Bachmann’s comments:

The American people overwhelmingly reject the government takeover of our health care. Last Friday a couple from Hawaii decided the time was so short they needed to get on a plane, come to Washington, to beg their representative to vote no — from Hawaii. What sacrifices freedom-loving Americans are making to get their government’s attention. And how big our government has gotten. They brought me this beautiful, precious lei and I’m reminded that the one who created this lei also created our freedom. Are we so insensible to the high cost our forebearers paid to purchase our freedom? Tonight, would we foolishly bargain those freedoms away? The American people, our forebearers, generations yet unborn are crying out to us tonight, for us to preserve their freedoms. Vote no on the government takeover of health care.

Both of Hawaii’s Members of Congress voted yes on the bill.

Here’s the video of Bachmann’s speech:

Another prop has prompted a demand from one of her colleagues in Congress that Bachmann apologize. Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) objects to signs depicting Holocaust victims that protesters brought to Bachmann’s rally against health-care reform last Thursday on Capitol Hill:

I just cannot believe that Congresswoman Bachmann sponsored and brought to the American people, the use of images from the Holocaust, actual photographs of the skeletal remains of people from the cremetoria, in order to make a point about the health insurance bill. I can’t believe that Congresswoman Bachmann would stand where she stood and see those images and not have the common decency to say, “I disagree with the use of those images.”

Photo: Graham Moomaw, The Washington Independent

There’s word that “Stunning” Steve King, congressman from Iowa, wants a Saturday reprise of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s “Superbowl of Freedom” rally against health care reform. Before a second “House Call” protest blurs memories of the original, here is a sampling of reportage from a pair of eyewitnesses to Bachmann’s achievement on Thursday.

The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein sought to mix freely with the folks Bachmann brought out, but he found his reporter’s notebook — and eventually, his sought-after business cards — gave him away:

On Thursday, I ventured down to Capitol Hill with a professional death wish. I was going to mingle with a group of tea partiers to get a sense of what, exactly, keeps their clocks ticking. For two-and-a-half hours, I got the Glenn Beck treatment — accused of, among other things, subverting freedom, working for a communist propaganda outlet, and having a soulless devotion to slander and scandal.

One woman picked up her items and moved away — taking her family with her — after I settled down on the Capitol’s front lawn. At another point a man, who seemed generally concerned about my safety, whispered in my ear: “You’re a sheep amidst the wolves in this crowd, son.”

And yet, a funny thing happened on the way to Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s (R-Minn.) “Super Bowl of freedom.” I was adopted — in a way — by a group of tea baggers. Sure, the politics they spoke seemed dripped in abject paranoia. But there was, at the very least, a sense of mutual respect. How else, after all, should one feel about people so devoted to a cause that they would skip work and travel hundreds of miles for a milquetoast protest?

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank asked if it didn’t “send the wrong message for House Republicans to hold an event on the Capitol grounds full of hateful and gruesome words and images,” noting in any case that it wasn’t technically a rally.

Technically, Thursday’s GOP-sponsored rally at the Capitol was a “press conference” (a Capitol Police spokeswoman explained that the lawmakers didn’t have a permit for a demonstration). The speakers took no questions at this news conference, instead calling, at least a dozen times, for the Pelosi bill’s death.

But, as with a similar rally by Democrats a week before, unpredictable things tend to happen in the wide-open spaces of the Capitol’s West Front. Minutes into the rally, a breeze toppled the American flag from the stage.

More ominously, a man standing just beyond the TV cameras apparently suffered a heart attack 20 minutes after event began. Medical personnel from the Capitol physician’s office — an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care — rushed over, attaching electrodes to his chest and giving him oxygen and an IV drip. This turned into an unwanted visual for the speakers, as a D.C. ambulance and firetruck, lights flashing, pulled in just behind the lawmakers. A path was made through the media section, and the patient, attended to by about 10 government medical personnel, was being wheeled away on a stretcher just as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stepped to the microphone. “Join us in defeating Pelosi care!” he exhorted. A few members stole a glance at the stretcher.

