Michele Bachmann - The new Sarah Palin?

[Sugar Ape]

How could you even think of voting for her? Look at her values below. Madness!

 

Bachmann's politics

 

For:

 

Spending cuts

Pro-life

Family values

 

Against:

 

Tax increases

Bail-outs

Gay marriage

Obama's healthcare plans

Environmental Protection Agency

Teaching of evolution

 

 

BBC News - Michele Bachmann: Her rise to political stardom

 

A mother of five from Iowa has emerged as one of the front-runners in the Republican race to take on Barack Obama in next year's US presidential election. So could Michele Bachmann end up in the White House?

 

All the momentum among Republicans dreaming of the Oval Office is currently with one woman.

 

Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party favourite and Minnesota congresswoman, is gathering a head of steam in her attempt to win her party's nomination next year.

 

One day after dominating the Sunday political shows, the former tax lawyer formally launched her campaign in her home state of Iowa, which hosts the first stage in the Republican contest in February next year.

 

An Iowa poll published in the Des Moines Register on Saturday places her alongside Mitt Romney at the head of the Republican field, well ahead of the rest. That's encouraging for her supporters -but the same poll in 2007 proved to be wildly inaccurate.

 

More compelling evidence of her chances was provided by her impressive performance at a televised debate two weeks ago.

 

Selling her own attributes on Fox News at the weekend, Ms Bachmann said: "I'm 55 years old. I've been married 33 years. I'm not only a lawyer, I have a post-doctorate degree in federal tax law from William and Mary."

 

She added: "My husband and I have raised five kids, we've raised 23 foster children. We've applied ourselves to education reform.

 

"We started a charter school for at-risk kids. I've also been a state senator and member of the United States Congress for five years."

 

To match her experience, Ms Bachmann has a rags-to-riches story.

 

Michele Amble was born in Waterloo, Iowa, to Democrat parents of Norwegian descent, but she was brought up by her mother in Anoka, Minnesota, with three brothers, after her mother's divorce.

 

Aged 16, Michele Bachmann discovered God when, in her own words, "people were coming to the Lord left and right." After graduating from law school in Oklahoma, she studied for a degree in tax law in Virginia.

 

She worked for the Internal Revenue Service for five years and then left her job to become a full-time mother when she had her fourth child, before pursuing a political career.

 

"I think Michele Bachmann is the total package," says Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

 

"She's articulate, telegenic and has a depth of policy in every level of government - local, school board, state legislature, Congress.

 

"And she offers that unique combination that really captures the zeitgeist, which is a marriage of the social conservative and Tea Party activist."

 

This broad constituency of self-identified Christian evangelists and their social conservative allies makes up about 41% of Republican primary voters, says Mr Reed, but it's too early and too simplistic to say any one candidate has their bloc vote.

 

Ms Bachmann has got herself into trouble with past remarks, to the extent that on Sunday, Fox News presenter Chris Wallace bluntly asked her: "Are you a flake?" He later apologised.

 

There have been several gaffes, like declaring while in New Hampshire that it was the birthplace of the American Revolution, and that the founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery.

 

And there have been some strong views, such as the time she accused liberals like Barack Obama, then a senator for Illinois, of having anti-American views.

 

But her consummate performance in a prime-time televised debate two weeks ago marked the emergence of a more disciplined operator, says Larry Jacobs, a professor in political science at the University of Minnesota.

 

Mr Jacobs, who has met Ms Bachmann about a dozen times, describes her as very engaging in person and smarter than the media portrayals depict her.

 

"Her brand of conservative populism speaks to the resentments, frustrations and anxieties of voters. She also has a clear identity. Some of the other candidates, like Mitt Romney, it's hard to say what he believes in."

 

Being the only woman in the race will be an advantage, Mr Jacobs believes, because she can present a different face of the Republican party, one that does not belong to a white male southerner.

 

However, being a conservative mother with strong opinions and a native of a northern, snowy state has a familiar ring to it.

 

Comparisons with Sarah Palin are obvious, and the choreography of their schedules brings this into sharper focus this week.

 

The former Alaska governor, yet to say whether she is running for president, is due in Iowa on Tuesday for the screening of a new documentary about her life called The Undefeated.

 

Yet these kinds of commercial ventures have lost Mrs Palin credibility and support among conservative populists, says Mr Jacobs, while Ms Bachmann has earned both.

 

Fundraising is always a crucial factor but Michele Bachmann - with a very experienced campaign team - has proved adept at mining a wide network of donors at grassroots level, each giving small sums.

 

She also has a more intangible gift - to electrify a crowd - says Arne Carlson, who served as Republican governor in Minnesota when Ms Bachmann was in the state legislature.

