Michele Bachmann is, as the AP amusingly puts it, "one to watch—for inaccuracies." Her gaffes have landed her a pretty awful score on PolitiFact, and have recently prompted her to fight back: She explained her John Wayne mix-up today on CNN and insisted she has "a strong academic scholarly background." A few of her mistakes, courtesy of the AP and the Washington Post:
- "My husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from" a family farm: Really? Her personal financial disclosure reports show that she holds an interest in the farm, that the farm received $259,332 in federal payments between 1995 and 2010, and that she earned income between $32,500 and $105,000 from said farm between 2006 and 2009.
- "The president released all of the oil from the strategic oil reserve": No he didn't; he approved the release of about 4%.
- "One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration": Actually, the number is somewhere north of 269.
- "Five decades ago in America, we had less debt than we have today. We had $300 billion or less in debt. A gallon of gasoline was 31 cents": When you adjust for inflation, that 31 cents turns into about $2.25. And that $300 billion in national debt was 55% of the 1961 GDP. Today's $14 trillion in debt is 96% of the GDP. So she has a point, but the difference is not nearly as dramatic as she's implying.
- Her claim that President Obama stated stimulus legislation would prevent unemployment from rising above 8%: Long story short, he never said that. She's referring to a projection, which was not even an official government assessment, issued by two aides before Obama took office. And she got the stimulus amount wrong, to boot, referring to it as $1 trillion when it was actually $800 billion.
Click for yet another recent gaffe, in which
Bachmann mistook John Quincy Adams for a founding father. (More
Michele Bachmann stories.)
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