Reminder: Bachmann Isn’t ‘Retiring,’ She’s Leaving Disgraced Amid Criminal Investigations, Unpopularity

Because, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the moral arc of the universe tends to bend in the direction of justice, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is finally leaving office. With her, she takes a legacy of incompetence, hatred, and stupidity that may be hard to match.

In a farewell speech on the floor of the House, Bachmann was heavy on references to Moses (“Moses is given for the full honor of the greatest lawgiver in this chamber”) and cutting taxes (“we hold the power of the purse, we would hold the nation’s credit card…”).

As for why she isn’t running again, Bachmann came up with a reason so obviously fabricated that carefully calibrated “BS” detectors as far away as China probably picked up sizeable readings.

“Our Constitution allows for the decision of length of service in Congress to be determined by the congresspeople themselves or by the voters in the district. However, the law limits anyone from serving as president of the United States for more than eight years and in my opinion, well, eight years is also long enough for an individual to serve as a representative of a specific congressional district.”

Yes. You see, our Constitution does not require congresspeople to serve indefinitely. Nobody said it did. Nobody said Bachmann had to. But she just wants to be clear: legally speaking she doesn’t have to run again. Bachmann, benevolent to her people, has decided that eight years is long enough.

While taken at face value it’s simply one more dumb statement made by a person who made delivering dumb statements an artform, what Bachmann is ignoring here is that she isn’t choosing to leave office. Not really. She’s being forced out by a consortium of factors that all but made her ouster a foregone conclusion.

First, there are the criminal charges. Despite hinting at running for president again in 2016, Bachmann’s last bid did not go well. She was an early contender in the Republican primaries, but was left undone when donors and voters began to realize that she was unelectable. She is unapologetically racist towards Hispanics (America’s fastest-growing demographic), casually suggesting they are disease-ridden and inherently criminal. She hates gay people in ways rivaled only by her colleague Rick Santorum. She is openly condescending about poor people. She also makes a fool of herself almost every time she opens her mouth.

Voters ran for the hills, slowly moving on to other, newer unelectable candidates until finally settling for Mitt Romney. In the meantime, Bachmann’s flagging presidential campaign managed to rack up an impressive amount of campaign violations.

Shortly after the election, the FBI announced that Bachmann and her husband Marcus were currently under investigation for money laundering, wire fraud, and mail fraud. According to David Shuster at the Huffington Post, things do not look great for Bachmann’s defense that she was merely surrounded by incompetent staff and had nothing to do with the fraud personally:

According to sources close to the criminal investigation of Bachmann’s presidential campaign, the FBI has now been given sworn testimony and documents alleging Bachmann approved secret payments to Iowa state Senator Kent Sorenson in exchange for his help and support in that state’s 2012 Presidential caucuses. Ethics rules explicitly prohibit Iowa lawmakers from accepting payments from Presidential campaigns or PACs.

But it gets worse. Bachmann isn’t just a potential criminal (something which is not necessarily a dealbreaker for the Republican voter), she is also almost laughably unpopular in her own state. In 2012, her last election, Bachmann had to outspend her Democratic opponent 12-1 in order to beat him… by one percent. And that was in a district that is blood red. So red, in fact, that the Democratic party hardly bothered to help their candidate, Jim Graves, until the end when it dawned on them that Bachmann could possibly lose. In case a friend ever argues that “voting doesn’t matter,” Bachmann beat Graves by just 4,000 votes.

And as the Atlantic points out, Bachmann appears to have desperately wanted to be reelected. In May of 2013, around the time she would need to start campaigning, she paid for some initial television ads to help kickstart her campaign… then quietly scrapped them.

According to GOP strategists, the party was actively encouraging Bachmann not to run. The UK’s Daily Mail spoke to one, who dryly noted:

“Bachmann has a less than 50-50 chance of winning again, and she knows it,” that GOP strategist said. 

“She’s probably bowing out gracefully so the RNC has plenty of time to find another candidate. That way if she ever runs for office again – say, for governor of Minnesota – she won’t have to worry about bridges she burned.”

