It’s becoming more and more apparent that the arguments of Occupy Wall Street and others focusing a spotlight on soaring inequality have made a difference. Inequality is now a regular topic of debate, and even the right is being forced to acknowledge that the 99 Percent is angry about the multitude of special privileges offered to the super-rich.

The clearest sign I’ve seen that the debate is shifting is this call for tax reform from Michele Bachmann. Granted, it’s Bachmann we’re talking about, so she’s still pushing extremist right-wing views. But she’s doing it with a touch of economic populism that’s new:

Let’s face it: freedom is not free and all of us benefit from it. Today we live in a world where only 53 percent of Americans pay federal income tax. That means 47 percent pay nothing. People who pay nothing can easily forget the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch.   

Second, even though everyone should pay something, those who can afford to pay more should pay more.  This is true not just in absolute terms. Someone at a higher income level should pay at least the same percentage of income as someone at a lower income level.  In other words, a flat tax should at least be flat, and not tilted against lower and middle income families. 

Third, fairness also demands that government limit its claim on the hard work and talents of the people it taxes. The income people earn is not the government’s income; it belongs to the people who earned it…. [Emphasis added]

Michele Bachmann believes the rich should pay at least the same percentage of income as the rest of us — leaving open the possibility that she could support progressive taxation. This is a red-letter day!

Of course, most of this is still Bachmann’s standard right-wing class warfare, calling for tax increases on the poorest Americans. Bachmann doesn’t actually care about inequality — she wants to raise taxes on Americans who make so little that their taxable income is $0. But it’s a small step in the right direction that she’s even forced to frame her arguments this way.

One of Michele Bachmann’s favorite tricks, when she’s not just outright making things up, is to take numbers out of context to make them appear to say something they don’t really say. She most famously did this in the bizarre Tea Party response to Obama’s State of the Union last year. This time, she wants to pretend that Obama is responsible for an unprecedented surge in gas prices:

Well, remember that the day Barack Obama became president, gas was $1.84 a gallon so gas prices have gone up 110% since he was in office. And in the last 30 days, gas prices have gone up 30 cents a gallon…

That sounds pretty bad. But let’s try a bit of context — after all, Bachmann does this sort of nonsense often. Remember, Obama took office at the height of the worst recession since the Great Depression, when demand for oil was plummeting. Now that the economy is on the mend, gas prices are just headed back to where they were a few years ago.

The fact is, we’ve reached peak oil, and as the global economy improves, gas prices can be expected to continue soaring. With demand in China and India growing exponentially, and little room to expand global supply, $4 per gallon gas is just the beginning. Gas prices are going return to the same sharp trajectory we saw before the global recession.

The worst part is, we’re completely vulnerable to soaring energy prices because Republicans have consistently obstructed all efforts to develop alternative energy sources. Why in the world would one party oppose such an obvious strategic necessity?

MN Progressive Project’s Bill Prendergast is despondent about the chances of Michele Bachmann’s newest challenger, Anne Nolan:

A “heavy lift?” For a liberal or progressive Democrat, the Sixth District is “the gravity on Jupiter,” dammit.

“If [Bachmann] wants to say we’re radical,” Nolan says of the 99%, “let’s have that conversation.”

What “conversation”? In the grand scheme of things, the conservatives of Minnesota’s Sixth District rate progressives just below “demons” (which many of them believe in.)

I wish Ms. Nolan all the best, I really do. If she can pull this off, it would be fantastic.  But I have to advise DFLers and progressives not to pour a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into the CD6 race (not to mention money). It’s time to forget about Michele Bachmann and focus on more important races.

As Prendergast points out, Bachmann has always won handily against whoever the DFL throws at her. Now, after redistricting, CD6 is even redder than it was before. That’s fantastic for us — it clumps the most conservatives voters together, making other districts more favorable for the DFL. But to take advantage of that, we need to finally learn to ignore Michele Bachmann.

Well, we had been wondering what Michele Bachmann would do; now we have our answer.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann announced Wednesday she will seek a fourth term in the U.S. House following her failed presidential bid.

Bachmann declared her plans in an interview with The Associated Press. The Republican congresswoman had been mum on her plans since folding her presidential campaign after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses earlier this month.

It’s probably the best choice for her. The polls make it clear that nobody can take on Klobuchar, and it appears a Fox News gig is not in the offing for Bachmann. If she has her sights set on something bigger and better, she can always throw her hat into the ring to face Al Franken in 2014.

This seems like a good time to make a plea to Democrats. Please, please, please let’s not spend millions of dollars trying to defeat Bachmann again. I know she’s a crazy right-wing extremist. But unless CD6 becomes significantly less conservative after redistricting, she’s proven by now that she’s not easily dislodged.

