GOP presidential contender Michele Bachmann (R) has been in hot water in recent weeks for personally taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government aid while denouncing the very programs she benefited from. Most recently, the Washington Post discovered that Bachmann and her husband signed for a $417,000 home loan backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac just weeks before she called for the two mortgage giants to be entirely dismantled.

Bachmann has been a consistently fierce critic of mortgage lending programs and has advocated abolishing the government sponsored mortgage enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yet she took out the maximum possible loan from those programs to finance her family’s move to a lavish 5,200-square-foot home on a golf course.

During an appearance this afternoon at the National Press Club, Bachmann gave a highly ironic defense of her use of federal home loans:

MODERATOR: I got a lot of questions from people asking is it fair for you to call for dismantling federal programs you ultimately have been a beneficiary of? So in terms of guaranteeing home mortgages, do you think the federal government has a role in that…?

BACHMANN: Now unlike all of you, who I’m sure pay cash for your homes, there are people out there like myself who actually have to go to a bank and get a mortgage. And this is the problem. It’s almost impossible to buy a home in this country today without the federal government being involved. Whether it is with the FHA, whether it’s with Fannie, whether it’s with Freddie, it’s almost impossible to buy a home…What’s important is that we do dismantle a number of these federal programs that everyone agrees are clearly out of control.

Watch it:

Bachmann’s disapproval of federal home loan programs obviously didn’t stop her from using them to buy an enormous house for herself. During recent campaign stops, Bachmann has bragged that her family simply “did without” government aid when times were tough, but apparently this time they couldn’t help themselves.

Bachmann said she wants the federal government to get out of the business of guaranteeing mortgages and leave it to the private sector. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac currently insure around 90 percent of home loans, and it’s unlikely that homeownership would be as widely accessible without some sort of government backing for home loans. If Bachmann had her way, the U.S. would go back to an era where only the very rich could get mortgages.

At the event, Bachmann also largely dodged questions about her personal finances and her husband’s use of Medicaid funds for his clinic which uses a discredited form of “ex-gay” therapy.

As the debt ceiling showdown continues to suck all of the oxygen out of Washington, the fact remains that the Federal Aviation Administration is shutdown due to a lack of funding, and House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-FL) says he has “no idea” when the FAA might be reauthorized. Due to the shutdown, 4,000 federal employees have been furloughed, the more than 150,000 airport construction projects have been halted (idling 70,000 workers) and the government is unable to collect more than $200 million per week in airline taxes.

House Republicans shut down the FAA over their insistence that any bill to reauthorize the agency also include an anti-union provision that would make it harder for employees at airlines and railroads to organize. One of the biggest corporate proponents of this anti-union provision is Delta Airlines, which has been fighting for years to stave off unionization (and is currently under investigation for tampering with union elections). Ironically, the GOP shut down the FAA due to Delta’s anti-union demands, and Delta is now profiting off of the FAA shutdown:

Delta Air Lines Inc. said on Wednesday it will keep pocketing millions in additional daily revenue from federal taxes that disappeared last week because of the Federal Aviation Administration’s shutdown…The FAA’s inability to collect a variety of levies including domestic ticket sales taxes and segment fees is allowing Delta to reap between $4 million and $5 million in additional daily revenue. The taxes had added 10% or more to an airline ticket’s price. Most—but not all—airlines have raised ticket fares by a similar amount.

Several airlines, Delta included, have increased their ticket prices following the suspension of federal airline taxes, and are simply pocketing the difference, rather than passing the savings on to customers. Yesterday, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) took to the senate floor to excoriate the GOP for letting Delta dictate policy:

I wish I understood why the policy objections of one company — Delta Air Lines — mattered more than the livelihoods of thousands of people. Last year, the CEO of Delta made $9 million. Delta paid its top executives almost $20 million. Yet, it is fighting to make sure its employees cannot organize for fear that they may secure a few extra dollars in their paychecks. At the same time it is pushing for special interest provisions in the FAA bill, Delta announced it was abandoning air service to 26 small rural communities—leaving many of them without air service.

Adding one last bit of insult to injury, Delta announced yesterday that it will be cutting 2,000 jobs, while increasing fares and cutting back on services. Last month, Delta found itself in hot water for charging troops who were returning from Afghanistan $2,800 in baggage fees.

In the latest embarrassment for Newt Gingrich’s floundering presidential campaign, an ABC producer discovered that Gingrich’s campaign T-shirts are not being made in America, but in El Salvador, even as Gingrich spends his time on the campaign trail calling American manufacturing “crucial” to the economy’s future. Gingich has also slammed the Obama administration for being “anti-manufacturing.”

