The below is a contestant in the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s Next Column” contest, written by “JW Of Minnesota”.   Vote above.

On a warm and sunny evening on upscale, progressive Minneapolis, a small handful of right-wing politicos selected their ringleader to succeed Tim P. After hosting the Young Socialists meeting at my ELCA worship center, I decided to hop in the Pruis and swing over to Minneapolis for the Republican convention. What I found was a bunch of grey-suited power-brokers striving to select another grey suit. After several breath-taking rounds of voting, the grey suit driving all the long way from that suburban Delano was selected.

He’ll mount a fine Minnesota challenge to the recently selected DFL’er Kelliher. Strong on Minnesota dairy farm values, with the right touch of Minneapolis progressive thinking, Kelliher will put up a super-duper fight.

Calling on an old friend from my reporting days, I spoke with the well-known conservative Arne Carlson. He tells me “Lori, the Republicans keep moving so far to the right, Genghis Khan would blush.” We wholeheartedly agreed the problem grey suit faces is not in his well-spoken, experienced DFL adversity, but with his predecessor. Following Tim Pawlenty won’t be easy. It’s tough, given the millions poor and children who have been forced to live on the street due to Pawlenty only growing the state government in single digits.

A reputation like that needs a strong-willed woman and community organizer from Minneapolis to move across the lovely Mississippi to make the Governor’s mansion a home.

The below is a contestant in the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s Next Column” contest, written by “Bubbasan”.   Vote above.

It was a dark and stormy night in Minneapolis when the Republicans gathered, the city anti-tobacco ordinance thwarting their dark dreams of selecting a grey suit in a smoke filled room. Out of the pall of American flags, anti-choice rhetoric, dangerous concealed firearms, and rejection of the common good came a man who will carry the GOP banner, Mr. XXX XXXXXXX.

The grey suited candidate wasted no time in slandering colorful Margaret Anderson Kelliher, the DFL nominee, for her stands supporting women’s rights, the responsibility of the prosperous to pay for the common good, and protection of public safety by restricting dangerous weapons in the hands of those not qualified to use them. It was a performance worthy of his convictions for drunken driving and his treatment of his GOP opponent, Mr. XXXXXXXXX.

The below is a contestant in the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s Next Column” contest, written by “Speed  Gibson”.   Vote above.

Style, not substance, perceived to be the key to victory.By MOSTLI IRRELEVANT, special to Speed Gibson

Last update: May 1, 2010 – 4:37 PM

MINNEAPOLIS – While the DFL quickly closed ranks behind Margaret Anderson Kelliher last week as their endorsed candidate for Governor, many in the GOP left the Minneapolis Convention Center clearly unhappy – with the choice, the process, or both.

Kelliher led from the first ballot, but Silas Marner had to come from behind to edge Uriah Heep, finally prevailing on the seventh ballot. It was difficult for the delegates to separate these two ultra-conservatives, the difference according to many delegates being electability.

“We have to assume that Kelliher will survive the primary, maybe convincingly so with Gaertner dropping out,” said one delegate. “The DFL isn’t going to hop off her love train to embrace a couple of retreads like Dayton or Entenza. I worked hard for Uriah, but we’re going to need some charisma of our own to beat her.”

Many of the remaining Heep supporters saw it differently. “Once [Mariner] got a small lead, the party leadership pushed hard, really hard, just to get a decision,” said a disillusioned floor walker. “We in the grass roots came here to pick the best candidate.”

It was a tough choice. They’re both likable, veteran legislators and they’re both committed to deep spending cuts to close the state budget gap. Both are firmly against tax increases. But how do you put a human face on the dramatically reduced state services that requires? That was the ultimate question, and enough delegates eventually found their answer in the more personable Silas Marner.

Uriah Heep actually has been in the legislature 6 years longer than Kelliher, chairing the Finance Committee until the DFL took control in 2007. Since then he has been the ranking member on Ways and Means, and Minority Whip the past two years. As such, he matches up well against Kelliher’s own impressive record and qualifications.

But enough Republicans were willing to trade some of that for the affable personality and tireless energy of Silas Mariner. A longtime Redwood Falls business owner, he came out of nowhere to win a 2003 special election to replace Senator Teresa Defarge when she took a job transfer out of state. And he’s been impressing people at the Capitol ever since. Barring a major upset in the DFL primary, he’ll need all of that to overcome Kelliher’s wide respect and support, which by the way includes a number of Republican women. The prospect of the first woman Governor in Minnesota history is not lost on them either, especially those with school age children.

For it’s one thing to sharpen pencils and affix green eye shades when tackling the state’s short and long term financial shortfalls. It’s quite another to face young parents and explain why their schools will have to cut back even further. Health care, the other big cost driver, will affect almost everyone, and the word will go forth: you’re on your own. Even the gifted orator that is Silas Mariner is already behind in trying to explain how there is a pot of gold at the end of his rainbow of across the board cuts.

Still, Mariner likes his chances in what will undeniably be a good year for Republicans, certainly at the Federal level. But by that reasoning, Mike Hatch running in a strong Democratic year would be Governor today. We therefore look forward to a spirited, creative campaign as Silas Mariner seeks to extend the GOP’s unbroken 24 year reign in St. Paul against the historic candidacy of Margaret Anderson Kelliher.

The below is a contestant in the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s Next Column” contest, written by “Golfdoc50”.   Vote above.

Bob Dylan famously wrote “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” If the Bard of Hibbing and 4th Street had been in the gallery at the Minneapolis Convention Center he might have noticed which direction the tea leaves were blowing when Tom Emmer tried to generate enough wind shear to dispel the anxieties about his checkered personal history. Perhaps those with short memories won’t shudder at the similarities between Emmer and Jesse Ventura, but citizens concerned about the continuation of basic government services in the next biennium will surely sit up and take notice.
The gray suited Republicans and their ladies in fur probably didn’t notice the tattered looking homeless hugging the curbs of downtown as they pulled up in their limos in front of the Convention Center, but the contrast between the smug and the unlucky was never more obvious.
How do you choose between a country club attending suburban elitist and neo-populist from the outer exurban ring? Closing your eyes to the plight of those clinging to the safety net that is the only thing between them and sleeping on street grates or under bridges every night.
As I was pulling my weekly one hour shift ladling soup at a homeless shelter, one of the regulars there, a toothless schizophrenic veteran tugged at my sleeve and gave me one of those looks. The kind that all great journalists expect to see when they feel the weight of the world compress their ASICS jogging shoes. Illuminating the self absorbed snotty Republican world view isn’t pretty, but somebody has to do it!

