A few months ago, the Los Angeles Times pointed out that virulenty anti-government spending Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was receiving income from a farm that collected federal subsidies. Bachmann responded by claiming, “the farm is my father-in-law’s farm, it’s not my husband and my farm. My husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm.” However, Bachmann claimed income from the farm on her 2009 financial disclosure form.

As McClatchy noted today, Bachmann — all her protests aside — claimed income from the farm again in 2010, which were filed last week:

Despite repeatedly asserting that she has never received income from a family farm that has drawn federal subsidies in the past, Rep. Michele Bachmann again listed the farm as a source of income when she filed her 2010 personal financial disclosures late last week. Bachmann, R-Minn., also reported that the farm had more than doubled in value since 2009. [...]

Bachmann’s financial disclosures paint a different picture. Since 2006, she has reported receiving between $37,504 and $120,000 in income from the farm, including between $5,001 and $15,000 that she disclosed for the 2010 calendar year.

Bachmann also reported that her farm doubled in value over the past year: “In 2009, Bachmann listed the farm as an asset worth between $100,001 and $250,000. In her 2010 forms, Bachmann valued the farm between $500,001 and $1 million.” The counseling clinic that Bachmann runs with her husband has also received federal funding.

Nearly 45,000 Verizon workers have been striking for nine days, as the company continues to demand huge worker concessions. Since these workers have gone on strike, the company has replaced them with temporary workers.

Now, a video has emerged of a group of striking Verizon workers assisting these scab workers with safety training that the company apparently did not provide them. In the following clip, a man from the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers (IBEW) Local 2321 Danvers Garage explains to some of the replacement workers how to safely get up an electric pole without being hurt. (Warning: The video contains some expletives):

ThinkProgress contacted IBEW Local 2321 Danvers Garage to interview them about the situation. Business Manager Ed Starr explained that, of the replacement workers being brought on the job, “a majority of contractors…they’re performing work in every capacity unsafely.” Starr said he knows of Verizon workers from sales departments, IT, and other desk jobs who are being asked to do work on outside infrastructure that they are not trained to work with. Upon request from the workers out of fear of retaliation, ThinkProgress will not name the workers in the video but can confirm they are from IBEW Local 2321 Danvers Garage.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) — who kicked off his campaigning for the GOP 2012 presidential nomination by saying Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s actions to boost the economy are “almost treasonous” — is spending a lot of his time criticizing federal regulations for supposedly stifling job creation. In Iowa this week, he related a story told to him by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) about tractor regulations forcing farmers to jump through hoops:

He then proceeded to cite what he termed an “obscene, crazy” regulation. “If you are a tractor driver, if you drive your tractor across a public road, you’re going to have to have a commercial driver’s license. Now how idiotic is that?”

Perry said he had talked on Sunday night with U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa at a GOP dinner in Waterloo. Perry told Grassley he had heard in the previous two days that the federal government was going to put such a regulation in place.

“Your own United States senator, sitting there at the table, said, ‘That’s right.’ And I said, ‘What were they thinking, senator?’ And he said, ‘They weren’t.’ So that is the issue at hand here,” Perry said.

Watch it:

The only problem is this regulation simply doesn’t exist. “We are absolutely not requiring farmers” to obtain commercial licenses, said U.S. Department Of Transportation spokeswoman Candice Tolliver. Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum spent some time getting to the bottom of this urban legend:

The [Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration] has long had rules that defined most grain haulage as interstate commerce and designated farmers hauling shared crops as commercial operators. This was never a big deal because they had never enforced those rules and neither had anyone else. But then Illinois decided to start enforcing the letter of the law and Illinois farmers were unhappy. So now FMCSA is asking whether these regulations ever made sense in the first place. [...] Far from trying to implement a barrage of regulations on our nation’s farmers, FMCSA is apparently trying to stop state officials from implementing a barrage of regulations on our nation’s farmers.

Perry is either ignorant of the issue at stake here or is simply lying to score an anti-government political point. Grassley, in a newsletter issued on Friday, wrote that “common sense had appeared to prevail in the matter of proposed agricultural transportation regulations.”

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) surprised many when he appointed a Republican widely perceived as a moderate, Rep. Fred Upton (MI), to serve as one of six GOP members on the congressional “super committee” tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit savings by November. Conservatives are worried that Upton will not toe the GOP’s hardline stance against taxes because he’s expressed a willingness to raise revenues by eliminating tax loopholes.

Yesterday at a public forum in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Upton gave another glimmer of hope that he would be willing to divorce himself from Tea Party dogma to do what’s right. Upton came out as a strong defender of entitlement programs, and vowed to protect current beneficiaries in the super committee’s deliberations:

UPTON: It’s critical…for people that are benefiting today from Medicare and Social Security, that they do not see benefit reductions. It’s awfully hard to tell someone…who might be 82 that they’ve got to go back to work because their benefits are going to be chopped. That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to let that happen.

Watch it:

In response to audience questions, he also said he doesn’t support raising the retirement age for Social Security over 67 (where it is for workers born after 1960). Upton’s unequivocal support for preserving entitlement programs, at least for today’s seniors, is encouraging when contrasted with the statements of his fellow GOP committee members who have called entitlements “cruel Ponzi schemes.” Like his fellow Republicans, however, Upton did not rule out cuts for future beneficiaries.

Upton also reiterated his support for ending corporate tax dodging by reforming the tax code. “I’m not afraid of looking at tax loopholes,” he said. “I don’t think anybody was happy to see that GE didn’t pay any taxes.”

Some liberals have voiced their concern that Upton is nothing but a conservative in moderate’s clothing who will ultimately go along with his party’s anti-entitlement agenda on the committee. Michigan constituents — and Americans across the country — should certainly keep a close eye on Upton to see if he keeps his promise to them to protect entitlements.

ThinkProgress filed this report from a campaign event in Litchfield, New Hampshire.

Former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) continued to paint himself as the Republican Party’s best “jobs candidate” today in New Hampshire, telling crowds that President Obama’s policies have stalled economic recovery and that he had the experience necessary to create jobs and turn the economy around.

In doing so, however, he outlined a policy that would have — and is having — the opposite effect. Romney promised that, as president, he would cut federal workers’ pay and slash the number of federal government jobs:

ROMNEY: Federal employees, we’ve got too many of them, and they’re paid too much. In many cases, they do a good job, we respect the work that they do, it’s important work that they do. We just have too many.

Watch it:

Government workers make for politically expedient targets, particularly in rough economic times. But Romney’s argument that federal workers are paid more than private sector workers distorts the facts. At the top end of the pay scale, federal workers are often paid less than their private sector counterparts, so much so that the government has “found it increasingly more difficult to attract and retain high-skill workers.” If Romney wanted to bring federal pay in line with the private sector as he suggested, he’d have to provide many government workers a raise.

Romney’s claims that there are “too many” government jobs, meanwhile, ignores the state of the American jobs crisis. While the private sector continues to grow (albeit slowly), federal, state, and local governments have shed more than 500,000 jobs in the last two years, negating the positive effects of private sector growth and dragging down the economic recovery. If public sector employment was at its 2009 level, the unemployment rate would be 8.4 percent, considerably lower than the 9.1 percent it stands at now.

Romney, who constantly reminds voters of his private sector experience, may not view government workers as participants in what he calls the “real economy.” But as Matt Yglesias notes, the effects of government job losses mirror those of private sector losses, as “the sharply reduced incomes of the former teachers and whatnot lead to them spending less in their local communities,” thus slowing economic growth.