It’s a question that’s been visited often by The Iowa Independent’s panel of contributors for the 2012 GOP Presidential Power Rankings, with some speculating that Paul must bring more people into his tent in order to get the first or second place finish at the Iowa caucuses that would give him a national boost.

“Your 15 percent, or 12 or 10 percent, will yell louder than [Mitt] Romney’s 30 percent,” Stewart said and couldn’t resist adding that Romney’s “30 percent don’t seem to like him much” to the glee of the studio audience that appeared heavily seeded with Paul supporters. “But how can you expand past that?”

“Keep delivering the message,” Paul responded. “The message is necessary and it is very popular. The country is in big trouble economically, and I have an economic message. The foreign policy is in shambles — perpetual war, the American people are sick and tired it. That message is truly spreading.

“I also work on the assumption that you don’t always have to convince immediately 51 percent. You do need a hard-core people who understand the message. Those are the people who will volunteer, work hard and donate the money. Then the persuasion comes. And I think that’s where we are. I think once you get to 10 percent, you have the number. We are 10, 14, 15 percent. So I think we very well could be and, most likely, are on the verge of an explosion of interest in this country.”

People, and specifically the national media, don’t understand Paul’s message of fiscal responsibility and personal liberty, Paul explained when asked by Stewart why some feel he is unelectable. “I think that’s the main reason why they are intimated by me having a presence on the stage.”

The full interview, in three parts because The Daily Show offered sections not originally aired, is embedded below.

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Paul is campaigning in Iowa today. Details of his and other political events can be found on our Factbook calendar.

“They have some rules of engagement that include a national poll that has you at 4 percent or higher,” explained Roemer, who added that he has a different campaign approach by only accepting small donations, has only been actively campaigning for a month and only recently began appearing in national polls.

“We’ve tried to get in every debate,” he added, but the way the policies governing the debates are decided is “purposefully vague” and it has been difficult to determine who sets the rules and who can change them.

“It’s a process that makes no sense,” Roemer said of the debate qualifiers that seem to exclude certain candidates while favoring others.

While Roemer may be the most gentle in his criticism of eligibility requirements for the 2012 GOP presidential debates, he’s hardly the first of the candidates to level such complaints.

The presidential campaign of former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson has offered to bring its own microphone if funds prevent more from being added to the stage at the Reagan Library Wednesday night. U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter mused that he, a Republican at age 21, was being excluded from the debate at the Reagan facility while two other candidates who weren’t even members of the GOP at the time of Reagan will appear on stage. Likewise, political consultant Fred Karger, a former member of the Reagan administration, is being excluded — as he has in previous debates.

Candidates appearing on stage will be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Atlanta businessman Herman Cain, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

While not all of the candidates are currently at the 4 percent national polling threshold, they can all point to a poll — some months in the past — where they garnered the necessary support to qualify.

Roemer, noting that he is the only GOP presidential candidate who has both executive and legislative experience, agreed with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart Tuesday night that there is an over-riding sickness within American electoral system. That sickness, according to Roemer, is the influence of money in politics.

“You can’t tackled the jobs problem, the budget problem, the tax problem or American rising without tackling the first problem — money in politics,” Roemer said. “It is corrupt. It is institutionally corrupt. They spend their time getting big checks from big special interests. It’s the special interests that write the tax code. … And nobody does anything. You know why? Corporations have never made any more money than they are right now.

“They wrote the tax code and they really don’t give a damn about the rest of America.”

Corporate or big money influence in politics is a key focus of Roemer’s campaign, which, as The Iowa Independent previously reported, has a self-imposed ban on special interest money. His campaign will only accept individual contributions of $100 or less.

“Electability should not be discussed in terms of who can raise the most money, but rather who has the best ideas to raise America,” Roemer said previously.

The Jon Stewart clip featuring Roemer is embedded below:

If Sen. Kyl and the Fox News friends are shaky on the facts about Planned Parenthood, Kyl’s women colleagues in the Senate can enlighten them.

One in five American women will have visited a Planned Parenthood in their lifetime. The vast majority of those women have gone to Planned Parenthood for checkups and consultations, not to receive abortions. No tax money pays for Planned Parenthood abortion services.

