Dylan Ratigan allows Marsha Blackburn to come on his show and play populist with her concerns for transparency and the national debt. This woman is about as far to the right as you can get with her voting record but he's going to allow her to come out and paint herself as some politician that's just concerned for the average working person out there.
BLACKBURN: Dylan one of the things you have to do is regain their trust. You do that by transparency, by moving these discussions out in the open where the American people can see and hear what is being done and said and I think that's an important step in this process. Certainly you mentioned the Tea Party movement and Enough is Enough. That is what people are saying. They've had it. Enough is enough. They are looking at a budget that the President has brought forward today that is focused on debt. It is not focused on jobs and creating jobs. And I think that's why so many people have said look, we're frustrated with this.
One of the things I'm going to do is immediately file the bills I file every year that call for 1%, 2% and 5% across the board spending reducations. Let's actually begin to cut what the Federal government spends.
The Republicans are all suddenly worried about the debt now that a Democrat is in charge when we never heard this kind of carping out of them while Bush was running the show. Blackburn goes on to claim that she "doesn't do earmarks". From Media Matters -- Rep. Blackburn Blasts Earmarks, Forgetting Her Own:
In a December 2, 2009 op-ed in the Washington Times, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) urged Republicans to campaign on earmark reform, noting she had "sworn off" earmarks herself. During the preceding year, Congresswoman Blackburn requested nearly $12 million in earmarks. As Blackburn has no doubt realized, it's easy to fast immediately after a $12 million meal.
She then goes on to cite Rep. Paul Ryan's "Roadmap to Recovery" as a solution to America's financial problems.
From the summary it looks like nothing but more of the same failed fiscal policies from the GOP that put us in this financial ditch to begin with and worse. On health care it's tax credits, health savings accounts and high risk pools dumped on the tax payers. Medicare vouchers to further privatize Medicare. Partially privatize Social Security. Give people a choice of a flat tax. And repeal the corporate income tax and replace it with a "business consumption
tax".
Ratigan didn't bother to ask her how she thought any of those policies would improve the economy or the lives of average working people. As I already noted, given her extreme right wing voting record it's not surprising to see Blackburn touting these policies but it would be nice to see these wingers actually have to defend some of the details of their plans.
