DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Eight Republican Hopefuls Get Ready to Rumble at Iowa Debate

Of the 8 people on that stage? Ron Paul for one, and Mitt Romney, when he isn't trying to appease the republican base. Both, if presented with fact, hard evidence, whatever, would be more likely to make a logical choice regardless of their gut, beliefs, opinions, preconceived notions, etc. That's what I like about Christy too. He's willing to look objectively into an issue and listen to fact, rather than rhetoric and party line talking points.

Just wanted to mention how much I really dislike the debate format that has been used to this point. One minute is not sufficient to produce anything other than soundbites, talking points ... there's no depth of knowledge on display. The other thing is that it almost appears to be more of a showcase for the panel of journalists than the politicians. Chris Wallace in particular seemed more interested in embarrassing the candidates than getting any depth of answer from them. Gingrich beat him like a piniata for asking a "gotcha" question, but Pawlenty fell right into the trap when he was baited to attack Romney, and then Bachmann. He ended up looking silly. I would like to see less "spectacle" and more discussion, but it appeared that Fox News was more interested in producing a good TV show. Last, I know its early but there are just too many candidates on stage to give all of them fair time, unless you change the format to just encompass foreign policy, domestic policy, fiscal policy, etc, separately, in a separate series of debates. I would like it to be more of a discussion format than a high school quiz show.

j/c

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/10/michele-bachmann-stimulus_n_922851.html

WASHINGTON -- Few candidates in the Republican presidential primary field have decried the federal government with as much gusto as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). The three-term congresswoman has belittled the stimulus package, deemed the Obama administration both corrupt and "gangster," and lamented the "orgy" of spending she sees happening in Washington.

The contempt has served her well, helping her craft the type of fiscally conservative, anti-government message that has catapulted her into frontrunner status for the Iowa Caucus and, more immediately, Saturday's crucial Ames Straw Poll.

But it's simply not supported by the Minnesota Republican's actual record.

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Huffington Post with three separate federal agencies reveals that on at least 16 separate occasions, Bachmann petitioned the federal government for direct financial help or aid. A large chunk of those requests were for funds set aside through President Obama's stimulus program, which Bachmann once labeled "fantasy economics." Bachmann made two more of those requests to the Environmental Protection Agency, an institution that she has suggested she would eliminate if she were in the White House.

Taken as a whole, the letters underscore what Bachmann's critics describe as a glaring distance between her campaign oratory and her actual conduct as a lawmaker. Combined with previous revelations that Bachmann personally relied on a federally subsidized home loan while her husband's business benefited from Medicaid payments, it appears that one of the Tea Party's most cherished members has demonstrated that the government does, in fact, play a constructive role -- at least in her life and district.

"It had been a longstanding tradition in Congress to be fiscally conservative in every other district other than your own," said John Feehery, president of QGA Communications and a top adviser to former Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert. "Bachmann apparently is being a traditionalist."

A traditionalist, perhaps, but only when the cameras are off. When President Obama crafted a $787 billion stimulus package that included historic investments in state aid, infrastructure projects, health care and education reforms as well as a large swath of tax breaks, Bachmann led a chorus of conservatives in decrying the policy.

“During the last 100 days we have seen an orgy [of spending]," she said of the stimulus and auto industry bailout during a conference in Minnesota on May 4, 2009. "It would make any local smorgasbord embarrassed."

Less than three weeks later, she went looking for her piece of the pie.

On May 20, 2009, Bachmann wrote Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, asking him to look into an application for aid that the city of Big Lake, Minn., had made to "develop and finance the Big Lake Rail Park," which she described as "an ambitious commercial and industrial complex which will enhance economic development and job opportunities in this rural Minnesota community." Toward the end of the letter, she added: "We must work together to ensure job creators have access to the vital credit they need to make projects like this a success."

On May 22, 2009, she wrote Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood asking for support for the St. Cloud, Minn., Metropolitan Transit Commission's application for federal funds to "replace twenty-three 35-foot transit buses with compressed natural gas (CNG) powered buses."

On June 4, 2009, she wrote LaHood again seeking grant funding to extend the Northstar Corridor commuter service from Big Lake to St. Cloud.

On June 19, 2009, she made an "urgent" request to LaHood to reverse a decision by the Federal Highway Administration that undermined a project in Waite Park, Minn. The project, she noted, had already received $2.578 million in federal funding through the stimulus package and was "only awaiting the final determination" from the FHWA.

On July 2, 2009, she wrote LaHood again, pleading for money for road improvements in Waite Park. She added that she was "pleased to learn" that Minnesota's Department of Transportation was not going to "pull the nearly $2.8 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding set aside for the project."

