Another September anniversary

The one the right wing in America wants you to forget

Where were you the morning of September 15, 2008? What did you do, as you watched the markets spiral downward in one of the biggest drops in the history of the Dow Jones? What did you think, as you watched the employees of Lehman Brothers filing out of the office tower with their possessions in cardboard boxes? Or have you already forgotten how we got into this mess?

Three years ago, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and purchase of Merrill Lynch over one September weekend represented the scariest moment in the financial meltdown. The announcement that there would be no bailout for Lehman and the corresponding bankruptcy filing set off a chain reaction. Lehman's collapse was followed the next day by an $80 billion bailout of AIG, and the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program on October 3rd. Lending seized up, housing values plummeted, and the economy ground to a halt, losing over 500,000 jobs a month for the rest of 2008.

By the time Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, the economic tailspin had resulted in over 2.6 million lost jobs in the previous year. The Recovery Act was passed with only 3 Republican votes in February 2009. That same month we lost another 651,000 jobs. By then, the first time anybody had done anything to boost employment, the U.S. had already fallen a staggering 6.2 million jobs behind what was needed to maintain 2007 levels of employment. At the beginning of 2009, we had 11.1 million unemployed people in the U.S. As of August 2011, we have 14 million. That's nearly the combined population of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, America's three largest cities. 

Over 6 million of those have been unemployed for over 6 months. When you include all people who can work and want to work full-time but are not so employed, 16.2% of the U.S. working age population is unemployed or underemployed. That's nearly one in six American adults. This is a crisis. Worse, it's a crisis with a genealogy that has been denied and obscured by the same people who are its progenitors. The DNA of this crisis is a right wing agenda of deregulation and tax cutting abetted by Democrats who too often share the belief that regulation and taxation are the problem. 

Consider Michele Bachmann's 9 point plan in her response to President Obama's job speech:

1)   Repatriate American business dollars earned from overseas,
2)   Massively cut spending and the size of government,
3)   Repeal Obamacare, which is the government takeover of America’s healthcare system,
4)   Cut taxes, including corporate taxes,
5)   Repeal Dodd-Frank,
6)   Repeal job killing regulations,
7)   Increase exports by finalizing free trade agreements,
8)   Spur new investment in America, inspire innovation,
9)   Provide job creating energy solutions, including decreased regulations on developing new energy supplies from our abundant domestic energy resources.

Far from being short on cash, American corporations quickly returned to profitability and are now sitting on the largest pile of cash in recorded history. Unregulated credit default swaps, junk mortgages packaged as AAA bonds, and years of blind faith in a self-regulating financial sector caused the financial collapse. Tax rates had never been lower in my lifetime than they were in September 2008, and they are even lower today. Dozens of Fortune 500 including giants GE, Exxon, IBM, and Yahoo pay little or no corporate income tax since 2008. The number of local government workers has fallen by 550,000 since its peak in September 2008. Despite ratifying free trade agreements with 11 countries during the Bush presidency, we saw labor shift overseas. Despite 8 years of a Texas oil man in office, with all of the corresponding access and subsidies, gasoline averaged over $4/gallon on September 15, 2008. Or have we forgotten that too?

We do not have an over-taxed, over-regulated market place. There is no shortage of corporate cash or corporate profit. The "job creators" have never had lower tax rates on their capital gains or their income. We have "freer" trade than ever. We have fewer government employees, and continue to slash their wages and benefits. Real wages for American workers have been falling for a decade, and American labor productivity is incredibly high. 

The bottom line is that the economy will not recover until we have more people working for higher wages and with more job security. So far, conservatives have successfully played on the fears and divisions of American workers to advance their political ambitions while rewarding their corporate donors. And at its best, President Obama's triangulation strategy blunts the worst of the GOP agenda while accepting the premise that taxation and regulation are the problem.   