More Planned Parenthood facts:

Three million women and men in the United States annually visit Planned Parenthood affiliate health centers.

Planned Parenthood health centers focus on prevention: 83 percent of clients receive services to prevent unintended pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood services help prevent more than 612,000 unintended pregnancies each year.

Planned Parenthood provides nearly one million Pap tests and more than 830,000 breast exams each year, critical services in detecting cancer.

Planned Parenthood provides nearly four million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

Three percent of all Planned Parenthood health services are abortion services.

“You spoke right after him at an event, and you called him the greatest historian in America,” Stewart said. “And I don’t know if everybody’s familiar with David Barton, but he doesn’t seem like a historian, he seems almost like a theologian whose thrust is, ‘I want this country to be Christian and go by the Bible.’”

Huckabee responded, saying, “No, David is, I think, very much a historian, I love his stuff, because he documents everything with source material and is very specific about dates and time, and he has a lot of original documents: Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. … He doesn’t just say, ‘I think, I believe, I hope.’ He says, ‘Here it is. Here’s the page number.’ If people want to dispute it, they are certainly welcome to do it.”

Here’s the first of three segments of the interview:

Stewart went on to press Huckabee on how he can credibly call Barton a great historian that should teach history in public schools when Barton contends that Jesus made arguments against the Estate Tax and minimum wage laws — documented by Right Wing Watch in March — and while Barton uses the Bible to justify gaining political leverage.

Part two:

Huckabee goes on to say he wishes more people would read up on Barton and then make up their own minds. Stewart counters that people can’t if that’s the curriculum the president or presidential hopefuls are advocating.

“What makes me uncomfortable about these Texas curriculum changes … is that they’re not looking at it from a historical perspective, they are looking at it as a way to justify their religious beliefs within the context of the country,” Stewart said.

Part three:

(h/t Right Wing Watch)

Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette was the leader of House Democrats working to stop this bill. In the end, of course, the Republican majority was simply too strong.

According to Ruth Marcus, writing in The Washington Post, the Pence amendment would cost the country far more than it saves by denying medical care to millions of economically challenged people.

From her column:

House Republicans voted to increase the number of abortions, raise federal health-care costs and swell the welfare rolls.

That wasn’t their intent, of course, and certainly not their stated policy. But it is the predictable and inevitable impact of their twin moves to eliminate funding for the federal family planning program and strip Planned Parenthood of all federal money.

If anything, this assessment is understated. The sharper, and still accurate version, would be that Republicans voted to let more women die from breast cancer, cervical cancer and AIDS. How’s that? The family planning programs also provide cancer screening and HIV counseling to millions of low-income and uninsured people. […]

But abortions represent 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood provides; contraception accounts for 35 percent; testing for sexually transmitted diseases, 34 percent; cancer screening and prevention, 17 percent.

In the end, though, you might as well have a good laugh. For that, we bring you Jon Stewart from Tuesday night’s The Daily Show, where he wildly skewers House Republicans, while slyly suggesting they just haven’t gone far enough yet.

“They’re focused on becoming big business,” Bachmann said on the House floor last week. “Sarah Stoesz, who heads the Planned Parenthood operation in my state of Minnesota, said she recently opened three express centers in wealthy Minnesota suburbs and shopping centers and malls and places where women are doing their grocery shopping, picking up Starbucks, living their daily lives and stopping off for an abortion.”

A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood told the Minnesota Independent that those “express centers,” actually called PLAN Express Care centers, do not offer abortion services.

According to the group’s website, the centers offer “no-exam health services” including birth control, emergency contraception, pregnancy testing, testing for sexually transmitted diseases and HPV vaccinations.

Here’s the clip from the Daily Show:

Unlike most of his recent media appearances, The Daily Show interview largely shied away from a discussion of Pawlenty’s presidential ambitions. Instead, Stewart spent the whole interview pushing Pawlenty to defend or reject government-as-tyranny language — particularly regarding President Obama’s policies — that has come to dominate the right wing of the Republican party through the tea party movement.

Stewart opened the interview by clarifying that he was not trying to tie any of this into the events in Tuscon last weekend and, instead, debate the general direction of political speech since Obama was elected. “I want to move past the idea that our political rhetoric and the context of news somehow is responsible for this but I do want to talk about our political rhetoric,” Stewart said.

