Replies to post #144555 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Romney dreaming of Rubio?



The WSJ's Stephen Moore on Marco Rubio's suitors. [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304791204576401814141712234.html ]

My contacts in the Mitt Romney camp are boasting: "Doesn't a Romney-Rubio ticket sound great?"

"We think that could be a dream ticket." One senior Romney advisor told me:

Also:

I asked a close Rubio advisor what he thought of the idea of Rubio for veep. "I've heard that rumor too. But he may not think he's ready yet," the consultant said.

But then he quickly added: "There's always 2016."

It's safe to say that pretty much every candidate is dreaming of Rubio as a VP pick in '12.




http://gop12.thehill.com/2011/06/romney-dreaming-of-rubio.html

[F6]

to note and tie in -- (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=64565568 and following -- including (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=64534374 and preceding (and future following)

[F6]

As GOP Continues Its War On Women, Study Shows Female Life Expectancy Is Declining In 313 Counties



By Travis Waldron on Jun 24, 2011 at 3:30 pm

The United States is rapidly falling behind the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to life expectancy, and no demographic is facing a more rapid decline in life expectancy than women. According to a new study [ http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/news-events/news-release/life-expectancy-in-us-counties-2011 (second below)] by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, the life expectancy of the American woman is not just growing too slowly — in 313 American counties, it is actually declining [ http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/life-getting-shorter-women-hundreds-us-counties ].


[ http://www.remappingdebate.org/sites/all/files/images/LifeExpectancy640_0.png ]

In these counties, primarily located in the Southeast, Central Appalachia, and the lower Midwest, life expectancy rates for women are as many as 50 years behind the best-performing countries. In other words, the worst female life expectancy rates in the U.S. are equal to the rate the best countries experienced in the 1950s.

Researchers and analysts caution against attributing the decline to any one factor, but say it is clear that “income plays a very large role in determining adult health outcomes,” suggesting that poverty and socioeconomic status play a key role in raising — or lowering — life expectancy. And while there may not be consensus as to why the decline is occurring, University of Wisconsin professor Dave Kindig told Remapping Debate that, to reverse the trend, the U.S. needs to strengthen its investment into public health programs, particularly those focused on preventive medicine and nutrition:

“If we tripled our investment in public health, and did it in a smart way, we would almost certainly get that money back in savings in the long run because fewer people would be going to the hospital for heart attacks and strokes and cancer and diabetes.”

But the increasing political pressure to cap health care costs, he added, creates a vicious cycle. As more money is spent on treatment, the temptation is to spend less money on public health initiatives that are aimed at prevention. With fewer funds available to increase access in underserved areas, improve environmental conditions, and enhance health awareness, even more money will have to be spent on treatment, ultimately squeezing public health budgets even further.

In Congress and state legislatures across the country, however, Republicans have targeted public health programs for drastic spending cuts or full elimination, focusing especially on programs that benefit women the most [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/02/10/143458/pelosi-womens-assault/ ]. ThinkProgress compiled a list of the most drastic cuts the GOP has attempted to make to women’s health programs:

WIC: The GOP’s initial budget sought to cut 10 percent [ http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02-25/politics/budget.women.children_1_wic-women-infants-food-costs?_s=PM:POLITICS ] from the 2010 spending level for the Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides aid to low-income pregnant and nursing women and their infant children. The spending resolution passed on April 12, which averted a government shutdown, slashed $500 million [ http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/04/12/a-look-at-the-cuts-in-the-new-leaner-2011-budget/ ] from WIC’s 2010 spending levels. Total cuts to the program for fiscal year 2012 are estimated at $833 million.

Title X: The budget plan the GOP released in February sought to eliminate [ http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/newsworldnation/911752-227/story.html ] funding for Title X, which provides family planning to low-income families, altogether. The program’s $317 million budget was cut by $17 million [ http://www.nationalpartnership.org/site/News2?abbr=daily2_&page=NewsArticle&id=28308&security=1201&news_iv_ctrl=-1 ] in the April 12 spending resolution.

Planned Parenthood: The GOP took the government to the brink of shutdown [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/04/08/173884/gop-clings-rider/ ] over funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides millions of women with basic health services each year. The deal to avoid a shutdown kept Planned Parenthood’s funding intact, but states across the country have sought to defund its state chapters [ http://thinkprogress.org/?s=planned+parenthood&sort=date+desc ]. In Indiana, defunding Planned Parenthood kept thousands of women [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/06/21/249576/indiana-law-forces-planned-parenthood-clinics-to-close-and-stop-treating-thousands-of-medicaid-patients/ ] from getting care provided by Medicaid. Wisconsin is the latest state to launch an attack [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/06/17/247808/wisconsin-planned-parenthood-next-target-in-gop-attack/ ] on the organization.

