Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

METRO AREA: Pay again to use your roads. Congestion pricing brings tolls to more highways on Wednesday. [Minnesota Public Radio]

MINNEAPOLIS: What’s bad for newspapers is good for incumbents. Braublog digs into the Star Tribune’s latest retrenchment: endorsing only in local races with open seats. [MinnPost]

MINNEAPOLIS: Show us the itinerary. The Strib’s editorial board did find time to ask Gov. Pawlenty to say more about what he’s doing with his. [Star Tribune]

MONTEVIDEO: Don’t call them sisters. Unlike sister cities Minneapolis and Najaf, Iraq, the cities of Montevideo, Minn., and Montevideo, Uraguay, have the same name, so they’re just “Partners.” [TPT's Almanac; West Central Tribune]

DULUTH: Jail for sale. Contact ReMax. [Duluth News Tribune]

ST. CLOUD: Eat against racism. A nonprofit attacks a persistent problem with food. [St. Cloud Times]

ROCHESTER: Man punches goose sculpture. It happened outside the public library after a wedding at the Mayo Clinic. [Rochester Post-Bulletin]

]]> http://minnesotaindependent.com/45782/am-mn-bachmann-ron-paul-applause/feed 3 http://minnesotaindependent.com/45705/bachmann-ron-paul-fed-audit-woods http://minnesotaindependent.com/45705/bachmann-ron-paul-fed-audit-woods#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:03:21 +0000 Chris Steller http://minnesotaindependent.com/?p=45705

Photo: house.gov

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann had a chance Friday morning to question the top lawyer for the Federal Reserve Bank during hearings into an audit of the Fed proposed by Rep. Ron Paul (with whom she’ll share a stage at the University of Minnesota tonight). “The Federal Reserve seems to have the power to do anything it wants to do without any restrictions whatsoever,” Bachmann said.

Bachmann was talking about Section 13.3 of the Federal Reserve Act, under which the Fed can make discount-rate loans to, for instance, bail out Bear Stearns.

The Fed’s top lawyer, Scott Alvarez (who charmingly begins every answer with “So … “), said the Fed had used its 13.3 powers only in the 1930s and 1960s, not the 1980s as Bachmann suggested. Under later questions on the same topic, he said 13.3 could only be invoked by a supermajority of the Fed’s board and under extreme circumstances.

Alvarez is the first of two witnesses before the House Financial Services Committee today. Next up was bestselling Libertarian author Thomas Woods, whose book “Meltdown” (with a foreward by Paul) Bachmann has studied.

I lost the House video feed for most of Woods’ testimony, but it seems to have gone less well than the average book-signing for him. As the hearing broke up, Woods could be heard off-mic, grumbling: “Good grief, I don’t know why I couldn’t get across what I was trying to say.”

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

WINONA: Locals aim to reinstate reciprocity. Gov. Pawlenty put the kibosh on a long-standing tax arrangement for residents of Minnesota who work in Wisconsin (and vice versa).  [Winona Daily News]

EAGAN: State senate candidate mourns T-Paw’s cancellation. David Carlson says Pawlenty will go to Atlanta instead of his Oct. 8 fundraiser. [Facebook]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Green revolutionary to be remembered. At another campus venue on Oct. 8, the U of M will honor alumnus and Nobel Prize winner Normon Borlaug. [Associated Press]

ALBERT LEA: No first lady. When Michele Obama can’t visit, she lets you know by … sending a postcard? [Albert Lea Tribune]

MINNEAPOLIS: Lutheran splinter group rethinking last month’s gay-clergy vote. What happens in Minneapolis gets reconsidered in Indianapolis. [Associated Press]

PIPESTONE: Monument vandals nabbed. Text messages like “backyard in trash can everything is there!!” led cops to objects stolen from the Keepers of the Sacred Tradition building. [Worthington Daily Globe]

Image: yaliberty.org

When we reported two weeks ago that Ron Paul will be joining U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann for a town hall meeting, the date hadn’t been set. Now it has: the duo will host a forum for students at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium on Friday, September 25.

The event is billed by its host, Young Americans for Liberty, as a “Campus Revolution” — a moniker that seems to meld Paul’s campaign slogan with Bachmann’s March call for an “orderly revolution.” The topics considered include “President Obama’s health care proposal, bailout mania and the rapid rise of government control and spending.”

Bachmann’s popular that weekend: The following day she’ll head down to St. Louis to address the How to Take Back America conference. Sharing the spotlight with Phyllis Schlafly and Mike Huckabee WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah, Bachmann’s lunchtime address comes between “workshop sessions” on topics including “How to defend America vs. missile attack” and  “How to recognize living under Nazis & Communists.”

