Salon.com > Steve King, R-Iowa

Five House members who should be reapportioned away

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:22:00 +0000

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau will deliver its report to the president, and we'll learn which states will gain and lose U.S. House seats and electoral votes. The news is expected to be bad for Democrats, even before the redistricting wars begin.*

But even if Barack Obama loses a couple of electoral votes, we could still try to make the best of a bad situation. Let's look at the states that are destined to lose a congressional seat or two, and fantasize about which current representatives we'd most like to see apportioned into retirement.

First, Minnesota will not lose a district, so Michele Bachmann is safe. Sorry!

1. Steve King, R-Iowa

Iowa is projected to lose one seat, and while that won't affect its stranglehold on the presidential nomination process, it might rid America of the one Iowa export even more offensive to thinking people than ethanol fuel. Steve King, proven by science to be the craziest congressman in the House, represents a sparsely populated but incredibly Republican district. No one would really miss the guy who was the sole vote against a plaque honoring the slaves who built the Capitol, right?

Horses run amok at Iowa parade; 1 killed, 23 injured

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:29:00 +0000

Sandie Crilly was helping her 8-year-old son, 12-year-old niece and 2-year-old granddaughter pick up Tootsie Rolls from the ground during Bellevue's annual Fourth of July parade when someone yelled to get out of the way.

Looking up, she saw two panicked horses dragging a carriage charging toward them.

"I could see it was two horses," said Crilly, 46, of Willow Springs, Ill., who was visiting her parents in Bellevue. "I could see they were running at full speed and they were harnessed together and I knew we were going to most certainly get hit, and as soon as it happened, everybody was crying and screaming."

Someone pulled her granddaughter to safety, but Crilly said her niece broke her wrist and lost her two front teeth. At least 22 other people were injured, some critically, and one woman was killed, police and hospital officials said.

Janet Steines of Spragueville, whose husband was driving the carriage, died Sunday evening at the University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City, according to the Hachmann Funeral Home in Bellevue.

The horses got spooked after they rubbed heads and one's bridle fell off, police said. They galloped for several blocks through downtown Bellevue, a town of about 2,300 residents along the Iowa-Illinois border. The wagon overturned at some point, dumping its four passengers.

Steve King makes a birther joke on the floor of the House

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:01:00 +0000

Yesterday, while rambling about the national debt on the floor of the House, Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King made a delightful joke about the president's birth certificate:

It's just a little one-liner, toward the end there:

Little baby with ink on their foot, stamped right there on the birth certificate -- there's one in this country we haven't seen -- but, the footprint on those we have seen, those little babies owe Uncle Sam $44,000.

Now, I don't think that's how the national debt works. (Babies owe money to the U.S. government?) But that aside, very funny, Rep. King. The "joke" is that Steve King thinks the president was born in Kenya or Indonesia, because King is a complete loon seething with racially charged hatred for the president and his family.

You can watch King's entire rambling speech here.

Tuesday link dump: Poor scots

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:16:00 +0000

"Unhealthy living 'almost universal' in Scotland"
If you rooted for North Korea against Brazil today, The Corner finds you morally reprehensible.
Oh hey, another lengthy investigation declares that ACORN didn't really do anything wrong, months after the media circus led to its destruction. Hope you didn't need any job training or help with housing discrimination, poor people of America.
Steve King says you can tell illegal immigrants based on what kinds of shoes they wear.
Texas GOP officially decides to not even write anything vaguely, slightly tolerant of immigrants.

Steve King wants Obama aunt to testify to Congress

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:30:00 +0000

It was a banner day for Iowa Republican firebrand Steve King. He called on Barack Obama's aunt Zeituni Onyango to testify before congress about her confidential asylum proceedings. He also said, on the radio, that President Obama just loves black people too much.

First, Aunt Zeituni. Onyango moved to the US in 2000. Her request for asylum was denied in 2002. Last month, she was granted asylum. King apparently thinks this is because of "favoritism," and so he wrote a letter to the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law demanding that they hear testimony from Onyango.

