Photo: Simon Stromberg

About 1,000 people gathered at the Minnesota State Capitol lawn Saturday to hear Rep. Michele Bachmann speak out against health care reform. Billed as the “Kill the Bill Rally,” Bachmann railed against a “government takeover” of all aspects of the economy and compared Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.

“Some have called President Obama the first post-American president,” Bachmann said. “Certainly this health care bill would be our first postmodern legislation where words mean absolutely nothing.”

While other speakers took the podium, Bachmann was easily the crowd favorite, and her supporters waved signs reading “Obama Lies, Babies Die,” “Damn this federal government to hell,” “Obama bin Lyin’” and “The citizens must declare war on their immoral, corrupt, Marxist government.”

“Obama’s idea is for Pelosi to pass a bill and have her members vote on something they never voted for. Sounds more like a Chavez tactic in Venezuela,” said Bachmann. “We have a duty to resist tyranny. This isn’t a joke. They can’t do this. The government is working against us. They are not working for us, and they got it all backwards. They work for us. We don’t work for them.”

“All I am doing in Washington is my job. And I’m in trouble every day of the week in the media in Minnesota, but it’s because I’m doing my job!” Bachmann said.

Bachmann praised veterans both past and present. “And these men had guts our founders, these were no pantywaist wusses, and neither are we by the way!”

She continued to rail against Pelosi and Obama. “They don’t scare us. They aren’t going to take our country. This is dictatorial is what they are doing.”

Bachmann wasn’t the only politician at the rally. Rep. John Kline gave brief introductory remarks. Congressional candidate Barb Davis White, addressed the crowd, while gubernatorial candidates Tom Emmer and Marty Seifert stood on stage alongside Bachmann.

Bachmann wrapped up her 27-minute speech by saying, “Mark my words, the American people are not going to take this lying down. We aren’t going to play their game. We aren’t going to pay their taxes.”

The UpTake recorded Bachmann’s full speech:

Bachmann said that she and her fellow “patriots” are pushing back against Democrats and health care reform:

“[W]e reject what they want, this centralized government approach, and what we want is no backroom deals, no political favoritism, no doing a bill behind closed doors. You read the thing before you actually vote on it. Some very simple things: don’t add to the crushing debt, don’t add to the state crushing debt.”

Listen:

The Minnesota congresswoman’s rallying cry, “It’s the charge of the light brigade!” drew mockery from politico-literary critics in America and in Tennyson’s homeland. That’s because the poem depicts one of the great military snafus of all time, with British soldiers showing courage as they faced certain slaughter by following misguided orders.

Here is Bachmann’s full-throated literary reference, via Talking Points Memo:

But maybe bravery bordering on foolishness is what Bachmann wants from her followers, as indicated by what she told Sean Hannity Monday about the fight against health care reform on his Fox News TV show: ”What this shows is the temerity of the American people.”

Did she mean “tenacity” — persistence in seeking a shared goal? That’d make more sense, since “temerity,” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “unreasonable or foolhardy contempt of danger or opposition.” But that’s not what she said.

And the crowd ate it up: Bachmann drew the biggest applause of the day.

Watch Bachmann speak in these two YouTube videos shot from within the crowd. Neither is high quality but both capture the feeling of the anti-health care reform forces on the apparent eve of the legislation’s passage. The first one has poor sound but shows Bachmann at about the 4:50 mark:

The second video has better sound, beginning at about the 2:15 mark, although Bachmann isn’t visible:

Photo: bachmann.house.gov

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann urged her supporters to fight health care reform by calling Congress “every day, when you wake up in the morning and comb your hair and take your vitamins.”

Democrats are purposely pushing health care legislation at holiday time, Bachmann charged during a nationwide conference call Thursday. “It’s intentional that they’re doing this at Christmas time and Hannukah.”

“We’re going to kill socialism,” Bachmann vowed during the call, which was hosted by the Republican National Committee. “They can’t have our country. We’re not going to let them win.”

