FreedomWorks for America, the super PAC for former Rep. Dick Armey’s (R-TX) FreedomWorks USA, just released new radio and TV ads urging the defeat of longtime Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). The spots are the latest in a series of attacks by the group against the six-term senator, who is facing a challenge from the right in this year’s renomination process.

The new commercials note that Hatch “voted 16 times” to raise the debt limit, allowing for $7.5 trillion of the national debt. Both ads say that it’s “time to retire” the man who “wracked up half of our nation’s debt.” Watch the spots:

The group helpfully documents these 16 votes in a report available on its website. The list includes 16 votes from between February 1981 and September 2007.

Prior to joining FreedomWorks in 2003, chairman Dick Armey served nine terms in Congress. Six of those debt-limit votes took place between the time Armey was elected to the House in 1984 and his retirement at the beginning of 2003. Armey voted for at least five of those six:

$179.9 billion in December 1985 (House roll call #454, 99th Congress)

$448 billion in September 1987 (House roll call #330, 100th Congress)

$600 billion in March 1996 (House roll call #102, 104th Congress)

$450 billion in July 1997 (House roll call #241, 105th Congress)

$450 billion in June 2002 (House roll call #279, 107th Congress)

Before the 2002 debt limit increase (which passed by a 215 to 214 margin — making Armey the deciding vote, arguably), Armey gave an impassioned floor speech urging colleagues to “do what is good for America” and back the bill.

And like Hatch, Armey helped run up the debt that necessitated those increases. In 2001, Armey helped push through a $1.35-trillion tax cut and in 2010, he urged Congress to renew this and other Bush-era tax cuts. He even argued that the 2001 tax cut wasn’t big enough. Hatch also voted for both the original tax cuts and the 2010 extension.

Put another way, FreedomWorks for America has invested about $500,000 into attacking Hatch for having a record that is not very different from Armey’s own.

Today is International Women’s Day, which this year is coinciding with a lot of debate on the subject of women’s rights, specifically regarding abortion, contraception and reproductive health. But it’s worth pausing for a moment to also consider the enormous contributions women are making vis-a-vis the global economy.

The World Bank predicts that the earning power of women will hover around $18 trillion by 2014, which is $5 trillion increase in current income, and more than double the estimated GDP for growing economic forces like India and China combined. So, in celebration of International Women’s Day, let’s take a look at the contribution that women are making, while bearing in mind all of the work there’s still left to do:

66 million: Number of American women currently in the workforce.

64: The percentage of mothers with children under the age of 6 that are in the labor force. 78 percent of mothers with children ages 6-17 were in the labor force.

60: The percentage of American women who are now the primary or co-breadwinner for their families.

87: Percentage of women who possess at least four years of high school or more education, as compared to 86 percent of men.

58: The percentage of all undergraduate degrees in the U.S. that were awarded to women in 2010.

50: The percentage of the total college educated population women accounted for in the U.S.

12: Number of Fortune 500 companies that have female CEOs.

1.9 million: Number of firms that are majority-owned (51% or more) by women of color in the U.S.

26: The percentage of vice presidents and senior executives that are female.

7: The percentage of directors on the world’s coporate boards who are female.

15.6: Percentage of elected parliamentary seats globally that are held by women.

18: Average percentage by which women worldwide are paid less than their male counterparts at work.

0.77: The female-to-male earnings ratio in the U.S., meaning female workers earned 77 cents on every dollar earned by a male worker. Progress on the pay gap in the last 10 years remains statiscally unchanged.

Although women have been making significant strides towards gender equality in the workforce, a survey carried out by Yale Law Women highlights a major discrepancy in the growing numbers of female attorneys (25-35 percent) in comparison to the small number of who are actually partners in firms (5-15 percent).

– Fatima Najiy

Today, House Republicans held a hearing to examine “skyrocketing fraud” in the food stamp program (i.e. SNAP), despite the fact that fraud and improper payments in the program have plunged to an all-time low. As House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said, “while the need for the SNAP program is at an historic high, fraud within the program is at an all-time low…Given this strong track record, I am concerned that the true purpose of this hearing may be to discredit the entire program in order to justify draconian cuts.”