The Republican Party of Minnesota, Minneapolis City Republican Committee, College Republicans,  Students for a Conservative Voice and the Minnesota Campaign for Liberty are consponsoring the Bachmann/Paul event.

Correction: WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah, in comments, says he won’t be at the conference. He is, however, a member of the conference host committee.

Photos: bachmann.house.gov, oberstar.org

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s talk of stopping health care reform by fasting, praying and wrist-slitting has prompted not only lefty pundits but a top Democratic colleague to question what’s going on between her ears. Jim Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, remarked Tuesday: “I don’t think God’s talking to her anymore. I think she’s hearing other voices.”

Bachmann said in 2006 that she was running for Congress on God’s recommendation (video), and last month said she would run for president if she “felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do.”

It wasn’t a one-off gag line for Oberstar, who earlier called Bachmann “a sweet woman” but had this advice for elderly health care reform advocates in Duluth who were planning to visit her: ”Tell her that there are voices other than God that are informing her.” [Via Tom Elko]

It wasn’t immediately clear whether one of those voices is that of Rep. Ron Paul, who has Bachmann’s ear on financial policy and will appear with her at a town hall in her district this month.

Oberstar’s comments are of the sort more commonly heard from cable TV yakkers like Ed Schultz, whose show featured her “psycho talk” two days in a row, and Dan Savage, who linked God-inspired politics to hate rhetoric of the worst sort:

When you have a party that claims to speak for God or says God is on its side, the rhetoric heats up and the anger heats up, because it’s not just a battle about ideas and positions and what’s good for the country and bad for the country. It’s a battle about what God wants and what God doesn’t want. And it’s easier to demagogue about your enemies and to despise them and to dehumanize them in this really personal and vicious way. And the religious right is fomenting this kind of hatred in this country at our peril. I really do think that the Michele Bachmanns of the world and the Glenn Becks of the world are actively and consciously, or subconsciously, trying to get — I’m just going to say it — trying to get the president killed. This kind of rhetoric — this paranoid style on the religious right, from Birchers to birthers — doesn’t usually end well. And somebody’s got to put the brakes on it. Unfortunately in the Republican Party, there’s no adults left in the room. There are only the Michele Bachmanns and the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs running the show.

Here’s MSNBC video of Savage (via City Pages) and Schultz (via our sister site the Colorado Independent):

Photo: MnIndy

In an interview with AM 1280 on Saturday, Rep. Michele Bachmann announced that she will have Rep. Ron Paul as her guest for a September town hall forum in St. Cloud.

“I’ll be doing another town hall up in the St. Cloud area in September and we’ll do that on monetary policy. Ron Paul is going to come in and we are going to host something on monetary policy,” Bachmann said.

Bachmann is a convert to the Ron Paul movement, sometimes attending the congressman’s weekly lunches.

“I especially want to speak to the 19- to 20-year olds so they can know what there future will be under this level of debt accumulation and spending,” she added about the forum. “They need to know their future. And so I’m bringing him in so we can have a discussion on monetary policy.”

Photo: MnIndy

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann is “intelligent” whereas Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is a “trained monkey” in the estimation of Libertarian scribe Karen De Coster, writing at Taki’s Magazine.

Takimag has a paleoconservative/Libertarian take on the world, which Bachmann’s fundamentalist Christian approach rankles. But most everything else – from her alarm over light bulbs, world currency and forced government labor to her doubt about global warming, and especially her worries about the U.S. census – sounds pretty good:

Be mindful that Bachmann is actually intelligent, unlike Sarah Palin, who is a trained monkey and came out of nowhere, thanks to her gender, sprightly sparkle, and the problems with McCain’s uninspiring, snooze-a-rama campaign. Bachmann is also articulate and pretty — which is never detrimental to a woman in politics—and comes across as steady and confident. The attribute of hers that gives me hope is her tendency to reveal recurring signs of un-Republican-like behavior.  Questioning the constitutionality of the census and making Timothy Geithner stutter like a pickled parrot are just a couple of strong points in her favor.

De Coster seems to see a role for Bachmann — playing Robin to U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s Batman:

I’d like to see Bachmann continue along her path, learning from Ron Paul and finding her rebel roots. And she appears to be educable! Which is more than you can say for most everyone else in Congress. And she’s not afraid to stand in the firing line on her own. Let’s watch this lady carefully over the next couple of years. There may be many more bright moments. …

Ron Paul, who’s long been a man on a lone crusade, needs all the assistance he can get on the House floor.

