She won’t be Bachmann

Michele Bachmann has decided to spare the 6th District her services.

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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.

There’s never enough Bachmania

Via Kaili Joy Gray at DK, Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald:

Over a year after she dropped out, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann has refused to pay five staffers from her failed presidential bid, according to a former top campaign official. Peter Waldron, her controversial former national field coordinator, told Salon the dispute started when former Iowa straw poll staffers refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would bar them from discussing any “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity” they witnessed on the campaign with police or reporters.
…
A home-schooling group accused the Bachmann campaign of stealing the [group’s e-mail] list, which was contained on a volunteer’s laptop, and then using it to fundraise for the campaign. The home-schooling group has sued the campaign and Waldron said there is also a criminal investigation pending, explaining that he spoke with police about the incident “several times.”

Now, I have as much expectation of the theft being prosecuted as for the Second Coming being at 9 o’clock tonight (which would, presumably, obviate any earthly prosecution). But it is truly amazing that a self-professed Christian has to demand that employees silence themselves over “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity.”

Reset the Bachmann clock

Thomas Beaumont, AP, reports that campaign aide Barb Heki is suing Bachmann and senior aide Kent Sorenson for stealing an e-mail list of home schoolers from her computer, resulting in Heki being removed from the board of the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators and its national counterpart. Heki also names four aides who she says covered up the theft.

The Strib, apparently comatose, has not followed up on the AP report, which has conveniently dropped off its front page.

No comment necessary

via Bartcop.

Uncaptioned

(image from CrowdedComics.com)

Ilya Gerner:

Congratulations, Switzerland! After 500 years of democracy and peace, elaborate clocks are no longer the only kind of cuckoos your scenic confederacy will be known for…

GOP Sends O’Reilly to Battle Bachmann

Republican bigwigs fear a Michele Bachmann candidacy almost more than they fear taxing the rich.

This was shown yet again by FOX News mainstay Bill O’Reilly’s adversarial treatment of Bachmann when she was on his show Monday night:

Bachmann refused to directly address any of O’Reilly’s tough questions, prompting the visibly frustrated conservative host to role his eyes, audibly sigh, and finally laugh in Bachmann’s face when she invoked her “titanium spine.” Noting that the Republican leadership understands the need to raise the debt limit, O’Reilly chided Bachmann, saying, “You are the renegade here.”

Whoa! Not only is he ripping into Bachmann, he’s also telling FOX viewers that the debt ceiling must be raised. Guess Boehner and McConnell, on orders from the Wall Streeters who will be hurt first and worst in event of a default, have asked FOX to both try to explain fiscal reality to teabaggers thus far sheltered from it AND to try and hamstring Bachmann before she achieves her goal of becoming the next Tom DeLay: a powerbroker with access to the wallets of the religious right and thus the ability to run primary candidates against Republicans she doesn’t like.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)

The crazy just masks the corrupt: the full story of Michele Bachmann

DemocracyNow! carried an extremely good segment on Michele Bachmann. It featured blogger Karl Bremer of Ripple in Stillwater, and Michelle Goldberg (ex-Salon, now with The Daily Beast) who praised the MinnBloggers.

While Matt Taibbi emphasized the crazy, and sometimes got it wrong, this segment emphasized the corruption, the hypocrisy, and the ties to totalitarian (theocratic) groups. Bachmann’s major funders include many members of an organization called Alliance for the Separation of School and State, a fact pieced together by Bremer. Bremer has also proven that Bachmann is lying when she claims that she has not profited from federal subsidies to her father-in-law’s farm. As Bremer said, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has utterly failed as a journalistic enterprise, meekly accepting Bachmann’s lying denials rather than doing shoe leather journalism.

Congratulations, MinnBloggers! Arise and shine, for your good work has become known!

Minnesotan ice

(Image from Lloydletta)

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone (via Barry Ritholtz):

Bachmann’s entire political career has followed this exact same pattern of God-speaks-directly-to-me fundamentalism mixed with pathological, relentless, conscienceless lying. She’s not a liar in the traditional way of politicians, who tend to lie dully, usefully and (they hope) believably, often with the aim of courting competing demographics at the same time. That’s not what Bachmann’s thing is. Bachmann lies because she can’t help it, because it’s a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.