Medicare/Medicaid: The House GOP budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) would end Medicare as we know it and turn Medicaid into a block-grant system, disproportionately hurting women [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55632.html ]. Both programs aid more women than men, and women in general retire at lower incomes than men. The average retired woman earns $14,000 in income each year — $12,000 of which comes from Social Security. Under Ryan’s plan, the average female senior would pay all of that $12,000 for Medicare coverage.

Affordable Care Act: During the health care debate, Republicans fought to prevent maternity care [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/09/25/61634/stabenow-kyl-maternity/ ] from becoming a standard inclusion on medical plans and attempted to keep the bill from passing despite its many benefits [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/03/five_ways_women.html ] for women. Those benefits [ http://politicalcorrection.org/factcheck/201103240002 ] include better coverage of preventive procedures like mammograms and cervical cancer scans, the establishment of community health centers to make it easier for low-income women to see doctors, and coverage protection for those with pre-existing conditions, all of which will save lives and allow women to stay healthier longer. The House GOP voted to repeal the law in January and has fought to defund many of its programs, including a Free Choice Voucher program that would have helped give low-income Americans more options when they chose their health coverage had it not been gutted by Republicans [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/11/965838/-Free-Choice-program-in-health-reform-sacrificed-in-budget-deal ].

It’s not too late for the United States to reverse the trend and begin catching up to the best countries in the world when it comes to life expectancy. But cutting programs that are vital to ensuring women’s health is not the way to do it. As Kindig told Remapping Debate, this is a “national problem” that needs to be addressed now.

“Changing these trends is very much in the social and public interest,” he said. “We can’t just assume that everybody is going to get better eventually if we continue down the same path.”

© 2005-2011 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/06/24/253392/gop-war-on-women-life-expectancy-declining/ [with comments]


===


Male Life Expectancy, 2007




Female Life Expectancy, 2007




http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/tools/data-visualization/life-expectancy-in-us-counties-2011


===


Life expectancy in most US counties falls behind world’s healthiest nations

The most current county-level analysis finds large disparities nationwide. Women fare worse than men, and people in Appalachia, the Deep South, and Northern Texas live the shortest lives.

June 15, 2011 - While people in Japan, Canada, and other nations are enjoying significant gains in life expectancy every year, most counties within the United States are falling behind, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

IHME researchers, in collaboration with researchers at Imperial College London, found that between 2000 and 2007, more than 80% of counties fell in standing against the average of the 10 nations with the best life expectancies in the world, known as the international frontier.

“We are finally able to answer the question of how the US fares in comparison to its peers globally,” said Dr. Christopher Murray [ http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/about-ihme/team/christopher-jl-murray ], IHME Director and one of the paper’s co-authors. “Despite the fact that the US spends more per capita than any other nation on health, eight out of every 10 counties are not keeping pace in terms of health outcomes. That’s a staggering statistic.”

The new study, Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context [ http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/research/publication-summary/falling-behind-life-expectancy-us-counties-2000-2007-international-cont ( http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/pdf/1478-7954-9-16.pdf )], was published June 15, 2011 in BioMed Central’s open-access journal Population Health Metrics. In conjunction with the study, IHME is releasing a complete time series for life expectancy from 1987 to 2007 for all counties, the most up-to-date analysis available.

When compared to the international frontier for life expectancy, US counties range from being 16 calendar years ahead to more than 50 behind for women. For men, the range is from 15 calendar years ahead to more than 50 calendar years behind. This means that some counties have a life expectancy today that nations with the best health outcomes had in 1957.

The researchers suggest that the relatively low life expectancies in the US cannot be explained by the size of the nation, racial diversity, or economics. Instead, the authors point to high rates of obesity, tobacco use, and other preventable risk factors for an early death as the leading drivers of the gap between the US and other nations.

Five counties in Mississippi have the lowest life expectancies for women, all below 74.5 years, putting them behind nations such as Honduras, El Salvador, and Peru. Four of those counties, along with Humphreys County, MS, have the lowest life expectancies for men, all below 67 years, meaning they are behind Brazil, Latvia, and the Philippines.

Women live the longest in Collier, FL, at 86 years on average, better than France, Switzerland, and Spain. Men live the longest in Fairfax County, VA, at 81.1 years, which is higher than life expectancies in Japan and Australia. Women are also living long lives in Teton, Wyoming; San Mateo and Marin, California; and Montgomery, Maryland. For men, long life spans also can be found in Marin, California; Montgomery, Maryland; Santa Clara, California; and Douglas, Colorado.

Nationwide, women fare more poorly than men. The researchers found that women in 1,373 counties – about 40% of US counties – fell more than five years behind the nations with the best life expectancies. Men in about half as many counties – 661 total – fell that far.

Black men and women have lower life expectancies than white men and women in all counties. Life expectancy for black women ranges from 69.6 to 82.6 years, and for black men, from 59.4 to 77.2 years. In both cases, no counties are ahead of the international frontier, and some are more than 50 years behind. The researchers were not able to analyze other race categories because of low population levels in many counties.

