CNN’s Anderson Cooper fact-checked Rep. Michele Bachmann’s remarks about Planned Parenthood on Tuesday, particularly Bachmann’s repeated claims that “Planned Parenthood wants to be the LensCrafters of Big Abortion.” Cooper found that claim, during a social conservative gathering for potential presidential candidates, to be incorrect. The Minnesota Independent’s check on that claim last year came to a similar conclusion.

At an event by the Family Leader in Iowa last weekend, Bachmann said, “The executive director of Planned Parenthood in Illinois said, ‘We want Planned Parenthood wants to be the LensCrafters of Big Abortion.’ They are the largest provider of abortion in the United States. And not only that, the are one of the largest political organizations you can imagine as well.”

Cooper said, “She’s made up a quote.”

Bachmann is grossly distorting a remark by the head of the Illinois Planned Parenthood from an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2008. As the Minnesota Independent reported in 2010:

“It is high time we follow the population,” said Sarah Stoesz, who heads Planned Parenthood operations in three Midwest states.

She recently opened three express centers in wealthy Minnesota suburbs, “in shopping centers and malls, places where women are already doing their grocery shopping, picking up their Starbucks, living their daily lives,” Ms. Stoesz said.

The mall sites promise walk-in convenience and “clothes-on” care, with services limited to birth-control counseling and tests for pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. Most patients are in and out in less than half an hour.

“I like to think of it as the LensCrafters of family planning,” Steve Trombley, the top executive in Illinois, said as he toured an express center a few doors down from a hair salon and a Japanese restaurant in the well-to-do suburb of Schaumburg, Ill.

Those clinics provide services other than abortions, which further contradicts Bachmann’s claim.

Cooper added that Planned Parenthood has spent far less on politics than Bachmann asserts. He notes that during the 2010 midterms, the United States Chamber of Commerce spent $33 million and the SEIU spent $53 million — much more than the $1 million Planned Parenthood spent on the election.

“Compared to the others,” Cooper said, “it’s hard to call it one of the largest political organizations you can imagine.”

Cooper last took on Bachmann’s grasp of facts last November after the Sixth District Republican falsely claimed that a trip to India by President Obama would cost taxpayers “$200 million per day.” When grilled by the BBC, Bachmann backtracked slightly, saying she was merely “quoting a newspaper” in India that made the inaccurate claim.

In an interview with the BBC on Friday, Rep. Michele Bachmann responded to criticism she’s received over her claims that President Barack Obama spent $200 million a day during a recent trip to India. Bachmann defended the statement, saying she was just quoting a newspaper and that she never said she believed it.

Host Emily Maitlis also grilled Bachmann about some of her more inflammatory statements, including whether Obama was anti-American.

ThinkProgress has a transcript of the exchange:

MAITLIS: You claimed that President Obama spent $200 million a day on a trip to India. It’s been roundly ridiculed as a quote.

BACHMANN: Actually, I didn’t claim that. I was quoting a newspaper out of India. And I only used that quote–

MAITLIS: Well why would you do that?

BACHMANN: Well number one it came out of the host country in India, a well-respected financial newspaper.

MAITLIS: And you believe that? $200 million dollars a day?

BACHMANN: Well, all I did was I quoted the newspaper. I quoted the newspaper and major national figures in the United States, many in the media had already been using that figure. [...] The reason it was so important was that the president has a two-year history of out of control spending. [...]

MAITLIS: You still believe that it was $200 million dollars a day?

BACHMANN: I didn’t say if I believe it or not. What I said was a I was quoting a newspaper.

Bachmann’s original statement came in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“Well I think we know that just within a day or so the President of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day,” Bachmann said. “He’s taking two thousand people with him. He’ll be renting out over 870 rooms in India. And these are 5-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending, it’s a very small example, Anderson.”

“But don’t all Presidents take overseas trips, and stay in hotels where there’s security?” Cooper asked.

“Not, not, not at this level. We have never seen this sort of an entourage going with a President before. And I think this is an example of the massive overspending that we’ve seen, not only just in the last two years, but really in the last four,” she said.