Electric moment

Bachmann warned that “senior citizens have the most to lose. … Senior citizens are going to be told ‘no’ an awful lot more. There will be rationing of health care. … We have to work hard and pray hard. It’s a far easier task to hit these senators hard now [than to repeal health care reform later].”

Bachmann credited her rally on the U.S. Capitol steps last month with giving Republicans in the Senate confidence to resist health care reform. “I went on Sean Hannity’s show and asked people to come,” she recalled. “This was wildly successful. We had over 20,000 Americans [who came on their own]. I didn’t organize a bus or a car. … It was an electric moment.”

After the rally, the “heroes” who attended went to their representatives’ offices, she said, and “looked at members of Congress with the whites of their eyes. … They were quaking in their boots. It sent a huge signal to the Republicans in the Senate.”

“It’s not inevitable that this is going through. I’m not just puffing smoke here,” she said.

Pollyanna enough

Also not inevitable: Republicans regaining the House in 2010. ”I am Public Enemy Number One for [Speaker] Nancy Pelosi to defeat next year,” Bachmann announced. “We have to win 40 seats back. … I have to raise $4 million to come back here. It’s a huge hill to climb, but it’s very possible.

“Then two years later we have to win back the presidency,” she said. That will require “a bold conservative who would campaign on repealing this health care bill. … The road will be very, very difficult to turn it around. I am Pollyanna enough to think that anything’s possible.”

“Lifeblood is awake”

Turning the tide will require more than Republicans alone. ”The lifeblood of this country is conservatism and that lifeblood is awake,” said Bachmann. “[It's a coalition of] libertarians, Ron Paul people, Constitution Party. We may agree on 70 percent [of issues]” — and that’s enough, she said.

Several times she stressed that the Republican Party was the appropriate vehicle for that movement: “We can do this through the Republican Party. We can agree to disagree. … The way back is through the Republican Party.”

“The number one thing is to fight right now the government takeover of our economy.”

To illustrate the scope of that takeover, she cited “an economist from Arizona State University” who calculated that by January 2009, government had already taken ownership or control of 30 percent of our economy. “Now if President Obama gets his way with health care, that’s an additional 18 percent of the economy” — for a total of 48 percent. Cap and trade would add another 8 percent, for 56 percent total. Rep. Barney Frank’s bill that the Financial Services Committee votes on tomorrow would raise that another 15 percent for a grand total of 69 percent, she calculated.

“It isn’t within our lifetime that we’ve gone to socialism,” Bachmann said. “It’s within 18 months!”

Children not slaves

“I’m not going to let our 5 biological children and our 23 foster children [live] as slaves going forward,” Bachmann said, quickly adding that she didn’t mean to belittle actual slavery. She warned: “We will be economic slaves to this federal government. … President Obama has put us in a dangerous place economically. We will be dead flat broke in eight years.”

“These people are not connected to reality,” she said, claiming few in the Obama administration have private-sector experience. She quoted Obama as saying, “We’ve got to spend our way out of the recession,” and questioned how someone making $20,000 a year could spend $30,000 a year. “We have a great story to sell — to tell people.”

“President Obama is burying us in debt, literally,” she said. “You can’t drink yourself sober. If you’re trying to lose weight, you can’t eat yourself thin. … Normal people have figured this out.”

The RNC Eight are greeting that news as a victory.

In a statement, co-defendant Luce Guillen-Givins said, ”This is an affirmation from Judge Warner of what we’ve argued all along: that separation for trial would have undermined the interest of justice in this case. Our best defense comes through standing in solidarity with each other, both inside and outside of the courtroom.”

Ramsey District Court Judge Teresa R. Warner “saw through” Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner’s bid for multiple trials that would increase chances for a conviction, said Bob Kolstad, attorney for co-defendant Nathanael Secor.

No trial date has yet been set.

In other rulings, Warner granted some defense requests for information about the evidence against them, but denied a request for disclosure of evidence from seized personal computers in accessible format, according to the RNC Eight.

Last April, Gaertner’s office dropped terrorism charges against the eight.