The transformation of the people who caused this crisis into victims of a "gangster government" will go down as one of the greatest PR campaigns in history. But we are reaching the nadir of this message, if only someone has the courage to articulate a response.

This response starts by remembering September 15th.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Michele Bachmann on the causes of hurricanes and earthquakes!

The Drinking Liberally Players got back together at the 331 Club last Thursday night to declaim more quotes of Michele Bachmann, especially on her "evolving" position on the causes of natural disasters. See if you can count 'em all!

The twin towers were bombed by cultural relativism

Or Evil = Muslim

Strib photo

That is the subtext of Katherine Kersten's column Sunday, September 11, 2011. It is indeed a regrettable thing that the Strib's star bigot got the Sunday slot for the tenth anniversary of that horrible day.

Katherine Kersten is the lament of the Plain of the Blackbirds, the Horst Wessel song, and every other ethnic revenge fantasy you can think of rolled up into one odious, vicious little ball. Kersten's hatred is boundless, still in full flower after ten years.

As she has done on numberless occasions, she equates the evil done by men to the act of Lucifer -- or maybe Mohammed -- and bemoans our failure to pay close enough attention to Western Civ 101. If we had only followed through with Pope Urban II, or even the Spanish Inquisition -- and the way it dealt with those pesky Spanish Moors -- we wouldn't have the problems we have today!

I don't intend to quote a single word of her poisonous screed; you'll have to read it on your own. But it would be a mistake to think that she is doing anything beside stoking the fires of religious and cultural hatred.

Dante never ran into her, or he would have imagined another circle of hell.

Update: I was reading again this evening (Sunday) the words of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson right after the attacks of 9/11; see if you think they are the melody for Kersten's tone deaf harmony:

Television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, two of the most prominent voices of the religious right, said liberal civil liberties groups, feminists, homosexuals and abortion rights supporters bear partial responsibility for Tuesday's terrorist attacks because their actions have turned God's anger against America.

"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve," said Falwell, appearing yesterday on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club," hosted by Robertson.

"Jerry, that's my feeling," Robertson responded. "I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population."

Falwell said the American Civil Liberties Union has "got to take a lot of blame for this," again winning Robertson's agreement: "Well, yes."

You ought to be hearing the echo of Michele Bachmann here, too.

Don't pin Michele on us!

The new book by the Dump Michele Bachmann authors

Many of you know by now that the authors of the Dump Michele Bachmann blog (and Ripple in Stillwater, too) have written a book about Bachmann that will come out about the same time as her own book, God is my Straight Man. (That's won't really be the title; it is just my suggestion.)

Andy Mannix at City Pages interviewed Ken Avidor, one of the authors, about the book; you can find it at the link). One of the motivations for the book, tentative titled The Madness of Michele Bachmann: A Broad-minded Survey of a Small-Minded Candidate, was:

I cringe whenever I hear people say, "What's wrong with you Minnesotans?" It's nice to have a book that kind of explains the Bachmann phenomenon, so people have an idea that we're not all to blame for this.

It's thumbs down for the needle, Rick

AP Photo

This is a photo from the recent debate by the candidates for the Republican nomination to run against President Obama in 2012. The gesturing, grinning boob on the right -- looking especially presidential -- is, of course, Rick Perry. Will Ferrell can do this guy in his sleep.

Perry's biggest applause lines came when the subject of the number of people executed on Perry's watch came up. That is what the "thumbs up" was doubtlessly about -- acknowledging the people who clapped the loudest for death. This applause was the most telling part of the debate, revealing for everyone to see what the modern Republican party has become.

An open letter to people who write open letters

Please don't.

That's it. Because if you do, you will probably -- nay, with virtual certainty -- pen such a turgid, self-aggrandizing polemic, so full of grievance and resentment -- not to mention simple pig ignorance -- that you will doubtlessly reveal yourself as the narcissistic boob that you are.