Photo: Graham Moomaw, Washington Independent

In headlining Thursday’s “House call” protest against health-care reform, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann was going rogue on her own party’s leaders, who had hoped to focus the day’s attention on their own 12-hour, online health-care “town hall.”

David Weigel, of the Washington Independent (a Minnesota Independent sister site) writes:

This isn’t a surprising turn of events. In the run-up to the Sept. 12 march on Washington, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) were surprise guests at a Sept. 10 rally outside the Capitol. That event was actually identical to this one–protesters fanned out after the rally to talk to their members of Congress. But the crowd at that rally was smaller and more controlled, with most protesters holding FreedomWorks signs that had been passed out. The crowd at this rally was far less on-message. By the end of the day, the images that made it out of the rally were of protesters waving signs comparing health care reform to the Holocaust, and the video that made it out of the protest was heavy on Bachmann — one of the people Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) seemed to be referring to in a cryptic October comment about how to deal with a “problem member” who keeps making news.

Photo: Graham Moomaw, The Washington Independent

The Minnesota Independent’s sister site, the Washington Independent, was on the scene Thursday for U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s “House Call” protest against health care reform at the U.S. Capitol.

Here is a video of the rally by TWI’s Graham Moomaw:

Update: This video clip by Moomaw features interviews with protesters:

And here is a slideshow of photos by Moomaw from the event:

The crowd’s chant of “Kill the Bill” was also heard in August from a more confined but no less riled group of protesters at U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum’s St. Paul office (MnIndy video post).

Photo: The Washington Independent

At least 10 individuals attending Rep. Michele Bachmann’s “House Call” event to protest health care reform have been arrested outside an office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The protesters were among the several thousand Tea Party activists that Bachmann invited to storm the Capitol on Thursday.

“They were inside an office and didn’t leave,” Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the Capitol Police told the Washington Post. They were being charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful entry.

Talking Points Memo contributor Christina Bellantoni described the “strange scene” where the the protesters were being loaded into transport vehicles.

Like a bad game of telephone, the crowd spread rumors without anyone having witnessed exactly what happened.

Several people said the group had been arrested for praying. Others said the group was arrested for ripping up pages from the nearly 2,000-page health care bill.

“This is America, this is not the Soviet Union,” one woman said.

That woman later told the officers, “I know you guys are just doing your job but don’t you hate your job?”

“I’m embarrassed,” another woman told her friends.

“Read your history books,” another woman shouted at the officers.

“Thugs from Chicago,” a man shouted at police.

“Arrest Nancy Pelosi for treason. You’re arresting the wrong people,” another shouted.

The full resolution is after the jump.

RESOLUTION

Expressing gratitude and appreciation to the individuals and families who participated in the Taxpayer March on Washington on September 12, 2009.

Whereas, on September 12, 2009, hundreds of thousands of American patriots, who refuse to sit idly by as the Federal Government advances skyrocketing deficits, taxpayer-funded bailouts, pork-barrel projects, burdensome taxes, unaccountable policy czars, command-and-control energy policy, and a government takeover of health care, came to Washington, DC, to show their disapproval;

Whereas individuals also wanted to convey their displeasure with the future tax increases that will be required to pay for deficit-financed spending;

Whereas these individuals understand that the fundamental American principles of limited government and personal liberty are under direct assault;

Whereas this dedicated group of freedom-loving Americans believe in open, accountable, responsible, constitutionally based government;

Whereas hundreds of buses, multiple caravans of cars from across the country, and many individually chartered flights, as well as thousands of lone-traveling cars and trucks, brought these patriots to Washington, DC, solely for this event;

Whereas these individuals endured considerable personal expense to get to the march, including transportation and lodging expenses, as well as lost wages in many instances;

Whereas estimates of the number of people who peacefully marched from Freedom Plaza to the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on September 12, 2009, range as high as 1,700,000 marchers;

Whereas all 50 States were represented in the march;

Whereas this event is considered to be the largest ever gathering of fiscal conservatives in Washington, DC;

Whereas special accolades are due to the grassroots citizens organizations across the country who helped individuals exercise their constitutionally protected First Amendment rights in the Nation’s capital; and

Whereas when the current trends of government expansion and freedom retrenchment are reversed, it will be due in large part to the efforts of the hundreds of thousands who marched on Washington, DC, on September 12, 2009: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives expresses its gratitude and appreciation to the hundreds of thousands of people who marched on Washington, DC, on September 12, 2009, to show their love of liberty and their grievance with recent government actions.