End the Fed rally last April. Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

Minnesota’s End the Fed group has something to celebrate Sunday as they march on the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s effort to audit the Fed passed in the House Financial Services Committee last Thursday.

Six of Minnesota’s members of Congress are among 313 co-sponsors to Paul’s bill: Republicans Michele Bachmann, John Kline and Erik Paulsen, and Democrats Jim Oberstar, Collin Peterson and Tim Walz.

Bachmann and Paulsen serve on the House Financial Services Committee and voted in favor of the amendment Thursday, which passed 43-26. Democrat Keith Ellison is also on the committee; he voted no.

Organizer Melissa Hill said she expects “a couple hundred” people to turn out for the local End the Fed group’s fourth rally at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank in the last year.

For the first time they will gather elsewhere — at 11:30 a.m. at Loring Park on the other side of downtown — before marching (on sidewalks) to a 12:30 p.m. rally the Fed building on the Mississippi riverfront.

Hill says the Minnesota group tries to be nonpartisan and is not affiliated with the conservative Tea Party movement. “We lean a little more toward the left” than other End the Fed groups nationally, she said.

For Hill, the march comes on the heels of losing her race as a “Civil Disobedience” candidate to incumbent DFLer Diane Hofstede in Minneapolis’ city council election. And she is still the target of criminal proceedings in Pittsburgh, where she is appealing a charge of  disorderly conduct arising from the recent G20 economic summit there.

Ending the Federal Reserve (a move for which Paul also has a bill pending) would, Hill says, mean getting control of the nation’s money supply again  – “in our control instead of behind shadowy doors.”

A more politically progressive protest kicked off the string of demonstrations at the Minneapolis Fed in late September 2009, when groups (including ACORN) protested federal bailouts for Wall Street financial firms without similar aid for homeowners threatened with foreclosure on Main Street (video).

Donald McFarland, who spoke at that rally, told MnIndy those groups had no affiliation with the End the Fed protests.

A few weeks earlier, during the 2008 Republican National Convention, Ron Paul himself made an appearance at the Minneapolis Fed’s plaza at the culmination of a Green Bay-to-Minneapolis “Walk for Freedom” — which some people call the beginning of the national End the Fed movement, Hill says.

After late-August protests, Cleveland and Filson were put on leave from their jobs. Photo: Andy Birkey, MnIndy

Anoka-Hennepin School District 11 teacher Diane Cleveland filed a lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) in Ramsey County District Court Monday, alleging that earlier this summer it wrongly disclosed that she had been accused of harassing a student over his perceived sexual orientation.

Cleveland and another teacher, Walter Filson, who worked at the Secondary Technical Education Program (STEP), which gives 11th and 12th graders the opportunity to receive college credit, allegedly made jokes, comments and innuendos about former student Alex Merritt’s supposed sexual orientation. The teachers were put on unpaid leave, while the case, which received plenty of media attention and public outcry, concluded with a $25,000 settlement agreement in August 2009 between the district and Jodi Merritt, Alex’s mother.

The 28-page complaint (pdf) against the human rights department, which states that she was “portrayed in a negative fashion,” contends that MDHR violated some parts of the Minnesota Human Rights Act (363A.01 et. al.) and the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, Chapter 13, when it printed her name online and provided the summary investigation, which names her, to the Star Tribune.

Cleveland’s attorney, Philip Villaume, said the case centers on her right to privacy. “The law is complicated, but the allegations are simple,” he said.

In the original complaint Cleveland wasn’t a respondent but a witness, so the department “did not have the right to use her name … It violated the confidentiality part of the settlement.”

The original charging documents don’t mention her by name and she was never interviewed by MDHR. That she’s a public employee doesn’t factor into it, he said.

Villaume declined to comment about why the other teacher isn’t a plaintiff in the case, whom he added he doesn’t represent. A press release from Villaume’s office states: “Plaintiff stresses that this action has absolutely nothing to do with the minor child’s complaint filed with the MDHR, only the release of private data by the MDHR.”

