Bachmann Begins

Ah Representative Michele Bachmann, the gift that keeps on giving. She is currently running 9% to 12% behind Romney is various polls, but that still puts her in second place. Not bad, and, unexpected. She IS the darling of the tea parties, and their champion in congress, so certainly that may account for her numbers. She always claims to be against government spending (apparently not the cases for her husband–more on that in a moment). Pretty ironic by the way that she’s an anti-tax advocate who once worked as an attorney collecting taxes for the IRS. Representative Bachmann claims to have the solution to all our woes. She wants to revoke the federal minimum wage. She believes that eliminating this and other regulations would “virtually wipe out unemployment.” Could this work? I don’t know, I doubt the answer is that easy. Though I wonder how Ms. Bachmann would fare on minimum wage. And then there’s the curious case of her husband Dr. Marcus Bachmann. He has collected Medicaid monies for his clinic, Bachmann & Associates. One thing is clear enough, Marcus Bachmann collected state aid, and he got these state funds and used them for, among other things, counseling gays to change their sexual orientation. He said last year on Point of View Radio Talk Show that "barbarians need to be educated" when asked how parents should deal with their homosexual children. “They need to be disciplined, just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to go down that road.” What he’s referring to is “reparative therapy”, the crackpot idea that gays can be cured through therapy. I believe people are who they are, and can’t be “fixed” nor should they be. Most mental professionals agree with me, attempts to change orientation can be dangerous and lead to suicide. So far Bachmann has remained silent about this, perhaps hoping the furor will die down. We’ll see. Maybe we can return to merely pointing out Michele’s foibles such as when she confused John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy! When asked why she launched her candidacy from Waterloo, Iowa, she said, "Well what I want them to know is just like John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That's the kind of spirit that I have, too." Yikes!