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Reward! $11,000 For Proof Of Bachmann’s HPV-Caused “Mental Retardation” Claim

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Bioethicists have joined together to offer a reward of $11,000 to anyone who can prove the child Michele Bachmann mentioned repeatedly on television this week actually became “mentally retarded” from the HPV vaccine. One of the scientists is from Bachmann’s home state of Minnesota.

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports:

Steven Miles, a U of M bioethics professor, said that he’ll give $1,000 if the medical records of the woman from Bachmann’s story are released and can be viewed by a medical professional.

His offer was upped by his former boss from the University of Minnesota, Art Caplan, who is now director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics. Caplan said he would match Miles’ challenge and offered $10,000 for proof of the HPV vaccine victim.

“These types of messages in this climate have the capacity to do enormous public health harm,” Miles said of why he made the offer. “The woman, assuming she exists, put this claim into the public domain and it’s an extremely serious claim and it deserves to be analyzed.”

After attacking Texas Gov. Rick Perry over his vaccination executive order at Monday’s debate — which scored Bachmann points from debate pundits — the Minnesota Republican said a woman had told her that the HPV vaccine had caused her daughter’s mental retardation. Bachmann repeated the story on NBC’s “Today” the next morning.

“There’s a woman that came up crying to me tonight after the debate,” Bachman told Fox News. “She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She said her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”

The comment has sparked widespread criticism from the medical community, which has said Bachmann was stoking unfounded fears similar to claims made about vaccines and Autism. The Centers for Disease Control website makes no mention of mental illness in its “adverse events” report on the HPV vaccine.

Bachmann somewhat walked back her comments Tuesday on Sean Hannity’s radio show, where she said she had “no idea” if the HPV vaccine was linked to mental illness. “I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist, I’m not a physician,” Bachmann said. “All I was doing is reporting what this woman told me last night at the debate.”

Last night, Anderson Cooper called Bachmann’s claims “incredibly irresponsible,” and said, “Bachmann is spreading an all-​out falsehood here.”

Crooks And Liars offers this sobering thought:

Bachmann has an imaginary friend. The Iowa Straw Poll winner has a made-up crying mother straw man. I think Bachmann actually meant to say “autism” and instead said mental retardation (not the same thing). There’s been an autism-is-caused-by-vaccines myth for a decade. The “doctor” who did that debunked and bogus study has since lost his license. While last year 10 infants in California have since lost their lives in a whooping cough epidemic as a result of his “work.”

Words are powerful, and when irresponsible politicians, especially ones like Michele Bachmann — who has time and time again positioned herself as a professional mother — lie, or merely repeat something they heard that turnd out to be false, they literally end up contributing to the deaths of children.

Via The New York Times in June:

“We had our five biological children that God gave to us, and then he called us to take foster children into our home,” Mrs. Bachmann told a Christian audience in 2006. “We thought we were going to take unwed mothers in,” she continued, adding, “We took 23 foster children into our home, and raised them, and launched them off into the world.”

The Bachmanns were licensed by the state from 1992 to 2000 to handle up to three foster children at a time; the last child arrived in 1998. They began by offering short-term care for girls with eating disorders who were treated through a program at the University of Minnesota, said George Hendrickson, the chief executive of PATH Minnesota, the private agency that handled the placements.

Yes, professional mom Michele Bachmann, whose husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann is a medical professional, thinks it’s OK to blindly repeat stories some unknown woman supposedly told her, and scare parents all across America. Excellent example of Christian love at work.

Gail Collins in yesterday’s New York Times wrote,

About the vaccine. It’s been proved to be effective in reducing cervical cancer in sexually active women, and it apparently works best if you begin the shots around age 12. The intense opposition from the social right appears to be based on the idea that once the kids had the shots they’d be more likely to have sex. Or, in the convoluted and creepy words of Rick Santorum: “Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government.”

Then, Bachmann tossed in another argument: vaccines are dangerous. “I had a mother last night come up to me … she told me her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter,” Bachmann told one TV interviewer after another.

O.K., hold the phone.

Let’s presume that Bachmann is being accurate, and that the woman in question was not someone she heard about from a friend of a friend’s cousin in Xenia, Ohio. What would you expect a candidate for president of the United States to do after such an encounter? Take a name? Investigate the case? Would a contender for the White House — or even the Zoning Board of Appeals — just blurt out something they heard from a stranger that could discourage parents from accepting vaccinations that could save their children’s lives?

The Bachmann campaign did not respond to my questions about who the woman was or what the candidate did to check out the information. So I guess maybe, yeah.

Joe.My.God. says, “We’re guessing this prize will go unclaimed.”

I guess maybe, yeah.

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Tennessee Governor Slammed After ‘Praying’ for Nashville School Community Without Mentioning Mass Shooting

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Governor Bill Lee quickly drew tremendous outrage in the wake of a school mass shooting where six people including three young children were shot to death. Social media users criticized the Tennessee Republican, who had signed a permit-less gun carry law, for declaring he was “praying for the school, congregation & Nashville community,” without posting any mention of the mass shooting.