An appeal would mean another return trip to the city, an expensive proposition that already has cramped her campaigning style in the final weeks before the Nov. 3 election. Hill was set to fly in and out of Pittsburgh today so she could be back in Minneapolis for a Ward Three candidate debate Thursday at the University of Minnesota.

Pittsburgh was the site of a September meeting of leaders from the G-20 group of nations that drew sizable street protests — protests that Hill says she was only trying to cover as a journalist for Indymedia when police arrested her, damaged her camera and confiscated a video cassette.

Hill is on the Minneapolis ballot as a “Civil Disobedience” candidate. She was also arrested outside the Rage Against the Machine concert in downtown Minneapolis during the 2008 Republican National Convention (charges were dropped), and has coordinated several “End the Fed” demonstrations at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

Paktika Province, Afghanistan (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Micah E. Clare)

WASHINGTON — As President Obama and his advisers debate strategy for the Afghanistan war and its related crisis in Pakistan, a factor that so far has not intruded on their discussions is emerging: the antiwar movement is showing signs of strength.

In Congress and around the country, a segment of the progressive movement that helped elect Obama is coalescing around a critique of the eight-year war. That cohort, of unknown size as yet, is skeptical of an open-ended commitment; willing to provide Obama with friendly criticism; unwilling to accede to a second escalation of U.S. troops under the new administration; and searching for an exit strategy. Powerful progressive groups and members of Congress that quietly accepted Obama’s infusion of 21,000 new troops for Afghanistan this spring, however uncomfortably, are finding their footing to oppose the current one, even if they are not yet demanding fixed dates for troop withdrawals. It is unclear what effect they will ultimately have on the debate, but, buoyed by polls demonstrating the war’s unpopularity, they complicate Obama’s decisionmaking.

Progressives are “asking ourselves what we’ve not accomplished in last eight years that we could possibly accomplish over the next eighty,” said Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), a favorite of liberals and an opponent of the Afghanistan war, “and more and more, the answer is: nothing.”

That hope is frustrated by the present debate. For the past two weeks, cabinet-level officials and military commanders have met with the president at the White House to consider whether to continue with an expansive military-led effort in Afghanistan aimed at weakening al-Qaeda’s insurgent allies through bolstering the Afghan government or whether to focus the mission around harassing al-Qaeda directly in its tribal Pakistan safehaven. While officials have stated to reporters that all assumptions are subject to examination, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a joint appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday, said withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is not under consideration. That means the baseline resource commitment under discussion is 68,000 U.S. troops, the highest troop deployment America has ever sent to the beleaguered central-Asian country.

Grayson is hardly the only Afghanistan skeptic in Congress, even varieties of congressional skepticism are still inchoate within the Democratic caucus. After a meeting at the White House on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rolled her eyes when her Senate counterpart, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), pledged support for Obama’s ultimate decision. “Whether we agree with it, [and] vote for it, remains to be seen,” she said. Two days later, Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.), the chief House appropriator, called a counterinsurgency strategy “futile” and expressed doubt that the U.S. could reverse Taliban advances at acceptable cost.

In the Senate, Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) has called for a “flexible timetable” for withdrawal. While the influential Armed Services Committee chairman, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), remains a supporter of the war, he has balked at a call for a second troop increase this year, preferring to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces instead. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, also remains a cautious supporter of the war, although he has backed away from what he once called a “global counterinsurgency” by holding a series of recent hearings in which he raised probing questions about the prospects for successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

Late last month, the antiwar movement received an infusion of support from a pillar of the new progressive online infrastructure: MoveOn.org, the progressive netroots organization with over 5 million members, and a staunch ally of Obama’s. Despite staying largely out of the spring debate on escalation, MoveOn, which ardently opposed the Iraq war, began emailing supporters to urge the president to adopt a “clear exit strategy” for Afghanistan, and on Sept. 29, sent out a request to its members to host country-wide screenings for filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s antiwar documentary “Rethink Afghanistan.”

Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn’s director of political advocacy and communications, explained that the organization’s membership, so far, wanted “to understand what the plan is” in Afghanistan. “Escalation with no exit strategy is all too familiar to them” from the Iraq debate, Hogue said, as are policy prescriptions “ramrodded from hawks outside and inside” an administration. The overall decline in public support for the Afghanistan war is reflective of MoveOn’s supporters, Hogue added. Recent polls have found that only 47 percent of the country thinks the war is worth fighting, and up to 70 percent of Democrats oppose it.

Escalation in Afghanistan comes as an anomaly to many Democrats. Obama on Friday received an unexpected Nobel Peace Prize, yet he campaigned for the presidency on a platform of recommitting to the Afghanistan war and increased troop levels by almost half within weeks of taking office. “One of the reasons [progressives] supported his campaign is because they believe in his multilateral approach to foreign policy issues,” Hogue said, including an increased reliance on diplomacy and a “clear plan on the ground” for the war.

Accordingly, the Obama administration’s Afghanistan critics are reluctant ones. Hogue said the progressive pressure on him was “to support Obama” by ensuring that the drift over the war doesn’t overtake his broader agenda and so he can explain to the country “how he’s going to achieve goals, what we’ll achieve, and how we’re going to get out.” MoveOn’s supporters, like many Democrats, are not yet at the point of demanding a concrete date for withdrawal, preferring at this point to insist Obama articulate a plausible plan for Afghanistan that includes an exit strategy.

Similarly, Greenwald said he was encouraged by Obama’s Afghanistan strategy review, particularly as it, reportedly, begins to distinguish between al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies while setting the goals for the war. “Why would you occupy a country for 100 [al-Qaeda] evildoers? It just doesn’t make sense to me if security is primarily the issue for our country” in Afghanistan, the filmmaker said shortly after premiering his film in Washington D.C. last week. While Greenwald said he would like the review to be “tougher, smarter and broader,” he said he hoped it would address the “implicit assumption” that “sending more troops will help our country.”

Greenwald, who has worked with MoveOn on previous anti-Iraq war and Fox News-hounding projects during the Bush years, said it was “great to have the most effective, efficient, smartest and biggest online group working with us and using the film.” His documentary — much of which was shot in Afghanistan — had reached about 600 screenings in people’s homes and from student groups and unions in its first three weeks of full release, after being available in installments for months on his website and primarily not yet available in theaters.

The next steps, Greenwald said, would be to target screenings to progressive members of congress’ districts and “invite congressmen and -women and staffers to come to the screening.” At the screenings, he hopes to present members or their staffs with concrete figures about how the costs of the war, an estimated $228 billion over eight years, has impacted specific districts in terms of measurements like lost jobs.

It will not be easy to predict how the emerging antiwar movement impacts the president’s decisions, particularly as much of the overlapping progressive infrastructure views the healthcare reform fight as its primary effort — and there the Obama administration is a crucial ally. While MoveOn can “walk and chew gum at the same time,” Hogue said “I’m not going to lie to you, we’re in the middle of a huge health care fight” and MoveOn had placed “enormous resources into that.”

Yet Grayson and another beloved progressive member of Congress, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), attended Greenwald’s Washington premiere last Tuesday and spoke at a panel afterwards. “The war itself is destructive, not constructive,” Grayson said at the panel.

In an interview just after Obama’s Nobel Prize was announced, Grayson combined support for Obama with opposition to the war Obama may decide to escalate. “Logically,” he said, “if you win the Nobel Peace Prize then you’re a man of peace. I think ultimately the commander-in-chief will make up his mind to end the war and bring our troops home. I hope it happens sooner rather later but I think it’s inevitable. I don’t think we’ll be in Afghanistan in the year 2089.”

Spencer Ackerman is national security reporter for the Washington Independent.

Photo: Paul Demko, Minnesota Independent

Shortly after 10 a.m. on Monday two yellow school buses pulled up in front of the corporate headquarters of UnitedHealth Group in Minnetonka. Roughly 100 people, carrying signs that read “Health insurance reform now,” filed off the buses. A half dozen protesters then locked arms, sat down on the sidewalk and blocked the entrance to the office tower.

