For a little more than an hour, Lynne Jackson of St. Louis, Missouri had commanded the attention of a large gathering of Minnesotans in Bloomington’s Civic Plaza.  Jackson’s engaging, slide-illustrated presentation described the human element that led up to the infamous 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Dred Scott Decision.  That decision held that African Americans could not be citizens and could not sue in federal court; that Congress did not have the authority to prohibit slavery in U.S. territories; and that slaves like Dred Scott did not qualify for emancipation for having lived in the slave-free parts of the United States.

The decision enraged and energized the abolition movement, further polarized north and south and set the stage for Lincoln’s presidency, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the abolition of slavery, citizenship for African-Americans and the right for African-American men to vote. 

The Dred Scott Decision has long been scolded by legal scholars as the worst ruling ever made by the nation’s highest court.  The decision was preceded by an eleven-year attempt in Missouri and Federal courts by Dred and Harriet Scott and their attorneys to gain their freedom from owners who refused to part with what they considered “private property”.

Lynne Jackson spoke of Dred and Harriet Scott – of their key and inspiring role in the emancipation of slaves and the challenge of the American dream; she spoke with historic detail and personal insight; they are her great-great grandparents.

The May 22^nd event had begun with an amiable buffet of toothpick-spearable meatballs, cheeses and fruits in the handsome, Bloomington Civic Plaza atrium; it is a pubic commons edged by theaters, art galleries, a gift shop and municipal meeting rooms.  The event’s chief sponsors, The United States District Court-Minnesota, the Minnesota Chapter of the Federal Bar Association and the City of Bloomington Civil Rights Commission and Parks Division, explains, perhaps, why the crowd was chatty and informed.  This was their comfort zone and, befitting Minnesota custom, everyone sported a name tag.  Judges, lawyers, law students, history buffs, community leaders, civil rights activists, municipal officials and un-fancy guys like myself – this color and that – were all equal before (1) the law and (2) the League of Women Voter ladies at the front table with the sign-in sheets.

Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott had lived and were wedded not far from Civic Plaza or, for that matter, Mall of America, Minnehaha Falls and a Burger King or two.  They were slaves owned by U.S. Army Surgeon Dr. John Emerson who had been assigned to Fort Snelling.  From 1836 to 1840, Dred and Harriet served two tours at the local fort before and after a short posting at Fort Jessup, Louisiana before being moved to St. Louis.

At that time, most of what was to become Minnesota was designated the Wisconsin Territory where slavery was prohibited.  Missouri law, while permitting slavery, also provided that slaves who had lived in slave-free U.S. territories or states were free if they moved or returned to Missouri. “Once free always free” was the non-musical coda for anti-slavery activists.  The Scotts’ residency at Fort Snelling provided their long series of legal petitions and appeals for emancipation with merit, but the Missouri Supreme Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court controversially shunned the U.S. Constitution and precedent to deny them freedom.

As Lynne Jackson traced her personal journey of discovery of her familial tie to Dred and Harriet Scott, she shared with us an account of a reunion of sorts between her family and the descendants of Peter Blow, a Virginia planter who had owned Dred when he was a child.  The Blow family and their slaves moved to Missouri via Alabama where Dred was eventually sold to Dr. John Emerson, the Army officer who had brought him to Fort Snelling.  It was Peter Blow’s sons who, soon after the 1857 Supreme Court decision, agreed to purchase the Scotts for the express purpose of granting them freedom.  Dred Scott lived only thirteen months as a free man before succumbing to tuberculosis, Harriet lived until June 1876.

Jackson said that each family – one a descendent of slaves and the other a descendent of slave owners turned abolitionists — are now mutually engaged in unraveling the true history of slavery and each family’s legacy.  Lynn Jackson is founder and president of the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation in St. Louis.