 

"She has the ability to instantly feel an audience and to relate to that audience. And she represents a strain in American thought that Washington and New York don't understand.

 

"In the Mid West, there's a very deep suspicion of Wall Street and she plays to that."

 

But the best candidates don't make the most suitable people for governance, Arne Carlson says. Michele Bachmann sees America in very nostalgic terms, he notes - everyone goes to church, everybody has a job and everybody shares the same civic and religious values.

 

This plays to a narrow base, while the urban, racial or religious diversity of America is not acknowledged, Mr Carlson says. He contends that beneath the surface of her politics, there are some clear flaws.

 

"The utilisation of the Bible to tell you what's constitutional and what isn't. That's very disturbing," he says, describing her ideology as a no-compromise approach to the debt ceiling, taxes and social issues.

 

So how far could Michele Bachmann go? There is concern, says Larry Jacobs, that the Minnesotan lawyer could do well in the primaries among conservative voters but then struggle in a general election.

 

"It's increasingly plausible that she could win against Mitt Romney," he says.

 

"But whether she could win against Barack Obama is one of the big debates going on in the party behind the scenes."

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

If she could change her views on a few things, she could get Stronts to be her campaign manager.

[Trumo]

If she manages to get CNN to push her campaign, will it be a Bachmann Turner Overdrive?

[zigackly]

Where are the pictures? I'm disappointed in this thread and all who have posted in her.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

If she manages to get CNN to push her campaign, will it be a Bachmann Turner Overdrive?

 

Rep owed.

 

That's twice you have beaten me to a comedy quote in the last few weeks. This is getting too spooky now.

[Sugar Ape]

Where are the pictures? I'm disappointed in this thread and all who have posted in her.

 

Apologies.

 

[DJLJ]

Fact-checking Michele Bachmann’s announcement speech and Sunday interviews - The Fact Checker - The Washington Post

 

Fact-checking Michele Bachmann’s announcement speech and Sunday interviews

By Glenn Kessler

 

(CHARLIE RIEDEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS) “Of course a person has to be careful with statements that they make. I think that's true. And I think now there will be an opportunity to be able to speak fully on the issues. I look forward to that.”

 

— Rep. Michele Bachmann, responding to a question about being “a flake” on “Fox News Sunday,” June 26, 2011

 

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who on Monday formally announced her candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, is a terrific public speaker with a long history of playing fast and loose with the facts. (For a list of our recent articles on Bachmann’s statements, click here.)

 

Monday’s address, given in Waterloo, Iowa, was mostly a vision statement, with only a few assertions worth double-checking. We will take a look of those — as well as more dubious statements she made on the Sunday morning news shows in advance of her speech.

 

Announcement speech, June 27

 

“Five decades ago in America, we had less debt that we have today. We had $300 billion or less in debt. A gallon of gasoline was 31 cents and owning a home was part of the American dream. Today, that debt stands at over $14 trillion. A gallon of gas is outrageously expensive and unfortunately, too many millions of Americans know what it is to have a home that's in foreclosure.”

 

Context matters a lot when you use numbers. In this case, Bachmann creates a false impression by using figures from a half-century ago without adjusting for inflation or other factors.

 

So, 31 cents in 1961 actually translates to about $2.25 in today’s dollars. That’s still cheaper than a gallon of gas today — about $3.64 nationwide — but not 10 times cheaper.

 

There’s a similar problem with Bachmann’s reference to $300 billion in national debt. That sounds puny compared to today’s $14 trillion in debt, but the right way to measure debt is as a percentage of the gross domestic product, which is the broadest measure of the nation’s economy.

 

According to the historical tables of the White House budget office (table 7.1), $300 billion was 55 percent of GDP in 1961.

 

As of June 23, the total debt was $14.34 trillion, according to the Treasury Department debt meter. Meanwhile, the gross domestic product, as of March 31, was $15.02 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. That’s a ratio of 96 percent, which is certainly pretty bad, but again, not as dramatic a difference as Bachmann suggested.

 

In both of these cases, Bachmann could have made valid points about gasoline prices and the debt without resorting to using out-of-context figures.

 

“And we can't afford four more years of a foreign policy with a president who leads from behind and who doesn't stand up for our friends like Israel, and who too often fails to stand against our enemies.”

 

Bachmann barely touched on foreign policy in her speech, and she does not really explain her comment on Israel. Bachmann has mischaracterized Obama’s position on Israel in the past. Obama has certainly had tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Nethanyahu over the strategy for peace talks with the Palestinians, but at the same time both countries say security and military ties have never been closer.

 

“In February 2009, President Obama was very confident that his economic policies would turn the country around within a year.

