PART 7
By
Kelleigh Nelson
September 12, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Michelle Bachmann
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague." -Marcus Cicero, 43 BC
First let me thank all of my avid readers of this series, for copying, e-mailing and passing to all your friends these many articles on our GOP candidates as well as for all the radio interviews. I have received literally hundreds of e-mails and most of you are asking me, "When are you going to tell us about Bachmann and Ron Paul? I've tried to save the least worst for last, but it seems the more I delve into the backgrounds of these candidates, the more appalled and disgusted I become. So, with trepidation, here is Michelle Bachmann.
The Early Years
Michelle Amble Bachmann, first Republican female congresswoman from Minnesota and now GOP presidential candidate, was born in Waterloo, Iowa in April of 1956 to a family of Norwegian Lutheran Democrats. Seems to me that most of these GOP candidates were once Democrats themselves, as were Perry and Willard Romney, but they also seem to have grown up in Democrat households. After the family moved to Minnesota, her parents divorced. Her mother remarried when Michelle was a teen and the new family totaled 9 children.
After graduation from high school, Michelle journeyed to Israel and spent a summer working on a Kibbutz Be’eri near Beer Sheva. In 1978, she graduated from university and in 1979 attended the first class of the O.W. Coburn School of Law, a part of the charismatic Oral Roberts University (ORU). In 1986 she received a Juris Doctor degree from Oral Roberts University. She was a member of the final graduating class of the law school at ORU, and was part of a group of faculty, staff, and students who moved the ORU law school library to what is now charismatic Pat Robertson's Regent University. She also received an LL.M. degree in tax law from the William & Mary School of Law.
I really find Bachmann's love for Israel unusual for a Lutheran inasmuch as their doctrine is replacement theology, (i.e., the church has replaced Israel), and her love for the nation of Israel and her statements regarding same are more attuned to the Baptist doctrine. I see nothing wrong with her stance and am delighted she is a supporter of our only friend in the middle east.
Only a few short months before declaring for President, Bachmann and her husband left the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (The denomination’s website states: "We identify the Antichrist as the Papacy. This is an historical judgment based on Scripture.") and joined Eagle Brook Church, which is Baptist in origin, but has spread out to a more informal worship service including all denominations. I am really shocked at this statement by her former church since I was raised in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church and it is very close to Catholicism especially in liturgy.
In 2009, the pastor hosted an event at Eagle Brook where hundreds of church leaders listened to a dialog with Rev. Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church in the Chicago area on effective ways to organize and run a large church. Hybels is considered by orthodox Christianity to be into heretical doctrines. I'm not saying Michelle is into Hybels, nor that she attended, I'm just mentioning this as fact to give the flavor of the church they are now attending.
While still a democrat, Michelle and her fiancé worked on the 1976 Carter campaign and voted for him, similar to Perry working on Gore's campaign and voting for him. That same year she became enamored with Francis Schaffer's works and pro-life as well as being discouraged with the liberal Carter agenda. In 1980 she campaigned and voted for Ronald Reagan.
From 1988 to 1993, she was an attorney working for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She spent the next four years making sure all of us paid our dues to the Internal Revenue Service, which makes her Tea Party-leader hypocrisy quotient about average. She left her position with the IRS to become a full-time mother after her fourth child was born. I wonder who took care of the first three children while she worked.
Early Involvement in Education
In 1993,
she and other parents started the K-12 North Heights Charter School in
Stillwater. Like other charter schools, the school took government funds
and therefore had to maintain a separation of church and state, as well
as state testing so Bachmann was reportedly careful to keep God out of
the initial outlines of the school's curriculum. Nevertheless, she soon
left the board of that school when parents complained she was introducing
Christian teachings into the curriculum.
Bachmann began speaking against a state-mandated set of educational standards,
which propelled her into the world of politics. On this, she's right.
"The significance of the charter school/school choice/voucher issue is NOT related strictly to educational choice. It is related to acceptance of a communist system of governance where decisions are made by appointed, not elected officials. Appointed officials cannot be removed from office by voters/taxpayers." For a thorough overview of the Charter School Trap see Charlotte Iserbyt's article and ask yourself why all these so-called conservative Republicans are backing Obama's push for charter schools.
In 1999, she joined four other Republicans in Stillwater in an attempt to seize control of the local school board. The slate of five had been put together by a local Republican kingpin named Bill Pulkrabek, who was jailed this spring for domestic assault after he allegedly pulled his mistress down a set of stairs by her hair. Bachmann seems to understand the educational threat and what is being pushed in the government schools today a la Reagan's Soviet/US education treaty. However, she lost this election along with the other four Republicans, but apparently she still favors vouchers/choice and charter schools, not understanding (or perhaps she does) that what the federal government funds, the federal government controls.
Here is a quote from an article by education researcher Jed Brown, "Finally, the entire plan to establish this quasi-privatized education system has a brilliantly conceived marketing plan. Those pushing the New World Order agenda have implored the conservative citizens to swallow school-choice plans in the name of the founding fathers, who would roll over in their graves. The words of John Chubb and Terry Moe, of The Brookings Institute and Stanford University respectively, would have gotten them an invite to a tar and feather party -- “Our guiding principle in the design of a choice system is this: public authority must be put to use in creating a system that is almost entirely beyond the reach of public authority.” (Politics, Markets and America's Schools, 1990)
Michelle and Early Politics
In 2000, Michelle was elected state senator to Minnesota defeating an 18 year incumbent for the Republican nomination, and then defeating the Democrat Farm Labor Party and the Minnesota Independence Party to win her seat. She held that seat for 6 years with the conservative platform issues of opposition to abortion and gay marriage.In November of 2006, she was elected to Minnesota's 6th congressional district and has held that seat for 3 consecutive two year terms. Michelle, like many other politicians, has never held a job in the private sector. She has always worked for government. She has openly stated that God told her to run for congress and now for president of the United States. "Politicians and operatives claiming that God spoke to them is as old as the hills," says Frederick Clarkson, author of "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy." "Whether said in earnest or as a matter of crass pandering, when people say such things, they should be viewed with extreme skepticism. Not so much to question whether or not God spoke to them, but because they were so unwise as to say so." Perry fits nicely into this category as well.
