Gov. Pawlenty's appeal in the unallotment lawsuit (which has been granted expedited review and will go straight to the state Supreme Court) is due for oral arguments March 15, but the appellants' briefs are due today and the first few have just landed.

I haven't read them yet (and I have to run off to watch my son's basketball game) but I will try to get through them tonight and file something by morning.

For those who are so motivated that you want to read the briefs for yourself, here are links to the first three that have landed (they are all on the same side of the case):

The main brief of the appellants, that's Gov. Pawlenty, arguing that (contrary to the ruling by Ramsey District Court Chief Judge Kathleen Gearin) Pawlenty's unallotments of 2009 were proper, is here. It's written by the Minnesota attorney general's office, namely by Solicitor General Alan Gilbert, and by the governor's own counsel, Patrick Robben. That one is here. [PDF]

An amicus brief by several Republican legislators, including the two top Repub candidates for guv, state Reps. Tom Emmer and Marty Seifert. It's written by attorney Charles Roulet of Maple Grove. That brief is here. [PDF]

An amicus brief by some law professors interested in constitutional law and separation of powers issues. They also take the governor's side, arguing that his unallotments were proper. That brief is here. [PDF]

There will be at least two, maybe more, briefs on behalf of the original plaintiffs in the case (now, for appeals purposes, the respondents) and an amicus brief on behalf of the state House of Representatives (but really its DFL majority). We'll post those when we can.

— Wisconsin Repub Congressman Paul Ryan, employing his customary straight talk, has squelched the buzz that he might run for president in 2012. His statement, made to a Milwaukee TV station, was frank and charming:

"I'll give you as Shermanesque a quote as I can," said Ryan.  "I am not going to run for president. I'm just not going to do it. My head's not that big, and my kids are too small.”

Too bad. Ryan, of Janesville, Wis., a rising Republican star and currently the top House Repub on the Budget Committee, has put on the table a complete budget alternative that the CBO says would eliminate the deficit. Ryan doesn’t say it. The CBO says it.

A couple of facts about how Ryan’s “blueprint” would do that:

First of all, the budget doesn’t hit balance until 2080. (But, for contrast, CBO projects that without changes, the deficit will equal more than 40 percent of GDP in that year.)

Second, he does it almost entirely by restraining the growth rate of Medicare and Medicaid. And he does that by ending the conventional Medicare arrangement, under which the government directly pays the bills for seniors’ health care expenses. Instead, future seniors (the plan grandfathers in those who are already 55 and older) would receive a voucher from the government and then be turned loose to choose a health insurance plan from among several options (the menu is supposed to be modeled after the many excellent health insurance choices now available to members of Congress and other federal employees).

But here’s where it gets tough. When the plan first kicks in, the voucher would be about equal to what Medicare is spending on the average recipient (actually, CBO says it would be slightly less and, because Medicare spends less than private insurers do on administration, and nothing on profits, the quantity of health care the seniors could purchase with their vouchers would be less than the quantity used by the average Medicare beneficiary).

Then — and here is where the potentially really big savings and the potentially really big pain comes in — the voucher payment would grow over the years at a rate that CBO says would be significantly less than the scandalously high growth rate of health care costs. So after a while, the voucher would purchase significantly less health care than what Medicare pays for now. Significantly less.

The long-term projected increase in the cost of Medicare and Medicaid is, by a huge margin, the biggest factor driving the long-term debt and deficit projections into the stratosphere. Ryan’s plan holds them down to the atmosphere and that is the magic factor that knocks the federal debt picture off its current unsustainable course. But it does it by putting future seniors in a position where they will have to spend more of their own money on health care, or they will have to do with less health care.

You can call Ryan’s idea “nothing short of violent,” as Wash Post health guru Ezra Klein did. But it is ruthlessly efficient and virtually guaranteed to accomplish its goal, which is to stop Medicare and Medicaid from making the budget unbalanceable.

I am not endorsing Ryan’s plan, but I totally respect it. It is honest.

