But Franken isn’t backing down. His spokesperson Jess McIntosh said reform must happen now.

“We know what went wrong with Wall Street’s credit rating system — conflicts of interest eroded it by rewarding cozy relationships instead of accuracy,” McIntosh said in a statement. “And we know how to fix it — the Franken amendment that passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support,” she said.

“You can be sure that if such a study came back, it would confirm the conflicts of interest. It just makes more sense to end the delay and instate the reform now.”

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank

On two days over the weekend, Tea Party Patriots hurled anti-gay epithets at Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the openly gay chair of the House Financial Services Committee. The insults came as several black members of Congress had racial slurs shouted at them as they headed into the Capitol and one Tea Partier spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo. Frank said that Republicans should distance themselves from the Tea Party activists and he laid much of the blame with Rep. Michele Bachmann.

On Saturday, Frank told TPM:

I do think the leaders of the movement, and this was true of some of the Republicans last year, that they think they are benefiting from this rancor. I mean there are a couple who–you know, Michele Bachmann’s rhetoric is inflamatory as well as wholly baseless. And I think there are people there, a few that encourage it.

“If this was my cause, and I saw this angry group yelling and shouting and being so abusive to people, I would ask them to please stop it,” Frank added. “I think they do more harm than good.”

Among the epithets shouted at Frank were “faggot” and “Homo Communist,” and one protester told him to “go homo to Massachusetts.”

Frank told the Hill this weekend, “Any movement in which the intellectual leader is Michele Bachmann is obviously going to be problematic.”

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.”

Frank recently introduced a bill to “use amounts made available under the Troubled Assets Relief Program of the Secretary of the Treasury for relief for homeowners and neighborhoods.” Described as a neighborhood stabilization program, the funds would go to help depressed communities hit hard by the foreclosure crisis.

But Bachmann sees an evil scheme to give money to ACORN.

“Now Barney Frank thinks that [TARP funds] should go out to his friends in ACORN,” she told Sean Hannity. “He is serious about this, about funneling this little bit of money back out to ACORN.”

That little bit of money? “This would be an additional $1.5 billion for ACORN,” she said. “And don’t forget, in over 12 states so far this year ACORN has been indicted for voter fraud.”

The bill itself never mentions ACORN. In fact, it specifically spells out who gets the money [emphasis added]:

the Secretary of the Treasury shall transfer $1,500,000,000 to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and such Secretary shall use such amounts for assistance to States and units of general local government for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes

Bachmann’s claim that ACORN is “under indictment” in 12 states in 2009 for “voter fraud” is also grossly inaccurate. Former ACORN employees have been brought under indictment this year in several states including Pennsylvania and Missouri, but so far this year only Nevada has indicted the actual organization.

And ACORN has not been accused of voter fraud. They are accused of voter registration fraud. Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller told the New York Times, “This is not a case of voter fraud, it’s a case of voter registration fraud. I’m very confident that none of these fraudulent voter forms found their way into the voter registration rolls or to cast votes.”

The full interview:

Photo: C-SPAN3

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann — famous for urging the media to expose anti-Americans in Congress – did her own probing today, pressing AIG CEO Edward Liddy for names of her colleagues who had foreknowledge of AIG’s controversial bonus payments. “Did any members of Congress know anything about the bonuses?” asked Bachmann. Yes, Liddy responded –  at least some were aware of “the obligation to pay the bonuses.”

But he didn’t name names for Bachmann, any more than he did earlier when Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) asked Liddy for names of the AIG executives who got bonuses.

Bachmann’s interrogation went like this:

Which members of Congress or staff knew about this and when?

Any members of the administration who knew about this?

Did any members of Congress know anything about the bonuses?

Could you be responsive about which members of Congress knew?

Liddy said he didn’t know but promised to try to find out for her.

Bachmann’s five minutes of questioning came toward the end of a long day of testimony from Liddy and an earlier panel of witnesses before the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises.

Bachmann, a member of the committee, appeared to be in attendance for the full hearing. Her questioning was measured in tone and lacked the incendiary word choice of other committee members, who shouted “Damn!” and warned Liddy of legislation that would be worse for AIG than waterboarding.

At one point, Rep. Paul Kanjorski (DR-Pa.) banged his gavel and threatened protesters from the group Code Pink with expulsion from the hearing room unless they surrendered their signs. Frank lightened the mood by expressing relief — after seeing how Kanjorski dealt with the signs — that the protesters weren’t wearing the slogans on their shirts.

Here is video from Bachmann’s questioning of Liddy:

A club member nominated McCollum for daring to suggest health care is a right:

I’d like to nominate Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota’s 4th District. Fortunately she’s not my Congressman, but last week she introduced H.J. Res. 4, which proposes a Constitutional Amendment decreeing health care is a Constitutional right. It’s clear that McCollum doesn’t understand economic liberty. Nothing can be considered a “right” when obtaining that right strips the rights from someone else. The text of her resolution can be found here.

But since the election, Republicans have made several high-profile mentions of things urban — urban myths and legends, that is. In exit interviews, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have three times invoked the phrase “urban myth” or “urban legend” — picking up on Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s use of “urban legend” to discount reports of her own statements, as quoted verbatim or shown in video clips, regarding anti-American attitudes in Congress.

Vice President Cheney, on Jan. 7, 2009, said about allegations that he made decisions for President Bush: “This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened.”

President Bush, on Dec. 17, 2008, said about torture and wiretapping: “There’s a lot of urban myths about certain decisions I have made. But when the truth comes out and people will say, ‘Oh, I see what he did.’”

President Bush, on Dec. 16, 2008, said about not listening to opinions on Iraq from outside his inner circle: “I’ve heard all kinds of voices. There’s urban myths in Washington, D.C., and, you know, of course I listened.”

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, on Nov. 18, 2008, said about her televised statements calling for an investigation of anti-American views held by her colleagues in Congress: “It’s an urban legend that was created. That isn’t what I said at all.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, “The speaker had to give a partisan voice that poisoned our conference, caused a number of members that we thought we could get to go south.”

Pelosi’s speech chastised the Bush administration for its part in the economic crisis, something Boehner said was responsible for them abandoning conviction and switching their vote.

But Bachmann flatly rejected Boehner’s rationale. “I want to assure you that was not the case. We are not babies who suck our thumbs. We have very principled reasons for voting no,” reported Roll Call Monday evening.

Her comments were almost identical to those of Democratic leaders. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said, “Here’s the story: There’s a terrible crisis affecting the American economy. We have come together on a bill to alleviate the crisis. And because somebody hurt their feelings they decide to punish the country.”