If you don't believe me, I offer this:

First paragraph of Bradlee Dean's letter

You can read all of Pastor Bradlee's plea for a return to sanity -- and the Bronze Age -- at Dump Michele Bachmann.

So all of you out there with pen poised -- and you, not to mention we -- know who you are: save yourself some embarrassment.

Obama's jobs and schools proposals: Is this a backdoor to the further destruction of public education?

Jim Horn at Schools Matter has a disturbing post about how President Obama's proposed stimulus plan plus a new House Bill might pave the way for an expansion of charter schools and further corporatization of public education. I'm quoting the first two paragraphs of his post, but please read the whole thing:

As the President warms up his teleprompter for this evening's big speech, the House is talking up H.R. 2218, a bill intended to hasten the corporatization of K12 schools and the further demise of public education, from pre-K through College. The numbers haven't been worked out yet, but hundreds of millions and maybe billions in public school funds will end up diverted to corporate welfare charter schools if this bill becomes law.  The Bill contains grant provisions for charter schools and charter school construction, which no doubt will fit in nicely with Obama's plan to finally fund some school construction.  Could the big announcement this evening provide cover for supporting this bill to fully energize the resegregation of American schools?

Charter schools offer a terrific example of the coalesence of both neoliberal and neconservative goals around a single issue, even though both sides are coming from different angles.  In the case of neolibs like the George Miller (one of  2 Dems co-sponsoring this school corporatization plan), they favor the No Excuses charters as a cheap way to create children who are eager to become adults trained to be complicit in their own subjugation by the corporate state.  This cheapest form of social engineering for disadvantaged children celebrates, in the end, the 40 to 50 percent of kids who work through these corporate reform schools and, thus, are cognitively and behaviorally altered in the KIPP or KIPPist methods to produce transformed, automatistic adolescents.  The ones who wash out are thrown back to the exploded public schools of last resort that have been labeled as failures by a decade of racist and classist testing, where they are allowed to mature enough to be tried in an adult court, and sentenced.  This is the neoliberal method of dealing with the "civil rights issue of our generation," as Arne has called this psychologically abusive and miseducative imposition of a segregated "self-help" protocol on steroids.

NCLB Waivers -- Relief For Schools, Or More Of The Same?

I haven't posted around here for awhile, but today I have a guest post up at the Campaign For America's Future website on No Child Left Behind waivers. Check it out if you have the time.

ALEC's Lackeys: Official King Edition

Earlier, I noted an eerie resemblance between Rep. King Banaian's budgeting "reform" ideas and ALEC's state budget playbook, erm, "toolkit." I was curious because neither of the stories about ALEC that came out in August (one from Minnesota Independent and the other from MinnPost) listed Banaian among ALEC members.

Well, now it's official. Spot reports that legislative staffer Kevin in Banaian's office confirms that King is a member of ALEC. While it's not surprising in the least, it fills in one of the blanks from the 30 members that ALEC state chair Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer claims belong to the organization. Previously, MnIndy reported 24 members, now we have 25.

No word, yet, on whether Rep. Keith Downey is a member of ALEC. Nor has ALEC chairwoman Kiffmeyer responded to Spot's requests for a list of the 30 members.

In his piece on ALEC and first-term state legislators, MinnPost's Jeff Severns Guntzel asks:

Going through four decades of ALEC coverage, the echo again and again was of a bold voice, determined to produce bold legislation. It makes all of the secrecy around the organization seem a little counterintuitive. When backing bold moves and following bold voices, why not be, well, bold about it?

It's a great question. Kudos to Rep. Banaian for being forthcoming about his ties to ALEC.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz

Taxes, etc.

The Republican debate in 45 seconds from Buzzflash.



It left out the part about the clapping for the death penalty and all the people that Rick Perry executed.

Maybe we'll talk about it at Drinking Liberally tonight: six to nine at the 331 Club in northeast Minneapolis.

The fullness of time has almost arrived

Tomorrow, September 9th, is the last day to vote in the CBS local Most Valuable Blogger plebiscite.