Food stamps have been key to alleviating poverty during the Great Recession. In 2010, the program kept more than 5 million Americans from falling below the poverty line. Plus, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted today, food stamps reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty — defined as less than $2 per day, before government aid — by half in 2011:

Counting SNAP benefits as income reduces the number of households in extreme poverty in 2011 from 1.46 million to nearly 800,000, the study found. And it reduces the number of children in extreme poverty in 2011 by half — from 2.8 million to 1.4 million…Other studies have also documented SNAP’s powerful poverty-fighting impact. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts SNAP as income, SNAP kept more than 5 million people out of poverty in 2010.

Food stamps are more critical now than ever, since extreme poverty in the U.S. has doubled in the last 15 years. Overall, the poverty rate in 2010 would have been twice as high as it was were if not for the social safety net.

House Republicans have been preparing to move a new jobs bill aimed at giving a 20 percent tax credit to small businesses. However, as Bloomberg News noted today, the tax break could very well be given to businesses that most certainly don’t need it — hedge funds:

A Republican proposal to give small businesses an extra 20 percent tax deduction may yield cuts for some multibillion-dollar hedge funds, law firms and other enterprises that create significant profits with few employees.

Republicans hope to release details of the bill during the week of March 19, said Laena Fallon, a spokeswoman for Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader. Cantor told House members in a memo last month his plan would let “every” business with fewer than 500 employees deduct 20 percent of its profits.

That approach would depart from restrictions in an earlier version.

Earlier versions of the bill would have prevented the break from applying to the financial industry. “They’re just trying to cut taxes for people with a lot of money,” said Citizens for Tax Justice Director Bob McIntyre. “That’s what they always do. That’s what they are.”

Hedge fund managers are some of the richest people in the world, making literally billions of dollars annually. Even at the depths of the Great Recession, the average hedge fund employee made nearly $800,000.

Hedge funds aside, there’s certainly no wisdom in giving every single small business a tax break because then firms that have been making huge profits will reap a windfall from the government for no real reason. If they are already making huge profits and aren’t hiring, it’s exceedingly unlikely that another tax break on top will change anything.

What’s really holding back small businesses is a lack of demand in the economy, and there’s no reason for businesses to hire, no matter how many tax breaks they receive, unless they have an expectation of more customers. As the chief economist for the conservative National Federation of Independent Business explained, “if you give a small business guy $20,000 he’ll say, ‘I could buy a new delivery truck but I have nobody to deliver to.’”

The Republicans’ plan, if this is the approach that they settle on, will amount to nothing more than another giveaway to financiers that are already bringing home huge paychecks.

Since the housing bubble burst, the federal government has implemented a host of programs aimed at helping Americans avoid foreclosure. So far, the results of those programs have been underwhelming.

One of the biggest disappointments has been the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Meant to save 3-4 million homeowners from foreclosure, the program has reached just a fraction of that number, has barely spent any of the money allocated to it, and has been bogged down by bank intransigence.

Bank of America has been one of the worst banks for getting homeowners through the HAMP program. This has mostly been blamed on the bank’s incompetence, but a whistleblower suit in Colorado alleges that Bank of America was intentionally steering customers away from HAMP:

The complaint unsealed Wednesday was filed by whistleblower Gregory Mackler, a Colorado resident who said he worked alongside Bank of America executives while an employee at Urban Lending Solutions, a company to which Bank of America contracted some of its HAMP work.

While working at Urban Lending, Mackler said he saw BofA and its loan servicing subsidiary, BAC Homes Loans Servicing LP, implement “business practices designed to intentionally prevent scores of eligible homeowners from becoming eligible or staying eligible for permanent HAMP modification.”

The bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents, failed to credit payments during trial modifications and intentionally misled homeowners about their eligibility for the program, the complaint alleged.

According to the complaint, Bank of America “let through just enough HAMP modifications to avert suspicion and allay congressional critics, while not enough to incur any substantial losses to its own bottom line.”

Back in 2009, ThinkProgress caught Bank of America violating HAMP by pushing eligible borrowers into the bank’s own, more expensive, private loan modification program. At the time, we pushed Treasury to more closely police the bank’s practices, to ensure it was complying with HAMP and providing maximum help to homeowners. If the allegations in the whistleblower case are true, that certainly didn’t happen.

