A conservative PAC aligned with U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential bid is targeting Texas Gov. Rick Perry on immigration in a spate of radio ads starting Tuesday in South Carolina.

The ads by Keep Conservatives United (KCU) paint Perry as being soft on illegal immigration and says “illegals take jobs.”

The radio ads supplement two television ads that have been running in the state in support of Bachmann since mid-August.

“The ad shows voters in next year’s critical South Carolina primary the clear differences between Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry on illegal immigration,” Bob Harris of KCU said in a statement on the website. “It will reach a politically attuned audience for a week to build support for Bachmann.”

The PAC has been airing two television ads targeting Perry. One targets his spending:

Another ad accuses Perry of embracing President Bush:

Bachmann, of course, has been the target of ads that poke fun at her embrace of President Bush:

Previously, employers could decline and surviving same-sex partners would have to pay tax on the inheritance of the deceased partner’s retirement savings. Legally married heterosexual couples automatically avoid that tax penalty.

National LGBT rights groups hailed the move. “This legislation secures much-needed protection for lesbian and gay couples,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “Our community faces unique challenges in preparing for retirement because we are denied Social Security spousal and survivor benefits. Protecting our hard-earned retirement savings is even more crucial to us, and until now, the tax code made it that much harder.”

“I’ve been willing to be a strong reformer in Washington, D.C., and take on my own party, including the bailout,” Bachmann said. She told an Associated Press reporter that she has “taken on the president” and was not running away from Bush, but she did try to tie her DFL challenger El Tinklenberg to Bush.

“He is more in line with President Bush’s policies than I am,” Bachmann said of Tinklenberg.

In 2007, video of Bachmann lingering on President Bush’s shoulder and giving him a kiss during the State of the Union Speech made waves in Minnesota media. Bachmann is done kissing Bush it seems, but she’s not done kissing presidents.

“If the presidency would somehow go to Barack Obama, I would welcome him to the 6th District as well,” Bachmann said to reporters after the debate. “As a matter of fact, I would put my hand on his shoulder and give him a kiss if he wanted to.”

“The president and his advisors undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the [Sept. 11] attacks to use the war against al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,” Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.V., wrote in a commentary on the report. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises.”

Here are some of the report’s key findings:

• Statements and implications by the president and secretary of state suggesting that Iraq and al Qaeda had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al Qaeda with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the president and the vice president indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the president and vice president prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• The secretary of defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the vice president repeatedly claimed.

In 2000, the proportion of those who felt they were worse off financially than the year before was only 22 percent. By 2001, after Bush’s first year in office, that number jumped to 36 percent, with 53 percent believing the economic conditions in the country were getting worse.

As USA Today notes, such a weak economic outlook has led voters in the past to oust the political party in the White House. Ironically, another Gallup Poll notes what that organization calls an “inexplicable” jump in America’s overall optimism: Two-thirds of Americans believe the U.S. will be better off five years from now. The level of collective optimism is the highest it’s been in four years.

Despite the lack of attention it’s received of late, violence continues to escalate in the region. Both the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs release new numbers every week regarding deaths, casualties, and VA patients. Below is a breakdown of the current toll of the Iraq War.

Minnesota deaths: 60

Minnesota casualties: 502

Total confirmed U.S. deaths as of May 16, 2008:: 4,077

Number of deaths since Jan 1, 2008: 162

Total listed as wounded in action as of May 3, 2008: 30,004

Number evacuated due to injury or illness: 32,248

Number of soldiers from both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to suffer from a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): More than 320,000, or about 20 percent of all soldiers deployed, nearly all which are not listed as WIA by the DoD and are only diagnosed later.

Number of vets diagnosed with PTSD: 300,000, or about 18 percent of all soldiers deployed.

Sources: Department of Defense, the Associated Press, Veterans for Common Sense, icasualties.org

Mary Gade became administrator of EPA Region 5, which covers Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, in September 2006. Gade began pressuring Dow about long-delayed plans to remove dioxin-contaminated soil from a 50-mile swath of land. A recent story from the Associate Press succinctly explains Dow’s dioxin legacy in Michigan:

Continued: Click “Read more”

More than a century after Dow Chemical Co. began dumping dioxins into a river flowing past its mid-Michigan plant, the company and regulators are still debating how to cleanse a swath of waters and wetlands that now reaches 50 miles to Lake Huron.

Dow acknowledges tainting the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers, their floodplains, portions of the city of Midland and Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay with dioxins — chemical byproducts believed to cause cancer and damage reproductive and immune systems.

After spending $40 million studying the soil and dioxin contamination, Dow Chemical has yet to agree to a plan of action. Some local residents are pursuing a lawsuit against Dow.

“There is no question this is about Dow,” Gade told the Chicago Tribune. “I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I’m proud of what we did.”