Change in life expectancy is so uneven that within some states there is now a decade difference between the counties with the longest lives and those with the shortest. States such as Arizona, Florida, Virginia, and Georgia have seen counties leap forward more than five years from 1987 to 2007 while nearby counties stagnate or even lose years of life expectancy. In Arizona, Yuma County’s average life expectancy for men increased 8.5 years, nearly twice the national average, while neighboring La Paz County lost a full year of life expectancy, the steepest drop nationwide. Nationally, life expectancy increased 4.3 years for men and 2.4 years for women between 1987 and 2007.

“By creating this time series, which has never been available at the county level, we hope states and counties will be able to take targeted action,” Dr. Sandeep Kulkarni, an IHME research fellow and the paper’s lead author, said. “Counties in one part of the state should not be benefiting from big increases in life expectancy while other counties are actually seeing life spans shrink.”

The authors propose that state and local policymakers use the life expectancy data and the county comparisons to tailor strategies that will fit the dynamics of their communities. This resonates with local policymakers, such as Dr. David Fleming, Director of Public Health - Seattle & King County.

“It’s not the health care system that’s having the biggest impact on health; it’s the community,” Dr. Fleming said. “The average person in the US spends one hour annually in a physician’s office unless they are really sick. So until we start moving our interventions out into the communities where people live, we are not going to get ahead of these problems.”

The Seattle & King County health department is collaborating with IHME on an ambitious analysis of health in King County, one of the largest studies of its kind. Called the Monitoring Disparities in Chronic Conditions (MDCC) Study [ http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/research/project/monitoring-disparities-chronic-conditions-study-mdcc-study ], researchers are integrating data from emergency medical services, hospital discharge databases, pharmacy records, and other sources to identify the biggest health challenges in King County. They are surveying 9,000 people and taking blood samples to analyze for a range of risk factors and diseases.

“We are building the evidence for focused interventions that will make an impact locally,” said Dr. Ali Mokdad, Professor of Global Health at IHME, who is leading the MDCC Study. “If we as a society are going to fund programs to improve health, we must ensure that we are measuring the impact, because these life expectancy numbers show that what we have been doing up until now clearly is not working.”

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global research center at the University of Washington providing sound measurement of population health and the factors that determine health, as well as rigorous evaluation of health system and health program performance. The Institute’s goal is to improve population health by providing the best evidence possible to guide health policy – and by making that evidence easily accessible to decision-makers as they strategically fund, design, and implement programs to improve health outcomes worldwide. IHME was created in 2007 through funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the state of Washington.

Media contacts

William Heisel
[phone]; cell: [phone]
[e-mail]

Jill Oviatt
[phone]; cell: [phone]
[e-mail]

Figures

Figure 1. Changes in years of life expectancy in US counties, women, 1987-2007
http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/sites/default/files/figures/Changes%20in%20years%20of%20life%20expectancy%20in%20US%20counties%2C%20women%2C%201987-2007_IHME.pdf

Figure 2. Changes in years of life expectancy in US counties, men, 1987-2007
http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/sites/default/files/figures/Changes%20in%20years%20of%20life%20expectancy%20in%20US%20counties%2C%20men%2C%201987-2007_IHME.pdf

All data for download. Life expectancy by county, sex, and race (US), 1987-2007 (2.6k xls)
http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/sites/default/files/datasets/Life%20Expectancies%20in%20US%20Counties_2011_data_IHME.xls

© 2011 University of Washington

http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/news-events/news-release/life-expectancy-in-us-counties-2011


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Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context

Published in Population Health Metrics, June 2011

Between 2000 and 2007, life expectancies in more than 80% of United States counties fell in standing against the average of the 10 nations with the best life expectancies in the world, according to new research by IHME, in collaboration with researchers from Imperial College London.

The study, Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context [ http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/research/publication-summary/falling-behind-life-expectancy-us-counties-2000-2007-international-cont ( http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/pdf/1478-7954-9-16.pdf )], shows that compared to countries like Japan and Canada, where life expectancies significantly increase every year, most counties within the US are falling behind.

Research objective

The US has extremely large racial/ethnic and geographic disparities, but data tracking these disparities at the county level are lacking. In order to assess the current state of population health, as well as to provide a baseline for future decisions that need to be made at the county level, this study compares life expectancy of US counties to those of the lowest-mortality nations to assess both absolute and relative progress for each county.

This study is part of ongoing work by IHME to better understand the current state of population health. County-level decision-makers need accurate information about local health trends, health system performance, and whether their local health systems are delivering necessary health interventions to achieve good health outcomes in their counties.

