Secrets of the City

Well, I had all the links open and ready to go, but LOL OMG! beat me to it, so here’s the score: Steve Marsh did a Q&A with Michele Bachmann last month. “You know, the one where she talked about AR-15’s, John Wayne and Thoreau?” Incidentally, Steve also opens by calling Bachmann a “political monster” — a phrase which she apparently likes so much she has started using it herself.

In a recent FOX Business news bit, the “monster” was mentioned again, which led to MinnPost publishing the video on their website today, Marsh responded with his own take on the matter (see comments section in the MinnPost article). FYI, Nancy Pelosi didn’t tell him to call her a monster, Slavoj Zizek did. For clarification, watch this brief video featuring the famous philosopher and culture theorist:

The new LOL OMG! blog gives us a brief glimpse of reporter Steve Marsh as he prepares for his Bachmann interview.

Marsh [Facebook] status update: “I’m wearing my magenta AmAppy underwears to the Congresswoman’s office just so I can keep it loose and feel sexy out there, Nuke LaLoosh-style.”

Marsh via Twitter: “Just went through security with a murder of Mormons (they’re all wearing black). Their leader: ‘Be reverent once you get inside!’”

And a more recent personal favorite:

“Michele Bachmann is super charming. I’m going to bathe in pig’s blood and booze now.“

Last week, our own former editor Max Sparber tweeted: “If you’re going to print Sarah Palin without factchecking her, you probably don’t deserve to be a newspaper.” Well, perhaps the same can be said for U.S. Rep Michele Bachmann. But it seems that many media agencies already know this as they are now calling her out for repeatedly misstating economist Christina Romer on the number of jobs impacted by health care reform and the percentage of Americans favoring the bill.

According to the Minnesota Independent, “Bachmann told Fox’s Sean Hannity that ‘President Obama’s bill will mean 5.5 million jobs lost, and that’s according to his own economist, Christina Romer.’ But Romer has never said such a thing. That number was cooked up by Republicans based on a faulty analysis of Romer’s research, according to the St. Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact.”

In fact, what Romer really said was that, “Controlling health care cost growth would allow lower unemployment in the short and medium run, without putting pressure on inflation. Employment could be 500,000 higher for a number of years.”

Of course, perhaps little surprises us when it comes to Bachmann at this point. See her 10 biggest “Oh no she didn’t” moments over at City Pages.

Our own Aaron Landy offers up an inventory of alleged ethics violations on Michele Bachmann’s Web pages and digital communication. Many of them are a little hard to understand if you aren’t an IT guy, but it boils down to Bachmann using communications that taxpayers have paid for to promote campaign donors and partisan Web pages. A sample: Michele Bachmann’s office violated House Franking Rules by using taxpayer resources to tell constituents to call the National Automobile Dealer’s Association. House offices can’t even encourage people to donate blood, let alone ask them to call a national organization to get legal representation. Unsurprisingly, Bachmann has received $13,000 from that very same organization in 2006 and 2008.

The always excellent autotune the news takes on Michele Bachmann, and, you know what? She sounds great!

Dustry Trice reports — with audio — on Michele Bachmann’s statement that she would break the law by refusing to answer questions from the Census. Why would she do this? Because, according to her, ACORN is going to use the Census data to rig elections.

Jezebel publishes an imagined confromtation between Michele Bachmann. Bachmann sounds unreal and ridiculous, which is disheartening but unsurprising, given that they have used mostly her own words. More impressively, they have nailed Judge Judy’s distinctive voice. Bup, bup, bup!

For our weekly dose of Bachmann lunacy, we can turn to, oh, the Minnesota Independent, or MinnPost, or the PiPress, or almost anything else you can mentions, because this one is extra crazy: “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s 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.”

Yeah … interesting.

People have been mocking Twitter lately, but today had a series of tweets that demonstrate why it’s a useful service, or, at least, a very entertaining one. You see, Michele Bachmann has arranged for a series of Town Hall Meetings this week, and today’s featured a forum on Climate Change & Cap and Trade, which raised some questions from the Dump MB blog, especially in light of the fact that Bachmann has been making long discredited statements regarding Cap and Trade, and that her speaker was Chris Horner, a global warning denier.

Well, thanks to Twitter, I have gotten a bird’s eye view of the event, which sounds like it was quite the show, thanks to Dustytrice, who was there. For one thing, we discovered that Bachmann was refusing to take questions. For another, protestors showed up with signs reading “fact check” and silently raised them every time a questionable fact came up. Apparently, Horner’s speech, which included an anecdote about windmills killing people, was not well received. And then, when reporters began to ask questions, Bachmann was rushed out of the auditorium.

Another exciting day in Minnesota politics.

Bachmann has taken her shots at Congress before, as we remember, complaining about anti-Americanism, although she later recanted, or, more properly, claimed she had never said anything like that and it was an urban myth. Now she lets loose on “socialized” medicine: “I know one thing, the people in my district are not interested in paying for the health care for illegal aliens that are coming across our border to be yet one more magnet to bring people in that should come here legally.”

The magnet for illegal aliens she refers to? The State Childrens Health Insurance Program.

She has plenty more to say as well.