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From: §pam.ßuster@all.com
"George VI" wrote in message news:Xns9F1E7F
243008fda@194.177.98.144...
>
> July 1, 2011, 11:12 pm
> Conservative Cash Crop
> By TIMOTHY EGAN
>
> Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
> Tags:
> farming, Federal Aid, Michele Bachmann
>
>
> The media jackals have been all over Representative Michele Bachmann
> for misstatements, zany ideas and alterations to history as she kicked
> off her presidential run in Waterloo, Iowa, home to serial killer John
> Wayne Gacy =97 not the actor John Wayne, as she said in her evocation of
> dreamy small-town life.
>
> From her contention that eliminating the minimum wage would mean full
> employment to her assertion that =93almost all=94 people in the =93gay
> lifestyle=94 have been abused, these things can be explained. Bachmann
> has a worldview that requires constant reshaping in the face of real
> life. However, if God is writing the script for her campaign, as she
> says, He needs a fact-checker.
>
> When pressed this week on her unique view of American origins =97 that
> =93the very same founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly
> until slavery was no more=94 =97 Bachmann doubled-down, citing as her only
> proof the abolitionist John Quincy Adams. Given that Adams was just 8
> years old when the Declaration of Independence was approved by the
> Continental Congress, 10-year-old Sasha Obama should be remembered for
> killing the world=92s top terrorist.
>
> All of the above only fortifies Bachmann=92s position with a Republican
> base that would eat dog food for breakfast if the government said you
> should not.
>
> But what is more troubling is the issue raised by taxpayer payments
> for various Bachmann family enterprises. This is where rigid ideology
> meets mushy reality. The Bachmann family farm in Wisconsin got
> $251,000 in federal handouts from 1995 to 2009, according to the
> invaluable table of subsidies put out annually by the Environmental
> Working Group, a Washington-based research organization.
>
> There=92s no story there, Bachmann insisted this week, because she and
> her husband didn=92t get a dime from the farm. It went to her late
> father-in-law, she said. If that were so, why did she list herself and
> husband as financial partners in the farm for every year that she has
> been in Congress? Are her Congressional disclosure forms accurate, the
> ones with a handwritten declaration of earning =93farm income=94 of up to
> $102,500 from the Bachmann limited partnership?
>
> Her husband, Marcus Bachmann, while farming the government one way
> through the business of his parents, tills another field of federal
> money with his mental health clinic in Lake Elmo, Minn., which offers
> =93quality Christian counseling=94 for the troubled. The clinic has
> collected Medicaid payments of roughly $137,000 since 2005, NBC News
> reported this week, on top of $24,000 in state funds to train the
> clinic=92s staff.
>
> Fine. It=92s all legal. Wouldn=92t every small business love to have a
> stream of reliable government revenue. And the hypocrisy of a
> socialism-hating Tea Party leader professing to own a piece of a farm
> that has been engaged in the nation=92s most indefensible socialist
> scheme is just standard behavior for a politician worthy of the
> calling.
>
> Bachmann=92s fabrications show a brain fevered in cognitive dissonance.
> She has to believe that the founders were perfect and divinely
> inspired =97 not flawed men who rose to greatness. Not, in Thomas
> Jefferson=92s case, even much of a Christian, and an owner of slaves
> valued as 3/5 of a person in those same heaven-sent blueprints.
>
> So she tells a fable, and like Sarah Palin when caught in a lie,
> refuses to admit the mistake. Her supporters cite Barack Obama, the
> candidate, who mentioned that he=92d been to =9357 states=94 in the 2008
> campaign. See, he makes stuff up, too! The obvious difference is that
> Obama did not continue to insist on the accuracy of the error.
>
> Farm subsidies are at least consistent with modern Republican ideas on
> wealth concentration. But, in every other way, they make a mockery of
> Bachmann=92s political philosophy.
>
> Even in times of bumper crops and record prices, rich landowners reap
> a harvest of tax dollars. Many of them, like those self-described
> partners in agriculture Michele and Marcus Bachmann, seldom get any
> dirt under their fingernails. About 90,000 checks went out last year
> to landowners who live in cities. Ah, to be a therapist with a field
> of federally fertilized corn.
>
> Nationwide, 10 percent of the subsidized farms get 76 percent of all
> the handouts: $447,873 per recipient over the last 16 years, the
> database shows.
>
> These payments assure protection from the cruel swings of the free
> market. Bachmann herself has pressed for even more farm socialism. In
> 2009, she praised the Agriculture Department for injecting money into
> the pork industry in an effort to keep prices up =97 and she urged
> further government intervention.
>
> =93You don=92t privatize your profit and socialize your losses,=94 she
> said this week, to a big cheer. If only it were true on the Bachmann
> family farm.
>
> A version of this article appeared in print on July 2, 2011.
>
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* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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