The below is a contestant in the “Write Lori Sturdevant’s Next Column” contest, written by “Jed Berg”.   Vote above.

I walked out of the Minneapolis Convention Center late on a rainy Friday night, after nearly 2,000 mostly white, mostly doughy, mostly men spent [FILL IN TOTAL TIME] hours debating between two mostly identical, but yet distinctively extreme, white men, Marty Seifert and Tom Emmer.  It took [FILL IN TOTAL BALLOTS] to endorse [FILL IN WINNER], making [FILL IN WINNER] the most extreme person ever to run for governor.

I walked out under a sky that scowled at us like the ghost of Elmer Anderson, wondering what had happened to a party that had once worked with the DFL to bring Minnesotans the services they expected?  The party that had walked side by side with the DFL to ensure that everyone paid their fair share?

The clouds threatened to rain – or was it the ghosts of the great Republicans past crying, wondering what had gone so wrong with their state?

But I took courage in the eyes of the protesters gathered across the street from the Convention Center – and was reminded of the spirit I’d felt only a week earlier in Duluth, as the sun shone brightly on the DFL as they endorsed a woman – a brilliant, respectful, genial woman! – to lead the DFL, and Minnesota, in the spirit of those great leaders of the past.

And I smiled,  And so, I think, did the sky itself.

Or was it the ghost of Elmer Anderson?  I’ll let you know what he tells me.

I got a rumor from someone connected with the press that The Uptake – the controversial left-leaning “citizen journalism” outfit that has spent the past few months striving for respectability with the Capital Press Corps – has been denied credentials to cover the MNGOP Convention this weekend.

A liberal commenter might response “aw, that’s just because they’re afraid of left-leaning media!”

Well, no.  In addition to the Strib, PiPress, WCCO, KSTP, MPR and KARE, the MNGOP has given press credentials to…

…KFAI, the obstreporously “progressive” Pacifica affiliate.  I used to work at KFAI; the place makes no bones about its’ sympathies.  But apparently its news department has spent some time in recent years trying to develop a reputation for fairness, at least, in its news coverage.

Again – it’s all rumor.

So far.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to predict Lori “Unofficial DFL PR Flak” Sturdevant’s Sunday column; it was a gauzy, florid paeon to Margaret Anderson-Kelliher. 

I come not to bury Sturdevant’s column – which was a howler…:

Before the balloting started, [Former state auditor, governor candidate, endorsed Lieutenant-Governor 2006 candidate, and former fair-weather Republican Judi] Dutcher and [former state Senator and two-time goober candidate Becky] Lourey, both now private citizens, predicted that this year would be different — not because it was finally a woman’s turn, but because of Kelliher’s other qualities.

“Margaret is such a candidate in her own right. She is so qualified for this job,” Dutcher exuded.

Lourey added: “There’s an energy here to endorse the person who can win in the general election. That’s Margaret, because of her communication skills.” Not her gender.

…and I certainly don’t come to praise this vapid group hug:

…A ripple of feminist pride added emotional punch to her victory celebration, revved up by Kelliher’s call, “DFLers, are you ready to make history?”

But there was no sense at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center that an upstart girl had defeated the good ol’ boys….

 Noooooo!  Not a bit!…

She won’t be another guy in a gray suit. She’ll stand out, and compel voters to take a closer look.

Former Secretary of State Joan Growe…said Kelliher’s bid to make history should bring her primary and general election support from “Republican women, or former Republican women, and independents…Older women particularly might be drawn to the chance to elect the state’s first female governor… 79-year-old St. Paul delegate Joan Wittman confessed, “It would be a dream to me to elect a woman governor. I’d like to see it in my lifetime.”

The scary part was, though, that I pretty much wrote Sturdevant’s column in my head on Saturday night after I got the word of Kelliher’s nomination.

I could have practically published the whole thing, thought for thought if not word for word!

I knew, after decades of reading Sturdevant’s bald-faced mash notes to the DFL, that there’d be some combination of…:

• She’s an old pro!
• But yet a new voice!
• And an impromptu conclave of strong yet approachable women are spritzing her with concentrated Sisterhood!  Yay!  Sisters are doing it for themselves!
• In the meantime, the tough woman is going to be facing The Man In The Gray Suit!

And it occurs to me; why not save Sturdevant, the environment, and the body politic the trouble for next weekend, after the GOP endorses its’ guy in a gray suit candidate?

Because I think we’re all familiar enough with Lori Sturdevant’s list of cliches – the gauzy soft focus, Up With People vibe for Democrats, the rote invocations of Republicans past (who happened to vote, spend and act like DFLers), the victorian vapours at the idea that conservatism is making inroads in “her” state – to take the next big step.

I want y’all to write Lori Sturdevant’s next Sunday column.

We know it’ll be a wrapup of the GOP convention; she’ll be beholding the new GOP Gubernatorial nominee the way a new father beholds his baby’s first diaper.  Write the column, or some portion of it, in the comment section.  I’ll be moving this post up through the week to make sure everyone can enter. 

Winners will be announced Saturday night.  The prize?  I will publish the “winning” Sturdevant column before the Strib does, so the winner gets bragging rights, and an eternal place of honor on my Contests page.

Would you want more than that for this kind of prize?

And by all means, reprint this challenge in your blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, the Dewdrop Inn, or wherever – and forward any entries you get.

Wednesday, Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “independent” wrote about an episode involving an angry caller leaving a profane, uncivil message at a local AFSCME office.

Birkey:

[AFSCME’s flak] forwarded audio of the call along with the identity of a person she says the calls were tracked to.  That individual, a local business owner, she says “claims to be an organizer of the Tea Party protest at the State Capitol tomorrow.”

Birkey ran the “organizer” claim uncritically, without any fact-checking; apparently AFSCME flaks are considered unimpeachable sources.

But since I was on the stage with every single one of the Twin Cities’ Tea Party’s “organization” last night, I asked around if anyone had heard of the alleged caller, “Ed Motch”.  Was he an organizer?  Was he even prominent enough among the Twin Cities’ small community of non-major-party tax activists that anyone even knew the guy’s name?

Nobody had ever heard of the guy.  A casual google of “Ed Motch” shows that most of the references to him come from…the Mindy.

