Among many other lunacies from last night's tea party debate, Michele Bachmann uttered this:

The immigration system in the United States worked very, very well up until the mid-1960s when liberal members of Congress changed the immigration laws. What works is to have people come into the United States with a little bit of money in their pocket, legally, with sponsors so that if anything happens to them they don’t fall back on the taxpayers to take care of them.

Ian Milhiser at ThinkProgress explains:

In 1924, Congress passed a package of immigration laws — including the National Origins Act and the Asian Exclusion Act — establishing a quota system giving preferential treatment to European immigrants. Under these laws, the number of immigrants who could be admitted from a given country was capped at a percentage of the number of people from that nation who were living in the United States in 1890. Because Americans were overwhelming of European descent in 1890, the practical effect of these laws was an enormous thumb on the scale encouraging white immigration.

These quotas were eliminated by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, an act which is widely credited for opening up our nation to new Americans of Asian and Central and South American descent.

As Milhiser explains, these laws were notorious for singling out Japanese immigrants -- and all other Asians as well -- for exclusion from immigration, which had the effect of reinforcing existing laws that prohibited Asians from even becoming naturalized citizens:

It’s worth noting that the 1924 laws that Bachmann believes to have worked so very well singled out certain people for particularly harsh treatment. As immigration scholar Roger Daniels explains:

1924 law also barred “aliens ineligible to citizenship” – reflecting the fact that American law had, since 1870, permitted only “white persons” and those “of African descent” to become naturalized citizens. The purpose of this specific clause was to keep out Japanese, as other Asians had been barred already.

The prohibition against naturalization embedded in these laws was slowly eradicated by the effects of World War II. Chinese -- who had been prohibited from emigration to the U.S. since 1884 -- were permitted to become naturalized American citizens in 1944 as a result of China's alliance with the U.S. Meanwhile, Japanese immigrants were finally permitted to become naturalized American citizens with passage in 1952 of the McCarran-Walter Act. But the race-based system of quotas persisted, and Asian immigration remained at a trickle as a result during those years.

This is the system that Bachmann thinks is just hunky-dory. Which is even more appalling when you consider its origins.

As I explained in my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, the 1924 Immigration Act was passed at the height of racist anti-Japanese xenophobia, the culmination of a long campaign to exclude Asian immigrants of all stripes. It began on the local level in Pacific Coast states like Washington and California, and eventually became a national phenomenon -- one that had powerful consequences 17 years later:

Politicians like Albert Johnson [a congressman from Hoquiam, Washington] in particular were prone to picking up the anti-Japanese cause, since the agitating factions represented several key voting blocs, while the Japanese themselves were excluded from voting and thus had no political clout whatsoever. Various officeholders, especially rural legislators, found that attacking the Japanese threat, and piously talking about saving American civilization, went over well with the voters. But even on a statewide level, the issue received prominent play; Governor Hart, a Republican, campaigned for his ultimately successful re-election on a promise to outlaw the leasing of any property by the Issei, while one of his GOP primary opponents, John Stringer, took it a step further: “It is our duty to take every acre of land on Puget Sound away from the Japs and place it in the hands of our ex-soldiers.”

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Around 500 A.D., the world was experiencing some drastic climate changes. There was a super El Nino weather phenomenon on the west coast. Cataclysmic floods were followed by drought. The Moche, like most ancient peoples, are thought to be very religious. They wanted to thwart this devastation and improve the weather by trying to appease their gods. So they sacrificed masses of their citizens. Just slaughtered hundreds of people in hopes of saving more.

Does this sound like religious extremism? Yes. Because it is.

Negotiating with nature is a very ancient thing to do: Pre-science, pre-wheel, - pre-written language. As a species, we’ve always seen patterns in natural events and taken it personally. Floods are because of sin – droughts are because of witches. Earthquakes are God’s anger towards women’s suffrage and Chinese immigration, etc.

But now we know better. At least, some of us do. Sort of. Now we know the Earth’s crust shifts. It always has. All our continents used to be one; scientists refer to as Pangaea. We know that continuing shift results in earthquakes. Instead of hurricanes just appearing all of a sudden as a result of moral shortcomings, we can now track them via satellite for days. There is also a growing understanding about how global warming has intensified weather patterns, hurricanes have been made worse by pollution and the extraction process for natural gas known as “fracking” has caused earthquakes.

Yes, we have a greater knowledge of weather and seismic activities than ever before.

So when the East Coast experienced a rare earthquake – there was an archaic response from religious leaders. It wasn’t that these things happen on this planet we all live on - it was because of gay marriage. Rabbi Yehuda Levin told his YouTube audience, “[We] are starting to see the connection.” As if the earth never moved before cake toppers had two grooms.