Wednesday’s program was more than a history lesson; it was part of a multi-day line-up of events intended to more clearly define and celebrate the Minnesota connection with the Scott legacy.  In 1971, the City of Bloomington had named a 48-acre complex of athletic fields in honor of Dred Scott but as community leader and former youth baseball coach Thomas F. Nelson confessed from the stage on Wednesday, there was no plaque and little interest in the park’s namesake.  He recalled that his dugout talks about Dred Scott to his various teams were met with the bored-rolling of eyes

My son Alex played Metro League fall baseball at the Dred Scott complex four years ago.  I knew of Dred Scott but not his local connection and thought that naming a bunch of ball fields for him was perhaps a curiosity engineered by, say, some well-meaning but forgotten Black History Month committee of do-gooders.  I didn’t give it much thought; my kid was hitting doubles and triples.

St. Paul-based human rights advocate Frank White did give it a lot of thought and has been credited with jump-starting local interest in the Scott legacy, beginning a with plaque for the playingfield.  The Bloomington Human Rights Commission and others agreed with White.  Some of them, including Nelson and U.S. District Judges the Hon. Donovan Frank and the Hon. Michael Davis, were among those who shared with us their perspectives on the initiative.

The evening concluded with Bloomington Mayor Gene Winstead reading proclamations designating Sunday May 26 “Dred and Harriet Scott Freedom Day” and re-dedicating the athletic fields to the memory of both Dred and Harriet.  The long list of supporting proclamative  “where as …” clauses leading to the few “there for be it resolved …” clauses would serve well as a history teacher’s time line and was read in full by Mayor Winstead with humility and gravitas.

A freshly minted, handsome, interpretative sign (rather than a simple plaque) was then unveiled by White, Nelson and Bloomington Parks Director Randy Quale; it will be installed this summer.

The germination the plaque project has happily sprouted into a much broader mission.  The story of Dred and Harriet Scott’s signature role in American history has become part of Bloomington Jefferson High School’s curriculum. The Minnesota aspect of their story is being provided more prominence at Fort Snelling where visitors can visit their quarters. 

A traveling, one act, Minnesota Historical Society play is being performed at schools and other venues.  Set during the last year of Dred Scott’s life in St. Louis, the three character drama imagines how Dred and Harriet might have confided with one another about their long ordeal and their new lives as free citizens.  Bruce Young and Dominique Jones performed the title roles not as historic icons, but as a long-married couple with the grit that had enabled them to survive lives of servitude. 

In stirring asides made directly to the audience, the Frederick Douglass character underscored the evil threat that slavery was posing to human welfare and the nation whole.  The charismatic, eloquent and moral spirit of Douglass, an escaped slave who became not only an author and statesman but arguably the most resonant abolitionist of the 19^th Century, was convincingly channeled by another lauded practitioner of the written and spoken word, Minnesota Court of Appeals Judge Kevin G. Ross.

My moral and civic compass is regularly informed, inspired and refreshed by the African-American experience.  After months of often dysfunctional Washington and State Capitol politics; right wing bloviating and liberal hyperventilating, mass killings, gun rights paranoia, xenophobic mudslinging and a future with aerial drones and global warming, it was a joyous relief to be among regular, good-hearted Minnesotans celebrating the hard-to-come-by human progress sparked of a common man and woman.

On Thursday, Lynn Jackson visited, for the first time, the very Fort Snelling quarters where her great-great grandfather Dred and grandmother Harriet lived.    This has been a very good week for Minnesota.

Jeff Strate

Eden Prairie, May 25, 2013

Links: 

Minnesota Historical Society.  Short article on Dred and Harriet Scott at Fort Snelling -

http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/99scott.html

Missouri State Archives.   Extensive biographical article on Dred and Harriet Scott and their “freedom suits.”

http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/africanamerican/scott/scott.asp

Dread Scott Heritage Foundation

http://www.thedredscottfoundation.org/dshf/

OMG, as my nieces say: can you believe that interview published this week in connection with the ongoing Michele Bachmann campaign investigations?
 