So as we take in Michele Bachmann’s farewell tour (she’s already hitting up the major networks for interviews), we should keep in mind that she is not leaving on her own terms. She has been ousted by her own vileness. As she puts together a campaign for her inevitable 2016 presidential run, we must never forget why she isn’t still in office in the first place.

Judge Hands Down Potentially Crushing Ruling Against Donald Trump In Racketeering Lawsuit

A civil racketeering lawsuit against Donald Trump can proceed as a class action, a federal judge has ruled, in a major incremental victory for a former student accusing him of running a bogus investment university.

The ruling by Judge Gonzalo Curiel means that a California businessman named Art Cohen can sue Donald Trump on behalf of anybody who bought seminars from Trump University after January 2007.

That lawsuit accuses Donald Trump and his university of violating federal racketeering law by scheming to defraud students into paying thousands of dollars for useless real estate investing classes.

Curiel's ruling is a big deal because it is generally not worth a lawyer's time to pursue a case like this on behalf of one person. Now, Cohen is representing thousands of people who were allegedly duped by Trump University, according to court documents filed by his attorneys.

Here's what Trump's lawyers said in a statement emailed to Business Insider: "We are taking action to immediately appeal the Court’s decision to certify a class in this case. However, we are confident that Mr. Trump will ultimately prevail on the merits once all the evidence is considered."

Trump University stopped operating in 2011 but has been the subject of continuous litigation. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Trump University last year for allegedly failing to deliver on promises to teach real estate investment techniques and defrauding students of $40 million.

Cohen also filed his suit last year after he allegedly spent $34,996 on Trump University's "Gold Elite" program. Trump misled students into believing they would learn investment secrets from both him and his "handpicked professors," the lawsuit claims. Instead, Cohen said, Trump had no real role in choosing instructors and didn't give students access to any of his real estate investing secrets.

"The misleading nature of the enterprise is embodied by its very name," the complaint said. "That is because, though Defendant promised 'Trump University,' he delivered neither Donald Trump nor a university."

Texas Governor Rick Perry Indicted On Felony Charges of Coercion and Abuse of Official Capacity Read more: http://www.towleroad.com/#ixzz3AVdE6h5g

In a move that might complicate Rick Perry's 2016 presidential ambitions, a grand jury in Texas has just indicted the long-time governor on two charges related to his effort last year to force District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg to resign after her drunken driving arrest.

Lehmberg [pictured], the first woman and first openly gay District Attorney in Travis County, runs the state’s Public Integrity Unit (PIU) which is charged with investigating wrongdoing by state officials. After her arrest and guilty plea for a drunk driving incident in April 2013, Perry called on her to resign and threatened to withhold $7.2 million in state money from the PIU if she refused.

Lehmberg refused and Perry carried through with his veto threat. The two felony charges, abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public official, stem from this.

The AP reports:

Several top aides to the Republican governor appeared before grand jurors in Austin, including his deputy chief of staff, legislative director and general counsel. Perry himself did not testify, though. 

Grand jurors indicted Perry on abuse of official capacity, a first-degree felony with potential punishments of five to 99 years in prison, and coercion of a public servant, a third-degree felony that carries a punishment of two to 10 years. [...] 

"I took into account the fact that we're talking about a governor of a state — and a governor of the state of Texas, which we all love," said Michael McCrum, the San Antonio-based special prosecutor. "Obviously that carries a lot of importance. But when it gets down to it, the law is the law."

The Austin-American Statesman continues:

Lehmberg supporters said Perry’s actions constituted political retribution; Many Republicans have said the Public Integrity Unit has unfairly targeted their party for prosecutions. The Travis County District Attorney’s office has for decades been led by Democrats, including Lehmberg.

As head of the PIU, Lehmberg was credited in 2010 with convicting U.S. House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay for money laundering. Had Lehmberg resigned after her arrest and conviction, Perry would have been able to name her replacement, likely a Republican. 

