Source: Flickr; Republicanconference (www.flickr.com/photos/republicanconference)

On the heels of the Minnesota Independent story last week about U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen’s cozy financial relationship with the medical device industry, the New York Times reported Tuesday that some health professionals are alarmed by Paulsen’s push to relax Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight.

“They have this unwritten assumption that every new device is innovative,” Dr. Rita Redberg, who is the editor of the Archives of Internal Medicine, said, referring to the venture capital funds. But some devices, she said, “are killing people or causing significant harm.”

The Times reports that 10 bills to speed up the FDA’s medical device approval process have already been introduced by House Republicans this month. In the Senate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar has introduced a similar bill.

The U.S. House of Representatives has held four hearings on F.D.A. device approval procedures since February, with the vast majority of witnesses being “investors, entrepreneurs, industry consultants, trade group officials or patients who said that agency delays in approving a device had harmed them or a loved one,” according to the New York Times. No one who was harmed by a faulty device was invited to testify.

As the Minnesota Independent reported last week, Paulsen has been rewarded for his advocacy for the industry with campaign donations from company PACs and executives. The Congressman is currently sitting on $900,000, according to Federal Election Commission records. The medical device and drug industry gives more generously to Paulsen than to other candidates or PACs in the district, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Times story shows a steep increase in donations from venture capitalists with an interest in health care after Paulsen testified to Congress in June that FDA processes should be streamlined.

As the Minnesota Independent reported, Paulsen has seen substantial increases in donations from the entire medical device industry since he became a member of the influential House Ways and Means Committee, with one medical private equity firm crowing that “his increasingly high profile in Congress may help bring additional visibility to the medtech sector.”

Photo: wikipedia

To the victor go the spoils, the saying goes. And so on Tuesday Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak took delivery of 10 pounds of hamburger from Jim Schmitt, mayor of Green Bay, Wisc., in fulfillment of the friendly wager they made on the Vikings-Packers football game. But the Vikings’ win wasn’t the only news since the mayors made their bet. On the day between the bet and the game, the New York Times published an expose on the serious health hazards of hamburger meat, focusing on a Minnesota victim and corporation and a processor in Wisconsin.

The Times article probed the source of hamburger meat that sickened Stephanie Smith of Cold Spring, Minn., in 2007, sending her into a medically-induced coma and eventual paralysis from which she is still trying to recover.

The meat was produced by the Minnesota-based Cargill, under its “American Chef” label. It was processed from sources around the country and hemisphere at Cargill’s plant in Butler, Wis.

Rybak’s reward for the Vikings’ 30-23 victory at Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome: “10 lbs. of All-American Hamburgers, Seroogy’s Chocolate, and Wisconsin-made cheese,” according to his office.

The Times article didn’t mention “All-American Hamburgers” and there is no reason to suspect that Green Bay’s gift is any different from any other hamburger — besides, as its name suggests, being made from exclusively domestic sources.

“I want to thank Mayor Schmitt for giving us a taste of Wisconsin in addition to the delicious taste of victory we’re still savoring,” Rybak said in a statement, adding that the hamburger and other booty would be donated to Sharing and Caring Hands, a local charity that serves needy individuals and families.

Processed meat also hung in the balance with a separate wager between the states’ governors: Wisconsin sausage versus Minnesota pork.

Photo: bachmann.house.gov

Were U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann to give a school speech of her own — “What I Did During My Summer Vacation” — she could confidently state that she cemented a place for herself in the national news media’s consciousness. The latest evidence: Bachmann figures prominently in two end-of-summer news quizzes from The Atlantic and the New York Times.

Neither quiz question will tax regular readers of the Minnesota Independent, but here they are for the record.