Research findings

Researchers found that across US counties, life expectancy in 2007 ranged from 65.9 to 81.1 years for men and 73.5 to 86 years for women. Geographically, the counties with the lowest life expectancies for both sexes were in counties in Appalachia and the Deep South, extending across northern Texas. Counties with the highest life expectancies tended to be in the northern Plains and along the Pacific coast and the Eastern Seaboard.

One way of analyzing county-level life expectancies is to compare them to a life expectancy time series of the 10 nations with the lowest mortality, known as the “international frontier.” Compared to this international frontier, US counties range from being 16 calendar years ahead to more than 50 calendar years behind for women and from 15 calendar years ahead to more than 50 calendar years behind for men.

Nationwide, women fare more poorly than men. The researchers found that women in 1,373 counties – about 40% of US counties – fell more than five years behind the nations with the best life expectancies. Men in about half as many counties – 661 total – fell that far.

Life expectancy for black women ranges from 69.6 to 82.6 years, and for black men, from 59.4 to 77.2 years. In both cases, no counties are ahead of the international frontier, and some are more than 50 years behind. The researchers note that the poor relative performance of the US compared to the international frontier is not simply due to racial disparities, as the pattern of life expectancy performance for white Americans is similar to that of all races combined.

Analytical approach

The researchers used newly released mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics by age, sex, and county for the US from 2000 to 2007 to compute life tables separately for each sex, for all races combined, for whites, and for blacks. They used a mixed-effects Poisson regression with time, geospatial, and covariate components to estimate annual life expectancy for US counties.

To show county mortality in an international context, researchers compared county life expectancy to an international frontier time series, defined as the average life expectancy of the 10 countries with the lowest mortality for each year from 1950 to 2010.

Policy implications

Methods to address health risks are likely to narrow the disparities seen in life expectancy. The researchers note that if the leading four risk factors were addressed (smoking, high blood pressure, elevated blood glucose, and adiposity), life expectancy in 2005 would increase by 4.9 years for males and 4.1 years for females. Because risk factor exposures vary by county, and state-level analysis shows that risk factor exposures are larger in places with higher mortality rates, addressing these risk factors would tend to narrow county-level life expectancy disparities.

Given the diversity of demography, epidemiology, physical infrastructure, and health system organization at the local level, a single national solution may not be the most effective for all risk factors. To assess this, the authors call for a more comprehensive attempt to measure mortality attributable to low quality of care in the US and the impact of low quality of care on disparities. Local measurement of the baseline level of key risks and their trends may be essential for priority setting and performance evaluation in the future.

Citation: Kulkarni SC, Levin-Rector A, Ezzati M, Murray CJL. Falling behind: life expectancy in US counties from 2000 to 2007 in an international context. Population Health Metrics. 2011; 9:16.

© 2011 University of Washington

http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/research/publication-summary/falling-behind-life-expectancy-us-counties-2000-2007-international-cont


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The reversal of fortunes: trends in county mortality and cross-county mortality disparities in the United States

Published in PLoS Medicine, April 2008

Despite gains in overall life expectancy in the United States between 1961 and 1999, the life expectancy of a significant segment of the population is actually declining or, at best, stagnating, according to research from IHME. The study, The reversal of fortunes: trends in county mortality and cross-county mortality disparities in the United States [ http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050066 ], is the first to look at mortality trends in the US by county over such a long period of time. The work was done in collaboration with scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Research findings

The researchers found that between 1961 and 1999, average overall life expectancy in the US increased from 66.9 to 74.1 years for men and from 73.5 to 79.6 for women. When looking at individual counties, however, the researchers found that beginning in the 1980s, the best-off counties continued to improve, but there was stagnation or worsening of life expectancy in the worst-off counties, where 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population experienced either decline or stagnation in mortality. In the best-off counties, men lived 9.0 years longer than those in the worst-off counties in 1983; by 1999 that gap had increased to 11.0 years. For women, the 1983 life expectancy gap of 6.7 years increased to 7.5 years by 1999.

The majority of the counties that had the worst downward swings in life expectancy were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas. The researchers also analyzed data on deaths from different diseases and showed that the stagnation and worsening mortality was primarily a result of an increase in diabetes, cancers, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, combined with a slowdown or halt in improvements in cardiovascular mortality. An increase in HIV/AIDS and homicides also played a role for men, but not for women.

Analytical approach

The researchers analyzed mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data from the US Census Bureau to estimate sex-specific life expectancy for US counties for every year between 1961 and 1999. Metrics of cross-county mortality disparity were calculated, and counties were grouped based on whether their mortality changed favorably or unfavorably relative to the national average. Probability of death was also estimated from specific diseases for counties with above- or below-average mortality performance.

Research objective

One of the major aims of the US health system is improving the health of all people, particularly those segments of the population at greater risk of health disparities. While average life expectancy overall in the US has increased in the last 40 years, evidence indicates that these health gains may not be distributed evenly. This study capitalizes on the benefits of county-level analysis: counties are the smallest measurable unit for which mortality data are available, county-level data allow analyses for small subgroups of the US population, and availability of county-level socioeconomic and cause-specific mortality data allow analysis of trends in all-cause and disease-specific mortality in relation to county environmental and socioeconomic characteristics. With this county-level data, researchers can provide insight into trends in mortality and mortality disparities in US counties for a period of approximately four decades, one of the longest trend analyses of mortality disparities in the US. This research is part of ongoing work by IHME to provide timely, accurate, and comparable health measurements.

Recommendations for future work

Life expectancy decline among some US counties highlights the relative geographic disparities that continue to exist in subpopulations of the United States. The role of risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and obesity in life expectancy should be further investigated, and programs that increase the coverage of interventions for chronic disease and injury risk factors in the worst-off counties, states, and regions should be established and regularly monitored and evaluated with respect to their local, versus aggregate only, impacts.

Citation: Ezzati M, Friedman AB, Kulkarni SC, Murray CJL. The reversal of fortunes: trends in county mortality and cross-county mortality disparities in the United States. PLoS Medicine. 2008 Apr 22; 5(4):e66.

© 2008 University of Washington

http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/research/publication-summary/reversal-fortunes-trends-county-mortality-and-cross-county-mortality-di


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[StephanieVanbryce]

..Michelle Bachmann doesn't forgive Mike Wallace for asking her "Are you a Flake" ...

Bachmann won't take Fox host's apology



Via POLITICO's Jennifer Epstein, Michele Bachmann isn't accepting an apology from Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace for asking her yesterday, "Are you a flake?"

ABC News' Jon Karl, who's been getting face-time with Bachmann in Waterloo in advance of her formal campaign announcement, played a clip of the web video in which Wallace said, "I messed up. I'm sorry."

When Karl asked if she accepts the apology, Bachmann brushed aside the question this way: "I think that it's insulting to insinuate that a candidate for president is less than serious."

Trying the question again, Bachmann replied, "Those are the small issues. I'm focused on the big ones."

The episode is an unusual moment of conflict between a Republican candidate for 2012 and Fox, and is a stark contrast to the relationship Sarah Palin, with whom Bachmann is often compared to, has with the network.

The full video that was posted Sunday of the Wallace apology had him saying, "A lot of you were more than perturbed, you were upset and felt that I had been rude to her. And since in the end it's really all about the answers and not about the questions. I messed up. I'm sorry. I didn't mean any disrespect."

Given that it clearly struck a nerve with viewers, there's a strong chance it will also add to Bachmann's appeal to women voters.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57826.html

[fuagf]

LOL, PARTY OF NOs known in JAPAN! .. Republicans setting filibuster record.
World Mar. 02, 2010 - 04:06AM JS

http://www.japantoday.com/category/world/view/republicans-setting-filibuster-record

Bachmann's running, i know you all know .. just on radio uptop
.. put that in your dictionary .. lol .. chuckle .. woan, too.

Q: Who likes red lines?

A: Stalin did. The GOP filibusters do, too.

[F6]

Bachmann's Unrivaled Extremism


Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo

Michelle Goldberg [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/michelle-goldberg.html ]
June 14, 2011 11:08 PM EDT

In April 2005, Pamela Arnold wanted to talk to her state senator, Michele Bachmann, who was then running for Congress. A 46-year-old who worked at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Arnold lived with her partner, the famed Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft, on a farm in Scandia, Minnesota. Bachmann was then leading the fight against gay marriage in the state. She'd recently been in the news for hiding in the bushes to observe a gay rights rally at the Capitol. So when members of the Scandia gay community decided to attend one of Bachmann's constituent forums, Arnold, wanting to make herself visible to her representative, joined them.

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. Hoping to speak to her, Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. "Help!" she screamed. "Help! I'm being held against my will!"

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was "absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her." The Washington County attorney, however, declined to press charges, writing in a memo, "It seems clear from the statements given by both women that they simply wanted to discuss certain issues further with Ms. Bachmann."

Lots of politicians talk about a sinister homosexual agenda. Bachmann, who has made opposition to gay rights a cornerstone of her career, seems genuinely to believe in one. Her conviction trumps even her once close relationship with her lesbian stepsister. "What an amazing imagination," marvels Arnold. "Her ideology is so powerful that she can construct a reality just on a moment's notice."

Belief is the key to understanding Michele Bachmann, who announced her presidential candidacy during Monday's Republican debate. Her impressive performance, which catapulted her close to the front of the presidential pack, surprised some, who perhaps expected her to be as inarticulate as Sarah Palin, to whom she's often compared. But in Minnesota, even those who don't like her politics say she shouldn't be underestimated. "The fact that she's not a heavy lifter, the fact that she's relatively unconcerned about the substance of legislation, does not mean that she's not crafty, that she's not intelligent and she's not fast," says former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, a Republican. Her ideological radicalism should not be mistaken for stupidity.

[embedded video]

On Monday, Bachmann didn't talk a lot about her religion. She didn't have to—she knows how to signal it in ways that go right over secular heads. In criticizing Obama's Libya policy, for example, she said, "We are the head and not the tail." The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 28:13: "The Lord will make you the head and not the tail." As Rachel Tabachnick has reported [ http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/9/13/11834/9878 ], it's often used in theocratic circles to explain why Christians have an obligation to rule.

Indeed, no other candidate in the race is so completely a product of the evangelical right as Bachmann; she could easily become the Christian conservative alternative to the comparatively moderate Mormon Mitt Romney. "Michele Bachmann's a complete package," says Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition wunderkind who now runs the Faith and Freedom Coalition. "She's got charisma, she's got an authentic faith testimony, she's a proven fighter for conservative values, and she's well known." She's also great at raising money—in the 2010 cycle, she amassed a record-breaking $13.2 million in donations. (Bachmann's office didn't respond to requests for comment.)

Bachmann, who was born in Iowa, was in high school in Anoka, Minnesota, when she was swept up in the wave of evangelical Christianity then surging through the country. "People were coming to the Lord left and right," she said in a recent speech. A pretty cheerleader, she was a member of student government and was elected to the homecoming court. But her family life was unsettled. Her parents divorced in 1970, and her father disappeared from her life and those of her three brothers. When she was in high school, her mother remarried, to a man with five children of his own. Working-class Democrats, the family went to a Lutheran church regularly, but it wasn't until she was born again at 16, she has said, "that the Gospel finally made sense to me."

After graduating from high school, Bachmann went to Israel with the evangelical youth group Young Life. Then, at Winona State University, she joined the evangelical Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, where she met her husband, Marcus Bachmann. At the time, the evangelical movement was not particularly political. Indeed, according to Randall Balmer, who is both an evangelical and a historian of American evangelicalism at Columbia University, it was the born again Jimmy Carter who first marshaled the era's newly awakened Christians. "He brings them into the political arena. There's no question about that," says Balmer. "And the great irony is that they turned so rabidly and rapidly against him four years later."

That's exactly what happened with Bachmann, who campaigned for Carter in 1976—she and Marcus even went to one of his inaugural balls—but soon tacked sharply rightward. A key moment in her political evolution, as for many of her generation, a was the film series "How Should We Then Live" by the theologian Francis Schaeffer, who is widely credited for mobilizing evangelicals against abortion, an issue most had previously ignored. A Presbyterian minister, Schaeffer argued that our entire perception of reality depends on our worldview, and that only those with the right one can understand the true nature of things. Christianity, he argued, is "a whole system of truth, and this system is the only system that will stand up to all the questions that are presented to us as we face the reality of existence." Theories or assertions from outside this system—evolution, for example—can be dismissed as the product of mistaken premises.

This accounts for some of the bafflement that occasionally greets Bachmann's statements. "Michele Bachmann says certain things that sound crazy to the general public," says author Frank Schaeffer, Francis Schaeffer's son and former collaborator. "But to anybody raised in the environment of the evangelical right wing, what she says makes perfect sense."

Bachmann honed her view of the world after college, when she enrolled at the Coburn Law School at Oral Roberts University, an "interdenominational, Bible-based, and Holy Spirit-led" school in Oklahoma. "My goal there was to learn the law both from a professional but also from a biblical worldview," she said in an April speech.

At Coburn, Bachmann studied with John Eidsmoe, who she recently described as "one of the professors who had a great influence on me." Bachmann served as his research assistant on the 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution, which argued that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy, and that it should become one again. "The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God," Eidsmoe wrote. "In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy."

Eidsmoe, who hung up the phone when asked for an interview, is a contentious figure. Last year, he withdrew from speaking at a Wisconsin Tea Party rally after the Associated Press raised questions about his history of addresses to white supremacist groups. In 2010, speaking a rally celebrating Alabama's secession from the Union, he claimed that Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than Abraham Lincoln.

Reading Eidsmoe, though, some of Bachmann's most widely ridiculed statements begin to make sense. Earlier this year, for example, she was mocked for saying that the Founding Fathers "worked tirelessly" to end slavery. But in books by Eidsmoe and others who approach history from what they call a Christian worldview, this is a truism. Despite his defense of the Confederacy, Eidsmoe also argues that even those founders who owned slaves opposed the institution and wanted it to disappear, and that it was only Christian for them to protect their slaves until it did. "It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible," he wrote.

After graduating from Coburn in 1986, Bachmann went on to get a degree in tax law from William and Mary School of Law in Virginia, while her husband studied psychology and counseling at Regent University, the school founded by Pat Robertson. His thesis was about the harmful effects of day care on children. "[T]he best interests of the public would be served if one parent did not work outside of the home unless it was absolutely essential," he wrote.

Nevertheless, when Bachmann's children were small, she worked at the IRS while Marcus got his Christian counseling business up and running. Finally, in 1992, she said, "I realized my lifelong dream, which was to be a full-time mother of children at home." That same year, she received her foster care license.

Bachmann often says she has "raised" 23 foster children. That may be a bit of a stretch. According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, Bachmann's license, which she had for 7 1/2 years, allowed her to care for up to three children at a time. According to Kris Harvieux, a former senior social worker in the foster care system in Bachmann's county, some placements were almost certainly short term. "Some of them you have for a week. Some of them you have for three years, some you have for six months," says Harvieux, who also served as a foster parent herself. "She makes it sound like she got them at birth and raised them to adulthood, but that's not true."

Yet Bachmann clearly had some of her foster children long enough to enroll them in local schools, and it was through them that she got involved in school politics. While she taught her own children at home before sending them to private Christian schools, state law required foster kids to go to public school. Seeing their curriculum, she became convinced that "politically correct attitudes, values, and beliefs" had supplanted objective education. She helped found a charter school but soon left the board amid allegations that she was trying to inject Christianity into the curriculum. Then, in 1999, she decided to run for the local school board.

School board elections in Stillwater, Minnesota, had been nonpartisan affairs, but when Bachmann ran as part of a slate of five Republican candidates, culture war issues were injected into the race. "I remember being called by someone and asked where I stood on abortion," says former school board member Mary Cecconi. People felt that it was "sullying the process, that the partisan aspect doesn't belong at the local level," says Bill Pulkrabek, a Republican county official who helped organize Bachmann's slate. It was the only election she ever lost.

But the race served as her springboard into the statehouse. In 2000, she challenged incumbent state Sen. Gary Laidig, a moderate, for the Republican nomination. Bachmann, says Pulkrabek, had an extraordinary ability "to motivate activists and delegates to action." She won on the first ballot.

In the statehouse, Bachmann made opposition to gay marriage her signature issue. Both she and her husband, by all accounts her most trusted political adviser, believe that homosexuality can be cured. Speaking to a Christian radio station [ http://minnesotaindependent.com/59781/bachmanns-christian-counseling-clinic-receives-state-funds ] about gay teenagers last year, Marcus, who treats gay people in his counseling practice, said, "Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined, and just because someone feels this or thinks this, doesn't mean that we're supposed to go down that road."

In 2004, Bachmann gave a speech warning that gay marriage would lead to schoolchildren being indoctrinated into homosexuality. She wanted everyone to know, though, that she doesn't hate gay people. "Any of you who have members of your family in the lifestyle, we have a member of our family that is," she said. "This is not funny. It's a very sad life. It's part of Satan, I think, to say that this is gay."

She was clearly talking about her 51-year-old stepsister, Helen LaFave, who had lived with her partner, Nia Wronski, for more than 15 years. As Bachmann became the public face of opposition to gay marriage, her relationship with her stepsiblings grew strained. "Helen always liked Michele, always," says Linda Cielinski, one of Bachmann's other stepsisters. "They lived together as teenage girls. They were very close at that time." Bachmann's anti-gay activism, Cielinski says, "was a hit to the gut."

And so, in April 2006, when the Minnesota Senate judiciary committee met for a hearing on Bachmann's proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Helen LaFave, Wronski, and several relatives including Cielinski were all in the gallery. "I wanted Michele to put a face to this whole thing," says Cielinski. "These were family members she was hurting." They didn't intend to talk to the press—LaFave has always shied away from media attention—but journalists quickly learned who they were and surrounded them. (LaFave declined an interview request, citing concern about the effect of the controversy on her 87-year-old father, who is still married to Bachmann's mother.)

The ensuing brouhaha further tore at the family. In a Star Tribune story headlined "Bachmann, stepsister hold opposing views," Bachmann claimed that she'd polled her siblings and stepsiblings, and that six of the nine agreed with her. Her stepbrother Mike LaFave was horrified. "The reality was she hadn't taken a family vote count, nor would my family ever do such a thing," he says. "I just find it terrible that when Michele was taken by surprise by a question she wasn't prepared for, the first thing she did was throw not only my sister but her whole family under the bus."

Over the years, several letters from disgruntled Bachmann relatives have appeared in local newspapers, though they usually don't mention their relationship. "I have a suggestion for Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater, since she's interested in watching gay people," Cielinski wrote in a letter published in the Pioneer Press in 2005. "Instead of hiding behind bushes with a security guard, go to the grocery store, a PTA meeting, ballgames, concerts, church, the movies, or take a walk around the lake…[T]hey are our friends and family members who have added so much to our lives." Bachmann never responded.

None of this is likely to sour her many devoted fans. Indeed, it's precisely her unwavering ideological commitment that endears her to them. "She's not afraid to say things that other people on the right are probably thinking, but they're just too wimpy to say," says Pulkrabek, who supports Bachmann's presidential ambitions. "She says these things and she promotes these views because she really believes them."

Michelle Goldberg is a senior contributing writer for The Daily Beast/Newsweek. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism [ http://www.kingdomcoming.com/ ] and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World [ http://www.amazon.com/Means-Reproduction-Power-Future-World/dp/B0043RT9DU ], winner of the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award [ http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/newsitem.aspx?id=100001 ] and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg's work has appeared in Glamour [ http://www.glamour.com/women-of-the-year/2007/11/empowering-hands ], Rolling Stone, The Nation [ http://www.thenation.com/article/palin-and-christian-right ], New York magazine, The Guardian (UK) [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/michellegoldberg ] and The New Republic. Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress and yoga evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012.

© 2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/14/michele-bachmanns-unrivaled-extremism-gay-rights-to-religion.html [with comments]


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Bachmann’s Husband Calls Homosexuals ‘Barbarians’ Who ‘Need To Be Educated’ And ‘Disciplined’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvwP4vHEc-I [via/title from/more at http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/06/29/257646/bachmanns-husband-calls-homosexuals-barbarians-who-need-to-be-educated-and-disciplined/ (with comments)]


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An annotated guide to the economics of Michele Bachmann

The debt ceiling, stimulus, jobs and taxes: The Minnesota Republican has a plan, but the numbers don't add up
Jun 28, 2011
http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2011/06/28/michele_bachmann_economics_the_annotated_version/index.html [comments at http://letters.salon.com/tech/htww/2011/06/28/michele_bachmann_economics_the_annotated_version/view/?show=all ]


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Michele Bachmann as Montesquieu’s Misadventure



By Brendan Beery
Posted on May 28, 2011

Those who rhapsodize most about “liberty” and “freedom” should be regarded with the most apprehension by the rest of us. In the tireless campaign by mindless political movements to co-opt every symbol of Americanism, our language has not been spared. So when a politician like Michele Bachmann uses the words “liberty” and “freedom,” she frequently means something much different than what our founders meant: individual liberty and individual freedom. Our founders were not beholden to oil companies or religious sects, so their notions of these ideas were not bastardized into concepts like states’ rights or strictly economic liberty.

We seem to have fallen into a sort of national slumber when it comes to guarding the very notions of liberty and freedom as things that should belong to all citizens as human beings. We assume that since this is a democracy, it is also a free country. What seems to have been overlooked here is that democracies need not be free, and they are therefore not guarantors of freedom. When we put something like the right to get married to a popular vote, we are merely substituting the tyrannical inclinations of the many for the tyrannical inclinations of the few, or the one.

In The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, Baron de Montesquieu wrote, “Democratic . . . states are not in their own nature free. Political freedom is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power.”

We are as “free” to elect theocrats or aristocrats as we are to elect moderate small-r republicans. Were we to choose one of the former two, then we would simply have erected a democratic tyranny. That is why early thinkers like Thomas Paine were so forceful in urging vigilance against efforts by religious and monied interests to contaminate government; Paine called the combination of church and state “a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying.”

Look how, in the following two video clips, Michelle Bachmann waxes on about liberty and freedom:

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd-ERDBs4ek ]

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MkWNIzE-Jc ]

These clips are telling. Only a worldview hopelessly infected with religious and corporate zeal could conceive of liberty and freedom in these ways. To Bachmann, the greatest threats to liberty are threats to her right not to have her gasoline taxed and her “right” to imbue her children with her own religion-based educational canons. Bachmann’s notions of freedom and liberty have lost all connection whatever to the idea of individual autonomy over one’s own personal life. Her freedoms relate only to money and religion and belong only to parents and states.

Now look at what AP reporter Brian Bakst wrote [ http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/iowa-may-be-fertile-ground-gops-bachmann ] in a May 26 article:

If there’s any state where Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann could stir the Republican race for president, it’s Iowa.

She was born in Waterloo, giving her a home-field advantage of sorts. The tea party, the GOP’s most energized segment, loves her. So do social conservatives, who cheer her forceful advocacy of gay marriage bans, abortion restrictions and home-school rights.

How remarkable that an incessant bloviator about liberty and freedom would be championed because of her “forceful advocacy of gay marriage bans” and “abortion restrictions.” That politicians like Bachmann can propose such antithetical viewpoints contemporaneously with one another is an insult to the intelligence of their listeners, which insult seems warranted with regard to any listener who does not walk away with head shaking.

Bachmann and her sort are a reminder of Montesquieu’s call to vigilance. Our democracy only yields freedom if we empower moderate governments that are not beholden to money or religion.

Copyright 2011 Brendan Beery (emphasis in original)

http://beeryblog.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/montesquieu-and-michele-bachmann/ [with comments]


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