Austin's KXAN adds that an indictment indicates the grand jury believes the state has a strong enough case to send to trial and is not an admission of guilt. McCrum told reporters he plans to meet with Perry's attorneys on Monday.

Is Dallas Television Host Amy Kushnir The Daughter Of Scamvangelist Robert Tilton?

It appears that anti-gay Dallas television host Amy Kushnir, who is so terribly outraged by Michael Sam's kiss, is the daughter of legendarily disgraced scamvangelist Rev. Robert Tilton, whose multi-million dollar grifting empire first crumbled in the early 90s following an exposé by ABC News. Christian Nightmares points us to this 2011 post on the televangelists watchdog blog Snake Oil, which refers to Kushnir as "Amy Tilton Kushnir." 

None of available bios on Kushnir list the names of her parents so I did a little digging. 

Rev. Robert Tilton's first wife, to whom he was married during the ABC-spawned scandal, is named Martha and goes by the unusually spelled nickname Marte. Two weeks ago Kushnir posted a Facebook photo of her mother's birthday party and in the comments a friend of Kushnir's writes, "Happy birthday, Marte!"

Robert Tilton's mother, Margaret Ruth Tilton, died in 2006 and her obituary lists the scamvangelist and his current third wife among her survivors. Also listed is an Amy Tilton Kushnir and her husband Bill. The husband of the television host Amy Kushnir is indeed named Bill and his Facebook profile lists that he attended Oral Roberts University.

Fourteen years ago Charisma Magazine interviewed Marte Tilton and noted that she had four children with Robert Tilton, including a daughter named Amy, then aged 30. According toExplore Talent site, Dallas television host Amy Kushnir is 44 today. In a 2001 interview with the Dallas Morning News, Marte asked that paper not say where her children live, saying that they have "suffered a lot because of their last name." Marte and Rev. Tilton divorced in 1993, when the television host Amy Kushnir would have been 23.

That's an awful lot of possible coincidences, but if I've connected the dots properly, it's certainly understandable that Amy Kushnir wouldn't want the world to know about her infamous father. But it's rather illuminating if she indeed grew up in lavish mansions that were paid for by the then-estimated $80M conned annually out of old ladies by Rev. Robert Tilton, who is still in the scamvangelism game and was raking in $24M a year as recently as a few years ago.

VIDEO: I won't go into all the ways that Rev. Robert Tilton scammed his followers, there's plenty about that on hisWikipedia page. Let's just close this post with one of the dozens of truly infantile and utterly hilarious YouTube clips that mock him. Maybe an Amy Kushnir remix is called for.

How Wall Street Loots Public Pensions and Blames Shortfalls on the Government

Would you invest your money with someone who said that he would find some hedge fund managers and private equity partnerships to manage it but that the terms of the agreement to manage your money would be a secret?  No rational person would and that should have been the first clue that something was wrong with the way public employees’ pension funds were being managed.

The GOP loves blaming public employee pensions for budget shortfalls. But Wall Street hedge funds control, and profit from, $3 trillion in N.C. alone.

When Ted Siedle a former investigator for the Securities and Exchange Commission was hired to look into the North Carolina Teachers’ and State Employees’ Retirement System, the seventh largest public pension fund in the country he found that it was not the government which was directly responsible for the under-performance of the fund, it was the Wall Street money managers who had brokered a sweet deal for themselves at the expense of the hard-working state employees who were depending on that fund to be there for them in retirement.

Siedle’s report found that:

“Today, TSERS assets are directly invested in approximately 300 funds and indirectly in hundreds more underlying funds, the names, investment practices, portfolio holdings, investment performances, fees, expenses, regulation, trading and custodian banking arrangements of which are largely unknown to stakeholders, the State Auditor and, indeed, to even the (State) Treasurer and her staff.  As a result of the lack of transparency and accountability at TSERS, it is virtually impossible for stakeholders to know the answers to questions as fundamental as who is managing the money, what is it invested in and where is it?”