Here’s video of Bachmann defending her claims:

CNN’s Anderson Cooper had a straightforward question for Rep. Michele Bachmann last night: Now that Republicans have the majority in the U.S. House, what spending cuts will they make to balance the budget? Republicans have talked about dismantling the Department of Energy, the Department of Education and doing away with corporate income tax. While Bachmann refused to name any specific programs she’d cut, she did have one case of “massive overspending”: President Obama’s upcoming trip to India. One problem with that: The cost of the trip she repeatedly cites is massively overestimated.

Bachmann told Cooper that Obama’s south Asian trip will cost taxpayers “$200 million a day” and represents “the kind of over-the-top spending” that’s rampant in Washington.

“No one really knows the cost, because for security reasons they don’t disclose the cost,” Cooper countered. “So this idea that it’s $200 million is simply made up.”

Bachmann replied, “Well these are the numbers that have been coming out in the press.”

CNN fact-checked the claim, finding that the press report Bachmann cited was not American but Indian, and the $200 million per day figure came from an anonymous Indian source, “allegedly an Indian provincial official.”

“How he would know how much President Obama’s trip is costing, I don’t know,” Cooper mused.

The White House says the estimate repeated by Bachmann has “no basis in reality” and is “wildly inflated.” FactCheck agrees: Bachmann’s wrong.

When Cooper asked Bachmann for specific spending cuts she’d make to balance the budget — asking whether cuts to Social Security or Medicare are on the table — she wouldn’t answer.

“Well with cuts, we need to begin with a general budget. We need to reform Social Security so it can stand on its own… We can’t be about scaring senior citizens right now,” she said.

When asked what three areas she’d cut to offset the lost income from extending the Bush tax cuts, she wouldn’t name any. (“Eligibility levels may be too high,” she said in her most precise moment.)

So just how far off is that $200 million cost Bachmann cited?

CNN says that the most expensive presidential trip on record — Bill Clinton’s Asia trip — cost $50 million dollars — not per day, but for the entire trip. Here’s the GAO report on Clinton’s travels (PDF),

The interview is the second in as many days where Bachmann has opted not to provide specifics on ideas she actively campaigned on. Tuesday night, she refused to answer MSNBC host Chris Matthews questions about whether the new Republican majority would use its subpoena power to investigate Democrats in Congress. This summer she told a Republican group that “all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.”

Update: The Pentagon characterized the $200 million per day figure as “a lot of creative writing” and “astronomical,” reiterating that for security reasons it doesn’t release the costs of such trips. The agency did bat down a rumor  that the president will use 34 warships during the trip. Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell called it an “absurd notion of there being 34 ships, or more than 10 percent of the Navy, deployed in support of this trip. That is most certainly not the case.”

Thanks for the memories. Now please go away. Yes, we’re talking about you, Rudy Giuliani. And you, Wolf Blitzer. We no longer wish to be a swing state. Henceforth the residents of the state of Minnesota promise to vote reliably Democratic. Or Republican. It doesn’t much matter which — just as long as you people promise to stop showing up in our little slice of the frozen tundra seeking to feel our pain. But to memorialize the horrors visited upon us during the (still ongoing) campaign season, we offer — in honor of our favorite member of the Statewide General Election Canvassing Board — the G. Barry Anderson Awards.

Betty McCollum

Personally we thought the Andy Rooney date-rape skit had potential: It’s tough to recall now, but back in June it looked as if Al Franken’s Senate campaign was going to run completely off the rails. Despite two years of suffering through fish fries and potluck suppers in East Jesus Nowhere, his campaign was beset by controversies over improperly paid taxes and past writings. But it wasn’t the inevitable frothing of Minnesota Democrats Exposed that put the Franken campaign at risk of losing the DFL endorsement to a little-known challenger from the Trotskyite wing of the party. Rather it was the attacks from Franken’s fellow Democrats, led by Rep. Betty McCollum, that nearly doomed his candidacy. Her sanctimonious outrage over a (rather dull) Playboy article triggered a cattle call of Democratic politicians expressing faux outrage over Franken’s past writings. The comedian’s possibly pending triumph, however, raises hope for a 2014 Diablo Cody campaign.

