Michele Bachmann’s Fact-Checking Pays Off

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Last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann’s campaign manager, Ed Rollins, caused a bit of a stir when he promised that everything his candidate says on the trail will be “100-percent fact-checked.” This seemed like a pretty daunting challenge; we noted at the time that the non-partisan fact-checking site PolitiFact had never fact-checked a Bachmann statement and found it to be anything but “false” or “very false”—the only major political figure for which that was the case.

No longer. Via PolitiFact:

Michele Bachmann said she would not support increasing the debt ceiling if it didn’t include major reductions in government spending. 

“I’ve already voted no on raising the debt ceiling in the past. And unless there are serious cuts, I can’t,” she said at debate June 13, 2011, in New Hampshire…

Bachmann said Obama refused to approve an increase in the debt limit when he was a senator, and that he blamed President Bush for failed leadership, as well as Bush’s supporters in Congress. She’s right on both counts, and we rate her statement True. 

Clearly, Rollins’ political savvy is paying off.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

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