The House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), is holding a hearing today to examine fraud in the food stamp program (known as SNAP). Here is how the Committee’s Republicans explained the hearing’s purpose:

Thursday’s hearing will focus on the testimony of officials about why USDA is struggling to police these unscrupulous stores who engage in fraud. Unfortunately, skyrocketing fraud and a dysfunctional enforcement system is handicapping the program’s ability to help those in need – families and children.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has made similarly disparaging comments about the food stamp program being “rife with fraud.” But the fact of the matter is that fraud in the food stamp program is incredibly low, at a rate of 1 percent. And overall error rates in the food stamp program have absolutely plunged in recent years, hitting an all-time low in 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Despite the recent rapid caseload growth, USDA reports that states achieved a record-low SNAP error rate in fiscal year 2010. Only 3 percent of all SNAP benefits represented overpayments, meaning they either went to ineligible households or went to eligible households but in excessive amounts, and more than 98 percent of SNAP benefits were issued to eligible households.

In addition, the combined error rate — that is, the sum of overpayments and underpayments reached an all-time low in 2010 of just 3.81 percent.

That low error rate encompasses both overpayments and underpayments, those instances when an eligible participant in the system received less money than he/she was due. As CBPP noted, “the overwhelming majority [of food stamp errors] result from honest mistakes by recipients, eligibil­ity wor­kers, data entry clerks, or com­puter program­mers,” not fraud.

Oversight Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said in his opening statement, “while the need for the SNAP program is at an historic high, fraud within the program is at an all-time low…Given this strong track record, I am concerned that the true purpose of this hearing may be to discredit the entire program in order to justify draconian cuts.” According to the Census Bureau, food stamps kept more than 5 million people out of poverty in 2010.

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” — which states that the signing lawmaker will never raise taxes for any reason, ever — has held Republicans in lockstep against tax increases in recent years. But with the country facing large deficits and plunging tax revenue, a few Republicans have publicly broken with Norquist, acknowledging that his position is totally unrealistic.

The pledge “restrains your ability to think creatively,” said Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE). “I don’t care to be associated with it.” “I will not sign another pledge,” said Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA). “We have to have the flexibility to do the right thing for American people.” “Have we really reached the point where one person’s demand for ideological purity is paralyzing Congress to the point that even a discussion of tax reform is viewed as breaking a no-tax pledge?” asked Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA).

Today, Norquist lost another devotee, with Rep. Timothy Johnson (R-IL) saying that while he signed the pledge for his first election, he now considers Norquist’s stance “disingenuous and irresponsible“:

“I would never in a million years have considered this as some kind of a locked-in-granite pledge. Frankly, I didn’t even remember it. That shows you how obscure it was to me,” Johnson said.

“My understanding was then, as I remember it, and certainly now, is that nobody could possibly ever in a million years, in their wildest imagination, expect you to sign something that was right before a primary election and then you’d be locked in on that position the whole rest of your career. Particularly something like taxes and particularly when the national debt 10 and a half years ago was $6 trillion and now it’s going to be $17 trillion.”[...]

“Nobody could lock themselves in perpetuity into a position like that. That’s like saying you’d never vote for armed intervention in a foreign country, until we get attacked”…“I’m not saying I’m even committed now to a tax increase, but I think anybody who doesn’t indicate their willingness to look at revenues — expiration of tax loopholes, tax credits, increase in contribution to Social Security, which is a tax, and otherwise — would be disingenuous and irresponsible.“

Several Republican members of Congress have felt heat at their town halls for their fealty to Norquist’s pledge. “You work for North Dakota residents, not some guy from another state,” a constituent told Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND).

During an interview last week with Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Norquist — who believes that President Obama should be impeached if he doesn’t agree to extend the Bush tax cuts again — said that he would not approve of a tax increase, even if the revenue went towards fighting a war, aiding victims of a natural disaster, or to combat “beard flu.” Last year, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) got into a high-profile spat with Norquist regarding the latter’s insistence that cutting subsidies for ethanol would constitute a tax increase, calling Norquist’s position “ludicrous.”