It’s ghoulish opportunism. Just like in the wake of the quake that nearly leveled Haiti and killed thousands, televangelist Pat Robertson claimed it was because Haitians made a pact with the devil to liberate themselves from slavery 200 years ago. So Robertson’s devil ran an 18th century anti-slavery Caribbean underground railroad? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? He has an odd religion. He also chimed into the “what did we do to deserve a non-fatal earthquake in DC?” discussion by claiming a crack in the Washington Monument meant something beyond why not to build a 555-foot marble obelisk on swampland.

Then there was a hurricane in the same area within a week. For capitalizing atmospheric interpreters – it’s show time! Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann told a rally in Florida – the state with the highest proportion of elderly (think Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries) and hurricanes in the country – that these events are a warning about government spending.

Because weather is a quid pro quo with God and the Republican Party’s agenda.

It’s time to build a wall (or a levee) between church and weather.

Natural disasters aren’t punishment. And religion isn’t a Doppler radar.

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Why on earth is Michele Bachmann holding a town hall meeting 1200 miles away from her district -- and who paid for it? Did this come out of campaign funds, or her congressional budget?

Michele Bachmann, the congressional representative of Minnesota's sixth district, will be holding a "town hall meeting" at DiGiorgio Campus Center at Winthrop University in Rock Hill on June 29. Nevermind that Winthrop University is roughly 1200 miles away from her district; she's running for PRESIDENT. Keep in mind that this is not a "meet and greet" or "backyard chat" as her other SC stops are titled, but a "Town Hall Meeting," where representatives in Congress are giving their ear to citizen concerns about policy. Why in the world is she having such a meeting in Rock Hill, SC, 1200 miles from Washington, Minnesota, where not a single person is expected to have any vested interest in the actions of congress as they effect the sixth district in Minnesota?

She'd have to be a real moron to pay for this with anything but campaign cash, so I'll assume she's trying to have it both ways: She wants to hold campaign rallies with a thin veneer of official function.

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(h/t Digby for reminding me about the above video)

Michele Bachmann received many positive reviews of her performance during the CNN GOP debate a few weeks ago by many famous TV pundits:

Gloria Borger, CNN chief political analyst

"I think she sort of stepped out of Sarah Palin's shadow tonight. She was clearly one of the best-prepped candidates here. She let people know the depth of her experience on the intelligence committee, for example.

David Gergen, CNN senior political analyst:

"But Michele Bachmann, I thought, was the biggest surprise, because she was -- I don't think the country knew her well. She was pithy. She spoke in a much more cleaner sentences. She sprinkled interesting facts into it. And she introduced her biography. The 23 foster children, she said that twice."

Bloggers like myself and many others have followed her for years because of the insane and utterly ridiculous statements she's made on the House floor and TV. Let's just say her statements have always made me chuckle, but I'm laughing harder at the talking heads' review of her performance.

I doubt you'll hear much about her history of religious fanaticism from the punditocracy unfortunately because why would cable pundits do some journalistic research, right? Enter Matt Taibbi, who serves up a must read article in Rolling Stone called: Michele Bachmann's Holy War. He doesn't think anyone should make the mistake of laughing at her:

Young Michele found Jesus at age 16, not long before she went away to Winona State University and met a doltish, like-minded believer named Marcus Bachmann. After finishing college, the two committed young Christians moved to Oklahoma, where Michele entered one of the most ridiculous learning institutions in the Western Hemisphere, a sort of highway rest area with legal accreditation called the O.W. Coburn School of Law; Michele was a member of its inaugural class in 1979.

Originally a division of Oral Roberts University, this august academy, dedicated to the teaching of "the law from a biblical worldview," has gone through no fewer than three names — including the Christian Broadcasting Network School of Law. Those familiar with the darker chapters in George W. Bush's presidency might recognize the school's current name, the Regent University School of Law. Yes, this was the tiny educational outhouse that, despite being the 136th-ranked law school in the country, where 60 percent of graduates flunked the bar, produced a flood of entrants into the Bush Justice Department.

Regent was unabashed in its desire that its graduates enter government and become "change agents" who would help bring the law more in line with "eternal principles of justice," i.e., biblical morality. To that end, Bachmann was mentored by a crackpot Christian extremist professor named John Eidsmoe, a frequent contributor to John Birch Society publications who once opined that he could imagine Jesus carrying an M16 and who spent considerable space in one of his books musing about the feasibility of criminalizing blasphemy.

