Michele Bachmann, Minnesota Congressional Representative and 2012 GOP Presidential hopeful, was born on April 6, 1956, in Waterloo, Iowa.. She was born to Democratic parents and moved to Minnesota when she was still quite young. After graduating high school, Bachmann worked on a kibbutz in Israel, and eventually attended law school. She worked for the IRS until 1993, when she quit to become a full-time mother. She has raised five children with her husband, Marcus. 

When she was still in college, Bachmann underwent a small political crisis and realized that she was not, in fact, a liberal like her parents, but rather a conservative. Very conservative. Soon afterwards, Bachmann and her husband became “sidewalk counselors” outside of abortion clinics, urging young mothers to keep their children. She worked on Ronald Reagan’s election campaign. In 1993, she helped form a charter school in Stillwater, Minnesota, and spoke out strongly against the controversial Minnesota state school standards. Her outspokenness helped launch her career in politics. 

She secured an office in the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2000 and shortly thereafter began campaigning on numerous conservative platforms. She twice proposed amendments to the state constitution barring same-sex marriage, but was never successful. In 2007, she began serving as the Representative for Minnesota’s sixth district. She was for the Iraq War troop surge and against the 2007 higher education finance bill. 

One amusing example of Bachmann’s particular brand of under-informed vitriol was the “Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act,” which she proposed in response to the government’s environmentally sound ban of outdated, wasteful incandescent bulbs. Bachmann claimed that “Fluorescent bulbs are more polluting because of their mercury content.” She failed to take into consideration the fact that, since fluorescent bulbs require so much less energy to use and last much, much longer, the reduction in greenhouse gasses and coal consumption vastly outweigh the potential damage caused by the miniscule amounts of mercury present. 

Bachmann is known for her passionate overstatements on matters of policy, including suggesting that Minnesotans should be “armed and dangerous on this issue of energy tax because we need to fight back.” She later clarified that her remarks were metaphorical. She also urged her supporters to slit their wrists and become blood brothers to oppose Democratic health care reform – again, of course, metaphorically. 

Bachmann has also drawn fire as a leading figure of the Tea Party, the reactionary antiestablishment spinoff of the GOP. She is expected to make a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, powered by her enthusiastic supporters and riding on the national media attention garnered by her tendency to say somewhat outrageous things. 

To celebrate Representative Bachmann’s special day, we look for inspiration to another of her somewhat under-informed pontification. In her 2011 speech in Iowa, Bachmann discussed the scourge of slavery on American history, but there were a few elementary errors in her timeline. By “elementary,” we mean errors that could have been easily fixed by thumbing through an elementary school history textbook. Bachmann claimed that “the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States ... I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly – men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.”  While it is true that John Quincy Adams was strongly anti-slavery, he was not exactly a founding father – he was nine when the Declaration of Independence was penned. She might have JQ Adams confused with the similarly named John Adams, an actual founding father and opponent of abolitionist legislature. To gently alert Bachmann to her misstatement, we recommend preparing John Quincy Adam’s wife’s famous Chicken Croquettes every year on Michele's birthday and sending one to her to associate the taste of chicken and ham with the right Adams since she can't keep her presidents straight. For a conservative birthday treat, watch her in Fire From the Heartland  (2010).