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Titanium spine: Michele Bachmann one point behind Romney in Iowa poll

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Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann
Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann

The Des Moines Register reports that Michele Bachmann trails Romney by one point in the latest poll from Iowa.

Excerpt:

Two-time candidate Mitt Romney and tea party upstart Michele Bachmann are neck and neck leading the pack, and retired pizza chief Herman Cain is in third place in a new Des Moines Register Iowa Poll of likely participants in the state’s Republican presidential caucuses.

The results are bad news for the earnest Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor who is in single digits despite a full-throttle campaign.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and business executive, claims 23 percent, and Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and evangelical conservative, garners 22 percent. Neither has done heavy lifting in Iowa.

The rest of the Republican field is at least 12 points behind them.

Cain, a retired Georgia business executive, is the top choice for 10 percent of potential caucusgoers.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose entire Iowa campaign team resigned in frustration two weeks ago over its perception that his efforts are half-hearted, is tied in fourth place at 7 percent with the libertarian-leaning Ron Paul, a longtime Texas congressman.

Pawlenty is at 6 percent; Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, 4 percent; and Jon Huntsman, a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, 2 percent.

“The surprise here is how quickly Michele Bachmann is catching on,” said Jennifer Duffy, a political analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report of Washington, D.C. “To me, she’s the one to watch, not Romney.”

The poll has a 4.9 point margin of error, so it’s not the greatest poll.

Titanium spine

Bachmann was also interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, where Wallace went out of his way to ask her the tough questions that she will be getting more of as a Republican female candidate. Bob Shieffer also interviewed her on CBS’ Face the Nation show on Sunday.

National Review reports:

 On the eve of her presidential announcement in Waterloo, Iowa, a confident Michele Bachmann made the case that she was a serious candidate, attacking President Obama’s record and parrying tough questions in interviews with CBS’s Bob Schieffer and Fox News’s Chris Wallace.

“Since the debate, people have paid attention and they recognize that I am very serious about what I want to do,” Bachmann said on Fox.

She didn’t shy away from outlining clear differences between herself and Mitt Romney, who is statistically tied with her for the lead among Iowa voters according to a Des Moines Register poll released yesterday.

“What people know about me is I do what I say and I say what I mean. I am a fighter for the cause … People recognize that I’m very sincere in what I say,” Bachmann told Wallace. She later criticized Romney for his “disappointing” decision to not sign the pro-life pledge by the Susan B. Anthony List.

“Mitt Romney has to say what he is, but I will say, if he is saying now that he is pro-life, this was a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate that by signing … the pledge,” Bachmann said.

On CBS, Bachmann hit Romney on his health-care program, calling individual mandates at both the state and federal level “unconstitutional,” and arguing that reliance on free market forces, rather than efforts by state or federal government, was how health-care costs should be brought down.

Asked by Wallace about New York’s legislature’s decision to legalize gay marriage, Bachmann said she acknowledged the state’s tenth amendment right to do so, but said she would continue to push for a federal marriage amendment that would outlaw same-sex marriage.  She said her position was “entirely consistent,” noting that the issue of gay marriage was likely to be dealt with at a federal level in either the courts or the legislature.

In response to Schieffer’s question about whether she believed homosexuality was a choice or not, Bachmann said she was running for president, not “to be anyone’s judge.”

She also defended herself against charges that she was a gaffe-prone politician who had made erroneous statements in the past. Wallace directly asked, “Are you a flake?” a term that Bachmann called “insulting,” noting her extensive career as a tax lawyer and politician. In response to Shieffer’s remarks about her history of “misleading” statements, Bachmann said, “I haven’t mislead people at all.”

“I think the question should be asked of President Obama,” she added, noting that he pushed for nearly $1 trillion dollar stimulus by saying it would prevent unemployment rates from going above 8 percent. “That is what’s serious. Did he mislead the American people? Not only did he mislead the American people, he caused our economy to go down to depths we haven’t seen,” Bachmann pointed out.

Bachmann, who has criticized Obamacare for taking $500 billion away from Medicare, told Wallace that she did not see Paul Ryan’s budget, a budget which Bachmann voted for and which would also cut Medicare, as impacting seniors the same way Obamacare would.

“Let’s be clear: the Ryan budget is really the 55 and under plan. People need to recognize no one under 55 will be touched,” she said, calling Ryan’s plan a “starting point” for a budget discussion.

“My commitment is to make sure government keeps its promises to senior citizens both on Medicare and on Social Security,” Bachmann said of the 55-year-old and older crowd, but noted that those younger would have to face “adjustments.”

She argued that if the nation was going to be serious about its fiscal situation, the debt ceiling could not be raised. Making clear that she was against defaulting, Bachmann said payments on the debt would have to be prioritized if a new, higher ceiling wasn’t authorized and that Congress would have to cut spending elsewhere. Speaking about how the number of federal limos had been increased by 73 percent in the past two years, Bachmann said it showed how Obama wasn’t “serious about cutting spending” now.

If she were president, matters would be different.

“I have a titanium spine to do what needs to be done to turn the economy around,” Bachmann said on Fox.

She will get the same treatment from the misogynists on the left. Can she take it? I think she can.

Learn more about Michele Bachmann

Speeches:

Reactions from her recent debate performance:

Profiles of Michele Bachmann:

Here is the latest comprehensive profile of Michele Bachmann from the Weekly Standard. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

News

If you favor abortions, then you favor sex-selection abortions

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Unborn baby scheming about banning sex-selection abortions
Unborn baby scheming about banning sex-selection abortions

This article from the Wall Street Journal discusses the unintended consequencs of sex-selection abortions. (H/T Joy McCann)

Excerpt:

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In “Unnatural Selection,” Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl’s counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.