That means you can still cast two votes, we hope for us here at the Cucking Stool.

Warren's dirty war on democracy

Warren Limmer's bill would disenfranchise thousands

Senate photo

I read an article in Rolling Stone online the other day, and it reminded me of Sen. Warren Limmer's bill from last session. The article was The GOP War on Voting, and the bill was Limmer's bill to require a photo ID to vote (there were other disenfranchisement provisions in the bill, e.g., making registration harder, too).

Although it could be called Warren and Mary's dirty war on democracy, because Rep. Mary "Jesus in the Conference Room" Kiffmeyer introduced companion legislation in the House, it was Limmer's bill SF509 that was passed and vetoed by the governor.

Kiffmeyer is the chair of Minnesota's American Legislative Exchange Council delegation, and according to his staff, Limmer "used" to be a member of ALEC. Voter ID is one of ALEC's big initiatives. Here's the Rolling Stone article's description of Republican voter disenfranchisement efforts:

Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots.

Well, not so disconnected, of course, as the article recounts:

In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

The hysteria of legislators like Limmer and Kiffmeyer is just that, hysteria, designed to manipulate people into thinking there is a real problem:

A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 [under Republican Attorneys General and U.S. Attorneys] failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. "Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere," joked Stephen Colbert. A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms. "It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning," the report calculated, "than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

The answer to why Republicans are making such a big deal out of this is clear, if we but remember the stirring words of of Paul Weyrich, again quoted by Rolling Stone:

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

That's one of the more honest things a modern-day Republican ever said.

Some form of voter ID requirement as constitutional amendment is likely to wind up on the ballot in 2012. The proponents are both mendacious and craven. The initiative is anti-little-d-democratic, racist and classist. It is none too early to start identifying it as such.

Make sure it doesn't work, then complain about it

A better demonstration of the GOP game plan you're unlikely to see

Rep. Eric Paulsen was unaccountably lured out of his gopher hole to have a town hall meeting that wasn't on the telephone, and where he talked to more than one person at a time. And mirable dictu, Two Putt Tommy was there to take it in.

In what Tommy describes as the hightlight -- and I would, too -- we see why Paulsen avoids questions like the plague:

Back to the highlight - Paulsen talked about the long time it takes for a manufacturer to get FDA approval for devices; that because of this, manufacturers were going to Europe to speed up taking new product to market.

So this guy gets the microphone, and basically says: "Hey! I'm in the medical device industry, and the reason it takes so long is the FDA is shorthanded. How about we hire some more workers to speed the process up?"

"Um, gosh, shucks, the graphs; ummm... well, I, ah....."

The guy at the mic is absolutely right, too. The FDA -- and other regulatory law enforcement agencies like the U.S. Customs Service -- are understaffed and are very slow to respond to anything from Freedom of Information Act requests on up. And without question, this is harmful to the domestic economy.

Be sure to read Tommy's account of the whole affair.

Update: Doug Grow was there, too.

The idea whose time has not yet come

Steven Dornfeld has what I hope is an op-ed piece up at MinnPost, because it is unabashed boosterism for mileage-based transportation taxes, instead of the gas taxes we have now. This is a really stupid idea, for reasons I'll explore in more depth in a moment, but first consider the "article's" subhead, its premise:

Americans are traveling more — causing more wear and tear to the roads — and paying less to maintain the system.

Uh, not exactly, Steve!

U.S. motorists drove a mere 1.45 trillion miles in the first half of 2011—15.5 billion miles less than they did in the first half of 2010, according to preliminary figures from the Federal Highway Administration.

It was the first time year-over-year mileage declined in the first half of the year since 2004. Analysts say unemployment worries, high fuel prices and a sluggish economy caused Americans to drive less.

The number of miles driven per year in the U.S. peaked in 2007 at 3.02 trillion miles. Last year the total was 3 trillion miles, up from a six-year low of 2.97 trillion miles in 2009.