To be fair to the Mindy, the rest of the Twin Cities media – Fox9, WCCO and MPR – repeated AFSCME’s claim that this…:

“Hey you [expletive] piece of [expletive]. Your days are [expletive] numbered sucking at the public tit. This [expletive] is over. I saw that [expletive] ‘Tax the Rich’ ad again. We don’t you come and visit tomorrow at the [expletive] little party we’re going to have on the 15th at the capitol. Why don’t you show up there with your [expletive] union signs. That’d be just [expletive] wonderful. Come you you gutless [expletive] wonders, show up!”

…was a “threat”.   An uncivil. profane tirade, certainly, and not an invitation in good faith to the event, but “threat?

Apparently it is, if AFSCME, like Steny Hoyer, Rep. Cleaver, Rep. Lewis and Nancy Pelosi, say so.

I was enjoying an all-too-rare hour of listening to Jason Lewis the other day.

I was driving through the teller line at the bank, when he chimed in with an oldie but goodie:  “Bikers don’t pay taxes”. 

And the teller looked at me, perplexed, when I shouted “you are wrong for two reasons!”.

First:  I do pay taxes.  City and county taxes.  Some of which go to paying for bike lanes – the odd strip of asphalt around the lakes, and a stripe lane on the occasional street.  Not every street mind you; one street about every mile or so, generally, usually not the high-traffic ones.  (And by the way – Minneapolis’ re-work of Hennepin and First Avenue North, putting the bike lane between the parking lane and the curb?  Reekingly stupid.  It smacks of equal parts revenue generation plan and green-über-alles arrogance).   While there may or may not be state transportation dollars mixed in there, I most certainly do pay taxes for them. 

Now – in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decided not to make bike paths a user-fee-based system, paid for by tolls or bike licenses or whatever.  Got any ideas?   I’m down with ’em – although we all know it’ll just mean more property tax revenues for government to spend.  But that’s a larger problem on which we all agree.

Second (ironically, inasmuch as I was in a car when I thought this):  Like 99% or more of bikers, I pay gas taxes.  I drive.  Six months or so a year, though, I commute by bike (as well as all sorts of recreational riding).    For longer trips, or trips where I have to haul groceries, I drive. 

And you can ask any engineer, but five five-mile trips cause more road damage than one 25-mile trip; the longer trip is likely to be on the highways (which my gas taxes pay for), with fewer starts and stops and turns, the kind of thing that wears down roads.  So since a higher percentage of my gas-tax-generating car travel is longer, more efficient, less-damaging trips, while for half the year most of my short-hop trips cause no damage to roads at all (because I”m on a bike!), the state taxpayer is actually getting less damage per gas tax dollar out of me, the driver who bikes a lot, than out of someone who drives all of the equivalent mileage.

By the way –  while I drive, I buy less gas – which means less demand pressure on the market, which lowers the price for the rest of you. 

On all counts, you’re welcome.

I was enjoying an all-too-rare hour of listening to Jason Lewis the other day.

Years ago, when I ran an annual “State of Twin Cities Talk Radio” feature, a solid year before the Northern Alliance Radio Network went on the air (I discontinued the series when the show started, due to my obvious bias); in it, I noted at least once that “Jason Lewis is the host I’d like to be when I grow up”.  And that day was one of the broadcasts where I realized exactly why.

I’m not one of those people who bays “politics is the worst it’s ever been”; it’s not.  1928 was bad; 1828 was worse (albeit for many of the same reasons it’s bad today, only on steroids).   But it is getting pretty bad these days.

And not because people aren’t “bipartisan”.  “Bipartisanship” is a chimera; taken to an illogical extreme, it is antidemocratic. 

And in a multipolar political world, people are going to disagree – on issues, and on lesser things.

To paraphrase Lewis, we need to avoid bagging on the lesser things – especially personalities and personal attacks. 

Conservatives: Barack Obama was born a US Citizens.  Even if he wasn’t, it’s really too late to do anything about it; but it’s a moot point, because he is.  Get a grip.  And he’s not a Marxist or a communist, and won’t be until he opens re-education camps somewhere in Utah.  He’s a cut-rate Richard Daley, not Josef Stalin.   He’s a fabian statist, all right – and he got elected President.  He’s doing the job that 52% of your most gullible neighbors sent him to Washington to do, for now.  Let’s see if we can fix that in 2012.

And yeah, the left is doing it, too.  Unable to fight the Tea Party and the resurgent grassroots right on the issues, they’re going for the ad-homina, the name-calling, the fearmongering and slander, and the yellow hackery – all standard drills for people who are running on intellectual empty, and need to count on their opponents to react to an ofay provocation to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve dug.

Americans need to be smarter.  Conservatives, in particular, need to be smarter than the opposition; we’re fighting against a full-court media press that is at present fully in the bag for the President.

And this president is so easy to attack on the issues; he’s really been an incompetent disaster, so far, except inasmuch as he’s copied Bush’s policies that worked.  There is no need to barber on about his birth certificate, his religion or his labels; he is so weak on the issues that there’s no excuse for it.

Because when he’s essentially destroying, in the long run, everything that ever made this nation great, who really cares where he worshipped as a child?

A new lefty group blog (pardon the redundancy; I don’t know that there’s ever been a lefty soloblog), MN Political Roundtable, rolled out last week.  The blog more or less apes the True North model – like TN, it claims to be based on ideology (if not principles) rather than allegiance to the DFL:

Welcome! Our goal is to respectfully further progressivism and air the moderate to liberal viewpoint. We are not a “Democratic Party” or “DFL” blog, although most (but not all) of us are Democrats.

Now, whenever a leftyblog rolls out, you have to ask yourself – is it going to be:

• a front for some lefty group or another (a la the Minnesoros “Independent”)
• a chromosomal garage  sale like – well, we all know who I’m talking about.
  
• a gathering place for perpetually-enraged Triggers, like Norwegianity,
• something better?

Well, there’s a little promise; among the writers are my old friend Erik Hare, the usually excellent if sometimes excessively victorian-vapour-prone Eric Austin, and the always-wrong-but-frequently-thought-provoking-and-usually-unembarassing Dave Mindeman.

On the other hand, their first “guest blog” post – chock full of preening condescension and “artistic” talent somewhere between Ken Weiner and Swiftee – says “chromosomal garage sale”.

Time’ll tell.

Oprah?  A diva?  Who’da thunk it?