As Matt Taibbi says, don’t underestimate her. The “ultimate reality show protagonist,” she’s a perfect illustration of how sociopaths have risen to power and now run the country. And, as Matt Taibbi says, there are millions of people willing to vote for her just because you laugh at her.

Congresswoman, if on the off-chance God guides you to read this, may He also inspire you to look up John 8:44b to learn where all lies, even those uttered out of the best intentions, come from. Resting your heels, my… donkey.

GOP Lies About Everything: Michele Bachmann Family Edition

Welcome to yet another episode of “If a Democrat did this his or her career would be toast”:

Bachmann, who’s flirting with a presidential run, was in the early-primary state of Iowa last week for the Rediscover God in America conference. Bachmann was born in Iowa, as she told the crowd. But she couldn’t leave it at just being an ordinary Iowan:

“I’m actually even more than just an Iowan,” she told her audience. “I’m a seventh-generation Iowan. Our family goes back to the 1850s, to the first pioneers that came to Iowa from Sognfjord, Norway.”

And from there, Bachmann was off and running, spinning an American story about her ancestors, Melchior and Martha Munson, who braved a 13-week ocean passage to Quebec and from there trekked overland to carve a homestead out of the wilderness of Iowa, felling trees and building a better life for themselves on the frontier.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t hold water, as researcher Chris Rodda ably points out at OpEdNews.

How off is Bachmann’s revisionist history? Really off. As in really, really, really off:

Since Bachmann said her great-great-great grandparents, whose names she provided, emigrated from Norway to Iowa in the 1850s, I searched the 1860 federal census for them. I started by searching for a Melchior Munson in Iowa, but came up empty. But, since unfamiliar foreign first names like Melchior were often misspelled or Americanized when written down by census workers, I didn’t think it was unusual not to find him on the first shot. So I tried Martha Munson, Melchior’s wife, since Martha was a common name that wouldn’t be misspelled. Still nothing. So I broadened my search to include sound-alike last names for Munson, in case it was their last name that was misspelled. Still nothing. Giving my search one last shot, I removed all search parameters except the first name Martha and the last name Munson, including any sound-alike last names. It was only then that I found Melchior and Martha — but not in Iowa. They were in Wisconsin.(1) So, there went that part of Bachmann’s ‘Iowanizing’ of her family history. Her great-great-great grandparents hadn’t gone from Quebec to Iowa. They had settled in Wisconsin.

And what about all those hardships that Bachmann says her ancestors persevered through during their first few years in Iowa — the worst winter in fifty years, the worst flooding in forty-two years, the worst drought that anyone had ever recorded, and a plague of locusts to boot? Well, obviously, none of this happened in Iowa, because her ancestors weren’t in Iowa. And it didn’t happen in Wisconsin either. This all happened in the Dakota Territory. That’s where Melchoir and Martha Munson and their children were from 1861 to 1864.(2) Like many Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Wisconsin, the Munsons set out for the Dakota Territory once Congress made it a territory in 1861.

[…]

But it’s not just where these events occurred that Bachmann is lying about in her revisionist version of her “Iwegian” family history. According to Bachmann, her ancestors “kept going, and they persevered, and they were people of faith.” But did her faithful ancestors really persevere and keep going? Well, no. They were among the settlers written about in the History of southeastern Dakota who “abandoned the Territory for the purpose of making homes elsewhere.” That’s how Melchior and Martha Munson ended up in Iowa — seven years after they came to America. By the time the Munsons abandoned the Dakota Territory in 1864, there was a well established Norwegian community in Chickasaw County, Iowa, so that’s where they stopped and resettled. Clearly, Iowa was never the intended destination of Bachmann’s great-great-great grandfather and grandmother when they left Norway in 1857, as she claims.

Bachmann even fudges the number of generations from Melchior’s and Martha’s to her own: Depending on how (and who) you count, it could be as few as four or as many as six, but it’s not seven. Then again, considering she’s an adherent of the Christian nationalist revisionist history movement as espoused by David Barton and John Eidsmoe (aka “Liars for Jesus” as Rodda calls it), this shouldn’t be surprising.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)