There’s some real shockers in that piece, it suggests the makings of a hot t.v. criminal courtroom drama. it’s an interview with pastor peter waldron, a former ‘bachmann for president’ staffer whose charges triggered the current michele investigations.
 
this is a damn good piece! i mean, pastor waldron was *there* when this stuff is alleged to have taken place. the pastor was on the inside, man — and he is now a whistle blower who is determined to *blow that whistle,* folks.
 
there’s some damned funny stuff in there (including the allegation that bachmann campaign staffers tried to get the liturgy changed in churches to further the campaign!)
 
… and how about waldron’s suggestion that michele should have been very alive to her campaign’s alleged theft of private property–because michele was “not just an attorney” but “a federal prosecutor” who “knows the law” because she “put a lot of people behind bars…”
 
WHAT?!! She was a “what?” She put ‘who’ behind bars?!! When? hey, this is the first time i’m hearing about any of this, and i’ve been writing about her for about a decade. (michele worked as federal tax attorney for the us government back in the eighties, and has steadfastly refused to discuss the specifics of any cases she litigated against US taxpayers during that time. and now here’s pastor waldron telling us michele’s “put people behind bars?” wow… is the pastor telling us that michele bachmann began her career by putting u.s. citizens “behind bars” for *not paying enough* in federal income tax?” oh, for a follow-up question to the pastor about *that* claim.
 
so you can read this piece about the alleged improper payoffs to senior campaign staffers, alleged money laundering to avoid accountability, alleged theft of a private political email list from a computer, which was allegedly carried out by senior bachmann campaign staffers, alleged bears eating alleged boy scouts — just kidding about that last one, but this waldron interview has everything else. including a photograph of michele posing with an abraham lincoln impersonator who looks like “zombie lincoln” (and i’m not kidding about that; look here.)

Now I don’t want to spoil it for you, and i’m damned if I’m going to narrate the whole story again. (just read the piece, you’ll get the sense of it very quickly.) but i will say this…
 
…reading the pastor’s words, i got the impression that we agree: he seems to think the most likely avenue for proving wrongful conduct by michele *herself,* *personally,* — is in connection with “the mystery of the stolen email list.” that is the bit of chicanery that parties involved claim michele “knew about — but did nothing about — thus leaving one of her innocent campaign staffers to take the blame, and twist in the wind.” the pastor’s emphasis on the fact that he told michele and marcus bachmann that the email list was stolen–is good way to understand what she, personally, did that was sooo wrong, in the months that followed.
 
another big shock: look who printed this piece — the minnpost! jeez, who would have seen that coming…the minnpost blog, turning in a valuable and informative piece about michele bachmann, the most notorious politician in the state! can anybody remember the last time the minnpost did anything like that?
 
it seems that they let out a reporter and she went to interview a guy with personal knowledge of bachmann…who was actually willing to spill some dirt on the record … and the reporter actually turned on the tape recorder and recorded what this guy was saying… and they let their readers know what he actually said. i think that this may be the first time that a professional news reporter in minnesota has ever attempted anything like this in connection with the michele bachmann story. (the reporter must have been a stringer or freelancer; da ‘big name’ regulars at the minnpost don’t play that investigative journalism s**t when it comes to da bachmann story.)

Hann can has the stupidness
 
Sen. David Hann (R-Eden Prairie) had no choice. The DFL majorities at the State Capitol passed all day kindergarten. Consequently, as the Tea Party inspired, low brain-function Republican that he is, he had to oppose it.
 
The story is not that he opposed it (as all Republicans like him are required to oppose everything Democrats do), it is why he opposes it:
 

Regarding the education package that provides school districts funding for all-day, everyday kindergarten, Hann said he would have preferred that schools got the additional money for their general fund without being required to spend it on kindergarten.
 
Hann also questioned claims that all-day, everyday kindergarten would reduce the education achievement gap. He said it hasn’t worked in other states.
(West Central Tribune, h/t Bluestem Prairie)

Okay, those are responses that sound reasonable. Except that this is David Hann we’re talking about.
 