On the appointed day and time, two limos pulled up and Oprah went into Deborah Gore Dean’s shop across Wisconsin Avenue. After waiting 30 minutes, Colasante walked over and found his famous client berating Dean. He told Oprah and her entourage (secretary, pilot, hairdresser, makeup man, guards) that he had other appointments scheduled and she needed to honor her timetable.

“Oprah does not walk,” she told him, referring to herself in the third person. “Who is this guy?” Then she started screaming at her staff, but finally agreed to cross the street and come through his front door.

“I just don’t feel it,” she told him. “The vibrations aren’t right.”

“You’ll feel them once you see the paintings we’ve assembled for you,” he said, pointing up the stairs where Court’s art was hanging.

“Oprah does not do stairs,” she said.

Things went rapidly downhill from there: Colasante’s partner hissed that maybe Oprah could use the exercise (unclear who heard), and she stormed out in a huff without buying anything.

It’s from Kitty Kelley’s new book on Oprah, by the way.  It’s the book you might not be hearing about, because everyone’s scared of Oprah:

No telling what else Kelley has unearthed or who gets to hear it: Her book has an initial printing of 500,000 copies, but she said some major news organizations have refused to schedule interviews for fear of Oprah’s power and displeasure.

Ms. Kelley – obviously, you need to come to the one media organization in America that won’t chicken out in the face of Oprah and her masses of droogs.  Come on the Northern Aliance.  I booked you 26 years ago for your book on Sinatra, so you know perfectly well I’m up for it.

By the way; while I’m sure it’s not a complete reflection of their own characters, much less of larger social trends, I think it’s interesting to note that while the babbling diva and top-flight Obama supporter Oprah acts like 18th-century French royalty, refers to herself in the third person and tramples people, especially “servants”, like crabgrass, Rush Limbaugh leaves 1000% tips and is apparently renowned by waitstaff as the best customer there is.

Again, not drawing broad conclusions.

Honest.

Last year, I noted that nothing in the world turns a bunch of “hard-boiled”, skeptical journalists into uncritical fanboys and giggly fangirls faster than a bit of attention from one of the superstars of their own field.

And so a crowd of the Twin Cities’ finest “journalists” suspended all judgment and skepticism last year when Seymour Hersh claimed that Dick Cheney was running a covert hypersecret assassination squad, “Joint Special Operations Command”; none of them could apparently be bothered to check that JSOC had existed for thirty years, and has founded by  Jimmy Carter, whose vice president Walter Mondale was sitting in the room with them, lapping up Hersh’s very presence.

It’d be easy to jump from that to “the media just doesn’t fact-check liberals”.

And unlike a lot of easy jumps, Mark Hemingway notes it’s pretty much correct.

Hemingway remembers the Hersh bit, too…:

In March of last year, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell that a “covert executive assassination ring” had been run out of Vice President Cheney’s office.

Of course, Hersh has long had a “loose relationship with literal truth,” according to a 2005 article by Chris Suellentrop in New York Magazine. Columbia Journalism Review once offered this pointed critique of one of his books: “Hersh’s attributions generally fall short of normal journalistic yardsticks. More important, many of his conclusions are weakly substantiated by his research and highly questionable.”

Despite Hersh’s unreliability, his suggestion Cheney was assassinating people at will was dutifully parroted by the activist Left and receptive members of the media.

(Note to Mr. Hersh, his people, and his legions of media fanboys; where is that book?)

This week President Obama publicly ordered the assassination of a U.S. citizen, Muslim Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Unlike Hersh’s scurrilous charge, this presidential directive is a matter of record — not a wild rumor.

Make no mistake: al-Awlaki is a bad guy. He’s been definitively linked to the 9/11 hijackers, and more recently the recent Fort Hood massacre, not to mention the failed underwear bombing plot this past Christmas.

But he’s also a U.S. citizen, and thus entitled to basic constitutional protections. So where are the denunciations of Obama’s extraordinary decision from those who spent eight years decrying Bush and Cheney’s wartime expansion of executive power?

Denunciations?

The “journalists” are all busy on their blackberries trying to get tickets to the Helen Thomas swimsuit shoot.

I can’t believe I missed this one last week; Lori Sturdevant asks:

Is DFL Senate majority leader growing more conservative on the job?

That’s easy.  No.

But Pogemiller’s no idiot.  I mean, he doesn’t have to be smart in the classical sense to keep winning a seat in his district, but he’s not dumb, either.  He can see which way the wind is blowing.

And in a year when the dominant sentiment is “throw the taxing, spending bums out”, having a statement like “I think it’s simplistic and naive to say people can spend their money better than the government” on one’s record can’t be good electoral mojo.

So it makes perfect sense that someone like Pogy would enlist some willing flaks – that’d be Sturdevant – to try to paper over that long record of “all of your money are belong to us”-type statements, made back when it looked like Obama’s shirt-tails were going to stretch all the way into the next century.

But underneath it all?  It’s gonna be the same old story.

By the way, I’m going to put that quote on a sign to take to the Tea Party.

Along with Cy Thao’s classic “When you win, you get to keep your money, when we win, we take your money”.

Wonder if Sturdevant’s gonna write a piece about Thao’s newfound financial libertarianism?

I’ve told the story before.  One of the most illuminating lectures I’ve ever gotten on human nature was from my 11th grade history teacher, Mr. Dudley Butts – who was perhaps the most “Big Lebowski”-ish football head coach I’ve ever met. 

He’d been drafted during the Vietnam War; he was proud to point out that he’d been stationed in Washington DC, and the Viet Cong never attacked the Capitol on his watch; mission accomplished. 

And he told us that during basic training, as they were doing any of the things that mimicked killing people – at the rifle range, while doing bayonet drills and hand-to-hand combat practice – the drill sergeants never referred to their targets as humans.  They were always collections of not-quite-human memes; “gooks” and “charlies” and “slopes” and so on.  It took him a while to realize this wasn’t just the mark of a bunch of bigots with sergeant stripes; there was a method to it.  It was much easier to train people who’d spent 18 years of their lives being taught “thou shalt not kill” to kill if you taught them to kill something that wasn’t really human. 

Likewise, the theory goes, it’s easier to convince people you’re right if you get them to believe that your opponent isnt’ operating from rationalism or intelligence.