According to the producer, Gingrich had originally said he would make sure his campaign gear was manufactured in America. Gingrich was confronted about the gear on the campaign trail as he awkwardly held up one of the shirts in question:

ABC: I just picked up that one and it was made in El Salvador…It was a big thing when we talked to your campaign people about how you wanted things to be made in America, do you have plans to change things?

GINGRICH: I have no — I’ll have to ask the folks who ordered this. I don’t order it and I don’t do it.

CAMPAIGN SPOKESPERSON: That was a rush order made by some of the volunteers.

GINGRICH: One of the challenges with a volunteer campaign is lots of volunteers do lots of different things.

Watch it:

Gingrich spokesperson Michelle Selesky tried to intervene by throwing the blame on campaign volunteers. Gingrich quickly took the cue and echoed her excuse.

On the campaign trail, Gingrich has repeatedly called for a resurgence in American manufacturing. He has denounced the EPA, the National Labor Relations Board and other agencies and regulations for “killing manufacturing jobs.” However, in March, Gingrich also made a misstep when he said that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) worked because it created jobs — in Mexico and Canada.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said last night that he “never” expected a Balanced Budget Amendment to pass, even as a large minority of House Republicans are threatening to reject any debt ceiling increase unless the Constitution is rewritten to include one. Speaking with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, Ryan said it’s not “realistic” to expect that Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) would force the large number of members needed to change the Constitution to “vote against their conscious”:

RYAN: What I never really agreed with is the idea that we would expect Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to deliver 40 [and] 15 votes from Democrats for our version of the Balanced Budget Amendment. You know, I just never thought that was realistic, to demand Democrats vote against their conscious for our version of the Balanced Budget Amendment. So I just never thought that would work.

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Ryan’s political calculus is of course accurate, but it’s noteworthy coming from the GOP’s chief number cruncher and the staunchly conservative author of the Medicare-ending Republican budget. The current GOP version of the BBA is a disastrous idea that even leading conservatives have rejected. There’s no way it could achieve the two-thirds majority needed in both houses of Congress to pass, let alone before the Aug. 2 deadline to raise the debt limit. But as House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said yesterday, many members of own caucus are willing to let the deadline pass in the hope that the ensuing economic “chaos” would force Democrats to switch their votes.

The amendment is an integral part of the GOP’s “Cut, Cap, and Balance” plan. This was the only GOP debt ceiling solution until it was rejected by the Senate, forcing Boehner to roll out his own framework Monday that has divided the GOP. Recognizing the reality of the situation, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took to the senate floor yesterday to excoriate his colleagues‘ intransigence for demanding nothing short of an Constitutional amendment.

As the Republicans haggle over whether to support their own plan for raising the nation’s debt ceiling, an “unprecedented” coalition of religious leaders are urging President Obama and Congress not to sacrifice the needs of the poor in the name of debt reduction. Even the conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops joined the effort, singling out House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) plan for its “disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons.”

In scrutinizing the debt deals, some religious leaders praised the plans for at least exempting low-income “means-tested” programs from across-the-board cuts. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes today, however, that Boehner’s plan does not actually exempt programs like Medicaid and food stamps from such cuts. Instead, it does the opposite.

Breaking a 26-year policy of exempting basic low-income entitlement programs from across-the-board cuts, both of the House Republican plans — “Cut, Cap, and Balance” Act and Boehner’s debt-ceiling proposal — “drop all of the low-income exemptions that have been part of every previous across-the-board cut mechanism since 1985″:

For 26 years, all budget legislation that would trigger across-the-board cuts if Congress fails to meet a fiscal target has exempted the basic low-income (or “means-tested”) entitlement programs from those cuts. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings laws of 1985 and 1990, the deficit reduction agreement of 1990, and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 — all bipartisan pieces of legislation — included that exemption. So did last year’s “pay-as-you-go” law, which requires Congress to offset the cost of new tax cuts or increases in entitlement programs so they don’t increase the deficit. Congress has never enacted a law with an across-the-board cut mechanism that subjects core assistance for the poor to these cuts.

But in the last few weeks, House Republicans have advanced two major pieces of legislation that would do just that. Both the “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act,” which the House passed last week, and the new Boehner debt-ceiling proposal drop all of the low-income exemptions that have been part of every previous across-the-board cut mechanism since 1985.

