From PolitiFact:
“The president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day.”
Michele Bachmann on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 in a CNN interview
Tag Archives: Government Accountability Office
Keep On Truckin’, Little Ricky Goodhair
From The Houston Chronicle:
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s decision to shift the production of Army trucks from Texas to Wisconsin after 17 years caught Texas’ elected officials by surprise, raising questions about overconfidence, a loss of political clout and the impact of economic incentives provided to the winning company by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor.
Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry and the 34-member Senate-House delegation are rallying to salvage a deal for BAE Systems that could be worth $2.6 billion and sustain 10,000 direct and indirect jobs around the sprawling truck manufacturing plant in Sealy.
But as one Democratic operative puts it: “That’s like having a party in the corral after all the horses have run out.”
We don’t know where the buck stops, but that’s okay, because there are no bucks left!
From Paul Krugman at The New York Times:
Everyone’s talking about a new New Deal, for obvious reasons. In 2008, as in 1932, a long era of Republican political dominance came to an end in the face of an economic and financial crisis that, in voters’ minds, both discredited the G.O.P.’s free-market ideology and undermined its claims of competence. And for those on the progressive side of the political spectrum, these are hopeful times.
There is, however, another and more disturbing parallel between 2008 and 1932 — namely, the emergence of a power vacuum at the height of the crisis. The interregnum of 1932-1933, the long stretch between the election and the actual transfer of power, was disastrous for the U.S. economy, at least in part because the outgoing administration had no credibility, the incoming administration had no authority and the ideological chasm between the two sides was too great to allow concerted action. And the same thing is happening now.
Mr. Shmeckel and Formaldehyde
From the Washington Post:
The Bush administration has changed Environmental Protection Agency reviews of chemicals in a way that will delay scientific assessments of their health risks and open the process to politicization, congressional investigators said yesterday.
In a new report and in testimony on Capitol Hill, officials with the Government Accountability Office criticized a White House policy that began this month to allow the Office of Management and Budget and other agencies to offer secret input on assessments of long-term exposure to chemicals such as formaldehyde.