Gade was also a force when plans for a massive expansion BP’s Whiting, Ind., refinery created a public firestorm. The proposed facility would have exceeded many federal and state pollution standards, though government efforts to secure an exemption were thwarted.

Great Lakes author and blogger Dave Dempsey had worked with Gade on a project coordinated by the Michigan Environmental Council. Upon hearing of her ouster, Demspey wrote, “I know her to care about the public trust, public health and the air and water. She’s also a Republican (if a moderate one). It’s clear that her willingness to enforce the laws against a recalcitrant polluter was too much for the White House.”

The day began as Kissinger was welcomed to the Minneapolis Convention Center by a few dozen protesters accusing him of genocide. Kissinger was then introduced by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who apparently did not accuse him of war crimes. Finally, Kissinger’s speech, which was filled with effusive praise for President Bush, was interrupted three times during the evening by even more protesters who had signed up to volunteer for the event in lieu of paying the $150 to $2,500 cost of admission. Kissinger is often accused of war crimes for past U.S. policies in Vietnam, Chile, East Timor and other countries around the world, but has never stood trial.

While Minnesota Monitor was unable to obtain a transcript of either the governor’s introduction or Kissinger’s speech, an account of the event in the Star Tribune by Eric Black and Kavita Kumar offers up a few nuggets of wisdom that have not quite held up to the test of time.

“Anyone who has seen the president in action knows he will fulfill the goals he has set for himself. …

“I am convinced history will record that President Bush saved not only America’s security but the world’s prospects for progress by the courage with which he faced those challenges.”

In a message delivered shortly after the disruption, the rabble-rousing protesters explained why they had taken action and gave security at the convention center a positive review.

To get in the news, you have to make news. The cost to ourselves was minimal, aside from the time to plan and carry out the action. I admit to being very nervous, and we were prepared for the possibility of arrest. But we were just dumped outside on the sidewalk, with no further consequences. To be fair, the security people were very quick and effective, but they were not unnecessarily rough. I would strongly recommend that others take advantage of similar opportunities in the future.

Good news, folks: John Bolton will be the keynote speaker at this year’s event.

“If Congress is truly interested in solving the problem, they can send the right signal by saying we’re going to explore for oil and gas in the U.S. territories, starting with ANWR,” Bush declared. “We can do so in an environmentally friendly way.”

The president’s enthusiasm for drilling underneath the placid wilderness of northern Alaska makes it seem as if ANWR is the best, or only, source of domestic oil currently available, but this is far removed from reality. Bush made no mention of the oil and oil shale reserves in Colorado and North Dakota.

North Dakota has been a small oil producing state for many years. Prior estimates of proven petroleum reserves in the state were a little over 400 million barrels. But the U.S. Geological Survey recently reported that the amount of recoverable oil in North Dakota’s Bakken Formation is now estimated at 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels, though past independent analysis has put that number as high as 300 billion barrels.

The Rocky Mountains are also an emerging source of recoverable oil. A 2005 study conducted by the Rand Corporation at the behest of the U.S. Department of Energy revealed, “oil-shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming have technically recoverable reserves of 500 billion to 1.1 trillion barrels of oil. The estimate – 800 billion barrels – is three times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves and enough to meet 25 percent of current U.S. oil demand for 400 years.”

And while the emphasis has been on domestic sources of energy, the Athabascan Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada have an estimated 173 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil and proven reserves approaching 1,700 billion barrels.

For comparison, the total US petroleum reserves as of 2006 was approximately 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Estimates suggest that there are somewhere between 5.7 and 16 billion barrels or recoverable oil in the area around ANWR. If drilling was approved today, oil from ANWR would not reach the market for 10 years and have little to no effect on current gasoline prices.

While conservationists fight to protect ANWR, environmentalists have raised concerns about the amount of energy and fresh water required to extract crude oil from shale or bitumen. The rapid growth of the petroleum industry and the energy-intensive extraction process have resulted in proposals for the Athabascan oil sands to have their own nuclear power plant, an idea that most find counter-intuitive. But the dramatic price increases, which have nearly tripled the cost of a barrel of crude in just seven years, has made the extraction of oil from shale a profitable venture.

The complete number of nonfatal casualties in Iraq is 60,645. Most assume the wounded number includes all, but it does not. It leaves out another 8,273 injured and 23,052 who became ill and required medical air transport from the war zone. The Department of Defense releases two reports: one with the weekly numbers of those wounded and killed, and then another monthly report with the complete numbers. After five years, it is time for respected news organizations to use the complete number.

The public needs this information so that we can better prepare for the care of all of our veterans from this war and others. The struggle for them and their families your article addressed is happening all across this country. Nearly 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have already sought care from the V.A.