The terms of these agreements are designed to be a win/win for the managers handling them and because they are guaranteed their very lucrative fees have little incentive to avoid risky investments of other people’s money.

The TSERS pension fund is not alone, public pension funds across the nation are in similar situations, while those managing them are reaping huge fees the funds lose money or make minimal gains.  Since 2000 fees for managing these funds have rocketed upward by over 1,000%, nearly doubling since 2008 from $217 million to $416 million.

This is a fight over the control of $3 trillion and as long as the Wall Street operatives are able to continue to reap the profits while hiding behind the secrecy built into these agreements we may never know the whole story.

Republican Birther Gets Indicted on Fraud Charges and Blames President Obama

Here we have a fine example of modern day conservatives’ idea of “personal responsibility”.

The birther conspiracy artist and “author”, who humiliated Forbes by publishing a bit of Obama paranoia that strayed wildly from facts, known as Dinesh D’Souza has been indicted on fraud charges under federal campaign finance laws, after he allegedly funneled $20,000 to the Republican challenging Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) in 2012. He’s blaming President Obama.

Yep. D’Souza claims it’s all the President’s fault. His defense is that Obama is “targeting” him because he has said some really crazy things, according to the New York Times. It’s “political”:

Mr. Brafman (Benjamin Brafman, D’Souza’s lawyer) has filed court papers contending that the government “targeted” Mr. D’Souza “because of his consistently caustic and highly publicized criticism” of President Obama. The office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, declined to comment on the defense filing. But last week, it filed papers saying that a selective prosecution claim was “entirely without merit.”

Mr. Bharara’s office said Mr. D’Souza’s illegal conduct came to light as a result of a review by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office of campaign filings of both parties for the seat held by Senator Gillibrand, “rather than through any investigative focus on the defendant himself.”

Apparently “caustic ” is the new “total fabrication and paranoid rantings”. Mind you, this is the guy who called the President a “grown up Trayvon in the White House” so he’s clearly unable to think clearly due to frothing hatred. But here’s a bit of reality for the rest of you.

Rick Perry is Now the Focus of a Criminal Investigation

Rick Perry may be the latest in a long line of Republicans to find himself in serious trouble, following in Chris Christie‘s well-trodden footsteps.

According to The American Statesman, the Governor of Texas has lawyered up with a high-profile Austin defense attorney as accusations that Governor Perry illegally withheld money from the DA’s office gather steam. Perry landed himself in trouble when he attempted to withhold $7.5 million dollars of funding until the Democratic Travis County DA resigned — Perry pushed for her to resign after she was convicted of a DWI, and while the DA said that she wouldn’t be running again, she wouldn’t resign, either.

Perry allegedly withholding the money is illegal; a governor cannot withhold funding to force another elected official to resign. The DWI is a matter between the DA and the people who voted for her, and the actions of Rick Perry throw into question hundreds of criminal investigations.

Both Perry and Christie likely had dreams of running for the presidency in 2016, but these criminal allegations may very well have undone them both.

SCOTT LIVELY DENIES ANTI-GAY ROLE IN UGANDA, SAYS OBAMA MIGHT 'BE A HOMOSEXUAL

On Sunday, Britain’s Channel 4 profiled American evangelical hatemonger Scott Lively and his role in helping Uganda pass its brutal anti-gay law last month. 

Lively, who is currently running for governor of Massachusetts, is shown in the video linking gays to pedophilia, the Holocaust and Rwandan Genocide and calling President Obama a "homosexualist" who "may well be a homosexual himself."

But Lively maintains throughout the interview that his views and activism haven't contributed to any anti-gay hysteria in Uganda...

Putin's Criminal Olympics

In a blockbuster report released today, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny details the waste, fraud, and mismanagement behind the most expensive Olympics ever.