From the “Summer 2009 Political Vocabulary Quiz” by the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder:

8. “Michele Bachmann” is:
A. an invention of the liberal blogosphere
B. a Republican member of Congress from Minnesota who aspires to run for the presidency
C. a family doctor in Tupelo

From “An End of Summer Quiz” by the New York Times’ Gail Collins:

III. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota or Sarah Palin?
A) “Right now we are looking at reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom in this country.”
B) “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’. …”
C) Refuses to fill out her census form.
D) Urged people to be “armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax.”
E) Going to China to address an investors forum sponsored by a Hong Kong brokerage firm.
F) “Only dead fish go with the flow.”

Bridge-blast double-take: Sunday morning’s implosion of Minneapolis’ Lowry Avenue bridge was big news, garnering coverage on TV and YouTube and, of course, in the local dailies. Front covers of Monday’s editions of the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press gave readers an inkling of what a one-newspaper metro might mean: both papers used the identical three photos of the bridge demolition, attributed to Hennepin County Public Affairs via the AP. The dailies followed up this morning with, you got it, front-page placement for the New York Times’ excellent piece on the death of 26-year-old Iranian democracy protester Neda Agha-Soltan, which also appeared on the Times’ front page. (Via Newseum.org, images of PiPress and Strib covers.)

Saberi inks book deal: Fargo-based journalist Roxana Saberi, having just penned a piece on threats to free speech in Iran for the Chicago Tribune, just landed a book deal with HarperCollins to tell the story of her arrest and 100 days of imprisonment in Iran. Financial details of the agreement weren’t made public, but a publication date was: the as-yet-untitled memoir will come out in March 2010.

Worth examining: As David Weigel at our sister site, the Washington Independent, writes about the conservative bent of the Washington Examiner and its founder, MinnPost’s David Brauer tweets about a headline at an apparently unrelated Examiner: “Plucky Minn. House GOP minority picks leader.” Of the piece, which references the “small but potent Minnesota House Republican caucus,” Brauer asks, “Did AP write this headline or is the Examiner being a bit patronizing about the House GO(mini)P?”

The question in question:

During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office, humbled you the most and troubled you the most?

Obama took out a pen and asked Zeleny to repeat the question’s key words, drawing laughter especially with this raised-eyebrow comment: “‘Enchanted.’ Nice.”

Zeleny’s query and Obama’s response clocked in at more than six-and-a-half minutes — more time than was spent on two questions about torture. The other questions reporters asked, including followups and Obama’s replies, required only about three-and-a-half minutes each, on average.

But Zeleny’s own estimate of the value of his question’s value apparently exceeds even its disproportionate claim on the president’s and the national television audience’s attention. More than one-sixth of his story on the press conference (co-written with Helene Cooper) is devoted to Obama being surprised, troubled, enchanted, humbled.

Zeleny “can get away with stuff like this,” writes the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, because he has been reporting on Obama since his early political career in Chicago.

Ambinder heard a White House aide console a reporter who didn’t get to ask a question: “Well, if it hadn’t been for one of your colleagues.”

Video is below, but first here’s the “enchanted” exchange from the Times’ own transcript (the newspaper also has an interactive transcript-video feature on the press conference).

OBAMA: Okay. Jeff Zeleny.

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office, humbled you the most and troubled you the most?

MR. OBAMA: Let me write this down. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Surprised.

MR. OBAMA: All right. I’ve got –

QUESTION: Troubled.

MR. OBAMA: I’ve got — what was the first one?

QUESTION: Surprised.

MR. OBAMA: Surprised.

QUESTION: Troubled.

MR. OBAMA: Troubled.

QUESTION: Enchanted.

MR. OBAMA: Enchanted. Nice. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: And humbled.

MR. OBAMA: And what was the last one, humbled?

QUESTION: Humbled.

Thank you, sir.

MR. OBAMA: All right. (Laughter.) Okay. (Laughter.)

Surprised. I am surprised, compared to where I started, when we first announced for this race, by the number of critical issues that appear to be coming to a head all at the same time.

You know, when I first started this race, Iraq was a central issue. But the economy appeared on the surface to still be relatively strong.