T-Paw

He even cut off his hockey mullet, dammit: We really, really thought Gov. Tim Pawlenty was a shoo-in. When GOP muckety-muck Ken Mehlman hosts a Georgetown cocktail-and-mini-wiener gathering in your honor and it’s revealed that First Lady Mary Pawlenty refers to you as “45″ behind closed doors, it’s time to start measuring the curtains for Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret bunker, no? Pawlenty couldn’t have telegraphed his desire for the post any more strongly if he’d offered to take on eBay’s Meg Whitman in a steel-cage match. But when it became clear that Sen. John McCain’s appeal was largely limited to (some) former guests of the Hanoi Hilton and beer-distributorship scions, the drab choice of Pawlenty got scuttled for a moose hunter with a unique ability to arouse the Republican base with just three words: “Drill, baby, drill.” Does M-Paw now cry out “46?”

Xcel Energy Center

Let’s play hockey, please: Barack Obama decided to pee on the ice first. On the night that he finally slew the Pantsuited Beast once and for all, Obama showed up in St. Paul to stir the masses with his magic happy talk. A photo that would become one of the iconic images of the campaign was snapped in an Xcel elevator by Time photographer Callie Shell. It shows Obama, surrounded by his wife and advisers, beaming as if he’d just discovered indoor plumbing. Even better: nobody had time to organize a protest or arm the police with $50 million worth of the latest riot attire.

The Republican National Convention

What a gas: Did anyone other than St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, Gov. Pawlenty and a few other insecure, ambitious politicians have any desire to host this four-day excuse to beat on protesters, arrest reporters, scream epithets at cops and hire really high-priced hookers? Does anyone care about whether the world at large has any clue where St. Paul, Minn., is located on a map and whether people view it as a “first-class” city? Can we please go back to being a Cold Omaha that rich people visit only when their nasal passages can no longer reliably process coke? Nobody was impressed by forced exposure to Minnesota Nice Passive Aggression and the Land of 10,000 Cops in Riot Gear. Anderson Cooper will not be returning this winter to hang out at the St. Paul Curling Club. If “this is what democracy looks like,” as the protesters kept insisting, we don’t want any part of it. To quote Meir Kahane and Kelly Clarkson: “Never Again.”

Palin-tology

Let them eat moose: That damned Katie Couric. She ruined everything. Before Sarah Palin performed her excruciating media belly flop on the “CBS Evening News,” she brought the house down at the RNC in St. Paul. Winking her way through a speech notable for its withering contempt for the Democratic presidential nominee, she had pundits (particularly the male variety) swooning. But even after it became clear that she was about as prepared to take up residence at the White House as your typical TV sports reporter, the GOP faithful were positively loopy for Palin. When she returned to Minnesota for a rally in Blaine (along with the old guy at the top of the ticket) just two weeks later, the delirious Palin-ites nearly filled an airplane hanger. But after it became increasingly clear that McCain had no chance of winning Minnesota, we were stuck with the surrogates. And unfortunately it wasn’t Bristol Palin. Or Levi Johnston. Instead we got the first dude — a man (to put it kindly) not known for his rhetorical gifts. But Minnesotans apparently weren’t offended by this snub. Todd Palin’s whirlwind two-day tour of the state was the biggest thing to hit Grand Rapids since the annual Judy Garland Festival.

The Crazy McCain Lady

Now she would have been a bold VP pick: When McCain arrived in Lakeville for a town-hall meeting in October, we were concerned that Minnesota might not be living up to expectations as a swing state. After all, recent McCain-Palin rallies had featured party faithful so riled up by the red-meat rhetoric that they’d spewed death threats at Obama and gnawed the legs off of anti-war protesters (OK, not really the latter). Were nice Minnesotans psychologically equipped to live up to such demanding standards? But then 75-year-old Gail Quinnell wandered up to the stage and let everyone know that we’re just as loony as the rest of the country. The “Crazy McCain Lady” utilized her moment in the political spotlight to declare Obama an Arab, earning a rebuke from McCain and her own skit on “Saturday Night Live.”

Cullen Sheehan

In October Harper’s Magazine reported allegations that Norm Coleman’s close pal Nasser Kazeminy financed lavish shopping sprees for the senator at Nieman Marcus. The Republican’s campaign initially refused to answer any questions about the controversy, brushing off inquiries from both Harper’s and Pioneer Press reporter Dave Orrick. “There are very awful things that are said about people on the blogs,” Coleman revealed. But it was the senator’s campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, who really transformed the story into Intertubes gold. At an excruciating state Capitol press conference, he repeatedly refused to disclose whether Coleman had received any free suits from Kazeminy. Instead Sheehan recited this mantra over and and over and over and over again: “The senator has reported every gift he’s ever received.” Of course Suit-gate was soon trumped by Donor-gate, after two lawsuits alleged that Kazeminy attempted to funnel $75,000 to the senator.