“If Republicans want to run against all-day, everday kindergarten,” said Murphy, pausing a moment as Rep. Mary Sawatzky inserted, “Go for it.”
 
Sawatzky, a teacher and DFLer from Willmar who accompanied Murphy to the Tribune, said the Willmar School District won’t have to spend $350,000 on the extra kindergarten days anymore and can instead use that money for other general education programs.
(West Central Tribune, h/t Bluestem Prairie)

The bill provides $485 million over two years in new spending for public schools. It sets aside $238 million to boost the basic school funding formula, with funding increases of 1.5 percent each year. A new all-day kindergarten program funded by the state will receive $134 million in order to “provide funding for districts that want or need it.”
(Eden Prairie Patch, h/t Bluestem Prairie)

Yes, folks. He is that dumb.
 

photo from state lege site

Last night the 17 year old grandson of Mary Kiffmeyer threatened to kill himself and his family, especially his mother, with a shotgun in the Kiffmeyer home in Big Lake. The teen’s mother, who did not live in the home, called law enforcement, who arrested the kid.

Mary Kiffmeyer has been a MN GOP career politician, having served as a state Representative in the legislature, as Secretary of State first under Jesse Ventura, then under ol’ T-Paw, and is  now serving in the state Senate during the 2013-14 , with her term ending in 2016.

She has also been the ALEC chair for Minnesota, meaning she does the bidding of that shadow organization that drafts legislation for special interests that is then pushed through by pretty much exclusively conservative politicians.  In exchange, the conservative politicians sell or barter their votes to act on behalf of those special interests in exchange for perks, campaign donations, and other benefits.

The graphic below is fairly illustrative of the relationships between conservative politicians and the special interests.

One of the biggest players in ALEC is the NRA and the gun manufacturers. The NRA within ALEC has been responsible for drafting the shoot first legislation, the expansion of both open and concealed carry, and of course it is the NRA that supports public spending to put armed guards in schools and which espouses the position that the only way to stop bad guys with guns – bad guys of any age, including children – is with a good guy with a gun who shoots them, vigilante-style.

ALEC and the NRA are hand in hand behind the conservative resistance to gun control of any kind, no matter what happens, no matter how many people are the victims of gun violence.  Murder / suicides, like the one threatened in Mary Kiffemeyer’s own home, are among the most frequent kinds of gun violence, not only in Minnesota, but nationwide.

The right does not care.  There is too much money, too much political influence in the gun industry, even if it means their own family members are sacrificed to the corporate greed.

Mary Kiffmeyer was lucky; she wasn’t home to be part of this gun violence threat.  Mary Kiffemeyer was also very lucky that law enforcement, not some neighboring vigilante with a gun who fancied himself  that NRA ‘good guy with a gun’ taking down ‘the bad guy with a gun’.  Because if the NRA premise had been followed, Mary Kiffmeyer could have a dead grandson, and possibly other family members dead or wounded, instead of anonymously in jail.

This raises the question, if their grandson was living with his grandparents because of some family issues that caused him NOT to be living with his parents, and given the statistics of the problems with male teens in particular with firearms and violence, how did this kid get his hands on the shotgun in the first place?

We are reassured over and over and over about how we do not need gun laws to keep children safe; this was still a minor, and he wasn’t safe with or from this shot gun.  We are told over and over how responsible Minnesota gun owners are with keeping their firearms secured, telling us that we don’t need to have laws mandating safe storage or liability or property insurance on firearms, even though firearms violence, both deliberate and accidental, sucks BILLIONS out of our economy every year, such that the non-gun owners, who comprise more than 60% of the population nationally end up subsidizing the costs of firearms ownership of the steadily declining numbers of gun owners.  Who besides this teen is going to be held accountable here?