On Sept. 15, 2009, Bachmann wrote six separate letters to LaHood asking for help funding six projects (the Northstar line among them) through the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program. The Center for Public Integrity and MinnPost has previously reported on those letters.

On Oct. 5, 2009, she wrote Vilsack again, praising him for putting money into the nation's beleaguered pork industry and encouraging him to help "stabilize prices through direct government purchasing."

Five days later, she was chastising the concept of government spending in public, saying that the president's efforts to stem the fallout of the recession amounted to a charade. "We hear about fantasy football games. This is fantasy economics," Bachmann said.

That the Department of Transportation was the primary target of Bachmann's quest for federal funds isn't surprising. The congresswoman has a record of trying to protect infrastructure projects from her party's budget cutters, arguing that transportation projects should be exempt from the ban on earmarks that the House of Representatives instituted in November 2010. She was also far from the only conservative who attempted to get her hands on some of the $12 billion in funds that DOT received under the stimulus.

"Some members refuse to take stimulus and won't have anything to do with getting government transit money flowing into their states. Others will say that they are against the idea of the stimulus or federal money flowing into the economy but if the money is there, they are going to try and get that money flowing into their district," said Brian Darling, a senior fellow in government studies at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

But that doesn't necessarily absolve Bachmann from attacks from her fellow party members, Darling continued.

"Some conservatives won't like it," he said. "No two ways about it. They will look at it and not like it because they don't want members trying to funnel money back to their state."

Even more problematic, however, could be Bachmann's attempts to get money and assistance from the EPA, an agency that she once said should be "renamed the job-killing organization of America."

In February 2007, well before Obama was in office, Bachmann co-signed a letter to the EPA urging its officials to help fund technical assistance programs and rural water initiatives "in small communities across Minnesota." The authors of the letter, which included nearly the entire Minnesota congressional delegation at the time, noted that FY 2006 funding for the National Rural Water Association had been set at $11 million.

"We need to continue these efforts in 2007," they wrote.

In other communications with the EPA, Bachmann was far colder to agency policy, criticizing spring 2009 federal management standards for coal combustion byproducts and 2008 National Ambient Air Quality standards. But in other instances, Bachmann turned to the EPA for constituent-related problems. In a Feb. 2, 2010, letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, she asked the agency to support a $270,806 grant application (filed with the EPA's Clean Diesel Grant Program) that would help a St. Cloud bus company replace two older motor coach vehicles.

"Voigt's Bus Service, with Community Transportation, Incorporated, is committed to bringing long-term benefits to the environment and the economy and they wish to accomplish this through the Clean Diesel Grant Program," she wrote.

More than the specific funding requests, it is Bachmann's private acknowledgement that the EPA can facilitate positive outcomes for both the environment and the economy that stands out for conservative activists. On her campaign website, after all, Bachmann refers to the EPA as the "Job Killing Agency."

"There is a line between representing your district and then trying to lard up on all of this pork spending, pun intended," said Bill Wilson, President of Americans for Limited Government. "There are very few in Congress who have been able to stand strong and say, 'No I'm not going to do this.' And they are, in our view, the heroes … By not being part of that group [Rep. Bachmann] isn't unique, obviously. But I think that she would owe an explanation to the public as to why she did it. Why she asked for certain things, including things from EPA when she's been very vocal about the overreach of the EPA?"

Both Bachmann's presidential campaign and her congressional office did not return requests for comment for this article. In the past, the congresswoman has tried to draw a distinction between the national message she imparts and her professional responsibilities as a representative from Minnesota.

"It is my obligation as a member of Congress to ensure stimulus dollars are spent on the most worthy projects. I did just that when I supported applications for the TIGER grant program," she said last year.

While Bachmann clearly petitioned the federal government for help in multiple venues, she was incredibly unsuccessful in her efforts. Minnesota's sixth congressional district received more than $234 million in stimulus contracts, grants and loans, according to the Obama administration's Recovery.gov website. That may seem like a hefty bundle, but it ranks last among the state's eight congressional districts.

A Department of Transportation official, meanwhile, tells The Huffington Post that the federal government did not end up funding a single one of the projects for which Bachmann solicited help. The department did send funds to the Minnesota state government, which in turn backed transportation initiatives in the state. But the DOT official said that only a small sliver of that pool, if any, was likely to have ended up where Bachmann wanted.

In one instance, moreover, Bachmann wrote LaHood in support of the "Cold Spring Police Department's application for funding through the COPS hiring Recovery Program." That program, the DOT official confirmed, is operated by the Department of Justice. Bachmann was petitioning the wrong agency.

In the end, Bachmann's ineffectiveness in securing federal help for constituents doesn't mitigate the fact that she sought federal help in the first place. And for Republican primary voters, who have been fed a healthy diet of anti-government rhetoric during this election cycle, that may prove to be a blot on her record.

