STFU Michele Bachmann

Opening a tea party-backed forum in this first voting state in the South, presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann is criticizing President Barack Obama’s understanding of the Constitution and is pledging fidelity to the nation’s founding document as she woos the grassroots activists who could deliver her the GOP’s nomination.

The Minnesota Republican on Monday said the 2012 presidential election would hinge on each candidate’s understanding of the Constitution, which she called “that sacred document.”

Branding herself a “constitutional conservative,” the former federal tax lawyer-turned-congresswoman challenged Obama’s understanding of his powers. She cited Obama’s political and policy advisers, whom she called “czars,” the Justice Department’s decision not to appeal a court’s overturning of a federal marriage law, and his immigration policies.

She says all were unconstitutional.

Uh, Michele, I see nothing “sacred” about a document created by a bunch of slave owning, misogynistic, racists. But then again, I’m not a member of the Tea Party.

(Source: associatedpress.com)

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann told Floridians Sunday that Hurricane Irene and the earthquake felt along much of the East Coast last week were messages from God to warn “politicians” to start heeding divine guidance, which she suggested is being channeled through small government conservatives.

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’” Bachmann, a third-term Minnesota congresswoman, told a crowd in Sarasota that the St. Petersburg Times estimated contained around 1,000 people

On the campaign trail in Iowa, Rep. Michele Bachmann’s response to the argument that she lacks the experience to run for president has been to turn the argument on its head. The Minnesota congresswoman rattles off her resume: She was a federal tax litigation attorney; she and her husband started “a successful small company”; she fought the establishment in the state Legislature and Congress. 

But there was one résumé item that was missing: a Ph.D. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Bachmann traveled the state as an education activist, she went by “Dr. Michele Bachmann,” even though she had never obtained nor sought the advanced degree that’s a prerequisite for the title.And one more thing: Lest you think she doesn’t have the brains to do battle with Obama, she rattles off her degrees. “I’m not only a lawyer, I have a postdoctorate degree in federal tax law from William and Mary,” she told Fox News’ Chris Wallace in June. “I work in serious scholarship.”

and

This isn’t the only instance of Bachmann exaggerating her résumé. She continues to call herself a “tax attorney” or “tax litigation attorney” even though, according to the state of Minnesota, she is not currently authorized to practice law in the state. In an effort to prove her bipartisan appeal, she has stated that Minnesota Democrats squeezed her out of her old Senate district and put her in a new, liberal-leaning one—but the districts were drawn up by the courts, and her new district actually leaned red.

On occasion, she has also stretched the truth about her foster children (she had 23) to make a political point. In a 2008 interview with Politico, she noted that she was feeling the squeeze from high gas prices because she has such a large family. “Energy will be the big focus right now,” she said. “Every weekend now when I go home, I will go to the grocery store, I’ll buy food for the family. We have five kids and 23 foster kids that we raise. So I go to the grocery store and buy a lot of food.” The catch? She didn’t have any foster children in 2008; her permit to take in foster children had expired in 2000 and she had taken in her last child, a teenage girl, in 1998.

(Source: Mother Jones)

 Tim Albrecht, a spokesman for Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, told me that the line for food at the Bachmann tent is the biggest he’s seen at any tent in four straw polls.

“And they’re actually going to vote for her. It’s amazing. Never seen anything like it,” Albrecht said.

A Pawlenty adviser, standing off stage minutes before Pawlenty spoke, downplayed the line, saying the Bachmann operation was less efficient and didn’t move people through as quickly, exaggerating the size of her crowd. — Jon Ward

Folks, it’s time to get worried.

Bachmann, a two-term member of Congress from Stillwater, Minnesota, is an ideologue of the Christian-conservative movement. Her appeal, along with her rapid ascent in the polls, is based on a collection of right-wing convictions, beliefs, and resentments that she has regularly broadcast from television studios and podiums since 2006, when she was first elected to Congress.

Often, she will say something outrageous and follow it with a cheerful disclaimer. During the last Presidential campaign, she told Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, that Barack Obama held “anti-American views” and then admitted, “I made a misstatement.” (In 2010, she said that she had been right about Obama’s views all along: “Now I look like Nostradamus.”) In the spring of 2009, during what appeared to be the beginnings of a swine-flu epidemic, Bachmann said, “I find it interesting that it was back in the nineteen-seventies that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama—I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

As commentators quickly pointed out, the President during the first swine-flu outbreak was a Republican, Gerald Ford.