Pres. Obama said the same about it when he met with the House Repubs last week. He spoke of it with respect and made clear that he had studied it and thought about it. But he also noted that Repubs have been having fun demagoguing the really quite modest provisions of the Dem health care bill to save a little money out of Medicare by ending federal subsidies for the supplementary “Medicare Advantage” programs. He invited Ryan and the others in the room to think about what Dems could do (will do, I suspect) with the Ryan plan to portray it as a granny killer.

Maybe Ryan has engaged in some of that demagoguery, I don’t know his record that well. From what I’ve seen, he is a straight shooter, deeply conservative, intellectually honest.

Apparently, he is also willing to put on the table and defend the very politically risky and explosive facts about what America could expect if it gave power to the Repubs and if they had the guts — as they have not had for the past 30 years of pretending that they care about deficit and debt to specify what it would take to get the deficit under control.

Do Minnesota’s House Republicans — John Kline, Erik Paulsen and Michele Bachmann - support the Ryan blueprint?

Do Democrats have a plan that will eliminate the deficit or bring it down to a sustainable level? Ever?

My buddy Tom Hamburger of the L.A. Times has published another peek inside the health care sausage factory. This one is not mostly about powerful lobbies using their Washington operations, backed by campaign contributions and the threat of TV ads, to get its way. This little case study is closer to what they call astroturf lobbying.

The short version of the tale is that Coca-Cola and others who make a lot of money selling soft drinks (this includes big fast-food chains -- McDonald’s and Domino’s were named in the piece) were able to recruit a lot of organizations that represent poor people to join them in opposing the idea of putting a tax on sugared beverages.

The idea behind the tax is it would discourage consumption of sugared beverages, which contributes to the American plague of obesity, which is a major source of our unhealthiness.

Obesity-induced diabetes hits Hispanic youth especially hard.

So how did the beverage industry get the Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity, the National Hispana Leadership Institute, the League of United Latin American Citizens and even the National Hispanic Medical Association, which represents 36,000 Latino doctors and focuses on health issues, to join the group  the beverage-sellers created, called Americans Against Food Taxes?

One way: They argued that the tax would be regressive and would fall most heavily on Hispanics (apparently true, because Hispanic youth drink more than their share of fattening soft drinks). See that’s sorta the idea, to see if a small tax on sweetened drinks, might encourage those who drink too much to drink less of it.

Second way:  (quoting from the Hamburger piece):

“Nearly all of the Latino groups, including the medical association, had received beverage industry money in the past or have industry representatives on their governing boards.

The medical association's director, Dr. Elena Rios, said the financial support -- which amounted to no more than $10,000 from a single company -- had nothing to do with the decision to oppose the tax, which she and the other Latino groups agreed would hurt minority communities. She also said the evidence is not clear that the tax would effectively reduce obesity. On Friday, Rios said her organization had decided to withdraw from the industry coalition.”

Third way: The anti-soft-drink-taxers were able to point to scientific studies that disputed or downplayed the role of soft drinks in American obesity. From the piece:

“The American Beverage Assn. website for the campaign against the soda tax points to three studies in peer-reviewed journals that dispute a link between soda and obesity. One was conducted by an author working for Archer Daniels Midland, a major producer of high-fructose corn syrup. Two were conducted by a researcher who now works for the beverage association; one of those studies was funded by a grant from the association.

Despite the funding source, ‘the researchers worked independently and their findings were published in a peer-reviewed journal. That's the gold standard in the scientific community,’ [Kevin Keane, senior vice president, public affairs, for the American Beverage Assn.] said.”

It’s important to note. The idea of the sugar-soft-drink tax was never part of the big health care bill. There were members of the House who expressed some interest in the idea. Pres. Obama himself, in an interview with Men's Health magazine, that such a tax was an "idea that we should be exploring."

First Lady Michelle Obama has chosen child obesity as one of the causes to which she will devote her influence, and is supposed to unveil some of her ideas for healthier eating today. I don’t guess it would be the job of the FLOTUS to suggest something like taxing sugared drinks.

Of course, the proceeds from a sugared drink tax could contributed to paying for the health care bill or even just to deficit reduction.

