Credit due

Does all this travel make me look fat cat?

After slagging the Strib the other day, now I’ve got to be fair and give due praise for a front page story today on Norm Coleman’s travel habits.

(However,for some reason, it’s not on the front page of the Strib web site as I’m writing this, so I guess they don’t want anyone who doesn’t get the printed version of the paper to know about it unless they happen to be searching for “coleman.” Actually, it seems the Coleman story lost its place to yet another heart-string-tugger about the murdered Chaska mom. Yup, that’s worth a lot of discussion. For example, we’ve been heard at the Rake water cooler spouting such insights as, “Gee, I’m sure glad my kid isn’t a drug addled murderer, aren’t you?” and “I never thought something like that would happen IN THE SUBURBS!”)

Sheesh.

At any rate, Strib reporters Rob Hotakainen and Aaron Blake do a good job of outlining the peripatetic Coleman’s travels and who paid the freight.

They make note of a couple of things worth mentioning here: that Coleman travels, especially at other-than-government expense, more than three times as often as Jim Oberstar, the House member and pork king of Minnesota; and Senator Mark Dayton did not travel at all unless on the government’s dime.

Draw your own conclusions about Coleman’s assertion that there are no strings attached to his first class tickets around the world. And think about the distinction between Dayton, who is getting out of politics because he hates the influence of money, and Norm, who utterly embraces it.