Hey, it gets cold in Minnesota -- maybe Mad Michele and Governor Tim, you know, their brains just kind of freeze up?

by Ken

You'll recall Steve Benen's report, after listening to all 13 minutes of Mad Michele Bachmann's radio interview with a right-wing loon, of the most famous nugget from her rant:

The recovery package is part of a Democratic conspiracy to "direct" funding away from Republican districts, so Democratic districts can "suck up" all federal funds. Bachmann doesn't think this will work because, as she put it, "We're running out of rich people in this country."

On Bluestem Prairie, Sally Jo Sorensen writes:

The zany "running out of rich people" quip has attraced most of the attention, but we'd like to look at the first part of that assertion: that recovery money is going to be pulled from Republican districts and funneled to Democratic ones.

For Minnesota, this seems bass ackwards if the administration figures are accurate. Here are those job creation projections for congressional districts in the North Star state, with an added emphasis on the figures for Bachmann's own district:

Minnesota 66,000

Congressional District 1 Minnesota 7,800
Congressional District 2 Minnesota 9,200
Congressional District 3 Minnesota 8,300
Congressional District 4 Minnesota 7,700
Congressional District 5 Minnesota 7,900
Congressional District 6 Minnesota 9,500
Congressional District 7 Minnesota 7,500
Congressional District 8 Minnesota 8,100

Bachmann's own district is projected to benefit most of any district in Minnesota under the recovery bill. Enough said.

Sally Jo, by the way, lives in MN-1, which is now represented by that fine progressive Tim Walz. [Wrong! See UPDATE below.] But she's had, I'm imagining, all too much close-range exposure to the blithering of Mad Michele.

UPDATE: We have a comment-clarification from the Bluestem Prairie blogger herself:

Actually, I live in the SE corner on MN-07, a a county abutting MN-06. I write about MN-01 because I was born and raised in Southern Minnesota...and Tim Walz is a bit better fit for me that Collin Peterson. -- Ollie Ox

Thanks for the clarification, and keep up the good work!


AND MINNESOTA GOV. TIM PAWLENTY
SAYS YES, HE'LL TAKE THE MONEY

Rachel Maddow made no secret of her pleasure last night at having an actual Republican guest, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (the clip is here), since Republicans are by and large fraidy-scared to come on the show, no doubt for fear of coming off as deceitful, mean-spirited jackasses. (This calls to mind John Leonard's story of doing a print interview, as a less secure younger journalist, with the famously blustering TV executive and producer Freddy Silverman, only to have the great man call him, raging, "You made me an ass," to which the thoroughly cowed John said the only thing that came into his head, "I didn't do that. God did it.")

The big question on Rachel's mind was whether Governor Pawlenty, who vocally opposed the Obama stimulus package, would accept the money designated in it for his state, and if so, how he justifies it when he considers the package a bad idea. The answer to the first question is yes, and to the second question -- well, the governor didn't so much answer it as talk around it:

My concerns about the bill -- I think it could have been done better. I was in favor of a stimulus bill. I was disappointed in this one for a variety of reasons. But in Minnesota's case, we're going to accept the money for this reason, Rachel. We pay in, for every dollar to the federal government, we get about 72 cents back. We're the 46th-least-receiving state of any state in the nation in terms of federal money, so our view is, if you buy the pizza, it's okay if you have a slice. That doesn't mean you can't express concerns about the bill or offer suggestions of about how it could have been better.

He added, "When you're paying the tab, like Minnesota is, one of the major contributors, subsidizers of the federal government, I don't think it's untoward for us to accept our share of the money." (By the way, the punctuation makes the governor's droning monotone seem way more nuanced than it actually sounds.)

Well, no, governor, that "46th-least-contributing state" statistic," which significant in some regards, isn't in this one, because it doesn't make Minnesota "one of the major subsidizers of the federal government." That would depend on the actual amount contributed. And it still doesn't explain why, if you think the bill is bad in principle, you don't reject the money on principle.


RIGHT-WING DOODYHEAD ALERT: IT'S A MIRACLE
THIS PATHETIC WRETCH CAN TURN THE TV ON

By the way, I notice some online doodyhead is tearing into Rachel Maddow -- gotcha! the poor creep apparently thinks -- for not knowing that governors don't vote in Congress. The only thing is, Rachel never said any such thing. What she said was that the governor had opposed the bill. This is a fact, which she is aware of because she has a functioning brain and pays attention to the world around her rather than living as this pathetic wretch does, with its head tightly wedged up its butt, taking in only the odd word that happens to fit in with the psychotic delusions playing inside its tiny brain.

It would be nice if this doodyheadness could be excused on grounds that the pathetic wretch is too stupid to know better (and to stupid to know), but it can operate a computer and sling fancy words around, and seems clearly to be this disconnected from reality by choice, out of either intellectual laziness, free-floating malice, or ideological rigidity impervious to reality -- or some combination of the three.

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