Things for which I'm grateful

In a year in which the country has been visited by three of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse -- War, in Iraq and Afghanistan; Famine, in the form of 9% unemployment and the first actual GDP contraction of my adult life; Plague, swine flu -- and in which my governor has announced his desire to secede to avoid a 2% increase in the top marginal tax rate, it's sometimes really hard to find reasons to be grateful. This morning I found one.
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> Michelle Bachmann is NOT from Texas.
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> Michelle Bachmann is a member of Congress from Minnesota, a state generally not known for electing crazies. Granted, Jesse Ventura was unusual, but he was only annoying, not actually certifiable. One can't really say that about Representative Bachmann. If it were only her wackjob opinions, I might be inclined to ignore her and continue being envious of Minnesota's record of electing bland, inoffensive and ineffective lawmakers. But in this case, she's not only crazy, she is willing to admit publicly that she lives in an alternate universe.
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> Yesterday, on C-SPAN, she noted that the last swine flu outbreak occurred under a Democratic president. Both Representative Bachmann and I were alive then and old enough to know who was the President. In my world, that president was Gerald Ford, but apparently in Representative Bachman's Earth 2, Jimmy Carter was Richard Nixon's VP and took office in 1974. (Being something of a DC comics geek, I have to wonder if Representative Bachmann will use her Canary Cry on the floor of the House someday to get a bill passed.)
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> Today was even better. I remember discussions of the Smoot Hawley tariff both from high school, and from Ben Stein's scene in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." (Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?) This was enacted in 1929, sponsored by two Republicans, and signed by Herbert Hoover, who was not a Democrat. On Earth 2, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Hoot - Smalley tariff, which led immediately to Al Franken becoming Representative Bachmann's Senator. I presume this bill restricted the import of British comedies, causing the pound to plummet and PBS to wait until the 1960's to be invented. The tariff wasn't good enough, smart enough, and nobody liked it, so Earth 2 experienced the Great Depression.