The Alinski-schooled left has known this for decades, of course.  Which is why over my years of blogging the left has followed such utterly predictable memes in referring to conservatives – “ignorant wingnuts” in their parlance.  Christians are “extremists”; Second Amendment activists are “crazy gunnies”; they never get exercised and motivated, they “Melt down” or “whine”.  Above all – or, in terms of plausibility and intelligence, below all – they never operate from bases in rationality, experience, knowledge of history or cognitive processes of any kind; the only conservative motivation is “fear”. 

I’ve never accused Lori Sturdevant of being much more than a willing water-girl for the DFL and all it stands for.  I didn’t expect any different from her “coverage” of the Bachmann/Palin rally.    I wasn’t disappopinted:

Minnesotans who tuned in to Wednesday’s Minneapolis rally on behalf of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and featuring former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin heard a lot about “freedom” and “liberty.” Those words are taking on a new partisan edge in this election year, not unlike the tinge acquired by the words “family values” a few years back.

Well, let’s shoot for accuracy, here – and we’ll have to do the shooting, because Sturdevant certainly won’t; the “partisan edge” to “family values” was pretty much entirely a product of the left and media (ptr). 

It’s a digression – but then, so was Sturdevant’s reference.  Offsetting penalties. 

Onward:

Those words also seem to be acquiring new definitions in the mouths of Republican politicians. Freedom seems to have a lot to do with the ability to avoid buying health insurance, thereby forcing others to pick up the tab for one’s hospital stay, should one’s good health run out.

Right.  That’s the motivation behind the Tea Parties and all of conservatism, Lori; getting someone else to pick up your tab.

It has nothing to do with believing in limited government, let alone the sense that for most people, Obamacare “fixes” something that needed a tune-up, not a complete overhaul.

Liberty, on the other hand, seems to be about building new nuclear power plants, drilling for oil just about anywhere, paying little or no taxes, and avoiding health and safety regulations in one’s business life.

Oooh, can I play?

Liberalism seems to be about being ashamed to be an American, being thankful to Mother Government for allowing you to exist, and shutting up and doing what your lords and betters tell you to do!

Liberty is also evidently compromised or diminished when the federal government takes emergency action to limit the collapse of major banks and prevent the demise of the nation’s homegrown auto industry.

Well, yeah.  As a matter of fact, it is; when there is no freedom to fail, then there is truly no freedom to succeed.  Badly run businesses should fail; in a true free-market economy, no business ever gets to be “too big to fail”. 

Those countercyclical rescue efforts came in for repeated scorn, from Bachmann, Palin and their warmup man, Gov. Tim Pawlenty — although many of the moves were initiated by a president they supported, George W. Bush.

“A President they supported?”  I can’t speak for Pawlenty, Bachmann or Palin, but I don’t know a single genuine conservative who supported Bush’s Kennedyesque spending. 

Let’s step aside for a moment, here.  When it comes to analyzing dissent, there are really two types of commentators; the ones that painstakingly develop taxonomies that shoehorn all of human nature’s wondrous complexity into implausibly neat but inevitably-pejorative, utterly-unnatural and completely self-serving boxes to make themselves sound all academic and serious, and everyone else:

Times of major economic and social change seem to spawn two kinds of political leaders in America — those who seek to help people overcome their fears and adapt, and those who play on fear and offer the vague promise that unsettling changes can be slowed or reversed.

Which is, of course – pardon a rare disgression into Old English – festering, reeking bullshit.

All political motivation is a complex mixture of education, tradition, self-interest, fear, communitarianism, and all manner of base and noble impulses.  Every person’s motivations are different; I’m a conservative because my study of history shows that statism is a cancer, and that limited government leaves the most room for humanity’s most noble natures to emerge, because the Constitution is fundamentally libertarian-conservative and if we don’t follow the Constitution then what the hell do we follow, because I “fear” the competence and motivations of this nation’s current “elite” and what it’ll do to the country I’ll leave my offspring, and because it is my right and duty as a free American citizen to fight for what I believe within our political process.

Likewise, Lori Sturdevant is a liberal because she’s been painstakingly indoctrinated into being a petty statist and D-list elitist, all of the “cool” people in her field have always been liberals, and she fears all of us peasants.

I mean, as long as we’re oversimplifying and caricaturing those we disagree with…

 Bachmann and Palin demonstrated Wednesday why they are among the nation’s leading exemplars of the latter category. Their success, this year and in 2012, will depend in large part on Americans staying fearful for a lot longer than Americans typically do.

I saw no fear on Wednesday.

But I read it all throughout Sturdevant’s column on Thursday.

Like Mr. Butts’ drill sergeants, Sturdevant is trying to tell her audience that her enemies – all us Teabaggers, Gunnies, Taxpayers-Leaguers, Wingnuts, God-Botherers, Bitter Gun-clinging Jeebus freaks and the whole lot – aren’t really as human as they are.

Peter Suderman notes that the Federal Communications Commission is poking its nose into regulating the Internet.

But that’s not the main issue.  The question is not whether we need the FCC at all:

The FCC’s entire approach is to rule by impulse and expand its reach whenever and wherever possible. Recent FCC actions include investigating the approval process Apple employs in its iPhone App Store, mulling whether and how phone companies might upgrade their networks and passing judgment on various consumer devices of minimal likely importance, such as the Palm Pixi.

The FCC is a crank-and-wire institution in a nanocircuit age:

When the FCC was launched in 1934, backers argued that airwave scarcity justified its existence. In an age of information overload, with a nearly infinite array of media choices available to anyone with a mobile phone or broadband connection, no such argument can be made. Yet rather than shrinking, the FCC has ballooned, growing its budget by more than 60 percent between 1999 and 2009.

The FCC is one of many government agencies that an administration that cared about responsible, limited, unobtrusive government could eliminate in toto without anyone noticing.

In broadcasting, one of the cardinal rules for air personalities on TV and radio is never get a subsitute that’s better than you.  It makes you look expendable; it’s reportedly one of the reasons that Hugh Hewitt hasn’t had the Northern Alliance back to fill in for him in four years.

Not that any of us are lucky enough to have Keith Olbermann figure that out after nearly a month off:

But a strange thing happened in the first quarter of 2010 – the 8pmET landmark show Countdown fared better without regular host Keith Olbermann than with him.