Politico taps Bachmann, King for worst Op-Ed ever

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:50:00 +0000

If someone came up to me one day and said, "Alex, I want to run the worst possible Op-Ed I can find. It has to be just totally pointless, misleading, free of actual facts or evidence and based solely on ideology, and it also has to be co-authored by two members of Congress -- who should I get to write it?" I would answer, without hesitating, "Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Steve King, R-Iowa." (Truth be told, I probably wouldn't include the IDs in spoken form, but indulge me on this.)

Then I'd start laughing, and I'd say, "But no one would ever be crass enough, or irresponsible enough, to run that Op-Ed."

And I'd be wrong. Because on Friday, Politico ran an Op-Ed by Bachmann and King about healthcare reform, and it is just as bad as you could expect it to be -- worse, maybe. So there's one very simple question to be asked here: Why the hell would Politico run this? Sure, I understand the traffic argument, but it's nice to think that even in this day and age media outlets have higher standards than traffic alone -- and the piece doesn't meet any of them. It contains not a single original argument, it does nothing to inform Politico's readers, it's often misleading or just plain wrong. It's totally predictable.

Healthcare votes an “affront to God”?

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:10:00 +0000

Seems like for some people, there's no issue so small that it can't be used against Democrats and their healthcare reform bill. Among those people, of course, are Glenn Beck and Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Steve King, R-Iowa.

Their latest complaint? The way that a couple important votes have happened to run up against religious holidays. The Senate voted on its version of the legislation on the day before Christmas last year, and now it looks like the House will vote this Sunday. As Beck and King pointed out Thursday, this Sunday happens to fall during Lent. They weren't happy about that.

"They intend to vote on the Sabbath, during Lent, to take away the liberty that we have right from God," King said during an appearance on Beck's radio show. That led to this little rant from Beck:

Steve King’s very long Communist enemies list

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:10:00 +0000

Were Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon still alive, they might have to be jealous of Rep. Steve King's ability to put together an enemies list. The Iowa Republican, who spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, certainly put together a comprehensive tally of villains for his speech.

Quoting Sun Tzu's exhortation to "know thine enemy," King said, "I want to define that enemy. They are liberals, they are progressives, they are Che Guevarians, they are Castroites, they're Socialists. More enemies on this list: Gramscites -- ring anybody's bell? -- Trotskyites, Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists, Marxists." He went on to list a final enemy, Democratic Socialists, saying that President Obama is one.

This sort of stuff is classic King; I interviewed him a couple years ago and came away with the realization that he's pretty much pure knee-jerk ideology, and there's not much intellectual power behind it.

Video below, with a hat-tip to Right Wing Watch.

King: Same-sex marriage just a step toward socialism

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:05:00 +0000

Normally Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, opposes same-sex marriage simply because of his social conservative stance on things. That alone is enough for the congressman to take a particularly strong stance on the issue -- after his state's Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, he worried that Iowa would become "the gay marriage Mecca."

But King's got a creative new reason for his position. Via The Hill's Blog Briefing Room, some comments King made on conservative radio Wednesday:

If there's a push for a socialist society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together living collectively off one pot of resources earned by everyone, this is one of the goals they have to go to, same sex marriage, because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. They want public affirmation, they want access to public funds and resources.

Oh, Congress, will you ever learn?

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:15:00 +0000

Clearly, we've been paying too much attention to Michele Bachmann. Come on, people -- there are other members of Congress out there just starved for attention and willing to say damn near anything that pops to mind in order to get it.

Like, say, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. As I noted on Friday, last week, in the wake of the Iowa Supreme Court's decision legalizing same-sex marriage in the state, King worried about the prospect of a "gay marriage Mecca" coming to Iowa. This week, he went further, worrying about civilization itself, according to the Iowa Independent.

“Our entire culture comes through a man and a woman joined in holy matrimony, being blessed with children and pouring those values into the children and then living vicariously through them as they go off and we are blessed with grandchildren,” King said at an anti-abortion event on Monday night, adding, "it has been thus since the beginning... We don’t have to apologize to anybody for this. They are the ones who are offending our civilization and our culture."

Immigrants = livestock; Baghdad = Washington

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 19:18:00 +0000

As long as we're on the subject of offensive analogies, let's not let the day pass without a nod to Rep. Steve King, who took to the House floor this week to equate immigrants with cattle. Proposing a wire-topped fence along the border between the United States and Mexico, King said: "We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time."