We never thought we'd see the day. But sure enough, here's Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, clad in her most confidently shiny suit, officially launching her presidential campaign in her native town of Waterloo, Iowa today. Will she be our new, shiny president come January 2013? If it can't be Donald Trump, then sure, this'll do.
In 2008, presidential candidate Mitt Romney spent $2.5 million to buy a win at the Iowa straw poll (an August event that "is one of the landmark events of the nominating contest"), and then, hilariously, lost the caucuses a few months later, because he doesn't love fetuses enough and may have once seen two men kissing. So, this time around, he's just going to skip the stupid poll! This lessens his chances of winning in Iowa, but it helps Romney position himself as a pragmatic business-golfer-pleated-pants type who will create jobs, rather than a bible-thumping-intense-gaze type who will ban MTV, or whatever Republicans are into these days. Good luck creating jobs while buying into the liberal conspiracy known as "global warming," Mitt! [WSJ; image via AP]
It looks like Rep. Michele Bachmann will be running for president, unless you hire a renowned campaign manager and plan a major rally in the Iowa town where you were born just to get a cruel laugh out of it. We shouldn't rule that out. But she seems ready to run, capable of doing well in Iowa, and willing to have her good friend and possible Iowa competitor Sarah Palin trashed through surrogates.
Well, well, well. It seems Sarah Palin is delving into the motion picture business! And her first, but hopefully not last, production will be about an Alaskan governor who quit her job halfway through her first term to make money. Behold The Undefeated, Palin's top secret film project that will debut in Iowa next month.
Poor Newt Gingrich, things just aren't going as perfectly as he'd imagined in this early presidential campaign of strange nonsense. Consider this fellow Gingrich met in Iowa yesterday. He doesn't want to be Gingrich's friend; he just wants to chastise him for throwing Rep. Paul Ryan under the bus. "Why don't you get out before you make a bigger fool of yourself?" he tells Gingrich, while still shaking his hand for like ten seconds.
Kathy Vitzthum took her first class at Iowa State University in 1992. Just one class. She continued taking one class per semester, every semester, for the next 19 years, while working and raising a family. Next week—at the age of 48—she will finally graduate with a degree in accounting, fulfilling a promise that she made to her dying father more than a decade ago.
If there's one issue related to factory farming that our nation's legislators need to address, it's the extreme perils of... people filming what's going on at factory farms, and showing the public. Iowa will put a stop to this!
A large tornado swept through the west Iowa town of Mapleton yesterday, damaging up to 60 percent of the buildings. Nobody was hurt. Looks pretty terrifying! In other news, we counted no less than five branded storm chasing outfits that were on-scene and uploaded video to YouTube.These guys are everywhere.
Fifteen-year-old Chloe Steward of Ankeny, Iowa was terrified last night to find some drunk idiot trying to break into her house's back door at 3 a.m. Naturally, he was an employee of the Tim Pawlenty Presidential Exploratory Committee. That is NOT how you win over voters, pal! You're supposed to drunkenly break into their houses during the daytime, only. Does Tim Pawlenty even train his staff?
Pottawattamie County, Iowa wanted to hold an anti-terrorism drill. They spent four months planning it around a scenario wherein anti-immigration white supremacists shoot up a school. And then they had to cancel it, because real white supremacists started making threats.
The news this morning from delightfully nuts Rep. Michele Bachmann's part of the world is that she'll form an presidential exploratory committee by June! That's according to, uh, one anonymous source "close to the congresswoman," at CNN.com. Let's hope that it's true, and that the anonymous source is just Bachmann herself wearing a Richard Nixon mask and speaking through fan blades.
Republican Iowa State Rep. Jeff Kaufmann, speaker pro tem of the Iowa State House, was caught joking on a hot mic that a proposal which would allow state residents to carry weapons in public without permission from a sheriff and without any training or a background check might better be called the "give-a-handgun-to-a-schizophrenic-bill."
The Republicans' slow limp towards the 2012 election will attempt another lunge forward today in Iowa, as some of the declared, half-declared, and likely future declarers meet for their first candidates' forum. While it's exciting that they'll be in the same physical location in an actual early battleground state, though, it's unclear how much interaction they'll have.