A strictly mileage-based system would charge the owners of a Prius and Hummer the same amount per mile, even though the far heavier Hummer takes a bigger toll on the highways. It would also diminish the incentive to buy the lighter Prius.

That doesn't sound fair -- or especially bright -- to me.

Moreover, a mileage-based tax would be subject to the same diminution as the gas tax if miles driven declines.

The transportation "experts" that Dornfeld cites say the gas tax system is not "sustainable." So, instead of raising gas taxes to cover the shortfall, an entirely new tax is proposed that would be a nightmare to enforce or administer.

There would be various ways to calculate the miles driven, according to Dornfeld, from odometer checks to GPS-based systems.

Hahahahahahahahahaha. Sorry.

We Americans are an ingenious bunch; the idea of just using a car's odometer to measure how many miles a car has been driven is astonishingly naive. Car odometers are about as accurate as pedometers to begin with, and by the time people got done changing tire sizes and employing all the schemes that people will come up with to decrease the numbers wracked up on the odometer, the public's confidence that everyone is being treated fairly won't exist.

And how will the odometer be checked? Just have the motorist call in the numbers? There is a reason that the gas and electric companies have someone come out to read the meter.

Maybe somebody from MNDOT will just come by and knock on your door every quarter or so and ask to see the cars in your garage. Oh, you're eating? Sorry! Won't be a minute! Maybe you will go to a MNDOT mileage station, conveniently located in Hugo and Grand Forks (think of the jobs!) every month or two. Many of you remember how well those state inspection stations were received.

What about the GPS, you say? Imagine that the computer system at MNDOT goes down for a day, or even an hour. Imagine having a government computer that knows where your car is every moment of every day. Imagine installing a GPS in every car in Minnesota, and think about how easy it would be to translate trip information into average speed. Wouldn't your insurance company love to check and see if you have a lead foot?

Even assuming we have somehow managed to collect the mileage driven by every mother's son (and daughter) in Minnesota, have we put a dime in the state's coffers yet? Nope. The money still has to be collected. How are we going to do that? Send a bill every year? (And hope to collect it.) That doesn't sound like very good cash flow management to me.

What about a bill every month? Maybe each week? I know! We could be required to pay mileage withholding every month, and then settle up with MNDOT at the end of the year. Right. Let's take a tax the is sublimely easy to calculate and collect and turn it into a companion of the income tax.

Imagine, if you will, that you go into a store and buy a hundred bucks worth of stuff. Instead of paying the sales tax at the counter, the merchant sends a note to the Department of Revenue informing it of the transaction, and the department sends you a bill for the $6.50 in tax.

This a ludicrous idea; it is too bad that Dornfeld reported it so uncritically.

State Fair polls: there's a message here somewhere

It's great that about 2/3rds of fairgoers who stopped at the Minnesota House of Representatives booth to take their annual survey think it's a bad idea to write marriage discrimination into our constitution. But as a sign of the prospects for the upcoming election, the results mean very little.

Statistically speaking, the State Fair surveys are no more valid than an online poll on the Star Tribune website. With no random sample, the results are not a reliable measurement of anything other than the opinion of those who took the survey. Despite that, legislators always declare that they consider  the results seriously. Given the design and validity of the survey, I can't. It's disappointing that the surveys no longer ask for party identification and geographic distribution (as the 2009 Senate survey did), since that would make the results a bit more instructive.

Consider that over 1.7 million people attended the 2011 Great Minnesota Get Together and of them, 12,549 filled out the survey at the Minnesota House booth. That's .71% of the total attendees. Still, that is a record, and a 25% increase over last year. The House survey attracted over 4,100 more voters than the Minnesota Senate booth (right next door) which saw only 8,324 completed surveys. While the difference in numbers could be attributed to a variety of causes, the most obvious is the hot question on the House survey that the Senate didn't ask:

2. Should the state constitution be amended to define marriage as “only a union of one man and one woman?”

Groups gearing up to support and oppose the marriage discrimination amendment encouraged their supporters to vote on question 2. This makes it difficult to ascertain whether one side stuffed the survey box with an overweighted grouping of their own supporters. But results on voter identification suggest that the added votes on the House survey didn't come from just marriage discrimination amendment opponents.

