Tag Archives: George Bush

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Michele Bachmann takes on NBC leftist David Gregory on Meet the Press

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From Newsbusters. (14 minutes)

Here’s the partial transcript:

MICHELE BACHMANN: When I came into Congress in January of 2007, the country was $8.67 trillion in debt; today it’s $15 trillion. Next year it’ll be $17 trillion. We’re acting like Greece and like Italy, and that’s what people are frustrated with. They want us to act like a first world nation, not like what President Barack Obama’s doing. He’s acting like we’re a banana republic. We’ve got to get our act together and stop spending money that we don’t have.

DAVID GREGORY: You’re not – I mean, you’re seriously calling the United States acting like a banana republic compared to the sort of debt issues that, that the Eurozone countries have had?

BACHMANN: What, what I’m doing is I’m – what I’m doing is saying that what – the decisions that Barack Obama is making is acting like a banana republic. It’s absolutely irresponsible what President Obama is doing to get behind measures to, to increase spending to such a level that we’re going into debt $1.5 trillion every year. This compares to President George Bush. Back in 2007, our debt for the entire year was $160 billion.

GREGORY: Congresswoman, that just misstates the record.

BACHMANN: Well, we topped that just in the month of November alone.

GREGORY: I mean, the Bush presidency, the-

BACHMANN: There’s no comparison. We’re talking-

GREGORY: -the, the debt – wait a minute, Congresswoman.

BACHMANN: David, let me just finish.

GREGORY: No, wait a minute. I just want to stop you for accuracy.

BACHMANN: Let me just finish. We’re talking-

GREGORY: For accuracy, Congresswoman.

BACHMANN: -we’re talking 10 times.

GREGORY: For accuracy, the debt exploded under the Bush administration.

BACHMANN: For accuracy. For accuracy. David, David, then, then let me finish. Do a comparison. I agree with you that there was too much money that was spent under George Bush.  But for the year 2007, the debt for the year was $160 billion. The debt for this last year was about $1 1/2 trillion. That’s almost 10 times more in debt than George Bush. And just for the month of – for the month of, I think it’s November of this year, it was more than the entire year for 2007.  So there’s no question that the debt has just skyrocketed under, under President Obama in comparison to George Bush.

GREGORY: Let me just point out, I don’t want to appear to be cutting you off. Sometimes the satellite delay can exacerbate that, so I wanted to make sure you could finish your point.

Can you imagine that DAVID GREGORY doesn’t even know what the deficit graph looks like?

Here it is:

Last Republican budget was in 2007
Last Republican budget was in 2007

The last Republican budget was 2007. The deficit was 160 billion. It’s almost TEN TIMES that under Obama. The Democrats took over the House and Senate in the 2006 mid-term elections. Doesn’t David Gregory know that? Does anyone in the mainstream media know ANYTHING?

News

CIA Director Leon Panetta confirms that waterboarding led to Osama Bin Laden

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CIA Director Leon Panetta confirms that waterboarding / enhanced interrogation techniques led to Osama Bin Laden, in this MSNBC interview by Brian Williams.

Excerpt:

Brian Williams: I’d like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?

Leon Panetta: You know, Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees, but we also had information from other sources as well. So it’s a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

Williams: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

Panetta: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were — you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.

Williams: So, final point, one final time: enhanced interrogation techniques, which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years, that includes waterboarding.

Panetta: That’s correct.

This is the waterboarding that Obama opposed. Obama opposed enhanced interrogations. Obama opposed military tribunals. Obama opposed CIA prisons. Obama opposed Guantanamo Bay. Obama opposes counter-terrorism in general.

And don’t forget how waterboarding prevented a similar 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles.

Excerpt:

The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.”

According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack — which KSM called the “Second Wave”– planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.”

KSM was the mastermind of the first “hijacked-airliner” attacks on the United States, which struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Northern Virginia on Sept. 11, 2001.

After KSM was captured by the United States, he was not initially cooperative with CIA interrogators.  Nor was another top al Qaeda leader named Zubaydah.  KSM, Zubaydah, and a third terrorist named Nashiri were the only three persons ever subjected to waterboarding by the CIA.

Waterboarding works. It is not torture. We waterboard all our our naval aviators as part of their SERE training.

But do you know what is torture? Partial-birth abortion. We don’t partial-birth abort our naval aviators as part of their SERE training – yet the same people who oppose waterboarding support partial-birth abortion.

Related posts

News

Bush’s tax cuts led to a 44% increase in revenues from 2003 to 2007

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Federal Receipts 2003 through 2007
Federal Receipts 2003 through 2007

From Newsbusters. It turns out that Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 were not responsible for adding to the deficit. They actually increased the amount of tax money being collected, as the economy grew, and more jobs were created. People pay more in taxes when they have jobs.

Excerpt:

The graph doesn’t show collections tanking, does it? Instead, the graph shows that collections increased by 44%, or almost $800 billion, in four years. Adding up the individual increments in each of the four years compared to 2003 (2004 – $98B; 2005 – $371B; 2006 – $624B; 2007 – $785B; 2008, not shown, treating IRS stimulus payments as outlays instead of negative receipts – $835B), what really happened is that in the five full fiscal years after George W. Bush got the across-the-board and investment-related tax cuts he had been pushing for since taking office in 2001, the cumulative increase in tax collections was over $2.7 trillion.

Doubtless, the static analysis crowd will claim that collections would have been even higher (I guess by a cumulative $1.6 trillion, given the AP’s Democratic Party talking point above) if the Bush cuts hadn’t been enacted. Two words, guys: Prove it. Two follow-up words: You can’t.

We can argue all day long about the how much of the increase in collections was due to the incentive effects of the tax cuts and how of the improvement might have occurred anyway, but no one can credibly act as if it’s an established fact that the Bush cuts somehow caused collections to go $1.6 trillion in the opposite direction. There is absolutely no proof for this contention, and plenty of evidence that the Bush cuts jump-started an economy and federal collections, both of which had been flat or declining during the two years leading up to mid-2003. The more reasonable conclusion to reach is that the country would already be dead in the water if the Bush tax cuts hadn’t passed in 2003. Instead, the wire service hopes that its “Bush tax cuts cost us” meme will be gullibly recited during the next several days at its subscribing newspaper, TV, and radio outlets. “Disgraceful” doesn’t even begin to describe this pathetic promotion of self-evident falsehood.

The fact is that the federal budget was one good year away from balancing after the $162 deficit reported in fiscal 2007. Unfortunately, that was the last budget passed by a Republican-controlled Congress, and it was the only year which showed a modest increase in overall spending. Beginning in 2007 with effects beginning in fiscal 2008, the House and Senate controlled by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid began increasing spending at rates far beyond what profligate Republicans spent earlier in the decade, and, unfortunately, Bush 43 made no real effort to stop them…

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Reggie sent me this article showing that the Reagan tax cuts also increased revenues.

Excerpt:

In 1980, the last year before the tax cuts, tax revenues were $956 billion (in constant 1996 dollars).

Revenues exceeded that 1980 level in eight of the next 10 years. Annual revenues over the next decade averaged $102 billion above their 1980 level (in constant 1996 dollars).

The graph is here.

When you get people to start engaging in the economy, you can collect more taxes from them. They engage when they think that they will be able to keep more of what they make from their labor.