Tim Pawlenty: … when President Bush asked governors to volunteer their National Guard to go to the border to help reinforce, through Operation Jump Start, our border, I was one of the few governors who did it.
Operation Jump Start was undertaken to beef up patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border. The idea was to deploy guardsmen from around the nation to border states to carry out non-law enforcement work, so that Border Patrol agents could "return to law enforcement duties along the southwest border," according to the 2006 Army National Guard Annual Financial Report. In the first year, that report says, the plan involved nearly 5,000 guardsmen from 41 states.
Army National Guard: At the close of FY06, Operation Jump Start included nearly 5,000 ARNG Soldiers from 41 states and resulted in an initial return of 394 CBP agents back to the border.
Over the course of the two-year campaign, all 50 states (plus the District of Columbia, Guam, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico) sent a little more than 30,000 guardsmen to four states: New Mexico, California, Arizona and Texas, according to a 2008 National Guard report on the program. That report (page 79) shows that Minnesota provided 370 guardsmen.
Clearly, Pawlenty was not "one of the few governors" to support the program. (Note: We asked Pawlenty's campaign about this, and a spokesman furnished a link to a 2006 press release saying that Minnesota was one of the first 11 states to participate. That would support a claim that he was "one of the first" to participate, but not one of the "few.")
Read My Lips?
Mitt Romney repeated a false claim that the Massachusetts health care overhaul didn't include new taxes.
Romney: [The federal law] raises $500 billion in taxes. We didn't raise taxes in Massachusetts.
As we pointed out before, the state did raise taxes —increasing the cigarette tax by $1 per pack. That hike was put in place by Romney's successor, Gov. Deval Patrick, not Romney himself.
Furthermore, the law Romney signed includes penalties similar to those he himself describes as "taxes" when attacking the federal law. In a list of those taxesprovided to us by the Romney campaign, he includes penalties on individuals who don't purchase insurance and businesses that don't offer it to employees. The Massachusetts law Romney signed also includes penalties on individuals who don't purchase insurance and businesses that don't offer it to employees. The first year's penaltywas a loss of the personal exemption on income tax returns; in subsequent years, the penalty has been half of the cost of the lowest priced plan available through the state exchange.
Santorum Wrong on 'Rationing'
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is the latest Republican to falsely claim that a Medicare advisory board created by the federal health care law will result in a rationing of care for seniors.
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