In previous years, support for requiring voters to show identification ran in the high 60's - low 70's. This year both surveys asked questions about voter ID with much closer results. The House survey showed narrow majority support (50.8%) for "should voters be required to show a current, government-issued picture ID before casting their ballot?" The Senate survey showed a narrow majority (50.4%) opposed to "would you support a constitutional amendment that would require individuals to provide a photo ID before they are given an election ballot for voting?" There's certainly a difference in wording here, and there will always be a group of people who'll oppose a constitutional amendment just because it's a constitutional amendment. In fact, all four questions on the surveys that asked if respondents supported a constitutional amendment failed to get majority support. Nonetheless, the rather similar results suggest that the 4,100 additional respondents to the House survey were relatively similar to the group that took the Senate survey.

The results are certainly encouraging for amendment opponents, but the only sure lesson we can draw are that the marriage discrimination amendment inspires passion on both sides and will drive turnout in 2012.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz

On any given Sunday

If it's Sunday, you can almost depend on Scott Gillespie to chamber either Katherine Kersten or Jason Lewis into the squirrel gun and fire it wildly into the air. This week it's Jason, and you'll never guess: he's complaining about government in Who makes things happen around here?

Now that you've recovered from your surprise, let's chat about it a little, shall we? First, the executive summary:

If Jason was a baseball player, he would believe he built the diamond, too.

The thing that got Jason's underwear in a bunch this time and gave him the inspiration for his homily was a comment by Joe Biden, quoted in the column:

Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision. ... In the middle of the Civil War, you had a guy named Lincoln paying people $16,000 for every 40 miles of track they laid across the continental United States. No private enterprise would have done that for another 35 years.

No! sputters Lewis, James J. Hill build a railroad from St. Paul to Seattle without any dad gum gubmint help!

Apparently, Hill decided to build a transcontinental line from St. Paul to Seattle in about 1889, and the line was completed in 1893. Joe Biden is given to a little hyperbole now and again, but he wasn't far off here. But that isn't really even the point. (Moreover, the first plan for an transcontinental railroad was floated in Congress in 1845.)

Hill had an advantage, going second; he was indeed a brilliant entrepreneur, and he doubtlessly took advantage of things learned -- per mile costs, routing considerations, etc. -- in the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869. Even Jason will have to admit that the Transcontinental Railroad was the true pioneer here. Experience from the Transcontinental Railroad certainly made it easier for Hill to find investors for his transcontinental line.

Moreover Hill did have friends in government and used eminent domain in his railroad building ventures. It is inaccurate to say he did it all by himself. Not that it's a criticism of Hill; just a note to Jason.

Bank of N.D. photo

Finally, on a somewhat related note, one great government idea that is having impact in today's economy is North Dakota's decision to create a state bank. In the linked Truthout article, Ellen Brown first counters the argument that oil is responsible for North Dakota's economic health:

Oil is certainly a factor, but it is not what has put North Dakota over the top. Alaska has roughly the same population as North Dakota and produces nearly twice as much oil, yet unemployment in Alaska is running at 7.7 percent. Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming have all benefited from a boom in energy prices, with Montana and Wyoming extracting much more gas than North Dakota has. The Bakken oil field stretches across Montana as well as North Dakota, with the greatest Bakken oil production coming from Elm Coulee Oil Field in Montana. Yet Montana’s unemployment rate, like Alaska’s, is 7.7 percent.