 

He said, and I quote, ‘A year from now, I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress. If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition.’ Well, Mr. President, your policies haven't worked. Spending our way out of the recession hasn't worked. And so Mr. President, we take you at your word.”

 

This quote is from an interview that President Obama had with NBC News about two weeks after taking office. But Bachmann leaves out a few crucial words that undercut her claim that he was “very confident” that his policies would turn around the country “within a year.”

 

Here’s is Obama’s full statement, with the missing words in bold: "A year from now, I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress, but there is still going to be some pain out there. If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition."

 

Bachmann on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” June 26

 

“No, I haven't misled people at all. I think the question would be asked of President Obama, when you told the American people that, if we borrow $1 trillion from other countries and spend it on a stimulus, that we won't have unemployment go above 8 percent, and today, as we are sitting here, it's 9.1 percent and the economy is tanking — that is what's serious. That's a very serious statement that the president made.”

 

Host Bob Schieffer challenged Bachmann’s history of misstatements in the past — citing, alas, our friends at Politifact — and strangely enough, she responded with yet another misleading statement.

 

The president never made any statement suggesting that the stimulus legislation — which totaled about $800 billion, not $1 trillion — would prevent unemployment from going up beyond 8 percent. Bachmann is referring to a projection issued Jan. 9, 2009 — before Obama even took the oath of office — by two aides: Christina Romer, the nominee to head the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, an incoming economic adviser to Vice President-elect Biden.

 

The 14-page report thus was not an official government assessment, nor even an analysis of an actual plan that had passed Congress. Instead, it was an attempt to assess the impact of a possible $775 billion stimulus package and what difference it would make compared to doing nothing. The president-elect had articulated a goal of passing a plan that would “save or create 3 million jobs by the end of 2010.”

 

Page 5 of the report included a chart that showed that unemployment would peak at 8 percent in 2009, compared to 9 percent in 2010 if nothing was done. But the report also contained numerous caveats and warnings because, after all, it was merely a projection. At the time, other economists had similar forecasts — Romer and Bernstein were in the mid-range — but the economy turned out to be in deeper trouble than most people thought.

 

In any case, Obama never said that.

 

"It’s ironic and sad that the president released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve because the president doesn’t have an energy policy."

 

 

This is a huge overstatement. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has 727 million barrels of oil, and the Obama administration announced last week that the U.S. will release 30 million barrels of oil from the reserve. (Another 30 million barrels will be released by European countries.)

 

So she’s off by a factor of 25.

 

“Under Barack Obama the last two years, the number of federal limousines for bureaucrats has increased 73 percent in two years.”

 

This assertion elicited a chuckle from Schieffer, who questioned whether this really amounts to much money. Bachmann’s statistic comes from a report by iwatch news, a Web site from the Center on Public Integrity, but the full article provides a lot of context missing from Bachmann’s statement.

 

For instance, much of the increase came in Obama’s first eight months in office, so the purchases could have reflected requests made by the Bush administration.

 

Another problem is that the General Services Administration says the numbers are not reliable because the term “limousine” is not defined and so it could include protective duty vehicles- — not fancy cars to ferry what Bachmann called “bureaucrats.”

 

Bachmann on “Fox News Sunday,” June 26

 

“What I want to do is to make sure that that we fully repeal ‘Obamacare.’ This will be one of the largest spending initiatives we will ever see in our country, and also it will take away choice from the American people. It will hurt senior citizens, because Obama took away $500 billion, as you say, from Medicare and will transfer it to younger people in ‘Obamacare.’ ”

 

Host Chris Wallace, who later apologized for suggesting that Bachmann was “a flake,” tried to engage Bachmann on the question of how she could complain about cuts in anticipated growth of Medicare spending in the new health care law when the new House Republican budget largely adopts those very same cuts, but she kept dodging his question.

 

We have examined this issue before, giving Bachmann two Pinocchios for suggesting seniors who suffer at the hands of the youth. As we wrote: “It’s rather rich for Republicans to complain about $500 billion in supposed cuts to Medicare that they themselves would retain, even under the cover of helping Medicare.”

 

“But even worse, the Congressional Budget Office is saying that we will lose 800,000 jobs with ‘Obamacare’. When we're in a situation now, where we have massive job loss, this is not what we want to do with ‘Obamacare.’ ”

 

Bachmann once again repeated this 800,000 job claim, another issue we have repeatedly tried to clarify. However, she does better than she did in the recent GOP debate, when she said the health care law would “kill 800,00 jobs.” This time, she said, the economy would “lose 800,000,” which is technically correct but is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

The Congressional Budget Office last August estimated that the new health care law over the next decade would reduce the number of overall workers in the United States by one-half of one percent. The CBO did not use a number, but that estimate effectively translates into 800,000 people.