This background is significant considering Bachmann's leadership role in the Tea Party, a movement ostensibly founded on ideas of limited government. Bachmann says she believes in a limited state, but she was educated in an extremist Christian tradition that rejects the entire notion of a separate, secular legal authority and views earthly law as an instrument for interpreting biblical values. As a legislator, she not only worked to impose a ban on gay marriage, she also endorsed a report that proposed banning anyone who "espoused or supported Shariah law" from immigrating to the U.S. (Bachmann seems so unduly obsessed with Shariah law that, after listening to her frequent pronouncements on the subject, one begins to wonder if her crazed antipathy isn't born of professional jealousy.) This discrepancy may account for why some Tea Party leaders don't buy Bachmann as a champion of small government. "Michele Bachmann is — what's the old-school term? — a poser," says Chris Littleton, an Ohio Tea Party leader troubled by her support of the Patriot Act and other big-government interventions. "Look at her record and see how 'Tea Party' she really is."...read on

It's a long article, but worth your time to see how she's been able to make crazy statement after crazy statement and keep moving her political career forward. Even Bill O'Reilly has not taken her seriously either like many of the other GOP grand poobahs, but did say on The Factor that she could be a good VP candidate. Taibbi makes the case early on in his piece that she shouldn't be dismissed out of hand because she's managed to keep getting elected. She uses teh crazy very well.

You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

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There's something about Anthony Weiner that seems to really get under Sean Hannity's skin. Maybe it's the way he makes both Hannity and his guests look like utter buffoons. That might have something to do with it.

Such as when Michele Bachmann went on with Hannity and Weiner the other night, producing hilarious exchanges such as this one:

HANNITY: Here's my point, $3.7 billion, we have nearly $5 trillion now accumulated Obama debt, $5 trillion. You tell me how much you are willing to cut out of the budget?

WEINER: Well, let me ask you something. Is it accumulated Obama debt when President Bush left office, there was 700,000 job losses that month. There are more private sector jobs created under President Obama in his two years --

HANNITY: That's a lie.

WEINER: It is a fact.

HANNITY: Congressman, I know you are a Democrat and I know you're a bitter partisan. But in the month of February --

WEINER: No, I'm just a partisan.

HANNITY: Stop it. In the month of February our deficit --

WEINER: Don't call me names, Sean. It is almost St. Patrick's Day you are going to call me names?

HANNITY: Yes. Our deficit was $223,000 for the month. In 2007, if we are looking at real dollars and real money, we paid less in a year than we did for the month of February!

WEINER: Well, look, I will tell you this. The deficit right now comes from three places. One, unfunded wars, two, enormous numbers of jobs lost a tragedy that President Bush drove us into this cliff and three tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

HANNITY: Congresswoman Bachmann, you know, George Bush has been out of office for nearly 2-1/2 years he can't get over it. Barack Obama's budgets nearly $5 trillion in debt. He won't mention where he would cut. I'll ask you the same question --

WEINER: What do you mean he?

HANNITY: That would be you! Congresswoman, where would you cut?

BACHMANN: You know, Sean. I had no idea that Representative Weiner was such a reader of fiction. He's a huge fiction reader because that's all of his numbers. I wanted to mention --

WEINER: Bachmann, I don't think you want to go there. I don't think you want to go there, Bachmann.

Weiner later repeated that Bachmann's little bit of projection was "ironic". No kidding. After all, this is the congresswoman who's been running around (mostly on Fox) for the better part of a couple of weeks now claiming that there is $105 billion in health-care reform implementation "secretly" tucked into the budget -- even though it's one of the most publicly debunked bogus republican claim in awhile. The Washington Post's fact checker dismissed it as "bordering on the ridiculous", while PolitiFact dismantled it as well.

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Michele Bachmann's paranoia knows no bounds. Now she's claiming that Bill Clinton wants to "take her out" (and not in the dating kinda way, either). Why? Because Clinton criticized her choice of language in calling the government "gangsters," as part of his weeklong observations that the rhetoric from people like Bachmann is what produced unhinged and violent acts like Oklahoma City.

Talk like this upsets the right-wing talkers very much, and of course it then all becomes about how the mean left-wingers are saying nasty things about poor meek conservatives, who have never said a mean things about anyone in their lives. That was Bachmann's schtick last night on Sean Hannity's Fox show.

And as proof that liberals are evilly trying to silence right-wingers, Bachmann trotted out ... net neutrality.

Bachmann: Oh sure, that's all they have left now, is they use pejorative terms, hateful terms, against those who are carrying the message. So whether they're attacking conservative talk radio, or conservative TV, or whether it's Internet sites -- I mean, let's face it, what's the Obama administration doing? They're advocating net neutrality, which is essentially censorship of the Internet!

This is the Obama administration advocating censorship of the Internet. Why? They want to silence the voices that are opposing them.

Net neutrality? Censorship? Really? Well, not really. How about more like the precise opposite?

Somebody's been watching too much Glenn Beck. Bachmann is a prime example of what happens when you let Beck do your thinking for you.