Olbermann was out all but one day during March before returning Monday due to the illness and death of his father. During that month, with Lawrence O’Donnell serving as the fill-in anchor, Countdown averaged 262,000 in the demo and 1,052,000 in total viewers. In January, the program averaged 1,000 more in the demo but 49,000 less in total viewers. In February, the program had 255,00 in the demo and 963,000 in total viewers. The year-to-year difference was also least in March than January or February. Overall though, the show is down 42% in the demo and 26% in total viewers year-to-year in the quarter.

In related news, Steny Hoyer demanded that House Republicans repudate allegations that Tea Partiers are scaring Olbie’s viewers away.

While Democrats have become very quick to try to hide their own failings behind purported Republican/conservative baseness (remember when Hillary Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City Bombing?), it’s interesting to notice how selective they are about the subject.

Evan Coyne Maloney on-again, off-again tolerance for violent imagery in activism:

The Obama Administration’s confrontational tone included some violent imagery last August, when one White House official encouraged Obama supporters to “punch back twice as hard” against opponents.

Later that day, at an anti-ObamaCare rally in St. Louis, a black man named Kenneth Gladney was handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags when he was approached by pro-ObamaCare SEIU union members. One of the men asked Gladney, “What kind of n*%%er are you to be giving out this kind of stuff?”

…

Obama’s supporters got the message. They were getting in people’s faces, and they were punching. And kicking. Repeatedly.

Yet despite the fact that the Kenneth Gladney beating occurred the same day that the Obama Administration recommended supporters “punch back twice as hard,” there was no hyperventilating in the media about political violence or the veiled threats that encouraged it.

Real statements.  Real violence.

Now, unlike Steny Hoyer and Ed Schultz, I’m not going to babble about how these actions – this preponderance of actions – reflects on every liberal.  That’d be stupid.

But in Modern Times, Paul Johnson notes that “the end justifies the means” is a theme connecting all statists, from Mussolini to Alinski.

…what can be better attributed to watching the bottom line.

“The Rage Is Not About Healthcare”, Frank Rich of the NYTimes assures us, and in so doing shows why his first gig was as drama critic:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

Attention, Frank Rich.  If the President, the Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader were all gun-toting Presbyterian Wal-mart-shoppers who could trace their anscestry back to the Mayflower, and they were proposing to nationalize much of the economy, sap the nation’s economic vitality, gut our healthcare system and put our great-grandchildren into debt, I’d be out there protesting, too.

And I’m pretty sure I speak for more Tea Partiers than you have, say, readers, when I say that.

The rest of Rich’s column is full of the kind of historical illiteracy and disingenuous dependence on Democrat talking points, it’s worth a separate fisking all on its own.

Maybe tomorrow.

Is the Uptake – the left-leaning but ostensibly higher-aiming “citizen news” outlet – on the outs with the Capitol Press Corps?

Sarah Janecek at PIM writes:

At least two media organizations currently renting space in the Capitol press room are objecting to The Uptake also renting space in the basement of the Capitol. The Uptake is a Minnesota-based citizen journalist organization operating on a low budget and perhaps best known for its live streaming of the various proceedings attendant to the 2008 U.S. Senate recount.

We’ve written about the Uptake before.  Since basically anyone can contribute to the Uptake, their efforts can be all right, and they can be pretty stupid, and in any case they depend on the restraint and “journalistic ethics” of the people involved.

And while I’ve broadly supported the Uptake, there’ve been some real veers into partisanship.

So have they, again?

Mike Dougherty, the local news editor for the Rochester Post-Bulletin, sent an email to Commissioner of Administration Sheila Reger (Admin is in charge of leasing the space), objecting to The Uptake’s presence. Wrote Dougherty:

“My concern is that they [The Uptake] are not a nonpartisan news site, which compromises the efforts of all the media in that complex that have built their reputations over time. Including The Uptake in this area with access to information about what many of the news organizations are working on with no guarantee someone else’s work won’t appear on their site or be Tweeted via Twitter … the media we represent are very different than The Uptake and we hope you will address our concerns by not allowing them to lease space in our current office or within the current press corps complex. We believe our concerns are shared by other news media organizations.”

TPT’s political reporter and “Almanac at the Capitol” host Mary LaHammer confirms that TPT also has concerns about The Uptake’s presence in the press room, noting that TPT is “zealous” about anyone or any organization using any TPT resources for partisan purposes, because of the public television company’s nonprofit status.

So what’s the problem?

Several people have said there have been some highly partisan tweets from some Uptake staff. We’ve checked the official Uptake Twitter account, and can’t find any specific, objectionable tweets other than the overriding liberal bent that is The Uptake.

We’re told the most partisan tweets are coming from Erin Maye, who is an Uptake intern. Specifically, Maye was tweeting from a House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher (DFL-Minneapolis) press conference while covering it for The Uptake. Maye allegedly tweeted that Kelliher would be a great governor. A check of Maye’s tweets doesn’t show that happened. So either the tweets were deleted or they didn’t happen.

The smart money would go with “deleted”.  We carried one of them last winter:

…in reference to a story where she was alleged to have done some fairly dodgy editing based, it might be surmised, on political bias:

UPDATE:  The years have played hob with some of my graphics.  The quote I refer to comes from Erin Maye, then an editor at the Uptake:  ““I’m Editing.  I feel important because I can make people say things they may not have said.  Muhahaha”. “

   – MBerg 10/1/2016

And Luke Hellier at MDE has another, the one from the presser above:

Both are from “Erin Maye”, an “intern” whose bio notes that she’s a “progressive” and was a “peace studies” major.

The Tweets are pretty much par for the course – if you’re a political blogger whose biases are part of your entire identity.  But if you’re trying to present yourself as a genuine news organization that’s “detached” from its staff’s individual partisanship, this is a real blot on the Uptake.

If you read through the PIM report’s comments, Mike Mcintee of the Uptake claims this is a battle of old media versus new media.

I’m sure that’s in the background. But then, it’s in the background of every story where new media and old media collide.

More to the point – what do you think would happen if someone, even a dime-a-dozen intern from, say, MPR or WCCO or the PiPress would do what Maye did?  Flout their biases, giggle about their ability to misrepresent and, says Hellier, go on to do it?

Do you think that “news” organization is going to get open, unfettered information from, say, the opposition party?

It’s the kind of thing “interns” and cub reporters and newbies get fired for doing at “real” news outlets (although it could be argued there’s a statute of limitations on that standard).

