Michele Bachmann’s Teflon’s Wearing Thin: She’s Got A Primary Challenger

From Jeff Kolb at the local conservative blog Look True North (hat tip to Dump Bachmann’s Ken Avidor), we hear that Michele Bachmann has a primary challenger — as yet unnamed, but known to be male.

Boy howdy.

Last year, Bachmann was riding high. Her 2010 outing saw her crush the well-funded Tarryl Clark by thirteen percentage points. She had an immense warchest and lots of media exposure from her showing in the 2012 presidential primaries, her congressional district had just had a Democratic stronghold removed from it, and she was set to outspend her Democratic opponent by a twelve-to-one margin.

And she very nearly lost, a fact which does not seem to have gone unnoticed by various local Republicans.

Last year, no one would have considered giving Bachmann a primary challenge. That was then, this is now.

Communion and Liberation, a detailed look at one of Pope Francis’s allegiances

Jamie Manson, NCR:

In his 2011 book La Lobby di Dio (God’s Lobby), Ferruccio Pinotti argues CL [Communion and Liberation] is “more powerful than Opus Dei, more well-oiled than freemasonry, and more ‘plugged in’ than Confindustria, Italy’s manufacturer’s association.”
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Much of what I have learned about CL, other than from the organization’s website, comes from the essay “Comunione e Liberazione: A Fundamentalist Idea of Power,” written by theologian and political scientist Dario Zadra.
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Much like evangelical Protestantism, CL understands the central, saving event of one’s life begins with a graced encounter with Christ. But unlike the Protestants, CL understands the saving agent to be the Roman Catholic church.
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Obedience to the authority of the church seems as crucial to Pope Francis as it did to his predecessor and as it does to CL. In a 2005 profile of Cardinal Bergoglio, Jose Maria Poirier, editor of the Argentinean Catholic magazine Criterio, wrote, “He exercised his authority as provincial with an iron fist, calmly demanding strict obedience and clamping down on critical voices. Many Jesuits complained that he considered himself the sole interpreter of St Ignatius of Loyola, and to this day speak of him warily.”
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This belief in the inerrancy of the church influences CL’s understanding of human conscience.
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Those who are convinced that Francis’ zeal for the poor and marginalized will lead him to engage the secular world without the broader agenda of “evangelizing” it ought to learn more about CL’s belief that the church’s authoritative truth is binding on all of society.