Brown continues, describing the role of the bank, and describing how it works and its results:

Access to credit is the enabling factor that has fostered both a boom in oil and record profits from agriculture in North Dakota. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) does not compete with local banks but partners with them, helping with capital and liquidity requirements. It participates in loans, provides guarantees, and acts as a sort of mini-Fed for the state.

You should ask a small business person sometime if better access to credit would help his or her business. Smaller banks can almost never find participations on loans for small to medium-sized customers.

The entire piece is quite interesting; I recommend it.

The most amazing things come out of her mouth

The Dump Michele Bachmann people continue to offer documented examples of the astonishing things that come out of Michele Bachmann's mouth, viz.:

I grew up in Anoka, Minnesota. This is my backyard where we are right now. I grew up in Anoka.

This will come as a helluva surprise to all the people in Iowa who've been treated to months of "I'm an Iowan."

L.K. Hanson

From the same stump speech by Bachmann, delivered in October of 2006:

I’m a federal tax attorney, and I spent my professional life fighting for individuals and for businesses to lower the tax burden on us so that we can have some sanity in our fiscal policy in our country and also here in our state.

Come on, Michele, let's be frank. You spent some time in the fender bender end of tax practice -- collections -- and even then, they didn't let you anywhere near a case involving real money.

It is an amazing feat of legerdemain to claim that you did anything important, much less claim that your job had anything to do with tax policy. Really, were you there?

"A fringe of the fringe"

A couple of weeks ago, now, Amy Goodman interviewed Frank Schaeffer, the son of pioneer Christian Dominionist Francis Schaeffer.

Frank has had, um, second thoughts about the philosophy of, inter alia, his father (for whom he directed movies), Rousas Rushdoony, and Herb Titus, the latter who founded the law school from which Michele Bachmann graduated. Frank Schaeffer says that Michele Bachmann comes out of the "fringe of the fringe."

Here's a video of the interview:



And here's one interesting paragraph from the transcript of the interview:

Again, mainstream U.S. America doesn’t understand that people like Michele Bachmann have signed onto Bronze Age mythology, including its misogyny, its homophobia, its racism, and all the rest of it, and that that is the religion they are part of. When it comes to politics, they try to dress that up, downplay certain things, omit other things, and bare-face lie about some things like the submission issue [discussed earlier in the interview]. But the misogyny, the homophobia, that is at the core of the Bible, which they hold up as the, quote, "word of God," which, in their view of politics, coming out of the Reconstructionists, should take over the laws of this country at some point, which is what they’re all pushing for when they talk about taking America back, taking America back for God. What they really want to return to is the Bay State colonies under Governor Winthrop, and that’s their ideal society, plus maybe modern medicine, so they can live a little longer and get their prostates checked, etc., etc. But essentially, we’re looking at people whose best of all worlds is the Bronze Age in the state of Israel, back in the day when someone lost their virginity, so they would be stoned to death in the gates of their father’s house. This is the book they’ve signed onto.

"Marriage equality is a civil rights issue"

Asked about his vote [to approve gay marriage as a New York Assemblyman], [candidate for Congress David Weprin] said simply, “it’s a civil rights issue, not a religious issue,” adding that “as a legislator,” he votes on behalf of “all the people.”

Let's go to the tape:



Weprin is excactly right: it's not a religious issue, in spite of what Bradlee Dean, Tom Pritchard, Archbishop John Nienstedt, Katherine Kersten, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Bob Vander Plaats, and all of the other poisonous pseudo-Christian windbags say.

Via Thinkprogress LGBT

The Wit and Wisdom of Michele Bachmann Part Four

This is the end. A valediction. That's all there is. There is more, truth be told, but we're going to stop now. Here, then, is the final installment of The Wit and Wisdom of Michele Bachmann. Thanks to everyone who participated.



This was a project of the Drinking Liberally Players of the Minneapolis - St. Paul chapter of Drinking Liberally, shot on August 25th at the 331 Club in historic northeast Minneapolis.

Part one, part two, and part three can be found at the links.