In the mid-1970s, amniocentesis, which reveals the sex of a baby in utero, became available in developing countries. Originally meant to test for fetal abnormalities, by the 1980s it was known as the “sex test” in India and other places where parents put a premium on sons. When amnio was replaced by the cheaper and less invasive ultrasound, it meant that most couples who wanted a baby boy could know ahead of time if they were going to have one and, if they were not, do something about it. “Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 later,” reads one ad put out by an Indian clinic, a reference to the price of a sex test versus the cost of a dowry.

[…]Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. “Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live,” she writes. “Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.”

[…]There is indeed compelling evidence of a link between sex ratios and violence. High sex ratios mean that a society is going to have “surplus men”—that is, men with no hope of marrying because there are not enough women. Such men accumulate in the lower classes, where risks of violence are already elevated. And unmarried men with limited incomes tend to make trouble. In Chinese provinces where the sex ratio has spiked, a crime wave has followed. Today in India, the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.

I think that it is a good idea, when talking to someone who is female and pro-abortion, to them about sex-selection abortions. It seems to me that it is impossible for someone who is pro-abortion to make a principled argument against aborting unborn children just because they are women. If abortion is morally permissible, then sex-selection abortions are morally permissible. After all, it’s the born woman’s body – it’s her choice. Right? Well, maybe not right. Maybe we need to think about this some more.

Note that the Republicans have been trying to ban sex-selection abortions in some states – but the Democrats are opposing them. Democrats favor sex-selection abortions – and in very liberal countries, they are openly permitted.

Learn about the pro-life case

Commentary

Which political party should Christians vote for?

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Mary sent me this disturbing story from Citizen Link, which shows how secular leftist special interests want to restrict religious liberty.

Excerpt:

A “who’s who” of Leftist, humanist, abortion and gay organizations submitted a stern letter to President Obama on Tuesday, demanding that he rescind part of the 2002 Executive Order protecting religious hiring rights.

More specifically, the coalition wants Obama to prohibit contractors who do business with the government from using religious-based hiring criteria.

The letter, signed by 52 organizations, comes days before the 70thanniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order that barred discrimination by federal contractors. His directive was then codified into law in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employers from hiring and firing based on religious beliefs. In 1972, it was slightly amended to exempt churches and religious associations.

The timing of the letter also coincides with the federal government’s stepped-up efforts to codify into law special protections for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people.

Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for CitizenLink, noted the biased news coverage of the weighty issue. “The liberal news media has given Americans the impression that faith-based charitable groups are pushing to rescind these protections,” Hausknecht said. “Not true. A closer look at the list of cosigners reveals the true motive: to silence people of faith and push them out of the public square.”

Cosigners include: American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for the Separation of Church and State, Catholics for Choice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, National Education Association, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and the Transgender Law Center.

When you elect a Democrat, you’re electing someone who wants to use the power of the state to marginalize and censor Christianity. In fact, if you read classical works on economics like “The Road to Serfdom”, you’ll learn that socialism necessarily leads to the destruction of all other liberties, including religious liberty. That is because the bigger that a secular government becomes, the less they are willing to allow individuals to make their own decisions based on their own personal morality and religion. Obama is one of the worst offenders in this regard – we have never had a more pro-abortion and pro-same-sex marriage President. We have never had a President who was more allied with pro-abortion lobbyists and pro-gay-rights lobbyists. And he is also in favor of paying welfare to women who freely choose to raise children without fathers. This man is anti-life, anti-family and anti-marriage. No Christian could vote for such a man.

Should Christians vote for Democrats who want to “tax the rich”?

Let’s make it clear, because a lot of Christians don’t understand this. In order for you to exercise your freedom as a Christian, you need to have money. With money, you can afford charity, private Christian schools, Bibles, apologetics books, marriages, children, homeschooling, and so forth. How do you get that money? You work for it. And how do you make it grow? You invest it.

Now let’s see how the secular left and their agenda of redistribution at wealth hurts that plan.

  1. They get you fired, like Frank Turek was fired by Cisco Systems, because you are a Christian
  2. They tax your income and give it to anti-Christian groups, like Planned Parenthood
  3. They tax your investments to fund public schools which undermine Christian truth claims (evolution) and Christian morality (sex education)
  4. They confiscate money from your employer and redistribute it to government workers and unions, which makes it harder for you to stay employed
  5. They restrict your choices for educating your children, by sending more money to public schools and legislating against private schools and homeschooling
  6. They take over health care, forcing you to subsidize secular leftist causes like abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc.
  7. They take over health care, forcing Christian doctors and nurses to perform procedures that violate their consciences
  8. They halt military spending and pro-democracy initiatives, and coddle captured terrorists, encouraging terrorist attacks, like 9/11
  9. They spend enormous amounts of money, increasing government dependence and discouraging families from having children

And so forth. Basically, the more you vote for free market conservatism, the more small businesses there will be. The more small businesses there are, the better your chance of finding an employer who will not discriminate against your Christian faith. (Contrary to popular beliefs, conservatives DO NOT like big corporations – because they are almost ALWAYS liberal, seeking to use the government to block younger companies from challenging them with better quality and lower prices). The more employers there are to choose from, the more likely you can find a higher salary. The higher your salary, the more you have to spend on charity, as well as your family and your community. The more money you make in investments, the more you can buy apologetics books and sponsor apologetics web sites and conferences and debates. The more the government stays out of the free market, the more choice you have to buy goods and services that are in line with your Christian values – e.g. – SCHOOL CHOICE. The more the government stays out of health care, the less you will pay for health care since you don’t need coverage for abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc. The less government regulates business, the less opportunity there will be for these secular leftist special interest groups to lobby government to discriminate against Christians.