Cleveland wants a restraining order and an injunction “restraining the Defendant from publishing her name on their website or dissemination of any information relating to the Plaintiff effective until a trial on the merits of this case,” according to the complaint. She’s also seeking $50,000 in damages, including lost wages, anxiety, humiliation, pain, suffering, mental anguish attorneys’ fees and more.

Jeff Holman, spokesman for the state human rights department, passed on a response from MDHR legal affairs manager, Michael K. Browne, who said that the department acted lawfully under the Minnesota Human Rights Act.

“The Commissioner has a duty to eliminate discrimination through education,” he said, adding that she has the authority to choose the most effective means. “The Department publishes information on closed cases and settlement agreements on its web site, as it did in this case, to fulfill its legislative mandate to educate Minnesotans about their rights and responsibilities under the Act.”

Further, under the law, he said, information is public once a case is closed. MDHR is required to release certain documents upon request.

“The charge included the names of those involved, including teacher Diane Cleveland; refusing to release the charge, or withholding any part of it, would potentially violate the Act,” he said.

Local data practices expert Donald Gemberling said the human rights commissioner has some latitude in releasing information for educational purposes, “showing people how to not get into trouble with the Human Rights Act,” he said.

But he’s unsure if it’s ever been tested.

“The fact that someone is not a respondent is an interesting argument,” he said, adding that it seems well within the department’s authority to do what it did. Sometimes settlement agreements include a provision for confidentiality, but it has no legal effect. “Settlements are public if they involve government entities,” he said.

Many aspects of the data practices law are black and white, but how information about public employees gets handled is murkier. It’s unclear how information flowed from the school district to the state department. Normally, when a department has some leeway in instances like this, “the judge favors the department,” Gemberling said.

CREW’s Matt Jacob told the Minnesota Independent that House members aren’t supposed to use their congressional websites to urge public action on behalf of or against pending legislation.

In its letter (pdf) CREW cited this House rule:

The content of a Member’s Web site … [m]ay not include grassroots lobbying or solicit support for a Member’s position.

Bachmann’s website, CREW says, urged “[t]he people” to travel to Washington, D.C. “and tell their Representatives to vote no to a governmental take-over of one-fifth of our economy.”

Bachmann announced the Nov. 5 “House Call” rally on Fox News on Oct. 30. That left enough time for Bachmann to meet the five-day lead time required to apply for a permit for an event on the Capitol grounds, according to a U.S. Capitol Police guidelines that CREW includes in its supporting documents (pdf).

CREW’s complaint doesn’t cover another apparent aspect of Bachmann’s official efforts as impresario of the Capitol-steps anti-health care rally. According to the Savage (Minn.) Pacer newspaper, Bachmann’s staff helped a man not from her congressional district to find a nearby bus from Eden Prairie, Minn. headed to Washington, D.C. for the rally:

So he called the Savage Chamber of Commerce trying to get a carpool together of other interested business owners. No one contacted him, so he began asking friends and other business owners and then contacted Rep. Michele Bachmann’s office where he found out about the buses leaving Eden Prairie.

The OCE is a newly formed body that has been on the receiving end of sniping from the longer-in-the-tooth but slow-off-the-mark House Ethics committee. Jacob told MnIndy the tally of CREW’s complaints to the OCE is so far “not a huge number.”

Both complaints involved Bachmann’s Nov. 5 rally against health-care reform in front of the U.S. Capitol.

Israel, of New York, used YouTube to voice his displeasure with prominent protest signs at the Bachmann event depicting Holocaust victims. A statement Bachmann released this week contains an apology of a sort.

On his TV show, Stewart took Hannity to task for inserting footage from another, larger rally into scenes from Bachmann’s event. Here’s Stewart’s take on Hannity’s sort-of apology.

Media Matters has a rundown of Fox’s past video trickery.

Here is Hannity’s original Fox News segment about Bachmann’s rally:

Update: On Wednesday’s show, Hannity acknowledged that Fox used the wrong footage.