http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110627/ap_on_el_ge/us_bachmann_fact_check FACT CHECK: Bachmann bomblets raising eyebrows BY CALVIN WOODWARD and JIM DRINKARD, Associated Press â Mon Jun 27, 7:29 pm ET WASHINGTON â Michele Bachmann's claim that she has "never gotten a penny" from a family farm that's been subsidized by the government is at odds with her financial disclosure statements. They show tens of thousands in personal income from the operation. And, on a less-substantive note, she flubbed her hometown history when declaring "John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa," and "that's the kind of spirit that I have, too," in running for president. The actor was born nearly 150 miles away. It was the serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr. who lived, for a time, in Waterloo. Those were among the latest examples of how the Minnesota congresswoman has become one to watch â for inaccuracies as well as rising support â in the Republican presidential race. Bachmann's wildly off-base assertion last month that a NATO airstrike might have killed as many as 30,000 Libyan civilians, her misrepresentations of the health care law, misfires on other aspects of President Barack Obama's record and historical inaccuracies have saddled her with a reputation for uttering populist jibes that don't hold up. [ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ] She announced her candidacy Monday in Iowa with a speech typical for someone joining the campaign. It laid out the broad themes of her candidacy and mostly avoided the Bachmann bomblets that have grabbed attention â and often fizzled under scrutiny â in the long lead-up. The more the political season heats up, the more that exaggerations and sound-bite oversimplifications emanate from the Republicans going after Obama â and from the Democrats playing defense. Still, Bachmann's record on this score is distinct. Examining 24 of her statements, Politifact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking service of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, found just one to be fully true and 17 to be false (seven of them "pants on fire" false). No other Republican candidate whose statements have been vigorously vetted matched that record of inaccuracy. A look at some of her recent statements and how they compare with the facts: BACHMANN: "The farm is my father-in-law's farm. It's not my husband and my farm. It's my father-in-law's farm. And my husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm." â On "Fox News Sunday." THE FACTS: In personal financial disclosure reports required annually from members of Congress, Bachmann reported that she holds an interest in a family farm in Independence, Wis., with her share worth between $100,000 and $250,000. The farm, which was owned by her father-in-law, produced income for Bachmann of at least $32,500 and as much as $105,000 from 2006 through 2009, according to the reports she filed for that period. The farm also received federal crop and disaster subsidies, according to a database maintained by the Environmental Working Group. From 1995 through 2010, the farm got $259,332 in federal payments. When asked about the subsidies and her income from the farm late last year, a spokesman for Bachmann said only that she wasn't involved in decisions about the running of the farm. Bachmann told The Associated Press on Monday that her husband became a trustee of the farm because his father had dementia before he died two years ago, and "oversees the legal entity." "Everything we do with those forms is in an abundance of caution," she said, insisting she and her husband receive no farm income despite the forms reporting it. ___ BACHMANN: "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." â Speaking to Fox News on Sunday. Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, nearly three hours away, and moved to California in his childhood. John Wayne Gacy, convicted of killing 33 men and boys, was born in Chicago, moved to Waterloo to work in his father-in-law's chicken restaurants and first ran afoul of the law there, sentenced to 10 years for sodomy. He began his killing spree after his release, and his return to Illinois. ___ BACHMANN: "Overnight we are hearing that potentially 10 to 30,000 people could have been killed in the strike." â Criticizing Obama in May for the "foolish" U.S. intervention in Libya, and citing what she said were reports of a civilian death toll from a NATO strike as high as 30,000. THE FACTS: The U.S. ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, said in late April that U.S. officials have seen reports that 10,000 to 30,000 people may have died in Moammar Gadhafi's crackdown on protesters and the fighting between rebels and pro-government forces, but it is hard to know if that is true. He was speaking about all casualties of the conflict; no one has attributed such a death toll to NATO bombing alone, much less to a single strike. ___ BACHMANN: "It's ironic and sad that the president released all of the oil from the strategic oil reserve. ... There's only a limited amount of oil that we have in the strategic oil reserve. It's there for emergencies." â On CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. THE FACTS: Obama did not empty all the oil from the strategic reserve, as Bachmann said. He approved the release of 30 million barrels, about 4 percent of the 727 million barrels stored in salt caverns along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. It's true that the U.S. normally taps the reserve for more dire emergencies than exist today, and that exposes Obama to criticism that he acted for political gain. But the reserve has never been fuller; it held 707 million barrels when last tapped, after 2008 hurricanes. ___ BACHMANN: "One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office." â Comment to a conservative conference in Iowa in March. THE FACTS: The Obama administration issued more than 200 new drilling permits before the Gulf oil spill alone. Over the past year, since new safety standards were imposed, the administration has issued more than 60 shallow-water drilling permits. Since the deep water moratorium was lifted in October, nine new wells have been approved. ___ Associated Press writers Brian Bakst in Waterloo, Iowa, and Dina Cappiello in Washington contributed to this report.