So there are several explanations for this:

• Maye didn’t get the memo on “journalistic ethics”.  Or maybe Uptake assumes they’re for squares.  I invite Mike Mcintee and/or Chuck Olson to comment on the Uptake’s “training”, if you will, in the rules of the road for “journalists” and CapCorps correspondents in particular.
• Maye got the memo, but just didn’t connect the dots.  She did major in “peace studies”, which is the “underwater basketweaving” of the 21st century, but I think we need to assume that the Uptake didn’t knowingly hire an idiot.
• It’s really nothing but a culture clash.  Maybe the old media really are attacking the new media!  Including Mary LaHammer, whose new media efforts via her blogs, tweeting and so on are among the most widely-read in town.  It could be.

I’ll be looking for comments from some of the principals in this story.

UPDATE:  Welcome PIM readers!

UPDATE 2: In the comments below, Margaret Martin notes that there’s another explanation:

If you’ve ever seen where the media resides down at the capitol, it’s a tiny space in the basement. I imagine there is no privacy down there at all for individual reporters and they rely on a sort of code of personal decency (among themselves) and a highly developed sense of personally assured mutual destruction if somebody should blab about something overheard from another member of the press about a source, or an impolitic opinion let loose in an unguarded moment that would shatter the illusion of non-partisan media.

I never learned the secret handshake among Capitol newsies, although I’ve known quite a few of them over the years (going back to Cathy Wurzer in 1986).  For people from such a range of fiercely-competitive companies to get along in such a small space, there must be some kind of rule, written or not.  Or so I’d suspect.

The uptake intern with her gossipy, gushy twittering is a menace to them all. No wonder they want to give her the boot. I have a little sympathy for them, but not much. Most of them are unsparing about politicians and would not hesitate to publish something unflattering about a politician they don’t like. Especially Republicans, and no matter how how the info came to them.

Yep.  It’s absurd to think that journalists don’t have political biases of their own; the crushing majority vote DFL; a staggering number of them go on to work for the DFL, for left-leaning think tanks, or for one government bureaucracy or another when they leave the news business.

But if you’re, say, Laura Brod or Dave Hann, and you have a “journalist” asking you for the straight conservative scoop on some issue or another, are you truly going to talk straight with someone that you more-or-less trust to detach their feelings, or one that you know is looking for the partisan angle?

It’s bad for business.

What happens when John Hinderaker meets Paul Krugman?

Lots of pieces of Krugman flying about the place.

Er, wait.  Krugman will probably call that an incitement to violence, too.

Hinderaker eviscerates Paul Krugman’s “Violent Republicans” column. You need to read it, if you’re a Republican who’s shaking his/her head at the constant slander, and especially if you’re a Democrat who still believes Krugman is anything but a Lori Sturdevant-style shill for the Democrats.

Once upon a time, as I eviscerated Krugman’s idiotic “Red States Are Welfare Queens” column (wherein he noted, devoid of context, that “red” states take in more “federal money” than “blue” states), I said that I’d love to debate Krugman on the subject.  Leftyblogger Charlie Quimby sniffed – partaking, I suspect, in the liberal delusion that credentials equal merit – that he’d “pay money” to watch a debate between Krugman and I.

On that topic?  I’d do it.  And mop the floor with him.

Katie Kieffer on some of the stories Obamacare is crowding out of the news:

Blah, blah, blah. Stop talking about health care for 15 seconds. You have until at least March 18th to analyze Speaker Nancy Pelosi and streakerciser Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel bludgeon Congress to vote for Obamacare.

Let’s talk about the stories of legal manipulation and scandal that this administration is happy you aren’t paying attention to while you’re focused on jobs and health care.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember there’s  “B” section when legislative armageddon is on the front page…

KSTP-AM program director Steve Konrad apparently smacked into a mattress on I94 last night while riding his motorcycle:

The crash happened about 6 p.m. on eastbound I-94 at Western Avenue. The mattress, left or lost by another eastbound vehicle, was in the left-hand lane, State Patrol Lt. Eric Roeske said.

A 2007 Ford Expedition was able to swerve and miss the mattress, but the 2004 Yamaha hit it and crashed, Roeske said.

Steven J. Konrad, 46, was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul. He was wearing a helmet, according to the State Patrol.

So pony up your prayers, hopes, crossed fingers, karmic imprecations or whatever your worldview calls for.

UPDATE:  According to David Brauer, Konrad is still plenty critical, with brain trauma and a bunch of broken bones – but on the doctors’ scale of 1 (“best”) to 20 (really bad) for measuring brain trauma, Steve is a “4”, and is responding to pain.

I take occasional issue with my fellow AM1280 host Bradlee Dean on some questions political and theological, even as I support his program, “Sons of Liberty”.  “Sons…” does for politics what his late, long-running show on AM980 The Believer did for religion; take it back to its original fundamentals; going back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on The Patriot more or less like referring to Luke and Saint Paul on The Believer. 

Neither program is/was for the faint of heart or the mushy of belief.  Like I said – I disagree with Dean on some things as strenuously as I agree with him on others.

But knowing Bradlee as I do – he’s a great guy, and I’ve had a lot of fun watching his kids grow up over the years during our mutual Saturday time slots – I got a kick out of Andy Birkey’s odd little swat at Dean in the Mindy yesterday (emphasis added):

You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, the front group for the punk rock ministry of Bradlee Dean…

“Front group?”

Now, perhaps Birkey was writing imprecisely.  But a “Front” usually implies some level of deception – like the Mob using a laundry as a front for a drug operation, for example, or someone setting up a potemkin news organization to serve as a campaign propaganda outlet.  That kind of thing.

Just between you (pl) and me, whatever Bradlee Dean is, he’s not especially reticent about who he is or what he or “You Can Run…” represents.

Back to Birkey:

… took his brand of fundamentalist Christianity to a DFL gubernatorial meet-and-greet several weeks ago…

Several weeks ago?

Then why cover it on a “news” site? 

Did Birkey just hear about it?  Or was it a slow news day at the Mindy?

Or did John Marty need to place a story showing how he was duking it out with all those teabagging fundies to make his gubernatorial campaign seem like less a relic from the nineties?

There was some other stuff, but I lost interest.  Sorry.

On the one hand, I don’t know that anybody quibbles about Lori Sturdevant being a bought-and-paid-for (figuratively) tool of the left – someone who is the mirror opposite of the “extremist” conservatives she clutches her pearls and complains about during the course of every single legislative session.  She’s pretty well thrown in with the radical dogmatic left; there’s really no need to argue about it.