She and her husband have five children and have provided foster care for 23 other children, all teenage girls. This seems to be her biggest claim to fame, and the one she constantly mentions. Why? Because as a politician she knows that people vote based on emotion and not necessarily on fact. The Bachmann home was legally defined as a treatment home, with a daily reimbursement rate per child from the state. Some girls stayed a few months, others more than a year.
Farm Subsidies
A family farm in Wisconsin, in which Michelle is a partner collected more than $260,000 in federal farm subsidies (mostly for dairy and corn) between 1995 and 2006 — that was her father-in-law's. And if you ask her about farm subsidies, she walks away or changes the subject. Bachmann stated that the subsidies went to her in-laws and she never received "one penny" from the farm. However in financial disclosure forms she reported receiving between $32,503 and $105,000 in income from the farm, at minimum between the above years. Her public stance is against federal farm payments.
In the 2008 farm bill, (a $307 billion package that would govern federal agriculture policy for five years) she declared that it was loaded with pork and subsidies for ethanol growers. However, just a year later she wrote to Ag Secretary Tom Vilsac, praising the feds for helping to prop up the prices of pig products and dairy by directly buying the commodities, a move that of course benefited her constituents. In a letter she wrote on October 5, 2009, she even encouraged the government to "take any additional steps to prevent further deterioration of these critical industries, such as making additional commodity purchases." Commodity purchase programs are not technically a subsidy, but are a deliberate effort of the feds to prop up these industries. Bachmann has insisted naturally, that she and her family have not benefited at taxpayer expense.
She actually had requests in 2009 to the government that echoed the arguments Republicans lampooned Obama for using. A bridge project could create nearly 3,000 jobs a year, Bachmann wrote, while a highway project would "promote economic prosperity."
In an interview with National Journal, she softened her stance and insisted that “our federal budget needs a complete overhaul, and agricultural subsidies are no exception,” Bachmann would not commit to doing away with them without seeing details of any future legislation. “If all farm subsidies were ended, that would be a complete change of policy over the last 80 to 90 years of American history, and that would be a very interesting vote,” she said. “So, of course, I would have to look at that before I could tell you how I was going to cast my vote.”
Of course all congress critters want to bring back federal monies to their districts. Nothing new here.
Marcus Bachmann's Clinic
Bachmann and Associates, Inc. is a Christian mental health clinic founded and run by Michelle Bachmann's husband. It has been receiving money from the state of Minnesota's coffers from its inception in 2003. Since 2007 the clinic has taken in nearly $30,000. Bachmann's rhetoric always opposes government handouts and socialized medicine, but it appears her husband is benefiting from these programs. In Minnesota, they have their own version of socialized medicine, just as we do in Tennessee. It is called Medical Assistance and Bachmann's family business actively sought to gain access to these taxpayer funds. The business applied for a Rule 29 license in the fall of 2003. Minnesota's Rule 29 certification describes the program as one that "establishes standards for community mental health centers and clinics and is required for certain categories of Medical Assistance payments. It is a voluntary program, not every clinic subscribes to it. Bachmann and Associates also applied for and was accepted into the Rule 31 program, which also covered payments for chemical dependency treatments.
According to the state's Transparency and Accountability Project (TAP), the Bachmann's earned $27,564 in state payments since 2007. The clinic likely received more since TAP's payout data only records payments since 2007. So yes, her husband is benefiting from taxpayer funded government programs that Michelle refers to as "socialism," while at the same time she's demanding that taxes be cut, which I would definitely agree with! Okay, so it's not much money, but it's the principle of it...it sounds as though Michelle is speaking out of both sides of her mouth.
| Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts! |
The MSM has been vociferous on their vituperative and vitriolic attacks of Marcus Bachmann's Christian Clinic and the counseling for homosexuals that want to leave that lifestyle. As far as I'm concerned the MSM needs to practice what they preach. How about learning some tolerance for Christians and homosexuals that truly want help in gaining a normal Biblical life? Of course not! Anything Christian that helps those in sin is obviously diabolical to them. Sin used to slink around in the back alleys, but now it parades with pride down Main Street. As for psychology, one would think that a Christian would run from psych 101 with all the Freud and Jung propaganda, nevertheless, I applaud Marcus Bachmann's clinic for offering hope to those who want to change. For part two on Michelle Bachmann click below.
Click here for part -----> 2,
Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
© 2010 Kelleigh Nelson - All Rights Reserved
Share
This ArticleSign Up For Free E-Mail Alerts
Kelleigh Nelson has been researching the Christian right and their connections to the left, the new age, and cults since 1975. Formerly an executive producer for three different national radio talk show hosts, she was adept at finding and scheduling a variety of wonderful guests for her radio hosts. She and her husband live in Knoxville, TN, and she has owned her own wholesale commercial bakery since 1990. Prior to moving to Tennessee, Kelleigh was marketing communications and advertising manager for a fortune 100 company in Ohio. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, she was a Goldwater girl with high school classmate, Hillary Rodham, in Park Ridge, Illinois. Kelleigh is well acquainted with Chicago politics and was working in downtown Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention riots.
E-Mail: proverbs133@bellsouth.net