Neiman Marcus

We’re pretty sure that was Rod Blagojevich trying on a houndstooth jacket over in aisle three: What other clothing store in the country can claim a place at the center of two different scandals during this election season? Coleman may have been responsible for the first free Neiman Marcus advertisement, but it took Sarah Palin to truly put the retailer in the national spotlight. After she was tapped as the VP nominee, the GOP brass were apparently fearful she might show up at the convention in camo waders and a blaze orange overcoat. So they tapped local Republican pooh-bah Jeff Larson to lead the Alaska governor on a $75,000, donor-financed shopping spree at Neiman Marcus. No word on whether she ran into Norm (or Nasser) while at the Nicollet Mall store.

Sixth Congressional District Voters

They’re not anti-American, but they’re definitely pro-Scandinavia: After the best-dressed homophobe ever to represent Minnesota in Congress spread her magic to the whole wide world via “Hardball,” it looked as though her congressional career might be over after just one term. Money poured in from across the country to support the underdog campaign of Elwyn Tinklenberg, and polls showed the race deadlocked. But the nice, racist Scandinavian voters of the Sixth Congressional District had an election day surprise for the pollsters. They gave Bob Anderson — a candidate who wasn’t endorsed by any political party, wasn’t invited to most debates, and hardly campaigned — 10 percent of the vote, thus ensuring that Michele Bachmann would return to Washington. We can vividly imagine the thought process of Ole and Sven while hovering over the ballot: “Bachmann? Isn’t she the one who wants to start gulags for everyone with un-American thoughts? Tinklenberg? I do kinda have to use the bathroom now that I think about it. Anderson? Well, I betcha he’s an awful nice gentleman. I’m sure he’d do a wonderful job in Washington, just like Coya Knutson.”

The Recount

This is dedicated to Eric Magnuson’s goatee: The fifth pile. The third pile. Wrongly rejected absentee ballots. Allegedly double-counted ballots. The 133 missing ballots. G. Barry Anderson. Marc Elias. Tony Trimble. The Lizard People. Flying Spaghetti Monster. G. Barry Anderson. Minnesotans have been forced to learn an entirely new lexicon and nomenclature to fully follow the U.S. Senate Contest That Refuses to Die. And now it’s clear that no matter how much we repeat the totemic words “G. Barry Anderson” over and over and over again, the recount is destined to drag on well into 2009. Even if we don’t end up in the swamps of south Florida with hanging chads and Cruella Harris haunting our dreams, it’s still been a rather gruesome process to behold. But here’s a simple proposal to bring this mess to an end: a lutefisk-eating contest on the state Capitol steps. The Uptake will carry a live feed. G. Barry Anderson will officiate. Whichever candidate can cram the most lutefisk down his throat in 15 minutes goes to Washington. With one caveat: He can never come back.

Tuesday’s stats got a bit lost amid news that long-lost ballots turned up in Ramsey County, but they suggest that Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s message about reining in challenges may have gotten through to the rival camps.

The official state figures for the day put Coleman ahead of Franken by 303 votes — a gap that has been shrinking and widening since being pegged at 215 by the State Canvassing Board so they could authorize a statewide recount as required by state law in such tight races. As the recount nears its end, it remains deceptive to draw conclusions even from the now-substantial fraction of the total ballots cast that have been recounted so far. The nearly 93 percent of ballots cast on Nov. 4 that recount crews have since given a second look represent a slightly skewed sample of the overall  vote. At first that seemed to be to Coleman’s advantage, since more of the ballots that happened to have been reviewed during the recount’s first days favored him, but that imbalance has now swung to Franken. Slightly more of the ballots that had been recounted as of Tuesday night were originally counted as Franken votes, and the recount’s running total also slightly favored Franken for the moment.

The recount’s drama quotient should increase as the recount progresses towards a Friday deadline for counties to complete their counts. But U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss’s run-off election victory in Georgia on Tuesday means a Franken win could not give Democrats a 60-vote majority in the Senate. Will that inspire CNN’s Anderson Cooper to pull a 360 on his rumored pilgrimage to Wright County’s recount this week? We’ll just have to wait to see.