That ignorant slut; that's almost as bad as Obama claiming to have visited 57 states with one to more to go.
i have seen it written that bachman is your pick if you think sarah palin is too intellectual and not religious enough.
http://nation.foxnews.com/michele-bachmann/2011/06/29/cnn-anchor-asks-bachmann-do-you-lie-purpose CNN Anchor Asks Bachmann: Do You Lie on Purpose? By Matt Hadro, NewsBusters On Tuesday's "American Morning," co-host Kiran Chetry reported that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is "prone to misstatements" and posed this question to her: "Did you mean to make false statements intentionally or were you just misspeaking?" "PolitiFact.com, which is a Pulitzer Price winning fact-checking web site examined 26 statements that you made and they found only one to be fully true and 18 to be false," Chetry told Bachmann. "Several of them relating to your criticism of President Obama. Did you mean to make false statements intentionally or were you just misspeaking?" <iframe title="MRC TV video player" width="640" height="360" src="http://www.mrctv.org/embed/103200" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This was from 5 months ago and yet today she continues to tell lie after lie http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/21/politifact-bachmann-false-politician/ PolitiFact: Bachmannâs claims âfalseâ more often than any other politician Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann isn't letting her lack of credibility get in the way of her presidential ambitions. Only a day before the congresswoman's Friday visit to Iowa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact noted that she had made false statements more often than any public official. "We have checked her 13 times, and seven of her claims to be false and six have been found to be ridiculously false," PolitiFact editor Bill Adair told Minnesota Public Radio. He added that no other politician had been fact checked as often as Bachmann without saying something that was found to be true. "I don't know anyone else that we have checked, more than a couple times, that has never earned anything above a false," Adair said. "She is unusual in that regard that she has never gotten a rating higher than false." When PolitiFact last checked the congresswoman, they gave her a "Pants on fire" rating for claiming President Barack Obama wanted to give a "massive" tax hike to businesses with $250,000 in gross sales. "We first fact-checked similar claims during the 2008 election, when Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, worried he'd get a tax increase under Obama's plan if he bought a company that took in around $250,000 a year," PolitiFact noted. "It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now," the fact checkers said. PolitiFact's trove of Bachmann fibs just scratches the surface. Minnesota Public Radio found at least four false statements during their most recent nine-minute interview with her. Frequent visits to Iowa are considered to be necessary for presidential candidates, and Bachmann has indicated she may enter the 2012 race. Following the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona that left six dead and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in the hospital, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) called out Bachmann for her use of gun rhetoric. "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back," Bachmann had said during an interview with WWTC 1280 AM in 2009.
We have seen this movie before. Anytime a conservative leader appears. particularly a woman or minority, the left mounts a desperate campaign to destroy them. Sarah Palin and Clarence Thomas are of course the poster children. The sheer hatefulness of the attacks on Palin are so breathtaking as to be almost unbelievable. The fact that they come from vaguely respectable figures in the media, entertaiinment and politics makes it even more disturbing. The thomas claims were notable for their shock value and total lack of proof, plus the dubious credibility of the accuser. The more normal way of destroying conservatives is to malign their intelligence and try to turn it into a latenight joke. Dan Quayle, law school graduate, U. S. Senator and Vice President, was uniformly pictured as too dumb to tie his own shoes. True? Of course not, but he was effectivley destroyed, and a decent man driven out of town. George Bush, Yale and Harvard grad, got the same treatment. It was so effective that highschool dropout "Sir" Paul McCartney thought it was appropriate to joke in a White House ceremony about Bush not reading books. In fact, he was one of the best read people in Washington, routinely reading several books a week. I wonder if Sir Paul has ever read one? Now we get this crap again with Bachmann. I read all these claims and, at most, they are nitpicking. So John Wayne was officialy from a town a few miles away. That's the kind of civic pride overstatement that pols make all the time. In her case though, there is a scurrilous campaign to make it appear she doesn't know the difference between the Duke and a serial killer. Was John Quincy Adams a Founding Father? I suppose not technically, but he clearly was a significant figure in the country's early years. Who can keep all the Adams separate anyway? Some of them clearly were Founders. The farm income claim seems to be a case of income perhaps technically being attributable to her husband through a trust but not actually being their income. Any tax lawyer, which Bachmann happended to be, will tell you trust accounting is complex. The Politfact assessments are almost all related to debatable political claims. Did obamacare contain "death panels?' They say not, and technically they are correct. They ignore the fact that rationing is inevitable under obamacare and that someone will have to decide who gets lifesaving treatment and who doesn't. Regarding obama's desire to raise taxes on small business and others making $250k, again there is some nitpicking about the actual details while overlooking the substance of the claim. Does obama want to raise taxes on a lot of people who are not fatcats and corporate jet users? Yes he does. Bachmann's minor misstatements pale into insignificance compared to obama's relentless demagoguery on taxes, health care and the budget. Just today he said pretty clearly there was a choice between tax breaks for millioniares and vital programs. That is not a misstatement. it is a flat out lie, unless you believe that every dodllar being spent by the government is absolutely vital. Instead of stopping food inspection, maybe we could, say, eliminate the affirmative action and civil rights offices at each federal agency. Or, just a thought, get rid of the departments that are not constitutional in the first place, like Education.