One more thing I like about Tom’s story, although this wasn’t a point he emphasized: The health care bill focuses mostly on changing health insurance. But if we think of the ultimate goal as a healthier population, many things could be done that have little or nothing to with insurance or doctors or hospitals. I’ve written on this theme before. If we did nothing about health insurance but reduced poverty and obesity, we might add more years to U.S. healthiness and life expectancy than if we got everyone insured.

There’s quite a bit more detail in Tom’s piece. And one more thing I remember him telling me about that got left out in the editing. Among those who publicly spoke against the soda tax was Bill Clinton. Tom checked the donors to the Clinton Trust. Sure enough, Coca-Cola, big time. $5 million.

Whoops. Wrote this on Friday but I didn't quite publish.

Playing off the swearing-in of Scott Brown, officially ending the 60-Dem Senate, the "PBS Newshour" on Thursday put up a segment about the filibuster and related issues and their panel included Minnesota's own Norm Coleman (plus MN native Norm Ornstein, plus our neighbor, former Sen. Tom Daschle of SoDak).

Coleman, unsurprisingly since it has been one of his signatures, said the answer was to reach across the aisle to get things done. You listen for yourself, but it sounded to me like he was putting the onus on the Dems to do the reaching, not sure why.

Me, I don't hear anyone talking straight about the need for filibuster reform, except maybe in the setup piece. But I'm becoming obsessed. Every time people talk about the filibuster as a guarantor or full debate, I want someone to say: It isn't about full debate. You could easily guarantee full debate and still guarantee that bills eventually get a vote. The issue not whether debate should be squelched. The issue is whether 41 senators should be able to squelch 59 from passing a bill.

Anyway, I'm putting this up mostly because of the unexpected Coleman sighting. Also notice, the think tank that Coleman will be running now has a name. The American Action Network. It will be, as described in the Wall Street Journal, "a new political group with the goal of organizing grass-roots support and raising funds ahead of the 2010 midterm elections."

OK, here's video. It's 16 minutes long. The panel that includes Coleman starts about four and a half minutes in, after the setup. (During the setup, from the Parallel Realities department, note that Repub. Sen. Jon Kyl, expresses his pain over the cheap shot that Obama took at Senate Repubs when the prez said, in the SOTU address, that the Repubs were demanding 60 votes on everything and always saying no. And, of course, in a strict sense, that is true. Repubs have not filibustered everything (nor did Obama say they did. He said that if they were going to demand 60 votes for everything, then -- given their new cloture-proof minority -- the must share the responsibility of governing.)

The headline above is a shameless come-on. So far, former Gov. Sarah Palin enters history mostly as the first Alaskan and only the second woman ever on the presidential ticket of major party. Her ultimate place in history will be determined by where she goes from her current spot as the darling of the Tea Party movement and potential candidate for president in 2012. Her recent statements on Fox News certainly left the door wide open to a presidential candidacy, and given the fact that she has assembled the bones of a campaign staff and is doing at least one of the main things that pre-presidential candidates do (running around the country giving speeches), she should probably considered a candidate, although at a less certain stage of candidateness than our Guv, Tim Pawlenty.

The place in history gag is this: Over recent history, almost every single vice presidential nominee from the losing ticket in the previous election has run for or seriously explored running for president in the next cycle. It's almost automatic. Being number two on the ticket makes you famous and almost inevitably apparently, makes you think that if you had been number one, you could really have done something.

So I made a little list and here's the bottom line: In the last 10 presidential cycles, the losing running mate from the previous cycle has announced a presidential candidacy in the next cycle six times. Of the four who didn't get as far as announcing, three engaged in serious explorations of running (and one of them ran the next time around). Only one of the 10, Geraldine Ferraro, never gave a presidential candidacy much consideration, and that could be that before the next cycle, her husband had been indicted (although Ferraro did make a subsequent bid for the U.S. Senate). I'll recap the list below.

In short, it is not at all remarkable that Palin is thinking about running and would be far more remarkable if she wasn't.

On the other hand, history does not suggest that the route to the presidency -- nor even to the nomination -- runs through the second spot on the previous losing ticket. Only one of the previous 10 actually was nominated in the net cycle. Another of them was nominated in a later cycle. And only one of the 44 presidents had previous experience as running mate on a losing ticket.