See that picture? That looks like a million people to G. Gordon Liddy's producer:

(T)oday’s anti-health care reform rally has been much more sparsely attended (than the 9/12 protests, but) that hasn’t stopped conservatives from inflating the numbers again. On G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show (Thursday), producer Franklin Raff, who was on the ground at the rally, told guest host Joseph Farah that the crowd is “just as big or bigger than” the 9/12 rally, which Raff estimated “at about a million.”

Uh yup. Rep. Eric Cantor dialed the number down, though not entirely into factual territory:

(S)hortly after addressing the crowd, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) actually blamed Democrats for the hateful images on display. In an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, Cantor suggested that the signs were the mere result of "frustration" over the democratically elected majority's "extreme policies." Mitchell pushed him to say whether he's "comfortable with those attacks against the President of the United States," but Cantor quickly changed the subject:

CANTOR: Listen, I don't think we should engage in personal attacks. But I think, and what I take the message from the gathering of tens of thousands of people on the steps of the Capitol today, and the elections on Tuesday, is the fact that, you know what, we need some balance here in Washington.

You know what, Cantor? You and the rest of your willfully ignorant and fear mongering party (and that includes your mouthpieces at Fox News) own every one of those sickening, disgusting, inexcusable signs, not Democrats.

The Politico, treading gracelessly between their GOP advocacy position and whatever journalistic integrity they still imagine themselves to have put the number at 10,000. Actually, according to reality-based sources, the number was around 3,000 - 4,000.

There's a joke I could make on how sad it must be for their wives when they must continually overinflate numbers, but I think their massive overcompensation speaks for itself.

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Michele Bachmann was on Glenn Beck's show yesterday -- with Judge Andrew Napolitano sitting in for Beck, who came down with appendicitis after his candidate, Doug Hoffmann, lost in the NY-23 race -- plumping her big Tea Party protest of the House health-care reform bill today on Capitol Hill -- which she calls "Super Bowl of Freedom".

According to ThinkProgress, Bachmann is calling on protesters to “scare” members of Congress into killing health-care reform. “Republican organizers are planning for activists to go into the House office buildings and the U.S. Capitol and confront members directly.”

You have to be a little concerned about the kinds of nutcases she's calling upon to visit their Congresscritters. After all, Bachmann herself is a promoter of far-flung "constitutionalist" conspiracy theories about replacing the American currency, youth re-education camps and Obama-ordered "concentration camps." Napolitano opened the segment with a clip of Bachmann grilling Tim Geithner with her otherworldly questions about the "constitutionality" of the stimulus package.

So of course, they couldn't help but indulge in a fresh round of paranoia about security for today's 'Tea Party':

Napolitano: I have to give you a little bit of a warning. I have a friend in the American intelligence community who lives and works around Washington, D.C., who told me: 'Watch out for Mrs. Pelosi making the security requirements almost impossible to get to this rally.' You guys have to watch out for that, that she doesn't do something to make it very difficult for the folks to come to this gathering at noon tomorrow.

Bachmann: Well, she controls the Capitol. She's a very powerful individual. And she controls ingress and egress, and so, I think it would be a big mistake for Speaker Pelosi to prevent the American people from coming to their House. This is their House, after all. This is why we need to make this emergency 'House Call' on Congress tomorrow.

One can only imagine some of these doofus teabaggers getting lost on the Metro and then blaming Nancy Pelosi for it.

PFAW:

There are many unanswered questions about the tragic hanging death of Bill Sparkman, a US Census Bureau employee, in rural Kentucky. But one thing is clear. Right-Wing leaders like Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and media outlets like Fox News have whipped up hysteria and paranoia over the 2010 Census.

Mr. Sparkman's untimely demise may or may not have been the doing of an anti-government fanatic, but it’s clear that the Right is creating an environment that is hostile to Census workers and the Constitutionally-mandated Census.

A steady stream of conspiracy talk by Beck, Bachmann, and others on Fox News has legitimized and propelled conspiracy theories among many everyday Americans who are now terrified of their own government. Talk of rounding up dissidents into concentration camps and nefarious plots by ACORN to steal Congress has fed anti-government sentiment, which could boil over at any moment.

This should be an important wake-up call to those national outlets that have employed fear in pursuit of ratings.

It's amazing to me that the party that presided over the biggest growth in government are now stark raving loons over aprogram that has been in place since 1790. Of course, it could be a classic case of Freudian projection, where they project exactly the kind of fascist tendencies in their own little heart and they panic at someone else being able to use the information the way they would if they have a chance. Or perhaps it's the very scary notion of information and facts that has their collective knickers in a bunch. God forbid we actually know that there really aren't 40 million illegal immigrants in this country, what could those wingnuts use to fear monger? Or that thanks to GOP policies, wages are down across the country? Or that those comfortably gerry-mandered seats in the House should actually be changed to the disadvantage of the GOP? [[Shudder]]

Facts are scary things to those wingnuts.