On May 7, Walz joined fellow Minnesotan Collin Peterson as two of 19 Democrats who are among the bill’s 143 House co-sponsors.

Walz’s Mankato office received a petition with names of more than 400 constituents asking him to support the Federal Reserve Transparency Act (H.R. 1207).

Minnesota’s three Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are also co-sponsors of the bill, and Rep. Michele Bachmann enthusiastically attends Paul’s lunches on economic theory.

A protest against the Federal Reserve Bank’s role in the current economic crisis drew more than 100 to the bank’s Minneapolis headquarters last month.

Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) (bachmann.house.gov, Flickr)

From time to time, a few members of Congress — as many as 10, sometimes fewer — gather with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) to eat lunch and hear from an author or expert whose opinion he thinks is worth promoting. They grab something to eat off of a deli plate. They take notes. They loosen up and ask questions.

“It’s not all that easy for the other members to get here,” said Paul in an interview with the Washington Independent, sitting just outside of his office before heading back to Texas for a few days. “It’s just that there’s so much competition. Once they get here and they get going, they all seem to enjoy it.”

A funny thing has started happening to Paul since his long-shot presidential campaign ended quietly in the summer of 2008. More Republicans have started listening to him. There are the media requests from Fox Business and talk radio where he’s given airtime to inveigh on sound money and macroeconomics. There is HR 1207 , the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, a bill that would launch an audit of the Federal Reserve System, and which has attracted 112 co-sponsors. When Paul introduced the Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act just two years ago, no other members of Congress signed on.

And then there are the luncheons. The off-the-record talks have brought in speakers such as ex-CIA counterterrorism expert Michael Scheuer, libertarian investigative reporter James Bovard, iconoclastic terrorism scholar Robert Pape, and George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. Perhaps the most influential guest has been Thomas Woods, a conservative scholar whose previous books include “The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History” and “Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush,” and whose current book “Meltdown” has inspired Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to question Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about economic fundamentals.

Paul’s unexpected and sudden clout with his fellow Republicans — even some of Paul’s staff have been surprised with the momentum of his “Audit the Fed” bill — come as the GOP engages in a tortured internal dialogue about its future. Since January, no small number of new coalitions have formed between current members of Congress, former advisors to President George W. Bush, and perennial party leaders such as former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) and former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.). Few of those conservatives, however, have spent much time criticizing the very foundations of America’s modern economic system and worrying about a 1929-style crash. Few of them had a drawer stuffed with off-brand economic ideas and forgotten libertarian texts, ready to explain what needed to be done. Ron Paul did, and as a result the ideas that made the Republican establishment irate enough to bounce him from a few primary debates are more popular than ever.

“There’s a growing recognition that the GOP is intellectually bankrupt and morally bankrupt,” explained Bovard. “Most of these Republican ‘rebranding’ efforts amount to a group of overpaid consultants getting detached from reality, but I’m glad that Paul is putting together these meetings. I hope the battle of ideas is changing.”

The success of Paul’s events, however under-the-radar, have been a pleasant surprise for the experts. “I’ll admit it,” said Thomas Woods. “I was dead wrong in my first reaction when I heard Ron talking about the Fed on the campaign trail. I said, ‘This is too complicated for most Americans. This isn’t going to galvanize people.’ I was wrong! He’s taken an issue that wasn’t even an issue, and he’s got a lot of Americans suddenly fascinated by the Fed, by monetary policy, by the Austrian business cycle theory,” economic ideas promoted by thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard that blame central banks for painful business cycles.

Since his congressional comeback in 1996 — after a long stint as a Libertarian Party politician, and after only narrowly defeating a Democrat-turned-Republican that Newt Gingrich’s Republican leadership supported — Paul has maintained a small circle of allies in Congress. Some of them, like Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), are regular guests at the expert luncheons. But the most prominent new face is Bachmann, the rising conservative star who left C-Span and YouTube watchers scratching their heads with a grilling on the Constitution that seemed to puzzle Geithner. “What provision in the Constitution could you point to to give authority for the actions that have been taken by the Treasury since March of ‘08?” asked Bachmann during a hearing on March 24. “What in the Constitution could you point to to give authority to the Treasury’s extraordinary actions that have been taken?”

Bachmann “goes to these luncheons on a weekly basis,” said Debbee Keller, Bachmann’s press secretary. Keller noted that Bachmann was reading “Meltdown,” which argues that the New Deal failed and that the Federal Reserve is responsible for the current economic crisis. “Just as Austrian theory suggests,” wrote Woods, “the Fed’s mischief was responsible for the Great Depression.”

