What’s in the Q?

Kupchella to tackle healthcare reform: Rick Kupchella has two new projects in the works after leaving KARE 11 two weeks ago. One’s a new-media project, but details haven’t been revealed yet. This is the other: the i.e. network, a PR effort targeting healthcare reform. According to the network’s site, they’re partnering with Target and “some of America’s most progressive corporate entities” to create The ALLIANCE for a Healthy Twin Cities to promote lower cost, higher quality healthcare through a focus on wellness. But it might not be as “progressive” as you’d think: partnering with Kupchella is Tom Mason, formerly chief of staff for Norm Coleman, senior communications adviser to Tim Pawlenty and communications director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Once dubbed a “rising star” of the GOP, he also published Twin Cities Business Monthly for five years.

Saberi’s plea: As Fargo-born journalist Roxana Saberi calls for the release of her former cellmate in Iran, Iranian aid worker Silva Harotonian, protesters for democracy in that country are reportedly dealing with the government’s news blackout by making an underground newspaper. Here’s the translation of one.

LATimes gives props to local Twitterer: The Los Angeles Times included a local — Secrets of the City‘s Max Sparber — in its list of funny tweets in response to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s news conference yesterday, in which he revealed he’d been unfaithful to his wife. “None of us are in a position to judge Sanford until we too have had sex with a woman in Argentina,” Sparber wrote. “Now who is up for a road trip?”

Hubbard honored: Hubbard Broadcasting, owner of KSTP radio and TV as well as other broadcast stations, is receiving the Historic Site in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists tomorrow. The family-owned company has been in business since 1942.

In the main atrium of the downtown Minneapolis library, Norm Coleman beams at passersby — from the cover of ”Shared Vision: Norm Coleman and the Remarkable Revitalization of St. Paul.” The 2001 hagiography currently has pride of place in the Friends of the Library shop window. Price? Two dollars. Coleman quotes on miracles, persistence and good karma? Priceless.

The cover shows then-St. Paul Mayor Coleman in a dark suit with a flag pin on the lapel, in front of a blurred-out background that has to be the inside of the Xcel Center. Whether he’s looking sexier than any other U.S. Senator or a gold bust of Vladimir Putin, as one blogger later attested, is a matter of personal taste.

Here are the Coleman quotes, mostly from a last-chapter Q&A, with text bolded to emphasize ties to Coleman’s actions and strategy in contesting Al Franken’s 312-vote victory in the election for U.S. Senate:

On miracles:

David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, said, “Anyone who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.” I believe in miracles. I’m a realist.

On persistence:

We would have come up with another idea [if people hadn't shown up for a concert on the Mississippi River]. We would have brought them down the next week for something else. You have to believe in the vision and stay with it. Individual things don’t always work out. If one door shuts, you walk around and try another one, until you find one that works.

On smoke and mirrors:

[The deal for a National Hockey League franchise] was so unlikely, you almost had to laugh. At times, we were bluffing. We put together an ownership group and submitted an application to the NHL — and we didn’t have a firm dollar commitment from anybody. We didn’t have the money for a deposit. We didn’t have a lead investor until the day we actually needed one. Along the way, there was a lot of smoke and mirrors, but we knew we had the right vision, we knew it would be good for St. Paul.

On karma:

Maybe it’s my 1960s “good karma” thing that still floats out there, but I believe that the arts appeal to the better angels in people.

The book’s listed editor, publisher and (from what I could tell) author is Tom Mason, a marketing exec who earlier served as Sen. Rudy Boschwitz’s press secretary and still does Q&As with people like Republican rainmaker Jeff Larson, a longtime Coleman associate and the former Senator’s Washington, D.C. landlord.