The St Cloud Times has an editorial piece out on Michele Bachmann that has been making the rounds on the tubes and wires here lately and it really is a must read, some samples:

And that’s the real tragedy here. We understand politicians need to distinguish themselves to succeed. But at some point those politicians must set aside extremist, distractive tactics and focus on making viable public policies.

And my personal favorite:

Instead, she consistently invokes extremism, typically by flitting around today’s 24/7 media culture ad nauseam. She stops just long enough to drop her political bombs, yet never gives a serious thought to how to shape viable solutions in the partisan environment she knowingly inflames.

Now we aren’t strangers to this tactic of Michele Bachmann’s, we’ve written about it before, but today we get to see what the St. Cloud Times was talking about in action yet again.

Today, President Obama met with his cabinent for the first time and outlined a challenge that he gave to them to eliminate an additional $100 million from their budgets in the next 90 Days, which is on top of the work already done by his budgeting office to make other program cuts. Pretty excellent news for taxpayers, Michele Bachamann should be all for this, right? Wrong… it’s time for some more non-factor bomb throwing! From her blog on townhall.com:

While it’s certainly a laudable move, it’s akin to shooting a giant hole in the side of a cruise ship and then bailing the sinking ship out with a dixie cup. Moreover, trimming millions of dollars means absolutely nothing if Congress and the President continue to add billions to the national debt.

Her second point might be more relevant if we had heard from her during the no-bid contracts in the war in Iraq, irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy, or on any of a host of Republican led policies that increased the deficit during the last eight years. Instead of saying, "It’s a laudable move, and here are some other common sense solutions," she goes right back on the attack. Classic "Party of No" from Michele Bachmann. If she would have been paying more attention to President Obama, rather than which Fox News show was going to have her on next, she would have caught this bit from the end of the President’s press conference:

Q A hundred million dollars, isn’t that a drop in the bucket, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: It is, and that’s what I just said. None of these things alone are going to make a difference. But cumulatively they would make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone. And so what we’re going to do is line by line, page by page, $ 100 million there, $ 100 million here, pretty soon, even in Washington, it adds up to real money.

This time, she can’t blame the media for her aversion to the facts. Instead of working with President Obama to make this a workable policy moving forward, she has chosen to remain a bomb-throwing non-factor, and her constituents pay the price.