobs, jobs, jobs,” now he says that if adding 200,000 federal employees to the unemployment rolls would please his tea partyist base, well, “so be it.”
This is, of course, demonstrably untrue. Just for starters, there are hundreds of thousands of contractors in aerospace, defense, transportation and elsewhere who owe their jobs to the federal government and no one else.
Notably, the federal government paid, and is still paying, the salaries of tens of thousands of employees of Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the other end of the spectrum, the federal government contracts out nearly all the construction work on new roads, bridges, tunnels, harbors and the like. State and local governments do the same.
Beyond the contractors, the federal government also has direct employees — about 2.8 million of them. Federal employees use their salaries the same way everyone else does. They pay mortgages or rent and other bills. They buy groceries, clothing, appliances and electronics. They go out to restaurants and on vacation. They even pay taxes.
Al Greene’s on the Ballot in S.C. Again — No, the Other Al Greene
He told the Associated Press he had “no comment” on his strategy in the race and said he was feeling OK about the election.
But don’t worry, if Greene’s brand of campaigning serves as well in this race as it did in his last one, he’ll likely be back with his sights set on an even higher office.
In November, he told Politico that he was thinking about a White House bid and had called South Carolina’s Democratic Party to ask how much it would cost to run for president. “Maybe. I’ll have to see,” he said.
South Carolina’s fee to enter the 2008 presidential election was $2,500 — substantially less than the 10 grand Greene anted up for his senate bid, but still more than the $165 it cost to enter the rep race.
