One of the funny things about covering Michele Bachmann’s presidential bid is that for most observers she’s a pretty recent entry on to the national stage. Here at TPM though we’ve been following her pretty closely back as far as 2008, actually even further back. So picking up a random conspiracy theory that Gardasil causes ‘sudden retardation‘ in young girls just isn’t that surprising. As just one example of numerous examples — but also on health care — here’s Bachmann from early 2010 claiming that people who criticize ‘government health care’ can have their health care ‘revoked’.

Elizabeth Warren will officially announce her candidacy tomorrow morning in Massachusetts.

Driving the attack on Perry, Rep. Bachmann now claims that Gardasil, the HPV vaccine which has the secondary effect of preventing most cervical cancer, actually makes young girls retarded. “I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate,” Bachmann said. “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.”

Needless to say, there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true.

From Dean Debnam, President of PPP polling: “In just three weeks Barack Obama has nearly doubled his lead over Rick Perry. That would seem to be an indication that Perry’s comments about Social Security are giving him trouble with swing voters.”

Rick Perry on cheers for the death of a (hypothetical) 30 year old man without insurance: “I was a bit taken aback by that myself.”

Feinstein, Petraeus say it’s time for war-time contractors to go.

Is John Boehner really opting for another government shutdown standoff? It’s looking like the Speaker may be prepping to renege on the earlier budget deal.

Colbert: Pawlenty’s big endorsement gives Mitt exactly one additional vote. Watch.

It’s been too long since the last government shutdown fiasco, so let’s do it again.

It’s not quite Minority Report but the Santa Cruz PD has begun experimenting with complex algorithms to predict when and where crimes will occur and have police there ready to catch the bad guys. They call it “predictive policing.”