Because when a teen does something bad with a gun – and this WAS certainly something BAD – then the adult responsible should be held equally accountable for the incident. Someone made some bad decisions here, and it was not ONLY this teenage boy.

This incident only serves to underline WHY we need better gun regulation in Minnesota — and makes it all too important that we follow the money behind the resistance to such obviously necessary regulation.

I’m speculating that Mary Kiffmeyer will continue to do the bidding of out of state special interests in the next session of the lege, and continue to obstruct and to oppose clearly necessary improvements in gun regulation.  The money is too good.  And if it means that her grandson does time in jail — well, heck, what’s wrong with that? There is plenty of big money in the prison system that the right likes to tap into as well, including pipelines that send kids into the prison system.  So — why not her grandson being grist for the same mill?  If it is good enough for the family members of other Minnesotans, why not hers?

What Mary Kiffmeyer does regarding guns in the next legislative session will tell us a lot about what really matters to her – family and the safety and well being of Minnesotans, including her own family; or all that filthy ALEC special interest gun money.

After all, it’s not like Mary Kiffmeyer hasn’t had some other issues with money during her career as a right wing politician.  She served on the board of the “Christian” Riverview Community Bank, of which she was a part owner, that was closed by the MN Commerce Department for fiscal mismanagement.   The FDIC was part of the closure of the Riverview Bank, noting “had engaged in unsafe and unsound banking practices and violations of law and/or regulation”, and cost the FDIC insurance fund some $20 million dollars. During her term in office as Sec State, an audit turned up expenditures to the tune of nearly $200,000 that was improper, and she had exaggerated some of her claims for mileage as well.  Right wing money, far right wing ideology, and right wing special interests almost always seem to go hand in hand with what Kiffmeyer says and does, not serving the people who’s interests she is supposed to be protecting and serving.  It will be fascinating to see how that plays out with this incident.

Kiffmeyer’s other legal troubles involved voter suppression suits, notably Minnesota Native Americans, and separately with University of Minnesota students, both of which she lost.  Not surprisingly, those are both ALEC legislative positions, as is the Voter ID legislation that Kiffmeyer nominally drafted in the legislature that lost in the 2012 election as a constitutional amendment — a wedge issue that the broke and deeply in debt MN GOP relied on for voter turnout in 2012 that backfired.

Kiffmeyer has such deep connections to ALEC that it will be VERY surprising if this incident prompts any change in her positions.  She has 13 other grandchildren, so maybe she will consider this grandson to be expendable, if her ALEC puppet masters pull her strings.

What we can expect NOT to see is any personal accountability for this incident from the adults involved.  Personal accountability and responsibility is something to which the right gives the emptiest lip service, along with ‘family values’, fiscal responsibility, and of course, gun safety, security and responsibility.

It will be fascinating to see what matters most to Mary Kiffmeyer, her family or right-wing money; the safety of Minnesotans, or the NRA and ALEC.  I know which one I’m expecting, but I’m hoping I might be wrong; but it’s not likely.

Opponents of the law, naturally are going all gloom-and-doom on the implications (even going so far as to take a quote by Democratic Senator Max Baucus where he worried about a “train wreck” out of context to further their cause).

But what if it doesn’t turn out to be a train wreck after all?  There have been some interesting developments in recent weeks that lead one to believe that strong, proactive management of exchanges by states can lead to positive results.

In Maryland, the largest insurer in that state (Care First) proposed a shocking 25% increase in premiums for 2014, which was widely cited as a troubling statistic for the ACA.  But nearly every other insurer in the state has proposed premium increases below 10%.  Care First either stands to lose a significant amount of market share, or they’re going to have to lower their rates.

In California, meanwhile, proposed premiums on their health care exchange have come in significantly lower than predicted.  2009 Congressional Budget Office projections anticipated that a “silver” plan (one that covers 70% of expected health care costs) would have a yearly premium of $5,200, while an actuarial firm projected an annual premium of $5,400.  When the actual prices were released yesterday, the actual average yearly premium for a “silver” plan is going to be about $3,300, or 35% lower than the CBO projection.