“We’re here today at UnitedHealth group to stop business as usual,” Tee McClenty, an emergency room technician at St. John’s Hospital in Maplewood, told the crowd. “Why? Big insurance has a lot to lose if bold reform happens this fall. And it needs to. We’ve waited too long and we need a public option now.”

UnitedHealth Group is the nation’s largest private health insurance company. It has drawn the ire of reform advocates by spending more than $600,000 per day on lobbying efforts in Washington, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The insurance firm has also been criticized for providing its top executive with lavish pay, including $744 million in stock options. The protest was organized by the nationwide coalition Health Care for America Now and was the third such event directed at UnitedHealth Group in recent weeks.

The Rev. Grant Stevenson, president of the social justice organization ISAIAH and pastor at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in St. Paul, also addressed the gathering.

“We know that if the insurance companies win, we lose,” Stevenson told the crowd. “There’s a choice to be made and Congress needs to be on our side. Congress needs to stand with you and with me and with the people that we care about. The insurance companies cannot continue to direct the way that health care is delivered and paid for in this country. It’s wrong.”

The assembled protesters then took turns explaining how the current health care system had failed their friends and family. “Business as usual is not working for people with preexisting conditions like my son,” said one gentleman. “Business as usual is not working for the millions of people who lost their jobs in the economic downturn,” added another woman.

After about 20 minutes, a half dozen squad cars from the Minnetonka Police Department arrived on the scene. When the six protesters blocking the entrance refused to voluntarily vacate the premises, the police handcuffed them and transported them to the Hennepin County Jail. They were cited for trespassing. Among those arrested were Julie Schnell, president of Service Employees International Union Healthcare Minnesota, and Anna Brelje, political director for the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation.

The neo-Nazi group, which up until late 2007 was headquartered in Minneapolis, announced it will protest the “More Than Skin Deep: Uprooting White Privilege and White Supremacy one cell at a time” workshop being held Saturday at the Midtown YWCA. The event “is for white people who already have an understanding of white privilege and white supremacy (WP/WS) and want to learn more about how to dismantle WP/WS through embodiment work, education, visioning and practical action.” Attendees will learn to “use critical race content and embodiment exploration to uproot ideologies of white supremacy and systems of white privilege in our lives.”

And workshop attendees will likely get a first-hand look at white supremacy if members of the NSM show up.

A number of counter-protests are planned for Saturday. “The NSM has been holding racist anti-immigrant rallies in southern Minnesota, and now they are seeking to establish a presence inside the City of Minneapolis,” reads a flier posted at the May Day Cafe in south Minneapolis. “They plan to bring their racist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, antisemitic message of division and hate right into the heart of the city. They must not go unopposed!”

On Wednesday, more than 100 Minneapolis residents attended an emergency meeting to develop strategies for the counter protest.

“We need to defend the vibrant, multi-ethnic diversity we have here in Minneapolis,” Dan Gannon, an anti-racist community organizer, said in a press release Friday. “Our city must remain a ‘no-go’ zone where white supremacists cannot organize or build a movement with their hate speech and violence.”

A Minneapolis resident who attended the meeting, Angelina Vazquez, said, “We’re not going to let this happen in our city. This is an attack on our multiracial, multicultural community. We refuse to be put under siege by violent right-wingers.”

Workshop organizers say they haven’t organized a counter-protest, but they’re happy the community is coming together to oppose the NSM.

Heather Hackman and Susan Raffo are organizing the YWCA workshop. “Susan and I are grateful that people are stepping up against these protesters,” said Hackman. “We are also very grateful for the support of the Y.”

“There are a number of people responding in a number of ways to this protest, and challenging racism and challenging white privilege,” she said. “It’s clear that this community is not going to stand for this.”

Hackman says the organizers will address the crowd at 10 am.

The Saturday protest will be followed by an NSM-organized rally “against illegal aliens and communism” at the Veteran’s Memorial in Austin, Minn., on Oct. 17, according to the group’s Web site.