This is hands down one of the best profile pieces done on Michele since she has taken over the ‘national spotlight’, everyone needs to click the link and read it. (It’s a bit long)

Also, HOW FUCKING CRAZY IS THAT SWINE FLU QUOTE?!?!?!

Michele Bachmann

(via figgymoonpowder)

(Source: colbertnation.com, via medievalfashion)

The big news Monday in the political world was that Rep. Michele Bachmann has surged to the lead in a new Republican poll in Iowa.

The even bigger news is that Bachmann’s lead over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney may be significantly wider than the four percent margin reflected in the poll, and we may in fact be under-selling her surge in the Hawkeye State

A closer look at the Voter/Consumer Research poll shows that among voters who are described as the “most attentive,” Bachmann leads by a much-wider 14-point margin, 32 percent to 18 percent.

Those numbers matter for several reasons.

One, of course, is that attentive voters are more likely to turn out to vote. And that’s especially true in Iowa, which uses a caucus system dominated by — you guessed it — more attentive voters. These kinds of voters are much more likely to be willing to trudge through the snow on a Thursday night in the dead of winter to cast their votes.

But the more important reason is the enthusiasm gap in the GOP presidential field. Put plainly, Bachmann is the candidate that evokes passion in Republican voters at the moment. Her opponents, by and large, don’t. And that gap means her lead could very well grow.

“What it means is the news stories are probably not over-estimating her current momentum….in fact, they may be under-estimating it,” said GOP consultant Dan Hazelwood. “And second, she has a sizable base to mobilize for a caucus event.”

Oh dear god, please don’t let her get anywhere near that nomination.

(Source: washingtonpostcom)

stfuconservatives:

And either could be sold like cattle at any given time! And they never learned to read and didn’t have any rights or freedom! Just like the Founding Fathers intended!

(Source: teapartyjesus, via stfuconservatives)

Michele Bachmann had been doing so well. The tea-party darling from Minnesota is almost neck and neck with Mitt Romney as favourite for the Republican nomination for next year’s presidential race.

So far she’s largely avoided the pitfalls that Sarah Palin stumbled into in the 2008 White House race, while enjoying almost Palinesque outpourings of adulation on the campaign trail. That is until this weekend when she walked right into a row over slavery.

She clearly didn’t see it coming. Last week she became the first Republican candidate to sign a “marriage vow” put forward by an evangelical group in the electorally crucial state of Iowa. At a cursory glance, it seemed a no-brainer: to pledge herself to the sanctity of marriage and family. She is openly opposed to gay marriages, and has five children as well as having fostered 23 others. Marriage, family – no problem!

But then the details of the pledge were picked up on the blogosphere, notably a clause in it referring to slavery. As Politico pointed out, the preamble of the pledge contains this phrase:

“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

As a general matter of course, it is not a good idea for American politicians to stray into the subject of slavery unless they’ve done a great deal of homework and are extremely confident about what they are saying. And as intelligent commentary on slavery goes, the preamble missed the target by miles. As Alexandra Petri put it in the Washington Post:

“Now you go and sign a pledge that includes a statement that can be summarized “gee, slavery was terrible for slaves, but at least they grew up in two-parent households?” There might have been two parents there, but that doesn’t really improve your family situation if the children are being treated like property. Do we really want to go down this path?”

Anger was quick to follow. On the black political blog Jack & Jill Politics,Cheryl Contee was livid:

“Given that families were broken up regularly for sales during slavery and that rape by masters was pretty common, this could not be more offensive. I mean, putting aside the statistics on this, which are likely off-base, I could not be more angry. When will Republicans inquire with actual Black people whether or not we’re ok with invoking slavery to score cheap political points? It has to stop.”

When the full scale of the internet backlash was clear, the Iowa group that devised the pledge, the FAMiLY LEADER removed the paragraph on slavery. But the damage had been done, in that Bachmann, as well as her fellow presidential candidate Rick Santorum, had already signed the unexpurgated version.

To rub salt into the wound, Nate Silver, the New York Times’s razor-sharp political statistician, pointed out on his Twitter account that the highly dubious claim about black families had in fact come from a research paper from the Institute for American Values that referred to the period 1880-1910 and had nothing to do with slavery in any case.