Oregon’s health care exchange is seeing similar patterns to Maryland.  After releasing the costs for all of the plans that will be on its exchange earlier this month, two large insurers have asked to come back and lower their prices after discovering that some competitors were pricing the same coverage for less than half the cost.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen evidence that health care inflation has been slowing substantially.  Provisions of the ACA have contributed to this trend and further policies, such as increased use of competitive bidding for Medicare-paid medical equipment slated to roll out between now and 2016, should only continue it.

These sorts of things should provide us here in Minnesota with hope that our health exchange — named MNSure — will be able to deliver coverage to citizens at a reasonable cost.  Minnesota has always worked hard to give our citizens access to health care and that should only get better under the ACA.

From a political perspective, we too should also remember that what voters tend to value about these sorts of programs is the real-world impacts on their lives.  Opponents of Medicare thought that implementation problems (that did happen) would end up undermining the program and resulting in its repeal.  Opponents of Medicare Part D thought the same thing.  In both cases, what opponents of those programs discovered is that voters ultimately liked the fact that they were guaranteed health care as a senior citizen and that they liked programs that helped them pay less for their prescriptions.  Outright repeal of these programs today is essentially unthinkable.

Ultimately, I think we’ll find the fact that the ACA ensures that you’re always going to have access to our health care system in a reasonably affordable way is going to outweigh any implementation problems at the beginning of the program. In fact, if states that are actively managing their exchanges end up producing better results, it may become a political liability for states that have chosen to actively fight implementation of the law.  After all, if dysfunctional California can build a working exchange with lower-than-expected health insurance premiums, why can’t Texas?

[Image courtesy of the Alexandria Echo Press, is of a 1904 train wreck in Osakis.]

Changing our tax code is a long run project and it’s controversial every step of the way.  There’s a good reason for that: we negotiate and renegotiate our social contract through taxes.  It’s where we sort out who pays and how much and for what.  Everybody has a stake and everybody has an opinion.  The tax changes coming in the next biennium are no exception.

First, what happened?  In a nutshell, we, as a state, did five things: 1) we raised $1.1 billion by asking the top 2% to pay 2% more, 2) we closed over $400 million in corporate tax loopholes, 3) we raised another $400 million in tobacco taxes, 4) we raised taxes nearly $100 million on large inheritances, and 5) we did a mini-version of sales tax reform: taxing digital goods and a handful of business services while lowering other taxes.

These are significant changes, but none of them are unprecedented.  From time to time we act to modernize our tax code.  Governor Anderson had it right: we are often waiting for our government to catch up with us.  This year was another in which we started to do just that.

1933 and 1971 are times when we enacted similar sorts of tax reforms.  In each of these three years, our state increased taxes on the wealthiest, asked corporations to pay more, and reformed other taxes to catch up with changes in the lives of Minnesotans.

For instance, in 1933 Floyd B. Olson entered his second term as Governor.  The state was entering the fourth year of the Great Depression.  Unemployment was at historic highs.  The farm economy was collapsing under a mix of low crop prices and a wave of property foreclosures.  The union movement was just a year away from the explosive Teamsters strike in Minneapolis.  The lives of Minnesotans were shifting, often painfully, from rural to urban, from agriculture to industry, from relying on family to risking in an impersonal marketplace.

The policy solutions offered around this time (i.e. unemployment insurance, foreclosure moratoriums, minimum standards at work, etc.) were designed to respond to Minnesotan’s problems.  To finance these solutions, we raised income taxes, corporate taxes, and instituted a new, post-Prohibition alcohol tax.  These tax changes lagged behind these dramatic changes in the lives of Minnesotans by years if not decades.