The fact is, there are better ways we can spend our money. We have to take back the legislature and defeat multiple constitutional amendments. Please don’t be distracted; let’s leave CD6 alone for a while and focus our efforts on more useful pursuits.

It’s official. Michele Bachmann is suspending her bid for President, months after she became the first Flavor Of The Month to collapse. Where will she go from here? She doesn’t have a lot of great options.

She could run for re-election here in CD6, but that’s an awfully long way to fall for a one-time presidential candidate. Still, it’s an option. Bachmann may be nuts, but she’s not a Palin-style megalomaniac.

She could run against Amy Klobuchar for Senate. That seems like suicide, and I think she’s smarter than that.

The last and best option appears to be a run against Al Franken in 2014. Every big-shot in the MNGOP is going to want that nomination, because they think Franken is vulnerable, but Bachmann would certainly be a formidable candidate for the GOP nomination. How she would fare against Franken, though, is another story. I really don’t see how she can win outside of the conservative stronghold of CD6.

What do you think, dear readers? What should Bachmann’s next move be? What will it be?

It’s no secret that Michel Bachmann’s campaign for president has been flagging. She’s been dropping like a stone in all the polls, and in the GOP’s field of “flavors of the month,” she’s two flavors ago. But what nobody could have expected was that she had two major endorsements that she waited until now to spring on us:

Minnesota House Majority Leader Matt Dean and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch.

Perfect timing! We all thought Bachmann was beaten. But announcing the endorsements of two state legislators, in a state that probably won’t even factor into the nomination, on a Friday afternoon months into the campaign, puts Bachmann right back in this thing.

Stay tuned for the upcoming Bachmentum.

Why do Barack Obama and his America-hating, Kenyan colonialist, socialist liberal goons insist on regulating our food supply? They’re Job Killers^TM, I tell you!

[Michelle] Bachmann says, as do most of those in the GOP field, that a lightened regulatory load would allow employers to spend money on expansion rather than federal compliance. But the Minnesota congresswoman is the first to focus the argument on the food-processing industry.

“That’s part of the problem, the overkill,” Bachmann told reporters during an appearance in which she posed with huge slabs of beef. “And when they make it complicated, they make it expensive and so then you can no longer stay in business.” [AP, via Think Progress]

Why is Obama attacking our Job Creators^TM like this? What good have regulations ever done for Americans?

An outbreak of listeria, a disease tied to tainted cantaloupe, has sickened 72 people and killed at least 16 others, making it the country’s deadliest food outbreak in more than a decade. The disease has killed people in eight states from Maryland to New Mexico after the tainted melons were shipped from a farm in Colorado. As many as 25 states received the shipment of bad cantaloupes, which have now been recalled, according to the Associated Press. [Think Progress]

Oh. Well, I’m sure the food industry will do a better job of self-regulating next time.

The writing’s been on the wall for Michele Bachmann for a while. Like so many candidates in the GOP race, she received a brief burst of interest, but found it wasn’t sustainable. Pundits have been tentatively pronouncing the death of her campaign for a while now, and yesterday her campaign manager uttered a phrase we only ever hear from campaigns that are in deep trouble:

This is the beginning of the track to the presidency. She has to win Iowa then move on from there.

Nope. Sorry, but once campaigns start publicly setting up these sorts of “must-win” scenarios for themselves, it’s usually the beginning of the end. Of course, it’s been the beginning of the end for awhile for Bachmann, so this is more like the end of the beginning of the end — an official acknowledgment that her campaign is desperately searching for momentum.

Another sign that Bachmann is desperate for attention? Her crazy-even-for-Bachmann claim that Hezbollah is building missile sites in Cuba. Yeah, it’ll be over real soon.

Michele Bachmann, and most other Republicans, have been using the same tired rhetoric against liberals for decades now. They believe — and their belief is based on long experience — that we’ll back down in the face of these attacks. But it’s time to start standing up for ourselves when they say things like this:

Bachmann said unions that are using terms like “anti-worker” are engaging in “class warfare.”

Are unions engaging in class warfare? You’re damn right they are. That’s the whole point of unions — to fight the class war on behalf of the little guys. If more of us would wake up and realize that a class war has been waged against us for the last 30 years, maybe we would finally join the unions in fighting back.

Good on our unions for calling big corporations “anti-worker” when they behave in ways that hurt workers. It’s the workers and the consumers who drive our economy, not CEOs and wealthy investors. Thank you, unions, for fighting the class war on our behalf.