"This will come up in the context of the battle for the Republican nomination and it will be up to Mrs. Bachmann to explain these things adequately," said Craig Shirley, a longtime Republican operative. "The task for any good candidate is to explain why they did such and such which might not conform with party orthodoxy, and then pivot very quickly to convince enough primary voters why it is they who should be the nominee and not the other contenders."

More to add about Bachmann. This is one of the reasons I don't like her very much. She's riding the coat tails of the libertarian movement and has co-opted what it really means. When in all reality she has a track record for pushing the federal government to become a christian nation because in her mind they have a moral right, God-given even, to rule. This blog post by Jon Winsor entitled "Reason and the Mind of Michelle Bachmann" over at The Intersection sums up my thoughts nicely.

Quote:

---

A couple weeks ago, when Chris described the Tea Party as authoritarian, I had to stop and think–how could that be? The Tea Party bills itself as libertarian. How could it be simultaneously authoritarian? How would that work?

Ryan Lizza’s great profile of Michele Bachmann in The New Yorker shows us. I’d encourage people to read the whole thing, but a couple key paragraphs jumped out at me. The first is Lizza’s description of Bachmann’s religious influences: theologian Francis Schaeffer (a very important theologian for modern evangelical activism), and a leading proponent of Schaffer’s, Nancy Pearcey:

[Pearcey taught] readers how to implement Schaeffer’s idea that a Biblical world view should suffuse every aspect of one’s life. She tells her readers to be extremely cautious with ideas from non-Christians. There may “be occasions when Christians are mistaken on some point while nonbelievers get it right,” she writes in “Total Truth.” “Nevertheless, the overall systems of thought constructed by nonbelievers will be false—for if the system is not built on Biblical truth, then it will be built on some other ultimate principle. Even individual truths will be seen through the distorting lens of a false world view.

Is the Bible a clearly discernible “system” that competes with all other systems? There are many ways to interpret the Bible, so who gets to say when the Bible and a “system” conflicts? The implication is that some people are continually right in some sense, and others are continually wrong, regardless of the demonstrable cases where the “right” people might be in error.
A second paragraph that jumped out at me has to do with the beginning of Bachmann’s political career:

Bachmann was getting interested in politics just as her party was getting interested in people like her. In the late nineteen-nineties, she began travelling throughout Minnesota, delivering lectures in churches, and writing pamphlets, on the perils of a federal education law known as School to Work, which supported vocational training, and a Minnesota education law known as Profile of Learning, which set state education standards. In one pamphlet, she wrote that federal education law “embraces a socialist, globalist worldview; loyalty to all government and not America.” In another, she warned of a “new restructuring of American society,” beginning with “workforce boards” that would tell every student the specific career options he or she could pursue, turning children into “human resources for a centrally planned economy.”

David Frum comments on this phase of Bachmann’s development:

This kind of talk would sound paranoid to most of us. It emerges from a religious philosophy that rejects the federal government as an alien instrument of destruction, ripping apart a Christian society. Bachmann’s religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today’s hard economic times.

When Bachmann is asked what principle motivates her, her answer is ”liberty”. But Lizza notes dryly, ”It is a peculiarity of the current political moment that a politician with a history of pushing sectarian religious beliefs in government has become a hero to a libertarian movement.”

Thinking over the above, it’s helpful to distinguish two strands of American libertarianism. The first is the kind we think of with Ron Paul or Reason magazine. This view believes in the power of a free individual’s reason to improve life, and it is plausibly anti-authoritarian (although arguably, it has its own authorities and ways of being absolute). The second libertarianism has to do with freedom from the federal government. This is not necessarily because you dislike authority. You might just view the federal government as a rival authority to the authority you want. With this second kind of libertarianism, “states rights” comes to mind, and also the religious homeschool movement.

Michele Bachmann has this second view in spades. Not only is she a staunch disciple of Schaeffer and Pearcey, but also John Eidsmoe (who told an interviewer “it was the state [of Alabama's] ‘constitutional right to secede,’ and that ‘Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln…’”), and also J. Steven Wilkins (“the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North”), and David A. Noebel (a homeschooling activist and “longtime John Birch society member whose pamphlets include… ‘Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles.’”)

So while the first type of libertarianism at least has a classical liberal’s respect for reason and shared facts, Bachmann’s style of libertarianism seems much more Manichean, and paradoxically authoritarian (where a particular “moral” authority is very strong. Maybe calling it libertarianism is a stretch). If we’re going to talk to a Michele Bachmann about just about any national policy, particularly science-related policy, right out of the gate reason and shared facts are going to have a hard time.

---

Link