In 1971, Wendell Anderson was entering his first term as Governor.  He was clear enough about the need update the tax code that he not only called a special session, he vetoed the tax plan the legislature then sent him.  He realized that the state urgently needed to change itself to catch up to the lives of Minnesotans.  Since the last major tax overhaul, the suburbs had grown.  The children of the Baby Boom were flooding the schools.  The promise of the New Deal was being delivered via a larger public sector.

In response, individual and corporate income taxes were increased.  A new sales tax was used to fund a statewide plan to increase, equalize, and stabilize school financing in every part of the state, i.e. the Minnesota Miracle.

In 2013, Minnesotans are facing changes (and challenges) that our tax code has yet to adapt to. Jobs have shifted from manufacturing-based to service-based.  Large banks and corporations have pushed a far-reaching ‘financialization’ of the economy that (along with the tax changes of the 1980s and 1990’s) has pushed wealth and income inequality to unsustainable extremes.  Our tax plan for FY 2014-15 is just starting to  respond to these trends that were themselves decades in the making.

The increase of 2% on the wealthiest 2% (and high-end inheritance taxes) will only begin to relieve income inequality.  The tax loopholes being closed will only begin to dismantle the system of preferences that corporations have built into government.  The tobacco tax will only begin to cover the accelerating health care costs of an aging population.  An expansion of the sales tax to digital goods and certain services will only begin to modernize a tax code that is rooted in an economy that existed decades ago.

Does the new tax plan overreach?  Far from it; it’s an overdue response to changes that Minnesotans have known about and supported responding to for years.  A tax on the wealthy and the closing of corporate tax loopholes is controversial in only one square mile of Minnesota. (Hint: it’s just to the north and west of downtown St. Paul.)  Tax fairness, on the other hand, is popular in other 86,942 square miles where the rest of us live, work, and recreate.  As November 2014 gets closer state legislators and Governor Dayton should not run away from this tax plan.  They should run to catch up with the rest of Minnesota.

– Chris 

Chris Conry is TakeAction Minnesota’s Organizing a New Economy Program Manager. 

Bachmann has made a sweeping claim: the “most personal, sensitive, intimate, private health-care information is in the hands of the IRS” under the health-care law. There is no evidence to support this assertion, and she is simply scaring people when she repeats it on television.
 
Bachmann thus continues her record-breaking streak of outlandish claims.

 
that’s the conclusion of a fact-checking article that appears in today’s Washington Post. political and media fact-checkers regularly expose successive bachmann claims as absurd. but it very rare that a respectable media fact checker labels one of her claims as ‘absurd’ in the *headline.* as the washington post did in this story, here:
 
Bachmann’s absurd claim of a vast IRS health database of ‘sensitive, intimate’ information
Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:00 AM ET, 05/24/2013
 

 
this is another of michele’s “the fed govt conspiracy against freedom s**t is coming down!” bids for attention (and funding from fellow paranoids.) as with all her previous attempts: the claim is false, she knows she cant prove it to the satisfaction anyone using an objective standard for reality. and as before, this u.s. congresswoman circulates the false charge despite her knowledge that it will certainly send steam shooting out the ears of paranoid, arms-stockpiling wingnuts on the right.
 
so read the wapo link to get the substance of the story — but understand: this is why it’s always been important to get michele bachmann out of government. her career long pattern of drawing bull’s eyes on the backs of federal officials by implicating them in imaginary schemes to end american freedom. abusing the dignity and credibility of a position in elected office, to confer credibility on these crap conspiracy charges.
 
i believe that michele bachmann can get entirely innocent americans killed, by encouraging and lending credibility to paranoid fantasies that appeal to the most violent outliers on the ultraright. here, bachmann’s message is false: but it’s designed to confirm what right wing terrorists already believe: that their legitimate government is actually an enemy of american freedom. that is the kind of unfounded craziness that puts innocent people in the crosshairs, including cops and first responders…
 
…and michele bachmann knows that, and continues to spread the lies anyway. so we have to keep fighting this fight to drive her out of elective office. every time she uses her office to spout these dangerous lies–it’s a victory for “insanity in american government.”