“This administration does not appear to be fundamentally different than eight years under George Bush, but the panic and the reaction it has set of has seemed fundamentally different,” Stewart said, as he frequently returned to comparing Obama’s policies to expansions of the federal government under the Bush administration.

Pawlenty countered Stewart by noting that activists on the left were equally angered in their rhetoric when Bush was president, but Stewart argued that the recent shift has not come only among the grassroots of the right, but is echoed among Republican leaders such as Newt Gingrich.

Watch the full 20-minute, extended interview below:

Overall, despite the best efforts of the Obama administration and Democrats to talk up the pernicious effects of anonymous spending on campaigns, it only seems to have registered for about a quarter of the population, while concerns about voter fraud or vote suppression only caught the attention of about one in five Americans. There’s also a slight partisan trend picked up by the Pew Survey in awareness of both topics — Democrats were slightly more aware of the anonymous spending issue, while Republicans were a good deal more tuned into reports of voter fraud or suppression. This follows naturally from the stated concerns of both parties; a part of me expected that partisan divide to be even bigger.

Beck spent a segment of his Fox News show decrying the march – and pointing out that among the more than 400 groups that have signed on are the Communist Party USA and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America.

“All of these groups, and the president of the United States, want nothing short of fundamental transformation of America,” Beck said on a recent show. “Do not allow them to get away with the lies! Do not allow them to say that we are just ‘one nation, working together.’ ‘We’re just trying to put America back to work, and putting America back together.’ These people, a lot of them, have fought their entire life to destroy America!”

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, who’s playing a leading role in organizing the event, described the coalition somewhat differently, telling the Post that “What unites our coalition is a common goal to pull America back together and put America back to work. We are unified through a deep concern over a lack of civility in the political discourse. We are unified around our common vision of an America where we acknowledge our differences and work together to solve problems.”

It’s a nice, albeit somewhat vague message that has managed to bring together a diverse coalition of progressive groups from African American churches to LGBT groups, but whether it’s enough to motivate progressives across the country to show up at the polls in November remains an open question.

Denise Gray-Felder, communications director for One Nation Working Together, tells me that they “certainly hope that people will remain energized and engaged and carry that energy into the voting booth on Nov 2.” One Nation is registering as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, Gray-Felder notes, and as such it won’t be doing any direct political advocacy. She confirms, though, that getting out the vote will most definitely be a central mission of the group going forward.

“There is a major civic engagement and public education component,” she explains. “We’ll have get-out-the-vote information, and we’ll be giving out voter registration applications, so that is a big, big component of the next step of our strategy…. There is a civic engagement staff that’s part of the One Nation team, doing social media outreach, and there’s also a face-to-face component where, as of first thing Sunday, people will be out going door-to-door. People at the rally will be asked to make a commitment to make ten calls, recruit least two friends to volunteer, and volunteer at least ten hours getting out the vote.”

Pawlenty would not say whether he would run for the 2012 nomination, but admitted he is considering it. “I might, but I might not. I don’t know,” he told host Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show.” He did acknowledge a potential handicap for his candidacy. “Mostly to run nationally you have to be rich, famous, or you have to have some kind of schtick or novelty,” he said.

Pawlenty got the special extended interview treatment from Stewart, with the first eight minutes of the interview airing last night, and the full interview posted online. The total conversation lasted almost half an hour, and barring a few divergences in the third segment (a presidential candidate has probably never been caught saying “bong water” that many times) the interview largely lacked typical “Daily Show” humor, instead focusing on a Pawlenty’s governing philosophy.

His message throughout the interview was making government smaller but more effective. One area he mentioned when asked for examples was reforming higher education, suggesting new technological possibilities such as “iColleges.” The second part of the interview was primarily spent discussing the importance of entitlement reform.

Pawlenty is a two-term governor and was a finalist for the second spot on John McCain’s ticket in 2008, but his national profile is still relatively low. In a poll released Friday from The Des Moines Register, 53 percent of likely voters in Iowa’s Republican caucus were “unsure” about Pawlenty. His media blitz over the past day should help raise his profile, laying groundwork for his spot as the “Sam’s Club” Republican candidate.

Watch all three parts of the interview below.

Part I:

Part 2:

Part 3: