Michele Bachmann Continues Opening Cans of Worms Best Left Sealed; New PAC Ad Attacks Anita Perry

She continues placing big bets on her mentally retarded tactics, this time claiming Anita Perry once worked for Merck.

Which she really hadn't. As a lobbyist in the nineties (a job she retired from, to avoid conflict-of-interest) she had worked for a firm that did some lobbying work for Merck on... osteoporosis screening.

Perry worked for MEM Hubble in the early Nineties, but left when her husband ran for lieutenant governor, Miller says, "so there wouldn't be any appearance of conflict." But to the Dems and to some of Miller's competitors in the business, that "conflict" had existed long before Rick Perry ran for lieutenant governor. "The scuttlebutt," explains one Democratic insider, "was that Miller had HMO clients and, hey, wasn't it interesting that Anita Perry worked for him." The assumption, of course, was that Perry was either lobbying for Miller's clients on the sly, or that the mere association of the lieutenant governor's wife with Miller's firm carried sufficient force to influence votes in the Legislature.

Miller vehemently denies both charges. "That's bullshit," he says. "I can tell you unequivocally that she did no lobbying for me. That would have been bad for me and bad for my business. It would have looked like I was trading on her." Miller insists that Perry's work was limited to health care consulting for such clients as Riverside General Hospital, an African-American hospital in Houston that took a PR beating in the early Nineties for allegedly mismanaging more than $1 million in state and federal funding. Another client, the pharmaceutical company Merck, enlisted Perry's expertise in launching a public education campaign for osteoporosis screenings, according to Miller. And finally, Miller says, Perry studied the health aspects of air pollution for another Miller Client, Tejas Testing, a company that had secured the state contract to perform tailpipe emissions testing throughout Texas. The program -- and Tejas -- died in 1995 at the hands of Houston Sen. John Whitmire, who mounted a relentless campaign to kill the mandatory-testing program.

So, Bachmann continues with the below-the-belt sorts of attacks.

Meanwhile, since she's engaging in such attacks:

Her husband's "Christian Reparative Counseling" service receives government money via Medicaid, $137,000 since 2005.

Conflict of interest? Well honestly I would have just chalked it up to people having connections to the state dole, which is all but unavoidable when the state is so large and so frequently intersects with economic and medical interests, but since Michele Bachmann thinks this is a big deal, let's have it on the conservative record: Her husband makes a good deal of his money from Medicaid, easily the most waste-and-abuse-prone spending program out of the big three entitlements.

Further, he took another $161,000 from the state of Minnesota.

Further, Michele Bachmann was less than forthright about these payments.

While Rep. Michele Bachmann has forcefully denounced the Medicaid program for swelling the "welfare rolls," the mental health clinic run by her husband has been collecting annual Medicaid payments totaling over $137,000 for the treatment of patients since 2005, according to new figures obtained by NBC News.

The previously unreported payments are on top of the $24,000 in federal and state funds that Bachmann & Associates, the clinic founded by Marcus Bachmann, a clinical therapist, received in recent years under a state grant to train its employees, state records show. The figures were provided to NBC News in response to a Freedom of Information request.

...

The $161,000 in payments from the Minnesota Department of Human Services to her husband's clinic appear to contradict some of Michelle Bachmann's public accounts this week when she was first asked about the extent to which her family has benefited from government aid. Contacted this afternoon, Alice Stewart, a spokeswoman for Bachmann, said the congresswoman was doing campaign events and was not immediately available for comment.

Questions about the Bachmann family's receipt of government funds arose this week after a Los Angeles Times story reported that a family farm in which Michelle Bachmann is a partner had received nearly $260,000 in federal farm subsidies.

When asked by anchor Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" about the story's assertion that her husband's counseling clinic had also gotten federal and state funds, Bachmann replied that it was "one-time training money that came from the federal government. And it certainly didn't help our clinic."

At another point, she said, "My husband and I did not get the money," adding that it was "mental health training money that went to the employees."
Read more reporting by Michael Isikoff in 'The Isikoff Files'

But state records show that Bachmann & Associates has been collecting payments under the Minnesota's Medicaid program every year for the past six years...

Another state official, Patrice Vick, communications manager for the Human Services Department, said she was puzzled by Michelle Bachmann's assertion on the broadcast that the funds under the state grant went to employees. While the grant was to train employees to help them treat chemical dependency, the money did not go directly to those being trained, she said. "It went to the clinic," Vick said.

Her husband is obviously a crony of hers, and he's receiving an awful lot of money from the federal and state government, and she doesn't seem to like to admit this fact, contriving stories of payments being "one-time" affairs and only going to her husband's employees.

Plus, the guy does pray-the-gay-away stuff. I don't have a problem with that in theory, even though I figure such programs are successful about 5% of the time, because I support anyone's right to not be gay if they so desire.

The liberals get to be big bullies on this point, insisting that someone who has gay tendencies must be gay, and it is some kind of forgoing of a Holy Destiny if they wind up not being so gay.

So, from my point of view-- if someone wants to not be gay, fine, let them try. But be aware that it is not "common" for heterosexuals to question their sexual orientation -- pretty much that "questioning" only happens among gays. And gays tend to be, ultimately, gay, and any claim to the contrary is simply false.

Marcus Bachmann, however, seems to think that "curiosity" towards homosexuality is a relatively common thing.

Question: Today The Wall Street Journal came out with an article, "What do you say when your teenager is gay?" What do you say to Christian parents who come up with this? Bachmann: Well, I think you clearly say, what is the understanding of God's word on homosexuality. And I think that this is no mystery that a child or pre-adolescent, particularly adolescents, will question and wonder about sexuality. That's nothing new under the sun since the beginning of time. But I don't think we should take that as, because we wonder or we think or we question, does that take us down the road of homosexuality --

Question: Could you add the word experiment to that?

Bachmann: Well, certainly, there's that curiosity. But again, we, like, you know, it is as if we have to understand: Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. And just because someone feels it or thinks it, doesn't mean that we're supposed to go down that road. That's what's called the sinful nature. And we have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings from moving into the action steps.

Eh, maybe he needs to claim that in order to work his Not-Gay magic on patients. That is, maybe he has to overstate how common homosexual tendencies are in order to offer hope (of the false type) that many people have such tendencies but just decide to be straight.

Even if that's the case, it's quackery. Most people never, not even once, "question" their sexuality or experience "curiosity" or "confusion" on this issue.

This is what gay people do. Because they're gay.

And yet he's taking government money while he tells the world that lots of teenagers find themselves unsure about which sex they're attracted to.

There are a couple of ironies here: 1, that Bachmann's super-PAC is "Keep Conservatives United," which, as a coblogger noted, is a case of Ur doin it wrong.

And 2-- eh, one's enough.

posted by Ace at 04:02 PM

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