Triple trivia question alert

That case, makes an excellent question for political history trivia buffs. In fact, before I divulge all below, feel free to test yourself against these questions.

1. Who was the only person every to go from vice presidential candidate, losing ticket (hereafter VPCLT) the presidential nominee in the very next cycle?
2. Who was the other person, in the past 50 years, to go from VPCLT to presidential nominee (although not in the succeeding cycle).
3. The big one: Who is the only person to go from VPCLT to President (not in the succeeding cycle)?

Okay, the list of the last 10 VPCLTs (which includes the answers to two of the three questions, so don't peek if you want full credit).

• 1968: VPCLT was Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie. Ran for prez in 1972 and started out at frontrunner for Dem nomination. Faltered early. (Yes, the famous weepy New Hampshire incident, but the impact of that has been overblown.
• 1972: VPCLT was Sargent Shriver (that's a trivia question all by itself, he took over after the McGovern-Eagleton disaster). Yes, you've surely forgotten this one, but Shriver, who never held elective office, announced as a presidential candidate in 1976. finished 5th in New Hampshire primary. Downhill from there.
• 1976: VPCLT was Bob Dole. Dole did seek the 1980 Repub nomination. Finished 6th in New Hampshire with 0.3 percent. But Dole recovered to run a much stronger race for the nomination in 1988 (he was the main challenger to eventual nominee George H.W. Bush) and, on his third try, became the Repub nominee in 1996. Which makes him the answer to trivia question #2 above.
• 1980: VPCLT was Minnesota's own Walter Mondale. This is a bit of curve, since Mondale had already served a term as the actual veep when the Carter-Mondale ticket went down in 1980 to Ronald Reagan. By 1982 (this is hard to imagine but important to recall) Reagan looked very vulnerable to losing for reelection. Mondale declared early, withstood a strong challenge from Gary Hart, and won the nomination. This makes him the answer to #1 above. But he (euphemism alert) did not fare well in the general election, which means he is not the answer to question #3.
• 1984: VPCLT was Mondale's running-mate, Geraldine Ferraro who, as mentioned above, is the only one of the last 10 VPCLT's never to launch even an exploratory bid for president.
• 1988: Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen was the VPCLT (Michael Dukakis' running mate). He explored in 1992, but never announced.
• 1992: Dan Quayle was the VPCLT (after Clinton-Gore defeated Bush-Quayle). given the image problems he acquired as vice president, he wasn't considered top presidential timber. But he nonetheless explored 1996 (when he decided not to run, he attributed it to health problems) and did announce a (short-lived and very unsuccessful) presidential candidacy in 2000.
• 1996: Former U.S. Rep. (and football hall of famer) Jack Kemp was Dole's running mate and was widely considered a leading contender for 2000. He explored, but after stumbling badly in the very early positioning, pulled the plug and endorsed eventual nominee George W. Bush.
• 2000: Sen. Joe Lieberman was the VPCLT (it was Gore-Lieberman, remember?) and committed early to run for the top spot in 2004. You probably don't remember this, but Lieberman was leader in polls in the earliest stages of the 2004 Dem nomination campaign. This is one of the points of the modern VPCLT -- it gets you name recognition, which is one of the entry points to being taken seriously as a presidential candidate. But Lieberman never achieved any of the other entry points, bombed in Iowa and New Hampshire, and dropped out.
• 2004: Former Sen. John Edwards was the VPCLT (having been the runner-up to John Kerry in the race for the Dem nomination itself). He never stopped running, and during the early 2008 fight was considered to be in the top three. But while the other two of those three (Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) went on and on, Edwards left the race and (euphemism alert) his political future has been clouded by personal problems.
• 2008: Sarah Palin will write the next chapter in the history of the VPCLT. If she did nothing more than she's already done, she would join the ranks of VPCLTs who have been considered serious contenders for their party's next nomination.

Oh yeah: Trivia question #3. A fact that escapes the memory of many trivia buffs. In 1920, Republican nominee Warren G. Harding won what was, by some measures, the biggst landslide in presidential history over the hapless Dem nominee, Ohio Gov. James Middleton Cox. Cox's running (and therefore an official VPCLT) was an affable, and still ambulatory, assistant secretary of the Navy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.