Keith Olbermann, Michelle Bachmann & Americorp

From NewsRealblog: August 17, 2009
It’s not at all surprising that Keith Olbermann detests Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota). She’s precisely the “type” Olbermann hates: a dynamic, attractive, eloquent female who isn’t afraid to publicly embrace conservative principles, and who articulates them extremely well. Olbermann has no use for people like that; they threaten him. For evidence of this, just look at his continuing crusade to discredit Sarah Palin, who remains, to this day, one of the foremost obsessions of the MSNBC hatchet man
“I think we do not appreciate,” Olbermann said on his most recent Countdown program, “the physiological specimen that is Michelle Bachmann: one of the world’s largest, most vibrant egos, fully functioning despite no evidence of any other brain activity.” For these alleged defects, Olbermann named Bachmann as the day’s “Worst Person in the World.” Not content to smear only the congresswoman, the broadcaster took up his broadest rhetorical brush and painted her supporters as an undifferentiated pack of “loony tunes.”
Olbermann is currently in a major snit over the fact that Bachmann has characterized the AmeriCorps program, which is so dear to President Obama and the Democrats, as a veritable network of “taxpayer-funded liberal reeducation camps.” A careful analysis of the facts, however, reveals that Bachmann’s assessment is quite accurate indeed.
AmeriCorps was launched by President Clinton in 1993, and membership in the organization is open to all U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents age 17 and older. Each member works a 10- to 12-month stint with a nonprofit group, public agency, or faith-based organization that participates in the AmeriCorps program. These members are paid workers, not volunteers. Their stipends are financed by U.S. taxpayers, half-a-billion of whose dollars are funneled annually through AmeriCorps and into the coffers of selected nonprofit organizations, which, in turn, use that money to pay the young people who register for a term of service with them.
The recipients of these AmeriCorps grants tend to be organizations whose politics fall on the left side of the spectrum, and whose efforts are focused on such projects as environmental activism, social-welfare programs, legal-aid assistance, political activism, teacher-education programs, community-organizer training, public health initiatives, childcare services, and ethnic-identity politics. Among the more notable recipients of AmeriCorps funding is the National Council of La Raza, which lobbies for racial preferences, bilingual education, mass immigration, and amnesty for illegal aliens.
Newsmax.com’s Washington correspondent Ronald Kessler has observed that AmeriCorps workers have traditionally “been put to work to promote the causes of Democrats.”
As of mid-2009, AmeriCorps had nearly 75,000 active members. Three months ago, President Obama signed a $6 billion piece of legislation to more than triple the size of the program – to 250,000 people — over an eight-year period. This move alone will increase the federal civilian workforce by 13 percent, and will make AmeriCorps the 14th largest employer in the United States – an employer perfectly positioned to promote Democrat agendas with taxpayer money.
And perhaps most notably, AmeriCorps has longstanding ties to ACORN, the pro-Democrat, pro-Obama, voter-registration-fraud factory that ranks among the most corrupt organizations in living memory.
But poor Keith Olbermann can’t understand why any fair-minded individuals would take issue with AmeriCorps. Thus he concludes that such people must be, as he phrases it with his characteristically juvenile petulance, “loony tunes.”