It was inevitable that Alexey Navalny would do something big with the Olympics. The opposition leader famous for his anti-graft muckraking—and put on show trial for bogus “embezzlement” charges—couldn’t let the biggest racket in Russian history pass without his own peal-back of corporate cronyism, cost inflation, and outright criminality. The upcoming 2014 Winter Games in Sochi is now estimated to have cost more than $50 billion, a price tag higher than the last 21 Winter Games combined and more expensive than any Summer Games ever held.  (The fact that Russia, a country associated with arctic temperatures, would hold an ice-and-snow competition in its warmest climate was a bit of an early giveaway of future book-cooking.) 

Today, Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption has launched an interactive website—which my magazine, The Interpreter, translated into English—outlining some of the juicier bits of Sochi waste and mismanagement. The names and figures behind each building, hotel, media center, and ski slope are detailed: who did the building, who paid for it, who really paid for it, and who got fired or indicted.

But the Foundation’s real service is adding meat on the bones of what most Russians already suspected. A poll taken last year found that two-thirds of the country is convinced that much of the money allocated for Sochi was either misused or “simply stolen.”

Federal Court Finds GOP Governor Violated Civil Rights Of Protesters

On December 16, 2013, a Federal Appeals Court judge ruled that South Carolina Governor Niki Haley violated the civil rights of protesters. The protesters, who gathered at the state’s capital building in 2011, were a spring off of the Occupy Wall Street movement. 19 protesters, who were a part of the group Occupy Columbia, were arrested without cause. The arrests occurred under the direction of the SC governor.

Gov. Haley ordered the arrest of Occupy members who did not break the law.

Haley ordered the arrest of protesters who were camping on the grounds. The arrests were made even though there was no law in SC that made it illegal for the group to set up camp. Seven members of the protest group filed suit against Haley for violating their first amendment rights. Attorneys for the protesters claimed that it was their message of income inequality that Haley didn’t like. They presented no danger and broke no laws. Haley’s attempts to quash the protests, as well as to silence the protester’s political speech, would not have taken place if the message had been one she agrees with, attorney’s stated in the suit. The protesters, whose hands were zipped tied, were taken to a detention center after the arrests. Charges against them were dropped shortly after.

The judge found that there was enough proof to show that the civil rights of protesters were infringed upon.

The recent ruling, which comes two years after the arrests were made, is being seen as a victory for civil rights. Although the ruling does not give restitution to the protesters at this time, it upholds their right to sue Gov. Haley and state officials involved in the arrests. In his ruling, the judge wrote that the protester’s civil rights were infringed upon by Gov. Haley, with the help of state officials, who were acting upon her orders. The ruling is further proof that while republicans often say they care about the Constitution, when civil rights get in the way of their agenda, they have no second thoughts about trampling them. The right to free speech and the right to assemble are protected by the US Constitution. Reps like Haley, who claim to care about constitutional rights, also have a habit of denying them, when it better serves their purpose.

Did the president order a crack down on the occupy protests, as some people claim?

Some Occupy protesters have pointed a finger at President Obama, claiming that he ordered a nation wide crack down on Occupy protests in 2011. In order to support this claim ‘journalists’ have cited documents that show that the FBI and other agencies were keeping tabs on the protest activity. Still there is nothing in those documents that suggests, even to a slight degree, that any federal agency ordered or even wanted the movement put down. Another ‘journalist‘ claimed he had secret. inside information from an unnamed source within the Justice Department. The source supposedly told him that the Department of Homeland Security was training state and local police to crack down on the Occupy protests. Speaking from a journalistic perspective, if I cannot track down the source of story and verify for myself that it is based on fact, I don’t give it a lot of weight. On the other hand, internal e-mails (that can be read with your own eyes) do show that President Obama did support the Occupy movement and that he requested that the civil rights of protesters not be infringed upon. There are several times that the president is known to have requested that state and local authorities not crack down on the protesters. If there was a national, coordinated effort to suppress the Occupy protest, the big question would be why did protests receive support in some parts of the country, while being openly attacked in others? With Haley and so many other Republican leaders being the loudest critics of both President Obama and the federal government, it’s unrealistic to think they wouldn’t be pointing the finger now, if federal agencies were involved in the crack downs.