 

(Note: Bachmann’s use of the word “massive” to describe a figure that is just one-half of one percent is a bit absurd.)

 

In dry economic language, the CBO essentially said that some people who are now in the workforce because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care. (As an example, think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because he or she is waiting to get on Medicare at age 65.)

 

These jobs would disappear, not to be replaced, so there is an intellectually defensible argument that one could make that this is bad for the economy; others, however, might argue that this is a small price worth paying for universal health care.

 

We realize that this is difficult concept for non-economists to grasp. Many readers have written wondering why new, younger workers would not fill those jobs, but the CBO maintains that the number of overall jobs in the United States would shrink. In any case, politicians shouldn’t be tossing around this figure — this is really a rather vague prediction of something that might happen in the future.

 

The Pinocchio Test

 

Bachmann’s announcement speech had relatively minor transgressions, factwise, but she did worse in her pre-announcement interviews. We are pleased to see she has modified her language on the 800,000 jobs — though this stale talking point should be dropped altogether — but she erred badly on her assertion about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. She needs to figure out how to eliminate the use of hyperbole — such as “massive” or “all” — from her vocabulary.

 

On a blended basis, she is getting two Pinocchios, but that’s only because we do not use 1/2 Pinocchios.

Two Pinocchios

[dennis tooth]

Apologies.

 

 

less pics please, there are men under 50 in here.

[dennis tooth]

How could you even think of voting for her? Look at her values below. Madness!

 

 

 

 

BBC News - Michele Bachmann: Her rise to political stardom

 

 

 

"And there have been some strong views, such as the time she accused liberals like Barack Obama, then a senator for Illinois, of having anti-American views."

 

Fucking BBC!

[stevebaby]

Apologies.

 

That face is just crying out for a load of horse jizz.

[Xherdan]

How can someone really be against the teaching of evolution?

[Jim MM]

If she manages to get CNN to push her campaign, will it be a Bachmann Turner Overdrive?

 

Hardly an overdrive so far, at least I ain't seen nothing yet.

[dennis tooth]

 

 

[Anubis]

Apparently the LA Times have been busy exposing the hypocrisy between what she says she beleives in, and what she does. Never mind Michelle, it was good while it lasted. Approximately a week.

[Stu Monty]

How can someone really be against the teaching of evolution?

 

Pretty easily if you're part of a cult, even if it's a popular one.

 

It's on a par with being against teaching kids about electricity, atoms or gravity in its retardation.

[RedinSweden]

I would.

[Section_31]

I reckon I could get a good following in the states if I got dressed up as a slice of apple pie and carried a machine gun.

[Newport]

Bill Maher: "Michele Bachmann! For people who find Sarah Palin too intellectual."

 

And here's a great read from this month's Rolling Stone: Michele Bachmann's Holy War | Rolling Stone Politics

[dirty_sanchez]

Sarah Palin is fitter.

[Anubis]

Michele Bachmann signs controversial slavery marriage pact - Telegraph

 

 

Michele Bachmann signs controversial slavery marriage pact

 

Michele Bachmann, the Republican presidential candidate, signed a Christian conservative pledge that stated that African American children were more likely to grow up in stable families during the era of slavery than under President Barack Obama.

 

By Toby Harnden, Washington, 10 Jul 2011

 

 

The controversial linkage of slavery to family values was made in the preamble to a pro-traditional marriage pledge given to White House contenders by The Family Value, a group in the first-voting state of Iowa, where Mrs Bachmann is the joint Republican front runner.

 

"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," the opening statement introducing the pledge read.

 

Mrs Bachmann and Rick Santorum, another Republican candidate, signed the pledge, which condemned gay marriage, abortion, infidelity and pornography.

There was a wave of criticism from the Left and bloggers. "If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you'd be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here," said Rachel Maddow, a liberal host on MSNBC.

 

"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," wrote Cheryl Contee on her blog Jack and Jill Politics, mainly about black issues.

 

"When will Republicans inquire with actual Black people whether or now we're ok with invoking slavery to score cheap political points? It has to stop. It is the opposite of persuasive and is another reason Republicans repel. It's hard to believe that Michele Bachmann would be foolish enough to sign this pledge."

 

The Family Value subsequently removed the offending language. "After careful deliberation and wise insight and input from valued colleagues we deeply respect, we agree that the statement referencing children born into slavery can be misconstrued," said Bob Vander Plaats, the group's head.

 

Mrs Bachmann, who is tied with overall Republican front runner Mitt Romney in Iowa, signed the two-page pledge but her campaign stressed that the "candidate vow" portion contained no mention of slavery.

 

[WaltonRed]

She's a mong like the rest of the Tea Party tits