There were underlying problems that I was seeing with health care for families and our education system and college affordability and so forth, but obviously, I didn’t anticipate the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

And so, you know, the typical president, I think, has two or three big problems; we’ve got seven or eight big problems. And so we’ve had to move very quickly. And I’m very proud of my team for the fact that we’ve been able to keep our commitments to the American people to bring about change, while at the same time managing a whole host of issues that had come up that weren’t necessarily envisioned a year and a half ago.

Troubled? I’d say less troubled but, you know, sobered by the fact that change in Washington comes slow. That there is still a certain quotient of political posturing and bickering that takes place even when we’re in the middle of really big crises.

I would like to think that everybody would say, you know what, let’s take a timeout on some of the political games, focus our attention for at least this year, and then we can start running for something next year. And that hasn’t happened as much as I would have liked.

Enchanted? (Laughter.) Enchanted. I — I will — I will tell you that, when I — when I meet our servicemen and -women, enchanted’s probably not the word I would use. (Laughter.)

But — but — but I — but I am — I am so profoundly impressed and grateful to them for what they do. They’re really good at their job. They are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices on our behalf. They do so without complaint. They are fiercely loyal to this country.

You know the more that I interact with our servicemen and -women, from the top brass down to the lowliest private, I’m just, I’m grateful to them.

Humbled by the — humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life and there are a lot of different power centers. And so I can’t just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want — (laughter) — or — (chuckles) — or, you know, turn on a switch and suddenly, you know, Congress falls in line. And so, you know, what you do is to make your best arguments, listen hard to what other people have to say and coax folks in the right direction.

This metaphor has been used before, but this — the ship of state is an ocean liner; it’s not a speed boat. And so the way we are constantly thinking about this issue of how to bring about the changes that the American people need is to — is to say, if we can move this big battleship a few degrees in a different direction, we may not see all the consequences of that change a week from now or three months from now, but 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, our kids will be able to look back and say that was when we started getting serious about clean energy, that’s when health care started to become more efficient and affordable, that’s when we became serious about raising our standards in education.

And — and so — I — I have a much longer time horizon than I think you do when you’re a candidate or if you’re listening, I think, to the media reportage on a day-to-day basis.

And I’m — I’m humbled, last, by the American people who have shown extraordinary patience and, I think, a recognition that we’re not going to solve all these problems overnight.

Okay?

UPDATED after the jump with more new newspaper editorials.

The Times’ editorial today is a shade less emphatic than the one that ushered former Sen. Tom Daschle out of consideration as President Obama’s secretary of health and human services. Former Sen. Coleman is unlikely to do what Daschle did when faced with “Daschle ought to step aside” and heed the Times’ advice with same-day service.

But the Times’ headline, “‘It’s Over, Norm. O.K.?,’” says it all with a phrase that’s direct and succinct, if borrowed (from former U.S. Rep. and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough). It’s almost worthy of a tabloid rival like the New York Daily News, which set the standard in the 1970s with the famous “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Compare it to the Star Tribune’s editorial headline on Wednesday, “Expedite appeal in election contest,” which said nothing.

The Las Vegas Sun also lays it on the line today in an editorial under the heading “Time to step aside: Republican Coleman should cede Minnesota Senate race to Democrat Franken.” Its kicker: “The longer (Coleman) persists in his charade, the more he hurts his own state.”

The Jamestown (S.D.) Sun today reprints an editorial (“Coleman’s time has run out”) that ran last week in the Albert Lea Tribune — one of the earliest in the recent crop of Minnesota newspaper advice for Coleman. 