“In an exercise in political cynicism,” CBPP notes that both bills include an exemption for payments to Medicare providers that was not part of previous laws. This allows Republicans to avoid another hit from the senior community “even as they subject those living below the poverty line to the risk of automatic cuts that would push them even deeper into poverty.” Earlier this week, CBPP put out an analysis showing that Boehner’s debt ceiling plan “could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history.”

The Republican move to cut a long-standing bipartisan protection for the poor really brings into question exactly which Americans Republicans say they’re fighting for. Religious leaders should take note. If asked “What Would Jesus Cut,” it seems Republicans are determined to provide the wrong answer.

As House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) struggles to get his caucus’ collective “ass in line” for today’s vote on his re-worked debt ceiling plan, a growing number of House Democrats are pushing for a vote on a clean debt ceiling increase. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) and the Congressional Black Caucus — save Rep. Allen West (R-FL) — were rounding up support for a plan that, absent a debt deal that can pass in both chambers, will just raise the debt ceiling to prevent default this coming Tuesday.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) predicted that this is the exact scenario Congress will face. “I think we’re going to end up in a stalemate,” said Cummings:

CUMMINGS: I think we’re at a point where the Republicans have pushed and pushed, haven’t given much at all, and now I think we’re going to end up in a stalemate. I anticipate that the Boehner bill will get through the House today after he’s pushed his folks kind of hard and then it’ll be dead on arrival once it get’s to the Senate, then the Senate will send something over.

And then I think the president is going to have to step in. Then he’s going to have to say ‘Look guys, there doesn’t seem to be an agreement here. And so basically let’s send this clean extension.’ By the way, which is what just about every member of the Democrats on the House side are petitioning for. And I think we’ll resolve this matter. And that’s the way it should’ve been. I still think this whole thing has been manufactured.

Watch it:

Some Democrats are even calling for Obama to use the untested legal option, via the 14th Amendment, to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling without congressional consent. “We’re getting down to decision time,” said Rep. John Larson (D-CT). “We have to have a fail-safe mechanism. We believe that fail-safe mechanism is the 14th Amendment and the president of the United States.”

As ThinkProgress reported last April, home furniture giant IKEA has set up shop at a manufacturing plant in Danville, Virginia for the past three years in order to gain access to a non-unionized pool of labor and avoid Swedish unions. Workers at the Danville plant allegedly faced mandatory overtime, frantic hours, and even racial discrimination.

Yesterday, following an intense union organizing drive by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the employees at this Virginia plant voted overwhelmingly to unionize:

Workers at Ikea’s U.S. furniture factory voted to form a union, a victory for the labor movement seeking to rebound from record-low membership at private companies. Employees at the plant in Danville, Virginia, voted 221-69 today to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the National Labor Relations Board said. The factory, operated by a subsidiary called Swedwood, makes low- cost bookcases and coffee tables for sale in Ikea’s 37 blue and yellow U.S. big-box stores.

Local news station WDBJ7 covered the workers’ victory. Watch it:

“We fully support the right of our co-workers to make this decision,” said a spokeswoman for the IKEA subsidiary that operates the plant. “We accept their decision and will work with their union in a mutually cooperative and respectful manner.”

GOP 2012 presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has been basing his campaign on his supposed economic bona fides, falsely stating that the Obama administration has made the economy “worse.” Romney particularly highlights his supposed history as a job creator. “I know what it takes to create jobs,” he says. “I’ll do everything in my power to create more jobs for Americans.”

Romney took his roadshow to Ohio yesterday. He spoke a manufacturing plant run by Screen Machine Industries Inc., where he , according to the Columbus Dispatch, “focused his remarks on jobs and the economy.” Bernard Cohen, the owner of Screen Machine Industries, joined the pile-on against President Obama, saying, “I think Obama doesn’t understand business and he’s hurting us.” Romney also featured Screen Machine Industries prominently in a web video that he released yesterday:

However, neither Romney nor Cohen ever pointed out that Screen Machine Industries has received substantial support from the 2009 Recovery Act (i.e. the stimulus). In fact, the company received four different stimulus contracts from the Department of Veterans Affairs, totaling more than $218,000:

Romney, of course, has slammed the “failed stimulus package,” saying it was akin to “putting a cup of gasoline on a fire.” Cohen said that he doesn’t recall receiving stimulus money.

This isn’t the first time Romney has chosen his venue for a campaign speech poorly. Back in June, he gave a speech at a bank that had received TARP funds, despite deriding TARP as a “slush fund.”