She's pissed about the DCCC's new Bachmannwatch.com web page, but she's using it to raise money. I got an email from her asking me to donate.
Title of her email: "How many vile attacks against me do you think $250,000 can buy?"
Where she'd get the $250,000 number? The email suggests but does not explicitly claim that it was her opponent from the 2008 election. "Who knows?" she adds. God help the Dems if they spent $250,000 to put up Bachmannwatch.com It better be a lot more informative than it is now, if they're putting that kind of money into it.
First "vile attack"--she says Bachmannwatch.com and all the papers and everybody in the world got it wrong; she says didn't lie about the costs of cap and trade. She says (and this is her grammar, apparently a staffer gets paid to write this):
"Now, Democrats clung to a statement by the MIT Professor John Reilly who took issue with the Republican use of his analysis and they published it far and wide. By the time the Democrat spin machine was finished with spreading the Professor's critique, they'd done everything but rent time in Times Square to try to discredit the GOP use of the $3100-cost-increase.
But, the Democrats have pretty much ignored the recent retraction he made of his criticism. Just last week, Professor Reilly was reported as saying, "I made a boneheaded mistake in an excel spread sheet. I have sent a new letter to Republicans correcting my error."
Notice how that's missing from the Democrats' Bachmann Watch?"
Professor Reilly also goes on to say that the real cost to families is "the Republican estimate [$3128] plus the cost I estimate [$512]."
So that's clear enough, right? Except that's not what Professor Reilly said. He said "something like that" but not that.
From the Weekly Standard:
During a lengthy email exchange last week with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, MIT professor John Reilly admitted that his original estimate of cap and trade's cost was inaccurate. The annual cost would be "$800 per household", he wrote. "I made a boneheaded mistake in an excel spread sheet. I have sent a new letter to Republicans correcting my error (and to others)."
Okay, so Reilly's latest story is "annual cost of $800." So where does Michele get the next statement: "Professor Reilly also goes on to say that the real cost to families is "the Republican estimate [$3128] plus the cost I estimate [$512]."
Here's what I find Reilly saying in THE WEEKLY STANDARD article.
The $800 paid annually per household is merely the "cost to the economy [that] involves all those actions people have to take to reduce their use of fossil fuels or find ways to use them without releasing [Green House Gases]," Reilly wrote. "So that might involve spending money on insulating your home, or buying a more expensive hybrid vehicle to drive, or electric utilities substituting gas (or wind, nuclear, or solar) instead of coal in power generation, or industry investing in more efficient motors or production processes, etc. with all of these things ending up reflected in the costs of good and services in the economy."
In other words, Reilly estimates that "the amount of tax collected" through companies would equal $3,128 per household--and "Those costs do get passed to consumers and income earners
in one way or another"--but those costs have "nothing to do with the real cost" to the economy. Reilly assumes that the $3,128 will be "returned" to each household. Without that assumption, Reilly wrote, "the cost would then be the Republican estimate [$3,128] plus the cost I estimate [$800]."
In Reilly's view, the $3,128 taken through taxes will be "returned" to each household whether or not the government cuts a $3,128 rebate check to each household.
This is a pain in my Caucasian balls to dig this stuff up, because Bachmann doesn't link to Reilly or the Weekly Standard in her email, when she attributes these quotes. She put things that look like they might be links to sources in her emails (colored text, underlined and highlighted) but when you click on them nothing happens. They go nowhere, except for the one that tells you where you can send Michele money.
Apparently she doesn't want you or the people she's asking for money to read what Reilly actually said. And since she doesn't give the original sources for what Reilly said, we just have to take her word for it--and she's burned us too many times for us to do that. (You know, like when she said that 3% of the atmosphere was carbon dioxide.) Or you can do what I did, and kill an hour trying to find out what document she's referring to, or misquoting, or half-quoting.
So until goddamn Professor Reilly gets out his latest estimate, and publishes it in a credible source, and tells us that he "really means it this time, no kidding, I go to MIT, I'm not gonna take it back or qualify it, and I figured out how to use the Excel spreadsheets, this time"--then I guess we'll have to wait and see. |
|