Tweeting he was “closely monitoring the tragic situation at Covenant,” Gov. Lee said, “As we continue to respond, please join us in praying for the school, congregation & Nashville community.”

There was no mention of any loss of life, and, as Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts passionately noted, the “situation” was a mass shooting.

“If thoughts and prayers alone worked to stop gun violence, there wouldn’t have been a shooting at a Christian elementary school. It’s your actions – including weakening the state’s gun laws – that’s killing kids in Tennessee,” Watts also tweeted. “SHAME ON YOU.”

Gov. Lee signed a permit-less carry bill into law in 2021, at a Beretta gun manufacturing plant.

According to the CDC, as of 2020 – one year before the permit-less carry bill was signed into law – Tennessee ranked tenth in the nation in per-capita firearm mortality.

READ MORE: ‘Our Children Deserve Better’: First Lady Jill Biden Speaks Out After Six Die in Nashville School Mass Shooting

Meanwhile, others took notice of the gun culture Gov. Lee has fostered in “The Volunteer State.”

MSNBC analyst and Bulwark writer Tim Miller commented, “Tennessee governor Bill Lee issued a statement recently about how the drag ban in Tennessee ‘protects children.’ If only he would have instead focused on laws that might have prevented the mass murder of children in his state today.”

Historian Kevin Kruse pointed to an article from last year, after the Uvalde, Texas school shooting, titled: “Rep. Clemmons Seeks Renewed Gun Laws, Gov. Lee Requests Prayer.”

“You chose prayer over gun reforms last year after the Uvalde massacre,” Kruse wrote. “And now here we are.”

The progressive website Tennessee Holler pointed out that Gov. Lee, along with GOP lawmakers, “just appointed Jordan Mollenhour to the [state] board of education— whose company was sued for selling ammo to an underage mass killer (SANTA FE) and sold ammo to at least one more (AURORA) He has ZERO education experience.”

Let’s Give a Damn founder Nick Laparra tweeted, “We are 86 days into 2023. So far, 9859 people have died by gun violence and there have been 128 mass shootings. Meanwhile, @GovBillLee spends his days being outraged over drag queens and CRT and book bans. This is Bill Lee’s and the GOP’s fault.”

See the tweets and video above or at this link.

READ MORE: New WSJ Poll Is Devastating for DeSantis and His ‘Anti-Woke’ Policies

 

 

 

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Mystery Grand Jury Witness in Trump Hush Money Probe Is Former ‘Enquirer’ Publisher and Trump Ally

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Avid followers of the Manhattan District Attorney’s moves noted the grand jury had been called into service for Monday, and soon news leaked that yet another witness would be testifying in the probe into Donald Trump’s alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.

Monday afternoon, NBC News’ Garrett Haake reported live on MSNBC that the mystery witness was David Pecker, the former tabloid publisher of the “National Enquirer,” who reportedly had been looking for stories in 2016 to protect Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Haake notes Monday was Pecker’s second appearance before the grand jury in the hush money case.

The New York Times also reported David Pecker as the grand jury witness, calling Pecker “a key player in the hush-money matter. He and the tabloid’s top editor helped broker the deal between the porn star, Stormy Daniels, and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time.”

READ MORE: ‘Our Children Deserve Better’: First Lady Jill Biden Speaks Out After Six Die in Nashville School Mass Shooting

“While the focus of Mr. Pecker’s testimony is unclear, he could provide valuable information for prosecutors. A longtime ally of Mr. Trump, he agreed to keep an eye out for potentially damaging stories about Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign,” The Times reports. “For a brief time in October 2016, Ms. Daniels appeared to have just that kind of story. Her agent and lawyer discussed the possibility of selling exclusive rights to her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump to The National Enquirer, which would then promise to never publish it, a practice known as ‘catch and kill.'”

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman weighed in, noting, “nothing about that decision [to have Pecker testify] suggests any change of heart on Bragg’s part to indict Trump.”

Former Dept. of Defense Special Counsel Ryan Goodman, an NYU professor of law, notes that Pecker’s “testimony can show the [hush money] scheme was designed to affect outcome of election.”

“He reportedly communicated directly with Trump on payment,” Goodman adds.

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‘Our Children Deserve Better’: First Lady Jill Biden Speaks Out After Six Die in Nashville School Mass Shooting

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First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, speaking Monday afternoon at a National League of Cities conference, told attendees, “Our children deserve better,” as she broke the news of the Nashville school mass shooting at Covenant Presbyterian School where three children and three adults were shot dead.

“You know,” Dr. Biden, herself an educator and clearly pained by the news, began her remarks by saying, “I hate to say what I’m gonna say next because you know you’re so enthusiastic and with so much energy and hope and I feel it.”

“But while you’ve been in this room, I don’t know whether you’ve been on your phones but we just learned about another shooting in Tennessee, a school shooting and I am truly without words and our children deserve better, and we stand – all of us – we stand with Nashville in prayer.”

READ MORE: New WSJ Poll Is Devastating for DeSantis and His ‘Anti-Woke’ Policies

The First Lady, a former public high school English teacher and currently a professor of English at a community college, was speaking at the organization’s Congressional City Conference.

Watch Dr. Biden below or at this link.

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