The Strident Centrist Blog

Last summer’s collapse of the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis focused Minnesotans’ attention on the states’ decaying transportation infrastructure, and that led to the overwhelming support for the Democrat-sponsored bill to fund maintenance and improvements with an increase of the fuel tax at the pump. Governor Pawlenty’s alternative was a less aggressive spending increase, funded by the preferred GOP practice of palming most of the costs off onto future generations with borrowed money. Six state House Republicans voted with the Democrats to successfully override the governor’s veto.

Now those six have been summarily stripped of their positions as the ranking minority members of various committees, and replaced by radical authoritarians. (The right wing elements of the Republican Party are no longer “conservatives” in any meaningful sense of the word, and thus I don’t use the term in reference to them.) (more…)

Michele Bachmann, the embarrassing first-term wingnutwoman who represents Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District (roughly the arc of far-northern Twin City suburbs plus the rapidly growing St. Cloud corridor stretching 90 miles to the northwest; PDF map here) finds that the shoe is not so comfortable when it’s on the other foot. After winning office with a lavishly funded campaign against Patty Wetterling that featured misleading and outright falascious negative ads, she now is upset by the fact that she finds herself on the other end of an uncomfortably truthful TV pitch, sponsored by Americans United, regarding her support of Bush’s veto of the S-CHIP bill. Eric Black of Minnesota Monitor has the details of the letter she had her chief of staff send to the TC area TV stations asking that the ad be withdrawn. Via the link in the MM piece to his blog you can find his deconstructions of some of Bachmann’s below-the-belt hits against Wetterling.