“I had a feeling she’d have some interest in the book,” said Woods, “because she asked some good questions. She was taking notes. She was asking if this or that point could be found in the book. I thought I recognized a sincere person who wanted knowledge, not the usual politician who couldn’t care less about what the truth is and just wanted to propagandize.”

Paul didn’t take credit for turning Bachmann on to Austrian theory (”He’ll give credit to everyone on the planet except himself,” laughed Woods) but said he was pleased to see more members of Congress delving into economics. “She’s very open to studying,” said Paul. “In fact, she’s been working really hard to get me back to Minneapolis. She says, ‘You’ll get such a great reception there!’”

Paul’s other influence has reached further across the aisle. Since he introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, he has locked in the support of a majority of the Republican conference as well as 13 Democrats, for a bill that would mandate an “audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks” before the end of 2010 to reveal how the board makes it decisions and moves around money. “As Congressman Paul pointed [out] many times,” said freshman Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) after co-sponsoring the bill, “the Federal Reserve should have come clean with the American people a long time ago. The Fed is disbursing trillions of dollars and the taxpayers have a right to know who is getting it.”

It’s been a rapid rise for an idea that, only months ago, was located firmly in the political fringe. The John Birch Society, the far-right group that Paul has often defended from media criticism, was one of the first groups to encourage members to contact their members of Congress to support an audit of the Fed. Paul’s own coalition, the Campaign for Liberty, has engaged in a months-long grassroots campaign for the bill, something that Paul credited for a surge in support unlike anything he’s introduced in his second stint in Congress.

“People today are clamoring for transparency,” said Paul, “and there is more awareness of the Federal Reserve. I do think it has something to do with the focus we put on this during the campaign. It’s not so much that I’m personally converting people, it’s that we’ve got people at the grassroots converting their members of Congress.” Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), a conservative who is running for governor of Tennessee next year, has told Paul that his support for the Fed audit and his condemnation of a Missouri law enforcement policy to watch out for cars with Ron Paul bumper stickers get some of his loudest, most positive reactions on the campaign trail.

Paul has remained surprised and bemused at his new influence. “I was talking with one of the other Republicans on the floor,” he remembered, “one of the types that had been voting with Bush, for big spending and all of that. I asked him: ‘Are you voting with me now or am I voting with you?’ They just laugh. They know what the situation is.”

David Weigel is a politics reporter for the Washington Independent.

But event organizer Melissa Hill told the Minnesota Independent the action is all on the ground today, with speeches and chants in the plaza in front of the Fed as well as a raucous parade around the bank’s riverfront headquarters.

Jordan Jelinek of Bloomington (in the foreground at left), a Tea Party protest veteran, said today’s gathering shared a message with the April 15 events: “Power to the people.”

Carrying a sign reading “Abolish the Federal Reserve System,” Jelinek said he “never really thought of myself as a protester until the socialist agenda of both Bush and Obama.” Government should leave people alone so they can engage in free trade, he said.

Government’s lack of control over the Federal Reserve was the main gripe of protester Matthew Caldwell of St. Louis Park. As an instution, the Fed, he said, is “not even quasi” governmental.

Like Jelinek and others at the rally, Caldwell supports a bill by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (HR 1207) to require an audit of the Fed. (Jelinek said the bill now has 82 co-signers including Minnesota Republicans Erik Paulsen and Michele Bachmann. He didn’t mention Democrats Keith Ellison and Collin Peterson, who opencongress.org also lists as co-signers — in error, it turns out, in Ellison’s case.

Caldwell missed the Nov. 22 End the Fed protest but attended an April 15 Tea Party, where he said Fox News’ hype had attracted followers of “Glenn Back, Sean Hannity, Fox News” who “co-opted”  the event.

Caldwell (pictured below) calls himself a “paleo-conservative” but said he distrusts the “left-right paradigm” that thrives on polarizing issues that distract attention from real issues.

Indeed, the first protest held at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve (video) in response to government bailouts of the financial industry was a more left-leaning affair contrasting concern for Wall Street institutions with a lack of concern for Main Street.

End the Fed is associated with Ron Paul but it’s an independent and non-partisan group, Hill said, noting that she had spread the word about today’s event via alternative outlets such as Indymedia.

She also said she has pushed for a future national End the Fed protest to be on a weekday, which she thought would help draw a crowd and more attention.