DeMint: Balanced budget pledge is litmus test for his support of 2012 contenders
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on June 27th, 2011 4:37 am by HL
DeMint: Balanced budget pledge is litmus test for his support of 2012 contenders
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the most prized endorsements in the 2012 presidential race, said Sunday that a new balanced budget pledge is now a litmus test for his support and that he had ruled out backing former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr.
DeMint, a leader of the tea party movement in Washington and a popular voice among grassroots activists across the country, said he is urging allies in the early voting states to abstain from committing to presidential candidates to see how they handle upcoming fiscal issues.
Obama’s Afghanistan plan gets mixed reviews from grunts at Fort Campbell
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. — Pfc. Rob Nunez was gulping Miller Lite from a plastic cup when the subject of President Obama’s plan for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan came up: 10,000 troops were being pulled out this year, said a friend at a roadside bar on the fringes of the Fort Campbell Army base. The rest of the 33,000 “surge” troops would leave in 2012.
Nunez swallowed his beer, let out a stream of profanity before landing on a sentence that he repeats a lot these days. “It’s worthless, and it’s never going to end.”
With Michele Bachmann’s surge comes fresh scrutiny
In the race for the White House, Michele Bachmann is surging. A new Iowa poll, the first snapshot in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, found Bachmann statistically tied with front-runner Mitt Romney among likely Republican caucus-goers there.
Yet on Sunday, a day before Bachmann was to formally launch her campaign in her birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa, the Minnesota congresswoman faced the kind of scrutiny that comes to any leading presidential contender.
On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace quizzed Bachmann on a series of apparent inconsistencies in her legislative record and personal background — from Medicare to government subsidies and earmarks to her opposition to same-sex marriage.
GOP compromise on debt: Cut military spending?
As President Obama prepares to meet Monday with Senate leaders to try to restart talks about the swollen national debt, some Republicans see a potential path to compromise: significant cuts in military spending.
Senior GOP lawmakers and leadership aides said it would be far easier to build support for a debt-reduction package that cuts the Pentagon budget — a key Democratic demand — than one that raises revenue by tinkering with the tax code. Last week, Republicans walked out of talks led by Vice President Biden, insisting that the White House take tax increases off the table.
Wisconsin justices in altercation
MADISON, Wis. — A member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal faction has accused a conservative justice of choking her during an argument in her office earlier this month — a charge he denied.
Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Justice David Prosser put her in a chokehold during the dispute. She contacted the newspaper late Saturday after Prosser denied rumors about the altercation.
“The facts are that I was demanding that he get out of my office and he put his hands around my neck in anger in a chokehold,” Bradley told the newspaper.