Except that she’s still employed by the Strib; there, she writes as a “general” columnist, which might tell the uninformed reader that she’s actually passing on unvarnished, “objective” information, rather than shilling for the DFL.  Sturdevant is no more detached or “objective”  in covering politics than David Brauer or Brian Lambert.

But how would the casual Strib reader know this?

Simple; most of them don’t.  Which is just fine by whomever is paying the bills.

Oh, yeah –Sturdevant favors single-payer healthcare, as she makes perfectly clear in her weekend mash note to Roseville senator John Marty, who I’d say has served as a sort of dimestore Paul Wellstone, except that the left and Sturdevant would likely think of that as a compliment.

The possibility that Americans would join hands and buy health care all together has found no traction in Washington.

[Aside:  Notice with Sturdevant how “bipartisanship” is always something warm and fuzzy like “joining hands” when it’s a DFL initiative like socialized medicine, but some sort of climate of mean hatred when it’s something like tax cuts?]

But at the DFL-controlled Minnesota Legislature, the idea has been quietly marching through committees, three in the Senate, one in the House.

If something is “quietly marching” – just like Martin Luther King! – then  it must be a great idea, right?

Well, no – the DFL, which never met a spending program that didn’t make a tingle run up its leg, has a supermajority in the Senate and an almost-veto-proof margin in the House.

The Minnesota Health Plan is propelled in the Senate by former and current DFL gubernatorial candidate John Marty, a seven-term legislator from Roseville. Marty recognizes that with GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty in office, a single-payer health plan has no chance to become law this year.

But health care politics will change rapidly in the next few years as the status quo becomes increasingly untenable, the senator predicted.

The whammy here is that the system by definition can only get less tenable – because it is perfectly tenable today.  Sturdevant, being a bobble-headed repeater of DFL talking points, likely doesn’t know it, but John Marty does, and is lying; 92% of Minnesotans have insurance already, of one kind or another.  And insurance in Minnesota, regulations aside, is fairly affordable compared to states like New York or New Jersey.  And of the 8% who don’t have insurance, the vast majority either don’t want it, which should be their right, or are part of a relatively tiny minority who actually can’t get any insurance.

His plan will gain adherents because it would cure more of what ails the costly health care system. It would insure everyone, cover all medical needs, provide the purchasing clout needed to reform the way medicine is practiced, and thereby drive down premium costs.

If I can perform no other service in this debate, I want to make sure you, gentle reader, who is likely to go to a healthcare protest,can read behind the code words Sturdevant just used.

• “Insure everyone” – even if you don’t want it, orif you like the plan you have now just fine!  Even if you move here strictly for the free health care (with no intention of paying anything meaningful into the system).
• “cover all medical needs” – they do mean all medical needs; viagra for 68-year-old real estate agents; chemical dependency treatment; sex change operations; since John Marty and the extreme left wing of the DFL is involved, abortions will be part of the package at some point or another.
• “provide the purchasing clout needed to reform the way medicine is practiced” – which is a nice, benign way of saying “provide a monopoly that can dictate prices to doctors”.  Who, inevitably, leave the business.  Which, inevitably, constricts the supply of care.  Which either means the state raises what they pay, or start rationing the care that is available.  Which is precisely what has happened in every single state, county or nation that has ever socialized healthcare.
• “drive down premium costs” – in the same way that union healthcare plans “drive down co-pays” – by passing the costs on to other people.  And when it’s government involved, you know where the buck stops starts, right?

Sturdevant:

Marty pegs the savings in total state health care spending, public and private combined at 20 to 25 percent.

Provided the conditions of the “pegging” stay static – which never, ever happens.

That claim faces a mountain of skepticism, even from his fellow DFLers, because he is talking about “government-run health care.” But his notion isn’t to put the Legislature in charge. It’s to create a quasi-governmental agency with a board selected by nonpartisan county commissioners, empowered to contract with local and regional providers of health care services and manage their care.

Sturdevant, knowing she can’t dazzle you with brilliance, is baffling the gentle reader with – well, Sturdevant.Again with the code words:

• “Quasi-governmental agency” – Being “quasi-governmental” is like being “quasi-pregnant”.
• “nonpartisan county commissioners” – Please.  County commissioners are as non-partisan as, well, Lori Sturdevant.
• “Empowered to contract with providers and manage their care” – A phrase that is so carefully crafted as to be almost dazzling in its misleading brilliance.  But if this board is “empowered” to compete against private health insurance companies, they do it with government subsidies, which drive down the apparent cost (because everyone’s premiums appear cheaper if someone else is paying for them!) and increase at least the initial fund of money available.  Which puts the private companies at a disadvantage and eventually drives them from the market.  Which leaves the “quasi”-public plan as the main player in the market.  Which, as more people flock to use the artificially-low-priced services, costs the taxpayers more.  Which means the board will “negotiate” lower prices with providers.  Which means providers leave the business (as they have in Canada, Sweden, the UK, France and every other place where socialized healthcare has been attempted). Which means that either the wait for services grows longer (as they have in Canada, Sweden, the UK, France…), or the “board” gives in and pays out higher prices, but then either has to make up the difference by charging higher premiums (which nobody can afford by themselves because, remember, you’re paying for Honest Eddie’s little blue pills and Dave’s sex change as well as little Raymond’s appendectomy), or raising taxes – which won’t solve the problem right away anyway, since replaceing doctors and nurses takes years, and doesn’t work if you’ve made medicine a wretched government job anyway.

Sturdevant:

That should sound familiar to the 13 rural (and Republican-dominated) counties of PrimeWest Health, a county-based health care purchasing system for low-income people that’s been turning in impressive cost savings in recent years.

But if it sounds familiar, it’s just the voices in the listener’s head, because there is virtually no similarity.

While PrimeWest Health may well run into exactly the same pathologies that we noted above, and for exactly the same reasons – like the Massachusetts health system did – it is at least something that makes more sense than Marty and Sturdevant’s fantasy; it attempts to solve the real problem (uninsured low-income people) rather than the imagined one (insuring everyone for everything).

That, indeed, has been the greatest danger of the healthcare debate lately; aided and abetted by people like Al Franken in last week’s rally, and Lori Sturdevant in the media, the left-voting crowd in Minnesota is chanting less “public option now!” and more “it’s just like free enterprise!”, without knowing just how wrong they are.