Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): “100 percent of our economy was private” before September 2008.
The Richmond Police Department confirms to us this morning that the gunfire incident Minority Whip Eric Cantor described as a direct threat to himself was in fact a “an act of random gunfire” not targeted at Cantor at all.
Sarah Palin will be down in Arizona today helping to bail out John McCain in his primary against Rep. J.D. Hayworth. That and the day’s other news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for Health Care Reform. Whether the people who actually did this over the last week did so in reaction to his call to arms is not clear. But he’s happy to take credit and others are crediting him too.
But Vanderboegh really is a classic exemplar of scream-at-your-TV tea-partyish extremism. A radical libertarian, champion of getting big government off the people’s backs, his day job? Vanderboegh lives on government disability checks down outside of Birmingham, Alabama.
It would be as foolish to say where things are going based on the last week as it was to make predictions on the same basis two or three weeks before. But I hope the current sense of turnabout (whether temporary or lasting) shows people once and for all the importance and transformative impact of winning. Big fights and wins don’t deplete political capital; they create it.
It’s truly done. The House just passed the slightly modified ‘reconciliation’ fix bill by a 220-207 vote.
It wasn’t quite as bad as showing up this morning with a backwards B scraped on his cheek. But even so, it doesn’t look like anybody’s buying Eric Cantor’s nonsense. Even the AP is coming about as close as their stylebook will allow them to come to calling him on his nonsense about the bogus attack he tried to float in this morning’s press conference.
From the AP report …
“A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I’ve received threatening e-mails,” Cantor said. He refused to release details, however, saying it would only encourage more threats, and refused to take questions.
Later Thursday, however, Richmond police said in a news release that the bullet had been fired into the air around 1 a.m. Tuesday. It finished its random arc back to earth at a sharp downward trajectory, breaking a window pane on the bottom floor of the two-story brick building where Cantor’s campaign leases the top floor.
The conservative American Enterprise Institute parts ways with David Frum after seven years — and just four days after he called the passage of health care reform the GOP’s “Waterloo.”
I came down with some kind of bug today. So from a bit after Eric Cantor gave his press conference this morning until a short time ago I was pretty much out of commission. So I read David’s post below about the alleged attack on Cantor’s office fresh, not knowing any of the reporting the team had done on the story. And I’m a bit surprised — or maybe not so surprised — that Cantor can even walk down the halls of Congress now without friends and associates snickering at him for making such a fool out of himself. Putting together Cantor’s statements to the press and the police report about the incident, Cantor’s claim seems to be that he was attacked by one of those Renaissance military engineers from Italy who first discovered the parabolic ballistic equations that allowed you to shoot artillery nearly straight up in the air and have it hit your enemy on the way back down. Read More