Also new today are in-state editorials from the St. Paul Pioneer Press (“we make the case for a state high court review”), the St. Cloud Times (“time to stop fight”), and the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Daily (“Certify Franken”). (Hat tip: Braublog)

Related: 
Give up, Coleman: Quotes from the election-contest courthouse and beyond
More free advice for Coleman from media, punditry
The conservative case for why Coleman should drop out
As world awaits order in senate trial, sideshows and catcalls continue
Drumbeat grows louder for Coleman to concede soon

Here’s Elias on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” April 14:

The New York Times’ Ralph Blumenthal has no trouble finding a place for Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff in Dante’s “Inferno”:

Mr. Madoff was 700 years too late to join Dante’s Who’s Who of sinners, but it is easy to imagine where the poet would consign this scam artist, who admitted to stealing as much as $65 billion: to the Pit, the Ninth (and deepest) Circle of Hell. It is where sins of betrayal are punished in a sea of ice fanned frigid by the six batlike wings of the immense, three-faced, fanged and weeping Lucifer.

The Financial Times’ Harry Eyres taps translated lines from Plato’s “Republic” to find an ancient Greek precedent for today’s conditions:

“The [oligarchic] Rulers, who are in power because they have amassed so much wealth, do not want to prohibit by law the extravagance of the young, and stop them from wasting their money and ruining themselves. Their intention is to make loans to such imprudent people or by buying up their property to hope to increase their own wealth and influence … The moneymakers continue to inject the toxic sting of their loans wherever they can, and to ask for high rates of interest, with the result that the city becomes full of lazy drones and paupers.” Has any better diagnosis of the origins of the credit crunch been written recently?

But it’s Karl Marx who had capitalism’s number and shows up most frequently in journalists’ financial diagnoses. Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic first relates what a retired British Museum worker told interviewers about Marx–

“And then one day ’e just stopped coming. And you know what’s a funny fing, sir?” A pregnant pause. “Nobody’s ever ’eard of ’im since!”

– before announcing, “He’s back.”

As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind. On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital? The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week? A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.” The falling rate of profit, the tendency to monopoly … how wrong could that old reading-room attendant have been?

Last week I noted how the 180-turn that U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann has apparently taken in her opinion of President-elect Barack Obama landed her on the front page of the New York Times. In a story headlined, “Harsh words about Obama? Never mind now,“ the Times made Bachmann the leading example among Republicans who, post-election, turned on a dime in their public attitudes toward the president-elect. Bachmann’s evolution, evident in a post-election interview with Politico, came after her infamous “anti-American” remarks on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” a tepid Obama mention on Election Night and more inflammatory remarks about him on radio the next day.

I also noted an error in the Times account: The article had Bachmann telling Politico she was “extremely grateful” for Obama’s win on Nov. 5 when Politico had clearly stated her comments came on Nov. 6. Now the Times has corrected the original story online and owned up to the error:

Because of an editing error, a Washington Memo article last Sunday about some Republicans who spoke more kindly of Barack Obama after he was elected reversed, in some editions, the dates on which Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska commented on Mr. Obama. It was on Nov. 6 that Ms. Bachmann said she was “extremely grateful that we have an African-American who has won this year.” And it was on Nov. 5 that Ms. Palin said, “God bless Barack Obama and his beautiful family.”

So now we know the rest of the story. It was the Times getting goofed up by the election season welter of Bachmannisms and Palinisms that forced the error. The Palin-Bachmann axis was quickly recognized in Minnesota but apparently is still enough of an unknown beyond our state’s borders that it can wreak havoc on the national stage.

The highlight, though, was this cryptic exchange about President-elect Barack Obama:

NYT: Are you going to send him a little note congratulating him?
Rove: I already have. I sent it to his office. I sent him a handwritten note with funny stamps on the outside.
NYT: What kind of funny stamps?
Rove: Stamps.

That called to mind one of the more cryptic MnIndy interviews of the campaign season. It took place last month, outside a Todd Palin rally in Moorhead, Minn. Prompted by the Minnesota Independent’s Paul Demko, Moorhead resident Greg Rhodes, a McCain-Palin supporter, revealed that he’d just handed Alaska’s “first dude” some photographs. What kind of photographs?  Watch a less-than-a-minute MnIndy video clip after the jump to find out.