The Minnesota Republicans held their central committee meeting last Saturday and elected their new party leaders. It’s an event to half pay attention to for me. Seemed like many of the speakers at least tacitly admitted that the party has a problem. With the two term governor Tim Pawlenty stepping aside, they are facing some of the same leadership issues that the national party is and the Democrats have over time.
The speaker who shocked me was Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. I guess it shouldn’t, she’s been spouting off crazy things for some time. I’ve even taken the time to blog about a couple of them.
But, it seems to me that she is going to a whole new level of fantasy words.
Her take on the economy is that the world is now in chaos and capitalism is being killed by the Obama Administration. I guess it’s possible. But her view seems to be based on such a one sided view. Wasn’t she in Congress for a couple of terms now? Didn’t she see what a rotten economy the Bush administration created? The recent ironic Pravda article about the death of capitalism seems more in touch with reality. This is after a week where she called the President a gangster and continued her ongoing battle with the truth.
Next was her ongoing attack that ACORN is going to be running all of our elections? I doubt they have the numbers. It might solve some of our problems like the Senate race here in Minnesota and the butterfly ballots of Florida. But, she means this to be a bad thing. It all goes to her claim that ACORN gets money that it uses to register voters. The reality is that the money is Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and goes to ACORN Housing, an affiliate of ACORN that offers home ownership counseling to low-income families.“CDBG rules list eligible uses of the money, including such things as building sidewalks, sewers and affordable housing, mostly. Specifically ineligible: ‘political activities,’” said Politifact ,a Pulitzer prize-winning operation of the St. Petersburg Times . “In other words, ACORN can’t use the money for voter registration.”
Finally, a new favorite as she claimed that American soldiers now had to read Miranda rights to Al Qaeda. I first have to wonder if she believes anyone should get their Miranda rights? But, back to the point, where does she get support for this claim? An O’Reilly report tnat misquotes another Congressman? It is an absolute untruth. The whole Guantanamo debate is whether we can just lock people up without charges, if they should get a hearing at some point and if we should at least treat them like prisoners of war.
It seems like she says enough that she actually believes this stuff. Hopefully, at some point she will stop getting chances to say them.
